Tutankhamun Uncovered

by Michael J Marfleet

  Carter was by now firmly on the defensive. He was not getting the breathing space to organise his thoughts and he was making no headway at all with the new Minister. It seemed he wasn’t being allowed to. Perhaps it was all by design. He was still remembering the paper Tottenham had shown him. There seemed no way to win this man over. It was all so hopeless. Another wasted trip. But he was not about to leave without making his point.

  “With respect, sir. We are not talking about quite the same thing. It is common practice to close down operations during the spring. No one, not even the fellaheen, can tolerate the summer temperatures. I meant we are currently wasting valuable winter season time.”

  The Minister did not acknowledge Carter’s reply. As soon as Carter paused he turned to his secretary. “Ask Monsieur le Directeur to join us, if you will.”

  ‘That’s all I need,’ thought the beleaguered Egyptologist, ‘Monsieur l’Obstacle.’

  Pierre Lacau’s massive figure filled the doorway to the Minister’s office. He was at once friendly but not overly so. He stooped and shook Carter’s hand firmly.

  “Now we wish to talk about the visitors to the tomb, Mr Carter,” said the Minister. “Professor Lacau has a number of names he wishes to discuss with you.”

  Lacau placed a slip of paper in Carter’s hand.

  “These people you have admitted to the tomb at one time or another, have you not?”

  Carter perused the list for a moment. “Yes. I know all of these people.”

  “None of these people was authorised by us to visit the tomb.”

  Lacau and the Minister stared at the Egyptologist as if he were expected immediately to admit his infraction and apologise. Carter, of course, did neither.

  “Excellency. Monsieur le Directeur. That is not a requirement. I am the one most qualified to judge who may and who may not and when they may visit the tomb no one else. You know that only too well, Monsieur le Directeur.”

  The leather squeaked as the Minister moved in his chair. “Frankly, I am at a loss for words. You honestly believe that it is you who has the authority to select and grant passage into this discovery? You actually believe this?”

  “Excellency.” Carter’s anger was welling. Everything else anxiety, analysis, strategic thinking, diplomacy, construction was overwhelmed by the natural rage that was building within him. Unlike before, the words came easily. “Excellency. You must understand what your employee does not. That is, that this discovery is so rare, so rich and so immense that it is too great for Egypt to hold to its own. That is, that I am employed by the holder of the concession for this excavation. That is, that I am he who is qualified to perform this work with diligence. That is, that I am he who performs this work for Egypt and the world at large. That is, that without my team’s expertise most of what you have already received in the museum in this great city would have been damaged irreparably or lost altogether.”

  He looked for a glimmer of acknowledgement in the Minister’s black eyes. There was not a flicker of it.

  “I am not asking for thanks,” he went on. “I am asking to be left alone to complete the work efficiently and satisfactorily, with the absolute minimum of harm to those wondrous pieces that still lie within. Please leave me to do my best. And that includes the selection of those who may enter the tomb. You will not be disappointed at the result, I promise you.”

  For a moment there was silence. An angry Howard Carter had addressed his counterpart at his own level. For once the delivery was almost without emotion. For now he thought he’d caught up.

  He was wrong. As if nothing had been said thus far, the Minister launched immediately into a dispassionate monologue concerning his proposals for the opening ceremony. After presenting a longish list of selected VIPs and requesting that Carter arrange all the seating and refreshments for the appointed day, the Minister asked at what point and in what manner the mummy would be revealed to him.

  “No, sir. Not at this ceremony,” answered Carter patiently. “I am almost certain there will be at least three coffins one within the other within the other and the opening of these in sequence will be a most delicate and time-consuming process. I am afraid there will have to be a second ceremony perhaps in the next season for the revealing of the king. However, allowing the anticipation to build can only make the final event more exciting and satisfying don’t you think, Excellency?”

