The Visitors

by Sally Beauman

  At about one-fifteen, the excavators, Carnarvon and Eve emerged from their luncheon tomb where, according to Carter’s plan and unnoticed by the reporters, they had been discreetly joined by their invited guests. This select group included Monsieur Pierre Lacau, Rex Engelbach, Ibrahim Effendi, Albert Lythgoe, Herbert Winlock, several important government Pashas, and two extremely eminent Egyptologists, namely Carnarvon’s friend, Dr Alan Gardiner of Oxford, and Dr James Breasted, of Chicago. As they appeared, Carter’s workmen unlocked the steel gates to the tomb, and began ferrying chairs inside, also tools such as picks and shovels. Seeing this, spotting the white-bearded Old Testament presence of Lacau, galvanised by the spectacle of Doctors Breasted and Gardiner – two plump august figures ambling across the sand arm in arm, resembling Tweedledum and Tweedledee and resplendent in matching pith helmets – the Combine realised the great moment had come at last. Zero hour. They shot back to the retaining wall and fumbled for their cameras and notebooks.

  Leading the way into the tomb, Carnarvon glanced back over his shoulder and smiled at them. ‘Just popping down for a little concert,’ he said. ‘Carter’s going to sing to us.’

  Humming a tune, he raised his hat in salute and sauntered down the steps. Arthur Weigall swung around to his fellow Combine journalists and said: ‘If Carnarvon goes down to the tomb in that spirit, I give him six weeks to live.’

  At this dramatic point in Callender’s narrative, Miss Mack interrupted.

  ‘Six weeks to live? What an extraordinary thing to say! How very unpleasant. Did he mean it in jest? If so, it is tasteless. Are you sure Mr Weigall said that? Would you mind if I made a note of it?’

  ‘Feel free.’ Callender concentrated: ‘I think he said six weeks. It was definitely six something. Oh Lord, maybe it was six months… or six years? Does it matter?’

  ‘Of course it matters! Six years doesn’t have the same ring at all, Pecky – surely you can see that?’ Miss Mack cried, becoming fretful. ‘Which was it? Think.’

  ‘I don’t know. Weeks, I’m pretty sure. Blighter muttered it as Mace and I walked past. He was trying to put the wind up us. And we weren’t falling for those little tricks.’

  With reluctance, Miss Mack let this detail go. Later that night she told me she would not use it. She would revise that decision six weeks later, when Carnarvon lay mortally ill at the Continental Hotel in Cairo. ‘Go on, Pecky,’ she said now, and he did.

  ‘Well, then they knocked the wall down,’ he said. ‘Carnarvon made a speech first – some rigmarole, went on and on for ever. Then Carter spoke for a bit. Then we got down to the nitty-gritty. Burton set up his camera, and angled his lights and reflectors and what-have-you. Carter stood on that platform I’d made – the one you saw – and he loosened the stones from the top downwards. He passed them to Mace, who passed them to me – and then the boys carried them out in baskets. That was it. Bob’s your uncle.’

  Miss Mack gave a cry of protest. ‘Pecky, please. You’re not trying. Don’t be so prosaic. What did you see? Did the audience gasp? The tension must have been palpable.’

  ‘Well, it was blood – it was hot,’ he said. ‘Boiling. Carter stripped down to his vest. We were all sweating.’ He turned his mild eyes to the river; Miss Mack scribbled frantically. ‘After a bit, he’d widened the hole enough and you could see blue and gold. I think Lady Evelyn cried out at that point, and there were gasps – yes, I’m sure there were. In fact, the tension was getting to us, now I think about it, because I nipped out to have a quick gasper, and Carnarvon shot out after me. Shot out like a rocket, Myrtle, and didn’t look too good either. Pale as death, dripping with sweat, hands shaking. He lit his cigarette and took three puffs, then tossed it down and shot back in again.’

