In the Valley of the Kings

by Daniel Meyerson

  Watching the spectacle even from this distance in time, one wants to cry out: No! Stop it! Control yourself, Carter! But the truth of the matter is that Carter could not control himself. For though he was remarkable, he was also a little—more than a little—crazy. You couldn’t be Howard Carter and not be. The same driven quality that enabled him to find Tut’s tomb also brought about his downfall.

  Weigall privately circulated a caricature he’d drawn of Carter looking very much like Charlie Chaplin. In the sketch a ragged Carter hit the road, following a sign advertising cheap lodgings. Weigall especially had little sympathy for the ex-chief inspector: Carter had brought the Saqqara trouble upon himself, Weigall wrote to his wife, the man was filled with childish pride, vanity, and stubbornness.

  Say Weigall was right, Carter’s flawed character had led him to resign—his pride, vanity, and anger. Or say Carter was right, that a strong sense of principle and ethical disgust made him throw in the towel. Or—probably the case—say both were right: In the end it came to the same thing. The strong flow of Carter’s feelings, the intensity that made him abandon his post at the service, was also what led him to make the greatest discovery in the history of Egyptology … perhaps a bad moral with which to conclude, but an interesting reflection on our human nature.

  Right or wrong, Carter was suffering, alone and without a penny, after his resignation. But the insult he had received only fueled his determination. He might be down in Cairo—but he was not down and out.

  One Month Later

  Cairo was a city of refuge for outcasts. It was blind to faults, forgiving of sins, delighted by scandal. When Lady Atherton, for example, was exposed as an adulteress by her French maid, where did she go? She left the terribly straitlaced London and came to Cairo, of course, where the new inspector of antiquities—Arthur Weigall—squired her around. Or, to take another example, when Prince Oblonsky lost everything at the Baden-Baden casino, where was he next seen? In Cairo, naturally, where he was all but applauded for his prodigality.

  Even that supposedly virtuous dame the Statue of Liberty planned on taking up residence here. (Her original name was An Allegory of Egypt Holding Out the Light of Learning to Asia. She was intended as a gift from the people of France to Egypt.) But King Isma’il of Egypt was going bankrupt and didn’t have the dough to bring her over from France. Otherwise she might have been the Statue of License, not Liberty, and her inscription would have proclaimed: “Give me your spendthrifts! Your lustful! Your social outcasts yearning to be free!”

  Only one outcast was beyond the pale—the unrepentant Carter. After resigning as chief inspector, he was cold-shouldered by the elite and blacklisted as an excavator. It was not official, of course, but for the next three years, all doors were shut. Nothing could open them—neither Maspero’s affection for him, nor the efforts of Percy Newberry his old Beni Hasan colleague, nor his brilliant record as inspector. He had ordered Egyptians to beat Europeans. (“That is the really bad part of the business,” Maspero wrote to Carter in an off-the-record letter. “Native policemen ought to let themselves be struck without striking back.”) No, Carter had proved himself not to be a gentleman. He was all washed up.

  The only reasonable course of action, he knew, would have been to beg, borrow, or steal the return fare to England. But instead, Carter used whatever money he had to head south, to the Valley of the Kings. When he got off the train at Luxor in 1905, he had no place to live, no money, and no idea whether he would be able to support himself.

  The American Egyptologist James Breasted reported firsthand (and Breasted’s son has confirmed) that Carter went to live in the hut of an Egyptian tomb guard whom he had fired. He ate at the man’s table and even borrowed money from him. What Carter’s fellow Europeans thought about this arrangement may be easily guessed. But Carter did not care. He was determined to find a way of remaining in the Valley and quickly settled into a routine, spending his nights in the hut at Gurneh (the desert’s edge) and emerging each morning to paint the ruins.

  The ex-chief inspector at his easel—what an astonishing sight it must have been for the beggars, urchins, and thieves he had driven away. Now they were thrown not into the Karnak temple jail, but into Carter’s paintings, where they were used to create local color—a child playing at the entrance of a tomb, a beggar stretching out his hand under a crumbling arch. It was not great art, but it was salable, that was the main thing: It appealed to all sorts of people passing through Luxor and helped Carter keep body and soul together.

