The Sleeper in the Sands (3 page)

THE TALE OF THE SLEEPER IN THE SANDS

Letter from Howard Carter to Lord Carnarvon

The Turf Club, Cairo,
20 November 1922

My dear Lord Carnarvon,

You will know how I have ever enjoyed my time spent with you, and yet on this occasion above all others, how pleasant, how gloriously pleasant, has been the cause of our meeting with each other once again! Even so the best, I may venture to hope, is still to come and I shall duly await, with the keenest sense of anticipation, your following me onwards within the next two days. By then, I trust, all should be readied for yourself and Lady Evelyn, for my preparations here in Cairo have gone exceedingly well, and everything is now purchased which we shall require to complete our excavation. I am therefore confident that between your arrival in Thebes and the commencement of our work within the Valley of the Kings, there will be no cause for delay.

You asked me last night what I thought we might discover beyond the doorway of our - as yet - unidentified tomb. I hesitated then, in the company of others, to reply with due

confidence; but now, putting pen to paper, I dare to proclaim that we are indeed on the threshold of a magnificent discovery, one which may grant us immortality in the annals of archaeological science. Anything - literally anything -- may lie beyond the passageway. I do not speak only of artefacts or gold but of treasures, it may be a hundred times more valuable. For unless I am much mistaken, the tomb we have uncovered is that of King Tut-ankh-Amen; and if such should indeed prove to be the case, then we shall discover within it, I prophesy, the proofs of a great and ancient mystery. Once the tomb has been opened and its contents examined, our understanding of the past may be remarkably and forever changed.

You will doubtless wonder what inspires me to make such a boast, and all the more so when you recall the six years of failure we have had to endure -- barren, it must have seemed to you, of even the faintest promise. Yet you will recall as well my assurances, made with all the earnestness and vigour I could muster, that the Valley of the Kings had
not
been exhausted, and how when, this summer, you finally contemplated abandoning our work, I swore that I was certain that a tomb lay undisturbed. You did not then press me to justify myself, but did me the honour instead of accepting my word. I shall ever be grateful for that mark of trust, since it is certain that, but for your untiring generosity and constant encouragement, our labours would long ago have come to naught.

Now, though, let us trust, the hour of triumph is at hand. At such a moment, my continued silence can no longer be justified. Yet as you read the papers which I have given to you, it may be you will understand my former reticence, for the story they tell is certainly a strange one. I would not have cared to stake my reputation upon it - and yet without it, as you will see, I would never have dared to believe that a Pharaoh’s tomb could indeed lie undiscovered. Therefore -- please, if you can find the time, read the papers enclosed with this letter. Some are my own: biographical reminiscences composed over the course of the past month or so, once I had learned for certain that this season -- unless successful - would be my last in the Valley. The other stories have a stranger origin. They have been in my possession now for many years -- and yet you are the first to whom I have ever shown them. I do not, of course, need to ask you to keep silent about their contents. As you will doubtless understand once you have completed your perusal of them, the papers raise matters of considerable interest. Let us discuss them in confidence once you have joined me again at Thebes.

Until then, conserve all your energy and keep yourself well -- for I do not doubt we have a good deal of hard work still ahead of us! Yet how mightily we have laboured, and how long we have searched -- and now at last journey’s end is drawing very near!

Look after yourself, my dear Lord Carnarvon. These papers are yours -- for so also is my success.

H.C.

Narrative composed by Howard Carter, early autumn 1922

Castle Carter,
Elwat el-Diban,
The Valley of the Kings.

I am not a man who thrives upon company, and yet tonight I feel - not despair, I would say - but rather the strangest compulsion to share my confidences and to justify the unfulfilled exertions of my career. Of course, should I finish this account I shall have to keep it locked from any prying eye, and yet even so it would do me good, I believe, tonight and over the course of succeeding nights, to imagine a colleague or a friend -- Lord Carnarvon, perhaps -- seated opposite me, able to listen to my words even as I commit them to paper.

