It was a scene filled with promise and new beginning, not threat.
Divinities were already acclaiming the newborn god.
Perhaps, by now, the architects of these astounding tomb defences assumed that any intruders would have been eliminated now and these scenes celebrated their defeat.
He hoped.
Anson entered the eleventh hour.
The eleventh hour. It was an ominous term. It raised the spectre of something happening at the last possible moment. One last, calamitous trap. What could it be?
Repulser of Rebels? Repulse meant to push back. What could push them back here?
His light revealed a hall longer than the others and it rose at the end in a ramp.
Something colossal, green, bulbous and smooth sat on the ramp. He edged closer his beam lighting up the split winged shell and mandibled head of a giant scarab beetle carved out of a stupendous green stone. It faced into the chamber, its back legs in the twelfth chamber.
Khepri, the mythological scarab beetle, lay in position to roll out the sun into the eastern horizon, just as scarab beetles rolled their balls of dung along in their back legs.
How could this insect colossus pose a threat?
Khepri became a threat in the next instant as he quivered and rumbled down the ramp at Anson like a rockslide.
The final repulser of rebels.
Anson dived sideways and flattened himself against a wall as the careering carapace hurtled past and slammed into the jambs of the previous chamber.
The wall collapsed in a crash of stone pieces.
When the dust settled he saw the others stepping around the beetle over the rubble to come through.
They walked into a blazing light of dawn and an aurora of golden objects. An avenue opened up in the gold, lined with of golden baboons jubilantly heralding the new dawn of Amun Ra.
Here lay the amassed treasures of Egypt’s dynasties and at its heart the sarcophagus of the priest king, two talismans of power on his body, the blazing golden disc, the Atenet, the fiery spirit of Ra on his chest, and down the length of his body, the golden snake-sceptre of Kematef, the soul of Amun.
Chapter 46
IN THE DESERT, beyond Dendera, two colossal, golden cliffs of an ancient wadi stretched out like the forepaws of a sphinx.
Or of a lioness, he thought.
It was a startling sight. Flutes of erosion in the paws looked for all the world like powerful, delineated claws and a cliff of stone rose like the chest of a beast at the end of the valley. Now he saw why the ancients had chosen this spot for the sanctuary of the Lady of Dread.
The setting triggered powerful images in his mind of the raging Sekhmet lioness in the desert, her claws dripping with blood as she spread death and destruction.
His theories had been proven right and he felt a rare sense of vindication that almost lifted him above the danger of his situation. Either he was getting very good or remarkably lucky as time went by, he thought.
He’d been right about Herihor too.
The intruders had taken the Atenet disc, sealing the tomb up behind and disguising the entrance, and now he, along with the captive Gemma Laughton, were being taken to the Sekhmet Sanctuary.
He recalled hearing a saying that ‘life starts going phenomenally well for you just before you die’.
Not yet, please.
Kraft gave him a nudge from behind. The procession trudged across the sand, Anson, Gemma, Kraft, the androgynous Neith in the clothes of a young man, Boy Wonder, the chantresses of Amun and a workman carrying the golden sun disc in his arms. In the dusk light, they passed between the paws of the sphinx into the shadow of a valley.
Anson glanced at the disc in the workman’s arms.
It was as if they were carrying the dying sun into the west, he thought, except this brilliant sun could soon rise again in a terrifying metaphysical dawn.
There were guards on the entrance to a remarkably tall doorway that looked as if it had been built for giants. Most of the doorway was still in place, filled with with stone blocks and they had cleared a smaller entranceway below, fitted with an iron door which a guard now swung open on hinges.
Anson noticed a sign on the rock beside the entrance, the vase-like shape of the ‘nefer’ glyph, faint but still visible, the sign left by Herhor’s tomb miners marking the sanctuary as a “good” or “beautiful” site for their attention.
He’d seen it in the photograph Alexia had shown him in London and as he approached the entrance, he felt a pang of loss.
Alexia with the daring smile had once walked here.
