The people’s growing affection for the young king during his short life did not go unnoticed by Horemheb. It had veritably gnawed at him. How could he be so likeable connected as he was with the heretic? Ay and he had manipulated the king into changing his name and in so doing they had likewise manipulated religious practice back to what it had been before his father-in-law had taken power. Clearly the general had done a very good job too good for his own benefit. His personal influence was not visible to the people the king’s was. And, with such evident public affection for the boy, his mentor now had to ensure that the dead king’s burial would be, if only in the smallest of king’s tombs, a grand affair, accompanied by the most treasured of grave goods. In the eyes of the people the young god king would be transported to the afterlife with as complete an entourage as any past Pharaoh in living memory so long as it would all fit.
Ankhesenamun at last had received welcome news from the Hittite chamberlain. Suppiluliumas finally had become convinced by her second appeal and was sending his firstborn son, Zennanza, to wed her and join their two empires. The young prince had been dispatched with all haste and should be in Thebes within one week of the time the message had been received. Assurance of her longevity as queen was within reach.
To intercept him and provide some additional protection and guidance, she had sent her unwilling messenger back up the road along which the Hittite would travel.
By this time Ipay was really disinclined to take the trip. After all, it was not long since he had returned. He had not been with his wife much of late and the girls of the north had not been to his liking a grubby lot. He decided to dally at home for a couple of days more with his family, with his wife, in his own bed. ‘The Hittite will be that much closer to home by the time I catch up with him less distance to travel less time away,’ he thought.
Horemheb had become somewhat confused by an excess of date wine the previous evening. By morning he was both mentally and physically impaired. Despite his heavy head, he forced himself to rise and inspect the night’s progress in construction of the funeral barque that was to carry the king’s body to the west bank.
As he rode uncomfortably to the boatyard he happened to catch sight of Ipay leaving the city by the north route. The coming and going was far too coincidental for his liking.
Chapter Six
A Man of Some Importance
Howard Carter took to his new responsibilities with considerable energy and determination. First, however, he needed somewhere to live quarters suitable to his official position. Happily this was provided by the authorities. It was a stucco faced building of mud brick construction with shuttered and louvred windows and a simple but attractively functional three arched veranda. He gathered about him a couple of servants and a number of pets, most of which, unfortunately for them, were to have foreshortened life spans. He already had his horse, ‘Sultan’, with whom over time he had developed a close and devoted relationship. He now added two gazelles and ‘SanToy’, a slothful and curious donkey, two characteristics that would soon prove sadly fatal.
He held a special attachment for the dumb and selflessly affectionate qualities rarely seen in humans, of whom he tolerated the illiterate, who he could dominate without question, more than the literate, who would invariably answer back, usually in ignorance. However, he was all too aware that without the help of the aristocracy and the otherwise wealthy in all practicality there would have been no financial support for the work he wished to accomplish. Therefore, so far as he could maintain control of his feelings, he suffered in silence the inevitable company of his benefactors, most of them inarticulate in Egyptology, and took comfort in the discoveries and restorations achieved through their aid and in spite of their naivety.
Now that he was ‘omnipotent’ in all areas within the Luxor Protectorate, Carter’s most immediate desire was to return to the spot where his horse had thrown him two years earlier and fully investigate that which he had quite literally stumbled upon. As soon as he felt comfortable with the rules of engagement and the arrangement of his office and had acquainted himself with his colleagues in the Service, he gathered a small party of labourers and rode out to rediscover the location of his former fortuitous accident.
He departed his quarters dressed in a three-piece tweed, bow tie, Homburg and light-coloured suede shoes. With his cleanly cut, short moustache he looked every bit the rank he now held. He would look just the same for many years to come.
The landmarks remained quite clear in his memory and he had no difficulty locating the site. He put his men to work immediately. The upper steps were revealed quickly. Carter beamed with delight. But the new inspector was about to receive a lesson on how to contain the urgency of his expectations.
It took his men two months of hard digging to reach, at last, what was clearly the top of a doorway. They were, by then, some fifty feet down. As the door became exposed, Carter saw that it was sealed with mud bricks. Excitement built within him as he sensed that this tomb, as tomb it surely was, could well have survived the ravages of robbers in antiquity. In just the first few months of his inspectorship already he could be about to open a tomb that had not seen a living soul since the Pharaoh had been laid to rest.
As the hole grew larger so did the wall of bricks. All the way to the bottom of the walled up door they were untouched! Carter could hardly believe his good fortune.
Unable to contain himself any longer he got the fellahs at the surface to lower him into the hole in a basket. On reaching the bottom he scrambled to his feet and immediately began removing the bricks from the top of the door. He opened a hole beneath the lintel large enough to look through and peered inside. He could make out nothing but blackness.
He turned to the reis. “A paraffin lamp. Bring me a lamp... and... and some rope. Quickly... Please!”
With the hurricane lamp suspended inside the cavity, he pulled himself up to the lintel and looked in. Directly in front of him was an inclined ceiling. He looked down and observed that the floor of the passage descended steeply into the darkness beyond. There was nothing apparently in the passage itself but indeterminate rubbish. This was not unexpected. The burial chamber and the rooms adjacent to it would lie some distance away in the depths.
