Valley of the Kings Read Free

god.
    â€œI can’t see anything human in them, Carter.”
    â€œMy lord, you’re looking at them with modern eyes.”
    â€œThat’s what I’m equipped with, Carter.”
    â€œPersonality—a man’s individual self—those are modern ideas. These people had no inward lives, as you call it. They were not free to have inward lives—to be different from the other men around them. Nature bound them. The Nile, the Sun, the Soil, the life cycle of the millet—those were their rulers, not their own morals or judgments. How could they develop any individuality? Everything they did and felt and thought was the same as it had been for generations—shaped by the constant inflexible challenge of making life possible here.”
    As he walked he watched me, his hands tucked behind his back. The schoolboy pose. He seemed to be listening. His eyes were dreamy. We started up toward the pyramids again. My gaze reached for their insuperable heights.
    â€œPharaoh was their self. He was the Personhood of Egypt. He represented them before the gods. They built these monuments to venerate him and to make themselves great. They did it for joy, as willingly as the medieval knight hauled stone to Chartres.”
    We walked on in silence. I was tired of talking. Let him do some of the work. I felt old and blocked and tiresome. I pinched the bridge of my nose between my fingertips. My forehead began to ache. There was fine sand in my mustache.
    We had reached the pyramids before he finally spoke.
    â€œYou see all this so differently than I, Carter.” He smiled at me, enigmatic. I wondered what he meant. It was so obvious to me, what I had said: who could see it differently? He nodded to me. “It should be an interesting collaboration.”
    â€œYes, sir,” I said, guarded.
    We started toward the camels, lying on their tucked legs, their heads drawn back.

2
    For the reasons I had recounted to Carnarvon at our first meeting, when we decided to search for the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun, I believed the lost tomb to be in the Valley of the Kings, in the desert near Luxor, where ancient Thebes stood. However, the Germans and the Americans had the licenses to dig there. Until they gave up, Carnarvon and I could do nothing except potter around elsewhere.
    We did some digging in the Nile Delta, around Saïs, uncovering some interesting sites from the Middle Kingdom and Ptolemaic times. I confess that my attention was elsewhere. The American Theodore Davis, whose work I had supervised before I met Carnarvon, was excavating in the Valley of the Kings, and I lived in daily fear that he would find the tomb himself.
    The Department of Antiquities had kept me on as Davis’s nominal supervisor, but he seldom informed me of his work. I had to rely on some friends in the nearby village of Kurna to watch him for me. Then one spring, just before Carnarvon would arrive in Egypt for the season, one of my friends sent me word that Davis was into a real find.
    I was in Cairo, buying digging supplies. I took the new railroad train down to Luxor. This is where ancient Thebes once stood, and in fact much of ancient Thebes is still there. Crowds of giant columns and gates cover whole acres of the east bank of the river. Some of them still retain the bright painting that decorated them when Pharaoh and his courtiers looked upon them on their way to the sacred rites and mysteries of Amun, the god of Thebes. The modern town of Luxor with its curving date palms and square white houses looks small and temporary by comparison with the gigantic structures of the ancients. The west bank is a warren of the mortuary temples of Eighteenth Dynasty pharaohs and their families. In the midst of these ruins is the village of Kurna; some of the villagers actually live in the ancient buildings, and they and their ancestors have made a local sport of tomb-robbing since the days of Rameses.
    As one crosses the Nile from Luxor