THE SMITING TEXTS
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Chapter 91
ANSON, Kalila and Daniel crawled out into the light and lay on the sand gasping.
They were surrounded, not by the galabea-clad guards, but by military men crouching on the sand with rifles pointing and a ring of armoured vehicles.
Melinda Skilling perched on the mudguard of an armoured car, jumped off, giving them a wave as she ran to meet them.
The sun fell in a yoke of heat, a burden that felt amazingly light.
Why had he been forced to journey so far and through such a shadowy underworld? The greatest mystery didn’t lie in those shadows or blinding darkness, but here in brilliant light, this blinding light.
He closed his eyes. The light, both ecstatic and unfathomably kind, stayed inside him and made him shiver with its warmth.
They were safe.
And he had seen heaven before he died, or a terrestrial version of it.
He twisted his head to look at the smiling face of Kalila, flushed with exhaustion and relief, and he thought that heaven might be something he would experience again. And again.
Bloem appeared, with Browning and the two younger men in tow.
“You went a bit ahead of the tour again,” Bloem said.
“You want a refund? How did you ever find us?”
“We never really left you, Mr Hunter. A confession. We slipped a piece of miniature hardware in the pockets of your clothing and we’ve been tracing you from the get go.”
That explained a lot, especially the casually loose rein they had put on him ever since their first day in Cairo.
Did that mean they’d been listening in on him too? Maybe the iPod worn continually by Ears was a bit more than that.
Don’t go there.
Some things were better not to know.
“Sorry if we scared you in that shoot out at Abydos,” Bloem added. “We were just putting down covering fire to give you a chance to escape.”
“How did you find us here? The trace?”
“That helped. But the SCA man Gamal Fawzi turned out to match your profile in our investigations -a Sufi background and a big grudge… we alerted the Egyptian authorities and followed him here.”
Chapter 92
ABUNA DANIEL Jacoub stood at his cave entrance and gazed out over the shimmering desert of the Wadi Natrun.
Out there on the shores of ten lakes lay the salt of preservation - natron. Its drying and purifying power had blasted the corpses of the pharaohs into stasis, if not eternity.
You are the salt of the earth, Jesus said, but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot.
Had the events of the past few days robbed him of the preserving salt of his faith? By no means, he thought. Seeing the reflections of my beliefs in a pagan age only makes me look harder for the original source of the light. I am strengthened in my belief.
But I have not quite shaken off archaeology, he admitted to himself with a sigh.
And what of the conspiracy of the afterlife? Had he been guided into a right understanding of what lay ahead after death?
He could not say and perhaps that was the right understanding of it after all. Establishing the truth about the existence and nature of the afterlife was less important than allowing its power to influence the way we lived this present life.
Chapter 93
ANSON BROKE the boredom of the transatlantic flight to America by opening up his laptop – he and his machine had been reunited after his desertion of the tour group - to view several PDF files that Melinda had given him what seemed a lifetime ago.
He was on his way back after the patient questioning and investigation by Egyptian authorities and police. It would take years, a decade perhaps, to excavate the collapsed remains of the Labyrinth and reveal all of its secrets. Did the golden sarcophagi of the Neteru contain actual physical remains of the predecessors of the pharaohs, a race of the primordial past from an age called Zep Tepi? Or were these glittering caskets like the questionable medieval reliquaries that were purported to hold the relics of the cross, of Christ and of the saints? Empty vessels.
He wondered if his father’s discovery robbed the world of heaven because it dramatised the dawning of an idea? Some might say so, but others, like Abuna Daniel Jacoub, the Coptic monk who has returned to the solitude of his contemplation in a cave at Wadi Natrun, would say that the prodigious glory of riches in this material heaven was merely a reaching out for an even greater radiance.
Where had the journey led Anson?
A totally open mind never won much loyalty, or eternal life, Kalila had once said to him.
Did he still have an open mind?
He had come to a door, the ultimate door, the gates of death and the afterlife, only to discover that it was a false door leading nowhere, just as his father had claimed.
But paradoxically the revelation of a dazzling, material Egyptian heaven had left him hungering for even greater effulgence and that hunger presupposed the existence of something that could satisfy it. It required an old-fashioned thing called faith.
Perhaps a mind with a totally open-door policy to beliefs could not hold on to truth, he reflected; it was like a country without borders or citizenship where ideas were as free to drift out as they were to drift in.
He opened up the exhibition catalogue “Immortal Egypt -eternity in art” for a preview of the exhibits. Melinda Skilling had asked him, as the son of Emory Hunter, to be a part of the forthcoming exhibition as well as a special guest at the grand inauguration of the Faiyum temple on the Potomac. He scrolled through the exhibits. Fine, painted sarcophagi and sculptures appeared on screen. He moved on to the pottery. One piece snared his eye, a tall elegant calcite jar with raised images of a pantheon of gods on the surface. A caption beneath it said: ‘LATE PERIOD Alabaster jar found in deposits beneath the temple of Fayoum.’
The milky surface washed him back to the day in the Cairo museum when he had visited the treasures of Tutankhamun.
