“Got it,” he said.
“Just be careful.”
She stepped back and posed in front of the screen walls of the temple columns.
Anson went through the motion of taking her picture and afterwards handed the camera numbly back to her.
“Is that all?”
“For now, yes. Thank you.” She flashed a smile as Boy Wonder came over to engage Anson.
She left.
Alexia. Dead.
What a far cry from the jewelled and beaded body he remembered once revering in a London apartment.
Who had done this?
Alexia gone. He went over their meeting on the train and how, after she had gone, he felt the warmth of where she had been. He would never feel her warmth again, nor see her daring smile. His lady of jewels who took nakedness to a new level had gone to the ages.
“Marry me, Alexia. We’ll run away to Egypt together and investigate the ancient origins of this find.”
“You think we’d be safe fleeing to Egypt…?”
She hadn’t been safe. Someone got to her and left her there lying at the edge of the Nile.
Did this happen because she tried to reach me?
Chapter 38
Anson Hunter’s Blog – The Other Egypt
I AM thinking about life and death on the Nile. Were the Egyptians right about ‘eternal return’, an endless recurrence of every smile, every touch, every kiss? What occurred at the first moment of Creation, Zep Tepi, or "the First Time", could be repeated over and over again…
Chapter 39
Luxor, Winter Palace Hotel
THERE was a knock on the door in the grand, colonial age comfort of his room in Luxor’s Winter Palace on the Nile Corniche.
He didn’t expect Scrummy Girl to be standing there. A thousand questions crowded the doorway along with the figure of Gemma Laughton.
What had she learnt? Who had killed Alexia? Where was Saad right now…?
She threw a glance over her shoulder and slipped past him into the room, bringing a breeze of urgency into the room with her.
“Ibrahim Saad is in Luxor.”
“Did he do that to Alexia?” Anson said.
She got out her digital camera and pressed buttons to reveal an image on the small screen. “This man may be involved. He’s a confederate.”
She held up the camera.
An image of a young man in a baseball jacket filled the LCD.
Anson shrugged.
“Do you have your laptop?” She said. “I have some other things you should see.”
He dug out his MacBook and set it up on a coffee table and she took over and inserted a small silver flash-drive. They sat together on a couch.
Gemma clicked on a JPEG and revealed an image of a leonine young woman walking beside a shaven-headed man. They were dressed in formal eveningwear and holding hands and looked as if they were going into a big city theatre or concert hall.
Saad and Lady Neith! Neith had admitted that she loved older men. She liked their heads, she said.
Even the balding head of a pharmaceutical magnate in his fifties?
They were in this together.
He felt his spine sag a little.
And yet… and yet. The New Age girl had seemed genuine about trying to reach out to him. To save him from outdated beliefs, as she claimed, or to save him from the enmity of Saad and his confederates?
“Now this. She clicked on a file. “I’ve gone up above for help.”
“Good. I could do with some divine intervention.”
“Not that high. Although I’ve been known to.”
“You?”
“You think intelligence rules out a faith.”
“I hope not. So what have you got to show me?”
“Satellite shots of the Dendera region.”
She clicked and opened up a high aerial view of ruins and beyond. He could make out the temple and its wavy, outer wall of mudbrick.
Another shot showed the desert beyond. She clicked on it by tapping the track pad on his laptop.
“Here it all is,” she said. “I just wish I knew what I was looking for.”
“I have an idea. Something I saw in a book of aerial photos recently. Can you go out wider?”
She brought the surrounding desert onto the screen.
“There, see that wadi,” he said. “The two arms forming a valley. With a bit of imagination you can see those as the forelegs and paws of an animal.”
“You’re good at imagining things. You mean like a sphinx?”
“Or a lioness.”
“If you say so. We’ll look into it.’ She ejected the flash-drive and took it out. “How is your cruise going? Have they converted you?”
“Not yet, and it’s a jolt to find that Saad is connected with them,” he said, “He’s a heavy hitter, a pharmaceutical magnate with a track record of funding archaeology in Egypt and has plenty of connections.”
