Tutankhamun Uncovered

by Michael J Marfleet

  “Mr Davis,” he announced firmly, “I think it better you leave my house at once. The Antiquities Service has no need for disrespectful bigots. Please be good enough to retire peacefully while I am inclined to believe it is the drink that is doing the talking. I hope you will be feeling better in the morning. If you do not, I may be forced to reconsider my options regarding this partnership.”

  Davis, although somewhat sleepy with booze, was alert enough to comprehend fully the implications of Carter’s words. Much as he despised authority in others, he well recognised that this young man indeed held the power to revoke his licence to dig. Davis’s consuming passion to find an intact royal tomb, to return to the United States bedecked with trophies, and to receive the public honours attributed to those who donated such artefacts to the Metropolitan Museum transcended all other considerations. More than anything else, he wanted to publish and to have his name as a donor engraved on the description plate of a rare and beautiful display piece, there for all to see in perpetuity in the grand halls of the Met. He had better tread carefully from here.

  Presented with what amounted to an ultimatum, therefore, Davis’s response to Carter was most thoughtful and, a first for Davis, totally submissive. “Howard, my apologies. I have been too long drinking on the porch. This will not happen again. Let us go tomorrow to this interesting place you mentioned, as you suggest. I am indeed most sorry for the rudeness of my outburst.”

  “I understand,” said Carter. “I will bring the houseboy in and you will apologise to him as well. Then all will be put to rights.”

  “Mmm? That really necessary?”

  Carter nodded.

  Davis did as he was told. They took dinner together after all, Carter in his nightshirt, Davis in his waistcoat, buttoned jodhpurs, boots and spats. They each had a final brandy and a cigar. By 10 p.m. Davis was on his way to his houseboat and Carter was in bed.

  The late evening’s dose of humility took much out of Davis. Perhaps for the first time in his life he had failed to get what he wanted through sheer force of will. He chose not to share the evening’s events with Emma. His sense of failure allowed him little sleep that night. So it was the following morning that he was already at breakfast on Carter’s veranda before Carter was out of bed. As the sun broke the horizon and threw a reflective glare across the river, Carter emerged, still in his nightshirt.

  “Mornin’, Howard. Not like you to sleep in, especially when we have work to do. You do remember your promise, don’t you? What is it we are going to see today?”

  Carter breathed in the cool morning air, stretched and sat at the table opposite his patron. “Good morning to you, Mr Davis. What a super sunrise. Invariably remarkable from here. Best location on the west bank. Fair sets one up for the day.

  “Abdel! Coffee, if you please.”

  Davis wasn’t interested in pleasantries. “What’s in store for me today, Howard?” he repeated.

  “Not sure you deserve anything after that exhibition last evening, sir.” Carter couldn’t resist the jab.

  “But I apologised. Can’t ask for more than that.”

  Carter had had his fun and decided to leave it. “Recognising your mood when I returned last night, I felt you needed something to spice up your senses, sir, but the martini issue got in the way. What I had in mind for you was a little pornography.”

  Davis’s face lit up. “Glad you didn’t tell me, man. Had little enough sleep last night. With the extra anticipation, I may have had none!”

  Following breakfast, Carter got dressed and they left the inspectorate house at about 7.30 Carter on Sultan; Davis on a mule; and the usual entourage of fellahs on foot and carrying supplies for their refreshment.

  Carter led Davis southwest along the clearly defined margin that separates the fertile, green fields stretching to the riverside from the golden, lifeless desert. Then they cut inland towards the great amphitheatre of cliffs in which the mortuary temple of Queen Hatshepsut stood, itself almost an extension of the rocks themselves. The excavation and restoration of the structure were now pretty much complete. Davis had visited the temple many times. He had marvelled at its architecture and the art on its walls, but since its discovery could never be attributed to him it bore less attraction than the mysteries that still lay hidden beneath it and, of course, inside the walls of The Valley of the Tombs of the Kings.

  “Pornography, Howard? I have been here many times. I have studied the reliefs and the paintings. They are beautiful. There is no pornography.”

  “We are not going to the temple, sir,” said Carter. “We shall have to dismount shortly and climb the scree slope that leads up to the cliff over there. D’ you see that cavity there, to the right and to the rear of the amphitheatre?”

  Davis, who was by now feeling considerable discomfort from his overindulgence the night before, could barely squint tightly enough to bear the punch of the sun off the blazing yellow cliff face. But he could make out a black spot in the brightness.

  “All the way up there? Sonofabitch! Have y’ no mercy?”

  Carter was unyielding. The trials Davis had put the poor fellahs through the previous night were still fresh in his mind.

  “We begin our walk from here, sir,” he said in a matter-of-fact way.

  The two men dismounted and Carter led Davis up the rubble slope. As they walked, their feet sank in the loose debris. The going was so soft it felt almost as if they were making no progress at all. But when Carter paused for a moment to look back at the temple below and the river beyond, it was clear to both of them just how far they had already climbed. To Davis the cave, the tomb entrance, or whatever it was, did not look so very far away after all.

  They scrambled their way to the cliff face and then along the top of the scree slope to the left until they stood beneath the opening. It was about fifty vertical feet away. The climbing was now firm footing and Carter had no trouble reaching the mouth of the cavity. Davis, under the weather as he was, lost his footing a couple of times, but made it in the end. When, panting, he reached Carter’s side, it became clear that this was no cave. It was another rock cut tomb unfinished; uninhabited. No royal body had ever lain here.

  Carter, stooping, led Davis into the crudely cut passage. The increasing darkness temporarily blinded them. Gradually their eyes became accustomed to the feeble light. All Davis could make out were the unfinished walls.

  “There’s nothing here,” panted Davis. “Why have we climbed all this way?”

  “Are your eyes not open, Mr Davis?” taunted Carter.

  “Damn right they are. I see nothing. Not a damned thing. Just rock.” And then he paused for a moment. “Wait a minute...” He laughed. “Sonofabitch! It’s Hatshepsut being rogered by a serf, is it not?”

  “In so many words, sir. At least, that is one interpretation,” said Carter. He continued clinically, “There is some controversy, however. The apparent lack of breasts a cartoon of a homosexual act? But the figure has the headdress typical in portraits known to be of Hatshepsut. She is often depicted as a man and, and...”

  “Yes, yes?” urged Davis, now totally fascinated.

  “Well... The triangle between the legs surely intended as a female representation.”

  “And would y’ look at this guy waving his weener around!” Davis burst into laughter, then pulled out his sketchpad and penned a few lines for posterity.

  On the way back, descending the scree slope and looking down on the magnificent spectacle of the queen’s temple below them, a thought struck Carter. To Davis’ surprise the inspector suddenly turned back and began to climb up the cliff again.

  “Where the devil are you going now, man?” asked the aching millionaire.

  “I just want to check something,” Carter shouted back. “Back in a minute.” And he disappeared over a ledge.

  Five minutes in the unrelenting sun was far too long to expect Theodore Davis to wait. He made his way back to Carter’s house and took a light and unusually booze free lunch by
himself. By late afternoon he was at the excavation site, his energies recharged by the food and the morning’s excitement. On occasion, he was to be seen down amongst the fellahs scrabbling about pulling rocks from the gradually lengthening corridor. It was by now quite deep and he found it so hot at the debris face that he could spend no more than five or ten minutes there at any one time. Even the candles were softening and bending on their holders. On his third trip out of the mouth of the tomb he met Carter coming down the valley side directly above the tomb entrance.

  “Where the hell have you been all this time?” Davis asked. “I’ve been working m’ guts out down in the bowels of this thing and you’ve been gallavantin’ wherever y’ please. Found somethin’ up there, have you?”

  “No. Found nothing, Mr Davis. But I have exercised a theory of mine. And when we have completed clearance of this tomb I shall perform a survey to see whether my theory has foundation. Until I climbed that cliff with you this morning I did not realise that the burial chamber, when we eventually encounter it, could be located beneath the innermost bowels of Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple on the other side of this divide intentionally so leading us to conclude that this must be the queen’s tomb. It might explain the tortuous path we are now excavating. I believe the tomb makers started at the valley head and the point closest to the queen’s temple in an unfinished and abandoned tomb that for its first few feet ran entirely in the wrong direction. So, using this initial drop, they continued at the same angle of descent but gradually turned the corridor towards and beneath the temple’s innermost shrine. That would make it unique among the tombs in The Valley.”

  The young archaeologist’s speculations appealed to Davis’ appetite for mystery and he decided to stay with the tomb clearance operations until they had been completed. But, with the air rapidly becoming too foul to breathe he first had to spend some additional money bringing an air pump to the excavation. Thankfully this was readily obtainable in Luxor and they had it at the site within twenty-four hours.

  The season ended as expected, still tunnelling and with no end in sight.

  With Davis back in the United States for the summer, Carter took off for Dendera with his palette and brushes, a sketchpad of heavy cartridge paper, and a folding canvas seat, for what he looked forward to as a pleasant, peaceful, uneventful, artistic interlude unencumbered with pampered, pestering hangers-on the like of TMD. He was to be sorely disappointed. The very first day turned out to be extremely uncomfortable, even horrific.

  Seeking a shaded spot inside the halls of the great temple, Carter placed his chair at the base of one of the massive columns in front of an enormous frieze, a section of which he planned to paint. He looked up at the great ceiling high above him. Row upon row of vultures and serpents, their wings spread wide and painted in vivid reds, blues and gold, guided the eye towards the ceremonial entrance. The sunlight momentarily blinded him and he jerked his head back into the shade. As his eyes focused once more, the early light crisply picked out the engravings in the wall before him. The moment was too precious to miss. He pulled the pencil from his jacket pocket, licked the sharp lead point and leaned forward. Just about to make the first pencil stroke, he was disturbed by a commotion coming from outside the temple walls. The noise became louder as an Arab ran into the temple, his white robe fluttering all about him.

  “Effendi! Effendi! Mr Carter, sir! Come at once! A body has been discovered! A body! Not two minutes from here.” The excited Arab gestured behind him.

  Carter knew the man. He had from time to time been a senior helper in his excavation gangs. ‘A mummy?’ he thought. The adrenalin flowed. The heartbeat increased. All at once he forgot his painting. He rose to follow the man who was beckoning him hastily and already running back but looking at Carter to see if he was coming.

  “I am coming, Sama. Be calm, I beg of you. And look where you are going or you may run into something!”

  Outside the temple boundary, about one hundred yards ahead, Carter could see a dozen or so Arabs clustered about a small pit. Sama shouted to the group of bystanders as he approached and they moved apart to allow the inspector through. When Carter got to the edge of the shallow pit and looked down, his feelings of excitement were wiped out at a stroke. Lying in the pit was no two, three or four-thousandyearold mummy, rather a dead Egyptian and, judging from the lack of bloating, an Egyptian probably not more than twelve hours dead.

  “God almighty!” exclaimed Carter. “Who could have done this? Summon the police, Sama, at once. Ghastly!”

  Stunned and appalled by the sight at his feet, Carter took a little time to recover his composure. While he awaited the arrival of the local gendarmerie he examined the body. The corpse was grotesquely contorted. The unfortunate man had clearly suffered the most horrific torture that ultimately must have led to his death. His hands were manacled tightly behind his back by a pair of crude wooden rowlocks secured together by large nails that skewered his wrists. The arms were bent over and tied to a wooden halter which had been used to drag him along the ground behind a vehicle of some sort probably a horse. His torso was deeply incised from the dragging, sand and gravel virtually cemented within the dried blood and flesh of the open wounds. The legs were wide apart as if dislocated at the hips from the terrible physical punishment his body must have endured as he had been towed over the rough terraine. His tongue protruded from between his clenched teeth in a grimace of agonising death.

  “Savages!” Carter swore under his breath. ‘No value to human life; no feelings; the like of wild beasts.’ The sight turned his stomach. He looked away and breathed deeply, filling his lungs with fresh, tepid air.

  Presently two policemen arrived. “Who found the body?” asked one.

  “Me, Effendi,” said Sama, coming forward from the crowd of onlookers.

