# From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier/Chapter 9

CHAPTER IX
AHMED, THE TOMB-ROBBER
On the wall of the passage leading to the interior of the Great Pyramid you will find scrawled with some rude pigment in the Arabic script the words "Ahmed the Carpenter." Tradition has it that this is the sign-manual of the enterprising explorer who was the first, at least under the Arab domination of Egypt, to force his way into the mighty sepulchre. Not, of course, the absolute first to violate King Khufu's "house of eternity." The Persians had broken into it more than a thousand years before, when already it was over thirty centuries old, and no doubt the Romans also at the beginning of the Christian era. But to Ahmed, the ​Arab artisan of the ninth century A.D., belongs the honour, such as it is, of having anticipated the Khalif Mâmûn in penetrating once again into the recesses of the Giant Tomb. Whether he got much for his trouble except the barren glory of recording his exploit on the passage-wall is extremely doubtful. A field which had been reaped by Cambyses and probably gleaned by a Roman pro-consul of the Empire was likely to be pretty bare; and it may be that "Tomb-breaker" rather than "Tomb-robber" would be the proper appellative of this Mohammedan artisan. It has been solemnly decided by the English Court for the Consideration of Crown Cases Reserved that the attempt to pick an empty pocket does not amount to the offence even of constructive larceny, and it may reasonably be assumed that at the time when this particular Ahmed effected his burglarious entrance into it, the Great Pyramid, so far as jewels and other ornaments of the dead are concerned, was completely "cleaned ​out." Another of his name in later days has been more fortunate.
"Would you like to see Ahmed the Carpenter's spiritual heir?" asked a well-known English resident at Luxor, as we stood watching the noisy crowd of Arabs before the Pylon of the Ramesseum. "His namesake, too, by the way," he added with a sudden touch of that mysterious satisfaction which is always aroused by the discovery of coincidence. "Curious! There must be something in the name of Ahmed that impels the owner of it to break into tombs. Yes, that's the fellow, the old man who has just shaken hands with the dragoman, and is now exchanging salutations with the native police. Oh, yes. On excellent terms with the constituted authorities nowadays. Still, they keep their eye upon him, and if our friend Ahmed Abd-er-Rasûl were often to be seen walking pensively at eventide in the direction of those hills yonder I have an idea that he would be shadowed."
​Meanwhile, there was no sign of any constraint in his relations with the representatives of the law. The grey, wiry, rather humorous-looking Arab peasant of some fifty odd years was chatting and laughing gaily with those around him, by whom he was evidently regarded with the respect due to a prominent citizen of distinguished antecedents.
"Oh, he is mighty proud of the feat, I can tell you," said our informing friend. "He has often talked about it to me with perfect freedom and even complacency, as a soldier fights his battles o'er again. Indeed, he is a little inclined to 'gas' about his knowledge of the treasures hidden under these hills, as though he had had the run of every tomb that they contain. When, for instance, he was told the other day of that magnificent batch of blue scarabs that Professor Flinders Petrie has just turned up he received the news with the ineffably superior smile of the man who could have laid his own hand on ​the Professor's 'find' any day had it not been for the unworthy espionage of the police."
"You think that's mere swagger, do you? Isn't it possible that he may have discovered more tombs than he ever confessed to?"
"Well, he himself never confessed to any. It was his dear brother Mohammed who performed that act of repentance on his behalf."
"But did Mohammed make an absolutely clean breast of it, do you think?"
"Probably not. An Arab seldom performs that operation with completeness, either in the moral or in the physical sense. But it is fourteen years, you must remember, since the confession was made; and during the last few years, at any rate, we have been digging pretty industriously out here. So that I imagine we have opened up everything that the Abd-er-Rasûl family could have known of, and more to boot."
"How did they first light upon the tombs?"
​"Well, that is a part of the story that the guide-books don't give. You must get that, as I did, from the excellent Ahmed himself. It is rather quaint and characteristic, and may be taken, I think, with a somewhat smaller grain of salt than is usually required as the condiment of an Oriental story. It seems that Ahmed, his elder brother, and a stranger were digging one day up in the hills there, when———"
"Do you mean actually digging for buried treasure?"
