‘Of what?’ Lopez asked.
‘The constellation of Orion,’ Hellerman replied. ‘If viewed from above, the three pyramids perfectly align in the same way as the three major stars of Orion’s belt. Travel further out into the deserts, and you find pyramids erected at the four points of the Orion constellation, just as there are four giant stars marking the corner of the constellation in our skies.’
Ethan stared at Hellerman for a long moment.
‘The entire Egyptian monument building campaign was designed to construct a giant map of the constellation Orion?’
‘Well, not the whole thing, but the major monuments all fit with that plan and they were all built at around the same time. The thing is, we still don’t know who built them.’
‘I thought that they’d found the tombs of the pyramid builders?’ Lopez said, briefly recalling things that she’d seen on the news. ‘I thought that chapter was closed.’
‘The tombs of builders were found on the Giza plateau,’ Hellerman confirmed. ‘Their remains bore testimony to huge physical labor. But that didn’t mean that they built the pyramids, and none of the artefacts or imagery found with them bore any reference to the pyramids themselves. Only the media made the connection, not really the scientists themselves.’
‘That’s not what I heard,’ Ethan said. ‘I heard that it was worked out that the pyramids could have been built by humans, using the technology available at the time, using four or five thousand men over twenty years.’
Hellermen appeared somewhat annoyed at Ethan as he replied.
‘Nobody is saying that human hands didn’t build the pyramids, okay? Researchers have found graffiti that was never supposed to be seen, on the inside of foundations inside the pyramids. The images and texts reveal that the workers were divided into crews, and then again into what were called phyles, a Greek word meaning tribe. Those phyles were again subdivided into teams with hieroglyphic names that meant things like strength, endurance, perfection and so on. One of the teams called itself the Friends of Khufu Gang.’ Hellerman sighed. ‘People built the pyramids, that much is not in question. What is important is why they should build such extraordinary structures in the first place, and why they would erect them in such a way as to mimic a constellation in the sky thousands of light years away.’
Ethan nodded, understanding the point. The pyramids were not just amazing creations in and of themselves: the Great Pyramid had been the largest man–made thing on earth until the 20th Century.
‘And you think that these Watchers are the reason why ancient cultures built massive structures?’ he asked Hellerman.
‘It’s not what I think,’ Hellerman argued, ‘it’s written all over everything they ever did. Every major civilization in history built as big as they could, and yet many of the structures they built had no defensive purpose at all. They could have built gigantic walls, immense fortifications, but no – they chose instead to build giant pyramids across continents separated by thousands of miles of ocean.’
Hellerman counted civilizations off on his fingers as he spoke.
‘The Sumerians lived in the land of Sumer, which literally meant the Land of the Watchers, and described intelligent beings who came from the water and taught them the skills of civilization. The Egyptians describe Ta Neter, the Land of the Watchers, as the lands from which the gods had come to Egypt, and in the Old Testament the Elohim or Shining Ones had also come from the same place of origin. They took their name from the Sumerian El, which means bright or shining. The Baylonian Ellu also means bright or to shine. The Old Cornish El means the same, and is where the word Elf originates, describing a mysterious shining and magical being. The Incas in South America referred to bright, shining figures who came from the sea as Illa, which meant “to shine”, who helped found their Empire. Ta Neter is also the Egyptian name for the Red Sea straits, which connected Mesopotamia to Egypt and is known as the place of the gods.’
Lopez folded her arms.
‘Okay, so these Watchers connect some ancient societies and maybe mean there’s something in the legends, but again, so what? It’s not that ground breaking.’
Hellerman slapped his head in exasperation.
‘Do I have to spell it out to you both? The Egyptians say in their Book of the Dead that the Watchers had come from Ta–Ur, which meant far of foreign land across the sea. Mesopotamian records and Biblical references name this land as Ur, the place where the father of the world’s great religions resided, Abraham. Likewise the legend of Votan in Mesoamerica and the Nordic Wotan both describe an aquatic origin of The Watchers, who then came and instructed mankind in technological matters before a great flood wiped men from the face of the earth.’
Ethan finally got it.
‘The division between religions.’
Hellerman clapped as he rolled his eyes. ‘Finally! The division between the world’s religions is false, and is provoked by the heirachy of some religions in an attempt to disguise the understanding that they’re actually all one and the same. The whole concept of having more than one faith is redundant and always has been.’
Hellerman pointed at the tablet’s inscription.
‘The reason the Catholic Church or any other religion would like to see evidence like this buried for all time is that it proves that before any of them existed, the true foundation of all civilization’s great legends and religions existed for real. It wasn’t a myth, a story, a fable – it really happened and everything that’s stood since, all the world’s religions, are simply twisted and falsified memories of that one great event.’
Ethan shook his head as he recalled the famous words of the late, great Arthur C. Clarke.
‘Any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic.’
Hellerman nodded as he slumped back in his chair.
‘They’re hiding the origin of faith,’ he said finally. ‘This is the path that leads to an understanding of the origin of all the world’s deities. Majestic Twelve and all the others weren’t looking for aliens, per se. They truly believed that they were looking for god.’
Lopez looked down at the inscriptions on the tablet.
‘And now, so are we,’ she said. ‘But what the hell are the Russians looking for?’
***
XXII
Megiddo, Canaan
1457 BCE
A hot wind moaned across the deserts, rumbling through the long shawl that protected Tjaneni from the savage heat now blazing down upon them as they rode. The hills were not far from the Pharaoh’s camp site, but even a few miles across these arid plains represented a dangerous ride to all but the most experienced of tribesmen, and Tjaneni was no soldier.
He followed Ahmen, the old man’s robes flowing like banners in the wind and his gaze set toward the east, where now the line of low hills was clear against the horizon. They appeared as barren and deserted as they always had, devoid of life. The old man showed no signs of breaking his pace as he rode to the very edge of the slopes and guided his horse into the cooler shadows of a deep gulley.
Ahmen dismounted and tied his horse to an outcrop of rock nearby, Tjaneni following suit and trying to quell the anxiety coursing through his veins. It was as if the hills were warning him to proceed no further, to go back from whence he had come and not risk incurring the wrath of the gods themselves.
‘We should not be here,’ he whispered to Ahmen as he tied his horse.
Ahmen raised an eyebrow. ‘How do you know?’
Tjaneni made to reply but then realized that he had no answer for the old man’s impenetrable logic. Misha walked up to them, his countenance even more nervous than Tjaneni’s.
‘You can stay here and watch the horses if you wish,’ Tjaneni said to him.
Misha looked at the lonely gulley and the empty deserts beyond and then he shook his head, clearly more afraid of being left alone than of facing whatever awaited them on the far side of the hill.
‘No, I will come.’
/> Tjaneni turned to see Ahmen already making his way up and over the slopes of the hills before them, surprisingly agile for a man of his age. Tjaneni hurried to catch him as they climbed over the top of the hill, ready to descend the other side and into the deeper ravines there.
‘We don’t know what’s in there,’ Tjaneni persisted. ‘We should have brought an escort.’
Ahmen humphed in disapproval.
‘The King’s men would attack anything that provoked them even if they were unprovoked. This is an opportunity that must not be entrusted to a mob of angry young men. We saw that light descend here and it has not emerged since. Whatever great fiery bird landed must still be here.’
Tjaneni nodded, wishing all the while that it were not so, but he knew that Ahmen was right.
‘You are not afraid?’ he asked Ahmen.
The old man smiled as he labored ever upward. ‘Of course I am afraid! But what courage is there in an absence of fear? We must see for ourselves what awaits, and then judge whether our fear is misplaced.’
Tjaneni followed Ahmen over the ridge and down into a deep gulley that bisected the hills, where once had a river flowed between the rocky peaks and burrowed deep cave systems through the ancient sandstone. Tjaneni could see the stepped cliffs either side of him, denoting the different levels of the water in some long bygone age when this parched wasteland had been rich with rivers and life.
