He finds her busily transcribing lines of text from the coffins into one of her ledgers. The lines run in strips, like flypaper or film, each frame a single picture: bird, scythe, foot, ankh, eye, a pair of hands…
“What does it say?” he asks, peering over her shoulder.
“They’re spells, for executing functions: opening the mouth so the deceased can eat, warding off crocodiles who want to devour his heart, things like that. All surfaces had these things written on them: amulets, masks, even bandages.”
On the page facing the one onto which she’s copying the strips are tables noting where these strips have come from: outer coffin, right… outer coffin, left… ditto, foot… head… inner coffin, right… inner coffin, left… ditto, foot… Below this, there’s a register of objects, with columns for grave, body, vases, coffin, beads. The entries in this read like doctors’ notes: cut-up body… copper borer in bone… XLIII, 2 rolls of bandage… linen over left leg, head on box… linen… lion scarab… jasper scarab… linen… linen… linen…
“You found bodies, then?” he asks.
“Mainly loose bones: these are everywhere, hundreds of them. Most of the intact bodies have been plundered or removed by expeditions. Royal and noble tombs get cleared out early on, due to the value of the objects in them. Middle-class ones are better: they tend to get passed over, and so end up less contaminated. I prefer them anyway.”
“Why?”
“They’re more interesting, more varied. From the Fourth Dynasty onwards, with the downsizing of the pharaohs’ tombs, pools of skilled craftsmen were available to decorate the private monuments of anyone who could afford it…”
She’s streaming information again-but the languor’s gone, and the excitement’s back. It excites Serge as welclass="underline" not only what she’s saying but how she’s saying it, its strip-procession from her. He looks at her mouth. Its lips, coated by dust, are brown. Watching them move, he has the strange sensation that he’s closing in on something: not just her, or information, but what lies behind these… Laura senses his excitement: her lips pinken beneath their dust-coat and quicken their pace:
“The decorators-artists, scribes-had greater freedom, more leeway to mix and match old texts, thereby creating new ones. A greater choice of subject matter, too. Look at this stele over here.”
She leads him to a large, flat slab propped up against the wall. On it, a coloured vignette shows a man seated, in profile, at a table piled high with food. At his feet a dog lounges; musicians, acrobats and dancers entertain him; beneath him servants and craftsmen labour-bakers, perhaps, retrieving loaves from ovens, or perhaps carpenters sawing at waist-high beams, masons chipping and hammering at stone or butchers hacking away at meat; around them, further from the picture’s central hearth, men work the fields and fish the marshes. All these figures-entertainers, tradesmen, farmers, pet-are drawn, like the main character, in profile. They interact with one another, and seem to be exchanging words-but in a silent, gestural language only.
“It’s beautiful,” says Serge.
“The colours?”
“No: the flatness.”
“It’s the autobiography of one of the people buried in the complex,” she tells him. “His life, the characters in it, the world around them. Literature in its infancy. Here the scribe has put himself in, in the bottom corner. See that figure writing?”
“Yes,” Serge answers. “What did you call this?”
“A stele. We found it just over here.”
Pinching his sleeve again, she leads him through the doorway that she wouldn’t let him go through earlier and, crouching down beside a large, square gap in the new chamber’s wall through which a small, plastic-coated wire runs downwards into darkness, tells him:
“Stelae were placed one level up from the grave proper, as a kind of visual portal to it. They carried pictures of the deceased’s old life to the underworld, and conveyed back up from there ones of the new life he was living-which, of course, was a better, more refined version of the old one.”
“Two-way Crookes tubes,” Serge murmurs; “death around the world.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Where’s the grave itself, then?”
“Down here,” she says-and, like a rat, she’s disappearing through the hole. She lowers herself feet-first, taking hold of Serge’s arm to steady her descent. When she lets go, he climbs in too, and makes his way down a long, slanting shaft into whose lower surface footholds have been cut. The sides are moist, oily; the wire runs all the way down, unsecured. When Serge emerges from the bottom into a large room illuminated by electric lamps, he sees that it’s the wire that’s powering these; also, that his hands are blackened.
“Bitumen,” says Laura, holding her black hands up too. “I hope you brought a change of clothes.”
He looks around. The numbered markers that he saw in the photographs are still here, standing beside vacant spots. Others guard objects that haven’t yet been hoisted to the upper chamber: alabaster dishes, copper pans, fragments of broken pottery.
“Don’t move anything,” she tells him.
“What are those?” he asks, pointing to three ebony statuettes.
“They’re figures for the ka-the soul-to dwell in.”
“They look like the same person, done in different sizes.”
“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.