“Who knows what Mr Hunter’s ambitions may be,” Boy Wonder said. “Does he dream of establishing himself on high perhaps?”
“Right now, I just want to get to that disc before the wrong people do. And before the wrong people do something wrong with it.”
“And then what?” Kraft said.
“Well?” Boy Wonder said.
They waited for his answer. So did Neith. She stopped chewing. It seemed to Anson that the dahabiyya had stopped in the Nile and that Egypt and the whole universe had stopped and was waiting and holding its breath for his answer. What did he tell them? Their questions were the same ones he was still asking himself.
“Questions, questions, we fringe thinkers do love them don’t we? And I have one for you. How is your duck?”
Chapter 32
IT WAS EXCEEDINGLY well appointed dahabiyya, he discovered, it even had a small library room aboard and he decided to go in there and do some research on the Dendera region.
In fact he found quite a few volumes in glass cases, including one showing aerial photos of Egypt and the desert, and he ferried his books to a table where he sat at one of the two small tables.
He paged through the aerial photos and paused on a remarkable desert photograph.
It showed two windblown buffs or rock in the desert that looked for all the world like the forepaws of a sphinx.
The door opened and Lady Neith filled the doorway.
She had a notepad with her and book.
“Are you also looking for a bit of peace and quiet? Shall I leave you alone?”
“No, join me. I promise to keep quiet.”
She opened her book and settled down to read. They soon settled into a companionable silence.
It was perfectly possible to flirt while reading, he discovered. You did it by falling into a subtle rhythm, by synchronising the turning of your pages, the jotting down of notes, the laying down of your book and the occasional pause and stretch to give rest to the body and relaxation to the eyes, when you would just happen to make eye contact and acknowledge each other with a look. Then there was the intimate lisp and murmur of turning pages themselves, the occasional clearing of the throat, even the odd mm, sigh and grunt that, although widely distributed, would, if strung together, speak of other pleasures. Then there was the forbidden fruit that tantalised.
Talking.
But conversation was a danger, something best avoided. If they started talking, it might burst the mood like a bubble and he was enjoying the feeling of being immersed in it.
It was altogether safer to restrict this meeting to the silent camaraderie of the internalised word.
He half hoped she would take charge and break the silence, but she seemed content to keep things this way too.
Anson gave a rather loud hm and she responded with a sigh that definitely stretched the protocol of the reading room.
Chapter 33
THEY FORMED a preparation circle on deck before arriving at their first stop, the temple of Kom Ombo that sat on a mound on a bend in the river.
“Don’t forget, tonight is our Egyptian night,” Neith announced as they broke. “If you don’t have a costume or galabea, there’s a bazaar on the way up to the temple for any last minute purchases.”
Anson gave a quiet groan.
He hoped that a New Age cruise might dispense with the customary Egyptian night or galabea party, but this was not to be.
“I hope you’ve got something to wear,” she said to him as they went down the gangplank and walked up the hill towards the ruins of the Graeco-Roman temple.
“I have an appointment with my tailor in the bazaar.”
Better to make his purchase on the way up, he decided. A purchase in hand would give him some kind of immunity from the pressing wave of hawkers who emerged from their stalls to fall on the group.
Anson chose the first stall, filled with racks of colourful Egyptian cotton.
He saw what he wanted.
“For you, fifty Egyptian pounds,” the vendor said.
“Sixty,” Anson said.
The young man in a blue galabea grinned, quickly catching on.
“Seventy pounds.”
“Eighty”
“Ninety it is. You drive a hard bargain,”
The vendor stuffed his purchase in a plastic bag and Anson went up the steps to the temple to find the place quickly filling with groups of tourists and their guides.
Although a late period temple, the columned ruins had a certain grandeur sitting atop high ground on the riverbank. It was also an unusual temple, twin temples conjoined along a central line. One half belonged to the crocodile god of the region, Sobek, the other half to Horus, the Elder.
He entered under a cornice emblazoned with winged sun-discs and wandered through the striking outer Hypostyle Hall, dominated by thick columns topped with floral capitals.
The group assembled at the back where the two temples met at a place that Neith called “The Seat of Centreing”.
“Just as the temple has two halves,” she said, “so do we, and here is a seat of power where we can use the energies to harmonize the light and darkness of Horus the sun and Sobek the night, of yin and yang, of consciousness and unconsciousness, within ourselves.”
They each took turns, sitting on the seat with the solemn air of people attending to their ablutions.
Anson strolled around an ambulatory wall outside the temple to seek out a favourite item of interest.
Here it was. Deeply silhouetted by the morning sun, the reliefs showed the figure of Imhotep, the deified father of medicine, and arrayed before him a display of surgical equipment, tweezers, forceps, scalpels, curettes, scissors and medicine flasks.
It brought his mind back to Ibrahim Saad, the American pharmaceutical magnate and the vow he had made.
Was Neith’s group connected? Maybe it was time to offer a carrot and find out.
He met Neith and they walked together past a wall of flowing sculptures and hieroglyphs. Today she looked lithe and goddessy in a pleated summer dress and she carried a small back-pack over one shoulder. She paused to take out a bottle of mineral water for a drink.
“You’ve come provisioned for a day trip,” he remarked.
She smiled. “I always take a change of clothes with me in Egypt. Something cooler or a wrap to keep out the dust if it’s blowing.”
While she chugged down water in a rather mannish way, he glanced at some incised text in the stone nearby, each glyph a little work of art, yet to some hieroglyphs seemed a cumbersome way for the Egyptians to set down their story. Cumbersome? Hieroglyphs were the most astonishing compression of meaning the world has ever seen, multivalent and polysemic, infinitely richer in their meaning than our words were to us, he always thought. Using the analogy of computers, our words were mere bytes of meaning, whereas each glyph was like a gigabyte loaded with symbol, tradition, mythology, cosmology and magic.
They came across Vincent Kraft.
He was invading the space of a wall carving, standing near enough to touch it. A group had just left, dragged along behind their Egyptian guide as though drawn on a line of trailing monologue.
He saw Anson and Neith arrive.
“I know I shouldn’t touch. But I like to read these reliefs like Braille. Try it.”
“No thanks.”
Kraft ran his fingertips over the wall. The fingers were splayed and swollen like roots. Anson followed the moving fingers. They ran exploringly over carved texts to reach the form of a goddess.
“Here she is, rippling in ravishing curves of stone. The goddess of your fantasies. Want to touch her, Mr Hunter? No one is looking.”
It was Isis and she was shown in raised relief, in profile, high waisted, long-legged, her body tapering like a vase in a form-revealing sheath dress. She wore a vulture headdress and held an ankh in one hand.
“It’s not a good idea to touch the local ladies,” Anson said, “of today, or yesterday, especially ones on temple walls. Th
e antiquities people disapprove.”
Undeterred, Kraft reached down and touched the foot of the goddess. He ran his fingertips from the ankles up the skirt.
“Isn’t this the form you dream about? You are here, at her feet and always have been, am I right? Don’t look surprised. I know more about you than you think. A man with Christian ideas who is also a captive to pagan sensuality.”
“You’ve been reading my stars.” That, or my blog, Anson guessed.
Neith gave Anson a smile.
“He has you figured out.”
“I do have a weakness for the dark beauties of ancient Egypt.”
“Yes, I know.”
The Tomb Party night on the deck of the dahabiyya looked like a party for extras and stand-ins from all the studio lots of Hollywood.
There were Cleopatras, a few Nefertitis, a Lawrence of Arabia in the form of Kraft, an Indiana Jones with a bullwhip, leather jacket and hat in the form of Scott, and a harem of girls in veils.
Then there was Neith, dressed in a gauze linen robe, long dark wig and a headband on her head, complete with a single ostrich plume, the feather of truth.
Neith had become Ma’at, Goddess of Truth.
Seeing her glide across the deck made Anson think of the words of an ancient love poem.
Sweet of love is the daughter of the king! Black are her tresses as the blackness of the night, Black as the wine-grapes are the clusters of her hair. The hearts of the women turn towards her with delight, Gazing on her beauty with which none can compare...
Fair are her arms in the softly swaying dance, Fairer by far is her bosom's rounded swell! The hearts of the men are as water at her glance, Fairer is her beauty than mortal tongue could tell.
His concession to the evening was a black galabea, which on his rake-like frame looked like a priest’s cassock. Not appropriate when you’re among neo-pagans, he decided.
“Did you have to look so ecclesiastical? Couldn’t you have gone a little pagan?” she said to him over the buffet dinner spread out on the floodlit deck.
“The night’s young.”
“That sounds promising.”
The lights went down as a Nubian band took the floor, beating out a throbbing rhythm on drums. They were joined on the deck by an Egyptian belly dancer, named Fadilah, a girl wearing a gold lame bikini that trailed strings of beads like an eastern door curtain.
A buffet dinner lay spread on trestle tables, a feast of dishes and salads, kebabs, kofta sausages, stuffed vine leaves, olives, falafel deep-fried bean patties, broiled pigeons, fish and shellfish as well as platters stacked like pyramids with honeyed Egyptian pastries.
After dinner, a quartet arrived on board and took over from the Nubian band and passengers drifted onto the dance floor, a small clearing on the deck. Neith came over and tapped him on the shoulder.
It wasn't his kind of music, or his kind of dancing, but she melted into his arms and surrendered to the sweetness of strings. She allowed herself to be swept around the dance floor, as lithe and close as his shadow.
They danced until the music stopped.
He decided to feed her some information and see what he could learn in return.
“It’s fitting, seeing you have transformed yourself into the goddess Ma’at that I make a negative confession. I haven’t been entirely truthful with you,” he said, when they enjoyed a drink, later, at the deckrail.
“Meaning?”
“About the disc of Ra. I’ve still only told the world part of the story. There’s something I’ve left out. A new hunch. I think I know who would have it today.”
“Go on.” She moved in closer.
“A late-period priest-who-would-be-king, a man who combined the powers of the military and the priesthood, a generalissimo of the army and a high priest of Amun-Ra. His name was Heri-Hor and he had pretensions to be a pharaoh of the south, ignoring the weak king in the Delta.
We know that under his orders they entered the tombs and reburied the pharaohs in a secret cache, on the pretext of protecting them from tomb robbers, but stripping them of their gold and valuables before they did so.”
“Who was he?”
“Herihor. His tomb has never been found, a supertomb containing the snowballed treasures of the pharaohs. I also think he had himself buried with Egypt’s greatest relics.”
“The disc of Ra?” “He was the High Priest of Amun-Ra.” “And where would his tomb be?” she said. “Do you have any clues?”
“An esoteric theorist has to keep some secrets.”
The feminine divine did come to him.
He found her waiting for him in his cabin after the party and coffee on deck, kneeling like Ma’at in the centre of his white cotton bedspread, the feather still in her hair.
“You never followed through on your promise about going a little pagan,” she said. “Maybe if you won’t give yourself to the Neters, then they’ll give themselves to you.”
He closed and locked the cabin door. “That feather could be fun,” he said.
“I’ll tickle you to death if you don’t tell me,” she said.
“Tell you what?”
“About where you think Herihor is buried.”
“I can’t know for sure where he’s hidden today. I would have to look for him like anybody else.”
“But you’ve got ideas.”
“Yes, I have. Do I get a turn with the feather?”
“You’re convinced Herihor is the key to the disc’s location?”
“Pretty much. But why are you so eager to know? Are you thinking of going to look for him, taking up archaeology as well as pagan neo-religion?”
“Anything to do with the relics of Egypt’s metaphysical power interests me.”
“Just you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Are you part of something bigger than your ancient horizons journeys?”
She surprised him by admitting it.
“Yes, I certainly hope so. I want to be part of something much bigger. A new creation, in fact a new beginning for humankind. Won’t you join me and be part of it too?”
“Tempting when you ask so nicely. But I wouldn’t presume to re-do the creator’s work, however he managed to do it, either by means of a Big Bang, or by his spirit moving over the face of the deep. But I will join you over there on my bed.”
He had been reasonably successful with women in his life, but not nearly as successful as he’d been just lately, he thought.
Perhaps it should be worrying him.
But not now.
Neith, alias Ma’at, brought something of both goddesses to her lovemaking - she was part warrior Neith, Mistress of Bows and Ruler of Arrows, and part Ma’at, the balancing Lady of Truth. She rolled him onto his back and covered him with her litheness, then began to move in hard, powerful, athletic coupling. It was the way men often dreamed of having sex with women but invariably the softness of the female dissolved lust into tenderness, intimacy and emotion. But there was none of that here, just sensation, intensity and bio-mechanics.
This was how it would be for a mortal to be seized by a goddess, he thought. No tenderness. Naked lust. Merciless delight.
She wanted not affection but to consume him like a flesh offering on a sacrificial altar, burning him up in her fires.
She was devouring him.
The knowledge grew and exploded in his brain and through his body along with it came a shuddering release of joy.
I am consumed.
She rolled off him.
“Two goddesses in one night! What hit me?” he said
She gave a wicked chuckle.
He noticed a smudge of a bruise on her arm and smoothed a hand across it as if to wipe it away.
“Hope I didn’t give that to you,” he said.
“You think you were rough with me?”
“No, I think I’m the one who should be bruised.”
“You’ll survive.”
“When you say join me, what do you really
want me to do?” he said.
“Just surrender.”
“I just did.”
“You must let go of past beliefs. See what comes to you here in Egypt to take its place.”
“Why are you here? And that’s not a philosophic question. I mean you and your group.”
“To commune with ancient powers and forces.”
“Why now?”
“I believe this is a special time, that we are on the eve of something.”
“An apotheosis.”
“If you like.”
“And what is going to trigger it? Clearly you have picked up on my theories about dangers from the ancient past, and fears of a return of what I call the Hathor Holocaust. What do you hope or expect to happen?”
“She will show us.”
“She? Like that T-shirt I saw on one of the Chantresses of Amun, ‘In goddess we trust’?”
“The Chantresses of Amun. Is that what you call them? They’d like that. No, I’m not talking about a vague mother in the sky, the female alternative to your god. I am talking about an atavistic female force of fertility, creation and destruction that humankind worshipped long before the Jews and their jealous patriarchal deity stumbled out of the wilderness.”
“If God exists, he didn’t suddenly stumble out of a sleep when the Jews came along. He would have been working through humankind from the start, including the ancient Egyptians who recognised an invisible higher god. So who is your alternative creatrix? Sekhmet?”
“Sekhmet who is also Hathor, who is also Neith, who is also Isis, who is also Nephthys, who is also Nut, Selkhet, Ma’at… She of a Thousand Names.”
“Oh god,” he said.
“There you go. The barrier. Are you really a phenomenologist, one who by his own definition accepts unseen realities and mysterious forces and believes that he must grant value and credibility to the sacred and engage with it experientially in order to appreciate it fully? If so, why are you reluctant to open yourself up to ancient deities?”
THE HATHOR HOLOCAUST Page 21
