Tutankhamun Uncovered (43 page)

“Abdel, bring me the rope we carried up here.” Carter took up the robbers’ rope, severed it with his penknife and allowed it to fall towards the cavity below. Abdel tied the new rope around a firm enough looking outcrop. Carter checked the security of the knot and took a tight hold on the rope as he slid over the edge. As he felt his footing give way, the change in balance caused the rope to twist and swing to the left and he bounced uncomfortably against the rock on the other side of the cleft, bruising his left shoulder and scraping his tightened knuckles against the sandstone. He now hung free, suspended from his grip on the rope, his feet flailing about trying to pinch the rope between them. Feeling the rope wind around his right leg he finally brought his feet together, one over the other, and felt in control enough that he could once more allow himself to slip downwards.

As he slid towards the ledge below, the sounds of the robbers’ voices became louder and rang with echoes from the confined space in which they were busy at their mischief. It took a few minutes before he felt his right foot touch the ledge. In the darkness he was unsure of the size of his precarious perch and chose immediately to sit down and gather his composure. As he did so, Gaggia barked anxiously from the cliff. The voices all at once stopped. The brief silence that ensued was overpowering.

With the passage of time, one by one the Arabs within the tunnel began talking to one another again. This time Carter could plainly make out what they were saying.

“Did you hear something?”

“I thought so, yes.”

“Listen...”

Through the light of the robbers’ lamp flickering dimly from the other end of the tunnel Carter could now make out the shape of the cavity. He decided to address them while they were still inside. His words would surely be amplified within the corridor and, since they couldn’t see who was speaking, the impact, particularly the English accent, would be all the stronger.

“You there! Come out immediately!”

Arabic with a country English flavour did the trick. Anything from an Englishman represented authority. They knew at once they were discovered and their retribution would be merciless. After a minute or two, and in silence, they began to crawl towards him one at a time.

Carter, on the other hand, did not feel quite as confident as his voice may have sounded. Had it not been so dark, his expression would quickly have given away that he was truly frightened. But, as the first man approached the entrance to the tunnel, Carter switched on his torch. The temporarily blinding light successfully added to the leading robber’s anxiety. Instantly the man stopped moving and tried to back up, stabbing the calloused soles of his feet into the face of his following colleague.

“We are dead men!” whispered the man.

Carter’s fear all at once left him and the arrogant authority that found its roots in Victorian England Empire, ‘Ruling the Waves’ and such like blossomed within his bosom. “Come! You are discovered! Out with you!”

The first man resigned himself to his fate and nervously emerged. Carter raised the torch from the man’s face and, now able to see his captor clearly, he instantly recognised Carter as the former keeper of antiquities in this area. The fact that Carter had lost that station some time ago did not lessen the robber’s respect. The man fell to his knees and bowed to the ground. This cemented Carter’s resolve and he let into the men as they emerged one by one eight in all reading them a litany of Egyptian profanities and promising them the severest of punishments through due process of law should he discover that they had damaged anything.

The rabble was suitably impressed. Without argument, they began the difficult climb back up the rope to the cliff top, Carter checking each man for contraband before he handed him the rope. He found none.

About thirty minutes later, Carter sat alone on the edge. He turned his face upward and shouted toward his colleagues at the top.

“Sheikh Mansour! I am going inside! Hold the rascals until I return!”

Gaggia barked an acknowledgement.

Carter got down on all fours and dragged himself into the small aperture the robbers had excavated in the tomb entrance. It was an arduous and uncomfortable journey down the narrow, rubble filled tunnel. Because of the tomb’s situation at the bottom of a cleft, the tunnel had completely filled with flood debris and was almost totally choked. After about fifty feet the robbers had reached a wall of limestone. At this point they had excavated in many directions, searching for a way onward, eventually discovering that the way ahead was to the right. This far into the tomb, the amount of debris lessened and there had been no need for further tunnelling. Carter scrambled down the pile of rocks choking the passageway until he reached the chamber floor. Here his torchlight caught the yellow translucence of a quartzite sarcophagus lying open at the edge of another passage which itself descended yet further into the darkness. The sarcophagus was impressive but empty, and there seemed to be little else about. He crawled on down the passage in the hope of finding more below. But he was to be disappointed. Water filled the cavity ahead and he was unable to penetrate any further. So far as he could see the robbers had gone to considerable effort, not to mention risking their lives, to find nothing of value that was in any way portable.

