The Linguist and the Emperor (4 page)

But still there is something
before that, before the Greeks and Hebrews,
something prior, preceding and half-forgotten like a dream or an hallucination: There is Egypt. Working his way back through the many moments in Egyptian time, first Arab, then Christian, Roman, Greek, Persian Egypt, Jean François arrives at the Egypt of the Pharaohs, dynasty after dynasty of rulers whose glory and splendor dazzled the world for millennia (the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms) before beginning to wane one thousand years before Christ. For when Athens was just a patch of rock-strewn ground and Jerusalem a crude Jebusite fortress; when Rome was a forest haunted by wolves, great pyramids and temples had already risen on the banks of the Nile.

The monuments, perfect in form and massive in size, are a measure of Egypt’s power. And the inscriptions with which they are covered are a measure of her wisdom: the writing which the Greeks call hieroglyphs, holy carvings, and which the Egyptians call “the words of the gods.” Fantastic pictures of walking jars and beasts with human bodies, a jumble of drawings: humpbacked vultures, squatting children, flowers and fruits, stars and palm trees and bald-headed priests, women giving birth, and male members spilling seed or urinating.

But what can they mean, these “words of the gods”? Their significance has been forgotten in the long course of time. “Speeches from the grave,” the hieroglyphs will be called even in Roman times when there are still a few old priests who understand them. “The language of the dead,” the Emperor Hadrian shrugs in the first century
AD.
But between “dying” and “dead” two centuries still remain and it is not until
AD
394 that hieroglyphic writing, in use for more than three thousand years, is inscribed on a temple wall for the last time. And then silence descends: For fifteen hundred years the strange symbols stand as a puzzle and a challenge to all who see them. The cumulative experience and wisdom of a great civilization, they are a legacy—but only for the scholar wise enough to read them.

The young Jean François takes in the challenge, not yet seeing its connection to himself. This is the first moment of a great passion: The lover sees his beloved for the first time, but he does not yet understand his agitation. He sees the beloved and stands still in awe. There is no movement toward her, no declaration, no vow—no, the determined cry
I will decipher the hieroglyphs!
will come later. Jean François will not wait long, a few years, not more. When he is eleven he will take that step, too. For everything in his life takes place early, quickly, as if he knows that he has much to do in a short time.
A bow that is tightly strung must be unstrung by midday
will be one of his favorite quotations—from a pharaoh who also knew that he would not have many years to complete his desired tasks.

For the time being, though, it is enough that Jean François sees Egypt—and that he hears Egypt’s mysterious silence of fifteen hundred years. Aware of the challenge, he turns to other projects, work for which his immature skills are more suitable. His brother’s letters encourage him, exhort him not to be idle. He compiles a list of ancient peoples and then, still dwelling on origins, he compiles another list of famous dogs going back to the beginning of time. There is the dog of Odysseus and the dogs who devour the body of Jezebel and the “cynotherapists,” the dogs of the healing temples, the Asklepieions, who gently walk or lay among the afflicted . . .

Thusor of Hermione, a blind boy, had his eyes licked by one of the Temple dogs and departed cured
 .  .  .

Thus, for Jean François the next years will be spent in study. In due course, his brother—finally!—will let him come to live with him in Grenoble although he never fulfills his brother’s requirements of “. . . first learning the simple, the necessary facts and practical skills—not the least of which is to write legibly!”

From the narrow winding streets of Figeac, Jean Fran-çois will be transported to a city two hundred miles away in which the snow-capped mountains can be seen on all sides. He will never see his mother again. She will die while he is learning Hebrew and Arabic and Chaldean, as well as Latin and Greek. For two years his brother will tutor him and then the next stage in his education will begin: the
lycée.

Two contrary elements will be present from this time on. Two sign posts as contrary as east and west mark his way:
the inevitable
and
the improbable.

