THE SMITING TEXTS

by Roy Lester Pond

  “Perhaps they were an emphatic attempt by the king to elevate himself to the scale of a god, dwarfing mere humankind,” Anson said. “But statues were also loci for survival, another hope for life after death, transmuting materiality into spirit. Likenesses provided alternative houses for the soul.” He looked up at the giant faces. “Unlike say the images of American Presidents depicted in giant scale at Mt Rushmore, these statues are not decorative or even memorial. Through magic, the Egyptians attempted to transmute matter into spirit. Statues like this were vehicles through which the dead pharaoh could take material shape. In front of these lips, priests performed the most important ritual in Egyptian religion, the ceremonial opening of the mouth. Using either an adze or two little fingers of meteoric iron they would touch the lips four times, re-enacting the clearing of a baby’s mouth at birth, and this would be accompanied by the sacrifice of a bull and the presentation of a foreleg and heart. A similar ceremony opened the king’s eyes. Statues were imbued with life, which explains why they called the Egyptian sculptor: 'he who makes to live’. There was no art for art’s sake. Nothing was fashioned for its sheer aesthetics. Everything was fashioned for a magical purpose and charged with the purpose for which it was made. That’s why their work defies reproduction. And that’s why their art holds such a fascination. It is imbued with heka, magical force, the animistic, motive power of the universe. Jewellery was not just jewellery, but prophylactic charms, statues were never vanity portraits, but houses for the soul, tombs were not painted to brighten the darkness of the underworld but to harness the power of heka. Death, ultimately, was the inspiration of all Egyptian art, or at least eternal life after death, about embodying eternity to create a home in which the soul of the dead could survive. In place of flesh they built themselves bodies in paint, wood and stone. And here, gazing down on us in monumental stone, is Egypt’s confidence, writ large, in the existence of the afterlife.”

  “The temple of Abu Simbel represents one the greatest feats of rescue archaeology in history,” the voice of a nearby Egyptian guide informed his group of sightseers, as they approached the temple’s entrance. “Threatened by the rising water of the Aswan Dam, this entire temple complex, with its colossal seated statues and its painted and carved interiors, was cut into thirty-ton blocks and reassembled two hundred feet higher up. It was an unprecedented enterprise in rescue archaeology. An international team of engineers from UNESCO, along with Egyptians, achieved the feat.

  “And yet they realigned the temple so precisely that twice a year, the rays of the morning sun shine through the doorway and penetrate the columns and halls to find a shrine deep inside, illuminating the forms of four gods who sit in darkness, one of them the deified Rameses.”

  Anson went with the group into the coolness of the temple, numbed by the heat outside and the scale of the structure. The entranceway opened up into a vast hypostyle hall divided by aisles of pillars. On the inner side of the pillars, statues of Rameses soared to the roof, holding a crook and scourge in his crossed arms.

  “Egyptian guides will tell you stories of Rameses the Great and his invincible valour at the battle of Kadesh, where he claimed to have annihilated the Hittites. Not entirely true,” he murmured to Bloem. “It was a victory of sorts, but ended in a stalemate for Rameses. He faced the humiliation of signing the world’s first peace treaty, a mutual non-aggression pact, with Egypt’s powerful enemy.”

  They passed on into the deeper shadow of the temple. Anson felt the shadows surround and enter him.

  Was this structure the clue that Daniel had revealed? A building at the furthest reaches of Egypt, the Nubian border, a building more impressive than the pyramids?

  Light and shadow, he thought. Life and death. No other people in history were so conscious of stark duality, reflected in the contrast of fertile river farmland and barren desert beyond. And it was this line of demarcation between life and death that became his father’s special province of study.

  They came to the famous smiting scene of Rameses on a temple wall. The pharaoh stood poised with a mace to smash in the skulls of a clutch of vile foreigners.

  The scene brought back memories of Anson’s PowerPoint presentation that day at Johns Hopkins University. The dim lighting and the drone-like buzz of the visitors’ voices inside the temple added a sinister, dream-like mood to the scene on the wall, as if it were the vision of an attack in a nightmare.

