The Murder of King Tut (18 page)

But most of all, Carter spent those two weeks in a state of perpetual self-doubt and second-guessing. It was as if his entire
life was tied up in this tomb.

“One thing puzzled me, and that was the smallness of the opening in comparison with the ordinary valley tombs,” he wrote.
“Could it be the tomb of a noble buried here by royal consent? Was it a royal cache, a hiding place to which a mummy and its
equipment had been removed for safety? Or was it actually the tomb of the king for whom I had spent so many years in search?”

As the days slowly passed and the news rapidly spread around the world, Howard Carter became a public figure.

This terrified him. Not that he minded the fame—after years of failure and struggle, it was nice to have his ego massaged.
But if the tomb was empty he would be a laughingstock everywhere, and his reputation for failure would only grow.

Carter tried the best he could to go about his business, spending night after sleepless night waiting for Lord Carnarvon and
his family to arrive.

At last they were here!

As the train settled to a stop, the dapper earl, wearing a scarf and wool coat on the cool November day, stepped down from
his first-class compartment. His daughter Evelyn, a twenty-year-old beauty, was at his side. She and Carter had enjoyed a
clandestine enchantment the season before, despite the nearly thirty-year difference in their ages. The two were “very thick”
in the words of one chatty observer, though with Carnarvon spending night and day with Carter in Luxor, it was impossible
for him to take the romance with Evelyn very far.

Lady Evelyn Herbert and Howard Carter. Their purported romance was one of the few sources of friction between Carter and Lord
Carnarvon.

Carter greeted them both eagerly, handing Evelyn a bouquet of white flowers. Next, the three would mount donkeys for the six-mile
ride to the Valley of the Kings.

The path would take them through the lush green fields outside Luxor. They would then cross the Nile by ferry and continue
down the dusty dirt path to the valley.

But even though Lady Evelyn was her usual radiant self, Lord Carnarvon was weak and tired. He needed rest.

The opening of the tomb would have to wait one more day.

A disappointed Howard Carter led his guests to his home, where he would spend yet another sleepless night.

November 24, 1922

THE FOLLOWING DAY, Carter, along with Lord Carnarvon and Lady Evelyn, arrived at the site. For Carter this had been a thirty-year
wait, but even for the Carnarvons the suspense must have been great.

The heavy boulders were rolled away from the tomb. Then Carter’s men began clearing the steps.

One group dug away the bits of debris while another swept the steps clean. But this was not as simple as shoveling sand out
of a hole, for as they dug deeper and deeper, ancient artifacts mixed with the soil.

Lady Evelyn was beside herself about the historical significance of it all, lovingly studying each new pottery shard or amulet—scarabs,
they were called—that turned up in the mountain of dirt.

But Carter’s spirits soon plummeted. In his mind these bits of rubble confirmed that he had found not a tomb but a royal trash
heap. “The balance of evidence would seem to indicate a cache rather than a tomb,” he admitted dourly, “a miscellaneous collection
of objects of the Eighteenth Dynasty kings.”

The shards were stamped with the names of kings he knew well: Amenhotep the Magnificent, Akhenaten, Tuthmosis. Less than pleased
with what he was seeing, Carter passed the day looking down from the top step, thinking this might be the end of his career—and
an ignominious final chapter at that.

When he was not having such thoughts, he was bent to the ground sifting through whatever new shovelful of dirt the workers
had exhumed, now and then admonishing them to be careful. His mood blackened further.

Finally, “by the afternoon of the 24th the whole staircase was clear, sixteen steps in all, and we were able to make inspection
of the sealed doorway,” he wrote.

He was terribly disappointed by what he saw.

“The tomb was not absolutely intact, as we had hoped,” he wrote.

Someone had been there before Carter.

November 24, 1922

WITH THE DOOR now fully exposed to sunlight and air, there was clear evidence that the plaster seals had been tampered with.
A party of tomb robbers—perhaps two—had actually entered the tomb, then had taken the time to
reseal
the door when they had finished ransacking it.

Carter’s mind raced in all the wrong directions. Would the break-in have happened in modern times? Impossible. The workmen’s
huts and loose soil above the bedrock predated the tomb to the time of Rameses VI, at the very least. This meant that whoever
rifled through the tomb had done it in a two-hundred-year window between the reigns of Akhenaten and Rameses.

There was one thing that gave Carter hope: the seal of Tutankhamen was stamped on the doorway.

This led to more questions: Was the seal evidence that this mysterious king, about whom so little was known, was buried inside?
Or was it merely an indication that he had been present or in power when the remains or belongings of others had been relocated
to this site? After all, the same seals had been found on the tomb that Davis had once claimed belonged to Tut.

As the light faded and work stopped for the day, the symbol taunted him. Carter’s mind kept going back to the same question:
Tut?

If so, this could be the greatest discovery of modern time.

In the morning Carter would get an answer. At dawn, he planned to be the first man in three thousand years to break down that
door.

November 25, 1922

IT WAS TIME. Well, almost time. Before the door could be destroyed, the royal seals had to be photographed for the historical
record.

This singular honor fell to Lord Carnarvon, president of his local camera club back home in England. The earl now stood at
the bottom of the narrow stairwell in the pale dawn light, fussing over shutter speeds and apertures.

He was calm and cool as he went about his work—a very professional and dedicated amateur. The last thing Lord Carnarvon wanted
to do was make a mistake that would lead to bad photos—or, worse, no photos at all.

