The Shadow King (8 page)

Eventually Carnarvon stepped in. Unless the Egyptian government insisted on taking the mummy to Cairo, “Tutankhamun’s body will be treated with utmost reverence and will be left lying in the sarcophagus unmoved from the spot where he has lain for three thousand years,” he wrote in The Times.18 “I have not yet discussed the point, nor do I view with favor the somewhat unwholesome and morbid taste which some people seem to enjoy of looking at mummies exposed in glass cases in museums.”

Ordinary people, however, seemed deeply concerned about the idea of disturbing Tutankhamun at all. A correspondent to the London Times compared the corpse to that of Britain’s not-long deceased queen: “I wonder how many of us would like to think that in the year, say, 5923, the tomb of Queen Victoria would be invaded by a party of foreigners who robbed it of its contents, took the body of the great Queen from the mausoleum … and exhibited it to all and sundry.”19

In the United States, a writer for the New York Times was even more upset: “It does not seem to have entered anyone’s thoughts to be shocked at the desecration of the tomb of the great King Tutankhamun. Science having abolished the Supreme and given omniscience to the atom is no doubt suitably employed in the ghoulish task of rifling an ancient tomb. It would be more becoming to Christian nations to take the bodies of the priests and kings now lying in the defilement of their public museums and reverently restore them to their sacred resting places.”20

As the cultural historian Christopher Frayling put it in his 1992 book The Face of Tutankhamun, “The balance of opinion was that the archaeologists were transgressing a deeply felt taboo, and they would surely pay for it. Like Drs Faustus, Frankenstein and Jekyll … the scientists who dug in the sand would be destroyed by the results of their researches, because they had gone too far.”21

BUT CARTER HAD NO INTENTION of stopping. By mid-February, the antechamber of the tomb had been cleared and swept, except for the two guardian statues on either side of the sealed door. It was time to see what was beyond it. Carter arranged a grand opening on February 16, with a series of important figures invited to view the inside of an Egyptian king’s burial chamber: the first time such an extraordinary spectacle had ever been witnessed by modern humanity.

Except that it wasn’t. That morning, Carnarvon drove to the Valley for the opening with his half-brother Mervyn and his daughter Evelyn. According to Mervyn’s diary,22 Evelyn leaned over to him and whispered something “under strictest promise of secrecy … They had both been into the Second Chamber!”

After discovering the sealed doorway, Carter’s little group had apparently been unable to resist reopening the sealed door where robbers had previously broken through, and had crept inside for a sneak preview. It’s not clear when, but it was probably shortly after the tomb was discovered. Evelyn also alludes to the episode in a letter to Carter, written on December 26—six weeks before the official opening—in which she tells him of her father’s continuing excitement about the “Holy of Holies” (the burial chamber). “I can never thank you sufficiently for allowing me to enter its precincts,” she adds. “It was the Great Moment of my life.”23

Carter never publicly admitted to the breakin, but many years later, Lucas wrote in a couple of scholarly articles that Carter told him he did indeed make a hole in the wall, then resealed it afterward, covering the area with a basket lid and reeds so that no one would suspect.24, 25 After his faux pas with Lord Cromer at Deir el-Bahri twenty years earlier, perhaps Carter can be forgiven for wanting to check what was beyond the door before arranging the grand opening.

Now, what he and his friends had seen was to be revealed to the world. There were about twenty privileged spectators. As well as Carter and the Carnarvons, and the rest of Carter’s team, there were Egyptologists, antiquities officials and politicians, including Pierre Lacau (the latest director of the antiquities service), Sir William Garstin, and a number of high-ranking Egyptian officials. After dining in the luncheon tomb, the party assembled in front of Tutankhamun’s tomb at a quarter past two.

“We are going to have a concert, Carter is going to sing a song,” announced Carnarvon, glancing nervously at the assembled journalists.26 The VIPs removed their coats and filed down the steep passage into the small antechamber, where rows of chairs had been set up for them, and the guardian statues had been covered with wooden planking, with a raised platform between them that looked like a stage. Under the glare of two electric lamps, Carter mounted the platform and attacked the top of the sealed doorway with a chisel, carefully chipping away the plaster and small stones. Within about ten minutes, he had a hole big enough to shine an electric torch through. But all he could see, about two feet from the doorway, was a solid wall of gold.

