The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [181]
Will you remember me, Margaret? Will you see what I accomplished here, and will you clarify it for the world? I have no one else, you see, to trust. If you ever loved me, or only the idea of me, please, please, rid yourself of your illnesses and make my work live on.
CCF is asleep. I have much to finish, especially if mad Ferrell is coming to stamp about with police and dogs.
January 6, 1955
One likes to be right, Macy. And to be right for the right reasons, that’s good, too. This morning, as I look back over what I wrote yesterday, I have the unpleasant feeling, shameful almost, that perhaps I was sometimes right for the wrong reasons. Today, reading this, it isn’t quite clear to me just where and in what fashion I caught Trilipush in a lie. And yet, I remember the sensation—a sensation, Macy, as plain and real as the taste of chocolate, or the brush of wind on your face—that he was lying. And I certainly wrote then in my notes that I knew he was lying. But rereading it now, the certainty seems somewhat faded. I could’ve told Margaret about Caldwell’s interest in archaeology, and she could’ve written to Trilipush in turn, I suppose. No matter: if it wasn’t that, it was something else. Too tempting to say that hindsight brings clarity. More likely time blurs the truth. I don’t question the correctness of my certainty then, only my ability to express it now. I’m no man of letters, Macy, that’s your job in this partnership. So make it clear how I catch Trilipush out.
And, also, I can blame myself now, I suppose, that I was unable to convince the police to look into this straightaway. The disappearance of an Englishman and an Australian, four years earlier, during a war, didn’t seem to the constable on duty to have the slightest relevance to his job. He told me to report it to the British consulate, and if they ordered an investigation, he’d look into it. I couldn’t budge him, and I saw his native pride in saying no to me, as if I were the King of England, and not in fact yet another of the Englishman’s put-upon colonials. That was Saturday the 30th.
I returned to my hotel to await word from my watchers. They did not appear. I stayed awake until midnight. Nothing. I descended to the street, looking for them. I thought I saw one of them, but when I approached, he spoke no English, and I couldn’t, at the end, be sure whether he was one of my team or not. The truth is, Egyptian boys don’t look terribly different from one another. I began to fear the worst: Trilipush in his desperation had done my poor boys some serious harm.
Sunday, 31 December, 1922
Dreamt I was sitting behind you, my hand on your hand on your thigh. We were sitting together in a safe, close space. I was whispering into your ear. I was holding your other hand, using your finger to point at the symbols on a papyrus, pouring into your soft ear the secrets hidden in those pictures.
The sun is already up, and there is activity on the other side of the cliff wall. I sat first on a bluff and then closer, on the balcony constructed above the entry to Tut’s treasure hole, and I watched the photographer take posed pictures of the great man. It is too much, the equipment, the miles of calico and linen, the jugs of preserving fluids, the vats of photographic fixatives, the countless sifting screens and barrels and picks and carts, the train built specially for him, rail by rail out of the Valley, the dozens of admirers, the journalists pleading for a word. All of that should be enough. But no, now we must have this puff after puff, silver flash and blue flash, click after click, and “Over here, Mr. Carter, look this way, please, sir,” the unblinking Eye of the world devouring him without ever reducing him. He was tireless—click, click, click, puff, puff, puff—feeding the world with his image. The great man in his tent. In front of his hole. With his minions. Pretending to oversee something. Walking some treasure up and out, into the sun of knowledge and fame. Consulting with this one or that one. Thinking. His is the tomb of the Restoration, the evidence