C (33 page)

“There’s little evidence,” the HumInt officer continues after they’ve all taken a few mouthfuls of lamb chops, “that the Russian residency’s actually doing much at present.”

“All the more reason to conclude they are,” replies the colonel. “Time of study, period of observation and all that. When somebody goes quiet, they’re usually cooking something up. Take the Swiss.”

“Yes: you’ve been paying them quite a bit of interest these last few months,” Macauley says. “I was wondering why.”

“Back door to Germany, and hence outpost of Soviet Marxism. They have their own paper here: read by bankers, watchmakers and the like. Least obvious of all channels, and for that very reason the most dangerous …”

“I sometimes think,” says HumInt, “that we need to look closer to home: Sinn Féin, the Labour Party …”

“Precisely!” snaps the colonel. “And where do those two take their orders from? You want to see what links Sinn Féin, the CUP, Young Persia, Labour, Spartacus and who knows what else: follow the Cyrillic script …”

“And Sarikat al Islam?” Macauley asks.

“That’s harder to track,” the colonel concedes. “India Office back home are uncooperative. We listen in on them too.”

“Sarikat al Islam?”

“No: the India Office, for the Foreign Office—who, quite possibly, are having them spy on us …”

“Then there’s Churchill’s old bugbear, the Egyptian Vengeance Society,” HumInt adds.

“Does that one exist, or not?” Macauley asks.

“It does now.”

“I seem to recall Standard Oil using them to stir up trouble,” says the colonel, squinting a little.

“Me too,” says HumInt, also staring vaguely in front of him, as though trying to discern some kind of outline. “Them or the Kemalists: that one was never entirely clear to me …”

The discussion continues while they ride in a car towards Abu Zabal. As they pass the city limits it winds down, and the four men stare in silence at the desert. The colonel dozes; once, as the road’s surface jolts them, he mumbles the word “Comintern” into his moustache, only it sounds more like “coming turn” or, perhaps, “coming term.” They pass through groves of date palms, then, just beyond the old Ismailia Canal, a village at whose edge a slaughterhouse stands. Heads and entrails have been thrown over its wall for dogs to pick at; their muzzles, purple with clotted blood caked by the sun, briefly emerge from their carrion nosebags to follow the car’s progress before burying themselves in cartilage and membrane again. The station’s beyond this. Its four masts, each about two hundred and fifty feet tall, are woven together by a net of wires.

“Like in the Chilean archipelago,” Serge says.

“What’s that?” Macauley asks.

“It must be powerful,” Serge answers.

“You bet it is!” Macauley exclaims proudly. “Got to reach all the way to Leafield in Oxfordshire.”

The colonel and HumInt wander off towards a table from which a large urn is doling coffee out to engineers and workers, all European, some of whom wear boiler suits with “British Arc Welding Company of Egypt” printed on the lapels. Further away, scantily clad Egyptian Qufti pass
homrah
slabs down a long chain that runs from the spot where the Mataria railway line ends towards the radio station’s compound.

“Before the track came out here,” says Macauley, noticing Serge watching them, “we had camels carry it all in: whole caravans of them crossing the sand. Looked like a scene from pharaonic times: building the Pyramids or something …”

Serge, looking across his shoulder, sees an arc welder perched halfway up one of the masts’ steel frames, soldering a cable into place.

“Look at the terrain,” Macauley continues, walking Serge away from the pylons. “Flat, unencumbered, plain. That’s the type of landscape our parallel erection needs.”

They pause at the compound’s edge. Serge stares out at the desert. In the distance, a caravan, or perhaps a line of joined-up, sleepwalking schoolchildren, seems to glide across a shimmering, reflective lake.

“Mirages
are
real,” he says to Macauley, suddenly remembering his conversation with the optician on the Alexandria-to-Cairo train. “They’re caused by the light’s gradient as it …”

But Macauley’s gone, headed towards the urn. Serge watches his figure shrink beneath the station’s geometric mesh, then turns away from this to face once more the utterly ungeometric desert. A squeal carries towards the compound from the slaughterhouse—and makes him think, again, of Abigail, her high-pitched, squeaky voice. He recalls what she told him about feeling sick at Gizah, her impression of watching what she called an “obscene spectacle.” Perhaps she wasn’t wrong. What if the whole of Egypt were one big, endlessly repeating pornographic film,
Love’s Madness
on a loop? The camel-schoolchildren turn into dancing girls with flailing limbs, then flowers or umbrellas opening, or perhaps bodies being torn apart: tricks of the light casting a flickering pageant of agony and remorse across a dense and endless sheet of matter.

i

H
e’s to travel upriver on a steel-hulled
dahabia
, departing from quay 29 at Boulaq. He arrives to find the boat already being towed out into the river.

“Not again!” he moans to the docker repositioning the fenders hanging from the berth’s edge.

“What’s the problem?” the man asks.

“I was meant to be on that,” Serge tells him.

The docker stares at him for a few moments, then breaks out in laughter.

“What’s so funny?” Serge asks.

“It’s not leaving yet,” the man says. “They’re only sinking it.”

“Only
sinking it?”

“They sink it to get rid of all the rats. Then they refloat it and kit it out with clean stuff;
then
you board it, it’s towed out again, they hoist the sails and set off properly. Understand?”

“It’s a sailing boat?” Serge asks.

“Has to be for this trip,” the docker answers. “Vibrations not good for the instruments.”

He jerks his thumb towards a group of men carrying large wooden boxes from a warehouse to the quayside. Overseeing them is a bespectacled European girl; barking orders at both her and the porters is a bearded European man.