‘There,’ Ahmen said, his voice pinched with excitement.
Tjaneni looked up and saw before them a large cave at the end of the gulley, its gaping black maw ominous and foreboding. He slowed as they approached the cave, like a giant gaping mouth leading deep into the bowels of the earth.
As they walked he heard the sand beneath his feet crunch loudly and he looked down in surprise. Beneath them the sand was solidified and reflective, some of it scorched black and sitting in sheets as though rivers of oil had streamed down the gulley.
Ahmen crouched down and gently pressed one hand against the black material, then lifted it away as he looked up at the cave.
‘It’s still warm,’ he said quietly. ‘I have seen this before.’
Tjaneni had seen it too, once before, in the aftermath of a terrific battle when the enemy had poured what looked like pieces of the sun onto the battlefield. The molten metal had rained down on Egyptian troops and burned them alive, scorching the sand into this hard, glossy substance that sometimes appeared almost transparent.
‘They are inside,’ Misha said nervously. ‘The lights, they will burn us too.’
Tjaneni looked at Ahmen, who leaned on his cane and took a deep breath.
‘Had they wished it so, it would have happened by now. They know that we’re here.’
Tjaneni’s legs trembled as they began walking once again, and with each pace the shadowy entrance of the cave swallowed them until the warmth of the sun was gone and only darkness prevailed.
The air smelled dry, and Tjaneni paused for a moment as he allowed his eyes to adjust to the darkness. The cave extended away from them, descending as it went, and the further they travelled the cooler the air became.
A new scent drifted on the still air, a strange chemical taint that Tjaneni recognized as metal, as though fresh swords had been forged somewhere nearby. The acrid taint of smoke wafted around them, Tjaneni’s eyes stinging as it drifted by.
‘Stay close,’ Ahmen whispered to them. ‘We have not far to go.’
Tjaneni’s dread grew with each and every step, as though he were daring the Underworld to attack, taunting Seth with his audacity to tread here, a mere mortal before the wrath of the…
From the darkness burst forth an intense light that forced Tjaneni to throw his arms up over his eyes and turn away from the fearsome glare. He heard himself cry out and felt his legs weaken as he dropped to his knees and then fell flat on his face, as much from fear as from the instinct to prostrate himself before a higher power.
Ahmen and Misha collapsed alongside him, equally blinded by the ferocity of the light blazing like a new–born star before them. Tjaneni lowered his arm slightly, squinting as he peered over his forearm and was shocked to see faint tendrils of smoke coiling upward from his skin and the fine hairs above it.
He heard Misha scream and suddenly leap upright in an attempt to flee the dreadful assault, and then the boy’s hair was aflame as streams of burning embers spiralled from his clothes and his skin.
Tjaneni felt a terrible heat wash over him and he tried to crawl away from the ferocious glare, cried out again in fear as he realized that he could only be staring directly into the All Seeing Eye of Horus himself.
‘Forgive us!’ Ahmen yelled at the light as he knelt alongside Tjaneni, rivers of bright embers flying from his smoldering shawl, ‘for we are but mortal men!’
The fearsome light seared their eyes with a force so powerful that Tjaneni could see the red glow of the blood flowing through his eyelids even though he was shielding his eyes with his arm and squeezing them tightly shut. He felt another wave of terrible heat wash over the three of them, cried out in pain and terrible fear as he collapsed onto his face in the dust and covered his head with his hands as he smelled his hair burning.
A tremendous screaming gale soared through the cave as though a storm had rushed from the hot bowels of the earth to scorch the very air, its stench metallic and fierce. Tjaneni cried in pain as he felt his skin burning on his back, prayed that the earth would swallow him whole to save him from the agony he was enduring, and his ears ached with the sheer volume of the diabolical roar thundering through the caves.
