AH, THE EARLS … IF THE SIXTH EARL OF CARNARVON HAD killed his father, the fifth earl, as he’d planned to, it’s hard to say what would have become of Howard Carter.

The Fifth Earl of Carnarvon was one of many rich men interested in digging in Egypt. Carter had even worked for some of them during his early years—when he was still learning and developing—before he came into his own. But they were reasonable men engaged in reasonable endeavors. That is, they expected a reasonable return, in a reasonable amount of time, for a reasonable investment of cash.

The search for King Tut’s tomb was not such an endeavor. It was begun amid warnings from every side that the Valley of the Kings was now exhausted: Even Gaston Maspero (who brought Carter and Carnarvon together) warned the earl that every royal tomb to be found there had been discovered.

There were good reasons for this pessimism, a pessimism that seemed to be confirmed by the results of the Carnarvon-Carter effort. To universal laughter, the spectacle of the futile excavation dragged on year after year for seven long years. The mounds of excavated rubble, meticulously sifted, piled higher and higher. Foot by foot, the area Carter had marked out was exposed to the bedrock.

The costs accumulated, the earl spent a fortune, and nothing was found. But still Carnarvon toasted Carter each season with the best champagne as he good-naturedly shrugged off the past failures. His slouch hat worn at a rakish angle, the sun glinting on his gold cigarette holder, Carnarvon would invariably irritate the gloomy Carter with his unbounded, amateurish enthusiasm. This would be their year, the earl was always sure; there was no telling what, in the coming season, they would uncover.

Who else would have been so foolish? The other men backing expeditions and buying antiquities in Egypt, the Pierpont Morgans and Theodore Davises, were too hardheaded to invest their money so unwisely.

But even say Carter had found someone willing to stake him in his impossible venture, who else would have put up with the moodiness of the embittered digger? For by the time Carnarvon and Carter teamed up, Carter had a reputation for being “difficult,” to use the polite expression (many other, less polite adjectives were often applied to him).

By his own admission he had a “mauvaise [sic] caractère,” which over the years had become worse owing to the strains of his life in Egypt, both physical and psychological. As he wrote apologetically in a letter to Percy Newberry, one of the few colleagues who remained a friend until the end: “Living alone as I do, is inducive to one letting the milk curdle.” Which was putting it mildly: He was exacting, touchy, unjust, tyrannical, unkind—and brilliant. And what was worse, he knew it.

As Geanie Weigall (a famous beauty visiting her archaeologist brother, Arthur Weigall, in Egypt) wrote to a friend: “I do so dislike Carter. His manners are so aggressive and every word he utters is veiled with thin sarcasm.” This in a social setting (Luxor’s Winter Palace), and with a beautiful woman around whom men fluttered like moths. But on a dig—where Miss Weigall’s charm did not exercise its restraining influence—Carter’s “thin sarcasm” became rage at his colleagues’ stupidity and ineptitude, real or imagined.

“I worked in the valley this AM. Carter took measurements for me until his extraordinary notions about projections caused such a violent disagreement between us that he refused to continue his assistance,” a colleague (the draftsman Lindsley Hall) noted in his diary. “The man is unbearable,” complained another (Henry Burton, one of the great archaeological photographers of all time). “But I must admit he showed me how to take a photograph I thought impossible.”

In his dark moods, he could be terrifying. Even Carnarvon’s daughter, Lady Evelyn, an admirer, said years after his death: “In the beginning I was in awe of him. Later, he made me rather afraid.”

Carter was a diamond in the rough, a fact that the discerning earl appreciated. He understood his temperamental archaeologist and looked out for him as no one else would have during the lean years.

Who else but Carnarvon would have cut him into a sweet deal such as the treasure of the three princesses, for example? The cache, belonging to the Syrian wives of the warrior pharaoh Thutmosis III, was one of the most fabulous collections of ancient jewelry ever found.

Tomb robbers had scoured the desert after a flash flood, one of only three in the last thirty-five years. The streaming waters had dislodged many-ton boulders, tossing them aside as if they were pebbles. High up on the sides of the desert cliffs, a hiding place was exposed, where beautiful gold bracelets and earrings and necklaces had lain since the fifteenth century BC. After wrapping the treasure in dirty rags, the robbers carried it to an Egyptian dealer.

Normally, the collection (some 225 pieces) would have been broken up and sold discreetly to different collectors over a number of years. But Carnarvon put up a huge amount of cash, enabling Carter secretly to buy the entire find from the Egyptian fence and sell it to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Thus, thanks to Carnarvon, Carter received a hefty commission that took care of his financial worries. In addition, the deal established him as a major player on the antiquities scene until the end of his life.

But perhaps the most revealing moment in the relationship between the two men can be found at the time of the fifty-six-year-old Carnarvon’s death. For who else—after being ordered out of Carter’s house forever during a stormy quarrel—would have written a letter such as the one Carnarvon sent Carter:

Carnarvon’s tact—he forgave Carter under the guise of asking for forgiveness; he was so careful not to wound his friend’s dignity—would have been rare enough under ordinary circumstances. But when you consider that Carnarvon was a dying man at the time—he’d nicked a mosquito bite while shaving and had gotten septic poisoning—and consider his suffering when he wrote to Carter, it makes his loyalty to the irascible, solitary archaeologist all the more extraordinary.

In his own way, George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert, Fifth Earl of Carnarvon, was as unusual as Carter was in his. They were both one of a kind. Which made it all the more fortunate for Carter (and for Egyptology) that Carnarvon’s son Lord Porchester did not act on the homicidal impulse he described sixty years later in his memoir, No Regrets.

For the most part, the memoir is ironic in tone, the incidents are all minor, the predominant quality is laughter and irreverence. Porchester describes his life, a life devoted to parties and practical jokes and love. But his childhood reminiscences are of interest in that, irony aside, we are able to see Carnarvon from the vantage point of his young son.

The grief of children! In their eyes, everything is raised to the tenth power. But in that exaggeration, there is sometimes more truth than in the view of less vulnerable adults.

As Porchester remembered, “Usually when I returned from school—accompanied by a very indifferent report—I would receive a summons to my father’s study. He would be sitting at his desk and, as I came in, he would look up and say, ‘My dear Porchester. As usual, your reports are very bad. Your writing is slovenly, your mathematics are appalling, and apparently you don’t pay sufficient attention. I intend to make a useful man of you. Now you’d better take heed of this warning. I expect a distinct improvement, d’you understand? Off you go.’ With that perfunctory statement, he would dismiss me back to the top floor where we children lived, ate, played and slept, using only the back staircase to make our escape to the outside world.”

The boy’s schoolwork didn’t improve, however, and one day he saw the head gardener making birch rods. “I guessed what was about to happen and was desperately frightened when I entered the room. I was told to undress and my hands were tied down to the brass bedstead. Almost immediately my father came into the room and, ignoring me, went over to the birch rods, picking up each in turn and swishing it through the air until he seemed satisfied with the one he had selected.

“Standing back he performed a little on-the-spot jig, as if tautening his muscles, and then suddenly brought down the birch as hard as he could on to my bare bum. After the sixth stroke, he threw down the birch and went out of the room.”

The tutor dressed the boy’s wounds with ointment and tried to comfort him, but he remained obstinate. “This episode had a deep psychological effect upon me which was to last for many years. From that day onwards, I planned to kill my father and when a few weeks later I found him alone, I concealed myself in some bushes nearby in order to observe him, unseen. I had brought with me a little dagger which seemed well fitted to the task in hand. But I was fearful of two things. Firstly, being caught and then, should I succeed, being sent to Borstal [prison]. So I forsook the project.”

We must remember that caning was common in England at the time, a standard practice, and that Carnarvon, despite some transcendent virtues, was very much a man of his time. The scene would have been typical down to Carnarvon’s insistence that he would make his son “useful,” a Victorian catchword usually coupled with “earnestness” in the categories of the day (an ideal that Oscar Wilde played with in the title of his wonderful farce The Importance of Being Earnest). The theory was that since the upper classes had been given so much, in return they had an obligation to accomplish something for the public good: noblesse oblige.

