Valley of the Kings Read online

  “If you lift one finger against me again, Ahmed, I’ll show you things the army never showed you!” I shook my fist in his face. I wanted to beat him to a jelly. I wished he would strike me so that I could have struck him back. He stood still, his hands between us, fending me off.

  I looked around, panting. There was a shelf on the wall, lined with jugs. I yelled. Grabbing a jar, I lifted it over my head and smashed it on the floor.

  The people in the doorway shrilled with excitement. Ahmed clenched his fists. I took up the next jar and threw it down on the floor, all the while watching his face. Oil splattered both of us. He did not move; he said nothing; he did not look at me. I went along the shelf casting the jars down at his feet, until he was standing in a puddle of oil and his house was littered through with the fragments of his jars. I went up to him again.

  “Stay away from me!”

  He blinked. I went off through the midst of a dozen people in his doorway, and went home.

  After Carnarvon had been a week out on the dig, he came to me at noontime and said, “There is a fellah in Kurna I think you ought to hire.”

  I did not have to ask who that fellah was. We were sitting on the slope of the ravine, above the digging site. Two yellow camels were tethered just to my left, the lunch hampers slung over their backs. Ahmed must have come with them, because there he was, off at the edge of the trench, carefully not looking at me and Carnarvon.

  The Earl sat spraddle-legged on the ground beside me, picking the onions out of a dish of meat. He said, “I spent most of the last hour talking to the man. He seems to know the Valley of the Kings upside down. Even better than you do, Howard.”

  I did not answer that. Evelyn was below us, walking along the side of the trench with a notebook in her hand. Lady Evelyn. She had her straw hat tied on with a scarf. Like everything else in the valley, her hat was dun-colored, but the scarf was bright orange.

  “Howard, I want you to do as I say,” Carnarvon said.

  “Yes, my lord.”

  Carnarvon smiled at me. The brim of his hat shaded his eyes. “Good man, Howard.”

  I did not answer. I was surprised how I hated him for that, for using me like that. After our years together, he could have been a little more kind.

  Ahmed stopped calling me “Bey.” Now when he said “the Bey” he meant Carnarvon.

  5

  We began work on the floor of the valley below the tomb of Amenhotep III, where I had worked during the war, and were trenching along the foot of the slope. I set Ahmed to leading that part of the crew carrying fill from the trench up to the dumping ground to one side of the Amenhotep excavation. Periodically I went up to inspect the dirt we were removing; the third or fourth time I appeared at his work site Ahmed began to bristle.

  “You think I am slighting the work,” he said to me, angry.

  “Not at all.”

  I squatted down on my heels and took a handful of the dirt and spilled it out again. Black flinty chip, the same as we had been cutting through all morning.

  “Then why are you here? Playing with the dirt?”

  His whole manner irritated me, and I was long in answering, so that he would know. I straightened up and faced him. “Yes: playing with the dirt. Sometimes the first sign that we’re coming into something is a sudden change in the character of the fill.”

  His face altered; for an instant he looked ashamed of himself.

  “Satisfactory?” I asked. “Or shall I put it in writing?”

  That made him angry. His black eyes glittered. He began to say something, but a shout from the trench below us interrupted him.

  I wheeled. All along the site, workmen were running toward the trench. On the edge, the old foreman stood waving his arm over his head. I sprinted across the floor of the valley toward him.

  Lady Evelyn was kneeling in the bottom of the trench, down in the deep blue shadow. She tipped up her face to me. “Howard—it’s a wall. Come show me what to do.”

  I jumped down beside her. The two of us crowded the space. Just behind the head of the trench, in the bottom, she had uncovered a hard worked edge of stone. My heart began to thud. Kneeling, I felt along the edge with my fingers.

  “What do I do?” she said.

  I was about to tell her to go up to the surface and let me clear it, but a glance at her face told me that would be a cheat. I called up for two shovels, showed her where to dig, and the two of us began clearing either end of the edge.

  Babbling with excitement, the workmen packed the lip of the trench to watch. I heard Carnarvon’s deeper, English voice among them. Lady Evelyn’s arms thrust and pumped with her shovel. When she had exposed another two feet of the edge, I touched her shoulder, and she stepped back, breathing hard.

  The air was acrid with dust. It was hard to see. I bent to grope along the stone and found a right angle.

  “There’s the corner,” I said. “Now, let me find the corner at my end, and we can take a measure and see what we have.”

  Raising my head, I caught the eye of the man directly above me on the top of the trench. It was Ahmed. I sent him for a basket for the dirt.

  Before he came back, I had uncovered the other corner. I straightened. My back hurt. At my feet the neat stone edge rose out of the dirt. I shook my head.

  “What?” Evelyn asked, apprehensively.

  “It’s too small to be a tomb,” I said. The edge was only about a yard long. Ahmed landed behind us in the trench, light as a cat, and silently began to shovel up the dirt we had thrown off. I bent to examine the rock wall.

  “It’s a cache, maybe.”

  Her hand touched my shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  She was beginning to amaze me. She had all the exuberance and generosity a man is supposed to have and never does.

