THE SMITING TEXTS

by Roy Lester Pond

  “What happened?”

  “An age of chaos called the First Intermediate Period. It was a time when the divine power of the king appeared to fail. Low Niles and terrible famine plunged the land into chaos. Riots, attacks on the administration, robbery of the tombs ensued. The crown toppled. Texts list dozens of kings in this period. Documents speak of seventy kings ruling for seventy days. Apocryphal perhaps, but they give us an idea of the breakdown of the divine order. A sage wrote, In truth, the country spins around like a potter’s wheel, the robber owns treasures, the servant becomes the plunderer. Lamentation texts also state that Those that were entombed were cast on high ground, suggesting that it was during this period that many of the pyramid and tomb complexes came under threat. This Dark Age lasted until the Middle Kingdom and the arrival of new, strong pharaohs such as Amenemhat III, who salvaged and rebuilt Egypt’s glory, yet the disaster had swept away belief in the divine power of pharaohs and the idea that eternal life among the gods was only for kings. A new current of democratisation appeared and heaven was brought low, to the level of all.”

  “At least the ancients believed in a heaven, even though a pagan one,” the SCA girl said. “They were perhaps more enlightened than some.”

  “That’s the tour, gentlemen. But now there’s one more place I have to visit. It’s personal this time.”

  Chapter 19

  ANSON HESITATED.

  He paused at the doorway to Mereruka’s mastaba tomb, the tall, narrow entranceway surmounted by a weather-worn, stone cornice.

  The group, surprisingly, agreed to let him go in alone, although Kalila, as a former student of his father’s, had requested to join him.

  Here it was.

  This is the tomb where it happened, he thought. Where things went terribly wrong for my father.

  In a sense, this tomb was also his father’s memorial, he thought, a shrine to his father’s obsession with the mythology and underworld of Egypt.

  Afternoon sunlight gave deeper shadow to reliefs carved in the stone at the entrance. Erect images of the vizier Mereruka flanked the doorway, his wife shown like a child at his feet.

  Circumstances had kept Anson from entering into his father’s life and now it seemed that he would be entering the realm of his father’s death. What would this doorway lead him to understand about his father and about death?

  Doorways. Life was all about passing through them, beginning with birth from the womb, going through the school gate, the doors of university, receiving of the symbolic Key of the Door when you turned twenty-one and the key to the door to your first home and maybe first car. Next came your career, a series of doors opening and shutting, some opened for you, others by your own efforts, and then Death’s Door. Depending on your beliefs, there might be two further sets of doors, the pearly gated one and the gates of a darker place. Nothing positive happened in life until you first chose a door, and success came from choosing the right ones and not false ones.

  He felt curiously anxious, fearing that he was on the threshold of a disturbing experience, that he was about to step from one world, the familiar one, into another, previously unknowable world. The Vizier looked magisterial, the way his father had always been to him. Forbidding access. The impression stopped Anson from moving inside, as if the Vizier had stepped out and blocked his way. Here was a man with authority, removed from mere affection. A towering figure. Like my father. How do I go through? Then it came to him. The only way through this door was to open the door inside himself first. Feelings of bitterness and resentment would bar the way.

  In his father’s absence Anson had drawn close to his mother as a child, but he had not found what he wanted. He missed the love of a father and it was this missing element now that drew him on, breaking the hold of his hesitation.

  He stepped inside, into darkness. Will I feel my father’s nearness here at the scene of his violent end? An unseen barrier like a web wrapped around him and resisted his skin. It made him tingle. Was his father’s ghost here to greet him? He doubted it. A man so committed to disproving the afterlife would flatly turn down the job.

  Anson’s eyes grew accustomed to the gloom. He discovered a scene of the Vizier holding an easel and brush, thoughtfully composing a document. That too was like his father. During the brief time he had been with the family, his father had constantly removed himself to his study to write or to read.

  The carved and painted world wrapped around Anson. It was like an embrace, but if it was an embrace from his father then it was the first his father had given him since he’d left the family.

  Anson’s eye fell on scenes of hunting in marshes teeming with fish, crocodiles and hippos. The Vizier, wife at his side, balanced on a light, papyrus skiff. Looking left, Anson saw the tomb owner harpooning fish.

  He wondered if the killer who had attacked his father had set eyes on the same scenes.

  “Unlike your father, Mereruka enjoyed a little recreational relief,” Kalila said.

  “It may look that way,” he murmured. “But it’s probably just magical symbolism. This scene represents Mereruka’s resistance to the forces of chaos and served to protect the place from the incursion of destructive forces.”

  “Then it didn’t work,” she said. “Not for your father anyway.”

  Mereruka launched a throw-stick into the air at a flock of waterfowl. Anson could almost hear the flutter of waterfowl taking off from the reeds.

  They went on through a pillared hall and a room dominated by a carved false door and then on to the main cult chapel.

  It opened into a chamber with six square pillars. A striking statue of the great man himself strode forward from his niche, a kilt with a stiffened apron around his waist. The statue of Mereruka appeared to jump out at them.

  Anson confronted it as if demanding an explanation from him. What had happened here?

