Stanley Elkin - Searches & Seizures

4.

He smells the gold before he sees it, a vague, involuntary pinch of nostrils, some pepper reflex. He feels the gold before he sees it, coarse-grained as the friction strip on a matchbook. He tastes the gold, warm, faintly curried, greasy as magnets, drawing his tongue like a poultice, carbonating his saliva. He hears the gold, its hum of precious engined molecules, its rare hiss just beyond range. It must be all around him. Its heaviness thickens the air, himself, stranding his stance, sucking at his legs and feet like ground beside a precipice.

He hears noises, hopes it is animals, knows it is men. No one has actually said anything. (It is this silence which is so minatory. Animals, forgetting themselves, would chatter.) He hears — what? Exploration. The silences presiding decision. Then a stone shoved against, the pressure of a shoulder against a wall, its resettling like elastic relaxing to its neutral length. Then taps, randomly scientific, reasoned, and shortly abandoned, a fury of the indiscriminate and something giving way, some rolled stone blossoming sesame; the source of the sounds abruptly shift, ventriloquized, higher, further off. But he takes no comfort from this, for if the noises are now more different, they are more regular too, the scuffle gone out of them, and he hears…footsteps. And their proximity again adjusts.

He knows where he is — in some payload of labyrinth, maze’s choice darkmeat like the eye of a hurricane — and that he is subterranean, in some architectonic cul-de-sac, an archipelago of walls and red-herringed ectopic space. He pictures the stone baffles and barricades, the inverted, earthen, conical screw of tunnel, wedges and bottlenecks and groins of space, all the false spurs, all the difficult dark. And through it all he hears them, now far, now near, unraveling the puzzle of place as if they were walking along a map, taking no confidence when momentarily he thinks he hears them where he has heard them moments before. Soon they are close enough for him to distinguish their tools, their levers and scrapers and mallets and spades, and to hear, too, in the aftermath of their progress, a queer dragged rustling. Then hears seals popping, stone scraped, wooden beams lifted and shoved back along grooves, some final hammering and the adjustment of stone tumblers in some huge lock. It is as if he hides in a hollow — the linchpin center, say, of a cube puzzle on a counter in a drugstore.

He sees their light before he sees them, refracted, rolling off the walls like a sand dune, breaking like a wave, caught, confirming as it comes the gold surfaces he had smelled, felt, tasted and heard before he had seen. He calls out, “Don’t hurt me. I’m your bondsman.” They keep coming. They are here.

In addition to the dish of blazing oil one of them carries, they have brought torches, and these they now ignite, planting them in standards already there. The torches mitigate the gloom, but it is the contents of the chamber which dispel it, laserizing the light, unfurling it like flags in wind and flinging down impression in a brilliant tattoo.

“Can you see anything?” one asks.

“Yes,” says the other, “wonderful things.”

Their first impression is aesthetic, then, the Phoenician thinks. He stands beside the tomb robbers, sharing their awe. It gives him a queer feeling. No criminal himself, this is the first time he has ever been tempted. He’s a little nauseous. Yet he is thrilled, privileged; something stupendous is about to happen. This is what he sees:

First the giant sarcophagus, the carniverous stone high as a man and long and wide as a car, a goddess in nude profile at each corner — Isis, Nepthys, Neith and Selkit — their arms spread like traffic cops’, their hands almost touching, death’s and state’s holy ring-a-rosy, an electric net of intersecting wings stretched like necklaces between them. Articulated tiers of carefully wrought scales and feathers hang from their armpits and along their outstretched arms, and bloom behind their breasts and cunts and asses like webs. Hieratic columns are etched behind these like sums in a foreign mathematics. The Phoenician squints but cannot read them, can make out only water fowl and horse, owl and implement, musical instruments, boat and bowl and fish and wheat, and an incoherent zigzag of joined m’s like an illegible signature or a level lightning. He is furious with himself. This is how he has felt staring into museum cases.

There is architecture on the walls, chemistry, astronomy. White Osiris sits on a throne in the air beneath a high hat like a bowling pin. Anubis, the black-headed jackal, stands behind him, resting a red, avuncular hand on his shoulder while bird-faced Horus looks on. Two of the gods trail hairdos like the comb of a cock.

One thief points to a wall; the other walks up to it and rubs his hand along a gilt bas-relief of two figures, a man and a woman, who sit in profile on a couch. The man clutches a sheath of arrows in his hand like a batter in a batter’s box, the woman a small fan of arrowheads. The tomb robber fondles the woman’s headdress.

“Geez,” says this perfectly ordinary, human young man, no ghoul or monster but only one of the locals seen everywhere around Thebes and Karnak and Luxor these days, with none of the vandal’s malice or nonconformist’s zeal, out of work perhaps, for these are hard times, the slaves getting all the plum jobs, having the construction trades sewn up — and welcome to it, too, he thinks. The Phoenician notices something funny with one of the man’s hands. It’s clear he can be no apprentice to an artisan, and to judge from his sharp, cheap, city clothes there is nothing of the farmer about him. “It’s like it was knit right there on the wall or something.”

“Come on, don’t stand there gawping or I’ll have your guts for garters. We’ve got work to do,” says the first, an older man, the pro in the outfit, the Phoenician thinks, down from played out Giza or Saqqara probably, or Heliopolis, lured by rumors of these new untapped fields in the south — maybe an escaped slave’s drunken tale, confirmed by a primitive, illiterate map drawn by the slave himself, who may even have been killed for it, for this one looks a tough customer. Yet there’s something dedicated about him as well. Tough as he is, he was just as taken aback by that first sight of the tomb, his dry runs through the reamed ruins of Imhotep’s masterpiece or his posed tourist attitudes at the sites of the crumbling mastabas not having prepared him for anything like this.

No. All he’d been truly prepared for (treasure being merely a concept to one who’d stood in plenty of treasure houses but had seen no treasure, or seen it only piecemeal, behind ropes in public rooms or flashing by quickly in a parade, or seen it only as a proposal, looking over a shoulder at the draftsman’s roughs and sketches on a drawing board; real collective treasure, a Pharaoh’s fortune, being just something one has heard of in rumors, third- and fourth-hand accounts that lost detail and sank deeper into wild myth each time they passed from mouth to mouth, as geography is merely a concept to one who has never traveled) were the architect’s mazes and torils and culs-de-sac, the dim blind alleys and traps and suckers’ avenues that led nowhere and kept him busy till the sun came up and the hired priests that guarded the tombs were flashed into wakefulness. Such impediments had turned him into the scout or hunter or Indian he was preparing himself to become by forcing him to discriminate between the real spoor and the counterfeit, testing himself in each of Lower Egypt’s violated pyramids, hanging back, then straying from the rest of his party who rushed forward with the guide to view the now empty storerooms and holy chambers and chapels where the Pharaoh’s painted double stood in mimic life in the picture-book rooms viewing his faded family album, fooled into feasting on images of food, hunting cartoon deer and fishing cartoon fish from cartoon rivers, copulating with cartoons and waiting for the dead man’s soul to invade the ka’s body like a virus. (And perhaps it could have happened, except that the tomb robbers always got there first, breaking the chain of expectation, spoiling eternity with the fierce needs of the present.) Hanging back from the rest of his party to wander those useless funhouse corridors and minefield spaces, an illiterate who has trained himself to read a stone’s insincerity, a musician of structure with perfect pitch for the false note, who fell to this place like water guided by gravity or a magnetized needle ignoring every direction but north.