Valley of the Kings Read online

  “I’ll leave a path up to the tomb past the dig.”

  “Now, Carter, please don’t shout at me. I am not responsible—”

  “I’ll personally carry every tourist through the dig on my back. Please—”

  “I’m sorry, Carter.”

  “Let me talk to the curator.”

  “I’m sorry, Carter.”

  The sound died out of the receiver; he had hung up his end of the line.

  I put the phone down. My hand was wet. I sat down on the camp stool behind me; I was in the local office of tourism, in the back room. Around me were banks of files and stacks of papers. Putting my head down in my hands, I dragged in a deep breath.

  There were other places to dig. Near the tomb of Amenhotep there was a very likely site for a tomb. I had trenched through it in 1920 and found nothing, but still—I might have turned the wrong way—dug in the wrong direction—not dug deep enough—

  I shut my eyes. In the next room, a door clicked, a bell chimed, a foreign voice called for service.

  For a few moments I could not find the will and the strength to get up. I thought of phoning Cairo again, but I knew those people: having said no once, they considered the word sacred.

  Dig in another place. I raised myself up from the camp stool and left the office building.

  When I reached my house in Luxor, Ahmed was sitting in front of the steps with a clutch of other men: he had gone out and gathered up all those people still living in Luxor who had dug with us the year before. They looked at me with eyes bright as bullets. Ahmed strode forward through their midst.

  “I have the job book, Carter. They have all been signed into it. We can begin tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow,” I said, surprised.

  “Or this afternoon, if you wish.”

  “No, no.” I laughed; his eager efficiency buoyed me, and I felt better. “Tomorrow will be soon enough.”

  “Shall we meet you there?” he said. “At Rameses VI?”

  The answer came as easily from me as a lie ought. “Yes.” We could start digging. It might be days before the department caught on. Weeks. I wiped my moist palms on my trousers legs. Going up the steps, I went into the security of my house.

  At dawn we all gathered together in the valley. The digging crew had brought their own tools and baskets, and we set to work at once. The ground where we began to dig was loose fill from Rameses’ tomb and all we had to do was shovel it up into baskets and cart it away.

  I laid out the trench on a line running straight away from the tomb. That cut across the tourists’ route, but as long as I was defying the department, I might as well do it with a whole heart. Every time a stone fell on the valley wall, every time a shadow crossed the yellow rock floor, I started with guilt, sure that they had discovered me.

  Just after noon, the front team of diggers began to uncover the walls of an ancient hut. Within an hour they had cleared half a dozen of these structures. They were barren little huts, packed close together; the fill piled on top of them had preserved them from the wind and kept them mostly intact. Some of them were no larger than large baskets. Probably they had been built to shelter the workmen on Rameses’ tomb.

  The tomb itself was large enough to house an entire village; in the end it had sheltered a single splendid carcass.

  Nothing gave me quite as vivid an impression of the way the common Egyptian lived than these huts. Rough as caves, cramped and rude, they were like kennels. I mapped them and made sketches of a number of them, and then my crew dug through them, and after thousands of years of existence they were gone.

  Three feet under the ground level of the huts, we reached the flinty, ungiving bedrock. By then, the evening had come, and we left off work and went home.

  The crew was all staying in Kurna. I dreaded returning to Luxor. The department could find me there at will; if they discovered what I was doing, they had only to wait at my house to arrest me. On an impulse I took Ahmed aside.

  “I want a place to stay, in Kurna. Do you know of one?”

  “A house?” he said. He blinked at me. “What do you need a house in Kurna for?”

  I saw that he would not be satisfied with a simple request. I would have to confide in him. I turned aside from him and moved on down the path, put off. He trailed after me. His shadow reached ahead of me down the path. Half a mile away, the lights of Luxor pricked through the gloom.

  “Carter,” he said. “There is a house near mine that is empty. The old woman lives with her son now.”

  My breath hissed away between my teeth. Relieved, I said, “I will pay her a good rent.”

  “I will help you bring your goods,” he said.

  That made me suspicious. I remembered that he was a robber—I remembered what I had forgotten, that he had a good reason to wish me ill. I would have to keep a closer watch on him, henceforth.

  I moved what I needed to live into the little house in Kurna; by day I worked in the valley and by night I stayed in Kurna, isolated from modern Luxor. I began to feel safe from the department. Then on the next morning, the fourth of November, I came up to the valley from Kurna and found the crew there on the site, but not working.

  They were sitting in a cluster on the ground, watching me expectantly. Among them, Ahmed got to his feet.

  “Carter,” he said, “you are a genius.”

  “What?”

  “We have found something.”

  I went after him up the gentle slope toward the site. The trench was about ten feet deep and twenty-five feet long. The huts we had been digging out stood in the bottom. At one end, the hut and the ground under it had been removed. In the deep blue morning shadow pooled at this end of the trench, I saw a ledge in the bedrock.

  I jumped down into the trench and bent to touch it. It was hand-hewn, much like the edge Lady Evelyn had found two years before.

  “Ahmed, bring some shovels. And a basket.” I pulled off my jacket.

