Tutankhamun Uncovered (78 page)

As the woods crackled and split all about them, Lacau thought he heard a scream, then laughter. In the excitement and panic of the moment he must have been mistaken.

The Cairo fire department managed to safeguard the public part of the museum, but the stores, where the fire had been started, were almost totally destroyed, their contents rendered unsalvageable.

That afternoon, the Director sat in his office composing a telegram to Howard Carter. He had no idea how he was going to break this news. The responsibility for the accident was deeply personal. But, regardless of his embarrassment, if he did not get on with it quickly the news, already heating up the wires to Europe and Luxor, would reach Carter before Lacau’s telegram. That would be quite unacceptable and the consequences unthinkable.

For H Carter STOP Most urgent STOP Regret to inform you T articles so far received in Cairo destroyed today by fire STOP Holocaust STOP Nothing survived STOP Deeply sorry...”

Lacau put his pencil down for a moment. Such a cold message for so crippling an event. But why search for sensitivity in a telegram? He fumbled for the pencil again and continued...

...for all our sakes STOP Me to Luxor tomorrow STOP Much to discuss STOP Lacau

He hastily rubbed out ‘Lacau’ and wrote, ‘Pierre’.

“Mustafah! Take this to the telegraph office immediately and hurry!”

No sooner had his fellah gone than there was a rapid knock at the door to his office.

“What is it?” Lacau shouted with irritation. He desperately needed some time to himself.

It was a messenger with a telegram.

Lacau visibly blanched as he took the envelope. ‘He couldn’t know already, surely not?’

He tore it open, pulled out the yellow paper and unfolded it. The telegram read:

For Director Lacau STOP Luxor Cairo train derailed in desert west bank between Asyut and Manfalut STOP Some loss of life STOP Explosion and fire STOP Tutankhamun antiquities losses unestimated but significant STOP Please come STOP

It was unsigned.

Lacau screwed the paper up in his fist and fell back into his chair. He stared at the ceiling. ‘This can’t be happening to me. If Carter sent this, what is he going to feel when he receives my news?’

The thought was too obscene to contemplate. He turned in his chair and looked out of his window at the teeming populace in the busy street below. Would he were one of them right now.

Chapter Twenty Six

The old irritations were still there. Monsieur le Directeur he who must be obeyed and must be present at the opening of the mummy or this climactic event could not take place was holidaying in Europe and would not return until November. It had been Carter’s plan to clear the burial chamber and the treasury this season. To be held up by having to wait on the pleasure of his old adversary, Lacau, was a frustration likely yet again to bring him to boiling point.

“Bloody French have no sense of immediacy!” he grumbled.

With the help of Lucas’s conscientious counselling, and several whiskies, for the time being Carter put his concerns aside and directed his attentions to busying himself with the work immediately in front of him. He assumed there would be three coffins before he would reach the mummy itself. He bubbled with immeasurable excitement and anticipation. He felt rejuvenated. The thrill of it all. He loved every minute. Each new discovery held the promise of the first.

With little difficulty, but with consummate care, he removed the pins from the tenons which attached the outer coffin lid to its base. Together they lifted the coffin lid clear of the sarcophagus. A dark, partially perished linen shroud was revealed, closely covering the second coffin lid. On the shroud lay dried garlands strung profusely about the head and crossed arms. At the forehead a circlet of tiny, desiccated flowers surrounded the lump in the shroud caused by the uraeus underneath.

Harry Burton photographed each stage of the proceedings. He knew only too well the importance of this work. It was a onetime opportunity and he felt greatly privileged to be a part of it. What he was recording was unique. It would never look like this again. Once the collection of objects was complete, his photographic record would place them in context. The pictures, therefore, had to be perfect. That not only meant precision in preparation for each plate, but also immediate processing before any further clearance work took place to ensure that there was nothing amiss with the film itself and that the prints were perfect.

Carter addressed his team. “Here is the plan. We must raise the coffin base and its contents whole and place it on a table we shall prepare over the top of the sarcophagus. That way we will be able to view it complete and get at it more easily.

Carter handed a couple of heavy metal screw eyes to Lucas.

