The Visitors (58 page)

How puzzling this was. I considered the candidates: Lord Carnarvon? Howard Carter? Herbert Winlock? None of them seemed an obvious hero to me, but perhaps my concept of that breed, honed by Nicola Dunsire’s taste and her reading lists, differed from Miss Mack’s. A suspicion began to steal into my mind, and so I asked when this heroic problem had first manifested itself.

‘Chapter Eight:
A Wishing Cup
, as I called it,’ she replied. ‘And I had to be
very
firm with Chapter Nine:
A Game of Consequences.
That described our Christmas lunch at the American House, and related events… You know, dear – this and that.’

This chronology narrowed the field. I had my answer, I felt; the identity of Miss Mack’s nascent hero was becoming clear. It became clearer during the afternoon, as I thought the matter over while exploring the ruins with Frances. It became clearer still that evening when we returned to our
dahabiyeh
. There were candles on our supper table, and three places, not two, had been laid. Miss Mack bathed and changed into her best frock; she came up to the deck in a state of high nervousness, smelling of lavender water and mothballs.

She paced up and down; she fetched binoculars and scanned the river, the hills. She consulted her watch ten times in the space of ten minutes. I was kind: I asked no questions, made no comments. At seven, Miss Mack gave a cry and leaned over the rails: ‘Why, goodness gracious, it’s
you
, Pecky,’ she called. ‘What a pleasant surprise! You’re just in time for supper – I know you won’t have eaten yet. I
insist
on your joining us.’

When we came to the end of this meal – Mohammed had pulled out all the stops and served a feast – Miss Mack poured coffee, offered Callender a glass of brandy, which he refused, and then plied him with Turkish Delight. ‘Now, Pecky,’ she said sternly, ‘the time has come for you to sing for your supper. Lucy and I want to know every detail of what happened at the famous opening today, and
you
are the person to tell us.’

Callender seemed surprised at this – not too many people requested his feedback, I think. He demurred, ate three pieces of Turkish Delight and was finally persuaded. Carter and Carnarvon had laid a
plan
for the opening ceremony, he said; it was cunning, required careful timing
and was tailored to confound the pressmen. By eight-thirty in the morning, he explained, all four members of the Combine had been at their customary perch on the retaining wall above the tomb’s entrance. They were suspicious that the opening was imminent, so for the last three days not one of them had shifted from that damn wall: they were lined up there from dawn to dusk, like so many vultures.

At twelve, as usual, the entire team of excavators broke for lunch. Carter locked the steel gates into the tomb and, joined by Mace, Lucas and Burton, strolled off for their midday meal in KV4, the cool ‘canteen’ tomb they used for that purpose. The Combine, unable to escape the Valley’s heat, crept under the shade of a rock, where they drank warm beer, consumed dry, curling sandwiches and grew dispirited. By twelve-thirty the temperature was one hundred and ten degrees: this swiftly sorted the sheep from the goats; most of the tourists fled, as did the less determined journalists. The Combine sat it out… but they were beginning to despair: if anything newsworthy
did
occur that afternoon, they needed it to happen soon. Their deadline for cabling their papers was 3 p.m. at the latest: in order to send those cables, they had to ride all the way to the ferry, a six-and-a-half-mile journey, then cross the Nile, then ride a further mile to the telegraph office. Time was running out on them.

At about one-fifteen, the excavators, Carnarvon and Eve emerged from their luncheon tomb where, according to Carter’s plan and unnoticed by the reporters, they had been discreetly joined by their invited guests. This select group included Monsieur Pierre Lacau, Rex Engelbach, Ibrahim Effendi, Albert Lythgoe, Herbert Winlock, several important government Pashas, and two extremely eminent Egyptologists, namely Carnarvon’s friend, Dr Alan Gardiner of Oxford, and Dr James Breasted, of Chicago. As they appeared, Carter’s workmen unlocked the steel gates to the tomb, and began ferrying chairs inside, also tools such as picks and shovels. Seeing this, spotting the white-bearded Old Testament presence of Lacau, galvanised by the spectacle of Doctors Breasted and Gardiner – two plump august figures ambling across the sand arm in arm, resembling Tweedledum and Tweedledee and resplendent in matching pith helmets – the Combine realised the great moment had come at last. Zero hour. They shot back to the retaining wall and fumbled for their cameras and notebooks.

Leading the way into the tomb, Carnarvon glanced back over his shoulder and smiled at them. ‘Just popping down for a little concert,’ he said. ‘Carter’s going to sing to us.’

