Valley of the Kings

by Cecelia Holland

  He retreated, grumbling. I glanced behind me; the Countess and her maid, with Evelyn in among them, were watching me from the side of the lane. When they saw I was through with the old man, they started off down the lane again.

  As she passed me, the Countess murmured, “Was it a fake?”

  “Decidedly, my lady.”

  “Oh—too bad.”

  Evelyn smiled at me triumphantly from the shelter of her mother’s grip. We went on down through the bazaar.

  Near Saïs was a well called the King’s Water, at the edge of a stretch of marsh called the King’s House. On the strength of this puzzling name, a number of diggers had explored in the area, and each dig yielded enough material reward to keep them coming—but no one yet had cleared anything major there.

  A large percentage of the artifacts uncovered at the site were from the Eighteenth Dynasty—Tutankhamun’s dynasty. Therefore, as long as I could not dig in the Valley of the Kings at Thebes, I dug in the King’s House.

  In the evening after I had gone with the ladies to the bazaar, while I was washing out some items of clothing in my tent, the old man who had tried to sell the necklace to me put his head in through the door.

  “Carter.”

  “Yes, sheikh.” I wrung murky water out of my socks. The camp stool and the frame of my cot were draped in soggy undershorts and vests and the tent smelled dreary. “One moment,” I said to the old man, and took my smoking old lantern off the table and went out of doors to talk to him.

  He was not alone. Three or four other men loitered in the shadows beyond my tent, keeping well away from the light. On the other side of my tent were the tents of Carnarvon and his people and servants and the diggers. As I emerged from my own doorway, Carnarvon’s voice said something sharply in the nearby tent, and there was a burst of answering laughter.

  The old man and his friends drew me off into the dark a little way. We stood at the edge of the marsh. The moon was up, gleaming on the still water pooled among the rushes. I trod carefully on the uneven ground, where I had more than once put down my left foot on solid earth and my right down into the black muck.

  “Carter,” the old man said, “is this a fake?”

  His teeth showed in a broad grin. He held out a figure no larger than my hand, and when I took it, made no effort to keep it back. Lifting the lantern, I bathed the object in the indifferent light.

  It was a statue of a lion, made of soft, pale stone. I turned it over, impressed with the workmanship. On the bottom was a mark. I looked closer, and my hackles rose. It was the pharaonic cartouche of Tutankhamun.

  “Where did you find this?”

  The old man retrieved the lion. “We will show you. Yes? You and the Bey.”

  I swung the lantern back and forth, mulling this over. Something was out of joint in the whole business. “How much?” I said.

  The men glanced at one another. The four Egyptians who had come with the old fellow stood close together, and whenever my light threatened to expose them, they withdrew from it. The old man turned back to me.

  “One hundred shilling English.”

  “Let me see the lion again.”

  “Oh, no.” The lion vanished inside the old man’s loose, sashed gown. “Get the Bey and come with us.”

  I stared at them, warm with excitement. There was something wrong in this, but the lion looked authentic. Irresolute, I tried to make out their features, and they retreated from the swinging light of the lantern.

  Out across the marsh a bird shrieked, and the wind rose, as if answering, a cool tingle along my neck and cheek. I made up my mind.

  “Wait here.”

  They shifted together in the dark. I went back past my tent to Carnarvon’s.

  The Earl’s tent was large enough for some stout furniture; Carnarvon was sitting in a stuffed armchair, and his wife across from him in a chair without arms. On the table between them was a litter of playing cards. Evelyn sat cross-legged on the floor; the maid was dozing in the back of the tent, beyond the light thrown by the lantern suspended over the table. As I entered, Carnarvon was saying, “And the ten of diamonds and the two of spades!” He tossed down cards as he spoke. His wife wailed; obviously he had won, although I had no idea what they were playing. Carnarvon looked up at me.

  “Excuse me, sir,” I said. “May I talk to you a moment?”

  His eyes sharpened. “Yes, of course.”

  “It is rather late,” said Lady Carnarvon. “Can’t it wait until the morning?”