  He developed other sidelines as well. He became a familiar figure at the ruins, taking around visitors who wanted a deeper understanding of their history. He was to be seen in the bazaars, offering his expertise to those who were interested in purchasing antiquities but were afraid of ending up with one of Oxan Aslanian’s “masterpieces” (the great Berlin forger was working in Egypt during this time).

  Now and then, the thieves themselves helped Carter to earn a commission. We find him approaching the American millionaire Theodore Davis on their behalf (at that time Davis was digging, or rather bankrolling the archaeologist Edward Ayrton to dig, in the Valley, unmethodically, striking out in all directions for whatever they might find). Carter offered Davis a hoard of small precious objects, jewelry and scarabs, all stolen from his dig. For a fair price, they would be returned—no questions asked, no arrests made. It was a mark of the thieves’ respect for Carter that they had made him their emissary—and a thief’s respect is worth having, especially in the antiquities game.

  With such makeshift stratagems as these, Carter managed to survive while, unknown to him, the man who would be his future partner arrived in Cairo. And in style—the Earl and Countess of Carnarvon took a suite at Shepherd’s, where they prepared to remain for the 1905 season—or so the Egyptian Gazette reported.

  It was not long, though, before Carnarvon tired of the social round and thought it might be just the thing to try his hand at some excavating. He took up the idea lightly. And though as time went on he pursued it with increasing seriousness, it never became the desperate obsession for him that it was for Carter. He never went slithering over mounds of debris in unstable tomb corridors or spent his nights brooding over maps of the Valley of the Kings.

  But as his enthusiasm grew, so did his commitment. Especially after World War I, when inflation ate away at his income and the sums spent on his work with Carter mounted higher and higher, he was tested. And though his test was only a financial one, still Carnarvon cared greatly about money, not to mention the fact that he had heavy expenses maintaining Highclere Castle, his ancestral estate.

  In 1905, however, Carnarvon began with a simple proposition—that it would be very pleasant to sit in the shade, watching as objects of rare beauty were dug up from the earth. Using influence, he obtained permission to excavate in the hills near Hatshepsut’s terraced temple. His plan was to go it alone with only a team of workers. But though he had no interest in engaging an archaeologist, or “learned man,” as he called them, still and all as he traveled south to begin his dig, the paths of the earl and the outcast Carter had begun to converge.

  The Fourth Earl of Carnarvon, 1831-1890.

  Influential statesman and classical scholar.

  The Fifth Earl of Carnarvon, 1866-1923.

  Patron of Howard Carter. Financed five years of digging

  in Thebes, followed by seven years of digging for King Tut’s tomb.

  The Sixth Earl of Carnarvon, 1898-1987

  Lord Porchester until he succeeded to the title in 1923.

  International playboy who fell in love.

  PREVIOUS PAGE: Lord Carnarvon.

  © GRIFFITH INSTITUTE, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

  AH, THE EARLS … IF THE SIXTH EARL OF CARNARVON HAD killed his father, the fifth earl, as he’d planned to, it’s hard to say what would have become of Howard Carter.

  The Fifth Earl of Carnarvon was one of many rich men interested in digging in Egypt. Carter had even worked for some
of them during his early years—when he was still learning and developing—before he came into his own. But they were reasonable men engaged in reasonable endeavors. That is, they expected a reasonable return, in a reasonable amount of time, for a reasonable investment of cash.

  The search for King Tut’s tomb was not such an endeavor. It was begun amid warnings from every side that the Valley of the Kings was now exhausted: Even Gaston Maspero (who brought Carter and Carnarvon together) warned the earl that every royal tomb to be found there had been discovered.

