Didn’t everything about this place attest to the Egyptians’ conviction about survival, confirming that they went to their graves believing firmly in an afterlife? The tombs were pious theatres of heaven enacting the drama of death, transformation and ultimately survival. It was hard to believe that countless generations of Egyptian believers had come to their tombs resting on a delusion.
He spotted a detail on a wall scene, a row of goddesses painted in silhouette, dancing above the bodies of snakes. The goddesses were as slender as the serpents.
They visited tomb KV62, the resting place of Tutankhamun, where the body of the boy king still lay in its sarcophagus, the only one in the Valley still in its original place. The cramped dimensions of the tomb always surprised him.
“Don’t forget, Tutankhamun was a minor king,” she said. “This was a just hole in the wall next to a real pharaoh’s tomb.”
They went into the tomb of pharaoh Amenhotep II.
Together they descended a series of passages and clattered down stairs before they came to a ‘hall of hindering’. They went across a ritual shaft, a large pit sunk into the floor, that led to a chamber and down into a twin-pillared vestibule where the tomb veered ninety degrees and ran down to a six pillared chamber, lined with elegant texts and illustrated like an unrolled papyrus that flung its length around the room.
“These texts are taken from the Amduat, the Book of the Underworld,” Anson murmured. “We are walking through a magical book.”
Chapter 43
THEY WALKED back through the valley in dazzling light.
“Could anything my father found rival these underworlds? They make a deep impression.”
“There’s no civilization so seductive,” Kalila said.
“Seductive is the word. I find the graphics of ancient Egypt pretty ravishing, I must admit,” he said.
She smiled.
“You find them erotic?”
“Hell yes. I can easily imagine myself being grasped possessively by one of those dark-eyed goddesses in the frescoes and reliefs. The art of ancient Egypt ensnares you with its atmosphere of pervasive mystery.”
“Yet there is rarely any lewdness portrayed in Egyptian art,” she commented. “Except for a few scurrilous doodles on ostraca. The Egyptians achieved a sense of sexual tension in far more subtle ways, in the ladies with their diaphanous gowns, painted eyes and gala wigs that sent an erotic signal. Then there were the other coded symbols, the scented delta of a lotus blossom held under a nose, the ducks and geese, or a monkey playing under a chair, the possessive arm slung around the waist of a husband, the intent, very-interested eyes of a goddess taking the pharaoh by the hand. It’s all there, but in the oblique Nilotic way. There is a love poem where the girl bathes in the stream with her beloved and says: ‘I'll go into the water at your bidding and come up with a red fish who will quiver with happiness in my fingers.’”
“I don’t get it,” he said, putting an expression of puzzlement on his face. “I hope you’re going to explain it to me.”
“I’ll do nothing of the sort.”
They went back to the Valley rest hut and bought chilled soft drinks.
“What would you miss most of all about Egypt, if you could never come back?” she asked him.
“There are two Egypts. The real Egypt of ticket offices, flies, stray dogs, crowds, coaches and clamouring trinket-hawkers, and then the Egypt of the mind and the soul. I’d miss the flash of dying sunlight seen on the river, the wistful sadness of a beauty’s smile in a tomb fresco, the sight of the fellaheen working an ancient shaduf to raise water to their irrigation ditch, the caramel cliffs of the desert, the yellow brown of ancient papyrus, especially that.”
“You like papyrus?”
“Yes, and the stories scrolls tell,” he said.
“What’s your all-time favourite?”
“I know my most unforgettable. It was a blank scroll,” he said. “It came from the tomb of a young noble lady named Mai, who lived in about 1250 BCE. It was totally blank when unrolled, nothing but the faintly ribbed grain of the empty papyrus and a few stains of antiquity. Fine quality stock, but quite blank. A mystery. But from its container, we know it was supposed to have been a copy of the Book of the Dead, a guide for the soul of the dead in the underworld, a sort of passport of magical formulae. Without it, a soul could not hope to pass through gateways guarded by fearsome gatekeepers and so reach bliss in the heavenly Fields of Aaru.”
