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Carter greeted them both eagerly, handing Evelyn a bouquet of white flowers. Next, the three would mount donkeys for the six-mile ride to the Valley of the Kings.
The path would take them through the lush green fields outside Luxor. They would then cross the Nile by ferry and continue down the dusty dirt path to the valley.
But even though Lady Evelyn was her usual radiant self, Lord Carnarvon was weak and tired. He needed rest.
The opening of the tomb would have to wait one more day.
A disappointed Howard Carter led his guests to his home, where he would spend yet another sleepless night.
Chapter 76
Valley of the Kings
November 24, 1922
THE FOLLOWING DAY, Carter, along with Lord Carnarvon and Lady Evelyn, arrived at the site. For Carter this had been a thirty-year wait, but even for the Carnarvons the suspense must have been great.
The heavy boulders were rolled away from the tomb. Then Carter’s men began clearing the steps.
One group dug away the bits of debris while another swept the steps clean. But this was not as simple as shoveling sand out of a hole, for as they dug deeper and deeper, ancient artifacts mixed with the soil.
Lady Evelyn was beside herself about the historical significance of it all, lovingly studying each new pottery shard or amulet-scarabs, they were called-that turned up in the mountain of dirt.
But Carter’s spirits soon plummeted. In his mind these bits of rubble confirmed that he had found not a tomb but a royal trash heap. “The balance of evidence would seem to indicate a cache rather than a tomb,” he admitted dourly, “a miscellaneous collection of objects of the Eighteenth Dynasty kings.”
The shards were stamped with the names of kings he knew well: Amenhotep the Magnificent, Akhenaten, Tuthmosis. Less than pleased with what he was seeing, Carter passed the day looking down from the top step, thinking this might be the end of his career-and an ignominious final chapter at that.
When he was not having such thoughts, he was bent to the ground sifting through whatever new shovelful of dirt the workers had exhumed, now and then admonishing them to be careful. His mood blackened further.
Finally, “by the afternoon of the 24th the whole staircase was clear, sixteen steps in all, and we were able to make inspection of the sealed doorway,” he wrote.
He was terribly disappointed by what he saw.
“The tomb was not absolutely intact, as we had hoped,” he wrote.
Someone had been there before Carter.
Chapter 77
Valley of the Kings
November 24, 1922
WITH THE DOOR now fully exposed to sunlight and air, there was clear evidence that the plaster seals had been tampered with. A party of tomb robbers-perhaps two-had actually entered the tomb, then had taken the time to reseal the door when they had finished ransacking it.
Carter’s mind raced in all the wrong directions. Would the break-in have happened in modern times? Impossible. The workmen’s huts and loose soil above the bedrock predated the tomb to the time of Rameses VI, at the very least. This meant that whoever rifled through the tomb had done it in a two-hundred-year window between the reigns of Akhenaten and Rameses.
There was one thing that gave Carter hope: the seal of Tutankhamen was stamped on the doorway.
This led to more questions: Was the seal evidence that this mysterious king, about whom so little was known, was buried inside? Or was it merely an indication that he had been present or in power when the remains or belongings of others had been relocated to this site? After all, the same seals had been found on the tomb that Davis had once claimed belonged to Tut.
As the light faded and work stopped for the day, the symbol taunted him. Carter’s mind kept going back to the same question: Tut?
If so, this could be the greatest discovery of modern time.
In the morning Carter would get an answer. At dawn, he pla
Chapter 78
Valley of the Kings
November 25, 1922
IT WAS TIME. Well, almost time. Before the door could be destroyed, the royal seals had to be photographed for the historical record.
This singular honor fell to Lord Carnarvon, president of his local camera club back home in England. The earl now stood at the bottom of the narrow stairwell in the pale dawn light, fussing over shutter speeds and apertures.
He was calm and cool as he went about his work-a very professional and dedicated amateur. The last thing Lord Carnarvon wanted to do was make a mistake that would lead to bad photos-or, worse, no photos at all.
Carter, on the other hand, was beside himself with anxiety. Complicating matters, a much-loathed bureaucrat from the Antiquities Service had arrived to oversee the entry. Rex Engelbach, nicknamed “Trout” by Carter and Carnarvon for his sallow demeanor, was firm in stating that his job title gave him the right to be the first person to enter the tomb.
Carter had never liked Engelbach, with his high-handed arrogance and lack of Egyptology credentials, but on this morning Carter refused to let Engelbach bother him. After a career defined by hard work and failure, Carter was finally about to enter the tomb of Tut. This was no time to be arguing with civil servants. But there was no way that Engelbach was getting into that tomb first. No way in hell.
Carter descended the steps with his sketchbook to draw each of the seals and impressions. These would serve as a backup for Carnarvon’s photos, and now the two friends worked side by side at the base of the cramped stairwell.
Carter’s sketches were precise in scale and detail. No aspect of the designs went unrecorded.
Only at midmorning, when he had completed the drawings, did Carter trot back up the stairway with Lord Carnarvon.
It was time.
Carter ordered his workmen to demolish the door.
“On the morning of the 25th,” wrote Carter, “we removed the actual blocking of the door; consisting of rough stones carefully built from floor to lintel, and heavily plastered on their outer faces to make the seal impressions.”
The crowd gathered atop the steps strained to see what was on the other side. Shadows and debris made it impossible to tell.
Carter walked down the steps to have a look. He found himself peering into a long narrow hallway. The smooth floor sloped down into the earth, a descending corridor.
Top to bottom, Carter wrote, the hallway “was filled completely with stone and rubble, probably the chip from its own excavation. This filling, like the doorway, showed distinct signs of more than one opening and re-closing of the tomb, the untouched part consisting of clean white chip mingled with dust; whereas the disturbed part was mainly of dark flint.”
How far into the ground the hallway led, it was impossible to know. But one thing was certain: someone else had been there.
“An irregular corner had been cut through the original filling at the upper corner on the left side,” noted Carter. Someone had burrowed through there long ago searching for whatever lay on the other side.
Carnarvon snapped a photograph of the rubble pile. Then a weary Carter gave the order for his men to clear it away, chips and dust and all. Sooner or later the tu
With any luck, the tomb robbers hadn’t taken everything.