0:00 On November fourth, 1922, a boy shouted that he’d found a step cut into the rock.0:08 Last week, we spoke of history’s forgotten witnesses.0:13 Today, you will stand in the dust with one of them.0:18 My hands were black with dirt, my back burned from the sun, and I was there when the silence of three thousand years was broken.0:31 We are men of this valley.0:34 The dust knows our fathers, and their fathers before them.0:40 We knew the signs.0:41 The way the ground settled.0:44 The taste of the air.0:46 For weeks, we had been clearing the rubble beneath the tomb of Ramses the Sixth, a thankless, heavy job.0:57 The Englishman, Carter, was on his last chance.1:02 His sponsor, the Lord Carnarvon, was tired of paying for nothing but sand and disappointment.1:11 We could feel it.1:13 The season was ending.1:15 Hope was a dry well.1:17 Then, the boy’s shout.1:19 It wasn’t a shout of joy.1:22 It was a cry of shock.1:24 We gathered.1:25 There, beneath the huts our own grandfathers had likely used, was a single, perfect step carved into the bedrock.1:36 Hope was no longer a dry well.1:40 It was a sudden flood.1:42 Carter arrived.1:43 His eyes had a fire in them I had seen before.1:48 Not greed, not yet.1:50 It was something sharper.1:52 The fever of a man who has chased a ghost for fifteen years and just heard it whisper his name.2:02 We worked like men possessed.2:05 Another step, then another.2:08 Sixteen steps in all, leading down to a doorway.2:12 Plastered.2:13 Sealed.2:14 Untouched.2:15 Carter sent his telegram.2:18 “At last have made wonderful discovery.” And then we waited.2:24 For twenty days, we guarded that hole in the ground.2:29 Our discovery.2:30 We sat under the stars, talking in low voices.2:35 What king slept below?2:37 What treasures?2:39 What curses?2:40 The waiting was heavier than the stones we had carried.2:46 It was their tomb now.2:48 The Lord from England was coming to claim it.2:52 November twenty-sixth.2:55 The air was tight, humming like a plucked string.3:00 Carnarvon had arrived.3:02 They stood before the sealed door, the Englishmen, their faces pale in the desert heat.3:11 We stood behind them.3:13 Close enough to smell the sweat on their collars, but a world away.3:19 Carter, his hands trembling just slightly, made a small hole in the upper corner of the doorway.3:29 He lit a candle.3:31 He pushed it into the darkness.3:34 For a full minute, there was NO sound.3:38 None.3:38 Not the wind, not a cough, not the scuff of a boot.3:43 The entire Valley of the Kings held its breath.3:48 The hot air from the tomb rushed out, smelling of forgotten perfumes and time itself.3:57 I will never forget that smell.4:00 Lord Carnarvon couldn’t bear it.4:03 His voice was a dry crackle.4:06 "Can you see anything?" Carter did not turn.4:10 He leaned into the hole, mesmerized.4:14 He said, “Yes.” “Wonderful things.” That is the story they tell.4:20 But I was there.4:22 I saw the candlelight flicker across his face.4:27 I saw the absolute, soul-shaking awe in his eyes.4:32 And for a moment, before we were pushed back, before the photographers and the officials arrived… I saw it too.4:43 A glint of gold.4:44 The leg of a beast carved into a throne.4:49 A mountain of treasure that shimmered in the dark.4:54 They would write the books.4:56 They would take the credit.4:59 Their names would live forever alongside the boy-king.5:04 But we were the ones who found the step.5:09 And the ghost of that first golden light… that is a treasure they could never carry away.
