C

i

There’s broken masonry along the Rue des Soeurs: window recesses and door frames with chunks missing where bars and hinges have been ripped out, façades chipped and crumbled under battery.

“Last year’s riots,” Petrou tells Serge.

“That too?” Serge asks as they wander past a row of damaged balusters outside the Bourse.

“No, that’s the ’19 revolt. Bourse took a hammering, so to speak.”

“And this?” Serge asks a little later as they come across a pile of giant slabs toppled over one another in a vacant lot on the Rue Stamboul.

“ ’Eighty-two bombardment-although these,” Petrou continues, pointing at the oldest-looking ones, “were probably torn down from some other edifice when the Persians sacked the place in the seventh century; and from another one before that too, when Octavian routed Antony. That’s the thing about Alexandria: these periods just kind of merge together…”

Petrou works in the Ministry of Communications. He’s charged with co-ordinating names. There seem to be three different names for every street and square in town: English, French and Arabic-beside which a controversy is raging over whether Arabic names should be translated into French or English on official street maps and, beyond this, which of three English systems, each backed by a rival government department, should be used. Petrou speaks about seven languages himself. He’s British, legally speaking, although, apart from a childhood stint in Liverpool, he’s never lived in Britain. His family hail from Greece, via Byzantium, or maybe Trieste, Odessa or the Levant, though he’s never lived in any of those places either. But he seems to have soaked up the idioms and affects of the cities, countries, islands and homelands-in-exile or -abeyance that lurk in his history, and to exude them to the satisfaction of the Bosnian florists, the White Russian dressmakers, the Syrian weavers, Armenian saddlers, Prussian carpenters, Cypriot haberdashers and Italian gunmakers whose premises he visits, Serge traipsing in behind him, on a daily basis, census-taking, plotting the linguistic layout of the city block-by-block.

“I’m doing epsilon through theta today,” he tells Serge as they down a Turkish coffee and a glass of arak pressed on “dear Morgane” (the tradesmen all call him by a variant of his first name: Morgané, Morjan, Morganovitch) and his “new friend” by a kindly proprietor.

“Yesterday was alpha-delta,” Serge replies. “Sounds like we’re walking through the alphabet.”

“Blocks here have always been labelled like that,” Petrou says, adding after a short pause: “This place and lettering go way back together. It was here that the fourth-century Copts devised their alphabet by transcribing spoken Egyptian into Greek figures, then adding hieroglyphs. This city’s where it all began: cultures and languages slamming into one another, making new ones. Where co-ordination started too: Rosetta’s just a short train-ride away. Just think: a single slab that fits all tongues together; second Babel in three feet of stone. The Rue Rosette’s my favourite in all of Alexandria, by virtue of its name alone. Infuriatingly, they’re changing that as well…”

Serge works in the Ministry of Communications too. As he rode from Versoie to London in Widsun’s car, his godfather explained to him what he’d be doing: compiling a report, or reports, that, in ways not yet entirely clear to him, assessed, abetted or advanced, or at least paved the way for the advancement of, the (still largely prospective) Empire Wireless Chain.

“The whole project was mooted years ago,” Widsun told him in the backseat of the chauffeured Ford. “The Egyptian station’s licence was issued in ’14. Why it’s still not up and running is beyond me.”

Serge, staring through glass at racing countryside, was distracted-neither by memories of his crash nor by pharmaceutical cravings (these have been bizarrely absent ever since his re-awakening; the odd faded track-mark on his arm is the only residue of past drug dependency) but rather by his recollection of the fact that, as the vehicle pulled away from the house and up the sloping path, gravel crunching beneath its wheels, he’d looked back to see that, of the people gathered there to wave him off, it was Bodner alone whose face had displayed signs of sadness.

“ Norman ’s committee proposed eight stations,” Widsun went on, voice blending with the motor’s drone, “each two thousand miles apart, relaying from here to every corner of the Empire. The Milner-Eccles report seemed to confirm that this was feasible. But the Dominions are being irksome, and the Cabinet now seem to want to set up a new committee and commission new reports, while simultaneously pushing ahead with the Egyptian station that’s been sitting around half-built for seven years. You’ll be working for Macauley, in Cairo: he’ll be having you prepare a sub-report that he’ll doubtless amalgamate into his own report to the Telegraphy Committee, who, in turn, will report up to the Imperial Communications Committee, who in turn…”

His voice trailed off, and they sat in silence for a while. Then Widsun, shifting his position, stretched his arm out horizontally across the leather bench-seat behind Serge and added, in a confidential tone:

“And if it’s okay with you, I’d like an appendix.”

“An appendix?” Serge asked.

“An appendix,” Widsun repeated. “Addendum, apocrypha, postscript, prolegomena-what you will. A section just for me. Think of it as the lost chapter.”

“What should it contain?”

“If I knew that I’d write it myself,” Widsun chuckled. “You’ll be there; I’ll leave it to you to decide what things should come to my attention.” He looked out of the window himself, as though scanning the blur of vegetation for a pattern, then continued: “These are ‘interesting times,’ as the old Chinese curse would have it. There’s… stuff happening in Egypt that I’d like to keep abreast of.”

“Like an Amazonian,” Serge muttered.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a… nothing. Carry on.”

“Send it to me separately. Think of it as our direct line: one that bypasses chains, committees and the like.” He brought his head right down to Serge’s and half-whispered: “You’ll be my little spy.”

Serge, digesting this rather cryptic commission, felt a sour taste gathering inside his mouth-a taste that returned each time he subsequently pondered Widsun’s request: bitter, and massing from further inside, like some peptic reflux.

After disembarking in Alexandria and reporting to the Ministry’s office on the Rue de France, expecting to be handed tickets for that evening’s Cairo train, he was informed that he’d be staying here for a while, “surveying damages.”

“Damages to what?” he asked.

“His Majesty’s communication network,” Major Ferguson, head of the Alexandria section, told him. “After we deported Zaghlul, the Egyptians chose to vent their anger not just on our businesses and residencies, but also on telegraph wires, phone lines and the like. Even the poles sometimes: hacked them down with a real vengeance, like a tribe of Red Indians wreaking sacrilege against enemies’ totem posts. Which they were, in a way.”

“How so?” asked Serge.

“Way I see it,” Ferguson said, picking up a salt biscuit from a bowl on his desk, “a phone box is sacred. No matter how shoddy, or in what obscure and run-down district of which backwater it’s in, it’s still connected to a substation somewhere, which is connected to a central exchange, which itself forms one of many tributaries of a larger river that flows straight to the heart of London. Step into a box in Labban or Karmouz, and you’re joined in holy trinity with every lane in Surrey, every gabled house in Gloucestershire.” He slipped the biscuit into his mouth like a communion wafer, then continued: “You’ve been attached to us-semi-attached, until Cairo has need of you-to assess the impact of these acts of telecommunicative blasphemy. You’re our attaché for detachment-our détaché.” Brushing crumbs from his shirt, he smiled, pleased at his witticism.

“Why not just get some engineers to do it?” Serge asked.

“Engineers are engineers,” replied Ferguson. “They understand wires and insulators, nothing else. What we want from you is a different angle on it all, a wider perspective.”

“Perspective was never my-” Serge began, but Ferguson cut him off.

“You’ll be taken around town by… Ishak Effendi Benoiel!” he called to his secretary.

“Yes, Effendi?” the man asked, appearing, notepad in hand, in the doorway.

“Go and dig out Petrou for us, would you?”

Petrou shuffled into the office several minutes later. He looked shy, and stood slightly sideways-on to Ferguson and Serge.

“Petrou, Carrefax; Carrefax, Petrou,” Ferguson intoned perfunctorily, reaching for another biscuit. “Name co-ordinator and détaché: you’ll make a great pair.”

So it is that, after sitting in on tedious morning meetings at which land purchase, hemp and fibre cultivation, steam-cotton-press importing and coin-mintage or marsh-drainage tendering are discussed in English, Arabic and pidgin French with bureaucrats from two more ministries housed in the same building as theirs and one more housed two Attic blocks away, Serge and Petrou set out on their daily jaunt round Alexandria. The city’s long esplanades sweep them from shop to shop, the awnings, balconies and palm trees shading their heads and marking their progress with a rhythm of half-repetition that seems almost regular. Motor cars and horse carts slide around them, cutting into and out of one another’s paths like intersecting eras. Native men in European dress embellished by red flowerpot fezzes hurry past them carrying briefcases of legal documents, newspaper copy or insurance claims; others in long robes roll barrels down the road with sticks; groups of schoolchildren in multi-coloured dreamcoats process along pavements hand-in-hand like paper-figure chains. The robes remind Serge of pyjamas, lending the city a sleepy look, as though it had just now been roused, or half-roused, from its slumber. Hawkers’ chants float through the air towards them as they pass the French Gardens each day; howls and cries spill out at them from the Cotton Exchange; flag staffs bristle in their honour as they move down the Rue Chérif Pacha. Trams carry them, past churches Maronite, Presbyterian and Anglican, banks Roman and Egyptian, mosques with a hundred different types of minarets, from General Post Office to Canopic Way, past the Gate of the Sun, through Turkish Town, across Mahmoudied Canal from one shore to the other and then back again.

“We’ll take the Ragheb Pasha tram to Anfoushi-that’s the Red Crescent one; then a Moharram Bey tram on to Karmouz-that’s the Red Circle one; and then the Circular tram onwards to Shatby-that’s the Green Triangle one,” Petrou informs Serge one Monday afternoon.

“Circles, triangles, crescents: how very geometric,” Serge replies as they board the double-decker drawing up beside them.

“That started here as well,” Petrou says as it pulls off again.

“What did?”

“Geometry. Euclid was Alexandrian: worked under Ptolemy Soter, the first one. Eratosthenes as well: he calculated the diameter of earth from the sun’s shadow as it fell across the city’s streets at noon. And Sostratus, their contemporary, conceived Pharos, the great lighthouse, as an expression of shape and form and boundaries: dividing sea from land and light from dark, cutting the night up into cones and blocks and wedges…”

They’re jolted slightly as their tram glides through a junction where the tracks from two lines intersect. The rails form cords and sectors on the ground, arcs, ratios and reciprocals. Another tram slides along a curve, joining the intersection from another angle; as it does, its trolley-poles swing out above its roof until they’re almost perpendicular to both it and the overhead wires; then they align themselves again, like arms of gramophones.

“ Alexandria was on the Nile as well as the sea,” Petrou’s telling him. “But the Canopic mouth silted up sometime in the twelfth century, defeating the main purpose for which Alexander built the city in the first place.”

“How?” asks Serge, holding the hand-rail.

“He wanted it to be the great hub of the world, connecting everywhere to everywhere else. More than that: it would be Greece ’s grand self-realisation, its ascent, beyond itself, into a universal condition. Über-Greece: a kind of simulation better than the real thing ever was. His version would assimilate all other cultures, all their gods and figureheads and what have you else, and conjoin these beneath the canopy of a transcendent, modern Hellenism in which reason, science and knowledge would all flourish. Alexander was a co-ordinator too.”

“So why didn’t it work?” Serge asks.

“He died,” shrugs Petrou, “without ever seeing it finished. His fellow Macedonians, the Ptolemies, took over, and started marrying their sisters in the old Egyptian manner. Then the Mouseion and its famous library burned down. Octavian saw the place as no more than a grainhouse, for storage and shipment back to Rome. The later Roman emperors just passed through on their way to visit the antiquities of Upper Egypt, and neither the Arabs nor the Turks saw much of value here. Nowadays we Europeans treat it as a trading colony on the shore of an alien continent. Oh: there’s the Ptolemaic dyke. We get off here. If you look closely, you can see the route it took…”

Petrou knows everything about the city. He seems to have absorbed it almost chemically: blotted it up, the subsequent reaction dictating his elemental constitution. It strikes Serge that if you cut a graft off him, a cross-section, and mounted it on a slide-tray beneath a microscope, then what you’d see would be a cellular combination of every Greek-speaking Jewish draper whose yarmulke’s made from Alexandrian cotton, each partially French-descended native clerk proudly twiddling his Second Empire moustache as he describes the tract he’s writing in his leisure hours about the horticultural benefits of Napoleon’s Egyptian reign, the Austro-Hungarian confectioners whose Viennese profiteroles bear the distinctive taste of local sugar, the Maltese photographers, Levantine booksellers and Portuguese tobacconists they visit every afternoon-a combination, too, of the cells of the Persians, Romans and ersatz-Greeks who people his daily talk: all of them, right back to the sister-wedding Ptolemies.

One day, their habitual round of morning meetings cancelled due to strikes by native civil servants, they begin their peregrinations early, stopping in on an Albanian shoe-maker whose shop, it turns out, has been vandalised the night before.

“A running battle, Morganou,” he half-wails as he crouches on his floor, sweeping up broken glass. “Up and down the street, hour after hour.”

“Who was fighting?” Petrou asks.

“Young people: Arabs, Greeks, Italians. Maltese as well, you can be certain.” Standing up, he brushes his head against one of the strips of flypaper hanging from the ceiling, then tears a double-page from the Egyptian Gazette lying on his counter. As he lowers himself again to sweep the glass fragments into the paper, Serge runs his eye over the pages now exposed. Their columns, like the flypaper, form long, narrow bands. One lists the ships at quay in Port Said: Lepanto in 71; Nickios, 28; Aurora, 77. Their export manifests descend the adjacent column: ten tons caustic soda, half a million cigarette papers, five tons haricots. On the far side, the sports: Sett’s taking on Naylor in a ten-round bout at CISC and Othello’s favourite over City of Cork and Archduke Ferdinand in the Heliopolis Oasis Stakes at odds of 3-2. Between these long strips, in a thicker column, the Revue Commerciale, in French, compares Nile Gages with last year’s. Coton is down, Sel et Soda Egyptien’s down, the Agricultural Bank’s down 1/16, trading at £4 3/16. Along the central crease run ads, all for insurance: Sun Insurance, Anagnostopolou Insurance, Caledonian Insurance (agent: Levant Company, 8c Passage Chérif)…

“They sell protection against riots now,” the cobbler moans, his own eye following Serge’s as he straightens. “I should have bought this last week.”

“You’d do well to buy it this week,” Petrou tells him. “I fear more trouble’s to come.”

“I’ll buy, I’ll buy-but the price doubles now, I tell you, Morganou. And next week, double again! And if,” he adds, his eyes rolling heavenwards in deterrent supplication, “independence should come, an emperor’s ransom will not guarantee my shop!”

Later that same day, they visit the Cleopatra Stationery Store, and Serge buys a ribbon for the Corona typewriter he’s borrowed from the Ministry to write his damage report, his détaché dispatch. He buys a small black notebook, and some carbon paper too: official documents, he reasons (although no one’s told him this), should be in triplicate.

“She was an Alexandrian as well,” Petrou says as they catch a Circular tram outside.

“Who?”

“Cleopatra. Came to the throne at seventeen. Her brother, Ptolemy Thirteen, also her husband, was just ten-and there were two more siblings, eight and five. The whole court was a nursery.”

“Didn’t she wrap herself up in a tapestry or something?” Serge asks.

“In a carpet, yes. For Caesar. Her real love was Antony, though: that’s the one that got immortalised. She poisoned herself after his death, with an asp.” Turning to face him, he pokes his pronged hand against Serge’s chest and starts reciting:

Dost thou not see my baby at my breast,

That sucks the nurse asleep?

The hand stays there for a while; then Petrou turns slightly sideways again, so that he’s partly facing Serge and partly the elegant Ramleh beachfront that’s slipping by.

