The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [131]
He is a brave boy, a proud example of the modern Egyptian, fast to understand. I have him begin hammering boards together and plastering them a uniform white to make a better screen for the tomb’s opening.
In the meantime, I reenter my tomb and reorient myself to the work left to be done in this vast and extraordinary space, which maps for now as
(FIG. F: THE FIRST SIX CHAMBERS, 29 NOVEMBER, 1922)
Plainly, the treasures to date are not so much material as historical, the clues that we are on the right track, tauntingly leading us to the more palpable findings, which are soon to appear and soon to outdazzle by a wide margin this season’s other finds. As an example of the historical prizes I mean, the unmistakable bloody footprints all over the Chamber of the Injured Workman should be noted briefly, as they are quite unique in the history of Egyptology. The likely explanation—and one readily admits that it is for now merely a hypothesis—is that a workman was injured, perhaps closing and sealing Door B.
I mallet in wedges and chisel away at the outline of the Great Portal. I begin trying to fit a crowbar in the spaces, but it is absurd to think that the boy and I can do this by ourselves. I could wait until Lord Carnarvon’s decision opens this and any number of other doors for me. I could hope that Margaret will finally exert herself to tease her father and his flunkies back into line. I could go ask my barber to lend some muscle. Carter shoved through his tomb very fast, and if hammering is the method down there, I can hardly be expected to preserve every blank rock stuck in my path. What might be behind Door C? I keep asking myself. Yet more definitive proof of Atum-hadu, as well as, at last, the treasury? How close I am and how abandoned, how completely left to my own wits.
I have much work to do at the site, and time is running out, if CCF’s will has withered as badly as I fear. But Carter’s site is magnetic, and I do not wish to offend the old-timer by skipping his big moment with the crowds and Press today, so at noon I order Amr to finish his carpentry and stand guard until later this afternoon, while I set off on his donkey to the Valley and Howard Carter’s celebration in the sands.
Margaret: My darling. I am sitting above the Valley of the Kings, about to attend a luncheon and the official opening of one of my colleague’s tombs. I am in a fix here, your father’s stubbornness having glued my hands together. I am reassured at least to know that there is no stronger solvent than your love. I know you are, even as I write this, pushing your father back to the correct path.
My love, it is a bit later now and I have returned to this same secluded spot to jot down my thoughts of what I just saw, before I head back to Deir el Bahari and my own pressing work, though I do move slowly on my injury. It is worth noting these events simply to show you, one day, when all of this is cleared up, the sort of people that so confused your father’s loyalty and judgement. Nothing! There is nothing in this find of Carter’s that should give a man even a minute’s envy or confusion. Your father’s bumbling is positively comical now that I have seen the “splendour” of Tut-ankh-Amen.
Besides Merton of the Times and other journalists grubbing for a free luncheon, there was Carter, the Earl and his daughter, a passel of pashas, Lady Allenby, Engelbach from Antiquities, the Commandant of the local police, Effendi the Antiquities Inspector for Luxor, and a veritable Burke’s of English fops and