The Visitors (77 page)
To tell the truth, which on the whole I’ve tried to do here, I’m none too sure I’ll see these crocuses in bloom, let alone the daffodils. But let’s not dwell on that. Far more interesting, and far more significant, is what happened next, when I’d completed my bulb inspection. One moment, there I was in my chilly garden, the towers of the new London in the distance against the unclouded blue of the January sky, and my wintry view of Highgate and its graves unimpeded by foliage. I was standing at the end of the lawn, close to the boundary wall. Below it, the ground falls away sharply to the beautiful wilderness of the western section of Highgate’s cemetery. I was admiring the angel I like best, the one with spread wings, a blind passionless face and an uplifted, pointing hand, when I realised that this area, empty of people a moment before, was now occupied. Standing near the angel, between it and a pyramid, her attitude contemplative, her head bent, was a woman.
There was a transparency to her, you could almost see through her, and at first I assumed I’d imagined her. But then I realised, no; it was my own vision, my eyes that were at fault; they had made this figure blurry and uncertain. Once I concentrated, I could see that she was real. She began to walk towards me, threading her way rapidly between the stones; on her face was an eager look of expectation that I recognised. Why, she was
young
, I realised – a young woman poised on the very cusp of adult life, her eyes brimming with the future, everything ahead of her, all life’s infinite possibilities, there for the grasping. My heart lifted. I moved forward to greet her. As she came close, I recognised her.
Coming to a halt below my boundary wall, she looked up at me with laughter in her eyes and lifted her hand to me. I knew that wall was insurmountable. I feared I’d be unable to reach her. But she raised herself on her toes and with a smile caught my cold hand in her warm one. She began speaking, and an impulsive, eloquent speaker she was too. She showed no reserve. I replied with equal openness. When we had finished this rapid, heartfelt communication, she gave me a quicksilver glance, pressed my hand, turned and swiftly returned the way she had come. I lost sight of her among the crosses, obelisks and angels.
It was three o’clock. The light was fast fading. I went indoors. I closed the shutters, opened the hall door so my ghosts might have ease of access, encouraged the fire, settled myself in my familiar chair. I thought of Dr Fong’s Egypt and my own, and the places to which my Egypt had taken me. I thought of voyages made, of the Valley I’d known in my childhood, and the way it had lain hidden behind the hills on the horizon.
I closed my eyes. In an hour or so, I’d resume those ordinary tasks, those little rituals of every day that serve to punctuate the passing hours for all of us. I’d make tea, switch on the lamps, banish the evening’s encroaching dark. Meanwhile, in the silent dusk of the long afternoon, I waited in patient expectation. I knew it would come, must come; and at last I discerned it. Difficult to identify; hard to put a name to it, but from the shadows, the shadows by the bookshelves I supposed, came the faintest of sounds, a gentle exhalation, a plaintive stirring, a sigh and an appeal.
Howard Carter
Carter’s account of Tutankhamun’s tomb was published in three volumes: the first, co-written with Arthur Mace, came out in 1923; the final volume in 1933. He never progressed beyond notes for the proposed six-volume definitive account of his work on the tomb, and never pursued the burial place of Alexander the Great, although he spoke of this project to numerous people in his final years. Once the excavation in the Valley was over, he wrote a series of autobiographical sketches about his life in Egypt; these remain unpublished.
On his death in 1939, the bulk of Carter’s estate went to his niece, Phyllis Walker; it included the contents of his London flat, where artefacts were found that without question came from the tomb of Tutankhamun. They included a headrest carved from lapis lazuli bearing the king’s cartouche, and a
shabti
figure
that Carter had always kept on his desk. His niece at once attempted to return these to Egypt, but the process was interrupted by the outbreak of war. Deposited at the Egyptian Embassy in London in 1940, they finally reached Egypt under the auspices of King Farouk in 1946. The King then presented them to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. ‘Nobody will dare to make inappropriate insinuations in… a matter in which His Majesty himself is interested,’ wrote the then Director of the Antiquities Service.