For what could be more improbable than the fate awaiting him? What could be more far-fetched—who would have guessed it?—that a young boy living in a small French town would conceive a passion such as the one which consumes Jean François? Who could have known that the strange carvings covering the tombs and temples of Egypt—mere chicken scratchings to a philistine mind!—would make everything else pale in the life of Jean François?

But if it is a strange, a fantastic passion, it is also, like all great passions, an inevitable one. To understand this inevitability, though, to see how it came about, one must ignore external circumstances. The logic of Jean François’ development is an inner one. To understand, to be in sympathy with him, one must ask along with this young French boy—and with the same naïve wonder
—And before that? And before that? And even before that?
until one is standing in blinding light before a silent Egyptian tomb.

Chapter Three

The Promised Land

WHILE CHAMPOLLION SITS
at his lessons, another boy, a British “boy,” appears on a London stage—eighteen-year-old Mademoiselle Legrini, the sensation of the day. Hair cropped short, she wears a schoolboy’s cap and tight breeches, and she saunters across the stage with a sexy swagger, singing a bawdy song while showing off her famous legs. Her fans go wild. Among them is Napoleon’s chief opponent in Europe, the pleasure-loving, corpulent Prince Regent. He rules England during the times when his father is mad. And though no warrior, he is one of the best dancers in the land.

On her way back to her dressing room, Legrini passes an Italian compatriot. She and the strongman Belzoni are both main attractions of the day. Their acts, her singing and his feats of strength, are part of a gala performance occasioned by the war with France which any day might be fought on English soil. Or, as a patriotic poster in front of the theater proclaims:

This day was published,
An
Address to the People
of the United Kingdom of
Great Britain and Ireland,
on the threatened
INVASION.

Among the inexpressibly dreadful consequences which are sure to attend the conquest of your Island by the French, there is one of so horrible a nature as to deserve distinct notice. This barbarous, but most artful people, when first they invade a country in the conquest of which they apprehend any difficulty, in order to obtain the confidence of the people, compel their troops to observe the strictest discipline, and often put a soldier to death for stealing the most trifling article. Like spiders they artfully weave a web round their victim, before they begin to prey upon it. But when their success is complete then let loose their troops, with resistless fury, to commit the most horrible excesses, and to pillage, burn, and desolate without mercy and without distinction. But the practice to which I particularly allude will make your blood freeze in your veins
 .  .  .

And so on. The details, a mixture of truth and propaganda, are calculated to arouse fear and indignation. Crowds gather to read the poster, jostling one another beside a man hawking plaster casts of Mademoiselle Legrini’s famous legs (the proceeds also going for the cause!)—“
La jambe de Legrini,
” the leg of Legrini, described by reviewers as being “. . . so beautiful, of such a symmetry, a
moelleux
and a play of muscle that the sight of it will enchant any lover of art!”

The audience agrees, for long after Mademoiselle Legrini has finished, the cries for her to return do not die down . . . until the giant Belzoni steps out onto the stage. He is handsome, with a long auburn beard flowing over his broad chest. And he is enormous. Six foot six with rippling muscles, his huge figure dwarfs the ten large men already in place. They stand center stage on a metal frame to which a harness is attached. The strongman crouches down, slips the harness over his shoulders and then slowly lifts the staggering weight. The audience, after a stunned silence, breaks into an ecstatic roar.

The applause lasts so long, in fact, that most performers would find the act a difficult one to follow. But the young girl waiting backstage has no qualms—having been dead for more than two thousand years, according to the doctor who has brought her mummy from Egypt and who claims that he can understand the inscriptions on her coffin, those bare-breasted goddesses and the jackal-headed gods.

The curtain is lowered and the learned doctor steps in front. He begins his introductory patter while the mummy is wheeled into place: “An ancient princess will be unwrapped tonight for the benefit of Science and for your personal edification! A girl who died tragically young, as inscriptions on her coffin indicate.”