Poor Queen Victoria, however, had to face the fact that while this ideal was sometimes realized, just as often her nobility were pleasure-loving wastrels and bon vivants—including her own son Edward, who was always getting into scrapes. (To the end of her life, she reproached Edward for having killed his father. The typhoid was incidental, she claimed: Her beloved Albert had actually died from the shock of learning their nineteen-year-old son had lost his virginity—and with a French dancer to boot.)

Measured by Victorian standards, the life of the Fifth Earl of Carnarvon would have to be judged anything but “earnest” (at least the first half of it). At the time he was caning his idle son, he himself had achieved much that could have been written up in the society columns—His Lordship’s yacht, His Lordship’s horses, His Lordship’s cars, and so forth. But he had done nothing that could match his own father’s accomplishments. For Carnarvon’s father, the fourth earl, cast a long shadow. He had been a brilliant classical scholar and a principled statesman who had served first as colonial secretary and then as Irish viceroy, becoming a close friend of Charles Stewart Parnell’s and resigning when his liberal Irish policy was rejected by Parliament.

Perhaps in that cry of Carnarvon’s, “I intend to make a useful man of you!” we can hear something of his exasperation with himself, for he had his father’s enormous energy but not his intellect. He played no part in politics and “frankly detested the classics,” according to his sister, Lady Burghclere. Their father, the fourth earl, she adds, was “too sensible to insist on his son pursuing indefinitely studies doomed to failure,” so Carnarvon was left to follow his own interests. At Cambridge, his most notable achievement (besides the usual drinking bouts) was to find some beautiful wooden paneling in his rooms buried beneath layers of ugly wallpaper. The knowledge that would be important in his life was not scholarly or academic. If, as it has been observed, the Victorian gentleman would have been silent without the classics, then Carnarvon was mute.

Upon leaving school, he traveled widely. In Africa, he went in for the benighted sport of the upper classes then, big-game hunting (unsuccessfully: His life was saved at the last moment when he climbed a tree to escape a charging elephant). He crossed the Atlantic on his sailboat, the Aphrodite, and when he arrived in Argentina, he made plans to go around the Straits of Magellan. It was a suicidal project given the lightness of his craft and the waterway’s rough seas, as an experienced sailor finally convinced him.

He gave it up and instead threw himself into the life of the capital, lingering in Buenos Aires before continuing his travels. It was a pattern we can see in these early years. He seemed to be trying to prove himself somehow, anyhow, taking up one pursuit after another, restlessly, without fixed purpose…. He became passionate about boxing matches, then opera, then aerial photography. There were passing affaires de cœur, which he took lightly, and successes at the racetrack, which he took seriously.

Whereas his father had “played” against the great statesmen of Europe, Carnarvon mingled with the betting underworld. As a friend (Sir Maurice Hankey) later said of him, “He was known to have pitted his brains against and outwitted the toughest bookies and ‘crooks’ on the turf.” To which Hankey added mysteriously, “I do not know whether he is consistently cunning, or often ingenuous.” Which is to say, he wasn’t sure whether Carnarvon succeeded because he was shrewd or because he was a fool (with a fool’s luck!).

Either way, fortune was on his side. He won the Ascot stakes, the Stewards’ Cup at Goodwood, the Doncaster Cup, and the City and Suburban. He enjoyed the glory of leading his horses to the winner’s circle. And he developed uncanny gambling instincts that would stand him in good stead—on the turf and off—along with a gambler’s sangfroid, or cool.

“On one occasion in his youth,” his sister related in her adoring eulogy, “he hired a boat to take him somewhere off the [Italian] coast to his ship lying far out to sea. He was alone, steering the little bark rowed by a couple of stalwart fishermen. Suddenly, when far removed from land, and equally distant from his goal, the two ruffians gave him the choice between payment of a large sum or being pitched into the water. He listened quietly, and motioned to them to pass his dressing-bag. They obeyed, already in imagination fingering the English ‘Lord’s’ ransom.

“The situation was, however, reversed when he extracted, not a well-stuffed pocket-book, but a revolver, and pointing it at the pair sternly bade them row on, or he would shoot. The chuckle with which he recalled what was to him an eminently delectable episode, still remains with the hearer.”

In the many disconnected episodes of Carnarvon’s early life, we get the picture of a young man whose knowledge of the world is becoming broader and who was steadily becoming surer of himself. His travels brought him into contact with all sorts of people and made him a good judge of character. At first, all this accumulated experience seemed to be wasted. He put it to trivial ends—backing a dark horse or making a killing on the stock market. But in the long run, it all came into play in Egypt when he made the gamble of his life: a useful, earnest “bet” that even the fourth earl, statesman and classical scholar though he was, would have been hard put to match.

Not that Carnarvon originally had any such plan. After his death, high-sounding obituaries maintained that it was his love of history or archaeology that brought him to Egypt. But the truth is that two stubborn oxen brought him there.

Carnarvon was motoring in Germany at the time. The oxen, hitched to carts, stopped on a road across which a farmer was leading them. In his car—the third ever to be registered in England—Lord Carnarvon approached from the other side of a steep rise in the road. It was too late to stop when he saw them, so Carnarvon steered toward the edge of the road, trying to get around them. Some stones caught the wheels. Two tires burst, and the car turned over and fell on Carnarvon, while the servant accompanying him was thrown clear of the burning wreck.

As the unconscious earl lay half-crushed, his quick-thinking servant grabbed a pail of water from some passing workmen, dashed it over Carnarvon, whose clothes had caught fire, and then sent the workmen for help. Upon regaining consciousness—temporarily blinded, his legs burned, and his wrist broken—Carnarvon insisted first on knowing whether anyone else had been hurt (no one had); only after being informed of this did he allow himself to be taken to a town nearby.

So began a long period of invalidism. He developed problems with his chest and underwent many operations, which left him in a weakened state. His doctors recommended a warm, dry climate, and Egypt was a natural decision. “So much is Egypt the resort of the invalid,” wrote the archaeologist Flinders Petrie, “that the guide-books seem all infected with invalidism; and to read their directions it might be supposed that no Englishman could walk a mile or more without an attendant of some kind.”

Apart from the weather, Carnarvon chose Egypt because it was convenient, just across the Mediterranean, and had a large European community who welcomed the rich aristocrat. Cairo, with its opera house (built for the opening of the Suez Canal), its Gezira Sporting Club, its soirees and polo matches, offered Carnarvon all the distractions he was used to while he recovered his strength.

If the ruins entered into his decision at all, they were only another diversion Egypt had to offer. A visit to a “find” was more a social event than a scholarly one. “We had the whole Devonshire party to tea this afternoon to see the find,” read a typical diary entry of the day. “The Duke and Duchess, her daughter Lady Gosford, and Lord Gosford and their daughter Lady Theodora Guest—with Mr. Weigall…. The duke, now a very old and broken man, is of course a great personage. The Duchess, so celebrated in her way, was a wonderful old woman—painted and enameled, with reddish wig, an old black hat, with painted lips—very keen to see everything.”

Carnarvon fit in very well, along with his wife, Almina, who at that time was still in love with him. His feelings for her were more restrained, his attitude toward marriage being pragmatic. Or so it seemed from the fatherly advice he gave his son when the boy grew up and decided to marry for love. As Porchester recalled in his memoirs, his father took him aside and told him: “It seems to me totally unnecessary to go marrying an American, Porchester, and if what you tell me is correct, even more ridiculous to marry one with no money. If you are determined to do such a thing, I would have thought it much better to have picked a very rich one…. I can only tell you that before I consented to marry your mother, I got hold of Alfred de Rothschild and made some very stringent terms.”

The incorrigible Porchester, though, followed his heart (and ended up living happily to an old age with his penniless sweetheart). Carnarvon’s marriage, by contrast, was a mere matter of form by the time he met Carter. Almina was not at her husband’s side when the great discovery took place; and she was “difficult to locate,” as the gossip columnists would say, when he fell sick afterward. She finally arrived at his bedside at the last minute in a small Puss Moth airplane, an emergency mode of transportation.

But whatever emotional reversals took place in the Carnarvons’ marriage, the financial benefits to the earl were lasting. For the Countess of Carnarvon, Almina, formerly Lady Wombwell, was actually the illegitimate daughter of a Rothschild, who could well afford Carnarvon’s “stringent terms.”

These included discharging his huge debts (150,000 pounds) and providing a dowry of 500,000 pounds (given its purchasing power at the time, an enormous sum), along with other financial settlements. On his death, Rothschild left Almina the bulk of his large fortune, including his London mansion and several country estates. Yet despite all this wealth, the prodigal Almina ended her days in poverty in a small apartment in Bristol—the court placed her in protective bankruptcy—forbidding any mention of Egypt to be made in her presence until the day of her death.

All of this was in the future, however. When in 1905 the wellheeled countess set out for Egypt in the company of her husband, she had no thought of her future poverty (or of her future lover, the tall, gaunt Tiger Denouston, charming, penniless, and also an invalid). And Carnarvon had no inkling that he would discover a royal tomb filled with art and treasure and the body of a boy-king lying in state for thirty-three hundred years.

One last glimpse of Carnarvon in his “pre-Egyptian” phase, though, reveals an important link connecting his past to his future. And again, this view of him was provided by his son. The boy, having accidentally knocked over the king at a children’s party, was sent to a small attic room in disgrace.

The room was over the bedroom where Carnarvon’s séances and palm readings and table rappings were held. If the strange voices and cries did nothing to soothe the boy, they shed an interesting light on his father. For Carnarvon was fascinated by the occult. He not only experimented with séances and levitation, but had his personal “supernormalist,” Velma,^1* a well-known psychic who had given readings to such figures as the bandit president of Mexico, Pancho Villa, and the last czar of Russia. He would later claim that he had warned Carnarvon of his fate from the beginning. Which may or may not be true.

But Velma was only one of many to have issued such warnings. A member of London’s Spiritual Alliance, Carnarvon often consulted psychics of many different descriptions. The famous medium and palmist Cheiro delivered messages to him from the Egyptian princess Meketaten (who died in childbirth in the fourteenth century BC). For effect, the medium could even produce the mummified hand that had scrawled them, though whether the severed limb was “the real thing” is anyone’s guess. As is the whole question of communications from the other side, Egyptian magic, curses, and “supernormalism,” as it was called at the time.

The one prediction that was beyond dispute, however—a matter of public record—was the one about Carnarvon made not by a psychic or medium but by Carter’s colleague and enemy Arthur Weigall. Carter hated him, perhaps, more than all his other enemies put together. He was everything Carter was not, eloquent, sure of himself in society, handsome—a ladies’ man and a romantic, who married first a beautiful American woman wandering throughout Europe (with whom he had five children) and then a brash composer of popular musical songs.

In 1923, Weigall, watching Carnarvon laughing and joking at Tut’s tomb, dreamily predicted that the earl had six weeks to live. His words were recalled—and created a sensation—when, almost six weeks to the day, Carnarvon died in agony and delirium.

Weigall had uttered his prophecy without thinking; he could give no explanation for its accuracy. But if he had premeditated some sort of plan to revenge himself on Carter, he could not have come up with a better one. Nothing upset Carter more than such speculation, which he would always indignantly dismiss as “tommyrot!” For unlike his patron, Carter was not a “believer” in the supernatural—at least not in a literal, simple sense.

Egypt always held mystery for Carter, but that mystery derived from understandable causes—the country’s beauty, the stark deserts and ancient ruins, the awe that came over him in the tombs and temples.

Nowhere else was one as aware that “we stand between the eternity of the past and the eternity of the future,” as Amelia Edwards, founder of the Egyptian Exploration Fund, put it. Living for long periods of time on such intimate terms with the past—as Carter was to and as Ms. Edwards had before him—magnified this feeling many times over.

An excavator’s state of mind was necessarily altered, call it psychological, call it mystical. As Weigall described it, descending into an Egyptian tomb that had been sealed for thousands of years was like walking through a tear in the curtain of time: The dried flowers strewn over the broken coffins, the leavings of the last funeral meal, and the bodies ravaged by ancient robbers all produced an impression that was uncanny and oppressive. In fact, more than one excavator who had had the experience—Jones, Ayrton, Weigall, Carter, for example—stated that at first he was overcome with the feeling of being an intruder, of committing sacrilege. This, together with an almost physical impulse to get out, to rush back through the winding passages and into the light of day.