Humming a tune, he raised his hat in salute and sauntered down the steps. Arthur Weigall swung around to his fellow Combine journalists and said: ‘If Carnarvon goes down to the tomb in
that
spirit, I give him six weeks to live.’

At this dramatic point in Callender’s narrative, Miss Mack interrupted.

‘
Six weeks to live?
What an extraordinary thing to say! How very unpleasant. Did he mean it in jest? If so, it is tasteless. Are you
sure
Mr Weigall said that? Would you mind if I made a note of it?’

‘Feel free.’ Callender concentrated: ‘I
think
he said six weeks. It was definitely six
something
. Oh Lord, maybe it was six months… or six years? Does it matter?’

‘Of course it matters! Six
years
doesn’t have the same ring at all, Pecky – surely you can see that?’ Miss Mack cried, becoming fretful. ‘Which was it?
Think
.’

‘I don’t know. Weeks, I’m pretty sure. Blighter muttered it as Mace and I walked past. He was trying to put the wind up us. And we weren’t falling for
those
little tricks.’

With reluctance, Miss Mack let this detail go. Later that night she told me she would not use it. She would revise that decision six weeks later, when Carnarvon lay mortally ill at the Continental Hotel in Cairo. ‘Go on, Pecky,’ she said now, and he did.

‘Well, then they knocked the wall down,’ he said. ‘Carnarvon made a speech first – some rigmarole, went on and on for ever. Then Carter spoke for a bit. Then we got down to the nitty-gritty. Burton set up his camera, and angled his lights and reflectors and what-have-you. Carter stood on that platform I’d made – the one you saw – and he loosened the stones from the top downwards. He passed them to Mace, who passed them to me – and then the boys carried them out in baskets. That was it. Bob’s your uncle.’

Miss Mack gave a cry of protest. ‘Pecky,
please.
You’re not trying. Don’t be so
prosaic
. What did you
see
? Did the audience gasp? The tension must have been palpable.’

‘Well, it was blood – it was hot,’ he said. ‘Boiling. Carter stripped down to his vest. We were all sweating.’ He turned his mild eyes to the river; Miss Mack scribbled frantically. ‘After a bit, he’d widened the hole enough and you could see blue and gold. I think Lady Evelyn cried out at that point, and there were gasps – yes, I’m sure there were. In fact, the tension
was
getting to us, now I think about it, because I nipped out to have a quick gasper, and Carnarvon shot out after me. Shot out like a rocket, Myrtle, and didn’t look too good either. Pale as death, dripping with sweat, hands shaking. He lit his cigarette and took three puffs, then tossed it down and shot back in again.’

He paused thoughtfully. Miss Mack gave him encouraging nods and replenished his coffee. He continued: ‘Let me think… Right, got it now: by the time I went back, the opening was large enough to enter and at about two-fifteen or so – Carter climbed through. Disappeared inside for a bit, not that long, then Carnarvon joined him. Then they
both
disappeared – for quite a while too. People started getting restive, twitchy, fanning themselves, and yes, Myrtle, the tension definitely was building… Lady Evelyn was saying,
Oh, what have they found, what’s happened?
That Lacau man was muttering away
– Sacré bleu
,
mon Dieu, zut alors
, that sort of stuff, you know what the French are like, excitable. Finally, Carnarvon and Carter reappeared… then… I forget what happened then. Pandemonium. It was confusing. Everyone crowding around and asking questions––’

‘But what did Lord Carnarvon and Mr Carter
say
? They must have said something, made an announcement, surely? Think, Pecky,
think.
’

‘Can’t remember. It’s all a bit blurry. Carter looked ill, desperate – I thought he was going to pass out, I remember that. Carnarvon handled it better. He has nerve, you’ve got to give him that.
Noblesse oblige…
no sign of being rattled. Very solemn. Invited everyone to go inside. Two at a time. Carnarvon and Lacau first, then the others in turn. A bit like the animals going into the ark. And when they came out––’

‘Yes, yes, yes?’ Miss Mack leaned forward, pencil quivering.

‘People wept. They were weeping. Winlock couldn’t speak. Neither could Lythgoe.’

There was a silence. Callender shuffled his feet and squinted at the stars. ‘I expect it was devastating,’ he went on in a ruminative tone. ‘I mean, it would be, wouldn’t it? They’ve found him, you see, Myrtle. The shrines are there, and they’re still sealed. They’ve found King Tut and he’s intact and they’ve discovered – wonders beyond belief – things that take your breath away. The whole caboodle, in fact. Yes indeedy.’

