Valley of the Kings

by Cecelia Holland

  “Did you want me, Carter Bey?”

  I looked him over, trying to make him squirm. I had not misjudged his great height, back in the cave; although he was standing on the ground his head and shoulders cleared the top rail. His mud-handling, bird-handling fingers were behind him. We stared at each other for several moments.

  “Ahmed,” I said, “I was not acting for myself, last night. I was acting in the place of the government. If you keep trying to revenge yourself on me, I will make use of the government against you.”

  His lips widened into a contemptuous smile. He raised his hands to the top rail and leaned on them.

  “I know you,” he said. “I know all about you, Carter Bey. You are a thief, like me, a tomb robber, that’s all.”

  “Better than you,” I said. “There was nothing in that cave you found, Ahmed. Nothing. And I got through the tunnel, which you did not.”

  He muttered an oath at me and walked away.

  In the heat of the season I often slept on a hammock on the veranda. That night the smell of smoke awakened me. I sprang up, all my hair on end; even in the dark I could see the roiling black smoke escaping from under the veranda steps.

  With the broom from the kitchen I raked out a mass of smoldering rags and cotton waste that had been stuffed into the space behind the steps. My blood went hot with temper. I seemed to feel every shooting pulse. I beat the smoking heap apart with the head of the broom and sat down on the step. The wood was warm. Dry as powder, it would have exploded into flames. Fortunately the fool had wadded his tinder together so tightly that it smothered out the fire.

  I looked up at the stars. In three days I had to go back to Cairo to carry silly messages about for the British Army. Everything suddenly clotted together into one festering gall: Ahmed, my job, the war, the government, the army, the looters and robbers who had got into the chamber in the cliff ahead of me. I could not begin to sleep. Until day came there was nothing else to be done, so I lay in my hammock watching the slow wheel of the stars and thinking of revenge.

  In the morning I went to the army recruitment office in Luxor, where the War Office signed men into the army to be taken off and made into bait for cannons and poisonous gas. With the war going on so long, they were desperate and would take anybody. A sergeant with a hangover gave me all the proper forms. I went back across the Nile to the path that led to Kurna.

  I went up the street toward the village. Ahead of me three or four Kurnite women were walking, encased in black from head to toe, with jars of water balanced on their heads. I followed them past the crumbling walls of the temples where their distant ancestors had worshiped Osiris in the form of a dead Pharaoh. The living village was made of the same mud, often the same bricks. Were they so wrong, the ancients?

  I went through the twisted street to the house of my elderly friend, who had taken me out to catch Ahmed on the cliff.

  His house was one square block of mud brick. In the unshuttered window, strings of mullet roe hung to dry. I smelled the beans cooking over the fire, laced with onion. The old man met me at the door and led me into his home.

  We squatted down on the rugs that cushioned the floor, and he took out his tobacco and a pipe made of glass, and we exchanged the amenities and smoked. Finally I took the recruitment papers out of my pocket.

  “Do you know what these are?”

  To my surprise, he did. His son had gone into the army. I explained what I wanted to do, and he sat breathing smoke, his eyes half-closed. Halfway through my explanation, he began to nod.

  “Very excellent, Carter Bey, but are they not to be signed? Will Ahmed sign them?”

  “Can Ahmed write?”

  “Ah,” he said, and smiled.

  “All I need is this information—his age, his full name, the names of his parents.”

  “Ah.”

  “Will you help me?”

  “I am not fond of Ahmed. Of course, everyone will know it was I who helped you.” He stroked his pointed gray beard. “Very well.”

  We filled out the forms. When we came to the space for the date of recruitment, I wrote in a date over two months gone.

  “Will they accept this?” my friend said.

  “You don’t know the army,” I said. “All I have to do is put it in the file. It may take them another two months to find it, but when they do, they’ll send half the knickers in Luxor to take Ahmed.”

  “Carter Bey,” my friend said, “you are a Turk.”

