Free The Deceit by Tom Knox Page A

And this was the one thing about teaching that Ryan really enjoyed – the chance to instil some mystery into these kids, to give them a glimpse of the grandeur of Egypt; to make these gum-chewing twenty-year-olds share a little of that soaring rhapsody that he had once enjoyed, in his first season’s digging at Saqqara, as he unearthed the tombs of the Apis bulls – the sense that he was an historical scuba diver, floating above so much translucent and fathomless archaeology it could give you vertigo.
    ‘Mr Harper—’
    ‘Sorry?’
    It was the Chicago kid again, Tyler Neale.
    ‘Explain the figures, maybe?’
    ‘Sure.’
    ‘’Cause I don’t see it. There’s, like, no way you could bury that many mummies: they’d be turning up in your lunch.’
    Harper gestured across the flooded tomb of Osiris, the Oseirion, where he spent much of his working week. ‘In a sense, you just have to do the math. But let’s go through it. First, as I say, you need to appreciate the profundity of Egyptian time. Let’s make a comparison. How long has America been around?’
    He gazed at the students. Daniel Melini seemed to be asleep standing up. The pretty girl, Jenny Lopez, was texting on her phone. And Tyler Neale, in his scruffy jeans and baseball cap, simply looked tired. Fair enough. The students had a right to be tired and maybe a little irritable: they’d spent five straight hours wandering the epic site in the endless sun, listening to him explaining styles of epigraphy in the Abydos King List and the problems of rising water tables across Middle Egypt. He liked to give them value for their money: he’d probably said
way
too much.
    Well now they could have some fun, at least for the last thirty minutes. And after that, as the sun set over the Rameses temple and the forts of Zebib, Ryan Harper could go back to his lonely bachelor apartment in the town and spend the rest of the evening smoking
shisha
outside the tea-house downstairs with the Arabs who somehow tolerated the slightly dishevelled, thirty-eight-year-old American with no wife and no kids, whose once-famous career had turned to humble toil.
    Harper quietly cussed himself. No need for self-pity. He liked his work, the charity and the teaching. He was lucky, in a way.
    ‘Two hundred and fifty years.’
    He was startled by another student answering. It was the cool one with the Italian heritage, Melini.
    ‘That’s the answer, isn’t it, Mr Harper? America has been a political reality, a nation, a country, almost two hundred and fifty years. Since 1776. Right?’
    Neale shook his head. ‘But the Pilgrim Fathers came in 1620, so that’s like, nearly four hundred. You could say America began then, no?’
    Lopez looked up from her smartphone. ‘Whoa! Racist much? You’re saying America has only existed since the first Caucasians were there? Since Columbus? Where, like, did the Navajo live in 1200, then, fracking limbo?’
    At least this was zesty, at least they were engaging; but the argument was going entirely the wrong way. Ryan raised a hand. ‘OK. Guys. Let’s say America has been a
political
entity, in the European sense, for about three hundred years. Can we agree on that? Well, from beginning to end, ancient Egypt lasted approximately –’ he paused, for effect – ‘
ten times as long.
Excluding more primitive cultures like the Badarian, the first true Egyptian civilisation began in 3200 BC .’
    ‘But half a
billion
mummies?’
    ‘I’m getting there! Remember, most ancient Egyptians would have sought some kind of mummification if they could, such was their obsession with making it to the afterlife. And of course mummification is not hard out here: the desert naturally mummifies bodies, it is so dry. That is probably, in fact, how the ritual began, in about 3200 BC , when the First Dynasty Egyptians realized that human corpses were curiously preserved by great aridity.’
    Lopez was toying with her phone again. Or maybe she was checking his sums. He