Valley of the Kings

by Cecelia Holland

  We started toward the camels, lying on their tucked legs, their heads drawn back.

  2

  For the reasons I had recounted to Carnarvon at our first meeting, when we decided to search for the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun, I believed the lost tomb to be in the Valley of the Kings, in the desert near Luxor, where ancient Thebes stood. However, the Germans and the Americans had the licenses to dig there. Until they gave up, Carnarvon and I could do nothing except potter around elsewhere.

  We did some digging in the Nile Delta, around Saïs, uncovering some interesting sites from the Middle Kingdom and Ptolemaic times. I confess that my attention was elsewhere. The American Theodore Davis, whose work I had supervised before I met Carnarvon, was excavating in the Valley of the Kings, and I lived in daily fear that he would find the tomb himself.

  The Department of Antiquities had kept me on as Davis’s nominal supervisor, but he seldom informed me of his work. I had to rely on some friends in the nearby village of Kurna to watch him for me. Then one spring, just before Carnarvon would arrive in Egypt for the season, one of my friends sent me word that Davis was into a real find.

  I was in Cairo, buying digging supplies. I took the new railroad train down to Luxor. This is where ancient Thebes once stood, and in fact much of ancient Thebes is still there. Crowds of giant columns and gates cover whole acres of the east bank of the river. Some of them still retain the bright painting that decorated them when Pharaoh and his courtiers looked upon them on their way to the sacred rites and mysteries of Amun, the god of Thebes. The modern town of Luxor with its curving date palms and square white houses looks small and temporary by comparison with the gigantic structures of the ancients. The west bank is a warren of the mortuary temples of Eighteenth Dynasty pharaohs and their families. In the midst of these ruins is the village of Kurna; some of the villagers actually live in the ancient buildings, and they and their ancestors have made a local sport of tomb-robbing since the days of Rameses.

  As one crosses the Nile from Luxor to the west bank, the two tremendous statues of Amenhotep III dominate the approach. They are so huge and so ruined by time that they no longer look human but, rather, like vast primeval brutes, enthroned beside the river, their heavy hands on their thighs. Behind them the alluvial plain runs back to the cliffs. Here the ruins are piled almost on top of one another. Some are no more than a square foundation, some are nearly whole. The long horizon of the desert shelf frames them.

  Here one can ignore the slight modern presence and imagine oneself living at the dawn of time.

  At the ferry stage there are donkeys for hire. I rode back past Deir el-Bahri, the great temple of Queen Hatshepsut, and onto the road that leads into the Valley of the Kings. As soon as I crossed into the desert I seemed to have left the modern world behind me. The barren ground, scoured by the wind, was ridged and hollowed like rock ribs. Dust hung perpetually in the air. My donkey had the frantic, steady trot of a rented hack whom everybody beats to death. The trail climbed. On my lips I tasted the acrid, poisonous dust of the desert.

  The slopes of the gaunt hills had collapsed into ranks of sheer cliffs. Taking off my jacket, I folded it cleverly over my head against the bright sun. I sang a little, although I don’t know many songs. I was happy to be back in the valley. I have always enjoyed this place, all honeycombed with tunnels and caves and rooms hacked into the rock.

  I passed the square mouth of a minor tomb cut into the cliffside by the trail. Another appeared, halfway up the opposite slope. To the west, one lone peak reared above the flat tablelands like a natural pyramid. The ravine swerved again, and, rounding the turn, I came within sight of the tremendous scarp that stands behind the tomb of Rameses VI. It is a favorite site for people on the tour, and one can see why, although the magnificent rooms are empty and the mummy of the King is in Cairo.

  In the broad yellow face of the cliff the opening of the tomb, neatly shaped and shored up to make smooth the path of the tourist, was oddly out of place: too square, too false. It always made me nervous: it looked as if it undermined that part of the cliff, as if the gigantic palisade might collapse before my eyes.

