The ceiling was painted with blue and yellow stars. And there, in the middle of the room, was a stone sarcophagus—with the
mummy still inside.
“Notice the band of hieroglyphics around the top of the sarcophagus,” said Carter in a hoarse whisper. “That is the mummy’s
curse, and that’s the
only
thing that has protected it from being stolen.”
As the group gaped in awe, wondering if their mere presence might somehow invoke the curse, Carter had to suppress a smile.
What incredible idiots they were! The hieroglyphics said nothing of the sort. He was lying through his teeth, hoping that
his fabrication might incite Davis to purchase a concession.
To Carter’s delight, he did just that.
1901
HUNDREDS OF BATS FLEW LOW to the sand, fully sated after a night of foraging and eager to sleep. They skimmed over the Valley
of the Kings, then banked hard to the left, finally whooshing down into the tomb where Howard Carter lay resting peacefully.
Echolocations guided them through the hieroglyph-covered hallways, then the bats burst as one into the main chamber and roosted
on the ceiling, just feet above Carter’s cot.
The adventurer barely stirred. Carter now had a home near the river, complete with an enclosed garden and a small menagerie
of animals that included a horse named Sultan; a donkey, San Toy, who wandered freely through the house; and two gazelles.
But his home in Medinet Habu was miles from the valley and his work, so Carter often slept inside the tombs.
He had ceased worrying about the bats long ago and was slightly comforted by their presence. They were “strange spirits of
the ancient dead,” to his way of thinking.
The bats’ arrival also meant sunrise, and sunrise meant another day full of the promise of discovery.
Suddenly, bare feet could be heard sprinting down the tomb’s entry corridor. Carter recognized the anguished voice of a young
Egyptian digger whose name he couldn’t immediately remember. In part, this was because Carter wasn’t a friendly man. He didn’t
socialize with staff or anyone else, except for the occasional female tourist.
“Inspector? Are you in there?” the young man yelled in Arabic. “
Sir? Sir?
”
“What is it?” Carter sat bolt upright and reached for his lightweight trousers.
“Come quickly, sir. There’s been a break-in. Someone came during the night!”
1901
CARTER WAS STUNNED. He’d done his job so well, so painstakingly as inspector in chief that not a single tomb had been robbed
in the Thebes area since he’d taken charge. Not one.
What had happened? Thieves in the night? Who? How?
Carter dressed in seconds and ran for the door. In the pale predawn light he picked his way across the rocks and scree of
the wadi.
The path soon became wide and smooth and then led into a flight of steps that climbed steeply upward before dead-ending against
a cliff face.
A doorway had been carved into the rock, marking the entrance. Carter had recently installed an iron gate across the opening
to keep thieves out of KV 35, as the tomb of Amenhotep II was officially known.
But now that impenetrable barrier swung uselessly on its hinges. “How could this have happened?” muttered Carter. Then he
called to the digger. “Bring men to guard the door.
I’m going inside! Hurry!
”
Back in Cairo, small fortunes were being made from tomb artifacts, with tourists and collectors quickly snapping up anything
and everything tomb robbers put on the market. Catching a gang of these soulless thieves red-handed would be quite a coup
for Carter.
He lit a cigarette and paced until the reinforcements arrived. Amenhotep II was the grandfather of Amenhotep the Magnificent,
and the great-grandfather of Akhenaten, whose queen was the alluring Nefertiti.
Carter entered the tomb slowly, cautiously. As he did, silence washed over him. The first steps into a tomb were always like
that—a reminder that he was leaving the world of the living and entering a place meant for only the dead. Sometimes he felt
like he was trespassing and supposed that he was.
There were nine chambers in the tomb, each connected by a narrow hallway with a ceiling so low that Carter had to duck his
head almost to his waist to pass through. He flicked on the light switch and waited for his eyes to adjust to the pale artificial
glow.
Then he listened for the distant scurry of an intruder. But he heard just himself as he walked farther into the rocky tomb.
