‘Curious, that famous telegram of Carter’s,’ Dr Fong said.
He settled himself in his chair on my Highgate terrace and surreptitiously switched on his tape recorder. I poured him a cup of Gunpowder tea and kept my eyes on the graves of Highgate Cemetery below my back garden walls: that long, long view over a wilderness of ivy and brambles, over crucifixes, obelisks and angels. A party of volunteers was clearing the undergrowth in this, the oldest, most neglected section of the burial ground. Their shouts as they uncovered another overgrown monument interspersed with the whine of their chainsaw.
A hot afternoon in May: I had recently returned from my stay in the country with Rose; Dr Fong, driven out of Egypt by temperatures that made filming impossible, had just left Luxor. This meeting was the first we’d had since his return. I wasn’t sure why he had pressed for it, or why I’d agreed. Perhaps I welcomed company: since leaving Rose’s house, my days had been solitary.
The first two episodes of Dr Fong’s Tutankhamun documentary were complete, the remaining two would be filmed the following autumn, he said, and the programmes would be ready for transmission by next January. But filming had disagreed with him: the technical wizardry took days to set up, the helicopter shots used up half the budget, the script kept altering and the producers had decided too many scholars were involved. ‘Too many “talking heads”,’ Fong explained in an irritable tone. ‘First they wanted to cut half the interviews, then they had a panic attack and said we needed drama . . . Intercut scenes from the life and death of King Tut. Costumes. Actors, God help us. Tut’s mourning sister-widow, villainous viziers.’
That insurrection had been successfully put down, but the political infighting of prime-time television had taken its toll. Dr Fong was looking tired and dispirited; there’d been a noticeable ebbing of confidence; his former youthful bounce was gone. He’d been ill while in Egypt, he’d told me: one of those feverish Valley colds, the ones that could fell you for weeks. I wondered whether these factors explained the change in him; not entirely, perhaps. I noted that his wedding ring had disappeared, though he said nothing of its absence and neither, of course, did I. Fong’s manner was chastened, less impatient than it had been; he’d greeted me with surprising warmth and a kindly concern: ‘You’ve lost weight since I last saw you, Miss Payne,’ he’d said gently. ‘You’re looking exhausted, you know. You haven’t been ill, have you?’
I brushed these enquiries aside. I’d endured similar cross-questioning from Rose, who was urging me to see some Harley Street specialist she favoured; under pressure, I’d made an appointment to see this man. A waste of time: even top consultants can’t provide a cure for age. I was able to give Dr Fong the same answer I’d given Rose: I’d been sleeping badly, that was all. I blamed the months spent poring over letters and journals, re-exploring my past . . . A trivial complaint, I told him crisply: nothing that the latest sleeping pills couldn’t cure.
Having made that remark about Howard Carter’s famous telegram to Lord Carnarvon, Fong lapsed into silence. He seemed unwilling to pursue that subject, but sat frowning at the cemetery below. The scent of the wisteria on my house walls honeyed the air and a faint breeze riffled the pages of his notebook. ‘To tell you the truth, Miss Payne,’ he said suddenly, ‘I found it kind of dislocating, being back there, in the actual places where it all happened – the Valley, the American House . . . I had hoped a friend would be there with me, but in the end he couldn’t make it, so I was on my own a lot. I had time to kill while the crew did their endless set-ups. I was kind of losing faith in the whole documentary, so I’d wander around the Valley for hours at a time. And that’s a strange place, as you know. It doesn’t exactly lift your spirits when you’re feeling low – buses, car parks, exhaust fumes, a damn great tarmac road, restrooms, guards and touts everywhere. A million visitors a year – and counting. The toxicity of tourism. The Valley you knew is lost for ever – all that’s left of that is photographs.’
‘And memories.’
‘Memories don’t survive – not unless they’re recorded. And besides, who’s to say what’s memory and what’s myth?’ He made a restless gesture. ‘I met this old man while I was in Luxor, Miss Payne – he must have been ninety or more. He used to hang around the hotels, yarning to the tourists. He waylaid me one day, wanted us to film him, I think. He told me he’d been one of the water boys on Carter’s dig. He claimed it was he who found that famous first step that led down to Tutankhamun’s tomb. Said he was six, maybe seven years old, and was just kidding around, delved about in the sand with a stick, suddenly hit stone, brushed the sand aside – and, abracadabra, there the step was . . .
