Chapter 45
‘The Other Egypt’ – Anson Hunter’s blog.
AS I WENT with my group into the Valley of the Kings, the natural pyramid of the mountain behind rearing blinding white above us, as if cased in burnished limestone, I could not help reflecting on death and eternity. In the Valley of the Kings, ‘the Great Place’, there are sixty-two tombs, where rulers were buried for five hundred years.
There is more to affirm the afterlife here than any other patch of ground on earth. But it was not just the god-kings who believed that they would survive. We find a belief in a life beyond the grave present in the most ancient predynastic times, such as the Badarian and Naqada periods, where the dead were buried in the desert sand or in the rocks of the djebel with great care and ornamentation, along with their favourite possessions, jars, food, slate palettes weapons, and jewellery for use in the next life.
A belief in survival after death seems innate. The craftsmen, who laboured as if their lives depended on it, building the pyramids and carving out these glowing underworlds for their kings, did so because they truly did believe that their survival depended on it. Egypt was a collective society. If their god-king survived, so would they, through the king. Much as Christians today might believe that they will have eternal life through Christ.
Their glowing underworlds were once virtually images of the heaven we read about in Revelations and in the Koran… streets or paths of gold, the brilliance of gemstones, scenes of hovering seraphim and winged divinities? Do they disprove the existence of heaven? Or do they suggest that humankind had intimations of heaven even in the most remote ages?
Although we saw it several times in the distance today, within a bay of the western cliffs, we did not have time to visit the Temple of Deir el Bahari, the sublime, terraced temple of Hatshepsut with its famous Hathor-headed columns and elegant colonnades.
Yet the place brooded over me. I can never forget that this temple has a less than a sublime recent history. It was the setting of gunfire and murder. A terrorist group fell on tourists and Egyptians in the glare of this desert temple site, killing fifty-seven of them and injuring eighty, while the Hathor faces looked calmly on.
The goddess certainly lived up to her unpredictable mythological reputation on that terrible day.
Hathor’s Holocaust – final part
The Big Cat watched the walking bowman through the red haze that swarmed in front of her eyes. Morning sunlight winked on the collar around the youth’s neck. It was that brightness, that same bejewelled brightness that had gleamed on the red periphery of her vision that had brought her to the river. Should she attack? In a few bounds she could take both the youth and the donkey.
No, keep the shining thing at a distance. What was one more man and a donkey? She wanted death on a larger scale. There was an encampment in the hills, men women and children. She licked her lips. Let the Eye of Ra seek them out and scorch them.
She ran out of the estate and through a field of palms towards the hills. “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!”
Flies were crawling in the sticky blood when Kha came upon the encampment in the hills.
The Big Cat had been through it like a roaring windstorm of annihilation, ripping out throats, clawing, tearing, so that bodies looked flayed with blood. Nothing moved here, except flies, filling the air with the sound of restless futility and despair.
The donkey tugged against its rope, jerking Kha's arm, and gave a morose bray.
How long ago had she been through here? Her spoor, blood-stained, ran away towards a broken line of rocks like battlements in the desert. He tethered the donkey’s rope to a jutting rock, leaving the beast in a patch of shade and set off, running lightly along the sand, nocking an arrow to his bowstring as he went.
She had not run far, but rested in the shade, licking the blood from her paws. He came upon her with startling suddenness on the far side of a rock and he thought at first that she was an outcrop, bulking out of the sand. He had found her side-on, a perfect target against the rock-strewn sand. He was downwind and she had not seen him, but in the shock of seeing her his mind was seized not with her scale, the powerful sphinx-like paws and blood-foamed jaws, but with a detail - a shoulder-knot of hair that was shaped like a rosette in her golden hide. It was the same motif he had seen on the dress of the girl, he recalled, as time stood still.
He would aim to one side of the knot, angling deep into her heart.
Kha bent the bow and drew the arrow to the anchor point of his chin.
Meet death, Great Cat, as it slides cold and deep into your heart.
“Master, master!” A voice came over the rise. “Bek, hurry. Reach your lord and warn him in time!”
The lioness turned eyes on Kha and it was as if the desert itself had turned its eyes to glare at him, gold-shimmer slashes of mystery and hate, flecked with red. They seemed to smother him in their smoking gaze, choking his breath like dust. Blood stained her jaws and her bared teeth. Blood and saliva streamed down the fur of her throat. She was the nemesis of Egypt, all the horror and ruin of divine rage.
You shall die, Great Cat. He loosed the arrow, but the cat bounded away as if under the force of a spring. She ran into a shadow line of rocks and passed from view.
“Master, master...”
Bek was panting as he ran up to Lord Kha’s side.
“Bek, go away!” the servant snarled at himself, seeing the look on his master’s face. “What are you doing here when you were given strict instructions? Look, your Lord is angry. You have frightened the quarry away.”
“Why have you come?” Kha said coldly. Inexplicably he almost felt relief. His legs were shaking like reeds. Shooting an arrow into the side of the great cat of destruction now seemed like a shocking act, an impious act, like daring an elemental force - a lightning storm or an earthquake. It shocked him that he had come so close to doing it. What temerity. A man against the destroyer of humankind!
