Chapter Thirty-Two
LUXOR, EGYPT
My parents have set up camp at the site. Underneath their open-sided tent with its walls of netting, they perch on the edge of the pit. Eager and ready to see what Howard and I unearth.
I’d been right about the ridge in the sand, that subtle line in the earth.
It is a threshold—one that opens to a set of hewn stone stairs.
As we oversaw the men’s efforts to shovel out each of the six steps, our shared excitement grew, becoming compounded when a fragment of a travertine jar was found in the dirt around the stairs.
When I brushed the soil from the jar’s surface, we saw half of a name underneath: Queen Ahmose-Nefertari.
I almost shouted with excitement, and, I swear, Howard did as well.
A great queen in her own right and the very first God’s Wife of Amun, Ahmose-Nefertari was a relative of Thutmose I, Hatshepsut’s father.
To us, it seemed logical that Hatshepsut might include an object honoring Ahmose-Nefertari in her tomb, making us optimistic that we might be near Hatshepsut’s burial place.
When the workers finally hit a vertical stone slab at the bottom of the sixth and final step, Howard and I spontaneously squeezed each other’s hands. A find such as this is every Egyptologist’s dream, and is certainly mine, even though I’m not a formal archaeologist.
Now we stand at the base of those six stairs, ready to descend and see what’s behind that slab, the ancient Egyptian equivalent of a door.
The workers have just finished chiseling around its edges and are ready to lever it open.
Silently, I clasp my hands together and pray that Hatshepsut lies inside.
“Would you care to be first?” Howard asks me.
“Me?” I am shocked. The honor almost always goes to the lead archaeologist or the dig’s patron.
“Yes, you,” he says with one of his rare, wide grins. “I asked your father, of course, but he suggested you might like to have the honors. You’ve earned it with all your labors on this site, he believes, and I quite agree.”
My hand flies to my heart, quite without planning. “Only if you’re sure,” I say.
“Completely,” he reassures me, and hands me an electric torch. “You’ll need this once you step inside.”
I take the torch from him and wedge it into my tool belt. I lift the hem on either side of my skirt and tuck it into my belt as well. I want nothing to trip me up, nothing to stand in my way.
“Eve, what on earth are you doing with your skirt?” Mama calls down. Only my mother would be worried about propriety at a time like this. She’s lost the war to keep me from archaeology, so she engages in skirmishes over small matters whenever the opportunity arises.
Ignoring her, I remove my hat, and put it on the ground next to the threshold. Then I descend the uneven steps, taking one at a time.
Four men crowd around the eight-foot-high stone rectangle that Howard and I have been calling a door, but is really more like a multi-ton barricade. They ready their levers and crowbars, but I put up a hand for them to pause. I want to study the door up close.
To the naked eye, the stone surface has no markings. But I want to be absolutely certain before they wrench it open, which could cause it to break or splinter. Running my hands along every inch of it, I feel nothing but the grooves and indentations of the stonemason’s tools from millennia ago.
“It’s clean!” I call up to Howard.
“You can go ahead then!” he calls back.
Stepping back a bit, I nod for them to proceed. The men insert their tools in the crevices around the door and try with all their might to pry it open. Sweat forms on their foreheads, and yet the stone does not budge.
The men pause, and one of them yells out in Arabic. In less than a minute, Ali scurries down the steps with a larger lever in his hand. We exchange smiles as he passes me, and I ruffle his hair.
The workers push their levers harder. Sweat pours down their faces with the effort and darkens their tunics. Finally I see movement in the stone. They give it one enormous, concerted effort, and the door clatters to the side, intact.
“It’s open!” I practically scream.
“What do you see?” Howard shouts back.
The men move to the sides to allow me to proceed toward the opening. I step toward the darkness of what can only be a chamber. Shining my torch into the interior, I see nothing but undecorated walls and ceilings and a pile of rubble in one corner. No objects.
“It seems empty!” I yell.
“Empty?” My father’s voice drifts down from the surface.
“Hold steady, Eve. I’m coming,” Howard calls to me.
I know I should wait. I know Howard will be at my side within a minute or so. But I cannot stop myself. I rub the scarab in my pocket for luck—I’ve become as superstitious as my father—and step into the chamber.
The blackness envelops me once I enter. It is as if the blinding Egyptian sun exists on an entirely separate plane than this space. Even the light from my torch illuminates only the tiniest of circles; the rest of its beam seems to be sucked away by the very air.
I feel rather than see Howard next to me.
We are silent, allowing our torches to explore every inch of the walls.
Once I scour the floor for signs of a single artifact—to no avail—I hunt for another entrance, perhaps to another, more plentifully filled chamber.
I assume Howard is searching for the same.
“Looks like it was plundered in antiquity,” he mutters. “Or abandoned for a more impressive tomb before anything of significance could be entombed here.”
“How can you tell?” I ask.
He points to markings on the floor. “There you can see the indentations from furniture. The feet of chairs and tables. And if you follow them, you can see the marks where they were dragged toward the entrance.”
I am deflated. Beyond deflated. The entire season dedicated to this chamber—for nothing.
“No Hatshepsut here,” I whisper, mostly to myself.