“Twist these deep into the wooden rim... about here... and here... and, as we attempt to haul the coffin set upwards, pray hard that the wood is strong enough to hold on to the threads!”

The ‘eyes’ proved difficult to screw into the wood but this was good news. The wooden body of the three-thousand-year-old casket was still firm. The labourers attached the ropes and took the strain. The immense effort showed in their faces. Far more muscle power than had been expected was required to raise the coffin set. The sweating labourers finally succeeded in getting it up high enough for Carter and Lucas hurriedly to lay five stout wooden planks between the body of the coffin and the top of the great quartzite sarcophagus. Quickly they placed some padding on them and the men eased the massive, golden mummiform coffin base slowly back down onto the platform.

The reis and his men took down the block and tackle.

Carter sensitively removed the fragile garlands, placed them on a tray to one side, and turned to address the faded shroud. Starting at the head, he took the cloth in his hands. He could feel the brittle fibres cracking as he gently began to roll the shroud back.

A stunningly beautiful, gilded coffin, far more colourful than the first, appeared before him.

Burton took his photographs and left to get them developed.

Carter quickly repositioned himself over the two massive coffins. They literally glittered in the floodlights. He soon realised that the next stage presented a problem. The seam of the second coffin lay well below the lip of the first and the gap between their walls was too small to permit complete withdrawal of the pins securing its lid.

“Bugger!” Carter shouted, and he threw up his hands in a gesture of hopelessness.

“What’s the problem?” asked Lucas.

“Can’t get the lid off this one, Alfred,” said Carter sticking his fingers down the space between the two coffins as if to confirm his disappointment. “There’s no room to pull the pins out. Just our luck. First of all I’m angry that bloody Lacau is swanning around the Mediterranean when he should be here; but now, rather than sat on our arses waiting for him, I’m worried we won’t even be ready by the time he’s due back.”

His colleague clambered onto the planks beside him and leaned over to look.

After a brief inspection he said, “But there’s space enough to pull them out a little, Howard, enough to allow us to attach wires. If the pins can stand it, we could suspend it at this point, then lower the outer coffin back into the sarcophagus. This one would then be out, sitting on the planks. We could open it easily then.”

The solution was so simple. Carter was not known to applaud the efforts of others, but on this occasion he felt such an extreme sense of relief at the simplicity of Lucas’s idea that his response was spontaneous and most complimentary. “Brilliant, Alfred! Bloody brilliant! Funny how, in the undying effort to appear clever, one tries so hard to find a complex remedy when a simple one is starin’ you right in the face. Bloody brilliant, Alfred... Well now, let’s get after it. Mohammed! Go get some stout wire. About fifty feet should do. Make sure it’s relatively easy to twist. Copper would be ideal, providing you make sure it’s thick enough. This thing’s damned heavy.”

As soon as Burton had returned from his darkroom to confirm that the last plates he had taken had turned out as expected Carter’s sense of urgency resurfaced and he and Alfred Lucas, now positioned either side of the coffin set, each set to easing out the pins holding the coffin lid in place.

The reis returned with the copper wire and his team reassembled the block and tackle. Carter and Lucas secured the copper wire to the beams and to the extended pins, making the intervening length as taut as they could manage. The labourers increased the tension on the block and tackle and raised the complete coffin set above the wooden planks just sufficient for Carter and his colleagues to pull each one of them clear. Then, on Carter’s order, they gently released the tension on the ropes supporting the outer coffin. As the lower portion of the first coffin was slowly lowered back onto its bed lying within the sarcophagus, the copper wires attached to the complete second coffin took the weight and twanged noisily as they stretched. There was a disturbing cracking sound as the two coffins separated from each other. Slowly but steadily, the outer shell of the first disappeared into the dark sarcophagus beneath. As it fell from sight, the colourful lower half of the second coffin became fully revealed.

With the lower shell of the first coffin resting safely on its ancient bier within the sarcophagus, Carter and Lucas helped each other once again to slide the eight planks across the top of the stone casket and, stretching beneath the suspended second coffin, stuffed a number of strategically placed bundles of cotton wool into the one inch gap between the base of the coffin and the planks.

