"This was to be our final season in the valley. Six
full seasons we had excavated there, and season after season had drawn a
blank; we had worked for months at a stretch and found nothing, and only an
excavator knows how desperately depressing that can be; we had almost made up
our minds that we were beaten, and were preparing to leave the valley and try
our luck elsewhere; and then— hardly had we set hoe to ground in our last
despairing effort than we made a discovery that far exceeded our wildest
dreams. Surely, never before in the whole history of excavation has a full
digging season been compressed within the space of five days.
"Let me try and tell the story of it all. It will not be
easy, for the dramatic suddenness of the initial discovery left me in a dazed
condition, and the months that have followed have been so crowded with
incident that I have hardly had time to think. Setting it down on paper will
perhaps give me a chance to realize what has happened and all that it means.
"I arrived in Luxor on October 28, and by November 1 I had
enrolled my workmen and was ready to begin. Our former excavations had stopped
short at the northeast corner of the tomb of Rameses VI, and from this point I
started trenching southwards. It will be remembered that in this area there
were a number of roughly constructed workmen's huts, used probably by the
labourers in the tomb of Rameses. ... By the evening of November 3 we had laid
bare a sufficient number of these huts for experimental purposes, so, after we
had planned and noted them, they were removed, and we were ready to clear away
the three feet of soil that lay beneath them.
"Hardly had I arrived on the work next morning (November
4) than the unusual silence, due to the stoppage of the work, made me realize
that something out of the ordinary had happened, and I was greeted by the
announcement that a step cut in the rock had been discovered underneath the
very first hut to be attacked. This seemed too good to be true, but a short
amount of extra clearing revealed the fact that we were actually in the
entrance of a steep cut in the rock, some thirteen feet below the entrance to
the tomb of Rameses VI, and a similar depth from the present bed level of the
valley. The manner of cutting was that of the sunken stairway entrance so
common in the valley, and I almost dared to hope that we had found our tomb at
last. Work continued feverishly throughout the whole of that day and the
morning of the next, but it was not until the afternoon of November 5 that we
succeeded in clearing away the masses of rubbish that overlay the cut, and
were able to demarcate the upper edges of the stairway on all its four sides.
"It was clear by now beyond any question that we actually
had before us the entrance to a tomb, but doubts, born of previous
disappointments, persisted in creeping in. There was always the horrible
possibility, suggested by our experience in the Thothmes III valley, that the
tomb was an unfinished one, never completed and never used: if it had been
finished there was the depressing probability that it had been completely
plundered in ancient times. On the other hand, there was just the chance of an
untouched or only partially plundered tomb, and it was with ill-suppressed
excitement that I watched the descending steps of the staircase, as one by one
they came to light. The cutting was excavated in the side of a small hillock,
and, as the work progressed, its western edge receded under the slope of the
rock until it was, first partially, and then completely, roofed in, and became
a passage, ten feet high by six feet wide. Work progressed more rapidly now;
step succeeded step, and at the level of the twelfth, towards sunset, there
was disclosed the upper part of a doorway, blocked, plastered, and sealed.
"A sealed doorway—it was actually true, then! Our years
of patient labor were to be rewarded after all, and I think my first feeling
was one of congratulation that my faith in the valley had not been
unjustified. With excitement growing to fever heat I searched the seal
impressions on the door for evidence of the identity of the owner, but could
find no name: the only decipherable ones were those of the well-known royal
necropolis seal, the jackal and nine captives. Two facts, however, were clear:
first, the employment of this royal seal was certain evidence that the tomb
had been constructed for a person of a very high standing; and second, that
the sealed door was entirely screened from above by workmen's huts of the
Twentieth Dynasty was sufficiently clear proof that at least from that date it
had never been entered. With that for the moment I had to be content.
"While examining the seals I noticed, at the top of the
doorway, where some of me plaster had fallen away, a heavy wooden lintel.
Under this, to assure myself of the method by which the doorway had been
blocked, I made a small peephole, just large enough to insert an electric
torch, and discovered that the passage beyond the door was filled completely
from floor to ceiling with stones and rubble—additional proof this of the
care with which the tomb had been protected.
"It was a thrilling moment for an excavator. Alone, save for my native
workmen, I found myself, after years of comparatively unproductive labor, on
the threshold of what might prove to be a magnificent discovery. Anything,
literally anything, might lie beyond that passage, and it needed all my
self-control to keep from breaking down the doorway, and investigating then
and there...."