He had paused at a wonderful chalice-shaped lamp in the form of an open lotus flower, surrounded by openwork carvings of lotuses and gods, the whole thing fashioned out of transluscent calcite, or alabaster. The craftsmen had designed the cup to be filled with sesame oil and it was only then, with the glow of a lighted wick inside it, that radiant, unseen images painted on the inside of the young king and his queen, including hieroglyphs and symbols, emerged into view through the surface, like a vision of Egyptian eternity seen through the milk of the cosmos.
Then it hit him with the force of a jar smashing.
“What’s on show?” he’d said to Melinda on the day of their first meeting.
“Gods, sarcophagi, statues, pottery.”
“Pottery? I don’t suppose there are any obvious execration texts scrawled over jars or pots? No? Worth a try. I’d like to see the catalogue.”
No obvious texts.
Was it possible? What if there were texts, but not obvious ones, cleverly concealed on the inside of the jar, a virulent and potent execration, invisible without a light inside. Not the customary red pottery favoured for execration texts, but calcite was seen to have rare alchemic potency and the smiting scenes and texts could be in red ink.
He pictured a light going into the jar and its radiance filling the interior. Threatening images and scrawled words emanated through the milky surface like harbingers of doom through clouds.
One more deadly act remained to be played out - the conspiracy was not over yet.
Chapter 94
ANSON PUT IN A CALL from the airport. A secretary at Johns Hopkins tracked Melinda down to
The National Gallery of Art.
He called.
“Give me a while,” Melinda said, after a moment of sceptical hesitation, when he explained his concern. “I’ll take a look.”
“I’m on my way. I’ll meet you there.”
Anson ran out of the airport, dragging a case on wheels and he joine
d a taxi queue.
The queue inched forward. Two cab drivers started an argument with their horns.
A woman in front had so much baggage she could have been moving house.
I stand here and wait, he thought, while an alabaster bomb sits serenely in the heart of an art gallery.
He pictured Pharaoh Rameses at full stretch, mace upraised above his crowned head, poised to smite the vessel, and with it, a foreign nation, and possibly western civilization.
“National Gallery. West Building,” he said into the window of the cab that crawled up. He didn’t wait for the driver to pop the trunk, but bundled his case into the back seat with him.
They pulled up at the Gallery in the National Mall, Constitution Avenue, opposite the greenery of a tree-studded park and he paid the driver with impatient generosity. He ran up the steps of the imposing white-columned facade, taking two steps at a time, his case bounding behind him.
A museum attendant spirited away his case and another took him to Melinda who was on her way to meet him in the West Building rotunda. He glanced up. The circular, enclosing walls and the dome above his head made him think of the curving belly of the light filled jar, and what may lie hidden in its heart. There was a story that the American crew had scrawled on the outer casing of the atomic bomb they dropped on Nagasaki, a bulbous, jar-shaped weapon, dubbed ‘Fat Man’. A grimly elliptical smiting text?
“That was quick,” Melinda said, appearing, this time in a little green dress, her heels ringing in the open space. “We’re still arranging to hook up a light to check it out. You didn’t have to come over.”
“Oh yes I did.”
She pecked him on the cheek.
It was the first time they’d met since Egypt.
“Congratulations, again,” she said. “On tracking down your father’s discovery. It’s a staggering find and you deserve every credit.”
“You’re not threatening me with an honorary doctorate again, are you? No, I expect not.”
She kept a patient smile on her face.
“What’s on your mind, Anson? Don’t you think it’s over?”
“Just a niggle,” he said. “Quite a catastrophic one, actually.”
“What do you expect to find? Some virulent text written on the inner lining of the jar? I haven’t told anyone here. They think we’re experimenting with lighting display.”
She had come a long way with him, but she wasn’t going to go quite this far. Here it was, the age-old battleground. Orthodox Egyptology versus those who entertained the possibility of unseen realities and esoteric forces. Science versus the crackpot.
Crackpot. Smashed pot. Smashed jar. He quickened his pace.
“I hope we’ll both soon be enlightened,” he said.
“It’s startling!” she said. “A wonderful suggestion, Anson. We’re going to have to display it just like this.”
A formal young man, an assistant curator, gingerly lowered a light globe into the heart of the jar and the milky surface turned to pink fire, with a ring of gods rearing like encircling flames.
But nothing else, no text on the inside came bleeding through.
“Maybe it’s being obscured by a layer of calcite cement, or gypsum,” Anson said.
“What is?” said the man.
“New cracks,” Anson said, evasively.
Anson didn’t know it, but the word ‘cracks’ to museum curators in charge of a priceless exhibition from another country, was more alarming than ‘bomb’.
The man’s hand actually shook, which had the advantage of bringing the light right up against the inside surface and it proved one thing. There were no execration texts. Or cracks.
“Thank you, Jim,” she said to the man Melinda took Anson aside.
“Feeling easier now?”
“Curses,” he said. “Another one of my alternative theories bites the dust.”
“Sorry,” she said. “It looks like ‘the mother of revenge’ was just a tangible threat after all. The weapon was really a war chest to fund mayhem.”
