The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [200]
“Dear boy, I do think so. I do absolutely believe a tomb is waiting for us down there, and I think I know where. Now listen: the War is almost over.”
“Is it? How do you know?” asks my most perfect idiot-tormentor, some twenty-four hours before the Armistice was signed.
“For heaven’s sake, listen. I will have to return to Oxford to finish my studies before I can come back here to conduct any full-scale excavation, but I intend to take the opportunity we shall have between now and the time we are shipped home to do a little more surface digging, to try out our glorious in the field, you and me, on a preliminary expedition.”
Honestly, Bev, I thought he was going to weep. He positively hugged me, a little boy on Christmas morning with a shiny new train. I was tempted to engage him in a more manly embrace, but I did not dare spoil the lovely tableau taking shape.
“Shipped home?” he said suddenly, all rapt with concern. “Can they force us to go back home? Can’t one stay here?” Apparently Australia calls to him no more than it would to me or you. At least he has learnt that much under my tutelage.
Well, you should see by now how your surprisingly sage advice is playing out, Bev. Tomorrow he and I depart for a four-day leave. I showed him the paperwork, already completed, and he gazed at his dear papa with childlike wonder. Tomorrow he and I are heading south, into the very heart of archaeology in this mad, beautiful country. Carter and Carnarvon are doing interesting work in the Valley of the Kings, and I think it would do my career a bit of good to meet chaps like that now if I can. My orphan is practically wetting himself to meet them, too, but that, of course, is sadly not to be.
For down there, far from here, in the magical light of desert dusk, hills and hills away from anything and anyone, complex affairs will work themselves out simply, as you predicted they would, and I shall return to normal life free of any unnecessary weight on my mind.
Have you absolutely fallen for a life in London, Bev? I am thrilled to hear about your rooms, of course, I simply cannot wait to see them, but I hope you do not find them too, too comfortable, nothing permanent. Please do not dismiss me on this, I am utterly sincere, think hard: Oxford, you know, is where I simply must be, and then I shall be back here and back there and back and forth, teaching and digging and writing and teaching and digging and writing. Doesn’t the life appeal to you, just a bit? Half your time in a don’s flat in Longwall Street, and half in a tent in Egypt, a mature and tolerant country, after all. Mightn’t one keep the friends one loves the best near one in such a life as that?
I shall write again on the 16th, free and light.
Eternally,
H.
(Sunday, 31 December, 1922, continued)
There is neither text nor illustration to explain the tomb’s ninth and final chamber, but this should not surprise us. By now all is clear. It is asking too much to hope for more explicit illumination.
He prepared his own sepulchre, placed the Master’s donated organs in necessarily simple clay pots at the corners of his own chamber. He was no sculptor: each pot’s lid was inscribed with the name of the appropriate god and an effort to draw their difficult shapes—baboon, falcon, jackal, man. He completed copying his Admonitions and to preserve his name on earth, ran back outside, buried one copy in a cylindrical jar (Fragment C, discovered 1915), another in a cloth a few yards away (Fragment A, 1856). A third, limestone copy (Fragment B, 1898) some messenger had been instructed