Message #136309

[Bianca]

Carter was in a somber mood. In six years of searching, the British archeologist had laboriously turned over almost every square meter of the sun-scorched canyon by hand - an estimated 200,000 tons of rubble - and it had been for nothing. "Six full seasons we had excavated there, and season after season had drawn a blank," wrote Carter bitterly in his three-volume account of the discovery. "We had worked for months at a stretch and found nothing, and only an excavator knows how desperately depressing that can be; we had almost made up our minds we were beaten and were preparing to leave."


In fact, Carter said, the reason Sergeant Adamson had been sent to Luxor was to collect and take back to Cairo some surveying equipment the expedition had borrowed from the army. The bulk of their supplies had already been removed; the labor force - bar a six-man clearing up party - had been paid off; and Lord Carnarvon had returned to Highclere Castle, in England, leaving Carter to pack up and, if he had the time, explore one more area.


That area - the only spot in the valley that Carter had not yet investigated - included the foundations of a small group of workmen's huts near the entrance of the tomb of Ramses VI - and Carter, a systematic man, had decided to spend his last days probing beneath the huts. Adamson, he said, must stay until this was completed, and together that morning. they left the Winter Palace to go to the valley.


They must have looked an odd pair: a tall young man in military police uniform, and the stocky middle-aged archeologist, who, making no concession to the climate, wore a three-piece suit, a bow-tie and
a Homburg hat. They crossed the road to the river bank and descended a rickety wooden catwalk to the quay. Here they boarded a ferry boat and crossed to the west bank of the Nile, where a team of donkeys was waiting at the top of a long flight of stone steps to take them to the Valley of the Kings.