“I just engaged with two of them, Ma’at and Neith, and they were quite a tag team.”
“Humour is another of your barriers. Come out from behind your defences and open yourself up to a new spirituality.”
“I could throw the same challenge to you. Have you ever thought of opening yourself up the old-fashioned god? Did I see a shudder run through you? What are you so afraid could happen? That there might be consequences for your transgressions? No fun, anymore? No sex?”
“I hate your god.”
“Yes, but to hate him aren’t you really saying you believe in him?”
“Not in the sense you believe in him. Tell me, don’t you have any doubts?”
He sighed.
“Sadly, yes. I have plenty of them.”
Chapter 34
ANSON used a remote from his laptop to project another slide onto a screen in front of an audience gathered below decks in the dahabiyya’s lounge room.
It said:
CHAOS THEORY
of the ancient Egyptian kind
“Chaos. The oasis civilization of Egypt threw all its energies into holding it at bay, whether that chaos was death and the dissolution of the body, the attacks of foreign enemies, political upheaval, the encroachment of the desert wilderness on cultivated land, pestilential disease, or the forces of nature.
“Horus, the god of the kingship, represented the light of the sun ranged against the darkness of Seth, god of chaos, desert and storms. And it so happens that the very next temple we are about to visit, the temple of Edfu, is said to be built on the very scene of an epic mythological battle between the falcon god Horus and his chaotic enemy Seth.
This was another titanic clash between chaos and order that took place between the good Horus and the embodiment of chas, Seth. Imagine warring cosmic foes as vast as figures in the clouds. Falcon-head is fighting for his kingdom against a slab-chested god with a donkey-like head. One, Horus, armed with the mace of Hierokonpolis, the other with an axe of the north, the god of havoc and storms.
Seth’s arm, like a peninsula, extends from the landmass of his body to strike and Horus raises a shield like a plateau to protect his beaked head. And in the background, at the water’s edge like two giant boats of stone – their next contests a race on the river in stone boats. But the boat of the trickster Horus is made of wood and painted to look like stone, while that of Seth stands ready to sink like an anchor…”
Anson changed the image on the screen to show a ground plan of the temple.
“In temples like Edfu, the best preserved and second largest temple in Egypt, priests repeated the battle, using magico-religious rituals in a daily struggle against the forces of chaos…”
A hand went up in the audience, tentatively.
It was the young speculator, Scott.
“I wonder if you can answer me something about that temple plan,” he said. He pointed to the black and white grid on the screen, showing a pylon entrance, a peri-style columned courtyard, a series of hypostyle halls with columns shown as dots, offering hall and vestibule, then around the central naos smaller chambers clustered.
“Look at it. Doesn’t Edfu’s plan remind you of something? Don’t you think the design has an electronic appearance? Have you heard the theory that the whole layout of the Temple of Horus actually resembles the design of a computer central processing unit and surrounding hardware?”
“The religious brains of the Horus cult? Keep going.”
Boy Wonder jumped up and his fingers threw a shadow pointer across the screen. “Look, it has the configuration of a microprocessor. The naos here is the control unit of a CPU meshing with all the other parts of a microprocessor.
And these storerooms are the registers that store data inside a CPU… And this Hypostyle hall, or hall of columns here -just like an Integrated Circuit chip with a roof resting on rows of columns, the metal pins standing out as the columns.”
“It was built in the late Ptolemaic period,” Anson said gently. “I think they were probably more accustomed to assembling blocks of limestone and granite than silicone chips.”
“That’s exactly it. This technology has to be from another source. Could the Edfu temple’s design reflect residual memories of an earlier high-tech civilization whose knowledge was lost to the world?”
“Atlantis again, or the aliens this time? You’ve got to love the human imagination,” Anson said. “Sadly there’s an even greater chaos around today than the Egyptian civilization ever dreamed of… the out-of-control sensationalism of the twenty first century. Good fun, though.”
The New Age group looked disappointed at his dismissal of the CPU theory.
Am I holding them back? he wondered.
Chapter 35
NEITH, back-pack over her shoulder, left him in Edfu’s hypostyle hall
“Soak up the vibration on your own,” she said. “Silence is best.”
He watched her go, moving off quickly through the columns. Was she looking for members of her group, or was she just eager to get away and immerse herself alone in the atmosphere of this great temple?
Anson strolled on through the mystical dimness of a hypostyle hall, weaving a thoughtful meandering path between swollen columns of stone stretching to the ceiling. He supposed he should have been thinking about the titanic battle that legend told had taken place on this very site: a falcon man and anteater-headed monster locked in battle with axe and club, making the ground shake with their blows.
But instead he was imagining himself passing through a giant Central Processing Unit, that this charged, sacred geometry with its dynamic changes of light and shade was charged with an intelligence that seemed acutely aware of him and why he was here in Egypt.
This place is processing me, he thought. I can feel it.
Too much time spent in the company of fringe travellers?
His group, who had split up into pairs on a jolly caleche horsecart ride to the temple, had wandered off in different directions to explore the vast temple precinct.