" Well, yes, I suppose so, in a sort of way. That is to say, they were 'mousing' about in the usual Arab fashion, in search of anything that might turn up in the 'antîka' line, and be worth anything from half a dozen piastres to twice as many pounds. But, of course, he could not have had the slightest expectation of hitting on the biggest find in money's worth, and incomparably the largest in scientific value, that has ever been made in these regions since modern history began. ​Well, they struck a shaft obviously of many feet deep, which might either have belonged to a disused and buried well, or, as I dare say the 'cutest of the party suspected, might lead to a rock-hewn tomb. Ahmed volunteered to descend and explore it. He was lowered by a rope, and at the bottom found himself facing a passage, which he entered and followed—not, I dare say, as far as it has since been found to lead, but far enough to make Ahmed Abd-er-Rasûl's heart beat and perhaps his mouth water. There was enough to show him that he had struck a vast mortuary full of the costly death-gifts of the great. It is immensely to his credit as a man of coolness and resource that he was not so overcome by his extraordinary discovery as to be unable to conceal it from his companions. Calm and alert of judgment even in the presence of all this buried wealth, he instantly conceived a dodge for doing his brother and his 'pal' out of their share. He hurried back to the bottom of the shaft and ​called to them in an agitated voice to draw him up at once, and on reaching the surface of the earth informed them in tones of horror that he had seen an Afrît."
"Seen a what?"
"An Afrît, an evil spirit. There is no Psychical Society among the Arabs, you know. They are not curious about ghosts. They are simply afraid of them, and give them as wide a berth as possible."
"I see; Ahmed's little ruse was intended to discourage further excavations on that particular spot?"
"Exactly; but observe the thoroughness of his dispositions. It evidently occurred to him that his brother or the other man might on further reflection consider the Afrît story too 'thin,' so after dark that very same night he returned on donkey-back to the spot, accompanied by his wife, whom, like a wise man, he took into his confidence, and, arriving at the shaft, he dismounted and threw the wretched creature—I need hardly say I mean ​the donkey—to the bottom of it, a distance of about forty feet."
"With the view of?"
"With the view of giving colour—or perhaps I should say odour—to the story that an Afrît, who, I should tell you, always manifests his presence by an intolerable stench, was really the tenant of this underground abode."
"By Jove! it was a rather elaborate and expensive way of creating a nuisance."
"Yes, but effective. A few days after the donkey's death there was no one in the neighbourhood who was not firmly convinced that an unclean spirit lived at the bottom of the shaft. Having allowed a decent interval of mourning to elapse, Ahmed again descended into the shaft, removed the decomposing remains of the donkey, covered up the hole, and marked the spot; and then there began for him that lucrative business in valuable 'antîkas' to which his brother was afterwards admitted, and as to the details of which are they not ​written in the books of Baedeker and Budge? The little game lasted for several years—long enough, at any rate, to enable Ahmed to lay by a comfortable provision for his old age, though, no doubt, he must have sold many things at prices vastly below their real value."
"I never could quite make out how the 'find' was found out by the authorities."
"Well, the wonder to me is that it was not spotted before. There surely must have been some of the mummy ornaments, sepulchral vessels, and so forth, which bore the signatures of the dead to whom they belonged, and thereby proved that the seller or the person from whom he acquired them must have obtained access to some hitherto unknown tomb. However, it was the funeral papyrus of Queen Netemet, of the twenty-first dynasty—a scroll taken straight from that lady's tomb—which put Egyptologists on the scent, and finally enabled them to run the ingenious Ahmed to earth. However, they wouldn't have managed ​it so easily, even as it was, if it hadn't been for the fraternal assistance of brother Mohammed."
"Ahmed was game, was he?"
"As a pebble. The Mudir of Keneh had him under lock and key for weeks, and subjected him to a most severe interrogation. Ahmed still points with pride to the record of it on the soles of his feet. But they never got anything out of him. That was in the summer of 1880, and in the winter of that year his elder brother stepped round to the Mudirate, and, if you will excuse an Arabic expression, 'blew the gaff.' Then, as we all know, M. Maspero took the matter in hand, and Brugsch Bey made his expedition to the spot in the sweltering July heats of 1881 and — but why inflict guide-book upon you? Every one has read the famous Egyptologist's graphic account of this most stupendous of all archæological 'finds'—how he made his way along the passage from the bottom of the shaft pointed out to him by the reluctant ​Ahmed, and what his sensations were on finding himself in the marvellous death-chamber and treasure-house at its end, every inch of it covered with coffins and antiquities of all kinds; 'My astonishment was so overpowering that I scarcely knew whether I was awake or whether it was only a mocking dream. Resting on a coffin, in order to recover from my intense excitement, I mechanically cast my eyes over the coffin-lid, and distinctly saw the name of King Seti I., the father of Rameses II., both belonging to the nineteenth dynasty. A few steps further on, in a simple wooden coffin, with his hands crossed on his breast, lay Rameses II., the great Sesostris himself. The further I advanced the greater was the wealth displayed, here Amenophis I., there Amasis, the three Thothmes, Queen Ahmes Nefertari, all the mummies well preserved—thirty-six coffins, all belonging to kings or queens or princes or princesses."
