The Linguist and the Emperor (19 page)

While thousands die in battle, in Spanish guerrilla actions and in brutal French reprisals, Bankes whiles away his time listening to love songs and having his fortune told by his new friends—none of whom will predict his actual fate: he will eventually be forced to flee England and live in exile to avoid imprisonment for “sexual depravity.”

For the time being, his passions are not yet criminal (or not yet exposed as such). By the time Wellington has left Spain as a hero to pursue a woman who had rejected him years before, Bankes has also left Spain, and is also in pursuit of an ancient object of desire: a fallen obelisk on the island of Philae he has long dreamed of claiming for his own.

Bankes had begun to covet the massive monument from the moment he had first seen Denon’s sketch of it in
The Description of Egypt
 .  .  . as only a man of his means might covet a six-ton objet d’art—or as only the lord of Kingston Lacy might dream of transporting it from the remote island in the Nile where it had first been raised millennia before by that naturalist and bigamist Ptolemy VIII Physcon and his mother-daughter team of wives, Cleopatra II and Cleopatra III.

That there might be difficulties involved in bringing it to Kingston Lacy, even Bankes admits. But his determination only becomes stronger when, after making the long pilgrimage down the Nile, he finds the obelisk lying half covered with sand near a ruined temple.

In its original position, it would have soared skyward and shimmered with “electrum”—a gilding of white gold and silver long since stripped away by thieves. Even as it is—slender and graceful despite its weight; exquisitely carved and covered with hieroglyphs—it is more splendid and beautiful than he had imagined it.

Bankes stands before it lost in admiration, oblivious to the heat and the importunate beggars and clamorous guides surrounding him. What the monument once meant, what any of the obelisks could have meant for the Egyptians, he has no way of knowing. How could he—when even in antiquity the meaning of the obelisks had been forgotten? Even the ancient Romans brought the great monuments from Egypt in all ignorance. They had lashed the granite monoliths to three-tiered slave galleys, some of the obelisks two or even three times the size of the beauty which entranced Bankes. For the Romans, the obelisks are fitting symbols of the power, a world empire now passed to Rome.

Perhaps some old priest of Ra or Isis or Ptah, some living relic come to end his days in Rome, could explain the Egyptian theology: how the god Ptah, in the beginning of time, in darkness and solitude, had brought the world into being by marrying his hand to his member . . . And thus in the midst of the watery chaos called
nun,
a primeval mountain arose, formed of the god’s semen. This divine act of onanism is recorded by the obelisks which, recalling the first mountain, soar and shimmer in the sun.

More likely, though, the priest himself would no longer remember the ancient cosmogony. It is just one of many: a hundred contradictory explanations of existence were proposed by the metaphysicians of Egypt, whose wisdom consisted of including them all.

But of what use would it be for the old priest—even saying he remembered them—to try to explain the ancient images and ideas? How much easier to make up a rigmarole for any idle, rich Roman who cared to ask (and to pay for the answer): a hodgepodge as meaningless as the fake hieroglyphs sometimes found in Rome, copies of Egyptian writing made by charlatans for curious Romans.

These copies—sometimes copies of copies—will be unearthed long afterward, during the European Renaissance when the popes set chained criminals to digging in the ruins of Rome. Thus, there will be spurious and corrupt specimens of the hieroglyphs for Renaissance scholars to puzzle over . . . along with the authentic ones. The obelisks, hurled to the ground during barbarian invasions, have been raised once again by these same antiquity-hunting popes who now rule Rome in place of emperors. They crown them with crosses and sprinkle them with holy water and claim them in the name of Christ, though there is no mistaking the signs of the sun inscribed on them, or the profile of the jackal-headed Anubis, or the breasts of Hathor, goddess of pleasure and love.

WHILE IN EGYPT,
Bankes arranges a meeting with the Italian strongman Belzoni who has been scavenging among the ruins in the south. And for a price Belzoni promises to circumvent the two most dangerous of the foreign consuls in Egypt, Drovetti, acting for France, and Salt, acting for England.

Working in stealth and secrecy, Belzoni floats the massive obelisk hundreds of miles upriver to the coast and thence to England. He manages to accomplish this feat with a small army of Egyptian
fellahin
he recruits, despite the fact that boats sink and piers collapse under its weight and the precious object is almost lost in the Nile.

When it finally does arrive in England, no less a personage than Wellington will lay the foundation stone for its new base in Kingston Lacy. However, by the time the obelisk stands erect, pointing toward the sky, Bankes has fled England—one step ahead of the law.

The name
Kleopatra
is found inscribed in Greek on the broken-off pedestal of Bankes’ obelisk; it is a name which provides the interlocking letters which should then appear in the hieroglyphs carved on the obelisk’s side: the “L”; the “T”; the “O”; and the “E” = the “AI” or “Y” sounds

PTOLEMY, PTOLEMAIOS, PTOLMYS

KLEOPATRA

However, the         
, the “T” in Ptolemy is represented by a hand,         
, “T” in Cleopatra. It is not a major stumbling block, in any case, since more than one sign can represent the same sound, Champollion knows. He goes ahead and applies the twelve sounds he has now proven to other cartouches with interlocking letters.

For example, there are the letters he now knows from a cartouche reproduced in
The Description of Egyp
t
:

Al
                                    
SE
                                    
TRS

By simply adding a “K” and an “N” the cartouche would yield “Alksentros” or Alexander—for Alexander the Great (keeping in mind that in hieroglyphs the vowels would probably be irregularly indicated—sometimes present, sometimes left out, as in Hebrew or Arabic):

ALKSNDRS

Once again, however, there is a difficulty. There are two “S”s in Alexander’s name. Sometimes they are both given by a double-bolt sign:         
.         And sometime they are given as a folded cloth or bent scepter, the way the “S” is indicated in the Ptolemy cartouche:
.