After that, the going got tougher. The door was made of huge slabs of stone, some precariously balanced, which took about two hours to clear. The air was hot and close, and the atmosphere horribly tense. The clink of the hammer and chisel echoed around the walls. At one point, Carnarvon retreated outside for a cigarette, his face pale and his forehead dripping with sweat. But he couldn’t bear to miss anything, and threw it away after two minutes to go back into the tomb. Not everyone was so excited, though—one elderly Pasha was heard to murmur that he would far rather be in his club in Cairo.

Once the door had been removed, it became clear that the golden wall was the side of a huge gilt shrine that almost filled the chamber, built to protect the king’s mummy in its sarcophagus. The floor of the burial chamber was about four feet lower than that of the antechamber. Carter lowered himself down into the narrow space between the door and the shrine, carrying a lamp, and edged cautiously to the corner of the shrine. Two alabaster vases blocked his way, so he passed them back to the antechamber, at which point Carnarvon and the portly Lacau squeezed down to join him.

The shrine was around seventeen by eleven feet, leaving a gap of about two feet on each side. Its roof almost touched the ceiling. It was made of wood, completely covered with gold, with inlays of blue faience* on its sides and covered with magic symbols to ensure its strength and safety. On the floor on the far side, eleven oars were carefully laid out—the magic oars the king would need to ferry himself across the waters of the underworld.

The main concern was whether the ancient thieves had penetrated the shrine. At its eastern end, round to the right, was a pair of enormous folding doors, closed and bolted but not sealed. The three men drew back the bolts and swung open the doors with an ominous creak. Immediately, they saw a second shrine. Between the two were some alabaster ornaments, and a little painted pot topped by a cat with a pink tongue that Carnarvon couldn’t take his eyes off. But more importantly, these doors were bolted, sealed, and tied up with string. The robbers had not made it beyond this point. Tutankhamun must still be lying there, intact.

Admitting to “a feeling of intrusion,”27 the men reclosed the doors and carried on around the shrine. In the far corner of the chamber, they found yet another low doorway, leading into a fourth small room. There was no door and as they peeped in, they saw some of the greatest treasures yet. Facing the doorway, on the far side, was what Carter described as “the most beautiful monument I have ever seen.”28 It was a large, shrine-shaped chest, covered in gold, topped with a cornice of cobras. At each corner stood four golden statues, facing inward but looking out over their shoulders—slender, graceful goddesses, with their arms protectively outstretched.

In front of the chest was the black figure of a jackal, the god Anubis, resting on a portable wooden sled and swathed in a linen cloth. Staring straight at them, he was elegant and alert, with golden eyes, curved claws, and huge bat-like ears. Otherwise, the room was filled with shrine-shaped boxes, caskets of ivory and wood, miniature coffins, and a profusion of model boats.

Carnarvon and Lacau returned to the antechamber, after which the other guests were admitted in pairs. Carter stood in the far room (which he named the treasury) to guide them, enjoying the succession of dazed, bewildered faces. As each pair peered in through the doorway, he lifted one of the box lids with a flourish, to reveal a sumptuous ivory fan, plumed with perfectly preserved ostrich feathers.

At a quarter past five, the party filed out of the tomb, hot, dusty, and disheveled. “The very Valley seemed to have changed for us and taken on a more personal aspect,” wrote Carter.29 “We had been given the Freedom.”

The following days were given up to a succession of high-profile visits to the tomb, as Luxor hummed with excitement. According to the New York Times, “the west bank of the Nile was black with masses of vehicles and people.”30 Every horse-and ass-drawn carriage in the region had been commandeered to take the officials and guests from the river up to the Valley, with herds of donkeys and crowds of donkey boys and hangers on, not to mention no fewer than seven motorcars, and a motorcycle with a sidecar. The water was congested with feluccas and motor launches, and throngs of spectators lined the river on both sides to watch the various celebrities on their way past. One highlight was the passage of the queen of the Belgians, dressed in white with a gray fox stole, veil, and broad-brimmed hat.