Suddenly the heat faded away and Tjaneni realized that the screaming wind that had been howling through the caves throughout their ordeal was now gusting out. The banshee wail faded away like a horrific nightmare and the air cooled around him as though the fiery source of the storm were ascending away from them. Tjaneni lay face down in the dust, his body trembling and the smell of scalded skin and hair lingering as he turned to one side and looked at Ahmen.
The old man was lying on the ground alongside Tjaneni with his face turned toward him, but his features were slack and his eyes empty, their rheumy lenses pale white and devoid of life. Tjaneni felt fresh panic rise up inside of him as he turned his head to search for Misha. There, before him, was a sight so terrible that he felt physically sick.
Misha was kneeling as though in silent prayer, his eyes empty black sockets and his mouth wide open in a silent scream for mercy that had gone unanswered. His form was as that of rich, black soil, his skin charred beyond recognition as though he had been scorched to cinders like a pillar of burned salt. Tjaneni fought back tears of horror and superstitious awe as his eyes slowly adjusted once again to the darkness and he looked up fearfully at where the infernal light had blazed so fiercely only moments before.
There in the shadowy darkness he could see a faint afterglow, a nearly perfect rectangle of light as though a fire had been extinguished and the embers still retained some heat and light. Tjaneni was about to try to stand when he saw movement in the depths of the cave.
He froze, catatonic with terror as he saw figures moving silently in the darkness. They were tall, pale, on two legs as all men were but somehow different. Tjaneni feared that they would detect him and the light would return, and he dared not breathe for fear of giving himself away. The figures moved silently around something in the darkness before Tjaneni, and then one of them emerged slightly from the darkness and stared directly at him.
Tjaneni’s entire body began to quiver with terror as he looked into a pair of slanted, black eyes that seemed to him to hold no sense of a soul, no heart that breathed life into all beings. There was no expression, no communication, nothing.
The strange human watched Tjaneni for several long seconds, and then in silence he turned away and walked into the darkness. The other figures joined their companion and Tjaneni heard the soft shuffling of feet in the sand that faded away into the depths of the earth, back into the hellish underw
orld from whence they had come.
Tjaneni, trembling with terror and fatigued beyond all measure, crawled to his knees. His limbs felt weak, his heart fluttering in his chest and his breathing coming in short, sharp gasps that seemed to snatch the life from his body with every convulsive breath. Pain soared across his skin, which had blistered in the terrible heat. He knelt there for how long he knew not, until he heard shouts coming from behind him near the entrance to the cave.
Tjaneni did not turn as he heard the men approaching, even though some dim recess of his awareness reminded him that they could be the Caananites approaching to slaughter him. Dim light flickered into life around him, the crackling of flaming torches, and with a vague sense of relief he recognized the sound of Coptic Egyptian voices.
‘Tjaneni?’
The soldiers hurried to his side, and then recoiled in horror as they saw the two corpses either side of Tjaneni. Then their torches illuminated what was before him in and their gasps of awe filled the cave, fearful whispers fluttering like dark thoughts around Tjaneni.
‘Tjaneni?’ one of the men called him again. ‘What happened here? The King is asking for you, for the battle will soon begin.’
Tjaneni stared silently at the tremendous sight before him, his mind empty and unfocused, his body weak and yet charged with something he had never felt before and did not understand. When he spoke, it was in a ghostly whisper.
‘The stars have fallen from the sky,’ he replied to them, ‘and we witnessed Horus himself bring one of them here to this cave.’
The soldiers all began backing away from the sight before them as Tjaneni spoke again.
‘Bring the King here and do not approach but upon your knees, or you will all suffer the same fate as Misha.’
The soldiers looked at the blackened pillar that was all that remained of Tjaneni’s man servant, and as one they collapsed onto their knees before the spectacle.
‘Go,’ one of the chiefs ordered his men. ‘Go and tell the King that the prophecy has truly been fulfilled!’
The Genesis Cypher (Warner & Lopez Book 6) Page 15
