Tom McCarthy - C

“They are: if one gets broken, the ka moves on to another; plus, they show the dead man in three periods of life-childhood, youth, age-so that he himself can relive all three, enjoying them simultaneously.”

“And what’s through there?” he asks her, nodding at another slab-shaped gap.

“Another chamber that we haven’t processed yet. You want to see?”

“Yes,” he says.

She picks up a zinc-carbon flashlight and disappears, rat-like again, into the new hole. This one leads to another downward-slanting shaft. He helps her steady herself, then follows her again. There’s no electricity in this shaft, nor in the chamber onto which it opens. Laura’s flashlight picks out random objects: more broken pottery, parts of a coffin, a tea-box with Lipton written on it…

“We’ll do this tomb after we’ve cleared the one above,” she says.

“Look: it goes on further!” Serge gasps, catching sight of yet another opening in the wall. The excitement’s spreading in him, spurred on by the darkness, or the depth, or both.

“They all do: they continue endlessly. Which way do you want to go?”

She jumps her light from one wall to the next; each has a hole in it. Serge looks at one after another, then announces:

“This way.”

They descend a little further, then the shaft turns sharply up. They climb it, then descend again. Sometimes the shaft runs flat. It feels like a sewer: slippery, with sides the texture of molasses. It smells like one too.

“Bat-dung,” she tells him, holding his hand for balance.

“This one’s a bordello,” he says as the corridor opens up onto another chamber. Several coffins lie about here, overturned and empty; all around them are smashed pots and shreds of linen. An old metal lamp lies on the floor beside a pile of rubble.

“Looks like the one above has fallen into it,” says Laura.

They press on, through chambers neither Falkiner and Laura nor, in most probability, anyone else will ever process, treading constantly over linen and ceramic fragments. Bones too: Serge steps on what feel like knee-joints, knuckles, shin-bones. Sometimes the corridor becomes so shallow that they have to crawl, dragging themselves forwards against whatever pitch-coated surfaces present themselves to their touch. Everything’s written on: pottery, bandages, even the walls themselves. At one point, out of breath, they rest, still on their knees, inside a chamber so cluttered with piled-up objects that it makes the previous ones look like neatly kept households.

“Whose tomb is this?” Serge asks after a while.

“Who knows?” she says, pointing the light around. “It looks like twenty people’s all collapsed together. Here’s another stele.”

This one, or what remains of it, shows two central figures, one male and one female, seated one behind the other, the woman whispering something into the man’s ear.

“ ‘Ra-something, master of…’ ” reads Laura, narrowing her eyes; “ ‘his sister, his beloved, in his heart… words spoken by… do not…’ ”

“There’s that scarab-god again,” says Serge, pointing his finger at the image, just below the seated couple, of a man kneeling, arms raised, before a giant beetle mounted on a catafalque or platform.

“ ‘… my heart of transformations,’ ” she continues reading, “ ‘who comes forth… who came forth from himself…’ ”

Her forehead’s got black stains all over it. Her cheek too. Serge moves round behind her and, kneeling upright like her, watches as her flashlight moves across the stone, bringing its images and inscriptions into view, as though the metal object were itself projecting them.

“ ‘Meret-something,’ ” she reads slowly, “ ‘she who loves… who loves silence… he who is… who dies… who rests upon… upon his…’ ”

Her breath’s getting shorter and shorter. So is his. Serge knows, and knows that Laura knows, and that she knows he knows, that it’s not the lack of air that’s causing it, nor the fragmentary nature of the inscriptions she’s reading: he can smell, above the dung and bitumen, excitement emanating from her flesh too. His chest is almost touching her back. He leans slightly forwards, and makes contact. She tenses, then tilts her head back, towards his face; her lips continue moving in short bursts, but no more words come from them. He kisses her neck; she wraps her hand around his head, and pulls it down across her shoulders. He starts taking off her clothes, then his. Peeling away his sock, he’s aware of a small tickling sensation on his ankle. Then he’s in her, his hands sliding down her back while hers grab hold of debris, bitumen and bones. His knee slips on some object, whether organic or not he can’t tell; then his hands, too, fall to the floor and find there other hands, not only hers. It feels like an orgy: as though the two of them, their bodies, had become multiplied into a mass of limbs, discarded wrappings and excreta of a thousand couplings, a thousand deaths. She drops the flashlight at some point; it flickers against the wall, then, just before their final gasps spill out and echo round the rooms and corridors, goes off. They crawl around on hands and knees afterwards feeling for it, for their clothes, each other…

Somehow, they manage to find their way back up to the surface. Laura stays in her chamber; Serge steps out into the daylight. He climbs to the spot he surveyed the landscape from earlier, and looks down on the site again. For some reason, he recalls Pollard’s warning about fake antiquities, and the mad thought flashes through his mind that this whole cemetery might somehow be artificial, phoney as a dud 10-piastre coin. His ankle’s itching. His clothes are smeared with black. Looking out across the wider landscape’s ridges and plateaus again, he takes his notebook out once more and writes in it: Here as good a place as any. Before closing it again, he crosses the word Arenow out and writes, in its place, Am not.

The journey back to Cairo takes much less time: they’re travelling with the flow. The river seems more concrete now, a moving belt that carries the Ani instead of shunting it. Now that it’s no longer rushing past him, Serge can see the individual silt clusters floating in the water’s mass; huge clods as well sometimes, being flushed downstream as though the land were voiding itself with a giant, continental enema. He’s alone with the crew now, the sole European. Fragments of his earlier conversations with the others play across his mind as the dahabia passes landmarks he vaguely recognises from the outward voyage-but, since he’s moving in the wrong direction, these fragments play themselves out backwards, words and gestures scrambled through reversal. Serge scratches his continually itching ankle as he tries to reconstruct their phrases from the plash and creak, their positions and movements from angles of the boom and tiller or the sunlight on the water…

Boulaq, when they arrive there, seems reversed too somehow, not quite right: as though, in approaching it from the wrong side, they’d turned its quayside, warehouses and tugs into negatives of themselves. Pollard, who meets Serge off the boat, also seems wrong.

“Didn’t your parting go on the other side?” Serge asks, looking at his hair.

“My what? Not got your land-legs yet?”

Serge is stumbling, his left arm lowered right down to his ankle, which he’s scratching violently now, digging his nails in, drawing blood. This isn’t the only reason he’s stumbling: he feels dazed and disoriented, as though seasick, although he senses that it’s something deeper than seasickness that’s making him feel this way. Pollard’s talking on and on, assailing him with information that doesn’t make much sense, as though its logic were reversed as well: