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Valley of the Kings
A Novel of Tutankhamun
Cecelia Holland
This book is dedicated to Marion Hardy for reasons that she alone knows
PREFATORY NOTE
A few years ago I had the good fortune to spend a few hours in the company of the present Earl of Carnarvon, son of the Carnarvon who with Howard Carter discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922. The Earl told me the story of his father’s search and what became of him afterward, and from that conversation this novel sprang.
1
My name is Howard Carter, and I am English; I am an Egyptologist. In 1902 I was working for the Egyptian Department of Antiquities, supervising the diggings in the Valley of the Kings, near the ancient site of Thebes. A long-simmering feud between me and my superior officer had flared up into hot words and threats, and when word of that got to the British Resident in Cairo, I got a summons to appear at the Residency.
The Resident at that time was Lord Cromer. Before the war, the British were officially only guests in Egypt, which was nominally ruled by the Turkish Khedive, although, of course, the place was under British domination. It was a ticklish situation, in which Cromer’s diplomatic talents were given full exercise.
Exactly how polished those talents were I learned when I presented myself at the Residency. I expected a reprimand; instead I was invited to dinner.
There was a third man at the table that evening. Slightly built, he looked frail and appeared to be in his mid-thirties, a few years older than I. His hair looked polished and his eyes looked overbright to me. I wondered if I’d have noticed that if I hadn’t been told he was delicate. He was the Earl of Carnarvon, and for reasons of health he was wintering in Egypt. After we had eaten, the three of us went to Cromer’s study for brandy and cigars. So far not a word had been breathed about my falling out with my chief. That was not Cromer’s way.
We arranged ourselves around the snug little room that Cromer used as a private study. The servant lit the hand-painted lamps and brought out the brandy in a crystal decanter. It was a very English setting, almost enough to let one forget that only a few feet outside the window lay teeming Cairo, crawling with flies and thieves and smelling of the Nile. Carnarvon sat in a deep leather chair and plucked the crease of his impeccable trousers straight. On the bookshelf behind him, before a matched set of Dickens, was a white soapstone bust of Napoleon. Pictures of horses running and jumping hedgerows took up the wall space between the heavy bookcases.
As usual in an English study, the first words spoken were of European politics. I stood at the end of the room, reading the titles of the books behind the glass, while Cromer and Carnarvon repeated the pretenses of the ruling class.
“The Kaiser,” Cromer said, pouring the brandy, “has no sense of the seriousness of seriousness. We are quite boring Carter, who has no interest in anyone not embalmed.”
I took a bell-shaped glass of brandy from him. Cromer was smiling. His pale eyes bulged, intelligent and cold, from his smooth, expressionless diplomat’s face.
“Sit down, Carter,” he said.
“Thank you,” I said, but I stayed on my feet.
“I understand you worked under Flinders Petrie in the digs at Tell el-Amarna,” Carnarvon said to me.
“Yes,” I said. “I worked in the crew that dug out the remains of the royal palace of Akhenaten.”
“Carter knows Egypt,” Cromer said. He took the chair next to Carnarvon’s. “He knows everyone, he is known everywhere. You couldn’t have a better man in your employ.”
At that I was glad I was standing up. I looked at Carnarvon’s finely kept hands cupped around the brandy snifter. He was the son of an earl; signs of labor would have been déclassé.
He said, “I understand you’ve fallen out with your chief, Carter.”
“Flinders Petrie trained me,” I said. “I have more respect for detail than some people. Are you interested in Egyptology?”
“I’m afraid I know very little about ancient history. I’m just keen on getting out of doors, you know. I spent my last season here doing word puzzles. There isn’t even any decent shooting.”
Cromer leaned over the arm of his chair for the brandy decanter on its tray nearby. The servant had come in behind him and was silently adjusting a lamp. Cromer said, “This isn’t England, in spite of all attempts. Do any shooting, Carter?”
“I haven’t the time, my lord.”
“I can’t say I know much myself about ancient Egypt,” Cromer said. He crooked a finger, and the servant brought about a box of cigars. Cromer went on, “I don’t follow the dynasties, and they had a crew of monsters for gods—the Greek gods are rather splendid, but the Egyptians—even Herodotus pokes fun at them. Monkeys and cats. Crocodiles.”
Herodotus saw only the decadent Egypt, past its glory. I took one of the long, slim cigars.
“The only Egyptian I find sympathy for is Akhenaten,” Cromer was saying. “The heretic.” He nodded to me. “You’d know more about him than I.”
“The Criminal of Tell el-Amarna,” I said. “The most overrated figure in the ancient world.”
Carnarvon was eying the cigars. The servant bent slightly to offer him the box; the golden lamplight fell on the dark Egyptian face, the lowered eyes, the mouth smiling.
“Overrated in what sense?” Carnarvon said.
“I’ve heard him called the first monotheist,” said Cromer, combative. “He may have influenced Moses. Our whole civilization may ultimately rest on the vision of Akhenaten.”
