Valley of the Kings

by Cecelia Holland

  “Because of me.”

  “You sent me into the army,” he said. “I did not thank you then, but I thank you now. I learned very much in the army, about Egyptians, about Englishmen.”

  “Always glad to help out,” I said. I smelled something rotten in all his gratitude. He was up to something. I went between two boulders and down the short steep slope into the valley. Here the rain had not fallen; the soil was fine and dry as flour. Ahead, the dig came in sight. Ahmed was behind me still; he said no more about the army and my role in his entrance into it, which relieved me. I had to sort out what he had said and done, try to get some grip on his motives and intentions, and figure out what he was up to.

  The rest of the digging crew came up behind us to the digging site. We all set to work at once. I kept half of them digging away at the stairway into the earth; the others went on filling up the other end of the trench.

  I worked with the diggers. Every time I straightened up over my shovel I glanced out of the trench toward the east, looking for the assistant curator. The other men worked without even lifting their eyes from the spectacle that was slowly opening up at our feet.

  We were lifting the earth of thirty centuries from a flight of steps that took us downward in space and backward in time. When we reached the end, what would we find? There were moments—long moments—during that day when I imagined we would go on forever clearing away the dirt from step after step: Sisyphus as Egyptologist.

  At sundown we reached the twelfth step. Just beyond that we found a door.

  Ahmed’s yell of triumph echoed through the valley. I scrambled down the steps, pushing the workmen out of my way. My first instinct—I don’t know why—was to press myself against the door.

  The upper half only had been cleared. Rubble still masked the bottom. I felt rapidly over the door with my hands. The door was made of blocks of stone set one on the other and plastered over.

  My fingertips grazed a regular ridge in the plaster. I grunted. The sun was going down and the area at the foot of the steps was darkening. I stooped to put my face up to the marking I had found.

  “It’s sealed,” I said. I straightened, dusting my hands over my thighs. “Where’s a light?”

  Ahmed stood just above me on the steps. His face was shadowed. He held out my electric torch to me; when I turned, I still felt his presence there acutely, the faceless tomb robber. I switched on the light and shone it over the wall.

  It was now quite dark. The beam of light was like a white blade. The rough-scored plastering cast little shadows around the doorway, so that it was hard to make out the features. I pointed to the oblong indentation the seal had made when the plaster was wet.

  “Allah ’kbar,” Ahmed murmured, behind me.

  He recognized them, the figures on the seals. There was Anubis, the dog that led souls through the underworld, lying with his paws outstretched, and beneath him the nine bound men, symbols of the races of man, all bound by death. It was the royal necropolis seal.

  I was breathing short. My hands were shaking so that I had to hold the torch with both hands. The beam of light showed me the top of the door, where the mask of plaster had fallen away. With one forefinger I poked a hole in the space at the corners of the blocks, right at the top of the door. The ancient mortar rained down. I widened the hole so that I could shine my light through, and saw the thin pale gleam shining on stones and earth beyond the wall. The room inside was filled with rubble.

  Then it was almost certainly a corridor. My heart was hammering so hard and fast that it hurt me.

  “What is it?” Ahmed said. “Shall I call for shovels?”

  I was twisting and turning my head, trying to see more of the passageway beyond the door. The light of the torch glanced off the mass of dirt and small stones. More plaster crumbled away under my efforts, falling in a silky rain around me.

  “Call for shovels, Carter,” Ahmed said. His voice was breathy.

  I drew back, warned by his tone. Why was he so madly intent on reaching whatever lay at the far side of that plug of earth? He would steal anything he could, steal everything we found.

  With that realization a whole new sense of the problem rushed in on me. My skin cooled, and my heart seemed to find its normal rhythm again. I had a lot to do before I could go any further. I had to protect my find, prepare for it, prepare myself to deal with it. There was the Department of Antiquities, for example. It was time to get Carnarvon into the scene.

