The brothers rode up.
“Bonjour, Howard. Votre frère?”
“Oui, Monsieur. Mon frère.”
“Je m’appelle Vernet, monsieur,” Vernet announced himself.
“Mon plasir.” That was the end of the pleasantries. “You know where to go. Take your brother and begin as I had previously instructed. I will remain outside today to ensure the fellahs clear this place in reasonable time. There are but five seasons left on our permit, as you know. Vitement, s’il vous plait.”
They walked on.
“Vernet. Before we go up there,” Howard gestured towards the upper platform, “I want to give you a flavour of what you will later get to down here once ‘Monsieur le Docteur’ has completed his clearance... First, however, something for mother...”
Howard had his six shilling ‘Brownie’ box camera with him. He had become an accomplished photographer of late and was trying his best to keep a visual record of the excavation’s progress.
“Give me some scale to this picture. Sit on top of that pile of debris.”
Vernet scrambled up the rubble slope and sat uncomfortably upon a rock pile between the tops of two columns in the colonnade. His panama provided some relief from the already hot sun. He crossed his legs, forced a smile, and wished his brother to be quick. The sooner he was out of the sun and within the coolness of the building, the better.
“That’s it. Just a minute now... Good.”
Howard wound the film on and climbed up after him. He placed his hand on his brother’s shoulder and announced with a note of ceremony, “Let us go in.”
Crouching to avoid the stone lintel, they scrambled into the darkness and slid down the rubble face until they felt the solid stone floor beneath their feet. They remained in a sitting position for a moment, allowing their eyes to become accustomed to the poor light. The tall corridor of the colonnade fell away from them into the gloom, but the walls nearest to the rubble filled entrance had sufficient natural light on them to make out the artwork clearly. Howard tugged at Vernet’s sleeve and pulled him over to a frieze of hieroglyphs and figures. The expanse was an ordered sequence of verticals and horizontals, texts and pictures. It extended into the darkness, seemingly never-ending.
“Vernet. Observe the fundamental laws of Egyptian art; how it eliminates the nonessential. Copy that art accurately and intelligently, with honest work, a free hand, a good pencil and suitable paper the Carter creed!” He grinned and patted his brother encouragingly on the shoulder.
They climbed back out of the colonnade and made their way up the second ramp to the upper platform. Howard had been hard at work here for some weeks prior to Vernet’s arrival. He guided his brother through the maze of doorways and rooms that led to the Chapel of Tuthmosis I, the father of Hatshepsut. The brilliantly painted arched end wall, though much damaged, was a picture of perfect symmetry. Its beauty was overwhelming.
“We start here.”
Vernet applied himself well, but at the end of each work period he absolutely dreaded emerging into the sunlight. Fatigued at the end of a hard day, all he was looking for were immediate rest and comfort. But the amphitheatre of vertical rock that held the temple close focused the sun’s rays and baked the desert rocks so that, once outside, radiant heat hit the body from above, from the sides and from beneath. It truly was like walking into a giant oven.
He would lie awake in his bed with a glass of Scotch long into the night. He would drink himself to sleep. Over and over in his mind he would relive the experiences of the previous day. He enjoyed the artwork. His product, though more laboured and less timely in its execution, was clearly the equal of his brother’s. But the place, the environment, the interminable heat it was all too much for him. It did not take long for Vernet to realise that he would not be able to stomach another season. How would he tell Howard he was not up to staying the course? Such thoughts became the stuff of his dreams.
A few weeks later Vernet left his brother to work alone in the small, complexly decorated chapel. The decision to move was not of his own making. The simple fact was that Howard had had enough of his brother’s company for long periods and at close quarters, that is. Vernet liked to chat as he worked. Active conversation kept his mind off his discomforts. Howard found this all too distracting and in the confined space the noise was intolerable to him. He sent Vernet down to the middle platform, which by now had been cleared sufficiently to gain access to the hypostyle hall and the Shrine of Anubis.
“It is a great opportunity, Vernet,” comforted his brother obsequiously. “You will be the first to attempt to copy the illustrations on the opposing flanks of the doorway that leads to the shrine.”
Despite his imposed solitude and the prospect of now being at the mercy of his own thoughts, Vernet was pleased to be granted this singular responsibility. Under a blue ceiling studded with yellow stars, the door to the shrine was framed on each side by a vibrantly painted base relief. The scenes were complex but exactingly proportioned, that on the left perfectly complementing, but not repeating, the one on the right. On the left side of the doorway, in the top left corner, was the ‘vulture of the south’. She overlooked the somewhat larger than life-size engravings of Hatshepsut, in antiquity almost completely excised, and of Amun. They both held the Was sceptre. Engraved between them was a large, neatly stacked pile of sumptuous offerings. On the opposite side of the door similarly opposing but somewhat different figures were carved the ‘hawk of the north’ in the top right corner and, in the centre, the female Pharaoh, again frantically grubbed out by the chisels of her successor; facing her the god Anubis, also brandishing the Was sceptre; and, once again, neatly serried ranks of offerings placed in stacks between the figures.