Carter pulled away enough bricks to allow him to squeeze through, then eased himself down to the floor carefully. In dropping the last foot or two he landed awkwardly and almost lost his balance. The passage was very steep and as he scrambled for a steady footing he inadvertently kicked something that bounced and rattled deeper into the blackness.
His heart was pounding. His hands were shaking. His whole body began to tremble. He felt such intensity to be standing for the first time alone in an unidentified tomb and, above all, to be the first to set foot there in perhaps several thousands of years. He drew a long, deep breath. The air had an acrid, stale odour to it.
Regaining his composure, he took the lamp from the rope and examined the floor. Nothing but dust and rock fragments littered the area around him. He turned to look further into the corridor. His eyes were becoming accustomed to the gloom and he thought he could make out some irregular shapes lying on the floor some distance ahead. He carefully edged his way deeper. As he drew closer, the strengthening shadows accented the shapes in front of him. Carter stared hard. As his eyes focused, the picture became less interesting. The ragged objects were animal parts; the desiccated head of a bovine it did not appear large enough to be more than a calf and pieces of one of its legs.
‘The remains of the funerary feast,’ speculated Carter, and with this reassuring thought he pressed on. As he descended further, the quality of the air rapidly worsened. He covered his nose and mouth with his handkerchief but didn’t stop moving forward. About one hundred yards further down, his hurricane lamp illuminated an open doorway at the bottom of the inclined corridor. Rarely was this first room the burial chamber, but Carter’s senses were on such an edge that any new doorway formed a portal to discovery. As he approa
ched the entrance, the shadows of the doorjambs gradually moved apart and the entire room and its contents were revealed.
Briefly conscious that in his excitement he had come far without considering the rules that were now very much a part of his office, he stopped on the threshold. If he turned back now, the private sense of presence to be the first to set foot in this place after so many millennia could never be repeated. ‘Damn protocol,’ he thought. ‘First I will see for myself.’ He raised the lamp and looked around the room.
Back at the entrance to the tomb the reis’s men were themselves becoming concerned with protocol. They were well aware that any fresh opening of an apparently undisturbed burial had to be in the presence of district officials of a much higher rank than the Chief Inspector of Antiquities of the Upper Nile.
“What is Mr Carter doing, do you think, Mustafah?” said the reis.
“He has spent much time in there. I fear he is either hurt or he investigates deeper and before the Consul!”
“I will go to see,” said the reis. He slid himself through the aperture in the doorway and fell to the floor.
The thudding sound back up at the entrance and the blink in the shaft of sunlight that lit up the floor of the passage startled Carter. He all at once felt like a boy caught in the act of stealing apples in the orchard of a neighbour. He stared at the silhouette advancing towards him.
The reis slithered to Carter’s feet. “What are you doing, sir?” he asked.
“Ahmed, my old friend. We have discovered a most curious tomb. Come, look at this.”
Carter took the man by the left arm and pointed. A large wedge-shaped object wrapped in white linen lay in the far left corner of the room. Alongside it was a wooden coffin with hieroglyphs inscribed all over it. Elsewhere lay red pottery, pots and dishes all over the place, more remains of the calf Carter had come across along the entrance passageway and a couple of skeletons of birds, possibly ducks or geese, entirely picked clean by the ancient participants of the funerary feast.
The lid of the coffin was not fastened shut. Together, gingerly, they raised it. Carter craned his neck to get the first sight of the contents. To his dismay it was totally empty.
He replaced the coffin lid and attempted to pull back a portion of the shroud covering the large object that lay beside it. He could tell from the shape of the closely fitting shroud that this was a statue of some kind. A black topknot poked out of the narrow end where the ancient, perished thread was beginning to tear under its own weight. The entire cloaked object resembled the shape of a seated figure. But who?
“Despair not, Ahmed. These have to be the trappings of a funerary feast within an antechamber of the tomb. There has to be more to this place!”
The walls of the room in which they were standing were solid, but this did not deter Carter. He knew that if there were any additional passages more than likely they led further downward. They would begin with a stairway or sheer shaft cut somewhere in the floor of the room. He was standing on debris from the partially collapsed roof so any opening was likely hidden from them.
“Go and get me a rod, Ahmed. We must probe the floor for additional cavities.”
Carter bubbled inside with anticipation. Indeed there was no evidence that this tomb had previously been plundered. The remains of the funerary festivities appeared undisturbed. The innermost sepulchre had to lie somewhere beneath him.
He heard the reis drop back down into the entrance, stumble on the slope and in so doing drop the steel probe with a cacophonous clatter.
“Quiet!” Carter hissed incredulously, as if the sound would wake the dead. It felt to him as if noise itself could violate this holy place.
“Sorry, sir. Very sorry, sir,” whimpered the reis as he slid backward into the chamber.