  “No,” I said. “It’s too dark.” Stooping, I gathered a handful of dust, spat on it, and plugged the hole I had made in the wall. “Let’s cover it up again, before anybody else finds it.”

  6

  We had shoveled the dirt back into the stairway, burying my find up to the brim. We worked until midnight at it. By the time we had done, I was at the edge of my strength, my hands bleeding, my shoes full of sand. With the Egyptians, I stood around the water jars draining dipper after dipper of cold water.

  No one spoke. We stood close together, like a gang of thieves. We went back to the site and rolled stones over it and trampled over the earth.

  The moon rose, and the valley grew perceptibly lighter. I stood at the mouth of Tomb Number 55, looking across the valley. It was like a landscape from the moon, waterless and windless. The cold blue-white light of the moon picked out the tumbled surfaces of rock and earth against pits of black shadow. The tomb had disappeared as if a tide of rubble had rolled in over it. I played with my imagination, pretending that it had been a dream; it might have been, for all the evidence we had left. I called Ahmed.

  “Mount a guard over it. Discreetly, d’you understand? I have to go to Cairo for supplies.”

  “How long will you be gone?” he asked.

  “A day and a half,” I said.

  Actually I intended to be gone three days.

  He smiled at me in the darkness. “You trust me, Carter.”

  “That’s right,” I said. I trusted him to know that it would take longer than thirty-six hours to clear the passageway beyond the door.

  He bowed to me. “I will do as you say.” He would wait for a better moment.

  I sent this cable to Carnarvon in England.

  At last have made wonderful discovery in valley; a magnificent tomb with seals intact; re-covered same for your arrival; congratulations.

  There was no need to inform him prematurely of my little difficulty with the department.

  I also sent a telegram to the museum in New York. I could use Carnarvon to manage Conway, and the Americans to manage Carnarvon.

  When both messages were off, I went out on a minor buying spree. The main thing was to do this carefully, because if the department learned that I was buying, as an example, eight hundred packages of surgical gauze, they would know that I was planning to wrap something up, probably not wounds. Yet I had little time. Perhaps that helped: it takes time for rumors to filter from the Egyptian quarters of the city, where I was careful to remain, into the cloistered offices of the English. I was back in Luxor two days after the day we uncovered the doorway at the foot of the stairs.

  The doorway was constantly in my mind. I saw it before me at every moment. That was what was real for me: that alone.

  When I got back to Luxor, I went to see Conway, who was visiting an officially financed dig at the temple on the east bank.

  “I’ve been out to look at your handiwork again, Carter,” he said to me, smiling. “You seem to have repaired the damage done.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  We were standing practically in the shadow of the Ninth Pylon. Before us loomed the tremendous columns of the temple. The sun shone through in slanted bars, foggy with dust. In that dust, who knows but that Pharaoh passed once more through the sanctuary of the god? Conway’s coarse, fleshy face was before me.

  “Sir,” I said, “I’ve come to ask you a fav
or.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Now, Carter, let me—”

  “I repaired it, as you said,” I said quickly, trying to run him into my way of thinking. “Please, just let me keep my licenses. If you take them away, I’ll be publicly ruined. We’re giving up digging at the end of this year, anyway. Less than two months. Please.”

  He stared at me, frowning, his eyes like bullets. His jowls were wet with sweat.

  “Please, sir,” I said. “I’m begging this of you.”

  “It’s against my better judgment,” he said loftily.

  “Oh, sir, please.”

  “Very well,” he said. “I’ll consider the matter ended.”

  “Oh, sir,” I said, “thank you.”

  He smiled, puffing a little. Feeding on it. What power does to a man. I thanked him several times more and promised him to sign my inadequate report the very first time I was back in Cairo. Then I went back across the river to Kurna, to wait for Carnarvon to come.

  A few days later I was at the river, but not to meet Carnarvon. The Americans had responded to my telegram by dispatching the young American photographer directly to me. Laden with bags and strung with cameras, he stepped off the ferry onto the quay at Luxor, put down his suitcases, and said, “I need a hat. My head is getting sunburned.” With a smile he put out his hand to me.

