In the Valley of the Kings (16 page)

“I have been able to judge what Mr. Carter can do,” he wrote to a colleague once the clearance had proceeded far enough for the copying to begin. “He certainly has much talent. His drawings are very good, and in this respect I do not think we could have a better artist. His copies when reproduced in colour or in black will make very fine plates….” Which they did. When it was published, Carter’s many-volumed record of Hatshepsut’s temple set a new standard for archaeological art. It was one of his most significant accomplishments in Egypt.

But Carter wanted more—he wanted to excavate. “Due possibly to Petrie’s training, [that] was my great desire,” he would say later, understating the matter. For it was not simply Petrie’s training that spurred him on—he had caught Petrie’s digging fever. The beauty of Hatshepsut’s temple, the surroundings at Deir el-Bahri, left their impression. He never forgot “the temple setting … the delicate sculptured reliefs upon its walls. In those six years,” he wrote, “I learnt more of Egyptian art, its serene simplicity, than at any other time or place.” But he was haunted by the excitement of excavation.

AS 1900 APPROACHED, THE TURN OF THE CENTURY BROUGHT
Carter a great surprise. The excellence of his work for the last five years had been noted by Gaston Maspero, director of the Service des Antiquités. He was requested to join the department as chief inspector for the south, a vast area including the Sudan (then an Egyptian province). Though his duties included all kinds of official obligations and administrative work (which Carter took very seriously), and though there was much work to be done in the many temples included in his new domain (especially in the Ramesseum and at Abu Simbel and Edfu, where the ancient structures needed shoring up), at last he was able to concentrate on “his” tombs.

For the next four years, from 1900 on, he spent more time underground than in the light of day, working on a long list of tombs, both royal (Seti II; Amenhotep II; Ramesses I, III, VI, and IX) and nonroyal (Maihipri, warrior companion of Amenhotep II; Hatshepsut’s wet nurse; Sennefer, mayor of Thebes—among others).

Though these tombs were already “opened,” some recently, some since antiquity, the work of thoroughly exploring them demanded everything Carter had—stamina, patience, skill. He would file many reports about the southern temples, but it was in the tombs that he really came alive.

Each one had its unique challenge, some requiring a more delicate
hand—the murals, reliefs, and fine architectural details were, after all, more than three and a half millennia old. Others called for the sheer strength of will to keep slugging away—tomb KV #20, unidentified when Carter first tackled it, showed him at his best: a fighter “with heart.”

“The tomb proved to be 700 feet long …,” he remembered. “With the exception of the first portion cleared by former explorers [Denon, 1799; Belzoni, 1823; Lepsius, 1845] almost the entire length was filled to the roof with rubble, most of which had been carried in by water from spates of past centuries.

“The filling was cemented into a hard mass by the action of water. To excavate, it needed heavy pickaxes, and the whole of this rubble had to be carried to the mouth of the tomb by a continuous chain of men…. Half way down its corridor the white limestone stratum came to an end, and a stratum of brown shaly [shalelike] rock of uneven fragile nature commenced. It was here when our difficulties began, for the latter stratum of rocks was so bad there was a serious danger of its falling in upon us.

“To add to our troubles the air was also very bad [from centuries’ accumulation of bat dung and the like]; candles would not give sufficient light to enable the men to see to work….”

Undeterred, Carter set up an air pump and ran an electric line down to replace the candles that kept flickering out. Sometimes they passed over rubble that had reached up to two feet of the ceiling—crawling on their stomachs as bats fluttered by or the sudden screeching of an eagle-owl they had disturbed shocked them into a moment’s pause.

They descended to the lowest depths, reaching the entrance of the burial chamber. Here they discovered that the ceiling had collapsed, filling the room with fallen rock. Digging their way in foot by foot, there, finally, was the prize: A huge stone sarcophagus carved and covered with spells was revealed; one at first, and then
a second sarcophagus, both royal, both empty, though inscribed with their owners’ names: Hatshepsut and her father, Thutmosis I.

