The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [86]
“Please, I found it all fascinating,” I said. “I am rather more scientific on these matters, so I cannot say that I sat with you as much of a believer.”
“Of course not, dear, of course not,” said Sonia, and she smiled precisely as one wants one’s mother to smile when she allows your lie to traipse by unharassed.
I bade them good night, left them waving to me from their doorway, hand in hand, made plans for breakfast tomorrow, and I lie now in my vibrating cabin (irritatingly Spartan after what I now know is available on the ship—I have half a mind to go back to Cairo to take it up with the man at the ticketing agency).
I do not wish to encourage quackery, Margaret, but these lovely, lovely people must have been rather well-practised, well-synchronised confidence artists and helpful amateur Egyptologists both, and eager to see me succeed, for how else to explain that A H A H R T N W, plus a few spaces, yields “aHA Hr Tnw,” which means “a fighter for honour” in the standard Roman-alphabet transliteration of hieroglyphs, and “rx-k st” translates, to the letter, as a very encouraging “you know the place”? What can I write here, Margaret? I saw what I saw. I do not believe it any more than you. It cannot have happened. It happened.
I have just awoken, 4.15 in the morning by my watch. In my dream just now, the engine-buzz of my wooden walls became the murmur of an impatient audience in a full lecture hall, like the room where I met you, but infinitely larger. Thousands of people are awaiting my remarks. I sit at a table on the stage with my lecture in front of me, several sheets in a hand I recognise as my own boyhood efforts to write demotic script. I am a little uncomfortable due to the weight of my headpiece, burdened as it is with golden figurines on the brow representing a vulture, a sphinx, a cobra, you, your father, Inge, and the Nordquists. Next to me on the dais sits Carter, very chatty, though in the rising ululating coming from the far, far back of the Boston audience, it is increasingly difficult to concentrate on his flattery: “Of the utmost importance, of course, we must always maintain, the manner in which we proceed from chamber to chamber within the tomb, my admiration extends far beyond your discoveries and encompasses also your heart.” The ululating grows louder and sweeps forward over the crowd, row after row of Boston ladies suddenly standing to shriek with contorted faces, flinging their arms and programmes towards me in pleading. “How do you maintain your calm in the face of such pressures?” asks a visibly nervous Carter. Half the crowd is ululating now, tearing at their collars and belts, the throaty howling, a noise as old as Egypt, echoing from the Boston ladies, Dean Warren, Professor ter Breuggen, all of Finneran’s flunky and criminal partners. Inge has torn her dress away from her magnificent body, and even you stand now, shaking off the groggy murk of painkillers to wail as everyone is wailing, and I stand up from the table and stride forward, naked and powerfully tripodal, holding my lecture in one hand and Carter’s still beating heart in my other.
I am tired. My eyes are heavy but I feel so very strong, strangely strong.
Friday, 27 October, 1922
I awoke late this morning and heard the news from one of the native pursers that last night a brawl erupted between two members of the kitchen staff and that one of the devils cut the other with a bread knife before two waiters could restrain him. I learnt also that the combat had begun over an insult by one of the blacks to an American tourist, and that the other Egyptian was moved to fight because he could not bear rudeness to Westerners. He defended the insulted American against his own countryman. A fighter for honour.
I finally convinced the purser to take me to where the poor fellow was lying, bandaged up,