The Visitors

by Sally Beauman

  14

  Lord Carnarvon was as good as his word: he sat with us outside the tomb, sipping coffee and conversing amicably; he seemed interested in the desultory conversation and completely restored. The chairs had been arranged in a semicircle in the shade, with two folding stools for Frances and me. Having served the coffee, Abd-el-Aal and Hosein returned to the tomb, from which drifted the sound of men’s voices and the faint clatter of crockery. I watched the kites circling on the updraughts above us; beside me Frances, flushed and mutinous, still smarting from the reprimands earlier, sat scuffing at the sand. Even in the shade it was stiflingly hot; rivulets of sweat were running down my back. I looked at my watch: time in the Valley had come to a standstill.

  Carnarvon smoked half a cigarette, inserting it into an amber holder that matched the one Howard Carter was using that day; he seemed so relaxed and at ease that I wondered if he’d change his plans. But no; exactly fifteen minutes after he’d sat down, two boys and their donkeys appeared. Carnarvon mounted without assistance; Eve was helped into the saddle by Carter, who said something to her in a low urgent tone. ‘No, no, not tomorrow,’ I heard Eve reply, ‘I have to… ’ The rest of her words were inaudible. Without further delay, father and daughter rode off. No one spoke until they had rounded an outcrop of rocks and disappeared from sight.

  As soon as they had gone, Carter began to pace up and down, then wrenched off his tweed jacket; he looked flushed and belligerent. ‘Christ, it’s hot,’ he said, tossing the jacket aside. ‘Damnable flies.’ He batted at the air. ‘And that champagne wasn’t cold enough. I gave Abd-el-Aal strict instructions, damn it. What’s more, the bread was stale.’

  ‘The bread was delicious, Howard,’ Helen said in a pacifying tone. ‘Really, it couldn’t have been fresher––’

  ‘I tell you it was stale,’ Carter replied, with a rudeness and aggression that startled everyone. ‘Hard as a board. Cracked my teeth. Carnarvon didn’t touch it – he scarcely ate a thing. And that clown Hosein, slopping chicken onto Eve’s plate, like being in a blasted soup kitchen. Well, I won’t stand for it. I pay their wages, it’s a simple enough task – cook the damn bread, wrap it, bring it up here – am I supposed to do everything? Christ, I turn my back for ten seconds, and the whole meal’s bloody ruined. I’ve a good mind to send them packing right here and now.’

  Miss Mack, allergic to profanities, had blushed deeply; she began on low polite squeaks of protest. Seeing this, Winlock rose and said in an easy tone: ‘Come on now, Carter. Cool down, old sport. It was an excellent lunch. Your men managed it perfectly and we all thoroughly enjoyed it. There’s really no need to––’

  ‘Need? Need?’ Carter interrupted, rounding on him, his face now sneering and furious. ‘What would you know about my needs, old sport? Don’t patronise me, Winlock. We all know you grew up with servants and I didn’t – that doesn’t mean you can lord it around here. They’re my staff, damn it, and I won’t tolerate sloppiness. Did I ask you to poke your nose into my affairs? Mind your own bloody business.’

  He gave the chair on which he’d been sitting earlier a violent kick, pushed past us and strode into the darkness of the tomb. ‘Abd-el-Aal, where the hell are you?’ we heard him shout. There was the sound of glass smashing, and then of raised voices, Carter’s and another man’s, both speaking rapid Arabic. ‘Heavens above,’ said Miss Mack as the voices rose in pitch and then receded into the depths of the tomb.

  ‘That’s torn it,’ Winlock said, sharing an expressive look with his wife. ‘Don’t upset yourself, Myrtle,’ he continued. ‘Abd-el-Aal has worked for Carter for twenty-five years. He’s used to the tantrums – and he can give as good as he gets. There’ll be no bloodshed, no firings and in about, let’s see… ’ he glanced at his wristwatch, ‘fifteen minutes, twenty at the outside, Carter will be back out here, being as nice as pie. Nicer, probably, because he’ll be penitent… That’s if he doesn’t decide on one of his mammoth sulks, of course. Which is also on the cards. Meanwhile, my apologies.’

  ‘It’s not your apology, I require, Herbert,’ Miss Mack replied, with asperity. ‘Mr Carter said nothing I haven’t heard before – I have worked as a nurse, if you recall. But in front of the children: such loss of all control, such a display of temper! And after such a pleasant lunch too – I’m at a loss to understand what provoked it.’