  He paused thoughtfully. Miss Mack gave him encouraging nods and replenished his coffee. He continued: ‘Let me think… Right, got it now: by the time I went back, the opening was large enough to enter and at about two-fifteen or so – Carter climbed through. Disappeared inside for a bit, not that long, then Carnarvon joined him. Then they both disappeared – for quite a while too. People started getting restive, twitchy, fanning themselves, and yes, Myrtle, the tension definitely was building… Lady Evelyn was saying, Oh, what have they found, what’s happened? That Lacau man was muttering away – Sacré bleu, mon Dieu, zut alors, that sort of stuff, you know what the French are like, excitable. Finally, Carnarvon and Carter reappeared… then… I forget what happened then. Pandemonium. It was confusing. Everyone crowding around and asking questions––’

  ‘But what did Lord Carnarvon and Mr Carter say? They must have said something, made an announcement, surely? Think, Pecky, think.’

  ‘Can’t remember. It’s all a bit blurry. Carter looked ill, desperate – I thought he was going to pass out, I remember that. Carnarvon handled it better. He has nerve, you’ve got to give him that. Noblesse oblige… no sign of being rattled. Very solemn. Invited everyone to go inside. Two at a time. Carnarvon and Lacau first, then the others in turn. A bit like the animals going into the ark. And when they came out––’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes?’ Miss Mack leaned forward, pencil quivering.

  ‘People wept. They were weeping. Winlock couldn’t speak. Neither could Lythgoe.’

  There was a silence. Callender shuffled his feet and squinted at the stars. ‘I expect it was devastating,’ he went on in a ruminative tone. ‘I mean, it would be, wouldn’t it? They’ve found him, you see, Myrtle. The shrines are there, and they’re still sealed. They’ve found King Tut and he’s intact and they’ve discovered – wonders beyond belief – things that take your breath away. The whole caboodle, in fact. Yes indeedy.’

  Miss Mack wrote down the word ‘caboodle’ in neat copperplate. She then crossed it out, closed her notebook and looked intently at Callender. ‘You didn’t go in, did you, Pecky?’ she said, on an accusatory note.

  ‘Too tight.’ Her hero gave her an evasive glance. ‘The gap between the wall and the outer shrine is very narrow. It’s a tight squeeze. You have to worm your way along the side of the shrine until you come out in the space at the front, where its doors are facing you. I’m six foot three. Forty-four-inch chest. Didn’t want to get stuck like a bally cork in a bottle. Dr Gardiner’s half my size and he nearly got wedged. So did Dr Breasted.’

  ‘Piffle. Now tell me the real reason.’

  ‘Too many people.’ Callender sighed gustily. ‘And it’s going to get worse, Myrtle. The Queen of the Belgians is arriving on Sunday with Lord Allenby – so there’s another big do coming up.’ I could see his habitual dolefulness was creeping up on him, although he was trying manfully to resist it. ‘When I go in,’ he continued, ‘I want to go in on my own. Have a bit of a think. Pay my respects to Tut. Explain what we’re going to do to him. Make sure he understands, knows there’s nothing to worry about and I’ll look after him.’

  He hesitated. ‘I’ll be working in there in due course, you see, Myrtle. It’s me who’s got to figure out how to dismantle Tut’s shrines, how we’ll get his sarcophagus open and handle his coffins. We won’t be tackling any of that this season, we’re buried ten feet under with the backlog as it is. So we won’t even start on that until next winter. But I’m looking ahead, working out how the heck we’ll do it, when the shrines are huge and there isn’t room in that Burial Chamber to swing a cat.

  ‘Oh, and speaking of cats,’ his face, which had become mournful despite his best efforts, now brightened, ‘the timing worked a treat, and the reporters all missed their deadlines, you’ll be glad to know – but Carter had another little trick up his sleeve. He knew the Combine would be on the hunt for info – at it like madmen – which they were. And he knew they’d try to pump his workmen, which they did. So he planted a few rumours. Got his men to tell them there was a giant cat presiding over the Burial Chamber, the biggest damn feline ever seen in Egypt.

  ‘We think they swallowed it too: hook, line and sinker.’ He gave a wide, beaming smile. ‘So we can all look forw
ard to reading about a ten-foot cat in the newspapers.’

  Callender’s account of the opening ceremony seemed evasive to me – no mention of the dissembling involved, I noted. I also felt it was woefully dull and unimaginative. Miss Mack did not agree and brushed such comments aside.

  ‘Wait until I write it up, dear,’ she said. ‘It may sound bald to you, but that’s because you don’t understand the first thing about reporting. Pecky has given me the bare bones, as I knew he would, dear man – now I shall wave my stylistic wand, Lucy.’