“Dryden has it bite her arm,” he carries on after a while. “That’s the way Plutarch said it happened. Statues of her and Antony as Isis and Osiris were discovered here…”

Serge, watching beach-huts and parasols that seem to move against a sea dotted with small sailing boats that seem not to, pictures a dual-pointed needle sinking into flesh. The tram’s slowing down; Petrou’s signalling to him to get off.

“Telegraph wires are cut just… where is it?” he mumbles as they stand at the trackside, turning left and right. “Ah! Here. See?”

“Yes, I do,” says Serge. The wire has been cut in two like a piece of string-and then cut further, with the detached stretch itself snipped into several shorter pieces on the ground. The tram-wires that run beside it are untouched. Petrou steps back and turns half-away again, deferring: telecommunication’s Serge’s brief, not his. Serge stares at the dead copper snakes for a few seconds, as though they could tell him anything, then follows Petrou’s gaze towards the beach. It’s late afternoon; beyond the yacht club, on past the casino, the wet sand’s turned the colour of oxidised mercury. The scene itself has a détaché air: it seems to bear the same relation to reality around it as a photograph-perhaps of somewhere else. The ladies promenading in white hats and dresses, the cravated men hauling their dinghies a few feet up the beach before heading towards the clubhouse, the pale children patting sandcastles: these seem to have been transposed here straight from Torquay, Cannes or Saint-Tropez-as though, in fading light, Europe, like Alexander’s Greece, were simulating itself, trying with a dogged persistence to block out the growing knowledge that it can’t take root here, that it won’t work.

“We should head back to town,” says Petrou. “When’s the next…?” He runs his finger down the tram timetable. “Would you look at this?” he clucks exasperatedly. “The French and English parts list different times!”

On the way back they pass the Royal Tombs.

“That’s the Soma,” Petrou says. “Where Alexander’s body’s meant to lie.”

“Meant to?”

“It’s almost certain that it never made it here. The Ptolemies liked to believe it did, and had themselves buried on this spot. The prophet Daniel too: his mosque’s above the founder’s vault. And there’s a little Isis temple here as well, just where the Rue Rosette and the Rue Nebi Daniel meet: a whole funerary complex-at the heart of which, unfortunately, there seems to lie a void.”

His eyes have been fixed on Serge’s chest while he’s been speaking, on the spot that he asped earlier. They remain there while the tram pulls up at a stop Serge recognises as his own, and move with it while Serge steps down onto the pavement, saying good night.

He spends his evenings at home, trying to write his report. The Corona ’s set up at a writing desk beside the window; on the wall above it, Serge has pinned a map of Alexandria and its surrounding region. He’s not sure what to write: the Ministry already know which wires have been torn down, which installations damaged; his brief’s the “different angle,” the “wider perspective.” He glances at the map from time to time, hoping for inspiration, glazing his eyes and moving his head from side to side in an attempt to set its lines, ridges and contours into some kind of motion that in turn might furnish him with what the RFC used to call a “narrative”-but these always seem to sense him coming in advance, and lock themselves in frozen immobility. The Nile ’s mouth, around Rosetta, forms the shape of a mons veneris. Running his gaze across its inverted triangle back towards the city’s more rounded sphere one evening, he passes the dot denoting Ramleh, and recalls the snipped-up snakes. “Wreaking sacrilege,” Ferguson said: he was probably right. Closing his eyes, Serge tries to hear what chants, or curses, might have been intoned around the totem posts embodied by the poles, but manages only to pick up game-moves whispered down Ting-a-Ling wires strung up over walls and hedges.

Many attacks on communications,

he starts to type,

seem to be carried out in areas of no military import, and with little practical end. The inconvenience caused to the overall machinery of empire by the interruption of the chain of orders between (for example) a country club and its caterers is negligible. From a symbolic point of view, however…

He pauses; it strikes him that he should have used the word “perspective” instead of “point of view.” He pulls the paper out-all five sheets of it: the three white ones and the two carbon sheets between them-winds a new stack into the machine, and starts again:

A majority of attacks on communication networks seem to be perpetrated in areas…

His knuckle’s got a carbon-smudge on it; he wipes this off against his wrist-and, as he does, begins to ponder the issue of Widsun’s appendix, his prolegomena. Glancing at Rosetta again as he once more replaces the pages, he types out in block capitals:

PUDENDUM ADDENDUM

Then he leaves, heading for the Iris Cinema. He goes there often: he’s seen the film currently showing there, Love’s Madness, three times. There are bars in his neighbourhood, but he doesn’t feel an urge to visit them: he likes the rhythm of typing, watching a film whose every move he knows and can anticipate, returning home, re-reading the pages he wrote earlier, then typing more. Sometimes he just sits and thumbs the carbon paper, letting its smooth, luminescent blackness rub off onto him while he stares through the pane-less window at the other blackness, the one outside. Sounds carry through this: music spilling out of cafés, the clang of metal cups, ships’ sirens sounding in the harbour. Beneath this, less audible but equally persistent, a rustling, hissing noise that animates the city at all times. Alexandria ’s air’s electric, harsh with static: lightning discharges flicker above it occasionally, but never bring rain; fireflies glow and fade, like faultily wired bulbs. It seems to Serge at times that in the city’s pulses, in its interrupted flows, there lurks some kind of unrequited longing. This is what he hears in the muezzin’s chants threading meshed balconies, or in the cries of tradesmen and the wails of beggars filtering through palm trees. More than anything, it’s what he hears in Petrou’s voice, its exiled, hovering cadences-and what he sees in Petrou’s face and body, his perpetual slightly sideways stance: a longing for some kind of world, one either disappeared or yet to come, or perhaps even one that’s always been there, although only in some other place, in a dimension Euclid never plotted, which is nonetheless reflecting off him at an asymptotic angle; and reflecting, it increasingly seems, straight towards Serge.

One morning in late February, Serge makes his way to the Ministry through streets thronged with jubilant Egyptians.

“ Independence,” a sour-face colleague informs him as he enters the half-empty building. “ Ferguson wants to see you.”

“ Independence,” Ferguson repeats, equally sourly. “Could have been avoided, if the will had been there. Never trusted Milner, between you and me. He’s got one big concession, though, as far as we’re concerned.”

He looks at Serge conspiratorially, as though the meaning of his statement were explicit. Serge stares back at him blankly.

“Communications!” Ferguson snaps. “ Britain reserves the right to maintain both military and civil offices in Egypt ‘to protect,’ as the wording has it, ‘her Imperial Communications.’ ” His hand dips into the biscuit bowl on his desk and flaps around, finding it empty. “Ishak Effendi-!” he begins to call out, then breaks off. “Opportunist. Can’t trust half the people here. They’ll probably be back in two weeks’ time, promoted to positions of…” He shakes his head, then, remembering why he summoned Serge in the first place, announces: “You’re being transferred to Cairo. Order came through from Macauley’s people just before our operators here abandoned their posts. Seems this independence thing has jolted Cairo, or Whitehall, or whatever ill-informed sub-sub-committee’s charged with the issue at the moment, into action: they’re finally getting the Empire Wireless Chain’s Egyptian station up and running.”

“When do I leave?” Serge asks.

“Day after tomorrow. Better go and pack.”

“And my report?” Serge asks. “It’s finished, more or less.”

“What report?”

“Perspective. Sacred phone boxes. I’ve typed it in tripl-”

“Oh, that. Yes. Drop it off in my secretary’s box…”

Petrou insists on spending one last afternoon with Serge. He takes him to the museum. The place is virtually empty: Egyptians are too busy celebrating, Europeans cowering indoors, to visit the salvaged jetsam of their city’s patchwork past. The two men roam through galleries lined with inscribed tombstones, framed papyri, cabinets of scarabs.

“This is Arsinoe, done as Eurydice,” Petrou says as they pause before a statue of a woman holding her distended stomach, as though pregnant. “She was the wife of the second Ptolemy, Philadelphus: his sister, seven years older than him. When she died of indigestion, he was inconsolable.”

“Bad ptomaines,” murmurs Serge, but Petrou doesn’t hear him.

“And this,” he continues, laying his hand on Serge’s chest once more and drawing him towards the next exhibit, “is Thoth done as Hermes, or Hermes as Thoth, depending on which way you look at it.”

“Oh, he’s the one with the cap,” Serge nods. “Cupid.”

“Inventor of writing,” Petrou tells him, “god of magic, measurer of time, keeper of divine records. Thoth-Hermes was supposedly the author of the Hermetic books of Roman Egypt. And here’s Bast and Sekhet.”

“They look like cats,” Serge says.

“They are, of sorts: Sekhet has a lioness’s head and holds a golden flower, to represent the sun, whose heat she takes into her body and re-emanates. Bast is a standard cat-god. In pharaonic times his statue was everywhere.”

“Is that what ‘pharaoh’ means?” Serge asks. “ ‘Sun’? Like the phare at Pharos?”

“No, it means ‘house,’ ” Petrou answers. “ ‘Great house.’ ”

They move on into a room full of small statuettes.

“Funerary art,” Petrou comments. “Dead children.”

Serge peers at a row of them. One shows a small boy sitting on his mother’s shoulders, while the one next to it has the same child, or perhaps one similar to him, riding a toy chariot full of grapes that’s drawn by dogs. Another shows seated pupils taking lessons.

“Relics from early Jewish settlers,” Petrou tells Serge. “Early Christian too. And Greek, of course: the various religions’ figures all blur into one another. This, for example,” he continues, leading Serge down the row as though he were a dignitary to whom state officials must be introduced, pausing before a bull-headed figure, “is Serapis, the deity clobbered together for the city by the first Ptolemy, Soter: Dionysus, Osiris, Apis, Zeus, Asculapius and Pluto all rolled into one. It all began here: city of sects and syncretism.”

“And incest,” Serge adds.

Ignoring his words, Petrou leads him to a large scroll that bears what seems to be a diagram: in black and white, above a set of interlocking rings inset with smaller circles that hold images of birds, compasses or clock-faces, a female figure rises. She, too, is largely composed of circles: round breasts with concentric nipples between which rests a pendant circle with a cross, or aerial, above it; a round womb in which floats a rounded baby; and, above her shoulders, a head formed by the sun, a perfect orb. Words annotate the diagram from every angle: “Lumen Naturae,” “Oculus Divinus,” “Tinctura Physica,” “Water,” “Soda,” “Terra,” “Blood.”

“Sophia,” Petrou says reverently.

“So fear what?” asks Serge.

“Her name: Sophia. Wisdom of the Gnostics. Syzygy of Christ.”

Serge is silent for a while, then says:

“Syzygy: I know about that. That’s why those orbs are dark.”

He points to two eclipsed suns on the right side of the constellated rings. One of them is blank, like carbon paper; the other has a skull set in it. Above these, to their left, a river, flat as the Canopic Nile-mouth, wends its way up between her legs.

“Philo of Alexandria devised her, to bridge the gap between man and Jehova. She’s the Logos, Dweller in the Inmost. Look between her breasts.”

He points; Serge follows his finger with his gaze and sees, hovering above the aerial-cross, its frame formed from a square inset with other squares for windows and its roof made of a triangle, a great house.

“Philo was a Jewish Platonist,” Petrou continues, “but the Christians picked up the Logos baton and ran with it. For them, Sophia’s a sad figure, symbol of our descent. Valentinus-an Alexandrian too-has her undone by love: desiring too ardently to be united with God, she falls into matter, and our universe is formed out of her agony and remorse.” Petrou’s eyes shift to Serge’s chest as he continues: “As an unknown theologian-yet another Alexandrian-wrote of her: ‘She is more beautiful than the sun and all the order of stars: being compared to light she is found beyond it…’ ”

It’s dusk; the museum’s rooms and corridors are murky. The two men stand quite static, Petrou sideways-on to Serge, his gaze fixed on his chest-as though they, too, were sculptures, syncretic overlays of eras and mythologies, gods, mortals and their relics. They remain like this as Petrou continues, in a voice becoming fainter all the time, his recitation:

“ ‘For after this cometh night…’ ”

His words trail off. Serge turns away from him, towards the window. Through it, in the gloaming, he can see a firefly pulsing photically, in dots and dashes.

ii

The train to Cairo runs through the Wady Natrun soda fields. Serge knows, because he’s sat in on at least two meetings about the issue, that the concession to develop these is held by the Egyptian Salt and Soda Company-but it’s good to set a proper landscape to an abstract history of bribery, fraud and ineptitude. Between the grey hulk of a factory and the isolated monasteries that wobble in the heat-glare, a giant mineral lake stretches. Despite the heat, the lake seems to be covered with a layer of ice; what’s more, the ice has crimson patches on it, as though baby seals had been clubbed there. Trickling streams of claret link the patches to blue and green pools. Above the blushing, multicoloured tracts stand impossibly large birds, perched on lumps of salt that look like towering icebergs.

“The mirage,” says the Scotsman sharing Serge’s compartment, noticing him staring in bemusement at the scene.

“It’s an illusion, then?” Serge asks. “There are no birds?”

“Oh, there are birds all right. But the light’s bending and expanding them. Ditto the salt.”

“You’re seeing it too?”

“We’re both seeing what the light’s gradient as it hits the warmer air is conveying to our retinas.”

“And the crimson?”

“Natron deposits rising to the surface.”

This man is an optician, as it turns out. He shows Serge his ad in the Gazette (his logo: a hieroglyphic eye-symbol beside a suspiciously anachronistic-looking pair of glasses done in the same style), then retreats behind the same newspaper, emerging from time to time to comment on its contents, none of which are to his liking.

“They’re attacking Europeans randomly,” he tuts. “Says here a whole train was halted by a mob at Damietta, and white men and women treated to ‘the worst indignities.’ ”

Their train also gets held up, although not by a mob: there’s a defect on the Shouba Bridge. It’s almost dawn when they arrive in Cairo. Serge makes his way past mini-phare lampposts, each casting small cylinders of phosphorous light onto the pavement, to the Ministry. He finds it in a complex so expansive as to dwarf the Alexandria outpost: here are the departments of Unappropriated Revenue, State Properties, Public Works, Justice, Irrigation, Ports and Light, Pensions, Public Instruction, Antiquities, the Army of Occupation, the Suez Canal-and, nestled among these, Communications. All of these seem to be undergoing overhauls: offices lie vacant, their contents packed in boxes on the floor; typewriters, all Coronas, stand stacked up against walls, awaiting relocation or, perhaps, evacuation; people move briskly and anxiously down corridors trying to locate other people who are moving down adjacent ones looking for someone else. Whenever Serge stops one of them to ask directions he’s met with an exasperated shrug; it’s by sheer chance that he eventually comes across Macauley, standing in the middle of a room supervising the removal of three wall-to-wall shelves’ worth of box files.

“I’m Macauley,” his new boss, a stout man in his mid-to-late fifties, tells him offhandedly. “If you’re from internal accounts then you’ll have to wait until I’ve relocated. Spreadsheets are all packed.”

“No, I’m Carrefax,” Serge tells him.

“What’s that supposed to mean to me?”

“Serge Carrefax. I just arrived from Alexandria. I’m to work on the Empire Wireless Chain. I should-”

“Ah, yes!” says Macauley, turning to face him for the first time. “Widsun’s boy. Expected you some time ago.”

“I would have been here sooner, but they’ve had me doing… I have it right here.”

He opens his case, fishes out the second copy of his détaché dispatch and hands it over.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” Macauley asks, tossing it into a box that’s being picked up and carried from the room. “First you’re three weeks late; now you’re one week early.”

“Early?” Serge repeats.

“We’re shifting operations to the Central Cairo Station. Offices here will be committed to disentanglement: installing native ministers, advising and liaising, other such nonsense…”

“And the Wireless Chain?”

“Oh, that’ll go ahead-in parallel: through Abu Zabal and another site. That’s what you’ll be working on-but not yet. Come back in a week. Not here: come to the Central Station. I should be installed by then.”

