Valley of the Kings

by Cecelia Holland

  Carnarvon shot a look at me. “Quite,” he said.

  “It must be restored to its proper condition at once. And this time I shall insist on rescinding your licenses, and probably fine you as well.”

  The Earl looked slowly all around us. The sun was setting and the dark was filling up the valley. Finally Carnarvon returned his attention to the assistant.

  “We have made a marvelous discovery here,” he said. “We intend to—”

  “No, no,” the assistant said. “I don’t want to hear about it. Don’t tell me any more lies.”

  Carnarvon frowned at him. “Did you interrupt me?”

  “No more tricks!” Conway cried. “I won’t listen to—”

  “Don’t shout at me,” Carnarvon said, and the assistant curator ran out of words. They stared at one another, the bureaucrat very red in the face, and the Earl monstrously calm. At last Conway took a step backwards and lowered his eyes. I warmed with triumph. Another class war won.

  “We have found something here,” the Earl said, “which will eclipse poor old Rameses up there for quite some time. Now, I’m sure you will want your name mentioned, somewhere in the reports. We will be happy to do so, considering the help you’ve given us.”

  The assistant curator’s chest was heaving; eventually he marshaled the breath to say, “This is blackmail.”

  Carnarvon was already turning his back on him. “Damn bloody fool,” he said. “Blackmail is entirely different. Go look it up.” He strolled off toward the hole in the earth. Across the space he had occupied, I faced Conway, who gave me an unloving look. He and I both knew he could only accept what I had done. He went back to the motorcar, black as a beetle in the last sunshine.

  The American was watching from the side of the dig, where Ahmed’s men were already filling sandbags to make a wall. He gave me an intent look. I wondered how much of our exchange with Conway he had heard. He lifted his camera again and aimed it at the top of the staircase.

  Carnarvon was there at the first step, looking down into the darkness. When I came up beside him, he said, “Now, Carter. So that’s why you covered it up until we got here.”

  “Not at all,” I said.

  He lifted his head to smile at me. “Never mind. I’m pleased to be of use.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “You’re always that.”

  “And this American camera buff, here. How did you arrange that?”

  “Oh,” I said, “I just thought it would be a good idea to have a photographic record of everything, from the very first.”

  Carnarvon grunted. I could see he understood that I’d gone behind his back to the Americans.

  “He’s the very best, sir,” I said.

  “I’m sure he is,” Carnarvon said. He turned to look down the steps again at the door. “Just the same, whatever you’ve found here, it had better be good.”

  The next morning we broke down the doorway to the tomb.

  I was determined to preserve everything—not simply the materials in the tomb, if indeed we found anything, but the whole setting. That meant photographing and diagraming every inch we uncovered. Fortunately my young American photographer was on hand, and in the first light of morning we took pictures of the seals in the plaster, and of the whole doorway before we tore it down.

  Beyond it lay the corridor packed with rubble, mostly a light-colored stone that I recognized as the chip of its own excavation. Through the top left-hand edge of the mass was a vein of darker stone, where whoever had broken through the door in ancient times had tunneled through the stuffing. The necropolis officials must have filled the tunnel up again with this dark detritus.

  A single glance around the site was enough to show where it had come from. The whole far wall of the valley was half-buried in talus of the same rock. In fact, the pit where Davis had found the bits of gold had been dug out of that rock.

  All that day we removed tons of rubble. I kept busy. I was afraid to consider what that tunnel might mean. The priests would not have sealed the tomb again if it had been completely looted.

  “You don’t put a cork in an empty jug,” I said to the American photographer. “As somebody said to Alexander the Great’s mother.”

  We kept finding scraps of things in the fill we removed from the corridor. I had him photograph them: a piece of a vase, a waterskin, a broken seal. He had taken to snapping shots of the workmen—not of their toil, but of the workmen themselves. Thinking perhaps he was bored, I tried to involve him in the anxious waiting.