‘That information cost me five Egyptian pounds – not that I minded that: the man was blind. Thin as a reed, eyes bandaged, could scarcely walk – he was pitiful; if he made some kind of living spinning tales for the tourists, I’m glad. We didn’t film him, of course – Luxor is filled with charlatans making similar claims. But true or false, Miss Payne? Howard Carter gave two versions of how that first step was found, if you recall. In the first version, his reis Ahmed Girigar and the workmen uncovered it, early one morning, before Carter turned up on site – and just three days into the dig too: 4 November 1922. In the second version, it was the water boy at play who uncovered the step by chance . . . kind of a quaint detail, yes? But that boy was never mentioned until Carter was on his triumphant lecture tour in America two years later, by which time extra colour was getting added in by the day.’
‘The old man was blind?’ I turned to look at Dr Fong, but it was not him I saw; it was Girigar’s grandson and namesake, that six-year-old imp of a boy pointed out to me in the Valley, the boy whose one ambition was to ride on Carter’s Decauville rail-carts . . . a boy who’d be in his eighties now. ‘Did the old man tell you his name?’
‘Oh, sure. He claimed he was called Ahmed Girigar. As in, Carter’s reis. That name wouldn’t mean a thing to ninety-nine per cent of tourists, but who knows? Maybe he figured it added to the authenticity.’
‘Maybe he did,’ I replied.
I watched the little boy of eighty years before dash back to work as his grandfather shouted a reprimand: he leapt, sure-footed, among the stones of Carter’s excavations, then disappeared into its billowing dust, leaving a familiar ache about my heart. I watched two small girls run through those dust clouds, escape into a narrow wadi, come to a halt by a tall wind-carved stone and bury a pink purse at its foot. Let it pass.
I turned my eyes back to the graveyard; the volunteers had taken a tea-break and were beginning work again. I watched them advance on an angel swathed in ivy and hemmed in with sycamore seedlings: the angel’s head, the arch of a wing, and a warning upraised hand were all that were visible; the chainsaw spluttered into life, and whined.
‘So – that famous telegram of Carter’s,’ Fong said, returning at last to the issue he’d been fretting over from the moment he arrived. ‘I can’t let go of that telegram, Miss Payne: it’s a foretaste of all the puzzles to come. Think about it: Carter sent it two days after they found that first step. At that point, they’d cleared the stairway, sixteen steps down – and they’d got as far as a wall at their foot. All he’d found at that point were the necropolis seals on that wall’s plaster: no identifying king’s cartouche, or so he claims – and worrying evidence of forced entry in antiquity too. So Carter couldn’t have been sure he’d made a “wonderful discovery” when he sent that cable. He couldn’t have known it was a tomb he’d found – let alone a “magnificent” one. It might easily have been a cache, or a minor burial. Even if it did prove to be a tomb, the probability was he’d find it rifled and emptied – and he, of all people, must have known that. Yet he sent that cable to Carnarvon at Highclere, in the certain knowledge that the earl would then hightail it out to Egypt on the next available boat . . . Then he filled in the staircase and halted excavation until his patron arrived. All very proper – but a risk, even so. Suppose Carnarvon arrived – and they found an empty hole in the ground?’
‘A risk Carter was prepared to take, I imagine,’ I said absently. Below us, the angel was slowly emerging from its cloak of ivy. ‘He was a showman. As you know.’
‘A showman – and a fabulist,’ Fong said, his tone bitter. I turned to look at him, surprised. ‘I’ve reached the point, Miss Payne, where I don’t trust a word that man wrote,’ he went on, his agitation now perceptible. ‘How he found the tomb, what he and Carnarvon did next . . . Looking into the tomb for the first time by candlelight . . . the “glint of gold”, the “wonderful things” he saw. Then, turn the page, and what do we find? Secrecy and deceit. A cover-up. You could say, a pack of lies.’
‘Effective lies, Dr Fong. It took decades for the truth to emerge.’
‘If it has emerged – even now. There are still unanswered questions. Too many of them.’
A silence fell. The sunlight glinted on the lenses of Dr Fong’s spectacles; a mauve petal from the wisteria fell onto his notebook and he brushed it aside. ‘Questions I’d like to answer,’ he went on. ‘I’d like to know whether the secrecy ever got too much for him. Did lying and subterfuge take its toll? Did he ever reveal the truth to anyone? Imagine it, Miss Payne: Carter makes the greatest archaeological discovery of all time – but he disguises the circumstances of that discovery. He lies – and he goes on lying. He pulls off an act of deception, aided and abetted by Lord Carnarvon and his daughter, by his Arab workforce and by a clutch of internationally distinguished scholars and archaeologists . . . And he does it in front of the world’s press. The assembled journalists never noticed a damn thing. They were taken in by an act of theatre.’ Dr Fong paused. ‘Were you?’
