The Daughter of Tem

Creeping, October fog lay thick around the Chamberlain Hotel’s empty veranda and clung close to the windows, like fragile, but heavy hands pounding silently on the thick, leaded glass. On better days, one could have sat in a fine wicker chair, drinking strong iced tea and watching the slow New England summers roll down the bunting-christened streets of Ogden, Massachusetts. However, when the leaves died and gathered themselves into already stuffed gutters, the town emptied and boarded up shore houses would stand solemn watch until the cold retreated to Labrador and the warm Bermuda wind came sweeping up the coast. I certainly would have welcomed such a wind.

Inside the hotel’s dining room, I sat by the crackling fire, distracted from the thick parcel of notes on my lap, unsure whether my distraction came from the comfort of dancing flames or my desire to heave the notes into them. Tel-el-Thinis, Tomb of the Reeds, 1919-1921 Dig Report by Dr. T.H. Finchley the cover droned across the front page. In my head, it had his voice. His voice. The voice I came here to escape is still corroding my ears, even this many miles from Boston. I sighed and buried my head in my hands.

It had been my wife’s idea to take a weekend away, alone, unfortunately, but at least away. She made me promise twice, once in the kitchen and again at North Union Station that I would leave this packet of foolishness at home, but sure enough they found their way into my suitcase yesterday and onto my lap today.

I sat hunched and alone, trying to ignore the hovering innkeeper, one hand wrapped around a half-eaten English muffin, the other tapping absently on page 486, the wall in my research. It had taken the miserable old man four hundred and eighty-six arid pages to finally get to where they opened the strange tomb of tel-el-Thinis, far up the ancient Nile.

The journey to page eighty-six told the tale of the lowly dig. Far up the Nile, and missing the soaring pageantry of Giza or the Valley of the Kings, tel-el-Thinis was a marshy hill between sugar cane plantations near Gurga’s Coptic monastery, rediscovered by an old farmer clearing land. The old man had found a pair of gilded cat mummies, laying nose to tail, encased in the Nile mud. The colonial officers had first reached out to the British exploration of Dr. Horace Wray at Luxor. Wray, already managing two digs, the Luxor one and a smaller expedition at Deir el-Medina, and not fancying digging in a bog, declined, but emphatically offered the services of his American colleague Thomas Howard Finchley who had been working at the smaller dig. The more I read, the more I think Wray was sick of Finchley and wanted to get rid of him. Having worked with the man, I can’t really blame him.

In command of his own fresh dig, the pompous little man had puffed out his chest, declared the mound a ritual site, and had optimistically named the boggy mound in honor of Thinis, the lost capital of the first dynasty. The dig proper began on New Year's Day, 1919 amongst the sugar cane, beneath the same Horian sky that had engulfed that place since the distant days.

The dig had been as tedious as Dr. Wray had feared. The soil was marshy, the weather was unseasonably poor, and every time they had begun to dig towards where they believed the remains of a structure were, they would just uncover more cat mummies, so many that in letters back to Wray, only around a fourth of which received a response, Finchley had begun calling the place Tel-el-Bis, the mound of the cat. It took them until late June to find a series of stairs, descending into the mound, and by that time, the Nile had already begun to spread its life-giving tendrils up from the Sudan and into the blossom of the full flood season.

The plantation had remained flooded until the second week in February. During this period, Finchley’s notes were brimming with sketches, grandiose predictions of what lay beneath the mound, and of course cats. Page after page of cats.

He began again in late February. By the end of March, they had uncovered the entrance to a small tomb with a novel sigil upon the door and a warning ringing the threshold among other blessings and curses. There was quite a bit of debate on what the warning actually said, even amongst our department, but I eventually settled on the translation. “Let no unrighteous man tread in the house built for ages to come.”

From this date on, Finchleys notes grow less organized. According to him, half the dig workers left, elders gathered on the edge of the sugarcane to pray duas of protection from dusk ‘til dawn, and the coptic monks began having prayer services in the middle of the night. By the time Finchley had decided to break the seal, only a small remnant remained, mostly Americans who had followed him up the Nile from Beit-el-Medina. Upon breaking the seal, the expedition found a low, triangular room, filled nearly to the cane root tangled roof with sediment, dripping with moisture and reeking of bad air.

By now Finchley and most of his team had stopped sleeping save for a few hours a night, towards morning. Shovel after shovel of mud slapped out into the sun, and with it came the degraded mummies of thirteen cats. While their condition was poor, Finchley recorded that the cats had been richly decorated and painstakingly posed. By late May, the mud had been lowered to reveal a great sarcophagus on a raised dias. By the first week in June they had completely uncovered the sarcophagus, revealing that it first, empty, secondly, built into the dias itself, and thirdly and most strangely seemed to have some kind of grip or handle on the interior, never seen in any Egyptian burial before or since. On June 16th, he had finished recording the bas reliefs on the interior of the tomb and had resolved to try and open the bottom of the sarcophagus, or the “door of the dead” as he had called it.

After this page, his notes faltered and then swung from the words of an overly optimistic scientist to those of an old man lost in his imagination. He never said what became of the door, or what he found beneath. All that was recorded was a rough sketch of a hole descending into darkness. Probably imagination, for surely by then the tunnel, if there was such a tunnel at all, would have been filled with water.

