In the Valley of the Kings (24 page)

Davis was preparing his volumes on Tut’s tomb; Maspero—who had recommended Carter to begin with—disagreed with Carter. Other archaeologists had tried to interest Carnarvon in digging elsewhere—why remain in the much-explored Valley when better results might be achieved elsewhere?

But stay in the Valley Carnarvon did. Each reason he gave himself against remaining was an added incentive to remain as well. After all, Carnarvon was a sportsman, and what real sportsman could resist backing a dark horse? He agreed to take the concession, and now at last the way was open for Carter to test his cherished theory. Only one obstacle remained to be gotten over, and then he could begin—World War I.

When war was declared, Carter reported for duty in Cairo, where he was assigned to the Department of Military Information. The menace was not just in Europe, but right across Egypt’s borders; for Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire, which had sided with the Central Powers and declared war on Great Britain. The Suez Canal must be protected if the Allies were to win, and desert scouts with a good knowledge of Arabic were in demand.

But there was more to Carter than his expert knowledge of the terrain. There was his nervousness, his poor temper, his bad manners, his inability to get along with most people. After a short stint
with the government, Carter was discharged from the service, the War Administration deciding they were better off without him.

For Carter, World War I meant that he had time on his hands. Now he had the leisure to get his teeth fixed and to scour Cairo’s markets, where because of the war antiquities were going for a song.

We next see him in the teeming Cairo railroad station. Making his way through the crowds of soldiers setting out to guard the canal, he was heading in the opposite direction. For soon after his discharge, Carter headed back to Luxor, where Carnarvon had built him a home: Simple, domed in Arabic style, constructed with bricks from a foundry Carnarvon owned in England, it was situated on a desert mound overlooking the Valley of the Kings.

What did Cairo have to offer him? Though he and Carnarvon could not yet make use of the Valley concession, still this was the place where he belonged. If the war had any impact on Carter, it was only in terms of the tombs, specifically a tomb in the lonely valley Wadi e ‘Táqa e ‘Zeide.

As he told the story (which throws a unique light on the Theban necropolis during wartime): “The absence of officials owing to the war, to say nothing of the general demoralization caused by the war itself, had naturally created a great revival of activity on the part of the local native tomb robbers, and prospecting parties [of thieves] were out in all directions.

“News came into the village one afternoon that a find had been made in an unfrequented region on the western side of the mountain above The Valley of the Kings. Immediately a rival party of diggers armed themselves and made their way to the spot, and in the lively engagement that ensued the original party were beaten and driven off, vowing vengeance.

“To avert further trouble the notables of the village came to me and asked me to take action. It was already late in the afternoon, so I hastily collected the few of my workmen who had escaped the
Army Labour Levies, and with the necessary materials set out for the scene of action, an expedition involving a climb of more than 1,800 feet over the Kurna [Gurneh] hills by moonlight. It was midnight when we arrived on the scene, and the guide pointed out to me the end of a rope which dangled sheer down the face of a cliff.

“Listening, we could hear the robbers actually at work, so I first severed their rope, thereby cutting off their means of escape, and then, making secure a good stout rope of my own, I lowered myself down the cliff. Shinning down a rope at midnight, into a nestful of industrious tomb robbers, is a pastime which at least does not lack excitement.

“There were eight at work, and when I reached the bottom there was an awkward moment. I gave them the alternative of clearing out by means of my rope, or else of staying where they were without a rope at all, and eventually they saw reason and departed. The rest of the night I spent on the spot, and as soon as it was light enough, climbed down into the tomb again to make a thorough examination.”

After a difficult clearance with a small team of men (the work financed by Carnarvon), the tomb was found to be an early one of Queen Hatshepsut’s, empty of all but a beautiful quartzite sarcophagus—which, however, the Service des Antiquités’ tough new director, Pierre Lacau, would not allow Carnarvon to keep.

Gaston Maspero had just retired at the end of a long and distinguished career, worn out not only by the strains of the directorship, but by the death of his son. Arthur Weigall related that when Maspero visited Luxor, all he wanted to do was play with Weigall’s children; his heart was no longer in his work. (In a few years’ time, Weigall too would be “out of the business”: Suffering a nervous breakdown, he would return to London to write potboilers and design exotic stage sets.)

Had Maspero continued as director, Carnarvon certainly would have been recompensed with the sarcophagus. But times were
changing, and Carter was caught between the old and the new. Lacau had taken over the service with the firm intention of retaining everything discovered for Egypt; further, he planned on giving institutions of learning precedence over private excavation teams—such as Carter and Carnarvon’s.

THE SARCOPHAGUS WAS AN INDICATION OF WHAT WAS TO COME
when Carter faced the great task of his life: Once Tut’s tomb was opened, Pierre Lacau goaded and insulted Carter like a toreador prodding a mad bull. He not only denied the Carnarvon/Carter team a division of the spoils, but refused him permission even to show the tomb to a party of his colleagues’ wives, thus forcing a showdown, which by that point was what he wanted, to bring their quarrel out into the open.

From today’s point of view, Lacau’s resistance to the Carnarvon/Carter team is perfectly natural; but it must be remembered that at the time of the tomb’s opening, Carter had been digging with Carnarvon for sixteen years, working in good faith under an agreement established at the very beginning.

He would not agree that Lacau or anyone else had the right suddenly, at the moment of his success, to change the rules. He would not give in to national passions, to Lacau’s scientific slogans, or to the newspaper campaigns. The tomb would be closed for two years while he fought a losing battle. And he became a kind of sacred monster—isolated after Carnarvon’s death, heroic, villainous, with a strange, “affected” voice that talked familiarly about the long, long dead.

At this point, however, the new director did not yet show his hand. Even under the old rules, unique pieces were reserved for
the Egyptian Museum: Carter and Carnarvon did not consider the piece they found in Wadi e ‘Táqa e ‘Zeide to be unique. But Lacau declared that the thirty-five-hundred-year-old royal monument must remain in Egypt, and he was the last court of appeal in the matter.

Though the issue rankled, it was forgotten as the war drew to a close and the Carter/Carnarvon team prepared to dig at last in the Valley of the Kings itself. Carter’s plan was to clear the area he had marked out down to bedrock. Mountains of debris from earlier excavations were scattered about, so there was only one way to ascertain what was really underneath: to clear it all away, foot by foot if necessary.

Which it proved to be. During the first season, nothing was found. Likewise, season number two brought rien—nicht—nothing, giving the international community its first good laugh since the war. A colleague, Arthur Mace, tried to comfort the forlorn team as their third and then fourth futile seasons rolled by: Archaeology, he intoned, is like a second marriage—the triumph of hope over experience.

But Carter and Carnarvon were way past their “second” marriage—they were on their way to outdoing Elizabeth Taylor, going into their sixth marriage (that is, season), with nothing more to show for it than a dozen or so Ramesses II alabaster vases finally dug out of the rubble (by Lady Carnarvon, who, atypically, had decided to desert her lover for a spell). It was a measure of the vases’ insignificance that Lacau let the explorers keep whichever ones they wanted.

Carnarvon returned empty-handed to Highclere Castle, where perhaps the bracing cold or the gloomy, misty fields cleared his head. He realized that the whole venture was insane, doomed, and going to bankrupt the noble house of Carnarvon.

Carter had returned to England as well to help his first patron, William Tyssen-Amherst, who was having money troubles as well
(in a few years, he would go bankrupt). Just now, however, Carter had been asked to help him sell off some pieces from Tyssen-Amherst’s Egyptian collection; he was to act as Tyssen-Amherst’s agent with Sotheby’s (first to go: the large granite statues of Sekhmet, the lion-headed goddesses who had awed the boy Carter on his way to sketch the family pets).

Hearing that Carter was in England, Carnarvon invited him to Highclere for a talk, determined to call it a day.

An account of their interview was given to us by James Breasted, one of the first American Egyptologists and founder of the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute. Carter’s contemporary and co-worker, Breasted was one of the few colleagues with whom Carter remained on good terms for his whole life. (Of course, they had a falling-out: Carter bought an antiquity to which Breasted claimed he had right of first refusal. But it was nothing in the scheme of Carter’s violent quarrels with almost everyone.)

Breasted was someone to whom Carter turned in a pinch—when Tut’s tomb was discovered, for instance, Breasted immediately showed up and generously gave of his epigraphic expertise, recording and deciphering the many seals plastered over its walls and doors. His account of the Carnarvon-Carter meeting, therefore, was to be trusted.

“In the summer of 1922,” Breasted revealed, “after still another unsuccessful season of excavation, Carnarvon summoned him to Highclere Castle to discuss the question of whether they should continue this expensive and thus far fruitless task. Carnarvon rather dreaded the interview which as it then seemed to him could end only in a decision even more saddening for Carter, if possible, than for himself….

“Carter also anticipated their interview with anxiety, for he better than anyone knew that thus far the record warranted no other conclusion. His one hope resided in a simple plan which he proposed to lay before Carnarvon.

“When they finally met at Highclere, Carnarvon reviewed the history of their work, expressed again his appreciation of the years of effort Carter had given to it, and with genuine regret stated that in view of the post war economic stringency, he would find it impossible to support further this obviously barren undertaking.

“In reply Carter said that their consistent failure to find anything had not in the slightest weakened the conviction he had held for years, that The Valley contained
at least
one more royal tomb—” Italics mine. This at least is really something. It sets Carter apart. What is he saying! Not only is King Tut buried in the Valley, but there may be other undiscovered royal tombs as well! And he has the chutzpah to offer this opinion after so many hundreds of thousands of pounds have been wasted.

He followed this up with another gesture that was quite wonderful, a kind of grand shrug: “He granted that perhaps even this problematical tomb might have been robbed in antiquity—”

What is Carter “granting”?! That even if they find Tut’s tomb, it may be empty! One can just imagine Carnarvon mopping his brow or jumping up and turning the portrait of his father, the Fourth Earl of Carnarvon, to the wall, for surely in the history of Highclere Castle the family’s cash assets had never been squandered so recklessly. Horses, mistresses, and marathon card games were solid investments compared with this.

Whatever Carnarvon’s reaction, he let Carter finish his spiel: Granted, Carter said as if he were the lord and Carnarvon the retainer, granted it all might be for nothing, it might be that the tomb had been robbed in antiquity—but then again—Carter wound up: “There was always the possibility that it had not!”

Now, admittedly words were not Carter’s strong suit. One of his colleagues (Breasted) put it a little strongly, perhaps, when he wrote in a letter, “It is well known that Carter does not know the meaning of the English language.” Fine—he was a practical man, a
sharp-eyed observer of nature, a craftsmanlike artist, a great draftsman, a good photographer, an intuitive, practically self-taught archaeologist, and he was in a class by himself as an excavator. What did it matter that he wasn’t eloquent?

Ghostwriters and collaborators helped him cook up his account of the discovery of Tut’s tomb—comparing it with his letters, excavation reports, and the like, one can easily spot what an act of ventriloquism his popular (and profitable) writings were. Ditto his lectures. Say of Carter (as Madame de Staël said of one of her lovers), “Speech is not his language!”

Still, surely Carter could have come up with a better conclusion than this when arguing his case before Carnarvon, some moving speech, some clinching syllogism, some eloquent appeal. However, Hermes Trismegistus help him, he did not.