Nor, I must hope -- even at this eleventh hour -- will they moulder forever in my drawer unread. It is true that King Tut-ankh-Amen and his tomb still defy my excavations -- yet though my final season in the Valley approaches, I remain confident. He shall be found -
he must be found
-- for to think otherwise would indeed be to despair of my entire career. I shall never marry, I fear, and yet in truth I have been married for a long while to my hunt for this- tomb. For I realise now that I had been set upon Tut-ankh-Amen’s trail,

without my ever knowing it, within the earliest months of my arrival in Egypt -- and indeed, it may be before even that occasion, for I recollect now an event in my youth, seemingly trivial and yet serving, so it strikes me at this distant remove, almost as a portent of much which was to come. It is not surprising that I failed to understand this at the time, for my prospects then were limited and circumscribed, and my passions confined to a self-taught knowledge of birds -not a great deal of use, sadly, to one having to make his way in the world. Indeed my education, as I have always regretted, was miserably incomplete, and yet there was no help for it, for there were bills to be paid and I had been set to earn my living at a very tender age. I did so at first as an assistant to my father, who worked as an illustrator in London and a portraitist in the country, a mode of employment which necessitated staying at many grand country residences. My favourite, and the one where my father was most employed, was Didlington Hall in the county of Norfolk -- for the family who lived there possessed both great talent and great taste, nor did they believe that quality need necessarily be determined by good birth. Certainly, they were gracious enough to recognise within me certain talents as an artist, and so to give me the run of much of their house, for they were wonderful collectors and their every room and corridor seemed adorned with treasures. To my youthful eyes, such a trove of riches seemed a fairy tale made true, and it soon became my ambition - no, my most passionate dream -- to hunt out and recover such marvels for myself.

Yet though generous and open in all other matters, there was one room to which the family barred me entry, for I was warned that its contents were especially precious. Naturally, I sought to respect their wishes - but equally naturally my interest was piqued, for human nature, I suppose, is always what it is, and all the more so when that nature is a child’s.

So it was that in the end, like Bluebeard’s wife, I could no longer hold out against my curiosity and crept away, while my father was occupied with his painting, to inspect the secret room. I discovered, to my surprise, that the door was unlocked and, opening it stealthily, I passed inside. The room beyond was in darkness, and for several seconds I could make out nothing at all. Feeling my way along the side of the wall, therefore, I reached for a curtain and pulled it aside, allowing a shaft of sunlight into the room. At once I gasped in wonder and surprise, as I viewed the collection of objects before me. Never had I seen such strangeness before! There were figures of stone and clay and gold, pictures painted on panels of wood, and the body of a mummy swathed in tight cloth -- laid out within its coffin, for all the world as though it were asleep. The idea inspired in me a remarkable fascination, and a shiver of mingled dread and delight. I approached the mummy and gazed at it in stupefaction for a long while, then went from object to object, inspecting each one with the minutest attention. What a bizarre nature these people must have had, I thought, what bizarre patterns of behaviour, and assumptions, and beliefs, to have created such things -- and yet, as was evident, they had been human just like me!

Of course, lost in my astonishment, I was at length discovered in the room -- and yet, such was the kindness of my hosts and so evident, no doubt, the brightness in my eye, that I was not punished but encouraged in my enthusiasm. During the next few years, such became my taste for Egyptian art that I came to have the greatest longing to visit Egypt itself. It was now that I regretted my poverty all the more, and my lack of education too, for in truth I knew nothing of Egyptology save what I had seen at Didlington Hall, and so my understanding of it continued very small. Yet in the end, at the age of seventeen, it was to be my skill in draughtsmanship which gave me my chance to journey there, for it had been decided that a survey was required of all that country’s monuments before the art upon their walls began to crumble into dust, and I was recommended by the kindness of my patrons for the post. It was not as an excavator, then, nor as anyone with any claims to specialist knowledge, but rather as a humble copyist that I first of all entered an Egyptian tomb.

What paintings I discovered there! And again, in the next tomb, and again after that -- endless galleries of wonder and beauty! Alone amidst such work, with the darkness illumined only by a feeble torch, I felt all those emotions I had experienced years before amidst the private collection at Didlington Hall, yet multiplied now a thousand times, for I was standing where the Ancients had once stood themselves, and this affected me more strongly than I had ever imagined possible. I found myself impressed by a profoundest sense of timelessness, so that I would almost forget the long roll of centuries and imagine that the figures before me were freshly painted - or even, sometimes, alive upon the wall!

