In the Valley of the Kings (25 page)

What did Carter do next? Breasted tells us that he “laid before him [Carnarvon] the familiar map—” The map! One can imagine what a welcome sight that was to Carnarvon, who had seen it so often that he could have shown it to Carter by this time. The map, “which recorded, season by season, the account of their probing and excavation. At first glance, not a square metre of Valley floor and slopes appeared unchecked, but Carter reminded him that just below the entrance to the tomb of Rameses VI there remained a small triangular area—” The triangle again! Another sight that must have been most welcome to Carnarvon’s eyes.

And why had Carter left it until last, this wonderful triangle of his? Why for the last six years had he ignored the place of his original hunch, the area where Theodore Davis had found his King Tut’s tomb, the place where Edward Ayrton had reached behind a boulder to find the telltale green faience cup with Tut’s name? What had he been waiting for? The answer he gave reminds one of a derelict schoolboy excusing his unpreparedness: He was waiting for an opportune moment!

What is he talking about? “Some later, off-season time because it would temporarily prevent visitors from entering the foregoing tomb.” That is, the tomb of Ramesses VI.

Now, this sounds simply beyond belief, and more than one Egyptologist has questioned it. Not only wild-eyed weavers of conspiracy theories (of whom there are many), but a clear-eyed, learned, lucid, and interesting scholar such as Christine El Mahdy—for one—doesn’t believe Carter for a minute. An Egyptologist at Yeovil College, England, she has pursued a lifelong interest in King Tut by carefully and critically studying all the available evidence.

In her thought-provoking
Tutankhamen
, she underscores her skepticism by pointing out, quite correctly, that as inspector, Carter had worked on strengthening the retaining wall leading to the entrance of Ramesses VI’s tomb. That means he would have been working directly over the entrance to Tut’s tomb. How can one believe he didn’t know about it? No, she opines, he knew it, but he was saving it for just such a moment as this: It was his ace in the hole for when Carnarvon should get tired of bankrolling a fruitless series of digs at high price.

Why should Carter have proceeded in this way? Well, unfortunately, one such doubt leads to another—and another and another—until we see Carter as either the mastermind of a complicated plot unequaled in the annals of archaeology—or a fool!

Was he looting the tomb through secret entrances running into it from below, behind, or on the side (another theory proposed by less scrupulous theorists than Mahdy)? Did he have a fleet of airplanes hovering overhead to take away the treasure, as was widely believed not only by the villagers, but even by sober members of the Wafd (or Nationalist) Party? Did he—

But wait! Let us draw back from these crazy theories and return to the well-informed Ms. Mahdy (whose account of Tutankhamun’s tomb is filled with truly striking, original, and thought-provoking
insights). It is possible that she is right that Carter knew about Tut’s tomb from the beginning, but Carter’s motive—or rather his motive behind his motive—is not convincing.

Say he wanted to string Carnarvon along (motive number one, given by Mahdy). But why? Why is he buying time? One has to answer that—and in doing so, one falls into a morass of speculation that just does not jibe with something essential to Carter: For whatever fetishes, dishonesties, rages, and out-and-out craziness he was capable of, he had integrity in the higher sense.

The (literally) thousands of painstakingly accurate index cards he filled out in his clearance of Tut’s tomb; the fanatically detailed sketches of objects; the care with which he treated the rotting cloth and fragile wooden antiquities of the tomb; the fanaticism with which he polished the jewelry and restored every atom of the royal chariots—down to the gilded horse blinkers—all was a result of his love for his work, his genius, his devotion.

Did he give in to dark impulses? Certainly! Did he try to steal this or that? Without a doubt. Was he a part of some Mafia-style scam? It seems to the present writer that the answer is an emphatic no.

It is altogether possible to say that Carter’s digging away from Tut’s tomb when he was just within a few feet of it at the very beginning is altogether in the nature of things. There is an irony about the way the world is put together, as thinkers from the Egyptian Old Kingdom on have observed.

After the fact, one can exclaim with disbelief: How is it possible? But one would perhaps have to be out in the hot sun surrounded by rubble and singing workers to enter into Carter’s feverish gambler’s frame of mind. One would have to hear the laughter of his colleagues, to feel the insult of his dismissal as inspector, and to have had the experience of years in dark, claustrophobic tombs to know just what motivated Carter to act this way or that. And as the simplest explanation is the one generally accepted
in the scientific model, perhaps one should resort to simplicity as well in accounting for human motives.

Breasted continued his account of the Carnarvon-Carter meeting: “In this area,” Carter explains to Carnarvon, referring to the “triangle,” “he [Carter] had noted the foundation remains of a row of crude stone huts, evidently built by ancient tomb workmen, which he would have to remove in order to probe the terrain beneath them.”

Just what these ancient crude stone huts were must be explained. During the unstable last days of the Eighteenth Dynasty, Ay seized for himself the large, royal-size tomb that had been excavated in the West Valley—probably the one originally intended for Tut—and buried the boy-king in a tomb that had probably been dug for some high-placed but nonroyal aristocrat.

Ay did not live long, and his successor, General Horemheb, had no children, passing the throne along to a fellow soldier, Ramesses I, who founded the Nineteenth Dynasty. Which in turn was followed by a long line of Ramesses in the Twentieth Dynasty.

This was what preserved Tut for three millennia—that the Ramessides built over the relatively small tomb (small by Eighteenth Dynasty royal standards: a flight of sixteen steps, a corridor, an antechamber with a side room, or “annex,” on one side, a sealed door on the other leading to the burial chamber, with another storeroom, the treasury, to one side). Ramesses VI’s tomb was just a little higher up on the slope; and the Ramesside tomb workers also covered up the forgotten boy-king’s sepulcher with their huts.