Backstage Belzoni pauses at the sight of the mummified princess. The handsome, laughing strongman crouches down, kneeling by her side. He has no idea that one day he will be surrounded by thousands of mummies, both human and animal—cats and crocodiles and bulls that were, for the Egyptians, divine. Nor does Belzoni dream that he will almost become a mummy himself as he crawls through the underground labyrinths of the City of the Dead, bats in flight extinguishing his torch, leaving him lost in dark winding tunnels, choking on the dust of the disintegrating and once sacred flesh. He will travel throughout the ancient land, be overwhelmed by Ramesses’ fantastic colossi, witness the lonely splendor of Abu Simbel. This colossus showman will explore the burial chambers of the Shining and Beautiful Pyramid, the Pyramid which is Pure of Places, the Pyramid where the Ba-spirit Rises. And his name will be forever linked with Egypt when he discovers her most famous temples and long-forgotten tombs.

But at this juncture, the corpse of the young-yet-ancient princess is just a rival act. He is a sensation—a Seven Days’ Wonder—and so is she. As the curtain rises, to peals of laughter he gives her a kiss before being shooed from the stage.

It is a theatrical gesture, obscene and unforgettable,
Grand Guignol
and nothing more. For Belzoni is a showman through and through who has used his strength to escape the poverty into which he was born. As a boy of twelve he was left to make his way in the world, but now he has begun to use his mind as well. It is a creative mind; the strongman is studious and imaginative. He gives himself no rest after his performances are over: working, inventing, experimenting into the small hours of the night, struggling to discover the necessary
something,
the undreamed of
whatever
that will complete his transformation from a boy sleeping in alleys and fighting for scraps thrown in the street to a man of the world who has achieved fortune and fame.

And when he finally does create an invention that seems promising—a hydraulic irrigation wheel more powerful than anything tried before—it will be this practical feat of engineering that will bring him to Egypt, a land that depends on the waters of the Nile.

But Belzoni’s hydraulic wheel will ultimately fail and be forgotten. Yet in those desert wastes, among colossal statues and ancient tombs, the strongman, a colossus himself, will put his enormous energy and stamina to good use. He will return to Europe with his undreamed-of wonders: sixty-three-foot-tall statues of pharaohs and soaring obelisks and alabaster sarcophagi. Covered with inscriptions, these monuments will ultimately be essential to Champollion’s work.

For the time being, though, Belzoni is as indifferent to Egypt as the princess he has just kissed is to him: “She did not shudder at my embrace!” he jokes to a writer for the broadsheets, a gossip from the
Gentleman’s Review
who dawdles backstage, knowing the strongman is always good for a quote. The two men stand together, talking and laughing in the wings, watching as the princess’ body is exposed layer by layer. Exotic flutes trill in the background, accompanying
oohs
and
aahs
as scraps of parchment, ancient spells, and strange amulets are found hidden in the bandages. And the phony doctor is also stripped naked onstage: stripped of his learned pretensions. For the coffin inscriptions, hieroglyphs he claims to have read, he cannot have understood. The mummy has
—or once had—
a male member.

This fact is not immediately known. By an ancient saving grace (saving for the doctor), this masculine member was removed and embalmed separately in imitation of Osiris, god of the dead, who is murdered and castrated by his brother—and revived and made whole by the magic of his sister-wife Isis. For in the primal world of the Egyptian gods nothing is obscene, the facts of the body are interwoven with the soul in tales childlike both in their violence and their innocence.

A real doctor, a serious young man named Thomas Young who has been granted his degree not by theatrical courtesy but by Emmanuel College, Cambridge, comes backstage to examine the mummy. An aristocrat and an intellectual with wide-ranging interests, Young will be drawn to the riddle of the hieroglyphs not, like Champollion, for metaphysical reasons but because of the logical puzzle it presents. Although a good classical scholar, he will never match the vast linguistic resources Champollion acquires. He will never know Coptic or Persian or Chaldean or immerse himself in Egyptian history and geography so that thousands of ancient place-names are on the tip of his tongue. This limitation will determine Young’s
mathematical
approach when he takes up the problem in the course of time.

