“At last,” Carter writes in a most memorable passage of his book. “we had the whole door clear before us. The decisive moment had arrived. With trembling hands I made a tiny breach in the upper left-hand corner. Darkness and blank space as far as an iron testing-rod could reach… Candle tests were applied as a precaution against possible foul gases, and then, widening the hole a little, I inserted a candle and peered in, Lord Carnarvon, Lady Evelyn Herbert and Callender standing anxiously beside me to hear the verdict. At first I could see nothing, the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle flame to flicker. But presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold—everywhere the glint of gold. For a moment—an eternity it must have seemed to the others standing by, I was struck dumb; the Lord Carnarvon inquired, anxiously—”Can you see anything?”
“‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘…wonderful things…’”
    This is Leonard Cotterill’s account of the discovery of the hidden tombs of Ancient Egypt and how Howard Carter opened the  tomb of  Tutankhamen in The Lost Pharaohs.
    Some years earlier, I had been enthralled by Howard Hawk’s movie Land of the Pharaohs in which the Pharaoh Khufu and a captive architect—played with their usual British Stoicism by Jack Hawkins and James Robertson Justice—spent a lifetime and the resources of the world’s wealthiest empire raising the Great Pyramid in the desert outside Memphis. Now this film is pretty good, with some fine construction detail, the ravishing Joan Collins as the evil scheming Queen, and a very nifty twist in the plot at the end, and it was the prospect that Cotterill’s book promised to tell me even more about all this that lured me into so serious a tome. What it told me mostly was that Hollywood could exaggerate even when reconstructing the most momentous building project in all history.