  The Minister was not amused. With an expression of frustration on his face he said, “Well, that being the case I do not feel it necessary or appropriate for me to be at the opening of the sarcophagus. I am a busy man and it promises to be far too mundane an event. You will advise me when you are ready to reveal the king. If I am available at that time I will come...”

  Carter did not allow the Minister to continue. He broke in, “And if you are not I will close the tomb and hold things until you can come, sir.”

  He wasn’t trying to be polite. He knew damn well the Minister was about to instruct him to do just this. All he wanted was to appear more generous and accommodating than the Minister cared to let him.

  It was to Carter’s satisfaction that his interjection had been timed so well. Lacau noted it, too. But it was lost on the Minister. “Now, if you will excuse me, I have work to attend to.”

  Carter was very disappointed with the way the meeting had gone and very angry at the earlier conspiratorial tactics of Lacau and Tottenham. Nevertheless, he maintained his outward civility and thanked the Minister for his time.

  He was quickly ushered out by the secretary.

  On the journey back to Luxor, he turned his mind to thoughts of the tomb and tried to shut out the feelings of remorse that had been eating at him. He had achieved nothing at the meeting but for a better feel for who and what he was dealing with.

  It was over, and the excitement and anticipation of what lay ahead of him in the tomb returned to fill his mind to overflowing.

  Two dozen persons attended the opening. That was about as many as could stand in the area immediately adjacent to the sarcophagus and still be assured of some view of the proceedings. At Carter’s invitation, James Breasted, at the time a very sick man, was among the group. Driven by the adrenalin of excitement coursing through his system he had left his bed against the orders of his doctor. After all, no sickbed could keep any man from an experience with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that held this magnitude of promise. The images fresh in his mind, Breasted would record his vivid experience two days later as he lay once more in his bed in Luxor, exhausted but immensely satisfied. (See Breasted, 1943).

  Standing on a low wooden platform to give himself some leverage advantage Carter manoeuvred a crowbar between the granite lid and the top of the quartzite casket and attempted to raise up one corner. He pressed down with all his weight until the lid eased. Immediately the base of the lid cleared the top of the casket, Mace jammed a couple of metal angle irons into the gap. The two continued to work around the sarcophagus in this way, bringing up the two halves of the broken lid separately until they were both sitting level about one inch above the lip. To ensure that the two broken halves stayed together, Carter and three of his colleagues slid in timbers lengthwise along each long edge and, with the aid of slender sticks, passed ropes from one to the other under the timbers and secured them to the pulley system above the lid.

  The time had come to take the strain. As the weight was taken at either end, the ropes stretched and audibly creaked and then, slowly, the lid began to rise.

  “Enough!” whispered Carter urgently.

  The lid hung swaying slightly just twenty or so inches above the stone casket. Everyone leaned forward to squint inside. The lights that flooded the burial chamber were standing too high to illuminate the interior of the sarcophagus. Inside was virtually impenetrable blackness.

  Carter, standing at one end, pulled a torch from the pocket of his trousers and shone it between the two great slabs of stone. Everyone leaned forward, pressing closer to the gap between the lid and t
he lip. Within their field of view lay a large mummiform shape tightly wrapped in a dull black shroud bespattered with a tawny dust and some tiny fragments from the granite lid. Carter’s torch picked up flashes of gold from deep inside the casket. “I can see the funeral bier,” he announced. Murmurs of acknowledgement issued from his spectators.

  Carter put his hand inside the casket until he could feel the texture of the shroud. The sense of touching the unviolated coffin of a king for the first time gave him a strangely apprehensive feeling.

  He withdrew. “Burton. Where’s Burton?”

  The whirring of the movie camera stopped. “Here, Howard.” A soft voice came from the darkness behind the pressing audience.

  “Harry, we will leave for a moment while you take some plates. Gentlemen, if you would be so kind...”

  He gestured to the straining eyes to his left and everyone dutifully pulled back to give Burton the room to shuffle by with his equipment.