  Every time I looked for him, I found him off among the workmen again, shooting closeups. That irritated me. Typically of an American, he could not keep his mind on the important things.

  Steadily we dug away the interior of the corridor. Six feet wide, as wide as the door, it was at least seven feet from floor to ceiling. It slanted down under the first gentle slope of the wall of the valley. Within, it was so dark that we had to use electric torches even in the height of the day. At first, with each yard we cleared, I expected to find another door.

  Night stopped our work. We had emptied twenty feet of rubble from a blank corridor. When the last workmen had come up to the surface I went down again and walked to the end. That far under the ground, the air was moist and cold. I put my hand on the wall of rubble. It had to end somewhere. It had to be going somewhere. I remembered the tunnel where I had met Ahmed. Ancient dust, empty jars.

  Two carpenters in Luxor had built me a wooden grating to keep out thieves. With Ahmed’s help, I hung it on hinges across the first doorway, and we locked it fast and went back to Kurna for the night. I was dead tired.

  That night a gray mood seized me. I dined with Carnarvon and Evelyn, but none of us spoke; one glance into Evelyn’s face showed me that she was full of wild speculations. Thereafter I avoided looking at her. Whatever we found at the end of the tunnel, it was only sport for her, but for me it was the making or the breaking of my life.

  I could not sleep that night. I lay in a paralysis of dread. The sounds of the village penetrated my room, so that whenever I drifted toward sleep, some racket teased me back to wakefulness—the crowing of a cock, or footsteps in the street. Before dawn, I was up, brewing tea, dressing, putting my notes together. The rising sun found me halfway to the valley.

  The crew came out earlier also. They set to work at once. They did not sing as they worked. Carnarvon sat in the shade near Rameses’ tomb, his hands on his widespread knees. He no longer tried to seem calm. Whenever I approached him his eyes gleamed with unspoken questions. Beside him, Evelyn took notes for me on the bits of pottery and alabaster and glass we sifted out of the tunnel stuffing.

  We found another door.

  It was the same size as the first, blocked, plastered, and sealed. Again the plaster at the top had been patched. My enemy had been here ahead of me. I sent for Carnarvon.

  Standing on a box, I made a hole through the top of the door. Ahmed held the torch for me. I dusted my hands off; I could hear his lordship’s footsteps clattering down the stairway thirty feet behind me. My knees were wobbling and I felt sick to my stomach. Suddenly the whole thing was totally unreal to me. I was dreaming this.

  Ahmed held a slender iron bar up to me. I poked it through the hole I had made in the door.

  Nothing. I stabbed the unresisting air.

  “Light the candle,” I said to Ahmed.

  Jabbing the iron bar here and there into the vacant space beyond the door, I encountered nothing, no objects, no rubble, no wall. In my mind I saw it already, an empty room heavy with dust. A question with no answer.

  Carnarvon said, breathless, “What have you found?”

  “There seems to be a chamber here,” I said.

  Ahmed lit a match. The diffuse light showed me Carnarvon’s face, pitted and lined with shadows, shockingly aged.

  I took the lit candle and put it through the
hole in the wall and held it at arm’s length into the room. Sometimes there were poisonous fumes in rooms shut off for so long from the atmosphere. The malevolence of the ancients. Of course, there’s no volition about it. The candle flickered in the rush of air escaping through the new hole. I put my eye to the opening and felt that flow of air on my cheek.

  For a moment all I could see through the opening was the little wavering candle flame. I stretched my arm out and moved it here and there. My eye, pressed to the opening above my arm, became used to the darkness. Gradually other lights appeared. They winked and gleamed here and there in the black depth beyond my candle. I jerked, startled, and all the other lights jerked too.

  There were reflections of my candle flame. Scores of them danced there in the darkness. Perhaps there were hundreds. My eye grew more accustomed to the light, and saw more lights, and more, flickering images gleaming back at me from surfaces of gold.

