Tutankhamen (32 page)

In 1923 Carter wrote an article for
Pearson's Magazine.
‘The Tomb of the Bird' tells of strange, almost supernatural events immediately prior to the opening of Tutankhamen's tomb.
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It is the start of the 1922 – 3 season. Carter has bought a caged bird, which sings most beautifully every day. To the amusement of his sophisticated city friends, he takes the bird to Luxor where it is to be the companion of his loneliness in the desert. The workmen are charmed by the new arrival, and believe it to be a bird of good omen. It is not long before the first steps of the staircase leading to Tutankhamen's tomb are revealed:

The tomb door was opened, and the fill in the passageway removed to reveal the second, sealed doorway.

A more down-to-earth account, recorded in a private letter written by Herbert Winlock of the Metropolitan Museum, confirms the essence of this much-repeated story. Carter did indeed have a much-admired songbird, which he kept in a cage in his house in the Valley. While Carter was away from home, meeting Carnarvon in Cairo prior to the tomb opening, Callender found a cobra in the cage ‘just in the act of gulping the canary down'.
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As the son of Samuel John Carter, a celebrated Victorian animal portrait painter who was himself the son of a gamekeeper, Carter had been raised with a small menagerie of pets which the Carter children, all talented artists in their own right, used to practise their drawing. Carter continued this tradition in Egypt, where tame animals were allowed to roam free in his garden. Birds, in particular, gave him great
pleasure; his notebooks mention tranquil hours spent floating in a small boat on the Nile floodwaters, watching the pelicans. However, life in the Valley, for Carter's pets, could be both brutal and short. A pair of young gazelles died, ‘the story being too sad to repeat'; a young donkey was bitten in the mouth by a cobra and expired three painful hours later.
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The story of a canary being eaten by a snake is startling – how did the cobra get into the house? – but not an unusual one, and Carter quickly replaced his lost pet.

What does make the story unusual is the hint of the supernatural which the down-to-earth Carter was prepared to allow in an article intended for a popular audience. It may simply be that, as a self-employed Egyptologist facing an uncertain future, he wanted to sell a good story that would encourage the readers of
Pearson's Magazine
to buy his book. He may have felt the need to compete with the other, equally lurid tales of the supernatural that were already in circulation. It may even be – as was later suggested – that he allowed the story to spread in order to frighten potential robbers away from a tomb that was under some form of spiritual protection. Whatever his motivation, the story had the entirely foreseeable effect of linking the tomb with the occult via the unimpeachable evidence of its excavator.

The belief that the dynastic Egyptians were possessed of a long-lost, esoteric knowledge can be traced as far back as ancient Greece and Rome. The mysterious, unreadable and surely magical hieroglyphic writings made this a very easy, and in many ways very attractive, assumption to make. By 1822, when Jean-François Champollion published his key to decoding the hieroglyphic script, the idea of Egypt as a powerful source of alternative understanding of all aspects of life and religion was deeply ingrained in popular culture. Now the hieroglyphic texts were no longer secret: anyone could buy a translation
and read the words inscribed on the temple and tomb walls. There can, however, be a wide gulf between reading and understanding, and misconceptions over the true nature of Egyptian theology abounded. Meanwhile, Western Europe was rapidly losing the rock-solid comfort of unquestioning Christian faith. The Bible was no longer the revealed word of God; people were descended from monkeys; light and voices travelled through metal wires; men sailed through the air in giant metal birds. The world had become a more scientific place, yet life seemed more uncertain as things that would once have been fantastic suddenly became real.

Up to 16 million people died in the Great War (1914 – 18). This included almost an entire generation of young men whose bodies were buried in foreign fields. A further 50 – 100 million worldwide – an estimated 250,000 in Britain – died in the devastating flu pandemic that followed (1918 – 20). These tragedies naturally led to an increased interest in the occult as the living struggled to maintain contact with their dead. Seances, automatic writing and ouija boards (originally promoted as a parlour game, and not as a means of communicating with the ‘other side') grew in popularity, and Egyptian religion, with its sinister mortuary rituals, held a great fascination for those who felt that they might be able to connect themselves to a lost knowledge simply by touching, or gazing at, ancient artefacts. The Theosophists – a sect who attempted to reach spiritual enlightenment through intuition and direct communication – were not the only ones to believe that the Egyptians had enjoyed strong magical powers which students of the occult might one day re-awake. Meanwhile, Tutankhamen's links with the ‘heretic' Akhenaten made him a particularly suitable study for those interested in the development of religion and magic.

A large library of mummy-based horror stories ensured that Carter's public was pre-programmed to accept the mummy as a malevolent entity.
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A corpse, so recognisably human many thousands of years after death that it carries the promise of resurrection, is indeed a
frightening figure. While many of the published mummy tales had little to distinguish them from other run-of-the-mill horror stories, some were tightly crafted and sprinkled with semi-accurate Egyptological facts, names and locations, which allowed the reader to suspend disbelief. Inevitably, some readers accepted this heavily disguised fiction as fact.

The first mummy tale written in English – appropriately titled
The Mummy!
– was published anonymously by Jane Webb (later the garden expert Jane Loudon) in 1827. Webb was apparently influenced both by the work of Napoleon's Commission and, more directly, by the 1818 publication and popular success of Mary Shelley's (then Mary Godwin)
Frankenstein
. Her mummy, Cheops, is a likeable and relatively harmless creature and her book, set in 2126 England, more akin to science fiction than gothic horror: among the exotica, it features ladies who wear flame headdresses and, quite shockingly, trousers! Here her hero, Edric, confesses his dream of resuscitating a corpse using a ‘galvanic battery'. Although he lives three centuries after his author, Edric has a nineteenth-century understanding of death, and he knows that the only way of being absolutely certain that a body is indeed dead is to observe the signs of putrefaction. This he is too squeamish to do. It seems that his experiment is doomed to fail before it starts, unless …:

Edgar Allan Poe's satirical short story ‘Some Words with a Mummy' (1845) echoes Shelley's and Webb's fascination with electricity, which, many suspected, could be used to bring the dead back to life: