THE SMITING TEXTS

by Roy Lester Pond

  “They’ve already crossed. And you cannot kill her. I am not supposed to be here, Kha. You were not to know this, but I feel it is only fair that the choice be yours.”

  “Know what? What choice?”

  “You cannot kill the cat.”

  “But I almost did - today! I had her in my sights!”

  “No, it is not possible for you to kill her.”

  “But I have the necklace.”

  “The Menat is only meant to attract her and you have done that. She is with you. You have been the bait, Kha. The plan is that you will lead her into a trap where she - and you - will be sealed away forever.”

  “Sesheshet?”

  “Yes. Don’t you already know it?”

  “I saved her from the reeds. She is Egypt.”

  “She is the destroyer of Egypt. She is the destroyer of humankind. You are travelling with the Lady of Death, Sekhmet-Hathor. She is swinging from one aspect to another - by day marauding lioness, by night Hathor, the Sweet One.”

  Kha remembered her drinking deeply from her cup and her amorous advances; he recalled the mystery of her survival when all around were dead; he remembered how she had survived in the shrine when the cat emerged...

  “Then what must I do?”

  “The choice is yours.”

  The most bitter choice any man in Egypt had ever faced, Kha thought. Run away and the destruction of Egypt would continue. Journey on with Sesheshet and walk into oblivion.

  “If I lead her into a trap, I will die the final death. My body will have no preparation. I will have no tomb furnishings, nothing for the hereafter...”

  “The trap is sumptuously furnished. She is a divine and we would not dare entomb her without every trapping and equipment for eternity.”

  “But my body...”

  “You will be carried to eternity on the breath of the lioness, Kha. Your name will live forever on the tongues of men...”

  “But I am young, Uncle...”

  “I will understand if you turn and run.”

  “Do not give me this choice. Better that I did not know...”

  “I am sorry, Kha. I love you like a son, the son I never had. I will pray for you till I die and set up a cult in your honour with daily offerings to continue into perpetuity.”

  Kha remembered the young girls lying in the hills beside the well, their throats ripped out. His shoulders slumped. “Where is the place? Where do I have to lead her?”

  “Egypt will bless you.”

  Perhaps I will save Egypt after all, Kha thought. Yet, by doing so, will damn myself...

  They embraced. “Goodbye Uncle.”

  “Before you go, I must ask you. You are walking in the company of the divine, while I must only know the divine in dreams. How is she? How is it to be with her?”

  “She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. She is everything sweet about Egypt that I wanted to save - yet I must lead her to her doom. But will she die?”

  “In time... All things die, even gods and goddesses - all except the High God.”

  “Which goddess will I be trapped with - the lioness or the Lady of Turquoise?”

  “I do not know, but I pray for you that it is the lioness.”

  With a final hug and no backward glance, the High Priest took the lamp and went back to the river.

  The hunter could not find it in himself to pray. He returned to the shrine and slept near Sesheshet, the Sweet One. In the morning Kha, Bek and the girl would set off, going north towards Iunet, the sacred nome of Hathor.

  In the morning, the girl was unconscious once again.

  “Bring the donkey. We must go to Iunet. I do not hunt today.”

  “Hurry, Bek before the lioness appears while the piece of fish is in her death-sleep,” Bek chattered to himself. The attendant hurried to pack up.

  Kha carried Sesheshet in his arms and later slung her over his shoulders, where she hung lithe and limp. The fragrant scent of her body clogged his nostrils.

  What a sweet and yet hideous load I carry.

  When he was too tired to carry her further, he slung her over the back of the donkey and walked beside her. They followed the river northwards. There were no boats sailing the Nile, no fishermen, no children playing on the riverbanks or farmers tilling fields. All was emptiness and desolation.

  He felt yellow eyes following him, but though he turned and searched the palm and reed-fringed banks, he saw no sign of his stalker.

  He could feel her presence though, and imagined the soft pad of her paws, the heavy shoulders and head hung low and the occasional moody twitch of her tail.

