Tutankhamun Uncovered

by Michael J Marfleet

  “Yes, Howard,” Lucas acknowledged with a broad grin.

  “Call for Burton while I take a small chip of this black stuff. It’s a ceremonial oil of some kind but I haven’t a clue what.”

  Carter couldn’t take his eyes off the colossal object before him. How did they make such a thing? If they did this for an insignificant king, one who barely made the history books, what would they have done for the likes of Ramses? Carter could not bear to think of the scale, the immensity of the riches previously plundered from this great necropolis. It was at once elating and at the same time deeply depressing.

  Lucas looked across at Carter. The Egyptologist was staring downwards, transfixed by the object before him. The chemist understood his colleague’s preoccupation. “Don’t worry yourself, old man. I’ll get him.”

  He manoeuvred himself around the coffin, clambered down from the scaffolding and left the tomb to summon Burton.

  To complete their work on the remaining coffin and ultimately the body itself, Carter had the third coffin and the bottom shell of the second in which it sat removed to the antechamber. The gold coffin was fixed solidly within the base of the second by the black substance which Lucas had now identified as a ceremonial unguent, and Carter had decided to leave the two cemented together for the time being until he could find a way of separating them without damaging either. In the meantime, in his urgent desire to get to the source, he would continue to work on removing the lid of the third coffin.

  Again they had found that the seam of the third coffin was well below the lip of the second and there was insufficient room between the two caskets’ walls for them to fully remove the pins that locked the lid shut.

  Because the two were cemented together so tightly, Carter and Lucas decided that damage to the gold pins that secured the lid to its base was, in this case, inevitable. They removed the pins a little at a time, prising them out as far as they would come before further movement was restricted by the inner wall of the second coffin, and then sawed off most of the protruding pin. This left just enough to grasp with pliers and pull out a little more until the entirety of each pin had been extracted. In this way, the complete set was successfully removed and the lid was raised.

  “Finally...” whispered Carter as he first set eyes on the contents of the third coffin, “...I have him!”

  There, staring straight up, was the funeral mask crafted in the form of the boy king’s face. The face itself shone in the electric light that bathed the antechamber, its serene expression veiled by the small, particulate debris of three thousand years of steady corrosion. Carter felt a welling urge to touch it but held back.

  “Lucas. Lucas! Come and look at this.”

  The entire mummy looked almost exactly like those pictured in innumerable funerary texts a lifelike mask at the head of a body, tightly wrapped in linen, the arms crossed at the chest, false fists of gold holding the remains of the almost totally decomposed crook and flail of kingly office. Positioned immediately beneath the crossed wrists, a humanoid bird the ba bird its coloured glass encrusted gold wings lying outstretched across almost the entire breadth of the chest. Four heavily decorated gold bands, evenly spaced from the chest to just above the ankles, bound the body and secured the wrappings. This regal ‘necrococoon’ fitted the contours of the golden coffin perfectly, as if welded to it so indeed it was, by the unctuous material that had been, in antiquity, so generously applied.

  By the time Derry and Carter were ready to begin unwrapping the mummy the Director of Antiquities had returned from his holidays. Carter summoned Lacey to make haste to the site. He and his entourage appeared the following day.

  Howard Carter bent down over the open coffin, a magnifying glass in his hand, and watched his colleague address the mummy wrappings.

  Dr Derry lightly scored the wax hardened fabric of the mummy with his scalpel. As he drew his knife along the length of the body, but for the barely audible popping of the threads, the corridor of the laboratory tomb was in complete silence.

  “Slowly... Douglas... Please,” Carter whispered.

  “Shh, Carter. You are disturbing my concentration.”

  Derry, a serious and most precise fellow at the easiest of times, was not at all receptive to interference from others. He gave Carter a cold look and then resumed drawing the scalpel along the surface of the linen, continuing all the way to the feet.