  There was a considerable buzz of excitement in the chatter of the privileged onlookers, Arab and English alike, as they waited for Burton to complete his photographic record. To give the photographer the room he required Carter himself sat back on his haunches against the wall between the burial chamber and the treasury. He wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. He looked at it. It was filthy. He was covered in the dust of ages.

  When Burton had finally cleared his stuff and confirmed that his plates were all right, Carter and Mace positioned themselves at the head of the sarcophagus.

  Burton’s lights blazed into the cavity. The heat was oppressive but not a single person present that day had any thought of discomfort.

  ‘Illumination sufficient to awaken the dead,’ thought Carter. He prepared to peel away the ancient cloth. “It’s tight on this side. What’s it like on yours, Mace? What do you think?”

  Mace leaned in and gripped the head end of the shroud gently. To his horror he could feel the threads begin to tear.

  “Dammit, Howard!” he whispered in an urgent tone, “It’s damn brittle. I can feel it giving way. For God’s sake don’t pull too hard!”

  Carter had maintained his grip on the shroud. He didn’t feel any yielding in the fibre of the cloth itself and, although he was pulling pretty hard, the shroud held together. It appeared stuck fast. He considered how the ancients might have succeeded in tucking the shroud in so tightly around so obviously a heavy and immovable object. Then, all of a sudden, without tearing, the material gave way and he found himself holding the ends of two shrouds free in his hands, several inches above the coffin.

  “It’s come free, Mace,” he whispered. “There are two of them.”

  The audience to his left leaned close to the rim of the casket to get a better look.

  “Gentlemen. A moment, please. If you would move back just a little. As we unroll the shrouds Mr Mace and I will have to move along either side of the sarcophagus. You will be able to look closer presently.”

  The observers moved away as instructed. Given more room, Carter and Mace slowly began to roll back the dusty upper cloth.

  “Arthur,” cautioned Carter. “Be careful to contain the stone fragments in the linen if you can. If they slip down the sides they may wedge between the coffin and the wall of the sarcophagus and we’ll have a devil of a job getting it out.”

  Like a pair of solemn undertakers, Carter and Mace steadily rolled the shroud to the foot end. They then took hold of the second shroud and rolled this in the opposite direction. This revealed a third sheet beneath, or so they thought until they had reached the head end once more and discovered this shroud was a single piece folded back on itself.

  As they rolled this longer shroud back towards the foot, Carter and Mace stared hungrily downward. The brilliance of gold shone up at them. A perfectly balanced, brilliantly golden, young face stared at them through deeply black eyes. The effigy wore the nemes headdress. The gold veneer was torn a little where the wood, desiccated by eons, had cracked beneath, but the vulture and serpent insignia of regal office stood proudly out, the two encircled by a tiny, delicately threaded bouquet of what appeared to be dried flower petals a tiny, final, fond goodbye set upon the ornament at the forehead.

  Carter and Mace looked at one another. Mace smiled. Carter smiled. It was a magical moment.

  They proceeded on to the foot and the richness of the entire body of the coffin was revealed. It looked as clean and fresh as if it had just been laid to rest. Every part of it glittered in the brilliance of Burton’s lamps except for the foot. This clearly had been wilfully damaged. There were some brilliant flashes of gold from the side of the foot, but the toe had been roughly cut, virtually hacked off.

  Finally they drew the shrouds from the coffin. Realising in the tension of the moment that they still held the soiled, ancient linen rolled up firmly in their fists, they placed it to the side on some packing materials and then turned back to lean over the head end of the sarcophagus.

  The guests pressed forward to look. No one spoke.

  Carter was face to face with the likeness of the dead king, the monarch he had been searching for all these years. This, then, was what the boy king had looked like. It was all a little too much to absorb fully in a few minutes, even an hour it could take days, perhaps weeks. Carter felt more overawed than the moment he had first set eyes on the objects in the antechamber. This was personal. This king, in history virtually unknown, Carter now felt strangely closer to than any person in the living world. The eyes seemed alive. They spoke to him through the blackness of the obsidian of which they were made.