  Bloem felt it too.

  “He looks pretty mean with that club.”

  “He was meant to.”

  Anson found the sunlight painful when he came out of the temple and went across a patch of rocky ground to a neighbouring temple, built as a shrine to Queen Nefertari. Inside this secondary temple, feminine images caught his eye, carved on walls and columns, depictions of the queen in the company of Egyptian goddesses wearing narrow sheath dresses.

  As they came out of the temple, he whispered to Kalila: “Where is the clue? What do we look for? My father has been here many times, no doubt, but did he see something here?”

  She gave a helpless shrug. “Egypt is a vast country filled with amazing structures, each, in its own way, as impressive as the pyramids. Clues to his discovery could be here or anywhere. On the other hand, this may just be a place he liked to visit.”

  “Could the temple itself be a clue? Is there something carved on a wall?”

  “I wish I knew. I wish Emory had been more explicit.”

  “I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised. He was always a mystery to me,” he said. “And now he’s mystifying me from beyond the grave.”

  The scale of the place crushed Anson’s optimism and he felt himself sag under the weight of expectation. Could he really hope to unearth the truth about a shadowy conspiracy or about his father’s murder for that matter?

  The statues of Rameses gave no clues as they gazed out complacently over the shimmering lake.

  “How is your fact-finding tour going, gentlemen?” Anson said to the Americans, who were squinting in the sunshine.

  A group of intelligence community folk was not the most appreciative audience for a journey through ancient history. They looked hot and out of their element. “Maybe you’d prefer a change of scene,” he said. “Come with me. I’ll show you something that is pure spy movie territory.”

  Anson had a word with the SCA woman who arranged for them to enter an anonymous doorway at the side of the giant statues of Rameses that was closed to the public. They entered a narrow tube-like passageway. It led them, footsteps ringing, into the heart of an artificially created mountain, a vast dome of reinforced concrete, built to house the entire structure of the temple.

  It was like walking onto the set of a sixties James Bond movie – the wide-screen spectacle of a villains’ lair hidden inside an island volcano, under a gigantic concrete roof and ringed by skeletal gantries and walkways

  Chapter 27

  THE YOUNG SCA woman explained.

  “The dome above this Great Temple is the largest man-made concrete dome in the world, with a circumference of sixty metres and a height of twenty-two metres. An artificially created mountain supports the temple complex and is covered with rock, soil and sand, to form the mountain, which holds these massive temples.”

  They stood on a high walkway and gaped around the echoing space of the dome.

  “Cool,” Ears said, impressed. “Where’s Doctor Evil?”

  The Americans squinted up at the curving concrete vault as if expecting to see a sliding roof that could grind open under hydraulics to release a missile from a silo below. Here was the spectre of a threat that they could believe in.

  From the walkway they could also gaze down on the interior of the temple. From their position they could see how the temple had been reassembled like a monster Lego kit. Humming air-conditioning plants explained the relative coolness of the temple interior.

  Even Bloem looked impressed.

  Several maintenance people were at work in the building, he notice
d.

  It happened in a blur, yet Anson saw it in slow motion.

  Bloem moved aside to the edge of the walkway to let two Egyptian men go past. They looked like workmen, dressed in grimy blue galabeas. As Bloem leaned out at the rail, they bent. One grabbed his leg and the other grabbed him under the arm and they hefted him like a big sack over the rail, fully intending him to land head first on the concrete below. Bloem gave a yell that batted around the dome and made a wild grab with one hand as he went over. He hooked on the rail and it put a brake on his fall. His body slammed against the outside of the walkway and set it ringing.

  Anson made a grab for Bloem’s wrist. From the corner of his eye he saw Browning and Eyes dive at the attackers, who fled, clattering down the walkway.

  “I’ve got you,” Anson said.

  Ears came to his aid, clamping onto the arm of Bloem.

  Anson looked down into the wide and wild eyes of the swinging man. It was like holding on to a pyramid block.

  Did they have to toss this one over? he thought, feeling the sweating hand begin to slip.

