Mariette was amused at the idea. “Ask him to read this for me,” he said, and gave them an inscription he had just discovered and which had not been translated.
Maspero’s companions took the inscription, and Maspero sat down and translated it. When Mariette received the translation he was far more amazed at finding this young man of twenty-one in Paris who could read hieroglyphics, than he would have been at finding some new temple on the Nile. It seemed to him simply incredible, so he gave Maspero something else to translate—lines that were all mutilated and from which a great deal was missing.
Maspero sat down to the problem, and after a few days managed to translate the fragments and supply the missing parts. Then Mariette realized that he had indeed found a born Egyptologist, and it is not surprising that the boy who was so interested that he taught himself to read the picture-writing should succeed Mariette in Egypt.
Who knows what Mariette thought when the translations of Maspero were brought to him? Perhaps his mind flashed back over the years to the rather unhappy time when he, a lad of eighteen, was professor of French at a school in Stratford-on-Avon, to the days when his talent for drawing was confined to designing ribbons for a Coventry manufacturer. Maybe he remembered how happily he returned to France to take his degree at Douai, those articles he wrote to add to his income, the cousin who had been dealing with Champollion’s material, and whose death brought all the material of that great man under Mariette’s own fingers.
From that period dates Mariette’s own romantic career. He was under thirty when he went to Egypt in search of manuscripts, and found instead the ruins of the Serapeum at Memphis. His diggers fought the desert, and rescued the Sphinx from the grasping sands, tore the drift of centuries from the ruins of the temples of Edfu, uncovered the glories of Karnak. The years brought more discoveries, his work was acclaimed, honours were heaped upon him. The call of Egypt to Mariette was irresistible, as it had been to Champollion, as it was to Maspero. Fate linked these three Frenchmen together to add to our knowledge of the past. They loved France, but the deserts and the debris of Egypt became part of their lives.
Often they went in the burning sun to the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings—one of the most desolate places on earth. Not a tree to be seen, not a flower, not even a blade of grass. Vegetation cannot live there. It is a veritable valley of the dead, an inferno of desolation. Birds avoid it, animals shun it, only the bats haunt the tombs. There at the base of the hills is the wonderful temple of Queen Hatshepsut, with its rows of pillars standing like sentinels before the blackness which is beyond. Years ago no trace of it could be seen, but a man with a spade came along and found it, and after prodigious labours it was dug out of the overlying rubble and rock in which it was buried.
Everywhere is the eternal rubble and sand. Huge piles of debris mark the sites where the diggers have been working; broken steps leading downwards into the mountains indicate where tombs have been found.
Rain hardly ever falls there.... If you sat and waited for a shower of rain, you would have to wait on an average for five years! Perhaps twenty times in a century the clouds break over the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings, but the ground is so parched and rocky that a deluge is almost swallowed up as it falls. In an hour the valley is again as dry as a bone.
THE WONDERFUL TEMPLE OF QUEEN HATSHEPSUT AT THE BASE OF THE CLIFFS IN THE VALLEY OF THE TOMBS OF THE KINGS. THE TINY FIGURE OF A MAN, NO BIGGER THAN A PIN-HEAD, ON THE CENTRAL ROAD, SERVES TO INDICATE THE SIZE OF THE TEMPLE