  ‘Carnarvon’s remark about their finds, for one thing.’ Winlock shrugged. ‘His early departure – that won’t have pleased him. Carter has a bit of a chip on his shoulder too… he’s on a short fuse at the best of times. He likes to be in control, Myrtle. He has these fixed plans, and he can’t stand it if they’re altered.’

  ‘But poor Lord Carnarvon was ill. He may have made light of it, but he hadn’t just dozed off, that was obvious. His lips were blue. It might have been a stroke – I was seriously alarmed – really quite fearful for him. And now he has that journey back to the hotel. Having to ride in this terrible heat, and then driving all that way on that appalling track. He shouldn’t be here in my view. He’s a sick man. Surely Mr Carter can see––’

  ‘Oh, he can see, all right, Myrtle,’ Helen said gently. ‘Howard’s well aware of Carnarvon’s precarious state of health. That’s another reason why he lost his temper.’

  ‘He’s afraid,’ Frances said, jumping up from the stool next to mine. ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Miss Mackenzie, can’t you see? He’s afraid Lord Carnarvon will be too ill to carry on in the Valley, and afraid they’ll lose their chance to find a glorious tomb, when it might be just inches away, and he’s spent half his life looking for it and he knows it’s there. And he’s afraid we all despised the lunch, because Mr Carter didn’t know how to get the details right… He’s afraid we’ll be sneering at him because that stupid champagne wasn’t cold enough – a thousand things! That makes him furious with himself, so he starts shouting and cussing––’

  ‘Hold your tongue, Frances, please,’ her father said curtly. ‘We’ve heard enough from you for one day. I’ve already warned you––’

  ‘It’s so unfair!’ Frances cried. I could see she was close to tears. ‘Now he’ll be ashamed and embarrassed, and that will make him even worse. And it shouldn’t. What does cussing matter? I’m used to it. Daddy cusses every morning, when he’s trying to shave and the water isn’t hot, or he’s late for the dig, or––’

  ‘My father does too,’ I said, suddenly fired up by Frances, the words spoken before I could think. ‘And when he loses his temper, which he does for no reason at all, when I haven’t said a word, scarcely breathed, it’s much worse than Mr Carter. It’s hateful.’

  ‘Lucy!’ Miss Mack gave a cry of outrage, and rose to her feet. ‘You will be silent this instant. What in heaven’s name has come over you? How dare you speak in that way?’ Advancing upon me, and angrier than I had ever seen her, she took hold of me by the wrist, hauled me to my feet, propelled me aside and backed me up against the rocks. ‘One more word of that kind,’ she said, ‘just one word, Lucy Payne, and I’ll take you straight back to the hotel, do you understand me? How can you be so disrespectful and disloyal? To speak of your own father in that way.’

  ‘It’s true,’ I cried, now furious and beside myself. ‘You know it’s true. You’ve been there, you’ve heard it. He shouts and curses, and then he goes for days and days without speaking at all and I know it’s the war that makes him do it, but he bullies me – and he bullied my mother as well.’

  I burst into tears. Miss Mack seemed to have been rendered speechless, and my head swirled with all the heat and consternation exploding like ordnance in the Valley. Behind me, I could hear Helen’s voice raised in angry reproof, and Frances’s tearful protests. Above me, in the high blue air, the kites were shrieking alarm, and from inside the tomb, amidst crashing and smashing, came Arabic wails.

  ‘Holy Moses,’ said a voice that I realised was Winlock’s. ‘Who or what unleashed this? Has the world gone completely mad? Right, that’s it: I’ve had enough. Helen, I
suggest you get out your watercolours and paint, as you planned to do. Myrtle, if you’d be kind enough to keep her company? You, Frances, and you, Lucy, come with me. Now.’

  He spoke in a tone that brooked no disagreement. He marched Frances and me away, towards the main section of the Valley. After a hundred yards, he handed us a handkerchief, telling us brusquely that we’d darn well have to share it. Frances and I mopped our wet eyes and our hot faces, and struggled to keep up, for Winlock was walking at a brisk pace, apparently oblivious to the burning heat of the afternoon sun. After a long interval, Frances began on some muttered speech, in which I joined her. Winlock held up his hand, paused briefly, glared at us both and said: ‘I don’t want to know. I don’t want to hear. I’ve seen the Valley have this effect before, and no doubt I’ll see it again, but that’s enough.’

