Wonderful things

Some doors are opened by armies, some by accident, some by the slow accumulation of a single life refusing to look elsewhere. The greatest discoveries are rarely made by the brilliant or the lucky. They are made by the patient: by men who have walked the same valley until the valley has nothing left to hide, and who, when the hinge of history finally swings under their hand, have the presence of mind to find the only two words the moment will accept.

THE TRACER FROM NORFOLK

Howard Carter was not bred for the heroic register. He was born at Kensington on the ninth of May 1874, the son of Samuel Carter, an animal painter who drew for Punch, and Martha Sands of Norfolk. He never attended a formal school. He learned to draw at his father's elbow, copying the anatomy of horses and spaniels until the line ran true. At seventeen he was sent out to Egypt as a tracer under Lord Amherst's patronage, to copy tomb-paintings at Beni Hasan in pencil and watercolour. The trade taught him what no university could: that the surface of a wall is a document, and that a man who can copy it accurately can read it.

He rose through the Egyptian Antiquities Service, was made Inspector of Upper Egypt, lost the post in 1905 after a scuffle with drunken French tourists at Saqqara that he refused to apologise for, and walked the country for three years selling watercolours to make rent. In 1907 George Herbert, fifth Earl of Carnarvon, a sickly aristocrat sent to Egypt for his lungs, took him on as excavator. For fifteen seasons they worked the southern ground. The Valley of the Kings was thought exhausted. Theodore Davis had said so publicly in 1912. Carter disagreed. He had a map in his head of the triangular patch of unexcavated rubble between the tombs of Ramesses II, Merenptah, and Ramesses VI, and a name he had been carrying for nearly twenty years: the boy-king whose cartouche turned up on a faience cup, on a piece of gold foil, on a cache of embalming refuse, and nowhere else. Tutankhamun. Eleventh king of the Eighteenth Dynasty. Buried, by every calculation, somewhere in the Valley, and never found.

THE LAST SEASON

By the autumn of 1922 Carnarvon had run out of patience and money. He summoned Carter to Highclere in the summer and told him the sixth season would be the last. Carter offered to pay for it himself if the Earl would lend him the concession. Carnarvon, shamed, agreed to fund one more campaign. On the first of November the workmen began clearing the triangle of rubble beneath the workmen's huts at the foot of the tomb of Ramesses VI, the one patch Carter had reserved for the end. On the fourth of November the foreman's water-boy, scooping a hole for his jar, struck the upper edge of a stone step.

By dusk on the fifth, twelve steps had been cleared. By the morning of the sixth, a plastered doorway stood at the bottom, stamped with the oval seals of the royal necropolis: the jackal above nine bound captives. Carter, by his own discipline, refilled the staircase to the brim with rubble, posted guards, and sent the telegram to Highclere that he had been writing in his head for fifteen years. At last have made wonderful discovery in Valley, it read, a magnificent tomb with seals intact, recovered same for your arrival, congratulations. Then he sat in his mudbrick house at Elwat el-Diban and waited three weeks for an English earl to cross a continent.

THE TWENTY-SIXTH OF NOVEMBER

Carnarvon arrived at Luxor on the twenty-third with his daughter Lady Evelyn. The staircase was re-cleared on the twenty-fourth. The outer door was opened, the rubble-filled corridor beyond it emptied through the twenty-fifth, and on the afternoon of the twenty-sixth a second sealed door stood revealed at the corridor's end. It bore the same necropolis seals and, plainer still, the seals of Nebkheperure: the throne name of Tutankhamun.

It is a quarter past three. Two oil lanterns and an electric torch run from a portable battery. Carter, Carnarvon, Lady Evelyn Herbert, and Arthur Callender, the railway engineer who has become indispensable, stand in the corridor's hot dust. Carter has a steel chisel his grandmother gave him as a boy. He works it into the top-left corner of the plaster, where any thief's breach would have gone, and after a few minutes opens a hole the width of a hand. He pushes an iron testing-rod through. It meets no resistance. He strikes a match and holds it to the breach to check for foul air. The flame burns clean. He takes the oil lantern in his right hand, raises it, and puts his eye to the hole.

A SECOND OF TIME IN THE VALLEY

What happens next is the small and famous interval that the rest of his life will be measured against. He cannot, in this first instant, see clearly. Hot air, escaping for the first time in three thousand two hundred and forty-five years, makes the candle-flame flicker and the lantern-light shudder. Then the eye adjusts, and out of the dark, by reflection, the gold begins to assemble itself.