  Ahmed sprang into the trench, two shovels held high in his hands like weapons. He and I dug carefully around the ledge, shoveling the dirt into the basket. I was clearing away one side of the ledge, hoping to find a corner, but my shovel grated on something hard below the loose earth, and I scraped away the rubble and found another, lower ledge.

  “A step.”

  I straightened. This was not like Evelyn’s find. I pointed past the second, lower edge.

  “There,” I said to Ahmed. “Dig there. I’ll bet fifty pounds there’s another.”

  Ahmed yanked up the hem of his robe, tucked it into his belt out of the way, and thrust his shovel into the loose ground. He grunted with effort. The shovel grated on the stony earth. I knelt and scooped the dirt away with my hands.

  “Yes. I was right. See?”

  Another straight edge showed under the dirt, a third step down into the hillside. I stood up. Ahmed smiled at me, and I nodded, like an idiot trying to stay calm.

  “Yes, yes. It’s an—well, it’s something, anyway.” I shook his hand, and he kept on smiling at me and nodding. “Let’s get organized here,” I said, and we climbed out of the ditch.

  The crew was gathered there, but they were not looking at us. They were staring off down the valley. I shaded my eyes with my hand to see where they were looking.

  A large motorcar was bumping and bouncing up the valley toward us. Puffs of jet black smoke burst from its exhaust. I swore. It was the department’s notorious old motorcar.

  I swore again. The crew was watching me, anxious; they gathered around Ahmed, looking to him for answers, but he said nothing. His gaze was pinned to my face. I stamped away from the trench, ready to meet the men in the oncoming motorcar. The suspicion took root in my mind that Ahmed had tipped off the department that I was digging here. Before I could think about that, the car stopped, and from all four doors there issued forth the minions of the
Department of Antiquities.

  Their leader was Conway, the assistant curator with whom I had discussed the issue over the phone. He came straight at me, and he didn’t mince any words. The first thing he said to me was, “We should run you out of Egypt.”

  There seemed no adequate response to that. I kept still. There had to be some way through this.

  The four men—they were all Englishmen—confronted me in a mass. Only Conway spoke, but the others emphasized what he said with nods and thunderous frowns, rather like a Greek drama.

  “Have you found anything?” the assistant curator said.

  I went by instinct. My conscious mind was still searching for an answer when my instinct answered, “No.”

  “I did not expect this of you, Carter. This is the most unprofessional, disrespectful, childish, egotistical conduct I have ever encountered in an Egyptologist.”

  Through the corner of my eye, I saw the Egyptian crew watching us all. The look on Ahmed’s face was one of anxious disbelief. Had he told them of the dig? I did not speak to the assistant, who was characterizing my behavior in very strong terms. My hands clasped behind my back, I tried to look chastened. My mouth was dry. It seemed as if I could still feel the edge of the step in the nerve ends of my fingers.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, when the assistant’s diatribe slackened.

  “Sorry,” he said, contemptuously.

  “I expected to find something extraordinary,” I said. “I thought my goals justified it.”

  “And you found nothing. Appropriately enough. Well, this is the end of your dig, Carter. Immediately I return to Cairo, I will do what is necessary to cancel your licenses.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Conway swelled. I could actually see him swell up. The other men murmured and looked from him to me. I was desperate; I had to get him to agree to one more thing—one last thing.

  He said, “I warn you, I shall not be mollified by all this repentance, Carter.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Very well, then.”

  “I’ll begin filling in the trench today, sir.”

  He was nodding at me. He was one of those big men who do so poorly in tropical countries: too much flesh, too much appetite. Below his eyes and along his nose his cheeks were raddled with tiny red lines. He said, “See that you do,” in a voice smooth as a fluid.

  “I shall, sir. If you’d care to stay, I’ll have my men rig up some kind of shade for you. The heat can be vicious out here.”

  That gave him pause. He looked up into the sky, cast a gaze all around us at the barren sun-washed hillsides, and said, “No—I have urgent business in Luxor. Riordon here will stay to supervise.”

  Riordon said, “I, sir,” in a voice of pain.

  Turning my head slightly, I met Ahmed’s gaze, and a look of triumph passed between us: he understood what I intended. So, then, he had not turned me in to the department, after all.

  “We’ll fill in the trench,” I said to him.

  “Yes, sir. Shall we start there, sir?” He indicated the far end of the trench—the end opposite the steps.

  I nodded. My crew started energetically toward the trench, and I followed them.

  We set to work pouring dirt back into the trench. The big motorcar roared away, leaving a foul trail of smoke behind, and Riordon, deserted, walked up and down a few moments, his hands in his pockets. Then he went to the side of the valley, where there was still some shade. I carried a basket or two of dirt and let it trickle down into the hole we had made in the desert.

  A few moments later, Riordon came up to me. “Now, Carter,” he said, “you’re going to do this, aren’t you? I mean, here you are doing it.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He was an associate or something to the department. Associates do not deserve “sir.”

  “Then I think it would be a slur on your word for me to remain here and watch,” he said. “I trust you. I know you’ll do as you promised.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Especially in front of the wogs,” he said earnestly. “One must stick up for another Englishman.”

