Valley of the Kings (3 page)

3

In the Delta, Carnarvon and I spent every fall and winter season at the digs, and I began to know him a little better. He was surprisingly companionable at times. When some topic took his fancy we could talk for hours. His wife usually accompanied him to Egypt, and in the evenings she would sit by the lamp reading, while we argued and talked over the details of the day's digging, or some wider subject. As the years went on, Carnarvon's daughter, Evelyn, joined us as well, a gawky, ugly girl in the starched pinafores and long white stockings in which the English upper class saw fit to swaddle their children. She collected rocks.

In spite of all, though, Carnarvon never really became broadly knowledgeable about Egypt. He knew—often very keenly—the areas that interested him; but if a subject failed to strike a spark with him, he could not be troubled to involve himself in it.

Periodically the Countess and little Evelyn dragged me off to the bazaar in Saïs.

The bazaar covered several acres of ground; the stalls under their torn and dirty awnings were set up without any particular order, so that the crooked lanes between them were like a warren. The Countess walked along with her skirts hiked up in one hand, holding Evelyn in the other, and the governess trailing after, all the ladies circling and swerving around the garbage and dung that littered the ground. The vendors screamed at them, and sent their boys to run after them screaming, which the ladies ignored. The air was rich with changing odors, of people and beasts, leather, dust, the beans cooking in open pots on every corner; and the racket was constant and deafening. The ladies might have been taking their tour through the park at Highclere.

While they looked at woven cloth I went over to a stall I knew. On the ground, on graying canvas, was spread a mass of artifacts. In the back of the stall, in the shade, an old man sat eating figs. I picked through the masses of bits of old pottery and scraps of what purported to be papyrus. Some of the Egyptian forgers of antiquities were marvelous and could fake anything well. There were some old brass beads in a pot in the middle of the canvas. The old man in the back was watching me with gleaming eyes.

I looked over everything on the canvas. When I looked up, the old man came over to me.

“Carter,” he said. “What are you looking for? What do you think I have?”

His voice was supposed to be plaintive, but he grinned at me. Evelyn was watching us from a few feet away.

“Oh,” I said, “I never worry about you, sheikh. I know you never have anything really old.”

The grin widened. He said, “I will show you something old.”

“Don't do that. I don't like to put you to any trouble, since I know you have nothing but fakes here.”

The old man dashed into the back of the stall. I glanced at Evelyn, watching raptly. She spoke rather good Arabic and understood everything she heard. The old man returned with a necklace.

“You see?”

He held out the necklace on his palms. It was made of innumerable small plates and chains linked together intricately, so that it jingled when he showed it to me. The tarnished metal seemed to be silver. Some of the plates bore an odd design. I reached for it, but the old man snatched it back.

“No, no. No touch.”

“Bah,” I said, disgusted, and started off. I put my hands in my pockets. If it had been genuine he would have had no qualms about letting me handle it.

“Carter! Thirty shilling!”

I kept on, strolling through the passing crowd. Suddenly the old man appeared before me, dangling his object in my face.

“Twenty-five shilling!”

“What do you take me for, sheikh? I don't spend my money on fakes.”

“It is not a fake! Carter—do you think you are the only man in Egypt who knows antiquities?”

I had to stop; he was standing right in front of me. He cried, “Look! See the metal!” With his thumb he rubbed at the heavy black tarnish on one of the links, and a smutty gleam came through. “See how the links are joined! Twenty shilling!”

I grinned at him. The price was falling faster than the old lady's drawers. I said, “Clean another part of it, sheikh, ha? Or let me.”

He yanked the necklace back out of range of my reaching hand again. His black eyes snapped with bad temper and bargaining zeal. For a moment we faced each other, he glaring at me, and I smiling at him.

At last, he said, “Fifteen shilling.”

“Get out of my way, sheikh.”

He retreated, grumbling. I glanced behind me; the Countess and her maid, with Evelyn in among them, were watching me from the side of the lane. When they saw I was through with the old man, they started off down the lane again.

As she passed me, the Countess murmured, “Was it a fake?”

“Decidedly, my lady.”