Some commentators believe these London-apartment artefacts were taken from the tomb by Carter for himself; others that they were part of Lord Carnarvon’s collection, removed from it by Carter when he supervised its sale, since he knew them to be identifiable. There is no definite proof either way. Other artefacts found in his house in Egypt after his death and bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York
did
come from the tomb, however, so the sad fact that Carter removed artefacts and and kept them seems irrefutable.
Lord Carnarvon
Carnarvon, together with his daughter Lady Evelyn Herbert and Howard Carter (with the assistance of ‘Pecky’ Callender), broke into Tutankhamun’s Burial Chamber on either Sunday 26 or Monday 27 November, 1922. That they did so remained a secret for decades – in fact, it was one of the best-kept secrets in archaeological history. The true story began to leak out among Egyptologists in the late 1940s; it was subsequently confirmed by an entry in the journals of Carnarvon’s half-brother the Hon. Mervyn Herbert, in whom Lady Evelyn and her father had confided. Those journals have been held by the Middle East Centre, St Antony’s College, Oxford, since 1966 and the secret came to light when they were examined in the 1970s.
The revelations reached a wider public with the publication in 1978 of Thomas Hoving’s book
Tutankhamun: The Untold Story
. Hoving was Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, 1967–77; there – in forgotten archives that included papers originating from Carter’s home in Egypt – he found further evidence of the secret entry to the Burial Chamber, the cover-up afterwards and the illicit removal of artefacts. Hoving’s account is flamboyant and much of it is persuasive, but it is marred by innumerable factual errors.
Lord Carnarvon’s collection of Egyptian art, later sold by his widow to the Met, included a number of exquisite objects that, while unstamped, almost certainly came from Tutankhamun’s tomb; presumably they had formed part of what Herbert Winlock, who coined the term, wryly called the earl’s ‘pocket collection’.
Highclere Castle is now owned by the eighth earl (great-grandson of the Lord Carnarvon in this book); in its cellars there is currently an exhibition that details the work of Carter and the fifth earl in the Valley. The final gallery, ‘Wonderful Things’, contains examples of Tutankhamun’s greatest treasures – in replica form.
Almina, Lady Carnarvon
In 1926, Lady Carnarvon bypassed the British Museum and, with the assistance of Carter, sold her late husband’s collection of Egyptian art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the sum of $145,000 (the equivalent of some $1.5 million today). In 1930, after years of litigation and vituperative argument, the Egyptian government awarded her and Carnarvon’s trustees the sum of £35,867 (around £1.1 million today) partly in lieu of any artefacts and partly in recognition of expenses incurred in the excavation and clearing of Tutankhamun’s tomb. In later life, Almina Carnarvon continued to spend money as swiftly as she had when chatelaine of Highclere; she was declared bankrupt in 1951. Her last home was a small terraced house in Bristol. She died there, aged ninety-two, in 1969.
Lady Evelyn Herbert
The evidence of an attachment between Lady Evelyn and Howard Carter rests in the main upon two letters and one note from her to him, and one letter from her father to Carter. Carter’s diaries detail nothing beyond the dates of her comings and goings, though he does record her bringing him the second, replacement canary. In the first of these letters, written from Highclere at Christmas 1922 to Carter in Luxor, Lady Evelyn speaks of entering the ‘Holy of Holies’, and describes it as the ‘
Great Moment
of my life’. She also says that she is ‘panting’ to return to Carter; she
was
twenty-one and (as Arthur Mace wrote of her) ‘slangy’. He also noted, however, that she and Carter were ‘very thick together’, and he was not alone in such observations.
It is possible, but not certain on existing evidence, that Lady Evelyn’s feelings for Carter contributed to the quarrel between him and her father in February 1923. If there was an infatuation on her part, it seems to have been short-lived: she married Brograve Beauchamp (later Sir Brograve Beauchamp, MP) in October 1923, some seven months after her father’s death. She never returned to Egypt. In 1972, when the celebrated touring exhibition of the Tutankhamun treasures came to the British Museum, Lady Evelyn attended and was photographed with them. She suffered a stroke on the steps of the Museum when leaving. She died in 1980.
