The Visitors (55 page)

‘
Les
tricoteuses
,’ he said with a smile, gesturing towards the three placid, knitting women. ‘They’re here every day, all day. As is that prince of cads, Weigall. If he starts pestering you with questions just ignore him.’ Mace began to cough. ‘Sorry. It’s the sand,’ he said. ‘All the chemicals Lucas and I have to use – the fumes build up. But I’ve been inhaling mummy dust for the last fifteen years of Met excavations, which doesn’t help. My poor lungs are shot… Come and see our lab when you’re done with the tomb,’ he added. ‘Where’s Callender got to? Ah, there he is – he’ll guide you.’

Pecky Callender had emerged from underground and was bruising Miss Mack’s hand. ‘Not a
whole
lot to see,’ he remarked, leading us towards the steps. ‘But you’ll get the feel of it. It’s hot down here. Very. If you come over faint, Myrtle – or you, young ladies, just say. I’ll whisk you out in two ticks. First aid. Yes indeedy.’

Frances, veteran of tombs, gave him a look of mild scorn. She led me down the sixteen steps, Miss Mack and Callender following. The steel gate Carter had installed was open, and the heat from the Antechamber beyond was fierce. It exhaled into our faces, then breathed in and sucked us along the approach corridor. Its damp intensity brought me to a halt on the threshold; even Frances faltered. The room beyond, so often described to me and so often imagined, was much smaller and more confined than I’d expected. The pale plaster that covered the walls was disfigured by a strange creeping pinkness, by blossoming stains. They had crept their way across the bare wall opposite, an area once piled, I knew, with treasures. Now these were gone; the mottled stains created patterns, the suggestion of watching faces concealed in the walls.

‘Spores,’ Callender said from behind me. ‘Fungi or mould. Not sure what’s causing it. Not sure what it
is
, actually. Lucas has run tests. It’s the alteration in the humidity, he thinks.’

‘It’s spread since I was last here,’ Frances said in an uncertain voice. ‘It’s spread a
lot.’

‘
Well, it does. Every day. Too many people in here, perhaps. Or my lights.’

He gestured to my right, where two large arc lamps had been fixed. Frances and I took a step towards them, and the heat at once intensified. Beyond their dazzle, I saw two tall black and gold figures, and realised they were the sentinels Eve had described, still standing guard in the emptied tomb. Their obsidian eyes glittered at us. As we gazed at them, one of those eyes closed, then reopened. I gave a startled cry.

‘Did he wink at you? He does that,’ Callender said. ‘It’s the gilding – tiny fragments break off. They cling to his brows, or his eyes. Then they get dislodged again, and for a moment you think––’ He cleared his throat. ‘Optical illusion. Nothing to worry about. Take a close look, they won’t hurt you.’

Frances and I hesitated, then approached
.
My nervousness began to abate: the statues were a little taller than I was, imbued with an eternal stillness; their faces were beautiful, and their expression profoundly gentle. If they had turned and spoken to me – and I felt that if I were alone with them, they might – I would have answered them without fear.

‘This is the wall to the inner chamber, Lucy,’ Frances said in a low voice, and I realised that of course it was: this was Mohammed’s important wall, the one that might conceal the boy king’s final resting place. Frances began to point out the seals on its surface: there were one hundred and fifty-one of them – she’d counted. ‘You’ve moved the rushes and the basket that were here,’ she said, in a sharp tone, glancing at Mr Callender. ‘The ones at the base of the wall. You’ve put this boxing in. When did you do that?’

‘Yesterday. Getting ready for the opening.’ He gestured to the boxwork covering the lower section of the wall. ‘Tomorrow I’ll box the statues in too. Lord Carnarvon wants them in place for the great opening. He insists they be visible and Carter insists they be protected. So they’re staying and I’m boxing them in. It’s called compromise. Plenty of
that
at the moment.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Myrtle, you’d like to look at the statues, I expect? Should have covered them up today. Disobeyed orders. I knew you’d want to see them.’

Miss Mack was touched by that. She gave him a grateful glance and stepped forward. In silence, she stared at the statues, meeting their steady obsidian gaze. Before anyone could demur, she lifted her right hand and rested it against the wall they guarded. She closed her eyes and bowed her head. She appeared to be listening.