“The cat. I saw it come out of the shrine. It followed you and then went ahead. It was in the garden shrine. With us!”
Kha’s heart leapt with fear as he remembered the girl. Was she lying back there in a pool of blood?
“Sesheshet -?”
“Safe. She lies still as a dead fish, but alive. But I said to myself: Bek, how could a cat come out of the shrine when only she was in there? What evil is this?”
“The cat came for me. She knows I am hunting her and is now watching me. I must go back to the shrine.”
“But this girl and the cat are mixed up.”
“What are you saying?”
“Tell the master what you fear, Bek. That she is the cat and the cat is she.”
“You’re the one who is mixed up.”
“But, Lord, the cat came right out of the shrine, yet never touched her.”
“It never touched you, either, I see, except to scare you out of your wits. Clearly the cat was hiding at the back of the shrine. She must have holed up there for the night.”
“You mean death was sleeping with us all night? Oh holy Ra! Your servant is protected beyond all deserving!”
They followed the cat’s spoor, but all they met was a trail of further destruction, a goatherd lying dead on a hill, a few girls at a valley well lying dead beside their smashed water jars.
They followed the cat’s spoor until the sun sank low, then weary and disappointed, Kha turned his head back to base.
He kept thinking about the shrine and wondering if the lioness had been hidden in there with them overnight. There were alcoves, recesses, places he had not bothered to explore. To think that they might have slept so close to death and destruction and never known it! His dream about the cat leaked back into his thoughts. Perhaps he had felt her breath on his face in his sleep. She must move as silently as shadows for he could not recall hearing anything, though like all good huntsmen, he slept lightly.
He had thoug
ht Egypt was safe under his protection! Yet he could have woken up in the morning to find the girl’s throat torn out.
He shuddered and quickened his pace. He would make the shrine his home again that night and hope that the cat would not plan to do the same. But this time, if she did, he would be ready for her.
She crawled to the edge of the ornamental pond and bent her head to lap and suck at the water between blue lotus flowers. When she'd had her fill and the ripples had spread, the surface of the water drew tight and calm and she saw her face as if in a bronze mirror.
It was smeared with blood.
But the hunter had washed her! How was it that she was again flecked with blood? How was it that again there was a haze of red in front of her eyes? She had a vague memory of a jewel shining and of people screaming and the flash of claws. When had she left the shrine? It was late afternoon now. The hunter Kha. He must still be at the hunt. Was he safe? Maybe he would be returning soon.
The villa. She would go there and find pretty clothes and make-up and perfumes. There would be dead ones there, she guessed, but she was growing used to them, even though it seemed obscene to one whose heart was made for mirth and music, drink and love. She didn’t want the youth to see her like this.
What was it about him that called to her? His beauty? He was shamefully handsome for a male, with a face like a strong, beautiful girl and a power of confidence in his abilities. As she thought of him she saw a mental image of him in the water. She saw him walking, followed by a donkey and the plump, smooth-limbed servant. Glints on the water struck spangles off the hunter’s turquoise necklace. He tried to save me from the crocodile. Was that the attraction? She saw the bow in his hand, the grim, weary look of his mouth. He had failed in his hunt. The necklace. He looked so fine in the necklace. She must have it! Perhaps she could win it from him tonight. But not in this state.
She got up and went through the grove to the house.
The nobles of this estate had fled, but the servants were still at their posts. She found a dead handmaiden in an airy apartment that was evidently the bedchamber of the mistress of the house. Good. There were boxes of cosmetics and clothes.
If Kha thought her attractive before, she would strike him dumb now. She ignored the dead handmaiden and found the bathroom, stone-lined to protect the mud-brick walls and there she also found a tall jar of water. She undressed and used a smaller jar to scoop showers of cold water over herself.
She wished the handmaiden could help her.
She found a gala wig, threaded with gold. It had a decorative headband. The wig made an architectural frame of her face. She would add a blue lotus flower from the ornamental pond outside, she decided. She found a pot of kohl with a long brush inside and used it to line her eyes like the outlines of fish, sweeping them up at the corners. She found a pot of green malachite and shaded her eyelids. She painted her lips with a fine brush and added big gold earrings like yellow suns emerging from the lappets of the wig.
She chose a sheer, close fitting sheath dress that left her right breast bare, full, firm and globe-like.
Yes, I could make a stone statue turn now, she thought, inspecting herself in the mirror with satisfaction.
'Put on your wig and make-up and spend a pleasant hour with me,' the lover wrote.
Sweet of love is the daughter of the king! Black are her tresses as the blackness of the night, Black as the wine-grapes are the clusters of her hair, The hearts of the women turn towards her with delight, Gazing on her beauty with which none can compare...
The gauzy dress, caught at her waist, allowed a glimpse of the pink haze of her left breast beneath. Could the hunter deny her wishes now? She added perfume, feathery and mysterious. She wondered about slipping on sandals, but looking down the tapering dress to her long, narrow feet peeping out, she preferred the effect. Goddesses went barefoot, charging the ground with their musk.
Fair are her arms in the softly swaying dance, Fairer by far is her bosom’s rounded swell! The hearts of the men are as water at her glance, Fairer is her beauty than mortal tongue could tell.