  “Play solitaire,” Carnarvon said to her.

  “But such a bore!”

  He was already leading me out of the tent. In the dark, we walked off a few strides, out of the hearing of his wife, and I nodded to the old man and his entourage, waiting in the darkness by the head of the marsh.

  “They have something they want to show us. Now. They want money. But it seems off true to me.”

  He gave the little group of Egyptians a searching glance and turned the same keen look on me. “How? What did they say?”

  “They showed me an artifact that has Tutankhamun’s reign name on it. It looks like the goods, but there’s something…” I shook my head. “Of course, there are many reasons why they’d insist on going at night. But it feels off, somehow.”

  “Marvelous instincts. I used to feel I’d die young.” He glanced at the Egyptians again. “Are we to go alone, naturally?”

  I nodded. “They want one hundred shillings.”

  “Wait here a moment,” he said, and went back into his tent.

  I raised my hand to the old man waiting at the marsh, to tell him that we were progressing. Inside his tent, Carnarvon and his wife had a brief discussion ending in a cry of dismay from the Countess. Through the tent canvas their shadows could be seen, and I watched them keenly; Carnarvon might be doing something foolish: for example, having us followed. I hoped he wasn’t having us followed. He reappeared, smiling, his hands in the pockets of his jacket, and Evelyn behind him in the doorway calling, “May I come?”

  “No,” he said, over his shoulder. Without pausing, he walked on by me toward the Egyptians. I followed him, catching up with him as we joined the old man.

  “Tell them that I have the money,” Carnarvon said calmly, “but I won’t pay them until we see whatever it is they have to show us.”

  The old man agreed to that without a murmur of protest. I could see Lady Carnarvon watching us from the doorway of the tent. We all set off together, going across the marsh.

  The old man led us on a path that skirted a brackish pool rimmed in rushes sharp as daggers. The peeping of frogs sounded ahead of us but ceased at the sound of our approach. Shortly after we left the camp, one of the old man’s followers slipped unobtrusively behind us. I did not glance behind me to see where he was going. He would stay on the path to warn the old man if we were followed. Carnarvon was trying to catch my eye. He was smiling.

  “Carter,” he said, “it’s about time you brought me an adventure.”

  I was thinking about the lion. I had seen it for only a few moments but the figure was familiar: it closely resembled a larger stone lion that had been unearthed some years before at a quarry in the south, where it had obviously been carved. The lion was lying down, its head turned slightly, and its forepaws crossed. As I thought of the little figure I had just seen, my blood quickened, and I began to walk faster; Carnarvon had to catch my arm.

  “How far is it now?” I asked the old man.

  He gave me an eloquent Egyptian shrug.

  We were now well into the marsh, and the insects had found us. I felt their lancet jaws at my neck and in my ears. The shriek of the marsh bird sounded again, this time to the far right. Stretches of rushes alternated with open water. The path twisted and circled around deep black pools that reflected the moon.

  The lion could have been his tali
sman. Or a fake, of course, copied from the other stone lion. I began to fret, wondering.

  Ahead, the path pinched down to a thread and wound into a tall thicket.

  Carnarvon said, “Steady.” He had stumbled; his hand caught my arm and he held me. Surprising. He seldom asked for any help. We went into the dark of the thicket, the lacy branches shutting out the moon.

  Abruptly the old man, just ahead of me, darted off into the brush. I yelled, warned. The thicket erupted with men rushing at me and Carnarvon. Carnarvon’s hand tightened hard on my arm; he was pulling me down. The Egyptians shrieked like banshees.

  A piercing whistle cut through the racket. I jumped a foot at the sound. The Egyptians did not hesitate. In unison the whole crowd wheeled and took to their heels. Within seconds the thicket was deserted except for Carnarvon and me.

  Carnarvon laughed. I straightened up out of my crouch, my ears cocked, and looked around. We were alone. The close quarters of the thicket made me nervous; I rushed out onto the open moonlit path. Carnarvon followed.

  “Who were you calling?” I said.