The question was as sharp as it was sudden; I was unprepared, and it disconcerted me. I looked away. Silence fell, broken only by the occasional whine of the chainsaw below. In the distance the towers of Docklands pierced the heat haze and the bluish pollution clouds; the lights at the summit of Canary Wharf winked and blinked, two ever-watchful eyes. Egypt, my Egypt, felt close yet impossibly distant, here inside me, vanishing fast.
I closed my eyes: clear on the evening air came the eddying wash of the Nile. For our second stay in Egypt, Miss Mack had hired a dahabiyeh. It was moored on the west bank of the river at Luxor, and at night the music in the Winter Palace ballroom drifted across the water from the opposite shore. Frances and I danced to that music one night, a Viennese waltz: we traversed the decks in a series of dizzying spins. ‘Weren’t we just fine, Lucy?’ Frances cried, clutching on to me for balance, as we hurtled to a stop and leaned against the boat’s rails. Catching our breath: there were two moons that night, one sailing the sky, and the other, a sister moon, in the river water below. An instant later, on a riffle of breeze, the sister moon shimmered, fragmented and was gone.
‘I can’t answer that question, Dr Fong,’ I replied, after a long pause. ‘I am old and you’re too sudden for me. My memories are too freighted . . . and with people who mean nothing to you. For your purposes, they’re marginal. They’re not marginal to me.’
‘I apologise.’ Dr Fong switched off his tape recorder. Below us, the party of volunteers were packing up their tools and departing. We both listened as their voices receded and silence fell; the excavated angel, freed from the undergrowth that had obscured it, now stood revealed. Blind eyes in a beautiful passionless face. She had a wise, if punitive, air.
‘I wish you would tell me – what you saw, what you learned, what you felt,’ Dr Fong said, on a sudden note of appeal, laying his notebook aside. ‘I’m in no hurry, you know. I have nowhere to go, no one to see. I can stay here and we can talk, Miss Payne, or I can go back to my room for yet another long evening and wrestle with all the questions I thought I’d answered when I started in on this project of mine. That’s what I did in Luxor. That’s what I do in London, these days. Stare at a wall, order a take-out, ask myself questions about a tomb – and watch the answers I thought I had slipping away from me.
‘You’re my only witness, Miss Payne. Everyone else is dead. But you were there. Those crucial three days when the tomb was found, when Carter breached the wall into its antechamber, looked through and saw his “wonderful things” . . . You were close by. You knew all the people involved. You witnessed the events after that, you watched the story unfold.’ He paused. ‘To me, your memories are like a treasure house. And you won’t admit me. You’re always blocking the entrance, standing on guard . . . A sort of watchdog – no, a Cerberus. Why is that? Don’t you trust me? All I want is the truth, you know.’
‘The truth? I certainly can’t give you that, Dr Fong.’
‘A variant would do. Your variant. Your version. I’d settle for that.’
He was looking at me in a sad, regretful way – and I took pity on him. The man had changed, as I had: we had something in common – we were both grappling with the past, if for different reasons and in differing ways. I too was facing the prospect of another evening alone. The light was fading, inside the house my ever-present ghosts would be circling; perhaps it would do no harm to talk, just a little, just for a while.
I hesitated, then sent Dr Fong into the house to find whisky, water and glasses. When he’d returned, poured drinks for us both and settled himself in his chair again, I said: ‘I tell this my way or not at all. Without interruptions and questions from you.’
‘I’ll be as silent as the grave.’
‘Very well.’ I paused, then began. ‘I was in Egypt with the friend I once mentioned to you, Miss Mack. She was a good woman – one of the few truly good women I’ve ever known. She had rented a houseboat for our stay. It was called the Queen Hatshepsut. It was moored at Luxor, on the west bank, just below the American House and within sight of Castle Carter. The track to the Valley of the Kings passed right by it – so as the story of the tomb unfolded we had what Miss Mack liked to call a ringside view.
‘We arrived there the day after Lord Carnarvon and Eve reached Luxor, when the excavation was about to begin. By then, over two weeks had passed since Carter sent his telegram, and the secret was out: everyone knew that Carter had found something, which might or might not prove to be a tomb. When Miss Mack and I were in Cairo, the city was ablaze with excitement; by the time we reached Luxor no one could talk of anything else. What would they discover when they breached the wall at the bottom of the staircase Carter had found? So we were in the right place, at the right time – and that wasn’t entirely accidental. My friend Miss Mack was writing a book, you see.’
‘A book?’ Dr Fong looked at me sharply.