  Under the thin prickle of his close-clipped hair, his scalp was turning red. I reached for one of his bags. “Come and get indoors, then.”

  “I’d rather go directly to your dig.”

  I led him off the brick quay and onto the road to Kurna. He could put up with me; Americans were supposed to be egalitarian. He hurried along until he caught up with me.

  “Where are you digging? Let’s go there.”

  “There’s nothing to see, yet,” I said.

  “What do you mean? You cabled us—”

  “I know what I cabled you.” I gave him the swiftest of oblique looks. “I’ve covered it back up again. Thieves abound here. When Carnarvon comes we’ll set to work again.”

  “Oh,” he said, his thin face settling a little. But he did not look as if he believed me.

  Eighteen days after we had uncovered the first step, I stood at the ferry stage watching Carnarvon approach in a small boat. Evelyn was beside him. Lady Evelyn. When she saw me she waved and smiled. She wore one of her odd straw hats and a plain white dress; she looked lovely. Beside her sat her father, expressionless, his hands on his knees.

  “Well, Carter,” he said to me. “What have you found?” His voice was tight. Although he managed to keep his tone even, his handshake was long and warm and excited.

  “I don’t know yet,” I said. “Come and look.”

  Evelyn was surveying the far bank of the Nile, littered with ruins, the columns of the temple like piles holding up the sky. She turned her level blue gaze on me. “You’ve waited for us, Howard? How extraordinary. I should think you’d have dug it all up by now.”

  “We’re all part of it,” I said.

  I did not dare even approach the site until Carnarvon was there to use his influence with the government.

  We went down the ferry stage to the tether line, where an array of shaggy gray donkeys was tied up. Ahmed had saddled four of them for us. There was a new service available to the valley, an old and smoky lorry, but the ride was slow and often unpleasant. Carnarvon was walking along beside me, his hands in his pockets.

  “Very honorable of you,” he said to me. “Waiting until we got here. I hope you haven’t dragged me away at the height of the bird season to witness another of your flashy false alarms.”

  I kept my mouth shut. Let the old bastard see for himself. On his far side, Evelyn hooked her arm through his and lengthened her stride.

  “Evie,” Carnarvon said, “the thing’s been there donkey’s years, no need to run. Carter, how long has it been there?”

  “If it’s Eighteenth Dynasty,” I said, “at least thirty-two hundred years.”

  Evelyn detached herself from her father. Ahmed held out the reins of a donkey to her, and she slid them over the beast’s head. Across the broken cavalry saddle, she said, “Is it Eighteenth Dynasty, Howard?”

  “Yes, I think so,” I said. “Some ruins from the Nineteenth Dynasty were on top of it.”

  Athletically she climbed onto the donkey and reined his head around toward the yellow cliffs. I mounted. My donkey took me after her at a trot. Evelyn—Lady Evelyn—tucked her riding whip under her arm.

  “I can’t wait to see,” she called.

  “Was it a hard trip down from England?”

  Her swift glance told me as much as a paragraph. Carnarvon and Ahmed were clattering after us, the Earl sitting well back in his saddle, his stirrups let down straight as a hussar’s. Ahead, the notched terraces of the cliff were coming clearer as we approached. I urged my donkey toward the trail to the valley.

  Ahmed had sent the crew out to the valley, but they had orders to wait until we appeared before they did any digging, and so when Carnarvon and I approached, the site was invisible. This part of the valley looked no different than any other, its honey-colored stone walls capped by the brassy blue archway of the sky. To the left was Tomb Number 55, with a little cairn of blue mineral-water bottles beside it. Directly before us as we approached, the gaping door to the tomb of Rameses VI opened in the cliff.

  The American photographer was there, burdened with cameras. I introduced him to Lord Carnarvon and Lady Evelyn. The American was subdued. In the moment’s polite conversation that ensued, he tried to say “my lord,” but stumbled. Carnarvon was sweeping the area with his gaze.

