In the Valley of the Kings (22 page)

Unlike the impious Greeks, who would sometimes mirthfully record that the deceased was a boozer and a mad dog, lustful beyond belief, someone who never said no to a wager, and so on, the Egyptians were concerned for the fate of their souls. Wandering among their graves, one is continually beseeched by the long dead to utter their names or to pour out some water or wine for them before the gods.

Before the discovery of his tomb, Tutankhamun was one of the least known of the pharaohs, his name familiar to perhaps half a dozen scholars. Afterward, he eclipsed even Ramesses in fame. Looked at in this way, Carter could truthfully claim that he deserved a blessing, not a curse, for having brought about the boy-king’s resurrection.

But if Carter was too practical to greatly concern himself with such speculation, he was also practical enough to humor the superstitious Carnarvon during their years of working together. During a return visit to England, Carter was a guest at Highclere, where he shot, rode—and attended séances in the East Anglia bedroom. Carnarvon’s son, the naughty Porchester, now a grown-up and a soldier on duty in Mesopotamia, was home on leave.

This time Porchester did not listen from the attic; he was invited to attend. As he remembered: “I watched [Lady] Helen Cunliffe-Owen put into a trance on an occasion when Howard Carter was also present. It had been an eerie, not to say unpleasant, experience which had shaken me considerably. One moment she had been her normal self, the next her features had become strained and white. Suddenly she had started talking in an unknown tongue which, to everyone’s astonishment, Howard Carter had pronounced as being Coptic.”

Carter would probably not have been able to distinguish Coptic, the last form of ancient Egyptian, from Celtic. He knew a little about the written form of ancient Egyptian, the hieroglyphs—but only what was useful in his excavations (when it came to any question about inscriptions, he turned to such experts as James Breasted or Sir Alan M. Gardiner, who were both working in Egypt during this time).

The pronunciation of the hieroglyphs (which ceased to be written in the fourth century
AD
) was and remains a disputed matter, the language having been written without vowels. Though as a spoken language, Coptic lingered on until the eleventh century
AD
, that still leaves us with the question of where Carter would have heard its sounds.

The only possible answer would be in church, where Coptic is still sometimes used in the Egyptian orthodox liturgy: an unlikely answer, since Carter’s religion was digging. Letters, journals, diaries, and reports show him at the sites (even at Christmas), not listening to the chanting of monks.

A more likely explanation is that he was too polite—or too politic—to disappoint his patron. It is revealing to consider this question in the light of another incident, also from his early years, the years when he was still struggling to forge a career: the visit of Emma Andrews to Amenhotep II’s tomb, which Carter was restoring. Ms. Andrews asked Carter about some hieroglyphs covering a coffin, and Carter, perhaps not wanting to disappoint her, perhaps wanting to be seen in a more authoritative light, “translated” the inscription as an ancient Egyptian curse. However, there was no such curse on the coffin lid!

The fact of the matter is that Carter was not above lying when it suited his purpose. It is a side of his character that we will encounter with a shock of surprise later on, when much more is at stake.

Even with the whole world watching—after the discovery of
Tut’s tomb—he could be deceitful. He could secretly enter the inner burial chamber and then replace the blocking for the official opening. He could not only pocket “small” objects from the tomb (his niece would secretly return them after his death), but also attempt to steal one of its great masterpieces: the wooden portrait bust of the young king emerging from a lotus.

Such actions should not serve to indict him. They only remind us of his complexity as a human being. They are a caveat—do not take the man at face value. He was like one of the desert cliffs or Delta mounds he excavated. More was going on beneath the surface than you saw.

He wrote in his autobiographical sketch that sometimes he became discouraged at the hardships of his life as an excavator; sometimes he questioned his own wisdom in choosing a profession other than that of his father. It was more than a new profession he was trying to achieve, though, it was a new identity. He was trying to reinvent himself but felt ill equipped for the part he wanted to play in life. He knew his manners were gauche and his education poor, but still he would not give up. A gentleman colleague wrote in a letter: “He [Carter] doesn’t hesitate to pick his last hollow tooth with a match stalk during dinner, bite bread that is so hard you can hardly cut it with a chopper, and help himself to whisky in an absent minded fashion, emptying half the bottle into his tumbler, then laugh and say he wasn’t thinking and pour it back again into the bottle, spilling a lot.”

“I have never accepted Carter as a colleague,” wrote another, the respected archaeologist George Andrew Reisner, at the time digging in Egypt for Harvard University and the Boston Museum.

Carter knew there were those who disliked and scorned him, but from the beginning he was determined to beat them at their own game. After the discovery, when he became a public figure, there were unkind comments about his “plummy” accent (Americans would say “fruity”): It was Carter’s version of an upper-class
accent, of course, which he affected along with the silk breast pocket handkerchiefs and the cigarette holders and even the body language that he copied from Carnarvon. In terms of Carter’s new identity, Carnarvon’s aristocratic style was just as important to the excavator as what he learned on the ancient mounds. For the earl served not only as Carter’s patron, but as a role model, a way of presenting himself to the world.

If Carnarvon could be irritating to Carter, sitting down in the desert to dine aristocratically on bacon, tongue, curried fowl, wine, biscuits, and Oriental pickles—courtesy of Fortnum & Mason—and in the middle of the day to boot; if Carnarvon’s enthusiasm in the face of dismal failures could likewise get on Carter’s nerves—if the earl’s séances and table rappings had to be borne—Carter could not have achieved what he did without him.

The genial earl came to Egypt for his health; the gloomy excavator was there to find his livelihood—purposes that grew in scope and depth by the time their paths crossed. It was a meeting that, in retrospect, seemed fated. It was as if they had been summoned by the boy-king, who, underground, waited for them in all his unresurrected splendor—a mystical notion that would have pleased Carnarvon no end but that would have made poor Carter suffer.

PREVIOUS PAGE: Howard Carter, May 8, 1924.
NATIONAL PHOTO COMPANY COLLECTION, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

1905
Southern Egypt

TWO MEN WHO DID NOT KNOW EACH OTHER PROVIDED ENTERTAINMENT
for the gossips of Luxor during the 1905 digging season. One was the dour ex-inspector Carter, hawking his watercolors and taking “superior” tourists around the sights. Though it was in his interest to be polite, many times an unconsidered remark would bring on an outburst of Carter’s temper, sending the “superior” tourist or potential buyer running for cover and leaving the ex-inspector without his fee, perhaps, but with the satisfaction of having spoken his mind.

The second figure of fun for the locals was the silly, rich British earl who could be seen raising clouds of dust in the desert hills near Deir el-Bahri.

Although Carnarvon had hired a large band of workers and basket boys, anyone could tell that he was an amateur. Digging first in one spot and then suddenly switching to another, he proceeded erratically, without any method to his madness.

Or so it seemed. A casual observer of this new farce in the desert had no way of knowing that though no archaeologist directed Carnarvon’s excavation, the earl was getting advice from a more reliable source—the ancient priests themselves, who whispered their messages to him through his psychics and supernormalists. The result was that after Carnarvon’s first season was over
and the dust had settled, what he had to show for his work was … well, a mummified cat.

An unimpressive find, perhaps—weighed on the scales of the uninitiated. But if we consider the account of Arthur Weigall, the new inspector, then Carnarvon’s first discovery might be seen as a portent of things to come, a find in keeping with the earl’s mystical propensities and psychic energy.

“Lord Carnarvon … discovered a hollow wooden figure of a large black cat, which we recognized … to be the shell in which a real embalmed cat was confined.

“The figure looked more like a small tiger as it sat in the sunlight at the edge of the pit in which it had been discovered, glaring at us with its yellow painted eyes. Its body was covered all over with a thick coating of smooth, shining pitch, and we could not at first detect the line along which the shell had been closed after it had received the mortal remains of the sacred animal within; but we knew from experience that the joint passed completely round the figure—from the nose, over the top of the head, down the back, and along the breast—so that, when opened, the two sides would fall apart in equal halves.

“The somber figure was carried down to the Nile and across the river to my house, where by a mistake on the part of my Egyptian servant, it was deposited in my bedroom. Returning home at the dead of night, I here found it seated in the middle of the floor directly in my path from the door to the matches; and for some moments I was constrained to sit beside it, rubbing my shins and my head.

“I rang the bell but receiving no answer, I walked to the kitchen, where I found the servants grouped distractedly around the butler, who had been stung by a scorpion and was in the throes of that short but intense agony. Soon he passed into a state of delirium and believed himself to be pursued by a large grey cat, a fancy
which did not surprise me since he had so lately assisted in carrying the figure to its ill-chosen resting-place in my bedroom.

“At length, I retired to bed, but the moonlight which now entered the room through the open French windows fell full upon the black figure of the cat; and for some time I lay awake watching the peculiarly weird creature as it stared past me at the wall. I estimated its age to be considerably more than three thousand years, and I tried to picture to myself the strange people who, in those distant times, had fashioned this curious coffin for a cat which had been to them half pet and half household god….

“In the distance I could hear the melancholy wails of the unfortunate butler imploring those around him to keep the cat away from him, and it seemed to me that there came a glitter into the eyes of the figure as the low cries echoed down the passage.

“At last I fell asleep, and for about an hour all was still. Then, suddenly, a report like that of a pistol rang through the room. I started up, and as I did so a large grey cat sprang either from or on to the bed, leapt across my knees, dug its claws into my hands, and dashed through the window into the garden. At the same moment I saw by the light of the moon that the two sides of the wooden figure had fallen apart and were rocking themselves to a standstill upon the floor, like two great empty shells. Between them sat the mummified figure of a cat, the bandages which swathed it round being ripped open at the neck, as though they had been burst outward.

“I sprang out of bed and rapidly examined the divided shell; and it seemed to me that the humidity in the air here on the bank of the Nile had expanded the wood which had rested in the dry desert so long, and had caused the two halves to burst apart with the loud noise which I had heard. Then, going to the window, I scanned the moonlit garden; and there in the middle of the pathway I saw, not the grey cat which had scratched me, but my own
pet tabby, standing with arched back and bristling fur, glaring into the bushes, as though she saw ten feline devils therein.