Huts that Carter now proposed to demolish as he laid his cards on the table. Breasted concluded, “Now, said Carter, only when this triangle had been cleared would he feel that their work in The Valley had been absolutely completed. He therefore wished to propose that Carnarvon grant him permission to undertake one more season’s work at his—Carter’s—own expense, using Carnarvon’s concession, and the same workmen and equipment he had employed
for years; and if at the end of this final season he found nothing, he would of course, and with a good conscience, agree that they should abandon The Valley.

“But if on the other hand he should make a discovery, it should belong to Carnarvon exactly as under their long-standing arrangement….

“Carter’s proposal appealed to him [Carnarvon] as eminently fair—in fact, as too generous. He would agree, he said, to another and final season of excavation; but it would be at his own, not Carter’s expense….”

Poor Carnarvon! Oppressed by “post war stringencies” and heavy expenses! Burdened by a huge estate and a small army of old family servants and pensioners! The sole support of an extravagant wife and her indigent lover! Obliged to underwrite a famous stable and an infamous archaeologist—a fanatical excavator who was either a genius or a fool, who held out to him crumbling earthenware pots and torn linen bandages as a sure sign of treasure!

Poor Carnarvon, everyone had a hand in his pocket! He was shelling out left and right at a time when my lord of this was renting out his castle and my lady of that was going bankrupt—take the Tyssen-Amhersts, selling off their Sekhmets, a terrible business.

But he had given his word, and he did not go back on it. He stood the test. At a time when he did not know where his next plate of pâté de foie gras was coming from, he backed Carter on a final throw of the dice.

EVERYTHING HAPPENED VERY QUICKLY AFTER THIS MEETING
at Highclere—with such speed that Carter barely had the chance to catch his breath. It was as if they had to be tested first—each according to his capabilities—before the earth would open up under their feet and yield up what they had been seeking.

Toward the end of October, Carter returned to Luxor and told his reis to round up the workers—there would be another season after all. Then he strode out to the site to plan and record the ancient workers’ huts, which must first of all be torn down (at least those beneath Ramesses VI’s tomb). If he had been “sleepwalking” around this vital area before, now he was wide awake.

There was a layer of rubble under the huts, around three feet deep, and by November 3 the men began to clear this away, preparing to trench toward the south of the triangle.

But before they got very far, a young water boy, hired the day before, saw a step beneath the soil and cried out. Though sometimes Carter mentioned him in his lectures, in his written account the boy did not appear. Except for varying details such as this, Carter’s written account can be trusted (at least until he reaches the inner door). Indeed, it would be very difficult for him to depart from the truth, since every step of his way into the tomb was so closely watched.

“Hardly had I arrived on the work next morning,” he wrote,
“than the unusual silence, due to the stoppage of the work, made me realize that something out of the ordinary had happened … a step cut in the rock had been discovered underneath the very first hut to be attacked. This seemed too good to be true, but a short amount of extra clearing revealed the fact that we were actually in the entrance of a steep cut in the rock….”

It seemed too good to be true not only to Carter, but to skeptics who read his story. But if this sudden discovery was a “setup,” as has been suggested, surely Carter would have been more clever about it. He would have waited a month or at least a few weeks before “allowing” the discovery to take place. In any case, the nervous strain Carter suffered until the tomb was finally opened was evident to everyone who knew him. Far from being assured, he was like a man on trial for his life. He could not sleep, he could not eat, he could not stop speculating about what he had found—a cache or a tomb, an intact burial or an empty, plundered sepulcher.

The men had to keep digging, since “masses of rubbish overlay the cut.” They cleared step after step until finally they were positive it was a descending staircase they were working on. Carter stood rooted to the spot, watching until finally by the twelfth step the men reached “the upper part of a doorway, blocked, plastered, and sealed.”

The seal gave no clue as to the owner’s identity. It was the jackal over nine captives seal used by necropolis officials. Clearly whoever was buried here was of importance, but nothing more could be inferred. Carter hollowed out a peephole, but the passageway behind the door was filled in with rubble.

“Anything, literally anything, might lie beyond that passage,” he wrote, “and it needed all my self control to keep from breaking down the doorway and investigating then and there.”

But it was late in the day, and the sun was beginning to set. Clearing the passageway behind the door would take time. Its rubble must be sifted for possible clues, and Carter was a professional.
He might break the service’s rules, but he would never jeopardize the smallest scrap of knowledge to be gleaned from a find. Petrie had trained him too well for that.

Again, he was tortured by doubts. If it was Tut’s tomb, why was the entranceway so narrow? The necropolis seals were a good sign—but then, they didn’t necessarily prove anything. There might be nothing at the end of that passageway but a bundle of bones stripped of jewelry and amulets and reburied in antiquity by pious ancient priests.

If he had cleared away just a few more inches of rubble, if he had exposed just a little more of the lower part of the door, he would have found Tutankhamun’s royal seal as well. But that did not happen. For security, the workmen shoveled back all the debris onto the steps and then rolled huge flint boulders in front of its entrance. Carter’s reis bedded down for the night in front of the tomb, together with his most trusted men. And then Carter rode home through the moonlit desert.

The next day, he telegraphed Carnarvon, who was in England, “At last have made wonderful discovery in valley: a magnificent tomb with seals intact; recovered same for your arrival; congratulations.” Then he must sit back and wait—he owed it to his patron to do nothing until he arrived.

He had overstated the matter in his telegram, as critics point out. But what could be more natural? After so many years of pursuing Tut, of course he was carried away by the possibility of success. In any case, he was not the only one to be carried away. When Carnarvon appeared two weeks later with his young daughter, Lady Evelyn, there was electricity in the air. The province’s governor escorted them from the train with a guard of honor while crowds cheered, though of course, nothing was certain yet.