THE SMITING TEXTS_Anson Hunter_Egyptology action adventure thrillers

by Roy Lester Pond

  Could this have once been the tomb of Osiris? Anson wondered. The Osireion was thought to be Middle Kingdom in construction, although the simple severity of the design could make it Old Kingdom, but somehow he did not think it was a candidate. Could my father have found the actual tomb of the man-god Osiris? But where?

  Teams had explored the Abydos region pretty thoroughly, knowing it to be the most important funerary site in Egypt with tombs, temples and cenotaphs studding the desert region beyond the bands of cultivation, but they had failed to locate his tomb. Yet it was a tantalizing thought. If it were anywhere, it would be here in Abydos. Generation after generation of Egyptians came on pilgrimages to this site, some making the journey while they lived, others brought here on a post-mortem visit, before being taken back to regional burial sites. And still others voyaged here symbolically through the magical transubstantiation of scenes painted in their tombs.

  Even the ancients had searched for the final resting place of Osiris. Priests of the Middle Kingdom found an ancient tomb in the drift sand which they declared to be the tomb of Osiris - a pro-mastaba tomb comprised of chambers covered over by a superstructure and surrounded by subsidiary burials, three hundred and thirty eight in all, made up of the king’s harem and courtiers. It was now identified as the tomb of the first dynasty king Djer.

  Anson took in the Abydos scene in a sweeping stare, the plain surrounded by the bay of the Libyan Hills. Some believed that the tomb might be near the cultivation, to the North East. In the nineteenth century, Mariette, author of the tale of Aida, searched for it there and later, Flinders Petrie also spent two seasons looking. Modern exploration however has turned up nothing. A dead end.

  What did that leave? Nag el-Mashayekh and al-Birba have been advanced as possible sites for the tomb of Osiris, but no evidence had ever been produced from here either.

  He paused on the bay of desert hills beyond Abydos in the west. There was another legend. It was said that the entrance to the Underworld lay in a gap in these hills. Osiris was the god of the underworld. He noticed a gap in the hills, just barely visible in the dust-heavy sky. The souls of the dead were said to make their way to their abode in the “other world” through a gap in the mountains of Abydos, their destination being a region in the Duat or underworld called Sekhet-Aaru, the Egyptian heaven.

  “Where did Professor Hunter concentrate his search?” Bloem asked.

  Kalila answered.

  “He operated all over Egypt at various times -Luxor, Abydos, Tell el Amarna, the Fayoum, Saqqara and Bubastis,”

  “And specifically in Abydos?”

  “You name it,” Kalila said. “From the oldest royal tombs and cenotaphs to an old causeway in the west.”

  Kalila caught his eye as she said it.

  Causeway. It must have hit her at the same time as it hit him. His father had excavated a rising causeway - or was it a staircase, the road to the tomb of Ancient Egypt’s saviour?

  This idea collided with another in his mind. His father had sent Abuna the potsherd and the message about going first to Osiris… and the seventh stair…

  The evidence clicked into alignment like the tumblers in a lock and new hope swung open. The dust-driven wind tugged at Anson, but he scarcely noticed it.

  Anson had a murmured word with Kalila and then made a suggestion to the others.

  “I believe my father did some excavating at the remains of an old causeway in Abydos. Should we take a look?”

  Saneya, the young woman from the Supreme Council of Antiquities, overheard him and stepped in. She shook her head vigorously.

  “No, no. That is not in your permit. Also it is an area where we cannot guarantee your safety from hostile local elements. Furthermore, a storm is closing in.”

  As if to back her up, two Egyptian guards filled Anson’s vision.

  He thought of Daniel. What would the Coptic priest make of his latest theory?

  The woman from the SCA made a point of sitting beside him at the back of a minibus on the drive back to Luxor.

  “You may not go into unauthorised areas,” she told him.

  “So I gather.” She managed to imply that she was warning him against crossing any lines. She confirmed this impression by adding: “It was a habit of your father’s and cannot be tolerated.”

  “You didn’t approve of my father?” he said.

