Tom McCarthy: C

The crew, again, look on indifferently. Eventually the recitation fades out, but Serge hears its loops and repetitions in the chafing of the anchor-chain against the Ani’s side, the clicks and beeps of insects, long into the night.

By the third day, the landscape has grown more hilly and less fertile; now the desert extends all the way to the Nile ’s banks. Its formlessness seems to have overrun not only the feeble effort to contain it within field-boundaries but also any attempt to box it temporally: today, it’s no longer epochs that stare back at Serge from it, but time’s basic units themselves, its material particles, freed of their hourglass-walls and multiplied to infinity. He still has the impression of being held in a machine, but now it’s one whose operator has abandoned it-or, perhaps, died inside it, at its very core-leaving its motions to repeat without a reason for doing so anymore. Actions are reduced to their own remnants: Pacorie’s arm flops and reels over the side like a decrepit lever or gear-handle; he, Alby and Serge spy on one another so half-heartedly it’s almost comic, their circular choreography of jottings, sideways glances and averted gazes no more than a set of empty and incomplete gestures. After tea Laura, purely out of habit, lectures him, half-heartedly as well, on the more secret ceremonies to Osiris:

“They were held in underground spots,” she says slowly, hand resting languidly across her forehead. “We don’t know what was said because the contents were never divulged. They could have been tied in with Thoth…”

“Why do you say the word in German?” Pacorie asks in a similarly disinterested tone.

“What word?”

“Tod. Mort. The death.”

“No, Thoth,” Laura explains. “The god of secret writing, whose cult centre was Hermopolis.”

“Little round Thoth again,” Serge murmurs.

“He carried cryptographic hymns and spells.” Laura, if she heard his words, ignores them. “Moses, with his stammer and his tablets of the law, grew out of him. He had his own book: with it, it was said, you could enchant the sky and understand the language of the birds, and other animals as well-even the little ones, right down to microbes. But it was lost…”

Nobody takes her up on this, and so the conversation ends. When the insects come, Serge watches one caught in the netting and, turning again to Laura, asks:

“What is it with scarabs?”

“How do you mean?”

“Why are there models of them everywhere, all patterned and inscribed and so on?”

“On the underside, for printing,” she says, even more slowly: her apparatus, too, seems to be voiding itself. “On the upper side, to represent Khepera, god of both the rising sun and matter-matter that’s on the point of passing from inertness into life. His emblem is a beetle.”

“Hail, Khepera, in thy boat,” Falkiner slurs, already drunk, “the three-fold company of gods is thy body…”

“Khepera was part of the solar trinity Khepri-Ra-Atum,” Laura barely manages to add. “He was a writer too. And a judge. These attributes were important in Egyptian cosmogony; that’s why scarabs are common…”

“Secret writing,” Falkiner announces. “Isis and Horus, the Department of… Department of… that shineth… doest homage… I am… I am all that is, was and will be and no mortal has ever lifted my veil… and so saith Isis…”

He continues, like a distant and plague-ridden muezzin, to slur out half-remembered snatches of his scripture. When he runs out of phrases to recite, he repeats the single word “ Isis,” pronouncing it over and over again, more and more slowly each time, before his voice, too, breaks down into grains and runs away.

They arrive at Sedment the next morning. It’s an upland of desert, exposed and windy. Qufti, drawn from nearby villages, form a chain from the main site towards a light railway, just like they did at Abu Zabal-only here they don’t seem to be carrying stuff in, but taking it away. There are holes everywhere, funnel-shaped pits riddling the ground: some are cordoned off with rope and neatly cleaned-out; others gape in disarray like ruined mine-shafts or natural craters. At the base of some Serge can see hatches, most of which are splintered, giving him a glimpse of lower holes beneath the holes, leading to more splintered hatches which, in turn, lead to lower shafts.

“Most of these top ones are mastabas,” Laura says as they walk past one pit after another.

“Masturwhat?” asks Serge.

“Mastabas: low-lying tombs of the early dynastic period. They had rectangular mud-brick superstructures and hollow substructures of four or five chambers. Below these, there are later tombs.”

“Below them?”

“Yes: later dynasties buried their dead lower. Then still-later ones built beside, around, through and all over these earlier-later ones, and so on almost endlessly. This place is a giant warren.”

“Looks more like a giant dump,” Serge says, pointing to the mounds of debris all around them. Shards of broken pottery protrude from these, alongside scraps of paper that he can’t, in passing, make out as either old papyri or contemporary news-pages, plus short lengths of what looks like copper. Beetles scurry up and down the surface of these mounds like mountaineers negotiating faces and approaches. He and Laura come to the spot where Falkiner seems to have established his headquarters: a gully or ravine that cuts a gash into the landscape, in which tent-poles support a canvas canopy that extends a more conventionally front-door-like tomb-entrance into a kind of covered porch.

“We’ve got to get on top of pilfering,” are Falkiner’s first words to her. “It’s become endemic: tools, food, everything. The Qufti say it’s Sebbakhîn and Arabs, but their word’s not to be trusted. We must let them know that the cost of anything in their charge that goes missing will be docked from their own salaries.”

“Where shall I put my things?” she asks him.

“In the tomb behind me,” he says. “Second chamber.”

She moves past him; Serge starts walking with her.

“Whoa! Where do you think you’re going, Pylon Man?” Falkiner barks.

“I thought-” Serge mumbles.

“Well, don’t,” the archaeologist growls back. “You’re in a tent in sector K.”

He jerks his thumb off to the left. Serge makes his way over the uneven ground in the direction the thumb indicates and eventually finds his tent, pitched in an uncordoned and neglected crater. The crater’s shallow; the wind rushing across the upland swirls down into it, throwing handfuls of sand against the canvas in a way that seems intentional, malicious. Sitting inside, he wonders what to do. Unpack? There are no shelves or cupboards here; nothing but a thin and dirty mattress on the floor. Attend to his brief? He takes his notebook out and reads the two words written in it so far: Méfie- toi. Not much to go on. Slipping it back into his breast pocket, he leaves the tent and wanders the site for a while. He climbs to a high spot and gazes down over the excavations. The Qufti-chain, viewed from above, looks like a tail or ribbon lightly fluttering beneath a kite whose main frame is suggested by the posts and strings being laid out on the ground in intersecting triangles, the triangles’ overlap allotting to each of the site’s mounds and craters its own sector, or sub-sector. Falkiner’s directing this pegging-out of station-marks, standing with the instruments he’s brought down on the Ani and has lost no time in having unpacked. His body’s shrunk by height and distance. His voice, too: Serge can see from the movements of his arms and shoulders that he’s barking orders at the men who scurry around shifting the posts and paying out string, but these are silenced by the wind. If Falkiner’s surveying, Serge wonders what he’s doing. Über-surveying: is that what Petrou would call it, after Alexander’s über-Hellenism? Flat, unencumbered, plain, Macauley told him. He looks away from the site: to the north, the landscape flattens; to the south, it rises in ridges, plateaus, hillocks. Any of these spots could house a pylon. Taking his notebook out again, he writes, below the first two hyphenated words, a third one: Arenow.