to each other over a copy (un• surprisingly open to Quatrain 42, 'Atum-hadu Favours Four Acrobatic Sisters") of Desire and Deceit in Ancient Egypt (Collins Amorous Litera• ture, 1920; new edition through Harvard University Press expected, 1923); O'Toole and Kovacs sitting aside, saying nothing at all.
"Jesus on fire, why won't Harvard pay your way on this, eh, Pushy?" CCF himself enquired, and I knew he was not truly troubled by the question; he merely did not wish to appear too easily convinced in the eyes of his partners. "Caught screwing a Dean's wife, were you?"
I guided them to the individualised sketches I had included in their
booklets on the "Personal Collections" page. "Now, gentlemen, do you want Harvard to own what I find? Do you want this to be the Harvard Collection of the Tomb of Atum-hadu? When the Lathorp Collection, the O'Toole Collection, the Kovacs Collection could fill your own homes with the gold of an Egyptian king and, after you are gone, carry on your name forever in the private wing of the museum of your choice? Know this: every museum in the country will be slavering to house your collection under your name in their museum forever, as I took the liberty of imagining in these sketches. And here we reach the key issue, gentlemen: the longevity of your names. This is something our friend Atum-hadu understood. If they speak of your name after you are dead, then you are not dead. Think hard about this. Your money can buy you precisely what Atum-hadu's bought him, what every king of Egypt knew was the most valuable commodity he could possess: immor• tality. Now when the day comes, what are you going to leave behind? A department store? A construction company? A trust fund? A series of flimsy indictments filed by an envious attorney general? Or are you going to make your name live on forever, mankind's ultimate prize?"
"Now stop for just a moment, Perfesser." Perhaps I have gone too far; everyone leans in to hear Heinz Kovacs's whisper. "If I may just say. I did a little poking around, see, a little arkie-ology of my own.
Like to know what's what before I write whopping big cheques to En• glish fruitcake explorers and pornographers." (I will explain that misconception presently.) "Now my boy goes to Harvard, and his per• fesser tells me your pharaoh didn't even exist. So how's that then?"
I will admit that I suffered just then a pang of envy, nothing more, just a single throb, because as I stood amidst the Boston nouveaux riches and answered their inexperienced questions, I thought of Howard Carter, leisurely checking his bank balance in Cairo, then simply wiring his placid, noble sponsor back in England, demanding some handsome sum and waiting for his Cairo account to swell accordingly. I thought
of Oskar Denninger, nicely outfitted by the plucky Weimar Republic, and of Giancarlo Buoncane pouring into the sands of the Sudan the quarterly profits of Cassini Distillatori, boozily willing to prime the
pump as long as necessary until steaming gold geysered back out of that barren Sudanese earth. And I thought of my own "colleagues" at Harvard, taking time out from their busy schedules of miseducating undergraduates and confounding my work and meddling in my finan• cial backing to go spend Harvard's immortal endowment by fouling up the tombs of teensy priestlets.
"Like anyone with vision, ambition, a sense of risk-taking, Mr. Ko¬ vacs, you understand what it means to be surrounded by small-minded enemies who hate you not because you hate them, or have wronged them, but because you ignore them, since they are too puny to be of in• terest to you. As the Internal Revenue Service or the Attorney General must seem to you, so do Professors ter Breuggen and Fleuriman seem to me, for it is they, I assume, who are the criminal befuddlers of your son. Gentlemen, I read Oriental languages and Egyptology at Oxford University. I pulled the writings of this king—this 'imaginary' king as Claes ter
"Jesus on fire, why won't Harvard pay your way on this, eh, Pushy?" CCF himself enquired, and I knew he was not truly troubled by the question; he merely did not wish to appear too easily convinced in the eyes of his partners. "Caught screwing a Dean's wife, were you?"
I guided them to the individualised sketches I had included in their
booklets on the "Personal Collections" page. "Now, gentlemen, do you want Harvard to own what I find? Do you want this to be the Harvard Collection of the Tomb of Atum-hadu? When the Lathorp Collection, the O'Toole Collection, the Kovacs Collection could fill your own homes with the gold of an Egyptian king and, after you are gone, carry on your name forever in the private wing of the museum of your choice? Know this: every museum in the country will be slavering to house your collection under your name in their museum forever, as I took the liberty of imagining in these sketches. And here we reach the key issue, gentlemen: the longevity of your names. This is something our friend Atum-hadu understood. If they speak of your name after you are dead, then you are not dead. Think hard about this. Your money can buy you precisely what Atum-hadu's bought him, what every king of Egypt knew was the most valuable commodity he could possess: immor• tality. Now when the day comes, what are you going to leave behind? A department store? A construction company? A trust fund? A series of flimsy indictments filed by an envious attorney general? Or are you going to make your name live on forever, mankind's ultimate prize?"
"Now stop for just a moment, Perfesser." Perhaps I have gone too far; everyone leans in to hear Heinz Kovacs's whisper. "If I may just say. I did a little poking around, see, a little arkie-ology of my own.
Like to know what's what before I write whopping big cheques to En• glish fruitcake explorers and pornographers." (I will explain that misconception presently.) "Now my boy goes to Harvard, and his per• fesser tells me your pharaoh didn't even exist. So how's that then?"
I will admit that I suffered just then a pang of envy, nothing more, just a single throb, because as I stood amidst the Boston nouveaux riches and answered their inexperienced questions, I thought of Howard Carter, leisurely checking his bank balance in Cairo, then simply wiring his placid, noble sponsor back in England, demanding some handsome sum and waiting for his Cairo account to swell accordingly. I thought
of Oskar Denninger, nicely outfitted by the plucky Weimar Republic, and of Giancarlo Buoncane pouring into the sands of the Sudan the quarterly profits of Cassini Distillatori, boozily willing to prime the
pump as long as necessary until steaming gold geysered back out of that barren Sudanese earth. And I thought of my own "colleagues" at Harvard, taking time out from their busy schedules of miseducating undergraduates and confounding my work and meddling in my finan• cial backing to go spend Harvard's immortal endowment by fouling up the tombs of teensy priestlets.
"Like anyone with vision, ambition, a sense of risk-taking, Mr. Ko¬ vacs, you understand what it means to be surrounded by small-minded enemies who hate you not because you hate them, or have wronged them, but because you ignore them, since they are too puny to be of in• terest to you. As the Internal Revenue Service or the Attorney General must seem to you, so do Professors ter Breuggen and Fleuriman seem to me, for it is they, I assume, who are the criminal befuddlers of your son. Gentlemen, I read Oriental languages and Egyptology at Oxford University. I pulled the writings of this king—this 'imaginary' king as Claes ter
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