“What do you think the conspirators plan to do exactly?” she said.
“To trigger their longed-for new age by tapping into the core belief of the eternal return, the idea that creation is a cycle. They believe that through imitation and the ritual of reuniting the elements of myth, they step out of concrete time into the power of mythical time where you can reactuate events from the past. As we phenomenologists have it, imitation of a mythical event literally becomes the mythical event itself, reoccurring.”
“So where do we go from here?”
“I just don’t know yet. But I’m still officially contracted to my tour group for another few days. They’re visiting Karnak for a big consciousness raising, then we have a free day before sailing to Dendera. What’s your next step?”
“Saad arrives in Luxor and I’m sure he’s going to catch up with the group, the girl in particular. Germaine Ryan. I plan to keep an eye on them both and see what they get up to. But an even more important step, lunch. Can I order from your room menu? I’m starving.”
Scrummy Girl had brought her appetite to Egypt. He wondered, as if he tended to do with women who enjoyed their food, whether she bought the same appetite to all her pleasures.
“Go for it, compliments of the New Age. Now tell me about the Iranian, Hassan.”
“We’ve turned up nothing.”
Chapter 40
IF YOU’RE not growing, you’re dying.
That seemed to be the philosophy of generations of successive pharaohs and priests who kept adding to the immensity of the Karnak complex, their accretions resulting in the construction of a metropolis of temples, Anson thought. The largest religious complex on earth, a temple city bigger than the Vatican, it covered two hundred acres, but once the ancients stopped building, it was all over.
Creation, genesis, had to be reactivated or entropy set in.
He walked with the tour group, behind the figures of Kraft and Neith, and he felt their shadows fall across him in the morning light. Had the malignity of one of them fallen like a shadow over the life of the Greek-Egyptian girl Alexia? He felt coldness on his skin that the morning sun did nothing to dispel. He was walking with enemies.
They entered the great hypostyle hall. Everything here symbolised creation and the First Time. The hall of over a hundred columns represented the primeval swamp solidified in stone. The dizzying pillars that now only held up the sky were the swollen stems of the first papyrus plants. The visitors went on into darker, sacred space. Here he felt the weight of the old religion pressing down on him.
They stood in a sanctuary, dominated by a standing figure of the lioness goddess Sekhmet, formed in black granite. She had a woman’s body with the head of a big cat, powerful jaws and oddly compassionate eyes. The Chantresses of Amun draped a long golden sash across her chest and it trailed to the stone floor of the shrine.
For their own sakes, they had better call on the right side of this fierce divinity, a rampaging goddess of apocalypse and pestilence, Anson thought. The plague that struck Egypt in the reign of Amenhotep III would have decima
ted close-knit communities such as the army and the priesthood of Amun-re, paving the way for Akhenaten to embrace a different manifestation of the sun in the god Aten.
“Well, Mr Phenomenologist?” Kraft said, leaning into him. “Are you ready to see Sekhmet move?”
The group had lit candles in the shrine and now gathered in a semi circle before the statue. Sekhmet held a papyrus staff in her hand and a sun surmounted her head like a stone halo.
“See her move?” Light from their moving candles was already making the image ripple. “I’ve heard the stories.”
“Sekhmet statues do move. A phenomenon that’s well known,” Space Invader said. “Masters call the phenomenon Hanu. She might even choose you as a devotee for a special message or teaching or maybe select you to perform her will.”
“You mean to commit murder?”
“Murder?” The whisper was like a shout in this enclosed space.
“Sekhmet was also well known to go on murderous rampages as the Great Cat and Destroyer of Humankind,” Anson said. “Do you feel any murderous impulses in here?”
“No.”
“Not here? Maybe in some other place, perhaps?”
“I’m not sure what you’re driving at. We’re here in Egypt on a shamanic journey. We feel only awe in this place of Sekhmet. We seek spiritual growth to commune with her and gain her beneficent wisdom as the goddess of medicine and alchemical healing, and also to receive her guidance.”
