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London's Curse
Murder, Black Magic and Tutankhamun in the 1920s West End
By Mark Beynon The History Press
Copyright © 2011 Mark Beynon
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-6672-9
CHAPTER 1
Of Curses, Newspapers, Writers and Books
In Cairo, in the Continental Hotel, a sick man, early in the morning, breathed his last. At the same moment, across the city, all the lights flickered and then at once went out. A darkness veiled Cairo, as heavy as that of an unopened tomb. At the same moment, in the Valley of the Kings, a guard by the tomb of Tutankhamun was disturbed. In the rocks above his head he heard a sudden noise, and as he rose from his chair he saw a scattering of dust, descending in a rivulet of dislodged pebbles. When he went, however, to investigate the cause, he could find nothing, nor hear anything save a gusting of wind.
Tom Holland, The Sleeper in the Sands
Legend has it that just as Howard Carter crossed the threshold of Tutankhamun's burial chamber his beloved pet canary was killed by a cobra. The canary, which Carter had bought in Cairo in an attempt to liven up his humble lodgings, was kept in a gilded cage outside his house near the entrance to the Valley of the Kings. Many people believed the bird would bring good fortune to the excavation, and even the fellahs (Egyptian workmen) at the site had adopted the canary as a lucky charm, naming Carter's great discovery as the 'Tomb of the Bird'. But not long after Carter and Carnarvon had entered Tutankhamun's burial chamber, the incident occurred and was noted by the visiting American Egyptologist James Henry Breasted. Carter had sent his trusted assistant archaeologist Arthur Callender on an errand to his house, but on nearing it Callender thought he heard a faint, almost human cry. He immediately looked up at the cage hanging near the doorway; to his abhorrence a cobra was coiled up within it devouring the small songbird. An extremely rare sight in the Valley of the Kings, the cobra was the Ancient Egyptian symbol of royal power and a symbolic serpent was often carved on the brows of pharaohs' headdresses to ward off their enemies. Across the Valley of the Kings many people justifiably took this as a sign of the pharaoh's fury.
Herbert Winlock, another esteemed American Egyptologist who was employed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, described and summarised in a letter the effect the incident had on Carter's workmen:
When Carter came out last October, alone, he got a canary bird, in Cairo, in a gilded cage to cheer up what he figured was going to be a lonely and deserted house. Carter, coming over to his house with his servant, Abdul Ali, carrying the canary behind him and guards and the foremen greeting him and right off, when they see a golden bird they say: 'Malbrook – it's a bird of gold that will bring luck. This year we will find inshallah [God willing] a tomb of gold.' Within a week they had made the most fabulous find of all time and at first the tomb was called 'the tomb of the Golden Bird' by the natives. The Canary almost had a halo around its cage ... Callender was living alone in Carter's house with the bird in his special care. Suddenly, one afternoon he heard a fluttering and squeaking and went into the next room and there in the cage with the bird was a cobra just in the act of gulping the canary down halo and all.
Now cobras had never been known around there before, and cobras, as every native knew, grow on the heads of Old Kings. The conclusion was obvious. The King's serpent had struck at the mascot who had given away the secret of the tomb. And the sequel was equally obvious – at least to them, though I admit to have lost some links in the chain of argument – that before the winter was out someone would die. It was all very dismal.
As dawn broke on the morning of the tomb's opening, a majestic-looking hawk was seen flying above the sun-drenched excavation site before disappearing to the west. This sighting was considered a bad omen; a warning that left the fellahs frightened and whispering among themselves that before long the foreigners would find gold and death. As the excavating party descended the steps that led down to the sepulchre, a miniature sandstorm swept across the desert and circled over the tomb. Only days earlier Howard Carter had been bitten on the hand by a scorpion; although the wound wasn't infected, it would hamper him throughout the course of the excavation.
Although these stories have, in all probability, been embellished over the years, the dramatic events that were to follow the opening of the pharaoh's burial chamber have not. With the world's imagination gripped by the story of the excavation of King Tut's tomb, the tale of Carter's unfortunate canary was eagerly regurgitated by newspapers attempting to cash in on the alleged curse of Tutankhamun. The New York Times, a prime carrier of Tutankhamun news since the city's own museum was heavily involved in the excavation, reported that:
Already in this land of superstition myths are beginning to grow up ... out of [the canary's death] the most fantastic stories are being manufactured ... so it has been easy to weave a legend that brought in the little bird, which in some ways symbolised the modern spirit of civilisation, and the cobra, which stood for the powers of old dynasties ...
The delicate state of affairs with the press had already come to a head on 9 January 1923, when Lord Carnarvon signed a £5,000 exclusive contract with The Times of London to cover the excavation of the tomb of Tutankhamun. Throughout the 1920s, The Times was the leading newspaper in Britain, with a worldwide reputation and an influential readership that spanned the vast British Empire.
