In the Valley of the Kings

by Daniel Meyerson

  Poor Queen Victoria, however, had to face the fact that while this ideal was sometimes realized, just as often her nobility were pleasure-loving wastrels and bon vivants—including her own son Edward, who was always getting into scrapes. (To the end of her life, she reproached Edward for having killed his father. The typhoid was incidental, she claimed: Her beloved Albert had actually died from the shock of learning their nineteen-year-old son had lost his virginity—and with a French dancer to boot.)

  Measured by Victorian standards, the life of the Fifth Earl of Carnarvon would have to be judged anything but “earnest” (at least the first half of it). At the time he was caning his idle son, he himself had achieved much that could have been written up in the society columns—His Lordship’s yacht, His Lordship’s horses, His Lordship’s cars, and so forth. But he had done nothing that could match his own father’s accomplishments. For Carnarvon’s father, the fourth earl, cast a long shadow. He had been a brilliant classical scholar and a principled statesman who had served first as colonial secretary and then as Irish viceroy, becoming a close friend of Charles Stewart Parnell’s and resigning when his liberal Irish policy was rejected by Parliament.

  Perhaps in that cry of Carnarvon’s, “I intend to make a useful man of you!” we can hear something of his exasperation with himself, for he had his father’s enormous energy but not his intellect. He played no part in politics and “frankly detested the classics,” according to his sister, Lady Burghclere. Their father, the fourth earl, she adds, was “too sensible to insist on his son pursuing indefinitely studies doomed to failure,” so Carnarvon was left to follow his own interests. At Cambridge, his most notable achievement (besides the usual drinking bouts) was to find some beautiful wooden paneling in his rooms buried beneath layers of ugly wallpaper. The knowledge that would be important in his life was not scholarly or academic. If, as it has been observed, the Victorian gentleman would have been silent without the classics, then Carnarvon was mute.

  Upon leaving school, he traveled widely. In Africa, he went in for the benighted sport of the upper classes then, big-game hunting (unsuccessfully: His life was saved at the last moment when he climbed a tree to escape a charging elephant). He crossed the Atlantic on his sailboat, the Aphrodite, and when he arrived in Argentina, he made plans to go around the Straits of Magellan. It was a suicidal project given the lightness of his craft and the waterway’s rough seas, as an experienced sailor finally convinced him.

  He gave it up and instead threw himself into the life of the capital, lingering in Buenos Aires before continuing his travels. It was a pattern we can see in these early years. He seemed to be trying to prove himself somehow, anyhow, taking up one pursuit after another, restlessly, without fixed purpose…. He became passionate about boxing matches, then opera, then aerial photography. There were passing affaires de cœur, which he took lightly, and successes at the racetrack, which he took seriously.

  Whereas his father had “played” against the great statesmen of Europe, Carnarvon mingled with the betting underworld. As a friend (Sir Maurice Hankey) later said of him, “He was known to have pitted his brains against and outwitted the toughest bookies and ‘crooks’ on the turf.” To which Hankey added mysteriously, “I do not know whether he is consistently cunning, or often ingenuous.” Which is to say, he wasn’t sure whether Carnarvon succeeded because he was shrewd or because he was a fool (with a fool’s luck!).

  Either way, fortune was on his side. He won the Ascot stakes, the Stewards’ Cup at Goodwood, the Doncaster Cup, and the City and Suburban. He enjoyed the glory of leading his horses to the winner’s circle. And he developed uncanny gambling instincts that would stand him in good stead—on the turf and off—along with a gambler’s sangfroid, or cool.

  “On one occasion in his youth,” his sister related in her adoring eulogy, “he hired a boat to take him somewhere off the [Italian] coast to his ship lying far out to sea. He was alone, steering the little bark rowed by a couple of stalwart fishermen. Suddenly, when far removed from land, and equally distant from his goal, the two ruffians gave him the choice between payment of a large sum or being pitched into the water. He listened quietly, and motioned to them to pass his dressing-bag. They obeyed, already in imagination fingering the English ‘Lord’s’ ransom.

