Shining the light around the walls, I see cracks or maybe the outlines of a door. I squat down and shine my torch along the floor. Underneath the bed, I see a rectangular opening, roughly the size of Papa’s Napoleonic desktop. “There.” I point.
Lying on my belly, I slide underneath the elaborate, patterned bed. “Be careful, Eve,” Papa warns. But I ignore him and crawl until I reach the aperture and stick my torch inside it.
“Can you see anything?” Howard calls over to me.
“Yes, there’s furniture, wooden crates, some alabaster statues and vessels. Similar items as in the main chamber but even more disorganized. As if someone ransacked the place and left things dispersed around the room.”
“More tomb robbers there as well,” Howard remarks. “Is there a sarcophagus?”
“Not that I can see,” I answer, as I slide out from under the bed. “And I think I’d see an enormous pharaonic sarcophagus if there was one in there.”
Placing my torch down, I brush off my clothes and face. I then push myself to standing. “There must be another chamber,” I announce.
“But where?” Papa asks. “There aren’t any other openings. Unless they are midwall and behind one of these stacks. But we cannot move the items right now. It would draw the attention of the authorities.”
My eyes are drawn to two life-size black-and-gold statues along the wall. These figures, wearing thenemesof the pharaoh and brandishing sticks, serve as vessels into which Tutankhamun’s ka—or life force—could pour in the afterlife. Never mind the pharaonic accoutrements, the imposing statutes, standing alone on the wall away from the piles, look like guardians to me. I begin to wonder, what are they guarding?
Slowly, I approach the statues. Shining my torch along the wall at their back, I peer behind them. There, I notice a series of seals. WhenI follow along the length of seals to the tomb floor, I see a heap of baskets behind which is a pile of loose plaster at the juncture of the wall and floor. I kneel in front of it, and remove a few pieces. Another opening emerges.
“I think the statues are guarding Tutankhamun’s tomb,” I tell Howard and Papa.
They crowd around me, studying the wall and floor as I’d just done. I begin to clear away the plaster pieces until the outline of another rectangular hole appears. “I knew this plaster was hiding an opening,” I exclaim.
“Excellent work, Eve,” Papa says. “But this hole is even tinier than the other.”
“I think I’m small enough to crawl inside.”
“That’s not safe, Eve. The ceiling or walls could be unstable and you could get trapped or injured,” Howard declares.
At the same time, Papa lets out an emphatic, “No. Not like last time.”
I pretend I haven’t heard them, and lie flat on the ground again. Using my elbows as leverage to pull me along, I slither into the breach. When half of my body is wedged into the hole, I feel a hand on my ankle. “Lady Evelyn, stop. Debris is beginning to trickle out of the ceiling above the hole,” Howard warns me.
Retreat is not an option. I’ve come too far, and we’ve broken too many rules. Soon, word will get out, and this site will be inundated with workers and tourists and archaeologists and governmental officials. The chance to make the actual discovery—to be thefirst—will never come again. And the fragile hope that this discovery may one day lead to the discovery of Hatshepsut will slip away.
I pull the rest of my body through the opening into the chamber. Then I switch on my torch. At first, I see the outline of an enormous dark statue of the god Anubis in the far corner. But then, as I shine my torch around the space, I am illuminated by golden light, reflecting from my torch off a golden object. It is a gilded shrine, which I’m hoping holds the sarcophagus of Tutankhamun.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
FEBRUARY 16, 1923
LUXOR,EGYPT
The following days fly by in a blur. A formal opening of the tomb with the Allenbys, the governor, Egyptian ministers, and other archaeologists, where we pretend surprise at the contents of the antechamber. The installation of the local police for the crowds that begin to form on the periphery of the site. The flood of reporters at the Winter Palace and in the Valley of the Kings, angling for stories, which Papa has tried to control by arranging an exclusive with theTimesfor which he gets paid. The selection of guards to patrol the tomb exterior day and night. A trip to London for supplies and experts’ advice about artifact preservation, during which Papa and I are hounded by journalists. An hour-long audience with King George V and Queen Mary in the Yellow Drawing Room at Buckingham Palace. A festive holiday at Highclere with an intimate exchange of gifts with Brograve along with the finalization of plans for Luxor, much changed now that we’ve found Tutankhamun. A heroes’ welcome on our return to Egypt.
Only the excavation itself grounds me. The hours inside the narrow, fragile antechamber—as Howard and I call it between ourselves, as no one else knows about the other chambers yet—bring me back to my passion and my purpose. I lose myself as we undertake the methodical mapping and scale drawing of the chamber, catalogue and remove the contents, and assist Harry Burton—who we borrow from the Metropolitan Museum team at the temple—in photographing the items. Occasionally, I must suppress the nagging thought thatall this attention should be bestowed upon an important figure like Hatshepsut and not a largely insignificant boy pharaoh like Tutankhamun. I focus instead on the gifts this discovery can bestow, funding for another excavation and a place for me at the site.
There will be time enough, I tell myself over and over,to find Hatshepsut afterward.Do I really believe this, or am I trying to convince myself?
I say the words again as I step through the crowd gathered outside the Winter Palace, the unofficial headquarters for the Tutankhamun fanatics of both the journalistic and voyeur type. Thousands of tourists and newspapermen have descended upon Luxor. All the hotels are full, and some have even set up courtyard tents to house the overflow. The demand for communication has increased multifold such that three additional telegraph lines have been run to the city, and a local hospital has been converted into a telegraph office.
Even those who cannot afford the luxurious accommodations of the Winter Palace find ways to camp out in the lobby, sometimes in the form of endless cups of tea or a slow-sipped aperitif. So many onlookers crowd the hotel, pestering the staff for information about the excavation, that the manager has installed a board in the lobby where he posts regular updates about the site. And at night, revelers flood the hotel’s Tutmania dance parties, where Tut-themed cocktails are served.
The faces of Papa and Howard have become known to the masses, particularly to the members of the press. But I am still largely unknown, and since Papa is busy with some officials this afternoon, I manage to slip inside the lobby without turning a single head. No one would suspect that a tiny, twenty-one-year-old woman had anything significant to do with the excavation, in any event. If any of the reporters other than theTimesjournalists to whom Papa had sold exclusive rights to cover Tutankhamun’s discovery understood who I am, I’d be swarmed by press desperate for any scrap of a story. The Egyptian newsmen who’ve been cut out of the biggest front page news in their country for millennia are particularly tenacious. But their plight, I understand. Neither Howard nor I is pleased with Papa’s decision, and the Egyptian authorities are furious.
Crossing the lobby toward the stairs, I dream about a long soak while reviewing my notes on the artifacts we catalogued today: two intricately carved chairs covered in gold leaf and inlaid with lapis lazuli. As I reach for the wrought-iron handrail, I see a familiar face on the bottom step with a wide, welcoming grin.
“Brograve! What a wonderful surprise! I didn’t expect you for weeks!” I cry out, delighted to see him. He looks handsome in the wide-brimmed straw hat and the colonial-weight campaign jacket from Poole’s I’d given him for Christmas. We’d spent an exciting holiday mapping out his trip here, and I think we both assumed we’d make firm plans for the future after the excavation season ended.