“Alfred, we are at a sensitive juncture. Take these pliers and, watching me all the time, untwist the wire at the foot end until you begin to feel it give. Then go to the next on your side at the same time as I as on mine and so on. In this way, it should ease itself down into the wadding pretty gently. With a bit of luck.”

As the two worked, the creaking and twanging of the wires caused each on occasion to jerk his pliers away and hold his breath in fear that some great and irreversible accident should occur. In fact the still suspended coffins made no urgent movement and, by the time Lucas and Carter had loosened the last wires, under its own tremendous weight the suspended coffin set caused the remainder to untwist themselves slowly. In slow motion, the massive package settled itself into the cotton wool on the planks.

As the timbers creaked under the load, Lucas’s and Carter’s heavy breathing became loudly audible.

“My God, Carter!” exclaimed Lucas after all movement had ceased. “Could have dropped. Could have broken through the wood. Could have damaged both coffins.”

“Didn’t, Alfred. Didn’t. Burton! Quick man. Take your pictures.”

Carter’s impatience and excitement had got the better of him. He knew he couldn’t hurry Harry Burton, but no sooner had Burton cleared his equipment, with no less care than he had shown throughout the clearance but with a whole lot more urgency, Carter set to pulling the pins out, one by one. He placed each carefully on a strip of muslin in the order it was removed, passed it to Mohammed, and then turned back to his waiting colleague.

“You take the head end, Alfred. Mo, put some padding in that tray and bring it over here.”

“But before we proceed we should wait for Burton to come back, Howard. Check the photos were okay.”

Carter stopped. Like an impetuous student chastised by his teacher for shortcutting his homework, Carter put his hands in his pockets and sat back on some boxes.

“You’re right, Alfred. I’m letting my excitement get the better of me. Go and check on how he’s doing, will you? There’s a good chap. I’m anxious to finish this bit tonight if I can. I’ll wait here.”

Lucas dutifully left to visit with Burton in his tomb darkroom which lay immediately opposite on the other side of The Valley. For Carter it was an agonising fifteen minutes before his colleague returned.

“All perfect, Howard.”

Carter said nothing. He quickly signalled Lucas to the head end of the coffin set. The two felt for the lip of the coffin lid with their fingers and began to take the strain. For a moment nothing happened, no movement at all, then a ‘crack!’ as the tenons, seated firmly within the desiccated wood for the last three thousand years, relented.

The lid began to rise. Carter looked underneath to ensure that it had cleared the top of whatever lay underneath, and then gestured to Lucas with a nod of his head to lower the lid onto the tray beside them.

Inside the lower half of the second coffin, a dark red ochre shroud lay neatly draped over the body of the third. With the precision of a mother cosying her young son up for the night, it had been tucked in tightly all around and up under the chin. A broad and intricate collarette of flowers had been placed around the neck. The scalp was cushioned from contact with the frame of the second coffin by a folded linen napkin.

Carter noted some curious black stains on the inside lip. It looked like some liquid had been spilt on it.

“Burton!” Carter called again. “At once, please.”

No response.

“Burton, old chap! More photographs, if you please.”

Still no response.

The fact was, Burton had left for the day. By the time he had emerged from the tomb with the last batch of plates, the evening shadows were already long, and, since it had not been Carter’s habit to work in the tomb after dark, he had decided to leave for Luxor as soon as he had finished processing the film. This he subsequently did and, by the time Carter called for him again, he was nowhere to be found. He was soon to be seen languishing on the hotel balcony accompanied by a stiff martini. The cocktail would not give him orders, much less show impatience and irritability.

Carter fumed. He was deeply wrapped up in the task of discovery and was most desperately anxious to get to the body itself that very evening. His sense of impatience was almost overpowering. It took him and Lucas over thirty minutes of running around in the dark and questioning various hangers-on before they finally ascertained that Burton had indeed left The Valley. In the end, Carter threw up his hands and stormed off like a spoilt boy who had found he could not have his own way, leaving Lucas to clear up and secure the tomb for the night.