This was his answer. No unseen menace. No locus of power. Just a bankroll for violence.
The explanation left Anson a little shattered. My theory lies in pieces, while the wonderful, alabaster jar sits there, beaming, like an ancient sun.
“I had such a feeling there was more.”
“Relax. You’ve been through a lot. Come and enjoy the party tonight. See you at our temple unveiling on the Potomac.”
Chapter 95
LIKE THE RIVER NILE, a world away, Washington’s Potomac knew a story of birth, wildness and flood.
It too was ‘the Nation’s River’, also beginning its run from two distant hinterland sources, here flowing wide and serene in the evening, tugged by the currents of history. It passed a sky-piercing obelisk and a great capital on its eastern bank that hid in plain sight, within its layout and architecture, a myriad symbols and symmetries of an antique civilization, including images of the Egyptian goddess, She of a Thousand Names.
On the other side of the river, in the west, the river slipped past a Land of the Dead, the Arlington National Cemetery, and ran silent beside a great labyrinth of secrets that was America’s great locus of power, the Pentagon.
Then, it reached a promontory on the riverbank where a pyramid of glass spread its base, holding in its glowing heart, like a jewel in a box, a small sandstone temple of ancient Egypt, bathed in floodlights. Reliefs of a pantheon of gods rippled on its surface. An orchestra played Verdi’s ‘TRIUMPHAL MARCH’ from Aida to a black-tie assembly of Washington DC’s dignitaries, congressmen and the President of the United States, who had gathered at the riverside for the ceremony
Chapter 96
ANSON DISLIKED parties and he took himself away from the celebrations to visit the temple.
Speeches were in full swing. It was Egypt’s turn.
He heard the voice of Saleh Haroun, the grey-templed, Egyptian Minister for Culture, addressing the throng over a loud-speaker system.
“This temple from Egypt’s Fayoum region has come to be reborn, like Osiris, in the new civilization of the West. I can do no better than to recite the words written on our commemorative plaque attached to the temple wall. ‘This is for every American,” his voice rang out, “’and all friends of America of all lands, the East, the West, the North and the South, every man, every woman, every child…’” Drone on, Anson thought. It sounded like the cadence of a familiar chant… ‘every land, every ruler, every servant, every woman, every man, every child… all will be destroyed forever. They will not exist, nor will their bodies. They will not exist, nor will their souls. They will not exist, nor will their flesh. They will not exist, nor will their bones… they will not exist and the place where they are will not exist.’
Anson entered the glass pyramid and approached the roped off temple when the words of the Egyptian Minister and words of an ancient text collided in his brain with a bang like railway wagons in a shunting yard.
Was it possible? A temple?
A locus of power… a container of the gods…
Chapter 97
IT WASN’T an execration jar, Anson thought.
It was a container of a very different kind, this temple, a gift, carried like a Trojan Horse into the very capital of America. This temple was a container of the gods, the most fierce gods and goddesses and a concentration of unthinkable power.
Not one stone of this temple had been found on top of another.
“May I name specifically, the President of the United States…” the Egyptian Minister of Culture continued in a chant like an execration ritual.
The temple seemed to spin around Anson’s head, carvings of the gods revolving like an ancient carousel.
“ … the Vice President…”
Had this temple, guarding its great secret of the labyrinth below, been primed to destroy those who would destroy it and threaten the seat of the gods?
“… Leaders of the United States’ Congress… ”
Had this temple’s destruction an aeon ago brought terrible ruin upon the empire of a Christian Rome, on zealots who had shattered its walls in a frenzy of religious intolerance? And was it possible that it could bring the same devastation to America, re-activated by an ancient smiting formula?
Inside the columned hall of the first chamber of the temple, gods now jumped out at him as if to challenge him, carved in reliefs that were raised from the background so that they would be more visible inside the darker interior.
He saw the apocalyptic Hathor-Sekhmet, a woman with the head of a raging lioness, goddess of destruction, disease and pestilence. He saw Montu, eagle-headed god of war, Sobek, the crocodile god, Seth, the Lord of Chaos and destruction... and he remembered the words of his talk to the consortium at Johns Hopkins University.
“The ancient Egyptians would recite an incantation then smash the pottery and usually trample, burn and bury the pieces, in the belief that this could break the power of any nation and all nations. They called on the fiercest gods and goddesses of Egypt’s pantheon to fight with and destroy every enemy, human or spiritual…”
Only the fiercest of Egypt’s gods and goddesses surrounded him on these threatening walls of stone. There was no rotund Tawaret, benign hippopotamus goddess of motherhood, no Hathor ‘the Sweet One’, goddess of sexual love and desire, no dwarfish Bes, protective god of mothers in birth.
The angry pantheon looked not so much frozen in stone as reared in threat, poised in the moment before they struck. ‘The angry gods above, and the power of Osiris and the forty-two gods who reside with him in the Duat below, will seize Egypt’s enemies like trapped birds. These were the angry gods above. Below lay Osiris and the 42 gods, hidden in the depths of the labyrinth. Anson tore his eyes away. What do I look for in here? What shattering hand might be raised as America listens? A time bomb within an ancient time bomb?