Anson went through a second hypostyle hall, offering hall and vestibule and into the dense ‘micro-processing’ area that led to the naos itself, a shrine that, according to Boy Wonder’s theory, represented the control unit of the brain. It was a shiny stone naos dedicated to the magician pharaoh Nectanebo II.
Then a woman stepped around the side of the naos and he could hardly help a gasp of surprise. She had a turquoise scarf draped over her dark hair.
“Follow me to the walkway around the temple,” Alexia said tersely. “The people you’re with are killers…”
Alexia, here?
Gemma Laughton had told him that the Greek-Egyptian was here in Upper Egypt, but he’d somehow expected she’d be sixty kilometres away in Luxor. Maybe she’d made a trip especially to see him.
She went past and he saw her pick up her pace.
He turned and followed.
He weaved his way through a rowdy Italian tour party.
Then she stopped, went rigid and veered out of the building.
He hurried on.
“Oh, I was just wondering…”
Scott stepped out from behind a column.
“Hold that wonder,” Anson said.
He left him standing, rubbing his chin.
She’d gone out into one of the long ambulatories that surrounded the temple between the inner and outer walls, a deeply shaded area with metre after metre of carved walls that paraded the drama of the battle between Horus and Seth depicted as a hippopotamus, a creature that symbolised the ungovernable forces of chaos.
A man in Egyptian clothes squatted, resting, in the narrow passageway. Anson almost tumbled over him in his hurry to catch up with Alexia. He saw her turquoise scarf flutter behind her as she turned back into a chamber.
Now a vast shadow stepped out of shadows and the passageway suddenly went even darker.
He ran into the solidity of Vincent Kraft.
“You doing laps?” he said, invading hi
s space. “You need to learn to slow down, my friend.”
“Sorry. I’d like to debate the merits of a new age lifestyle with you, but can we chat later?”
Kraft twisted and looked around behind him, still blocking his way.
“You chasing some skirt?”
“Maybe. It’s a lonely life on the waves. Now will you step aside please? You’re blocking out my day.”
“Okay, okay.” He raised his hands. He stepped aside.
But when Anson brushed past him, Alexia had vanished.
A cold hand inside his chest depressed his breathing.
He began a thorough search of every chapel and room surrounding the sanctuary and there were more than he remembered. He checked the chapel of Min, the chamber of linen, the chamber of the throne of gods, the chamber of Osiris, the chamber of the West, the tomb of Osiris, the chamber of Horus, the victor with its modern reconstruction of a ceremonial barque, chapels of Khonsu and Hathor, the chapel of the throne of Re and a chapel of the spread wings…
He made two more tours of the temple.
Where had she gone?
Think, brain.
Maybe she was lying low for the moment.
He decided to give her time. Hang around in the ambulatory.
The walls told the story of the battle between Horus and his evil uncle, ending in a scene of Horus in a boat, spearing Seth, who had taken the shape of a crocodile, under the water. The carving showed the hippo reduced to a helplessly small scale, made innocuous so that is representation would not act as an uncontrollable force against order.
He looked at his watch.
He’d give her half an hour, then go out to the entrance. Maybe she had fled the temple and was waiting for him. But he was reluctant to leave and risk missing her. He waited the half hour, then another quarter of an hour.
One more lap of the ambulatory around the temple, then a walk through the temple to the entrance…
The androgyne knew that the Greek girl was on her guard.
The antiquities thief stood pressed up against a carved wall in shadows as she waited for the Egyptologist to join her for a secret meeting.
She was not expecting the appearance of the rangy young man in a baseball cap and sunglasses, who sauntered up to her.
“That carved relief behind you shows the god Horus with a man’s body and a falcon’s head. Do you suppose divinities were shape-shifters, one moment human, the next a creature?”
The Greek-Egyptian girl tensed, but the tension drained away as she looked at the newcomer.
She saw me earlier, but doesn’t recognise me now, the androgyne thought.
“I wouldn’t know,” she said, trying to deflect the unwanted approach by the temple visitor.
“No? Let’s see what my guide book says.”
The new arrival swung a pack off one shoulder and zipped it open so that the girl could look inside.
The androgyne followed the girl’s puzzled glance into the bag by dipping inside and wrapping a hand around a dull black handgun, then angling the barrel to point at the startled girl who shrank back against the image of Horus.
“Let’s take a walk out of the temple together. Nice and easy…”
Anson doubled back, almost jogging through the two hypostyle halls and out into the courtyard where two giant Horus falcons in stone flanked the entrance, giving him frowns in unison.
He’d lost her.
Who or what had spooked her?
Would she try to reach him again in Luxor?
They had one more night on board and a visit the temple of Esna before sailing onward to Luxor where they would transfer to the Old Winter Palace hotel.
His cruise was coming to an end, along with his hopes of getting any closer to answers from this mysterious group.
Chapter 36
A BREEZY steward, Anwar, brought Anson a cooling guava juice topped with mint as he lay back, his length stretched out on a sun lounger as he watched the river banks slide by, mile after soothing mile of mudbrick Nile villages, palm trees thronging in their millions and swathes of acid green crops.
“When are you going to surrender, Anson?”