  I signed Ahmed’s name in the proper place. Under it was a space for a witness. I signed my name there, clearly, so that Ahmed would find out. Surely someone would read him the name of the witness.

  At noon the old man invited me to dine with him. We ate bread and beans and onions and rice, and argued about whether the British would let the Khedive have his government back, after the war.

  “Not the Khedive,” my friend said. “The Khedive is a Turk. They will give Egypt back to the Egyptians.”

  “The British never give anything back, once they’ve taken it,” I said. “It would be an admission of theft.”

  “They have promised us. We shall have our independence.”

  “They won’t keep their promises, they never do,” I said. “Besides, foreigners have ruled Egypt for thousands of years. You ought to resign yourselves, some people are fated to be oppressed.”

  “Once Egypt ruled Egypt,” he said. “Once. As you know.”

  I went back to Luxor. My leave ended at sundown the next day, and I would have to go back to Cairo that night. In Luxor, I returned to the recruitment office, asked the sergeant, still battling the agents of his debauch, to bring me a file from the back room, and, while he was swearing and ringing open the drawers, slid Ahmed’s recruitment papers under a pile of other papers on the desk. I began to smile. I relaxed, drew a deep breath, and put thoughts of Ahmed out of my mind.

  The war ended. The British did not allow the Khedive to return. Nor did they elevate an Egyptian government to real power. There was a little trouble over that with a labor union, which delayed the return of Lord Carnarvon to Egypt until 1920.

  I went to meet them at the wharf of Luxor; Carnarvon had chosen to sail up the Nile, although now most tourists took the train. As the boat turned sedately to approach the wharf, with a start of shock I recognized the old man standing at the rail as Carnarvon. It had been seven years since our last meeting, but he looked fourteen years older.

  Beside him was a young woman in a hat. I shook hands with Carnarvon, and he turned to the girl and said, “You recall my daughter, Evelyn.”

  “Oh. Naturally.” I gave her a startled look. Vaguely I remembered pinafores, braids, black shoes, certainly nothing to prepare me for the tall, slim girl who coolly put her hand out to me and smiled.

  “Hello, Mr. Carter. I’m so glad to see you again. To be here again.”

  A little parade of fellahin passed up and down the gangplank past us, lugging down Carnarvon’s baggage. The brown leather cases were plastered with steamship stickers. I stuck my hands in my pockets.

  I began, “How was your—” and simultaneously Carnarvon said, “Got through the war all right, did you?”

  “Oh. Fairly. Better than I expected.”

  Their baggage was stacked on the wharf. I led them toward the motorcar I had hired to take them up to the hotel. Lady Evelyn walked along in front of me. She wore a linen dress; she walked with an athletic boyish grace.

  Carnarvon was on my left. I shortened my stride a little, so that I would not outwalk him. “I have all the plans laid out,” I said. “I judge we can cover the Valley of the Kings in six good seasons.”

  Lord Carnarvon cleared his throat. I knew something was wrong.

  The Egyptian driver was sitting in the front seat of the motorcar. He did not get out to hold the door, and I scurried around ahead of Lady Evelyn and yanked th
e door open and helped her climb the single high step into the back seat. Carnarvon settled himself beside her. His gaze aimed straight ahead, he fluffed his mustaches with his forefinger. I expected him to comment on the driver’s cheekiness, but he did not.

  I sat in the front passenger seat. It would have been awkward to try to talk leaning back over the seat, and so I said nothing more to Carnarvon. The driver took us off with a roar and a spray of dust. He had driven lorries during the war. I had told him to take us up to the hotel by a circular route through the ruins of the Great Temple at Karnak. Now I regretted it. Something was wrong, and I could guess what it was: Carnarvon was losing his taste for archaeology.

  At top speed we raced past the tumbled blocks and columns of the Imperial Temple. The Ninth Pylon cast its shadow across the road. We passed by a heap of blocks that had come out of the core of another column. A team of Americans had begun looking them over and discovered that they had all once been part of the wall of a great Temple of Aten that Nefertiti had sponsored and that the Amunist Horemheb had torn down. Through the corner of my eye, I saw Lady Evelyn surveying the ruins, her hat clamped on with one hand. The shadows of the columns flickered over us like a moving film. I rubbed my hands on my knees. Without Carnarvon’s help I could not dig.