  My hands were shaking. I had been ambushed once before, and been badly beaten; I thanked God we had escaped that.

  Carnarvon held out a silver whistle. “I wasn’t calling anyone. You see the power of authority.”

  “Good God! Do you mean that was all? They ran from that?”

  He laughed again, this time jubilant. We started down the path toward home, keeping a watchful eye out.

  “Damn it,” I said bitterly, after a time, “then it was a fake. Damn, damn.”

  Carnarvon laughed again. He tossed his silver whistle up and caught it in his hand. “A genuine adventure. Let me tell the ladies, Carter.” He tossed the silver whistle up; it sparked in the moonlight.

  Davis kept the licenses to dig in the Valley of the Kings until 1914, damn him, while I wasted my time in Saïs. In the course of it he found a number of tombs and some sensational finds, none more sensational than the ambiguous mummy of Tomb Number 55.

  The Valley of the Kings is a narrow gully cut into the desert just to the west of ancient Thebes. At one end of this wadi, on the lower slope, Davis uncovered the doorway to a corridor that led back into the steep, flinty hillside. It ended at a chamber cut from the cold rock. That chamber was empty, stripped of all the funeral equipment that should have filled it, save for a few wrecked pieces of furniture. But in the alcove in the rear of the chamber, Davis found a mummy, laid out in the conventional pose of a woman, one fist clenched to the breast, and the other arm extended down straight along her side.

  Davis, with his talent for misunderstanding what he found, proclaimed this oddly disposed body to be that of Queen Tiye, the Royal Wife of Amenhotep III, and mother of Akhenaten.

  I say oddly disposed, because, on closer examination, the mummy turned out to be a man.

  Someone had disguised him awfully well. His name and titles had been sliced off the gold bands around his torso and legs, and the single coffin in which he was buried bore no markings. The tomb had in fact been made for Queen Tiye, but there was no evidence that she had ever occupied it.

  The body itself was in bad condition. Much is made today of the sacred, almost supernatural power of the Egyptian embalmers, but the truth is that the dry air of the desert, where most of the mummies have been found, would suffice to preserve most bodies. In this case, the work of the embalmers had been for nothing; water had seeped into the burial chamber and rotted the wooden bier that supported the coffin, and it had broken and pitched the coffin to the floor. The lid had fallen off, and the unprotected mummy had been reduced to little more than bones and tarry, moldering linen.

  Davis, in his fashion, had broken so hastily and violently into the tomb that he destroyed any other clues to the real identity of the hidden (or disgraced) body. I saw it a few days after Davis found it; I went over the ground and through the tomb for evidence, but, finding nothing, I could make no firm guess about the mummy’s identity. Yet I had a certain intuition about Davis’s odd find.

  The tomb was very close to the pit that Davis had uncovered some years before, almost within stone’s throw of it. The fragments of evidence that had survived the harrowing years and Theodore Davis all seemed to point to the Eighteenth Dynasty. Who in that great dynasty would be apt to be so disgraced? I was sure—on no evidence but my feelings—that the misused body in Tomb Number 55 was that of Akhenaten himself.

  And if it was Akhenaten, then whoever had fooled with the mummy must have done so during or near the reign of Tutankhamun, Akhenaten’s successor.

  I communicated none of my suspicions to Davis. In fact, he and I were hardly on speaking terms. I could do nothing except wait—while Davis like the Typhon of myth smashed and battered his way through the Valley of the Kings.

  I had a house in Luxor, on the east bank of the Nile at the site of ancient Thebes. One day in 1914, after the digging season had closed, I was facing myself in the washroom mirror and trimming my mustaches. It was early morning, and I was expecting no one, so at first I overlooked the knock on the door.

  At the second, louder banging, I went to the front room to answer and found Theodore Davis on my threshold.

  “You have to sign this,” he said. He held out a sheaf of papers, typed and folded.

  He wore a black suit and waistcoat and carried an elegant soft hat in his hand. I had never before seen him in city clothes. He looked like someone’s rich father.

  “What are these?” I put my scissors into the pocket of my shirt and opened the papers.