“Why was it blank?”
“We can speculate. Scribes made a handsome living from preparing lavish copies of the Book of the Dead, yard after yard of elegant hieroglyphic script, illuminated with beautiful vignettes, which they sold as vital funerary items. These so called Books of The Dead were works of art and cost a fortune. It’s clear to me what happened. An impious scribe showed an example of his work to the bereaved family, husband or lover of the girl. Wishing to safeguard her survival in the next life and ensure her safe passage through the terrors of the underworld, her loved one paid the scribe his price. But the scribe played false with the loved ones and substituted a blank papyrus for the finished book of the dead, believing that, once the scroll was deposited in the tomb, nobody would ever discover his fraud. The horror of his crime can scarcely be comprehended today, but the scribe knew that, according to the funerary beliefs of his people, by depriving the girl of her magical spells in a properly written scroll, he had denied her any chance of survival in the afterlife. He had consigned her to eternal non-existence. I often think of the soul - or shade - of the poor young woman wandering through the shadowy world of animal-headed monsters and demons, alone, unprotected and guideless, clutching her worthless scroll. I like to think that Osiris, Lord of the Underworld, and Judge of the Dead, reserved a special fate for the scribe who betrayed a young girl and her loved ones, perhaps feeding the criminal's heart to The Ravisher of Souls.”
“You’re a romantic. I never would have guessed. This really has been a journey of discovery.” She looked at him in a measuring way, and he felt as if she were weighing him in some private set of scales. “Do you really want to feel the power of the afterlife?” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“I can take you somewhere.”
“Very mysterious. Where?”
“Are you game to come with me for a walk through the underworld - in darkness?”
“You’re scaring me.”
“I know just the tomb. Closed to the public.”
Chapter 44
HE’D PICKED her correctly as an experiential type.
She gave the tomb guard money and murmured to him in Arabic, persuading him to leave them alone for a while. She also requested that the electric lights in the tomb stay doused. Then she took Anson’s hand at the entrance. They had the place to themselves.
“I’m quite at home in here,” she said. “I’ve written a paper based on this tomb.”
They passed from the skin-singeing heat of midday into drowning coolness. He heard the click of a pencil torchlight snap on and a spurt of light sprayed cut walls of limestone, decorated with faded, salt-blistered paintings of gods and goddesses of the underworld.
“This certainly gains atmosphere without the tomb lights,” he said.
His voice ran ahead into the tomb like a sonar device taking depth and came ringing back after a delay. He turned on a torch of his own. The tomb ran on for hundreds of metres into the cliff. He could smell the dust motes that they had disturbed and saw them shredding the torchlight, surrounding them like a net-curtain of time.
“You believe in unseen realities. See with your eyes and also with your inner eye,” she said.
What did he see?
He saw a painted female divinity on the wall, her form rippling in a pale, clinging dress. Age had eroded her image and in his torchlight she looked like a collection of ghostly atoms that had somehow emanated from a painted tomb scene and taken form. Her eyes, dark planets in brilliant whites, were as mysterious a
s any underworld.
“Tell me what you see,” he said.
“What I see as a romantic? Or as a professional who cares about conservation? As a professional, I see us perspiring and exhaling, spreading dangerous moisture and carbon dioxide in this tomb. I hear the goddesses on the walls groaning. I see moisture soaking into their paint and plaster bodies, joining the attack of moisture coming up from beneath the walls, caused by changes in the water-table brought on by the Aswan High Dam. I hear salt crystals forming, lethal, crackling efflorescence splitting and pushing away flakes of plaster and ancient paint. I see an almost imperceptible split in the pigment of an eye, in the single black painted eye of a goddess in profile. A deadly row of flowers - crystals - appear in a gala wig like a wreath. Dissolution rises up and eats away frescoes and dissolves away stone reliefs.”
“I’d prefer the romantic tour.”
“Would you? Turn off your torch,” she said. “Put it away, in a pocket.”
