THE SMITING TEXTS_Anson Hunter_Egyptology action adventure thrillers

by Roy Lester Pond

  Wep needed a mound. He set to work again with his shovel, building up a small pyramid of sand. That’s when his shovel blade hit something hard, jarring his arms and shoulders. Stone.

  Curious. He knelt, tossing the spade aside. Just a rock? On all fours, he clawed away sand like a dog, showering grains behind himself.

  More stone appeared under his scratching fingers. Smooth, dressed stone!

  He kept going.

  A bit more digging revealed the curved tails of two crocodiles on a broken stela. It was like finding an ancient road sign.

  Crocodiles were revered in the Fayoum and were particularly associated with the Labyrinth of Amenemhat, where the sacred crocodiles were said to lie.

  A sign of the Labyrinth, here?

  It’s a good thing I’m on my knees,’ he thought. His entire body trembled.

  But it wasn’t only his bodily reaction that surprised him. His behaviour surprised him too. He decided in that moment to check his excitement, resisting the urge to call out for Kalila or for his Head Man.

  Could he have shouted out even if he had tried? It was as if sand had choked up his throat.

  The words of the Greek historian Herodotus rang in his brain as if announced by a herald amid a fanfare of trumpets. A glittering procession of possibilities now streamed through his mind and with it the greatest dream of all, the prospect of a find greater than the pyramids. ‘They decided to leave to posterity a memorial and caused to be built a Labyrinth a little above Lake Moeris…'This Labyrinth I actually saw, a work greater than all power to describe... Inside are two groups of chambers, one group underground, the other group above on top of them, three thousand in number, fifteen hundred of each type... where lay the tombs of the sacred crocodiles.’

  Could this be the most astounding discovery in the long long history of Egypt? A history-making, history-exploding discovery that would dazzle the world?

  Slow down.

  Cold reality halted his imaginary cavalcade.

  Two things would happen if he was right. First the Supreme Council of Antiquities would swoop. Then Egyptian bureaucratic delay would fall like a dead hand over the dig.

  This was his discovery – his and Wep’s and he took the further step of deciding to keep it that way, at least for now, until he could savour it, reflect on it and think through the implications.

  Would this site prove what he had always thought, that the Lost Labyrinth had never been found. It was never so much lost as misplaced. Egyptologists believed that the Labyrinth was attached to Amenemhat’s pyramid at Hawara, but how could such a vast structures, with sepulchers beneath, have vanished without trace?

  Emory glanced almost fearfully over his shoulder. Relief swept him. Nobody was watching.

  The secret was still his. He went on digging like a dog, but this time a starving dog that had smelt the whiff of carrion bone.

  “Speak to me, stones! Say what I want to hear.”

  Text, on a pale fragment of stone appeared. Carved hieroglyphic characters. With each scoop of sand removed, living words swarmed up like insects to reveal themselves.

  ‘Oh god.’ He recognized the name in a cartouche as easily as he would recognize his own signature.

  Maat-en-Ra, son of the sun, Amen-em-hat.

  The name resonated like a mallet blow on stone.

  Emory covered it over impulsively like a greedy dog burying a bone to be certain of keeping it from others.

  Gone. Hidden again.

  How long could he keep this from the world and fit it together with all the other clues he had found?

  Chapter 70

  THEIR CAPTORS gave them Arab bread and water and bolted the door. The water sat in a clay jug. Where had the water come from? Even Egyptian tap water was notoriously undrinkable. They viewed the contents suspiciously, but their thirst prevailed. They broke the bread into pieces and ate. It was stale. They sat on the floor, resting against the wall. Anson drank but did not eat.

  “What do you think?” Daniel said. “Are they zealots, or criminals?”

  “A bit of both,” Anson said. “Especially the black widow spider. She seems to combine both devoutness and greed.”

  Being captive under the same roof as the assassin who had probably murdered his father pressed on him like a weight. Part of that weight was an unexpected sense of guilt. Why, now that he had found the likely killer, could he not find it within himself to hate her in the way he should?

  The veiled woman had killed his father. Yet her presence in this house did not fill him with revulsion, but rather a sense of loss.

  He closed his eyes and tried to get some rest.

  Devoutness and greed, Daniel recalled Anson saying of their captor.

  Do I too combine these opposing qualities in myself, the monk thought, both religious commitment and a hunger to unravel secrets?

  Daniel wondered how much of his commitment to uncovering the truth about the death of Emory Hunter, and about his secret discovery, had to do with friendship and how much to do with the sheer cerebral pleasure of investigation and his fascination with the ancient past, a worldly pleasure that his years of solitude and devotion in the desert had not been able to overcome.

  He looked at Anson, the young man resting against the wall, his eyes closed, the Egyptian girl’s head resting on his shoulder.

  Anson too was a mixture, of hunger and innocence. He was on a journey to solve the mystery of his father but also to find answers to the larger mysteries of life and death and what lay beyond. Along the way he had found a young woman of faith who could help him on the road.

  Abuna Daniel prayed over the two of them that they would survive to fulfil their quest and the hopes of their lives

  I also pray, Lord, that you will guide me into the right understanding of what awaits us after death - but not yet.

  This business is far too intriguing to die just now.

  Chapter 71

  THE KHAMSIN had all but cleared by the early morning light, leaving just a murky red glow hanging high in the sky.

  After parking the vehicles in the lee of a rocky outcrop, they went on foot. They trudged across a sandy plain as the sun rose vast and smoking into view.

  Their captors had left Daniel’s nephews James and John behind, bringing only Anson, Daniel and Kalila. Armed men shepherded them at gunpoint, while others carried picks and spades as they searched for a trapezoid plain to the north west of Lake Qarun. Sunlight spangled off the water. The plain twisted in the gathering heat.

  Anson wiped his forehead on a sleeve and consulted the aerial photo, comparing their position in relation to the lake.

  “Where is the site?” the dark figure in the chador said, walking beside him.

  “It could be anywhere in this area,” he said. “Finding one spot in a shifting a sea of desert sand is no easy matter. I’ve been looking for the site of a temple that was excavated here and transported. The recent storm may have complicated things. Who knows, it could be lying six feet under.”

  “Then sharpen your eyes or you could be doing the same.”

  “I say we try here,” he said, jamming a heel into the sand. He noticed some uncovered stones, partly exposed in the sand. Maybe he had some of his father’s luck.

  The workmen began digging. Their third trench struck a slab of flat, chiselled stone.

  It revealed itself to be a slab of enormous proportions. They followed its length, clearing mounds of sand and arrived at a gap blocked with scree. They cleared it away to find a hole falling between sheared slabs of stone. Whoever had been here had simply covered it over, allowing the desert sands to guard its secret.

  Chapter 72

  THEY DESCENDED one at a time down a rope that snaked into a shaft. The chador woman and one of her guards were already below when Anson’s turn came. She turned up her veiled face to watch him descend. The guard kept his rifle pointed. There was dream-like air to the descent. Daniel, Kalila and more guards came next. Two armed men with guns stayed above,
along with the workmen, to guard the entrance.

  The sun was high by the time they were all below, and its hard stare, charged with motes of dust, gave dim light to the chamber below. The tinted light made the new arrivals look like an assembly of gods gathered in the mist of the underworld.

  Kalila turned around in a circle of astonishment.

  “Is this really it? Can it be what you said, Anson? The Labyrinth!”

  His eyes slowly adjusted to the gloom. They had come down into a vast court bordered with twin rows of square columns. Devastation had struck here. Columns had been smashed aside and cracks rivered through others. Earthquake? Their captors turned on torches, splitting the darkness.

  “We need torches too,” Anson said.

  “No,” the shrouded woman said. “If we have the light it will keep you with us. If you should decide to go missing in this darkness you condemn yourselves to a long and slow death.”

