The Murder of King Tut (6 page)

It was Carter’s second season excavating the structure dedicated to Hatshepsut, a female pharaoh nearly as famous as Nefertiti.
It was a rocky location, situated at the base of a cliff, two miles from the Nile. Daytime temperatures often soared above
110 degrees Fahrenheit, and there was no shade.

Still, Carter worked dawn to dusk, in the fashion he had learned from Petrie, mainly because he so loved what he did. This
was his life. There was nothing else for him.

His boss now was a Swiss named Edouard Naville. The prolific excavator had long believed that a vast temple complex lay beneath
the soil at Deir el-Bahri, and the results of several seasons’ work were proving he might be correct.

Grand columns and towering walls now rose from the ground, unearthed after centuries of landslides and storms had covered
them over.

Naville had been pleased with Carter’s growing professionalism but was also concerned that the young Englishman was too slow
when it came to sketching and photographing. The same methodical bent that Petrie had once encouraged was now seen as a serious
flaw.

But this cloud had a silver lining. Naville had requested a second artist to help Carter. The man hired for the task was none
other than Carter’s thirty-year-old brother, Vernet.

The two had worked side by side through the early months of 1894, producing a series of dazzling sketches that were soon to
be reproduced in book form.

Howard Carter had come a long way, actually. Not only had he learned to excavate, photograph, and supervise dig crews, but
the young man was showing that his childhood sickliness was a thing of the past. When Naville closed the site for Ramadan,
he asked the Carter brothers to continue working.

But the strapping Vernet fell prey to the heat and deprivation. He was forced to return to England, leaving his brother to
finish Naville’s job alone.

Carter had enjoyed the time with Vernet, but he never once contemplated returning home with his brother.

The life of an Egyptologist had its perils to be sure. It wasn’t everyone’s idea of the ideal job. But for Howard Carter,
it was
paradise.

And one day, he hoped to be a modern-day king—in the Valley of the Kings. He dreamed of making the greatest tomb discovery
of them all, even though he had no idea what it might be.

1899

THERE WAS NO SHADE to be had in the valley of Deir el-Bahri, not so much as a dancing speck. So as Carter set up his easel
atop the ruins of an ancient and quite spectacular mortuary temple, the clock was ticking.

The rising March sun was just now lining the horizon. Within an hour, the heat of the day would get uncomfortable, and beads
of sweat would drench Carter’s hatband.

Within two hours, his brushstrokes would dry almost as soon as he applied the watercolors.

And within three hours, the lead of his pencil would become too soft to sketch even a single line.

So he worked quickly, drawing the exterior of the temple, making sure that its massive proportions were in scale with the
equally massive cliff rising like a great wall behind it.

The precision and symmetry of the sprawling complex, with three levels and sculpted columns, evoked images of an army of craftsmen,
at the height of their talent, proudly building a structure that would last for all time.

What an idea.
No wonder he could never leave this magical place.

Carter had acquired a reputation as a very good artist—indeed, his subjects ranged from the animals in the Cairo Zoo to intricate
tomb interiors. But he had been in Egypt eight years now. It was impossible for him to paint a watercolor like the one on
which he now labored without mentally filling in the history behind it.

A bead of sweat trickled down his face, but he was already lost in a reverie.

The temple before him had belonged to Queen Hatshepsut. It had taken fifteen years to build, but then the queen had been buried
someplace else. The building looked more like a palace than a tomb and was peculiar for being so ostentatious. At the time
of its construction, back in the fifteenth century BC, pharaohs were trying to conceal their burial places, not flaunt them
for tomb robbers.

Hatshepsut’s temple, where Carter spent many years excavating. The Valley of the Kings lies on the other side of the cliff.

But just as this was no ordinary temple, Hatshepsut had been no ordinary pharaoh. After her husband (who was also her half
brother) died, she ruled as one of the first female pharaohs. Her reign had been prosperous, as were those of her children
and her children’s children.

Carter knew that Hatshepsut had once been deeply in love, for she was a queen before she was a pharaoh. He knew also of her
father, Tuthmosis I, the first pharaoh to be buried in what came to be known as the Valley of the Kings rather than in a pyramid.

The pyramids, so obvious and tempting, had been easy to plunder, which meant the pharaohs were deprived of their possessions
during their journeys into the afterworld. Carving a tomb in a desolate valley seemed the best way to discourage thieves.

Sadly, the architect Ineni had been wrong about that.

So had Hatshepsut.

Despite the fact that the massive mortuary temple sprawled like a small city across the valley floor, no trace of Hatshepsut
had yet been found.

Carter dabbed more paint on the paper—quickly. The sun was low on the horizon and directly in his eyes. He averted his gaze
to reduce the risk of ophthalmia, bleeding of the eyes that came from looking too long at the sun. The disease was common
among Egyptologists and could easily end a career.

A few hundred yards off, tourists and their Egyptian guides were dismounting mules and making their way to the temple.

Little did they know that one of the world’s most promising Egyptologists was in their midst. Carter had worked his way up
from being a poorly paid junior draftsman and was now learning the methods of the great excavators.

The key to becoming an excavator, Carter knew all too well, was luck. But after that came money, a great deal of money. He
needed to find a wealthy benefactor to cover his costs. He had seen such patrons in Luxor, hanging out at the Winter Palace
Hotel or enjoying the Nile nightlife aboard lavish yachts.

Carter didn’t know how to mingle comfortably in that society—or any society, really—but it was time that he learned.

How hard could it be to fool a bunch of fools?