At the present, however, Young determines the “princess’” sex right away. And more besides: He finds among the linen wrappings fragments of a poem written in Greek on gazelle skin, a scrap of leather used like old newspaper to wrap fish. Perhaps this had been thrust between the toes to keep them apart or perhaps it had been tucked in as padding for this long-dead man’s heels.

The Greek on the scrap dates the mummy as being late in Egyptian history, sometime after Alexander conquers Egypt in 330
BC
when both the Greek and Egyptian languages are in use. And thus the serious young scholar, unable to read the hieroglyphs on the coffin, can read the ancient dialogue written on the hide of a gazelle.

The poem describes a scene between a girl and her would-be lover. With many lines crumbled into dust, it is like a conversation overheard from the past, words and half phrases carried on the winds of time—

 .  .  .
simply restrain yourself
 .  .  .
or if you can’t, there, in our house, is a girl
 .  .  .
why then grieve her?

This was her plea. So I formally answered:

“There are many sweet gifts for young men from the goddess,
Pleasures that stop at the brink
One will suffice.

If the god wills,
 .  .  .
pour my libation
Out at your grassy gateway
 .  .  .
Do not deny me the threshold, beloved
 .  .  .
I’ll not break in
 .  .  .
As for Neoboule, she is for others.
Let who will have her
She is full blown and her grace is gone.
 .  .  .
 .  .  .
I prefer you.”

This said, I laid the girl down among the flowers in my
soft cloak.
I embraced her gently.
I touched her flesh with my hands.
She remained still but she trembled like a fawn as I
released the white force of my passion.

A fitting poem for Young to find curled beneath the “princess’” leg: a warning at the beginning of his career. For like the
demivierge,
the half-virgin who both accepts and refuses her importunate lover, Egypt will never give herself completely to Champollion or to Young, to Bonaparte and his scholars, or to those who come after. She will forever remain a mystery, half-revealed and half-hidden beneath her eternally shifting sand.

THE MOON SHINES
down on a fleet sailing across the Mediterranean. The deck of the flagship is brightly lit with torches burning around a raised platform. A play is in progress, not a bawdy comedy like the ones which have pleased the soldiers and sailors on other nights, but a dramatic adaptation of Goethe’s novella,
The Sorrows of Young Werther.

It is a strange choice for the night’s entertainment, but the men are now used to their general’s unpredictable ways. At the same time he is both the perfect soldier and completely unsoldierly. Napoleon has filled valuable space, they whisper, storage room another general would use for ammunition and provisions, with box after box of scientific instruments; with printing presses, presses set up with Arabic and Greek as well as Roman type; and with a huge library of books that he has had taken on board besides. Reference and technical and historical works are stacked in crates beside the pawing and nervous horses, of which there are not enough—a fact that will force most of the light cavalry, when they reach Egypt, to march on foot.

But then if there are not enough horses, there are plenty of scholars: 167 of them, the general’s “favorite mistress” as the men call them. Night after night, Bonaparte sits on deck debating, arguing, theorizing with them as the ships make their way through dangerous waters. The fleet is in a race with the stronger British Navy, England’s most powerful weapon in its life-and-death struggle against revolutionary France.

And so, though all eyes are on the actors, everyone is aware that at any moment the British might suddenly materialize. In the unequal battle that would follow, General Bonaparte, his scholars, his books, printing presses, and scientific instruments would all be sent to the bottom of the sea: thirty-eight thousand men, including the soldier playing the tragic Werther, a burly dragoon (totally miscast!) who throws out his arms as he declaims: “Treat my heart as a sick child! Grant it whatever it requests!”

But the British do not interrupt the performance. Luck has been with Napoleon since the night the expedition left France when a terrific storm dispersed the British warships threatening Toulon. “An act of God!” the atheistic revolutionaries joke. As the British struggle to regroup, Napoleon’s ships slip past them and out to the open sea. A fleet is sent from England to find the French fleet—but just where to look in the Mediterranean is the question: Sicily? Egypt? the Greek Isles?