  “The situation was, however, reversed when he extracted, not a well-stuffed pocket-book, but a revolver, and pointing it at the pair sternly bade them row on, or he would shoot. The chuckle with which he recalled what was to him an eminently delectable episode, still remains with the hearer.”

  In the many disconnected episodes of Carnarvon’s early life, we get the picture of a young man whose knowledge of the world is becoming broader and who was steadily becoming surer of himself. His travels brought him into contact with all sorts of people and made him a good judge of character. At first, all this accumulated experience seemed to be wasted. He put it to trivial ends—backing a dark horse or making a killing on the stock market. But in the long run, it all came into play in Egypt when he made the gamble of his life: a useful, earnest “bet” that even the fourth earl, statesman and classical scholar though he was, would have been hard put to match.

  Not that Carnarvon originally had any such plan. After his death, high-sounding obituaries maintained that it was his love of history or archaeology that brought him to Egypt. But the truth is that two stubborn oxen brought him there.

  Carnarvon was motoring in Germany at the time. The oxen, hitched to carts, stopped on a road across which a farmer was leading them. In his car—the third ever to be registered in England—Lord Carnarvon approached from the other side of a steep rise in the road. It was too late to stop when he saw them, so Carnarvon steered toward the edge of the road, trying to get around them. Some stones caught the wheels. Two tires burst, and the car turned over and fell on Carnarvon, while the servant accompanying him was thrown clear of the burning wreck.

  As the unconscious earl lay half-crushed, his quick-thinking servant grabbed a pail of water from some passing workmen, dashed it over Carnarvon, whose clothes had caught fire, and then sent the workmen for help. Upon regaining consciousness—temporarily blinded, his legs burned, and his wrist broken—Carnarvon insisted first on knowing whether anyone else had been hurt (no one had); only after being informed of this did he allow himself to be taken to a town nearby.

  So began a long period of invalidism. He developed problems with his chest and underwent many operations, which left him in a weakened state. His doctors recommended a warm, dry climate, and Egypt was a natural decision. “So much is Egypt the resort of the invalid,” wrote the archaeologist Flinders Petrie, “that the guide-books seem all infected with invalidism; and to read their directions it might be supposed that no Englishman could walk a mile or more without an attendant of some kind.”

  Apart from the weather, Carnarvon chose Egypt because it was convenient, just across the Mediterranean, and had a large European community who welcomed the rich aristocrat. Cairo, with its opera house (built for the opening of the Suez Canal), its Gezira Sporting Club, its soirees and polo matches, offered Carnarvon all the distractions he was used to while he recovered his strength.

  If the ruins entered into his decision at all, they were only another diversion Egypt had to offer. A visit to a “find” was more a social event than a scholarly one. “We had the whole Devonshire party to tea this afternoon to see the find,” read a typical diary entry of the day. “The Duke and Duchess, her daughter Lady Gosford, and Lord Gosford and their daughter Lady Theodora Guest—with Mr. Weigall…. The duke, now a very old and broken man, is of course a great personage. The Duchess, so celebrated in her way, was a wonderful old woman—painted and enameled, with reddish wig, an old black hat, with painted lips—very keen to see everything.”

  Carnarvon fit in very well, along with his wife, Almina, who at that time was still in love with him. His feelings for her were more restrained, his attitude toward marriage being pragmatic. Or so it seemed fro
m the fatherly advice he gave his son when the boy grew up and decided to marry for love. As Porchester recalled in his memoirs, his father took him aside and told him: “It seems to me totally unnecessary to go marrying an American, Porchester, and if what you tell me is correct, even more ridiculous to marry one with no money. If you are determined to do such a thing, I would have thought it much better to have picked a very rich one…. I can only tell you that before I consented to marry your mother, I got hold of Alfred de Rothschild and made some very stringent terms.”

  The incorrigible Porchester, though, followed his heart (and ended up living happily to an old age with his penniless sweetheart). Carnarvon’s marriage, by contrast, was a mere matter of form by the time he met Carter. Almina was not at her husband’s side when the great discovery took place; and she was “difficult to locate,” as the gossip columnists would say, when he fell sick afterward. She finally arrived at his bedside at the last minute in a small Puss Moth airplane, an emergency mode of transportation.

