The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [176]
Ferrell had become confused, you see, Margaret, by three documents: two missing and one incomplete. This often happens with people new to interpreting texts. They take any one document much too seriously, when of course nothing can be understood from a single document. When it comes to incomplete history, one needs to encircle the truth, not bound at it like an amorous kangaroo. But for men like Ferrell, if the first thing they happen to read says x, they believe x forever, and if a second document should say the opposite, they grow confused and begin shouting, “Conspiracy!” When they cannot find something, they assume it is because it never existed. Why is there no record of my career at Oxford? he demanded, as if the answer was not patently obvious: because someone misplaced the file or misspelled my name. For this, a detective has sailed across the globe and I have lost my job and my money and perhaps even your love? It does not matter, not anymore: I will have my discovery.
A small scrap of words can yield as many interpretations as there are interpreters. I tried to explain this to him. He is in a line of work not dissimilar to my own, except that he is incompetent. He has a scrap of “papyrus,” an official scribe’s notation—in his case a little synopsis of British Army records, telling the moth-eaten story of Marlowe’s disappearance, a lacy collection of loose ends and outright admissions of ignorance. Fertile ground, in other words, for the assumptions of asses, for the annunciation of inanities. As I explained to the slothful sleuth, in the face of such spotty knowledge, how many images come to the mind of an imaginative archaeologist? A dozen or more. And with a dozen minds at work, a dozen dozen possible explanations, a hogshead of possibilities.
This is a valuable lesson in textual veracity for us all, courtesy of the doltish detective. It is only a few years since the tragic death of my friend, and it is already damned difficult to say just what happened. Now, cast our vision back three and a half millennia, and from a few such documents let us determine with 100 percent certainty what was happening in Thebes, amongst a people we scarcely understand whose language remains so much a mystery we do not even know how to pronounce it. (Gramophones! If the ancients had had gramophones—those great guarantors of immortality for countless singers today—then we could have heard them speak to us, and we would have known everything. A scandal, in a way: the gramophone has rearranged the nature of immortality in our degraded times: we may never really know how to pronounce Atum-hadu, but the world will remember forever the names of Daisy Montgomery, Victor Edwards and His Tuxedoed Chums, Will Wrentham and the Wellington Warblers.)
Inevitably, horrified by blunderers like Ferrell, one wonders about one’s own archaeologists, certain to be drawn buzzing to our posthumous fame. What if it were me being sought, now or a thousand years in the future, by a china-shopping bull like Ferrell? What will be misconstrued or simply lost in the record I will have left behind, either knowingly or inadvertently? May the gods protect us all from excavators like Mr. Ferrell! Perhaps, like him, my future chronicler will find it significant that the War Office, in its infinite clumsiness, lost my dossier whilst stamping returned over missing. Thus are false lives stacked upon the crumbling foundations of real ones.
And you, my darling? Where would we be if I believed everything I heard today about you from Mr. Ferrell? Do you need the whole pathetic scene? It went like this, as best I can reconstruct it, though it makes me choke or laugh, I can hardly say which: “You and Finneran are going back to Boston? Really?” The demonic detective looked peakish at the prospect. He could not bear the thought of me returning to you, and tried several tactics to dissuade me.
“Of course,” I said. “Why not?”
“But she