Hattie Clarke - Extract from Tentra

Last to arrive at the dig house, Élise thought. What a perfect way to start. “We were terribly unlucky,” Charles said, handing over her suitcases to a young Egyptian who came running up the platform. Their missed train chugged into the distance.

“You can’t plan for these things, Miss Lassarre,” he said over his shoulder as he marched towards the guards’ office. He wasn’t able to plan, Élise was sure of that much. Since she’d met the museum’s chosen escort, Egyptian cities seemed more chaotic than their reputation. While he argued with the man on duty, Élise copied down the next train times from a chalkboard into her notebook. Without it, she doubted if they’d ever make it to Boulaq.

Thankfully they did, but not quite in time to catch the first-class steamer. Why the museum had sent Charles as her escort, Élise did not know. Surely she was better equipped to puzzle out her journey to Tentra than their back-of-house archivist. A stern letter to them was forming in her head.

Élise sat on an upturned crate in the midday sun while Charles tried to negotiate with a dragoman, in an awful medley of French and Arabic. The dragoman’s children came out of the shade to watch her. One dared the other to pull her skirt.

“God would not like it,” Élise said quietly in Arabic. The little boy gasped as if she were God himself and fled back to his sister.

There would have been reclining armchairs, Élise thought, as she felt a splinter from the crate catch the side of her hand. She saw herself on the deck of the steamer, a server putting a glass of something refreshing and cool into her hand.

The alternative boat Charles found for them was used by the locals and for this reason it would take longer than a week to reach the dig house. How much longer was as unknowable as the ‘helpful’ dragoman’s shrugging shoulders.

The Nile churned beneath them but Élise felt they were going backwards. A large cage behind her held a dozen chickens, scrawny but with good lungs. Being on site at the beginning of an excavation was crucial. She wanted to see the state of the land before a single spade cut through it. The director would be starting to make plans and assigning men their duties. Without her.

“Maxime won’t have started yet,” Charles told her. It was hard to hear him in the packed hull. A group of women in veils tried their best to herd their collection of toddlers and billy goats into a corner where they could contain their outbursts.

“Planning isn’t what he’s known for,” he continued. His words confirmed her concerns and the reason her father had only funded the excavation on the condition the director was supervised. Her father had cursed when he’d read that the curators had hired Maxime for the dig. Élise had tried to calm him, but the great exertion of the curse triggered a coughing fit that sent him back to bed for days.

The night’s insects were unwelcome companions in the sleeplessness Élise found on the boat. If Charles had not delayed them, Élise might have had time for the conversations with Maxime she’d rehearsed on her journey over from Paris. She’d thought to start with the uses of tramways for clearing spoil, then the best pencil weight for section drawings (Castell’s 4H Graphite pencil, naturally) and the advantages of paying the workers baksheesh for discoveries.

But Élise felt none of the conviction she’d rehearsed as they drifted along the long Nile.

The boat made an unscheduled stop due to a buffalo herd bathing in the shallows. Their tails flicked flies and droplets of water. Local sellers waded out to the boat with butter made from the herd’s milk. Charles ate a lump with his fingers and passed the rest to Élise. It was white like sugar and sweet on her tongue.

As the days went on, Élise observed that young Charles the archivist had the unforgivable habit of caressing a wisp of beard on his chin. He’d no doubt grown it since his arrival in the East. No more than two months, Élise suspected from its straggle. He’d told her the museum had sent him on a ‘very important acquisition’ of three papyri from a dealer in the Delta.

The papyri were certainly not in evidence during their journey, as Charles sat snorting at the witticisms of a souk pamphlet he refused to let Élise look at. Despite concentrating desperately on her own book of hieroglyphs in an effort to ignore the feathered and non-feathered inhabitants of the boat, by the time they reached Tentra, Élise was still no wiser as to how three strokes marked a plural.

“We’re hardly late at all,” Charles told her in the back of the donkey cart. Their luggage bulging around them, Élise felt the jolt of every hole in the dirt path. Charles looked at her with an expression of awkward sympathy. Another jolt. She pulled down the brim of her hat to hide her face. Perhaps her father had been wrong to leave this journey to her. Élise tried to remember his encouragement in those last days of talking. Thinking of that time did her no good.

The wheels slowed as the donkeys mounted a slope of sand. This was not the convoy of camels Élise envisaged herself astride for her first sighting of proper Egypt. She hadn’t minded Cairo’s citadel or the bustling port culture at Alexandria, or even the wild river and its wealthy green borders. But the Europeanisms of the cities were more than she could bear. Moneyed Egyptians wearing waistcoats and laceup shoes. If she’d wanted to witness poorly-copied French fashion, she would have taken the shorter trip to London.

Proper Egypt now lay before her, even if only from the bumpy vantage of a cart led by two tired mules. Over the last two years, laid up in their house on Rue Saint-Martin with lungs forbidding him to travel, her father had spoken of this land. A sweeping desert where, thousands of years ago, a civilisation was born. Since the funeral she’d read everything in his library, but none of those books brought Egypt to mind as well as his descriptions.

Old histories are judged by the light of new readings and new discoveries are found where the spade strikes new ground.

Élise had copied his well-worn phrase onto the first page of her dig site notebook, but it was already seared into her mind. As the sickness in his lungs worsened, her life had been ruled by her father’s desperation for new discoveries. It still felt like a stone on her chest.

The cart dragged Élise through a decrepit village and up onto a plain of white sand; the power of the landscape neutralised the quarrel of thoughts in her head. How could she recall those bleak Paris days when she was witness to such a place? This wasn’t just a pretty view of the Dordogne valley from her aunt’s chateau; this was the hard truth of history set out before her. It was the possibility of uncovering a story that had been lost for thousands of years. Under that mound, in the crevice of the mountain, in the earth under the donkey’s hooves; the truth was here.