Herbert Winlock
Winlock was the author of many books; they remain the best accounts of excavating in Egypt in the period 1910–1930; he wears his erudition lightly. His sharp, witty correspondence gives an insider account of the circumstances surrounding the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb and its aftermath. Insofar as Howard Carter had friends, Winlock was one of the closest, and most loyal. His account of Tutankhamun’s funeral, published in 1941, nineteen years after he made the discovery that confirmed Tutankhamun’s near-certain burial in the Valley, repays rereading, not least for its tone of abiding melancholy. Winlock kept a close tally of those associated with the tomb who had died and those who survived; he frequently attempted to demolish journalists’ claims of a ‘Curse’.
In January 1934, following the deaths of Arthur Weigall and Albert Lythgoe, when speculation as to the ‘Curse’ broke out anew, Winlock wrote to
The New York Times
in yet another attempt to disprove such claims – and when the ‘Curse’ is discussed, as it still often is, this letter’s tally is almost always cited. When it was written, his daughter Frances had been seven months at Saranac Lake, which perhaps explains why he pursued the subject with such determination and seriousness. Winlock remained Director of the Met until 1939. He died, aged sixty-five, of a heart attack while on holiday in Florida in 1950 and, as a veteran of the First World War, is buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Washington DC.
Helen Winlock
Helen Winlock survived her husband; she lived to see her younger daughter married and to become a grandmother. She returned to live on the island of North Haven, Maine, where her family still owned the house that is mentioned in this novel. She died on that island, aged eighty-seven, in 1974. She is buried with her husband in Arlington.
Frances Winlock
Frances Winlock’s death was scarcely reported, and she was spared speculation as to whether she too could be added to the dubious list of ‘Curse’ victims. It proved possible to retrieve traces of her life from the shadows: there are references to her in letters written from Egypt by her mother, and by Arthur Mace and his wife; there are extant photographs that show her as a child at the American House in the 1920s. She is mentioned, in passing, in the one surviving volume of Minnie Burton’s diaries. Her maternal grandmother’s diaries provide further information about her and about the death of her infant brother; these diaries, and one letter, written by Frances from Egypt in 1923, were found with other family letters in archives in Boston. Detailed records relating to her proved to exist: they include her schooling, her medical records at Saranac Lake, together with information as to where she lived and which doctors treated her there and, finally, the details of her funeral at Mount Auburn.
Albert Lythgoe
A respected scholar and former professor at Harvard, Lythgoe became the Metropolitan Museum’s first curator of Egyptian art in 1906, at a point when that department had little of worth to display. For the next twenty-three years, until his retirement in 1929, he laid the foundations for the great collections that can be seen today, pursuing acquisitions for the Museum through excavation in Egypt, and via an aggressive, well-funded buying policy. By the time Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb, his friendship with Lythgoe was well established; Carter had been instrumental in the Met’s acquisition of some of the finest private English collections of Egyptian art when they were sold off during the First World War; their relationship had been cemented by the help Carter and Carnarvon gave the Met in the purchase of the ‘Treasures of the Three Princesses’.
Lythgoe volunteered the assistance of the Met’s team of Burton, Mace, Hauser and Hall early in December 1922, in an exchange of cables with Carter. He did so in part for pure and scholarly reasons – also, as his correspondence makes clear, in the hope of a quid pro quo. He was not disappointed: within weeks, a grateful Carnarvon had assured him, in confidence and at a private meeting in London, that he would gift the Museum a share of the objects found in the tomb and would ensure the Met was ‘well taken care of’.
Both men, at that point, believed Carnarvon would receive half of the tomb’s contents. Both knew that the Director of the Antiquities Service wished to reform this system of
partage
, so that all finds from foreign excavations were retained in Egypt; both believed he could be outmanoeuvred. Lythgoe fought for years to prevent reform, enlisting
inter alia
the support of the American State Department, the British Residency in Cairo, lawyers, newspapers and leading Egyptologists. He won the battle, but lost the war: the reform of the
partage
system was delayed, but in the end implemented – the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb made that outcome inevitable. Lythgoe died in 1934, at the age of sixty-six, in Boston.
