The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [77]
“Oh! Meestair Cartair! We are apologising for your waiting with all of our most sincere hearts!” And out of the D-G’s office rolls the little secretary, burbling over with admiration and excuses. “You are back from your villa in Gurna? You were not expected, but what complete happiness to be seeing you!” And similar sycophancy, at which Carter and I rolled our eyes at each other.
“What! Is Carter out there, too? Send him right in!” booms a voice from the D-G’s office, neatly illustrating the bureaucrat’s typical preference for dealing with the unthreatening embers of past success rather than the burning fire of present-day promise. Carter’s bearing, even in the few steps from his chair to the D-G’s door, was highly impressive. Were I still young and malleable, I would have sought to emulate him: his unspoken but unmistakable conviction that everything important was somehow more complicated than the layman could understand, but that the only necessity was a clear intention, and that a relaxed simplicity would always yield results. Although perhaps even results are not the point (sixth season, after all) and to conduct oneself as if results were the point is to strive for something illegitimate or grubby. Rather, his bearing implies that one should conduct oneself as if acknowledging that success is often out of one’s control, and—I seem to be having trouble pinpointing the exact effect Carter has—he made one feel smallish, I have heard others say, as if he knew more than you but felt neither superior nor apologetic for that, only wanted, as long as you were in his presence, that you would feel neither inferior nor sorry, but strive, as he did, not for petty things, but only for some unnameable greatness, and to do that with precisely his same sort of unexcitable but stylish calm. And never to mention any of this aloud.
Nodding to me to acknowledge the unfairness of his welcome over my own, Carter took his leave. Before he entered the D-G’s office we made plans to dine often, later, upriver at Thebes during the digging season, and he complimented Desire and Deceit again.
DuBois informed me that the D-G was busy for the rest of the day and to make my “retour in other weather.”
Sunday, 22 October, 1922
Journal. Logistical planning: Visit bank, which is open, but Sunday, of course, is a bank holiday in America. So, tomorrow, as soon as credit is established, first task will be to settle rental of villa in the south, ideally near Gurna. Make appointment for lunch tomorrow with agent. Prepare schedules, begin packing. Hard to know which gramophones to bring south for the villa, and for on-site at the excavation. On the one hand, the Victrola XVII is an excellent salon unit and fills a room well. The Edison Audiogram 3 is very small, fine in a bedroom to help one sleep. Depending on the ease of transport between the villa and Atum-hadu’s tomb, I could bring the Columbia Favorite. But the XVII’s power and volume would be ideal for inspirational music for the men and myself. Popular songs. Old Army favourites.
But, as Carter reminded me yesterday, the great delight on excavation is hearing the men’s work songs, the simple melodies these simple people chant to keep their minds occupied as they burrow away, uninterested in the search itself, and the sweetest sound of all is the sudden silence that falls magically everywhere and all at once when one of them unearths something. Carter spoke of that silence with nostalgic rapture in his eyes.
Monday, 23 October, 1922
Journal: Bank first thing, but there is a delay of some sort. Bank manager asks me if I am “quite certain about the details of my financial arrangements?” I am ready to strike him as he peers up at me from behind his ludicrous spectacles, one of those Englishmen who in the heat of the tropics does not bronze or blossom, does not sweat through with passion, but instead shrivels, a sun-dried little fruit, desiccated and clinging to his figures and protocols, the only things that can save him