By the time Derry and Carter were ready to begin unwrapping the mummy the Director of Antiquities had returned from his holidays. Carter summoned Lacau to make haste to the site. He and his entourage appeared the following day.
Howard Carter bent down over the open coffin, a magnifying glass in his hand, and watched his colleague address the mummy wrappings.
Dr Derry lightly scored the wax-hardened fabric of the mummy with his scalpel. As he drew his knife along the length of the body, but for the barely audible popping of the threads, the corridor of the laboratory tomb was in complete silence.
“Slowly… Douglas… Please,” Carter whispered.
“Shh, Carter. You are disturbing my concentration.”
Derry, a serious and most precise fellow at the easiest of times, was not at all receptive to interference from others. He gave Carter a cold look and then resumed drawing the scalpel along the surface of the linen, continuing all the way to the feet.
As he bent over the coffin next to Carter, Lacau felt an irresistible impulse to touch someone and his huge left hand closed over Carter’s. The Egyptologist, concentrating hard as he was on the job before him, naturally was alarmed by this but only for a moment. He turned his head upward quickly to acknowledge the gesture with a brief smile and then, politely withdrawing his hand, returned his attention to the developing autopsy below.
Derry finished his incision.
Carter said, “Right, gentlemen. Let us begin.”
He pocketed his magnifying glass and stood up to address his audience. “Doctor Derry and I are going to – very gently and carefully – peel back the outer layers. Please give us a little room.”
The linen, burned it seemed to a crisp, came away in handfuls, tearing or disintegrating into a black, sooty dust at each attempt.
As the unwrapping progressed, they appeared one by one – the unmistakable glint of tarnished golden objects placed about the body and within each layer. As soon as Carter felt he had completed removal of one layer, he stopped, quickly penciled a neat sketch of the layout, placed numbered cards on the objects and asked Burton to take his pictures.
For each of the onlookers the succeeding hours became perhaps the most memorable of their lives. As the layers were removed one by one, immeasurable riches revealed themselves before their eyes. Each article, though stained by the copious black substances that had been liberally applied during the burial ceremonies, looked unbelievably extravagant. If not as pristine as they had been when placed in position so many millennia before, they were, nevertheless, literally out of this world. Despite his expectations, which by now were not modest, Carter was no less impressed with the grandeur of what now appeared before him.
A day later they reached the body.
An excerpt from Tutankhamun Uncovered, by Michael J. Marfleet.
Copyright 2009-2010 Michael J. Marfleet. All rights reserved.
Published by Apex Publishing Ltd.
