The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [17]
Professor Ralph M. Trilipush
18 January, 1923
Residence of the Director-General of the Antiquities Service
Cairo, Egypt
[RMT—Verify 24 November and 18 January before typesetting.]
Journal: 11 October, and I have just finished composing certain necessary background elements of this work, to be assembled in the proper order later. I can now begin my log from the beginning, welcoming you, Reader, to Egypt.
I reached Cairo yesterday, my first visit to this wondrous city since 1918. I came by rail from Alexandria, after disembarking from the Cristoforo Colombo, which vessel bore me here (after a train ride from Boston) from New York, via London and Malta, where I passed a very relaxing week in preparation for my coming work. I have now established my temporary headquarters here in the gold-and-pink Pharaoh Suite of Cairo’s veined-marble Hotel of the Sphinx. While I have no taste for luxury, I do need a certain amount of space to perform the myriad tasks I have at hand, and the millions more to come, and the consortium of Boston’s wisest and wealthiest Egyptological experts and collectors who are financing this expedition would not wish to have its leader worn down—before he had even moved south to the site—by residence in substandard lodging.
For the extent of an archaeologist’s tasks sometimes surprises the layman. By way of example, I shall, when at the site, be the Director of a vast enterprise, commanding an army of workmen, responsible for their salaries, behaviour, honesty, efficiency, and well-being. I shall be measuring, diagramming, cataloguing, and often preserving in some haste several hundred objects, ranging in size from a jewelled earring to the exquisitely carved and painted walls of a massive sepulchre. I shall be negotiating with bureaux of the Egyptian Government, which, for its own protection, is still overseen whenever necessary by the guiding wisdom and financial probity of the French and English Governments. I shall simultaneously be composing a scholarly work, detailing events three and a half millennia old, and likely translating newly found erotic, political, and acerbically witty texts written by a genius in a language that has not been in common use for well over two thousand years. And I shall be preparing detailed reports back to the wise Partnership that is financing all of this frenzied toil. Thus, if I have begun my trip in some style, it is dictated by scientific necessity.
That said, for all its vaunted luxury, the Hotel of the Sphinx displays Egypt’s creeping decadence. It is a tourist hotel (in a land that to me has always been an explorer’s frontier or a soldier’s outpost), and it represents the modern Egyptian’s apparently insuperable innate urge to barter his noble patrimony for a shilling. The hotel’s emblem—stitched to every conceivable surface—sports a nonsensical group of vulture, sphinx, and cobra, surmounting a motto—an extract of hieroglyphs which warn (to whom I cannot imagine, since who amongst the hotel’s guests could be expected to read hieroglyphs?) HORUS CONSUMES THE HEARTS OF THE WICKED.
Horus, ancient Egypt’s falcon-headed sky-god embodied by every Egyptian king, would perhaps hesitate to endorse this hotel, and yet, even here amidst the faux-Pharaonic trappings of a fanciful antiquity, through the open patio windows, from out over the Nile, the smell and feel of the real Egypt—my Egypt—waft in, and all the modern luxe of the suite curls and crumbles under the hot exhalation of the kingdom as it was, sighing to me from across millennia. Atum-hadu, in his power and his glory, summons me even here, as I sip (without the worry one felt, even in Finneran’s private barroom, about the American liquor-lawmen) lemonade and