Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey (32 page)

A portrait of Lady Evelyn taken shortly after her father’s death in 1923.
(photo credit i4.16)

The Christening of Porchy’s daughter, at Highclere castle in 1925. Left to right: Sir Brograve Beauchamp, Mr Jac Wendell, the 6th Countess of Carnarvon and baby, the 6th Earl of Carnarvon, Lady Evelyn Beauchamp, Mr and Mrs Portman with little Lord Porchester and Mrs Wendell.
(photo credit i4.17)

Almina’s son Porchy, the 6th Earl of Carnarvon, with his wife and daughter, in the 1930s.
(photo credit i4.18)

Lady Evelyn with her mother Almina, at the Exhibition of French Art at the Royal Academy of Arts, 1932.
(photo credit i4.19)

Howard Carter dispatched the telegram and then returned to the Valley of the Kings to refill the stairway down to the entrance to the tomb. He and Carnarvon had been colleagues and friends for fifteen years, and he was not about to press on with what he was convinced was the find of a lifetime without his patron. But what an enormous amount of restraint that must have taken. Carnarvon and Carter’s hunch or, better put, their informed guess, closely cherished for years, had paid off. And now Howard Carter was going to have to wait the two or three weeks it took for Lord Carnarvon to arrive. The tomb had to be kept safe from grave robbers in the meantime, so Carter was all discretion, telling as few people as possible about
what he believed he had found. He hunkered down to wait.

He left Luxor for Cairo on 18 November, only to discover when he got there that Carnarvon’s ship was delayed. Carter made use of this enforced pause to begin to assemble a team of experts to assist at the opening of the tomb. Arthur Callender was a noted chemist and longstanding friend. He had to ask Carter to repeat himself when he heard the news. It sounded too good to be true: the sealed, unplundered tomb of a pharaoh? If Carter was right, then this was a totally unprecedented moment in archaeology. Callender agreed at once to come along and help out.

Lord Carnarvon paced the deck of the ship from Marseilles, willing it to travel faster. Eve was with him but Almina was not. She had gone with her husband on every trip he had made to Egypt since their marriage, but now she was unwell with terrible pain in her jaw and head. On Dr Johnnie’s advice she had reluctantly elected to stay at home in case she should need dental treatment. She waved her husband and daughter off, demanding that they call on her if she could be of any use.

The whole family knew what was at stake. They had been discussing ‘the undiscovered tomb’ for years. Carter’s informed guess was based in part on American Egyptologist Herbert Winlock’s suggestion that some of the interesting fragments turned up by Theodore Davis, Carnarvon and Carter’s predecessor in the Valley of the Kings, might be items used during Tutankhamun’s funeral rites. Davis wasn’t interested in such minutiae at the time, but Winlock, who had been a guest at Highclere, was. And so were Carnarvon and Carter.

On Friday 24 November, Lord Carnarvon and Lady Evelyn arrived at Luxor. The mood was of tense excitement; everyone was on edge. Eve was very fond of Howard Carter but she also found him a bit difficult to deal with because of his absolutely single-minded obsession and tendency to sarcasm; now she braced herself for the increase in pressure. Carter and Callender lost no time in clearing the rubble away from the staircase once more. It wasn’t until the afternoon of Sunday 26 November that the party of four found themselves standing in front of the doorway. Lord Carnarvon wrote, ‘We wondered if we should find another staircase, probably blocked, behind this wall or whether we should get into a chamber. I asked Mr Carter to take out a few stones and have a look in.’

Carter made a small hole through which he could insert a candle into the space beyond. He would describe the moment of discovery for the newspapers over and over. ‘Presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold – everywhere the glint of gold. For the moment – an eternity … I was struck dumb with amazement, and when Lord Carnarvon … inquired anxiously, “Can you see anything?” it was all I could do to get out the words, “Yes, wonderful things.” ’

Carter’s three companions exploded into relieved delight. His heart pounding, Carter widened the hole and made way for Eve, who took her turn to peer through into the chamber. ‘On getting a little more accustomed to the light, it became apparent that there were colossal gilt couches with extraordinary heads, boxes here, boxes there …’ Carter could contain himself no longer. He pulled at the wall,
scrabbling to enlarge the hole sufficiently to let himself down to the chamber. He scrambled in and started to tread, softly, reverently, as he held the candle above his head to cast its light as far as possible into the corners of the space. The others followed and stood still in amazement at what they saw by flickering candlelight. ‘We knew we had found something absolutely unique and unprecedented.’ Carnarvon wrote that there was a throne of ‘surpassing beauty … the delicacy and grace indescribable … from a period when Egyptian art reached one of its culminating points.’ Here, finally, after fifteen years of searching, were the treasures of the Pharaohs. And, as their eyes adjusted and their minds raced to catch up with what they were seeing, the group realised that just as significant, if not more so, was what
wasn’t
there. There was no sarcophagus. Which meant that there had to be more chambers, perhaps a whole series of them.

Then they spied something, ‘between two life-size statues, a wall covered in seals and low down … traces of a break large enough to admit a small man.’ Perhaps thieves of early millennia had robbed the inner chamber. Overwhelmed, Carnarvon called a halt. Carter agreed: there were procedures that needed to be followed.

The group clambered back out and stood staring at one another in the fading daylight. Everyone was elated. Carnarvon and Carter clapped each other on the back in mutual congratulation. Carter looked as if he might burst with excitement. Arthur Callender had the expression of a man who couldn’t believe his luck, and Eve, overjoyed for her beloved father, thought wistfully of how much Almina would long to be there when they told her.

There were drinks on the terrace of the Winter Palace Hotel and then Lord Carnarvon placed a call to his wife, during which he, like Carter with Callender, had to repeat himself several times before Almina could take in what he was saying. Who could sleep after what they had seen? A small party secretly returned later that night to explore the other, partly closed room. It was not difficult to knock out the wall through which the robbers had gained access 3,000 years earlier. Carter, Lady Evelyn and Carnarvon simply had to enlarge it again and slip through.

The little party left unable to speak about what they had seen. They carefully placed some old rush baskets against the lower part of the false door. Attention from visitors would be taken by the pair of life-size gold-kilted statues. They had found it: the burial chamber of Tutankhamun.

The following morning, Carter sent a note to Engelbach, the local Chief Inspector of the Antiquities Department, informing him of the developments. Engelbach had been told about Carter’s initial discovery of the steps and was present when Callender and Carter began to clear the debris away again. But he, like almost everyone else, believed that the Valley of the Kings was exhausted, and didn’t consider Carter’s staircase worth hanging around for on a Friday afternoon.

Now he sent a representative of the Department to accompany Carnarvon’s group as they returned to the tomb. They had arranged to connect to the mains electricity in the valley, so this time, when they stepped into the chamber, they could see everything in crisp detail. Carter later wrote in his book,
The Tomb of Tutankhamun
, ‘Three thousand, four thousand years maybe, have passed and gone since human
feet last trod the floor on which you stand, and yet … the blackened lamp, the finger-mark upon the freshly painted surface, the farewell garland dropped upon the threshold – you feel it might have been but yesterday … Time is annihilated by little intimate details such as these …’

Carnarvon and Carter stood in wonder, beginning to assess the scale of the glorious task that lay ahead of them. They were going to need an army of expert help to remove, catalogue and preserve every single object, each one at least 3,200 years old. They were also going to have to make the tomb secure, immediately. Any find that included gold was a magnet for every tomb robber in the area. That night an armed guard was placed at the top of the steps leading down to the first chamber and the following day, Carnarvon hired military policeman Richard Adamson to oversee security. Carnarvon built him a police hut to provide some shelter from the blistering sun, and Adamson virtually took up residence there.

The first viewing for visitors took place on Wednesday 29 November. There was to be a tour with Howard Carter followed by lunch. It was a low-key affair. Lady Allenby deputised for her husband the British High Commissioner; also invited were Monsieur Lacau, the Chief Inspector of Antiquities; the local chief of police and, crucially for subsequent events, the correspondent of
The Times
, Arthur Merton.

There had been a series of murders of British citizens since the declaration of independence and the imposition of martial law, so there were anxieties over drawing too much attention to what was taking place. But even more than that, nobody in officialdom had yet woken up to the
enormity of what had just been found on their doorstep. M. Lacau and his assistant missed the official unveiling entirely: they were too busy to turn up until the following day.

By the time they did,
The Times
had published the first article in what became the longest-running news item ever. There has still never been a story that took more column inches than Carnarvon, Carter and Tutankhamun. Merton, like a good newspaperman, had immediately seen the significance of what he was being shown. Instantly the world’s press descended upon Luxor in force, camping in hotel gardens when the rooms ran out.
The Times
approached Almina and asked her to write an exclusive article about accompanying her husband on his trips to excavate in Egypt, which she duly did.