The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [89]
All Egypt dies with me
And I will leave nothing for the accursed.
Cowards and invaders pursue me
But I will quench my thirst.
—(Quatrain 74, C only)
We may safely assume the following about Atum-hadu:
• He is buried.
• He is buried with as much wealth and art as could fit in his tomb, since the act of burying this last king coincided with a need to preserve as much of a vanishing kingdom as possible. A complete copy of his Admonitions will likely be found with him, ending all question of his authorship and my scholarship.
• He is buried near the sites of Fragments A, B, and C of his Admonitions, all found within a half a mile of each other.
• He is buried near Thebes, where his capital was.
• Since he died prior to the earliest use of the Valley of the Kings as a necropolis, he is not buried there.
• His tomb is unmarked, well-hidden, and perhaps high off the ground, not unlike the empty cleft tomb prepared for Hat-shep-sut that Carter stumbled into back in ’16.
• As none of his relics have ever turned up for sale (keeping his reign and existence in doubt for the debating-club pleasure of idiots), one can logically conclude that he was never found by tomb-robbers. His tomb is gloriously intact, safe for his dear friend, Ralph.
• Therefore, he is in Deir el Bahari, in or against the cliffs near where Marlowe and I found Fragment C, where Marlowe and I conjectured and mapped and intended to return, before I was sent off to Turkey.
I shall be in Isis’s bed
My tongue swimming in her Nile delta,
E’er any intruder find my head
Wrapped and resting upon a lion’s pelt.
—(Quatrain 52, B & C)
And yet, how did he do it? It is a maddening puzzle. How did he arrange, in the chaos of the end of days, to have a tomb built and stocked, and to know that after his death (in battle? in bed? in battle in bed?) his body would be transported there, mummified, sealed in, and then promptly forgotten? Tomb architects, decorators, workmen, Overseers of the Secrets (the priestly specialists who would disembowel, preserve, and wrap him), and strong men to seal the tomb: none of whom would reveal to a living soul what they knew? How did he know that his authority would endure to the last crucial minute, and that his world would then disappear a moment later, under the onslaught, before anyone who knew enough thought to disturb his peace? Somehow he did it, setting for us the most brilliant Tomb Paradox in the history of Egyptian immortality and preparing, for only the most brilliant and deserving, a discovery like no other.
Sunday, 29 October, 1922
Journal: Up early, hours before the bank will open, and I find . . . Cats! Wonderful family of cats appears outside the villa this morning, and as the rising sun gilds our Nile, I happily share water and the food I bought yesterday in town, all adorably lapped up from the villa’s dishes decorated with romanticised pictures of Arab horsemen. There are three of them, two toms and the most endearing orange girl. Name the toms Rameses and Rameses (II and VI, of course), but a creature as rare as an orange girl can only be Maggie. She has a fine appetite, and after finishing off her breakfast she immediately reports to my lap for an affectionate round of petting and purring. The ancients were wise to see in these charmers the wiles of goddesses: they know more than they let on. When Maggie turns her gold-and-green eyes on me, with their slim, sharpened ovals of anthracite, I am clearly in the presence of an eternal force occupying this body for just a spell. And they know who their friends are, with neither hesitation nor misstep; they recognised at once my lap as that of a cat-worshipper.
My father kept hounds, of course, kennels full of them, maintaining at all times five to six hundred English and American foxhounds, harriers, beagles, beagle-harriers, and anglo-français. The kennel masters (a team of twenty-five, dressed in my father’s unconventional livery) were some of my keenest childhood friends, especially when Father was on expedition. In such