  “I'm trying to find the way,” he said. “If I can't do it properly, then we’re all in trouble.”

  “Only you, then,” she said. “But if you escape, the others will pay.”

  They handed him a torch. He shone it on to the nearest stone column.

  “A discovery beyond belief,” Daniel murmured in admiration. “If this truly is the labyrinth, it could take a lifetime to survey.”

  “This hall will lead to others,” Anson said, trying to recall the descriptions written by classical writers about the Labyrinth.

  The closeness down here wrapped itself around him.

  Anson felt the ages stir like the dust and the place sit up to stare at him as he went ahead, watching his torch beam cut a wedge in the darkness. The silent procession with torches went through the hall like a long insect with compound, shining eyes searching in all directions.

  “Move,” the woman said.

  Kalila protested. “If this is the labyrinth, we can’t just jump in. We have to decide how to go through it.”

  “Any ideas?” Daniel said.

  Anson recalled theories he had read about the Labyrinth’s construction and ancient eyewitness reports. The classical author Herodotus said: The Labyrinth consists of twelve roofed courts which have their gates opposite one another, six facing northwards and six facing south. The courts are also contiguous and confined by the same wall on the outside. Once inside there are two groups of chambers, one group underground, the other group above on top of them, 3,000 in number, 1,500 of each type.

  The chambers above ground Herodotus saw for himself as he passed through them and he spoke about them on the basis of his own observation, but the subterranean group he had heard of only by oral report. For the Egyptians in charge flatly refused to show them, saying that there lay the tombs not only of the kings who had caused the Labyrinth to be built in the beginning but also those of the sacred crocodiles. So the historian’s statements on the lower chambers were based on hearsay, although he wrote of the upper chambers from his own observation. The upper chambers are quite beyond human capacity to build, Herodotus reported, for both the exits through the vestibules and the extremely twisting and winding course which one must take through the courts inspired boundless wonder as one passed from court into chambers and from chambers into columned porches, then into further vestibules from the columned porches and into yet other courts from the chambers. All these structures have a roof made of stone - exactly like the walls. The walls are covered with reliefs, and each court has a colonnade around it made of exactly fitting limestone blocks...

  Pliny talked about forty chapels and said: men are already weary of traveling when they reach that bewildering maze of paths; indeed there are lofty upper rooms reached by ramps and porticoes from which one descends on stairways... inside are images of the gods, statues of kings and representations of monsters. Certain of the halls are arranged in such a way that as one throws open the door there arises within a fearful noise of thunder ... then there are other subterranean chambers made by excavating galleries in the earth.

  “Pomponius wrote: It has one descending way into it, and contains within almost innumerable paths, which have many convolutions twisting hither and thither. These paths however, cause great perplexity, both because of their continual winding and because of their porticoes which often reverse their direction, continually running through one circle after another and continually turning and retracing their steps as far as they have gone forwards with the result that the Labyrinth is fraught with confusion by reason of its perpetual meandering...”

  “How are we supposed to find our way through a labyrinth we’ve never seen before?” Kalila said anxiously.

  “There must be a secret scheme to the building that only the initiated understood,” Anson said. “Unless, like the legendary Theseus, they followed a ball of string.”

  They went some distance before the court ended in a square doorway, edged with images of the crocodile god. They passed through it.

  “Over there!” Daniel said urgently.

  Someone had been this way before. Long ago. A figure sat slumped in a corner formed by a wall and a pillar.

  Kalila gasped as Anson turned his light on to a skull. Its eyes were empty, bone-rimmed pools of darkness. It was an ancient skeleton.

  Chapter 73

  WHO WAS HE?

  Behind his head, scenes of a marsh decorated the wall. It showed long-stemmed papyrus plants and wavy lines of water below. Crocodiles lurked beneath the zigzag lines of water. Anson’s torch discovered something else. The skeleton's fingers were clenched around a long flake of stone. Written text in faded ink covered its surface.

  Daniel whispered as if at a gravesite.

