Valley of the Kings Read Online Free PDF Page B

man.
    Someone had disguised him awfully well. His name and titles had been sliced off the gold bands around his torso and legs, and the single coffin in which he was buried bore no markings. The tomb had in fact been made for Queen Tiye, but there was no evidence that she had ever occupied it.
    The body itself was in bad condition. Much is made today of the sacred, almost supernatural power of the Egyptian embalmers, but the truth is that the dry air of the desert, where most of the mummies have been found, would suffice to preserve most bodies. In this case, the work of the embalmers had been for nothing; water had seeped into the burial chamber and rotted the wooden bier that supported the coffin, and it had broken and pitched the coffin to the floor. The lid had fallen off, and the unprotected mummy had been reduced to little more than bones and tarry, moldering linen.
    Davis, in his fashion, had broken so hastily and violently into the tomb that he destroyed any other clues to the real identity of the hidden (or disgraced) body. I saw it a few days after Davis found it; I went over the ground and through the tomb for evidence, but, finding nothing, I could make no firm guess about the mummy’s identity. Yet I had a certain intuition about Davis’s odd find.
    The tomb was very close to the pit that Davis had uncovered some years before, almost within stone’s throw of it. The fragments of evidence that had survived the harrowing years and Theodore Davis all seemed to point to the Eighteenth Dynasty. Who in that great dynasty would be apt to be so disgraced? I was sure—on no evidence but my feelings—that the misused body in Tomb Number 55 was that of Akhenaten himself.
    And if it was Akhenaten, then whoever had fooled with the mummy must have done so during or near the reign of Tutankhamun, Akhenaten’s successor.
    I communicated none of my suspicions to Davis. In fact, he and I were hardly on speaking terms. I could do nothing except wait—while Davis like the Typhon of myth smashed and battered his way through the Valley of the Kings.
    I had a house in Luxor, on the east bank of the Nile at the site of ancient Thebes. One day in 1914, after the digging season had closed, I was facing myself in the washroom mirror and trimming my mustaches. It was early morning, and I was expecting no one, so at first I overlooked the knock on the door.
    At the second, louder banging, I went to the front room to answer and found Theodore Davis on my threshold.
    â€œYou have to sign this,” he said. He held out a sheaf of papers, typed and folded.
    He wore a black suit and waistcoat and carried an elegant soft hat in his hand. I had never before seen him in city clothes. He looked like someone’s rich father.
    â€œWhat are these?” I put my scissors into the pocket of my shirt and opened the papers.
    â€œMy report. I’m giving up my licenses to dig in the Valley of the Kings.”
    He walked into my house, and I pulled the door shut after him. My hands were trembling a little with excitement. Now I could begin the real search for Tutankhamun.
    In the middle of the room, he stopped and looked around, at the window covered with a bit of cloth from the bazaar, and the desk half lost under books and papers. The rest of the room was stacked up with the crates where I kept my notes and gear.
    He said, “They do pay you, Howard, don’t they?”
    â€œI spend it on women,” I said.
    His report was twenty pages long. I ruffled the edges with my thumb. “Do I have to read all this?”
    â€œYou should. It’s the definitive archaeological description of the Valley of the Kings.”
    He ambled innocently around the room, pulled back the curtain to look into the room where my hammock was, and passed by my desk, his head cocked to read the letter lying on it. I sniffed. He trailed an aroma of shaving lotion behind him. He said, “Writing to Carnarvon, are you? Where