  “How?”

  “There was a square depression in the ground. I thought it might be an opening to a shaft. I got down on my knees and scraped away at the sand with my hands and very soon came upon the man’s toes. I ran at once for Monsieur l’Inspecteur here,” he gestured towards Carter, “who was working in the temple over there. By the time we got back here the body had been exposed as you see it now.”

  “By who?”

  “By them.” Sama waved his arm at the surrounding rabble.

  “The evidence is corrupted, then,” stated the policeman authoritatively. “The site is despoiled. There is nothing more we can do here. We will remove the body to the morgue. There is a tarpaulin on my horse. Fetch it.”

  On the policeman’s directions the Arabs wrapped the body in the tarpaulin and secured it with some rope. An idle donkey was selected to carry the load. The policemen took the names of all those present and then set off back to their hut to do whatever they chose to do. ‘Surely as little as possible,’ thought Carter.

  Carter made no attempt to interfere. He was not at all surprised at the lack of interest in the discovery and the absence of normal police procedure. Procedure meant responsibility and work, and the Arabs always looked for ways to avoid both. Besides, Carter had already recognised this horror as the handiwork of a former Moudir of the area. He was well known for his merciless treatment of the fellaheen. This barbarism had been a message to the rank and file that it was far less painful to yield to conscription.

  Carter returned to his equipment in the great hall of the temple of Dendera. Try as he might, he could not summon the energy to draw. A long, frustrating and fractious winter season with Davis, the heat of summer, and now this gross obscenity. ‘Is there no hope for these people?’ It was as if the waters of the Nile itself had contrived to sap the last of his energy. He gave a long sigh, picked up his things, and left to return to Luxor to sleep; hopefully not to dream; and to forget. In the morning he would telegraph his personal report with his own thoughts on culpability to the Viceroy’s office.

  The following season’s work revealed that the tomb entrance corridor just kept on getting deeper and deeper, and weirder
. As it continued to descend, it curved in a lengthening sweep to the right until coming around to a westward direction, a full 180 degrees from where it had started at the surface.

  Carter sensed they were nearing their goal west was the setting sun, west was death and indeed at this point they at last broke into the burial chamber. Clearing of the rubble fill was followed by the usual anticlimax devastation, fragments, rubbish, amongst which were the remains of a rifled wooden sarcophagus.

  Carter pursued clearance of the chamber with his usual attention to detail until every scrap of evidence had been sifted from the dirt and faithfully catalogued. Little more was found until one day, while Carter and Davis were taking a lunch break outside the tomb entrance, the reis summoned them back into the tomb. With difficulty, they once more made their way down the long, narrow and precipitous corridor until they reached the burial chamber. Barely half of the floor had been cleared, but in the far right-hand corner of the squarish room the top step of another staircase had been uncovered. Carter and Davis’s excitement regenerated, but the two did not wait around while their men cleared the staircase. The atmosphere was stifling and only partly relieved by the air pump. They were compelled to climb back out for some fresh air.

  The new and last room to be discovered in this strange tomb yielded a pair of open but complete and relatively undamaged yellow quartzite sarcophagi. One was oblong, the other fashioned in the shape of a cartouche. Carter lowered his oil lamp into one of them and a glow of yellow lit up the translucent hull. As he withdrew it, the lamp accidentally struck the inner wall. The sarcophagus rang like a great cathedral bell, startling everyone within earshot.

  A quick inspection of the names on the two sarcophagi confirmed that they had been intended for, and probably originally had received, the mummies and nested coffins of Hatshepsut and her father. The evidence that may have appeared coincidence at first was now beginning to make sense to Carter, at least. This last tomb not only had contained the body of the female Pharaoh, and not only was its location close to that of the inner sanctuary of Hatshepsut’s temple outside The Valley, but also its architecture was based on the same geometric system used to construct that temple. Her father was buried with her this was reflected in the reliefs that memorialise the two of them together in life on the massive walls of her temple complex. The fit was as complete as Carter could have hoped. He was well satisfied with his conclusion, particularly after all the miserably hard work and the odious fights with his patron.