The Murder of King Tut (3 page)

Amenhotep ignored his goblet and raised the full pitcher to his lips. The ruby liquid spilled along his face, then trickled
down his thick neck and under his collar onto the copper skin of his belly. It came to rest on the white kilt around his waist,
leaving a stain that looked like blood.

The pharaoh tumbled backward into his pillows. This was an act of retreat, and they both knew it.

Tiye stood over him to close the deal, as the sun’s fiery rays taunted the crocodiles and cobras painted on the tile floor.
“This must be done, Pharaoh. And soon.”

“They are almost finished decorating my burial chamber,” the pharaoh muttered. He reached for a plate of bread flavored with
honey and dates, unaware that the grains of sand in every bite were the source of his pain. Year after year, the desert grit
in the bread wore away the enamel on his teeth, inviting the decay and infection that would soon take his life.

Tiye handed him another goblet filled to the brim with wine, then remained still as Amenhotep chased the bread with a long
gulp. She was as serene as the Sphinx as she waited for her husband to bend to her strong will.

“Tuthmosis would have been a great pharaoh,” he said mournfully.

“That son now wanders the afterworld,” Tiye replied.

Amenhotep nodded sadly. Their oldest boy, his beloved, his favorite, was dead. Soon he would join him. Egypt would need a
new pharaoh. The only way to control the selection was to do it himself.

“Bring the accident to me,” Amenhotep roared. “Of course he will be pharaoh. But shame on me for leaving Egypt to him. Shame
on both of us.”

1887

“HOWARD, IS THAT YOU? What do you think you’re doing in here?” asked Lord Amherst, swinging open the library doors. “These
artifacts are
irreplaceable.
I’ve told you that before. You are a stubborn boy.”

Thirteen-year-old Howard Carter quickly turned his head toward His Lordship. He was caught! He had been warned repeatedly
about this room. He was definitely a stubborn boy.

It was the middle of the day. Young Carter was supposed to be helping his father, who was painting a new commission for His
Lordship. In a moment of boredom, the boy had slipped away to the most forbidden and imposing room at Didlington Hall:
the library.

He couldn’t help himself. The room was utterly fascinating, its silence augmented by the startling, massive stone statues
situated about the room, imported straight from the sands of Egypt. To gaze at them allowed Carter to see into the history
of the known world. These pieces truly
were
irreplaceable.

Didlington Hall was a palatial fortress eight miles south of Swaffham. It was the county seat of Lord Amherst, a member of
Parliament with a penchant for styling his hair in the foppish manner of Oscar Wilde. Seven thousand acres and sixteen leased
farms surrounded the great home. There was a large, pristine lake, a paddock, a falconer’s lodge, a boathouse, and a ballroom
that had been host to grand and important parties for more than a hundred years.

But it was the library that Howard Carter loved most, and he couldn’t stay out of the room.

Fortunately, Lord Amherst was a nice man with five daughters; Carter was the closest thing to a son he’d ever had. He recognized
the slender, strong-jawed young man’s innate, sometimes fierce curiosity and saw in him something of himself.

He and young Carter both wanted—no, that would be too soft a description—
demanded
answers about what had come before them. They were obsessed with the ancient past.

So rather than kicking Carter out of the library, Lord Amherst proceeded to walk him through the wood-paneled room, patiently
explaining the significance of the more notable books.

There was a priceless collection of Bibles, for example, many printed centuries earlier. There was a section devoted to
incunabula,
books printed shortly after the invention of the printing press. There were books with fancy bindings, first editions by
famous authors, and so forth and so on.

And then there was the
Egyptian
collection.

In addition to owning tome after tome detailing the known history of ancient Egypt, Lord Amherst had rather obsessively decorated
the library with Egyptian relics. The taller statues were bigger than a man and loomed like sentinels among the overstuffed
wingback chairs and oil reading lamps. There were dozens of smaller statues too, and rare texts printed on papyrus that had
been sealed behind glass so human hands like Howard’s couldn’t damage them. Amherst had bought the collection from a German
priest two decades earlier and had added to it every year since.

