Valley of the Kings

by Cecelia Holland

  “The more we think we know.”

  “Evelyn, what are you driving at?”

  “Well, it seems to me that the only reality about any time in history is the sort that never leaves a trace. I mean the way people felt about their lives.”

  She was making me angry. She was trying to tell me everything I did was for nothing. I said loudly, “Rubbish.”

  She was still. In the rearview mirror I could see her watching me.

  “The trained mind can infer something of people’s attitudes from the evidence,” I said. “We piece together this idea and that one—”

  “The trained mind interprets,” she said. “In the end one can interpret only by reference to one’s own experience. It’s a circle, Howard, isn’t it? You may look into the past, but it’s only a mirror, it can show you only yourself.”

  I drove on a long while down the empty road before I could even try to answer. Finally all I could say was, “If I accept that, dear, I’m pitching out my whole life.”

  “Why?” she said, passionately. “Is it so useless to understand yourself?”

  “You’re being melodramatic, Evelyn, calm yourself down.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  She did not sound sorry; she sounded sarcastic. We did not speak for several hours after that.

  Later, when she was driving, and the sun was up, she said, “What are you thinking about?”

  “I should have sent someone out to guard the tomb.”

  “Ahmed will watch over it.”

  “Ahmed! He’s the one I want the tomb guarded from.”

  She threw me a look of startled amazement. “What?”

  “Ahmed is from Kurna. He’s a tomb robber. His people have robbed the tombs of the Valley of the Kings for centuries.”

  Ahead of us a man was driving a water buffalo down the road. She braked and steered the car around the beast. On its withers, between the broad backswept horns, a child lay asleep. We flew on into the morning.

  “I think you’re wrong,” she said, when she had the car up to speed again. “Ahmed is dedicated and hardworking, and, besides, he’s devoted to you.”

  That made me laugh. I did not bother to explain Ahmed’s reasons for giving me trouble.

  “Well, not to you, exactly,” she said. “But to the work. He loves the work, he’s always right there where the hardest and most productive work is—”

  “Watching,” I said, “for something to steal.”

  “Really, Howard,” she said. “You aren’t just single-minded. You’re immovable.”

  After that we did not speak until we reached Cairo.

  We arrived just after noon. Lord Carnarvon was quite unconscious. Lady Evelyn went for a French doctor, and I got the sick Earl settled into a suite in the Continental Hotel. The menials and serving people closed in on him, and I was freed of the responsibility.

  From the window of the second bedroom in the suite, I looked over the city’s twisted streets and straight Parisian boulevards, blunt white Egyptian houses with iron scrollwork grilles over the windows, the spires of mosques, the grotesque modern buildings sprouting like mushrooms after the rain, all strung precariously with the wiring for the electricity that was Cairo’s proudest monument. In the streets water buffaloes and donkeys competed successfully for space with the few blundering motorcars.

  The Nile Corniche was almost below my window. On the benches facing the slow-moving filthy water sat the ubiquitous boys, their arms languidly extended across the seatbacks, and their pretty faces turned toward the water. Pigeons crowded the pavement. A sheet of newsprint had wrapped itself around the base of a palm tree near the river. I turned away from it all. Lack of sleep, the sick man in the bed, being here instead of where I belonged; all my troubles were laying siege to me. I felt all grinding edges.

  Evelyn did not come back for hours. When she did, there were nurses in gray uniforms, and doctors with rubber tubing hung around their necks, and the sick man. Evelyn and I were never alone, we could not talk—there was no way to pick up the tear in our night’s conversation and sew it together again. She seemed to be drawing further away from me.

  She had notified her mother. Lady Carnarvon flew from England with the family doctor, hopping in a small plane from one city to the next, until at last she arrived in Cairo. Evelyn was busy at her father’s bedside until her mother came. The doctor took over with the Earl, who seemed to be rallying.

  Evelyn’s time was absorbed in caring for her mother. I could not reach her.