He did. She turned off her torch too, plunging them into darkness. “Trust me and I’ll lead you through the underworld in the dark.” She pulled his hand and drew him along. The darkness here felt textured, breaking softly around his face.
Was it tiredness after the heat of the day outside that made him feel that he was dreaming, or the spell of this young woman and this place? Was he sleepwalking? She towed him by the hand. A current ran from her hand. The voltage buzzed and cemented his palm to hers like a live wire.
“Like all tombs, we have an image of the sun on the wall near the entrance. The sun in its cycle. First, the newborn yellow sun,” she murmured. “As we go further into the tomb we’ll find the sun turning orange and at the end it will turn into the fiery red ball of sunset. Overhead, vultures hover with wings outspread.”
“Keep talking.”
“This tomb, like all tombs, echoes the journey of the soul through the underworld. It also reflects the journey of the dead body and the ceremonies they performed over the corpse as they carried the coffin solemnly through to the burial chamber.”
He went with her down a staircase into a new passage.
They crossed over a wooden ramp. “A tomb pit falls away underneath us. Be careful now, we’re coming to the first pillared antechamber. Keep hold of my hand, but walk behind me so you don’t bump yourself.” His shoulder brushed a pillar. She went on with her commentary: “Threatening images of underworld serpents rear into view all around us. Over there is the image of the mummified dead lying on a living bier. The bier takes the form of a giant snake. In the darkness there is a new virulence in these images. Even the hieroglyphs in the tomb now seem hostile, tiny mouths, snakes, eyes, birds, men, gods, and animals, climbing in vertical registers, closing us in like hostile hordes. The journey to the afterlife is filled with terrors for the soul.”
They turned at a veering axis of the tomb and continued deeper along a staircase and along another corridor that led to an antechamber. A faint anxiety grew in him as they drew nearer the burial chamber and with it a thrill of going to the edge of something unknown.
“The passage opens up into a pillared antechamber in the presence of a pantheon of gods and goddesses. Now we come into the burial chamber, covered with an astronomical ceiling. In this tomb, a slab of stone lies underneath the heavens. Here it is, right here.”
She stopped him. He felt the corner of the slab. Solid, but cool as water after the heat outside the tomb.
“Rest here. Lie down on the slab,” she said, but he hesitated. “I thought you were daring, Anson. Do it.”
“I suppose I did ask for the romantic tour,” he said.
He went along with her, sliding onto the slab and stretched himself out on his back. He let his arms fall beside his body. The coolness of the stone was refreshing, not shocking. The image of a lamb spread out for sacrifice came into his thoughts.
“Keep still.”
There came a sound of clothes rustling and then he felt her come up on the slab and cover him on all fours, her hands and feet on either side of his and her body hanging in the air like Nut, the Sky Goddess, or Isis hovering as a kite over the bier of Osiris.
“I knew I’d chosen the right tour.”
She whispered to him in soothing tones that stroked his growing excitement. “Do you know what it is your heart truly desires, what all humankind desires?” His mind followed her words just as his body had followed her guidance when she’d led him by the hand. “We are all born with a craving to be bound up in this thing, to surrender our freedom to serve it, to ‘die’ for this greater other. Have you guessed what it is? The hunger for this one thing is the strongest drive of the human spirit. Only one thing can satisfy it.”
Sex? he wondered. Or divinity? It had to be one or the other. Why these two poles? Were religion and sex yearnings on the same continuum? Maybe sexual love was sublimated god-hunger, he thought, or was god-love sexual hunger turned heavenward?
“The secret craving of your heart is this...” The Egyptian girl paused, giving weight and moment to her next words. “To be bound up in ecstatic union with the divine! Isn’t that your hunger? Isn’t that not the only thing that can fill your aching void, that can bind the pieces of your life together?”
To be bound up in ecstatic union.
Was that his soul’s longing?
He saw a glimpse of light in his mind, not a painted sun, but a real sun. If humankind was made in a creator’s image, did that creator have this same craving to close the separation between himself and his created? Did he want the same thing as us? Union? Had he achieved ecstatic union and intersection with humankind on the cross in the suffering servant of his son who was beaten, killed and finally transmuted?
