The Visitors (17 page)
‘Some bread, Miss Payne?’ Lord Carnarvon said, making me jump. The conversation, to which I’d been listening intently, had taken me off into a dream of valleys and ill-fated excavators; now I returned from them with a snap, to find Carnarvon turning in my direction, and the servant called Abd-el-Aal proffering a basket. Miss Mack was looking the other way, so I took some bread, broke off a small piece and ate it. It was excellent. Before I knew it, I was telling Lord Carnarvon about Hassan and our trip to the pyramids.
‘By Jove!’ he exclaimed, having listened with grave attention. ‘He actually warmed it up on the Sphinx’s paw? Most ingenious. What an admirable fellow.’
‘He was a very kind man,’ I replied. ‘When we said goodbye, he gave me an
ankh.
’
‘Did he
indeed
? How absolutely splendid. You must show me that one of these days.’
‘I can show you now,’ I said, fishing the
ankh
from my pocket – I carried it everywhere, wrapped in my handkerchief; it was my talismanic equivalent to Frances’s scarlet lipstick.
Carnarvon took the small fragile piece of tin from me and examined it scrupulously; had it been some priceless
antika
he could scarcely have given it closer scrutiny. ‘That is a
very
fine present,’ he said, returning it to me. ‘It signifies life, of course – you’ll know that? And what better gift could anyone receive?’
‘I also have a bead – a very ancient bead that Mr Carter gave me,’ I said. ‘Might you like to see that too?’
‘My word, what treasures you carry around with you! I most certainly
would,
Miss Payne.’
I handed him the bead, and with similar care and seriousness Carnarvon examined it. I was being taught a lesson – in charm, and the deceptions that charm conceals. But I didn’t know that then; Carnarvon was a fine actor; it did not occur to me that his fascination might be feigned.
He took his time inspecting the lapis lazuli bead, and, as he was now wondrously near, I took the opportunity to inspect him. I knew he was in his mid-fifties, roughly the same age as Miss Mack, and only some six or seven years older than Howard Carter. Close to, he seemed much older, his evident frailty and ill-health in marked contrast to their air of well-being and vigour. His face bore the traces of smallpox scars and his complexion was a sickly grey, with tired blue shadows beneath his ice-pale eyes. His breathing was laboured, and he had an odd mannerism – a continual pressing of his hand to his chest – that I thought must be a legacy of the many operations endured since the motoring accident years before that had rendered him an invalid.
His clothes were those of a dandy or an aesthete from an earlier era: they looked old and slightly shabby, but were exquisitely tailored – my father, who was fussy as to dress, would have admired them, I knew. According to Frances, Howard Carter so admired Carnarvon’s
fin de siècle
style that he copied it religiously, favouring the same Savile Row tailors, the same exclusive shirt-makers and hatters as his patron. When I examined the two men now, however, the differences between them were marked: Carnarvon’s shirt was darned, his bow tie was frayed, yet his elegance appeared effortless. Carter, portly and sleek, with a silk pocket handkerchief that matched his florid bow tie, looked overdressed and faintly preposterous by contrast.
Carnarvon seemed unused to children’s eating alongside adults; he solved this puzzling American difficulty by ignoring it, and by treating me as if I were a woman of age and experience. He returned my lapis bead to me, and, as fresh plates were brought, ensured I took some figs and some little Egyptian pastries, oozing honey. He said with solemnity: ‘Now, Miss Payne, you simply must tell me – what do you think of our Valley?’
That ‘our’ made me blink. ‘Well,’ I began, carefully, ‘I’ve only had a glimpse so far––’
‘Nonsense. You are an observer – Carter confirms that. In which context, and remembering your –
observations
– at Shepheard’s, Eve and I and our mutual friend Mrs d’Erlanger are grateful to you and to Frances as well.’ He slowly closed one keen grey eye, and then opened it again. ‘So, as an observer of the Valley, fresh from your first view of it, tell me your impressions.’
I hesitated. My impressions were a muddled series of images that had not yet had time to lie down, let alone be assimilated. I thought of the approach path we’d taken that morning: it wound up towards the hills on a rough incline, and I’d caught my first glimpse of Castle Carter as we passed, not a castle at all, but a small, white, domed house, sited like a sentinel post near the incisor rocks at the mouth of the Valley. Lord Carnarvon’s hired car was parked outside it, I saw; a young boy was busy polishing its gleaming coachwork.