  I thought of returning to Luxor, but there was no use in that. I certainly could not work with Carnarvon ill, not while the attention of the entire world was fixed on us. I was jailed in Cairo. The Earl seemed to be improving. Soon, surely, we could return to the valley.

  Then he sickened again. This time no one thought that he would get well. Evelyn’s brother, Lord Portchester, was summoned from India. The suite filled with doctors and nurses and telegrams and flowers. I stood unnoticed in one corner of the room and watched; or I went out entirely and walked and tried to organize my thoughts.

  Evelyn, caring for her mother, overseeing the care of her father, directing what now amounted to an entire household, never tired, never looked frightened or upset. I never saw her sit down, much less sleep. Once I came into the room and found her at a window, staring off across the city. Her chin was set. I went up behind her.

  “What an odd place,” she said, under her breath. “It’s as if it’s struggling to be born.”

  “Let me help you,” I said. “Let me do something for you.”

  She lifted her face to me. “You could make me a cup of tea.”

  “I will.”

  “Thank you.” She put her hand on my arm and pressed with her fingers an instant. Comforting me: I intended to comfort her. Or perhaps with her it was all automatic. She went off toward the door. I looked out the window, wondering what had elicited from her that odd remark about being born, but there was nothing, only the broad street clogged with a throng of donkeys and strollers, an open touring car honking and inching its way through. When I looked around, Evelyn had left the room.

  Portchester arrived late that night, a young, bland, babyish face quite lost above his splendid Hussar’s uniform. He saw his father, who was delirious then, and went off to bed. Then at two in the morning, people rushed down the hall past my room, which was only a few doors from Portchester’s. I jumped out of bed and went to the threshold.

  The corridor was brilliantly lit by electric lamps on the walls. The nurse was babbling through the next door to someone I could not see.

  “It’s his lordship, your lordship—he’s just now passed on. Your lady mother is with him.”

  In the midst of her words, the light of the hall lamps dimmed. The nurse screamed. I reached for the light switch and flicked it stupidly off and on again, to no avail. The light was dimming out, the filament a dull red curl inside the glass. The corridor sank into utter darkness.

  I went back into my own room and tried the lamp by my bed. It was out too. I went to the window. Out there in the city, not a light glowed.

  “Now, damn it, shut up,” a man barked in the hall. “I want to see my father.”

  The nurse sobbed. I wheeled around and through the open door of my room saw Lord Portchester march down the hall, an electric torch in his hand, and the nurse tagging after.

  A few moments later, the lights came on again all over Cairo. I went to bed but I could not sleep.

  The morning newspaper was sensational with headlines.

  CARNARVON IS CURSED! DIES OF ANCIENT EVIL!

  AT THE MOMENT OF DEATH, CAIRO IS SWEPT INTO DARKNESS!

  Of course, that was nonsense. The lights had gone out several moments after the death. I sipped my Turkish coffee; I was sitting on the terrace of the hotel, trying to keep the flies away from my bre
akfast. I folded up the newspaper to a manageable size and read through the article as I ate.

  The headline told the whole story; some feature writer for the local papers had seized on the wild notion that Carnarvon had somehow violated an ancient taboo in opening the tomb—as if Carnarvon had opened the tomb—and so had been struck down by the long arm of the past. The malice of Pharaoh had reached down through thirty centuries to destroy him who had dared to burst in on the peaceful sleep of Tutankhamun.

  Halfway through the article, it began to sound familiar to me. That was when the writer mentioned in passing the general terror of the workmen at the tomb. I thought of Ahmed. A cold tingle of my nerves warned me. I had been in Cairo too long; I had better get back to Luxor and protect what was mine.

  I went to find Evelyn, to tell her I was going.

  She was sitting in the parlor of the suite, her hands in her lap, her shoulders rounded. I stopped in the doorway. She looked so young, suddenly, so frail. She turned and saw me there, but she said nothing, as if we were strangers. The dried tracks of tears lay matte on her cheeks.

  “I’m going back up to Luxor,” I said.

  “Good-bye, Howard,” she said. She swiveled her face away from me; her clasped hands opened, the fingers parting, and then twined shut again. I should have said something, but that gesture of her head shut me out. She did not need me, and so I left her there.

  On the stairs down to the lobby, I met the young American photographer, going up as I was going down.

  We stopped face to face. His mouth was tucked up primly into a little frown. He said, “I’m sorry to hear of Carnarvon’s death.”

  “Yes,” I said, “it’s a loss. What are you doing in Cairo?”

  “I heard he was going,” he said.

  “And you wanted to remind me that your people have the first call to take over the dig?”

  “No. Oddly enough, that isn’t why I’m here.” He snapped the words out; he looked angry. I’d have looked angry if I were accused of such a thing. I didn’t believe him for a moment: of course he wanted the tomb. He glared at me.

  “That’s why I was here,” he said. “As a counterweight. You used me.”

  “Don’t be a schoolboy,” I said. “You’re acting naïve. The world is more complicated than that.”

  “It looks simple enough to me,” he said. His broad Yankee accent was more pronounced than ever. “We aren’t actually real to you, are we, Carter—the people around you. Just tools for you.”

  I grunted at him, unamused, and started down the stairs. His voice rang after me.

  “Tutankhamun isn’t real to you, either, Carter—he can’t be! You can’t live in his world, and you won’t pay attention to your own!”

  The people on the lobby were turning to look. I felt the heat climb in my face. I reached the foot of the stairs and walked out across the black-patterned red carpeting.

  “You’re caught out of time, Carter!”

  A bright haze of sunlight marked the open doors to the street. I strode toward them as fast as I could walk.

  8

  I drove the motorcar back to Luxor. The road was straight and wide; I made good speed most of the time, although I had to slow down through the villages. It was a hot day, and the heat climbed as the sun climbed across the sky. In the broad fields, graded to a perfect slope by millennia of floods, the fellahin tilled the rows of cotton, the buffalo trudged around the track of the pump that raised water to the fields, the Nile gushed over the land.

  The road came down suddenly into a twisting alley through the outskirts of Luxor. A crowd of boys blocked my way. I held down the button of the car’s horn, but the boys only grinned over their shoulders and sauntered down the middle of the street. The white brick walls came down flush to the edge of the pavement. The city closed around me. The air was thick with the fighting odors of beans, fish, sewage, and incense.

  I left the car on the ferry stage. The barge was in the slip, but the crew was hosing the deck down, and it would be a few minutes before I could cross the river. I stalked up and down across the road. Down the river, the tufted heads of palm trees peeked up above the tops of the columns and gates of the great temple, but directly opposite me, standing above the roofs of the city, was the spire of a mosque.

  Of course, there were obelisks in the Imperial Temple, too—the golden needles of Hatshepsut and Thothmes, symbolizing the rays of the sun. I tramped up and down the apron of the ferry stage, my eyes shifting from the mosque to the temple. Those old spires were gone now. The Greeks had nicknamed them obelisks, meaning “spits for roasting meat”; the various conquerors of Egypt had carted them off. To Karkamesh, to Rome, to London and New York. My eyes returned to the mosque.

  The horn blasted, announcing that the passengers for the far side of the river could board the ferry. I got on with a crowd of tourists.

  The broad boat nosed its way across the Nile. A flat island had risen in the center of the stream; there were farmers on it, cultivating tomatoes there. I glanced back at the scene behind me. As we got out into the middle of the Nile, my view of the Imperial Temple widened. There was something random about it, something secretive, in the close-packed columns, the heavy space-absorbing cross-beamed gates. It reminded me of Evelyn’s theory of history, or should I say theory of ahistory. I turned toward the bow of the barge, my head throbbing in the first stages of headache.

