The Sleeper in the Sands (8 page)
I would have welcomed the chance to stay in Karnak and consider further such mysteries. My post, however, required me elsewhere, and so that same evening, as the twilight began to deepen, I crossed the Nile to the western bank. Mud-rich fields soon gave way to tawny sands and beyond me, its peaks dyed red by the setting of the sun, arced a low range of mountains. Here, in the ancient mythology, had lain the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead; just as the sun each evening would disappear beneath the western horizon, so also, it was conceived, would the spirits of the departed journey west towards the desert. I had come to work within the shadow of this boundary, for it was marked by monuments of unparalleled romance and interest, built as gateways to the underworld and forming, to this very day, one vast and fabulous city of the dead.
Here, over the next six years, I laboured hard to become the master of my chosen calling. I had been employed to work upon the greatest of the Pharaonic mortuary temples, barely visible when I first arrived upon the site but gradually revealed to be a masterpiece of art. The excavation was a back-breaking one, and I found nothing which could shed any direct light upon the mysteries of El-Amarna. But I was not impatient, and indeed I have ever looked back upon those years with the most cheerful of reminiscences. I have often considered how, if life had dealt me some other hand of cards, I might have made an excellent detective: not a Sherlock Holmes, perhaps, producing solutions with some great flash of insight, but rather one who accumulates his evidence with a steady care, hunting out every scrap of information, observing and analysing every clue. Certainly, I had realised that to pursue my ambitions I would need all the grounding I could possibly obtain -- and this I drew from my six years’ work upon the temple. For I learnt more there about the Ancient Egyptians, their history and their way of life, than in any other place or time; and it left me well equipped for the great adventure of my life.
Not that I had wholly neglected - during this period of my apprenticeship -- to explore those mysteries which had first set me out on such a course. Beyond the temple on which I was working there rose a mighty cliff; and beyond that cliff there stretched a bleak and wild ravine, remote from every mark or sound of life. The Valley of the Kings! Of all Egypt’s wonders, there is none, I suppose, which makes more instant appeal to the imagination. Here in ancient times whole dynasties of Pharaohs had been entombed within the rock, and still to this day, thousands of years after its abandonment, it can seem an awesome, holy, death-haunted place. One might almost believe that one is on another world, and the very paths which wind across the contours of the valley, whiter and more blinding than the sand and rocks themselves, can seem like the veins of some calcified monster, the beat of its life long since drained and turned to stone. Certainly, it is hard to explain those impressions which go to make the entering of the tombs themselves so unsettling, for one cannot adequately express the silence, the echoing steps, the dark shadows, the hot, breathless air; nor describe the aura of vast Time, and the penetrating of it which stirs one so profoundly.
Yet although the tombs of the Valley possessed an incomparable magnificence and beauty, I found nothing on the walls which could compare with the portrait of Nefer-titi, whose face, beauteous and deathly, still rose on occasion before my mind’s eye, surprising my fancy, or sometimes my dreams, as though luring me onwards to some unglimpsed goal. Nor did I discover any of those strange symbols and Arabic inscriptions which I had traced at El-Amarna; yet in truth, the finding of such marks would have surprised me more than their absence did. For the Aten had never been the guardian of the Valley; it was not the radiant image of a single god who had kept watch upon the tombs, but rather the ancient divinities of the underworld -- those same divinities Akh-en-Aten had been so desperate to suppress.
Above all, reproduced again and again upon the walls, I found the image of Osiris -- Osiris, the first King of Egypt, whom his own brother Seth had sought to overthrow. Inspecting the artwork, I would recall the legend which Newberry had related to me; how twice the god of evil had murdered his brother, first by sealing him within a sarcophagus, then by dismembering and scattering his limbs across the world. Yet I was also reminded of how Osiris had then been brought back from the dead by Isis, his sister, the Great Goddess of Magic, to reign for ever in the Underworld; and it was in this role that he had been portrayed upon the walls of the tombs, as the eternal King of the realm of the Dead. The legends did not reveal how Isis had achieved the mystery of his resurrection; and yet his presence as a guardian over the royal sarcophagi - his expression inscrutable, his lips faintly smiling -- appeared to hint that the secret had somehow been vouchsafed, to the souls of the Pharaohs at the very least. Again, thinking of this, I would find myself puzzling over Akh-en-Aten; at what had persuaded him to abandon such a god, and the prospect of an eternity of life after death.
