Valley of the Kings (2 page)

“No,” I said shortly. I was tired of coddling his nobility.

“How, then? It must have taken thousands and thousands of men thousands of hours.”

“For four months out of every year,” I said, “nine out of every ten Egyptians were idled by the flood.”

“Still, it seems an odd way to spend a holiday?”

I wondered if he were having a joke on me. I glanced up at the ruined features of great Khefren. The Arabs did that, hating idols.

“I confess, Carter,” he said, “that your Egyptians elude me. I can't find the key to them. Even their art, which ought to be a window of their lives—it's beautiful, some of it, sophisticated, subtle—but, damn it, the most graphic of the pictures give one no sense at all of what their inward lives were like. How they thought, how they thought of themselves. Like those friezes in the temples. There's no individuality, the people might be interchangeable. It's as if they deliberately effaced all the personality out of their pictures.”

He turned his back on Khefren as he spoke. I followed him up toward the open again, away from the sun god.

“I can't see anything human in them, Carter.”

“My lord, you're looking at them with modern eyes.”

“That's what I'm equipped with, Carter.”

“Personality—a man's individual self—those are modern ideas. These people had no inward lives, as you call it. They were not free to have inward lives—to be different from the other men around them. Nature bound them. The Nile, the Sun, the Soil, the life cycle of the millet—those were their rulers, not their own morals or judgments. How could they develop any individuality? Everything they did and felt and thought was the same as it had been for generations—shaped by the constant inflexible challenge of making life possible here.”

As he walked he watched me, his hands tucked behind his back. The schoolboy pose. He seemed to be listening. His eyes were dreamy. We started up toward the pyramids again. My gaze reached for their insuperable heights.

“Pharaoh was their self. He was the Personhood of Egypt. He represented them before the gods. They built these monuments to venerate him and to make themselves great. They did it for joy, as willingly as the medieval knight hauled stone to Chartres.”

We walked on in silence. I was tired of talking. Let him do some of the work. I felt old and blocked and tiresome. I pinched the bridge of my nose between my fingertips. My forehead began to ache. There was fine sand in my mustache.

We had reached the pyramids before he finally spoke.

“You see all this so differently than I, Carter.” He smiled at me, enigmatic. I wondered what he meant. It was so obvious to me, what I had said: who could see it differently? He nodded to me. “It should be an interesting collaboration.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, guarded.

We started toward the camels, lying on their tucked legs, their heads drawn back.

2

For the reasons I had recounted to Carnarvon at our first meeting, when we decided to search for the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun, I believed the lost tomb to be in the Valley of the Kings, in the desert near Luxor, where ancient Thebes stood. However, the Germans and the Americans had the licenses to dig there. Until they gave up, Carnarvon and I could do nothing except potter around elsewhere.

We did some digging in the Nile Delta, around Saïs, uncovering some interesting sites from the Middle Kingdom and Ptolemaic times. I confess that my attention was elsewhere. The American Theodore Davis, whose work I had supervised before I met Carnarvon, was excavating in the Valley of the Kings, and I lived in daily fear that he would find the tomb himself.

The Department of Antiquities had kept me on as Davis's nominal supervisor, but he seldom informed me of his work. I had to rely on some friends in the nearby village of Kurna to watch him for me. Then one spring, just before Carnarvon would arrive in Egypt for the season, one of my friends sent me word that Davis was into a real find.

I was in Cairo, buying digging supplies. I took the new railroad train down to Luxor. This is where ancient Thebes once stood, and in fact much of ancient Thebes is still there. Crowds of giant columns and gates cover whole acres of the east bank of the river. Some of them still retain the bright painting that decorated them when Pharaoh and his courtiers looked upon them on their way to the sacred rites and mysteries of Amun, the god of Thebes. The modern town of Luxor with its curving date palms and square white houses looks small and temporary by comparison with the gigantic structures of the ancients. The west bank is a warren of the mortuary temples of Eighteenth Dynasty pharaohs and their families. In the midst of these ruins is the village of Kurna; some of the villagers actually live in the ancient buildings, and they and their ancestors have made a local sport of tomb-robbing since the days of Rameses.

As one crosses the Nile from Luxor to the west bank, the two tremendous statues of Amenhotep III dominate the approach. They are so huge and so ruined by time that they no longer look human but, rather, like vast primeval brutes, enthroned beside the river, their heavy hands on their thighs. Behind them the alluvial plain runs back to the cliffs. Here the ruins are piled almost on top of one another. Some are no more than a square foundation, some are nearly whole. The long horizon of the desert shelf frames them.

Here one can ignore the slight modern presence and imagine oneself living at the dawn of time.