“And what should I do in the meantime?” Serge asks.

“Bed in, attend receptions, buy some trinkets. If you can hunt down Pollard and Wallis they’ll take you to the lodgings we’ve kept ready for you-assuming that these haven’t since been taken over by some righteous mob…”

The lodgings, near the Ezbekiya Gardens, are intact. From their terrace where he takes his coffee every morning he can see the sun hitting the roofs of Heliopolis, the slopes of Mokatem, the City of the Dead running to Matary. The evenings he spends with Macauley’s men Wallis and Pollard, who are a few years older than him. Having first kitted him up with tie and tails in Orosdi-Back’s department store, they take him, as their boss anticipated, to receptions: at the Gezira, Turf and Jockey clubs, the Mena House, Shepheard and Continental hotels, or chalet-like private residencies in Maadi, Abdine and Khalifa. One such event, hosted by Conte Mario de Villa-Clary, chairman of the Maltese Colony of Cairo, has an undertone of suspicion laced with resentment: of the civil servants by the Maltese, who feel that the former have never quite accepted them as “proper” British subjects, and of the Maltese by the civil servants, who murmur into their canapés accounts of double-dealing, bet-hedging and convenience-flag seamanship. Another, an annual dinner thrown by the Cairo Horticultural Society, is spoiled by a choice of menu-card background that’s deemed unappetising by the majority of those at Serge’s table: entitled “De Metamorphosibus Insectorum Surinamensiun,” it shows a palisade tree, or Erythrina fusca, beset by the moth Arsenura armida, depicted in all phases of its life-cycle. Having grown up surrounded by such insectoid mutations, Serge has no problem with the intersecting carapaces and antennae forming a trellis in which the words “asparagus,” “saddle” and “parfait” sit; in fact, he quite likes the picture, and slips the card, before the table’s cleared, into his jacket pocket to take home with him as a memento.

He spends most of his days trawling the markets-the antiques ones-buying, as Macauley suggested, trinkets. Ankhs and scarabs, signet rings, papyri, necklaces. The scarabs come in many shapes and styles: square, oval, decorated, some with beetle-armour moulding on their backs, others with images (the sun, a bird, a human figure writing something), others still with geometric patterns: circles, spirals, mazes. He buys them for his mother and his father, for Maureen, the schoolrooms. For Bodner he buys jars containing pulverised mummified cat, which, he’s informed in broken English by the seller, is a prodigious fertiliser.

“Is that true?” he asks Pollard a few hours later.

“Apparently,” Pollard replies. “The tombs they’ve been unearthing constantly for the last hundred years are so full of these bandaged creatures that they’re twenty to the dozen, and quite nutrient-rich to boot. Whether or not you’re getting the real thing each time you buy a jar of ground-down ancient cat in a market is another question. Same goes for the scarabs and papyri: half of them are fake.”

Wallis, warming to the theme of forgery, tells Serge to double-check his change in shops and cafés: there’s a glut of counterfeit 10-piastre pieces and 5-livre égyptienne banknotes going round these days. It’s not just currency that’s counterfeit: people themselves are often of dubious provenance-especially Europeans. You never know whether the person you meet in a restaurant is a surgeon or minor statesman as he claims, or a card-sharp, pimp or hustler. The Gazette’s awash with stories of well-spoken Englishmen who waltz into the Continental, introduce themselves as middle-men for jewellers and take consignment of gold watches and diamond rings to show to clients, never to reappear; or ones who scour the social pages to learn who’s pitched up in town and where they’re staying, then set out to befriend, seduce and generally swindle them. A well-known bigamist, one article announces, who’s wanted for gross deception, extortion and manslaughter, is rumoured to be passing through Cairo incognito: “HE COULD BE ANYONE,” the headline shouts excitedly. It’s true: anyone and everyone seems to pass through here; it’s the gateway to the Middle and Far East. Oil prospectors, irrigation-pump importers, engineers, brokers, general speculators: they’re all milling around, waiting for boats or business, trying to buy or sell something or other. One evening, in the Savoy Palace brasserie, Serge runs into his old Hythe training partner, Stedman.

“You survived!” they blurt out simultaneously, equally incredulous.

“Did anybody else?” Serge asks.

“Pepperdine got taken prisoner on his first flight, I heard. Spurrier got wounded and shipped home. The rest are dead, I think.”

“And you?”

“Bullet-resistant. Like a reverse magnet: they just veered away from me. Must be some magic powers those lacrosse girls had. I went through five observers-no, six. The best part of the ground crew in my squadron got killed too; but I was in the air each time the bombing raids came. I’ve been flying ever since: figure it’s lucky for me…”

“Flying where?”

“Joy rides over London until last year.”

“I read about those,” Serge says, his head filling with Amazonians and Osram Lamp advertisements. “From Croydon, right?”

“Exactly,” Stedman answers. “Now I’m heading for the Levant, to do aerial surveys for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company.”

“If they can still afford it, that is,” a fellow diner to whom Serge was vaguely introduced some nights ago, and who’s been listening to their conversation while he reads the Gazette at the bar, chips in. “Their share price is down three-sixteenths.”

“Three-sixteenths isn’t so bad,” counters Pollard, who’s wandered over, having failed to secure an invitation to the table of a minister whose wife he’s been buying drinks for. “The Agricultural Bank’s down a whole pound, and the Banque d’Orient’s fallen two since independence. If they can take it, Angie-Percy can drop the odd sixteenth and bounce back.”

“Bounce back?” the Gazette-reader scoffs. “I’m not sure any of them can ‘take it,’ as you say. We’ll all be lucky to avoid a run.”

“I don’t think…” Pollard begins-but the man, warming to his subject, cuts him off:

“Least of our worries, anyway: says here there’s talk of a complete withdrawal.”

“I can assure you that that option’s not being-” Pollard tries to tell him, but the man continues:

“Even the Copts want us out, apparently. If our fellow Christians won’t stand by us, then what hope have we got? And to top it all, we’re being assassinated left, right and centre.”

“Bit of an exaggeration…” Pollard answers soothingly.

The man waves his Gazette at him. “Page seven: ‘Italian Lawyer Shot in Labban.’ Page eight: ‘E. Brown, of Ministry of Public Instruction, Shot in Abdine.’ Further down the same page: ‘F. Bloch, of Egyptian State Railways, Bludgeoned-’ bludgeoned!-‘in Boulaq.’ ”

“Got a nice alliterative ring to it,” Serge says.

“Meanwhile,” the gazetteer continues, “they’re not even guaranteeing our pensions.”

“Not so,” Pollard disagrees. “Pensionable-age officials are being told that they can leave on ad-hoc-”

“Right,” the other jumps in again, “but only if we can show that we’re working under ‘unacceptable conditions.’ What’s unacceptable? Being shot at’s only unacceptable once it’s occurred, and by then it’s too late.”

“What ministry are you in?” Pollard asks him.

“Finance,” the man answers resentfully. “I’m having to help ratify this great injustice. And to add insult to injury, I’m being made to divest my own powers to some underqualified and smirking local. ‘Disentanglement,’ they call it; I call it rubbing ourselves out.”

He makes a frotting motion with his hand. Serge, his magnetic thought-poles influenced by Stedman’s presence, thinks of Walpond-Skinner’s ledger, then of balls of wool, then of Widsun, whose ‘appendix’ he has yet to write…

Besides British officials and their civil servants, labourers from all over Europe and entrepreneurs and hustlers from the earth’s four corners, the town’s also full of tourists. They seem quite oblivious to the political upheaval taking place around them-yet they have their own brand of disquiet. Serge spends an evening in the company of one: an Abigail he picks up, like some fraudster, at the Continental and, giving her parents, a Chelsea banker and a Lawn Tennis Association social secretary, the slip, takes to one café, then another, then another, the establishments’ respectability diminishing as they progress, until they find themselves surrounded by horse-players and their bookies, courtesans on breaks and worse. The conversation buzzing around them is full of High Nile stakes and boxing odds, of anxious speculation about what will happen if capitulations are repealed and foreign miscreants tried in native rather than consular courts before being locked up, unsegregated, in Manshiyya. Abigail, insensible to these strands that Serge’s ear’s unpicking, coughs on the Melkonian he offers her and, waving smoke from her eyes, complains:

“The brochure says we’re meant to ‘discover’ the Pyramids. But they’ve already been discovered. Egyptology’s a hundred years old. Did you know that?”

“I suppose-” Serge begins, but she continues:

“I read it in the Times before we left: a hundred years exactly since that French chap Champignon deciphered that old tablet.”

“Second Babel in three feet-” Serge starts to say, but she interrupts him again:

“I mean, my grandfather remembers seeing the Egyptian court in Crystal Palace as a child. And I read as well, in the same article-was it the same one? Doesn’t matter: that one or another like it-that until recently you could pitch up here with a compass and a map, and your hosts would arrange for you to find-to ‘find’-” her voice goes high and squeaky at this point-“a tomb, which they’d prepare overnight for you, mummy and all, while you slept on Oriental cushions. It’s all so… fake!”

She drags on her cigarette again, then, puffing the smoke out in a rush, continues:

“We got all the guidebooks before we set out. The Cook’s one told us we should read Herodotus, so as to come here not as tourists but as ‘travellers,’ ‘individual explorers.’ So we got that too. But now it turns out everybody else on our tour is carting round a copy of Herodotus-which they got told to buy by Cook. What’s individual about that?”

“Maybe-” Serge ventures; but she’s on a roll:

“And we got another book as well, that tells us how to do ‘research’: we’ve bought a sextant and chronometer, a siphon and barometer and measuring tape-oh yes: and paper to do pressings of inscriptions on these temples, like they haven’t been transcribed a hundred million zillion times before. And then, because it’s the latest edition that we’ve got-of the book, I mean-there’s a note telling us it’s now acceptable to photograph inscriptions rather than pressing them. Acceptable to whom? Who are we photographing for?”

Her voice has gone squeaky and breathless again; Serge, looking at her neck, sees that it’s flushed. She pauses for a while and sips her drink. Serge, following the red flush from her neck down to her blouse, recalls his nights spent DX-fishing in Versoie: the sense that, in transcribing all the clicks, notating all the messages, logging the stations and their outputs, he was performing a task so vital that a single wrong entry would have disastrous consequences for whole hierarchies of-of what? Committees, subcommittees? Of important bodies who relied on him, who’d process and act on his dispatches, who needed them. Beyond that: that the stations at the far end of the dial, the signals on the edge of audibility-from ships, or desert outposts, or more distant ships and outposts ever further still being picked up and forwarded through vast, static reaches-were coming from a place so remote and enchanted as to belong to another dimension entirely, a “there” as far divorced from “here” as angels from the mortals before whom they might briefly appear in flickering electric visions. Now, though, there’s no “there”: he’s here where “there” was and it’s not “there” anymore, just “here.”

“Do you know,” Abigail’s asking him, “what happened when we went past Gizah on the steamer? Well, I’ll tell you: at exactly half past four the dragoman came below deck and said: ‘Ladies and gentlemen…’ ” She slips into a mock-Egyptian accent and repeats: “ ‘La-dies and gentle-men. If you care to as-cent un-to the main deck now, the mar-vel of the Pyra-mids will be re-vealed to you.’ So we as-cented, and the Pyramids were there, just like in the photographs that I’d already seen in all those bloody books but not looking so nice and aesthetic; and people got their cameras out and started photographing them, although I don’t know why, because their photos won’t turn out as nice as the ones in the books and brochures either. And they didn’t even photograph the things for very long, because there was a buffet laid out on the deck, and they all wanted to get at it before the sandwiches and lemonade ran out; but then of course they realised that they had to show a certain reverence towards the Pyramids, while still not missing out on lunch, so they revered and ate and photographed and drank all at once. And our dragoman said: ‘Please don’t for-get your tem-ple tick-et, as it’s valid for the Sphinx tour too.’ ”

“And what did you do?” Serge asks.

“What could I do?” her voice goes high and squeaky and her neck flushes again. “I looked at the Pyramids, and tried to revere them, and photographed a little. Then I looked at the others looking at the Pyramids, and photographed these people too. I tried to eat a little, but I felt sick. It was obscene-like a pornographic film: this dirty entertainment laid on for us all to gape at.”

“I had that impression in the war,” Serge says.

“You were in the war?” she asks, looking straight at him for the first time. “Doing what?”

“Observing,” he says. “Gaping from a plane.”

“That sounds quite exciting,” she says. “Tell me more.”

He takes her back to his place. During sex, her gasps have the same high and squeaky pitch as her voice during conversation, as though arousal, for her, were a heightened form of indignation. Kneeling behind her, he watches the flushes move from her neck down her spine and out along her rib-lines. Afterwards, they lie in silence for a while; then she asks him:

“So, did you kill anyone?”

She leaves the next day-on another steamer, heading down to Luxor and Assuan. He thinks of her two days later, though, when, leaving his flat by foot and turning the corner into Rue de Paris, he hears two gunshots and, looking down the street to where they came from, sees two black figures running from a growing patch of white that’s spreading across the pavement. It’s milk: their victim, an English professor at the Law School, had stepped outside his front door to collect it when they shot him-they were lying in wait. The man’s already dead by the time Serge reaches him. His blood, trickling from his head and abdomen, is running into the milk, marbling its pool with deltaed strands, like natron on a lake of soda.

iii

The Central Station has its own building, a much more modern one than that housing the other ministries. Antennae sprout from its roof; soldiers guard the compound that surrounds it: Imperial Communications are indeed, as Ferguson intimated, “protected.” Its rooms are full of people and equipment, its corridors of well-directed bustle. Macauley leads Serge past rows of desks at which men sit with headphones on, transcribing letter sequences while other men move up and down the rows gathering the transcriptions and depositing them in front of yet more men who mark them up on blackboards. In a corner two more men are working their way through a pile of newspapers-Gazette, Wady et Nil, al-Ahram, al-Balagh, al-Jumhur, al-Akbar-underscoring certain words, then tearing out the pages on which these have been highlighted and passing them to the gatherers, who convey them to the marker-uppers, who, in turn, copy them out to mingle with the letters on the boards.

“They use all kinds of channels,” Macauley says to Serge, obscurely.

“Who do?” Serge asks.

“Everyone!” Macauley answers. “We’re at the crossroads here, the confluence of all the region’s interest groups’ transmissions. We’re listening to the Wafdists and the Turks; they’re listening to Ulamáists and Zionists; the French are listening to us, and we to them-but we share info on the Russians, who we both hate, although not as much as we all hate the Germans, who we listen to as well. Or is it the Spartacans? In any case, we listen to them all. Telegrams, radio messages, acrostics and keywords lurking within print: we try to pick as much of it up as we can. A thankless task, of course; who knows what tiny fraction of it all we actually get?”

“And that’s what all these men are doing?” Serge asks.

“All these men and more: my décryptage department. Headed up by Egyptologists. Got the right minds: used to cracking New Kingdom texts or something. Rebus logic. It all goes above my head, to tell you the truth. This stuff,” he continues, leading Serge through a door into the next room, “I can understand a little better: at least it looks like something vaguely recognisable.”

He’s pointing to a wall on which a huge map, as big as eight or so of the other room’s blackboards, is painted: a map extending from Izmir down to Khartoum and from Tunis to Baghdad. Pins of various colours have been jabbed into this-some small and some with heads as large as ping-pong balls, some all alone and some in clusters. More pins are being added all the time, by men consulting photographs, hand-written notes and smaller maps.

“ImagInt,” Macauley says. “Aerial, terrestrial, snapped, painted, scribbled on some scrap of fabric: it’s all there. Even livestock movements, locust swarms, what have you. All adds up-or at least, it’s supposed to. HumInt too, of course.”

