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Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.
Julius Frontinus (Highly respected engineer in Rome, 1st century A.D.)
It was her, definitely her, and she hadn't aged a day. So much for being woken in the night, taken by the servants to meet 'an old fakir with a map': it was her, and there was the same mischief in her that very day when she painted those scenes and those hieroglyphs in tantalising detail.
On a wall in a house in Bayswater.
She'd known I'd come here, to Egypt, fascinated by the glimpse of history she'd given me as a young man. She'd known, also, that I would be a gentleman of independent means, well able to pursue my curiosity: much of our correspondence had been profitable to a man prepared to venture capital in mineral exploration.
The science of geology has served me well, and I find myself wondering if Hutton learned it from her, too.
So it was with some respect that I looked down at the petite figure, sitting demurely on a blanket: not the strange obsessive blue-stocking, filled with ideas that women should sit for degrees if only we would let them, not the poetess, nor the lightning-quick artist with an eye for machinery. Definitely not the half-dressed figure considered mad by the servants, who saw her painting in the dark and had - discreetly - called me down by candlelight and asked me what to do.
She had painted and painted and painted, hands moving like the shuttles in a loom, left and right, left and right, chattering and clicking as a tapestry of images unrolled itself down the kitchen passage. Inhumanly fast, working with utter surety in what, to me, was near-impenetrable darkness. I have no idea whether she ignored me, as I watched in the flicker of a servant's candle: or whether she was unaware, lost in a fugue of brushes and colour and freehand lines.
Grey light was silhouetting the windows when she stopped and turned to me, and said in Matron’s disapproving voice: "Shouldn’t you be in your bed, young man?", then laughed, trilling mischief at her little victory in making me mumble "Yes, Miss" and shuffle like the nine-year-old boy who had obeyed that very order, barely a decade before.
My father had some strange house-guests in his dotage, but even he had no idea how strange some of them turned out to be.
That was twenty years ago, and on another continent.
I had learned to be patient when she paused and daydreamed, bringing the flickering memories back to the fore; and she, likewise, was patient with me.
"I'm here to meet an old fakir who has a map to sell", I ventured, and raised my hat.
"Hullo, Mr. Stevens. Or should I say Sir Oswald, Baron Cowdray? We're both a little old for 'Ozzie', don't you think?"
She patted the blanket beside her, but I sat on the ground in front of her, a few feet distant. I was nervous, remembering that she was so much more than she seemed and wondering what, exactly, she intended to do.
"You've got the map you need, and your men are digging exactly where they are supposed to. I should know: I drew it"
I looked at her, dubiously.
"And gave it to Bin Suleiman, so sell to you at whatever price he thought he'd get away with. Don't be too hard on him: he believes it to be genuine and forty pounds is hard to come by".
I laughed out loud at that: "Believes it genuine! He didn't draw it himself and that's as genuine as any map you’ll ever buy in Cairo. The only reason I paid is that it was so detailed: the faker knew the lie of the land and had an eye for it".
"Faker, was it?" She was amused by that.
"The reason it differs from the French military map is that it was drawn without the landslips and the flood wash that your men are digging into".
"It is the map of this valley before those events."
And I must say that troubled me: it was indeed the map of this valley before the slides and I had realised that it was far too accurate to be some Cairo backstreet fake. But it was on vellum, and faded, and far, far too old: drawn as landscape art without the modern knowledge of perspective, and I had hoped it was the work of a mediaeval Arab trying his luck for treasure.
It troubled me because I know geology and the silt my men were digging into was centuries old: marked on the map but hidden to all recent surveys by a landslip. Hidden to the French, too: the 'errors' in the map weren't errors at all. I had thought it genuine because its rough and seemingly-approximate nature concealed a fine hand with the pen: an honest representation by a hurried but skilful artist, without the heavy-handed redrawings of a laborious fake. I've seen plenty of those! Now that the land revealed itself under excavation, the map was turning out to be very accurate indeed.
Perhaps I paused, again: the sound of my own voice, breaking the silence, came as a shock to me:
"Who are you? Please, I have to know!"
"Well, there's not much point in telling: you can't pronounce it and I'm not sure that it’s any more real than all the other names I've used".