  Her eyes flashed. “I do not approve of you. What is your interest in following in his footsteps?”

  “Going where I shouldn’t go, you mean?”

  “Do you not think that what your father was trying to prove is best forgotten?”

  “Many apparently do, it seems. And you are one of them. You have firmly set ideas about boundaries, I take it,” he said.

  “You have to decide where your lines are drawn, Mr Hunter.”

  “Tell me something. As an official, what do you think happened to my father? Who killed him?”

  She gave him a shrug of indifference.

  “I’m sure I cannot say.”

  “Somebody with firmly drawn lines, no doubt.”

  “While you are free from the boundaries of any kind of belief, no doubt,” she said.

  She did not sound like an official at that moment, but a fervent young woman fired by her beliefs.

  “I believe in finding out the truth,” he said.

  “Disturbing precious beliefs and traditions no matter what the consequences?”

  “Certainly. If that’s what it takes.”

  “You are your father’s son.”

  Chapter 55

  WITH THE DUST storm worsening, the group put further visits on hold. Anson returned to his hotel room with Kalila to discuss their mutual flash of inspiration. “Abuna.”

  The Coptic monk was sitting on the edge of Anson’s bed and had evidently been taking a nap. He sat up, rubbing his eyes.

  “A relative let me in,” he said.

  “Another cousin?”

  “A brother-in-law as a matter of fact. I had to see you. I have had a brainwave.”

  “Good, so have we. We think we’ve found the stairway.” Daniel blinked in surprise.

  “You know?”

  “We didn’t know until today.”

  “But that’s exactly what I’ve come here to tell you. Your father was trying to lead me to the old causeway in Abydos. I figured it out finally from a cryptic phrase written in the Book of Buried Pearls.”

  “I know it well,” Kalila said. “I was on the dig with him a few seasons ago. He may have discovered something and kept it to himself.”

  “Then it’s clear enough what we do next,” Daniel told them. “We must head back to Abydos and take a look. Two sturdy young nephews, John and James, are outside with a Land Cruiser. This storm will provide us with perfect cover and it could blow for days, the Lord willing…

  Chapter 56

  THE WHIPPING sand and wind turned the air into a granulated swarm, stinging their faces and exposed areas of skin. Covering their faces, Anson, Kalila, Daniel and his nephews, James and John, two silent, Biblical-looking young men as swarthy as Daniel, left the Land Cruiser and trudged across the sand towards the western hills. A sound of howling accompanied them.

  “The cry of the dog god?” Daniel said to Anson, cupping his mouth with his hand.

  “Nice to think so, but it’s only the wind blowing over the dunes. The fine sand in this ancient plain makes a moaning sound. Locals say it comes from the mighty throngs of the dead who wait for Osiris to come forth and show himself at his great annual festival. A gathering of millions of souls.”

  Kalila stopped them.

  “The causeway begins here. The sand has covered it so we may need to do a little clearing.”

  Daniel’s nephews had brought tools, including spades, and they began to clear away sand to reveal blocks in a causeway.

  Kalila bent close to Anson.

  The two young men worked with a will. Sand flew up from their labours and it also flew at them from the streng
thening dust storm. First they found a pair of stone slabs, then another.

  “Here it is,” Kalila said jubilantly.

  A swing of a pick brought a hollow metallic ring. A metal cover? They cleared more sand, craning to see. A trapdoor covered the spot where the seventh stone should have been and had been carefully covered over with sand.

  “Good work, men,” Daniel said.

  His nephews got down on their knees to dig with their hands.

  They uncovered a shaft, guarded by a pair of padlocked iron doors, and flanked by two stone offering tables. John produced a crowbar and broke the padlock. The two young men swung the doors open, exposing a shaft that dropped away into darkness.

  Abuna cheered.

  Anson was electrified.

  A tomb. Then my father was right.

  Was this a doorway to the ancient Egyptian underworld?

  The desert air nipped. He swallowed dryly.

  Upeqer.