  We spent the rest of the afternoon digging away from the other three walls of our find. I showed Evelyn how to record measurements and draw the diagrams to show exactly what we had found. We spent an hour over supper talking about the tools and building techniques of the ancients. In Egypt there is no wood, and that single fact, I think, explains more about Egyptian building practices than anything else.

  For that same reason I discarded a pet theory of mine that the close-packed columns of the great temples had their power over the ancients because it reminded them of the primordial jungle. For a long time I had tried to imagine that the Egyptians had migrated here from somewhere to the south.

  The following morning saw us removing the contents of the square pit Evelyn had discovered. It was full of rubble: chip from the tombs built nearby, probably, mostly flints, but here and there a layer of the softer white stone from the east end of the valley. I made careful records of everything and saved out samples of each type of rock. Evelyn did most of her own digging.

  At noon we all stopped for lunch. I looked down the valley, hot as a smelter in the sun. On either side the pale hillsides were veiled in the dust we had raised. The sky was the color of lapis lazuli, the blue of ancient Egyptian faience work.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Carnarvon said, beside me. He dipped up water from the jug. “And yet nothing grows here, it produces nothing, it’s utterly worthless.” He dropped the dipper back into the water jug with a splash. His forehead was puckered into furrows, as if something puzzled him.

  In the evening our careful digging in Evelyn’s cache exposed a round of alabaster. Evelyn gave a cry. She insisted that I show her how to clear away the dirt packed around the thing, and in the course of freeing the first jar we found another, and another after that, alabaster jars lying on their sides, with handles in the shape of lotus stems. On her knees, she whisked away the dirt with a little broom and bent over her notebook, spread beside her on the rubble, to sketch the relative positions.

  Around the site the gathered workmen were watching, their faces split with wide g
rins. They appreciated what she was doing, perhaps, even more than I did.

  In all there were thirteen jars. She removed each one herself. But there was nothing else in the cache, and we found nothing else that year.

  The next year was 1921. We found nothing at all.

  By the end of that season Carnarvon was determined to quit. Evelyn talked to him, I argued with him, and in the end, to please her, he promised to finance my work in the valley up to January 1, 1923, but not a day or a shilling more.

  I was determined to go on in my search, even if Carnarvon defected. Exactly how I would finance my work remained a problem. Then, during the flood, a photographer from the finest museum in New York City arrived in Cairo to work with the local collection.

  I went immediately down to Cairo from Luxor. I intended to meet this American, but I wanted the meeting to seem unintentional. I spent two days at the Cairo Museum without encountering him, but I did find out that he was digging up old files in the Department of Antiquities, on the other side of Cairo.

  The river had only begun to ebb. Cairo simmered in the heat. The streets were empty, and all the shops closed: everyone had gone indoors until the evening. Only the English offices were still open. I trotted up the steps of the Department Building and into the dusty shade of the interior.

  My quarry was in the bursar’s office. I loitered outside in the corridor, pretending to read notices and newspaper clippings fastened up on a board on the wall. The door to the bursar’s office was ajar and I could see the young American’s back as he talked across the counter to another man. The corridor was dark and stiflingly hot; my hair and shirt were soaked. Excited, I waited for the young American to come out. I would bump into him going in, apologize, and introduce myself. I began to practice the introduction in my mind.

  Twenty feet down the hall a door slammed.

  “Howard Carter!”

  Startled, I jerked up my head at the sound of my name, while a tall, balding, red-faced man tramped down on me.

  “Well, this is most opportune. There’s a matter that needs your attention. I was afraid we would have to send away to Luxor for you.”

  “Who are you?” I asked, bewildered.

  “Conway. Assistant curator in charge of catalogs.”

  Instead of offering his hand to shake, he lifted it slightly toward his forehead, in a half-suppressed salute. He stood four inches taller than I, and his voice boomed; I stepped away from him.

  “Will you come to my office a moment?”

  “I don’t understand what you want me for,” I said.

  The American was coming out of the office behind me. I started to intercept him, but Conway blocked my path.

  “You turned in an incomplete report of your last dig,” Conway said. “You forgot to sign the last page, as required by regulations.”

  The American was out the door, going away from me down the hall. When I tried to pass Conway, he stepped sideways to get in my way again.

  “My office is right this way.”

  “Sign it yourself!” I shouted. “Spit on it! Kiss it! The dig was barren, anyway.”

  “I say, Carter, you don’t need to shout.”

  “To hell with you!”

  “Everything they say about you is true,” Conway said. He marched off the way he had come.

  He left me facing the young American. The quarrel had drawn his attention, and he was eying me with blunt interest. He looked even younger than I knew he was, with his fair hair cut very close, and his pink cheeks and scalp.

  He said, “Are you Howard Carter?”

  I put out my hand to him, out of wind after the shouting match. We had tea together.

  We drank tea and ate flat sesame-seed cakes in the courtyard of my hotel. The American’s babyish looks were deceptive. He was clever enough to be guiled.

  When I was sure of that, I said, “Are you interested in backing any new digs in Egypt?”

  He was biting into a cake, and he chewed thoroughly and swallowed before he said, “I was under the impression you were with Lord Carnarvon.”