"Yes," said one of the listeners, "but even ​that part of the story is not so remarkable as the incident of the fellahin women following the boat containing the royal mummies down the river with their hair loosened and filling the air with lamentations."
"Strange," murmured another of our party, "that these old kings should have kept the treasures of their tombs inviolate for thousands of years only to be rifled at last by an Arab villager! And it is the more wonderful when one remembers that many centuries must have passed before these sepulchres were finally covered up and hidden by the desert sands, and that during all that time their position and their riches contained in them must have been matters of common knowledge. It says much for the honesty and piety of the early Egyptians that they seem never to have———"
"My dear fellow!" interrupted our friend, who had been listening to this rhapsody with a queer smile; "Don't say another word. Let me remind you of that pregnant ​remark which Sir Peter Teazle makes in the last act of the 'School for Scandal.'"
"What pregnant remark?"
"'It's a damned wicked world, Sir Oliver, and the fewer people we praise the better.' I advise you to exercise a certain caution in extolling the honesty and piety of the early Egyptians or, at any rate, in congratulating them on their universal innocence of the crime of tomb-robbing."
"You don't mean to say that this particular form of sacrilegious burglary is an ancient———"
"Only just upon three thousand years old. The earliest recorded case was about 1100 B.C."
"Recorded?"
"Yes, to be sure. Ask some Egyptologist to give you a translation of the passages about it in the Abbott and Amherst papyri. You will find enough there to convince you that the early Egyptians knew a thing or two about mummy-snatching, and that ​Ahmed Abd-er-Rasûl is a mere modern plagiarist."
And so it proved to be. For here, furnished me by the kindness of Mr. Percy Newberry, the accomplished archaeologist who has done such admirable work for the Egypt Exploration Society, is the translated record of this oldest of old-world criminal investigations. "It was found," reported the commissioners of inquiry into an alleged desecration of the Royal tombs, "that the thieves had violated it" (the tomb of King Sebekensanef and his consort) "by boring through the principal chamber of the sepulchre of Neb-Amon, the Superintendent of the Granaries of King Thothmes III. The place of sepulture was found to be without its occupant. So was the Chamber of the Royal wife, Nubkhas. The thieves had laid hands on them."
The tomb-robbers, as the public, even at this considerable distance of time, will, no doubt, learn with satisfaction, were ultimately ​captured and brought to justice. And here, from the Amherst papyrus, is the record of their trial. It appears that they were eight in number, most of them servants in the Temple of Amon, and, having been "examined," or, in other words, "beaten with sticks both on their hands and feet"—precisely the same form of "question" it will be seen, as was applied to Abd-er-Rasûl—one of them confessed to the theft. "We broke into the passage," said this sacrilegious Sikes of the age of Rameses IX., "and found the tomb protected and surrounded by masonry and covered with roofing. This we destroyed and found the King's and Queen's mummies inside. We then opened their sarcophagi and the coffins in which they lay. We found the King with his axe beside him and a long chain of golden amulets about his neck. His head was covered with gold, and the mummy was entirely overlaid with gold, and his coffin was burnished with gold and silver, both ​inside and out, and inlaid with all kinds of precious stones. We took the gold which we found and the amulets and ornaments that were round his neck. We found the Royal consort, and we likewise took all that we found with her, and we set fire to their coffins and stole their furniture which we found with them, vases of gold, of silver, and of bronze, and divided them into eight lots."
Here, unfortunately, the record breaks off, so we do not know what punishment was inflicted on the desperate villains who thus confessed to an offence which the orthodox Egyptian of ancient times must have regarded with unspeakable horror. But the more remote sequel of these proceedings is pretty well ascertained, and is, in itself, curious. For it was, no doubt, the increasing audacity and success of the tomb-robbers which some hundred years later induced the priests to transfer the Royal mummies from their original resting-place ​at Biban-el-Mulûk to the crypt in which they were ultimately found by Ahmed-Abder-Rasûl three thousand years later. Thus did Time and Fate conspire to mock these mighty kings with a temporary prolongation of the sanctity of their tomb-treasures, withdrawing them from the reverent explorer only to leave them at the mercy of the robber. And thus does one resurrection-man stretch out his unscrupulous hand to another across the centuries.