Message #136311

[Bianca]

Later, though, he relaxed and began to question Carter about his search of the valley. "Have you worked here long, sir?" Adamson asked. "On and off for 20 years," was the matter-of-fact reply.


He had come to Egypt, Carter went on, when he was 17, the most junior member of the Egyptian Exploration Fund, a private organization linked to the British Museum. A water-colorist, his job was to record the paintings, reliefs and inscriptions in the funerary temple of Queen Hatshepsut. Despite his lack of formal schooling, Carter learned archeology and Egyptology quickly, and at the age of 25 was appointed inspector of the monuments in Upper Egypt, with headquarters in Luxor.


Ever since his arrival in Egypt in 1890, it had been Carter's ambition to dig in the Valley of the Kings. But it was not until 1914 that Lord Carnarvon, for whom he was then working, received the long-awaited authorization from the Egyptian Antiquities Department. Though previous expeditions, including one sent by Napoleon, had already combed the valley, Carter was not convinced that it had given up all its secrets; no one, he pointed out, had yet found the tomb of Tutankhamen, the boy king, who reigned from approximately 1334 to 1325 B.C. and died at the age of 18 under mysterious circumstances.


This was not blind faith, Carter said. Three pieces of evidence - all unearthed at' the beginning of the century by American archeologist Theodore Davis - indicated that the tomb was somewhere in the valley. One was a faience cup bearing the name of Tutankhamen that Davis found under a rock; another was a cache of large jars containing what Davis dismissed as "rubbish," but which later proved to be remnants of the Pharaoh's funeral feast; and the third was a small pit tomb containing fragments of gold foil bearing the name of Tutankhamen. On that basis, Davis claimed he had actually found the missing Pharaoh's tomb, but Carter, considering the pit tomb "ludicrously inadequate" for a king's burial, stubbornly insisted that Tut's tomb was still to be found.


"Like to see inside one of the tombs?" Carter asked his unwilling guest as they finished off their packed lunch. "Very well, sir," was the grudging reply. Taking the torch that the archeologist handed him, Sergeant Adamson followed Carter down a long, straight passage into the bowels of the earth. It was, Carter said, the tomb of Ramses VI.