  So alive, he thought, yet those sightless eyes expressed only complacent ownership. The Vizier did not look like a man who would concern himself with the fate of a tomb intruder in the twenty-first century.

  Anson inspected the steps where his father’s body had fallen. Steps leading… where? To oblivion? He expected to see blood, but it was spotless.

  On an impulse, he bent and placed the flat of his hands on the cool stone. He sighed.

  Kalila noticed.

  “Do you feel something there?”

  “Just regrets.”

  This was where it had all ended for his father and where a bigger mystery had begun. Someone came out of the shadows to silence his voice. He’d paid for his theories of the afterlife with his own life, died right here on these steps in front of the statue of the Old Kingdom Vizier.

  What a contrast, he reflected. A man of the ancient world stepping forward in confidence, affirming his belief in survival after death, while at his feet lay a man of the twenty-first century who expected oblivion… who was right in the end?

  Anson threw a glance to the columns bearing reliefs of Mereruka.

  The striding figure in profile seemed beyond time and decay. The Hittite, Greek, Persian, Roman and British empires had all come and gone while the Vizier had continued to move steadfastly through eternity.

  It was a reminder that the Egyptians really believed, he thought. People were wrong to imagine that cynical priests pretended to believe and merely went through the motions when they presented offerings and prayers and burnt incense in front of this door. They believed unshakeably in an afterlife. They lived in an age where humankind and gods, the living and the dead, and the forces of good and evil, existed side by side in two parts that held the universe together. In today’s age that denied god and laughed at the devil, people could not see both sides. But they needed to believe in the light and the shadow and to hold both in their minds, not least the shadow. The shadow gave things shape and form. Without it there was just blinding, unrelieved glare like the sunlit desert outside.

  Was Mereruka’s afterworld a physical place? Or just a different r
eality, a sort of virtual world created by a civilization’s collective unconscious and sustained by its religion? Mereruka did not question its existence.

  ‘Do I believe in survival after death?’ Anson asked himself. ‘Perhaps not, when I think about it. But what about when I don’t think about it, but merely feel it, at a deeper level?’

  Everyone knew that the Egyptians were preoccupied with the afterlife, but they took it even more seriously than many imagined. Humans, they said, were the only creatures that must live life with the knowledge that one day they’re going to die and our culture was the world of distraction we create around ourselves to shield us from this knowledge. But the Egyptians’ culture did not serve as a mere distraction to the pitiless cruelty of death. Instead their culture came to grips with death in an attempt to overcome its tyranny. This doorway and statue, the glowing underworlds of the tombs, the Books of Coming Forth By Day, or the Book of the Dead as they called these religious texts - were the results of government-funded research into the ‘first mystery’- death and the afterlife. The early pyramids were like nationally financed space-shots designed to launch the god-king pharaoh into the hereafter. The Egyptians even had maps showing the routes to the underworld painted on the bases of coffins.

  The unconscious psyche believes in life after death Carl Jung asserted.

  Anson recalled that the doctor and founder of analytical psychology had written of a near-death experience after a heart attack and had reported a spiritual existence outside of his body.

  The images of the afterlife carved on the tomb walls around him urged Anson to believe.

  But the veil of mystery remained.

  Perhaps we were not meant to know the truth so that we could endure this life.

  Chapter 20

  KALILA HAD BOOKED them into the Cairo Marriott, a palatial hotel set in gardens on the island of Zamalek, overlooking the Nile. It had been built by the Khedive Ismail at the time of the opening of the Suez Canal - a palace that formed the central building of the hotel, its antique-filled surroundings still recalling past glory.

  Darkness and a smoggy haze now hung like mystery over the six acres of formal gardens of the hotel and it made Anson feel as if he were trying to peer into the past through a powerful lens.

  They had arrived back tired after a long day and since it was rather late to eat in one of the restaurants, they decided to order through room service. Kalila drew Anson aside in the lobby and the two went for a coffee in the coffee lounge.

  As she sipped a macchiato in a small glass, a dark and strong coffee with just a stain of cream, he noticed a tiny stylised tattoo on the skin of her wrist. On such a young woman it might have appeared like punk ornamentation, but a cross on the wrist was a sign worn by many Coptic Christians.

  “Abuna made it clear that we must tell nobody of his approach, or of our meeting tonight, so we’re going to have to be careful when we slip out later,” she said. Her eyes shone with intrigue. “I’m eager to hear what he has to tell us.”

  “You knew this monk?”

  “I was with your father when he drove to see him once. We met him at the Baramus monastery.”

  “You know a great deal more about my father than I do.”

  “Your father was very kind to young students and we enjoyed an odd relationship… intellectually speaking,” she added quickly. “I was a postgraduate student and I suppose I was one of his protégés, but no, that sounds too favoured. I was more of a Devil’s Advocate, except he liked to play the role of the devil himself. I was his East, you see, and I don’t mean the Middle East. I was his opposite, the East to his West, the fervent believer versus his secular man of science. He said he liked me for balance, but I think he needed me for the provocation he fed on.”

  “He was certainly no believer.”

  “Are you a man of beliefs?” she said.