  We reached the old hotel where I had engaged them a suite, and while the servants were bringing in the crates and trunks of baggage, Lady Evelyn got her father settled in a chair in the study. She disappeared into the back of the suite. I waited nervously by the window.

  Carnarvon sat there looking tired. He did not move; he seemed not to have the will to move.

  “Is it too bright in here?” I asked. The sunlight poured in through the wide french windows.

  “Yes,” he said, and I closed the lace curtains. He said, grouchy, “Place smells awful. What d’you do, Howard, store mummies in it?”

  I laughed, in case he intended that to be funny. He leaned back in the chair and crossed his legs, and for a moment I saw the old Carnarvon, perfectly turned out, supremely confident.

  He said, “Sorry we couldn’t get down here last year, Howard.”

  “I can understand that.” The year before we had been face to face with the rebellious Egyptian labor union. It had required Lord Allenby’s talents to lure the natives back into harness. I said, “We can go right out to the dig tomorrow morning, if you want.”

  “Now, there’s something I must—” he began, and then Evelyn came in with a tray of tea things.

  He let out a gusty sigh and sat straight up. Beaming, she put down the tray and poured his cup full and put cream and sugar in. She had not even taken her hat off yet, but when she had the cup in his hand, she stepped back, the corners of her mouth tucked back in a smile, and pulled her hat off and ran one hand over her fluffy brown hair and grinned at me.

  “That’s better,” her father said. “You dear girl.”

  “Will you have tea, Howard?”

  I shook my head.

  Carnarvon put the saucer down on the table beside his chair. The room was stocked with old-fashioned furniture; with the draped french windows and the ticking mantel clock, we might have been back in England. An older England, before the war. The Earl sipped his tea.

  “Carter,” he said. “I’ll be frank. I don’t want to dig another six years.”

  “I don’t honestly think we can do a fair job on the valley in less than that,” I said.

  “I can’t afford it anymore. Money doesn’t buy as much anymore—the damned war…” He held out his cup, and Evelyn rose to pour. “You expect too much of me,” he said.

  “How can we give up now?” I said. “I’m sure that Tutankhamun is somewhere in the Valley of the Kings. Now we have the licenses—the first real chance we’ve had to dig—”

  “Our first chance,” he said. “Everybody else has already given up. Egyptologists have been shoveling up the Valley of the Kings for years, Carter. Men as good as you.”

  “Father,” Evelyn said. She held the teapot lid on with one finger while she tipped it over his cup.

  “Besides, there’s this problem with the local people.”

  I sat down in a cane-bottomed chair beside the window. Nervously I fingered the white fringe on the doily on the table beside me. “I don’t think we’ll have any more problem with the Egyptians.”

  “It was a bloody revolution,” the Earl said. His head bobbed up and down over the last word. “The damned Jews and Bolsheviks—”

  Lady Evelyn said, “Tea, Howard?”

  “No, thank you.”

  She was pouring tea, anyway. “It’s marvelous for steadying the nerves.”

  “I’m telling you, Carter,” her father said, “it isn’t our world anymore. The damned wogs are taking over everything.”

  “One lump or two, Howard?”

  “I don’t—one, please. Cream. The situation in Egypt is pretty much settled, my lord. Allenby won a lot of goodwill, letting the labor leaders come home out of exile.” The Egyptians, new at rebellion, were naively appreciative of that. I let go of the white fringe to take my cup and sat there stirring and stirring the pale tea. “It wasn’t anything like a revolution, actually—”

  Carnarvon said, “I know what it was, Carter.”

  His jaw was set like the lintel on the Ninth Pylon. I stirred the tea around and around, wondering what had happened to him to make him like this. I sipped English tea.