  “We did more work together before the war than since,” I said.

  “I don’t—have you some specific—are you onto something, Mr. Carter?”

  I did not answer him; I did not say no. All I did was pack my pipe.

  “If you have uncovered a new site, Mr. Carter, I’m sure my boss would be interested in exploiting it with you.”

  “Excellent,” I said, and lit my pipe.

  “What exactly have you found?”

  “Nothing.”

  He looked confused and a little angry. I smiled broadly at him. I said, “Carnarvon is still paying for it.” His face cleared, and he nodded gravely at me.

  “When do you begin to dig?”

  “October,” I said.

  “We will be waiting to hear from you.”

  In October, after the flood had receded, I went down to Luxor again.

  The first day after my arrival, I went out to look the place over, to decide where to begin work. It was a quiet day, but then days in the valley are quiet. Maybe the solitude and the silence here induced the pharaohs to dig their last houses here. I rode slowly from one end of the valley to the other. Every turning brought me within sight of another triumph of Egyptology: the splendid tomb of Hatshepsut, the woman who overthrew Thothmes II and kept Thothmes III from his throne for so many years, and the tomb of Amenhotep III, called the Magnificent, the father of Akhenaten, who built the palace now in ruins on the bank of the Nile above Luxor, Magnificent they all were, the princes of the Eighteenth Dynasty, and the power of their personalities still glimmers a little through the thousands of years. They were not brutes: in the brute world, women do not dominate men. Their wealth was only a poor outward show of the subtle richness of their culture. Yet their dynasty ended in failure and decadence (as perhaps all dynasties must) and within a few generations of their triumphs Egypt was a poor sick old man, helpless before invaders, and senile with hollow superstition.

  All this we know because of the discoveries made here and elsewhere in Egypt, the scraps and treasures unearthed by archaeologists. To this evidence, for all my work, I had contributed relatively little. I had worked and worked and come up empty, or finished off other men’s finds, strung together other men’s evidence. The name of Howard Carter would occur only in a footnote.

  If only I could have found one cup, one bracelet, one sandal that told me that Tutankhamun had been buried here! The least artifact might have helped us bridge the gap between the fall of Akhenaten and the failure of the dynasty. Brooding on this, I rode on my donkey past the ancient splendors of the valley.

  Halfway to the end of it, I met Ahmed.

  The big Egyptian was on foot. He stood on the path waiting for me to catch up with him. When I reached him, he said, without smiling, “Hello, Carter. One more time, ah?”

  “Looking for something to steal?” I said, sourly.

  “I learn from you, Carter.”

  After this habitual exchange of snarls I started off again. He walked beside me, and I admit that I was glad of the companionship. I was feeling pretty hopeless. I had put my head in the noose: if I did not find something worth attracting the support of the Americans, my ploy with them would discredit me with other possible backers. I was here now to find a site to begin the new dig. That was easy. Every place I looked I wanted to dig. But I had to find something fast.

  We rounded the bend in the valley that brought us before the great tomb of Rameses VI, a square hole gaping below the cliff. I stopped. This place had always had a peculiar attraction for me.

  On the left was the strange tomb where Theodore Davis had discovered the mummy disguised as a woman. Nearer to me and Ahmed was the pit that Davis had claimed was the tomb of Tutankhamun; even closer, almost at Ahmed’s feet, was the rock where the blue
faience cup had been found. I stood staring at the blank walls of the valley. I was overwhelmed by the feeling that all these finds were part of a single find; if only I could put them together, I would understand. Yet I could not understand them.

  “Well,” I said, out loud, “suppose the cup and the rings in the pit were loot from the tomb. Perhaps the robbers threw the things away, to get rid of the evidence before they were caught.”

  Now something began to form in my mind.

  Ahmed was staring at me. “Carter, what are you talking about?”

  “Ahmed.” I clutched his arm. “If you stole—if you broke into a tomb here and were caught, which way would you run?”

  “At night or in the day?”

  “At night,” I said. The valley would have been well guarded; only at night could anyone chance a theft.

  “Down,” he said. “Down into the dark.”

  “Into the dark,” I said after him. “They would have run away from the tomb into the darkness of the valley.”

  My eyes followed the line from the place where the blue faience work cup had been found, back past the hole where the rings had been found, back straight across the valley floor to the low slope in front of the tomb of Rameses VI.

  No one had ever dug there. Rameses’ tomb was such an important tourist attraction that the authorities refused to let the way be blocked.

  “We’ll dig there,” I said. “We can trench across it before the main stream of the tourists arrive.”

  Ahmed was watching me obliquely. Clearly he doubted my sanity. I said, “Well? Do you want to work for me?”

  “As you wish, Carter.” He turned away from me; his shrug was eloquent.

  I went back to Luxor and got on the telephone to the Department of Antiquities in Cairo. Unfortunately it was Conway, the assistant curator, who took my call. He refused outright to let me dig across the route to Rameses’ tomb.

  “I’ll have all the fill dirt lugged off out of the way,” I said. “I’ll leave the site by January. Just—”

  Out of the black telephone receiver came the smooth voice of the assistant curator. “I’m sorry. We simply can’t allow—”