The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [44]
Visit post to see if any news from Partners/Margaret in the poste restante. Assure myself that the postal workers have the correct spelling of my name. Cable CCF to assure my bank information is accurately relayed to the Partnership’s bank in Boston, and inform him of my delay.
Begin looking for estate agents for rental of villa near the excavation site in the south, see drawings and photographs of some exquisite and suitable properties. Howard Carter himself used one of these agents, the agent informs me. An impressive credential: the man will know the sort of thing I shall need. Visit bazaar—find a light scarf for Margaret as well as a small boy’s hand reaching into my pocket. Nearly snap the little thug in two before a hammy actress playing his weeping mother appears to plead for his life.
Sit at an ahwa and have a coffee to calm my nerves. Note the day’s frustrating events in journal. Back to the hotel to bathe.
Friday, 13 October, 1922
Evidence pointing to the location of the tomb of Atum-hadu: The dillydallying at Antiquities allows me to address an implied question: how does one know where to look for a tomb? To answer, I must begin some years ago, when I cut my teeth as an Egyptologist alongside and under the heady influence of Hugo St. John Marlowe, who would by now have been one of the most celebrated members of our dusty fraternity had he not been cut down in the mad slaughter of the War.
Before that tragic day, we were both young captains, working for our great cause side by side right here in Egypt (before I headed off in ’15 to fight in the Bosporus campaign). We had been at Oxford together, Hugo Marlowe and I, and both of us spoke modern Arabic fluently, as well as knowing our way around ancient Egyptian. Our linguistic gifts were duly noted by His Majesty’s Army, our posting to the Near East theatre merely logical. With our linguistic and cultural expertise, we were based in a Cairo suburb, responsible for prisoner interrogations (the occasional suspicious Arab tribesman bearing a German or Turkish weapon or document) and counterintelligence operations (trying to convince Arab tribesmen to carry Turkish weapons but not mean it).
I know it is hardly fashionable to say this about the War, but I had the most marvellous time, until I was asked to advise the ANZACs in that jolly trip to scrap with Johnny Turk and catch bullets at Gallipoli. For in the months before that sad exploit, Marlowe and I took advantage of our happy posting in our beloved Egypt, scouring the sands whenever passes could be acquired and, when the opportunity arose, making ourselves known to some of the old hands of archaeology still trying to do their work, uncovering the past even as the present collapsed around them.
My dearest friend and I spent our free moments (more than you might guess in what was for me, to tell the truth, a theatre of war with a very light repertory schedule) on motorcycles, finding official justifications for visits to the pyramids, the Sphinx, even making excursions of several days to the south in order to see the Valley of the Kings and Hat-shep-sut’s temple at Deir el Bahari—all of the fantastical places of my childhood and varsity days, suddenly there before me in the most extraordinary reality. To long for something, from the age at which the very first foundation stones of one’s personality are laid and cemented, to long for something from the best part of one’s heart simply because it is more beautiful than anything else in one’s entire life, to