‘Yes. A book. Within a very short time, everyone began writing books, Dr Fong. Howard Carter himself, several of the journalists who came out to cover the story – there was a positive outbreak of books. But Miss Mack was ahead of the game. She had been planning to write her memoirs for some while, you see, and once we were in Luxor, those memoirs – evolved. She was writing on a manual typewriter – an Oliver No. 9. I can still hear it, Dr Fong: she liked to write at night, so she’d be rattling the keys until midnight and well beyond. It kept me awake, but I didn’t mind that: I was twelve years old, I was in love with Egypt. I’d go out on deck, and sit there in the dark: star-gazing, thinking.’ I paused. ‘Why, sometimes I’d stay out there for hours at a time.’
‘Night vigils. A houseboat within sight of Castle Carter. Well, well, well. So you really were in the key place. At exactly the key moment. You’re full of surprises, Miss Payne.’ Fong gave a low laugh, but he was quick on the uptake, as I’d noticed before, and I could sense a new excitement in him. Reaching for the whisky bottle, he topped up my glass and then his own. ‘That won’t loosen my tongue,’ I told him.
‘I live in hope,’ he replied, reaching for his notebook. ‘Go on.’
A book was not the term Miss Mack used, and in deference to her I didn’t use it either; it was The Book – and it had an imperialistic nature, I learned. As Miss Mack would explain our first evening on the dahabiyeh, The Book made constant demands.
‘It’s a most peculiar phenomenon,’ she said, leading me into her cabin, indicating a stack of onion-skin typing paper and carbons, stroking the Oliver No. 9’s round metal keys; it was painted olive green, weighed as much as a small child, and had terse instructions stamped on its front: Keep machine cleaned and oiled at all times. ‘The Book leads me into the most unexpected places,’ Miss Mack said with an authorial sigh. ‘It’s taken me over. And it’s most dictatorial, even tyrannical, Lucy. It has Napoleonic tendencies. I feel it’s changing my whole outlook, even my character. Truly, dear, I’m putty in its hands.’
I wondered if this could be so: it seemed unlikely – and unwise. Could a book, even The Book, have such an effect? But I had noticed changes in Miss Mack on our voyage out to Egypt, so perhaps it was true; these alterations in her outlook became more apparent that first evening by the Nile. Obtaining the use of this boat was a coup of which Miss Mack was proud: she had pulled it off with the assistance of the Winlocks as well as every other contact ever made in Egypt and beyond. It belonged to some New Englanders, cousins of acquaintances, who had planned to use it this winter, but changed their minds. Mounted above the upper deck was a flagpole, from which the Stars and Stripes bravely fluttered in the breeze from the Nile.
There was a saloon, with books and an out-of-tune piano; there were two bedrooms, with dark panelling, awnings and louvre shutters; there was a bathroom of sorts, where we’d bathe in Nile water. It was romantic and economical, Miss Mack claimed. She went on an inspection tour of the galley areas within seconds of our arriving and pronounced herself fully satisfied: the kitchen was spotless, the Egyptians who’d be looking after us were most obliging, spoke excellent English and kept everything shipshape; the boat might be old, but it had immense charm. ‘One can’t fuss too much, Lucy,’ she said breezily. ‘If one’s going to have adventures – as I certainly hope we shall – then there’s no time to fret about the finer details of hygiene, don’t you agree?’
This startling emancipation extended to our meals, I discovered, when we sat down under the awning on the upper deck to eat supper. The cook, whose name was Mohammed Sayed, served us grilled fish freshly caught from the river, shamsi bread, a salad of onions, herbs and cucumbers . . . A feast, Miss Mack declared, tucking into everything with a keen appetite. She had brought her binoculars to the table, and at intervals, trained them on the desert beyond. ‘Birds, dear – maybe a jackal,’ she said; but I noticed it was the area around Castle Carter on which she focused her gaze. When the failing light made the binoculars useless, she abandoned them and, in her new spirit of adventurousness, poured us both a glass of wine – mine diluted with Evian. We sat back to admire the numberless stars and their reflections, leaping like silver fish in the wash of the Nile.
To crown my astonishment, Miss Mack lit a fat Egyptian cigarette, puffed at it in a professional way, and explained that tobacco helped to provide inspiration. ‘Just the one after dinner, dear,’ she said. ‘I find it gets me in the writing mood. I like to write at night, you see. I hope you won’t mind.’
I assured her I wouldn’t. Her colour had deepened as she made this confession, and I wasn’t sure whether that implied that discussion of The Book was taboo. I finally risked a shy question – might she, perhaps, tell me what her book was about? Miss Mack, scarlet with emotion, was at once launched.