Carter emerged covered with sweat, black dust darkening his face and hands, sick from bad air—and jubilant. For the real prize was the knowledge. The royal names that allowed him to scratch two more rulers off his list. Each such find took him a step closer to Tut, over whose tomb he unknowingly walked almost every day as he performed his duties, sometimes extraordinary, more often routine.

A sample, from the Egyptian Exploration Fund archaeological reports:

Report, 1901: “Ramesseum. Northeast Wall of 2nd Temple Court, West face of which bears support about to fall.”

Report, 1902: “Tomb #42 Fine yellow mud, now dry, carried in by flood.”

Report 1902-1903: “Kom Ombo Temple. Repairs to the end enclosure wall in progress.

“The tomb of Merneptah has been completely excavated.

“Sheik Abd el Qurneh. Mr. Robert Mond [industrial chemist; amateur Egyptologist; patron] has cleared twelve tombs already known.

“Quft. A naos [shrine] of Nectanebo [last native pharaoh] has been obtained from sebakh-digging [peasants searching for fertilizer].”

Report, 1903: “Tomb #60. Found: Hairpins. Fragment of alabaster vase. Late, intrusive burial: 4 rough wooden coffins, Christian Coptic; skeleton of a child.”

Carter lived alone in a house at the edge of the desert. His pets kept him company; his donkey, San Toy, was so attached to him that startled visitors reported he pushed open the door and came
searching through the rooms, braying, until he had found Carter. He had two gazelles, tame enough to eat from his hand. He had a pigeon house and got to know them so well that he recognized the individual sound of their cooing. On a photo he sent to his mother, he noted at the bottom that “the pigeon on the right … has a mournful note different from ordinary pigeons.”

But the gazelles sickened mysteriously, and Carter buried them under the acacia trees just outside his window. A cobra—which he shot—bit his donkey, and he was left alone with his mournful pigeon and his conjectures.

Sometimes he ferried across the river to Luxor. During the fierce summer heat the town was deserted by Europeans, but that did not disturb Carter, who in any case was a habitué of the Egyptian cafés (his status-conscious colleagues would never allow themselves to be seen in such places). In the summer, the pace of life slowed, especially when the Nile rose and the ancient rhythm of life asserted itself. The high dam at Aswan did not yet exist to check the flood. The waters turned the low-lying desert basins into huge lakes and half covered the temples.

Lying in a small boat, covered up with straw, Carter floated over the desert; he watched and sometimes sketched the great flocks of birds brought here by the inundation. Thousands of pelicans swooped down to fish among the ancient pillars, while jackals and hyenas roamed at the water’s edge.

But even during inundation, thieves, dealers, and vandals continued their work. It was Carter’s duty to be vigilant, and he was vigilant, whatever the season. The hapless thieves he caught were locked up inside rooms of the Karnak temple, where wine and incense were once stored.

If he was sometimes too zealous, that was his nature. An astonished colleague (Arthur Mace) found him hiding behind a temple portico like a jealous lover, watching and ready to pounce. A little girl had arranged the pieces of a broken jug in front of her. As visitors
to the temple approached, she began to cry over her “misfortune.” But before they could toss her some coins, Carter jumped out to foil the ploy. Another colleague (Arthur Weigall) told of him chasing a man who had been begging in the ruins. Carter jumped his horse first over a canal and then over a garden hedge in hot pursuit.

But though he could be “rabid,” his workmen liked and respected him, even those he had treated harshly. James Breasted recounted that when Carter lost his post, “the reis [chief] of the guards whom Carter had dismissed took him into his house, fed him, gave him money, tided him over until he had painted some pictures to sell….”

Even during the one “big robbery” of Carter’s inspectorate—the break-in at Amenhotep II’s tomb—the men he prosecuted bore him no ill will. Later, one of the thieves brought him a “tip” leading to the discovery of Amenhotep I’s tomb, even though Carter had gone to great lengths to make sure that he was punished.