“What’s humming?” Serge asks.

“HumInt: Human Intelligence. Got agents everywhere: here; Suq Al-Shuyukh, where the sheiks all meet; Nasiriyah, from whence sedition seems to spread down the Euphrates to the Arab tribes; the Shia holy cities, hotbeds of intrigue and points, if memory serves me rightly, of contact with Damascus, which, via them, can exercise remote control of Persia… or is it the other way round? Either way, we’ve got to keep an eye and ear out for what’s brewing. We have men doing the Hajj, or wandering around with herdsmen, or hanging out in mosques, bazaars, communal washhouses, village meetings…”

“Folklore?” Serge asks, pointing to a table labelled with this word, across whose surface lies a mish-mash of handwritten pages crudely illustrated with pictures of lions and eagles.

“Supposed to contain useful information,” Macauley responds. “Stories of curses going round, or afrits haunting districts, may be telling us something… or not…” He sighs. “It’s all pretty intangible: whispers and rumours drifting like some kind of vapour across swathes of desert…”

“Back in London,” Serge says, “I was reading about some chap named Laurice, Lorents, Laudence…”

“That fucking twit,” Macauley snorts. “Bombards us all the time with useless information. Not just him: every two-bit traveller, ‘adventurer,’ ‘novelist’ or general man of leisure who’s inherited more money than sense… ladies of leisure too: they’re just as bad… Sending us their ‘reports,’ briefing their friends on Fleet Street to extol their bravery and cunning to readers who aren’t any the wiser, then expecting knighthoods when they get home… Fantasists and frauds, the lot of them! The worst part of it is, they’re actually quite useful.”

“How?” Serge asks.

“With the other parties all spying on us, if we appear to take something seriously, well, they take it seriously too. We call it ‘feedback’-no, hang on a second… ‘bleedback’: that’s it. Lots of those sequences you saw being written out across the blackboards in the other room get bled back too, mutated but still recognisable, in telegrams, transmissions, new acrostics… Make sure they’re confused as we are, eh? Plus, who knows? We might actually hit some nerve, activate something… maybe… Oops! Don’t let us get in your way: carry on!”

This last phrase is directed at a man who’s arrived bearing more photographs, maps, foolscap pages. As Serge and Macauley move aside, he sets them down on the table next to the folklore one and starts sorting them, stamping each with a different scarab-sized seal as he does so.

“Half the people in the region are spies,” Macauley says as they move on. “Engineers, archaeologists, anthropologists: you name it. If they’re not spies, they’re suspected of being spies, which makes them just as much a part of the whole maddening caboodle as if they had been. To give you an example: we’ve been keeping a close eye on a consignment of butterflies that’s at quay here on its way from Baghdad to the Tiergarten in Berlin. Butterfly eggs, to be precise: they’ll hatch when they arrive. The French have been showing a keen interest in the consignment. The Italians too. The Wafdists not-which might be because they already know something we don’t. The eggs are being escorted by some acclaimed naturalist, Professor Himmel-This-or-That von Something-Else. Papers in order: all legitimate, perhaps; or perhaps not. We’ve picked up intimations that the whole operation forms part of a larger German rearmament plan, although how it does this isn’t clear; also, that Prof Von’s in cahoots with the Bolsheviks; or, in fact, the Turkish CUP. And it has been decided, at some juncture, that, for our part, we should act as though each of these theories held water.”

“But what’s the truth?” Serge asks.

“The truth?” Macauley repeats. “Who’s to say? Scientists-physicists-are telling us that two things can be true at once nowadays. The point is, if we think the butterflies are something other than what they are, or that they serve some purpose other than that which they serve, or if we act as though we think this, then the French will also think they are-do, I mean-or think that they’ve tricked us into thinking this, and the Italians will follow suit, which means the Germans will… I lose track beyond that point… It’s quite frustrating…”

He sighs again, and leads Serge from the room. As they move down a corridor, Macauley continues, wistfully:

“One of my men’s working on mirages: trying to prove they’re real…”

They’re in his office now. The box files have been rehoused on new shelves; the desk has one large folder on it, labelled “EmpWirCh.” Macauley holds his thumb and finger to his scrunched-up eyes for a few seconds after he sits down, then opens them again and says to Serge:

“So, finally: the pylon at Abu Zabal is to be completed. It’ll be switched on in May, they say. About eight years too late-eight years in which the nation that had radio before all others has slipped hopelessly behind. The French alone have high-powered transmitters in Beirut, Bamako and Tananarive; America has five times more foreign stations than we have; even the Germans match us kilowatt for kilowatt worldwide. It’s an embarrassment. And all because the Post Office Department and the Committee of Imperial Defence couldn’t agree; or if they did they couldn’t get the Admiralty on board, or the Treasury, the Board of Trade, the India Office, the Air Ministry or whatever other gaggles of failed politicians had to be in accord in order for the whole thing to progress. Do you know,” he asks Serge, “how many committees have been set up to address the Imperial Wireless question in the last eight years?”

Serge shrugs his shoulders.

“Six! The technology’s not even the same now as when Marconi first proposed the whole chain idea: arc-transmission’s giving over to the valve method; there’s talk of a new beam-system that’ll enable long-distance communication without intermediary stations; who knows what else? The man himself, meanwhile, seems to have lost his marbles. Last I heard he was heading to Bermuda, to find out if Mars is sending wireless messages to us.”

“Marconi?” Serge asks.

Macauley nods.

“But I thought,” Serge says, “that he wasn’t involved in the whole chain thing anymore.”

“Oh, he’s not,” Macauley reassures him. “The Cabinet felt he’d have a monopoly, which is precisely what they wanted for the Post Office. They forgot, though, to consult with their Australian and South African counterparts, who’ve thumbed their nose at Whitehall by developing their own high-powered transmitters with him-Marconi, that is. Now Whitehall’s worried the Dominions will start distributing counterproductive content through the airwaves-which is why they’re setting up, back home, a national Broadcasting Corporation, to pump a mix of propaganda, music and weather reports all around Britain and, eventually, to every corner of the Empire. Which, in turn, is why they’ve realised that they’d better get the Abu Zabal pylon up and running, and start working on the next one, and the next…”

“Strange timing,” Serge says.

“What’s that?”

“That we start broadcasting central content Empire-wide just as we lose our empire…”

“The irony is, as they say, striking,” Macauley concurs.

“They should play dirges,” Serge suggests.

Macauley breathes out heavily, then tells him, in a voice that’s laced with fondness: “I can see your father in you.”

“You know my father too?” Serge asks.

Macauley looks back at him bewilderedly. “Well, yes, of course,” he says. “After all, he’s the one who sent-” He stops, as though catching himself, and looks away, then, shifting in his seat, continues: “The new chain will run in parallel-through Egypt at least.”

“Oh yes, you mentioned that,” says Serge. “What does that mean?”

“It means,” Macauley tells him, “that beside the Abu Zabal pylon, which we’ll visit after lunch, Egypt will host another mast. The chains will split beyond here: one running through Nairobi down to Windhoek and the other on to India and Singapore.”

“And where will the second Egyptian mast be?”

“Where indeed? That’s where you come in. I’m sending you upriver to scout out a possible location.”

“When?” Serge asks.

“Few days from now,” Macauley tells him. “There’s a large party heading up to Sedment. We’ve been helping them with the Antiquities Service: concessions and the like. French interests prevail there, I’m afraid.”

“We’re going to a place called Sediment?”

“No: Sedment. Falkiner’s the archaeologist: a good man, friend of the Ministry. He’s been digging there a while; returning there this week with some equipment too large to transport by train. The Inspector of Monuments is sending a man too. Then there’s some Frenchie-chemist, I think. Keep an eye on him.”

“And you want me to decide whether the second transmitter should go there?”

“ ‘Decide’ might be too strong a word. ‘Advise.’ Assess the spot’s particulars: whether it’s got easy landing, flat ground, raised rather than sunken-that kind of thing…”

A bell sounds somewhere down the corridor. Macauley rises from his chair and beams:

“Ah: lunch!”

Their table seems to be the refectory’s senior one: its occupants are older, all Macauley’s age, and ooze the same air of confused frustration.

“Falkiner got his concession at last, did he?” a moustachioed colonel asks. “Thought the whole thing had passed right out of our hands.”

“We had to let Lacau send one of his men along,” Macauley explains, buttering his bread.

“Is that the chemist?” Serge asks.

“No: that’s Pacorie,” Macauley answers.

“That cad?” the colonel snorts, spraying his soup. “Méfie-toi!”

“French are being sneaky as hell of late,” a red-faced HumInt officer adds, pouring wine for himself and the others. “They’re setting up semiautonomous local states within Syria.”

“Why?” asks Serge.

“They’re tied in with Amir al-Husayn,” the HumInt officer says.

“You think so?” asks Macauley.

“Without doubt,” the other answers. “They’ve been undermining us right from the off by siding with the Arabs.”

“We’ve sided with the Arabs too at times,” Macauley reminds him. “Fomenting unrest and all that.”

“Yes, but for other reasons than the French,” HumInt responds.

“Half the Wafd have spent a good long stretch in Paris,” says the colonel, whether by way of agreeing or disagreeing with his colleague Serge can’t quite work out. “They were liaising there with Comintern envoys. Bolsheviks are the real villains of this piece.”

“Oh, let’s not forget Constantinople,” cautions HumInt. “They’ve got their finger on the button as far as Mecca ’s concerned. They could summon up an armed conspiracy at any moment-one that would spread like wildfire through the entire Muslim world.”

“So in stirring up the Arabs, we’ve been doing the Turk’s work for him?” Macauley asks.

“It depends.”

“On what?”

“On the role of the Muslim Soviets in Jeddah.”

“Exactly!” the colonel sputters excitedly, pushing his bowl away. “It always comes back to the Soviets. Arabia’s becoming Bolshevised: the Zionist immigration to Palestine is seeing to that.”

“But I thought,” Serge chips in meekly, “that the Jews and the Arabs hated one another.”

“Maybe they do,” says the colonel. “But Moscow ’s perfectly capable of playing them both.”

The main course comes. More wine is poured.

“There’s little evidence,” the HumInt officer continues after they’ve all taken a few mouthfuls of lamb chops, “that the Russian residency’s actually doing much at present.”

“All the more reason to conclude they are,” replies the colonel. “Time of study, period of observation and all that. When somebody goes quiet, they’re usually cooking something up. Take the Swiss.”

“Yes: you’ve been paying them quite a bit of interest these last few months,” Macauley says. “I was wondering why.”

“Back door to Germany, and hence outpost of Soviet Marxism. They have their own paper here: read by bankers, watchmakers and the like. Least obvious of all channels, and for that very reason the most dangerous…”

“I sometimes think,” says HumInt, “that we need to look closer to home: Sinn Féin, the Labour Party…”

“Precisely!” snaps the colonel. “And where do those two take their orders from? You want to see what links Sinn Féin, the CUP, Young Persia, Labour, Spartacus and who knows what else: follow the Cyrillic script…”

“And Sarikat al Islam?” Macauley asks.

“That’s harder to track,” the colonel concedes. “India Office back home are uncooperative. We listen in on them too.”

“Sarikat al Islam?”

“No: the India Office, for the Foreign Office-who, quite possibly, are having them spy on us…”

“Then there’s Churchill’s old bugbear, the Egyptian Vengeance Society,” HumInt adds.

“Does that one exist, or not?” Macauley asks.

“It does now.”

“I seem to recall Standard Oil using them to stir up trouble,” says the colonel, squinting a little.

“Me too,” says HumInt, also staring vaguely in front of him, as though trying to discern some kind of outline. “Them or the Kemalists: that one was never entirely clear to me…”

The discussion continues while they ride in a car towards Abu Zabal. As they pass the city limits it winds down, and the four men stare in silence at the desert. The colonel dozes; once, as the road’s surface jolts them, he mumbles the word “Comintern” into his moustache, only it sounds more like “coming turn” or, perhaps, “coming term.” They pass through groves of date palms, then, just beyond the old Ismailia Canal, a village at whose edge a slaughterhouse stands. Heads and entrails have been thrown over its wall for dogs to pick at; their muzzles, purple with clotted blood caked by the sun, briefly emerge from their carrion nosebags to follow the car’s progress before burying themselves in cartilage and membrane again. The station’s beyond this. Its four masts, each about two hundred and fifty feet tall, are woven together by a net of wires.

“Like in the Chilean archipelago,” Serge says.

“What’s that?” Macauley asks.

“It must be powerful,” Serge answers.

“You bet it is!” Macauley exclaims proudly. “Got to reach all the way to Leafield in Oxfordshire.”

The colonel and HumInt wander off towards a table from which a large urn is doling coffee out to engineers and workers, all European, some of whom wear boiler suits with “British Arc Welding Company of Egypt ” printed on the lapels. Further away, scantily clad Egyptian Qufti pass homrah slabs down a long chain that runs from the spot where the Mataria railway line ends towards the radio station’s compound.

“Before the track came out here,” says Macauley, noticing Serge watching them, “we had camels carry it all in: whole caravans of them crossing the sand. Looked like a scene from pharaonic times: building the Pyramids or something…”

Serge, looking across his shoulder, sees an arc welder perched halfway up one of the masts’ steel frames, soldering a cable into place.

“Look at the terrain,” Macauley continues, walking Serge away from the pylons. “Flat, unencumbered, plain. That’s the type of landscape our parallel erection needs.”

They pause at the compound’s edge. Serge stares out at the desert. In the distance, a caravan, or perhaps a line of joined-up, sleepwalking schoolchildren, seems to glide across a shimmering, reflective lake.

“Mirages are real,” he says to Macauley, suddenly remembering his conversation with the optician on the Alexandria-to-Cairo train. “They’re caused by the light’s gradient as it…”

But Macauley’s gone, headed towards the urn. Serge watches his figure shrink beneath the station’s geometric mesh, then turns away from this to face once more the utterly ungeometric desert. A squeal carries towards the compound from the slaughterhouse-and makes him think, again, of Abigail, her high-pitched, squeaky voice. He recalls what she told him about feeling sick at Gizah, her impression of watching what she called an “obscene spectacle.” Perhaps she wasn’t wrong. What if the whole of Egypt were one big, endlessly repeating pornographic film, Love’s Madness on a loop? The camel-schoolchildren turn into dancing girls with flailing limbs, then flowers or umbrellas opening, or perhaps bodies being torn apart: tricks of the light casting a flickering pageant of agony and remorse across a dense and endless sheet of matter.

i

He’s to travel upriver on a steel-hulled dahabia, departing from quay 29 at Boulaq. He arrives to find the boat already being towed out into the river.

“Not again!” he moans to the docker repositioning the fenders hanging from the berth’s edge.

“What’s the problem?” the man asks.

“I was meant to be on that,” Serge tells him.

The docker stares at him for a few moments, then breaks out in laughter.

“What’s so funny?” Serge asks.

“It’s not leaving yet,” the man says. “They’re only sinking it.”

“Only sinking it?”

“They sink it to get rid of all the rats. Then they refloat it and kit it out with clean stuff; then you board it, it’s towed out again, they hoist the sails and set off properly. Understand?”

“It’s a sailing boat?” Serge asks.

“Has to be for this trip,” the docker answers. “Vibrations not good for the instruments.”

He jerks his thumb towards a group of men carrying large wooden boxes from a warehouse to the quayside. Overseeing them is a bespectacled European girl; barking orders at both her and the porters is a bearded European man.

“Careful with that box!” the latter calls out in an English accent. “If the theodolite gets damaged, the whole expedition’s stuffed. Lawrence & Mayo label upwards.”

He looks about the same age as Serge’s father.

“Are you Falk-?” Serge begins to ask.