There was a lengthy preamble – how she’d been deeply affected by two sermons her minister had preached while she was home in Mercer Hill, Princeton: one relating to the parable of the talents, and the other to hiding your light beneath a bushel. ‘I’ll be sixty in two years, Lucy, dear,’ she confided. ‘Of course, I shall never be able to leave my dear mother, but it’s time to grab life by the scruff of its neck even so. A bit late, you’ll say – but better late than never, don’t you agree? I always wanted to be a writer – I wrote poems as a girl, you know, and my, oh my, how I fussed over the scansion and the rhymes! Then, somehow, I lost the habit, and all my splendid ambitions went underground. Never, never let that happen to you, Lucy, dear . . . ’
She paused. ‘Then, this summer, I decided to bite the bullet, stiffen the sinews, screw my courage to the sticking point and take the plunge! So I bought my beloved Oliver, and off I went. And once I started, I discovered it was surprisingly easy. I can’t think why I imagined writing would be hard, dear – it isn’t at all. You simply sit there and talk to the page. Sometimes you know what’s coming and sometimes you don’t, in fact, all sorts of things just pop up out of nowhere and astonish you.’
I listened to this intently – it continued in similar vein for some while. When Miss Mack finally drew breath, I reminded her that she still hadn’t told me what her book was about. At this, she shifted in her seat and gave me a sibylline look that, over the next two months in Egypt, I would come to recognise.
‘Well, dear, it’s called An American Amidst the Tombs, but that will have to change. You see, Lucy, it started off as a family memoir: I wrote a great deal about my first visit to Egypt with my father, the pyramids, the pelicans, and so on. I did so want to do the flora and fauna justice . . . ’ She frowned. ‘But The Book soon began to make its wishes known. It reminded me of everything that happened to us on our last visit: meeting Mr Carter and Lord Carnarvon – that lunch in the tomb, the storm in the Valley, the political upheaval, a new nation in the throes of being born. And then I heard the rumours that Mr Carter had found a tomb. That’s when I realised I was an eyewitness, Lucy, right there on the spot when history was being made.
‘I can see now how slow I was,’ she continued, ‘but The Book knew which route I should take – and once I listened to it, all became clear. What I need to write, Lucy, isn’t some fusty memoir. I need to report what’s happening in the Valley right now. A detailed blow-by-blow account by one who was there. What do you think, dear?’
I made encouraging noises. I asked her if she was writing to a plan, an authorial scheme.
‘No, no, no!’ she cried, throwing up her hands. ‘A scheme would have a very cramping effect! The Book itself will decide that – and where it leads, I’ll follow. A bit like Ruth and her mother-in-law in the Bible. You remember, Lucy? Whither thou goest, I will go.’ She paused. ‘However, I have given considerable attention to the far more important issue of style. I’ve never written reports, as such. They need to be crisp, concise and informed. But I’ve rewritten my first five chapters now, dear, and I’ve found my voice, I’m hitting my stride. I have a model in mind, obviously.’
I could see she wanted me to press her, so I asked who this model could be.
‘Mark Twain, who else?’ she replied, on a triumphant note – and shortly afterwards we retired to our rooms. ‘Stout shoes and an early start tomorrow morning, Lucy,’ she announced from her bedroom doorway. ‘It’s time to explore the Theban hills. We’ll do some investigating; the view of the Valley from there is superb. If anything is happening at Mr Carter’s site, we’ll soon know. The Book needs material, dear. Mohammed will pack us a picnic. Some rugs – binoculars, obviously – and off we’ll go!’
She gave me a speaking look, then firmly closed her door. From beyond it, within minutes, came the rattle of the Oliver No. 9 keyboard, the screech of the return carriage, the ratcheting sound as she inserted a fresh page. The Book must have had her in an iron grip: it was two in the morning before the Oliver fell silent at last.
I’d gone to sit on the deck by then, to breathe the air, to drink in Egypt and remind myself that at last I was there. I gave silent thanks to my mother and to Miss Dunsire, the two women who had made my journey possible. The crew had left one kerosene lamp alight; I extinguished it and wandered the boat in the starlight, back and forth. At a distance, on the east bank of the river, the windows of the Winter Palace glowed. It was still early in the season, but even so I could hear hotel dance music, drifting its seductions across the water – blues, a tango, ragtime; another drift of blues. I lay down on the deck and gazed up at the heavens, the arching stars. I could hear the shift and lap of the Nile, a sussuration as it stroked the dahabiyeh’s hull. The boat’s timbers creaked and moaned as it moved on the water, tugged against its mooring ropes; the reeds whispered and rustled; from the desert came the hooting of an owl.