  As he bent over the coffin next to Carter, Lacau felt an irresistible impulse to touch someone and his huge left hand closed over Carter’s. The Egyptologist, concentrating hard as he was on the job before him, naturally was alarmed by this but only for a moment. He turned his head upward quickly to acknowledge the gesture with a brief smile and then, politely withdrawing his hand, returned his attention to the developing autopsy below.

  Derry finished his incision.

  Carter said, “Right, gentlemen. Let us begin.”

  He pocketed his magnifying glass and stood up to address his audience. “Doctor Derry and I are going to very gently and carefully peel back the outer layers. Please give us a little room.”

  The linen, burned it seemed to a crisp, came away in handfuls, tearing or disintegrating into a black, sooty dust at each attempt.

  As the unwrapping progressed, they appeared one by one the unmistakable glint of tarnished golden objects placed about the body and within each layer. As soon as Carter felt he had completed removal of one layer, he stopped, quickly pencilled a neat sketch of the layout, placed numbered cards on the objects and asked Burton to take his pictures.

  For each of the onlookers the succeeding hours became perhaps the most memorable of their lives. As the layers were removed one by one, immeasurable riches revealed themselves before their eyes. Each article, though stained by the copious black substances that had been liberally applied during the burial ceremonies, looked unbelievably extravagant. If not as pristine as they had been when placed in position so many millennia before, they were, nevertheless, literally out of this world. Despite his expectations, which by now were not modest, Carter was no less impressed with the grandeur of what now appeared before him.

  A day later they reached the body.

  What he saw now, Carter had not been expecting. It was little more than a blackened skeleton. For an unviolated mummy it was one of the most pathetic examples he had ever laid eyes on. The thorax and the feet had some flesh on them, but over the thousands of years those parts that had been more liberally soaked in the ceremonial fluids had smouldered slowly away and little but the bone had survived. Chemistry, time and the mummy’s inviolate security had consorted against the discoverers.

  Carter looked up at the expressions on the faces of the onlookers. Derry and Lucas, analysts through and through, showed no sign of emotion, but the faces of Lacau, the Egyptian authorities present, and Harry Burton were each a picture of shock and disappointment.

  “A sad sight, gentlemen,” said Carter solemnly. “It appears that all the care taken during his preservation was in vain. Destruction was perpetrated through the ignorant hands of the devout and the mourners themselves. Tutankhamen himself, having been liberally ‘marinated’ with holy oils, has been effectively cremated, sealed within the oven of his gold coffin.”

  “A three-thousand-year-old pot roast,” Burton irreverently whispered.

  Carter was not amused.

  It had taken them five days to clear the body to the head. By this time, with the exception of the Director himself, the ‘hangers-on’, as Carter disrespectfully referred to them, had returned to Cairo. It was just as well. The final stages of clearance were best left to the few witnesses that remained. With so much jewellery attached to the body itself, Carter had been forced to separate many of the limbs at the joints. The operations had been distasteful but necessary if the complete funerary equipment was to be recovered and, once he had come to terms with making the first break, the subsequent disarticulations came all the easier. The worst was the last.

  “The mask is f
irmly cemented to the bandaging about the back of the head. Ideas, gentlemen?”

  “Heat,” responded Lucas. “Let’s try using heated knife blades. See if we can gradually melt a cavity between the two. But we’ll have to lift the whole thing out to do it. Break the neck.”

  Carter accepted the proposal without question. He was anxious to look upon the king’s face,

  With due care and patience, the method worked admirably and the mask finally came free of the black, tarry glue which had, when a liquid three thousand years earlier, insinuated itself into the space between the gold sheet and the mummy wrappings. Once the mask and the linen wrappings had been completely removed, the face of the dead king was revealed to his onlookers for the first time since his mummification. It also was charred by years of slow combustion. Nevertheless, it retained a better state of preservation than the rest of the body. The skin, although cracked and parted in places, was still present. There was a semblance of a youth’s face. Also there was a peculiar iridescence in his cheeks.