“This hunger for ecstatic union will not be denied,” she whispered in his ear. “Even in death. Frustrated or denied, a longing for unfulfilled spiritual union is a driving force that can even linger on after humans die - as ghosts. Will your longing live on like a ghost after your death? Will your heart be lost in an underworld of dreaming? Or will you seize what your heart was born craving?”
He felt the downward heat of her eyes. Her hair swung down in lappets, brushing his face.
He felt his heart give a giddy spin. A darkness greater than blindness swarmed inside his head. Was he falling? Or soaring?
He spent a time in a rushing, spinning void.
He had once read words of an Egyptian underworld spell said: whoever knoweth this chapter may have union with women in the night or by day, and the desire of the woman shall come to him whenever he would enjoy her.
He knew the spell and the spell knew him. Suddenly he wanted to follow it through twisting, turning pathways of pleasure, to seek out its fulfilment in an underworld union of journeying and discovery.
He felt her undo his belt and then bare him and then cool air brush his body, like a wafting of wings.
Was this happening or was it something that she had put in his mind? She was there, stretched above him in the darkness, her body vaulted like the heavens, her hands and fingertips on either side of his head and her feet astride his legs. The scent of her hair, enclosing the sides of his face, drowned him in a waterfall of feminine scent.
Anson Hunter felt the pylons of eternity hanging above his head. Ecstatic union. Divine union. Maybe that was his life’s terrible longing. He felt the glinted beauty of her eyes and like Geb, the earth god, whose member strained to reach Nut in the sky, he ached for her, separated by Shu, the god of atmosphere between them.
With one hand she took him and led him to the gate of her secrets, the ‘place of piercing’ as the ancient called the mouth of a tomb, in their evocative phrase.
She descended on him, slowly enshrouding him in shuddering delight.
He thought of the wrappings of death, the wrappings of the womb, of the mother’s arms, of the lover’s hug and the last great wrapping of the grave.
He thought of the Nile and reeds whispering and the verdant ooze of the river bank. I am a red fish caug
ht in her net, quivering in delicious entrapment. Ecstatic union. Unbearably sweet union. There was a whistling like wings in his ears and a beating of wingtips on his heart.
He lay frozen on the slab of stone, his limbs gripped in a total muscle-seizure of delight. She rose and fell on him and her touch brushed his skin like wingtips as he gave shudders.
I hope this is Kalila, he thought, and not some entity from the underworld. In mythological legend, Isis revived the dead Osiris with her magic of knotted cords and the life-giving breath of her nostrils. She descended on him in the shape of a bird, with wings outspread, fanning his desire.
Eternity possesses me, he thought. I am commingling with the divine. The cell walls of my flesh, blasted by the sweet assault of her body, are crumbling as tomb walls did before the onslaught of time.
This was the act that Isis had performed on Osiris, the “Helpless One” as he lay on his bier. I am helpless, like Osiris.
He understood now that the quest of the ancient Isis to recover the fragments of the dead Osiris was not about his arising, but about his arousal and her impregnation. The cycle of birth and rebirth had to be completed, like the phases of the moon, the rise and fall of the river Nile, and the turning of the planets.
The Pyramid Texts said: ‘Your sister Isis comes to you rejoicing for love of you. You have placed her on your phallus and your seed enters into her…’
Now he knew why the Copts, who took up residence in the empty tombs and temples of Egypt, struck with blind fury at those divine feminine forms carved on the walls. The distant whisper of the flesh of Egypt could be heard even across the silence of millennia. Their allure was possessive and never let you go, following you down into your dreams.
When the end came, it was like breaking through a tomb wall into the beyond, into an explosion of wonder and unbearable radiance.
He felt release of the most exalted, agonising nature. My flesh is gold, my bones are electrum, my hair is lapis lazuli. He felt his heart would burst with the flames that beat in upon him. The golden mystery of Egypt is mine.
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