Suddenly he winced, roused from his reverie by a sharp pain. He raised a finger, and angled the mirror again to inspect a cut to his face. It was the same, he realised, that he had suffered several weeks before, when he had fallen unconscious in the tomb of Tut-ankh-Amen. The scar had never properly healed - and now, once again, he had opened it up.
A drop of blood splashed on to the porcelain of the basin. Lord Carnarvon turned on the tap and the water, as he swirled it, was stained a pinkish red, before it emptied and drained away.
He was brought back in a cab, muttering strangely and making no sense. Lady Evelyn, who had already been warned of his relapse, was waiting for him on the hotel steps. ‘Oh, Pups,’ she whispered as he was helped out from the cab. She took his arm and guided him up the steps. ‘What were you thinking of, you silly man?’
Lord Carnarvon gazed at his daughter as though startled to observe her. ‘The mosque,’ he whispered. ‘Went to see the mosque.’
‘Mosque?’
‘To see if it was true.’
Lady Evelyn paused, as she looked at the swollen glands on his neck. ‘I should never have allowed you to come to Cairo,’ she said at last, ‘not while I knew that you were feeling so seedy.’
‘Eve.’ He clutched at her suddenly, as though to stop himself from tumbling back down the steps.
‘Yes, Pups?’
‘There was no one there.’
‘Where?’
‘In the mosque. In the summit of the minaret.’ Lady Evelyn shrugged. ‘I do not see why there would have been.’
‘But do you not see?’ he whispered. ‘How can I know now if any of it were true?’
‘Please, Pups . . .’
‘No . . .’ He reached up with his hand to touch his swollen glands. ‘How can I be certain . . . what this is . . . what it means?’
‘Pups.’ Lady Evelyn reached up to kiss her father on his cheek. Feeling how his skin was burning hot, she took care not to display her concern or her shock. ‘There is no cause for worry’ she whispered, ‘but only so long as you do what your doctors say. You know, if you do not, that you will grow ever more rotten -- and where, dearest Pups, is the mystery in that?’
She squeezed his arm, then continued to lead him up the steps towards the lobby. He swallowed and attempted to add something more, but his words, as he babbled them, no longer made sense.
Carter tore open the telegram as soon as it was delivered. He read it greedily, then cursed, and his face grew blank.
‘Bad news?’ asked his colleague as casually as he could. ‘Nothing serious, I hope?’
Carter stood in silence a moment more, then unfolded the sheet of paper again. ‘It is from Lady Evelyn,’ he muttered, handing it across. ‘Lord Carnarvon is sick, and she is very alarmed. I must leave for Cairo at once.’
‘Dear, oh dear. Bit of a nuisance, you having to go just when we were really getting ahead with our work. Let’s hope the old man gets well soon.’
‘Yes.’ Carter nodded slowly. He gazed about him at the empty antechamber, then through the gap in the wall to the golden shrine beyond. ‘I had been hoping to be able to take him some good news.’
‘Oh?’
Carter stroked his moustache. ‘Been hoping to find some papyri, don’t you know? Records, personal writings, stuff of that kind. But it seems certain now there’s nothing. Not a single scrap.’
His colleague laughed. ‘Dammit, Carter, but you’re greedy. Isn’t what you have found enough to keep you going?’
‘To keep me going, yes. But it is still not enough.’
‘What did you want, then?’
‘Oh, to know what really happened. To find the truth -- to understand.’
Carter’s colleague paused a moment, then shrugged. ‘It all happened so horribly long ago.’
‘Yes. And there is the problem. I had thought, if I made this discovery, if I brought the artefacts to light, then the . . . I don’t know . . . the . . . the inner life of the Ancients might be brought to life as well. That sounds foolish, I suppose. But then, after all, what has always been my inspiration? Why, the idea that they lived and thought and felt like us. But we don’t know that. In fact, we can’t be sure at all. Standing here, even in this tomb - what do we know? So little. So little. We are utterly removed.’
His colleague clapped him on the back. ‘Come on, old man, don’t you realise this find has made you more famous than any archaeologist who’s lived? It won’t do at all for you to show yourself so glum.’
‘No,’ Carter sighed. ‘And yet I cannot help it.’ He glanced round again at the shrine of the King, sweeping his torch across the gap in the wall. ‘The mystery still eludes us. The shadows move, but the dark is never quite dispersed.’
He lapsed into silence and bowed his head, then glanced down at the telegram crumpled in his hand. He smoothed it out and read it through again. ‘I had better be heading off for Cairo immediately’
His colleague nodded. ‘Let’s hope the old man gets well soon.’