  She disappeared to her cabin the instant Callender left, and the Oliver No. 9 keys were kept busy until three in the morning. This marathon session was followed by several more, all equally taxing, for the following seven days in the Valley were filled with incident: they were, as Miss Mack kept reminding me, historic.

  The Times ran the first full account of the opening of the Burial Chamber, and the story told was the one Carter and Carnarvon had planned, much of it ghosted by them for the obliging Merton – or so the Combine was claiming. During the course of the week, the news spread worldwide – but in the excitement generated by the discovery, the duplicity involved went unrevealed. Frances was delighted by this: her sympathy was entirely with the excavators. ‘So much for the Combine,’ she crowed one day at the American House. ‘Eve says there have been acres of coverage – but not one single journalist has come close to the truth. I knew Mr Carter and Lord Carnarvon would pull the wool over their eyes! Serves those reporters right for all that spying and lying they did at the Winter Palace.’

  To its chagrin, The Times did not actually break the story: it was scooped by the newshound Valentine Williams, who went to the Valley that opening day armed with two pre-written, triple-rate, flash telegrams: one read TOMB EMPTY, the other KING’S SARCOPHAGUS DISCOVERED. Thanks to considerable cunning, forethought and expenditure, he contrived to send the second of these to Reuters within his deadline, and thus broke the news in London that same night – to the rage of The Times executives. His co-conspirators made the best of a bad job; when the English newspapers finally reached Luxor, Miss Mack, Frances and I fell upon them. We discovered that Weigall had not been deceived by those planted rumours of a giant feline; two of the Combine members, however, were. Our favourite strapline ran: GIGANTIC BLACK CAT FOUND IN KING’S BURIAL CHAMBER: WHAT CAN THIS SIGNIFY? ARCHAEOLOGISTS ASK.

  The instant the news of the intact Burial Chamber reached Luxor, the number of visitors to the Valley doubled. Once the Queen of the Belgians, escorted by Lord Allenby, had made her tour of the tomb – a visit conducted with great splendour and maximum publicity – the numbers doubled again.

  ‘Ridiculous!’ Miss Mack said, with republican scorn, as we watched the Queen and her retinue make their slow procession to the Valley that Sunday. ‘Why do they need royalty? What on earth has the Queen of the Belgians to do with it… though I’m sure she’s a charming woman, of course.’

  Frances and I counted an amazing seven cars, one motorcycle (Mr Engelbach), fifteen horse carriages and twelve donkey carriages. Mohammed, who watched with us from our houseboat, pointed out the Mudir of the province, Pasha Suleman, who was riding with the Queen, in a uniform so splendid it threatened to eclipse her grey fox stole and large, veiled picture hat. ‘Observe the glory of the ghaffirs, misses,’ he said – and we duly did.

  It was difficult to miss these guards: on the Mudir’s orders they’d been stationed every sixteen yards along the entire six-and-a-half-mile route from ferry to tomb, each in a magnificent parade uniform of red, green and magenta, with a glittering brass breastplate. As the Queen passed, each man came to attention and saluted with his nabut, or swagger stick. They saluted again for Lord Allenby and his wife, and a third time for the car containing Monsieur Pierre Lacau, Lord Carnarvon and Eve; after that, they seemed to lose heart. It was one hundred and twelve degrees that day, so this was understandable.

  The Queen of the Belgians had happened to be in Cairo, Helen Winlock reported – and had gamely stepped into the breach left by King Fuad; the political situation being as it was, his hoped-for visit had had to be abandoned. And very charming and indefatigable the Queen had been, removing her fox fur, descending into the Burial Chamber, and inspecting everything with interest for an impressive forty minutes before faintness came upon her.

  ‘Poor Carnarvon,’ Helen said, ‘what he’d really have liked is a British royal – not the King and Queen, obviously. But given that two Englishmen discovered the tomb, I think he had cherished the hope that one of the royal brood would turn up – some HRH, a prince or princess, a royal duke – there are enough of them, in all conscience.’

  ‘One crowned head is much like another in my view,’ Miss Mack replied tartly. ‘The effect will be the same, you mark my words, Helen.’