At the ferry stage there are donkeys for hire. I rode back past Deir el-Bahri, the great temple of Queen Hatshepsut, and onto the road that leads into the Valley of the Kings. As soon as I crossed into the desert I seemed to have left the modern world behind me. The barren ground, scoured by the wind, was ridged and hollowed like rock ribs. Dust hung perpetually in the air. My donkey had the frantic, steady trot of a rented hack whom everybody beats to death. The trail climbed. On my lips I tasted the acrid, poisonous dust of the desert.

The slopes of the gaunt hills had collapsed into ranks of sheer cliffs. Taking off my jacket, I folded it cleverly over my head against the bright sun. I sang a little, although I don't know many songs. I was happy to be back in the valley. I have always enjoyed this place, all honeycombed with tunnels and caves and rooms hacked into the rock.

I passed the square mouth of a minor tomb cut into the cliffside by the trail. Another appeared, halfway up the opposite slope. To the west, one lone peak reared above the flat tablelands like a natural pyramid. The ravine swerved again, and, rounding the turn, I came within sight of the tremendous scarp that stands behind the tomb of Rameses VI. It is a favorite site for people on the tour, and one can see why, although the magnificent rooms are empty and the mummy of the King is in Cairo.

In the broad yellow face of the cliff the opening of the tomb, neatly shaped and shored up to make smooth the path of the tourist, was oddly out of place: too square, too false. It always made me nervous: it looked as if it undermined that part of the cliff, as if the gigantic palisade might collapse before my eyes.

Four or five donkeys were waiting nearby as I approached. One carried panniers, doubtless full of a picnic lunch. Across the valley from them was a string of fellahin, handing up baskets of rubble from a pit in the ground.

This was Davis's dig. I took the jacket off my head.

Davis himself was sitting above the dig in the shade of a huge blue beach umbrella, one gaitered leg crossed over the other. I left my donkey and climbed a short steep path toward him. The slope was treacherous, covered with broken rock and gravel; the whole valley here is half-buried in bits of rock, the chip from the many tombs hollowed out of the cliff on either side.

“Carter,” Davis said, sharply. “What are you doing here?” He stood up, his hands on his hips.

“I understand you're on to something,” I said. I stopped on the path. My gaze went to the fellahin at their work, bending and swaying over the baskets of dirt.

They were working around the edge of a square pit that seemed to me to be already empty. I glanced around me for signs that they had removed anything other than rock: artifacts, for example, or pottery. The only thing on the slope was a pile of empty blue mineral-water bottles behind Davis's beach umbrella. He was glowering at me.

“Nobody asked you here, Carter,” he said.

“I am your supervisor, aren't I?” I took a step toward the pit. He grabbed my elbow.

“What do you think you're doing?”

“Well, let's have a look at what you've found,” I said. “Or aren't you proud of this one?”

He grunted. His hat was pushed back a little, exposing a strip of bright red sunburn above the tan of his forehead. “All right,” he said. “I'll show you.”

He started down the slope toward the pit. One of the men below saw him and, taking a whistle from around his neck, blew on it. The shrill sound brought the other workmen up straight. As a band they trooped off from the dig into the shade of the cliff wall and sat down. Davis and I went over to the pit.

“I have not yet made my official identification,” Davis said. “But I have my strong suspicions what this find is.”

I said nothing, tramping down after him across the hot flint. Davis had uncovered a number of magnificent sites, both here and elsewhere in Egypt, but he was notorious for misidentifying them. He was a careless, undisciplined digger who went by intuition more than reason, and he had no time for the grinding detail work that in the end pays off in a more total picture of Egyptian life. What Davis was after was sensation. Now he stood on the edge of the pit and gestured to me to inspect.

I looked down into a narrow hole, deep in shadows even in strong daylight. Davis said, “It was full of rubble. Took us nearly a week to empty it out. Obviously it's been looted.”

“Looted,” I said. “What do you think it was, anyway—a cache?” Near my feet there was a ladder extending down into the pit. I stooped to rattle it, testing its strength.

“It's a tomb,” Davis said roughly. “Look at it, damn you—it's a pit tomb, and my guess is it's Eighteenth Dynasty.”

“Come on,” I said, and climbed down the ladder into the pit.

Midway, I passed from the sunlight into the cold grip of the shadow of the earth, and I shivered from head to foot. Davis came after me, his heavy boot soles sometimes grazing my hands. The pit was so small that he and I could barely stand side by side in it. It was a cache pit, no more, perhaps even less; the ancients very neatly buried the debris of their farewell rituals after a funeral.

I tilted my head back. The patch of blue Egyptian sky shone far overhead. The pit had been hewn roughly from the rock. It had never been painted or even smoothed out, although the work was well done. But it usually was.