  But whatever emotional reversals took place in the Carnarvons’ marriage, the financial benefits to the earl were lasting. For the Countess of Carnarvon, Almina, formerly Lady Wombwell, was actually the illegitimate daughter of a Rothschild, who could well afford Carnarvon’s “stringent terms.”

  These included discharging his huge debts (150,000 pounds) and providing a dowry of 500,000 pounds (given its purchasing power at the time, an enormous sum), along with other financial settlements. On his death, Rothschild left Almina the bulk of his large fortune, including his London mansion and several country estates. Yet despite all this wealth, the prodigal Almina ended her days in poverty in a small apartment in Bristol—the court placed her in protective bankruptcy—forbidding any mention of Egypt to be made in her presence until the day of her death.

  All of this was in the future, however. When in 1905 the wellheeled countess set out for Egypt in the company of her husband, she had no thought of her future poverty (or of her future lover, the tall, gaunt Tiger Denouston, charming, penniless, and also an invalid). And Carnarvon had no inkling that he would discover a royal tomb filled with art and treasure and the body of a boy-king lying in state for thirty-three hundred years.

  One last glimpse of Carnarvon in his “pre-Egyptian” phase, though, reveals an important link connecting his past to his future. And again, this view of him was provided by his son. The boy, having accidentally knocked over the king at a children’s party, was sent to a small attic room in disgrace.

  The room was over the bedroom where Carnarvon’s séances and palm readings and table rappings were held. If the strange voices and cries did nothing to soothe the boy, they shed an interesting light on his father. For Carnarvon was fascinated by the occult. He not only experimented with séances and levitation, but had his personal “supernormalist,” Velma,1* a well-known psychic who had given readings to such figures as the bandit president of Mexico, Pancho Villa, and the last czar of Russia. He would later claim that he had warned Carnarvon of his fate from the beginning. Which may or may not be true.

  But Velma was only one of many to have issued such warnings. A member of London’s Spiritual Alliance, Carnarvon often consulted psychics of many different descriptions. The famous medium and palmist Cheiro delivered messages to him from the Egyptian princess Meketaten (who died in childbirth in the fourteenth century BC). For effect, the medium could even produce the mummified hand that had scrawled them, though whether the severed limb was “the real thing” is anyone’s guess. As is the whole question of communications from the other side, Egyptian magic, curses, and “supernormalism,” as it was called at the time.

  The one prediction that was beyond dispute, however—a matter of public record—was the one about Carnarvon made not by a psychic or medium but by Carter’s colleague and enemy Arthur Weigall. Carter hated him, perhaps, more than all his other enemies put together. He was everything Carter was not, eloquent, sure of himself in society, handsome—a ladies’ man and a romantic, who married first a beautiful American woman wandering throughout Europe (with whom he had five children) and then a brash composer of popular musical songs.

  In 1923, Weigall, watching Carnarvon laughing and joking at Tut’s tomb, dreamily predicted that the earl had six weeks to live. His words were recalled—and created a sensation—when, almost six weeks to the day, Carnarvon died in agony and delirium.

  Weigall had uttered his prophecy without thinking; he could give no explanation for its accuracy. But if he had premeditated some sort of plan to revenge himself on Carter, he could not have come up with a better one. Nothing upset Carter more than such speculation, which he would always indignantly dismiss as “tommyrot!” For unlike his patron, Carter was not a “believer” in the supernatural—at least not in a literal, simple sense.

  Egypt always held mystery for Carter, but that mystery derived from understandable causes—the country’s beauty, the stark deserts and ancient ruins, the awe that came over him in the tombs and temples.

  Nowhere else was one as aware that “we stand between the eternity of the past and the eternity of the future,” as Amelia Edwards, founder of the Egyptian Exploration Fund, put it. Living for long periods of time on such intimate terms with the past—as Carter was to and as Ms. Edwards had before him—magnified this feeling many times over.

  An excavator’s state of mind was necessarily altered, call it psychological, call it mystical. As Weigall described it, descending into an Egyptian tomb that had been sealed for thousands of years was like walking through a tear in the curtain of time: The dried flowers strewn over the broken coffins, the leavings of the last funeral meal, and the bodies ravaged by ancient robbers all produced an impression that was uncanny and oppressive. In fact, more than one excavator who had had the experience—Jones, Ayrton, Weigall, Carter, for example—stated that at first he was overcome with the feeling of being an intruder, of committing sacrilege. This, together with an almost physical impulse to get out, to rush back through the winding passages and into the light of day.