I recall, for instance, one example in particular which somehow served to place all my feelings on the matter into focus. It happened one afternoon that I had been copying the painted image of a hoopoe. When I had finished my work for the day, I walked to the entranceway to the tomb where I saw, to my astonishment, a living example of the very same bird -- its plumage, its posture, the angle of its head, precisely the same! I felt almost shaken by the coincidence; and all the more so when, having mentioned it to my superior on the surveying team, Mr Percy Newberry, he told me that to the Ancients the hoopoe had been a bird of magical significance. I answered him that I could well believe it - for indeed, I had felt a little touched by magic myself! The idea that both I and an artist who had lived more than 4,000 years before my time could have observed and represented the same species of bird struck me with the force of a thunderclap -- and I felt once again the strangest sense of how the present and the distant past might yet be linked. Inspired by such fancies, I found my own work steadily prospering and my fascination with the world of ancient Egypt, my concern to penetrate its mysteries, growing all the more. Nor did I ever cease to be struck, copying the figures before me, by how familiar they seemed -- and yet, at the same moment, how very haunting and strange.

I mentioned this seeming paradox to Mr Newberry one day. He gazed at me narrowly, then asked me what I thought the explanation might be. I answered him, somewhat hesitantly, that it was perhaps a reflection upon the formalised nature of the art: that we soon grew to recognise the conventions which had governed it, while never ceasing to find them exotic. Newberry nodded slowly. ‘And yet the strangest Egyptian art,’ he replied, ‘certainly which I have seen, is also the art in which the conventions are most radically overthrown. Some have called the result life-like.’ He paused, then made a face. ‘I call it grotesque.’

‘Indeed?’ I asked, intrigued.

‘Yes,’ said Newberry hurriedly. I wanted to ask him more; but he rose to his feet, and even as I opened my mouth he cut me short. ‘Grotesque,’ he repeated, then walked briskly away. I watched him leave, puzzled by his abruptness -- for I had always found him a most communicative man. I wondered what the art could be which had affected him in such a way, but in the days which followed I chose not to press him, and Newberry himself did not mention it again. But then, shortly before Christmas, when we were due for a break from our work upon the tombs, Newberry approached me in a confidential manner and asked me if I would care to make a short trip across the desert. Not yet having left the cultivated borders of the Nile, I replied that nothing would give me greater pleasure, and indeed I felt flattered, for I was only one of three assistants upon the site and Newberry had sworn me, in offering the invitation, not to repeat it to the other two. Still, though, it seemed I was not altogether trusted, for when I asked him what our destination was to be, Newberry would only tap the side of his nose. ‘You shall see,’ was all he would add.

We left that same afternoon upon camels. I had never ridden upon such a beast before, and my body was very soon aching all over. Newberry must have observed my discomfort, for he laughed at me and told me I would soon be distracted from all thoughts of my bruises. Again, I pressed him to tell me by what, but he continued reticent. Instead, he urged his camel onwards and together, lumbering and swaying along the dusty track, we had soon left the palm groves of the Nile behind and passed into the desert. I was astonished by the suddenness of the transformation: one moment there had been cattle, and crops, and trees, the next nothing but a vast expanse of rock and sand. The dunes would sometimes be skimmed by a blast of hot wind, the dust lifted in a momentary veil, but otherwise all was deathly still. It was as though the very world had ended, and I at once understood, gazing out at the fiery sands, why for the Ancient Egyptians the colour of evil had been red.

Certainly, the landscape through which we rode -- savage and barren, and littered with boulders -- might have seemed a fitting haunt for restless demons, and I felt something almost like relief when we suddenly joined the edge of a cliff and saw the ribbon of the Nile once again below us, fringed with the green of fields and trees. We continued to follow the edge of the cliff, until at length it curved away from the river and we saw before us, hollowed out to form a natural amphitheatre, the crescent of a sandy plain. There appeared nothing of great interest upon it, only scrub and the odd low pebble-strewn mound; but I could see, toiling in the centre of the plain, gangs of white-clad workmen and, just beyond them, a line of baked-mud huts. We began to descend the cliff towards them, and as we did so, unable to restrain my curiosity any further, I demanded to know from Newberry what it was we had come to see. He answered me by sweeping outwards with his arm. ‘This is known today as the plain of El-Amarna,’ he replied, ‘but its ancient name was Akh-et-Aten, and there once stood here, though for barely fifteen years, the capital city of a Pharaoh of Egypt.’