We’d passed into a long, narrow defile that curved ahead of us like the blade of a sickle, its track glittering with broken flints, and at once the heat had intensified – coming at us in a rush, as if someone had thrown back the door of a blast furnace. As we rounded a massive fluted outcrop that seemed to bar our path, a great ravine suddenly opened up before my startled eyes, a place of terrible beauty, tumbled with rocks and mounds of shale – a place that looked as if it had recently suffered a catastrophic earthquake. I realised that this vast slashing gash through the hills was the Valley of the Kings.
Staring at the spillage and debris, at the rockfalls caused by flash floods and the mountains of spoil left by man, I’d begun to make out the black gaping caves that were the tomb entrances – scores of them, some cut into the Valley walls, some into its floor, some facing the main path and others, just visible, secreted in the smaller wadis
that snaked and
bifurcated between the hills. Winlock, knowing the Valley and its ways, had raised a hand and brought us all to a halt. Frances, who’d been chanting Tennyson, and had just reached ‘Half a league onward/ Into the Valley of’, stopped speaking; the donkey boys ceased their chattering, and moved to calm their animals. ‘Listen,’ Winlock said – and when the donkeys finally stopped their head-tossings and pawings, I heard what clever Mr Winlock meant me to hear: a hot, fearsome and resonant silence.
It was broken in due course, inevitably. We were not alone in the Valley, whose clear air carried every sound and magnified it. I heard the mew of a kite far above, the jingle of a harness, then, in the distance, the voices of tourists entering a tomb, and the shrill call of their dragoman. But that experience of silence remained: it was still in my mind at this table and I knew I should never forget it.
‘Your impressions,’ Carnarvon prompted.
‘The silence. It made me feel – like a trespasser,’ I began. ‘And the number of the tombs, I think. There are so very many. I wished… ’
‘Don’t be shy. Tell me what you wished, Miss Payne.’
‘I wished the tombs had been left undisturbed. I wished no one had ever come here, so the kings could – wait out eternity in solitude as they meant to do. That’s why they made the tombs here; that was
their
wish. I was sad their wish hadn’t been granted.’
I said this earnestly, but in a blurt. The instant the words were out, I saw they were tactless. For a moment I thought Lord Carnarvon was affronted, or in pain: his face contracted and his gaze became sombre. Then, with a grace that was characteristic of him, he gave me a wry smile. ‘My dear,’ he said, ‘you know, I don’t disagree with you? However… ’ he glanced around the table, ‘here we are, Carter, Winlock and I – three ardent trespassers, three disturbers of the peace, all guilty as charged, and, I’m afraid, woefully unrepentant. Are we to leave, according to your doctrine?’
‘No, it’s too late,’ I replied. ‘The tourists are here now. And the tomb robbers arrived centuries before you.’
‘And if we weren’t here now, their thieving modern counterparts would be only too quick to replace us,’ Carter put in, somewhat aggressively.
‘Alas, they
would,
’ cried Miss Mack. ‘Oh, if only the kings had seen fit to have a modest burial… if they hadn’t believed in the need for huge tombs, for great statues and paintings and sarcophagi and gold and jewels. I’m sure no one would have disturbed them then.’
‘A nice, sober, modest, Episcopalian burial,’ said Winlock, with a grin, helping himself to figs. ‘That would have saved them, eh, Myrtle?’
‘Now, now, Herbert,’ she corrected him, good-humouredly. ‘I’m from Princeton and of Scottish descent – modest and
Presbyterian
is of course what I had in mind.’
‘Maybe a funeral pyre,’ Eve suggested in a dreamy voice. ‘If they’d simply been burned. A spectacular conflagration. You know, like Shelley––’
‘Very poetic, Eve,’ said Helen. ‘But no Lord Byron figure to steal the heart away from the embers, mind – they’d have to bury it in the Valley tomb, so it would be there for the Weighing of the Heart ceremony.’
‘Complete tommyrot,’ Carter interrupted irritably. ‘Their bodies had to be preserved – that’s fundamental to their beliefs. The Egyptians didn’t just believe in the immortal soul, they believed in the immortal body. You’re all forgetting that. You’re also forgetting beauty: these burials and these tombs are incomparably beautiful. What about the art they contain – the art
we
uncover?’
‘Carter’s right. We might put in a
little
word for the science of archaeology,’ Winlock interjected in a mild, amused tone. ‘Before we go totally off the rails, might we be pious for a second? Think of what we learn from the tombs, about the Egyptians’ way of life and death. Of their history and religion. Think of the art we save – and take to museums, make available to thousands of people every year. All right, I’m biased because I practically grew up in the Smithsonian, but even so… Museums change people’s lives – they certainly changed mine. They’re powerful.’