  1*All that is known of Velma’s identity is that he was a psychic and a palmist. He himself often consulted Cheiro, Count Louis 1 Warner Hamon, 1866-1936, the most famous medium of the day.

  BUT EVEN ABOVEGROUND, IN EGYPT THE LIGHT OF DAY WAS darkened with memories. During the time of the pharaohs, its barren wastes had been the setting for meditation, prayer, and magic. First came pharaoh’s sorcerers and the temple recluses. For three thousand years they roamed the desert, seeking visions from the oracles of Hathor, Amun, and Ptah.

  Then came the Christians: monks living in the ruins of pagan shrines (Christian monasticism began here); hermits practicing fantastic forms of self-denial; and stylites—half-mad holy men living exposed for decades on the tops of pillars, their food hoisted up by means of palm-frond ropes.

  The Muslims followed, with mystical Sufi orders and mosques rising in the midst of pharaonic temples—in fact, built from the ancient stones. And finally the archaeologists arrived, lowered into their tombs by means of these same palm-fiber ropes, as Ms. Edwards recounted in her memoir. Writing the year Carter came to Egypt, she described this daily encounter with another reality. At every step in Egypt, the excavator is aware of the bejeweled and mummified dead “just below the surface, waiting to be discovered. Whether you go up the great river [the Nile], or strike off to east or west across the desert, your horizon is always bounded by mounds, or by ruins, or by ranges of mountains honey combed with tombs.

  “If you but stamp your foot upon the sands, you know that it probably awakens an echo in some dark vault or corridor untrodden for three or four thousand years. The exploration is a kind of chase. You think you have discovered a scent. You follow it. You lose and you find it again. You go through every phase of suspense, excitement, hope, disappointment, exultation.

  “With the keenness of a North American Indian, [you must use your] wits, your eyes. You sight a depression in the soil, splinters of limestone, perhaps the wreck
of a tomb? Baskets are loaded at the bottom of a tomb and hauled up, spilling half their contents on the way up…. [The workers,] the children and their parents go home but you remain in the dark hole, with nothing to eat since seven o clock in the morning and a furious headache….

  “The next morning [it is the same] again and again, one, two, three weeks … [in Carter’s case, for years]. You descend into tomb pits, one hundred or one hundred and fifty feet deep, crawl through subterraneous passages…. There is a rope you must trust to: a flimsy twist of palm fibre which becomes visibly thinner from the strain and goes further down as if into a mine … and you find Nobles from the time of Thutmoses II? [1500 BC] Ramses II? [1260 BC] lying in three coffins … alabaster vases, libation vessels—or only a broken coffin, a handful of bones with the jewels, amulets, papyri gone! There is an inscription on one of the walls of the passages…. Perhaps a new [hitherto unknown] chapter of The Book of The Dead…. Or a genealogical table. A link in the royal family of a dynasty, or [the records of] a Greek or Roman tourist….”

  There was no telling what would be found next. This sense of anything being possible, of continual suspense, was shared by Carter. He experienced it almost from the beginning, and nowhere more strongly than in the Valley of the Kings. Over the course of decades, he developed a special feeling for the Valley. For him, it had a nature, a personality, all its own: It was capricious, disappointing the most strenuous efforts and then suddenly revealing some long hidden secret when one was at the point of giving up. The Valley had, Carter would say privately, a “mystical potency”: an uncanny power to which he became attuned over many years of digging. He worked at many sites, but no other place had the same draw.

  What saved him was his strong grip on reality: His love for the Valley had no admixture of superstitious dread. Weigall, by contrast, gave complete rein to his imagination. At the end of 1911, Weigall’s breakdown began on a train returning to the Valley, where he had been living for many years. He turned around and fled to Cairo, unable to face yet another encounter with the stark cliffs sheltering the ancient royal tombs. Soon afterward, he left Egypt on sick leave.