Sitting up, and turning towards the hills that hid the Valley of the Kings, I could just make out the American House, its dark crouching bulk backed up against the rocks; the Winlocks were not due in Egypt for some weeks yet, so perhaps it was still closed up, awaiting their arrival; it was unlit, I saw. At Castle Carter, however, someone must have been keeping a vigil similar to mine: lights blazed from its windows – and I wondered if a wakeful Howard Carter was there, planning his next day’s work in the Valley; if so, was he alone, or were Lord Carnarvon and Eve with him? What would they find tomorrow?
I returned to my cabin and, still wakeful, wanting to share the excitement I felt, I began on the first of my promised letters to Nicola Dunsire. I wrote: Luxor, aboard the good ship ‘Queen Hatshepsut’, Friday 24th November 1922. Dearest Nicola . . . My handwriting was improving: I had nearly mastered italic script, and, as a parting gift, Miss Dunsire had given me a fountain pen. It fitted my hand perfectly. Now Lord Carnarvon and Eve have arrived, I wrote, as I reached the letter’s end, Mr Carter can recommence excavations. They begin tomorrow, which is very exciting! Miss Mack and I are making an expedition to the hills in the morning, in the hope of watching them at work.
Meanwhile, the great news is, Miss Mack has decided to become a reporter. She has begun a book about Mr Carter’s work. In the style of Mark Twain. If you’d been here, we might have laughed together about this – but you aren’t, so I did so alone. Such a night, so many, many stars . . . I’ll send this letter to Athens, where you should have arrived by now.
Pour mon père, félicitations. Pour toi – à bientôt et je t’embrasse, ma chère Nicole.
‘Can you see anything, Lucy?’ Miss Mack asked. She was pacing restlessly back and forth between the rocks high on the barren Theban hills. ‘Surely you can see something, dear?’
I could see dust. My binoculars were focused on clouds of billowing white dust. Occasionally, when these dust clouds dissipated, I could see below us the figures of Carter’s workmen; some seemed to be resting, but a few were still plying their way back and forth from the dark square that must be the entrance to the putative tomb. Standing on a rise from which he could direct operations, was the thin bearded figure of Ahmed Girigar. It was ten minutes to four in the afternoon of Sunday 26 November – and this was the second of our reportorial expeditions to the hills.
At the behest of The Book, we’d spent much of the previous day in the same way, exploring the hills, selecting a suitable vantage point, picnicking and reading, while watching the events in the Valley below – historic events, or so local rumours claimed. When Carter had removed the infill protecting the stairs, he had discovered seals on the wall at their base – and they bore a king’s name. The discovery, which suggested this was a royal tomb, even if it did not prove it, had given the excavators new heart. They’d pressed on at speed: the previous morning, they had demolished the wall and discovered behind it a tunnel of unknown length. That tunnel proved to be blocked off, packed to its roof with rocks and chippings.
Both yesterday and today, Carter’s workforce had been excavating this barrier – or so we’d heard. And it seemed to be true: for two days, Miss Mack and I had watched huge quantities of flint debris being carted from a shadowy hole in the ground . . . not the most exciting of views, I felt. As I’d pointed out several times, there could be more tunnels and, for all we knew, they could all be blocked. They might extend two or three hundred feet into the rock, as those leading to the tombs I’d visited with Frances had done. Carter’s workmen could be engaged on this task for the next week, the next month, longer . . . in which case, Miss Mack was in for a tedious wait – and so was I.
‘I think they’re slowing down now,’ I said. ‘Maybe they’re taking a break. Not much seems to be happening.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, child,’ Miss Mack said, losing patience, ‘give me the binoculars.’
I retreated to the shade of a rock, ate an apple, stared at the air. I was thinking of the meeting in London, which Miss Dunsire had described as ‘the handover’ when I passed from one protectress to another. ‘Ah, that must be your guardian angel, Lucy,’ Nicola had remarked, spotting the anxious figure of Miss Mack on the boat-train platform at Victoria. Nicola had looked her up and down, eyebrows arched, and then advanced, with me scurrying beside her. ‘Don’t tease,’ I was muttering. ‘Be nice. I told you, she’s very kind – and she isn’t stupid, either.’
‘Miss Mackenzie. At last!’ Nicola clasped Miss Mack’s hands, kissed her in the French fashion on both cheeks. Miss Mack recoiled sharply and then, as I’d known she would, over-compensated. She talked. On and on, while Nicola stood by, appraising her, a bemused smile on her face: So taken aback when she’d heard of the wedding . . . Gracious! Didn’t mean that, quite the wrong way of putting it. Sincere congratulations, overjoyed for everyone, the best thing that could have happened . . . so kind of Mrs Foxe-Payne to entrust her new stepdaughter to a woman she’d never met and didn’t know from Adam . . . Rest assured, vigilance, best possible care, old Egyptian hand, firm friends, would ensure Lucy wrote regularly, and kept up with her homework . . .
