As we selected places on the polished oak bench seats under the launch’s awning, Esmé came to settle her warm little body against mine. She was at her sweetest this morning and did much to dispel my mood of fatalistic gloom at the dawning realisation that I was to begin work in enormous heat having failed to get even a moment’s sleep. ‘I hope you did not miss me, darling,’ she said. I felt a pang of guilt. I assured her that, of course, I longed for her, but sometimes duty took precedence over personal needs. She frowned for a moment before she shrugged and began to sing a little song she had learned in Paris. For some reason this caused Mrs Cornelius to raise her eyebrows as she nodded good-morning to us on her way to the back of the boat where, she said, she could stretch out a bit and get the best of the morning sun before it threatened to touch her. The sun, in those days, was a serious threat to the complexion. It is only in recent years, with the rise of the Beach Bunny in a mongrelised Los Angeles, that the Tan has become a sign of health, wealth and sexual prowess. I wonder why the Americans got rid of the Mexicans in the first place when they now spend their leisure trying to make themselves look indistinguishable from them! This is what I mean when I say standards are slipping in every sector of human life. I remember when Watts was a pretty little village of neat lawns and flowers. Now, I understand, it is a warren of burning tenements with every available space filled with bizarre sculptures in place of trees, where negroes lope, hyped on heroin and rock and roll, performing primaeval rituals of puberty and manhood, of magic, and hunting and murderous revenge. It is hard to believe it could alter so much in a matter of twenty-five years! I spoke to an American I met in the Portobello Road. His opinion was that the slaves not only should not have been freed but did not want to be free. The worker bee, he told me, dies if it cannot work. The negro goes mad. He was, I gather, a famous writer and editor in his own country. He was over here for a Convention, he said. This was in 1965. I do not know what kind of Convention. Perhaps a Convention of Sane People! That would be an original idea. But we know they had no effect so far upon the world.
It seemed that Esmé had also had a poor night, perhaps pining for me. I felt sorry for her. While I had embarked on a harebrained personal chase, she had been working to help our company. Did Mrs Cornelius appreciate how much all our fortunes depended upon my little girl? I remember that the ferry ride was conducted in a mood of general conviviality, especially since our crew was growing increasingly more anxious to complete their work and get back to Hollywood. They had had enough, they said, of the local colour. Most had had bouts of dysentery. Professor Quelch made some dry joke about ‘crossing the River of Death’ while Seaman, who was better read in Egyptology than the rest of us, looked about him and asked where ‘Turnface the Ferryman’ had got to. I believe he referred to Sir Ranalf. We were all in high spirits as we disembarked and mounted the donkeys which were to take us to the valley of the Tombs. Helped by courteous boys we mounted the little animals, surprised to discover that their saddles were relatively comfortable. Suddenly we were trotting up a long, dirt road into a low line of hills, the burial caves of the pharaohs and their favourites. It was already warm. I was glad of my wide-brimmed straw hat, my dark glasses. We had not gone half-an-hour, with the dust of the road beginning to rise like mist behind us, obscuring our view of a distant line of tourists, before I had the urge to remove my jacket, but decorum disallowed me from taking it off until I saw others doing the same. Behind us the Nile had become a path of grey silver through the red-brown clay, through the dark yellows and the untidy clumps of green, of rocks and palms, while Luxor was a ghost on the far shore, distance as usual undoing the damages of time. My little girl, prettily sidesaddle on a donkey more her size than mine, seemed entirely at her ease, jogging at the rear, chatting to Professor Quelch, while Mrs Cornelius rode beside me, a billowing cloud of white linen and lace. A sunshade over one shoulder, a gloved hand upon her donkey’s pommel, she could not maintain her ill-temper but shrieked with pleasure every time the donkey’s hooves struck an uneven part of the path. ‘Y’d pay an effin’ fortune for a ride like this at Margate!’ But she admitted she would be relieved when we got to what she was insisting on calling ‘Tooting Common’. His long legs brushing the ground, Wolf Seaman bounced moodily in her wake, glancing at his watch and looking up at the sun, while the rest of the crew trailed back along the path, commenting on the scenery and waving away the occasional group of children who appeared from nowhere to offer us reed fans, straw scorpions, huge living lizards harnessed with string or the usual figures of Bast and Osiris. I began to think the whole area hid a troglodytic city, a warren of caves where these children skulked and their goods were manufactured. Could that barren landscape deceive the eye and support human life in subterranean tunnels? Was all of Egypt living, literally, with its dead? But I knew this to be fanciful. The villages were behind us and to one side. That was where the bony children originated. Everything else here was dedicated to Death and the Netherworld. How careful had these people been to ensure their immortality! How vulnerable, in the end, that immortality was proven! When the day came for the souls of the dead to return to their bodies, there would be nothing for them to occupy but the temporal forms of huge German Hausfraus in sturdy cotton walking-suits or slender French homosexuals in the latest Paris cut. One could imagine them feeling a certain amount of confusion.
The Valley of the Kings is itself a somewhat disappointing sight. It was, after all, picked for its isolation rather than its beauty. It is a wide, shallow wadi in the walls of which, over the centuries, tombs were bored and into these tombs had been placed the mummies of kings, some of which survived until the twentieth century when, with our more sophisticated methods, we succeeded in disturbing the rest of what were probably the last untroubled dead. Cook’s and the Egyptian Society had built sets of iron or wooden stairs to some tombs so that the thousands of tourists who came here every year to peer, without much interest, at what the looters had spared (mostly wall-paintings) and giggle or gape at the oddness of it all, might save themselves even the discomfort of a modest scramble. There were only a few tourists here before us, most of whom belonged to Thackeray’s German Touring Group which had pitched its tents overnight, perhaps in the delicious hope that the spirits of Tutenkhamun or Horemheb might be tempted to return to earth by the smell of canned frankfurters and sauerkraut. These Germans did not look as if they had seen ghosts and as we approached were finishing a hearty selection of breakfast meats. O. K. Radonic, who was our best German-speaker, went up to explain what would be happening, asking merely that they did not stray into camera-shot. I noticed that many of the campers had been looking rather sullen and actually cheered up at his news, taking rather more interest in our Company than in the ringing tones of Miss Vronwy Nurture who addressed them, in clear, precise schoolroom English, on the lineage of the Egyptian God-Emperors. Even in Germany, that bastion of culture, there are those who would rather watch a modern movie crew at work than absorb the wisdom and revelations of ancient stones or admire the beauty of an unnamed artist whose skills were dedicated only to an unearthly posterity.
There would be time to inspect the tombs later, said Seaman. For the moment he wanted some good outside shots. Later that afternoon, Sir Ranalf would send a party of fellaheen to us. These we would dress as slaves to carry the mummy into the tomb. We had not yet decided whose tomb to use. Radonic said we seemed to have come a long way to get a take we could have gotten better in Death Valley. Seaman, who had invested so much of his reputation in this film, asked him pompously not to display his philistinism but just to turn the camera when he was commanded. Radonic, who had been losing patience with Seaman as his boredom increased, told him there was only one place he was prepared to point his camera at that moment whereupon Seaman began to utter his familiar self-pitying squawks, like a gannet discovering a damaged nest.