My journey which ended up with me dragging out the mummified corpse of an Egyptian King which had been snoozing in a sarcophagus of solid gold for over 3,000 years begins in a mansion in Norfolk where i trained as an artist and got hired by the local rich family to draw their collection of Egyptian antiques which impressed them so much to suggested me to their friend who was excavating a tomb in Egypt.
I turned up, copied the tomb decorations and went to several other excavations before being appointed Inspector of Monuments for Upper Egypt in the Egyptian Antiquities Service (EAS) based at Luxor and given funding to head my own excavation projects.
I teamed up with Lord Carnarvon to excavate the Valley of Kings but we were not getting anywhere until a water boy stumbled on a stone that turned out to be the top of a flight of steps cut into the bedrock.
We dug it out until the top of a doorway was found, a door with Tutankhamun's insignia stamped on it along with some hieroglyphic nonsense on it but once we cracked it open...kerching!
Now that hieroglyphic nonsense we ignored translated as: 'Cursed be he who moves my body. To him shall come fire, water, and pestilence' and in the tomb itself was a statue of Anubis, the guardian of the dead, but come on, a curse is about as real as leprechauns and to show how much we disregarded it, when my anthropologist pal Sir Bruce Ingram visited, i presented him with a paperweight with a mummified hand inside it.
True, soon after receiving the gift, Ingram's house burned down, followed by a flood when it was rebuilt but King Tut had nothing to do with it.
Nor Lord Carnovan's demise when he died of an infected mosquito bite and another expeditions financier's suicide was probably due to something else while George Jay Gould, dying of a fever shortly afterwards and my secretary dying was both purely a result of 1920's medicine.
The death of my pal Aaron Ember and his family all dying in a house fire was pure coincidence and Lord Carnarvon's half-brother, Aubrey Herbert, going blind and dying from Sepsis was poor timing as was the death of the guy three days after X-raying Tut.
Admittedly, if you believe in these things then all those unfortunate events from fire and pestilence within 12 months of dragging the corpse out of a door which warned of deaths from fire and pestilence doesn't look good but i could only be considered jinxed if my curse as the guy who found him was to live out my life in luxury and die in my comfortable bed 20 years later.
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