I could sense Nicola Dunsire’s amused derision, her deepening scorn. I crimsoned with embarrassment, praying she’d see beyond that torrent of words to the essential good-heartedness of the woman who uttered them. She gave no sign of doing so. She glanced at her watch, smoothed the lapels of the exquisite suit she was wearing, allowed her beautiful satiric gaze to dwell on Miss Mack’s crumpled tweeds, her flushed complexion, her untidy hair escaping from its pins; she cut in on the word ‘homework’.
‘Indeed. Lucy must not let her standards slip. She must keep up with the work I’ve set her. I intend her to be intelligent.’
There was a tiny pause: the word ‘intelligent’ hung in the air like a sword. Miss Mack lowered her eyes. ‘But Lucy is intelligent. At least, I have always believed so,’ she said in a quiet tone. ‘However, no doubt there is room for improvement, as there is for us all.’
It was the gentlest of reprimands – I wasn’t sure whether Nicola even noted it. She gathered me in her arms for a farewell embrace. ‘Improve each shining hour, remember, Lucy,’ she instructed, in a teasing tone, over her shoulder – and then she was gone.
In the heat of the Theban hills I considered the nature of shining hours. My plans were specific: I meant to return home and dazzle Miss Dunsire with the amazing progress I’d made while away. Accordingly – one poem, by heart, every day. I leaned back in the shade of my rock, opened the collection of Coleridge I’d brought and made sure I now knew Kubla Khan by heart. I did . . . Caverns measureless to man: would Carter and Carnarvon discover such caverns? Should I next learn sections of Christabel? I read on for a while, then closed the book and turned back to examine the Valley. From here, the view of it was magnificent: I could see its every twist and turn, trace the routes I’d followed with Frances, identify the tombs to which Herbert Winlock had taken us. The site of Carter’s excavations lay close to the ramped entrance to the burial place of Ramesses VI. So the tomb he’d found – if it was a tomb – was situated, as he’d believed, beneath the workmen’s huts, in that last unexplored section of his celebrated triangle.
A few of his men had been posted to keep any tourists at bay – though I’d seen very few visitors and the Valley was now deserted. The only activity had been centred on Carter’s workplace, next to which a small white tent had been erected; but even this work seemed to be winding down. The noise of digging was intermittent, and the number of basket boys carrying spoil much diminished: perhaps Carter’s workforce was making ready to down tools for the day.
My guardian angel was still on the alert, but I was beginning to lose faith in her reporting skills. So far, the gathering of information had consisted of these walks and a shameless attempt to interrogate our cook Mohammed, who, according to Miss Mack, would convey the all-important reactions of a man born and bred in this area. She had then discovered that he could be an even richer source of material: Abd-el-Aal Ahmad Sayed, Howard Carter’s major-domo, encountered on our previous visit, was his uncle.
Mohammed, grilled at length that morning, had proved richly informative. It was universally known, he said, and had been for over two weeks, that Mr Carter had already uncovered a tomb. This discovery had been predicted by his uncle Abd-el-Aal and by all the other servants at the Castle, the instant Carter arrived from Cairo to begin his dig. Carter had brought with him a cage containing a bird unknown in Egypt, a canary; the servants instantly understood that, Inshallah, this golden songbird was a good omen – so they were not surprised when that first step was found, only three days after its advent. They’d been sure that the stairway then revealed must inevitably lead down to a tomb filled with treasures, and had at once christened it ‘The Tomb of the Golden Bird’.
Unfortunately, and in circumstances that were opaque, this bird had been eaten by a cobra some days later. A cobra decorated the crown of all ancient Egypt’s kings, so the snake’s sneaking into Carter’s compound and snacking on the canary was not a good omen; quite the reverse. However, Mohammed continued more cheerfully, the cobra had subsequently been shot by Mr Carter’s good friend, Mr Pecky Callender, on whose watch the disaster had occurred: he had dispatched the snake with two blasts from a shotgun. And this first golden bird had now been replaced with a second, brought by Lady Evelyn from Cairo; so perhaps the ancient gods would be appeased and all would be well.
In any case, Mohammed went on, in a more confident tone, it was well known throughout Qurna and Luxor that the current activities of Mr Carter and El Lord in the Valley were a blind: fabulous treasures, tons of bullion, had already been removed from the tomb and spirited away. This booty, which included a mummified king and his gold coffins, was on its way to England right now and would never be seen in Egypt again; it had been looted weeks ago, then collected from the Valley by a fleet of aeroplanes.