All that was missing was that necklace of fine turquoise stones. But that would be hers after tonight.
Kha had washed at the river and, as he came along the road to the estate, he was still wiping his face on a cloth, but when he saw her standing at the doorway of the shrine, the cloth dropped from his hand and fluttered to the ground like a bird hit with a throwing stick.
The hearts of the men are as water at her glance, Fairer is her beauty than mortal tongue could tell.
He bent to retrieve it, his eyes sweeping the length of her body. She gave Kha a look that would turn his limbs to water. She saw him swallow. She felt her power.
“Sesheshet? Is that you?”
“Welcome, brave young hunter. We will have no soldier's beer and bread tonight. Come and see the repast I have prepared for my returning hero." She gave a glare to the servant, warning him to stay where he was.
“Bek, don't go ogling. Tether the donkeys, Bek. Soldier's beer is good enough for you.”
Kha went past her at an awed and respectful distance, yet he could not take his eyes off her.
“Look at the table, Kha.”
With an effort, he did. On the table were jars of wine, fruits and vegetables and baby fowl roasted in honey. His mouth hung open. Good, she thought. She would fill it now with food and then with kisses. “Tell me about your hunt. It did not go well,” she said sympathetically.
“I saw her. For the first time I saw the cat, Sesheshet. But I did nothing.”
“Sit and drink.” She poured him a cup of wine and some for herself. He drank and the colour returned to his cheeks. “My poor Kha. Don't think of it. Think of love tonight. And poetry. A young man in his blush of youth like you must know poetry. What love poems do you know?”
He frowned, measuring her mood, like a Nile boatman taking a reading of the river’s depth with a rod. There was no bottom to the depth of those eyes. He wanted to resist but couldn't. He cleared his throat and said:
Oh my beautiful one, I wish I were your mirror, so that you always looked at me. I wish I were your garment so that you would always wear me. I wish I were the water that washes your body. I wish I were the unguent, O woman, that I could anoint you. And the bands around your breasts, and the beads around your neck I wish I were your sandal that you would step on me!" Then he went to another text: “When I embrace her and her arms are open I feel like a man in incense land who is immersed in scent. When I kiss her and her lips are open I rejoice without ever having drunk beer...
“A woman's love was no less passionately expressed,” she said.
Sweet, sweet, sweet as honey in the mouth, His kisses on my lips, my breast, my hair; But now my heart is as the sun-scorched South, Where lie the fields deserted, grey and bare.
Come! Come! Come! And kiss me when I die, For Life - compelling life - is in thy breath; And at that kiss, though in the tomb I lie. I will arise and break the bands of Death.
“You rival any goddess, Sesheshet.”
“Surely not the beauty of Hathor?”
“Even Hathor.”
She took his hand and drew him to her and they kissed. She opened her lips just like the love poem and felt the tremble of his desire for her. She wanted to love him in the passionate way she felt, but she held back and merely tempted him, beguiling him. Yes he was granite, warm, blazing granite and she loved the feel of him.
‘Sweet, sweet, sweet as honey in the mouth, His kisses on my lips, my breast, my hair’...
She came close and touched his chin and slid cool fingers down his neck to the necklace. Her fingers took hold of a turquoise bead.
“Give to me the thing I desire, Kha. And I will give you more than you dream.”
“And be damned?” he whispered. “Must I let Egypt die, to possess Egypt now?”
She darted forward and kissed him again.
He gave a sound of despair and his voice was dead when
he spoke. "You are doing this for a bauble.” He was silent for a long while.
“Will you not make a gift of it to me?”
“No.”
“Kha, I want it... I crave it. I don‘t know why. I am a weak woman.”
“And I am weak too, but I must be strong. To save you and to save Egypt.”
She had failed.
He barely slept that night, keeping a watch over the doorway and the girl.
He left the shrine only once, when his uncle, He with the Sidelock of Heliopolis, made a surprise appearance beside Bek. His uncle removed the cowl from his face and he saw the bald head and sober eyes in Bek’s lamplight. His uncle raised a finger to his lips and pointed to the sleeping girl. Kha went outside.
His heart was beating hard. Why had the high priest come here?
“Uncle...”
Ra-hotep took him by the arm and led him into the grove alone.
“Guard the door, Bek,” the chattering servant instructed himself. “It is not for your ears to learn why the high priest of Heliopolis comes to see a hunter and a piece of fish...”
“Why have you come?”
“Kha, sit,” the older man said in a grave voice.
They sat on a fallen column, a clay lamp on the ground between them. Kha was dismayed by his uncle’s manner. His uncle leaned sideways and hugged Kha and tears streamed down his sober face.
“What is it Uncle? What news do you bring? My family? My father and mother and little sister Tamit..?”
“All are well, Kha.”
“Then why do you cry?”
Ra-hotep raised eyes that were normally unflinching in their gaze, but they wavered to look at the young hunter. “I cry for you!”
“But I am safe. I still have the necklace. I will kill the cat soon. I am drawing closer to her. Our paths are crossing...”
THE SMITING TEXTS Page 18