As soon as Carter heard of the break-in, he had his tomb guards arrested—obviously they were in collusion. He took photographs of footprints near the tomb and matched them with the feet of the suspects. He gave testimony about a gun that was fired, or not fired. Or fired after the fact—the complicated evidence was not worth unraveling, since nothing came of Carter’s sleuthing.

The judges understood that the robbery was part of a game, and a very old one at that, with the poverty-stricken pitting their wits against the guardians of vast treasure. Every one of Egypt’s ninety pyramids had been robbed in antiquity. If tons of stone had not stopped the ancient thieves, how could the service’s tomb gates be expected to?

Furthermore, they knew that the break-in could not have taken place without the entire village’s complicity, and they had no wish to put the village on trial (when two years later the British ordered floggings all around in Denshawee, the incident became a nationalist
battle cry). Perhaps most important, the court was mindful that just to the south, in the Sudan, the mahdi with his dervish army had not long ago seized Khartoum and slaughtered all the foreigners. Next to such considerations, pharaoh’s burial equipment did not weigh heavily. The case was dismissed.

The ill-gotten gains provided a month of feasting. As the smoke of roasted lambs rose from the huts together with the sound of song, Carter grieved for Amenhotep II’s lost royal barge and great bow, while in the meantime Egypt’s French newspapers attacked him. Insinuating that Carter had worked hand in hand with the thieves,
Le Phare d’Alexandrie
asked: Who is this Inspector of Antiquities? He is little more than an agent for the “rapacious” and “unscrupulous” collector Wallis Budge, keeper of Egyptian antiquities for the British Museum. Why would “a person of no importance” such as Carter be raised to this position?
L’Égypte
asked, pointing to his lack of scholarly background and even the low salary that he had been receiving before his appointment.

It was against this background that in 1904 the service director, Gaston Maspero, decided to switch Carter to the inspectorship of Lower (or northern) Egypt and to bring the northern inspector south. Not as a reproach—Maspero would always be a staunch supporter of Carter’s, admiring his dedication and his energy. But he felt that the measure would prevent his inspectors from becoming too entrenched in their domains while providing an invigorating change of scene.

“A change of scene” it turned out to be, but not in the way Maspero had imagined. Before Carter had a chance to settle in to his new responsibilities, the “incident” occurred—or “the affray,” as Carter called the brawl that took place—a knock-down, drag-out fight. He was paying a courtesy call on his old mentor, Petrie, who, together with his wife, was excavating in the desert just outside of Cairo. Some other visitors were there as well, Arthur
Weigall among them, a colleague and enemy whose eloquence and social ease always intimidated Carter.

As the sun began to set (it was a late winter afternoon), one of Carter’s ghaffirs, or tomb guards, rode up. There was trouble at Saqqara, the man reported, and Carter’s presence was urgently needed. Excusing himself, Carter left hurriedly, his ghaffir giving him details along the way. As Carter related in his report:

“About three pm, some fifteen visitors, whom I believe to be French, arrived at the Necropolis of Saqqara in a rowdy condition…. They eventually came to the Service’s Rest-house (known as Mariette Pasha’s House) where they stayed for an hour or so talking in a loud manner and drinking. They afterwards stated a wish to visit the monuments. Upon this, the Ticket Inspector Es Sayid Effendi Mohammed … requested the necessary fees. It was not until after some trouble that he was able to collect the money for eleven tickets.

“The whole party then went to the ‘Serapeum’ [collective burial chambers of the sacred Apis bulls] accompanied by a gaffir, who at the entrance requested to see who had tickets and who had not, knowing that some of the party had not obtained tickets…. The party would not wait for this inspector, but rushed at the door [leading to a descending staircase] and forced it open, breaking one of the side catches which held the padlock. Upon their finding, when they entered, themselves in darkness they returned and demanded candles from the gaffir. The gaffir explained to them that he had not any candles nor did the Service supply visitors with candles. The party then roughly handled the gaffir and demanded their money back….”