by Paula Guran
“Endlessly,” she says tartly, rising off her haunches. “Then let us be off. I need to stretch my limbs.”
I follow her lead, not caring to mention that her tail bends crookedly to the left. My mama has much in common with Bastet, in that she can be a benign godlike force and also one Hatshepsut of a demon-raiser when riled. Especially when raised from the dead.
The walk is long and the moon has only sailed halfway through the sky-bowl when we pause in the awesome shadow of the pyramid. This man-made and stone-clad mountain, smooth as sandalwood and as precisely pointed as an arrowhead fashioned for a behemoth, seems like a monument worthy of its mighty occupant-in-chief, Death.
My mama has finished lamenting her impious fate by now, and is all business.
“There are secret ways into every pyramid, son, stones that balance upon the weight of a hair to spring open. Sniff for air.”
So that is how I come to scraping my nose raw along stone seams so narrow the advertised hair could hardly slip into them.
Suddenly my mama stretches up her front feet. Just as suddenly they plunge forward back to the level, taking her with them. I find the stone has swung open wide enough to admit a mouse. Apparently my food-starved mama fell right through. I must grunt and groan my way past, much compressing my innards. Maybe hers were removed after all . . .
“Hush!” she warns from within.
I sense a draft of air we are soon following up a long stone-paved ramp.
“I have seen the plans,” she hisses in the dark. “No one expects a cat, no matter how sacred, to understand the science of humans. But living in the palace taught me the value of learning their labyrinthine ways.”
Whatever, I just hope she can lead us out of this maze.
Then I see the light. My mama is a haloed silhouette ahead of me. She stops. “This is wrong, Heart of Night. No one should be in the pyramid now.”
“Not even some artisan finishing up a frieze?”
“No one.”
Mama pads grimly forward, and I follow.
The passage opens into another, then finally into a large chamber lit by the flicker of an oil lamp. I brush past my mother to reconnoiter. She may know her pyramids, but I know the perfidy of humans from my time in the Necropolis.
Yet no humans are present, just the flickering lamp scenting the air with a rancid odor. Or, rather, the only humans present are a painted parade upon the walls. Several Eyes of Horus gaze down on me, as well as a number of insect- and animal-headed gods. I do not spot the Divine Bastet.
I do spot the massive stone sarcophagus that occupies the center of the room.
Mama jumps atop this with an impressive leap for one in her recent condition.
“It is untampered with,” she reports with satisfaction. “In fact, from up here, I see no signs of disruption.”
“There must be something. Why else the lamp?”
I take advantage of its erratic illumination to study the paintings. The figures, so stiff in their ceremonial headdresses, seem to move in the uncertain light. I see Nomenophis ministered to by serving girls. Offering something to wing-armed Isis. I see sacrificial geese and bulls. I see the noble cat in several representations, all sitting, all in formal profile, like the people. Like the people, the cats are all a burnt-sand color, ruddy brown.
All except one.
The painting depicts Nomenophis in his throne room. Officials and gods gather around. At his feet crouches, not sits, a single cat. She is black.
“Look, Mama! You are in one of the paintings!”
“Hush, boy. Of course I am. As I should be here in my mummified form, with a canopic jar of my vitals nearby. Instead I am robbed. Robbed of my immortality. That painting is a lie! I am no longer Pharaoh’s Footstool!”
Her voice has risen to echo off the stone walls.
“Hush,” I tell her in a reversal of roles. “Whoever has lit this lamp may still be within hearing.”
I leap up beside her and survey the room in all its glory. I know Nomenophis inhabits a richly painted and inlaid mummy case beneath this stone sarcophagus. I know beneath that his linen-wrapped mummy wears a jeweled gold headpiece and collar.
Yet the tomb itself has not been breached.
I look around, until my eyes rest upon something that should not be here, but is.
My mother ceases her mourning long enough to notice and follow my fixed gaze.
“My mummy! It is here.”
Indeed, a wrapped white figure of a cat sits upon a costly miniature throne (quite appropriate placement for one of the Sacred Breed).
“Who has usurped my place?” my mama demands, assuming the very same combative crouch in which she is depicted so handsomely on the tomb wall.
“I am not sure that anyone has.”
“And what does that mean?”
I am too busy casting my particular Eye of Horus, representing theft and restitution, about the premises. I spy a pile of abandoned linen windings near the oil lamp on the floor. The inspiration of Bastet floods my brain.