They said he kept digging until mid July, when the floodwaters were pouring down the stairs. In spite of himself, Dr. Wray had rushed by steamship down from Luxor and dragged Finchley, jaundiced and raving, back to Cairo. That’s not what he’d said in his lectures, but seeing the notes, I believed Wray. Yet, even if the notes were worthless, the pictures were all there at least: the tomb and its bas relieved walls, the door and its prophecy of doom on any intruders, the empty sarcophagus, the unmovable panel, and the thirteen mummified cats in the chamber itself.

This is where I came in, 1921.

Finchley, mostly recovered, had returned to Boston to write his notes and experiences, bringing with him a half dozen of the most degraded mummies for his graduate students to dissect. At first I had seen it as an opportunity, but in the end, I saw it as little more than an exercise in one man’s delusion, with little to show for it other than the gold and lapis baubles wrapped into the moldering shrouds.

The darkness of the front room was growing oppressive. The green and gold wallpaper patterns took on strange undulations and unsettling patterns in the late-morning gloom, seeming to grow closer and more complex as I continued tapping at the page and not eating the muffin. I felt a slight chill running up my back though the fire was oppressively warm. Finchley had mentioned the cats often at the end and I, even having touched them, cut them, and seen what was inside, the circle of them around the sarcophagus keeping eternal sentry never failed to give me that chill. Something about its otherworldly dedication, its unshakable belief in the unknown frightened me, but only after the fact, just as the warning on the door had only frightened Finchley on his return to the States. Even in the warm, tacky safety of the Chamberlain Hotel I needed to remind myself that dead men’s curses do not make old men die of pneumonia.

The page started to swim in my eyes, words and pictures combining to make unreadable monsters and blobs of disconnected letters. Merrilee was right. I shouldn’t have taken these notes to waste my time. A walk, a good dinner, good night’s rest, and, most importantly, time away from page 486 should restore me. A wise man retreats before he is defeated, something Dr. Finchley should have learned sooner.

Sighing again, I placed the muffin back on the blue china plate and looked for the innkeeper who, true to form, was at my side in mere seconds, clearing away the dishes with the stiff grace unique to yankee hoteliers. “Are there any good walking trails around?” I asked, closing the book carefully.

“Well now,” the innkeep stood there, shifting from foot to foot, wiping his free hand on his apron. “Some folk go down to the beach for walking. It’s a good clear stretch of beach, a few miles down to the lighthouse at Maynard’s Cape and back. You could do it in an afternoon, easy. If not, you could always head up to the bluff. The path doesn't go all the way down to the lighthouse, mind you, but it’s pretty far still. Most take the high road on the bluff.”

I thanked him, stood, and escaped from the claustrophobic front room. From my hotel room, on the edge of the top floor, full of thick carpet and dark wood, I stood at the window, watching the ocean churn out beyond the fog. I would walk by the sea.

I dropped the notes on the rickety desk by the window and, to my horror, they fell open to page 486. It mocked me. With a scowl, I shut the book and lay it aside. Cats and coffins. I needed a walk. I really needed a drink, not that there was much possibility of that.

Down at the front desk, coat and hat in hand I lingered by the abandoned front desk, hands on the manicured counter, toying with the idea of calling Merrilee, but she would still be at the library, even on a Saturday. Giving up on the idea, I turned and left the Chamberlain, head lowered in quiet meditation.

Down empty, Puritan streets I wandered, piercing the fog between the early twinkles of streetlamps. Even blocks away from page 486, I was still thinking about it. How many times had I read the hieroglyphics with a magnifying glass, creeping my fingertips over them. I knew them all by memory. I knew them probably better than the man who carved them. Finchley’s obsession was now mine. Embrace it, I thought, he built a career on it, so can you.

A sudden, metallic bang stopped me in my tracks. Somewhere deeper in the fog, a yowl and another crashing of metal rang out before dying away with a hiss and a darting of feet. Cats. I smoothed the collar of my jacket, regaining my composure. Cats: things best enjoyed when mummified, just like people.

With a renewed confidence, I continued down the empty streets to the sodden shore. The fog held close and wet, dulling all things edgeless and gray, even sound. The beach before me vanished into a blue-gray void between hissing waves to the left and grim bluff face to the right.

Wet sand pushed out from under my rubber soles as I stepped gingerly into the mist. Even with my jacket pulled tighter around my narrow shoulders, the all consuming dampness settled stubbornly on the back of my neck.

Deeply alone, I walked further, hands jammed far down into my pockets, pennies and nickels pressing into my slightly bent knuckles, their jingling and my footsteps making a dreary rhythm for my thoughts. Thoughts ran while I walked up, down, and upside down inside my head, pushing at its soft underbelly, peering cautiously from behind my eyes, but always returning to the accursed page eighty-six.

I cursed under my breath. What had the old doctor seen in me that he would choose me, of all his students, to carry on with his notes? What spark burned in me that he had carried to that hospital bed in Boston? If that same spark burned in me, would I ever write a mad diary like his? I hated the thought of it, I hated the thought of being like him. I know one ought not speak ill of the dead, but–

My foot pushed down on something wet. Pausing, I stooped and picked up a piece of seaweed, dull green and brown, with thick cylinders of stalk and branches with exquisite bubbles of air built into them as tiny floats. This must have traveled some distance. How many miles had this little traveler been drifting? And of all the perfectly good beaches in the world, it washed up on this one. I stroked my chin for a moment before smiling. We had something in common in that regard, I supposed.