January 1900

“GENTLEMEN ARE INVITED to take off their coats,” Carter advised the tour group as they approached the tomb. “It will get rather
warm inside. Ladies, I’m afraid you’ll have to settle for removing your hats.”

His work ethic and passion for Egyptology had already lifted the ambitious twenty-five-year-old Carter from the obscurity
of his early days to the relative power of his new position as chief inspector for the Antiquities Service in Upper Egypt.

Carter had beaten out Percy Newberry for the job, and now he oversaw all excavation in the region.

Many within the British Egyptology community found this distasteful, even ridiculous. They objected to Carter’s lack of book
knowledge, his lack of a university degree, and, perhaps most of all, his lack of table manners. To them, Carter was not one
of the world’s foremost Egyptologists, just its most infamous and crude.

At a Christmas dinner in 1897, Newberry’s brother had marveled at Carter’s lack of social graces: “He doesn’t hesitate to
pick his last hollow tooth with a match stalk during dinner, bite bread that is so hard you can barely cut it with a chopper,
and help himself to whiskey in an absentminded fashion, emptying half the bottle into his tumbler, then laugh and pour it
back again.”

Even Gaston Maspero, Carter’s new boss, admitted that his charge was obstinate.

But Carter also had supporters and admirers, many of them female.

Lady Amherst still welcomed Carter to Didlington Hall whenever he returned to England. He was something of a hero to her family
for his ongoing series of adventures in the Egyptian desert.

Carter was certainly someone to reckon with, even if he didn’t know which fork to use for his salad. He was now museum curator
for the entire Valley of the Kings. The area was an isolated jumble of hills, cliffs, and dry riverbed located three miles
west of the Nile, just below the “horn,” the highest point in the Theban hills.

Nobody knew exactly how many Egyptian rulers were interred beneath the sunbaked earth. And there was a good chance no one
would ever know. Time and weather, crumbling rock, and blowing sand had completely changed the valley floor and enhanced its
natural camouflage.

To actually stumble upon a tomb was to find the proverbial needle in a haystack, which is why any discovery was so precious
and why everyone, from tourists to tomb raiders, was eager to see inside each burial chamber.

Since Italian circus strongman-cum-Egyptologist Giovanni Belzoni had performed the first serious excavation of the area in
1815, the tombs of more than two dozen pharaohs had been found within its craggy, soaring walls. Belzoni had stopped excavating
in the valley after thirteen years because he believed there was nothing left to find.

The discovery of tomb after tomb since then proved he’d been wrong.

In exchange for a “concession”—permission to dig in the valley—excavators agreed to split all treasure fifty-fifty with the
Egyptian government. Sometimes the discovery process was as simple as clearing away a few scattered rocks. At other times
finding a tomb required scraping away mountains of hard-packed sand and stone, clear down to the bedrock.

The allure was treasure first, history second.

January 1900

CARTER COULD NOT AFFORD to purchase a concession.

Nonetheless, just a few weeks into his new position, he was busily making the valley his own. In addition to setting up a
donkey corral that could accommodate a hundred animals, he had begun installing heavy metal gates on all tomb entrances—to
keep out the pesky robbers and squatters who prowled the valley at night.

He was also introducing electric lighting to make the tombs more inviting to the European tourists who visited the valley
during the day.

And for reasons having nothing to do with his job and everything to do with his own future success, Carter had begun to woo
wealthy foreign tourists, hoping they might be convinced to fund a concession for him.

American businessman Theodore Davis was just such a tourist.

Davis was a small, hugely opinionated man with a dense white mustache spanning ear to ear. A regular visitor to Luxor (the
site of ancient Thebes), he had begun to display an obsessive interest in Egyptology.

Now Carter stood with Davis and his group at the entrance to the tomb of Amenhotep II, a spectacular and yet dangerous place
to be leading novices, especially rich, influential ones who might break a leg or suffer heatstroke. “It was a fine hot day,”
wrote Emma Andrews, Davis’s traveling companion, who also took pains to point out that Carter was “pleasant, despite his dominant
personality.”

These tourists were hardly dressed for tomb exploration, the men wearing hard shoes and ties, and the women floppy hats and
long dresses. Carter gave them each a candle and issued sharp instructions not to lag behind.

He led them down a narrow, low-ceilinged corridor, which descended steeply into the side of the cliff.

“Pay careful attention to each and every step, please,” Carter advised as the earth suddenly disappeared: the tomb builders
had excavated a well thirty feet deep and ten feet wide to dissuade—or trap and mangle—the uninvited.

Carter had laid boards across the chasm, and one by one the party made its way safely to the other side. In truth, he was
playing up the danger a bit to pique the interest of these potential investors.

The tunnel plunged deeper into the earth, revealing an ancient stairwell that had given way and forced the group to scramble
over a pile of loose stones. Paintings lined the walls here, ancient murals in subtle shades of maroon and yellow.

Carter was an impatient tour guide, despite his desire to woo a potential benefactor. Slower and weaker members of the group
were tolerated but just barely.

At the site of another crumbled stairway, the tourists had to pick their way, hand over hand, up the rocky pile, then squeeze
through a narrow opening to continue the journey. By now most were sweating and breathing hard. The close air made some of
them sick. More than one finger and forearm had been burned by dripping wax as the sightseers struggled to manage their candles.

Yet they gamely pressed on, following Carter, quite literally, into the bowels of the earth.

The corridor turned a corner, and suddenly the group was inside a great rectangular chamber, and this room made the difficult
trip worth every step.