“No Hatshepsut here,” Howard echoes me, his voice sounding every bit as dejected as I feel.
“Wait, one moment,” he says, following the beam of his torch. It has landed on a seam in the wall opposite the opening.
We walk toward it, shining both our torches on the crack. I get down on my haunches, and Howard follows suit. My finger traces the seam; I desperately want it to be a secret entrance and not a natural crack in the wall. I ask, “Is it too sinuous to be another door?”
“I’m afraid—”
Before he can finish, a crash sounds behind us. We turn, and our torches light upon an enormous pile of rock blocking the entryway. Racing toward it, we can just make out a glint of sunlight at the very top of the mass of rubble.
“The ceiling has collapsed,” I cry out. Panic rises within me, and I struggle to control my voice and my breathing.
I’ve heard the stories of collapsed tunnels and tombs. Of archaeologists and workers who never made it out alive. I’d never imagined that could be me.
As my thoughts spin around wildly, Howard places a finger on his lips. “Stay still and talk quietly. Loud noise or sudden movement could cause further instability.”
Placing his hand on my arm, he then turns to me, looks into my eye, and whispers, “Breathe.” Together, we take several deep inhales, until I feel myself calm. Somewhat.
We hear the voices of the workers on the other side of the heap of rocks, just outside the entrance. I cannot make out what they are saying, but Howard approaches the rubble and speaks to them softly in Arabic.
“What’s happening?”
“They are gathering equipment to dig us out,” he murmurs, trying to reassure me.
More stones cascade from the ceiling, forming another mound near the entrance. I feel frantic again, nearly desperate to claw my way out. I begin to remove the stones, one by one, but Howard stops me. “Let my men work on it from the outside. Eve, it will be all right.”
I’ve always trusted Howard, ever since I was a girl. His soothing tone and words calm me, and my heartbeat slows. I feel the fright begin to subside.
But then I hear Papa’s voice, louder than I would have expected. He must have climbed down into the pit. “Eve, Howard! Are you quite all right?” he calls to us, his tone as panicked as I’ve ever heard it.
Very gingerly, Howard steps toward the rock pile. In a hushed voice, he says, “We are fine. We will just wait to be dug out.”
“Papa, be careful. The pit is very rocky,” I say. The last thing I want is for my father to suffer an injury trying to prevent our injuries.
“Don’t you worry about me, Eve,” Papa says. Then he adds more quietly, “Howard, you keep her safe.”
“I promise, Lord C.,” Howard replies.
With his torch, Howard gestures toward the wall farthest from the rubble. “We should sit away from the debris. I don’t want any more to rain down on us. And it could be some time before the men dig a hole through the rubble.”
We settle side by side against the ancient wall, and I allow the stone to cool my skin.
The chamber has become increasingly hot, and I worry what temperature it might reach by the time the workers get to us.
“Will we really be fine?” I whisper, wiping my brow of the sweat that already streams down my face in the close air and mounting heat.
“Yes,” he whispers back. “I’ve been dug out of worse pits than this.”
The sudden sound of hammering begins to echo throughout the chamber, making me jump. “What on earth are they doing out there?”
“Simply what I instructed,” he says, his voice unerringly calm. “Building a simple scaffold around the chamber entrance to support it as they clear the rubble.”
“How long do you think it will take for them to reach us?”
Instead of answering, he says, “The time will pass very slowly if we are focused on it. Let’s try to keep our attention on something else.”
“Like?” I glance at him, observing sweat starting to drip down his face now.
“Like, where we will dig next? I feel certain that your father will be so delighted to see your face emerging from this chamber that he’ll grant you any wish. Do you have another site in mind?”
Howard knows how to distract me. “Well, you and I had considered that expanse on the periphery of the Valley of the Kings, closest to Hatshepsut’s temple.”
In hushed tones, we debate the merits of one site over another.
As the heat mounts, however, even this topic cannot divert my focus from the crisis at hand.
When the smell of sulfur begins to waft through the stagnant air from some ancient source recently disturbed, Howard tries to dismiss my mounting concerns.
But I can see that even the stalwart Howard Carter is worried.
Has an hour gone by? Perhaps two? Longer?
The passage of time has become hazy in the chamber.
Too anxious to sit any longer, I push myself to standing and pace around the small rectangular space.
“I only wish we’d found something in here to make it worth the risk.
And worth dedicating an entire season to it. ”
“Never lament your efforts, Eve. It is only by failing that we will ultimately succeed. We will uncover Hatshepsut. She is waiting to be found.”
“I’d been so hopeful that this chamber would contain the tomb made for her once she became regent—or even pharaoh.”
“Me too. But we are close. She is somewhere nearby in the valley; I can feel it.”
The metallic clank of stone on stone sounds out.
At first, we think more debris has fallen from the ceiling, and we crouch down, our hands held protectively over our heads.
But then, we hear a whoosh, and a pile of rocks dislodges from the corner of the rubble pile and tumbles in our direction.
A hint of daylight streams through the hole formed in the detritus blocking the entrance, and the top of a white turban peeks through.
It is Ahmed Gerigar, one of Howard’s foremen, come to save us.