ROGER LUCKHURST The mummy’s curse: a study in rumour The idea of the mummy curse immediately evokes the opening of the tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamen in the winter of 1922–3 by the excavator Howard Carter and his wealthy patron, the Fifth Earl of Carnarvon. The tomb had been discovered in Carter’s last-chance season of digging in the Valley of the Kings, in November 1922. No new tomb had been discovered for over a decade, and all the surviving valley tombs of the New Kingdom pharaohs were considered to have been unearthed. At the news of a discovery, Carnarvon travelled from England. Secretly, they breached the inner doors to ensure that the tomb would offer up treasures with that famous exchange: ‘Can you see anything?’ ‘Yes, wonderful things.’ 1 The antechamber was then opened at the end of November and news reports of the discovery swept round the world. They did not proceed to the burial chamber until February 1923, by which time Carnarvon had signed an exclusive reporting deal with The Times for d5,000 and seventy-five per cent of syndication rights and was in advanced negotiations with Sam Goldwyn for a Hollywood film of the discovery. The world press gathered for the tomb opening, but was seething with rage at the Times exclusive, and reporters from the Daily Express and the Daily Mail had been sent with the express purpose of undermining the deal. Tightly controlled at the site, they soon got another story when Lord Carnarvon fell ill at the beginning of March. What was assumed to be a mosquito bite had become infected – over the next month Carnarvon progressed from fever to blood poisoning and then pneumonia, before dying on the 5 April. As he hovered at death’s door, the famous popular novelist Marie Corelli was reported as saying: ‘I cannot but think some risks are run by breaking into the last rest of a king of Egypt . . . According to a rare book I possess, which is not in the British Museum . . . the most dire punishment follows any rash intruder into a sealed tomb.’ 2 The day after Carnarvon died, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stepped off a steamer in New York at the start of another tour to promote spiritualism. Doyle, the Morning Post reported, ‘was inclined to support to some extent the opinion that it was dangerous for Lord Carnarvon to enter Tutankhamen’s tomb, owing to occult and other spiritual influences. He said ‘‘An evil elemental may