Angered by this deal and resentful of being shut out of the biggest story of the age, journalists and reporters of rival newspapers and magazines were subsequently forced to write more exciting, stimulating and, in some cases, deliberately frivolous stories in order to win their readership back; this in turn caused a huge amount of friction on Fleet Street with newspapers clamouring over who had the most scintillating scoop on the curse. Their over-zealous reporting endeavours soon got the better of Carter, and he remarked how he was 'weary of telegrams and sick to death of reporters ... [he] wanted to avoid being followed by gentlemen of the press'. But Carnarvon had already made an enemy of the newspapers, and one journalist working for the New York Times wrote how he would 'Drive C and C out of their minds for having sold a piece of the world's ancient history to the London Times'.
Carter understandably found the story of the curse an unnecessary and ridiculous sideshow. Although rumours began to circulate that he had catalogued the warning inscription found upon the clay tablet before erasing it from written record and burying it in the sand, Carter indicated in his book just how disgusted he was with the reporters and their fabrications:
It has been stated in various quarters that there are actual physical dangers hidden in Tutankhamun's tomb – mysterious forces, called into being by some malefic power, to take vengeance on whomsoever should dare to pass its portals. There was perhaps no place in the world freer from risks than the tomb ... Unpardonable and mendacious statements of this nature have been published and repeated in various quarters with a sort of malicious satisfaction. It is indeed difficult to speak of this form of 'ghostly' calumny with calm. If it be not actually libellous, it points in that spiteful direction, and all sane people should dismiss such interventions with contempt.
Carter supported this statement when he was quoted, on 4 October 1924, as saying: 'It is rather too much to ask me to believe that some spook is keeping watch and ward over the dead pharaoh, ready to wreak vengeance on anyone who goes too near.'
However, it is worth mentioning that when Carter, in the early years of his tenure in the Valley of the Kings, was working as an archaeologist in the employment of Theodore Davis, he was far more open to the possibility of curses. In his book Howard Carter: The Path To Tutankhamun, T.G.H. James recalls a young Carter, who was giving a female visitor a guided tour of the recently discovered tomb of Amenophis II, saying: 'The pharaoh's mummy was probably protected ... by a curse pronounced in the band of hieroglyphics around the top of the sarcophagusupon any maraudinghands.' Also, Sir Thomas Cecil Rapp, the British vice-consul to Cairo at the time of the excavation, supported this claim when he wrote in his unpublished memoirs how '[Carter] was suffering too from a superstitious feeling that Lord Carnarvon's death was possible nemesis for disturbing the sleep of the dead, a nemesis that might extend to him'.
Yet the initial notion or mention of the curse of Tutankhamun (before the press got hold of it), coinciding with the swell of Egyptian national pride that seemed to follow the end of the First World War, must have originated with the native Egyptians who were appalled by the colonial and increasingly imperialistic British invading, monopolising and tampering with their ancient artefacts for their own ends (Carter had already found himself cast in the role of the jingoistic villain, for example). Perhaps more importantly, the hieroglyphic caveats in the pharaoh's tomb, as well as the pharaoh himself, were yet to be discovered, and Carter's canary had yet to meet the dreaded cobra. However, whispers of curses weren't uncommon in Egypt as magic brick inscriptions issuing warnings to trespassers had already been discovered in other tombs in the Valley of the Kings; the natives quite rightly believed that Tutankhamun's tomb would yield similar threats. For example, the tomb of the Priestess of Hathor, Lady of the Sycamore, Nesysokar, from Giza, bore a curse that stated: 'O anyone who enters this tomb, who will make evil against this tomb: may the crocodile be against him on water and the snake against him on land. May the hippopotamus be against him on water, the scorpion against him on land.' Her husband, Pettety, had a similar curse inscribed in his tomb, except he calls upon the crocodile, lion and hippopotamus to aid in his protection. The tomb of Harkhuf at Aswan, which dates from the Sixth Dynasty, c. 2340 BC, was also found to display the warning: 'As for any man who shall enter into this tomb ... I will pounce upon him as on a bird; he shall be judged for it by the great god.'
With the British public initially incredulous to such outwardly fanciful stories, in March 1923, just weeks after the opening of Tutankhamun's tomb, their scepticism had all but disappeared. Lord Carnarvon had been bitten on the cheek by a mosquito, and, although the scar was innocuous-looking, the bite soon became infected when he cut it with his shaving razor; within two months of the discovery of King Tut's sarcophagus, Carnarvon succumbed to septicaemia and pneumonia in his suite at the Continental-Savoy Hotel in Cairo. It was believed he uttered the words 'I heard his call and I will follow him. Pharaoh, I am returning to you' just prior to his passing. Shortly before he died, Carnarvon began to suffer from a raging fever during a film screening at an Egyptian cinema, and even in his delirious state he could be heard muttering, 'A bird is scratching on my face'. It was another Egyptian belief that the Nekhabet bird would scratch the face of anybody who dared to disturb the peace and sanctity of the pharaoh's tomb. To many, it seemed uncanny that the benefactor of the excavation, the leader of the dig, should be the first victim of the newly proclaimed 'Curse of the Pharaohs'.