‘Let us hope so indeed,’ Carter smiled grimly. ‘Or we will be hearing all sorts of nonsense about how this tomb has brought bad luck.’
In Cairo, in the Continental Hotel, a sick man, early in the morning, breathed his last.
At the same moment, across the city, all the lights flickered and then at once went out. A darkness veiled Cairo, as heavy as that of an unopened tomb.
At the same moment, in the Valley of the Kings, a guard by the tomb of Tut-ankh-Amen was disturbed. In the rocks above his head he heard a sudden noise, and as he rose from his chair he saw a scattering of dust, descending in a rivulet of dislodged pebbles. When he went, however, to investigate the cause, he could find nothing, nor hear anything save a gusting of the wind.
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
The historical record
AKH-EN-ATEN: The son of Amen-hetep III, after whom he was originally named, he reigned alongside his father for a number of years, although there are some historians who dispute whether there was in fact a co-regency at all. In the fifth year of his exclusive reign he changed his name and ordered the construction of a new capital in Middle Egypt, on the site now known as El-Amarna. It was from this city that he promulgated the exclusive worship of the sun disk, the ‘Aten’, a policy which resulted in unparalleled cultural and economic turbulence throughout Egypt and her empire. After Akh-en-Aten’s death, his name was excised from every public monument, so that all memory of him and his revolution was lost. Only the excavations of the nineteenth century revealed that he had ever been.
Inevitably there remain massive gaps in the historical record, and accounts of his character and reign vary wildly. Modern historians have tended not to be charitable in their interpretations; for Flinders Petrie, however, Akh-en-Aten stood out as indisputably ‘the most original thinker that ever lived in Egypt, and one of the great idealists of the world’.
AMEN-HETEP III: Titled ‘The Magnificent’ by subsequent generations, his long reign marked the apogee of Egypt’s opulence and wealth. Judging by reliefs from the end of his reign, he suffered from appalling obesity.
AY: Although the relationship has not been absolutely proved, he was most probably the brother of Queen Tyi, and therefore the uncle of Akh-en-Aten. Under the reign of Tut-ankh-Amen he rose to the position of Vizier, and is portrayed on the wall of his great-nephew’s tomb administering the final rites to the dead king’s mummy. Ay was by then ruling as Pharaoh himself, but he was an old man and his reign was short. He was succeeded in turn by Horem-heb, a general in the army who was unrelated to the royal house. It was during Horem-heb’s reign that the names of Akh-en-Aten, Smenkh-ka-Re, Tut-ankh-Amen and Ay were all excised from the royal records.
GEORGE HERBERT, 5TH EARL OF CARNARVON: Enormously rich as a result of both his inheritance and his marriage into the Rothschild family, he was a keen sportsman whose twin obsessions were horses and automobiles. Almost crippled in a motoring accident in Germany in 1901, he took to visiting Egypt for the purposes of recuperation, and it was while there that his fascination with archaeology grew. Having been introduced to Howard Carter by Gaston Maspero, the head of the
Service des Antiquites,
he proceeded to fund Carter’s excavations for fifteen years, finally being rewarded with the discovery of Tut-ankh-Amen’s tomb. He died some months after its opening, most probably of a shaving cut which had grown infected.
HOWARD CARTER: ‘The great Egyptologist’, as he was described in his obituary in
The Times,
his discovery of Tut-ankh-Amen’s tomb was the most extraordinary achievement in the history of archaeology. Carter had never had any formal training, however, and his great find was the culmination of many years’ hard work.
First sent to Egypt at the age of seventeen, he worked as a draughtsman upon the tombs of Beni Hasan and the ruins of El-Amarna, and then the funerary temple of Queen Hat-shep-shut at Thebes. In 1899 he was appointed the Inspector General of Upper Egypt, in which capacity he cleared many tombs and installed the first electric lights in the Valley of the Kings. In 1903 he resigned from his post, following a dispute with French tourists at Saqqara, and subsisted for the next four years as an antiquities dealer and occasional guide. It was only his meeting with Lord Carnarvon which rescued him from penury, and enabled him to continue his archaeological excavations.
Following the discovery of Tut-ankh-Amen’s tomb, he was to devote the remaining years of his life to analysing its contents, and squabbling with the Egyptian authorities. He never married. He died in 1939.