They entered and went down a very steep staircase with a high roof that reminded Anson of the corbelled gallery in the great pyramid. Why had the ancients built on such a scale to house the sanctuary of a lioness statue?
As they moved on their lights revealed a cavernous barrel-vaulted passage that ran straight into darkness, its floor deeply grooved. Ancient air enveloped his skin.
They continued along a stretch of corridor, dimly lit by strip lights on the wall.
Why was it so wide? And what were these grooves in the passage, curving up on each side of the wall like vast skateboard ramps?
The passage stretched on to arrive at a vestibule, the walls enlivened with images of the goddess in two forms, Lady of Death and Destruction and Lady of Sex, Love, Music and Drunkenness.
A man paced in the vestibule, a shaven-headed, middle-aged man with a look of erect fitness about him.
Ibrahim Saad, pharmaceutical industrialist and major archaeological sponsor, was waiting for them.
Saad made a signal to Kraft, who shoved him forward. “Anson,” Ibrahim Saad said, a light globe on the wall making a glowing orb of his shaven head. “Thank you for your rare and particular genius. I have relished the chance to work with you, at last, even if from behind the scenes.”
He spoke as if he’d been supporting Anson all along like an anonymous benefactor.
“So now you are sponsoring murder and illegal archaeology,” Anson said.
“My interest in Sekhmet is not just about destruction and the beginning of a new order. Sekhmet is also the goddesss of healing and that is my remit. You could call her the patroness of doctors and pharmaceutical manufacturers. Your ill will towards me is ill founded, and, if I have done any wrong, I plead the defence of ‘noble cause’. We have so much to achieve and so much in common. We are both impatient with academic Egyptology, are we not? We both believe in unseen realities and the spiritual technology of ancient Egypt, do we not? Maybe you have not gone far enough in your alternative thinking. Maybe now is the time for you to abandon today’s belief systems for a truer, more ancient one.”
“You’re right. How could I have been so blind? A new world order and a return to paganism is the answer.”
Neith came forward to join them.
“We’re trying to reach out to you, Anson, can’t you see? Join us in an epoch-making endeavour. We want the same thing, don’t we? To re-discover the secrets of ancient Egypt’s hidden power.”
“Re-discover perhaps, but not unleash. I think we have rather different agendas,” Anson said. “So I must turn down your generous membership offer.”
“Be reasonable, Anson,” Neith urged him. “We’re trying to build a bridge here.”
“Maybe. But I am a little uneasy about where it leads.”
Neith gave a gasp of impatience.
“You would prefer to ally yourself with outdated religion, with those steeped in belief systems that have given the world nothing but division and grief?”
He looked from Neith to the young Intelligence girl.
What do I want? The excitement and sensationalism of the esoteric and the forbidden that impelled Saad’s movement towards a New Age, or the beauty of another mystery, one of a deeper, eternal kind?
“Come with us and see, and then decide,” the archaeological sponsor said.
They entered another high-roofed passageway and followed it before it o
pened into a chamber the size of an arena, lit by a generator and electric lights.
Now he understood the reason for the lofty height of these passages.
They weren’t built for giants. They were built to allow the transportation of a gigantic sun like a gleaming deep-space satellite dish. It was concave, like the Sekhmet sun disc, brilliantly shiny, but irregular, divided like a compound eye into a collection of lenses, so that it had the appearance of a battery of mirrors.
It soared against the back wall of the cavern and in front of it sat a golden feline, the lioness Sekhmet, throwing out shafts of light like flashing claws. Sekhmet, the lioness of destruction, sat enthroned on a dais, bare headed, missing her crowning Atenet.
Was I right about Akhenaten too?
Yes, he had built this horrifying sun and the priests of the restoration and brought it here. Why? To protect her? What power could a reflective golden sun have down here in an underworld?
They say in moments of heightened emotion we speak in poetry, repetitive, sing-along.
Ibrahim Saad looked up at the goddess and spoke:
“This is the day, the day of days, the beginning of a new day. Here she is, Anson. We have found the lioness and brought her crowning glory to her. “And you have lived to see this day!”
What kind of metaphysical explosion did he hope to ignite by the act of crowning her? To unleash chaos on a cosmic scale as the precursor to a new age and the reinstatement of the mystery religions?
He was the most frightening kind of visionary, one who believed he had something to offer humankind and was prepared to kill to deliver it.
Anson felt his exhilaration struggle with a dazed dread.
I have found and penetrated the Super-tomb of Herihor and now I am inside the Sanctuary of Sekhmet-Hathor, standing in front of her locus of power. Have my eyes been allowed to see this because I am going to die?
Chapter 47
THE CHANTRESSES Amun reached a pitch of fervour as the androgyne officiant lifted the golden sun disc above her head and held it up towards the head of the goddess.
Anson saw the gleam of the gold reflected in the thousand dishes in the giant sun’s surface. It was an otherworldly sight, made more eerie by the figure of Neith, the andogynous one, still dressed in a man’s clothes, but her head bare, cropped golden hair shining.
Immense power radiated from the golden form of the seated lioness and she seemed to suck light into herself like a black hole from which nothing, not even light could escape.
She crackled with the numinous.
Anson could not take his eyes away.
Small, rounded-ears in a hair-mane. Strong-browed, heavy of muzzle, eyes curiously saddened as if wearied of her killing; it seemed that this was her quiescent phase, before the anger and the hunger rose again and she would once more rise to roar “I am Sekhmet the Mighty One, Lady of Flame, The Tearer, the Scorching Eye of Ra. I will kill, I will kill, I will kill!”
Here she was, the quintessence of unpredictable female divinity, serene yet ferociously compelling.
What does she compel me to do?
To surrender to the sensational part of my nature that feels her drawing me to her in waves of magnetism?
Bow down to pagan femininity and take the step from revering to ecstatic worship?
Don’t resist me. You cannot stand in the path of my flames.
He felt as if all his life had led to this audience with an elemental entity.
Are you really a phenomenologist, Neith had once said, 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? Come out from behind your defences and open yourself up to her.
Is that what I am? A fencesitter? Never coming down strongly on one side or the other. Not too alternative. Not too mainstream. Not too Christian, not too mystical. He had now found the sun disc, his quest was accomplished, and now he had to come down on one side. Firmly, with both feet and wholeheartedly. Either he believed in the power of this relic or he didn’t, believed in a god’s anger or didn’t.
Which is it? Which side am I on?
There were mysterious catalysts in history, he believed and the appearance of this locus of power at this time was such a catalyst, representing the arrival of civilisation at a set of cross roads.
Am I looking at a metaphysical trigger for an Armageddon? He did not consider this event strictly in the biblical sense of a final ideological battle, more in the sense of a great catastrophe for humankind, even though he knew that there was a common belief among the book-based religions in a final Great Battle. Christians called it Armageddon, Muslims and Jews had texts about the War of Gog and Magog, which Muslims called Al-Malhamah Al-Kubrah.
Forget your ice-in-the-veins religion of a cold church, a dry creed and a dim candle. Burn with me in the flames of pagan joy.
He wondered what it was that lay at the back of his faith? The fear of the emptiness of death and ultimate extinction that the Egyptians fought against, counterbalancing it with the monumentality of temples, tombs and pyramids of stone and the hope that death alone could bring eternal life?
He felt Gemma touch his arm and just that touch made his choice clearer.
“Today we trigger the dawn of a new creation…” the adrogyne piestess began, her low voice rising in pitch and emotion.
Anson expected to see a spark crackle between the disc in Neith’s hands and the Sekhmet statue.
“O SEKHMET, RAMPAGING SUN, SOUL WITH TWO FACES, LADY OF TERROR, WARRIOR NETJER, POWERFUL ONE, COME AGAIN TO COMPLETE YOUR CIRCLE! BURN! SCOURGE! CLEANSE THE EARTH COMPLETE YOUR PURIFICATION OF THE UNENLIGHTENED! DESTROY A BLIND AND IGNORANT HUMANKIND! BY THE INFERNO OF YOUR FIERY EYE, BY THE PURIFYING FLAME OF YOUR BREATH, BY YOUR SEVEN ARROWS OF FIRE, OF PLAGUE AND OF PESTILENCE. LADY OF RED, LADY OF BLOOD, YOUR NEW AGE HAS COME…”
Like lethal nuclear material with a power to destroy that could last for thousands of years, the disc had been sequestered beneath the earth, he thought. It had to be locked up in a special place that was lined and sealed by ancient walls of protective prayers and utterances, neutralised from the world and even the anger of a divinity who would allow even the devil to exist provided he stayed in a certain place, a place believers called Hell.
It had been disturbed in the past, the intermediate periods of chaos and disaster.
Prince Khaemwaset had found it, triggering the retribution of the Ten Plagues.
Akhenaten had taken it to begin his cult of the Aten, and released a pandemic that killed millions in ancient times, and then returned here by the priests of the restoration before being appropriated by Herihor, the usurper, who triggered the collapse of the third intermediate period.
Now it was back and about to be reunited with the Sekhmet relic, to release a new and unknown catastrophe on the world.
No.
He broke from the control of the enraptured Kraft and made a race to the statue. He must stop her.
Neith’s hands came down, trembling with the weight of the golden disc.
He shouldered the man-woman aside, made a grasp for the disc, but he was too late.
The disc slipped into a groove in the feline’s head with a metallic clunk.
Primordial chaos broke loose.
Maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe he could still stop a chain of events that could lead to an abyss of unknown destruction. His fingers wrapped around the edges of the disc and he lifted it free from the glittering head just as he felt searing heat strike the side of his face.
A blast furnace had erupted from pits, gouts of flame that climbed up higher than the head of Sekhmet.
Anson ran back towards the chamber entrance. Ibrahim Saad tried to cut him off, making a dive at him. Anson side-stepped, Kraft followed, launching himself at Anson, but Gemma tripped him and he staggered into Anson sendi
ng him reeling sideways to the wall, where unable to stop in time he ran into the stone, the disc ringing in his arms like a cymbal.
He slipped to the ground, stunned. Gemma landed on top of him as heat like a nuclear blast ignited the cavern.
When he turned, heat scorching his face, he gaped at what he saw.
The big man Kraft, now held a handgun pointed at him, but instead of gunfire coming from the barrel, his whole body had ignited in flames. Ibhahim Saad, nearby, was aglow like an incandescent element, his clothes alight like burning mummy wrappings. Neith, arms outflung, either in dismay or worship, Anson could not say, was ablaze like a fiery cross. Boy Wonder, also clutching a handgun, burnt on the floor like a blazing question mark. The Chantresses of Amun staggered in flames in a horrible parody of exaltation.
The holocaust sun had done this, not a metaphysical one, but a madman pharaoh’s weapon of horror.
Here were the multiple shining shields of Archimedes that history said had burnt the Roman fleet, but built centuries before the Greek.
Akhenaten’s Aten, the sun disc deity, shown shedding beneficent rays that ended in hands holding the anhk symbols of life, had here become ‘the sun that killed with the arrows of heat’.
This weapon did not need the real sun to reflect and direct its inferno. The heat from the furnace, powered by some unknown fuel of the ancients’ science burnt at a ferocious temperature and it was enough. The reflective surface of the golden sun was taking the heat, converging and concentrated it a hundredfold, a thousand fold into solar rays of destruction, a defence planned by ancient priests to destroy any who would re-awaken the lioness.
“Get out - against the wall!” he shouted.
Anson shielded them behind the disc and wriggled after her, propelling himself with his feet and an elbow. They snaked along the floor, squeezed into the corner where the wall met the floor, shrinking from the blast that fulminated through the cavern. Gemma was gasping in the furnace and Anson felt heat sear his fingers at the edges of the disc.
THE HATHOR HOLOCAUST Page 26
