The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [78]
No matter. The delays of the modern financial system are one of the unavoidable obstacles thrown in our path. Were our task easy, anyone could accomplish it, and immortality would be a cheap honour.
Lunched at the Explorers’ Club in Cairo, and I must admit I found it rather overwhelming to see the company I hope one day to keep. The building was an officers’ club in the War. I had heard of its transformation and I had vaguely expected some rather crass or amusing tribute to the fathers of Egyptology and excavation, perhaps something to lure American tourists, or more practically, a well-decorated house of assignation wherein impoverished archaeologists could discreetly pair off with cash-heavy would-be patrons, whether the representatives of skimpily stocked but well-endowed American museums or bored and daffy English lords, ideally shell-shocked and narcoleptic, fanning themselves with signed cheques.
But no, I found something else entirely, a little vanity of the French and British Consuls-General perhaps, but one which had quite an effect on me, as if a panorama of my future were laid out glistening before me. In the pillared, sandstone building—a bank at first glance—one entered a dark wood hall on bloodred carpets as gaslights cobra-hissed behind globes of lapis and crystal. Floating fezzes unburdened me of my things, and then I stood quite alone, straightening my cuffs and tie in the dim light under the watchful eyes of a portrait gallery of the men who came before me, each leaving his large, ineffaceable footprints in the sand. To the left of the mirror where I examined my own face hung old Henry Salt, whose memoirs I devoured as a boy. Next was Salt’s muscleman, Belzoni, the former circus strongman who opened Abu Simbel’s temple. Then, the half-mad, hypnotic gaze of Fouéré, who was reputed to have kept a harem with the full blessing of the French Government, as it kept him more productive in the accepted Golden Age pursuit of unwrapping mummies for their golden rings. Next in oils was Champollion, white-collared, stiff-necked, and a bit cross-eyed, as if the effort of decoding the Rosetta stone had twisted his eyesight and reason into a coiled snake. And a dozen others hung there, too, nearly all of them retiring or dying with the warning to the world that there was nothing left under the sands of Egypt; they had found the very last of it themselves. And each being proven wrong by the bold fellow who followed him, who in turn said he had been the last, who in turn . . . and so on.
I stood amidst these pictures, my own mirrored face hanging equal amongst them. I could see the reflection of Carter’s face over my shoulder. “Hullo, Trilipush,” said the painting, so audibly that if I had not been alone I would have asked a companion if he had not heard it, too. A foolish phantasm, but I understood at once the meaning of this mad vision, this excess of imagination too long trapped in the city and the corruptions of hotels and clubs: I could hear the pantheon welcoming me into its ranks.
Exhilarated, I retreated into the dining room to look for my lunch engagement amidst the tables drooping with mouldy consular staff. The vicious maître d’hôtel would have dispatched me to the membership office before seating me, but my companion arrived in the nick of time and we were soon seated, examining his photographs of Nile-front villas.
A few moments later, the living Carter entered the restaurant and passed close to my table, dressed, as in his portrait, in a light gabardine, and peering strangely at me, nodding as he does. “Ah, feeling better, are you, Trilipush?”
“So far, so good, old man. Avoiding the more recherché dairy inventions and anything hailing from our friend the goat, but otherwise nothing should keep me out of the sand, thanks.” He looked at a few of the estate agent’s photographs on the table. “We shall be near neighbours,” I told my colleague, and he expressed his pleasure at the news.
In the end, confident in CCF and the Partnership, I settled on a large house in a secluded suburb