Tutankhamun Uncovered (79 page)

He was so frustrated that he did not return to join Lucas and Burton at the hotel later that evening but retired straight to his bed at Castle Carter. He spent a miserable night. He hardly dozed. The suspense of what lay before him in that third casket filled his mind with hallucinations. He had to learn the truth as soon as possible. Thank God the sun was rising!

However, fatigue from the loss of sleep had done much to calm Carter’s anger of the night before. By the time Burton arrived at the tomb that morning, punctual as ever, Carter greeted him warmly as if nothing had happened.

While Carter appreciated that the process of photographic recording was of necessity a slow one, he nevertheless wanted Burton to be as quick as the quality of his work would allow. Burton, therefore, had crossed paths with Carter’s abrasive nature on many occasions. But these confrontations were infrequent and the strong mutual bond of respect that existed between the two, each acknowledged experts in their own distinct field, always prevailed. It was more frequently Carter who found himself having to simmer down lest his zeal for discovery should overpower him. This was one of those occasions.

Burton emerged from his darkroom and pronounced his work ‘acceptable’.

Carter and Lucas, now accompanied by the recently arrived pathologist, Doctor Douglas Derry, took off back to the tomb to advance the next stage. The two walked briskly into the burial chamber and were soon intently stooped over the still enshrouded third coffin. Carter gently lifted out the linen padding at the head and removed the floral collarette. On either side of the casket, Lucas and he, with carefully coordinated movements, gradually rolled back the red shroud until the entire form of the third coffin had been revealed.

At this first sight of the third coffin, in the midst of his euphoria, Carter felt an extreme sense of disappointment. It was horribly stained with a thick, black substance which, below the crossed arms of the mummiform figure, appeared to cover most of the casket. It filled much of the space between the casket and the shell of the second coffin. But the foot of the coffin, which had no doubt been too steep for the black substance to adhere to, was relatively clean.

Disappointment turned to elation. Carter smiled to Lucas. Lucas smiled back. Their conclusion was mutual.

“Gold!” they each exclaimed at the same time.

“It is gold, Alfred! Solid gold! No wonder the bloody thing was so heavy! God in Heaven, what have we found?”

“Yes, Howard,” Lucas acknowledged with a broad grin.

“Call for Burton while I take a small chip of this black stuff. It’s a ceremonial oil of some kind but I haven’t a clue what.”

Carter couldn’t take his eyes off the colossal object before him. How did they make such a thing? If they did this for an insignificant king, one who barely made the history books, what would they have done for the likes of Ramses? Carter could not bear to think of the scale, the immensity of the riches previously plundered from this great necropolis. It was at once elating and at the same time deeply depressing.

Lucas looked across at Carter. The Egyptologist was staring downwards, transfixed by the object before him. The chemist understood his colleague’s preoccupation. “Don’t worry yourself, old man. I’ll get him.”

He manoeuvred himself around the coffin, clambered down from the scaffolding and left the tomb to summon Burton.

To complete their work on the remaining coffin and ultimately the body itself, Carter had the third coffin and the bottom shell of the second in which it sat removed to the antechamber. The gold coffin was fixed solidly within the base of the second by the black substance which Lucas had now identified as a ceremonial unguent, and Carter had decided to leave the two cemented together for the time being until he could find a way of separating them without damaging either. In the meantime, in his urgent desire to get to the source, he would continue to work on removing the lid of the third coffin.

Again they had found that the seam of the third coffin was well below the lip of the second and there was insufficient room between the two caskets’ walls for them to fully remove the pins that locked the lid shut.

Because the two were cemented together so tightly, Carter and Lucas decided that damage to the gold pins that secured the lid to its base was, in this case, inevitable. They removed the pins a little at a time, prising them out as far as they would come before further movement was restricted by the inner wall of the second coffin, and then sawed off most of the protruding pin. This left just enough to grasp with pliers and pull out a little more until the entirety of each pin had been extracted. In this way, the complete set was successfully removed and the lid was raised.