  Then my eye began to divine forms in the dark. Opposite me the head of a great cat took shape. To my left, ten feet away, was a man with a lance. The round top of a chest appeared nearby. There were stacks of boxes to my right. That was a chair, there, and a couch or a bed. The room was packed full with furniture, piled to the ceiling. Everywhere, over everything, was cast the soft seductive glow of gold.

  “Do you see anything?” Carnarvon said, behind me.

  “Wonderful things,” I blurted. “Wonderful things.”

  I drew my candle out and gave it to Ahmed. Widening the hole in the door, I moved to one side so that Carnarvon could look in.

  7

  After the blocking had been removed from the door I entered the tomb for the first time. The excitement had transfigured me. I felt like another man; I felt immortal. Holding an electric lantern out before me, I went into a magical realm where I was king, putting my feet down with such care I did not disturb even the dust.

  A little alabaster cup lay on the floor just inside the threshold. Beside it was a heap of what looked at first like brown paper. Stooping, I saw that a garland of flowers lay there, so dry the petals were turning to dust in the wash of air through the open door.

  The mourners had dropped that wreath behind them as they left, fifty lifetimes ago.

  Yesterday. To the tomb the intervening centuries were only a moment of silence. I was standing in the tracks of the ancient Egyptians. I was entering a place modern to them, breathing the air they had breathed, bringing with me the first light to pierce this darkness since before Moses led the Israelites away to Sinai.

  Here at least I could strip myself of those years and return to the world where I had always felt spiritually more at home than my own home. This was where I belonged.

  The room was small, about the size of an English parlor, and so crowded with furniture and boxes that Carnarvon, Evelyn, and I had to pick our steps single file down the middle. Everything I saw was made of gold. Before me were the great heads of beasts that I had first noticed when I looked into the tomb through the hole in the doorway. The lamp painted the wall beyond with their monstrous shadows. Their elongated and flattened bodies formed the beds of couches. He must have lain there when he was alive, daydreaming, waiting for sleep to come.

  “Howard, look!”

  I spun around. Evelyn was squatting down before a casket-shaped box, marvelously painted in black, white, and shades of red-gold with an archer in a chariot. The wild rush of beasts he drove before him filled the whole right side of the scene. I started toward Evelyn, and my gaze went beyond her and I let out a low cry.

  Against the far wall stood two life-size figures, facing each other. They were men, painted black, the color of the dead, and dressed in gold. Between them the wall had been plastered and sealed. The two figures carried lances.

  They were guards. They were standing watch over a doorway beyond which could only lie the body of the King. Rags of their sacred funeral shawls still hung from their shoulders, their arms, like tendrils of moss. He was still here.

  I stood frozen in my tracks. The enormity of what we were seeing was at first beyond my mind’s grasp. Slowly I was understanding that we had come on a tomb virtually intact from the greatest and richest dynasty of the New Kingdom. Where before we had made do with fragments, two or three pieces out of thousands, now we had the thing complete.

  This would begin a new epoch in Egyptology.

  Carnarvon’s hoarse voice broke the silence. Evelyn and I went high-stepping like storks across the jumbled treasure to his side. He was bent to look under the hippopotamus couch, where there were boxes, gloriously painted. Evelyn gave a soft murmur, sensuous, and knelt beside her father to look.

  There was another murmur behind me. I turned my head to see Ahmed, standing at the mouth of the corridor. His black eyes moved over the room. One hand braced him against the side of the door, as if he might have fallen down with awe at what he saw.

  I stooped beside Evelyn. Ahmed would have to be dealt with.

  “Howard, what are these?”

  The boxes piled up before me were familiar, although I had seen them before only in pieces or in pictures. I said, “They hold food. For the mummy.” I was looking past these boxes. A golden wing had caught my eye.

  There were a pair of wings, vulture’s wings, extended, forming the arms of a chair. I raised the lantern, and the light swept up across a gilt and glass-paste picture on the chair’s back.