Miss Mack wrote down the word ‘caboodle’ in neat copperplate. She then crossed it out, closed her notebook and looked intently at Callender. ‘You didn’t go in, did you, Pecky?’ she said, on an accusatory note.

‘Too tight.’ Her hero gave her an evasive glance. ‘The gap between the wall and the outer shrine is very narrow. It’s a tight squeeze. You have to worm your way along the side of the shrine until you come out in the space at the front, where its doors are facing you. I’m six foot three. Forty-four-inch chest. Didn’t want to get stuck like a bally cork in a bottle. Dr Gardiner’s half my size and he nearly got wedged. So did Dr Breasted.’

‘Piffle. Now tell me the real reason.’

‘Too many people.’ Callender sighed gustily. ‘And it’s going to get worse, Myrtle. The Queen of the Belgians is arriving on Sunday with Lord Allenby – so there’s another big do coming up.’ I could see his habitual dolefulness was creeping up on him, although he was trying manfully to resist it. ‘When I go in,’ he continued, ‘I want to go in on my own. Have a bit of a think. Pay my respects to Tut. Explain what we’re going to do to him. Make sure he understands, knows there’s nothing to worry about and I’ll look after him.’

He hesitated. ‘I’ll be working in there in due course, you see, Myrtle. It’s me who’s got to figure out how to dismantle Tut’s shrines, how we’ll get his sarcophagus open and handle his coffins. We won’t be tackling any of that this season, we’re buried ten feet under with the backlog as it is. So we won’t even start on that until next winter. But I’m looking ahead, working out how the heck we’ll do it, when the shrines are huge and there isn’t room in that Burial Chamber to swing a cat.

‘Oh, and speaking of
cats
,’ his face, which had become mournful despite his best efforts, now brightened, ‘the timing worked a treat, and the reporters all missed their deadlines, you’ll be glad to know – but Carter had another little trick up his sleeve. He knew the Combine would be on the hunt for info – at it like madmen –
which
they were. And he knew they’d try to pump his workmen,
which
they did. So he planted a few rumours. Got his men to tell them there was a giant cat presiding over the Burial Chamber, the biggest damn feline ever seen in Egypt.

‘We think they swallowed it too: hook, line and sinker.’ He gave a wide, beaming smile. ‘So we can all look forward to reading about a ten-foot cat in the newspapers.’

Callender’s account of the opening ceremony seemed evasive to me – no mention of the dissembling involved, I noted. I also felt it was woefully dull and unimaginative. Miss Mack did not agree and brushed such comments aside.

‘Wait until
I
write it up, dear,’ she said. ‘It may sound bald to you, but that’s because you don’t understand the first thing about reporting. Pecky has given me the bare bones, as I knew he would, dear man – now I shall wave my stylistic wand, Lucy.’

She disappeared to her cabin the instant Callender left, and the Oliver No. 9 keys were kept busy until three in the morning. This marathon session was followed by several more, all equally taxing, for the following seven days in the Valley were filled with incident: they were, as Miss Mack kept reminding me, historic.

The Times
ran the first full account of the opening of the Burial Chamber, and the story told was the one Carter and Carnarvon had planned, much of it ghosted by them for the obliging Merton – or so the Combine was claiming. During the course of the week, the news spread worldwide – but in the excitement generated by the discovery, the duplicity involved went unrevealed. Frances was delighted by this: her sympathy was entirely with the excavators. ‘So much for the Combine,’ she crowed one day at the American House. ‘Eve says there have been
acres
of coverage – but not one single journalist has come close to the truth. I
knew
Mr Carter and Lord Carnarvon would pull the wool over their eyes! Serves those reporters right for all that spying and lying they did at the Winter Palace.’

To its chagrin,
The Times
did not actually break the story: it was scooped by the newshound Valentine Williams, who went to the Valley that opening day armed with two pre-written, triple-rate, flash telegrams: one read
TOMB
EMPTY
, the other
KING
’
S
SARCOPHAGUS
DISCOVERED
.
Thanks to considerable cunning, forethought and expenditure, he contrived to send the second of these to Reuters within his deadline, and thus broke the news in London that same night – to the rage of
The Times
executives. His co-conspirators made the best of a bad job; when the English newspapers finally reached Luxor, Miss Mack, Frances and I fell upon them. We discovered that Weigall had not been deceived by those planted rumours of a giant feline; two of the Combine members, however, were. Our favourite strapline ran:
GIGANTIC
BLACK
CAT
FOUND
IN
KING
’
S
BURIAL
CHAMBER
:
WHAT
CAN
THIS
SIGNIFY
?
ARCHAEOLOGISTS
ASK
.