AKHENATEN/TUTANKHAMUN

Carter's own record makes no mention of this. "Hardly had I arrived next morning (November 4)," he wrote, "than the unusual silence, due to the stoppage of the work, made me realize that something out of the ordinary had happened, and I was greeted by the announcement that a step cut in the rock had been discovered underneath the very first hut to be attacked. The manner of cutting was that of the sunken stairway entrance so common in The Valley, and I almost dared hope that we had found our tomb at last."


Yet another version is given by Hoving in Tutankhamen: The Untold Story. Quoting Lee Keedick, who organized Carter's subsequent lecture tour of the United States, Hoving says a small boy, whose job it was to carry water for the workmen, discovered the step while playing in the sand, covered it up again so the others would not see it and ran, as fast as his legs would carry him, to tell Carter what he had found.


All the versions, however, agree that from that moment on, excavation proceeded at a feverish pace, and that, as basket after basket of rubble poured out of the pit, more steps were disclosed. Even Sergeant Adamson found himself picking up a shovel to prevent sand from falling back into the hole, and that night, on Carter's instructions, he did his first guard duty over the tomb. Little did he know as he sat out the night on the steps that it was to be his job for the next seven years.


Work progressed even more rapidly next day, and towards sunset, at the level of the 12th step, the top of a sealed doorway was revealed. At this point Carter ordered his workmen to refill the stairway and roll the flint boulders back into place, until he could recall Lord Carnarvon to Luxor. "Had he dug a little further," says Adamson, "Carter would have saved himself three weeks of uncertainty, for a few inches below where he had stopped digging was a perfect impression of the seal of Tutankhamen" - the king he most wanted to find.