Stairs led down to a sharp left turn at what he liked to call the first-pillar room. Keeping one hand on the wall in case
he slipped—and a sharp eye out for deadly cobras—Carter made his way down more steps and into the burial chamber.
The starry night painted on the ceiling was the handiwork of a long-dead artisan. Straight ahead lay the mummified body of
Amenhotep II, thrown on the floor like a rag doll. The burial chamber had been ransacked, everything stolen. What a terrible
crime had been committed here.
And on Carter’s watch.
1901
HIS HEART BEATING LOUDLY, angry as he could be but also heartbroken, Carter scoured the tomb for clues and telling details
of the crime, sometimes crawling on his hands and knees. This sort of detective work was part of his job description. Thanks
to his dogged disposition, it came naturally to him, almost as if he’d been trained by Scotland Yard. And of course the tombs,
with their dusty passageways and stale air, were like his second home.
Whoever was responsible for this crime had to be a professional. He’d known exactly what he was looking for and where to find
it. By all appearances it was the work of an insider, but Carter’s local diggers were a well-disciplined bunch whom he trusted.
He immediately dismissed them as suspects—until he realized that the gate’s lock had
not
been broken.
A key must have been used, and a key meant that his staff
was
somehow involved. Damn it!
Betrayal welled up in his throat like bile as he continued pacing through the chambers, appalled by the extent of the theft.
All through the day and then into the night, Carter wandered the tomb, returning to the opening every now and then to smoke
a cigarette in the fresh air before plunging back inside.
He never stopped racking his brain for some clue he might have overlooked—one that was most likely in plain sight.
He went to bed reluctantly and slept just long enough to realize that he couldn’t sleep anymore.
By first light Carter was back at the tomb, vowing not to leave until he’d solved the heinous crime. He flicked on the light
switch and again stepped inside.
Then he stopped.
In his investigation the previous day, Carter hadn’t looked closely at the gate. He had
assumed
that the robber had a key. He suddenly remembered that the week before, someone had jimmied the gate open and sprung the
lock. Nothing had been stolen at the time, and because the gate had shown no signs of significant damage, the matter had been
forgotten.
Carter squatted down to inspect the lock. The previous day he had noticed a few scraps of lead paper and resin particles littering
the ground and had thought nothing of it.
Now he rolled the resin between his fingers and gave it a sniff. He recognized the scent immediately—it came from the sont
tree.
“What would this be doing here?” he said as he scrutinized the substance further. “The resin is the key somehow. But how?”
He studied the lock at eye level. Then he examined the resin.
Soon Carter realized that someone had shaped the resin into a small ball, one identical to the tongue of the padlock. “Ingenious,”
he said. “Simple, yet effective. This thief is clever. Almost as clever as I am.”
Now he could imagine what had transpired. The earlier break-in wasn’t a break-in at all but a
pretense
for snapping the lock and molding the resin to make the lock
look
like it hadn’t been damaged. The robber then waited until the time was right and returned to the tomb. At that point, giving
the lock a couple of good pulls would have been enough to cause the resin to give way.
Carter crept back into the tomb, feverish with anticipation, seeing the crime with new eyes.
His mind flashed back to a foiled robbery attempt some months earlier. A set of footprints had been found at the scene.
There was even a suspect, a man named Mohamed Abd el Rasoul, a local from a family known for generations of tomb robbing.
El Rasoul was fond of studying excavations and then making “accidental” discoveries of his own, but the tombs were always
looted by the time Carter and his crew were called to investigate. Rasoul constantly walked the line of being suspicious and
under suspicion, but no one had attempted to link him to those earlier footprints.
If Carter could just find another set, somewhere in Amenhotep’s tomb, and then match them with el Rasoul, he would have his
thief.
So Carter searched the tomb. Within minutes, he had found the footprints of a shoeless man.