“Label upwards!” he shouts. “Who are you?”

“Serge Carrefax. From the Ministry of Communications.”

“Ah, yes: Pylon Man. I know thee, and I know thy name, and I know the name of the god who guardeth thee!”

He speaks these last few words as though somehow performing them: arms straight by sides, head up, voice measured and incantatory.

“I’m sorry?” Serge asks.

“Look: it’s sinking,” says the girl, pointing over the men’s shoulders.

Serge and Falkiner both turn round. The dahabia’s hull, deck and cabins have all disappeared beneath the Nile, leaving only two bare masts to mark its watery burial site. Small eddies whirl around these, giving over to more violent eruptions as air from the boat’s interior rises to the surface.

“Rats abandoning: not a good sign,” another English voice at Serge’s back says, ominously. Turning round again, Serge finds a man in his mid-thirties, in plus-fours and a chequered yellow waistcoat. “You Macauley’s scout?” the man asks.

Serge nods, a little apprehensively. “And you?”

“I’m from Antiquities. Alby’s the name! Seems we’ll be shipmates on this jolly spree.”

As Serge and Alby shake hands, an argument breaks out beside the warehouse. This time the voices aren’t English: one of them’s Egyptian and the other, which belongs to a man wearing a long, black jacket and a matching bow tie, is native to the language in which the argument’s being conducted.

“C’est marqué dans le manifeste!” the bow-tied man’s trying to convince the clipboard-holding Egyptian, over and over again.

“Pas marqué dans mon manifeste, Effendi,” the Egyptian’s insisting, tapping his board. “On nous en a donné des nouveaux hier.”

“A mon insu!” the Frenchman cries, turning his palms out.

“Désolé: je ne peux pas les embarquer,” replies the Egyptian, shaking his head.

“Ce sont mes utils!” the other hisses, gesticulating with his hands in a way that reminds Serge of M. Bulteau’s gunpowder-act in Kloděbrady. Running his eye along the quayside, Serge can see the object of the argument-objects, rather: a new set of boxes, smaller ones, have been unloaded from a taxi and stacked up next to Falkiner’s surveying instruments.

“Pacorie,” Alby mutters to Serge. “Heaven knows what he’s got with him.”

“No magnets, I hope!” Falkiner barks, walking over to inspect the rival boxes.

“Only minuscule ones,” whines Pacorie, casting a hurt look back at him.

“Magnets play havoc with my compasses,” Falkiner snaps.

“So: I leave behind the magnets, and you tell this clown to sign the other boîtes for embarkation; is okay?”

Negotiations rumble on for the next hour or so. Serge introduces himself to the girl. She’s called Laura and must be about twenty-three or -four, like him. She’s been working for Falkiner for six months, she informs him, both in London and here “in the field.”

“Field?” asks Serge.

“Desert, delta, bank, whatever,” she corrects herself. “Territory.”

“You’re heading towards some tomb or other, right?” Serge asks her.

“Not just one,” she tells him, rubbing her palm against her forehead as she speaks. “Sedment’s an enormous burial site. There are thousands of tombs, all stacked on top of one another. Professor Falkiner’s one of the men who first excavated there. I studied his work at university.”

“So why’s he going back again?”

“The layers are-”

She doesn’t get to finish: Alby’s wandered over and is asking Serge if he’s brought picaridine with him.

“No: he came on his own. He’s a chemist or something-”

“No, picaridine: insect repellent. You’ll be needing plenty of it.”

“Aren’t those mosquito nets?” Serge asks, pointing to a pile of fine-mesh webs folded up on the quayside next to an assortment of mattresses, carpets, blankets, sheets, towels and pillows.

“Nets don’t catch everything,” Alby tuts in the same ominous tone he used earlier.

“Oh, look: the boat’s rising again,” Laura says.

The men turn round once more, and see the white hulk break the surface like some wood-and-metal Aphrodite. Muddy water gushes from her every orifice.

“Won’t it take a while to dry out?” Serge asks.

“We don’t leave until tomorrow,” answers Alby.

“I was told today.”

“Today’s loading. Where’s your stuff?”

“I’ve just got this,” Serge says, pointing at the small suitcase by his feet.

“May as well go home, then; get a last night’s sleep on solid ground.”

Serge does this. Back in his flat, he shuffles aimlessly through a stack of papers and finds, wedged among them, the small, unused pocket notebook he bought back in Alexandria. He slips this into his jacket: it’ll be where he sets down his thoughts about the suitability or otherwise of Sedment as a site for the parallel mast. Beneath it lies the sheet of paper with “PUDENDUM ADDENDUM” typed across it. It occurs to him that he should send the third and final copy of his détaché dispatch to Widsun: since it seems that no one else is going to read it, it will, indeed, be-as requested-just for him. He digs this out: its print is weak and carbon-smudges cloud the paper’s surface, but it’s legible. He slips the thing into an envelope that he addresses and is just about to seal when he changes his mind. He slides the report out again and, in its place, inserts the Horticultural Society’s illustrated menu-card: the “Metamorphosibus Insectorum,” the sick palisade, the hungry and rapacious grubs and moths that scrape and prod at words and world alike with their blunt carapaces and sharp antennae. Then he seals it and leaves it in his post out-basket, to be picked up and sent tomorrow.

The dahabia, whose name, Serge learns when he arrives the following morning and sees it painted on the hull, is Ani, casts off just before noon. The tug-pilot who tows it from the quay into mid-river wears a look of blank indifference; the Ani’s crew, too, perform their duties with the same disinterested expression: hoisting the sails, cleating ropes, plying the tiller. They progress at a slight diagonal across the river’s surface-not tacking, since the wind’s behind them, but not following its course directly either: every so often, as they near first one bank, then another, the boom swings languidly across the foredeck as the helmsman brings the boat about. The wind may be behind them, but the current’s not: it runs backwards past the bobbing prow, shunting them constantly to leeward.

“It’s counter-intuitif,” says Pacorie, noticing Serge watching the flow.

“What is?” Serge asks.

“Appellation: Lower Egypt, Upper Egypt.”

“You’re right,” says Alby, who’s sitting beside them on the deck. “I always wondered why the northern part’s called ‘Lower’ and the lower ‘Upper.’ ”

“Altitude,” Pacorie explains. “The terrain rises as the country descends from the sea. The river flows from south to north. One time each year it débords, and deposits black silt over the fields. That’s why the land is black-but only in a narrow corridor along the Nile.”

“A strip,” says Serge.

“Précisement,” nods Pacorie, approvingly. “Only this strip is cultivated. The silt allows lush marécages with fish and birds on either side the river, and soil that is oxygène-isated, and so good for food. The villages are just above the line of débordage. Then comes hills and desert: no fertile terrain there; no habitations either.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” murmurs Alby. “You’re forgetting the dwellings of the dead.”

Pacorie thrusts his lower lip out and rolls his forearms upwards in acknowledgement. Steamers chug past them, following the river’s line directly and at more than twice their speed. Watching them go by, Serge is struck by the strange and slightly dizzying sensation that, in their anachronistic sailing boat, they’re somehow drifting leeward in time, too: slipping back-or, more precisely, sideways-in it, losing traction on the present.

“Heading for Luxor,” Falkiner calls out from midship, pointing at the steamers. “Place is a giant dummy chamber.”

“What’s a dummy chamber?” Serge asks.

“It’s a trick,” says Laura, rubbing her forehead again, “used by the pharaohs to fool the plunderers they knew would one day come and disinter their funerary complexes. They’d have a second burial chamber, not the real one, built in a part of the structure that was relatively easy to find, and fill it with a few half-precious things. The thieves, thinking they’d hit the jackpot, would stop digging when they came across it, and the real chamber and its treasures would stay undiscovered.”

She looks over at Falkiner expectantly, as though awaiting some sign of approval for her annotation. He neither gives nor withholds this, but continues:

“Draws the tourists to it like so many flies to shit.” Raising his fist at the parasoled and safari-hatted passengers who lean across the steamer’s railings facing their way, he shouts: “Buzz, flies, buzz!” These people, for their part, wave back excitedly, mistaking his hostility for friendliness.

Falkiner looks like an old sea-dog with his beard. He holds a sextant and a compass, which complete the look. Between bouts of checking the ship’s position against these-or, perhaps, since this act is quite redundant in the circumstances, vice versa-he rails intermittently against the Concession system:

“Worse than taxi licences in London! Most archaeologists would sooner die than relinquish theirs-and when they do, they’re snapped up by the EES, the Philadelphia Museum or the Institut Français. Your people have a lot to answer for!”

He points an accusatory finger at the prow-a finger that, due to the boat’s motion, wavers between designating Pacorie and Alby.

“Whose people?” Pacorie asks. “Mine, or his?”

“Both of yours!” Falkiner barks back. “Department of Antiquities has consistently favoured the French since Lacau’s headed it.”

“That’s not quite true,” Alby responds. “Look who’s digging right now: Winlock’s at El-Kurneh; Fisher’s at Asasif; and Carter and Carnarvon-English as you or I, it must be said-are up at Thebes.”

“Won’t find a single scarab there,” scoffs Falkiner. “And even if they did, your man has signed away our rights to anything we turn up!”

“It’s not that simple, as you’re well aware,” says Alby. “The permittee must notify the Chief Inspector of all finds, and the Antiquities Service assume overall jurisdiction of each dig, while still-”

“Overall jurisdiction? They confiscate the whole lot, and hand it over to the Museum in Cairo, who decide what paltry scraps to toss back to the finder’s national collections.”

“Isn’t that fair?” Alby asks.

“Hell, no! The home of Egyptology is London – Berlin too. What’s Cairo got to do with any of this?”

“Could it not be argued-” Alby starts; but Falkiner roars back at him:

“Appeasers! Turncoats! Cowards!”

Towards Serge, Falkiner’s attitude is softer-not that he bothers to learn his name: he calls him “Pylon Man” each time he addresses him:

“You an engineer then, Pylon Man?”

“Not at all,” Serge replies. “I studied architecture.”

“AA?” Falkiner asks.

Serge nods, squinting against the light reflecting off the water. “Old Theo Lyle still there?”

“I went to his lectures every morning-well, most mornings.”

“Theo! We studied together at Cambridge. He still banging on about metopes?”

“Metopes and triglyphs-absolutely.” Serge tries to recall the other terms that Lyle used in his lectures, but loses these beneath the buzz of half-remembered conversations in Mrs. Fox’s Café, titles of West End musicals, narcotic code-words… “How did you become an archaeologist, then?” he asks Falkiner after a pause.

“Grew up in Greenwich: used to ride my tricycle across the Prime Meridian, beneath the Royal Observatory. Gave me a sense of measurement and time, I suppose. I’d go around Kent as a teenager, looking for Roman villas, temples, bathhouses, what have you-little knowing there was one two hundred yards from the observatory.”

“Oh yes,” Serge says. “I was meant to visit that with my class once. Were you involved in excavating it?”

“I was consulted,” Falkiner replies. “Didn’t like their method, though. More vandalism than curation: coins, vases, tablets and the like were being hauled out as though the place were a house on fire. Wrong way to go about it: you should brush it down inch by inch, notating everything-positions, state of degradation, the lot. Like police detectives going through the scene of a catastrophe.”

“It is like a house on fire, then,” Serge says.

“Yes-but the fire’s already happened. Everyone’s dead; the evidence alone is to be salvaged. Same mistake was being made here when I arrived: explorers ripping stuff out of tombs willy-nilly, plundering as fast as they could, rendering artefacts illegible and therefore meaningless. A real disaster!”

“A disaster that the catastrophe was lost, rubbed out?” Serge makes the frotting motion that the man from the Ministry of Finance made in the Savoy Palace.

“Exactly,” Falkiner replies. “Pylon Man, you get it. Only here, it’s much more complex: there’ve been generations upon generations of excavation, which you have to disinter and notate too.”

“Egyptology’s a hundred years old, right?”

“A hundred? Three thousand, more like. These tombs were being dug up from the moment they were made. Romans, Arabs, the pharaohs themselves would delve into and disinter them-and the artefacts they took from them would themselves be re-located and re-used for their own ends. This is part of what we’re studying, or should be studying: you have to look at all of this, at all these histories of looking. The mistake most of my contemporaries make is to assume that they’re the first-or, even when it’s clear they’re not, that their moment of looking is somehow definitive, standing outside of the long history of which it merely forms another chapter…”

He turns away from Serge towards Laura, and the two of them spend the next few hours planning the elaborate trigonometry according to which their Sedment excavations will proceed in light of the new instruments they’re bringing with them:

“If we plot it all in three-point,” Falkiner says, “reading by verniers to three seconds… What’s the average error with that?”

“Four-fifths of one second,” Laura answers, counting off her fingers.

“Fine. We take the first triangle from here-” he marks the map that’s laid out on the deck in front of them-“the second here-” a second mark-“the third here, and so on. We lay down rock-drilled station-posts, and work out the relative value of each station by taking observations from those. If a shift’s proved, we treat the observations as two independent sets, not one…”

Serge listens to them for a while, thinking of clock codes, zone calls, houses and batteries on fire. Gazing towards the Ani’s sails, he lets the rhombi and trinomials of their conversation run across the surfaces of these, their intersecting angles. Beyond the sails, just past the shoreline, irrigated fields form neat-edged planes; beyond these, the desert is, once more, ungeometric. Birds wheel occasionally above it, homing in on prey, or maybe simply signalling to other birds the whereabouts of decaying carcasses. At some point, the boat drifts past oxen yoked to a water-hoisting mechanism, turning its lever in slow, plodding circles.

“Same méthode they are using since antiquity,” Pacorie says, noticing Serge looking at them. “Greatest achèvement of technologie in all the history.”

“What: ploughs?”

“No: making the water to flow upwards. Once this was realised, the automobile and flight mécanisé were no more than a small step away.”

“Still took a while, didn’t it?” Serge asks.

Pacorie rolls his lip and forearms outwards again, although this time it’s less in agreement than in contestation: Did it really? Then, turning away from Serge, he sets about unpacking the boxes that he’s been allowed to bring on board. Each one seems to contain a larger, more sophisticated version of the old chemistry set that Serge, The Boy’s Playbook of Science in hand, used to fool around with. Throughout the afternoon he busies himself taking readings from the river, dangling a test tube on a piece of string from the boat’s deck, reeling it back in and emptying its contents into beakers into which he then dips various reactive bands. The water’s murky, full of the silt with which it’s been fertilising fields and smothering transcendent, Hellenistic dreams since time immemorial. While waiting for the bands to give him readings, he watches Serge, as though keeping track of what Serge is looking at. Each time he does this, Serge looks away, usually at Alby, who himself seems to be observing Pacorie and making the odd entry in a notebook: suspicion, like a yoke of oxen, seems to move in a closed circle. Serge, prompted by Alby’s scribbling, takes his notebook out as well, but finds he can’t think of anything to write in it. The only words that come to him are Méfie-toi; he jots them down. After wondering for half an hour or so what Pacorie and Alby are really on this expedition for, or what their respective agencies think the other might be here for, or want the rival agency to think that they themselves are here for, it strikes him that he should be asking that same question of himself: why has he really been sent, through endless counterflows of animated sediment, to Sedment? Could he himself be-to his own insu, as Pacorie would say-some kind of decoy: a dummy chamber, and a moving one at that, being slowly dragged across the surface of events? If so, by whom, and for whose benefit, or detriment? Dizzy again, he looks back at the two words in his notebook and underlines the second: Méfie-toi…

Later, as mint tea and biscuits are served, he chats with Laura, who tells him that she studied history at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford:

“I did a dissertation on Osiris,” she announces. She goes on to outline the well-known myth: the god’s dismemberment, his sister Isis’s search for his parts, her conception of Horus from the one part of him that she couldn’t find and so was forced to remake for herself, and Osiris’s subsequent adoption as the deity of death and resurrection by the people of the Nile, who’d depict him in their art with a large phallus, rising to inseminate each day.