“Whatever makes you think it's Eighteenth Dynasty?”

Davis shot me a fiery look. “If you'd waited until I could do a little more excavating—”

“If you'd tell me when you find these things, I might be able to help you from the beginning.”

“Come on,” he said.

We climbed out of the pit. He led me back across the valley, through the blazing heat, to his beach umbrella. There was a little box near his chair, and he sat down and put the box on his knees.

“See? Rather fine, don't you think? And obviously Eighteenth Dynasty.”

In the box were half a dozen bits of gold. I put my fingertips to them. I was touching the past, touching them. Thousands of years in the earth. There were a few rings, a small statuette of alabaster, a couple of strips of gold foil. Lifting the foil, I held it into the sunlight.

A line of pictographs crossed the surface. Part of the writing was a name, and my nerves jumped with excitement. It was Tutankhamun's name.

“Well?” Davis said. “What do you think?”

I picked up the box with the bits of gold and walked back down the little slope and across the valley to the pit. Davis trooped after me. Midway to the pit he began to shout at me.

“You won't admit it, will you, Carter. It's the tomb of King Tutankhamun, isn't it, but you won't admit it.”

I put the box down at the edge of the pit. “What kind of fill did you remove?” I squatted down and ran my hand over the top of the pit. It was dug in the sandy floor of the valley. “Was it the same as this stuff?” I looked around me again, at the heavy flint boulders and flint chip piled against the foot of the cliff nearby. That was chip from Rameses' tomb.

Davis struck at my hand. “Stop the act, Carter. There's nobody here to impress. Flinders Petrie is dead, Carter. You're old-fashioned—your methods are obsolete.”

“Listen,” I said. “This is important. I want you to show me exactly where and how you found these artifacts.”

“Get out of here. This is my dig.”

His cheeks were red under his tan. His eyes glinted with bad temper. I kept my own temper under control. It would do no good to fight with him again—not now, when he might have the key to finding Tutankhamun.

I said, “I am your supervisor, Davis. Now, just show me where you found these things.”

“It's the tomb,” he said. “It's the tomb of Tutankhamun.”

“Damn you,” I shouted into his face, “you don't know, do you! You didn't keep any records!”

He shouted back at me, standing nose to nose with me. “Nobody cares about that stuff, Carter—measuring this, sifting all the little baskets of rock—nobody cares.”

“I care!”

He turned on his heel and walked away from me. I pursued him, and he shouted at me over his shoulder. “What do you think, Carter—you can't bring Egypt back, you know. It's dead, it's gone.”

“People like you destroy it. You didn't even go through the chip, did you? Didn't record what was on top of the pit—”

“Get out of here! You crazy fool—”

On the opposite side of the valley, the party of tourists was coming out of Rameses' tomb. Currently, we were their attraction. Davis saw them and hushed his voice. We glared at one another. His face was flushed and his bushy gray mustache bristled with anger.

“This is an important find. You can't deny that.”

“You goddamned Philistine,” I said. “It might have been, if you'd do your bloody job. Now it's nothing, don't you see? Whatever significance it had you destroyed when you destroyed the context.”

“What does it matter where we found everything?” Davis roared. His arms flailed in the air as with his blunt fingers he pointed around us. “We found them, didn't we? Would it be different if we'd found the rings over there, and the cup in the pit? What if—”

“What cup?”

Davis shut his mouth. His hands fell to his sides.

“What cup?” I said evenly.

“We found a faience-work cup,” Davis said.

“Where?”

He kept still. Apparently he remembered the tourists; he shot a look in their direction. They were standing by their donkeys, their faces turned toward us: four white oval faces and two brown ones, the dragomen.

“Where did you find it?” I asked. I was being very civil, because I knew I had him.

“Under a rock,” he said, and pointed to the foot of the slope, a few tens of yards away. “There. It was buried under the loose earth. Someone must have hidden it there. When they robbed the tomb. Just a blue faience cup. But it has Tutankhamun's name on it.”

I took him by the arm and made him walk together with me down the valley; I made him show me exactly where he had found the cup. He was disgruntled. He said no more than he had to and his eyes never met mine. We both understood what he had done. Egyptian law specifies that all artifacts found in the course of a dig belong to the Egyptian people; Davis had tried to keep the cup secret from me so that he could sneak it out of the country.

I stood there looking at the slope at my feet. Turning my head, I looked back across the pit at the tomb of Rameses. The feeling welled up in me that the parts of a puzzle were there before me, if only I had wit to put them together; what I saw ought to be telling me something. But I could not grasp it. Under Davis's furious eyes, under the eyes of the native workmen and the tourists, I turned and went to my donkey and rode away down the valley.