  There were good reasons for this pessimism, a pessimism that seemed to be confirmed by the results of the Carnarvon-Carter effort. To universal laughter, the spectacle of the futile excavation dragged on year after year for seven long years. The mounds of excavated rubble, meticulously sifted, piled higher and higher. Foot by foot, the area Carter had marked out was exposed to the bedrock.

  The costs accumulated, the earl spent a fortune, and nothing was found. But still Carnarvon toasted Carter each season with the best champagne as he good-naturedly shrugged off the past failures. His slouch hat worn at a rakish angle, the sun glinting on his gold cigarette holder, Carnarvon would invariably irritate the gloomy Carter with his unbounded, amateurish enthusiasm. This would be their year, the earl was always sure; there was no telling what, in the coming season, they would uncover.

  Who else would have been so foolish? The other men backing expeditions and buying antiquities in Egypt, the Pierpont Morgans and Theodore Davises, were too hardheaded to invest their money so unwisely.

  But even say Carter had found someone willing to stake him in his impossible venture, who else would have put up with the moodiness of the embittered digger? For by the time Carnarvon and Carter teamed up, Carter had a reputation for being “difficult,” to use the polite expression (many other, less polite adjectives were often applied to him).

  By his own admission he had a “mauvaise [sic] caractère,” which over the years had become worse owing to the strains of his life in Egypt, both physical and psychological. As he wrote apologetically in a letter to Percy Newberry, one of the few colleagues who remained a friend until the end: “Living alone as I do, is inducive to one letting the milk curdle.” Which was putting it mildly: He was exacting, touchy, unjust, tyrannical, unkind—and brilliant. And what was worse, he knew it.

  As Geanie Weigall (a famous beauty visiting her archaeologist brother, Arthur Weigall, in Egypt) wrote to a friend: “I do so dislike Carter. His manners are so aggressive and every word he utters is veiled with thin sarcasm.” This in a social setting (Luxor’s Winter Palace), and with a beautiful woman around whom men fluttered like moths. But on a dig—where Miss Weigall’s charm did not exercise its restraining influence—Carter’s “thin sarcasm” became rage at his colleagues’ stupidity and ineptitude, real or imagined.

  “I worked in the valley this AM. Carter took measurements for me until his extraordinary notions about projections caused such a violent disagreement between us that he refused to continue his assistance,” a colleague (the draftsman Lindsley Hall) noted in his diary. “The man is unbearable,” complained another (Henry Burton, one of the great archaeological photographers of all time). “But I must admit he showed me how to take a photograph I thought impossible.”

  In his dark moods, he could be terrifying. Even Carnarvon’s daughter, Lady Evelyn, an admirer, said years after his death: “In the beginning I was in awe of him. Later, he made me rather afraid.”

  Carter was a diamond in the rough, a fact that the discerning earl appreciated. He understood his temperamental archaeologist and looked out for him as no one else would have during the lean years.

  Who else but Carnarvon would have cut him into a sweet deal such as the treasure of the three princesses, for example? The cache, belonging to the Syrian wives of the warrior pharaoh Thutmosis III, was one of the most fabulous collections of ancient jewelry ever found.

  Tomb robbers had scoured the desert after a flash flood, one of only three in the last thirty-five years. The streaming waters had dislodged many-ton boulders, tossing them aside as if they were pebbles. High up on the sides of the desert cliffs, a hiding place was exposed, where beautiful gold bracelets and earrings and necklaces had lain since the fifteenth century BC. After wrapping the treasure in dirty rags, the robbers carried it to an Egyptian dealer.

  Normally, the collection (some 225 pieces) would have been broken up and sold discreetly to different collectors over a number of years. But Carnarvon put up a huge amount of cash, enabling Carter secretly to buy the entire find from the Egyptian fence and sell it to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Thus, thanks to Carnarvon, Carter received a hefty commission that took care of his financial worries. In addition, the deal established him as a major player on the antiquities scene until the end of his life.