“A res-erection,” Serge quips. Laura looks back at him through her glasses without laughing. He pictures the girls he’d see emerging from St. Hilda’s gates during his stint in Oxford -riding bicycles, chatting with friends or clutching books as they headed to lectures: maybe one of them was her. SOMA: the School of Military Aeronautics’ buildings merge in his mind with the funerary complex Petrou pointed out to him from the Circular tram on the way back from Ramleh, the Royal Tombs-and Alexander, a young Macedonian soldier, morphs into an ankh-bearing, hook-bearded god.

“The sun itself entered the body of Osiris,” Laura’s saying. “He’d swallow and pass it, bringing about the repetition of creation, the timeless present of eternity. The ancient Egyptian cosmology had no apocalypse, no end: time just went round and round…”

Her little lecture fades out, and there’s silence for a while on deck, broken only by the regular plash of the bow and the creaking of the tiller. The man holding this smokes a black, wooden chibouk; another river-man sits cross-legged at the prow, staring at the water like a mesmerised Narcissus. The crew’s completed by two more Egyptians: one of them lounges at a fixed spot on the cabin’s roof, reaching up to casually pass the front sail’s boom above his head each time they go about; the other lurks inside, preparing food. The landscape slips by indifferently. Like the crew, it looks bored, weary of being stared at. At sunset, it turns a chemical shade of pink, then green, then changes, via white, to the same dark blue tone as the sky. As they drop anchor they’re besieged by insects: grasshoppers, cicadas, moths, mosquitoes. They look like flocks of birds, congesting the whole air and covering cabin, deck, sails, crew and expedition members alike in a twitching and vibrating coat.

“Maybe we’re the shit,” Serge says to Falkiner.

“Get the nets up,” Falkiner instructs the helmsman, who seems quite unbothered by the insects-perhaps because his chibouk’s smoke is keeping them away from him. The helmsman murmurs something at his crew, who slowly haul mosquito-netting around the deck’s rear, from the roof above the cabin’s entrance to the helm beside the rudder, wedging two vertical poles between it and the boards so as to form a tent. They then pick some of the larger insects from the netting’s outer surface, fry them over a stove and eat them with dourah paste. The Europeans, meanwhile, dine on a stew of dates, figs and pigeons. They drink wine too: Serge, Laura, Alby and Pacorie in moderation, Falkiner to excess. He spends a good hour after supper issuing invocations to the night air:

“Hail, ye gods, whose scent is sweet,” he chants, arms pressed to his side like they were when he assumed the same declamatory tone on the quayside in Boulaq. “I am a swallow; I am a swallow. O stretch out unto me thy hand so that I can… so that I can… so that I may be-may be!-may be able to pass my days in the Pool of Double Fire, and let me advance with my message, for I have come with words to tell…”

“What is that stuff he’s saying?” Serge asks Laura.

“It’s from the Egyptian Book of the Dead,” she replies, hand pressed to her forehead as though this action alone allowed her to think. “ ‘The Book of Stepping Forth by Daylight,’ in fact, if I recognise this passage rightly.”

“First thing ever written for a dead readership,” mutters Alby.

“Who then is this?” asks Falkiner. Not waiting for an answer, he continues: “It is Ra, the creator of the names of his limbs. Who then is this? It is Tem the dweller in his disk. I am yesterday; I know today. Who then is this? It is Osiris; or (as others say), it is his dead body; or (as others say), it is his filth. I gather together the charm from every place where it is, and from every man with whom, with whom it is… and though… Hang on… Ah! yes: And though I be in the mighty innermost part of heaven, let me stay-remain!-remain upon the earth…”

Serge turns his head towards the river bank, but can’t make it out anymore. Water and sky have disappeared too: there’s no moon. Only the glow of the helmsman’s chibouk lights the scene at all, intermittently revealing, etched across the faces of the crew, looks of bemused indifference to the bearded interloper’s drunken incantations.

He wakes just after dawn to a landscape that seems utterly synthetic. The sun, rising behind hills, is tearing the mist into gauzy shreds. The sky’s a worn, scratched kind of red, spliced with orange streaks; the desert’s laced with purple. The soil beneath the floodline is, as Pacorie pointed out yesterday, black-a painted-on, superficial kind of black, as though some giant inkpot had been knocked over and stained its surface. The Nile water looks synthetic too: grained and oily, like film. It runs past the boat’s prow at an obtuse angle; again there’s that slight leeward slippage. Again Pacorie observes Serge studying the flow and shunt. As they drift past a village (Falkiner’s forbidden any stops, citing reports of plague) from whose tower a muezzin’s chant spills, the Frenchman says to him, reprising yesterday’s conversation as though no time had passed between it and the present moment:

“It’s counter-intuitif in more ways than one.”

“What?”

“ ‘Upper,’ ‘Lower.’ ‘Upper’ should be newer, but it’s older. Its formations were made sooner, when the continent was first construit.”

“Civilisation and culture too,” Alby joins in. “This is where it all began.”

“I thought it all began in Alexandria,” says Serge.

“ Alexandria is where it ended,” Alby corrects him. “The Christianity and reason that took root there were a re-modelling of dead pharaonic fable. Beneath the cross, the ankh; behind monotheism, a plethora of older deities…”

The boom of the foresail sweeps slowly through the air above them, guided by the languid crewman’s forearm. Pulleys whirr, teeth click. Serge is so used to the boat’s rhythms by now that they colour everything around him: he has the impression of being not in nature but in some giant mechanism, like a clock, sextant or theodolite. The stalks and herons that strut and peck their way through marshes look mechanical; the marshes themselves, the fields, settlements and stretches of desert beyond them look mechanical as well, alternating and repeating like a flat panorama that’s wound round and round by a dull, clockwork motor. Passages of desert suggest epochs-present, Napoleonic, ancient-which loom into focus like so many photographic slides, one following the other with an automated regularity; sometimes several epochs appear simultaneously, as though two or three slides had been overlaid. Even the movements of humans take on a mechanical aspect: chibouk-stuffing, tiller-plying, boom-guiding, forehead-rubbing, test-tube-lowering and hoisting, spying. Events follow the same sequence as they did yesterday: Alby and Pacorie and Serge conduct their three-way stand-off; tea and biscuits are served; Laura lectures Serge on Osiris, the information streaming out like a strip of punch-card paper issuing from her mouth-constant and regular, as though, by rubbing her forehead, she had set her exegetic apparatus at a certain speed from which it wouldn’t deviate until instructed otherwise. This time she describes to him the festivals performed at Abydos:

“People descended with lanterns and statuettes, awaiting his funerary barge. When it arrived they’d shout: ‘Osiris has been found!’ A priest wearing a jackal mask would lead the cortege to the cemetery, carrying a chest, and people-”

“A chest?” Serge asks.

“A wooden chest containing silt and seeds: his body, which Isis, through her various travails, had recombined. The statuettes-of corn, earth and vegetable paste-were buried in the ground, and the whole ceremony culminated three days later with the building of a pillar in the temple court-”

Serge, listening to her, his thoughts mechanically tinted, pictures the priest’s chest as a wireless set, filled with black metal filings. The image forms so clearly in his mind that he interrupts her to announce:

“ Isis was a coherer.”

“What’s that?” she asks.

“The old sets operated through coherence,” he explains. “The signal made the particles all jump together and conduct the current, in bursts either short or long. That’s how dots and dashes were-”

“What are you talking about?” she asks.

“Radio,” he tells her. “It’s a gathering-together too.”

Falkiner, eavesdropping, grunts in amusement, then calls Laura over to assist him further with his plotting. In the evening, after the insects have descended and the nets have gone up, they eat pigeon and date again. Falkiner gets drunk again. This time he declaims, in Serge’s honour, from “The Book of the Pylons”:

“Homage to thee, saith Horus, O thou first pylon of the Still-Heart. I have made my way. I know thee, and I know thy name, and I know the name of the god who guardeth thee…”

“I recognise this bit,” Serge comments.

“Lady of tremblings,” Falkiner intones, “with lofty walls, the sovereign lady, mistress of destruction, who-wait-who sets-setteth-setteth in order the words which drive back the whirlwind and the storm… Saith the pylon: Pass on, thou art pure…”

“Pylons?” Serge asks Laura. “Is he making this bit up?”

“No,” she resumes her role as annotator. “Pylons were gateways-to both temples and the underworld.”

“Homage to thee, saith Horus,” Falkiner continues, “O thou second pylon of the Still-Heart. I know thee, and I know thy name, and I know the name of the god who guardeth thee: Lady of heaven, mistress of the world, who terrifieth the earth from the place of thy body…”

“The deceased, who was himself awaiting recombination, had to pass them all,” Laura explains, “naming the guardian of each.”

And name them Falkiner does. By the sixteenth pylon it’s Terrible One, Lady of the Rainstorm, who planteth ruin in the souls of men, Devourer of dead bodies; by the twentieth it’s Goddess with face turned backwards, Unknown One, Overthrower of him that draweth nigh to her flame… The twenty-first speaks of her secret plots and counsels. Then comes a long list of the names of all the pylons’ secondary guards:

“Tchen of At is the name of the one at the door; Hetepmes is the name of the second; Mes-sep is the name of the third; Utch-re is the name of the fourth…”

The crew, again, look on indifferently. Eventually the recitation fades out, but Serge hears its loops and repetitions in the chafing of the anchor-chain against the Ani’s side, the clicks and beeps of insects, long into the night.

By the third day, the landscape has grown more hilly and less fertile; now the desert extends all the way to the Nile ’s banks. Its formlessness seems to have overrun not only the feeble effort to contain it within field-boundaries but also any attempt to box it temporally: today, it’s no longer epochs that stare back at Serge from it, but time’s basic units themselves, its material particles, freed of their hourglass-walls and multiplied to infinity. He still has the impression of being held in a machine, but now it’s one whose operator has abandoned it-or, perhaps, died inside it, at its very core-leaving its motions to repeat without a reason for doing so anymore. Actions are reduced to their own remnants: Pacorie’s arm flops and reels over the side like a decrepit lever or gear-handle; he, Alby and Serge spy on one another so half-heartedly it’s almost comic, their circular choreography of jottings, sideways glances and averted gazes no more than a set of empty and incomplete gestures. After tea Laura, purely out of habit, lectures him, half-heartedly as well, on the more secret ceremonies to Osiris:

“They were held in underground spots,” she says slowly, hand resting languidly across her forehead. “We don’t know what was said because the contents were never divulged. They could have been tied in with Thoth…”

“Why do you say the word in German?” Pacorie asks in a similarly disinterested tone.

“What word?”

“Tod. Mort. The death.”

“No, Thoth,” Laura explains. “The god of secret writing, whose cult centre was Hermopolis.”

“Little round Thoth again,” Serge murmurs.

“He carried cryptographic hymns and spells.” Laura, if she heard his words, ignores them. “Moses, with his stammer and his tablets of the law, grew out of him. He had his own book: with it, it was said, you could enchant the sky and understand the language of the birds, and other animals as well-even the little ones, right down to microbes. But it was lost…”

Nobody takes her up on this, and so the conversation ends. When the insects come, Serge watches one caught in the netting and, turning again to Laura, asks:

“What is it with scarabs?”

“How do you mean?”

“Why are there models of them everywhere, all patterned and inscribed and so on?”

“On the underside, for printing,” she says, even more slowly: her apparatus, too, seems to be voiding itself. “On the upper side, to represent Khepera, god of both the rising sun and matter-matter that’s on the point of passing from inertness into life. His emblem is a beetle.”

“Hail, Khepera, in thy boat,” Falkiner slurs, already drunk, “the three-fold company of gods is thy body…”

“Khepera was part of the solar trinity Khepri-Ra-Atum,” Laura barely manages to add. “He was a writer too. And a judge. These attributes were important in Egyptian cosmogony; that’s why scarabs are common…”

“Secret writing,” Falkiner announces. “Isis and Horus, the Department of… Department of… that shineth… doest homage… I am… I am all that is, was and will be and no mortal has ever lifted my veil… and so saith Isis…”

He continues, like a distant and plague-ridden muezzin, to slur out half-remembered snatches of his scripture. When he runs out of phrases to recite, he repeats the single word “ Isis,” pronouncing it over and over again, more and more slowly each time, before his voice, too, breaks down into grains and runs away.

ii

They arrive at Sedment the next morning. It’s an upland of desert, exposed and windy. Qufti, drawn from nearby villages, form a chain from the main site towards a light railway, just like they did at Abu Zabal-only here they don’t seem to be carrying stuff in, but taking it away. There are holes everywhere, funnel-shaped pits riddling the ground: some are cordoned off with rope and neatly cleaned-out; others gape in disarray like ruined mine-shafts or natural craters. At the base of some Serge can see hatches, most of which are splintered, giving him a glimpse of lower holes beneath the holes, leading to more splintered hatches which, in turn, lead to lower shafts.

“Most of these top ones are mastabas,” Laura says as they walk past one pit after another.

“Masturwhat?” asks Serge.

“Mastabas: low-lying tombs of the early dynastic period. They had rectangular mud-brick superstructures and hollow substructures of four or five chambers. Below these, there are later tombs.”

“Below them?”

“Yes: later dynasties buried their dead lower. Then still-later ones built beside, around, through and all over these earlier-later ones, and so on almost endlessly. This place is a giant warren.”

“Looks more like a giant dump,” Serge says, pointing to the mounds of debris all around them. Shards of broken pottery protrude from these, alongside scraps of paper that he can’t, in passing, make out as either old papyri or contemporary news-pages, plus short lengths of what looks like copper. Beetles scurry up and down the surface of these mounds like mountaineers negotiating faces and approaches. He and Laura come to the spot where Falkiner seems to have established his headquarters: a gully or ravine that cuts a gash into the landscape, in which tent-poles support a canvas canopy that extends a more conventionally front-door-like tomb-entrance into a kind of covered porch.

“We’ve got to get on top of pilfering,” are Falkiner’s first words to her. “It’s become endemic: tools, food, everything. The Qufti say it’s Sebbakhîn and Arabs, but their word’s not to be trusted. We must let them know that the cost of anything in their charge that goes missing will be docked from their own salaries.”

“Where shall I put my things?” she asks him.

“In the tomb behind me,” he says. “Second chamber.”

She moves past him; Serge starts walking with her.

“Whoa! Where do you think you’re going, Pylon Man?” Falkiner barks.

“I thought-” Serge mumbles.

“Well, don’t,” the archaeologist growls back. “You’re in a tent in sector K.”

He jerks his thumb off to the left. Serge makes his way over the uneven ground in the direction the thumb indicates and eventually finds his tent, pitched in an uncordoned and neglected crater. The crater’s shallow; the wind rushing across the upland swirls down into it, throwing handfuls of sand against the canvas in a way that seems intentional, malicious. Sitting inside, he wonders what to do. Unpack? There are no shelves or cupboards here; nothing but a thin and dirty mattress on the floor. Attend to his brief? He takes his notebook out and reads the two words written in it so far: Méfie-toi. Not much to go on. Slipping it back into his breast pocket, he leaves the tent and wanders the site for a while. He climbs to a high spot and gazes down over the excavations. The Qufti-chain, viewed from above, looks like a tail or ribbon lightly fluttering beneath a kite whose main frame is suggested by the posts and strings being laid out on the ground in intersecting triangles, the triangles’ overlap allotting to each of the site’s mounds and craters its own sector, or sub-sector. Falkiner’s directing this pegging-out of station-marks, standing with the instruments he’s brought down on the Ani and has lost no time in having unpacked. His body’s shrunk by height and distance. His voice, too: Serge can see from the movements of his arms and shoulders that he’s barking orders at the men who scurry around shifting the posts and paying out string, but these are silenced by the wind. If Falkiner’s surveying, Serge wonders what he’s doing. Über-surveying: is that what Petrou would call it, after Alexander’s über-Hellenism? Flat, unencumbered, plain, Macauley told him. He looks away from the site: to the north, the landscape flattens; to the south, it rises in ridges, plateaus, hillocks. Any of these spots could house a pylon. Taking his notebook out again, he writes, below the first two hyphenated words, a third one: Arenow.

