Tom McCarthy - C

“Egyptology’s a hundred years old, right?”

“A hundred? Three thousand, more like. These tombs were being dug up from the moment they were made. Romans, Arabs, the pharaohs themselves would delve into and disinter them-and the artefacts they took from them would themselves be re-located and re-used for their own ends. This is part of what we’re studying, or should be studying: you have to look at all of this, at all these histories of looking. The mistake most of my contemporaries make is to assume that they’re the first-or, even when it’s clear they’re not, that their moment of looking is somehow definitive, standing outside of the long history of which it merely forms another chapter…”

He turns away from Serge towards Laura, and the two of them spend the next few hours planning the elaborate trigonometry according to which their Sedment excavations will proceed in light of the new instruments they’re bringing with them:

“If we plot it all in three-point,” Falkiner says, “reading by verniers to three seconds… What’s the average error with that?”

“Four-fifths of one second,” Laura answers, counting off her fingers.

“Fine. We take the first triangle from here-” he marks the map that’s laid out on the deck in front of them-“the second here-” a second mark-“the third here, and so on. We lay down rock-drilled station-posts, and work out the relative value of each station by taking observations from those. If a shift’s proved, we treat the observations as two independent sets, not one…”

Serge listens to them for a while, thinking of clock codes, zone calls, houses and batteries on fire. Gazing towards the Ani’s sails, he lets the rhombi and trinomials of their conversation run across the surfaces of these, their intersecting angles. Beyond the sails, just past the shoreline, irrigated fields form neat-edged planes; beyond these, the desert is, once more, ungeometric. Birds wheel occasionally above it, homing in on prey, or maybe simply signalling to other birds the whereabouts of decaying carcasses. At some point, the boat drifts past oxen yoked to a water-hoisting mechanism, turning its lever in slow, plodding circles.

“Same méthode they are using since antiquity,” Pacorie says, noticing Serge looking at them. “Greatest achèvement of technologie in all the history.”

“What: ploughs?”

“No: making the water to flow upwards. Once this was realised, the automobile and flight mécanisé were no more than a small step away.”

“Still took a while, didn’t it?” Serge asks.

Pacorie rolls his lip and forearms outwards again, although this time it’s less in agreement than in contestation: Did it really? Then, turning away from Serge, he sets about unpacking the boxes that he’s been allowed to bring on board. Each one seems to contain a larger, more sophisticated version of the old chemistry set that Serge, The Boy’s Playbook of Science in hand, used to fool around with. Throughout the afternoon he busies himself taking readings from the river, dangling a test tube on a piece of string from the boat’s deck, reeling it back in and emptying its contents into beakers into which he then dips various reactive bands. The water’s murky, full of the silt with which it’s been fertilising fields and smothering transcendent, Hellenistic dreams since time immemorial. While waiting for the bands to give him readings, he watches Serge, as though keeping track of what Serge is looking at. Each time he does this, Serge looks away, usually at Alby, who himself seems to be observing Pacorie and making the odd entry in a notebook: suspicion, like a yoke of oxen, seems to move in a closed circle. Serge, prompted by Alby’s scribbling, takes his notebook out as well, but finds he can’t think of anything to write in it. The only words that come to him are Méfie-toi; he jots them down. After wondering for half an hour or so what Pacorie and Alby are really on this expedition for, or what their respective agencies think the other might be here for, or want the rival agency to think that they themselves are here for, it strikes him that he should be asking that same question of himself: why has he really been sent, through endless counterflows of animated sediment, to Sedment? Could he himself be-to his own insu, as Pacorie would say-some kind of decoy: a dummy chamber, and a moving one at that, being slowly dragged across the surface of events? If so, by whom, and for whose benefit, or detriment? Dizzy again, he looks back at the two words in his notebook and underlines the second: Méfie- toi…

Later, as mint tea and biscuits are served, he chats with Laura, who tells him that she studied history at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford:

“I did a dissertation on Osiris,” she announces. She goes on to outline the well-known myth: the god’s dismemberment, his sister Isis’s search for his parts, her conception of Horus from the one part of him that she couldn’t find and so was forced to remake for herself, and Osiris’s subsequent adoption as the deity of death and resurrection by the people of the Nile, who’d depict him in their art with a large phallus, rising to inseminate each day.

“A res-erection,” Serge quips. Laura looks back at him through her glasses without laughing. He pictures the girls he’d see emerging from St. Hilda’s gates during his stint in Oxford -riding bicycles, chatting with friends or clutching books as they headed to lectures: maybe one of them was her. SOMA: the School of Military Aeronautics’ buildings merge in his mind with the funerary complex Petrou pointed out to him from the Circular tram on the way back from Ramleh, the Royal Tombs-and Alexander, a young Macedonian soldier, morphs into an ankh-bearing, hook-bearded god.

“The sun itself entered the body of Osiris,” Laura’s saying. “He’d swallow and pass it, bringing about the repetition of creation, the timeless present of eternity. The ancient Egyptian cosmology had no apocalypse, no end: time just went round and round…”

Her little lecture fades out, and there’s silence for a while on deck, broken only by the regular plash of the bow and the creaking of the tiller. The man holding this smokes a black, wooden chibouk; another river-man sits cross-legged at the prow, staring at the water like a mesmerised Narcissus. The crew’s completed by two more Egyptians: one of them lounges at a fixed spot on the cabin’s roof, reaching up to casually pass the front sail’s boom above his head each time they go about; the other lurks inside, preparing food. The landscape slips by indifferently. Like the crew, it looks bored, weary of being stared at. At sunset, it turns a chemical shade of pink, then green, then changes, via white, to the same dark blue tone as the sky. As they drop anchor they’re besieged by insects: grasshoppers, cicadas, moths, mosquitoes. They look like flocks of birds, congesting the whole air and covering cabin, deck, sails, crew and expedition members alike in a twitching and vibrating coat.

“Maybe we’re the shit,” Serge says to Falkiner.

“Get the nets up,” Falkiner instructs the helmsman, who seems quite unbothered by the insects-perhaps because his chibouk’s smoke is keeping them away from him. The helmsman murmurs something at his crew, who slowly haul mosquito-netting around the deck’s rear, from the roof above the cabin’s entrance to the helm beside the rudder, wedging two vertical poles between it and the boards so as to form a tent. They then pick some of the larger insects from the netting’s outer surface, fry them over a stove and eat them with dourah paste. The Europeans, meanwhile, dine on a stew of dates, figs and pigeons. They drink wine too: Serge, Laura, Alby and Pacorie in moderation, Falkiner to excess. He spends a good hour after supper issuing invocations to the night air: