Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1925-12-11
CONQUEROR LYING
IN TOMB NEAR TUFTS
Amenhotep, Great Ruler, in
Coffin Near Burial Place
of Young King.
BY JOHN l.. BAIDERSTON,
Special Correspondent OF The Star ana North
American Newspaper Alliance.


LUXOR, December 10-The Valley
of the Kings, where King Tuts mum
my was found, still holds many secrets
OF bygone days. Its treasures have
by no means been exhausted with the
recent feat of the psychologists in pry
ing that poor little boy king. Tut-ankh-
Amen, out of his golden coffin in the
tomb where they carried him from his
own shrine. in which he had lain UNI
disturbed since the days when all our
ancestors We're savages who wore
skins-sometimes only their own
and spent their time chipping hints.
l have just visited again the tomb
of Amenhotep, the last Pharaoh of
them all to remain in his own Sar-
Cophagus in the tomb he made for him
self. These great Pharaohs indeed
chose for their sepulchres place the
entrance OF which must have seemed
to them the gate of the underworld.
The hills look like battle-ground
OF some gigantic war, crater land
torn to pieces by shells and bombs a
thousand times more destructive than
those which make the deserts of the
Somme and Verdun.
1t is hot here. Nobody who has not
toiled up to the Valley of the Tombs
Of the Kings "out of season." when
Summer is still supplying Upper
wait in cool Cairo for the Winter. can
imagine how hot it is. 1t Is hard to
believe that there are hotter places in
the world than the entrance to the
valley, where you come into a great
cup-shaped ring of blasted mountains.
To take off smoked gla sses means
blindness, to take off helmet means
SunStroke.
Heat Like Dante's Inferno.
No green thing grows, even our
desert cactus would wither; of living
things, only jackals, wolves, a few
birds, and man, come here. The
ordan Valley, they say, and a place
Somewhere in Mesopotamia, south of
I3agdad, and the Death Valley in Cali
fornia. are hotter. Perhaps. But
this Biban-el-Moluk Is hot enough.
Somebody last Summer put q self
registering Thermometer in the mouth
of an old tomb at the valley entrance
where the sun could not reach it.
When retrieved, the mercury had re.
corded as its maximum 1882 Fahren.
heit
But two miles further on, at the
royal tombs themselves, the ground
IS higher, and there Is often a breeze
Here I saw a wag-tail. hopping cheer
lily about in the sand; perhaps it lives
valley-common house flies, which
plagued the cortege of Rameses the
Great here, and which, as somebody
has written, will be buzzing around
the head Of the last man when he lies
dying under a waning sun on our
freezing planet
BottlinE up the News.
Nobody would come to the Valley of
the Kings at this season Of the year
for pleasure. I came thousands of
miles. on the stern business mission
OF reporting the opening of Tut's
coffin. That news has already been
told, but probably few of those who
read 1t have realized the difficulties
which accompa MED the task of obtain
ing the information.
The Egyptian government had de-
clared that no news of this important
event must reach the outside world
The officials explained that some days
later, an official bulletin-which might
or might not be more accurate than
the two VIGOROUSLY inaccurate COM
muniques previously issued about the
opening of the two outer collins inside
the sarcophag us-would be given out
in Cairo. Newspaper correspondents
In Cairo were solemnly warned Of the
fate awaiting them If they travelled
the 400-odd miles to the famous royal
metropolis in the Sahara. They gave
heed and stayed away.
But l had come too far for that I
paid no heed to the official warnings.
and in due course l arrived in the Val
ley of the Kings for the great event,
Government officials did their best to