  Four or five donkeys were waiting nearby as I approached. One carried panniers, doubtless full of a picnic lunch. Across the valley from them was a string of fellahin, handing up baskets of rubble from a pit in the ground.

  This was Davis’s dig. I took the jacket off my head.

  Davis himself was sitting above the dig in the shade of a huge blue beach umbrella, one gaitered leg crossed over the other. I left my donkey and climbed a short steep path toward him. The slope was treacherous, covered with broken rock and gravel; the whole valley here is half-buried in bits of rock, the chip from the many tombs hollowed out of the cliff on either side.

  “Carter,” Davis said, sharply. “What are you doing here?” He stood up, his hands on his hips.

  “I understand you’re on to something,” I said. I stopped on the path. My gaze went to the fellahin at their work, bending and swaying over the baskets of dirt.

  They were working around the edge of a square pit that seemed to me to be already empty. I glanced around me for signs that they had removed anything other than rock: artifacts, for example, or pottery. The only thing on the slope was a pile of empty blue mineral-water bottles behind Davis’s beach umbrella. He was glowering at me.

  “Nobody asked you here, Carter,” he said.

  “I am your supervisor, aren’t I?” I took a step toward the pit. He grabbed my elbow.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Well, let’s have a look at what you’ve found,” I said. “Or aren’t you proud of this one?”

  He grunted. His hat was pushed back a little, exposing a strip of bright red sunburn above the tan of his forehead. “All right,” he said. “I’ll show you.”

  He started down the slope toward the pit. One of the men below saw him and, taking a whistle from around his neck, blew on it. The shrill sound brought the other workmen up straight. As a band they trooped off from the dig into the shade of the cliff wall and sat down. Davis and I went over to the pit.

  “I have not yet made my official identification,” Davis said. “But I have my strong suspicions what this find is.”

  I said nothing, tramping down after him across the hot flint. Davis had uncovered a number of magnificent sites, both here and elsewhere in Egypt, but he was notorious for misidentifying them. He was a careless, undisciplined digger who went by intuition more than reason, and he had no time for the grinding detail work that in the end pays off in a more total picture of Egyptian life. What Davis was after was sensation. Now he stood on the edge of the pit and gestured to me to inspect.

  I looked down into a narrow hole, deep in shadows even in strong daylight. Davis said, “It was full of rubble. Took us nearly a week to empty it out. Obviously it’s been looted.”

  “Looted,” I said. “What do you think it was, anyway—a cache?” Near my feet there was a ladder extending down into the pit. I stooped to rattle it, testing its strength.

  “It’s a tomb,” Davis said roughly. “Look at it, damn you—it’s a pit tomb, and my guess is it’s Eighteenth Dynasty.”

  “Come on,” I said, and climbed down the ladder into the pit.

  Midway, I passed from the sunlight into the cold grip of the shadow of the earth, and I shivered from head to foot. Davis came after me, his heavy boot soles sometimes grazing my hands. The pit was so small that he and I could barely stand side by side in it. It was a cache pit, no more, perhaps even less; the ancients very neatly buried the debris of their farewell rituals after a funeral.

  I tilted my head back. The patch of blue Egyptian sky shone far overhead. The pit had been hewn roughly from the rock. It had never been painted or even smoothed out, although the work was well done. But it usually was.

  “Whatever makes you think it’s Eighteenth Dynas
ty?”

  Davis shot me a fiery look. “If you’d waited until I could do a little more excavating—”

  “If you’d tell me when you find these things, I might be able to help you from the beginning.”

  “Come on,” he said.

  We climbed out of the pit. He led me back across the valley, through the blazing heat, to his beach umbrella. There was a little box near his chair, and he sat down and put the box on his knees.

  “See? Rather fine, don’t you think? And obviously Eighteenth Dynasty.”

  In the box were half a dozen bits of gold. I put my fingertips to them. I was touching the past, touching them. Thousands of years in the earth. There were a few rings, a small statuette of alabaster, a couple of strips of gold foil. Lifting the foil, I held it into the sunlight.

