Yet no one dared leave to find a sliver of shade. That could wait until the pharaoh’s body was sealed in the ground.
The overseer snuck a glance at the queen. She was radiant in her sorrow, stifling tears, her pain impossible to hide. The overseer had always considered her a fine woman-too young to have endured the loss of two children and a husband. He wondered what would happen to her next and how she would rule this great land.
It was his job to safeguard the tomb’s contents, for even the richest and most powerful person in Thebes might be tempted to grab a golden trinket if given the chance. Once the pharaoh’s body had been placed in the tomb, the overseer quietly pressed through the crowd and descended the steps. His men were already using wood and plaster to seal the burial chamber.
Tut now lay inside a solid gold coffin, which was nested inside another coffin, which was nested inside another, which was then placed inside a sarcophagus made of quartzite, with a lid of pink granite. The sarcophagus was housed in a burial shrine, which was encased in another, and then another, all of this hidden within the outermost shrine decorated in blue faience and gold.
Tut’s innermost coffin, made of solid gold. There were three coffins in all.
The structure was so big it filled the burial chamber from wall to wall, with barely an inch to spare.
As the workers labored, gangs of men began carrying Tut’s possessions into the much larger room next to the burial chamber. No item of his was considered too small or insignificant-from childhood game boards to travel beds. The work went on for hours, as if Tut were moving everything he owned into a new residence, which, of course, he was.
“We’re finished, sir,” said the mason, motioning with one hand for the overseer to inspect the work. The plaster was still wet, but it was clear that the job had been expertly done. For a tomb robber to penetrate that chamber would take an act of supreme will-and muscle.
Getting to the pharaoh’s body would require knocking down the entire new wall, then disassembling each piece of the elaborate sepulchre.
“You are safe now,” murmured the overseer, proud of his handiwork and professionalism. “You were a good pharaoh.”
No one would bother the pharaoh ever again.
The overseer was the last man to leave the valley that evening. He mounted his mule and began the familiar trek back to Thebes.
In the distance he could still see the bright royal banners of the queen’s procession and her many servants. He suddenly realized that Tut’s tomb was too small-and too well sealed-for her to join him one day.
And yet he knew of no plans to carve a tomb for the queen.
That was odd.
What would become of Ankhesenpaaten?
Chapter 73
Valley of the Kings
November 4, 1922
CARTER WAS SMOKING a cigarette, already his fifth or sixth that day, and was again in a hopeful mood. He sat astride his brown and white mule as it sauntered into the valley, his feet resting in the stirrups of a fine leather saddle.
The dirt path wound between cliffs that climbed steeply, giving way to pale blue sky.
This was the same route Carter had traveled countless times in the past thirty years, and the day seemed like it would be just another day, fraught with expectation but tempered by despair. Before going home the night before he had ordered his foreman to finish clearing the soil down to the bedrock. Now he smoked and wondered how the work was progressing.
Thirty years-a long time for such unpleasant and unrewarding results. No wonder they laughed behind his back in Luxor.
He noticed the valley was quiet.
That could be a problem, for the valley was never quiet during dig season.
His curiosity aroused, and not in a good way, Carter dismounted and tied the animal in the shade. Reis, the foreman, found Carter almost immediately to tell him the news. “I was greeted by the announcement that a step cut into the rock had been discovered,” Carter recalled. “This seemed too good to be true, but a short amount of clearing revealed that we were actually in the entrance of a step cut in the rock.”
Carter had seen this sort of staircase in many valley tombs, and, he mused, “I almost dared to hope we had found our tomb at last.”
Chapter 74
Valley of the Kings
November 4, 1922
HE ORDERED THE MEN to dig. The single step found by the water boy soon revealed more steps, leading deeper and deeper into the hard bedrock a dozen or so feet beneath the entrance to the tomb of Rameses VI.
Carter had worked the valley long enough to know that this was the sort of stairwell associated with tomb construction. The way the rock had been cut was a giveaway.
The men didn’t need to be told what to do. All other areas of the job site were abandoned.
As one group dug deeper, clearing away the hard-packed soil and limestone that covered the staircase, another worked up top. Their job was to hack away the soil around the opening to reveal the stairwell’s true shape and size.
Carter halted the work at nightfall.
But the frantic pace began again at dawn, with the men back to jabbering.
By the afternoon of November 5, it was clear that they had found some kind of great underground structure. They just needed to dig until an entrance was revealed.
Even with the clang of turias and dust choking the air, Carter’s pessimism had returned. He began to ponder the status of the underground chamber.
Was it empty? Had it ever been used? Was it just a storage chamber, or was it actually a burial tomb?
And if it was a tomb, how was it possible that it might have somehow eluded plunder?
The staircase was now a partially covered passageway, measuring ten feet high and six feet wide. Eight steps had been unearthed.
Then nine.
Ten.
Eleven steps.
At step twelve they found the uppermost portion of a door. In his journal, Carter described it as “blocked, plastered, and sealed.”
