Hussein Abdel-Rasoul vividly remembers those bright November days 70 years ago when a forgotten pharaoh called King Tut became a superstar.
It began as Abdel-Rasoul, then 12, brewed tea for his father, Hassan, and family friend Howard Carter, the most respected archaeologist on the west bank of the Nile, opposite Luxor.Nearby, Carter's diggers removed the huts of ancient workmen, relentlessly seeking a long-lost tomb.
Suddenly, commotion.
"My father and Carter went immediately to see what was happening," Abdel-Rasoul said. "They'd found the top of a staircase."
How did Carter look when he got the news?
"Very happy indeed," said Abdel-Rasoul, whose relatives have dug up tombs and pharaohs, legally and illegally, for generations.
Days later, he remembers, the boy watched as Carter and his father made a small hole to peer into the darkness of a tomb.
"They said nothing, as though the tomb had been robbed, like all the others," Abdel-Rasoul said. "They didn't trust me to keep the secret, but I knew something was up. Police immediately surrounded the tomb."
The tomb's darkness held, almost intact, the world of Tutankhamun, sent to eternity 3,245 years earlier with gold, jewelry and weapons.
Nothing about Carter's world, the world of the young tea-maker - indeed, the world of commoners and kings everywhere - would ever be quite the same.
Seventy years later, King Tut's world seems as exciting as ever.
"It's the gold, so much gold," said Mohammed Saleh, director of Cairo's Egyptian Museum.
The most amazing item is the beaten-gold burial mask, which weighs 221/2 pounds. "Never, never, never could we reproduce it today," Saleh said.