“Oh—too bad.”

Evelyn smiled at me triumphantly from the shelter of her mother's grip. We went on down through the bazaar.

Near Saïs was a well called the King's Water, at the edge of a stretch of marsh called the King's House. On the strength of this puzzling name, a number of diggers had explored in the area, and each dig yielded enough material reward to keep them coming—but no one yet had cleared anything major there.

A large percentage of the artifacts uncovered at the site were from the Eighteenth Dynasty—Tutankhamun's dynasty. Therefore, as long as I could not dig in the Valley of the Kings at Thebes, I dug in the King's House.

In the evening after I had gone with the ladies to the bazaar, while I was washing out some items of clothing in my tent, the old man who had tried to sell the necklace to me put his head in through the door.

“Carter.”

“Yes, sheikh.” I wrung murky water out of my socks. The camp stool and the frame of my cot were draped in soggy undershorts and vests and the tent smelled dreary. “One moment,” I said to the old man, and took my smoking old lantern off the table and went out of doors to talk to him.

He was not alone. Three or four other men loitered in the shadows beyond my tent, keeping well away from the light. On the other side of my tent were the tents of Carnarvon and his people and servants and the diggers. As I emerged from my own doorway, Carnarvon's voice said something sharply in the nearby tent, and there was a burst of answering laughter.

The old man and his friends drew me off into the dark a little way. We stood at the edge of the marsh. The moon was up, gleaming on the still water pooled among the rushes. I trod carefully on the uneven ground, where I had more than once put down my left foot on solid earth and my right down into the black muck.

“Carter,” the old man said, “is this a fake?”

His teeth showed in a broad grin. He held out a figure no larger than my hand, and when I took it, made no effort to keep it back. Lifting the lantern, I bathed the object in the indifferent light.

It was a statue of a lion, made of soft, pale stone. I turned it over, impressed with the workmanship. On the bottom was a mark. I looked closer, and my hackles rose. It was the pharaonic cartouche of Tutankhamun.

“Where did you find this?”

The old man retrieved the lion. “We will show you. Yes? You and the Bey.”

I swung the lantern back and forth, mulling this over. Something was out of joint in the whole business. “How much?” I said.

The men glanced at one another. The four Egyptians who had come with the old fellow stood close together, and whenever my light threatened to expose them, they withdrew from it. The old man turned back to me.

“One hundred shilling English.”

“Let me see the lion again.”

“Oh, no.” The lion vanished inside the old man's loose, sashed gown. “Get the Bey and come with us.”

I stared at them, warm with excitement. There was something wrong in this, but the lion looked authentic. Irresolute, I tried to make out their features, and they retreated from the swinging light of the lantern.

Out across the marsh a bird shrieked, and the wind rose, as if answering, a cool tingle along my neck and cheek. I made up my mind.

“Wait here.”

They shifted together in the dark. I went back past my tent to Carnarvon's.

The Earl's tent was large enough for some stout furniture; Carnarvon was sitting in a stuffed armchair, and his wife across from him in a chair without arms. On the table between them was a litter of playing cards. Evelyn sat cross-legged on the floor; the maid was dozing in the back of the tent, beyond the light thrown by the lantern suspended over the table. As I entered, Carnarvon was saying, “
And
the ten of diamonds and the two of spades!” He tossed down cards as he spoke. His wife wailed; obviously he had won, although I had no idea what they were playing. Carnarvon looked up at me.

“Excuse me, sir,” I said. “May I talk to you a moment?”

His eyes sharpened. “Yes, of course.”

“It is rather late,” said Lady Carnarvon. “Can't it wait until the morning?”

“Play solitaire,” Carnarvon said to her.

“But such a bore!”

He was already leading me out of the tent. In the dark, we walked off a few strides, out of the hearing of his wife, and I nodded to the old man and his entourage, waiting in the darkness by the head of the marsh.

“They have something they want to show us. Now. They want money. But it seems off true to me.”

He gave the little group of Egyptians a searching glance and turned the same keen look on me. “How? What did they say?”