Each eminent guest insisted on squeezing round between the shrine and the wall, with two or three of the least slender getting stuck and needing help. “Fortunately the tabernacle is admirably built of wood,” said the New York Times.31 “Not every similar structure built today would last 3,000 years and stand as much pushing.”

On February 28, the tomb was closed for the season, and Carter’s team focused on their work in the lab, cataloging and conserving the hundreds of objects retrieved from the antechamber so far. With no new discoveries, the excitement and press attention started to ease off. But in mid-March, something happened that changed everything. Lord Carnarvon got bitten by a mosquito.

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* Malek has since retired.

* As with many details of this story, different sources give varying accounts. In his excavation journal held at the Griffith Institute, Carter says he answered, “Yes, it is wonderful.” An account written by Carnarvon gives the rather less catchy “There are some marvellous objects here.”5 But the most memorable (and most quoted) version is the one Carter came up with later (probably due to editing by his coauthor Arthur Mace) in his popular account of the discovery, published in 1923, in which he simply says: “Yes, wonderful things.”6

* Although this is what Carter says in his journal, it has been claimed, for example in Thomas Hoving’s 1978 book Tutankhamun: The Untold Story,7 that Carter and his three British companions actually first entered the tomb the night before. This is tough to prove but it doesn’t seem that unlikely, especially as Carter and his friends almost certainly did enter the burial chamber ahead of its official opening (see page 34), though they probably didn’t get that far on this first night.

* Photography has changed a bit since the 1920s. Burton took his pictures directly onto glass plate negatives, rather than film.

* Labels on wine jars from the tomb also suggest a short reign, as none of the wine dates from later than the ninth year of Tutankhamun’s rule, but that wasn’t known at this point (as the wine jars were in the burial chamber and the annex, which hadn’t yet been cleared).

* Sometimes described as the first high-tech ceramic, faience was a brightly colored glaze (usually blue-green) made by heating finely ground sand, lime, and salt or ash. It was probably intended to mimic hard-to-get gems and precious stones.

LORD CARNARVON KNOCKED the top off the mosquito bite, on his left cheek, while shaving in his suite at the Winter Palace hotel. It became infected, and thanks to Carnarvon’s already weak constitution, the infection soon developed into blood poisoning. On March 14, he traveled to Cairo, planning to head home from there, but his condition grew rapidly worse and he developed a high fever. Five years before the discovery of antibiotics, there was little that his doctors could do but watch and wait.

After seeming to recover slightly, the patient relapsed on March 28. His temperature rose again and the infection reached his lungs, causing pneumonia. At two o’clock in the morning on April 5, 1923, with his wife, daughter, and son at his bedside, Carnarvon died.

And so began the legend of Tutankhamun’s curse. Even before Carnarvon’s death, the newspapers were full of suggestions that he had been afflicted not by any natural illness, but by the mummy’s dreadful revenge.

A mystical writer called Marie Corelli (her real name was Mary MacKay) was one of the first to capitalize on Carnarvon’s misfortune. She declared that she had personally warned the Earl of the dangers of entering the tomb, and said she wasn’t surprised that disaster might befall “those daring explorers who rifle the tombs of dead monarchs.” She cited an ancient book in her possession on Egyptian history, which apparently stated that some of the pharaohs were buried with “divers secret potions enclosed in boxes in such wise that they who touched them shall not know how they came to suffer.”1

Other psychics followed, also claiming to have warned Carnarvon against working in the tomb. He had apparently replied: “If at this moment of my life all the mummies of Egypt were to warn me I would go on with my project just the same.”2

Stories began to spread about written warnings that Carter had allegedly found in the tomb and suppressed. One rumor said that a clay tablet found over the tomb’s entrance had read: “Death shall come on swift wings to whoever toucheth the tomb of Pharaoh.” Carter supposedly buried it in the sand in case it scared his laborers into stopping their work. Another story featured a reed torch that was indeed found at the entrance to the treasury, with an inscription: “It is I who hinder the sand from choking flame. I have set aflame the desert, I have caused the path to be mistaken. I am for the protection of Osiris.”3 A fictional extra line was added: “And I will call all those who cross this threshold into the sacred precincts of the King who lives for ever.”