Miss Mack, who had been taking rapid notes, stopped him at that point. ‘Now, now, Mohammed,’ she said, ‘you know that can’t be true. Land an airplane in the Valley? That’s just plain ridiculous. Besides, it may not even be a tomb, and they’re still in the first stage of excavating. I watched them with my own eyes yesterday.’
Mohammed stuck out his lip and regarded her in an obstinate way. As I’d learned on my previous visit, the Egyptian notion of truth was often elastic and imaginative; it differed from Miss Mack’s somewhat hard-line, narrow-minded Yankee approach. It did not always admit the concept of facts and, given the choice between two versions of events – one likely, unvarnished and dull; the other unlikely, glittering and resonant – it went for the Homeric alternative. Miss Mack, who never appreciated such distinctions, became fretful at Mohammed’s stubborn refusal to recant. ‘Fairy stories like that,’ she said reproachfully, ‘are of no use to me whatsoever, Mohammed. The canary I like. The canary I can use. Thank you. But airplanes? I shan’t waste a single piastre on them, I assure you!’
Mohammed pledged immediate reform, a newly industrious approach. Thus, while we we’d been up here in the hills, our binoculars trained on Carter’s excavations, he’d also been working on the case. This very afternoon he was visiting Castle Carter, where he would cross-question his esteemed uncle Abd-el-Aal on Miss Mack’s behalf. He would report back this evening. I sighed: I really could not understand why Miss Mack needed such a go-between. Why couldn’t she walk up to Carter’s castle and do her own investigating? I had suggested this; several times. Miss Mack reacted with scorn. ‘Lucy, I’m sorry, but you don’t grasp the methodology of journalism,’ she said. ‘That approach would be premature – even fatal. No, dear – by indirection, find direction out. I’m laying the groundwork. I shall move on to interviews in due course.’
I stretched lazily in the warm sun and looked up at her with affection. The Book and its needs had her in their grip, I felt. We’d been up here in the heat of the hills all day. Miss Mack’s hat was askew; her grey hair was dishevelled; runnels of sweat ran down her face, yet here she still was, untiring, dedicated, remorseless as destiny, binoculars trained on the Valley below. As I watched her and smiled, she gave a start; she adjusted the glasses and said: ‘I knew it, Lucy. Something’s happening.’
Turning to look at the dark entrance of the tomb below us, I saw she was correct. Excavations had finally stopped. Carter’s workforce, some standing, some hunkered down, were gathered silently together a short distance from the mouth of the dig. His reis, Girigar, was now standing at the top of the sixteen steps, peering down, his attitude expectant. There was no sign of the excavators, who must still be underground. The westering sun lit the peaks above the Valley and washed them in gold; below them, the shadows were lengthening fast. As always, the kite birds circled the updraughts and broke the silence with their cries. I felt the first flutterings of excitement, but for a while, ten minutes, perhaps more, nothing happened; below us, no one spoke or moved. I glanced back the way we had come: it was almost five o’clock – we’d have to leave soon, before the light began to weaken and the long, steep descent through the hills became treacherous.
‘Lucy, look,’ Miss Mack said, and I turned to see the unmistakable figure of Howard Carter emerge at last from underground. He was walking unsteadily; he paused to mop sweat from his forehead, and then looked about the Valley with a blind man’s gaze. Without a word, Miss Mack handed me her binoculars; by the time I had focused them on Carter’s white distraught face, two other figures were emerging from the dark: Lord Carnarvon, who seemed similarly dazed, and Eve, who was shivering violently.
Eve wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and, in a sudden, impetuous way, embraced her father, then clasped Carter in her arms. Her father grasped both their hands; he seemed to be deeply moved and was saying something with emphasis. Carter made some reply and covered Carnarvon’s hand with his own. He gestured to one of the boys, who came running with stools, and Carnarvon sank down onto one of them, burying his face in his hands. Eve bent over her father. Carter crossed to the thin alert figure of Ahmed Girigar. The two men, who had worked together so long, spoke briefly; Girigar, turning to his workmen, said a few quick words. Their reaction was immediate: first one man, then another rose to his feet; they lifted their faces to the sky and tilted back their throats – and in unison they released a haunting sound, that long guttural ululation peculiar to Arab ceremonies, that whooping cry that can signify rejoicing or lament; the cry that, in Egypt, accompanies births, deaths, weddings and funerals.
The unearthly howl swooped, echoed and re-echoed around the Valley like the voice of the long-dead; it pricked the hairs on the back of my neck, closed a cold hand around my heart – and if I shut my eyes now, I can hear it still, echoing down the decades: the crying out that told me Carter and Carnarvon had finally found their tomb.