  “My report. I’m giving up my licenses to dig in the Valley of the Kings.”

  He walked into my house, and I pulled the door shut after him. My hands were trembling a little with excitement. Now I could begin the real search for Tutankhamun.

  In the middle of the room, he stopped and looked around, at the window covered with a bit of cloth from the bazaar, and the desk half lost under books and papers. The rest of the room was stacked up with the crates where I kept my notes and gear.

  He said, “They do pay you, Howard, don’t they?”

  “I spend it on women,” I said.

  His report was twenty pages long. I ruffled the edges with my thumb. “Do I have to read all this?”

  “You should. It’s the definitive archaeological description of the Valley of the Kings.”

  He ambled innocently around the room, pulled back the curtain to look into the room where my hammock was, and passed by my desk, his head cocked to read the letter lying on it. I sniffed. He trailed an aroma of shaving lotion behind him. He said, “Writing to Carnarvon, are you? Where will you be digging now?”

  I ran my fingers over the expensive paper in my hand. “The Valley of the Kings.”

  “Save yourself the trouble. And your aristocratic pal a lot of money. The valley is exhausted.”

  “I think we’ll try it.”

  “I went through there with a sieve, Carter!”

  His report needed my signature. I patted my pockets, remembered that I had left my pen in the kitchen, and went after it. Davis stayed behind in the parlor. I heard the rustle of papers as he went through my desk. Spreading his report out on the kitchen windowsill, I held the pages down with my forearm and scribbled my name in the space marked SUPERVISING OFFICIAL.

  “What’s the date?”

  “June 30, 1914.”

  I wrote that in.

  Davis said, “D’you think you folks will get into this thing in Europe?”

  I blinked around at him. He was standing in the doorway right behind me, rocking back and forth on his heels. I said, “What folks? What thing in Europe?”

  “The fracas over the assassination.”

  “Oh. That Austrian prince.” I folded his papers and held them out to him. “Or do you want me to file them for you? I’ll have to go to Cairo for my lice
nses.”

  “The Grand-Duke Franz Ferdinand,” Davis said portentously, “was the heir to the Austrian throne.”

  “Is he buried in the Valley of the Kings? Then I don’t care.”

  Davis’s fingers twitched at his mustaches. “You file them, if you’re going to Cairo anyway.”

  “Very well.”

  I opened the drawer in the kitchen cupboard and dropped the papers in. Someday I would have to read them, but I certainly did not intend to let him know that.

  “Well,” he said, dogged, “if France goes in, Britain certainly will.”

  By now I knew perfectly well what he was talking about, but I could not resist the urge to bait him. I blinked several times at him and said, “Go in where?”

  “The war, damn it!” he cried. “The war. But don’t count on the U. S. of A. coming to rescue you!” He put on his soft hat and tugged the brim down. His gaze made another slow passage around my kitchen and over me. “Howard,” he said, “you’re a nut.” He went out.

  I hated Cairo. The Francophile Turks of the nineteenth century had remodeled it into a dirty version of Paris, but the succeeding hundred years had filled up the open spaces and streets with dumpy little hovels and dumpy little shops. Giza was close enough that from certain rooftops one could see the pyramids, but otherwise Cairo was like a foreign island in Egypt. Even the bank of the Nile was paved. Down the Corniche, stained with donkey dung beneath its shedding palms, an occasional motorcar swerved in and out of the carts and plodding beasts of burden, its klaxon horn braying every few feet. A dead cat floated in the water at the quay where my boat tied up. I went along the wharf and up toward the street. At the kiosk under the palm trees a man in a tweed waistcoat and a fez was stacking newspapers with headlines in French and English. Two Egyptian students waited, coins in hand. The assassination of the Archduke was still the most important news. I took my valise to my boardinghouse and went over to the Government Building.

  Outside, this rambling structure of shaded courts and colonnaded porches was all Turk; inside, all English. There were umbrella stands inside every door, pictures of the King overlooked the work of typists and clerks, and everybody wore shoes. The Department of Antiquities was on the third floor.