“Yes, it’s all about love and spiritual growth. I forgot.” The chantresses of Amun began a chant from the Book of the dead:
“May the goddess Sekhmet raise us, and lift us up. Let us ascend into heaven, let that which I command be performed in Het-ka-Ptah. I know how to use my heart. I am master of my heart-case. I am master of my hands and arms. I am master of my legs. I have the power to do that which my KA desireth to do. My Heart-soul shall not be kept a prisoner in my body at the gates of Amentet when I would go in peace and come forth in peace...”
Anson left them to it.
He visited the Mut temple enclosure where a pride of Sekhmet statues stood in black granite in the sun.
They looked like a field of gravestones for all of humankind, he thought morosely.
Chapter 41
Anson’s Blog -‘The Other Egypt’
WHERE WOULD Sekhmet’s disc of Ra be hidden today?
Something has jogged my memory, a clue that I had overlooked and now I am becoming certain of what happened. I believe the Atenet was taken in a period of Egyptian breakdown, the Third Intermediate period in the rule of Herihor the priest-king. Herihor was probably history’s greatest usurper. And he was also history’s most outrageous tomb robber. A high priest and Commander of the Army, Herihor made himself virtually the pharaoh of the south, having himself portrayed on the same scale on monuments as the ineffectual Ramesses XI in the Delta and assuming the royal prerogative of inscribing his name in a five-fold titulary with his title of high priest and his last name enclosed in a cartouche.
During a period of a divided kingdom, Herihor seized control over the southern half of Egypt - Upper Egypt, particularly the Theban region, a place that Homer wrote about, saying “In Egyptian Thebes the heaps of precious ingots gleam, the hundred-gated Thebes’. Yet this was a time when the people were starving and the tombs were under attack by tomb robbers. The most tempting target of all was the Valley of the Kings, the so-called Place of Truth, where unimaginable stashes of treasures lay hidden. Remember, the Valley was the burial place of rulers for 500 years from the 18th through the 20th Dynasties.
“People are amazed at the treasures of Tutankhamun, treasures that fill a quarter of the Cairo museum, yet Tutankhamun’s tomb was a cubby house - just four small rooms - next to the deep-cut tombs of pharaohs like Rameses the Great or Seti whose tombs extended hundreds of metres into the rock and contained a series of corridors, pillared halls and chambers. We can only imagine what treasures Herihor found and took to the grave with him.
But weren’t tombs sacred? How was someone so high up able to rob tombs?
Herihor was unusual in being both the Head of the Army and the High Priest of Amun, the most powerful priesthood of all. He could do much as he pleased. Quite an old man when he grabbed power in an army takeover, he claimed royalty for himself.
He began mining the tombs, claiming that he needed to protect the dead kings and bury them again somewhere else that was safe. He opened the tombs of the greatest pharaohs: Ahmose, Amenhotep the First, Amosis, Rameses the Great, Rameses three and Rameses nine, Seti, Thutmosis one two and three, and more. Herihor repackaged them in cheap coffins and took the solid-gold gift-wrapping. The coffins of Seti and Rameses 11 found at a hiding place at Deir-el Bahari carry dockets stating that in ‘year 6 Herihor caused these kings to be buried anew.’
Herihor gathered the mummies of famous pharaohs and stored them together in simple coffins in two tombs considered safe enough to hide them permanently. The mummies were found intact, but where was the treasure?
Already stripped away by earlier tomb robberies? Unlikely.
Tomb robbers pilfered grave goods during the reigns of Rameses the ninth and Rameses the eleventh at the end of twentieth Dynasty, according to the Abbott Papyrus and others. But testimonies of thieves reveal only small scale pilfering. Generally, tomb robbing was just that, pilfering - ants running off with the crumbs at a picnic feast. Real theft of massive golden coffins and shrines needed state sanction. To give an example, the solid gold inner coffin of Tutankhamun weighed over six hundred pounds. Since Herihor was in charge of the reburial he was in a position to take the treasures of Egypt to his own grave. It was the greatest usurpation in history and the greatest treasure trove the world has ever known, the combined treasures of Egypt’s god kings. Think of it. All of the treasures of ancient Egypt’s greatest pharaohs’ rolled into one! A kind of immense snowballing jackpot of gold bullion and jewellery. And the old thief Herihor scooped the pool. He ended up with not just a tomb, but the entire glittering underworlds of all the great pharaohs amassed in one spot - a supertomb.
But the Egyptians were deeply religious people. How could they justify such robbery?
We must remember that every pharaoh was an earthly incarnation of the god Horus. So every pharaoh was in a sense the same Horus. And each could be said to own the grave goods of the ruler who preceded him. Herihor just took it further than anyone else ever dared.
Herihor may also have used the rationalization that such goods came from burials that had already been unlawfully pillaged - assuming that a tomb once robbed became permanently defiled so as to make removal conscionable. Did he employ tomb robbers to break into all the promising tombs they could find, to give him this legitimate loophole? The desecration gave him the perfect excuse to empty the tombs of august pharaohs and rebury their bodies.
There is clear evidence of officially sanctioned tomb marking and mining. We know that promising finds once located were marked with the signs of nefer.
Nefer is my clue.
I remember seeing a photo taken at sunset of red-gold light illuminating a door cut into the rock. It could have been a cave, or a tomb. The opening had been cleared, for debris still lay around and I could see the stone jambs that marked a doorway. The light even picked up a glyph, roughly scratched on the stone, a nefer sign. Nefer meant ‘beautiful’ or ‘good’…
I’ve always suspected that somewhere in Egypt lies the greatest hoard of treasure ever amassed. But where is it?
And what other ‘holy’ talismans did he take with him?
As well as a talisman of Ra did Herihor also take a talisman of Amun - the sceptre of Kematef, a golden snake-staff that was said to hold the soul of Amun?
Only a high priest of Amun, a pretender pharaoh and a general could hope to get away with such an impious act.
Persistent rumours suggest Herihor chose to be buried not in the Valley of the Kings, but in the lonely adjoining West Valley.
Chapter 42
ANSON never thought he’d miss an opportunity to visit the tombs of the Valley of the Kings, but today he did.
But he had another visit in mind for his free day.
He went alone into another, lesser known valley of kings, the so-called West Valley, a wild, desolate and tumultuous valley of shattered, sunburnt stone and cliffs where only two kings were known to have been buried, Ay and Amenhotep III.
The valley shivered in heat.
Anson followed the stony road into a silence that once reigned over The Valley of the Kings before the coaches, motorised trolleys and the clamour of tourists and tour guides invaded her solitude. Had the snake-goddess of the peak, She Who Loved Silence, taken herself from her valley of gold to this wilderness in order to escape? Who could blame her?
The desolate spell of this place grew in him and around him like the heat. Good thing he’d brought a bottle of water in a shoulder bag.
What was he looking for?
A sign.
He needed to look out for snakes.
One in particular.
The snake went by the name of Kematef, the name of a serpent sceptre that was said to contain the soul of Amun, a relic the rapacious Herihor could possibly have helped himself to as the High Priest of Amun, that and one other relic, a shining yellow disc, like the sun that beat down on the valley today.
Where to look?
Somewhere up there, he wondered, looking up into the shattered cliffs. In a crack between flutes of stone like pan pipes so that an entrance would be covered by falling scree?
The gravely rocks crunched under his feet.
It was going to be a long excursion.
The place felt like a landscape left by an angry sun, he thought. This valley of shattered, sunscorched stone could have been a course of destruction created by a rolling ball of fire, now left silent, lifeless, sterile, dry. Was his own sweat the only humidity in the air?
The desert god had chosen the purity of such places as holy ground, intersections between life and eternity, and so had the pharaohs. Its very emptiness was not only its value, but its power, allowing, no compelling the mind to fill it with the sacred and with hidden treasures both of the spiritual and the material kind.
THE HATHOR HOLOCAUST Page 23
