The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [164]
I landed at Alexandria late on the 24th, Macy, and made Cairo by train the next day, Christmas, though you hardly notice in Egypt. I worked fast: our man had indeed been at the Hotel of the Sphinx and had left it on the 26th of October, holding his suite open for his return, so his reports to Boston had been truthful to that date at least. The deskman also said Finneran had been at the hotel as well, stayed the night nine days before me. I, in my turn, spent the night of the 25th, space at the inn Christmas night. No talking donkeys, though.
Sunday, 24 December, 1922
Work. Miserable bowels. The gramophone does not help. The work is hard. It makes one think about immortality. To the average man, I suppose, the Egyptian notion of immortality is the most foolish superstition. But that is only because our idea of eternal life has changed, whether we are Christians or not. Though we agree with our Nile ancestors that immortality is still man’s most important accomplishment (more important than love, or a mild reputation for virtue, more pressing by far than friendship), we are not so mad as to think that our bodies are transported into an afterlife. We use a different vocabulary, salvation of souls, lasting fame. Call it what you will, but to make one’s name ring out after the names of your inferiors and tormentors are snuffed out, that is something all of us still hope for. (And, most delicious of all, to have this happen before their physical lives end, so they can feel the last wisp of their names vanish while they still breathe and know—know, ter Breuggen—that when their mouldering carcass is discovered and tossed into the ground, it will already be anonymous hair and skin, on its merry way to becoming anonymous carbon ash, while others of us will become stars and suns.) I do not know of anyone who does not aspire to this permanence, even if they claim not to. The world is littered with the arcs de triomphe and such-and-such juniors, the chattering artists nervous to know their work will last, poets committing suicide to assure their fame, last wills and testaments trying to control heirs, names annually read out in churches and synagogues, ornate tombstones and deathbed I-love-yous, bequests and named donations, money left to political parties and charities. We are all plenty Egyptian still and no debate.
I am not an idiot. When the time comes, I know that I will be dead. I will not be strumming a winged stringed thing, or even (as I planned as a boy) be savouring the hot, fleshy delectations of a palm-lined, Anubis-guarded, Isis-assisted Egyptian underworld. I speak of something lighter, finer, more intellectually and spiritually unassailable and inexhaustible. Immortality for us, though it will be bodiless, is not without consciousness: the consciousness at the precise moment of the expiration of our bodies that our name will carry on.
CCF agrees.
Monday, 25 December, 1922
Journal: Belly protests as if I have swallowed sharpened knives, but CCF and I continue our work into the late afternoon. Then clear out rubbish, empty pails, burn this and that.
Margaret: I have just had a visitor. It has been rather a while since I have spoken to anyone. Besides your chatterbox father, I mean.
She came to see me, the sweet old girl. I had just emptied the pails. She caught me rather tired, quite at the end of my resources, sitting outside the tomb, massaging my aching thigh.
“Dear boy, they said I’d find you up here.”
I thought perhaps I was hallucinating—the sudden appearance of one of the people one would most like to see. She was so kind to me on that boat. She shielded her eyes from the glare and climbed the last steps, lifting her old-fashioned dress to scramble over a rock with surprising ease.
“Dear Ralph, you look unwell. Whatever has happened to you up here?”
“Nothing. Searching. Hard at work. Made an extraordinary find.”
She sat beside