  The name of the burial place of Osiris, the Jesus of the ancient world, a man-god who had perhaps ruled as a king in early times. He was said to have brought enlightenment to savage Egyptians, giving them laws and teaching them agriculture. But then he had suffered treachery. His brother Seth, the Egyptian devil murdered him, tore his body into fourteen fragments and scattered them in the Nile. Bewailing his loss, Isis, his devoted wife, embarked on a search for the fragments of her husband. She gathered them all and restored his body, giving all Egyptians the hope of resurrection and eternal survival. Osiris went on to rule the underworld, his survival assured by the process of mummification, which led the way for all Egyptians.

  It was a story as familiar now as a childhood tale learnt in the nursery.

  Above them, a pale sun struggled to penetrate a sandpaper sky.

  Chapter 57

  THEY DROPPED down on ropes through an opening in a shattered superstructure made of great slabs of granite, descending into a large chamber cut into rock.

  Daniel went first, lowering himself, hand over hand.

  Anson was next. Were they going down into the burial place of a god, or just the tomb of a king revered by later generations? As he lowered himself, the dry rope rasped through his palms. Maybe we’re going down into the underworld itself, he thought, glancing up at the sky fading in a spray of dust at the opening.

  The others followed and their torch beams shot rays into darkness.

  They moved cautiously through the underground structure. Their torch beams told them that others had been here before. Tomb robbers? Was anything left? Mud-brick walls lined the interior that had once been faced with decorated wooden boards. These had been ripped off the walls and lay in splinters at the base of the walls. What had they been looking for - hidden doors?

  The darkness brushed against Anson, challenged him, stirred the hairs on the back of his neck. More brick walls separated other rooms in the structure. The torch beams showed these to be empty too.

  They moved on.

  Chapter 58

  THEY PASSED through a series of columned halls. He counted six. The colonnades were cut out of the living stone. All of the halls were empty, except for a single carving of Osiris in a niche.

  “What prodigious offerings once choked these halls?” Daniel muttered to himself. “How did a people honour a god, the one whom they believed held the key to eternal life for all Egyptians, the Lord of the underworld?”

  In the seventh chamber, a wall and ceiling had cracked, perhaps in an earthquake. Debris swept down by ancient flash floods had filled the chamber with silt. They climbed a mound and crawled on their bellies over the silt, their heads brushing the roof.

  A flaking image of Nut the sky goddess, Mother of Osiris, arched her naked body over their heads, rows of yellow stars painted on her blue body. The painting showed a brazen sun entering her mouth and traveling through her body to be reborn at dawn.

  Rebirth.

  Anson felt as if he were also traveling through the innards of her star-lined body as he crawled. I am on a journey like that sun, but not towards rebirth. Or am I? Perhaps rebirth is exactly the point of my journey and my eventual destination. At the end of my journey, am I to emerge with a newborn understanding of my father and of the greatest mystery of all - death and the afterlife?

  At the end of the seventh hall, they scrambled to their feet and brushed silt from their clothes.

  The air was tighter here, stifling. They shone their lights ahead.

  It was a sealed chamber, dominated by a black basalt statue of the god Osiris, lying on his back on a lion-headed bier, facing a painted ceiling. He wore the cone-like, feathered Atef crown and the tight swathing of a mummy.

  They drew closer and saw that a moat surrounded the platform that supported the bier, turning it into an island. Had it once been filled with water?

  Underneath the tightly stretched cloak of wrapping, one hand of the god reached down to his groin, where his hands closed around his phallus, or where his phallus should have been. Instead, a black hole gaped.

  “You see that?” Daniel said,

  “Yes, a vital part of the god’s original equipment is missing,” Anson said.

  Kalila spelt it out.

  “The penis of Osiris has gone!”

  “Oh, that,” Anson said. “I was thinking of his shepherd’s crook. Yes, well spotted Kalila. What an eye you ladies have. It certainly is missing. This is consistent with mythology. According to legend, it was the one piece of the god that Isis never found as she collected together his body parts. A oxyrynchus fish in the Nile gulped down the vital organ, a fish forever after despised by the Egyptians. But Isis, being the infinitely provident and kind lady she was - as well as Egypt’s greatest practitioner of magic - modelled Osiris a new part, a clay prosthetic, to make her consort whole again.”