That evening, a pot of stew is brought to his tent. After eating it, he wonders where the latrines are. Wandering around in search of them, he bumps into Alby.

“You in sector K?” the Antiquities man asks. “I’m in F. Windy, isn’t it?”

“Where are the toilets?” Serge asks.

“Use a pot,” Alby shrugs back. “They’re everywhere.”

The next morning Serge wanders around some more. He wanders down to the jetty. It looks firm enough to land the segments of a radio mast. Should he write that down? He’ll remember it. He wanders back to the main site again, and follows the paths trodden between one hole and another, the lines made by the strings. It’s an aimless wandering: he has to wait another day before the Ani sets back off to Cairo. Sometimes the paths split, or end, or double back on themselves; sometimes the strings angle him back to an intersection that he crossed ten minutes or a half-hour earlier, but he doesn’t mind: it helps him pass the time. At around noon he finds himself descending into the long gash where Falkiner’s tents are. Falkiner himself is absent; Serge passes unhindered through a tent-porchway to a chamber of tomb proper that’s been turned into a living room: a desk, sofa and deckchair have been set up in it, and a carpet has been spread across the floor, its pattern strangely offset by the decorations on the walls.

“Found your way here after all?” asks Laura, appearing in a doorway that leads further in. For the first time since he’s met her, she’s smiling-in a way that makes Serge feel embarrassed, as though found out, although what for he can’t quite think. He tries to smile back.

“Come in,” she says, rubbing her forehead again.

Her chamber has been turned into a kind of warehouse. All kinds of numbered objects lie around it-some crated, as though ready for dispatch, some open, still awaiting processing. Some, like two wooden coffins covered on both outside and inside with inscriptions, are large, occupying a pallet each; others, like a set of headbands, necklaces and bracelets laid out on the floor in rows, are tiny; yet all seem to be accorded the same meticulous attention. This indiscriminate assiduousness has been applied regardless of age as well. Not all the objects are old: some, like a sardine-can with German writing on it, a scrap of newsprint, a wristwatch with a snapped strap and a leather boot with rusty cleats and a frayed lace, are clearly relatively modern-yet they, too, have been dusted down, laid out and numbered.

“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.

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 well: 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.

“Whose tomb is this?” Serge asks after a while.

“Who knows?” she says, pointing the light around. “It looks like twenty people’s all collapsed together. Here’s another stele.”

This one, or what remains of it, shows two central figures, one male and one female, seated one behind the other, the woman whispering something into the man’s ear.

“ ‘Ra-something, master of…’ ” reads Laura, narrowing her eyes; “ ‘his sister, his beloved, in his heart… words spoken by… do not…’ ”

“There’s that scarab-god again,” says Serge, pointing his finger at the image, just below the seated couple, of a man kneeling, arms raised, before a giant beetle mounted on a catafalque or platform.

“ ‘… my heart of transformations,’ ” she continues reading, “ ‘who comes forth… who came forth from himself…’ ”

Her forehead’s got black stains all over it. Her cheek too. Serge moves round behind her and, kneeling upright like her, watches as her flashlight moves across the stone, bringing its images and inscriptions into view, as though the metal object were itself projecting them.

“ ‘Meret-something,’ ” she reads slowly, “ ‘she who loves… who loves silence… he who is… who dies… who rests upon… upon his…’ ”

Her breath’s getting shorter and shorter. So is his. Serge knows, and knows that Laura knows, and that she knows he knows, that it’s not the lack of air that’s causing it, nor the fragmentary nature of the inscriptions she’s reading: he can smell, above the dung and bitumen, excitement emanating from her flesh too. His chest is almost touching her back. He leans slightly forwards, and makes contact. She tenses, then tilts her head back, towards his face; her lips continue moving in short bursts, but no more words come from them. He kisses her neck; she wraps her hand around his head, and pulls it down across her shoulders. He starts taking off her clothes, then his. Peeling away his sock, he’s aware of a small tickling sensation on his ankle. Then he’s in her, his hands sliding down her back while hers grab hold of debris, bitumen and bones. His knee slips on some object, whether organic or not he can’t tell; then his hands, too, fall to the floor and find there other hands, not only hers. It feels like an orgy: as though the two of them, their bodies, had become multiplied into a mass of limbs, discarded wrappings and excreta of a thousand couplings, a thousand deaths. She drops the flashlight at some point; it flickers against the wall, then, just before their final gasps spill out and echo round the rooms and corridors, goes off. They crawl around on hands and knees afterwards feeling for it, for their clothes, each other…

Somehow, they manage to find their way back up to the surface. Laura stays in her chamber; Serge steps out into the daylight. He climbs to the spot he surveyed the landscape from earlier, and looks down on the site again. For some reason, he recalls Pollard’s warning about fake antiquities, and the mad thought flashes through his mind that this whole cemetery might somehow be artificial, phoney as a dud 10-piastre coin. His ankle’s itching. His clothes are smeared with black. Looking out across the wider landscape’s ridges and plateaus again, he takes his notebook out once more and writes in it: Here as good a place as any. Before closing it again, he crosses the word Arenow out and writes, in its place, Am not.

iii

The journey back to Cairo takes much less time: they’re travelling with the flow. The river seems more concrete now, a moving belt that carries the Ani instead of shunting it. Now that it’s no longer rushing past him, Serge can see the individual silt clusters floating in the water’s mass; huge clods as well sometimes, being flushed downstream as though the land were voiding itself with a giant, continental enema. He’s alone with the crew now, the sole European. Fragments of his earlier conversations with the others play across his mind as the dahabia passes landmarks he vaguely recognises from the outward voyage-but, since he’s moving in the wrong direction, these fragments play themselves out backwards, words and gestures scrambled through reversal. Serge scratches his continually itching ankle as he tries to reconstruct their phrases from the plash and creak, their positions and movements from angles of the boom and tiller or the sunlight on the water…

Boulaq, when they arrive there, seems reversed too somehow, not quite right: as though, in approaching it from the wrong side, they’d turned its quayside, warehouses and tugs into negatives of themselves. Pollard, who meets Serge off the boat, also seems wrong.

“Didn’t your parting go on the other side?” Serge asks, looking at his hair.

“My what? Not got your land-legs yet?”

Serge is stumbling, his left arm lowered right down to his ankle, which he’s scratching violently now, digging his nails in, drawing blood. This isn’t the only reason he’s stumbling: he feels dazed and disoriented, as though seasick, although he senses that it’s something deeper than seasickness that’s making him feel this way. Pollard’s talking on and on, assailing him with information that doesn’t make much sense, as though its logic were reversed as well:

“… might opt for the direct transmission system… still to be decided… general feeling you’ve done excellently though… Macauley asked me to pass on…”

“How does he know how well I’ve done? I haven’t reported back yet.”

“… leave brought forwards… back to Blighty and all that… Port Said tomorrow… report can be completed in your own time…”

“My leave?” asks Serge.

Pollard nods.

“But it wasn’t due for…”

Pollard starts explaining something, but Serge can’t listen properly: the movement of the taxi into which his colleague’s bundled him is disorienting him further. They head straight for his apartment, where he finds his trunk already packed. He spends a fitful, sweaty night there, then is picked up in the morning and put on a train to Port Said.

“You’ve got a nasty cysthair,” says the man sharing his compartment as Serge scratches at his now much-inflamed ankle.

“A nasty what?” asks Serge.

“A nasty cyst, there,” the man repeats, more slowly. “Ought to get it looked at.”

Serge looks at the man instead.

“You’re an optician, right?” he asks him.

“Not at all,” the other answers guardedly. He begins to tell Serge what it is he does, but Serge ignores the content of his speech, trying all the while to place his accent. That he can’t do so isn’t due to any sociological failing on his part, but rather to a growing acoustic strangeness overtaking him: all dialogues and tones have sounded foreign since he left the Ani, as though his aural apparatus had been thrown off-kilter by the land’s vibrations. Port Said assaults his ears when he arrives: porters and lemonade-sellers haggling for custom, ships’ representatives calling out the names of liners as they round up passengers, water-busses sounding their horns as they ply the harbour. Serge is escorted, by somebody or other, to the Island and Far East Line’s Borromeo, on whose deck a gaggle of tourists, businessmen and civil servants argue in cacophony with stewards over hold and cabin baggage, cabin size and cabin allocation. One lady is repeatedly complaining at being given the wrong one. Serge, surrendering both his cases, is led to his own, where he immediately lies down, passing the next few hours in a state between waking and sleep. At some point the Borromeo’s engines start up, and the whole room begins to shake. A little later, the huge ship starts moving. Dragging himself from his berth, Serge steps out on deck to watch the land dwindle away. The city’s lights appear to flicker on and off, as though signalling, Pharos-like, across the water. The ship’s wake runs backwards like an inverted vapour trail, its parallels nearing each other as their distance from the stern increases. He wonders if they converge at some point-at the horizon, wherever that is, or perhaps just beyond it. Conversations are taking place around him: someone, leaning on the railings, is pronouncing the “Said” of the disappearing city’s name “said,” as in “he said, she said…”

Supper is called, but Serge skips it. Lying on his berth, sweating, he becomes aware of his own body in a way in which he hasn’t been since adolescence. His limbs are heavy, gangly; they don’t seem like part of him-at least not parts that fall beneath his mind’s control, but ones jolted and twitched instead by some manipulating hand located elsewhere. The engine noise sounds in his chest. It seems to carry conversations from other parts of the vessel: the deck, perhaps, or possibly the dining room, or maybe even those of its past passengers, still humming through its metal girders, resonating in the enclosed air of its corridors and cabins, shafts and vents. Their cadences rise and fall with the ship’s motion, with such synchronicity that it seems to Serge that he’s rising and falling not so much above the ocean per se as on and into them: the cadences themselves, their peaks and troughs…

When he falls properly asleep, he dreams of insects moving around a chessboard that may or may not be the sea. At times it seems more like a gridded carpet than a chessboard. The insects stagger about ponderously, stupidly, reacting with aggression towards other insects when these cross their paths: rearing up, waving their tentacles threateningly as antennae quiver and contract, and so on. Despite the unintelligent, blind nature of the creatures’ movement, there’s a will at work behind them, calculating and announcing moves, dictating their trajectories across the board. The presence of this will gives the whole scene an air of ritual. Above the board a voice intones, with a rhythm as steady as a galley drummer’s beat, “K4, K4, K4…” After a while the woven mesh of sea turns into desert: an enormous stretch of it, all parched and cracked, across which figures stumble-multitudes of them, whole armies, linked up hand-in-hand, wave after wave, heading towards a demarcated compound. Falkiner’s inside the compound, fiddling with an urn, his station-marked geometries forming the supporting struts and girders of some kind of sandbox…

Serge wakes up briefly. His berth’s drenched in sweat. Looking around the cabin, he sees nothing special: just a cupboard and a chair, his untouched trunk. The single porthole gives onto a night that’s lit up by a full, bright moon. The sky’s a kind of silvery-black-an odd combination that, again, gives him the sense of having pitched up in a photographic negative. Turning away from the reversed image, he falls straight back into a lucid dream, once more of insects-only this time, all the insects have combined into a single, giant one from whose perspective, and from within whose body, he surveys this new dream’s landscape. In effect, he is the insect. His gangly, mutinous limbs have grown into long feelers that jab and scrape at the air. What’s more, the air presents back to these feelers surfaces with which contact is to be made, ones that solicit contact: plates, sockets, holes. As parts of him alight on and plug into these, space itself starts to jolt and crackle into action, and Serge finds himself connected to everywhere, to all imaginable places. Signals hurtle through the sky, through time, like particles or flecks of matter, visible and solid. Each of his feelers has now found its corresponding touch-point, and the overall shape formed by this coupling, its architecture, has become apparent: it’s a giant, tentacular wireless set, an insect-radio mounted on a plinth or altar. Serge is the votary kneeling down before it, arms stretched out to touch it; he’s also the set itself-he’s both. Twitching and shifting in his sleep, he fiddles with himself, nudging his way through the dial-and picks up, through the background thrum and general clutter of the conversations taking place all over, particular voices coming from some station that’s located in a cabin close at hand: one neighbouring his own, or two away, or possibly lying one deck above or below his and then one cabin along. They’re special voices, saying important things. There’s music coming from this nearby cabin-station too, but Serge can’t quite hear its melody: it, like the special voices’ words, is just beyond the range of hearing. He can tell, though, from the rhythm, the solemnity and grandeur of both words and music, that they form part of a ceremony of such splendour and magnificence that, to it, the ritualised game of chess he witnessed earlier bore the same relation as a canapé does to a banquet, a prelude to a symphony or a quick sketch to a fully executed masterpiece in oil: the ceremony is the climax of the process he’s embarked upon, the main event.

“That’s the place to be,” he says aloud-and, in doing so, wakes himself up. It’s morning. The engine noise is still going. The ship’s rising and falling as before. He feels slightly better; climbing from his berth, he digs a dressing gown out of his trunk and, slipping it on, makes his way to the Borromeo’s baths. These are located near the ship’s stern: two rows of wooden shacks each of which opens straight onto the deck. There’s a queue to use them. Men read papers and nod at one another gruffly as they wait. Women queue on the far side. A young, honeymooning couple wave to one another from their segregated spots; the lady who was complaining earlier looks out to sea indignantly, clasping her towelling robe tightly around her shoulders. Crewmen change the water between bathers, sloshing from buckets as they swing these across the deck. The bath itself is filled with hot sea-water, cooked in the ship’s bowels and piped in through a tap; what the staff are replacing is the bowl of fresh water that rests above this on a shelf. Both have traces of engine oil in them. Stretched out in the tub when it’s his turn, Serge watches the petroleum and coal-tar swirl and coalesce across the water’s surface; then he shifts his gaze down to his ankle, which is suppurating. Flesh-eating, Laura told him: lying on his back quite still, ignoring the impatient tapping on the door, he pictures himself as a dead man in a sarcophagus, swathed in spells and imprecations, heart replaced with secret writing and censorious seals. The soap has a logo embossed on its surface; it has tar on it as well. Serge feels more dirty after he’s washed than before, as though his labours, like those of a dung-beetle, had soiled rather than purified him.

Breakfast consists of blocks of bacon, fried bread, black pudding and mushrooms. They all look the same: dark lumps of matter. They taste the same as well, all giving off the flavour that, in vapour form, pervades the whole ship: a compound of decayed funguses, hot engine oil and onions. The indignant lady’s at it again, complaining to the stewards that she hasn’t been allotted the right table. The stewards try to relocate her, concocting a story about mixed-up or badly copied seating manifests, which they attempt to sell, with profuse apologies, to the family at the table the complainer covets. These people grudgingly move, although not to the complainer’s table, which is too small to accommodate them: they’re re-seated at a third one, which necessitates a new eviction, a new relocation. Pushing his plate away half-eaten, Serge leaves the dining room and skirts a game of deck quoits being played outside. Pausing for a while, he stares at the patterned markings and the poles rising above them; then, feeling fever taking hold of him once more, heads back to his cabin.

