“I have to inventorise it all,” says Laura, nodding towards two large ledgers lying face-open on her table.
“So it was newspapers I saw in those mounds,” Serge says, “and not papyri.”
“Could have been,” she replies; “could equally have been papyri. It’s an eclectic mish-mash around here. The newspaper that page came from is eighty-two years old, while other scraps we’ve found have headlines from six months ago. It’s like that across all periods: the chambers have been gone through so many times that you get Fifth Dynasty, Late Kingdom, Napoleonic and modern objects lying side by side. By noting where you found each you can date the various interventions, right back to the outset. Watch out.”
Serge is running his hand over one of the two coffins.
“Why? Are they infectious?” he asks.
“No, delicate. The wood’s rotting away, and the ink’s fading. I have to copy the writing.”
Serge lowers his face into the coffin: the texts are written in deep, blue-black ink that disappears in places into the dark mahogany, which, in turn, is full of holes.
“Ants,” she explains. “It’s funny: ‘sarcophagus’ means ‘flesh-eating’-and now it’s being eaten itself. Some of the objects we’ve found are in too delicate a state to be examined here. Pacorie takes a swab off them; then they get sealed and shipped back up to Cairo for examination.”
“What are these flies made of?” Serge asks, pointing to a necklace that’s composed of several plastic-looking insects all threaded together.
“Flies,” she answers. “They are flies, preserved in resin. Necklaces of this type were fairly common. This one beside it’s a mixture of ivory, carnelian and glaze.”
She passes her hand over a set of beads strung in repeating sequences of white, gold and blue, with a red spacer-bar between them. Circular and domed, they look like tiny insulators made of porcelain or coloured glass.
“Look at all these scarabs!” Serge exclaims excitedly. There must be twenty or more of them. Their shapes, sizes and patterns are as varied as those of the ones he came across in the museum or the market-on top of which there’s a detail that he hasn’t seen before: two or three have, carved into their underside, not images or patterns, but whole sequences of words.
“Secrets of the heart,” says Laura, noticing him peering in bemusement at the hieroglyphic phrases. “In New Kingdom burials, the deceased’s unreported deeds, clandestine history and guilty conscience were confided to these things.”
“And that’s what’s written on them, to be printed out after his death?” he asks.
“It’s more complex than that,” she answers. “What’s engraved on them are spells to censor all these secrets, so they won’t come out at judgement and weigh down the heart. It had to weigh less than a feather, or the soul was doomed.”
“So the scarab withholds the vital information even as it records it? Even as it prints?”
“Exactly. They were often placed in the heart-cavity. This one,” she continues, picking up a sparkling grey scarab carefully, “is made of basalt. And the one beside it is rough quartz.”
“But it’s got copper wound around it,” Serge says, pointing with his little finger to a band circling the beetle’s waist. “Why would some grave-robber or archaeologist wind copper round it, then leave it behind?”
“The copper would have been there from the start,” she says. “The ancient Egyptians used it a lot. This bowl’s copper; so’s this ewer.”
She flicks the latter with her finger; it rings out tight and clearly, like a tuning fork. Serge follows its vibrations round the chamber with his eye. The place looks less like a warehouse to him now, and more like the backstage area of the Empire Theatre where he visited Audrey. The anachronous medley of objects, their jumbled juxtaposition, seems as incongruous as the faux restaurant interiors, modern cars and Amazonian horse-heads. One of the objects in the room looks quite familiar: a shallow, open box in which a kind of circuit-board is fixed.
“Is that Isis ’s cohering set?” he asks, nodding at the thing. Straight metal strips divide its wood at regular intervals; above these, cut into the box’s side, are notches, every fifth of which is larger than the four on either side.
“Professor Falkiner thinks that it’s some kind of game,” she answers. “You move up one side and down another, with the players starting at opposite ends. The notches are for counting. You can see the tenth and twenty-sixth lines are connected, which suggests that you could jump from one spot to another, like in Snakes and Ladders.”
“So where are the dice?” he asks.
“They probably used knuckle-bones. A pair of these were found a few feet from the board-I think…” She steps back to the table and flips through the ledgers till she comes across a diagram. “Yes: right beside it.”
“Wow, you really are forensic,” Serge says, looking at a photograph pasted beside the diagram, confirming the positions, indicated by the latter, in which objects have been found. Beside each object in the photo there’s a little stand-up card bearing a number-presumably the same one with which it’s been labelled in its new location here in Laura’s props-room.
“Oh, this is nothing,” she replies. “You want to see forensics? Come with me.”
She leads him through another doorway to a chamber to the side of hers. Pacorie’s in here, chemistry set fully unpacked, tubes, slides and beakers laid out all around him.
“L’Homme Pylon,” he says by way of greeting, “bienvenue.” He has a ledger too, in which he’s entering readings.
“He’s scraped, scratched or rubbed at virtually all the objects in my room,” Laura tells Serge. “The earth around them too; the walls, the floor, the lot.”
Pacorie, faced with this accusation, shrugs. “Is necessary.”
“And what have you found?” asks Serge.
“Gypsum, limestone, manganese, copper, calcite, the garnet, amethyst, red jasper-or, to state it in a mode more scientifique: Mn, SiO2, Cu, CaCO3, CaSO4. Surtout, the C: the C is everywhere.”
“The sea?” asks Serge.
“The letter: C.”
“What’s C?”
“Carbon: basic element of life.”
Laura tugs at his sleeve, in a way that’s familiar to him, though not from her. He follows her back to her chamber. At the back of this is a third opening, the only one he hasn’t been through yet.
“What’s behind there?” he asks.
“The part where all this stuff came from.”
“Can we go in there?” he asks.
“No,” she tells him. “Falkiner will be back soon.” It’s the first time she hasn’t used the word Professor when talking about him-as though, inside the tomb, and perhaps only here, her allegiance and complicity were gravitating away from him and towards Serge. She’s still holding his sleeve. Releasing it eventually, she says: “Come back in two hours, after lunch. He’ll be out again then.”
Serge returns to his tent, where he’s served some more stew in a pot that looks just like the one he’s using as a commode. He dozes after this, then wanders the site again, this time keenly aware of the plethora of buried objects it contains: he pictures coffins, boots, board-games and sardine tins lurking beneath him, particles shaken from the sand and plaster by each footstep trickling down across their surfaces. A rat scurries across the path in front of him, then disappears into a hole. Some of the tomb-openings have wasps’ nests growing, mould-like, on their splintered hatches. He has to detour round a hovering cluster of them on his way back to see Laura.