  It was difficult to say whether the lure was royalty, the mystery of the tomb, the pull of buried treasure, the power of international front-page publicity, or a combination of all these factors, but the result was startling: on the following Friday, just a week after the opening, twelve thousand people visited the Valley; of the many tombs it contained, only one was of interest to them. Things had by then reached such a pitch, Frances said, that Carnarvon had decided they must close the tomb and concentrate on conservation for the remainder of the season. Everyone was about to take a short break, in an effort to preserve the team’s sanity.

  It was that Friday we went to the American House for tea to say our farewells. We were leaving for Cairo the next day, Miss Mack returning via England to America, and I to Cambridge via Paris, where my father and Nicola Dunsire were now renting an apartment. Our departure had been brought forward a few days; the New England acquaintances who owned our houseboat had decided to return to Egypt after all – they were reluctant to miss out on a ringside seat for the archaeological event of the century, Miss Mack explained, frowning over their telegram. ‘And I shan’t mind leaving a little earlier,’ she added. ‘I do not like this hubbub. And besides, dear, I have all the material I need now. One last paragraph or so, and The Book will be finished.’

  She extrapolated on this at length as we walked up to the American House that day. All she needed now, she told me, was an apposite sentence or two, a few wise words of summation. I nodded encouragement, but I was not really listening. I was thinking of my goodbyes to Frances – and of Paris, a city I had never visited, to whose delights Miss Dunsire was promising to introduce me. Would it feel like a homeland, a heartland; would Cambridge – or would the Valley still hold sway?

  When we arrived, the Winlocks and Minnie Burton were already in the common room; Mrs Lythgoe, who had returned to Egypt with her husband for the ceremonial opening, was, to Minnie’s fury, presiding. Carter, Carnarvon and Eve were outside on the veranda. Mr Callender had not been invited – or had simply been overlooked, as was often his fate; Mace and Burton arrived shortly after we did, both looking exhausted.

  ‘Tutmania really has hit now,’ Mace said, sinking down into a chair. ‘They’re saying there were twelve thousand visitors to the Valley today. It felt twice that. You can’t move, you can’t think. We can’t go on like this – it’s insupportable.’

  ‘I blame the journalists,’ Minnie Burton said irritably. She was examining with a critical eye the food Michael-Peter Sa’ad had sent in for Mrs Lythgoe: the offerings included cucumber sandwiches, scones of incredible lightness, a perfect Victoria sponge, a superb fruitcake and shortbread no Scotswoman could have improved upon.

  ‘Those reporters deserve a flogging,’ she went on. ‘Apparently that Valentine Williams man procured a motorcar and hid it behind a rock in the Valley. He had a team of natives on hand to drive that wretched cable of his to the ferry, and that’s how he scooped The Times. Can you imagine what that little escapade cost Reuters? They had to buy the car, at least three hundred pounds, and ship it to Luxor – just for one ridiculous cable. The malice of it! He’s spent the entire week boasting about it.’

  ‘The world�
�s gone mad. You know they’ve turned the tomb’s discovery into a dance tune?’ Herbert Winlock said. ‘The Tutankhamun Rag. It’s the most requested number at the Winter Palace ballroom, I hear. Is that right, Eve?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ Eve replied. She had just entered the room and was at the tea table with Mrs Lythgoe; her father and Howard Carter remained outside on the terrace. ‘I avoid that ballroom, Herbert. All those journalists, eavesdropping on every word I say, writing these vicious lies about my father and Howard. I won’t be in the same room with them.’

  ‘Quite, quite,’ Mace said in a peaceable tone. ‘The Tutankhamun Rag? Absolutely disgraceful. Though these days nothing would surprise me.’

  I knew the Rag in question – I listened to it nightly. I’d first heard it drifting across from the Winter Palace; a day or so later, one of the houseboats moored near us had taken it up. The young Americans there danced to the tune every night, thumping out its rhythms on a piano and a banjo. Its jagged syncopations lodged in the brain. I could hear it now, under the conversation and complaints in the sitting room:

  Tut, Tut, Tutsie, at last!

  Three thousand years-plus have shot past

  I guess dying was hell but

  Ain’t resurrection just swell?

  Now git out of that tomb, hand over your diadem

  Wanna do, wanna do the Tut-strut again –