Regrettably, without the opportunity of excavating in the Valley I had little chance of discovering answers to such questions. Indeed, only one faint avenue of investigation suggested itself. Recalling Newberry’s discovery of the legend of the restless King, it struck me that there might perhaps be similar folk tales abroad in the neighbourhood of Thebes. Certainly, there was one tradition which had been preserved from time immemorial amongst the villagers of the area, for the Valley remained what it had been since the age of the Pharaohs, the profitable hunting-ground of tomb-thieves and robbers. Evidence of their labours was everywhere to be found: open or half-filled mummy pits, heaps of rubbish, great mounds of rock debris with, here and there, fragments of coffins and shreds of linen mummy-wrappings protruding from the sand. Surely, I thought to myself, the accumulated wisdom of such professionals might contain some fragments of information which I could put to my own use. By this time I was able to converse in Arabic with tolerable ease, and on the darker nights, when the pestilential gnats and midges had tired me out of all patience, I would sometimes rise from my quarters and visit the headman of a neighbouring village. It is true my inquiries met with no immediate response, but I was neither surprised nor especially disheartened by this. For I had the impression, when I asked about the legends of the ancient tombs, that something was being kept back from me, and I found evidence enough that such legends might indeed be still alive. Sitting by the coffee-hearth of the headman of a village, one could often listen to reciters of romances who, without any books at all, had committed their subjects to memory, and afforded the villagers wonderful entertainment. Their recitations contained a good deal of history and ancient lore, and I would occasionally hear, with reference to the Valley, vague allusions to some great and wonderful secret, protected, so it seemed, by a terrible curse. It was hard to make anything specific of such stuff, but it certainly served to pique my curiosity, and I would often find myself wondering what more the village poets might not know.
While I was being employed upon the mortuary temples, away from the Valley, such a question might not have seemed an urgent one. But then in the autumn of 1899, towards the end of my sixth year of field work at Thebes, a dramatic upturn in my fortunes occurred which was to place the question into the sharpest of focus. It appeared that my efforts to prepare myself for the excavator’s life had not gone wholly unnoticed, for I was suddenly offered, as though from the blue, the post of Chief Inspector of Antiquities. This was a doubly unexpected honour, for not only was I still very young -- a mere 25 years old -- but I had the far worse disadvantage of not being French. Petrie’s prejudices had influenced me strongly: I had always assumed the worst of the
Service des Antiquites.
But the head of that organisation, Monsieur Gaston Maspero, was in reality a man of remarkable discernment, and it may be, indeed, all the more so for his not being English -- only a Frenchman, I suspect, would have appointed a man of my humble background to the post. I accepted it, of course, with the utmost alacrity, and with a sense of excitement intermingled with the utmost anticipation; for henceforth I was to be responsible for the antiquities of the whole of Upper Egypt -- and in particular, for the exploration of the Valley of the Kings.
At last, then, I reflected with a measure of satisfaction, I could count myself a true archaeologist. Nevertheless, in those first few months of my appointment, I remembered the lesson I had learned years before when I had seen the portrait of Nefer-titi dissolve before my eyes, and I bore in mind how the pre-eminent virtue of my chosen calling must ever be patience, patience, patience. Of course, I longed to plunge into excavations and make great discoveries, but the over-riding requirement, as I saw it, was first to make a close inspection of the already discovered tombs. And so it was, in my favoured character of a detective investigating a crime, that I began my hunt for clues.
Almost straight away, I uncovered something startling. It appeared that someone had already been around the tombs before me: in all the most recently uncovered ones tiny amulets had been left, either upon the breasts of the mummies in their sarcophagi or at the feet of paintings of Osiris on the walls. The amulets themselves appeared to be of recent manufacture, and yet the image they bore made my heart begin to pound, for although very roughly reproduced, it was unmistakably a portrait of the sun, with the two familiar worshippers crouching underneath. Here was a pretty puzzle to be sure! What a copy of the Aten was doing in Thebes, many hundreds of miles away from El-Amarna, I could not begin to imagine -- nor what the natives might be up to, manufacturing an image of such a clearly pagan nature. Yet I was certain, remembering the graffiti I had found at El-Amarna -- similarly by a Muslim, similarly of the sun -- that the parallels were exact, and that such a correspondence, perhaps, was the greatest puzzle of them all.