  He walked on a little further, and then, coming to a halt by a spillage of rock, he said, on a kinder note: ‘Okay, let’s get this over with. You two have just defended your friend Carter: that was loyal and we’ll let it pass. But at lunch, you inflicted your opinions concerning Egyptian tombs on a group of people who’ve forgotten more than you’ll ever know on that subject. I can sympathise: I had opinions in spades when I was your age. I was opinionated at Harvard, and nearly got thrown out for it. I still am excessively opinionated, I’ll admit that, but then a world where people didn’t have ideas and opinions would be a very dull one. However, as I finally learned, opinions are valueless unless they’re informed – and neither you, Frances, nor you, Lucy, are well informed on that subject. In fact, you’re conspicuously and lamentably ill informed.’

  He paused, frowning along the Valley, removed his panama and mopped his forehead. ‘So,’ he continued, ‘out of the goodness and generosity of my heart, and in a spirit of self-sacrifice, because there are more important things I could be doing right now, working, for instance… I intend to educate you just a little. We may as well rescue something useful from the wreckage of the afternoon. Lucy came here to see the Valley, and see it she will. I’ll give you two hours of my precious time, and during those two hours, we will explore some tombs of my choosing. I will speak, you will listen. Then we’ll go home and have tea. How does that sound?’

  ‘It sounds good,’ Frances said in a small voice. There was a pause and then she added: ‘I’m sorry, Daddy.’

  ‘I’m sorry too, Mr Winlock,’ I muttered. ‘I shouldn’t have said that. I don’t know why I did.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure you do,’ Winlock replied, with a sharp glance. ‘These things will out. And if ever there was a place to bring them out, it’s this one. The Valley can be disruptive and this infernal heat doesn’t help, but it can also be a calming place – trust me. You’ll see.’ He patted my shoulder, and in a quieter voice continued: ‘You can come here feeling pretty terrible, Lucy, really churned up with anger and misery and heartache, and then you enter one of the tombs and – it kind of slips away from you. It’s happened to me many times. I call it the three-thousand-year effect.

  ‘Now,’ he looked along the Valley, towards the wider, bellying space where the most-visited tombs were located, ‘I don’t intend fighting our way past a hundred tourists, and dragomen and hawkers and charlatans, so we’ll avoid the main drag for the moment. We’ll start with Frances’s favourite tomb, which is also my favourite and, in my view anyway, the most beautiful in the Valley. It was made for a king called Seti I, Lucy. He ruled Egypt roughly one thousand three hundred years BC. He was a warrior king, inevitably, though nothing on the scale of his son and successor, Ramesses II, who was the greatest of the pharaohs, long lived, all powerful, a ruthless imperialist and a pitiless dictator – a monomaniac who bequeathed us some of the most glorious monuments in Egypt. We’ll visit him later. This way, Lucy.’

  Frances took my hand and we followed her father. Turning aside from the central section of the Valley where scores of tourists and donkey boys were milling about, and hawkers were noisily overcharging for candles and magnesium flares, he led us to the right, into a narrowing wadi where the rocks either side protected us from the sun; within a few yards, the tourists became inaudible and silence enclosed us.

  ‘It’s the longest, deepest tomb in the Valley,’ Frances whispered. ‘It’s pitch dark and terribly hot. You won’t be afraid, Lucy? It goes down and down for ever.’

  Winlock came to a halt. Squinting up at the sun, he said: ‘Lucy, I want you to listen – and Frances, given your remarks at lunch, it won’t hurt if you listen too. You spoke of treasure – now, I want you to think about the implications of that word. I want you to think about this place. Try to put aside all preconceptions and consider what it signified to the man for whom it was made.’ He gestured towards the dark gape of the entrance, and said: ‘Right, lecture begins.