“He destroyed Egypt,” I said. I had an almost personal dislike of Akhenaten. “The Egyptians understood their world in terms of their religion. When he attacked their religion, he upset their whole way of thought. They could never get back on track after him.”
“What did he do, precisely?” Carnarvon asked. He took one of the cigars and sniffed it, languid.
I said, “He was a fanatic. He believed in one god, the Aten, the disk of the sun, giver of all life, that sort of thing. He abolished the hierarchy of the popular gods, whom the Egyptians had worshiped for thousands of years.”
Carnarvon took a small gold clipper from the Egyptian servant. He nipped off the end of the cigar, moistened it with his lips, and fit it neatly into his mouth. The servant struck a match. Ceremoniously they waited until the sulfur had burned off. No one spoke. Carnarvon tipped his head slightly and the servant lit the cigar.
This ritual successfully completed, Carnarvon leaned back into the depths of his chair, exhaled a plume of smoke, and said, “I don’t understand. Was he some sort of priest, this Akhenaten?”
I saw that I would have to begin at the beginning. Going slowly, I said, “He was Pharaoh—the King of Egypt. He embodied the connection between the world of men and the eternal world of the gods. The ancients saw things much differently from us. We live in Newton’s universe. We see reality as a mechanism, like a watch: once it’s started, it goes on by itself according to rational rules. The ancient Egyptians believed that the world had to be made to go on functioning, every day, every hour. Pharaoh did that. He made the sun rise and set, the Nile flood and ebb, the grain grow and ripen—all this by interceding with the gods through the proper rituals. Then Akhenaten threw all the old gods out.”
Carnarvon said, “What happened?”
“What would you expect?”
I meant that rhetorically, but before I could go on, he said, “Chaos.”
>
“It was a disaster.”
“On the short term,” Cromer said. “But Akhenaten’s idea of One Loving God conquered the world. What’s that line of Shelley’s—‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair’?”
That was certainly malapropos. I had forgotten my cigar, beside me in a little silver dish, and I reached for it.
“A heretic King,” Carnarvon said. “It’s a contradiction in terms.”
“To our age, it is,” Cromer said. “It appears that modern man will stomach rather much if the man doing it wears a crown. Akhenaten was an extraordinary man. He was ill, and died young—”
“Thirty-odd was a full age for an Egyptian,” I said.
“How was he ill?” asked Carnarvon.
“That’s conjecture,” I said. “His images usually show him with a swollen abdomen and thighs and breasts like a woman’s. There’s been some attempt to prove he had an endocrine disease.”
“Was he married? Did he have children? That would give a clue.”
I puffed on my cold cigar. The stale residue of smoke almost made me cough. “He was married to Nefertiti.”
“Nefertiti! That name I know. A legendary beauty, wasn’t she?”
“The most famous piece of Egyptian art yet uncovered is a head of Nefertiti.”
“And did he have children?”
“Yes.”
“So much for endocrine disease,” said Carnarvon. “What did he die of?”
The Egyptian servant came over to light my cigar for me. I talked around it, my eyes on Carnarvon’s. “Nobody knows. Anyway, his religion failed. The King who followed him was Tutankhamun, who took the court back to Thebes and restored the old gods. The priests made sure nothing lasted of Akhenaten. They hacked his name and face off his monuments and left him out of the lists of Kings—”
“Then how do you know so much?”
“We know almost nothing,” I said.
“Who was this Tut-amun?”
“Tutankhamun. Nobody knows anything at all about him. He reigned for only a few years. His tomb has never been found.”
“What do you mean? Where is his pyramid?”
I cleared my throat. He seemed so clever to be so ignorant. “The pyramids were all built a thousand years before Tutankhamun.”
“Oh. The Sphinx, too?”
“Yes,” I said. Was he teasing me?
“Well,” he said, “I’m interested, Carter. It sounds like good fun, searching around the ruins. Do you have some project in mind—something I could join in on when I’m here for the winter?”
Beside the soap-colored bust of Napoleon, Cromer was smiling at me. I realized that he had invited me here for exactly this, to give his friend an amusement, to get me off the hook at the Department of Antiquities. He had a Turkish mind for intrigues. I sucked on my cigar; it had gone out again.
“Well,” I said, “if I had the money…”
“What?” Carnarvon said.
“I’d look for the tomb of Tutankhamun.”
“Akhenaten’s successor? But why not look for Akhenaten himself?”
“His tomb has been found, empty and looted, at Tell el-Amarna.”
“What makes you think you can find Tutankhamun’s, if it’s been lost for so long?”
I wet my lips. Cromer was watching us intently. I launched myself into the arguments I had used so many times before.
“Tutankhamun was of the Eighteenth Dynasty. Except for the people buried at Tell el-Amarna, all the members of that dynasty were buried in the Valley of the Kings, at Thebes—where Luxor is now. Now, in the 1880s, some peasants discovered a cache of mummies of those kings, all packed together in a single tomb in the valley. Apparently their tombs had all been rifled in ancient times, and the priests had gathered up the mummies and put them away for safekeeping. Amenhotep II and III were there, and Thothmes III, some others, but not Tutankhamun. I believe he is still somewhere in the Valley of the Kings.”
