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By Root 1030 0

study it, aching to trap it and master it, to spend years in pursuit of it, and then, all at once, through the miraculous intercession of a modern, nonsense war, to have it all delivered up to one’s fingertips . . . and then to realise with shock and rapture that all one has learnt in one’s years of amorous study are mere surfaces, that the luminous object of one’s adoration is so vast that one might spend one’s life and every life one may yet receive straining to sound its depths and make oneself as one with it, to make it acknowledge one’s love and presence, knowing all along that one will never taste even a fraction of what she hides—all of this I felt in my first weeks and months serving King and country in my promised land.

When military duties prevented me and Marlowe from leaving our base to ramble amongst the pyramids and colossi and cliff tombs and temples, we would instead, from our tents and offices, explore—as we had done at Oxford—the holes of Egyptian history, those thrilling moments when for all the world’s scholarship and speculation, we simply squint into darkness and we do not know. Peering into the shadows where parenthetical question marks pursue every date and reference like vengeful cobras unfurled to devour any stray, careless certainties—as in “Atum-hadu (?) reigned (?) circa 1650 B.C. (?) at the tail end of the XIIIth Dynasty (?), of which he was (?) the final king (?)”—the scholar must strain to make out the silhouettes of the kings and queens whose very existence is in doubt. These once-great men and women now cling to their hard-won immortality by the thinnest of filaments (half their name on a crumbling papyrus written a thousand years after their hypothetical death) while, across that chasm of time from them, historians and excavators struggle to build a rickety bridge of educated guesses for those nearly vanished heroes to cross.

At Oxford, even as Marlowe and I mocked those reckless historians who too freely plant ancient papyrus in their own fertile imaginations and chronicle the resulting growths of fantasy with loving care, we were nevertheless drawn to the halo of uncertainties surrounding the purported XIIIth-Dynasty hero-poet-king Atum-hadu. Marlowe and I spent long nights in the Balliol Junior Common Room toiling over the photographic or sketched reproductions of the first two Atum-haduan Fragments. We debated the possibilities, charted the chronological implications, interpreted the verses’ hidden meanings, and of course laughed at those first two efforts to translate the Fragments: the skittish evasions of prim Harriman and the perfumed seductions of Vassal.

Reader, would you know and understand me, as a man and an explorer? Then pay no attention to my childhood; despite my father’s influence and our family’s ease, it truly does not matter. Rather, if you would know my passions and understand how I came to be searching for Atum-hadu’s tomb, focus your vision intently on Oxford; these searing sessions of impassioned scholarship formed me, almost literally made me, it seems now. They gave me historical heft, a third and most crucial dimension, while the feeble light of an Oxford winter’s dawn crept unnoticed through the leaded glass and we pored over Lepsius and Mariette and the other classic texts of Egyptology. Marlowe and I—nineteen, twenty, twenty-one—fiercely debated the mysteries of ancient Egypt, especially the possibility of Atum-hadu. Our devilish advocacy proceeded with rigour but without rigidity; we debated as a relay, readily passing back and forth the baton of doubt, all in a race to illuminate some shadowed crevice of evidence, an unnoticed nook of possibility. Where, if he existed, might Atum-hadu fit in the chronologies, as his name did not definitively appear in the (tantalisingly incomplete) king lists discovered in the preceding decades?

And in these days and nights, you would have witnessed something more: the emergence of a certain voice, the blazing red dawn of vocation, of effortlessness: Marlowe had these without question. More than just memorised knowledge