In the weeks preceding his death, Carnarvon's relationship with Carter had become increasingly strained and had turned sour. Although the two men were the complete opposite in every way – Carnarvon was a nonchalant aristocrat and dilettante with vast sums of money – they had enjoyed a healthy and amicable friendship. However, the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb, which propelled both men to international superstardom, inevitably led to disagreements. Arguments over the distribution of the finds (Carter had urged Carnarvon to renounce any rights to the contents of the tomb in fear of further inflaming Egyptian national feeling) and Carter's brusque handling of the pushy reporters merely aggravated the situation, but it wasn't until Carnarvon's daughter Lady Evelyn arrived on the scene that things took a turn for the worse. She was the apple of her father's eye and he naturally disapproved of Carter's growing affection for her. Carnarvon could see that Carter was an outwardly gauche figure, seemingly without feelings and rather lacking in diplomacy; yet Carnarvon still cared enough for Carter to write him the following note shortly before his death – a clear indication that Carnarvon was willing to make amends: 'I have done many foolish things and I am very sorry. But there is only one thing I want to say to you which I hope you will always remember – whatever your feelings are or will be for me in the future my affection for you will never change.'
Perhaps a note in Carter's diary which read 'Poor Ld. C died during the early hours of the morning' indicates that the two men were able to bury the hatchet before Carnarvon's untimely demise. Either way, his death provided the catalyst for the hysterical reporting in the more sensationalist newspapers that followed. Reporters happily embellished the discovery of the inscription upon the magic brick of the Anubis shrine and the strange coincidence that the mummy of Tutankhamun was found to have a wound on the left cheek. The wound was in the exact same position as the mosquito bite that had led to the death of Lord Carnarvon.
The seeds of the curse of Tutankhamun had been sown. It was even reported that Carnarvon's dog – a three-legged fox terrier named Susie – at his family estate at Highclere Castle howled inconsolably and died at the same instant as her master, and that Cairo was simultaneously plunged into darkness following a power cut; its complete electricity supply, four entire grids, failed for a full five minutes at 1.40 a.m., precisely five minutes before Carnarvon passed away. Nobody at the power station knew how to explain the return of electricity after the short breakdown as no one had time to fix the fault; its cause was also unknown and remains so today. As Lord Carnarvon, who was being watched over by his wife, Lady Almina, his daughter and his son, Lord Porchester, breathed his last, the Daily Express reported on the incident as follows: 'Suddenly all the lights in Cairo went out leaving them all in complete darkness. After a lapse of a few minutes the lights came back on again, only to go out abruptly. This curious occurrence was interpreted by those anxiously awaiting news as an omen of evil.'
Although power cuts were by no means a rarity throughout Cairo at the time, it is unsurprising that the public began to feel perturbed by the curse, as the relish with which the newspapers reported these coincidental, if somewhat unnerving, events would have led even the most disbelieving to question the very nature of Lord Carnarvon's demise. However, amidst the speculative hearsay, idle conjecture and vengeful reporting that seemed to swamp the front pages, there was some corroboration for the curse from respected and valued sources.
Arthur Weigall, an esteemed reporter and Egyptologist working as a correspondent for the Daily Mail (who would himself later become part of curse folklore), wrote of 'the malevolence of Ancient Egyptian spirits' and how he felt 'pity' for the 'ordeal' the mummy faced. He also wrote, in response to dismissive claims about the curse, that ' ... I must admit that some very strange things – call them coincidences if you will – have happened in connection with the Luxor excavations'. However, on Thursday 25 January 1923, Weigall wrote to Carter from the Winter Palace Hotel in Luxor 'in an attempt to persuade him to defuse the mounting resentment being hurled against him and Lord Carnarvon in the international press. At one point in the lengthy letter – sent with genuine concern from one Egyptologist to another – Weigall stated, quite bluntly':
The situation is this. You and Lord Carnarvon made the initial error when you discovered the tomb of thinking that the old British prestige in this country is still maintained and that you could do more or less what you liked, just as we all used to in the old days. You have found this tomb, however, at a moment when the least spark may send the whole magazine sky-high, when the utmost diplomacy is needed, when Egyptians have to be considered in a way in which you and I are not accustomed, and when the slightest false step may do the utmost disservice to our own enemy. You opened the tomb before you notified the Government representative, and the natives all say that you may therefore have had the opportunity of stealing some of the millions of pounds' worth of gold of which you talked. (I give this as an instance of native gossip about you.)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from London's Curse by Mark Beynon. Copyright © 2011 Mark Beynon. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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