THEODORE DAVIS: A rich and elderly American lawyer, whose excavations in the Valley of the Kings resulted in the discovery or clearance of over twenty tombs. His reports on the tombs are marked chiefly by their errors and omissions. He finished his excavations in 1914, commenting, ‘I fear the Valley of the Tombs is now exhausted.’ He died some months afterwards.
AHMED GIRIGAR: Carter’s long-serving foreman, he supervised the work in the Valley of the Kings both before and after the discovery of Tut-ankh-Amen’s tomb.
BI-AMR ALLAH AL-HAKIM: Infamous in Egyptian history as ‘the Muslim Caligula’, al-Hakim was the son of the Caliph al-Aziz, and is represented in histories of the period as having been almost fabulously psychotic and sacrilegious. It has generally been assumed that he was slain by one of his many enemies -- possibly even, it has been claimed, by the Princess Sitt al-Mulq herself, whom he had supposedly wished to marry. In Coptic legend, however, it is said that he was visited on the Mukattam Hills by a vision of Christ, after which he retired to a monastery, while to the Druze he is a messiah, and to the Ismailis a saint. The Ismailis, indeed, have recently restored his crumbling mosque, so that of its former aura of evil and decay nothing now remains.
LADY EVELYN HERBERT: Lord Carnarvon’s daughter, she was his constant companion upon his Egyptological adventures, and tended him on his death bed. It was also claimed that she was ‘very thick’ with Carter. She married and became Lady Beauchamp in 1923.
INEN: The brother of Queen Tyi, he held the official position of ‘Second of the Four Prophets of Amen’. The details of his career are otherwise obscure.
KIYA: Secondary Queen of Akh-en-Aten, she is titled in inscriptions as ‘The Royal Favourite Kiya’. She appears to have had a prominence at Court that contradicted her ostensibly junior status, and it is evident that she must have been much loved by Akh-en-Aten himself.
MASOUD: The fabled Nubian manservant of the Caliph al-Hakim. His appetite for sodomy was feared by every corrupt shopkeeper in Cairo.
NEFER-TITI: The Great Queen of Akh-en-Aten, her parentage and origins remain obscure. Even more than Queen Tyi, she appears to have wielded unusual power, and is regularly portrayed as the equal of her husband, officiating alongside him in religious ceremonies, and sometimes even smiting foreign enemies. Her ultimate fate is uncertain, and her tomb, if it exists, has never been found.
PERCY E. NEWBERRY: Leader of the Egypt Exploration Fund expedition to record the tombs at Beni Hasan (1891-2). Despite his disappointment at not discovering Akh-en-Aten’s tomb, and his feud with Blackden and Fraser, he did not abandon his chosen career, instead becoming Professor of Egyptology at the University of Liverpool. In the years following the discovery of Tut-ankh-Amen’s tomb, he grew to be one of Carter’s closest friends and supporters.
WILLIAM FLINDERS PETRIE: The founder of professional Egyptology, his techniques of excavation were far in advance of those of his contemporaries, concentrating as they did on the preservation of every fragment of evidence. His report on his work at El-Amarna, published in 1894, is a classic of archaeological scholarship.
SITT AL-MULQ: Sister of the Caliph al-Hakim - and the reputed object of his incestuous desires -- she appears to have been almost as intimidating a figure as her brother. After his death, she reigned as Regent for four years, ruling with a savage efficiency, until she too mysteriously disappeared.
SMENKH-KA-RE: A shadowy and ephemeral figure, even by the standards of the Amarna period, it has even been suggested that he may have been Nefer-titi, reigning as Pharaoh under a pseudonym. More probably, however, he was the elder son of Akh-en-Aten, ascending the throne after his father’s death, but dying himself almost immediately.
For the controversy surrounding his probable burial place, see Author’s Note below.
THOTH-MES IV: The father of Amen-hetep III. I have not invented his belief in the value of dreams. A stele found at Giza records how the Great Sphinx had appeared to the sleeping prince and promised him the throne if he would only clear the Sphinx’s body of sand. Thoth-mes did as he had been requested, and duly became Pharaoh.
His tomb was discovered by Howard Carter in 1903.
THUA: Wife of Yuya, their joint tomb was discovered by Theodore Davis in 1905. The evidence for Thua’s Nubian origins is exceedingly circumstantial.
TIYA: Wife of Ay and High Priestess of Isis, she appears to have been related to the Royal House.
TUT-ANKH-AMEN: Most probably the son of Akh-en-Aten and Kiya, he ascended the throne when he was only a child, reigning for some nine or ten years before his death of an uncertain cause.