Sealed. That was a positive sign. Carter began to believe it was possible he had found an unopened tomb.
“Anything, literally anything, might lie beyond that passage,” wrote Carter. “It needed all my self-control to keep from breaking down the doorway and investigating then and there.”
But he was through investigating-at least for now. As the sun set on the Valley of the Kings on November 5, Carter ordered that there be no more excavation.
Instead, as much as he wanted to dig deeper, as much as he needed to, he ordered the men to fill in the stairwell.
Chapter 75
Luxor
November 23, 1922
AS THE TRAIN FROM CAIRO pulled into Luxor station, nearly three unnerving weeks had passed since the tomb’s discovery.
Not a bit of work had been done since the staircase had been filled in on November 5. Sentries guarded the site night and day. As added insurance, boulders had been rolled over the opening.
These safeguards were vital. Rumors about the find had already sent droves of tourists into the valley, leading Carter to note wryly in his journal that “news travels fast in the small town that is Egypt.”
Yet he refused to open the tomb.
“Lord Carnarvon was in England,” he explained. “In fairness to him I had to delay matters until he could come. Accordingly, on the morning of November 6th I sent him the following cable: ‘At last have made wonderful discovery in valley; a magnificent tomb with seals intact; recovered same for your arrival; congratulations.’”
Carnarvon had replied by telegram two days later, saying that he might not be able to come.
Before Carter could take that as a reason to resume digging, a second cable announced that Carnarvon would arrive in two weeks.
“We had thus nearly a fortnight’s grace, and we devoted it to making preparations of various kinds, so that when the time of reopening came, we should be able, with the least possible delay, to handle any situation that might arise,�
�� Carter wrote.
Somewhat ominously that same week, a cobra had slithered into Carter’s home and eaten his pet canary. Otherwise, all went smoothly. A friend named Arthur Callender had been hired, tasked with mundane details Carter might be too busy or too distracted to handle. Lord Carnarvon’s favorite foods and drinks were purchased. Electrical wire and lamps were procured in Cairo.
But most of all, Carter spent those two weeks in a state of perpetual self-doubt and second-guessing. It was as if his entire life was tied up in this tomb.
“One thing puzzled me, and that was the smallness of the opening in comparison with the ordinary valley tombs,” he wrote. “Could it be the tomb of a noble buried here by royal consent? Was it a royal cache, a hiding place to which a mummy and its equipment had been removed for safety? Or was it actually the tomb of the king for whom I had spent so many years in search?”
As the days slowly passed and the news rapidly spread around the world, Howard Carter became a public figure.
This terrified him. Not that he minded the fame-after years of failure and struggle, it was nice to have his ego massaged. But if the tomb was empty he would be a laughingstock everywhere, and his reputation for failure would only grow.
Carter tried the best he could to go about his business, spending night after sleepless night waiting for Lord Carnarvon and his family to arrive.
At last they were here!
As the train settled to a stop, the dapper earl, wearing a scarf and wool coat on the cool November day, stepped down from his first-class compartment. His daughter Evelyn, a twenty-year-old beauty, was at his side. She and Carter had enjoyed a clandestine enchantment the season before, despite the nearly thirty-year difference in their ages. The two were “very thick” in the words of one chatty observer, though with Carnarvon spending night and day with Carter in Luxor, it was impossible for him to take the romance with Evelyn very far.
Lady Evelyn Herbert and Howard Carter. Their purported romance was one of the few sources of friction between Carter and Lord Carnarvon.
Carter greeted them both eagerly, handing Evelyn a bouquet of white flowers. Next, the three would mount donkeys for the six-mile ride to the Valley of the Kings.
The path would take them through the lush green fields outside Luxor. They would then cross the Nile by ferry and continue down the dusty dirt path to the valley.
But even though Lady Evelyn was her usual radiant self, Lord Carnarvon was weak and tired. He needed rest.
The opening of the tomb would have to wait one more day.
A disappointed Howard Carter led his guests to his home, where he would spend yet another sleepless night.
Chapter 76
Valley of the Kings
November 24, 1922
THE FOLLOWING DAY, Carter, along with Lord Carnarvon and Lady Evelyn, arrived at the site. For Carter this had been a thirty-year wait, but even for the Carnarvons the suspense must have been great.
The heavy boulders were rolled away from the tomb. Then Carter’s men began clearing the steps.
One group dug away the bits of debris while another swept the steps clean. But this was not as simple as shoveling sand out of a hole, for as they dug deeper and deeper, ancient artifacts mixed with the soil.
Lady Evelyn was beside herself about the historical significance of it all, lovingly studying each new pottery shard or amulet-scarabs, they were called-that turned up in the mountain of dirt.
But Carter’s spirits soon plummeted. In his mind these bits of rubble confirmed that he had found not a tomb but a royal trash heap. “The balance of evidence would seem to indicate a cache rather than a tomb,” he admitted dourly, “a miscellaneous collection of objects of the Eighteenth Dynasty kings.”