  “Tragically so. I believe in far too many things for most people’s comfort, mostly things that others don’t believe in. But if you’re talking about God, I like to keep an open mind.”

  This answer did not seem to impress her as being a philosophy with particular virtue.

  “You say that with pride. Yet you need a degree of commitment. A totally open mind never won much loyalty - or eternal life.”

  “Hope you’re wrong. An afterlife is an option I’d prefer to keep open. I’m kind of hoping my father got it wrong about the afterlife, that it wasn’t just something dreamed up by the ancient Egyptians.”

  “Your father’s ideas threatened people’s beliefs,” she said. She had a shyly abrupt way of speaking. “People who have far from open minds. Your father received threats.”

  “Do you know who threatened him?”

  “Zealots, I suppose, but I don’t know who.”

  “You’ve worked on digs in Egypt with him.”

  “Yes, but not for a few seasons now.”

  “What was he like? On a dig, I mean?”

  “Didn’t he ever take you?” You are his son. She left the words unsaid.

  “My father left us when I was a child,” he said. “I think the harmony and domesticity of a family life were not to his taste. He preferred the life of academic controversy and notoriety.”

  She explored his face and seemed to read his regrets.

  “I’m sorry. He did talk about you though, you know. He noted your work. But you ask what he was like on a dig. Meticulous, I can tell you. A dig with Professor Hunter, no matter how insignificant - it could be just clearing an ancient causeway in Abydos or the perimeter of a ruined temple in the Fayoum - had all the romance of cleaning up your bedroom as a child under the watchful eye of your mother. He liked to do archaeology the old fashioned way. With his hands. We had plenty of arguments. I often tried to move him on to modern techniques, like computer technology. On one dig, I convinced him to give computer science a try. It was in Saqqara and we used sonic imaging in the search for a Sixth Dynasty official’s tomb. With the help of a computer expert, we set out chains of geophones and receivers along the ground, like baited long-lines set to catch fish. They recorded signals sent by microwave to a mobile computer suite with processing software that produced three-dimensional images of any volume discovered under the surface. Much good it did us! Even though we were able to read immediate results of the imaging on a laptop, we were looking in the wrong place. Instead, your father found the burial site, fifty yards away, locating it not with the aid of science, but with a sense of where things might be. He had the sharp eye of a bird of prey, a grasp of space and possibility and a sense of what could lie beneath the surface of things. His eye would go over a site like a spy satellite while his mind seemed to print out the topography in a series of grids, which he would analyse, classify, compare, match and select, square by square.”

  “I’m wondering who did this to him,” he said. “If there really is a conspiracy going on, who is behind it? Who would want to kill my father?”

  “Somebody who wanted to silence him. Stop his work and the promulgation of his discoveries, I suppose.”

  The possibilities were as dark and heady as the elixir that he sipped gratefully, but not nearly as palatable.

  “Who do you believe cared that deeply about my father’s revelations in Egypt to kill him?”

  “Muslims, Jews, Christians. You choose.”

  “That’s half the religious world.”

  “Start at the very top.”

  “The Pope?” he joked.

  She frowned. “I don’t think Pope Kyrellos would resort to killing.”

  “Kyrellos?” he said puzzled. Then he understood. She was referring to the new Coptic Primate of Egypt, Pope Cyril VII. There was a parallel papacy in the world, he recalled. Cyril was a Byzantine-looking man with a twin beard, like his predecessor Shenouda, and ornate regalia, the East answering the West like a view in an antique and oblique mirror.

  “Sorry, I thought you meant the other Pope and I’ve already ruled out the Catholic Church on this one. I can�
��t quite buy the idea of their involvement. Powerful though it may be, Catholicism surely cannot lie at the bottom of every religious conspiracy.”

  “Your father’s work challenged the belief systems of three faiths. If he had found the proof he was claiming to have found - and, if he did, he certainly kept it a secret from me - then it could be a zealot from any one of those faiths who attacked him.”

  He smacked his lips over the coffee.

  “Radical Christianity, Islam, even Zionism? Okay, let’s start with Christians. Who? A secret sect you mean, or organized religion itself?”

  She shrugged.

  “Ultra-conservative Christian forces.”

  “And Muslims?”

  “The idea of a paradisiacal life after death is central to Islam with its Al-Akhira, the hereafter, rather like Christianity with its heaven and Judaism with its Olam Ha-Ba, the world to come. Islam teaches that the human soul is not extinguished when the believer dies, but continues to live between one's death and the resurrection when one’s soul and body are reunited. The Koran promises that the blessed obedient can expect to enjoy paradise and a sensual existence in beautiful mansions after death.”

  “Yes, and I’ve no doubt that holding out such a motivation helps keep the faithful in line. Without it why would they bother to follow the precepts of their religion? I can see why certain people have become anxious.”

  “Very anxious,” she said.

  In his hotel room in a tower block, Anson poured himself a whisky and water and for a while he stood in dreamy reflection, gazing at the wavy lines of alcohol in the glass. What a day. After his meeting at the Supreme Council of Antiquities and tour of the Cairo museum, they had visited the pyramids at Saqqara - the ancient Egyptians’ most convincing bid for eternity - and finally the mastaba tomb of Mereruka.