We listened too, and I realised that the tomb was not a place of silence, as it had seemed at first, but an echo-chamber for the tiniest, most infinitesimal of sounds. The air eddied and sighed; there were little creaks, wooden protests, easings and shiftings in the walls, sounds like the trickling of gravel; the hot metal of the arc lamps sizzled and clicked. Miss Mack remained still and intent. Then she straightened, removed her hand from the wall and turned. Her face was bloodless.

‘I shall go outside,’ she said. ‘It is – I feel – Pecky, if you wouldn’t mind helping me.’

For a moment I thought she was about to faint, but Callender grasped her arm and she seemed to recover her poise. He led her outside. Left behind in the tomb, Frances and I clung to one another tightly. I think we both felt that we were not alone, that there was another presence here. We waited: it appeared to tolerate us. After a long eddying silence, Frances tugged at my arm. ‘You must look at this, Lucy,’ she whispered. ‘The last time I was here I had to crawl under one of the couches to reach it, and Daddy kept telling me to come out. He dragged me out by my heels in the end… but now it’s much easier to see in. Look, this is the little storeroom Mr Carter calls the Annexe.’

I turned to see that there was a small opening low down on the room’s west wall; the beams from the arc lamps were not directed that way, so it lay in shadow. Frances led me across and we knelt down. The opening was a jagged one, made by the thieves who’d plundered the tomb millennia before and left unsealed by the necropolis officials. I leaned forward and peered into the dusty space beyond, Frances crouching beside me. This area had not been cleared: as my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness inside, I began to make out the tumbled shapes, the mountainous, precariously balanced pile of
things
: vases, chairs, boxes, rifled and rejected by the thieves, seized upon and cast aside. Some shapes I could identify, others not: I glimpsed an oar, a carved walking stick, an intricate boat, glints of gold, the faint phosphorescent gleams of alabaster. There was a strong scent emanating from the dark: unexpected, unnerving, the scent of ripeness.

‘I can smell
fruit
,’ I whispered. ‘Surely there can’t be fruit in here, Frances?’

‘There might be,’ she whispered back. ‘They found fruit in the Antechamber, Lucy. In baskets and in those strange, white, egg-shaped boxes. Fruits and meat and grains and vegetables. In three thousand years, none of it had rotted – it was sort of desiccated.’ She reached her hand into the dark space and felt around. Dust eddied. ‘All those provisions, stored away for his afterlife. Do you think the dead get hungry, Lucy?’

I thought of my lost mother, of lost Poppy d’Erlanger… Did the dead have appetites? To me, they were sad, shadowy, irretrievable. ‘I can’t imagine that,’ I whispered.

‘Neither can I. But then I can’t imagine being dead… and if I do, when I try, if I try now, I can’t see anything. Just nothingness.’

She turned her face to me and fixed me with her dark bright gaze. ‘Do you think people know when they’ll die, Lucy?’ she then asked. ‘Do you think they foresee it?’

‘No, no, no,’ I whispered. ‘I’m sure they don’t. Don’t say that, Frances. Not in here… ’

‘Sorry.’ She grasped my hand tightly and began to cough. ‘Oh, this dust – everything’s covered in it,’ she said, ‘and the sand – it gets everywhere, it’s choking. Maybe it’s that horrid mould on the walls – I can’t breathe. Let’s go now, shall we?’

‘Yes, let’s.’

We both stood up and looked around the empty chamber one last time. A mischievous look stole onto Frances’s face. Releasing my hand, she ran across to the sealed north wall and, before I could prevent her, tapped it lightly. ‘Until we next meet,’ she said. ‘Farewell, King… ’ Then she laughed softly, which made her begin coughing again. I dragged her away. We both ran towards the stairs and, terrified, elated, made quick our escape – up and out, into the blessed air, into the hot light of the Valley.

The three women had abandoned their knitting; they were folding up their camp stools and making ready to leave. The two young cameramen had gone. The journalist Arthur Weigall was pocketing his notebook. He nodded to us as we drew level with him. ‘Beautiful evening. I think I’ll walk back over the hills,’ he announced, in a friendly tone. ‘My favourite route. Keeps me fit as a fiddle. I can make it to the ferry in under two hours from here – pretty good, eh?’

He looked closely at Frances; recognition dawned and I saw him make a lightning-quick calculation. ‘Miss Winlock, I presume?’ He smiled broadly, edged closer, tipped his hat. ‘Didn’t I see you here with your father the other week? How’s the clearance work going? Encounter anything interesting down there in the tomb, young ladies?’