“They showed me an artifact that has Tutankhamun's reign name on it. It looks like the goods, but there's something…” I shook my head. “Of course, there are many reasons why they'd insist on going at night. But it feels off, somehow.”

“Marvelous instincts. I used to feel I'd die young.” He glanced at the Egyptians again. “Are we to go alone, naturally?”

I nodded. “They want one hundred shillings.”

“Wait here a moment,” he said, and went back into his tent.

I raised my hand to the old man waiting at the marsh, to tell him that we were progressing. Inside his tent, Carnarvon and his wife had a brief discussion ending in a cry of dismay from the Countess. Through the tent canvas their shadows could be seen, and I watched them keenly; Carnarvon might be doing something foolish: for example, having us followed. I hoped he wasn't having us followed. He reappeared, smiling, his hands in the pockets of his jacket, and Evelyn behind him in the doorway calling, “May I come?”

“No,” he said, over his shoulder. Without pausing, he walked on by me toward the Egyptians. I followed him, catching up with him as we joined the old man.

“Tell them that I have the money,” Carnarvon said calmly, “but I won't pay them until we see whatever it is they have to show us.”

The old man agreed to that without a murmur of protest. I could see Lady Carnarvon watching us from the doorway of the tent. We all set off together, going across the marsh.

The old man led us on a path that skirted a brackish pool rimmed in rushes sharp as daggers. The peeping of frogs sounded ahead of us but ceased at the sound of our approach. Shortly after we left the camp, one of the old man's followers slipped unobtrusively behind us. I did not glance behind me to see where he was going. He would stay on the path to warn the old man if we were followed. Carnarvon was trying to catch my eye. He was smiling.

“Carter,” he said, “it's about time you brought me an adventure.”

I was thinking about the lion. I had seen it for only a few moments but the figure was familiar: it closely resembled a larger stone lion that had been unearthed some years before at a quarry in the south, where it had obviously been carved. The lion was lying down, its head turned slightly, and its forepaws crossed. As I thought of the little figure I had just seen, my blood quickened, and I began to walk faster; Carnarvon had to catch my arm.

“How far is it now?” I asked the old man.

He gave me an eloquent Egyptian shrug.

We were now well into the marsh, and the insects had found us. I felt their lancet jaws at my neck and in my ears. The shriek of the marsh bird sounded again, this time to the far right. Stretches of rushes alternated with open water. The path twisted and circled around deep black pools that reflected the moon.

The lion could have been his talisman. Or a fake, of course, copied from the other stone lion. I began to fret, wondering.

Ahead, the path pinched down to a thread and wound into a tall thicket.

Carnarvon said, “Steady.” He had stumbled; his hand caught my arm and he held me. Surprising. He seldom asked for any help. We went into the dark of the thicket, the lacy branches shutting out the moon.

Abruptly the old man, just ahead of me, darted off into the brush. I yelled, warned. The thicket erupted with men rushing at me and Carnarvon. Carnarvon's hand tightened hard on my arm; he was pulling me down. The Egyptians shrieked like banshees.

A piercing whistle cut through the racket. I jumped a foot at the sound. The Egyptians did not hesitate. In unison the whole crowd wheeled and took to their heels. Within seconds the thicket was deserted except for Carnarvon and me.

Carnarvon laughed. I straightened up out of my crouch, my ears cocked, and looked around. We were alone. The close quarters of the thicket made me nervous; I rushed out onto the open moonlit path. Carnarvon followed.

“Who were you calling?” I said.

My hands were shaking. I had been ambushed once before, and been badly beaten; I thanked God we had escaped that.

Carnarvon held out a silver whistle. “I wasn't calling anyone. You see the power of authority.”

“Good God! Do you mean that was all? They ran from that?”

He laughed again, this time jubilant. We started down the path toward home, keeping a watchful eye out.

“Damn it,” I said bitterly, after a time, “then it was a fake. Damn, damn.”

Carnarvon laughed again. He tossed his silver whistle up and caught it in his hand. “A genuine adventure. Let me tell the ladies, Carter.” He tossed the silver whistle up; it sparked in the moonlight.