Carter, on the other hand, was beside himself with anxiety. Complicating matters, a much-loathed bureaucrat from the Antiquities
Service had arrived to oversee the entry. Rex Engelbach, nicknamed “Trout” by Carter and Carnarvon for his sallow demeanor,
was firm in stating that his job title gave him the right to be the first person to enter the tomb.

Carter had never liked Engelbach, with his high-handed arrogance and lack of Egyptology credentials, but on this morning Carter
refused to let Engelbach bother him. After a career defined by hard work and failure, Carter was finally about to enter the
tomb of Tut. This was no time to be arguing with civil servants. But there was no way that Engelbach was getting into that
tomb first. No way in hell.

Carter descended the steps with his sketchbook to draw each of the seals and impressions. These would serve as a backup for
Carnarvon’s photos, and now the two friends worked side by side at the base of the cramped stairwell.

Carter’s sketches were precise in scale and detail. No aspect of the designs went unrecorded.

Only at midmorning, when he had completed the drawings, did Carter trot back up the stairway with Lord Carnarvon.

It was time
.

Carter ordered his workmen to demolish the door.

“On the morning of the 25th,” wrote Carter, “we removed the actual blocking of the door; consisting of rough stones carefully
built from floor to lintel, and heavily plastered on their outer faces to make the seal impressions.”

The crowd gathered atop the steps strained to see what was on the other side. Shadows and debris made it impossible to tell.

Carter walked down the steps to have a look. He found himself peering into a long narrow hallway. The smooth floor sloped
down into the earth, a descending corridor.

Top to bottom, Carter wrote, the hallway “was filled completely with stone and rubble, probably the chip from its own excavation.
This filling, like the doorway, showed distinct signs of more than one opening and re-closing of the tomb, the untouched part
consisting of clean white chip mingled with dust; whereas the disturbed part was mainly of dark flint.”

How far into the ground the hallway led, it was impossible to know. But one thing was certain: someone else had been there.

“An irregular corner had been cut through the original filling at the upper corner on the left side,” noted Carter. Someone
had burrowed through there long ago searching for whatever lay on the other side.

Carnarvon snapped a photograph of the rubble pile. Then a weary Carter gave the order for his men to clear it away, chips
and dust and all. Sooner or later the tunnel would have to end.

With any luck, the tomb robbers hadn’t taken everything.

November 26, 1922

IT WAS JUST AFTER LUNCH, which had gone mostly untouched by Carter. He and Lady Evelyn were sifting through a basket of rubble,
when a digger ran up the steps with the news: the workers had found a second door.

His heart racing in anticipation, Carter readied himself to go back down the steps to have a look and evaluate the new discovery.

It had been a tumultuous and nerve-racking twenty-four hours for everyone. The diggers had labored into the night, hauling
debris out by the basketful. Yet the corridor was still a seemingly endless repository of rubble when they finally quit working.

Making matters worse, the rock was laced with what Carter described as “broken potsherds, jar sealings, alabaster jars, whole
and broken, vases of painted pottery, numerous fragments of smaller articles, and water skins”—further signs that this could
be an ancient trash heap,
not
a tomb.

Work resumed at first light. Carter and Lady Evelyn carefully sifted through each new basket of debris, searching for historical
clues. Carter was an Egyptologist, first and foremost. To him, this diligence was a matter of preserving history. Rather than
simply dumping the rubble, as Theodore Davis would have done, Carter meticulously cataloged and recorded each new discovery,
however small or seemingly insignificant.

To the anxious onlookers—desperate to see inside the tomb and literally baking in the desert sun—the record keeping was a
monotonous waste of time that was slowing things down.

Excitement shot through the crowd as Carter again walked down the steps, now trailed by Lord Carnarvon, Lady Evelyn, and Arthur
Callender. The four of them jostled for space with the diggers as they traded places in the slender passage.

Dust filled the air, as did “the fever of suspense.”

The second door was an almost exact duplicate of the previous one. Faint seal impressions were stamped into the surface, bearing
the name Tutankhamen.

But this door too had been penetrated in ancient times. The symbol for a royal necropolis was also stamped into the door,
and Carter couldn’t help being pessimistic. “It was a cache that we were about to open, not a tomb,” he wrote.

Still, he stepped forward and began clawing a hole in the upper-left corner of the passageway. His hands trembled as he reached
up to pull away thick chunks of plaster and rock.

Callender handed him a long slender iron rod. Grasping it firmly, Carter jammed it into the small opening until it poked clean
through to the other side. He tested for further resistance. There was none—no wall of limestone chips or pottery shards,
just air.

He had actually broken through to the next level.

Carter had no idea what might happen next, but the great moment had finally arrived. Was it a cache, or was it a tomb? There
was only one way to find out. “There lay the sealed doorway, and behind it was the answer to the question,” Carter recalled.

He clawed at the hole he had opened with the rod. Then he worked with his bare hands, the only digger.

He figured that he deserved as much.

1324 BC

THE EYES GAVE THEM AWAY—always
.

So eyes were what Ankhesenpaaten studied whenever a member of the royal court entered her presence during these dangerous
times. As she stood alone in her study, the morning sun barely brightening the large stone room, she steeled herself for another
day.

If their eyes were slightly downcast, they thought she had killed her husband. The same was true of those who fixed strained
smiles on their faces while avoiding her gaze.

She could not quite describe the look of those who believed her. But there weren’t many in the palace who did. It seemed that
she had already been tried and found guilty.