The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [106]
Journal: It is a new Ahmed today, smiles and bowing, and the men follow his lead. Most gratifying. They arrived at dawn, cables sent and cats fed, and with an impressive train of new gear, though before this adventure is done I will have to go to Cairo myself for some of the more critical scientific equipment. Also, tonight I must send him for mosquito netting if I am to sleep outdoors again—my arms resemble one of my father’s relief maps of the Himalayas.
We began at once, driving wedges under the door, digging as we went along its top and sides. The work is painstaking, and by lunch we have dug a space around the door’s perimeter about a foot deep but still have not loosened it. We have concluded our only choice is to run ropes behind and around it and then with all twelve of our arms control its descent onto its outside face, onto padding to protect any microscopic inscriptions invisible to my lenses, on top of rollers we can tie directly to the donkeys’ harnesses. Back to it.
5.00—I am now able to discern a seam where the top surface of the door abuts something, probably the ceiling enclosing the space behind the door. I am able to place the first wedges into this seam, hammering bars into the slim resulting space, and gently prying the block of the door away from its frame until one of the first wedges falls out of view, behind the seam, and we all hold our breath as we hear it click against stone. We are nearly there. I insert a testing rod into the space where the wedge fell (a space we would already be in, curse the Metropolitan Museum of New York, if we had enough men and were not forced to lurk in the shadows like criminals). I perform a candle test to assure no poisonous gases leak from the crevice. There is not enough space to see into or to insert a torch so, eager as I am for a look, I call a break for the men to rest. They chew jujubes, say nothing, grin at me whenever they catch my eye.
7.30—An hour of backbreaking pulling before the first motion of the door is achieved and I am able to lower a small candle inside the tomb and press my eye to the space. At first my vision cannot adjust to the dark, to the haloed, wick-speared cone of the light, unstirred by any moving air, nor can I yet see what I hope to see (shadows, winking metals), and for a long moment for all of us, there is only breathless anticipation. “What do you see, curse you?” mutters Ahmed in English. “Immortality!” I say (change the epigraph from Abdullah to Ahmed, though the bugger hardly deserves his name mentioned at all).
Finally, a space clarifies itself, walls of a dusty white, a section of a similar floor, but little else. By nightfall we have succeeded only in clearing the door far enough from its frame that we will be able tomorrow, with fresh muscles and a night’s sleep, to succeed in lowering it. I authorise Ahmed to return with extra hands and I send the men home.
Monday, 13 November, 1922
11.00 A.M.—Ahmed, late but with six men today, arrived at 8.30. Paid five salaries to date, and the two new men for today only. We have just now lowered the door onto its padded transport, crushing flat the transport cylinders almost at once. It must weigh, we agree, nearly 2000 pounds, and the men strained to lower it safely, and the two new men hobbled off doubled over, clutching their backs, but the job is done and I was immediately down a single step and into my chamber with an electric torch. The air—hot, thick, immobile for 3500 years—was delicious. The door had stood at the centre of one wall of a square chamber, approximately fifteen feet to a side, perhaps seven feet tall. Every surface was a uniform, smooth, yellow-white stone. Of objects, wall decoration, statuary, footprints, guardian gods, wall inscriptions, a later inventory will perhaps be able to reveal what I have been unable to see so far, alone and with my one torch. But I would say, tentatively, that of these, for the time being,