“Finally...” whispered Carter as he first set eyes on the contents of the third coffin, “...I have him!”

There, staring straight up, was the funeral mask crafted in the form of the boy king’s face. The face itself shone in the electric light that bathed the antechamber, its serene expression veiled by the small, particulate debris of three thousand years of steady corrosion. Carter felt a welling urge to touch it but held back.

“Lucas. Lucas! Come and look at this.”

The entire mummy looked almost exactly like those pictured in innumerable funerary texts a lifelike mask at the head of a body, tightly wrapped in linen, the arms crossed at the chest, false fists of gold holding the remains of the almost totally decomposed crook and flail of kingly office. Positioned immediately beneath the crossed wrists, a humanoid bird the ba bird its coloured glass encrusted gold wings lying outstretched across almost the entire breadth of the chest. Four heavily decorated gold bands, evenly spaced from the chest to just above the ankles, bound the body and secured the wrappings. This regal ‘necrococoon’ fitted the contours of the golden coffin perfectly, as if welded to it so indeed it was, by the unctuous material that had been, in antiquity, so generously applied.

By the time Derry and Carter were ready to begin unwrapping the mummy the Director of Antiquities had returned from his holidays. Carter summoned Lacey to make haste to the site. He and his entourage appeared the following day.

Howard Carter bent down over the open coffin, a magnifying glass in his hand, and watched his colleague address the mummy wrappings.

Dr Derry lightly scored the wax hardened fabric of the mummy with his scalpel. As he drew his knife along the length of the body, but for the barely audible popping of the threads, the corridor of the laboratory tomb was in complete silence.

“Slowly... Douglas... Please,” Carter whispered.

“Shh, Carter. You are disturbing my concentration.”

Derry, a serious and most precise fellow at the easiest of times, was not at all receptive to interference from others. He gave Carter a cold look and then resumed drawing the scalpel along the surface of the linen, continuing all the way to the feet.

As he bent over the coffin next to Carter, Lacau felt an irresistible impulse to touch someone and his huge left hand closed over Carter’s. The Egyptologist, concentrating hard as he was on the job before him, naturally was alarmed by this but only for a moment. He turned his head upward quickly to acknowledge the gesture with a brief smile and then, politely withdrawing his hand, returned his attention to the developing autopsy below.

Derry finished his incision.

Carter said, “Right, gentlemen. Let us begin.”

He pocketed his magnifying glass and stood up to address his audience. “Doctor Derry and I are going to very gently and carefully peel back the outer layers. Please give us a little room.”

The linen, burned it seemed to a crisp, came away in handfuls, tearing or disintegrating into a black, sooty dust at each attempt.

As the unwrapping progressed, they appeared one by one the unmistakable glint of tarnished golden objects placed about the body and within each layer. As soon as Carter felt he had completed removal of one layer, he stopped, quickly pencilled a neat sketch of the layout, placed numbered cards on the objects and asked Burton to take his pictures.

For each of the onlookers the succeeding hours became perhaps the most memorable of their lives. As the layers were removed one by one, immeasurable riches revealed themselves before their eyes. Each article, though stained by the copious black substances that had been liberally applied during the burial ceremonies, looked unbelievably extravagant. If not as pristine as they had been when placed in position so many millennia before, they were, nevertheless, literally out of this world. Despite his expectations, which by now were not modest, Carter was no less impressed with the grandeur of what now appeared before him.

A day later they reached the body.

What he saw now, Carter had not been expecting. It was little more than a blackened skeleton. For an unviolated mummy it was one of the most pathetic examples he had ever laid eyes on. The thorax and the feet had some flesh on them, but over the thousands of years those parts that had been more liberally soaked in the ceremonial fluids had smouldered slowly away and little but the bone had survived. Chemistry, time and the mummy’s inviolate security had consorted against the discoverers.

Carter looked up at the expressions on the faces of the onlookers. Derry and Lucas, analysts through and through, showed no sign of emotion, but the faces of Lacau, the Egyptian authorities present, and Harry Burton were each a picture of shock and disappointment.

