The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [61]
Thursday, 19 October, 1922
Journal: Today’s activities included two hours of meditation while the artist pencilled his rough plans onto the canvas. I also found an excellent craftsman of valises, an unadulterated delight, which I know my brother Atum-hadu would have savoured in preparing for his travels, too—the soft scale of the crocodile, the glistening brass of the hasps, the burnt-black monogram (A being only 1/3 the cost of RMT, of course, but that is one of the perquisites of kinghood). Nothing at the bank today, though of course the wire is not officially due for three days yet.
Tonight, I toil in the clamour of a little cabaret where the chicha smoke forms jinn who embrace their puff-cheeked masters with massaging fingers. I watch the smoker by the door: a nest slowly coils around his head, the faint echo of an ancestor’s mummy wraps, but each time the door opens to his right, all at once the smoke rushes out, away, up into the star-flecked, plum-coloured sky. The door closes and he begins again, shrouding himself top to bottom with smoke; the door opens and invisible plunderers again unravel his work.
On immortality and “The Tomb Paradox”: Immortality is, of course, the central issue under the sands. The ancient kings, I would remind my lay readers, all shared a healthy desire to live forever in a well-equipped eternity. To achieve this personal permanence, two elements were necessary:
• The preservation of their physical remains, eternally secure
• The preservation of their names, spoken forever by the living.
Margaret: M., a memory forms like smoke gathering around my head: that village vicar who would appear when I wandered away from Father and the Hall. “Tell me, child. Do you believe in the immortality of the soul?” Aside from him, I do not remember fear in my childhood, but in the case of this vicar, I can conjure today the varieties and intensities of childish terror I felt at the mention of his name, at the sight of his face across a street (calibrated before and after he caught sight of me), the sound of his voice, the feel of his massive, speckled hand on my shoulder, the smell of his breath, the harsh, changeable weather of his moods, and that tingling dread, most intense, when he would present me with some gift.
“Yes,” I mumbled, nearly choking on the proffered sweet.
“And what are the requirements for the soul’s immortality in everlasting paradise?” He leaned in close to hear my answer, placed his ear directly before my mouth, where he must have heard the slurping and crunching of the candy, and I saw deep into that bristled conch shell, red and flaking from winter cold.
I was not trying to mock him, not at that age, Margaret. No, I was relieved, for I knew the answer to his question! I had happened to read it that very day, absorbed until well after dark by Bendix’s Nile Kings (a work I can no longer endorse for scholars). I was relieved, relieved, and I spoke before I heard a faint stammering voice in my brain telling me to stop: “The survival of your remains and your name. Your name in chronicles, your body in the mummy wrap, and your heart, lungs, intestines, and liver in canopic jars. Figurines of serving girls to arouse you for the act of re-creation . . .” My voice was slowing down at the same speed his ghastly ear withdrew and was replaced by the smoothly shaven face (with a red-brown sliver of dried blood) and the so-blue eyes, and the shards of skin speared and quivering in his eyebrow.
And yet from here the beating that followed seems not to have been administered to me; I can instead (in this Oriental music here that may be scarcely changed from that of 3500