  “Well, Carter?” he said.

  I had taken precise measurements, and while Carnarvon and Evelyn and the crew watched, I paced off the distances from the sides of the valley to the place where we would start digging.

  Then we picked up the shovels.

  It had taken us only a few days to dig it up before, including the long trenching across the floor of the valley. Now, knowing precisely where to dig, removing dirt and stones already loosened, we reached the first step within a matter of a few hours.

  We dug furiously, madly through the day. I stopped a few times, trying to make talk with Carnarvon and his daughter, but the words always dribbled away: after a few moments of awkward socializing we all fell into staring at the hole in the ground, silent again. I kept a watch on the trail down the valley, where my enemies in the department would first appear.

  Just before sunset we cleared the last step. Carnarvon and I went down to the bottom of the staircase to look over the door. I switched on my electric torch; I had never seen the bottom half before, only the top.

  At once I saw that the plaster that had covered the top was different than the plaster on the bottom.

  “Damn,” I said. “It’s been opened. Someone’s got into it.”

  Carnarvon crouched down, squinting at the door. Evelyn was behind him; she said, “What? How can you tell?”

  “See, the top half of the door was plastered over again, after the bottom half. And the seals are different.” With my torch I picked out the necropolis seal for her. “This is the regular seal of the necropolis. This—” I stooped to show her the seals at the bottom of the door.

  The light glinted on the plaster. The oblong imprint of the seal was set across the doorframe. At first I thought I was misreading the pictographs in the bad light; they were so familiar that I did not trust my eyes.

  “These are Tutankhamun’s seals,” I said.

  I stood up in the cramped space. Then it was. It really was. All this time, after all this hunting, it was here before me. Carnarvon was smiling wide at me.

  “That’s the fellow we were looking for, wasn’t it?”

  “Someone’s got into it ahead of us,” I said. I raised my head. The patch of sky at the top of the
staircase was still blue. A dark head appeared against it, leaning over the head of the trench, its shape distorted in a headcloth.

  Evelyn was saying, “But the ruins on top of it—they were so old—”

  “The robbers got into it just after it was sealed,” I said. “And the priests found out and sealed it again.” I raised my voice. “Ahmed, what?”

  “That man is coming,” Ahmed said. “That man in his motorcar.”

  Conway was here. I swallowed with difficulty. Carnarvon was watching me, smiling.

  “Well: congratulations,” he said.

  “There may be nothing left in it. Besides, there’s this fellow.” I started up the staircase.

  “What fellow?” Carnarvon was coming after me.

  We reached the top of the staircase in time to see the department motorcar chugging to a stop a hundred feet away. The assistant curator burst out of the passenger seat door. His great long strides galloped across the valley. His arms swung, ending in fists, and his face was clenched like a fist. He strode up to me and shouted into my face.

  “Damn you, Carter—I trusted you! You made a fool out of me! Get off the valley! Now—you’ll leave Egypt within the week!”

  “Now, what’s this, Carter?” Carnarvon asked.

  I said nothing; I had no chance to say anything. The assistant curator swiveled his beet-red face toward Carnarvon and gave the Earl a volley at close range.

  “This is the rankest, most disrespectful action I’ve ever heard of, in all my life as an Egyptologist. You’ll all be broken, I promise you that.”

  Carnarvon’s calm was impressively stony. He said, “May I ask who you are?”

  The assistant faltered. He glanced at me and back to Carnarvon, and he realized that he was taking on a different beast; he said, “I beg your pardon. Allow me to introduce myself. Conway, the Department of Antiquities at Cairo.”

  “I am Carnarvon,” the Earl said. “What exactly is the difficulty? We have the permits to dig in the valley, do we not, Carter?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Carter was told without ambiguity not to block the access to the tomb of Rameses VI,” the assistant said. “Then when I found him digging here…” As he talked, his tone turned starchy again; he realized that he was right, if common. “He promised me to repair the damage and leave the site alone, and now look! He’s dug it all up again!”