The Egyptologist by Arthur Phillips

found erotic, political, and acerbically witty texts written by a genius in a language that has not been in common use for well over two thousand years.
    And I shall be preparing detailed reports back to the wise Partnership that is financing all of this frenzied toil. Thus, if I have begun my trip in some style, it is dictated by scientific necessity.
    That said, for all its vaunted luxury, the Hotel of the Sphinx dis• plays Egypt's creeping decadence. It is a tourist hotel (in a land that to me has always been an explorer's frontier or a soldier's outpost), and it represents the modern Egyptian's apparently insuperable innate urge to barter his noble patrimony for a shilling. The hotel's emblem — stitched to every conceivable surface — sports a nonsensical group of vulture, sphinx, and cobra, surmounting a motto—an extract of hieroglyphs which warn (to whom I cannot imagine, since who amongst the hotel's guests could be expected to read hieroglyphs?) HORUS CONSUMES THE HEARTS OF THE WICKED.
    Horus, ancient Egypt's falcon-headed sky-god embodied by every Egyptian king, would perhaps hesitate to endorse this hotel, and yet, even here amidst the faux-Pharaonic trappings of a fanciful antiquity, through the open patio windows, from out over the Nile, the smell and feel of the real Egypt— my Egypt—waft in, and all the modern luxe of the
    suite curls and crumbles under the hot exhalation of the kingdom as it was, sighing to me from across millennia. Atum-hadu, in his power and his glory, summons me even here, as I sip (without the worry one felt, even in Finneran's private barroom, about the American liquor-lawmen) lemonade and gin from cut crystal on the balcony overlooking my Nile, and revolving seventy-eight times per minute on the gorgeous, colossal cabinet-model Victrola XVII I have installed next to the balcony door, is "He's a Fella Who Gets His Way (and Who Can Blame Him?)."
    In this respite from my labours, I caress with undiluted joy the rec• ollection of my recent send-off from Boston, though it seems ages ago, a party whose guests included the expedition's financial backers and their ladies, celebrating both our approaching good fortune in Egypt and my engagement to the daughter of the house. The images coalesce into clear memory: crisp evening attire and the new light gowns, glow• ing paper lanterns, and a Negro jazz orchestra stationed in the garden courtyard, its music drifting in and out of the open doors and windows of Chester Crawford Finneran's Commonwealth Avenue mansion in the unseasonable heat of early September:
     
    Canis and man is
    A grand combination. Gee, my dog is swell!
     
    The already dense Egyptian decor in the Finneran home prolifer• ated for the party: CCF had installed at the head of the ballroom two golden thrones on a faux-brick dais. As the climax of the evening's events, he walked Margaret and me up the three steps to our seats before topping us with outrageous (and structurally inaccurate) Pharaonic crowns, then scowled at the bandleader, told him to "give the jungle noise a rest," and lifted his goblet, bringing an alcoholic tear to an eye or two with the words "Now, desert sands aside, there's no treasure in this whole wide world means a thing to me next to that little girl up there on the throne where she belongs." A flurry of "aww" and "ohhh" and "CC's so sweet" fluttered in the air before the grinning old
    bear batted his paws at the noise and it retreated. "But that don't mean you're comin' back empty-handed, Pushy!" Vast amusement. "No, folks, folks, serious now, what dad wouldn't just leap at the chance to pick up a son-in-law like this one, hey? English gentleman, well-educated, ex• plorer. Honestly, Margaret and me are of one brain on this: we both feel like the luckiest gal in the world! Now then, you go get our gold, Pushy, my boy, and if you come back with piles of it, ingots and jewels and crowns, well"—wily squint through winding coils of cigar smoke —