Carter grabbed the probing rod and began a methodical search of the floor. He started in the near left corner, probing every three feet in parallel lines each about a yard apart, back and forth. The debris that littered the place lay up to about a foot deep. Carter, on his knees now and with both fists on the probe, stabbed downward, hitting bedrock, the true floor of the room, within a few inches every time. He finished the second row, turned and began stabbing at the ground again. Three penetrations later Carter fell unceremoniously on his face. The probe had encountered no resistance to the full extent of its length. He had found the opening.
Carter wiped the soil from his lips. “I knew it. I knew it,” he whispered excitedly. Turning his dirty face towards the reis, he smiled broadly.
Ahmed beamed back. He could have laughed outright at the sight of his ecstatic, dirty master, but respect of position and the peremptory need of a steady job permitted only a knowing grin.
“We shall return to the surface.” Carter could see there was evidently too much labour ahead to continue the illicit exploration. “I shall advise the Consul General that we are at the threshold. We shall first clear this room
completely. Then the men will begin digging here where I have marked.” Carter pulled the probe out and stuck it gently back into the gravel close to where he had found the cavity.
The two scrambled back up the passage and, with the aid of a rope which the reis had attached for the purpose, clambered up the inside of the mud brick doorway and back out into the blinding sunlight.
Carter told the men to complete clearing the doorway and then place a guard there for the night. He must return to his house and send a message to Viscount Cromer, the British Consul General in Egypt.
“Ahmed, bring Sultan to me.” That evening in his small study he scribbled on a notepad...
Sir, I have the consummate pleasure to advise I have come upon an inviolate tomb. I have excavated to the antechamber in which I have discovered the remains of a Pharaoh’s funerary feast and a magnificent, painted, greater than life-size sandstone statue, probably in the likeness of the king himself. Once I have cleared this chamber I will set the men to excavating the continuance of the passageway which in this particular tomb appears to take the form of a vertical shaft at this point I know not how deep. It is clear to me that the burial chamber will lie somewhere off this shaft and once I have come upon the doorway it is my intention to advise your Excellency and request your presence at the opening. While it is true to say that to this juncture I have come across no sign that could lead me to identify the Pharaoh within, I am most assuredly convinced that he is here and, once discovered, all will be revealed to us.
It is with the greatest excitement and anticipation that I send you this good news, and I hope it will not be long before I call upon you to visit the site, and that you are able to come.
Your obedient servant,
H.C.
Carter folded it up and placed it in an envelope. He addressed the envelope: ‘URGENT. PRIVATE & CONFIDENTIAL. For the attention of His Excellency The British Consul General, Cairo’, and passed it to his houseboy, charging him to ensure its delivery.
As the boy left, one of Carter’s two pet gazelles came into the room through the opened door and began sniffing about for scraps of food. Carter addressed the animal as if it were a colleague. “A drink is called for. Do you not think so, my little one?” The delicate creature put its forelegs on the seat of the chair in which Carter was sitting and nuzzled the palms of his hands.
“This will be a fine find, my beauty.” He looked into the two large, black, heavily eyelashed eyes. “I cannot believe my luck. And so soon after starting. Oh, what a story this will make!”
The last glimmers of evening sunlight twinkled on the empty gin bottle standing on Carter’s desk. The light faded and was gone. Carter slept deeply and dreamed sweetly that night.
Nearly three hundred evenings would pass before Carter got to the threshold he sought one for every foot dug! There was time aplenty for his enthusiasm to dull, but many matters to occupy him in other parts of his protectorate. Some were not at all to Carter’s liking.
Possibly the most unfortunate affair concerned the arrival at
Luxor of one Mrs Charlotte Avery Oliphant. She announced herself as a close friend and confidante of Lady Amherst. Her husband had recently passed away after contracting diphtheria. He had left her well provided and Lady Amherst suggested that she travel to Egypt for the sights and the clean air, and to overcome her grief not that that would take long. Lady Amherst told her to make use of her ladyship’s protégé as a guide and report back on the progress of his career. His principal benefactor had no conception that her idea could be so badly misplaced. But the die was cast.
This particular lady had a strong propensity for exercising her vocal cords. When she spoke, it was commonly on subjects about which she knew absolutely nothing. Nevertheless, on these occasions she would speak with a strong sense of authority and confidence, a trait that would become all the more acute when she had had a drink or two she had a fierce liking for the spirits.
At the same time, the protégé in question had a strong preference for solitude and quiet. He spoke little and then only on subjects in which he was well versed. When it came to alcohol he had both capacity and control, unlike the new and unwelcome visitor.
The only areas in which their characters converged were in the degree of authority and confidence in their oral deliveries and their fondness for a little tipple.
Mrs AO, therefore, was in most respects not a bit like Howard Carter. Consequently, the occasion of their first meeting was a calamity looking for somewhere to happen. In view of their similar tastes, it was natural that the arena for their first altercation would be within the sublime atmosphere of the bar at the Winter Palace Hotel.
“Totknees the Fird, I said. You ’eard me quite correctly, sir, the first time Totknees the Fird. ’E was the one wot begat Cleopatra, don’t y’ know.”
Tutankhamun Uncovered Page 14