  “The damned war,” Carnarvon said. He pinched his nose between his thumb and forefinger.

  “Father wants to continue the digging on a year-to-year basis,” Lady Evelyn said. “If everything goes well—”

  “That isn’t what I said,” Carnarvon said.

  “If the new Egypt is so bloody awful—”

  “Evelyn, don’t use that word.”

  “It behooves you to support the old Egypt. Doesn’t it?”

  “Bah,” he said. Standing, pulling the sleeves of his coat down, he gave us both a bitter look. “I’m going up to rest before supper.” He left the room. His feet were heavy on the carpeted floor.

  Evelyn sighed. She went to the marble mantel to view the old clock, bracketed by cupids.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Not at all. When shall we go out to the valley?”

  “Tomorrow. I’ll come here, eight or so, with the motorcar.

  “Good,” she said. “Thank you for all you’ve done, Howard.” She smiled at me, but her eyes went beyond me, and she looked weary. Glancing at her wristwatch, she opened the face of the clock on the mantel and moved the hands carefully back to the right time.

  That evening I was out on the veranda of my own house, going over a chart of the valley by the light of a lamp. Gradually I became aware that someone was standing in the darkness just beyond the steps. I peered at the huge, vague shape there in the dark.

  “Yes?”

  “Hello, Carter Bey.”

  I went cold all over. It was Ahmed, the tomb robber from Kurna. I pushed my work away across the desk. A book fell to the floor. “Oh,” I said. “Hello. I thought you were in the army.”

  He came closer to the rail, into the lamplight. “I was.” He made a mirthless smile at me. “The war is over, Carter Bey.”

  His face had filled out. His gaze, shifty before, was direct now, even arrogant. But he was not going to attack me. His hands hung empty at his sides. I leaned on my elbows on the desk.

  “And you came back to Kurna,” I said.

  “Yes. I want work. I thought of my friend Carter, who was so helpful in the past. In finding me work.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “You are digging in the Valley of the Kings? I want to work for you.”

  “I have my crew,” I said.

  He shook his dark head. His smile was gone, and he looked angry. “I will be the leader. The foreman. No
t just one of the diggers.”

  “I’m sorry. I already have a foreman.”

  “Then make two foremen.”

  “You have no experience. Besides, as I said, I have no use for you.”

  “I know the valley foot by foot,” he said. He leaned toward me across the railing. “I am strong—I will work harder than anyone else. I speak English—”

  “No, damn you.” I reached across the littered desk for the pad of paper I had been writing on. “Get out.”

  He made a half shrug and went away into the darkness. I sat hunched over my chart, my mind buzzing. I had forgotten all about him. Of course, he had to come back now, when I was already burdened with Carnarvon’s new temperament. I forced myself back to work on the chart.

  In the morning, all our donkeys had been run off. We spent most of the morning herding them up, and all the afternoon ushering Carnarvon around the valley, and got no work done at all. When I had returned him and Evelyn safely to their hotel, I dragged myself exhausted back to my own house.

  The place had been ransacked. All my books had been pulled off the shelves and the pages torn.

  My temper exploded. Shivering with rage, I set off at a dead run for Kurna, on the west bank of the Nile.

  It was suppertime. The houses in the ruins were full of people. Talk rose from the windows with the aroma of beans and onions. The streets were empty. I dashed up toward Ahmed’s house, on the edge of the village.

  A brown goat was tied up to the front door. Goat droppings like pebbles covered the path. I knocked on the door. No response. I tried the latch and found the door barred. Standing back, I slammed my foot into the door, and the whole panel fell inward.

  Ahmed was a big man, or I would not have caught him. He was climbing out the back window as I dashed into his house, and the window was too small for him. I got him by the back of his robe. Caught, he wheeled around to face me.

  “What do you want?” I shouted. “Money? If it’s money, you’re wasting your time, Ahmed.”

  Three or four people were watching us from the doorway. Ahmed’s gaze flickered at them. He put his hand to his mouth, but he said nothing. I screamed into his face.