You would expect me to be taken aback by that, but I'd become accustomed to it. No two letters had the same signature and every one contained the same tantalising fragments of fact and myth and mathematics. I'd even heard her addressed by two different names in the same conversation and thought better of drawing attention to it, all those years ago. But I pressed the point:
"But you can't know these things, and you do."
Well, she looked across the valley, down into the shadows, and I saw her face in profile. Thoughtful, then resolved. She looked straight at me, straight into my eyes and said:
"No. You can't know these things: you. Not I"
"I can know them and I've known them for a very, very long time".
It gets cold at night in that desert and I felt the chill in my bones. I found myself wondering what 'a very, very long time' might really mean to someone who'd explained geology and the use of stratigraphic columns. I shook my head at that: woolly thinking, Cowdray! This is a woman, not a geological observation!
But how had she known about the Babbage machine and how to use it for generating Poisson tables? That's impossible, too. There is simply no way that she could have known.
Well, she answered my questions, and at length. Here's what she said, as best as I can recall it: some of it was frightening and not all of it made sense to me:
"Soon, very soon, you people will discover new energies and new truths about physical science. Perhaps it will change you: I hope that it will change you because it is in you to destroy yourselves and every living thing you know when you discover such a power."
"Fire was bad enough, Stevens, then metals, then steam: what of writing, the tool for language? You have already built tools for thinking, in your London City, and you cannot imagine what it means to do that."
"I will leave here, soon: you have almost built the tools and you have already made the leap, in your imaginations, to the journey I will be making."
"Was I mad, then, painting those walls in your house, all those years ago? We are sitting above the originals, Stevens, sitting forty feet above the very spot where they were painted and you will see them with your own eyes in the morning. Just as I did, on the day that they were painted for the Queen, and you will never know her name: just a nickname, Nefer Tar-Eh."
"You still can't quite believe it, can you?"
"Mad, Stevens? What is sane, Stevens? I'm not you, I don't think like you, I don't have to be the way you are and sometimes I just don't keep up the pretense."
I watched her face: irritation, then anguish, pleading with me, then: blank. A mask, expressionless. Or rather, the mask of human emotions was a masquerade, and she set it down. My God, she simply stopped playing it. All that I had heard, all that I had seen, all that I had felt in her: emotions, expressions, humanity, all was mere artifice.
She dropped the masquerade, and I have never been so frightened, or so cold, as I was at that moment.
She turned away, looked back into the desert, and she spoke like a statue:
"Sane is Human, Stevens, and I'm not one of you. I was worshipped as a god, Stevens, but even that is human because the Godhead is a thing of human hopes and imaginings and I was never that. Sometimes, Stevens, I fall into the pretense like an actor in a part becoming something he is not: but always, always, there is more of me and sometimes that is more than any actor ever could portray in human thought and language."
"Don't ask me, Stevens, what I'm thinking: you have no words for it, you do not even have ideas for it."
I was shaking and she knew it: I saw her put the mask back on, saw her turn back and become a woman again and it was like some terrible legend of statues drawing breath and taking life. She smiled, a little amusement tinged with sympathy: rather worried about the state I was in, I think. Then I thought, coldly, that this concern or amusement hadn't crept into her expression: it had been deliberately put there. I'd have killed her, there and then, shot it like a snake, if I only could have moved.
"Stop that! Get a grip on yourself, Stevens! For what its worth, for any meaning in common between your thoughts and these, I see you as a friend and I would not see you harmed."
"I am sorry, and it does mean what I say, that I should not have frightened you. But you are capable of seeing the truth and that is better than seeing a good man deceived."
"A good man", I asked: "Do you mean man, do you even believe in good and evil?"
I like to think the amusement on her face, and the warmth, reflected something close enough to genuine emotions:
"No."
And there and then, she gave me the drawings. When I opened them in daylight, I saw that she'd even put my signature on them, and they are perfect representations of those beautiful pictures. She had drawn out every glyph, translated them - in my handwriting! - and provided an accurate catalogue of every item in the tomb.
I have never shown the translations: who would believe that I know how to read hieroglyphics? I don't and never have! If anyone had ever asked I couldn't have explained a word of what I, apparently, had written.
Mischief, indeed.
She left without a word, and I went my own way down towards to the camp site.
She got one thing wrong: it wasn't the next morning, it took another three days to get into Nefertari's final resting place.
I think she'd mad, and maybe I am, too: I am certain that she painted the originals.