Tutankhamun Uncovered (6 page)

“Thank you, sir.”

“Take care, my boy. Watch y’self over there. Gordon is dead these six years. The Sudan is lost. Yet the papers say the Mahdi is vanquished. Be careful. The infidel was well on his way to extinguishing the foreigner in Egypt. He is not beaten yet. You watch them fuzzywuzzies! A treacherous breed of untrustworthy ragamuffins. Make your mark and stay close with the occupying forces. Like ’em or not you know you understand ’em not so the darkies. Cut your throat soon as look at you. Mark my words.”

“Father.” Howard acknowledged with a condescending nod. The ‘fuzzywuzzie’, be he corrupt or compassionate, could await his personal assessment when he finally arrived. He knew full well that his father’s cautions were based on nothing more than unsubstantiated reports in the British press and recycled, embellished pub banter. The boy held no fears, just anticipation.

The train shuddered and slowly began to move out of the platform. Their hands parted. It was only a moment or two before the smoke and steam from the engine descended in thickening white billows over the carriages. The image of his father, arm raised in farewell, became at last extinguished in the pungent, tumbling fog. He would never see him again.

So now he was embarked on the broad, blue Mediterranean. Howard was not physically accustomed to sailing. Worse for him, the ship’s galley lay adjacent to his cabin and the thick, oily scent of cooking issued liberally through the louvres of his cabin door. This was quick to cause a revolting discomfort within his belly that, as it turned out, could only be relieved by an unfamiliar potion administered by a cloaked, priestly Irish gentleman answering to the name of Seamus. They had befriended each other at embarkation. Hitherto unused to more than the odd small glass of beer the continuous draughts of champagne Howard consumed rendered him blessedly insensible for the duration of the trip.

On his arrival at Alexandria, Newberry was there to greet him. In the milling crowd of waving arms, dusty suits and swaying smocks, a sorely hungover Carter had been barely able to focus sufficiently to pick out his new guardian. Even if the teenager had been feeling one hundred per cent, he would have had difficulty recognising the man.

Like Carter himself, Newberry was not of the build to stand out in a crowd. He was thin and had a small face with a prolific, bushy moustache, from the centre of which protruded a bent cigarette. He wore spectacles and a pith helmet, the brim of which sat uncomfortably upon his ears.

With the help of a contemporary photograph sent to him earlier by Lady Amherst, Newberry picked Carter out from the line of disembarking passengers relatively easily. Carter had, after all, only one suit. He advanced and shook the young man’s hand warmly and a little too vigorously for Carter’s fragile state of mind. As Newberry spoke his few words of welcome, the cigarette end remained adhered to his lower lip. The teenager hardly noticed. He smiled back as best he could and submissively followed the lead of his new master to a waiting carriage and horse.

Greatly fatigued after his journey and his drinking, Carter took to his bed early that evening and slept peacefully through the night. He awoke the following morning clearheaded, recharged and very much looking forward to the railway trip to Cairo. Every moment provided a new sight and a new experience and generated more than enough adrenalin for the energy to continue looking forward never a thought back from whence he came.

First impressions had left Percy Newberry not so enamoured with his new charge as Griffith had led him to expect. He was but a boy for his years and clearly unused to anything outside of a typical English village. He noted in his diary: ‘Looks spoiled to me. For his age he seems overly drawn to the bottle. He will have trouble accepting the hardships of field camp. He had better have a good eye, a steady hand and a lust for work for work is all he is going to get, all the daylight hours available. There will be no personal money of significance. I dearly hope his exalted friends have acquainted him thus.’

Newberry need not have worried. The morning trip in the train did much to help settle the Egyptologist’s mind. Carter spent the entire time asking questions about Beni Hasan. What were the rock cut tombs really like? The state of preservation of the reliefs? Did he have an understanding of the texts? What stories did they tell? What matters of life did they depict? Who had been buried there? Are the colours discernible? What techniques did he use to copy the paintings? How large a piece did he copy at one time?