“A sad sight, gentlemen,” said Carter solemnly. “It appears that all the care taken during his preservation was in vain. Destruction was perpetrated through the ignorant hands of the devout and the mourners themselves. Tutankhamen himself, having been liberally ‘marinated’ with holy oils, has been effectively cremated, sealed within the oven of his gold coffin.”

“A three-thousand-year-old pot roast,” Burton irreverently whispered.

Carter was not amused.

It had taken them five days to clear the body to the head. By this time, with the exception of the Director himself, the ‘hangers-on’, as Carter disrespectfully referred to them, had returned to Cairo. It was just as well. The final stages of clearance were best left to the few witnesses that remained. With so much jewellery attached to the body itself, Carter had been forced to separate many of the limbs at the joints. The operations had been distasteful but necessary if the complete funerary equipment was to be recovered and, once he had come to terms with making the first break, the subsequent disarticulations came all the easier. The worst was the last.

“The mask is firmly cemented to the bandaging about the back of the head. Ideas, gentlemen?”

“Heat,” responded Lucas. “Let’s try using heated knife blades. See if we can gradually melt a cavity between the two. But we’ll have to lift the whole thing out to do it. Break the neck.”

Carter accepted the proposal without question. He was anxious to look upon the king’s face,

With due care and patience, the method worked admirably and the mask finally came free of the black, tarry glue which had, when a liquid three thousand years earlier, insinuated itself into the space between the gold sheet and the mummy wrappings. Once the mask and the linen wrappings had been completely removed, the face of the dead king was revealed to his onlookers for the first time since his mummification. It also was charred by years of slow combustion. Nevertheless, it retained a better state of preservation than the rest of the body. The skin, although cracked and parted in places, was still present. There was a semblance of a youth’s face. Also there was a peculiar iridescence in his cheeks.

They unwrapped the cranium layer by layer, allowing Burton to take his photographs at each stage. The head, finally naked but for the beaded skull cap which was so tightly bonded with the skin on the roof of the cranium that it could not be removed but bead by bead, was photographed by Burton in all manner of postures and at all angles.

“Decidedly young noble features, and the shape of the cranium does it remind you of the family of Akhenaten?” Carter observed, turning the head over in his hands.

“Indeed, there is a strong likeness,” acknowledged Lucas.

Burton’s final picture was of the entire disarticulated body reassembled piece by piece in a wooden tray on a bed of sand. It would be the last time anyone would see the body entirely whole.

Burton having completed his work and removed his equipment, the team prepared to rewrap the body and replace it in the second coffin.

“Ironic,” said Lucas, for a moment allowing his mind to drift from the job at hand, “that in this one case it is the richness of the grave goods that survives and the body that does not and not by the hand of the plunderer but by the hand of those who sought so reverently to preserve him.”

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” Carter felt compelled to add his epitaph.

“In this case, just ashes,” added Burton coldly.

As they turned to collect up the bandages, Carter noticed the reis of the day, Mohammed, who had been staring fixedly at the skeletal remains for some time, bend down over the body in what appeared to be a final gesture of farewell. ‘Touching,’ he thought.

Carter, Lucas and Burton were taking an evening cocktail. Each sat in an upright canvas collapsible chair set on the sand outside the front porch of Castle Carter. As the sun set behind them, they watched the waters of the distant Nile gradually darken.

They all felt a sense of closure to the project. The ultimate object had been discovered. There was a huge amount of work yet to do, and many more treasures yet to be uncovered, but from here on the adrenalin would not be flowing at quite the same rate.

As if to dismiss his feelings of anticlimax, Carter shook his head and got right back to discussing the work ahead of them. “Lucas. The gold coffin is held fast by this solidified unguent. How are we going to go about separating them, do you think? Any ideas?”

“Well...” started Lucas after a pause, “...without taking the time to research an appropriate solvent, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say we have plenty of time, Howard...” Carter nodded. “...There is only one realistic alternative. And you’re not going to like it.”