  ‘Seti chose this wadi as the site of his tomb, I expect because he wanted to be buried next to his father, Ramesses I – that’s his tomb, Lucy, over there. You see how secluded it is now? Try to imagine how remote and hidden it was then. Work on Seti’s tomb would have begun long before he came to the throne and it continued throughout his reign. He employed the greatest architects, goldsmiths, painters and sculptors of his era. The most powerful spells known to his priests were recorded on the tomb walls – and there was a reason for that. These tombs are not about death, Lucy: never make that mistake – they’re about conquering death. Everything in them is designed to ensure safe passage through the underworld and an afterlife that would never end. Seti would have been buried inside three magnificent coffins, Lucy, with a solid gold portrait mask covering his face, and with the flail and the crook – they were the symbols of his power – in his hands. Inside the mummification bandages, his priests secreted jewels, weapons and amulets to protect his body eternally. And on his chest, they placed a single, huge scarab: that was there to protect him during the Weighing of the Heart ceremony, as Frances knows: its weight prevented his heart from crying out, you see, and confessing its sins…

  ‘His three coffins would have been installed inside a vast calcite sarcophagus – we know about that sarcophagus for sure, because it’s in London now, at the Soane Museum, Lucy: you should go and look at it one of these days. And that sarcophagus would have been surrounded by four protective wooden shrines – we know that from descriptions on papyri – each of them panelled in sheet gold. But that’s just the bare details of his funeral chamber, the Holy of Holies: as you’ll see, the approach to it goes three hundred feet deep into the rock. There are seven corridors leading to the Burial Chamber, and ten ante-rooms off them. In those rooms, his priests piled treasure upon treasure: there were magnificent things – golden chariots, weaponry, thrones and jewels – but also practical, useful things, like linen and looking glasses and tools; they left board games and musical instruments, so, in the afterlife, the pharaoh might never be bored… And there were shabti figures, of course – hundreds of them, so every task in the afterlife could be performed for Seti by his servants just as they had been in his lifetime.

  ‘People think these burials were all about glory and display, as Miss Mackenzie claimed over lunch,’ he went on. ‘And that’s true to a degree, of course. But they were also thoughtful, Lucy, when they supplied these tombs: thoughtful – and loving too. The priests wanted to ensure the pharaoh’s happiness and well-being in the afterlife, so they left him with food and grain and meat and wines. They provided him with medicinal ointments and sweet-smelling oils, and left him lamps so he need never endure the dark. Those who mourned him decorated his tomb with flower wreaths, just as we do now… ’ He hesitated and his voice caught. ‘I’ve seen examples of such wreaths, in fact we have some at the Met, and it always moves me to look at them… They’re beautiful, Lucy, woven from olive and palm leaves, interlaced with beads, decorated with blue lotus, cornflowers and nightshade berries. They’re joyous things – not like the funereal tributes we send now. The ones we have at the museum are in a near-perfect state of preservation, yet it’s three thousand y
ears since the funeral for which they were made.’

  He fell silent and looked along the wadi, his face clouded and his eyes sad. Frances reached for my hand and clasped it tight. I wondered if they were thinking of other, much more recent funerals, as I was; perhaps the burial of the little son who died when his father was on a different continent, fighting a war – and maybe they were, for Frances wiped her eyes, and Winlock remained quiet, his gaze averted.

  After a while, he gave himself a shake and said in a newly hesitant way: ‘Where was I? Ah yes: the death of kings… Lucy, all those things I’ve just described, are you imagining them? The Burial Chamber, the shrines, the treasures – can you see them?’

  When I nodded, he said in a new brusque way: ‘Good. Go on imagining. Imagine very hard – because they’ve gone. None of it is here. Not the chariots or the shrines or the golden coffins… there’s not one stick of treasure left. All the loving tributes disappeared long, long ago. That’s true of this tomb – and, to a greater or lesser degree, of every single one ever found in the Valley. There isn’t one that wasn’t rifled. The spells, the amulets, the goddesses and the guards, even the slow, hideous process of execution by impaling that was inflicted on all tomb robbers who were captured – none of it could protect Seti from human avarice. All that is left of him – and a poor forked creature he is – you saw in a glass case in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

  ‘Meanwhile, I’ve come prepared,’ he added, turning towards the dark entrance to the tomb. ‘No candles for us, and none of those infernal magnesium flares either. The smoke and the chemicals damage the wall paintings – and the ones here are magnificent, as you’re about to see, Lucy. Also, the flares and the candles can go out and then you’re left in the dark. That’s unpleasant: it once frightened Frances badly.’ He turned with a smile to ruffle Frances’s hair, then handed us the torches. ‘New flashlights and new batteries, and I’m with you, so there’s nothing to fear. Are you ready? I want you to use your eyes: the two eyes you’ve been blessed with and your mind’s eye as well. You’ll need all three. The dead await us. In we go.’