Neith joined him, looking cool in a blue sundress, grass hat and sunglasses, sitting beside him on an empty chair.
“You mean to the languor of river travel under sail. I already have.”
“No, to the call of the hidden, divine Egypt. To more ancient entities. Let go of the barriers that are holding you back. We can be exalted right now, in our lifetimes.”
“It’s funny how you neo-religionist, non-believers in God don’t reject the idea of divinity for yourselves. You need to know the truth about original sin. The act of original sin that Lucifer urged upon Eve in the Garden of Eden was not just concerned with disobedience. The real crunch was God versus Gnosis and the dangerous idea that ‘we can be as God.’ The Forbidden Tree of Knowledge is a gloss for illumination, transformation and divinisation – the real red rag to the god of Moses. Interestingly, as in the story of the Tree of Knowledge, the Book of Thoth originally had a serpent wrapped around it, the same symbol that sat on pharaoh’s brow.”
He went on.
“Genesis tells us that the serpent in the garden said to the woman about eating the fruit: Go for it. God’s just scared that when you eat it your eyes will be opened, and you shall be as God. The serpent was the first Gnostic, a possessor of secret truth. That’s the significant part. God immediately banished Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, lest the man become as one of us… and live forever. Divinisation, man’s desire to be established on high, was the fatal sin. And the problem’s still around today with humankind’s hunger for supernatural power and fascination withn tools that support our inner desire to be ‘as gods’”.
She sighed.
“That barrier again! Are you sure it isn’t just some search for a missing father figure?”
She had been following his life closely.
Vincent Kraft took a turn at presenting to the group in the lounge area.
Anson found a seat next to Lady Neith.
“Archaeo-astrology is an interesting new field,” she said in a murmur. “Vincent is at the cutting edge.”
A title flashed up on a screen.
EGYPT. GIFT OF THE NILE - OR OF ATLANTIS?
Anson had heard it all before.
Solar and Sothic Cycles… celestial Leo and the Great Sphinx… the Great Bear…
Shouldn’t that be the great bore?
Ancient star alignments point to a far more ancient Egypt than we know… proof of an advanced pre-existent civilisation that we call Atlantis, whose knowledge will bring about a new age for humankind…”
Anson put up his hand.
The speaker stopped.
“Yes?”
“I don’t know why we bother with these ancient Egyptians at all? This Atlantean civilisation sounds far more interesting. They managed to figure out everything, except perhaps how to leave a single trace of themselves.”
That brought a spark of life into Kraft’s eyes.
“The evidence of a pre-existent higher civilisation is everywhere. Egypt’s civilisation arrives complete. How could this be? It’s suddenly all there. Architecture, medicine, art, writing… fully formed. Then there is Egyptian literature itself. In the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, the hero is shipwrecked on a mysterious Island of Ka, very like Atlantis in that it later sinks after a serpent-god delivers a prophecy.”
“Then the Egyptians were a damned ungrateful lot.”
“Meaning?”
“They didn’t use their newfound skills to jot down a single thank you note to their benefactors.”
“Allow me to continue.”
Kraft searched for his place in a thick wad of notes and went on.
And on. He evidently had little sense of the passage of time, Anson thought. It explained the man’s belief that Egypt’s civilisation had arrived overnight, fully formed, when in fact, Egypt’s gestation had taken place o
ver 300,000 years, beginning with a Paleolithic population.
At the conclusion of the presentation, Anson said: “What an imagination!”
He started a clap and the audience took it up without much enthusiasm.
Kraft gathered his papers and gave Anson a gaze. “You shouldn’t provoke my friend,” Lady Neith said. “Did I? I hope not. I’m thinking of collaborating with him on my next theory.”
Chapter 37
THERE WAS NO BETTER evidence of the necessity to dig down through layers in order to arrive at answers than the Temple of Esna.
Esna was a buried temple and it still lay buried - in a pit, around nine metres or three storeys below a rural town. Only one hypostyle hall remained on view, the whole, remaining structure lay buried under surrounding buildings of the town. Esna was dedicated to another great creator god Knum, the ram-headed deity who was said to have created humankind from the clay of the earth, forming them on a potter’s wheel.
It was their last stop on their cruise northwards, 55 kilometres before Luxor, and Anson stood with his group, mingled among a shipload of tourists in front of the façade, an intercolumnar screen wall with six carved columns.
“Excuse me, would you mind taking a photo of me in front of the temple?” A pretty young blonde woman in a sunhat and dark glasses, handed him a camera. It was Gemma Laughton and Boy Wonder and Vincent Kraft were nearby, he noticed from the corner of his eye.
“Certainly, but I may need a little explanation,” he said.
She handed him a small, silver, digital camera and she gave the LCD screen at the back a meaningful tap.
“Take a look through here,” Scrummy Girl said. “It’s all clear.”
Anson squinted at the screen
Yes, it was clear.
On the LCD screen was a photo of a dark-haired, yet fair-skinned girl who had once regarded him with a daring smile. Now her dark hair lay wrapped over her face like wet reeds. She was lying at the water’s edge on the riverbank, a wound in her temple.
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