  They inched Bloem up and things got a little easier when he managed to swing another hand onto the rail of the walkway. With the arrival of help from Kalila and Saneya they heaved the very-nearly-dead-weight back to safety. The height of the fall may not have been lethal, but at the angle of his descent, Bloem would most likely have broken his neck. At best he’d have been put out of action.

  “Right of way isn’t a big thing in this country, but that didn’t look like clumsiness,” Anson said.

  “Let me get my hands on those bastards,” Bloem said. He ran off, clattering along the walkway. They followed.

  Who were the attackers and why had they picked on Big Bloem? Did they know that he was the leader of the intelligence team? Anson wondered as he ran. Somebody clearly wanted to thin out the group.

  They emerged at the back of the mountain, blinking in bright sunlight,

  Browning and Eyes were standing in a clearing, puzzled looks on their faces, inspecting streams of tourists who were coming and going from the temples.

  The two attackers had melted away.

  “The whole site is covered by CCTV,” Saneya said. “We can try to track them down.”

  “Forget it,” Bloem said in a growl. “Let’s call it a freakish accident.”

  “A freakish accident,” Anson said.

  But calling it that didn’t quite explain it away.

  Chapter 28

  ‘The Other Egypt’ – Anson Hunter’s blog

  WE TRAVELLED back to the airport in the bus, gazing out at the blinding waste of the desert that stretched away on either side. I found myself thinking of the goddess who regarded Nubia and all foreign lands as her property, Hathor.

  From time immemorial Egyptians had penetrated the desert in search of her sacred stone, turquoise, particularly in the Sinai where mining expeditions built a distant shrine at Serabit el-Khadim, dedicated to the patron goddess of miners and quarrymen. The turquoise droplets must have seemed like a mockery of moisture to the ancient criminals and captives of war who dug the nodules out of fissures of sandstone in the desert. These same men prayed for the protection of Hathor, ‘Mistress of Turquoise’, ‘She who shows her loveliness when the rock is split’.

  Would the goddess have cared that they gave their sweat and lives to mine her precious stones, so that rich ladies in Egypt, her devotees, could grace their necks with sumptuous broad collars of turquoise, their arms with turquoise bracelets, their fingers with rings inlaid with turquoise? Did the captives, dazed with thirst and heat, ever raise their eyes from their work in the mining camps to the turquoise sky and rock-strewn horizon and imagine that perhaps they glimpsed Hathor overlooking them from the dazzle? Did they picture her as an ardent young woman under a sycamore tree, or in the form of a lioness of the desert, Sekhmet-Hathor? Perhaps I am in an apocalyptic mood, but as I travel through Egypt with this group I am thinking more and more about the story of Hathor. Hathor-Sekhmet was the goddess with two faces, one, Hathor, the Sweet One, goddess of sexual love, joy, music and intoxication, the other, Hathor-Sekhmet, the terrible lioness of annihilation, sent by Ra to destroy humankind, when he uttered his smiting execration to punish them for their rebelliousness.

  In her marauding stage they called her The Confused One in the Night.

  Were there times when Hathor slipped from one state to another? One phase, goddess of love, shining in her beauty, and the next a wild and dreadful lioness of destruction. What would it have been like to come across Hathor, the young woman, and not know that she hid another side?

  For those with a mythological bent, I am uploading a piece of speculation about what it might have been like to run into this volatile and apocalyptic female entity and share her company, unawares. [Click to read - or move on...]

  Hathor’s Holocaust.

  The young bowman stopped at the river’s edge to listen to the sounds of papyrus reeds clashing in a breeze.

  Se-sheh-shet, they seemed to whisper, se-sheh-shet.

  Then something sharper stirred the reeds. There it was again, a sound of movement in the reeds almost like the crackle of flames.

  The hunter parted the reeds. Here, near the river, the stench of death and decay had thinned, cleaned by the early evening breath of the north wind.

  He had come down to the river to rinse away the taste of dry clay at the back of his throat. Dust blown across the valley from high in the atmosphere of the western desert, said to be the breath of the lioness goddess, had filled the sky. It threw a pall over the valley.

  What had he heard? Something was dragging itself through the reeds. Crocodile? Or that other force of elemental chaos, a hippopotamus?