The short commute to and from work each day was pure torture for Vernet and, as time wore on, it became barely worth the pleasure of reproducing the art. Carter and Naville, apparently insensitive to the heat, would exacerbate his discomfort by insisting that the party dismount and leave their mules before they entered the avenue of sphinxes. From there, Vernet would have to walk the length of the sandy avenue, ascend the ramp to the lower platform, walk up the second ramp to the middle platform, and walk all the way across the middle platform to its northern corner. All this under the unyielding sun before he reached the shaded sanctuary of the covered hall where he could begin his work. And it was worse going home in the evening.
On this particular night, however, he lay back in his bed with a smile on his face. He was truly pleased with himself. The art he had accomplished that day had been most satisfying. The subjects themselves had helped, of course, but it had been the gratuitous praise of his brother that had been most pleasing. And, to top it all, Naville had instructed him to make a colour copy of the vulture and of the hawk in opposing corners. He would recommend to the Exploration Fund that it make use of this pair of colour reproductions in a forthcoming memoir. Naville acknowledged the contributions of the brothers in the preface to volume one of his report. Vernet’s colour plate of the vulture was published in volume two, documenting the second season’s
work at which he was not present. In the event, his brother was responsible for completing the second colour plate of the hawk. It is not possible to detect any difference in style between these faithful freehand copies. The sixth and final volume of Naville’s epic Deir el Bahri report was finally published in 1908. Much of this monograph had been the product of Howard Carter’s work. In Egyptological circles it is acknowledged to hold some of the finest examples of reproduced ancient Egyptian art on record; see Naville, 1894 1908.)
The red mud brick tower that Vernet had noticed at the start of their first day’s work, although built in antiquity, post-dated the Pharaohs by hundreds of years. When the brothers emerged from the temple at the end of their fifth day of copying they found it had disappeared. Naville, aspiring to uniformity in the architecture of the buildings he was restoring, had had his men dismantle it. He justified his actions by pointing out that som
e of the stone incorporated in the brickwork had come from the temple complex itself and therefore was required to assist in its restoration. The original mud bricks were not wasted either. Naville reused them in the construction of a house for the excavation party close to the bottom of the first ramp.
As the season progressed, Naville continued his clearance of the rubble that choked the length of the middle platform colonnade. Howard was not happy with the manner in which he did this, but, without risking total alienation from the more experienced archaeologist, not to mention the possible loss of an assignment that he relished and a note of recognition in the annual publications of the excavations, protocol would not permit him the temerity of any suggestion to take a more careful and systematic approach. In this he failed his mentor, William Flinders Petrie, totally. As he matured, however, consideration of ‘protocol’ in the face of practicality would fast become a lesser virtue.
During rest periods at the entrance to the halls, Howard would watch Naville directing the fellahs to clear rubble like a human dredge with no care for what fragment of artefact may lie buried in each basketful of sand and stones, tossing the debris in growing heaps into a pit far away from the temple threshold. The professor was himself impatient to get to the business of restoring the structure to something like its original grandeur. There were only a few months each year in which he could execute his task and he was not about to leave unfulfilled.
Finally, the colonnade was completely cleared. Naville announced the end of the excavations for that season, and paid off his labourers. That night the professor broke out champagne at dinner to celebrate the successful completion of the excavations. Vernet, exceedingly relieved and thankful that his discomforts of the past weeks shortly would lie behind him, entered fully into the spirit of the evening and drank heavily. There was considerable joking and laughing at the dinner table that night and Howard joined in the stories, recounting some of his earlier experiences with Newberry and the distasteful antics of Messrs Fraser and Blackden. Vernet himself did not say much, but what little he did say became all the less coherent as the evening
wore on.
Eventually, on madame’s instructions, Naville retired to bed.
“A fine evening, Sir, madame,” said Vernet, as the Navilles took their leave.
Vernet tried to stand.
“Oh, please remain seated. The pleasure and gratitude is all ours, Messieurs. We return to Cairo tomorrow. We wish you luck in the completion of the hypostyle frieze. Enjoy yourselves.”
“Completion?” Vernet was not so far gone that he did not recognise the significance of the professor’s parting remark. He looked at his brother in bewilderment.
Howard touched his arm and turned to Madame Naville. “Good night, madame. Pleasant dreams.”
“Bon nuit, Messieurs. À bientôt.” And they left the room.
Vernet pulled at Howard’s sleeve. “What did he mean, Howard, wishing us luck like that?”
“We are expected to finish what we have begun before we leave. I don’t think it’s going to take us, together, more than one more month.”
Matter of fact words from Howard he had never contemplated leaving with the Navilles and was completely insensitive to his brother’s expectations to Vernet a sledgehammer blow.
“Another month? Can you be serious? Howard, I don’t think I can take another month in this heat... Dammit, it’s getting hotter every day!”
“You’ll get used to it. Everybody gets used to it. We all acclimatise eventually. Have patience.” A virtue the younger brother extolled but had precious little of himself.
“‘You’ll get used to it.’ That’s what you said when I arrived last February. Not yet I ain’t!”
