The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [75]
Journal: Find, with much trouble, an open cable office, and cable Boston to confirm certain details necessary for the Partnership’s first scheduled wire, as preliminary resources are dwindling, and we are only beginning.
Bank closed. No one responds to knocking.
Call for portraitist to return; nothing else to be done on a Friday in a Mohammedan city.
CABLE. CAIRO TO C. C. FINNERAN,
BOSTON, 20 OCT. 1922, 3.18 P.M.
OXFORD UNIVERSITY IS IN ENGLAND. NO FURTHER CLARIFICATION OF MY ACCURACY NEEDED. KNOW NO FERRELL. 22ND APPROACHES. MUCH DEPENDS. Q3: IN ALL ATUM-HADU’S REALM, THERE IS NO MAN MORE TRUSTED/THAN HIS MASTER OF LARGESSE, WHOSE EVERY MOVEMENT IS DIVINE./I SHALL REPLACE WITH GOLD ANYTHING OF HIS WHICH IS RUSTED/AND I SHALL ASSURE HE CAN AT HIS WHIM SWIM IN WINE. DADIAE, CAL, 1920. RMT.
Saturday, 21 October, 1922
Journal: Today, with time nipping at my heels and still no word from the Antiquities Service, I paid them a call. For last night, in troubled pre-sleep clarity, it occurred to me that I have been fooled into worshipping a slip of paper. Such fragile fetishes, an archaeologist knows better than anyone, are not carved in stone. There is no use making a god of before-the-fact permission, as Marlowe used to say in the matter of applying for leaves. A man-to-man chat with the Director-General, perhaps a gift and a candid negotiation over terms, even an expression of willingness on behalf of Hand-of-Atum, Ltd, to offer him an honourary share in our discovery, and with that, we should at last be under way.
I presented the D-G’s secretary with a signed first edition of Desire and Deceit in Ancient Egypt. He was duly impressed, grateful, muttered some French. I requested an urgent audience with the D-G himself, to share my latest thinking about the tomb of Atum-hadu.
“You are wanting to make change of your application?” asks dubious DuBois.
“No, I am wanting to enhance my application, ducks.” Which is true: I am willing to make one last goodwill gesture to their rules.
As DuBois apparently could not blink without clearance, he duly retreated into the D-G’s chambers and left me standing at his desk. The trappings these office-officers feel they need! “From the desk of the Director-General of the Antiquities Service.” “From the Desk of the Chief Secretary to the Director-General of the Antiquities Service.” Wax and seals, presigned, prepaid blank telegraph forms. Frippery.
I waited my turn in one of the overstuffed leather chairs, withdrew my papers from my bulging briefcase, and have now updated my Journal to the present moment. And I wait, hopeful that my visible willingness to submit myself to their corrupt rules will unclog the constipated system.
And now it is later this same evening and I am back in the hotel, and it is with pride and excitement that I write these words: today I met and befriended one of my great heroes, a man whose professionalism and dedication I respect above all others, even though he is now reduced to chasing shifting shadows in the Valley of the Kings.
Sitting, waiting the word of the D-G, and having finished my updating of the Journal, and still with no sight of the toadying Frog, I felt the shaking-jelly preamble of a medium-grade gut attack, and so I retreated to the gilded facilities of the Antiquities Service’s gentlemen’s lounge. Though it may strike you as indelicate, I must invite you, Reader, to join me there, as I wash my hands and watch in the mirror as the colour returns slowly to my damp, exhausted face.
I had recognised—from the sounds of unhappiness in harmony with my own that had risen from the next closet over—a fellow member of the digestively damned, a brother of the beastly bowel. And then at the sinks and mirror, as I rose from the basin with my face dripping lukewarm water and cursed the native towel-boy who took his sweet time drying me before my shirt collar was soaked, I examined