The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [76]
I studied him in the mirror, the grace with which he moved, the bearing, the air of masterful indifference. He wore a light twill suit. I was fascinated to see, even in his dotage, the obvious relationship between his manner and his expertise. Like Marlowe, he is one of those for whom his work is his destined calling, and so it is visible even in how he washes his hands, how he bears up under the banal but omnipresent burdens of his body. I introduced myself.
“Trilipush?” he repeated. “Trilipush?” He washed his hands and peered into my reflected eyes, all of Egyptology nestled in his memory, organised and comfortably accessible. “ ‘The pornographer’? ”
His sympathy at the pain I have suffered at that idiotic epithet applied by small minds to my work was evident in his compassionately humorous “quoting” tone of voice; we both knew that even one more word on the topic would be lending the ignorant too much of our time. His ironic question was a welcome “how-d’ye-do” from a peer who knew all too well what sort of envy and stupidity we sometimes meet in this treacherous world.
“Ah, yes, quite so! And a fellow slave to wicked Intestinus the Large, if I may be so bold. Local food doesn’t agree with you, old boy? Or are you a chronic victim, diet aside? This is no continent for the incontinent.”
As the towel-boy dried my hands, I noted with interest that Carter chose to take his towel himself. As if he knew that an explorer, accustomed to the rough ways of the site, cannot allow himself to grow used to the city’s soft luxuries.
We sat and smoked in the D-G’s waiting room (even the great Carter has to wait his turn for the attentions of the desk-wallahs), and he accepted and placed in his portfolio my gift to him, Desire and Deceit in Ancient Egypt, which I inscribed, “To my dear friend, a fellow sufferer of both imbeciles and irritable innards, and a great archaeologist, truly the passing generation’s greatest Egypt-man. With fondness on 21 October, 1922, in the waiting annex of the D-G’s office at the Antiquities Service, Cairo. Ralph M. Trilipush.”
Carter’s renowned quietness, combined with—let us just imagine—some exhaustion at the prospect of pursuing his minor but elusive prey for another season, having burdened himself with the concession for the obviously drained Valley of the Kings, was remarkably stylish. His manner was of the insightful monosyllable, the expressive eyebrow, the breath that could be tuned to the most precise gradations of meaning, practically the sculpting of exhaled cigarette smoke into hieroglyphs which, translated into English, would fill pages. His repose (especially after those internal barrages that would have reduced lesser men than us to outright sobbing) spoke volumes.
We conversed for several minutes about explorer’s gut, my discovery of Fragment C, my prospects for finding Atum-hadu’s tomb, his own prospects for success in the Valley. We discussed Oxford, my childhood in Kent, my military career, Atum-hadu. “Gardiner had some rather choice words about your rhyming translations,” Carter teased, shaking his head at the dishonest and dim-witted philologist who had reviewed Desire and Deceit in Chronicles of Egyptology as “embarrassing for laymen and painful for scholars.”
“Amusing, wasn’t it? That reminds me: I must ask you, Howard, what you make