“Not only is it one of the largest and most important collections of Egyptology in all of Great Britain,” he told Carter,
“it is the joy of my life.”

“And mine as well,” Carter chimed in.

The tour concluded with a history-changing announcement: Lord Amherst was hereby offering the young man unlimited access to
his collection. Never mind that something as simple as bumping into a statue could cause thousands of pounds’ worth of damage—Amherst
had seen the passion in Carter’s eyes as he told him of the mysteries of Egyptian culture, with its strange alphabet and belief
in the afterworld and the amazing burial chambers.

Amherst encouraged Carter to immerse himself in Egyptology. And that was precisely what Howard Carter did—until the day he
died.

1891

IT WAS LATE MAY, almost June. Howard Carter, now seventeen, strode up the Watteau Walk toward the white columns marking the
south entrance of Didlington Hall.

There was a fragrance of fresh grass in the air but a weariness in his step. He had spent the day as he spent most every other
day, sketching household pets. It was a living—not a good living, and certainly not an exciting living, but he had no other
skills and little formal education. Though he had grown accustomed to being treated as family by the Amhersts, the fact of
the matter was that while he could put on airs with the best of the nobility and was always welcome to spend hours in Lord
Amherst’s library, he was doomed to a life of very modest income and minimal prestige.

He simply had to accept the fact that he would be a nobody, accomplishing nothing. But it made him grumpy. Very much so.

1891

CARTER STEPPED into the cool entryway. This was much better. The great expanse was lined with expensive paintings and other
works of art, some of which dated to the eleventh century.

A butler showed Carter to the library.

Lady Amherst was there, as was her youngest, twenty-five-year-old Alicia. They greeted Carter warmly and introduced him to
an affable stranger who clearly had a flirtatious relationship with Alicia. Carter didn’t much like that, but what Alicia
did wasn’t his concern.

The stranger was a bony young man in his early twenties named Percy Newberry. His face and hands were deeply tanned from hours
outdoors, and his face was half covered with a prominent mustache.

Carter soon learned that Newberry was an Egyptologist who was pursuing Alicia’s heart and Lady Amherst’s pocketbook. He was
fresh from a November–April stint along the Nile, surveying ruins at a place called Beni Hasan.

Lady Amherst, who had always loved Carter, was obviously keen on having the two of them meet. He wasn’t sure why.

But Carter sat and listened eagerly as Newberry told incredible stories about life on the Nile. He spoke of working in the
tombs from first light all the way through to the evening meal, then devoting the greater part of the night to study and discussion.
Newberry’s tone was intense, and he had a deep passion for his work. Carter liked him instantly.

It also turned out that Percy was something of a botanist, which seemed a rather unusual sideline for a man laboring in such
a barren location. But Carter remembered that Alicia also enjoyed botany, and then their connection made sense.

On behalf of the British Museum, Newberry’s expedition had undertaken to create a visual record of the drawings and colorful
hieroglyphics inside the pharaohs’ tombs before they completely faded away—something that often happened when ancient drawings
were exposed to air and the presence of human beings. The task was enormous. There were some
twelve thousand square feet
of wall drawings to sketch.

And while the job had gone well at first, the relationship between Newberry and his sketch artist had soured. Now, as he was
raising money to fund another season in Egypt, Newberry was also searching for a new sketch artist. The job required someone
with significant knowledge of Egypt and a talent for drawing and painting.

That person, it soon became obvious, was Howard Carter.

1891

ONLY THE HUGELY IRRITATING FACT that he was seasick prevented Carter from bursting with excitement. My God, he was in Alexandria,
Egypt. He steadied himself against the roll of the steamship as he scanned the docks for Percy Newberry.

Carter had just reached the ancient port founded by Alexander the Great, the man responsible for
ending
the great Egyptian empires. Some said the city was the gateway to Africa; others called it the crossroads of the world. For
the seventeen-year-old Carter, Alexandria was simply the place where his life would begin, the life he believed he had been
born for.