  “I wonder who he was? An ancient tomb robber, perhaps?”

  “Whoever he was, he knew how to read and write,” Kalila said. “That’s hieratic text. A priest perhaps?”

  Anson bent and drew the flake of stone from the fingers.

  Kalila meanwhile spotted something in the skeleton’s hand that was jammed partly behind its back. The fingers were clutching a linen rag.

  “What else has he got? Look, he’s holding something wrapped in cloth.” She reached for the cloth. It was jammed in the bony fingers and she had to give a tug. The skeleton, undisturbed for centuries, shifted. It toppled towards her, clattering like the limbs of a wooden puppet.

  She smothered a yelp of surprise. “That’s what I was afraid of.”

  Using long, stretched-out fingers of distaste, she pulled out the cloth. She put it on the floor and unrolled it while Anson flooded it in his light. As the last fold of cloth came away, the light struck flares off two golden objects. One was a small figurine of a woman, the other a crocodile, no larger than a lizard.

  “Gold!” Their captors drew nearer, adding their torch beams.

  “That one is a fish-bearing goddess of the Lake region and the other one is Sobek, the crocodile god,” Anson said. He remembered the collector in New York telling him about the discovery of a golden crocodile in Egypt. Was it from the same source? He pocketed his torch and picked up the statues. He gave them a heft and held them up to examine them. “Solid gold.”

  “Give them to me,” the chador-wrapped figure said holding out her gloved hand. She took them from Anson and handed them to a guard.

  Anson took out his torch and played the beam over the skeleton. The hips appeared twisted and compressed.

  “There’s something bothering me about him. He’s bent at a strange angle, and not just because we shifted him. Something has crushed his hips. Do your think this guy was injured and dragged his body here? What could have done that? He couldn’t have come far in that shape. Had he been bleeding?”

  He turned his light on the floor, hoping to find a trail, but the centuries had dusted over any stain, if there had ever been any.

  “We’ve got to figure out what this writing says before we go any further,” Kalila said. “Bring your light here,” she said. “I’m going to have to do a bit of translation on the fly.”
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br />   She squatted on the floor with her back against the wall.

  The others rested too, the guards propping their rifles against the wall. The woman in the veil squatted like the goddess Maat, her chador pulled over her knees.

  Kalila spent a time in studious silence, nodding and murmuring to herself while she examined the flake of stone.

  Chapter 74

  “IT IS A SHORTHAND script.”

  “Is it telling us anything?”

  “Only in the most cryptic way imaginable. It’s a riddle titled THE TEMPLE IN THE KING.” She read aloud from the flake of stone, halting in places.

  The Temple of the King: To find the sacred zones, Seek beneath the temple bones. Those who know the Inner Ways Can survive the fearful maze. Mark well! who know the code Of this twisted, nether road Like the shepherd in the rear, Probe where none would dare, Deep down beneath the earth, Where Mother Nut gave birth, Through pylon gates of waste, You must go with watchful haste. Where hidden Sobek waits, Beyond the organ lakes, To the chambers of the heart, But now the terrors start. At last, the inner shrine. But will the prize be thine? For now the walls excrete And death comes to defeat.

  “That’s a maze right there,” Daniel said. He looked daunted.

  “Maybe not. I think this refers to the ‘Shepherd of the rear,” Anson said. “It’s the title of a specialist physician who attends to the bowels and stomach -and that gives me an idea.” He picked up a flake of chalky limestone lying on the floor. Now he used the piece like chalk and began sketching on the stone floor.

  “He’s drawing a map,” she said.

  Anson’s lines dashed over the floor. Slowly the floor revealed the outline of a pharaoh, standing with clenched fists at his sides and wearing a head cloth and false beard.

  “That’s a map?”

  Now Anson sketched something inside the pharaoh’s body. A building. It looked very much like the plan view of a structure. A maze? It ran inside the figure of the king.

  “Get it?”

  “It looks like a diagram from a medical text book – the insides of the human body.”