The Murder of King Tut Read online

  “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.

  Chapter 21

  Valley of the Kings

  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!”

  Chapter 22

  Valley of the Kings

  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.

  Chapter 23

  Valley of the Kings

  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 ba
ck 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?

  Chapter 24

  Valley of the Kings

  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.

  Chapter 25

  Valley of the Kings

  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.

  He was, in truth, thoroughly exhausted, having spent most of the night sleeping outside on the hard ground.

  At 4:00 a.m. he left a pair of men to stand guard, then went inside to prepare for the great unveiling-draping electric lights, placing beams over the deep wells, hanging rope ladders and handrails, and constructing wooden walkways so his eighteen guests wouldn’t destroy fragile archaeological items.

  Howard Carter had finally found his tomb.

  Tuthmosis IV was the eighth monarch of Egypt ’s Eighteenth Dynasty. He reigned from 1401 to 1391 BC and was the father of Amenhotep the Magnificent and the grandfather of Akhenaten. His body was sealed inside a stupendous tomb in the southeast corner of the Valley of the Kings. Elaborate pains had obviously been taken to hide the burial site, including a location several hundred yards away from any other dead pharaoh.

  Tuthmosis IV had deliberately chosen the most desolate, distant spot possible. Not only did he wish to be buried for all eternity, but he also wanted to stay hidden.

  Nevertheless, seventy-nine years after his death, tomb robbers found him.

  On January 17, 1903, so did Howard Carter.

  Tuthmosis IV was KV 43.

  This was the first great find of Carter’s career.

  He’d had to wait two weeks for his patron, Theodore Davis, to return from a boat trip upriver to Aswan. Now Carter would lead yet another tour, only this time it would be to a tomb that he had discovered.

  Davis had purchased an exclusive valley concession in 1902 and immediately hired Carter to lead the excavation. That first season had been inconclusive, with Carter discovering only the tomb of a minor noble and a box containing two leather loincloths.

  For the 1903 season, Carter chose to excavate a small, forgotten valley within the valley. In days his men had uncovered a tomb entrance, complete with small vessels embedded in the rock, which the Egyptians believed held magical powers.

  He led the large group into that opening now.

  The path descended quickly. One heavyset functionary had comical difficulty wriggling through a particularly narrow passage into the deeper reaches of the tomb, and Carter had to pull him through. By now Carter was working mostly on adrenaline, proud of his discovery even as he delivered a clipped monologue about the tomb’s contents: the war chariot, the sarcophagus, the mass of beautiful debris strewn about the burial chamber-no doubt by the tomb robbers.

  The air was rank, and
Carter would have to bring in fans and run lines of air from the outside as the excavation continued. But for now it was plenty good enough. As he escorted the satisfied group back up the steep passage to the main entrance, Carter’s workday was done. He felt a little like a god himself.

  Tea and a lunch awaited, served atop white tablecloths. The group, clearly awed by what they’d just seen, celebrated Carter and Davis as they dined.

  Carter deflected the praise onto his egomaniacal boss, who was beginning to see himself not just as a benefactor but as an Egyptologist in his own right. There were plenty of accolades to go around, and everyone proclaimed what a successful dig season this was going to be.

  “All praise goes to Mr. Davis!” said Howard Carter, believing not a word of it.

  All praise goes to me, and perhaps to Tuthmosis IV, he thought.

  Chapter 26

  Valley of the Kings

  February 12, 1904

  CARTER COULD BARELY BREATHE, and poor Percy Newberry was about to pass out from the bad air, but their goal was within reach, and they soldiered onward into the most recently discovered burial chamber.

  The subtext of this great moment was that Howard Carter had done it again. It was almost unbelievable, but just a few weeks after finding the tomb of Tuthmosis IV, he’d unearthed another tomb on the same side of the valley. Inside was a mummy in a coffin.

  The dead man’s identity was unknown thus far, but Carter had made an amazing find. Not long before, he had come across evidence of Hatshepsut’s burial place. The female pharaoh’s temple on the other side of the mountain was perfectly aligned with this latest tomb. To Carter’s way of thinking, it was possible, even likely, that a tunnel connected them.

  “I do not hope for an untouched tomb,” he had written Edouard Naville, alluding to every Egyptologist’s prayer of finding a virgin burial chamber. “Rainwater will be a great enemy, but hope for the best.”