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By Root 1181 0

for him, too real when compared to the unreality of his service in a colonial army, doing his bit in a war that has not the slightest bearing on him. Imagine him, Margaret, so obsessed with this land that he loses all interest in potential punishments. He knows the penalty for his repeated illicit absences, but this war seems every day less real. Perhaps in a muddy trench in Luxembourg he would have been more attentive (or dead). But in the presence of his desert, the spitting bray of camels for hire, each of them calling him to trot into the dark and touch the noseless beauty of the Sphinx, to sit at the foot of Cheops’s great pyramid and consider where in this vast desert he would meet his destiny—it would have been impossible for him to fear some slow-moving, slow-thinking sergeant (losing, throughout the late watch, hand after hand of patience by the cone of lamplight in the guardhouse).

And then one day when I am injured and lost in Turkey, Paul Caldwell probably learns that a British officer visiting the Australian camp is, in civilian life, a rising Egyptological expert, even now conducting expeditions when the War allows. I knew Hugo Marlowe’s manner all too well. I have no doubt that Caldwell approached him over and over, trying vainly to win his attention. And failing that, I can well imagine that he simply began to follow Marlowe (stationed fully forty miles away) out of sheer fascination with his work, but also because Marlowe knew everything. Caldwell must at last have won Marlowe’s attention and trust, it hardly matters how. I can imagine Marlowe taking the boy under his wing, and the thrill with which Caldwell heard details, methods of scholarship and exploration, the latest research, and what topic more gripping than the latest thinking about Atum-hadu?

But of course. Of course Marlowe would have discussed Atum-hadu with Caldwell. Marlowe had Fragment C in his tent, waiting for my return. He would have told Caldwell all about Atum-hadu, and everything in that story would have made beautiful sense to the poor boy: a civilisation where a man of genius could make and remake himself every day until he was king. Perhaps Harriman had already been part of Paul’s childhood reading, and Atum-hadu’s fire, pale as it was in that version, had already singed him. And now Marlowe introduced them.

If he had survived the War, he would have been allowed to become, perhaps, a librarian, maybe a teacher in a provincial boys’ school. He could have been as intelligent as I, as charming as I, as well-made as I, but without credentials and wealth and all the rest, he would have been an oddity, a circus freak, a poor boy who so amusingly knew some trivia of Egypt for inscrutable reasons of his own. Would you love me if I were that, if that were me? No, how could you. No one will remember Paul Caldwell, and no one should.

The final days of Egypt. There must have been such a day, the final day. The final hour. The final instant. There was in every cataclysm precisely such a single last moment, incredible, but true: a last casualty in the Great War, a final victim ravished by the Black Death, one last Neanderthal to parent a first Homo sapiens. And there must have been a last man to worship Atum and, at his death, to take with him all the mysteries of his cult. There was a last man who knew how to pronounce ancient Egyptian; a whole language died with him and all we can do now is strain to hear its echoes by leaning very close to books and wishing hard.

And for Atum-hadu there was this day when all was inarguably lost, when no escape remained, walking in an empty palace, stepping over a man with his face bludgeoned to pudding. How did the king feel that afternoon? Sleepy, so terribly tired. Wishing it could be some other way. Longing for his queen and a peaceful place they could rest together.

There was this day; this day came and then ended, snatching the whole universe with it. There was this last sunrise over pig-faced hordes at the gate under the command of foreigners and the temples burnt and the histories all burnt and