  In a smooth, protective action, he drew an arrow from a quiver, attached to a belt around his kilt, and nocked it to the string of his bow. He searched the base of the thicket, looking for the scale-net pattern of a crocodile’s flank. He drew the bow to be ready, edging nearer, using the tip of the arrow to move aside a tall papyrus stem, its umbel a feathery triangle like the delta of a woman.

  The bowman’s eye, narrowing to focus beyond the bronze arrow tip, widened in surprise. Instead of an animal, he found himself regarding the slithering form of a young woman on her belly. She was moving down the bank to the water. He went still closer, parting the reeds with an elbow. She was splattered with blood.

  Someone - still alive.

  A fish jumped. A dragonfly darted away. He saw her stretch her neck. Long hair swung down in lappets to trail in the water, hiding her face. He heard lapping and sucking. Was she a chance survivor or another dying victim of the pestilence? A dying one, he guessed. She must be injured for she was splattered with blood. The soles of her feet were crimson as if stained with henna, but it was blood. There had been no other survivors in the trail of destruction he had been following for days.

  Maybe he should end her suffering quickly with an arrow. All it would take would be a slackening of his fingers. Oblivion would slide into her body with little more shock than the cold ache of water going into her stomach.

  But his spirit had become stretched taut as his bowstring against death. No more killing. It was as if he had been walking through the scene of a battlefield for weeks. Bodies of the dead choked villages and towns and fields like rising mud-waters of the inundation.

  He could taste death along with dust in his throat. The desert that on two sides hemmed in a land that was green and sweetly verdant - the oasis civilization of Egypt - was now like the sides of a coffin entombing a dying people. Too late, inhabitants had fled to the hills to hide, but the scorching eye of destruction had followed them there too, striking with claw and with fever, leaving some to die in their own blood, others in the rictus of plague. The path of destruction was moving upstream, the hunter observed.

  He watched the survivor. A young woman, probably a noblewoman or a temple priestess, judging by the remnants of a sheer linen dress, now blood-splattered and
clinging to her body, and by the turquoise bracelets on her arms. She made soft gasps and snuffles as she drank.

  Here was Egypt, all of beautiful, dying Egypt, captured in one young woman crawling on her belly to suck at Mother Nile. Unexpectedly tender feelings stirred and grasped the strong young man, like the thicket of papyrus plants that crowded him, murmuring and shushing as though to calm a distressed child.

  Se-Sheh-Shet, the reeds whispered softly in the breeze.

  The feelings that stretched his heart with sympathy were the feelings he imagined a father would have for a helpless child, although he did not know what it was to be a father. Tears stung the bowman’s eyes. The clear symbolism of what he saw prodded him like the pointed finger of scripture. Here beneath him stretched a proud young woman, like this once proud land, brought low by catastrophe. Such awful symbolism was unmistakably the language of the god to humankind, he thought, with a jolt of recognition. The god was telling him. You and yours have brought this on yourselves. The symmetry of the lesson had the sharpness of a spear tip to the throat.

  It was because of the rebellion of man that the god had sent this judgement. And now he, Kha, had been sent on the most impossible mission since the creation - to stop an apocalypse. He had been sent by the god’s prophet, the One with the Sidelock of Heliopolis. But could a man armed with a bow, even though he was protected by a much vaunted, amuletic collar of turquoise, hope to stop the course of divine destruction?

  I don’t know if I can save Egypt, he thought. But I would like to save this girl. It was not only gods who could focus their mind in a reverberating symbol. He could do it too. Damn you gods and damn you Ra. I throw your symbolism in your crumbling, rotting old teeth. I have not saved a soul yet, but I will save this woman if I can, Kha thought, if for no other reason than to defy divine vengeance.

  He marvelled at his own rage. How could any man dare to feel anger for a god, he wondered, yet was it not because of this very rebellion of spirit that Ra had struck in anger? Enraged, Ra had decided to visit his vengeance on humankind, seeking no less than their complete annihilation. They would die for their rebellion, drowning in a flood of pestilence and bloodshed.