  Anson looked up to the ceiling above the statue. A figure of a hawk, wings outstretched, hovered above the bier of Osiris.

  In myth Isis in the form of a hawk, straddled the loins of the god in order to impregnate herself with the seed that would become Horus.

  Daniel stepped down into the moat and climbed up the other side to take a closer look at the statue. But as he mounted the stone platform, it triggered a convulsion of the floor. A grinding noise filled their ears. It came from behind. They twisted round.

  A block of stone rumbled down behind them, sealing them inside the room.

  “We have a bigger problem than a lost penis,” Daniel said in a hushed voice to a hushed chamber.

  “There’s no bigger problem. Let’s take a look around,” Anson said. “The missing part may be hidden in this room. Maybe it’s the trigger for something to happen.”

  Daniel climbed back up, abandoning the stone man on the slab. They spread out to search the chamber including the dark corners.

  Kalila gave a whoop of delight.

  “I’ve found something. Behind the relief of an oxyrynchus fish.”

  They ran to join her. She knelt on the floor in front of a sculpted scene of the River Nile, filled with zigzag lines to represent water, and alive with images of reeds, birds, crocodiles and hippos.

  She must have pressed on the block and swung it open for now a gap had appeared in the wall. Kalila reached inside and came out with an object.

  “What have you found?”

  Kalila chuckled. She lifted the object and held it up in her fingers for the rest to see. Their torchlight illuminated an erect, veined penis, some six inches in length, in smooth, swollen basalt, set on a cylindrical handle or base.

  “Not much, really,” she said, a mocking look in her eyes.

  Every male in the room looked and then gave the Coptic girl a stare.

  “Only kidding, guys.”

  She got up and carried the stone penis to the basalt statue. She stretched over Osiris to the groin of his statue and slid it into the hole.

  It clicked into place, slightly curved, angling towards the bird figure on the roof. What now? Let’s hope the roof doesn't fal
l in, Anson thought. Daniel turned his eyes up to check on the ceiling and that was when the slab on the island shivered. It was moving. They jumped back. It rumbled up like a car hoist to meet the ceiling and the waiting bird’s body.

  It stopped just as the protruding tip brushed the bird.

  As it did, it triggered another roar.

  The stone door ground open, moved by some unseen force, perhaps under the influence of hidden weights or sand operating like hydraulics and so did another stone in the wall ahead of them…

  This time death’s door did lead somewhere.

  They went forward into a shadowy sanctuary. Anson paused to throw a parting glance at the ceiling.

  Great aim, he thought.

  Chapter 59

  THEY FOUND themselves in a hypostyle hall filled with decorated, papyrus-shaped columns. Thronging the walls were the painted images of the gods of the underworld, each squatting with their knees raised and their gowns stretched over their knees.

  “The forty-two gods, judges of the dead,” Kalila said under her breath.

  “There!” A torch beam found it.

  A white form leapt from shadow at the back of the hall under a pavilion, overlooking a reception area. Their torch beams converged on it sharply.

  It was a human figure on a throne, looming out of the wall, a white mummy figure with a cone-shaped, white crown. Osiris. This time, he had risen from his bier, and had taken his place on a throne as the Lord and Great Judge of the Dead, raised on a platform with seven steps. His crossed arms held a crook and flail. His face was green and his body swathed from his shoulders to his feet.

  They went nearer in awe and wonderment.

  He looked alive. Eyes of inlaid rock crystal jumped into the torch beams to throw out a morose stare. But it was only a carving in brilliant white crystalline limestone.

  “Osiris, the Downcast One,” Daniel said in a hoarse whisper.

  They circled the gleaming white statue. The painted sculpture was a masterpiece, the muscles, the feet, the hands and the face finely delineated. In front of it stood a stone offering table carved in the shape of an open lotus flower.