The Curse Read Online Free PDF Page A

said “as soon as one’s eyes became accustomed to the glimmer of light, the interior of the chamber gradually loomed … with its strange and wonderful medley of extraordinary and beautiful objects. Lord Carnarvon said to me, ‘Can you see anything?’ I replied to him, ‘Yes, it’s wonderful.’”
    It was an extraordinary moment.
    Egyptian tombs had been picked over for thousands of years and not a single intact tomb had been found. Archaeologists were lucky to find even broken fragments left behind by looters and conquerors.
    It was also an extraordinary moment for Howard Carter who had come to Egypt thirty-one years earlier as a seventeen-year-old artist. Great photography was still in its infancy and Carter was first employed to reproduce the wall etchings by hand.
    He learned archaeology and Egyptology hands-on by working at the sites and stayed in the profession for the rest of his life.
    Carter had been working for Lord Carnarvon for about fourteen years, without making a major discovery, when he found the boy-king’s site.
    What he saw told him that he had made a discovery of monumental importance. He wrote that he was struck dumb with amazement, that as objects took shape in the dark mist, his first impression suggested the property room of an opera of a vanished civilization. He saw “strange animals, statues, and gold—everywhere the glint of gold.”
    What a thrilling moment for a treasure seeker, which is what an archaeologist is, even if the treasure is to be placed in a museum.
    The first person to set eyes upon the treasure in nearly four thousand years, Carter reported that he had experienced “the exhilaration of discovery, the fever of suspense, the almost overmastering impulse, born of curiosity, to break down the seals and lift the lids of boxes…”
    As a treasure seeker myself, I was electrified just reading about it.
    Peeking inside, Carter realized that he was only looking into the tomb’s antechamber—the actual burial place and treasure room, with their untold riches, would be beyond that.
    Carter stated he and Carnarvon went home that night and that the tomb was opened the next day when inspectors from the Egyptian department that supervised antiquity sites arrived.
    According to the article, the exhilaration that Carter and Carnarvon felt at seeing what they realized was just a small part of the most amazing antiquities find in history was too much for them.
    They had to see what was beyond, in the burial room where the pharaoh was entombed and the treasure room where the wealth that would give him a kingly existence in the next life was stored.
    So they returned surreptitiously that night. And created a controversy as to what had been—or might have been—removed before the site was fully cataloged.
    The article stirred a vague memory of having read before that there had been a nighttime secret entry of the tomb.
    It also pointed out that a few weeks after the incident, Lord Carnarvon admitted to a London reporter that they had come back during the night and enlarged the hole in order to get into the antechamber to examine the artifacts there firsthand, but he claimed that they had resisted the tantalizing temptation to go beyond into the burial and treasure rooms.
    The temptation would have been irresistible.
    I suspect that’s why they did it in the middle of the night. It had nothing to do with the fact that the Egyptian antiquities inspectors were arriving the following morning. It just may have been a seduction these men who spent their lives searching for riches were unable to resist.
    Personally, I saw nothing wrong with their entry, even if it was done secretly. They weren’t tomb robbers. The two of them returned in the middle of the night to get another look at their exciting find. Besides, they had dutifully notified the authorities of the discovery and the incident took place in 1922, before many of