The questions continued. Newberry’s chain-smoking didn’t bother the young man the windows in the carriage were all open. Carter, his curiosity unconstrained, hopped from one thought to another. Newberry responded willingly such hunger deserved his full attention. By the time they had reached the Hotel Royal in Cairo, Newberry was as encouraged with the prospect of his charge’s talents, dedication and enthusiasm as he had been discouraged at that initial meeting on the dockside.

During those first few days in Cairo, Newberry was occupied with the provisioning. This task included the purchase of a long list of excavation supplies and the essentials for survival. For Newberry these included his visiting a number of tobacco shops to ensure supplies of cigarettes adequate to keep him ‘lit up’ for the anticipated duration of their forthcoming stay in the desert. Carter, meantime, was able to acclimatise.

Back at their hotel at the end of the day, Newberry ushered Carter into the smoking room. He removed the cigarette from his mouth. “There is someone here you must meet, Howard.” He led him over to a gentleman sitting alone and absorbed in his newspaper. Newberry announced himself and then said, “Mr William Matthew Flinders Petrie, I would like to introduce to you my new assistant Mr Howard Carter who is about to begin his first assignment in Egypt.”

The teenager was dumbstruck the great man of Egyptology was actually seated before him.

The words “M’ pleasure, Mr Carter,” came from behind the raised newspaper. That would be all he would hear from Petrie for the rest of the evening.

But there was better to come. Before their trip south, Carter had had the opportunity to meet with Petrie a number of times. In the course of their encounters the boy discovered that he and Petrie held a common interest their individual love of fine art sufficient in common that the famous man would spontaneously talk to him; that is to say, more exactly, at him. Petrie was accustomed to controlling all situations and particularly conversations about, among other things, his propensity to collect scarab seals and his consequent expertise and knowledge of this prolific form of ancient Egyptian art. Carter would listen in silence for as long as Petrie was happy to speak, but, as soon as he had finished, the Egyptologist lapsed back into thoughts of the more immediate puzzles he was trying to solve elsewhere. Carter respected this and would leave immediately it became obvious that Petrie had finished his dialogue. The young man’s display of early maturity did not go unnoticed.

For the few days that Newberry busily scurried about town continuing with his provisioning, Carter, at the time thinking that his trip to Egypt might be the one and only opportunity of a lifetime, was determined to see as much of Cairo as he could. One morning he took advantage of a horse drawn taxi waiting outside the hotel and was driven to the Cairo Museum.

He studied the poorly displayed treasures for at least six hours. All the time he was there he felt neither thirst nor hunger.

At three in the afternoon he took time for a cold lemonade at the entrance to the museum and then left for the pyramids at Gizeh. Initially he did not grasp the immensity of the three principal structures. But the closer he came, the huger they became. The great stone paws of the partially excavated sphinx emerged from slopes of sand and gravel. Behind the deeply scarred and eroded head the greater portion of its body still lay buried. Behind this, the two largest pyramids filled his field of vision. As he walked on, the great structures continued to rise in height before him. The clear, sandy horizon provided no scale. It wasn’t until he could make out the diminutive figures of one or two tourists and the odd Arab walking about the base of the largest pyramid that he could grasp any sense of perspective and appreciate the immensity of the massive stone structures planted firmly foursquare on the limestone plateau ahead.

He paid the entry fee and went inside. It struck him that the interior was not unlike the labyrinth within a natural limestone cavern. Though in part confining, after a while it opened up like the aisle of a colossal, inclined cathedral. That all this could have been built by the hand of man the enormity, complexity and magnificence of the building a mere tomb, a grave for one soul quite overwhelmed him.

Right now, just like the rest of them, he too was enjoying himself as a tourist. Tomorrow he would not be not ever again.

Even though it was nearly nightfall when they arrived, Carter eagerly scrambled up the slope ahead of Newberry. He was desperate to look inside one of the tombs. When he got there he found the interior was almost totally dark and stood for a minute hoping his eyes would become accustomed to the blackness. Faint images gradually materialised from the gloom the simple, elegant shapes he had become so familiar with at the British Museum here in place where they had always been. He breathed an atmosphere thick with the presence of long dead peoples.

