Tom McCarthy - C

The dahabia, whose name, Serge learns when he arrives the following morning and sees it painted on the hull, is Ani, casts off just before noon. The tug-pilot who tows it from the quay into mid-river wears a look of blank indifference; the Ani’s crew, too, perform their duties with the same disinterested expression: hoisting the sails, cleating ropes, plying the tiller. They progress at a slight diagonal across the river’s surface-not tacking, since the wind’s behind them, but not following its course directly either: every so often, as they near first one bank, then another, the boom swings languidly across the foredeck as the helmsman brings the boat about. The wind may be behind them, but the current’s not: it runs backwards past the bobbing prow, shunting them constantly to leeward.

“It’s counter-intuitif,” says Pacorie, noticing Serge watching the flow.

“What is?” Serge asks.

“Appellation: Lower Egypt, Upper Egypt.”

“You’re right,” says Alby, who’s sitting beside them on the deck. “I always wondered why the northern part’s called ‘Lower’ and the lower ‘Upper.’ ”

“Altitude,” Pacorie explains. “The terrain rises as the country descends from the sea. The river flows from south to north. One time each year it débords, and deposits black silt over the fields. That’s why the land is black-but only in a narrow corridor along the Nile.”

“A strip,” says Serge.

“Précisement,” nods Pacorie, approvingly. “Only this strip is cultivated. The silt allows lush marécages with fish and birds on either side the river, and soil that is oxygène-isated, and so good for food. The villages are just above the line of débordage. Then comes hills and desert: no fertile terrain there; no habitations either.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” murmurs Alby. “You’re forgetting the dwellings of the dead.”

Pacorie thrusts his lower lip out and rolls his forearms upwards in acknowledgement. Steamers chug past them, following the river’s line directly and at more than twice their speed. Watching them go by, Serge is struck by the strange and slightly dizzying sensation that, in their anachronistic sailing boat, they’re somehow drifting leeward in time, too: slipping back-or, more precisely, sideways-in it, losing traction on the present.

“Heading for Luxor,” Falkiner calls out from midship, pointing at the steamers. “Place is a giant dummy chamber.”

“What’s a dummy chamber?” Serge asks.

“It’s a trick,” says Laura, rubbing her forehead again, “used by the pharaohs to fool the plunderers they knew would one day come and disinter their funerary complexes. They’d have a second burial chamber, not the real one, built in a part of the structure that was relatively easy to find, and fill it with a few half-precious things. The thieves, thinking they’d hit the jackpot, would stop digging when they came across it, and the real chamber and its treasures would stay undiscovered.”

She looks over at Falkiner expectantly, as though awaiting some sign of approval for her annotation. He neither gives nor withholds this, but continues:

“Draws the tourists to it like so many flies to shit.” Raising his fist at the parasoled and safari-hatted passengers who lean across the steamer’s railings facing their way, he shouts: “Buzz, flies, buzz!” These people, for their part, wave back excitedly, mistaking his hostility for friendliness.

Falkiner looks like an old sea-dog with his beard. He holds a sextant and a compass, which complete the look. Between bouts of checking the ship’s position against these-or, perhaps, since this act is quite redundant in the circumstances, vice versa-he rails intermittently against the Concession system:

“Worse than taxi licences in London! Most archaeologists would sooner die than relinquish theirs-and when they do, they’re snapped up by the EES, the Philadelphia Museum or the Institut Français. Your people have a lot to answer for!”

He points an accusatory finger at the prow-a finger that, due to the boat’s motion, wavers between designating Pacorie and Alby.

“Whose people?” Pacorie asks. “Mine, or his?”

“Both of yours!” Falkiner barks back. “Department of Antiquities has consistently favoured the French since Lacau’s headed it.”

“That’s not quite true,” Alby responds. “Look who’s digging right now: Winlock’s at El-Kurneh; Fisher’s at Asasif; and Carter and Carnarvon-English as you or I, it must be said-are up at Thebes.”

“Won’t find a single scarab there,” scoffs Falkiner. “And even if they did, your man has signed away our rights to anything we turn up!”

“It’s not that simple, as you’re well aware,” says Alby. “The permittee must notify the Chief Inspector of all finds, and the Antiquities Service assume overall jurisdiction of each dig, while still-”

“Overall jurisdiction? They confiscate the whole lot, and hand it over to the Museum in Cairo, who decide what paltry scraps to toss back to the finder’s national collections.”

“Isn’t that fair?” Alby asks.

“Hell, no! The home of Egyptology is London – Berlin too. What’s Cairo got to do with any of this?”

“Could it not be argued-” Alby starts; but Falkiner roars back at him:

“Appeasers! Turncoats! Cowards!”

Towards Serge, Falkiner’s attitude is softer-not that he bothers to learn his name: he calls him “Pylon Man” each time he addresses him:

“You an engineer then, Pylon Man?”

“Not at all,” Serge replies. “I studied architecture.”

“AA?” Falkiner asks.

Serge nods, squinting against the light reflecting off the water. “Old Theo Lyle still there?”

“I went to his lectures every morning-well, most mornings.”

“Theo! We studied together at Cambridge. He still banging on about metopes?”

“Metopes and triglyphs-absolutely.” Serge tries to recall the other terms that Lyle used in his lectures, but loses these beneath the buzz of half-remembered conversations in Mrs. Fox’s Café, titles of West End musicals, narcotic code-words… “How did you become an archaeologist, then?” he asks Falkiner after a pause.

“Grew up in Greenwich: used to ride my tricycle across the Prime Meridian, beneath the Royal Observatory. Gave me a sense of measurement and time, I suppose. I’d go around Kent as a teenager, looking for Roman villas, temples, bathhouses, what have you-little knowing there was one two hundred yards from the observatory.”

“Oh yes,” Serge says. “I was meant to visit that with my class once. Were you involved in excavating it?”

“I was consulted,” Falkiner replies. “Didn’t like their method, though. More vandalism than curation: coins, vases, tablets and the like were being hauled out as though the place were a house on fire. Wrong way to go about it: you should brush it down inch by inch, notating everything-positions, state of degradation, the lot. Like police detectives going through the scene of a catastrophe.”

“It is like a house on fire, then,” Serge says.

“Yes-but the fire’s already happened. Everyone’s dead; the evidence alone is to be salvaged. Same mistake was being made here when I arrived: explorers ripping stuff out of tombs willy-nilly, plundering as fast as they could, rendering artefacts illegible and therefore meaningless. A real disaster!”

“A disaster that the catastrophe was lost, rubbed out?” Serge makes the frotting motion that the man from the Ministry of Finance made in the Savoy Palace.

“Exactly,” Falkiner replies. “Pylon Man, you get it. Only here, it’s much more complex: there’ve been generations upon generations of excavation, which you have to disinter and notate too.”