‘Well, that is true of course, Herbert,’ Miss Mack put in. ‘And I wouldn’t presume to argue with you or Mr Carter. But I still feel I have a point. The very opulence of the tombs was precisely what defeated their purpose. If the kings had been modestly interred, they would never have been disturbed, and their poor bodies would never have been rifled. You must admit, their burials were vainglorious––’
‘I can’t believe this,’ Frances suddenly burst out, her eyes bright and her cheeks flushed. ‘A
modest
funeral? A wooden coffin? Dust and ashes? That is so mean and dreary. Who wants to lie under a stone in a mouldering old churchyard, or in some horrible overcrowded cemetery, with an inscription that just gets worn out, so no one can read it or remember you? No – I think the Egyptian kings got it exactly right: in the Valley, in a huge rock tomb, with a magnificent gold coffin, and a vast sarcophagus, and priceless… ’
‘… Treasure?’ suggested someone.
‘Yes, treasure!’ Frances cried, ignoring her mother’s semaphored attempts to silence her. ‘Powerful spells on the walls, and heaps of jewels and glorious paintings. The pharaohs wanted their names to live eternally, they wanted to defeat death – and they’ve succeeded. If they’d just been bundled up in some old sheet and stuck under a rock, no one would bother to dig here – and no one would remember them either.’
A silence followed this outburst, broken by a barking laugh from Carter: ‘Well, that hits the nail on the head,’ he said. ‘And it’s honest.’
‘Don’t encourage her, Howard,’ Helen said quickly; two bright patches of colour had risen in her cheeks and I could see these comments had upset her. ‘Frances, that’s more than enough. We are not here to be lectured by you.’
‘Have you been drinking water, Frances, or did you filch some champagne by any chance?’ her father put in. ‘What are you thinking of? Seen and
not
heard, please––’
‘Pups, darling – are you all right?’ Evelyn interrupted and, with a sudden cry, half rose from her seat.
We all turned towards the head of the table; Carter and Winlock leapt to their feet and there was a moment of panic. Lord Carnarvon, silent for some while, had taken no part in this argument. Now he had slumped back in his chair, his lips blue, his eyes closed and his face ashen.
‘Smelling salts!’ cried Miss Mack, ‘I have some in my purse… ’ An instant later, just as Miss Mack was producing a small brown bottle, Carnarvon gave a start and a sigh and opened his eyes again.
The collective alarm took a moment to register, and then with a smile, and a waft of the hand, he reassured us. ‘Good grief, how disgraceful – I must have drifted off for a second. The penalty of age and an excellent lunch… Forgive me, everyone. Eve, perhaps if we had our coffee now? And then, you know, my dear, I think we might wend our way back to Carter’s place, pick up our motorcar and return to the hotel––’
‘You can’t leave now. We planned to show everyone our workings,’ Carter interrupted, with a scowl. ‘You wanted Winlock to see our latest finds.’
‘Well now, our latest finds are not so very exciting,’ Carnarvon replied. ‘A few pottery shards, a couple of ostraca – I feel you’ll explain them better than I shall. Another time, my dear fellow, another time… ’
He half turned to the four Arab servants behind him and, addressing the air, said: ‘Send word back to the house. I’ll need the car ready. The donkeys in fifteen minutes.’ His eyes rested briefly on the four men and he added: ‘Boy, take the chairs outside.’
He turned back to us. ‘We’ll have our coffee there, shall we? I need some fresh air. No, no – I’m perfectly fine, I assure you… Eve, my puss-cat, no need to fret. If you’ll all forgive me, I’ll stay for a brief while, and sun myself – and then I’ll leave you.’
Lord Carnarvon was as good as his word: he sat with us outside the tomb, sipping coffee and conversing amicably; he seemed interested in the desultory conversation and completely restored. The chairs had been arranged in a semicircle in the shade, with two folding stools for Frances and me. Having served the coffee, Abd-el-Aal and Hosein returned to the tomb, from which drifted the sound of men’s voices and the faint clatter of crockery. I watched the kites circling on the updraughts above us; beside me Frances, flushed and mutinous, still smarting from the reprimands earlier, sat scuffing at the sand. Even in the shade it was stiflingly hot; rivulets of sweat were running down my back. I looked at my watch: time in the Valley had come to a standstill.