“I apologize for urging you to, er, shut up earlier, Mama. I think you should resume your caterwauling, but first . . . ”
In a few minutes my mama’s finest notes are bouncing off the sober faces of Isis, Osiris, Selkis, and Neith on all four walls.
I join her, and quite an impressive chorus we concoct in the silence of a deserted tomb.
I soon hear running sandals slapping stones down the long, dark corridor leading toward us. I also hear the sweet sound of curses.
A moment later two linen-kilted men burst into the lamplight.
That is when Mama and I proceed to dance atop Nomenophis’s sarcophagus.
We are not particularly good dancers but manage to totter on our hind feet and bat our flailing front feet enough to provide an artistic flurry among the mummy-wrappings that drape our assorted limbs.
“The fury of Bastet,” howls one man, falling to his knees and pressing his forehead to the cold stone.
“We have offended the goddess!” screeches the other, doing likewise. “I told you we should not tamper with the mummy of the Sacred One.”
At this, two of the Sacred Ones leap off the sarcophagus on to the temptingly revealed naked backs of the prostrate worshipers of Bastet.
Claws dig deep and often. The wretches’ howls mingle with our own. They rise to evade our rear harrying, only to find their faces being inscribed with the sacred sign of Bastet: four long parallel tracks repeated to infinity.
Soon we are alone in the tomb, listening to the eerie echoes of tormented escapees.
I leap off the royal masonry to meet the mummy who has replaced my mama.
“Heart of Night,” she calls after me. “You have seen the Revenge of Bast. Touch not the cat.”
“I do not touch the cat . . .
“ . . . I level it.” With one paw-blow I knock the mummy over and begin unraveling the wrappings. I am getting good at this.
While my mama howls her horror (receiving fresh echoes down the corridor with every bleat), I turn the mummy into shredded wheat.
Lo, this mummy’s innards have been left inside too, only they gleam hard and gold in the lamplight.
“Those are some royal artifacts of Pharaoh,” my mama says from her perch, stunned.
I nod. “That is why you were shuffled into some spare wrappings and thrown into the desert to die. Your false image here hid the items the servants filched during the funeral. Even as Pharaoh in all his richness was lowered into his sarcophagus, those vermin were wrapping priceless trinkets into a feline-shaped treasure chest. No wonder they fled just now as if the breath of Bastet were smoking their heels behind them.”
“But they escaped.”
“Marked by the tracks of Bastet? People will comment on their condition. In their current state of fear they will not have the wits to conceal anything. Also, the stone is askew that opens the secret passage we used. Someone will soon notice. We must guard the mummy treasure until the aut
horities arrive.”
“But that may take hours, even days.”
“Shall I go out and hunt food first, or you?”
So it is written that when Pharaoh’s guard came to his father’s tomb two days later, after the claw-marked thieves had been noticed, questioned, and confessed, a fierce black cat was found crouched over the spilled booty from the mummified cat wrappings.
The mummy of the former pharaoh’s cat, the valiant Eye of Night, was missing and presumed to have been assumed into the underworld by Bastet Herself, whose Terrible Tracks still defaced the backs and faces of the would-be thieves.
And so it is now inscribed on the tomb walls of Nomenophis II, who will in his own day go into that underworld that all Egyptians long for, that the position of Pharaoh’s Footstool is once again occupied, by Heart of Night, son of Eye of Night, who will live in human memory for two thousand years . . . or possibly more, so long as Bastet and the Sacred Breed are revered, to the ends of the earth.
The Eye of Horus, representing theft and restitution, never sleeps. Evil-doers, read Heart of Night’s cartouche and weep.
During the nineteenth century, scientific archaeology—with its meticulous excavation, recording, and study of artifacts—was being born. Meanwhile, treasure hunters and nationalistic antiquarians ignored science as they raced to secure ancient relics, art, statuary, and monuments. With no regard for the knowledge that can be gained from the methodological study of the past, these treasure hunters, tomb-robbers, and curio seekers irrevocably destroyed priceless information. Tilton and Doyle invent two men who personify that struggle between science and greed, combine it with ancient myth, and come up with a compelling tale.
The Chapter of Coming Forth by Night
Lois Tilton & Noreen Doyle
The wake of the sun’s golden barge washed over the limestone cliff s, flooding the desolate landscape with the lurid hues of the dying day. For a brief moment the fading brilliance illuminated a narrow fissure among the rocks, until it was lost in the shadows climbing up from the valley floor.