We made no reply. Escaping fast, we ran to the tomb of Seti II, now used as the conservation laboratory. It proved to be deep, facing north and refreshingly cool. The only daylight came from the entrance, and it was dark in its furthest recesses – so dark that Miss Mack and Callender, who were examining
antika
there, were using flashlights. It was set up with an array of benches, tools, ranked bottles, burners, tiny bellows for removing dust, and porcelain crucibles. It smelled strongly, chokingly, of chemicals.

‘Acetone. Ether. Pure alcohol.’ Mace ran his hand along the bottles. ‘Formalin and collodion – we’re using celluloids and formaldehyde too. None of them nice. Horrible stink. I have to go outside for a breather, but Lucas seems immune, don’t you, old chap?’

Lucas, his fellow conservationist, then came forward: a tall, thin man, a good ten years older than Mace, he was also English, and had worked for years as a government chemist in Cairo. Both men were somewhat donnish, I thought; Lucas was wearing a three-piece suit and brogues, whereas Mace, as usual, wore shabby, crumpled work clothes; Minnie Burton liked to say he dressed like an under-gardener.

Lucas shook hands and regarded us in a dry way. Glancing back to Mace, he winked at him and said to us: ‘So how was the tomb? Been admiring Callender’s carpentry work?’

‘Just following orders,’ Callender interjected mildly, from the recesses of the lab. ‘As per instructions, I’d point out. When he removes the wall, Carter wants a platform.’

‘I’ll bet he does,’ Lucas replied. ‘Don’t we all?’ And with that enigmatic remark, he and Mace began to explain their work, to show us their triumphs and recount their disasters.

The single most difficult task they’d faced, they said, was the chariots. Only two had ever been discovered in Egypt before; in the Antechamber, there were four. They had been too large to be manoeuvred whole into the tomb when it was originally stocked, so their axles had been sawn in two and their parts dismantled. They had been piled together in a corner, and there, over the millennia, their leather fittings had disintegrated, forming a black sticky resin, glueing all four chariots together. They had had to be disentangled, piece by delicate piece. It had taken weeks of work in the tomb before they could safely be removed from it. Their six-spoked wooden wheels had been bound with thin tyres of rawhide, fragments of which had survived: Mace and Lucas had experimented with seven different chemical solutions until they found one that kept these scraps intact.

Frances and I bent to examine the gold relief work – and there the boy king was before our eyes, mounted in the chariot’s basket, bow aimed, his arrow about to fly, plumed horses at full stretch, a hound racing beside: galloping to a hunt one glorious morning three thousand two hundred years ago.

Mace and Lucas showed us the records of this work – and it was then I began to understand for the first time how prodigious a task this was, and how minutely Carter had organised it. Every object was numbered and mapped by the Met’s draughtsmen Hauser and Hall and its position in the Antechamber recorded. Each object, small or large, was then photographed in situ by Harry Burton. Carter himself drew them and recorded their measurements, their materials, their smallest details. Once restored to a state in which they could be safely transported, they were recorded again; finally they were packed – padded with wadding, wrapped in linen bandages and shrouds, laid into special boxes made to fit their contours.

‘The most precious things ever found by any archaeologist,’ Lucas said, ‘and we have the job of saving them. We’re trying to do it, God help us, under the noses of these pestilential journalists and tourists––’

‘In one-hundred-degree heat,’ Mace put in.

‘While being pickled in chemicals––’

‘While being constantly interrupted by visitors with special access. Carnarvon’s friends, Egyptian officials
.
Two US Senators and four Pashas yesterday––’

‘One earl, two Honourables, a viscount, three ladies and a bishop the day before––’

‘But we stay calm and even-tempered at all times. No matter the provocation––’

‘No matter how fatuous the questions. Even when Carter shouts and rages––’

‘Which he does. On occasion. Very, very rarely of course––’

‘A mere five times today, for example.’

Both men laughed. Drawing Frances and me deeper into the tomb, they began to show us some of the objects that had been restored but not yet boxed for transport: a gold stick adorned with a tiny statue of the king as a child; an exquisite fan made of ostrich feathers – feathers that had survived three thousand years. We were standing in a small area, hemmed in on all sides by packing cases. ‘Where is all this treasure
going
?’ Frances asked; she’d been counting the containers and had given up at two hundred.