Carter gauged the prints with his tape measure. They were the
exact
size of those found at the other robbery. “Down to the millimeter,” he marveled. “I’ve got you, el Rasoul!”
Carter walked slowly back to the mouth of the tomb. He pulled out another cigarette and lit it, all the while staring out
across the Valley of the Kings.
The sound of picks and shovels digging into the desert floor echoed across the valley, as yet another archaeologist searched
for some long-lost tomb and the valuable spoils within.
Carter was rightly pleased with himself. How many other men could lay claim to the titles artist, excavator,
and
detective?
1902
FORTY-THREE.
As Howard Carter stood atop the Theban horn, looking straight down into the Valley of the Kings, that was the number on his
mind.
It had rained the night before, a violent colossus of a storm that had literally formed rivers and caused landslides along
the hills.
The upper layer of soil had been washed away, making it the perfect place for Carter to be strolling at that very moment.
With his eyes fixed on the ground, and the number forty-three rattling around his head, he was scanning the freshly scrubbed
earth for a telltale fissure or cleft that might yield a new tomb entrance.
Once again his heart was pounding. He was thinking how much he loved his job and that one day it would lead to great things.
It had to. He had paid his dues.
Carter still felt an indescribable power in the Valley of the Kings and believed that the area had a life of its own. He found
it alternately spiritual and playful, a mischievous wasteland that continually taunted Egyptologists who believed there was
nothing left to discover. Time and again, great explorers had declared that they’d found all there was to find.
And then the valley would reveal another tomb or another cache of mummies, and the frantic spending and digging would resume.
Carter had carefully studied the detailed records of every Egyptologist since Napoleon and his men came through here at the
turn of the nineteenth century. He had also studied the pharaohs’ line of succession, comparing their names with the list
of mummies that had already been found.
Simple cross-referencing told him that several pharaohs were still somewhere below him in the valley floor, just
waiting to be discovered.
So now he gazed out over the valley, wondering about the mysterious forty-three.
Forty-three was not a person’s name. In fact, Carter had no idea what it might be. Tomb discoveries were numbered sequentially,
and in the previous three years an astounding ten new tombs had been located by Frenchman Victor Loret. But after finding
KV 42 in 1900 and allowing Carter to help him do the major portion of the excavation, Loret had quit the valley.
KV 43 was still out there, waiting for someone to find it.
Carter suspected, sadly, that he would not be that man. The cost of hiring several hundred diggers for a season was more than
five thousand pounds sterling. Add to that astonishing sum the cost of a yearly concession, lodgings, food, donkeys, shovels,
picks, and wheelbarrows to move the excavated stone, and it was obvious that Egyptology was the calling of the rich. What
chance did Carter, the son of a simple portrait artist, have of finding a great pharaoh’s tomb? But still
he could dream.
And he was
here
rather than in dreary old England.
Carter stared out at the folds and tucks of the valley, as if merely by looking long enough he would spot some obscure sign
of a tomb. Finally, he settled down onto the ground, sitting cross-legged on the only smooth patch of yellow dirt for a hundred
yards in any direction. He opened the cover of his sketchbook.
Holding his pencil lightly to the page, then running it over the paper in quick bursts, he drew a simple outline of the valley
floor and of the low flat mountains to the west. His challenge, as always, was to somehow capture the peace and grandeur that
permeated that place. But for all Carter’s genius as an artist, pencil lines on a piece of white paper could never fully convey
the wonders of this magical spot.
There was great history here, if only he could find some of it himself, if only he could find KV 43.
February 1, 1903
CARTER BLINKED RAPIDLY several times as he stumbled out into the pale morning light in this place that he loved. A loyal Egyptian
worker, hoping to revive his boss, immediately handed him water and a cigarette.
As Carter took a greedy swallow, another local man slipped a long, double-breasted overcoat around Carter’s shoulders. This
might have given the young Englishman an air of casual elegance were it not for the fact that onlookers swore he looked like
a ghost.