  But perhaps the most revealing moment in the relationship between the two men can be found at the time of the fifty-six-year-old Carnarvon’s death. For who else—after being ordered out of Carter’s house forever during a stormy quarrel—would have written a letter such as the one Carnarvon sent Carter:

  Friday Evening. [1923]

  I have been feeling very unhappy today and I did not know what to think or do, and then I saw Eve [Carnarvon’s daughter] and she told me everything. I have no doubt that I have done many foolish things and I am very sorry. I suppose the fuss and worry [over the tomb’s discovery] have affected me but there is only one thing I want to say to you which I hope you will always remember—whatever your feelings are or will be for me in the future my affection for you will never change.

  I’m a man with few friends and whatever happens nothing will ever alter my feeling for you…. I could not rest until I had written you.

  Carnarvon’s tact—he forgave Carter under the guise of asking for forgiveness; he was so careful not to wound his friend’s dignity—would have been rare enough under ordinary circumstances. But when you consider that Carnarvon was a dying man at the time—he’d nicked a mosquito bite while shaving and had gotten septic poisoning—and consider his suffering when he wrote to Carter, it makes his loyalty to the irascible, solitary archaeologist all the more extraordinary.

  In his own way, George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert, Fifth Earl of Carnarvon, was as unusual as Carter was in his. They were both one of a kind. Which made it all the more fortunate for Carter (and for Egyptology) that Carnarvon’s son Lord Porchester did not act on the homicidal impulse he described sixty years later in his memoir, No Regrets.

  For the most part, the memoir is ironic in tone, the incidents are all minor, the predominant quality is laughter and irreverence. Porchester describes his life, a life devoted to parties and practical jokes and love. But his childhood reminiscences are of interest in that, irony aside, we are able to see Carnarvon from the vantage point of his young son.

  The grief of children! In their eyes, everything is raised to the tenth power. But in that exaggeration, there is sometimes more truth than in the view of less vulnerable adults.

  As Porchester remembered, “Usually when I returned from school—accompanied by a very indifferent report—I would receive a summons to my father’s study. He would be sitting at his desk and, as I came in, he would look up and say, ‘My dear Porchester. As usual, your reports are very bad. Your writing is slovenly, your mathematics are appalling, and apparently you don’t pay sufficient attention. I intend to make a useful man of you. Now you’d better take heed of this warning. I expect a distinct improvement, d’you understand? Off you go.’ With that perfunctory statement, he would dismiss me back to the top floor where we children lived, ate, played and slept, using only the back staircase to make our escape to the outside world.”

  The boy’s schoolwork didn’t improve, however, and one day he saw the head gardener making birch rods. “I guessed what was about to happen and was desperately frightened when I entered the room. I was told to undress and my hands were tied down to the brass bedstead. Almost im
mediately my father came into the room and, ignoring me, went over to the birch rods, picking up each in turn and swishing it through the air until he seemed satisfied with the one he had selected.

  “Standing back he performed a little on-the-spot jig, as if tautening his muscles, and then suddenly brought down the birch as hard as he could on to my bare bum. After the sixth stroke, he threw down the birch and went out of the room.”

  The tutor dressed the boy’s wounds with ointment and tried to comfort him, but he remained obstinate. “This episode had a deep psychological effect upon me which was to last for many years. From that day onwards, I planned to kill my father and when a few weeks later I found him alone, I concealed myself in some bushes nearby in order to observe him, unseen. I had brought with me a little dagger which seemed well fitted to the task in hand. But I was fearful of two things. Firstly, being caught and then, should I succeed, being sent to Borstal [prison]. So I forsook the project.”

  We must remember that caning was common in England at the time, a standard practice, and that Carnarvon, despite some transcendent virtues, was very much a man of his time. The scene would have been typical down to Carnarvon’s insistence that he would make his son “useful,” a Victorian catchword usually coupled with “earnestness” in the categories of the day (an ideal that Oscar Wilde played with in the title of his wonderful farce The Importance of Being Earnest). The theory was that since the upper classes had been given so much, in return they had an obligation to accomplish something for the public good: noblesse oblige.