  They did not rest until sunset approached and the girl began to stir on the donkey’s back. They found an abandoned hut near the river. At a small jetty sat a boat with a deckhouse and furled sail.

  He took the girl down from the donkey and spread her on the earthen floor of the hut on covers.

  She opened one eye and then another.

  “What is different? What has happened? There was no hunting today.”

  Did she mean no hunting for the cat? Or no hunting by the cat?

  “We are on our way to Iunet.”

  “Have you given up your quest? You seem discouraged.”

  He shrugged.

  She ran cool fingers up his arm and she then rubbed his arm comfortingly. Her own bracelet of turquoise rattled softly as she moved, Se-Sheh-Shet, Se-Sheh-Shet.

  “Did I discourage you? First I must drink and eat and then I will make it up to you. But not here. We must journey a little further to the temple of Dendera.”

  “It is abandoned - deserted.”

  “I know. And so it must be. I do not want your chattering servant there. I want to lead you into a great mystery, Kha.”

  They ate and drank the last of the beer. She was ready.

  “Let us take the boat. We will be there before dark. Your servant can follow with the donkeys.”

  “No boat rides for you, Bek!” the servant lamented to himself. “Just plod along on your aching feet, behind flea-ridden donkeys, with no more beer to drink and no hunter’s bow to protect your hide from the lioness, who surely follows so closely that you can feel her whiskers tickling your backside.”

  Sesheshet led him through columns that lost their height in darkness and into an inner shrine. The cedar doors of the divine tabernacle of the goddess were left flung open by the departing priests and Kha’s lamplight revealed a seated twin-headed image of the goddess enthroned in gold. One head was a savage lioness, the other a beautiful face of a woman, a face that he knew well. In front of the image lay a block like a low offering table.

  “Here you will worship and make your offering,” she said.

  “To the statue?”

  “To me.”

  She slipped out of her halter dress and stood naked in the lamplight. She looked like a tomb painting, a mist of colour and texture that had somehow emanated from a tomb wall and her eyes were like planets in their whites and otherworldly like the eyes of the female dead.

  “Undress, Kha,” she said.

  He did, unable to resist the force of her will here in her own temple, setting his lamp at the edge of the stone with unsteady hands. “Offer yourself to me here. Lie with me.” He did.

  “It is an offering that satisfies,” she announced.

  She knelt across him.

  “See, I raise a Djed pillar in my own honour,” she said brushing him lightly. “Are you ready for the attack of divinity? You will learn now what it is the gods and goddesses want. We don’t want your gifts. We want you. We experience our divine existence in your ecstasy!”

  She descended on him and so did he descend into a swarming, intoxicating joy.

  The sky began to rise and fall. Her face above his was hideously beautiful in the lamplight, her heat an agony of voluptuousness. Her sweet attack overran his defences, breaking down his walls. At first the travail was thrilling, then it passed into uncertainty and then fear. This was not union, but in
vasion, an elemental attack of unbearable pleasure. She was entering his bloodstream like an invading army. His fortress was fallen, all resistance crushed. Something whistled past his soldier’s ears like arrows flying overhead or the sweep of wingtips of passing birds.

  The attack was remorseless.

  It is She! Lady of the Sky. The Golden One! Hathor, The Eye of Ra!

  She beat like a slow battering ram at the gates of his soul. I am destroyed, vanquished! He thought. He could stand no more. His fortress shook and crumbled to its foundations. He felt his spirit and all his being sucked up into her hungry loins, emptying him not just of his strength but of his heart and his being, as release and joy spilled like tickling jewels of pleasure up his belly and spine down his thighs.

  Sesheshet laughed the laugh of the demon.

  “The love of the goddess consumes you, Kha.”

  Kha was annihilated, but his desire still stood inside her and when she began to move again he found new strength as if she was raising it up from his depths like water from a well.

  The same attack took place again and then again and each time the defence of his fortress grew weaker. Could her incessant love continue until his body was hollow, the encircling walls of an empty well?

  Is that what his uncle had meant in their parting exchange?

  “But who will I be trapped with - the lioness or the Lady of Turquoise?”

  “I do not know, but I pray for you that it is the lioness.”

  Could the appetite of the Lady of Sex and Death ever be sated?

  “Bek, find your master. Is he safe or has he fallen to the claws of the cat?”

  Kha was spared more travail by the arrival of the chattering attendant. Kha heard Bek’s shuffling footsteps coming closer. “Be swift, Bek. Bring your light closer...”

  The Lady of the Sky rolled off Kha and giggled.

  “I want beer,” she said. “Much beer!”

  The ending to the story will be left unclear – true beauty is mystery. What happened? It seems that after the High Priest Ra-Hotep visited the hunter in secret, he continued his journey. Kha knew the truth about the necklace. It could not save him, but could only be used to lure her into the trap. So that was what he did. He led her to the tomb and the cat followed. The trap was shut. The tomb was sealed with Kha and the Great Cat of Destruction inside. That appeared to be the end of the story. The killing and the pestilence stopped.

  What of Kha? Did the lioness kill him - or did he kill the lioness? What of Sesheshet? It seemed that Sesheshet was also sealed in the tomb - all three of them. Or all two - if the tale was to believed for there was a strong implication that she and the great cat were one and the same. What was the secret of the tomb, the trap that had been set for the cat?

  This tomb was different from all others. It lacked the calling card that eventually betrayed all tombs - tombs chippings from what the ancient architects called the ‘place of piercing’... A tomb with no entrance. It was a brilliant inspiration by an ancient architect. Many old tombs that had lain empty for a long time later became the sites for intrusive burials. Lesser eternity-seekers hoping for a free ride to eternity, would avail themselves of the magical efficacy of a great sepulchre. The architect of the trap had chosen the used and abandoned tomb of his sister, a priestess of Hathor. The tomb had an angled axis. What was odd about this one though, was that the bend in the axis was dictated not by an architectural plan, but by nature. The reason was evident. The ancient stonemasons, using hammers and copper chisels, were well able to cut through limestone, but they had unexpectedly struck a mass of flint. Their copper chisels could cut the toughest stone like quartzite and granite, but against flint, they curled like butter.

  There were marks on the ball of flint that showed their attempts, probably representing weeks of work, as they tried to cut through it, but they failed. They were forced to change the design of the tomb and veer to the left, earlier than they may have intended.

  The trap lay behind the mound of flint.

  Chapter 46

  SHE ENCOURAGED him to sneak away from the group again. She wanted to take him to one of his father’s discoveries, not a grand tomb, but an interesting one.

  There was another Valley of the Kings, away from the tourist coaches and the crowds. It was the western branch of the Theban royal necropolis, a place of far more desolate grandeur with fortress cliffs, eroded with scores of bays, fissures and clefts.

  Kalila brought him part of the way in a rented truck with two donkeys in the back.

  “Ridden before?” she asked.

  “One or twice.”

  “These little donkeys are the ancient world’s four-wheel drive vehicles. They're amazingly sturdy. They can get along at a steady clip and can go places even a trail bike can't go.”

  She drove as far as she could, then pulled up at a rise. “It's the donkeys from here.”

  They left the truck and mounted the donkeys.

  Anson swung onto the back of his, steadying the creature. It seemed awfully small to be carrying him, but he had seen them trotting along the riverbank loaded with bales of hay and riders.

  “The donkey had a bad press in ancient Egypt,” she informed him. “Much maligned, generally inoffensive, occasionally perverse and abominated since ancient times - so hated that the temple scribes could not write its name without showing a knife stuck in its shoulder - yet the little African donkey is indefatigable. It goes like the devil. Which was exactly what the ancients thought it was. A devil. The donkey was an essentially evil entity in the creeds of the Egyptians, personified by the god Seth. The donkey was the magical scapegoat par excellence."

  Kalila swung onto her donkey with a practiced air and gave the creature a slap. It trotted off. Anson followed. The donkey seemed to stagger more than run, but it took off briskly.