  They unwrapped the cranium layer by layer, allowing Burton to take his photographs at each stage. The head, finally naked but for the beaded skull cap which was so tightly bonded with the skin on the roof of the cranium that it could not be removed but bead by bead, was photographed by Burton in all manner of postures and at all angles.

  “Decidedly young noble features, and the shape of the cranium does it remind you of the family of Akhenaten?” Carter observed, turning the head over in his hands.

  “Indeed, there is a strong likeness,” acknowledged Lucas.

  Burton’s final picture was of the entire disarticulated body reassembled piece by piece in a wooden tray on a bed of sand. It would be the last time anyone would see the body entirely whole.

  Burton having completed his work and removed his equipment, the team prepared to rewrap the body and replace it in the second coffin.

  “Ironic,” said Lucas, for a moment allowing his mind to drift from the job at hand, “that in this one case it is the richness of the grave goods that survives and the body that does not and not by the hand of the plunderer but by the hand of those who sought so reverently to preserve him.”

  “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” Carter felt compelled to add his epitaph.

  “In this case, just ashes,” added Burton coldly.

  As they turned to collect up the bandages, Carter noticed the reis of the day, Mohammed, who had been staring fixedly at the skeletal remains for some time, bend down over the body in what appeared to be a final gesture of farewell. ‘Touching,’ he thought.

  Carter, Lucas and Burton were taking an evening cocktail. Each sat in an upright canvas collapsible chair set on the sand outside the front porch of Castle Carter. As the sun set behind them, they watched the waters of the distant Nile gradually darken.

  They all felt a sense of closure to the project. The ultimate object had been discovered. There was a huge amount of work yet to do, and many more treasures yet to be uncovered, but from here on the adrenalin would not be flowing at quite the same rate.

  As if to dismiss his feelings of anticlimax, Carter shook his head and got right back to discussing the work ahead of them. “Lucas. The gold coffin is held fast by this solidified unguent. How are we going to go about separating them, do you think? Any ideas?”

  “Well...” started Lucas after a pause, “...without taking the time to research an appropriate solvent, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say we have plenty of time, Howard...” Carter nodded. “...There is only one realistic alternative. And you’re not going to like it.”

  “Try me.”

  “Done so in the past. Never done me any good!”

  “Try me again, all the same. Promise to keep my temper this time!” Carter smiled back.

  “Well... heat.”

  “Heat?”

  “Yes... heat... flame... blow torch... portable paraffin stove... that sort of thing.”

  “You’re crazy. It’ll damage the metals. Crazy.”

  “You don’t like it. Told you so. But hear me out. We don’t apply the heat directly. We use zinc plate between the coffin and the heat source. Zinc melts at a much, much higher temperature than gold and will distribute the heat relatively evenly over the body of the coffin and its contents.”

  Carter was listening.

  “However,” added Lucas, “watching the process is going to scare the living daylights out of you! Got a pencil and paper?”

  Burton pulled his pencil from behind his ear, tore a sheet of paper from his notebook and passed them to Lucas. Lucas placed the paper on Carter’s knee and drew two ‘Vs’ upside down and a crude rendition of an upturned coffin resting on them. He sketched a couple of flames underneath to depict the lamps that would be used to apply the heat.

  Carter regarded the sketch for a moment.

  “What if the bloody gold coffin just falls out of the second? It’s as heavy as hell.”

  “Won’t, Howard. It won’t. This black stuff is solid like Bakelite. Count yourself lucky if it moves at all. The process, when it begins, will be an extremely slow one. No fear of that happening.”

  “Let me get this straight. We line the inside of the gold coffin with zinc. We turn it upside down, and support the outer wooden coffin on two trestles, one at each end. We drape the upper surface of it with wet blankets. We place two smaller trestles between the others to catch the third coffin. We place paraffin lamps beneath the whole thing... and blaze away?”

  Lucas nodded. “Simple as that.”

  “Tommyrot!”

  “If it doesn’t work... you can hold my pay for this month.”

  “Hmm,” Carter shrugged his shoulders contemptuously.

  “Trust me, Howard. Have I ever let you down?”

  “Well... no. But then this kind of problem is not your expertise.” Carter was never one to mince words.

  “That is true, Howard. But I am here to analyse, deduce and solve problems. I am sure this is a viable solution. So let’s do it. First thing tomorrow. Now, how about another Scotch?”

  Carter called Abdel. While they waited, Carter became pensive once more. After a pause, he straightened up in his chair.

  “No. I don’t like it. Why don’t we try something gentler first? See if it works. Same basic procedure but using the sun. Gets bloody hot in the afternoon. Natural heat. The process feels more comforting to me. Let’s try natural heat.”

  Abdel came out of the house with a tray upon which was a bottle of Gordon’s Gin, two bottles of tonic water, a bottle of Dewar’s and a small bowl of ice. The three of them in turn replenished their glasses.

  “Have it your own way,” said Lucas after a quick sip. “Won’t work, but have it your own way. You’ll have to be careful the sun does not damage the outer shell of the second coffin. We’ll give it a try.”

  The next day, Carter emerged from the laboratory tomb at around four in the afternoon. It was his turn to relieve Burton who, under the shade of a large umbrella, had been watching for signs of movement. The coffins had been sitting outside, upturned on trestles through the heat of the day.

  “Nothing, Howard. Not a damn thing. I’ve touched the stuff with my fingers. Feels warm, but just as solid as ever.”

  “Hmm. Lucas may be right. Cannot abide the thought of applying flame to it, however. Goes against my better judgement. Really worrying.”

  “I think you must accept, Howard, that there may be no other way short of taking the entire thing to England or the United States for treatment and we know that will be impossible, let alone timely.”

  “I’d better go in there and admit my defeat with honour, then.”

  Carter turned back towards the entrance to the laboratory and called to Lucas, “You win, Alfred! Finish up and come on out. Time for a drink. We’ll try your method in the morning.”

  Carter watched in tense horror as the flames of the Primus lamps burned beneath the zinc clad gold coffin. After two hours of staring, tension mounting all
the while lest he miss the first signs of movement, Carter snorted, got up from his canvas chair, and walked back towards the tomb.

  “Where are you going, Howard?” asked Lucas.

  “Fed up watching, Alfred. Damn process isn’t working.”

  “But it will, Howard. Just have to give it time.”

  “Something we haven’t got.”

  “Well, if you don’t mind, I’m going to wait here a while. Waited all bloody day for the bloody sun. Might as well give the flames a similar go.”

  Carter didn’t answer, and when Lucas turned to see where he was he had disappeared. Lucas turned back to the coffin set and called for more water to be poured over the blankets. He took a glass of water for himself and manoeuvred his umbrella a little to make sure he had the maximum shade. Slipping off his seat, he dragged himself on his back until he had a full upward view of the open coffins. He refined his gaze on the open seam between the two, hoping against hope for just a tiny suggestion of movement.

  He lay there prone for what seemed to be an age. Not a sign. He blinked and as he did so he thought he saw the inner coffin ease towards him. He stared hard at the rim. There was movement! Very, very slow, but definite movement. He turned over immediately, shut down the lamps, and pulled himself out.

  “Abdel! Get Master Carter at once!”

  By the time the panting Carter had returned to the spot, the inner coffin had already settled down onto the second set of trestles lying just an inch below.

  “It’s still warm enough, Howard. We must raise the outer shell before the damn stuff hardens again.”

  Positioned at either end, the two of them struggled to lift. Gradually each sensed the outer shell easing away from the gold coffin beneath it. As they strained, the lifting became easier. Abdel and another helper moved the trestles on which the outer coffin had been resting to the side so that it could be replaced on them away from the base of the third coffin.

  Once revealed, the back of the solid gold coffin was not a pretty sight. Globs of the black treacle like substance lay all over it and, like long black icicles, the substance hung in straggling ribbons below it.