The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [43]
Having been well received at my bank, I then spend the rest of 12 October wrestling not with heavy tomb doors or incalcitrant work crews or fading hieroglyphs suddenly and fearfully exposed to bleaching sunlight, but with Franco-Egyptian bureaucracy. To what they submit an explorer nowadays! It was not always like this; there was once a glorious golden age when men went into the desert with no one’s permission and no one’s help. Wit and curiosity were the requisites. Once, not even academic degrees were required: Belzoni was an Italian circus strongman, Howard Vyse a demolition expert, but Egypt drew them both into her embrace, and richly rewarded their manly love. Belzoni simply carried off sarcophagi on his own knob-muscled back; Ferlini knocked the tops off virgin pyramids, like a bear batting at a beehive, and descended upon the sweet treasures nestled inside. The tennis professional F. P. Mayer, in a possibly misguided effort to understand how the pyramids were built, hired a team of native workers and closely monitored their work habits, exhaustion, and attrition as they dismantled a small VIth-Dynasty pyramid stone by stone, wheeled the heavy blocks through the desert on primitive rollers, cut the pyramid’s perfect blocks into rough, random, “natural” shapes, and buried them in a quarry several miles away. The whole experience proved very little but did reveal at the nearly empty pyramid’s central chamber an extremely small gold-flake figurine of Anubis, which I believe was melted down by Mayer’s children, after the explorer died quite mad, certain that there was anagrammatic significance to be found in the name of the Vth-Dynasty king Shepseka’are. At any rate, these explorers were men. They came, they dug, they took risks, they walked off with their finds, and their names have entered the pantheon. And while I cannot always endorse the scientific value of their methods or results, they did not wait while an application for an “Archaeological Concession” was pondered by sleepy Frenchmen in a Cairo office, which in exchange for mummifying explorers in red tape, extorts 50 percent of their discoveries to toss into the insatiable maw of the Egyptian state museums.
In short, my visit to the office of the Director-General of the Egyptian Antiquities Service was a grave disappointment. Instead of the ready assistance I could reasonably have expected, I was told that the application letter I had sent several weeks earlier from Boston “wandered, it is possible to say?”
“No,” I instructed the secretary, a pale Frenchman who claimed never to have heard of me or my application, “it is not possible to say that my application wandered.” He tarried a few minutes behind his boss’s evidently soundproofed door, then emerged with the news that my application was once again under consideration and would I please return to the office in eleven days’ time. Eleven days! 24 October is now my earliest departure date for the site. I had intended to be under way in two days, and budgeted accordingly. This is my error, of course, an error of overestimating the efficiency of others, and now, under this infantilising regime, I have no choice but to postpone. I report to the tourist agency and book first-class passage to Luxor on the Luxor Princess for the 24th, return to the hotel and extend my stay in the Pharaoh Suite, an expense I had not foreseen in my planning sessions with the Partners. The wire on the 22nd will be, it seems, more urgent than any of us had intended.
My concession application is cannily modest. Unlike those who would excavate vast stretches of the country on whimsical suspicions, I have applied for the exclusive licence to explore only a very small