Lying on his berth, he sweats. The sweat, mixing with the tar-deposit left on his skin from his bath, turns black. That’s what he thinks is happening, at least: it’s possible that the sweat came out of him black in the first place. Mela chole: he hears, amidst the engine’s rumble and the room’s higher-pitched rattling, Dr. Filip’s thin, electric voice talking about black meat. He hears a lot of things: chants of the Versoie Day School children as they reel off their pronunciation exercises, footsteps marching along country roads, the whirr and clack of film projectors or motorised curtains. It seems that these are welling upwards, from the bottom of the sea-and that the sea itself is black, oily and dense. Closing his eyes, he pictures it as shellac, and the Borromeo’s prow as a gramophone needle, bobbing as it rides the contours of a disc. After a while, the image grows so strong in his mind that he becomes convinced that there’s a Berliner just outside his cabin: one deposited by someone, for some reason, in the corridor beside his door. He can clearly hear it playing, repeating variations of the same phrase:

Inking the centre

Inking the centre of the country

Inking the centre of

These words loop a few times, then give over to a single syllable, repeated:

kod, kod, kod, kod…

– a word, or non-word, that itself eventually mutates, changing its provenance and status until it finally resolves itself as a knocking on the cabin’s door.

“Who is it?” Serge calls out, or thinks he does.

“Thod, thod, thod, thod…” a voice calls back. The door swings open, and a steward enters.

“Bodner?” Serge asks.

The steward says something, but it doesn’t make much sense. His voice trips over itself, stuttering.

“Bring the Berlin inner,” Serge says. “In, I mean.”

“The what’s the what, sir?” the steward enquires, holding some kind of clipboard in his hand.

“The ink set,” Serge replies.

The steward momentarily retreats, returning behind a trolley on whose tray large, black machine parts lie. The parts, while different shapes and sizes, have a uniform look: Serge can tell that they all belong to a single, larger contraption. The steward runs his finger down his clipboard’s columns until he finds the entry that he’s looking for and, tapping his fingertip twice against the spot where the pertinent paragraph commences, tells Serge:

“It’s inset inset.”

“What’s that?” Serge asks him.

“It’s in sections,” the steward repeats, without moving his lips.

Serge tries to ask him what the thing is, but his lips won’t move either. None of him will move-not willingly, at least. It’s by virtue of the gangly, mutinous movement willed from elsewhere he experienced earlier that he finds himself, after the steward’s disappeared again, crawling across the floor and, taking hold of each machine part with his feelers, reassembling the contraption. Segments slot together with an automated ease: he knows right where to put them, and they know right where to go. Pretty soon he has the whole thing up and running, in its full arched, columned, knobbed and needled glory: it’s an even better version of the wireless set he merged with last night-an improved model, Mark II. As he hits the first clear frequency a voice spills from it and announces, in the manner of a call-sign:

“Incest-Radio.”

Lubricating the dial with his sweat, Serge sets to work, first capturing, then moving around, the cabin-stations he was tuned into last night, the station-chambers. It’s a matter of laying hold of each, feeling for its parameters, its walls, then lifting it up intact and relocating it wholesale: the room, and the conversation taking place in it. Parts of each spill in transit, trickling into other ones, distorting and corrupting their own conversations and adding to the general clatter-but Serge knows that, in methodically capturing and relocating one after the other, he’ll eventually unearth the one he’s looking for, the special chamber. He can feel its music growing closer, its melody gaining form; its voices, too, becoming clearer, more precise. At the same time, commensurate with this drawing-near and sharpening, corresponding to it with a perfect technological alignment, a part-to-part reciprocity, he can feel excitement and desire growing in him, driven to a pitch by the knowledge that nothing is, has been or ever will be more important than the successful execution of the task in which he’s now engrossed. Finally, whether after minutes or hours he can’t tell, it happens: the chamber itself looms into view and opens up to him, and he finds himself bathed in its noise and signal-not just the transmitted noise and signal, picked up at a distance, but the source noise, the source signal, at their very point of origin-as he stands right at the ceremony’s heart, its main participant.

The ceremony is either a coronation or a marriage-or, more properly described, a combination of the two. The décor is regal: jewel-encrusted birds set upon boughs of gilded trees while peacocks roam a petal-strewn floor below them, their fanned-out, diamond-studded tails displaying large suns as they brush over amber-coloured blocks of camphor delicately spun around by filigrees of twisted gold. Serge and his bride stand on a raised podium. The couple wear, wrapped around their heads, black ribbons that have smudged their foreheads in the manner called for by the ceremony’s custom. To the side of the podium a steward stands wearing the ibis-mask of Thoth, holding a set of towels or tablets, copy orders or reports. Behind the steward stretches Versoie’s Mosaic Garden, stables dilapidated, path all overgrown, the ruins of the main house visible beyond its collapsed wall. Next to him, transformed into a towel-robed priestess, aerodynamic purple and black triangles running backwards from her eyes, stands the ship’s indignant lady. Behind these two, just off the podium, seated at front-row tables over which they lean excitedly, are journalists: they thrash incessantly at typewriters, hammering out sheets of copy that are torn from their machines’ rollers the moment each page is filled, handed to scurrying messengers and whisked off to Fleet Street to be typeset alongside insurance ads, printed on huge, groaning presses, bundled and dispatched to cities all around the world and scoured in secret rooms for keywords and acrostics. Since Serge and his bride have commandeered the typewriters’ ribbons for their headgear, the pages are all blank-but this doesn’t seem to worry anyone: they’re hammered and handed out, transferred, typeset, printed and pored over nonetheless. Opposite the journalists, on the podium’s far side, musicians play, vibrating as they do so. Behind these, and all around, handmaidens-androgynous children of both sexes-hold black circles aloft as they chant, in unison:

In front of Serge and his betrothed a male priest stands, canvas or papier-mâché wings extending outwards from broad shoulders. He, too, pronounces words, mumbling in liturgical tones long strings of blessing that, through their iteration, bring about the ceremony’s goal. The exact form of each word can’t be made out above the chanting of the hermaphroditic handmaidens and the clickety-clack of the reporters’ Coronas, nor is it meant to be: like all liturgical oratory, it runs from his mouth and slips by in a smooth and constant thread. This turn of phrase, this figure of speech, “a smooth and constant thread” (and Serge can hear it too, this phrase, these very words, running alongside or behind or, perhaps, still further within the chanting and intoning and the rest, issuing as though from a room not separated from this one but lying rather somehow concurrent or convergent with it: words being reeled off like the radio commentary at a boxing match) is far from metaphorical: a silken thread is actually running from the priest’s mouth, streaming over Serge’s and his bride’s shoulders and the shoulders of the handmaidens, the branches of the trees and the fragrant camphor blocks before it falls to the confettied floor and gathers round the gliding peacocks’ feet. Parts of its script ring clear: the part (for example) about the “tick of time” that, at some juncture in the recent past, ceremonially bit him, or the associated, aptly reflexive two-word fragment “ticker-tape.” The handmaidens continue chanting, modifying their refrain’s sequence as their voices, somehow dull and jubilant at the same time, rise in pitch and volume:

Serge can feel this love, too, not in some abstract way but literally: physically feel it-see it as well, materialised in the camphor and the thread, the branches and the feathers, the gold filigree and, most of all, the black typewriter ribbons. It’s in the texture of the air, which has a crinkled feel, like crêpe. It’s in his transformed and transforming body. Two of the handmaidens step forwards and drape a garland on the pylon rising from his waist. Glancing down, he sees that the garland’s made of dead flowers-and the knowledge hits him in this instant that the children are dead too, that the whole kingdom over which he and his new wife are being anointed is negative. It’s negative, again, in the strict photographic sense: a reversed template from which endless correct, right-way-round copies can be printed, but that itself is destined to be held back in abeyance, out of view, withdrawn-a fact that makes this one moment of revelation he’s being granted all the more exceptional, all the more sacred, as though he’d suddenly been given access to the darkroom of all history. Chemical odours waft across the podium as the priest turns to bride and groom and pronounces their names. These are both long, and full of compound parts: Serge’s is “Ra-Osram-Iris-K4-CQD”; his bride’s is “CY-Hep-Sofia-SZGY.” Crowds, thronging around the stage from further back, shuffling and stumbling forwards across squares extending to infinity, whole hordes of them, wave their feelers in the air in celebration. Time flattens as it rushes backwards, ticker-taping too: this is a send-off, a departure-only this time, Serge is on the boat, not the jetty…

A sudden whistle pierces the air: it’s a reveille, a gathering-call. Everything’s coming to a head, converging: the lines, angles and dimensions of the room, the gazes of handmaidens, priests, attendants, journalists and insect-populace alike. All these are now directed towards the veil covering the face of Serge’s bride. The music, chanting, intoning and typing have all been suspended in anticipation of the fabric being lifted. Sophie does this now, peeling the gauze away and gazing straight at him. There’s no need for her to ask him if he recognises her. Her face is blank-a featureless oval of the texture and off-white colour of a fluoroscope screen-which for some reason makes it all the more instantly recognisable. It has folds in it, creases and indentations. Images kink and distend as, accompanied by the familiar sound of whirring, they start playing across its surface: grainy and jumpy, they show siblings passing through an orchard, running down the neatly ordered rows between its trees. The trees themselves-their bark, leaves and fruit-are a corroded colour. The siblings are as well. The whole scene’s flat, like film. Without unflattening, it rotates round until it’s being shown from above, in plan view. Then it flickers out, and gives back over to the map-contours of Sophie’s otherwise blank face. These, in turn, direct Serge’s gaze downwards, to her hands, which rest above a vat of apples that are slowly fermenting. Picking a much-worm-drilled one from near the pile’s top, she proffers it towards him…

It’s not clear whether he’s meant to take the apple or not. The contours of Sophie’s face morph to form a mouth, which opens, in an equally ambiguous way: it seems at first that it’s going to bite the apple; then that it’s him into which the teeth are about to be sunk. But both these impressions turn out to be wrong: it soon becomes apparent that the mouth has opened in order to speak. Sophie’s going to say the word that will complete the ceremony, bring about its climax, sealing his and her anointment, their ascendancy and union-and that will, at the same time, deliver to the crowd the proclamation that they’ve come to hear, transforming, unifying and redeeming them, redeeming everything. The word is welling, not so much in Sophie’s lungs and thorax as in space itself, roaring across it like a giant wave, loudening as it approaches. Then it arrives, rupturing the air as it breaks across the podium: it’s a burst of static-a static that contains all messages ever sent, and all words ever spoken; it combines all times and places too, scrunching these together as it swallows them into its crackling, booming mass, a mass expanding with the strength and speed of an explosion of galactic proportions, a solar flare. The static rushes over the whole crowd, and roars through Serge’s body, making his limbs and chest contract and shiver with convulsions. Sweat, or seed, or sediment, spills from him. Everything is spilling: as the chamber’s walls are blown away, rows of box files spring open on ministry shelves, vomiting their contents; archives gush up from the ground like oil; glass cabinets shatter and erupt; bathtubs slosh and overflow; even graves are opening, the dead being catapulted back out of the earth…

The static comes at him again: a second burst, heading the other way, like an enormous echo or the backrush from the first explosion, air propelled out by its breath being sucked in again. This time it carries him along with it: he feels himself rushing backwards, through a black and endless void. He’s merging with the void: seared, shot through, carbonisé, he’s become the sea of ink, the distance between planets, the space across which signals travel. Like time itself, he’s flattening, turning into carbon paper: the black smear between the sheets, the surface through which things repeat, CC themselves, but that will itself always remain black, and blank. Looking backwards as the sound-wave draws away from him, accelerating onwards, he sees things being duplicated in the expanse created by its passage: cats and phone-wires, cars and dancers, rivers. The orchard’s been duplicated too: the siblings have stopped running through it and are sitting at a game-board. All these scenes and objects have been reproduced inwardly, as though injected through some kind of time-syringe into his stomach, in whose blackness they’re suspended like small, lit-up screens, contained by the walls of a new syringe that frames them and injects them further inwards, again and again, the scenes and objects miniaturising more and more as they regress. Eventually, they become so small and distant that they dwindle. From where he is now, he can see the children in the orchard and their game-board shrinking, and the orchard itself shrinking, and the wires around it too: their edges all contracting to form a compound that itself shrinks until it’s so small that it’s no longer perceptible. Then the whole image fades away. The noise has faded too: only fragments of it are left, small residues, vague sonic smudges…

In the middle of the second night away from port, Dr. Martinov, an Island and Far East Line company doctor of some six years’ standing (previously of the Chakdina and, before that, the Aurora), is summoned from his cabin to attend to a sick passenger. He finds the young man delirious, bathed in sweat and subject to a temperature so high as to be (in his opinion) unsurvivable. Quinine would be of little help: it’s not malaria that’s causing the fever, but rather a cyst on the patient’s ankle that’s become so infected that it’s clearly poisoned his whole bloodstream.

“Tourist?” he asks the steward.

“Civil servant,” the other replies. “He was muttering something about rooms being moved around.”

The sick man, roused by these words, tries to speak.

“What’s that?” asks Martinov.

The man, his eyes half-vacant, makes a great effort that results in no more than the word “dumb” issuing from his lips.

“Who’s dumb?” asks Martinov.

The young man concentrates his face again and manages to say, beneath his breath:

“Dummy chamber.”

“Where?” Martinov asks.

“Everywhere,” replies the man. “What’s not?”

“What’s not what? Do you have a next of kin?”

The young man’s eyes roll upwards and his face wrinkles into what looks like a smile. A kind of growl rises from his throat; he concentrates his facial muscles again, and manages to say:

“It came through.”

“Through what?”

“Through me.”

“What did?”

“The call: I’m being called.”

Dr. Martinov turns to the steward and instructs him:

“Go to the wireless room and ask them if anything’s come in for him.”

The steward leaves the cabin. While he waits for his return, Martinov pulls a chair up by the berth, and sits watching the young man’s face. He’s watched a lot of people die, but it’s a little different each time. This man is struggling with something. Although his eyes are growing more and more empty and listless with every passing minute, the jaw seems rigidly determined, held in firm position; the lips, too, are taut and sculpted, as though trying to shape more words. With each outward breath, they form a small, thin parting, which makes the exhalation sound as a long, drawn-out sssssss; then, at each breath’s end, after the failing lungs have emptied themselves but before they’ve thrown their engines into reverse and started the slow process of replenishing themselves again-in the short hiatus between exhaling and inhaling, the man’s throat contracts three or four times in quick succession, making a repeated clicking sound, a set of quick-fire c-c-c-c’s. It does this every time, with a strange regularity: “sssssss, c-c-c-c; sssssss, c-c-c-c; sssssss, c-c-c-c…”

The wireless room is one deck down. It has two clocks on the wall: one showing Cairo time, one London. Beneath these, thin electric cables trail across the room’s wooden panels, one leading to a lamp, another to a bell. A man sits below the wires with headphones on, facing the wall. To his right is a stack of paper and a stamp; to the right of these, nailed to the wall, a basket; above the basket, widening as it runs up to the ceiling, hangs a speaking tube. The room has no windows. The operator doesn’t turn around as, in response to the steward’s enquiry as to whether any telegrams have arrived for an S. Carrefax, he flicks through the basket and answers in the negative.

The steward leaves. As he passes the kitchen door on his way back to the stairs a Sudanese cook comes out and tips scraps from a bucket over the Borromeo’s stern. The steward pauses and watches the scraps bobbing in the churned-up water for a while. The moon’s gone: only the ship’s electric glow illuminates the wake, two white lines running backwards into darkness. When the stretch in which the scraps are bobbing fades from view, the steward turns away towards the staircase. The wake itself remains, etched out across the water’s surface; then it fades as well, although no one is there to see it go.