  The tourists disembarked in a swarm, all headed for the dragomen and the horse-and-buggy service to the valley. There was yet another addition to the clutter, now, a large truck, and several ugly painted signs advertising guided trips to THE TOMB OF KING TUT.

  They were charging twice the price for tours at this season. I rented a donkey from the string at Kurna and rode back into the valley, to see what effect all this was having on my dig.

  From the mouth of the ravine I looked back and saw the tourists in their herd being led toward the two colossi of Amenhotep III on the bank of the river. The dragoman guides would see that the European visitors saw everything in proper order.

  I kept my donkey trotting at top pace through the valley. Now that I was here, I yearned to see the tomb again. That at least was permanent and real. Everything else had gone exactly contrary to what I had hoped, since we had opened the tomb. The donkey began to snort, a warning that it intended to quit soon, and I kicked it hard in the ribs. My sort of warning. I resolved not to think any more about Lady Evelyn Herbert.

  We rounded the bend in the ravine that brought me before the tomb. The panoramic cliff spread out before me. The sky above it was a perfect infinite blue. A small crowd of people stood around the mud-brick wall that surrounded the tomb. Above it, the tomb of Rameses VI was deserted. Gratified, I reined the donkey in, to approach at a dignified pace.

  Two armed Egyptians in military uniforms stood guard over the gate through the wall. I left my donkey near the wall and went around to the gate, and the guards turned their rifles toward me.

  “No one goes in,” said the soldier on the left of the gate.

  “I’m Howard Carter,” I said. “I’m just here to make sure that everything is in order.”

  “Nobody goes in.”

  “You don’t understand,” I said. “I am Howard Carter.”

  The soldier on the left shrugged and turned one hand palm up. The soldier on the right said, “This place is under the command of the government of Egypt. Nobody goes in.”

  I did not understand. I stared from one face to the other, wondering why they were not letting me into the tomb. The government of Egypt. What did he mean by that? Those were my people.

  “Carter!”

  Ahmed was coming across the narrow part of the valley toward me. He slipped between me and the gate.

  “This place belongs to the people of Egypt,” he said. “Even the British Commissioner admits that. You will have to apply through the Cai
ro Museum—”

  “The Cairo Museum!”

  “—The museum has taken control of it,” he said.

  I backed up one step from him. Behind him the soldiers stood impassively gripping their rifles. At first I could not collect myself enough even to face Ahmed. I got my control back and sputtered at him, “You! You damned tomb robber— You’ve been plotting this all along! You and the department—I’ll wager they were very happy to do this to me—”

  “Carter, quiet down.” He put out his hand to me. “Let me explain.”

  “Explain!” I cried. All around me, heads were turning; in the crowd of tourists, people murmured. I shouted at Ahmed, “What will you explain—how you can steal a man’s life work—” That thought stopped me; I stood with my mouth open, realizing that he was doing just that.

  “No,” he said. “I am not stealing anything, Carter. This is my past. This belongs to Egypt, the tomb and everything in it, and everything that it means. You taught me that. I tried to tell you that, how you taught me the value of that. I am grateful to you for it.”

  I did not answer him. I could not gather myself together enough to talk. In the background, near the line of the yellow cliffs, was a gaggle of motorcars. Among them a man stood watching me. It was Conway, the assistant curator in charge of catalogs. A sense of the order of my loss rushed in on me.

  I would apply to the Cairo Museum for the permission to work on the tomb, and perhaps it would be granted. But still I had lost. My whole life had been devoted to my search, and now that the search was over it was all anticlimax and disappointment. I would never recover the moment when I looked through the hole in the wall and saw the glittering reflections of my candle flame on the treasure of the King. That was the curse on the tomb. I would never be happy again.

  The people standing around the tomb were watching me, talking to one another about me. Stiffly I walked away from the tomb of Tutankhamun.

  9

  Sunset. The lotus flower closed. The sun god Ra grew old, and his power dwindled, until all that was left was his red swollen eye, watching Egypt from the western rim of the world, and the least beggar could look on him with impunity.