  A line of pictographs crossed the surface. Part of the writing was a name, and my nerves jumped with excitement. It was Tutankhamun’s name.

  “Well?” Davis said. “What do you think?”

  I picked up the box with the bits of gold and walked back down the little slope and across the valley to the pit. Davis trooped after me. Midway to the pit he began to shout at me.

  “You won’t admit it, will you, Carter. It’s the tomb of King Tutankhamun, isn’t it, but you won’t admit it.”

  I put the box down at the edge of the pit. “What kind of fill did you remove?” I squatted down and ran my hand over the top of the pit. It was dug in the sandy floor of the valley. “Was it the same as this stuff?” I looked around me again, at the heavy flint boulders and flint chip piled against the foot of the cliff nearby. That was chip from Rameses’ tomb.

  Davis struck at my hand. “Stop the act, Carter. There’s nobody here to impress. Flinders Petrie is dead, Carter. You’re old-fashioned—your methods are obsolete.”

  “Listen,” I said. “This is important. I want you to show me exactly where and how you found these artifacts.”

  “Get out of here. This is my dig.”

  His cheeks were red under his tan. His eyes glinted with bad temper. I kept my own temper under control. It would do no good to fight with him again—not now, when he might have the key to finding Tutankhamun.

  I said, “I am your supervisor, Davis. Now, just show me where you found these things.”

  “It’s the tomb,” he said. “It’s the tomb of Tutankhamun.”

  “Damn you,” I shouted into his face, “you don’t know, do you! You didn’t keep any records!”

  He shouted back at me, standing nose to nose with me. “Nobody cares about that stuff, Carter—measuring this, sifting all the little baskets of rock—nobody cares.”

  “I care!”

  He turned on his heel and walked away from me. I pursued him, and he shouted at me over his shoulder. “What do you think, Carter—you can’t bring Egypt back, you know. It’s dead, it’s gone.”

  “People like you destroy it. You didn’t even go through the chip, did you? Didn’t record what was on top of the pit—”

  “Get out of here! You crazy fool—”

  On the opposite side of the valley, the party of tourists was coming out of Rameses’ tomb. Currently, we were their attraction. Davis saw them and hushed his voice. We glared at one another. His face was flushed and his bushy gray mustache bristled with anger.

  “This is an important find. You can’t deny that.”

  “You goddamned Philistine,” I said. “It might have been, if you’d do your bloody job. Now it’s nothing, don’t you see? Whatever significance it had you destroyed when you destroyed the context.”

  “What does it matter where we found everything?” Davis roared. His arms flailed in the air as with his blunt fingers he pointed around us. “We found them, didn’t we? Would it be different if we’d found the rings over there, and the cup in the pit? What if—”

  “What cup?”

  Davis shut his mouth. His hands fell to his sides.

  “What cup?” I said evenly.

  “We found a faience-work cup,” Davis said.

  “Where?”

  He kept still. Apparently he remembered the tourists; he shot a look in their direction. They were standing by their donkeys, their faces turned toward us: four white oval faces and two brown ones, the dragomen.

  “Where did you find it?” I asked. I was being very civil, because I knew I had him.

  “Under a rock,” he said, and pointed to the foot of the slope, a few tens of yards away. “There. It was buried under the loose earth. Someone must have hidden it there. When they robbed the tomb. Just a blue faience cup. But it has Tutankhamun’s name on it.”

  I took him by the arm and made him walk together with me down the valley; I made him show me exactly where he had found the cup. He was disgruntled. He said no more than he had to and his eyes never met mine. We both understood what he had done. Egyptian law specifies that all artifacts found in the course of a dig belong to the Egyptian people; Davis had tried to keep the cup secret from me so that he could sneak it out of the country.

  I stood there looking at the slope at my feet. Turning my head, I looked back across the pit at the tomb of Rameses. The feeling welled up in me that the parts of a puzzle were there before me, if only I had wit to put them together; what I saw ought to be telling me something. But I could not grasp it. Under Davis’s furious eyes, under the eyes of the native workmen and the tourists, I turned and went to my donkey and rode away down the valley.