Some faint light at least was shed upon the mysterious affair by the supervisor of my workmen, Ahmed Girigar. He was a man in whom I had an absolute trust, for he had worked under a succession of excavators and possessed an integrity which was rivalled only by his knowledge of the Valley’s terrain. One day, when I had found another amulet laid upon a mummy, I handed it over to him. Ahmed inspected it suspiciously.
‘Do you recognise it?’ I asked.
He shrugged with disdain. ‘It is a proof,’ he answered me, ‘that folly is still alive and flourishing.’
Intrigued, I asked him to explain himself.
Ahmed shrugged a second time. ‘It is believed, when a tomb is uncovered in the Valley, that one of these symbols must be left upon the mummy, so that the spirits of the Kings will not be woken from their sleep.’
I frowned. ‘Why would they be woken?’
‘It is nonsense, sir, all nonsense.’
‘Naturally,’ I pressed him, ‘but what do people say?’
‘There is an old story . . .’ Ahmed paused to glance down at the mummy -- ‘a very old story . . . that, long, long ago, a tomb was discovered. Great treasures were found inside it -- unimaginable wealth - but also a secret of terrible evil . . .’ He swallowed and paused again, appearing suddenly uncomfortable; but I could not permit him to halt now, so I insisted that he continue. ‘The secret?’ I demanded. ‘What was the secret?’
Ahmed frowned at me, then suddenly laughed. ‘Why, sir, what do you think? In these foolish stories of ours, wherever there is treasure there must also be a demon. This particular demon had once been a Pharaoh, buried in his tomb. When he was disturbed, he punished those who had released him, for he had the power to summon up the spirits of the dead.’ Ahmed paused again, and bent down closer by the mummy in its coffin. ‘The demon, by Allah’s grace, was destroyed in the end. And so it was, you understand, sir, that the tomb which had been disturbed was sealed up once again, and for many years the Valley was left well alone -- for it was feared that wherever treasure might be uncovered, there also the demons would certainly be found.’
‘Whereas now . . .’
Ahmed glanced up at me inquiringly.
‘Whereas now,’ I repeated, ‘people no longer seem afraid of any demons.’
‘Oh no, sir,’ Ahmed whispered, his face suddenly solemn, ‘they are still afraid.’ He raised his candle to inspect the amulet. ‘But has it not ever been this way?’ He smiled faintly. ‘That greed, in the end, will always conquer fear?’
Well, I reflected later, that was a pertinent enough warning for any Chief Inspector to be offered, and I certainly had no intention of ignoring it. I duly installed gates upon the most prominent tombs, but, alas! - Ahmed’s words were to return to haunt me all the same. Barely months after he had spoken them, the very tomb in which we had been standing together was brutally ransacked, with even the wrappings being torn from the mummy. Fortunately, there had been no valuable objects left upon the body, and the damage to the tomb itself was only very slight. I could not help but understand fully now, however, what a task of conservation I had before me, and so I was careful to fit the gates even more securely than before, and to install electric lights. I also stepped up my night patrols and to be sure, roaming across the cliffs alone and unarmed, always on the lookout for the marks of clandestine excavations, did not want for excitement. At such moments, with the blaze of the stars above me and the tombs all around, it did not seem so hard to believe in demons after all!
Nor, if truth be told, had the proof of the tomb-robbers’ continuing interest in the Valley altogether disappointed me. I had been in the area of Thebes long enough now, and grown sufficiently familiar with the habits of its natives, to have developed a healthy respect for their lore. I could not, of course, readily admit this to my colleagues in the government service, who would have viewed such a trust as both degrading and foolish -- yet I had grown convinced that superstitions might sometimes veil the germs of fact. Certainly, the tradition to which Ahmed Girigar had alluded - that a tomb filled with treasure had once been found by the villagers - appeared exceedingly plausible; and if one such tomb had already been found, then why should not a second be uncovered in the future? On this point, at least, the logic of the tomb-robbers struck me as being perfectly sound - so sound, indeed, that I was eager to follow it myself.