  “The wogs clearly won’t,” I said.

  “May I use one of your donkeys?”

  “Oh, certainly,” I said. “I can walk back to Kurna with the others.”

  “Thanks.”

  He took the donkey and started away down the valley. When he went out of sight around the bend, Ahmed and the other Egyptians and I moved as one man toward the shovels.

  We worked without a single break through the rest of the day and into the night. The grit in my shoes rubbed my feet raw. When the dark made work impossible, I limped with the others into Kurna.

  We had uncovered eight more steps, leading straight down into the bedrock of the valley. So far there was no indication of what lay at the end of the stairway. I was too exhausted for sleep; in my bed in the little house in Kurna, I lay staring into the dark and wondering what I had found. An unfinished tomb, a plundered tomb, a treasurehouse— one or two artifacts would be enough to justify me. A failure would ruin me. Just before dawn, steeped like an insomniac in the weird hopes and terrors that normal people lose in dreams, I fell uneasily asleep for a few minutes, only to be awakened by a tremendous crash.

  I sat bolt upright in my bed. My hackles rose. Another crash sounded directly above my head, over the roof. I scrambled out of bed and into my clothes. I could hear people screaming, outside in the street, and I considered crawling under my bed but rejected that; the bed was too flimsy. I dashed into the front room of the house just as another deafening explosion echoed through the sky.

  This time, fully awake, I noticed the flicker of light that accompanied it. I stopped, my arms falling to my sides. It was only a thunderstorm.

  Rain is almost unheard of in the Nile Valley. In the intervals of silence between the claps of thunder, I could hear the wailing and shrieking of the terrified villagers. I went to the door. Now the rain struck. In a sluicing downpour it swept over the village, drenching in an instant the entire area. Muddy droplets began to fall from the ceiling over my head. A few moments later the drops were solid brown streams.

  I realized that there was a good chance of my roof caving in, and I rushed back through the two tiny rooms of the dwelling, gathering my notes, my books, and my clothes and packing them into the boxes I had brought them in. I stowed them all under the bed and went back to the door.

  The fickle airs that had made the storm were already disassembling it. A last racketing, rambling thunderclap sounded in the west, and the fitful lightning picked out the cliffs in the distance, the flat roofs of the village close by, in a lemony light. The rainfall lessened. It stopped entirely, and the sky grew swiftly lighter. The sun was rising.

  The villagers were running aimlessly up and down through the alleys and lanes around their houses. They splashed through the runoff; they held their hands over their heads as if to shield themselves from something terrible in the sky. Directly opposite me was the house of a widow. The deluge had reduced it to a heap of mud, and as I watched, the roof collapsed inward with a sucking, plopping noise.

  I ran to help. Fortunately no one was inside except the family’s goat. The widow and her children gathered around me, sobbing, and I took them back to my house and made them all tea. Perhaps I had acquired that from Evelyn, the efficacy of tea.

  In the first bleaching rays of the sun, the village lay like a smoking ruin. Plumes of steam rose from the soaked buildings and streets. A long cocoon of mist lay along the foot of the cliffs, obscuring all but the very tops, floating like gilded islands in the fresh sunlight. I helped my visitors back to their hut; they began to dig their belongings out of the mud.

  I had to go back to the valley. Strangely, I had forgotten it during the storm, and it rushed back in on my consciousness like a flood. While I was taking my note
books out of the box under my bed, Ahmed came.

  “Carter,” he said, “are you safe?”

  “Yes.”

  I went into the front room, where he was standing. His head nearly grazed the ceiling, which was now decorated with feathery stalactites of dried mud.

  “Interesting episode,” I said. “How often does it rain here?”

  His shoulders moved in an uneasy shrug. “I cannot remember the last time. You don’t…” He gave an embarrassed laugh. “You don’t think it means anything?” he said, in a sheepish voice.

  “It scared me half under the bed, at first,” I said. “Let’s get going.”

  He laughed again, this time at me. We went out into a village now like a steambath.

  I walked quickly back toward the cliffs. I had gotten almost no sleep; I was charged with restless nervous energy. Ahmed walked along beside me.

  “I have never heard of such a storm,” Ahmed said.

  “Yes, it was a freak. It was interesting—I can see something more in stories like the biblical flood.”

  We climbed the path through the desert, past Deir el-Medina, where the ruins of an ancient village had been laid bare in a recent dig. I thought of those people, what such a flood would have meant, so chained as they were to the processes of nature. In the aftermath of the rain, the desert was magnificent, the air washed clear, every gaunt line of cliff and boulder sharply drawn, and the whole scene shimmering with the already blistering heat of the sun.

  We went down the steep slope into the Valley of the Kings. My thoughts raced ahead of me to the steps leading down into the earth.

  “Some people say it was an augury,” Ahmed said.

  “What?” I said, startled.

  “The storm. Augury? Is that the proper word?”

  He was coming just after me on the trail. I glanced at him. Because of the steepness of the hillside, his head was at the level of my shoulder. I said, “Yes, that’s the right word.”

  “I don’t believe it,” he said. “I would have, before. But now I don’t believe things like that. Because of you, Carter.”