These open, naked, rock cut tombs, high up on a terrace above a limestone escarpment in the desert, provided shelter for his body and much to absorb his mind. The shelter part, however, took a bit of getting used to the bedstead made of the branches of a palm tree; at night the bats wheeling noisily in and out of the tomb; the deep cold of the night following the scorching heat of the day.

But he quickly adjusted to his surroundings. He became infatuated with the gentle dignity and clarity of the art form and buried himself in the work as if he were one with the original artists.

His greatest discomfort was not physical, however, it was the method by which he had been instructed to copy the friezes. Newberry and copyists before him reproduced the works by tracing the scenes on paper with a soft pencil. Carter despised the technique. It was quick; it was accurate; but it lacked the life and personality of the original. On occasion he experimented with freehand copying, as he had done with the still lifes in the British Museum, a technique in which he was particularly talented. The watercolours were more lively and satisfying to his eye but he would show no one. He kept them hidden between the boards that supported his makeshift desk at camp. There would be a right time to reveal the pictures but for now Newberry’s emphasis was on speed and quantity and the young apprentice had to toe the line.

Their work at Beni Hasan was completed too quickly, it seemed to Howard, but he had enjoyed it immensely. It was to the yet greater satisfaction of Newberry, who wrote many letters to Griffith lauding the praises of his younger colleague and themselves as a team.

Carter, too, did some writing. He began what was to become a relatively regular accounting of his experiences in Egypt in epistles to Lady Amherst. Without her personal interest and help he could not have come this far and he felt he owed an enormous debt of gratitude. At the time he could have no conception of the melancholy circumstances that would lead to his final payment some twenty years later.

The night before they journeyed south to Deir el Bersha, their next assignment, it was with some considerable emotion that Carter packed his things. He consoled himself with thoughts of expectation and the new wonders awaiting him. This seemed the appropriate moment to show Newberry examples of his freehand work. The demonstration was successful and he obtained his supervisor’s approval to try the technique at el Bersha.

During his time at their second site, Carter met two more of Newberry’s colleagues, Messrs Blackden and Fraser. Newberry introduced them as ‘MW’ and ‘GW’ and thereafter never referred to the pair in any other way. For himself, Carter didn’t bother to pursue a familiarity that would get them all on proper first name terms. The two seemed far too relaxed and undisciplined for his tastes. After a drink or two a sufficiency for the likes of Carter they would drink some more and talk much and loudly of the young lady tourists they had seen lately in Minya. To Carter their minds were too preoccupied with thoughts of future liaisons, and less so with the work. Neither was he impressed with their professional handiwork. His unforgiving, overcritical eye observed that Blackden’s artwork was barely fair, almost cartoonish in style. On Fraser’s skills as a surveyor he held no opinion. It was already Carter’s view that this particular component of the profession of Egyptology was little more than blue-collar. Together the pair seemed to develop a thirst every hour or so and would disappear into the tomb the party used as a mess hall long enough to put away a beer or two before returning to their work. Carter tried to ignore them, immersing himself in the task at hand.

A giant frieze in one of the tombs at el Bersha captured the young man’s attention. Rows of identical half-clad men, one above the other in four ranks, ahead of and dwarfed by the colossal statue of a seated monarch as, in regiments, they pulled it slowly out of the quarry from which it had been cut. Standing awkwardly on a ladder, he copied it with precision. The discomfort never bothered him.

The day after he had finished work on this relief happened to be Christmas Eve. Carter hardly gave the occasion a second thought. The cooler days of winter provided precious time for comfortable daytime working conditions, and besides it was hardly pleasurable celebrating Christmas in the sand.

Fraser and Blackden, however, were more inclined to play out the holiday season and that morning they took off for Minya, the prospects of a Christmas cuddle or two uppermost in their minds.

Carter and Newberry returned to the reliefs and continued their work.

On the evening of Christmas Day, Carter relaxed with Percy Newberry. They sat in the mouth of the tomb in which they were encamped, gazing out at the paling orange light. The two shared interpretations of what they had seen during the course of the day’s work. As their conversation began, the leader of their Arab helpers ran over from his camp. Panting somewhat from exertion and somewhat from fear of interrupting his masters during their private evening discussions, the reis respectfully asked to be heard.