The Murder of King Tut by James Patterson, Martin Dugard Read Free Book Online

and making their way to the temple.
    Little did they know that one of the world’s most promising Egyptologists was in their midst. Carter had worked his way up
     from being a poorly paid junior draftsman and was now learning the methods of the great excavators.
    The key to becoming an excavator, Carter knew all too well, was luck. But after that came money, a great deal of money. He
     needed to find a wealthy benefactor to cover his costs. He had seen such patrons in Luxor, hanging out at the Winter Palace
     Hotel or enjoying the Nile nightlife aboard lavish yachts.
    Carter didn’t know how to mingle comfortably in that society—or any society, really—but it was time that he learned.
    How hard could it be to fool a bunch of fools?

Chapter 19
Valley of the Kings
    January 1900
    “GENTLEMEN ARE INVITED to take off their coats,” Carter advised the tour group as they approached the tomb. “It will get rather
     warm inside. Ladies, I’m afraid you’ll have to settle for removing your hats.”
    His work ethic and passion for Egyptology had already lifted the ambitious twenty-five-year-old Carter from the obscurity
     of his early days to the relative power of his new position as chief inspector for the Antiquities Service in Upper Egypt.
    Carter had beaten out Percy Newberry for the job, and now he oversaw all excavation in the region.
    Many within the British Egyptology community found this distasteful, even ridiculous. They objected to Carter’s lack of book
     knowledge, his lack of a university degree, and, perhaps most of all, his lack of table manners. To them, Carter was not one
     of the world’s foremost Egyptologists, just its most infamous and crude.
    At a Christmas dinner in 1897, Newberry’s brother had marveled at Carter’s lack of social graces: “He doesn’t hesitate to
     pick his last hollow tooth with a match stalk during dinner, bite bread that is so hard you can barely cut it with a chopper,
     and help himself to whiskey in an absentminded fashion, emptying half the bottle into his tumbler, then laugh and pour it
     back again.”
    Even Gaston Maspero, Carter’s new boss, admitted that his charge was obstinate.
    But Carter also had supporters and admirers, many of them female.
    Lady Amherst still welcomed Carter to Didlington Hall whenever he returned to England. He was something of a hero to her family
     for his ongoing series of adventures in the Egyptian desert.
    Carter was certainly someone to reckon with, even if he didn’t know which fork to use for his salad. He was now museum curator
     for the entire Valley of the Kings. The area was an isolated jumble of hills, cliffs, and dry riverbed located three miles
     west of the Nile, just below the “horn,” the highest point in the Theban hills.
    Nobody knew exactly how many Egyptian rulers were interred beneath the sunbaked earth. And there was a good chance no one
     would ever know. Time and weather, crumbling rock, and blowing sand had completely changed the valley floor and enhanced its
     natural camouflage.
    To actually stumble upon a tomb was to find the proverbial needle in a haystack, which is why any discovery was so precious
     and why everyone, from tourists to tomb raiders, was eager to see inside each burial chamber.
    Since Italian circus strongman-cum-Egyptologist Giovanni Belzoni had performed the first serious excavation of the area in
     1815, the tombs of more than two dozen pharaohs had been found within its craggy, soaring walls. Belzoni had stopped excavating
     in the valley after thirteen years because he believed there was nothing left to find.
    The discovery of tomb after tomb since then proved he’d been wrong.
    In exchange for a “concession”—permission to dig in the valley—excavators agreed to split all treasure fifty-fifty with the
     Egyptian government. Sometimes the discovery process was as simple as clearing away a few scattered rocks. At other times
     finding a tomb required scraping away mountains of