Vernet took an almost full bottle of champagne back with him to his room that night. Howard did not expect him to appear for work the following day and he didn’t. But he was there the day after, and the day after that. And so he continued, forcing himself to rise each morning, the only encouragement being the pleasant artwork ahead and a day nearer to the end.
It had been tolerable working in the shade provided in the depths of the hypostyle hall. So much so that, with the Navilles now departed, the brothers would bed there and so avoid the daily torture of commuting back and forth to the camp. But this would do little to ameliorate Vernet’s continuing discomfort. He would see this season through and that in itself would be an end to it. In this decision he was resolute. He would never return. But how would he break the news to his brother?
As spring advanced and it grew steadily and inexorably warmer each day, Howard finally recognised the agony of toleration in his brother’s face. One night he saw an opportunity to ease his brother’s torment. All it took was a casual suggestion at dinner the opportunity to leave without fear of return placed before him for the taking. Vernet jumped at the chance. He was greatly relieved that his brother had taken the initiative.
They completed the work in the hypostyle hall together. They shared the copying of the decoration to the doorway of the Shrine of Anubis, Howard taking the north frieze, Vernet the south. But for their signatures, the authorship was virtually indistinguishable.
At the close of that first season’s work, Vernet Carter bade farewell to Egypt. It was, as both of them recognised, to be for ever. Howard accepted it more willingly than his brother realised. While Vernet had been a helpful and skilled asset in the execution of the tasks before them, outside of the work they accomplished, his incessant chatter and lack of discipline were to his younger brother at times intensely irritating.
Vernet was to be the only one of the Carter family ever to visit Egypt. The thought did not vex Howard unduly.
Four seasons after his brother’s departure there was a break in the routine. A late afternoon downpour caused Naville and his entourage of helpers to leave for the expedition house early. Carter was now copying decorations deep inside the rock cut shrines. He knew nothing of the deluge until he emerged at the end of his working day. Everyone but his bedraggled horse had left. He pulled himself into the soaking saddle and began the slow amble home.
Years in the desert had conditioned Carter to the perpetual heat and dryness. Nevertheless the downpour was pleasantly cooling and a welcome relief. He relaxed. As they descended the long ramp, Carter’s body lolled about in loose harmony with his horse.
The late evening light was poor and the torrential rain made the ground virtually invisible. A few steps from a second causeway that led from the adjacent temple of Mentuhotep, Carter’s horse caught a front hoof in a depression in the ground and faltered. Carter cart wheeled off its back and slid for a short distance in the mud. The startled animal quickly regained its footing and sprinted into the darkness. Carter, tired from the day’s labours, was slower to recover. He sat for a moment breathing heavily, his heart racing from the shock of the fall. After a while he gathered himself and wiped the wet mud from his jacket. He walked back to the site of the accident to see what had caused the horse to stumble.
The runoff had found a small hole to drain into and this had gradually become enlarged by the continued torrent. A flat slab of rock was exposed in the hole. It was difficult to see clearly, but Carter was sure the hand of man had shaped this stone it was a step hewn from the solid bedrock.
He quickly regained his composure and his sensibilities. The possibility of kneeling at the threshold of the stairway to an undiscovered tomb filled him with excitement and he totally forgot his fall. It dawned on him that he was alone and there was a unique opportunity to keep this to himself. The notion was irresistible, providing he could also resist the natural and urgent need to investigate. That would be easy, however; discipline was one of Carter’s more fundamental characteristics. He would ‘bank’ this discovery for another day. He quickly obscured the area with rubble. He wiped the rain from his eyes. So he could be sure of recognising the spot again, he took mental bearings on the nearby landmarks, then he collected his horse and continued on foot to the expe
dition house.
Howard Carter had laboured with the Navilles for five years. He had never become bored with the routine. He had gained great personal satisfaction from the work, and there had been a bonus publication.
Naville’s respect for Carter’s talents, the young man’s dedication to his artwork, plus his advancing skills at restoration, grew season on season. Toleration of his stubborn streak was a small price to pay for the product. At the conclusion of their work at Deir el Bahri, intent on providing a just reward for Carter’s services, Naville was quick to secure for his assistant a position with more permanent prospects. The persistent Madame Naville suggested that the professor talk with Gaston Maspero when he next returned to Cairo.
An old friend of the Navilles and Director General of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, Maspero was an important, powerful and influential man. He was short, plump and habitually dressed in a three-piece suit and bow tie. His bushy, grey moustache was stained at the tips from chain drinking thick, black Egyptian coffee. During their conversation that day in Maspero’s museum office, Naville mused to himself that it was a little like talking with a French speaking St Bernard the slight movement of his chin was the only visible evidence of a response; one never glimpsed his lips. There might not have been a barrel hanging from his neck but the brandy was never far from reach.
As head of the Service, Maspero was deeply committed to his responsibilities. He took meticulous care in the selection of those to whom he would entrust supervision of the archaeological licences permitting work on the various sites.
Naville recounted his recent experiences with Carter. The stories did much to endorse those Maspero had heard from other respected sources Petrie for one and his own more piecemeal observations. It all helped to confirm his earlier intention to seriously consider Carter for one of the two senior regional posts.
Tutankhamun Uncovered Page 11