The shards were stamped with the names of kings he knew well: Amenhotep the Magnificent, Akhenaten, Tuthmosis. Less than pleased with what he was seeing, Carter passed the day looking down from the top step, thinking this might be the end of his career-and an ignominious final chapter at that.
When he was not having such thoughts, he was bent to the ground sifting through whatever new shovelful of dirt the workers had exhumed, now and then admonishing them to be careful. His mood blackened further.
Finally, “by the afternoon of the 24th the whole staircase was clear, sixteen steps in all, and we were able to make inspection of the sealed doorway,” he wrote.
He was terribly disappointed by what he saw.
“The tomb was not absolutely intact, as we had hoped,” he wrote.
Someone had been there before Carter.
Chapter 77
Valley of the Kings
November 24, 1922
WITH THE DOOR now fully exposed to sunlight and air, there was clear evidence that the plaster seals had been tampered with. A party of tomb robbers-perhaps two-had actually entered the tomb, then had taken the time to reseal the door when they had finished ransacking it.
Carter’s mind raced in all the wrong directions. Would the break-in have happened in modern times? Impossible. The workmen’s huts and loose soil above the bedrock predated the tomb to the time of Rameses VI, at the very least. This meant that whoever rifled through the tomb had done it in a two-hundred-year window between the reigns of Akhenaten and Rameses.
There was one thing that gave Carter hope: the seal of Tutankhamen was stamped on the doorway.
This led to more questions: Was the seal evidence that this mysterious king, about whom so little was known, was buried inside? Or was it merely an indication that he had been present or in power when the remains or belongings of others had been relocated to this site? After all, the same seals had been found on the tomb that Davis had once claimed belonged to Tut.
As the light faded and work stopped for the day, the symbol taunted him. Carter’s mind kept going back to the same question: Tut?
If so, this could be the greatest discovery of modern time.
In the morning Carter would get an answer. At dawn, he planned to be the first man in three thousand years to break down that door.
Chapter 78
Valley of the Kings
November 25, 1922
IT WAS TIME. Well, almost time. Before the door could be destroyed, the royal seals had to be photographed for the historical record.
This singular honor fell to Lord Carnarvon, president of his local camera club back home in England. The earl now stood at the bottom of the narrow stairwell in the pale dawn light, fussing over shutter speeds and apertures.
He was calm and cool as he went about his work-a very professional and dedicated amateur. The last thing Lord Carnarvon wanted to do was make a mistake that would lead to bad photos-or, worse, no photos at all.
Carter, on the other hand, was beside himself with anxiety. Complicating matters, a much-loathed bureaucrat from the Antiquities Service had arrived to oversee the entry. Rex Engelbach, nicknamed “Trout” by Carter and Carnarvon for his sallow demeanor, was firm in stating that his job title gave him the right to be the first person to enter the tomb.
Carter had never liked Engelbach, with his high-handed arrogance and lack of Egyptology credentials, but on this morning Carter refused to let Engelbach bother him. After a career defined by hard work and failure, Carter was finally about to enter the tomb of Tut. This was no time to be arguing with civil servants. But there was no way that Engelbach was getting into that tomb first. No way in hell.
Carter descended the steps with his sketchbook to draw each of the seals and impressions. These would serve as a backup for Carnarvon’s photos, and now the two friends worked side by side at the base of the cramped stairwell.
Carter’s sketches were precise in scale and detail. No aspect of the designs went unrecorded.
Only at midmorning, when he had completed the drawings, did Carter trot back up the stairway with Lord Carnarvon.
It was time.
Carter ordered his workmen to demolish the door.
“On the morning of the 25th,” wrote Carter,
“we removed the actual blocking of the door; consisting of rough stones carefully built from floor to lintel, and heavily plastered on their outer faces to make the seal impressions.”
The crowd gathered atop the steps strained to see what was on the other side. Shadows and debris made it impossible to tell.
Carter walked down the steps to have a look. He found himself peering into a long narrow hallway. The smooth floor sloped down into the earth, a descending corridor.
Top to bottom, Carter wrote, the hallway “was filled completely with stone and rubble, probably the chip from its own excavation. This filling, like the doorway, showed distinct signs of more than one opening and re-closing of the tomb, the untouched part consisting of clean white chip mingled with dust; whereas the disturbed part was mainly of dark flint.”
How far into the ground the hallway led, it was impossible to know. But one thing was certain: someone else had been there.
“An irregular corner had been cut through the original filling at the upper corner on the left side,” noted Carter. Someone had burrowed through there long ago searching for whatever lay on the other side.
Carnarvon snapped a photograph of the rubble pile. Then a weary Carter gave the order for his men to clear it away, chips and dust and all. Sooner or later the tunnel would have to end.
With any luck, the tomb robbers hadn’t taken everything.
Chapter 79
Valley of the Kings
November 26, 1922
IT WAS JUST AFTER LUNCH, which had gone mostly untouched by Carter. He and Lady Evelyn were sifting through a basket of rubble, when a digger ran up the steps with the news: the workers had found a second door.
The Murder of King Tut Page 13