But first he had to find Percy Newberry.

It was Newberry who had rescued Carter from the tedium of drawing family pets and had sent him to train at the British Museum
so he would be prepared for his role as a sketch artist.

Percy had gone ahead of Carter to Egypt and now should have been waiting for him onshore.

Somewhere.
But where?

Carter was slender, with a lantern jaw and a whisper of the bushy mustache he would wear for the next four decades. The air
was hot like the mouth of a blast furnace, and he could feel the searing heat of the deck burning through the soles of his
shoes.

He was dressed for October in England, not October in Egypt. He would have eagerly traded his suit and tie for the dockworkers’
simple white robes. None of them seemed bothered by the heat.

Carter squinted into the pale sunshine, scanning the distant dock for a sign of Newberry. But there was no Englishman among
the mélange of half-dressed Moors, Turks, Nubians, and Egyptians. No sign of Newberry’s straw hat.

Where in hell are you, Percy?

Carter studied the skyline and spotted Pompey’s priapic pillar jutting above Alexandria like some ancient Roman practical
joke.

He double-checked that he had everything he needed to go ashore. His list was short: sketchbook, notebook, valise.

The ship’s anchors splashed into the Great Harbor like a shotgun blast. Immediately, a locust-like plague of dockworkers clambered
up over the side.

Carter barely avoided being knocked over as he made his way to the gangplank being lowered off the edge of the ship. He scuttled
down into a waiting boat, where a local man whose rippling shoulders told of years of plying the harbor rowed him ashore.

Carter paid the man and stepped up onto the stone dock. And there stood Percy Newberry, resplendent in his straw boater, smiling
broadly.

“Where were you?” Carter dared to complain to his boss and employer. “I’m always prompt and efficient myself.”

Percy Newberry just laughed. “Well, you’d better be, with that attitude of yours. Welcome to Egypt, Carter.”

Howard Carter’s Egyptian adventure was about to begin. Though he didn’t realize it then, a boy had come to find the Boy King.

1891

CARTER WOKE UP INSIDE A TOMB. He was eager to begin working, though it was totally dark, and the small room smelled like,
well, death warmed over.

The floor of the burial place was carved stone covered in a fine layer of sand. Bats clung to the ceiling, the rustle of their
wings making a sound like what Carter would one day call “strange spirits of the ancient dead.”

Newberry lay nearby. Like Carter, he had spent the night in the tomb, for they had arrived after nightfall and had nowhere
else to sleep.

If this was to be Howard Carter’s first day as an Egyptologist—and it was—it couldn’t have gotten off to a more atmospheric
start.

From Alexandria, Carter and Newberry had taken the train to Cairo, where they spent a week with Flinders Petrie, whom Lord
Amherst had called “the master” of Egyptian excavation for his years of experience in the tombs.

Those days spent in the Egyptian metropolis had been exciting, but soon it was time to move on. From Cairo, Carter and Newberry
chugged south.

The tracks hugged the Nile, but while the scenery on the train ride from Alexandria had been lush and green through the river
delta, just outside Cairo it had turned barren and desolate. A thin strip of greenery sprouted along either side of the Nile,
thanks to its annual habit of overflowing its banks, but otherwise the sensation of being surrounded by desert was powerful
indeed.

After two hundred miles, the men disembarked at Abu Qirqas station, where they hired donkeys—one each for themselves, and
one each for their luggage.

Carter had no problem handling his animals, thanks to his many years living in the country.

“Just watch me,” he told Percy Newberry. “Do as I do, and you’ll be fine.”

The fertile black loam of the riverside path soon turned dry and rocky. The sun was setting, and Carter and Newberry knew
that it would be a race just to get to the tombs before dark.

They lost.

The trail became increasingly narrow and rugged as it climbed an escarpment. But eventually they reached the tombs, which
provided acceptable shelter from the wind and nighttime cold. Their remote location allowed the two men to simply step through
the ancient stone doorway and stretch out for the night.