“Careful with that box!” the latter calls out in an English accent. “If the theodolite gets damaged, the whole expedition’s stuffed. Lawrence & Mayo label upwards.”

He looks about the same age as Serge’s father.

“Are you Falk—?” Serge begins to ask.

“Label upwards!” he shouts. “Who are you?”

“Serge Carrefax. From the Ministry of Communications.”

“Ah, yes: Pylon Man.
I know thee, and I know thy name, and I know the name of the god who guardeth thee!”

He speaks these last few words as though somehow performing them: arms straight by sides, head up, voice measured and incantatory.

“I’m sorry?” Serge asks.

“Look: it’s sinking,” says the girl, pointing over the men’s shoulders.

Serge and Falkiner both turn round. The
dahabia’s
hull, deck and cabins have all disappeared beneath the Nile, leaving only two bare masts to mark its watery burial site. Small eddies whirl around these, giving over to more violent eruptions as air from the boat’s interior rises to the surface.

“Rats abandoning: not a good sign,” another English voice at Serge’s back says, ominously. Turning round again, Serge finds a man in his mid-thirties, in plus-fours and a chequered yellow waistcoat. “You Macauley’s scout?” the man asks.

Serge nods, a little apprehensively. “And you?”

“I’m from Antiquities. Alby’s the name! Seems we’ll be shipmates on this jolly spree.”

As Serge and Alby shake hands, an argument breaks out beside the warehouse. This time the voices aren’t English: one of them’s Egyptian and the other, which belongs to a man wearing a long, black jacket and a matching bow tie, is native to the language in which the argument’s being conducted.

“C’est marqué dans le manifeste!” the bow-tied man’s trying to convince the clipboard-holding Egyptian, over and over again.

“Pas marqué dans mon manifeste, Effendi,” the Egyptian’s insisting, tapping his board. “On nous en a donné des nouveaux hier.”

“A mon insu!” the Frenchman cries, turning his palms out.

“Désolé: je ne peux pas les embarquer,” replies the Egyptian, shaking his head.

“Ce sont mes utils!” the other hisses, gesticulating with his hands in a way that reminds Serge of M. Bulteau’s gunpowder-act in Kloděbrady. Running his eye along the quayside, Serge can see the object of the argument—objects, rather: a new set of boxes, smaller ones, have been unloaded from a taxi and stacked up next to Falkiner’s surveying instruments.

“Pacorie,” Alby mutters to Serge. “Heaven knows what he’s got with him.”

“No magnets, I hope!” Falkiner barks, walking over to inspect the rival boxes.

“Only
minuscule
ones,” whines Pacorie, casting a hurt look back at him.

“Magnets play havoc with my compasses,” Falkiner snaps.

“So: I leave behind the magnets, and you tell this
clown
to sign the other
boîtes
for embarkation; is okay?”

Negotiations rumble on for the next hour or so. Serge introduces himself to the girl. She’s called Laura and must be about twenty-three or -four, like him. She’s been working for Falkiner for six months, she informs him, both in London and here “in the field.”

“Field?” asks Serge.

“Desert, delta, bank, whatever,” she corrects herself. “Territory.”

“You’re heading towards some tomb or other, right?” Serge asks her.

“Not just one,” she tells him, rubbing her palm against her forehead as she speaks. “Sedment’s an enormous burial site. There are thousands of tombs, all stacked on top of one another. Professor Falkiner’s one of the men who first excavated there. I studied his work at university.”

“So why’s he going back again?”

“The layers are—”

She doesn’t get to finish: Alby’s wandered over and is asking Serge if he’s brought picaridine with him.

“No: he came on his own. He’s a chemist or something—”

“No,
picaridine:
insect repellent. You’ll be needing plenty of it.”

“Aren’t those mosquito nets?” Serge asks, pointing to a pile of fine-mesh webs folded up on the quayside next to an assortment of mattresses, carpets, blankets, sheets, towels and pillows.

“Nets don’t catch everything,” Alby tuts in the same ominous tone he used earlier.

“Oh, look: the boat’s rising again,” Laura says.

The men turn round once more, and see the white hulk break the surface like some wood-and-metal Aphrodite. Muddy water gushes from her every orifice.

“Won’t it take a while to dry out?” Serge asks.

“We don’t leave until tomorrow,” answers Alby.

“I was told today.”

“Today’s loading. Where’s your stuff?”

“I’ve just got this,” Serge says, pointing at the small suitcase by his feet.

“May as well go home, then; get a last night’s sleep on solid ground.”

Serge does this. Back in his flat, he shuffles aimlessly through a stack of papers and finds, wedged among them, the small, unused pocket notebook he bought back in Alexandria. He slips this into his jacket: it’ll be where he sets down his thoughts about the suitability or otherwise of Sedment as a site for the parallel mast. Beneath it lies the sheet of paper with “PUDENDUM ADDENDUM” typed across it. It occurs to him that he should send the third and final copy of his
détaché
dispatch to Widsun: since it seems that no one else is going to read it, it will, indeed, be—as requested—just for him. He digs this out: its print is weak and carbon-smudges cloud the paper’s surface, but it’s legible. He slips the thing into an envelope that he addresses and is just about to seal when he changes his mind. He slides the report out again and, in its place, inserts the Horticultural Society’s illustrated menu-card: the “Metamorphosibus Insectorum,” the sick palisade, the hungry and rapacious grubs and moths that scrape and prod at words and world alike with their blunt carapaces and sharp antennae. Then he seals it and leaves it in his post out-basket, to be picked up and sent tomorrow.

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.”