Gaggia barked with anticipation as Carter pulled himself back up the rope and re-established himself safely with his colleagues at the top of the cliff.

He turned to the anxious sheikh. “Search them once more and, if you find nothing, let them go. They can have found little, if anything, of value. The tomb is almost completely filled with rocks from the flooding. It requires careful excavation. We shall begin tomorrow. I am tired and I hurt, it seems, everywhere! Post a guard. Let’s get back.”

The journey back down to Castle Carter seemed to be over almost as soon as it had begun. Carter had fallen asleep the instant he’d sat himself on the donkey. The combined effects of mental stress, physical exhaustion and lack of sleep had at last caught up with him. How he managed to stay upright during the rocking, rolling and sometimes stumbling descent was a mystery a kind of narcoleptic balancing act. He fell into bed as the sun was rising.

There was something familiar about the banging on the door that dragged him unwillingly out of his slumber and into the daylight.

“Sar’nt Adamson, sir, h’at your service. H’I ’ave been sent by the Colonel to h’ask you to front h’up at ’is quarters h’as soon as you are h’able, sir. H’if you please, sir.”

“What is it this time, sergeant? I thought the army had no more need of my services.”

“H’on the contrary, sir. You h’are a h’integrool part h’ov the war effit. H’England cannot do wivout you, sir. So h’I am led to believe.”

“Indeed, sergeant. Indeed. Well, what is it this time?” Carter knew what the answer would be.

“’Ush, ’ush, sir. H’as you is aware. H’in the Intelligence Service no one knows wot h’anyone does.”

“Surprise, surprise,” muttered Carter under his breath.

“Beggin’ yer pardon, sir?”

“Nothing, sergeant. Just trying to shake the sleep out of my eyes. I have been up all night.”

“H’oh, sorry, sir. H’Abdel didn’t say. H’I wouldn’t ’ave burst in like this ’ad I known.”

“Abdel didn’t answer the door?”

Adamson paused. “Well... no. Not now you mention it, sir. No, maybe ’e didn’t. H’I do believe h’I burst in ’ere h’unannounced, as it were. Me apologies, sir.” And with a continuing lack of feeling, “Can you please get dressed quickly, sir? The colonel’s waiting.”

Carter took his time. The army could wait. “Abdel! Abdel! Wake up, man. I need you at once!”

Abdel appeared at the door in a state of partial consciousness.

“Ah. Good man. I have to go to the UCO over the river. While I’m away I want you to get the fellahs organised with a reis. Hosein will do if he’s available. Get back to the tomb and begin clearing the entrance passage. It will not be easy. Get them to construct a gantry of some kind so that the men can access the place more easily and in greater safety. Be sure they sift everything for broken stuff. I want a full accounting when I return. Well... Get on with it!”

The servant left the room. It would be some hours before he had regained his senses sufficiently to begin doing what his master had asked of him. In the meantime Carter accompanied Adamson to UCO HQ. He hadn’t met the colonel before.

‘This has to be important,’ he thought. Colonels have no time for civilians unless they really need them.

His conviction that the matter had to be so important was reinforced when he found himself admitted to the colonel’s presence immediately he arrived at HQ.

“Carter! Alhamd’Allah!” The colonel stood up as soon as he saw Carter enter the room. “Name’s Lawrence. Damned pleased to meet you at last. Please sit down.” He waved towards the only chair on the opposite side of his desk.

Carter took his seat and looked the colonel up and down. He was not a big man by any means and was extremely thin, thin to the point that his linen uniform hung off him so loosely that he almost assumed the form of a tube. An incongruously large wristwatch was strapped around the outside of his left sleeve. He wore an Arabic headdress, as many did in these parts, it being the most practical for relief from the heat. This one was unusual in that it was far more extravagant in both the design and the quality of material than any Carter had seen before. The colonel had it draped, it seemed purposefully, about his shoulders. The head cloth framed a large, elongate face, somewhat out of proportion with the rest of the body. Carter looked into the deep blue of his eyes. They seemed strangely sad. There were no smile lines radiating from them. There was an intensity in his gaze. The colonel stared directly at him.

“Mr Carter,” he began. “I know a bit about you. But this is the Intelligence Service, is it not? So you would expect that, would you not?” he smiled. “Actually I know a bit about you not through the IS but through reputation. You are very well known in these parts. I am sure you are aware. Well respected as an artist; as a trader; as an Egyptologist; as an Arabist; as a linguist. I have long wanted to make your acquaintance. I think we have much in common. Hopefully we can be friends.”

Carter was puzzled by the man. He was different from those he had previously met in the UCO. There was an educated, even scholarly feel about him an academic, surely. He had an aura of confidence and sophistication that came only from a solid education at a very good school. At the same time, however, he seemed one who had endured experiences in the extreme. One who had been touched by horror more than once. It was in the face. Carter was greatly intrigued. His personal curiosity and his empathy for the man compelled him to listen.

The colonel continued. “But you will be anxious to know why I have summoned you here. The fact is, I need your specific skills to help me with the problem which now faces me. And I mean me, not the king’s army.”

‘That’s a relief!’ thought Carter.

“I am temporarily in Cairo. Spend most of my time in the desert. But right now I’m having to put up with Allenby and his entourage. Career army you know the type not good for anything else. Not much of a gift for fighting either, if you ask me. Anyway, Allenby’s in the process of mustering a large force to support Faisal against the Turks. It’s going to require a lot of artillery big bang stuff. While he’s engaged at that, my job is to cut the Turkish lines of supply. The Turks are using the railway infrastructure which bridges the deserts. We ambush the trains. Sounds dangerous but actually it isn’t. It’s pretty easy really. The Turks aren’t that well prepared think that when they’re out in the middle of nowhere no one in their right mind would bother to come all that way through all that nothingness to clobber their train. They forget that the desert is the Arab’s backyard. We fall on them wherever we wish.”

“We?” asked Carter.

“Well, me really, and my Arab militia. Guerrillas if you like.”

Carter’s earlier uneasiness was creeping back. What is he leading up to? Could this mean they at last have come to summon me to the front? “Never mind that. The subject of our meeting has nothing to do with the war.”

The Egyptologist’s sigh of relief was almost audible.

“Mr Carter, my travels through many deserts have taken me to and through places that no Englishman has ever seen very few living men of any race for that matter. In the course of my work I come across objects left by the ancestors of the desert’s present landlords. Ancestors, I believe, who in fact did not live in deserts but were, during their lives, surrounded by lush vegetation and fertile fields all this now turned to barren sand and bare rocks. I have been fortunate enough to have been schooled in the literary arts and in language but, although I have read archaeology, my schooling has lacked any depth of teaching in the ageing of antiquities. Please enlighten me about these...”

So saying, the colonel bent down and picked up a large and clearly weighty sack and placed it on the desk between them.

Carter helped the colonel untie the cord about the neck of the sack and they opened the mouth fully, rolling the hessian down until the top of the pile of objects, each wrapped rather awkwardly in newspaper, was revealed. As he unwrapped the first, Carter couldn’t believe his eyes. This man truly had an eye for quality. It was a Neolithic hand axe of beautifully polished, frosted quartzite.

The colonel looked at him expectantly. “It’s Neolithic,” said Carter. “Perhaps six thousand years old maybe older.”

“My word!”

As they progressed through the hoard, Carter realised the importance of this meeting. The man could recall the provenance of most of the objects he had collected over the past two years. Their quality and variety were sufficient to stock a small museum. He wondered if he dare ask the key question.

Carter picked up a piece of pottery and examined it closely.

“Picked that up in the Rubal-Khali at Ubar at least I think it’s the site of Ubar. Ruined walls, buried in sand. What isn’t around here? Been looking for the place for a year. Camel train route. Can’t really miss it if you keep your eyes open. Plan to go back there one day. Satisfy my curiosity... And this. Roman. From Um el Jamal, some way northeast of the Dead Sea. But then you probably know that.”