Where was the tunnel entranceway that had brought them to this cavern?
Keep going.
The roar of flames like an angry sun filled his ears.
As he ran with the heavy weight of the golden Atenet disc clutched against his chest, he felt it penetrating his skin through his shirt as if he were exposed to electromagnetic radiation. A surge of invisible light entered him and he entered it. He saw faces, contorted in flames, dying people in the grip of plague, swarms of pestilential flies and locusts, buildings crumbling. His legs went hollow.
Atlas carried the earth and now I am carrying the sun of ancient destruction.
Gemma saw him slowing and tugged his arm as she ran.
The disc was gazing into his heart, through the cage of his ribs, but not to see - to know.
You have your dream, Disturber. You hold the numinous in your hands. Now what will you do with such power?
The eye of Ra, revered in a thousand temples and worshipped by thousands of priest and by pharaohs, had a stare that he could not hide from.
What would he do with the sun now that he had it?
Bury it in the sand, where it might one day rise again?
Drown it in the waters of the Nile. Would it hiss and sizzle to the depth like red hot metal?
He was not a vandal.
Hand it over to science, to the detailed study and scholarship of professional academics?
They would be blind to its light.
Take its power into himself?
We can be exalted, right now, in our lifetimes, Neith had told him. Did he want that?
“So the threat could be both an esoteric trigger and a very real-world trigger for catastrophe regardless of whose finger is on that trigger… an angry God, or a leader of a powerful secret society… the result could be the same. Catastrophe. I’ll leave it to you to decide whom we should fear the most. Man or God. Or maybe there’s a third option… someone who would be God,” he had told an audience.
Divinisation, man’s desire to be established on high, was the fatal sin. And the problem is still around today with humankind’s hunger for supernatural power and fascination with tools that support our inner desire to be ‘as gods’”.
He held the sun in seared fingers.
Something set it off.
It was as if they had pressed a lever.
A sound like approaching thunder stopped them and turned them into statues. The vibration made the air, the floor and, it seemed, their bones and teeth tremble.
A blast of air hit like the approach of a storm. Right beside them. There was no time to go back.
“Hurry, something’s coming out of the wall!"
They now sprinted. A roar filled the chamber. He turned as he ran.
A swollen sun disc of red granite, crushing in size, rolled sideways on its edge down one of the grooved ramps, throwing sparks.
The sun of Ra.
Like a granite millstone on its rim, the disc thundered through the chamber, up the ramp and out of sight.
Should they go back?
No, here it came again. It had slowed, turned and was now rolling back down upon them!
The priests had brought a stone sun into the stronghold in a disc of staggering proportions. Was it set to trap anyone who had disturbed the goddess, to seal in the baleful influence of Sekhmet before it could be unleashed on Egypt? The whole sanctuary gave a shudder as it thundered through again and he felt the force of its passing blast him like a gale.
Now he understood the reason for that wide, vaulted corridor. No steps. No pits.
Ra was against them, poised to roll down and crush them.
The passage shook violently under their running feet as the crushing solar disc rolled out of the wall and roared back into view. Then it rolled away, its journey shortening with each roll. It would settle to form an impassable plug, sealing the sanctuary like a lid on the neck of a jar. Thunder and a wind ripped behind them, like a shock wave. The passage stretched ahead. Gemma was running beside him. They were still only half way down it. Wind, screaming stone and noise swelled around them. Their flight along the passage seemed to stretch now and time to slow, almost to stop. He flicked a glance at the running figure of the girl. This sun was not the gentle life giver, it was crushing and merciless. They ran harder. Gemma stumbled and was gone. He turned to look back.
A second sun was coming.
He saw her falling in slow motion, throwing out her hands to break her fall, but she slammed hard against the stone floor and lay still. The new sun came thundering down from the side.
Fear urged him to keep running. Leave Gemma to the sun? He willed strength to his muscle.
He had saved her from the knives of the moon in Nubia – now he must save her from the crushing stone sun.
He ran back.
Gemma lifted her head, shook it. She seemed dazed. The sun disc roared down on her. He saw fright jump into her face as the rolling fate came to find her lying in its path.
She tried to rise, lost balance in his wild fright, seemed to topple again.
The sun cannot have her.
He reached her, stretched out and hooked her with jealous fingers and pulled her from its path.
He saw her upturned face looking at him, stark-eyed.
The sun was upon her, fragments of stone and sparks flying.
Anson hauled.
The sun disc came, but something had happened. Instead of rolling straight up the curve of the ramp, it tilted off its axis. Now it careered up the barrel vaulted ceiling before rolling back down and back along the passage. It met the first sun in an explosion of colliding planets.
Pieces of broken granite flew.
On his feet, Gemma ran with him.
What had happened? Had an earthquake damaged the ancient defences?
Rubble and dust showered on them as all fell silent.
They waited. When the dust cleared and they were certain that there were no more suns about to roll down on them, they went on.
They found a pile of broken rubble at the end of the passage.
“Look.”
The colliding sun discs had shattered, creating a way through to the entrance passage.
Chapter 48
THEY RAN into a group of armed, uniformed men, the government man Saleh Haroun at the front.
They did not see Anson and Gemma at first as they worked busily in the tunnel, Haroun supervising. What were they doing?
Gemma knew.
“They’re setting charges.”
They were going to blow up the place.
Haroun saw them and saw the sun disc in Anson’s arms.
“I’m shutting this place down.”
“Why?”
“It stops here. I am not interested in letting chaos loose in my country. What about the others?”
“Burnt to ashes,” Gemma said. “It’s a crematorium in there.”
Haroun shrugged.
“A terrible accident. It happens.”
He signalled to the men and they cleared the area. Anson and Gemma stood frozen, reluctant to leave, but knowing what would happen next.
She tugged his arm.
“We can’t do anything now, Anson.”
They dived for a bend in the tunnel and joined the others taking shelter on the ground.
A great blast erupted like a colossal clearing of a throat, then silence.
“An unfortunate tunnel collapse. Now please hand over that relic to me.”
Anson and Gemma Laughton were sitting in the office of the new Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, but that individual was not present.
In his place sat Saleh Haroun, Minister of Culture.
“You did not heed my warning, Anson. You went in search of the forbidden and now, see… You have burnt your fingers as I predicted.”
Egyptian humour? The pain in Anson’s fingertips was anything but amusing.
“I told you not to turn over a stone in Egypt. You did not listen. A
nd yet we will not argue over the final result. I did not want this Sanctuary open, nor did I welcome the symbolism it provides to certain dangerous groups. Let us have no more talk about triggers for a new world order.”
He still hadn’t mentioned the Herihor tomb and its hoard.
Didn’t the authorities know about it?
If they didn’t, he was not going to be the one to tell them.
“How are you going to keep this business quiet?” Anson said. “A group of people, including an important sponsor of archaeology, has died. You can’t keep that hidden forever, and then how are you going to explain the fact that they were burnt to death, without letting the whole story come to light?”
“Such a conflagration has occurred before, in the animal sanctuary of Tuna el Gebel. A carelessly dropped cigarette end started a fire that burnt for a month and we had to brick up a section of the catacomb to stop it spreading.”
“What do you want with me?”
“Your absolute discretion. I would recommend that you accept my official version of events if you ever want to visit or work in Egypt again. Consider yourself under a suspended sentence of exile from Egypt. You are free to go. And also to come back. Provided you remain discreet.” He turned to Gemma, Laughton. “And you, my young lady, conducting unlawful intelligence operations in our country. I will not create a diplomatic incident over it and you would be wise to do the same. Do we understand each other?”
The British girl nodded.
“And what about the golden sun disc?” Anson said to him. “Are you afraid of it, too?”
“It is a very potent artefact, of that there can be no doubt. But let us say, we fear its symbolic power and potential to ignite certain groups.”
“In other words the sun may never see the light of day?”
“Inshallah.”
If God wills it.
Would God will it?
The government man smiled.
Chapter 49
Anson Hunter’s Blog – The Other Egypt
I THINK of a giant sun trapped in an underworld night along with those who once revered it.
A recovery, no doubt carefully stage-managed, must take place at some point after such events, and what then?
Will the mystery be shut and sealed away and stay that way?
Can the genie ever be put back in the bottle?
Gemma said her goodbyes, with a farewell kiss at Heathrow Airport and a promise to email me when the dust settled, but it sounded like one of those promises members of groups always make after the prolonged camaraderie of a tour and rarely keep.
“You didn’t disappoint,” she said.
Past tense.
I would have preferred the sweeping and continuous observations she normally made about me. It might have given me more hope that something would continue.
And what about the sun?
Does the malefic light of a holocaust sun confirm the existence of that other, kinder light for me?
The hardest choice is not between light and darkness, I have discovered - that’s too simple - but between different kinds of light and each has the power to attract in its own way. There is such a thing as an evil light that leaves radiation burns in the soul, and, by implication, I have to believe, its opposite light.know which sun I would choose, yet I am still emotionally scorched by my exposure. Is it over?
Chapter 50
Plaza, United Nations Headquarters, Manhattan Island, N.Y.
ANSON was back in the USA to support the publication of a new book and once again he stood mirrored in the surface of a shattered globe.
It was the monumental sculpture that sat on a promenade outside the United Nations Building on Manhattan Island, New York. Floating continents bounded the shining surface of the metal planet. Instead of oceans dividing the landmasses there were chasms and glimpses of machinery inside, like hidden forces at work in the world.
Plate tectonics in a nightmare, he thought.
When the image of a dark-suited man loomed beside him, he said.
“I still don’t know. Does this globe stand for the parts of the world coming together or exploding apart?”
“The world seems to be coming apart inside there too,” the man said, looking up at the UN building. “Middle East again.”
The new arrival, his civilised-looking friend, greeted him with a pat on the shoulder.
‘The Diplomat’, a UN official and a secret collector of Egyptian antiquities. His face seemed perpetually saddened as if by the loss of the ancient past.
“Sorry, I couldn’t resist the symbolism of meeting you once again in front of this sphere, in spite of what happened last time,” he said. Then he dropped his bombshell. “Perhaps there is Egyptian sympathetic magic at work here, Anson. Listen to this. Tonight marks the opening of a new exhibition in the UN Visitor’s Lobby. Astonishingly, it’s about Egyptian mythology, including a display of a Sekhmet figure with a golden sun disc on her head. Can you believe it?”
“Go on,” he said.
The warmth of the late afternoon sun had quite suddenly vanished. He felt an evaporative chill on his skin.
“I asked you here to invite you to the opening. The exhibition’s just arrived from Egypt. A collection of relics never assembled before. All to do with the great lioness goddess of punishment and healing.”
The diplomat reached into his coat and brought out a flyer. It was a promotional piece that featured a picture of a golden sun disc and a Sekhmet statue and the words ‘The Female in Civilisation #1 – Primordial Egypt.’ A United Nations Exhibition. “It’s part of an international series,” the UN Diplomat said.
Anson’s brain seemed to shatter like the metal globe in front of them.
Chapter 51
HE’D LEFT Egypt thinking that the threat was contained, at least for now, although there were growing signs of chaos and conflict in the world just lately.
It raised the spectre that perhaps, like the genie released from the bottle, the breath of the lioness was already spreading its contagion.
Gemma Laughton had gone her way thinking the threat was explained – satisfied that it was not a physical danger to the region or the world, but a metaphysical one, beyond the remit and the understanding of the Intelligence community.
Now this.
There was a price to pay for an over-active imagination and a speculative brain and sometimes it was terror.
Had they brought the Sekhmet locus of power here to America to re-enact the eternal return and the chaotic forces of an atavistic pre-creation and so actuate a new age for the earth?
In Egyptian mythology, the Ogdoad, eight reptile-headed gods and goddesses created an island called The Island of Fire in the middle of chaos and here they produced the cosmic egg of creation from which the sun god Ra emerged.
This place was an island too.
Manhattan, the heart of today’s new world superpower, America.
Now he remembered the foreign cleric in Egypt - the Iranian connection.
What lay at the heart of the Sekhmet scorching sun?
The fiery light of Ra, or something more lethal?
He looked up at the sculpture of the globe. The machinery in its heart, cogs and spikes looked cruel, like teeth in a maw.
A sun with a nuclear heart? Or hidden in the hollow-cast golden image of the lioness herself?
Surely it was all just a phantom fear, a ‘dirty bomb’ of a wild theorist’s nightmare. Could such a thing really be happening?
A countdown to zero from an age beyond Dynasty Zero?
0. A sphere. Like the sun. A void. Nothingness. Obliteration. The gaseous explosion of an
angry sun - not of a new dawn but the blinding light of fiery destruction.
The Egyptians believed that one day the forces of chaos would burst in on creation and destroy the world, and once again the universe would become the primordial waste of Nun's chaotic waters…
His insides felt as hollow as a metal ball, but it was a whirling
emptiness that sucked in fears.
It seemed that at this moment events brought to a head the ultimate choice of his existence as an alternative archaeologist.
Should he fear the ancient metaphysical power of a sun disc and the goddess of chaos it belonged to, a relic of an ancient curse by the sun god… believe the unbelievable, that a metaphysical explosion and reactivation of original chaos from the deep past could occur by bringing together the original explosive elements of a pagan execration?’
Or would he leap instead to a fear of the physical? A bomb - the ghastly materiality of a detonation about to take place at the heart of the world’s assembled nations that would blow the place into atoms?
Either way, a countdown to a new age of chaos may already have begun.
The words of the prophecy came back to him.
History will soon be made. A new dawn for humankind approaches. The beginning of the end for today’s world order is at hand as a force of hidden power will emerge and precipitate the fall. Hear this prophetic warning to all the nations. On this day, the roots of the old ideology will wither and die and a new order of the ages will commence. Rise to a new illumination.
A prophetic warning to all the nations.
Anson stood frozen in front of the United Nations Building in New York.
He looked up at the shiny metallic sculpture of the brazen sphere that stood outside the UN.
Was it exploding apart or coming together?
Was its counterpart sitting in an exhibition within the United Nations Visitors Lobby, holding within its shell a nuclear yolk, about to blow up, or was it merely a metaphysical ‘chaos bomb’?
Had Haroun and Saad wanted the same thing all along?
Chaos.
But perhaps Saad had been too eager and Haroun did not want the reactivation of chaos in Egypt on his doorstep. He planned to export it to the West…
Questions, questions, in a circle, like eternity.
For an alternative theorist there was no ending, or beginning, he thought, just an eternal return to the same existential dilemma.
To believe, or not to believe in the existence and possibility of the unbelievable…
THE HATHOR HOLOCAUST Page 27