Three couches, gilded, life-size, in the shapes of animals he can name from a hundred tomb-walls he has copied: the cow of Mehet-weret, the lioness, the composite hippopotamus. Disassembled chariots heaped against the far wall, their gilt panels catching the lantern. Alabaster vessels stacked in the corner. A throne, inlaid, on which a young king and a young queen face one another under the rays of the Aten. Two life-size figures of the king himself, black-skinned, gold-kilted, flanking a further sealed door: the burial chamber proper, behind which the body must lie.

He understands, in the time it takes a lantern to steady, what he is looking at. The antechamber is a storeroom; the inner door is unbroken; the seals on the inner door bear the same names as the outer; therefore the body of an Eighteenth-Dynasty king lies, undisturbed, eight feet beyond his hand. No such thing has been seen by a modern eye. The whole archaeology of the New Kingdom has been a record of plundered chambers, scattered mummies, looted shrines. He is the first man in three millennia to look into a royal tomb of Egypt that no one has stolen from.

Behind him Carnarvon, who has paid for this moment and who is also short of breath, cannot bear the silence. Can you see anything? he asks. Carter knows that the speakable answer in this instant will be the published answer forever; he knows the press is already at Luxor; he knows the words a man says with his eye to a hole in a door will be printed in The Times of London before the year is out. He hears himself say, after a pause, yes, wonderful things. It is the only honest summary, and the only one short enough to bear repeating. The lantern goes on burning. The gold goes on returning the light.

WHAT FOLLOWED THROUGH THE BREACH

They widened the hole, fitted an electric bulb on a long flex, and stood for hours in the antechamber simply looking. The burial chamber was sealed again and not opened until the seventeenth of February 1923, under the eyes of twenty invited guests and the officials of the Egyptian Antiquities Service. Within lay a gilded shrine; within that shrine a second shrine, and a third, and a fourth. Within the fourth shrine, a stone sarcophagus; within the sarcophagus, three coffins nested one inside the other, the innermost of solid gold weighing one hundred and ten kilograms. The mask of beaten gold and lapis was lifted from the king's face on the twenty-eighth of October 1925. Carter recorded five thousand three hundred and ninety-eight objects in the tomb and spent the next decade conserving them. The work was finished in 1932.

THE EARL AT THE HOTEL CONTINENTAL

Carnarvon, who had stood at Carter's shoulder at the breach, never saw the burial chamber opened beyond the first inspection. In late March 1923 he cut a mosquito-bite on his cheek while shaving at the Winter Palace in Luxor. The wound turned septic. He was taken down to the Hotel Continental at Cairo, where he died on the fifth of April with his son and Lady Evelyn at his bedside. The lights of Cairo, by the testimony of his son, failed at the moment of his death. The tabloids of London, hungry for a sequel to wonderful things, called it the Curse of the Pharaoh, and the curse has outlived almost everyone who repeated it. Carter himself never gave it a sentence of credit. He went on cataloguing.

THE HOUSE IN COLLINGHAM GARDENS

The dispute came in 1924. The Egyptian government, newly independent in form if not yet in fact, ruled that the contents of the tomb belonged entirely to Egypt and would not be divided with the excavators or the British Museum. Carter, who had assumed a partage on the old colonial pattern, took the ruling badly, locked the tomb, walked off the dig, and was for some months barred from the Valley. He was right about the contents and wrong about the politics, and the politics outlasted him. He returned, finished the work, and went home to Kensington. No knighthood was offered. The honours system found him politically inconvenient; the conventional view, argued by his biographers for ninety years, is that the 1924 quarrel had marked his card in London. He lectured in America, lived quietly at 19 Collingham Gardens, and died there on the second of March 1939, sixty-four years old, of Hodgkin's lymphoma.

RETURN

The mask is in Cairo. The body of the king, after a century of removal and restoration, lies in his own tomb in the Valley, in a climate-controlled case a few yards from the breach Carter made with his chisel. Tutankhamun, an obscure boy on the throne for nine years and dead at nineteen, is by the careful judgement of the Egyptological literature the most-recognised ancient Egyptian in the world, more familiar to the modern eye than Ramesses or Cleopatra, and he is so because one Norfolk-trained tracer would not give up a patch of rubble that other men had said was empty. The great hour is not always granted to the great. Sometimes it is granted to the patient, and patience, on the rare day it is asked the right question, answers in two words.

Howard Carter is buried at Putney Vale Cemetery in south-west London. The headstone carries a line from the alabaster Wishing Cup of Tutankhamun, lifted by his hand from the antechamber floor in the winter of 1922: May your spirit live, may you spend millions of years, you who love Thebes, sitting with your face to the north wind, your eyes beholding happiness.