The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [182]
And there, 200 yards down the path when I return, is Ferrell, rodential and rank, poking at the cliff face.
The next day, Sunday the 31st, in my panic, I again visited the places I knew: Trilipush’s former villa, Carter’s crowded site, where I watched him pose for photographers, and the blank stretch of desert that had once been Trilipush’s site. Everywhere nothing. I returned to my hotel, praying that my little army of informants would appear. Nothing. I consoled myself that perhaps they’d followed him somewhere, and there he stayed, and therefore there they stayed. But my position felt worrisome. I went to the travel office, and they confirmed that Trilipush and Finneran were still scheduled to sail the following day, the tickets had even been paid for. I hired a new boy to watch the rail station for anyone of the unmistakable appearance of Trilipush or Finneran. He, at least, reported to me after the day’s last train: they had not left Luxor by rail. I prepared my next move: I wired the details of our arrival to the British consul in Cairo, told him I was going to bring him a suspect in the 1918 murder of Captain Marlowe for our joint interrogation, and to prepare himself. See here: I was using every tool I had to solve crimes no one else was even willing to investigate, Macy.
That evening, the 31st, to make certain I’d done all I could, I crossed the river one last time to walk the Trilipush site again, but this time, as I stepped off the ferry on the Nile’s western bank, the crowd waiting to board the ferry’s eastbound return included a native boy I would’ve sworn was one of my missing army of watchers. The boy was carrying a large package. When I tried to catch his attention, though, he ignored me, just stepped on the boat, and I couldn’t reach him. I lost sight of him. I pushed my way to the front of the pier and watched as the ferry left, but I couldn’t see him until, as the boat chugged out to the current, I spotted him suddenly, staring at me from the deck, as if he’d been there the whole time, and I would’ve sworn, even at that distance, that he was laughing.
Of course, I again found nothing at Trilipush’s site, and I know enough of human psychology at times of stress not to take too seriously those sensations of apprehension that tickled me in the last sunlight, that suspicion I was being watched. Even the little boy’s laugh was probably more a sign of my heightened nerves than of anything real.
(Sunday, 31 December, 1922, continued)
Atum-hadu faced the most daunting example of the Tomb Paradox in all Egyptian history. It is, at tenth glance, a puzzle with no solution. To secure his immortality, his name must survive forever aboveground and his body below it, preserved, mummified, and sealed into a minimally outfitted tomb. With nobody left to tell the tale. While the world upstairs melts in the desert sun: his name was on no king list. The XIIIth Dynasty was fast becoming a lumpy purée of fact and legend, quicksand lacunae bubbling with satisfaction where once kings had strode.
WALL PANEL L: THE LAST HOURS OF EGYPT
Text: Atum-hadu was abandoned. He left Thebes and crossed life-giving Nile and walked alone; he carried his goods, his Admonitions, paint, reed, ink, brushes, his cat. The cobras inside his stomach had died. Across mighty Nile he burnt the small boat he had captained, and he watched the silver flashes of the fire against the sky. To the east the invaders sacked his palace, and he could hear the cries of his women. He was empty of this world. He carried his goods into the tomb Seth had given him.
Analysis: The last minutes of his reign. The last minutes of Egypt. Unimaginable sorrows, regrets, but not without a certain beauty, the end of days. Surrounded by blood, danger approaching rapidly. Not danger to his life, but to his afterlife. He is abandoned by everyone. But all is now clear: the puzzle—which has tormented small minds for millennia, stymied