The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [63]
So, making a display of yourself fails. Working in secret fails. The natural next notion is to endow a state-run and protected necropolis, the Valley of the Kings, in which no one attempts secrecy but instead the mummies rely on the well-paid living to protect the crowded, enclosed city of the dead. “We will stick together,” say the kings for an optimistic period. “We will build openly, with immortal displays of our wealth and power, and we will lie mummified cheek by mouldering jowl, and make an institution, a governmental ministry of tomb management and protection. The kings who come after us will see that the maintenance of a secure necropolis is in their own future interest; each king will trust his successor, because each king will know that his successor must, in turn, trust his successor to return the favour.” A golden rule to protect all that underground gold. “You, too, will need the fallible living someday, oh yes you will, so do this for me today and the future will protect us both.” Ah, except! Except it does not take long for the present to find the pious claims of the past and the hypothetical necessities of a distant future to be, both, of little weight when pressing, present needs appear. Observe: to a government in need of money for wars or monuments, the immortality insurance glinting under the sand begins to look not unlike a well-located treasury, and the past seems to be volunteering to finance the present, and the future immortality problems of the current spendthrift king seem comfortably far away.
Suddenly, your immortality, which matters more to you than anything else in the entire universe, seems horribly tenuous, as you grow every day older and your enemies approach. How to bring everything that you need for an uncertain future without losing anything or drawing unwanted attention to yourself? Every traveller’s dilemma, mine heading south, the king’s heading to the underworld: what to pack?
Three days until the wire.
The dancers on the narrow stage here remind one of a verse of Atum-hadu’s:
Atum-hadu admires two sisters.
He takes them to his chambers.
Too late they realise the dangers
Of a king whose love produces blisters.
—(Quatrain 9, Fragments A & C, from Desire and Deceit
in Ancient Egypt by Ralph M. Trilipush)
The strenuous contortions poor Harriman performed to navigate even that relatively mild passage! “Two sisters’ unfortunate behaviour comes to the king’s attention,” and “Atoom-Hadoo’s chamber of justice,” and “the heat of royal wrath,” and so forth, the injured prude taking shelter in jurisprudence.
19 Oct.
Cairo, a cabaret, late at night
My darling Queen-to-be,
I have just reread your letter of 22 September, as I have done over and over for three days now, and I see your face everywhere I look, even in this Oriental stage show. The women on the stage remove their silken scarves to the sound of the tambourines and moaning violins, and the veils drift down like perfume. They seem practically naked when they step onto the stage, but then even after removing veil after veil after veil for minutes, strewing them in heaps on the stage and my table, they leave not much nuder than they arrived, though the silken skins they have shed form a pile as large as a desert bluff hiding a royal tomb.
Cairo teems with reminders of you. The palm trees at night resemble quite precisely a giant wilted bouquet, like the one I held out for you last spring, as you stepped down from the cab, a distant look in your eye, scarcely recognising me, as I had just spent two hours in the driving rain waiting for you. I was just now recalling the evening in May you and I rode the swan boats in the Public Garden and I recited Atum-hadu’s verse to you and you laughed at us:
Atum-hadu sees his newest queen for the first time.
His heart and body swell and inflame.
He will go mad, will commit some crime,
If she is not brought to him at once,