  3

  In the Delta, Carnarvon and I spent every fall and winter season at the digs, and I began to know him a little better. He was surprisingly companionable at times. When some topic took his fancy we could talk for hours. His wife usually accompanied him to Egypt, and in the evenings she would sit by the lamp reading, while we argued and talked over the details of the day’s digging, or some wider subject. As the years went on, Carnarvon’s daughter, Evelyn, joined us as well, a gawky, ugly girl in the starched pinafores and long white stockings in which the English upper class saw fit to swaddle their children. She collected rocks.

  In spite of all, though, Carnarvon never really became broadly knowledgeable about Egypt. He knew—often very keenly—the areas that interested him; but if a subject failed to strike a spark with him, he could not be troubled to involve himself in it.

  Periodically the Countess and little Evelyn dragged me off to the bazaar in Saïs.

  The bazaar covered several acres of ground; the stalls under their torn and dirty awnings were set up without any particular order, so that the crooked lanes between them were like a warren. The Countess walked along with her skirts hiked up in one hand, holding Evelyn in the other, and the governess trailing after, all the ladies circling and swerving around the garbage and dung that littered the ground. The vendors screamed at them, and sent their boys to run after them screaming, which the ladies ignored. The air was rich with changing odors, of people and beasts, leather, dust, the beans cooking in open pots on every corner; and the racket was constant and deafening. The ladies might have been taking their tour through the park at Highclere.

  While they looked at woven cloth I went over to a stall I knew. On the ground, on graying canvas, was spread a mass of artifacts. In the back of the stall, in the shade, an old man sat eating figs. I picked through the masses of bits of old pottery and scraps of what purported to be papyrus. Some of the Egyptian forgers of antiquities were marvelous and could fake anything well. There were some old brass beads in a pot in the middle of the canvas. The old man in the back was watching me with gleaming eyes.

  I looked over everything on the canvas. When I looked up, the old man came over to me.

  “Carter,” he said. “What are you looking for? What do you think I have?”

  His voice was supposed to be plaintive, but he grinned at me. Evelyn was watching us from a few feet away.

  “Oh,” I said, �
�I never worry about you, sheikh. I know you never have anything really old.”

  The grin widened. He said, “I will show you something old.”

  “Don’t do that. I don’t like to put you to any trouble, since I know you have nothing but fakes here.”

  The old man dashed into the back of the stall. I glanced at Evelyn, watching raptly. She spoke rather good Arabic and understood everything she heard. The old man returned with a necklace.

  “You see?”

  He held out the necklace on his palms. It was made of innumerable small plates and chains linked together intricately, so that it jingled when he showed it to me. The tarnished metal seemed to be silver. Some of the plates bore an odd design. I reached for it, but the old man snatched it back.

  “No, no. No touch.”

  “Bah,” I said, disgusted, and started off. I put my hands in my pockets. If it had been genuine he would have had no qualms about letting me handle it.

  “Carter! Thirty shilling!”

  I kept on, strolling through the passing crowd. Suddenly the old man appeared before me, dangling his object in my face.

  “Twenty-five shilling!”

  “What do you take me for, sheikh? I don’t spend my money on fakes.”

  “It is not a fake! Carter—do you think you are the only man in Egypt who knows antiquities?”

  I had to stop; he was standing right in front of me. He cried, “Look! See the metal!” With his thumb he rubbed at the heavy black tarnish on one of the links, and a smutty gleam came through. “See how the links are joined! Twenty shilling!”

  I grinned at him. The price was falling faster than the old lady’s drawers. I said, “Clean another part of it, sheikh, ha? Or let me.”

  He yanked the necklace back out of range of my reaching hand again. His black eyes snapped with bad temper and bargaining zeal. For a moment we faced each other, he glaring at me, and I smiling at him.

  At last, he said, “Fifteen shilling.”

  “Get out of my way, sheikh.”