  The Coptic girl had dressed in practical clothes, jeans and a khaki top, adding a grass hat with a scarf tied around the brim and trailing in a girlish bow at her neck.

  The heat shimmered off the rocks.

  They picked their way up the cliff face, following an ancient path.

  The valley opened out in front of them like an expanse of blinding golden sunlight that had fallen and shattered itself on the barren rocks, hills and chasms. At the heart of the vista the thin scar of a path twisted up a hill.

  They went on. Little African donkeys were a part of this landscape and had been so since the dawn of civilization. Small and skinny and ungainly, they had carried the goods of the official caravans since the days of the pharaohs; gold and metals from the mines of the sun-blasted desert and turquoise from the mines of the Sinai and they had carried the nomads of the Arabian Desert. Now they carried the two of them along at a steady, mincing trot.

  He spurred the little donkey on and put on speed to catch up. The donkeys were climbing now. They followed the ancient path winding up the hill.

  The donkeys could go no further. The two dismounted and tethered the beasts to an outcrop of rock under a patch of shade.

  They climbed on foot up loose shale rock.

  It was mid morning when they reached the top. A blue vibrating sky lay over the shattered cliffs and the desert beyond, with the Nile and Luxor spread out far across the river.

  Kalila had brought torches, ropes and gear as well as water and provisions for a morning out, in a bag.

  “This is even more magnificent than the Valley of the Kings,” he said, sweeping around in a slow three hundred and sixty degree turn.

  “That's why it was chosen as the location for movies such as Sphinx and The Awakening,” she told him. “But careful. There's a drop of several hundred feet to the valley floor.”

  Why hadn’t the pharaohs build their tombs here as well? he wondered. A bit too far away he supposed, and difficult to guard and the rocky area would have made tomb excavation more difficult. Yet three New Kingdom kings were buried here. “Your father came across a forgotten tomb here,” she said. “I say forgotten, because it had be
en found in the eighteen hundreds, but had then somehow been overlooked. He rediscovered it. I wanted to take you there to see it. It demonstrates what lengths the Egyptian went to in order ensure an undisturbed afterlife. ”

  “Up here?”

  “No, down there, about half way down in a narrow cleft, a fissure between two pan pipes of rock. It's about a hundred feet above the floor of the valley. A favourite trick of the tomb builders. A tomb high up in a cliff, especially in a cleft, made a very good hiding place. Flash storms and falling scree tended to build up and totally cover the entrance, hiding tell tale tomb chippings, the great betrayer of tombs.”

  “So how do we get down?”

  “We climb down part of the way, then drop the rest of the way by rope. I suppose you’ve abseiled before?”

  “Once or twice.”

  “Help me rig up ropes to let us down to the ledge.”

  They climbed down a narrow chimney until they reached a ledge.

  From a pack she produced more ropes and pitons and he hammered one into a crack on the near side of the cleft. “I'll put one on the far side of the cleft and then string a cross rope. Then we'll clip on a karabiner and abseil down to the tomb mouth.”

  He leaned across the narrow cleft and jammed in a second piton, then he tested the rope by putting his weight against it, his feet on the edge of their rocky ledge. It happened in a moment. Did the rope break or the rock, sun-blasted and friable, crumble away under his feet? He lost balance and dropped away as if going through a trapdoor. He gave a swiftly fading cry.

  Anson slid down the rock face for around twenty feet and passed like a wedge into a narrow cleft. It brought him to a jolting stop, but it saved him. Pieces of rock clattered to the valley floor. A hundred foot drop fell away beneath him, he saw, daring a look down. Silence closed in around him.

  He looked up, his head buzzing. He could just see Kalila above him on the ledge.

  She knelt at the edge and bent to look for him, scouring the valley below for sight of a crumpled form.

  “Here, in a cleft!”

  She lowered her glance to the point directly below her in the cleft of rock. Could she see his head and shoulders poking out? Yet she remained immobile, just looking down at him.