“Can you find him?”
“If I have the money, and—”
“Can you find him?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” Carnarvon said. “Let’s give it a go.”
A few days later I took Carnarvon out to the pyramids. He had been there before, of course, but he suggested going together—he wanted to hear what I had to say. That made me ill at ease, and a little didactic.
We rode out on camels, with a dragoman, more to mind the camels than anything else. Carnarvon sat very straight and stiff in his worn, rug-covered saddle. I asked him if he rode horses back in England. He gave me a wry look.
“Commenting on my seat, Carter? Actually it isn’t my sport. I prefer walking. My son’s dead keen on polo.”
We were approaching Saqqara. We both turned forward. The coolness of his answer rebuffed me. He took such pains to remind me of my inferior social rank.
The pyramids loomed ahead of us.
No matter how often one sees them, they jolt the mind and senses. They are still among the largest monuments built by man. Enough of the limestone cap remains on the Pyramid of Khefren, which stands in the middle of the three, that one can visualize how they must have looked, forty-four hundred years ago, polished white and blazing in the sun.
Their shapes emulate the sun, radiating downward in a widening fan from a single point in heaven. Nothing else in Egypt so expresses the confidence and devotion of the Old Kingdom.
I explained the construction and the design of the interior tunnels and chambers, as Carnarvon and I strolled around the base of the large group. Carnarvon had little to say. He seemed uninterested. I began to worry about what the next few years would be like, trying to stir this dilettante to sufficient interest that he would pay for a lot of digging. We left the camels and the dragoman in the shade and walked away along the causeway that led from the Pyramid of Khefren to the funerary temple, a third of a mile away, in the Nile Valley. The Sphinx is there. One forgets the ruin of the temple for awe of this creation, half monster and half god.
Perhaps the original spur of rock, jutting more than sixty feet up from the sand of the desert, reminded some ancient sculptor of a crouching lion. Then he had only to touch up, here and there, and shape the huge, regal head into the head of Pharaoh.
“It represents the King as the sun god Ra,” I told Carnarvon. I was sure he had heard all this before. He listened obediently, like a clever schoolboy tolerating the chatter of an ignorant tutor. We walked slowly down between the colossal paws. The layered sandstone striped the breast of the lion in shades of gold.
The head towered above us into the cloudless blue sky. I said, “No King since has ruled so absolutely. He was like the sun, he was everything.”
Carnarvon emitted something like a sniff. “I’m afraid I can’t admire people who built such monuments to their vanity with the sweat and pain of slaves.”
“Slaves,” I said. “The Egyptians did not have slaves.”
He turned his head; his eyebrows described arcs of surprise in his lean face. “Weren’t all these monuments built by slave labor?”
“No,” I said shortly. I was tired of coddling his nobility.
“How, then? It must have taken thousands and thousands of men thousands of hours.”
“For four months out of every year,” I said, “nine out of every ten Egyptians were idled by the flood.”
“Still, it seems an odd way to spend a holiday?”
I wondered if he were having a joke on me. I glanced up at the ruined features of great Khefren. The Arabs did that, hating idols.
“I confess, Carter,” he said, “that your Egyptians elude me. I can’t find the key to them. Even their art, which ought to be a window of their lives—it’s beautiful, some of it, sophisticated, subtle—but, damn it, the most graphic of the pictures give one no sense at all of what their inward lives
were like. How they thought, how they thought of themselves. Like those friezes in the temples. There’s no individuality, the people might be interchangeable. It’s as if they deliberately effaced all the personality out of their pictures.”
He turned his back on Khefren as he spoke. I followed him up toward the open again, away from the sun god.
“I can’t see anything human in them, Carter.”
“My lord, you’re looking at them with modern eyes.”
“That’s what I’m equipped with, Carter.”
“Personality—a man’s individual self—those are modern ideas. These people had no inward lives, as you call it. They were not free to have inward lives—to be different from the other men around them. Nature bound them. The Nile, the Sun, the Soil, the life cycle of the millet—those were their rulers, not their own morals or judgments. How could they develop any individuality? Everything they did and felt and thought was the same as it had been for generations—shaped by the constant inflexible challenge of making life possible here.”
As he walked he watched me, his hands tucked behind his back. The schoolboy pose. He seemed to be listening. His eyes were dreamy. We started up toward the pyramids again. My gaze reached for their insuperable heights.
“Pharaoh was their self. He was the Personhood of Egypt. He represented them before the gods. They built these monuments to venerate him and to make themselves great. They did it for joy, as willingly as the medieval knight hauled stone to Chartres.”
We walked on in silence. I was tired of talking. Let him do some of the work. I felt old and blocked and tiresome. I pinched the bridge of my nose between my fingertips. My forehead began to ache. There was fine sand in my mustache.
We had reached the pyramids before he finally spoke.
“You see all this so differently than I, Carter.” He smiled at me, enigmatic. I wondered what he meant. It was so obvious to me, what I had said: who could see it differently? He nodded to me. “It should be an interesting collaboration.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, guarded.
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