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By Root 1126 0

of this modern War. “May I speak openly, sah?” he bellows. Of course you can, ducks, but do keep it down. Prepare yourself, Bev: it seems our little Aussie just loves Egypt and Egyptian studies, crazy mad for them. He does not want anything else from me, really, on the soul of his favourite koala, he just wants to talk to me about ancient Egypt. “How would I know anything of that?” I ask. Ah, well, he knows all about me, you will be as alarmed as I was to hear. He knows not only that I read the pharaohs at Oxford but that I am due “to go back and finish up and become a University professor,” he says with stars in his eyes. He shyly confesses that having learned this some time ago, he had approached me prior to our first encounter in the desert, back when I spent that week at Tel el Kebir, though I have not the slightest recollection of him. When I understandably paid him no attention there, he took to following me about whenever he could, and even stole out of camp and came across to our base that fateful night, just to introduce himself again. But he saw me leaving and assumed I was off on a “walkabout to gaze at the unparalleled beauty of the Gizeh pyramids,” and off he set to catch up with me. He tells me all this as if I shall be pleased to hear it.

A cloying tale, but what the devil does he want from me now? Why, just what any ordinary blackmailer wants: he wants lessons in Middle Egyptian. Trembling to exhibit his hidden depths for me, he takes pen and paper from my table to prove he can already write hieroglyphs, hieratic, and demotic. He taught himself, he claims (do be sure you are sitting down for this, Bev), from books in an Australian lending library run by his first love, a woman who died tragically, breathing her last in his arms. And now he simply wants to discuss the history of the kings with me. In short, Bev, I am being blackmailed into tutoring an antipodal, autodidact, widower, criminally inclined, would-be Egyptologist. Surely you know the type, an old story. Do tell me when I am boring you, love.

My pupil is a complete naïf but has strange, unconnected depths of knowledge, bottomless lakes of Egyptian expertise separated by vast beaches of ignorance. He is aware of this and wants the land flooded evenly. While we are at it, he would also like to learn Arabic, which he has already started to murder on his own.

He has come to my tent three times since—a forty-mile trek, Bev! Such devotion! He treats me absolutely with awe. Tales of Oxford hypnotise him, like a cross-eyed cobra swooning for a wog’s warbling flute. I whisper “Balliol” very softly and he begins to grow faint, though not so faint that I am able to begin instruction in the pedagogical method I think would be more pleasurable. I tried this once or twice (one does lose count), thinking it would be amusing and would also release the young scholar’s unpleasant hold over me. But I was trying to plant my seed in desert sand, I am sure you are relieved to learn, Bev: “Very koind of ye, Cap’n, but I don’t wanna waste yer toim, we should troy t’discuss just serious matters.” The beast. If I looked like you, of course, we would have progressed nicely by now.

Do write me of what I am missing at home. Tell me of the seasons. Tell me if my name ever comes up in conversation anymore. Tell me there is still a place for me back there. And for Christ’s sake, tell me what Wexler says.

Your dusky prince of Egypt,

Go-go

29 July, 1918

Dear Bevvy,

Heartbreaking, honestly. Thank you for your efforts, and thank you for passing the news. Not that she ever thought much of me, but tell the poor widow I send my most heartfelt condolences, and that her husband meant the world to me. Say it better, say it how you would. I am not joking—he truly was important to me, really, dipsomania and senility aside. He was a pedant, of course, and his goal in teaching was to produce, before his soul seeped from its body, as many scholars as possible who thought and spoke precisely as he did. I think he probably succeeded: before I left Oxford, I had noticed a half