  Carter was so totally absorbed in what he was looking at that he lost all sense of time. When he finally recalled that he had an audience and raised his head to take their questions, there was no one there. One by one the guests, profoundly struck, had quietly left to contemplate what they had witnessed in their own private way.

  Carter and Mace stepped off the wooden platform and walked out into the auburn light of early evening. Burton set up his camera equipment once more.

  The entire audience had assembled at the top of the stone staircase. They greeted Carter warmly as he exited the tomb. He received a vigorous, grateful handshake from every one of them. He thanked them all in turn, ending with Pierre Lacau. Holding the Director’s hand a little longer than the others, and for the moment suppressing his disdain for the man, Carter took the opportunity to give Lacau the courtesy of hearing his immediate plans.

  “We are to have the press conference tomorrow, as agreed, then four days of official visitations, again as agreed, and then I can get back to work.”

  Lacau nodded and smiled, knowing only too well Carter’s dislike for the formalities.

  “Before the press, however, I should like to escort the wives of the excavators into the tomb for a viewing. They have sacrificed much by being here with their husbands dedicated to their tasks and I would like to give them some reward for their tolerance. The Minister isn’t likely to have a problem with that now, is he?”

  “I’ll check with him, Mr Carter, to be on the safe side.”

  The statement was clinical. There was something in Lacau’s expression that Carter didn’t like. Carter, the euphoria of the moment still coursing through his veins, shrugged his shoulders and bade a cordial “au revoir” to the Director.

  He turned back down the steps to his colleagues. “We’ll get the wives over here tomorrow before he has a chance to respond,” he murmured confidentially. “Give them a full view of the place before the smelly ones arrive in an orgy of local publicity and self-importance.”

  The others quickly nodded in agreement.

  Reassured by the unhesitating support of his colleagues Carter set about closing up for the evening.

  The party of visitors left The Valley busily relating one another’s most recent impressions. As the noise of their chatter died away Carter was once again within the tomb inspecting the lifting tackle that was straining under the suspended weight of the great granite lid per
haps one ton or more. In the strong light of Burton’s arc lamps, Mace and he closely examined the ropes and pulleys for any signs of impending failure.

  The cavity for once was soundless and everything looked secure. The excavators returned to the outside and Carter instructed Adamson to get the guards to lock the gates and take their positions for the night.

  Abdel came in the car to fetch him back to Castle Carter for supper. He said goodnight to his colleagues and in little more than five minutes he was at his front door. He walked inside, across the hall and into his bedroom, spread-eagled himself on the bed and fell almost immediately into a dreamful sleep, still fully clothed.

  At once he found himself reclining with Dorothy Dalgliesh on the cool, sunlit lawns of Didlington Hall recounting his experiences of the last few hours to her intent delight and riveted attention.

  Abdel knocked on his door to tell him dinner was ready. There was no response. His master’s mind could not have been further removed from thoughts of dinner in the Egyptian dust.

  The food did not go to waste.

  The precisely pressed dressed, never-mind-the-heat Egyptian emissary arrived at Castle Carter at eight in the morning with a white envelope secured with a blob of crimson sealing wax. Abdel took it in to Carter who had just risen from his bed and was in the process of stripping off. In his vest and underpants he sat back on the edge of the bed and took the envelope.

  The wax was tacky and stuck to Carter’s thumb as he opened the letter. He unfolded the single sheet of paper with the crudely printed Ministry letterhead and read it. In a few short lines of impeccable English, the Under Secretary of State for the Ministry of Public Affairs clearly stated that the Minister of Public Works was prohibiting Carter from admitting the wives of his colleagues to the tomb.

  Carter flicked the sealing wax across the room. His fist tightened around the paper. He stared at the floor for a moment and then looked up at Abdel.