The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [21]
. . . just as this morning, this dawn of 12 October, an orange light is now appearing over the Nile’s eastern bank. I have spent the night working here on my balcony, sustained by gin-lemonades and sweet mint tea in glass tumblers painted gold, tracing my finger over the inlaid ebony swirls of my humidor, now containing a set of fine brushes and inks to copy the wall illustrations I hope to find in Atum-hadu’s tomb. (I do not smoke cigars, but they should make fine baksheesh, and the box is lovely.) I sit on the still-warm balcony, watch my sun rise, and examine the lump of sugar half-dissolved in my tea, for all the world like the crumbling foundation stone of a temple ruin.
I shall be, in some six weeks, thirty years old, an age I have long hoped to celebrate in this, the country of my dreams, achieving, by that milestone age, the necessary unparalleled victory to justify thirty years of life. And, as I consider the party for my departure from Boston, as I consider the king who has rested undiscovered some 3500 years, I could almost wish that this moment—here on the fast-brightening balcony of my Cairo hotel—might never end.
I mean something more by this than merely blurting out that I do not wish to grow older, that I would prefer to be excused from blundering into corpulent middle age and bleary post-prime. I mean, rather, that here, in the early summer of one’s life, with preparatory glory still thrumming behind one and seismic triumph perhaps mere weeks ahead, one desires to hear the soprano of this one particular mosquito singing in one’s ear forever, to see these precise midges waver forever in their nervous indecision, hypnotised by the very sun which will soon scorch them, to feel the pinprick heat of this glass of mint tea, warming each crevice of three fingertips forever, to see that sugar’s disintegration pause forever. One’s blood roars with the desire that somehow this instant of possibility and potential be seized and held, vibrating and glowing orange in one’s softly closed fist. That one might stroke and examine this captured moment, feel its velvety tread in one’s palm, that I might remain quivering on the brink rather than tumbling headlong into the future, until I have had my fill of the present. Or, think of it like this, Reader: one climbs a high, steep hill. Then, after years and years of climbing, one sees the crest within reach and one realises that, upon achieving that crest, only two possibilities remain: up and over, to begin an accelerating descent, or . . . to continue moving in the same direction one has grown accustomed to and fond of, to continue the way one has come, up and up, to ignore the fallible earth that ceases to rise, but to rise oneself nevertheless.
And if you should sit up for a moment from your soft easy chair and wonder, Why? Why Egypt? Why the desire to rummage in the dust? I can only suggest that the kings of Egypt kept climbing. They mastered those frilly, fleeting moments, imprisoned them in soft cages. In their wrapped corpses with their organs bottled in canopic jars, and in their picture-alphabet and in their beast-headed gods, the best Egyptians lived with the certainty that they were owed eternity, that they lived and would live forever in a present of their own choosing, unhaunted by the past, unthreatened by the future, luxuriously entertained in a present they could extend as long as they wished, releasing these savoury moments on their own terms, not at the imperious demand of mere days, nights, suns, moons.
Margaret, may I share with you a darker memory of my shining youth? It is not the sort you prefer, but it makes a point. As a boy, I recall a village vicar berating me (r optional) for my obsessive interest in the Egyptians. (This would, of course, happen only when my father was abroad on expedition and unable to protect me from the vile clergyman, and I would wander away from the Hall, roam into the village near our estate. Where the vicar did not realise who I was, so far from my