The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [94]
I hauled myself up to the summit, an exhausting business, resting whenever I could find a notch to place a foot, and my arms were twitching and I was spitting dust when I scrambled to the top, where Ahmed was lying down, having a smoke under a makeshift sunscreen: a Hotel of the Sphinx bedsheet (with that mad emblem of vulture, sphinx, and cobra) spread out and supported on sticks. I cursed his laziness and had him prepare me lunch, which we shared in the pale yellow shade. The sun hit the sheet and cast its emblazoned seal in a slightly darker shadow between us. “Hotel of the Sphinx,” says unsmiling Ahmed in English. “A-One, Jack. You are a happy digger, eh?”
“Where did you learn English?”
“I don’t speak English,” he replied in English.
“Digger is a term for Australian soldiers,” I explained. “I am English, so the term is inappropriate.”
“I hate the Australians,” he replied calmly, in English. “They were the worst men here during the War. Worse than any of the others, even the Turks. They made whores of everyone. You English, yes, you are trouble, and the French, pah.” Ahmed spat. “The Americans, I do not know them. But the Australians. These were a disgrace, these men.” All of this he said with a strangely toneless voice, his hand rubbing the short fringe of hair around his temples. It is an odd thing, to hear the grievances and passions of a native people, the misunderstandings or petty concerns that animate them but that are inexplicable to Westerners. I can understand Ahmed’s ancient ancestors better than I can understand Ahmed himself, but then his ancestors were their own masters, not Protected by foreign Powers. To cheer him up, I described something of Atum-hadu and his times. He nodded, seemed to understand the significance of what I was telling him, seemed to grasp towards a sort of pride that these were his people, his history.
After our meal, I hopped over the edge again, my last reassuring sight on the surface being Ahmed’s glowering face as he double-checked the knots gripping the rocks and posts.
This time I descended approximately ten feet further to the next smooth outcropped ledge, but found something far more promising. This shelf was indubitably the porch of a chamber cut into the cliff face, approximately twenty-five feet into the cool dark after a slight turn to the right, so that even a bird hovering directly in front of the cleft would not see the depth of the chamber, and my heart began to pound. Untying myself, I looked over the edge and noted with a thrill that I was nearly directly above the spot where I had found Fragment C, seven years before. This chamber was absolutely man-made (or at least man-enhanced), just like Hat-shep-sut’s unfinished tomb. In this case, however, despite nearly four hours of my massaging the walls from top to bottom, poking with the testing rod like a drunken fencer, scraping my electric torchlight over every inch of shadow, I could conclude only that I had a dry hole: an ancient tomb architect had started on this first room but then found something not to his liking, or a king changed his mind and opted at the last minute for a nice, opulent pyramid instead. There are many such disappointments lurking out here to devour the hopes of the overeager.
The sun, though still cruelly hot, was lowering quickly when I had tied my rope again and called up to Ahmed to lend some muscle, a request I made again and again as I pulled myself, squeaking and wheezing with peeling palms, up to the top, finding it to be quite unoccupied. I collected the gear, folded the sheet, gathered the dirty cooking equipment, and wove my way down the hill alone to find harnessed donkeys, but not a single workman.
I sit now, at the end of day two, in the lamplight of Villa Trilipush, holding this inadvertently comic cable from Finneran (predictably confused by the Gregorian calendar: MONEY? TOO SOON TO SEND MONEY. WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH ALL YOUR MONEY SO FAR? BEST LUCK, CCF). I can imagine Atum-hadu pondering the Tomb Paradox that he would most surely face. I can imagine