  Two royal Egyptians were molded there in low relief. The man sat in a chair, one arm crooked on its back; his wife leaned toward him, one hand extended, to anoint him with oil from a little pot she held in her other hand. The work was exquisite. They were so naturally posed that I half expected them to move.

  That was he, in the chair; it had to be.

  Carnarvon and Evelyn were chattering beside me. I put the lantern down. There were scores of things here. Everywhere I looked, I saw something new. The casket Evelyn had noticed first was slightly ajar; my hand moved toward it, longing. I yearned to open it.

  First I had to make diagrams, take notes, number everything, photograph everything. And this was only the beginning. Behind that plastered wall was at least one more chamber. I imagined several, a chain of rooms, each packed with grave goods. I had a lot of work before me.

  First there was Ahmed. He was still in the doorway, feasting his robber’s eyes on my treasure. I kept my back to him. I knew just the way to keep him off.

  “Now, look here,” I said, in a theatrically loud voice. “What’s this?”

  “What?” Carnarvon and Evelyn said, together.

  “Writing,” I said. I reached for the lantern and stuck it under the couch, to light the wall beyond, as if I were reading something written there. “It says something about a curse.”

  “What?” Evelyn said, in a voice high with skepticism.

  “It says that Osiris will avenge Tutankhamun on anyone who violates this tomb.” I straightened out from under the couch and looked her in the face. Through the corner of my eye I kept track of Ahmed behind me. I wiggled my face at Carnarvon and Evelyn to keep them quiet. “Osiris,” I said, “was the god of death.”

  “Ridiculous,” Carnarvon said.

  Evelyn put her head to one side. “Really, Howard. How quaint.”

  “A curse against anyone who takes anything from this tomb,” I said solemnly. “We ought to think about that. Make clear in our minds exactly what risk we are running.”

  “Rubbish,” Carnarvon exploded.

  He was getting angry. Did he half believe it himself?

  I turned casually to the door. Ahmed was gone. The corridor looked empty. Satisfied, I rose to my feet and reached for my lantern.

  “We have a lot of work to do,” I said, and started toward the door.

  A few days later, my stratagem got an unexpected boost: one of the workmen, an elderly relative of Ahmed’s, died in the night. Thereafter none of
the workmen would go near the tomb. There was plenty for them to do on the surface, building the wall around the entrance. I did not need them below anymore.

  From my notes: objects found in the first days of opening the tomb.

  1. The head of a child, six inches high, made of wood painted and sculpted in stucco. The head of the child emerges from the petals of a lotus flower: an emblem of rebirth.

  2. A small shrine made of wood plated over entirely with sheets of gold, and mounted on a silver-plated sledge. The shrine is in the shape of a miniature building, approximately twenty inches tall and ten inches deep. The gold is embossed with pictures of the King and his wife, Ankhesenamun. The front doors, bolted with a tiny ebony bolt, open to disclose a chamber where there must have been an image of the King: the pedestal with his name remains. Obviously the robbers took the statue.

  3. The golden throne I noticed on the first visit to the tomb. This is only one of several thrones we found in the tomb. It stands forty-five inches at the back and is twenty-five inches deep. The back and legs are covered with gold and the arms are made of gold in the shape of vultures’ extended wings. The legs are fashioned like lions’ legs, topped with the heads of lions. Around the legs of the chair are the remains of what was once an openwork design depicting the lily and the papyrus plants, symbols of the Upper and Lower kingdoms of Egypt.

  The scene on the back of this throne is riveting. I have sat staring at it for many hours, taken by the charm of the young faces, the grace and naturalness of their poses. It is like a window into that past time. I feel I know him, I would recognize him in the street among crowds, I could talk to him as easily as to Evelyn, say, or Carnarvon.

  His wife bends over him affectionately. I am jealous of him; she is beautiful.