1841: Cairo
Edward Ashbury Cygne, Professor of Antiquities, King’s College
You will forgive, I trust, both the lateness of my reply and the faint discolouration of this paper, the dust of Memphis having insinuated itself into every fold and crevice. The air here curdles ink. Even my gestures, when I write, seem slowed by an invisible residue—as if one waded through the ghost of antiquity itself.
You asked, with that mixture of curiosity and incredulity peculiar to our order, whether the rumoured “duck‑headed tablet” truly exists. I can now confirm that it does—or did, before the Director of Antiquities swallowed it into his vault, claiming “administrative precaution.” The object, in fact, more closely resembles a sculpted drake’s head, carved of basalt veined with salt, the lines of its bill inscribed in both cuneiform and an older, indecipherable pictograph. The work may predate Hammurabic conventions, though that assertion, as you know, will earn me no friends among our Berlin critics, who prefer their time‑lines as straight as their tempers.
The inscriptions—those few characters my assistant Rashid and I can render with the aid of the new “Rosetta”‑type stele found near Sais—refer (or seem to) to two plants: Agnus Castus and Apocynum. Both, you will recall, possess subtle virtues tempering lust and life, hence their dual employment in rituals of abstinence and revenge. The text divides them as emblems, one pale, one venomous, yet both “cool of sap, cold to the gods.” Every reference pairs their cultivation with serpentine symbols and a recurrent winged water‑bird, styled Ma‑El‑Ardu, which the priests of Lagash called “the divine feeder.”
Now, before you dismiss this as one more herbal litany among the innumerable Sumerian catalogues of cabalistic agriculture, note a fragmentary passage at the tablet’s side, where the stone itself bulges like a pressing thumb. There appears there a genealogy—part vegetal, part dynastic—beginning (if my reconstruction holds) with “He who first plucked the bitter blossom beside the flood and named his hunger Lordship.” It is difficult not to hear, in that punning assembly of syllables, the embryonic form of what we later would call “Mallard.”
I do not pretend to certainty. The temptation to declare discovery is the archaeologist’s cardinal sin, equal perhaps only to miscataloguing another man’s wife, which, incidentally, befell the unfortunate Champollion two seasons ago. Yet one cannot ignore coincidences that persist in the imagination. The Mallards—or Fitzarturs as you prefer to remember them when quoting their genealogical extravagances—have long cultivated an aquatic ancestry. Their heraldic offices overflow with bills, reeds, and stylised pools. Could such imagery be the faint survival of a myth imported from the valley’s oldest strata? I submit, discreetly, that it is at least conceivable.
Among the fragments we found near the tablet lay small cones of dried flora wrapped in silk like mummified pencils. Their composition corresponds precisely to Agnus Castus leaves, the so‑called chaste tree. Yet beneath them had been placed roots of Apocynum cannabinum—dogbane—whose milky exudate can paralyse an insect or a conscience with equal facility. The juxtaposition cannot be chance. The priests appear to have used them conjointly, perhaps as sacraments of coldness and deceit: botanical metaphors for purity enforced through poison. The accompanying figure of the duck, drawn on a slip of reed parchment (now mostly reverted to gas), shows the bird in an act neither of flight nor feeding but of waiting—a deity of stillness rather than motion.
It is odd, is it not, that virtue and falsehood should share a root? Nearly all these early rites pursued contradiction as revelation. They worshipped equilibrium by creating imbalance; they believed warmth could be summoned only by enacting chill. One hymn, which I transcribed before the atmosphere obliterated half the lines, prays: “Let the cold plant guard the warm seed; let the deceiver guide the true.” There lies, Pembroke, the very moral evolution of our own polite hypocrisy.
I suspect that when the medieval chroniclers later embroidered the legend of “the immortal Mallard that cannot drown,” they were not inventing but echoing this same sacramental logic—the bird afloat above corruption, cold yet living, deceitless only because indifferent. Whether the Fitzarturs’ lawyers will thank me for tracing their ancestry to witchcraft I cannot foresee, though I imagine the present Duke would regard it as proof of divine favour. You recall his remark over port: that “the Mallards are God’s last experiment in hereditary grace”? Perhaps he was nearer the mark than even his vanity knew.
The journey here has done little for my health. Nights on the river have the texture of disease; the Nile smells not so much of life as of continuation. Each dawn breaks thickly, as if the sun were embarrassed by what it sees. Our dragoman tells me the locals view the duck not as bird but as judge—one that listens without reply. There is justice in that silence. Compared to it, our universities seem very talkative indeed.
You asked also, half in jest, whether deceit can fossilise. I think perhaps it can. As leaf becomes shale, motive becomes myth. The ancients knew this. Their tales of transformation—Daphne into laurel, Linos into lamentation—are geological in spirit. If the Mallard name arose from such a sediment of legend, then each courteous bow and signature of that family is but a compacted layer of the old sacrament—a pleasing civility laid over something cooler, older, and unmelting.
Forgive the tone; the desert lends one a kind of solemn irony. I am aware I sound half‑mad. The translator who assists me, a man of practical mind, laughs whenever I speak of noble genealogies. “All men,” he says, “come from something that wished to eat them.” It is a philosophy at once repulsive and undeniable.
When next you write, tell me if London still debates whether history is a science. Here in Egypt it behaves more like humidity. We scrape at one stone after another, and truth gleams only when the light moves—never when we do.
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