The cooling desert exhaled; the lizards and scorpions crept from the crevasses and shallow dens where they had taken refuge from the searing heat of the day. Sand slid away, widening the fissure, from which stepped into the newborn night a figure draped in a hooded black cloak, as if shadows had wrapped themselves around her. The Oppressor had departed the sky and she was free, until his return.
Raising her arms, she faced the west and her voice filled the evening silence:
A hymn of damnation to thee at eventide,
When thou shalt set as the living set,
Forever and forever in the west,
Never to traverse thy nightly passage,
For the Fiend shall swallow thy prow,
For the Fiend shall swallow thy midships,
For the Fiend shall swallow thy stern,
And the Fiend shall swallow thee and thy every crew.
Here of all places on earth was the oppressive power of the sun most manifest, this barren land burned lifeless, a place where only the dead dwelled, they and their forgotten gods. She knew them all, the ancient dead: from the gnawed and scattered bones of beggars to the flesh of kings preserved in aromatic resins and cased in solid gold. Yet it was life she needed now, so she descended with a smooth gliding stride across the crumbling rocks and sand, toward those places where water flowed.
Approaching the familiar scent of goats and donkeys—a well, and men drawn to it with their livestock to spend the night. One of them slept a bit apart from the fire where the rest were gathered, wrapped in his ragged blanket against the evils of darkness. She beckoned him in dreams. He opened his eyes, he beheld her: the black cloak thrown back from her shoulders uncovered the alabaster smoothness of her form, glowing like the moon against the cloak that hid only her face from his sight.
Like a serpent his staff of life rose, though he never willed it, for he knew what she was, and his fear would have made him flee if he only could have moved. But he was entirely powerless to resist her, and soon his drained and lifeless form lay empty on the ground.
Five thousand years ago the people of this region had found the remains of such men, her victims, preserved undecayed in the sunbaked sand. So they in error came to believe in the power of the Oppressor to grant eternal life, and they began to prepare the bodies of their dead to keep them from corruption in their tombs. But those times had long since passed and the monuments they had once raised were ruins now, their treasures plundered and despoiled by grave-robbers.
This man too had been a grave-robber, drawn to this barren land by greed, which overruled his fear of the specters that were whispered to haunt the buried necropolis. Now his own grave would be a shallow pit in the desert. But all mortals must die; only the gods were doomed to live forever.
She drew a leather sack out from his tattered garments, spilled out the familiar contents on to the ground. Once these had lain in the tomb of Nakht, her faithful worshipper: scarabs and other amulets of fine faience; a gold ring; a tiny glass bottle; the stopper of a canopic jar with the head of a baboon carved of alabaster from Hatnub. She reflected that once her own image had watched over the preserved remains of her mortal worshippers. How long it had been since anyone had called upon her power or sung her praises! Now she too was reduced to a thief, little more than a grave-robber herself, she who had once been invoked as a protectress of the dead. In ancient days, she had commanded men to steal for her, to bring her riches from the graves at Thebes and Memphis, and with these lures of gold and alabaster and real lapis lazuli she tempted others into these hills. Sometimes she had caught her own. “Forgive me, Nakht,” she whispered.
She poured the objects back into the sack and drew the strings tight. On her return, she would replace them among the rocks. More men would come to seek such things, as they had for ages. And they would find them. And her.
Sunrise came too soon. Fearful of the Oppressor’s harsh touch, that which would shrivel her as surely as it had the desert, as surely as she had shriveled this man at her feet, she returned to her lord’s house of eternity.
Within the heart of the hills was the tomb where her lord was imprisoned. He lay at the very back of it, fastened to the rock floor by adamantine chains forged by the Creator from the substance of Creation. But more hateful yet was the immense Serpent coiled next to his body, formed from the living stone.
“Brother, I return.”
He turned a face that pain could never make less beautiful to her. “You were not gone so long tonight.”
Millennia had passed while he lay bound here, great empires rose and fell, and the gods themselves had passed away, fading even from the memory of the people who now lived in this most ancient of lands. But there was yet a sharp pang to see the plunder of the temples and shrines which men so long ago had built for the worship of her lord and their brothers and sisters. She hated the thieves but she needed them, for without their lives she could not spare her lord the most painful of his torments.
“More rich foreign merchants come into the land. The grave-robbers are all dreaming of becoming wealthy men.” So she had heard their thoughts as she slid unseen past their sleeping forms.
He sighed, nostrils flaring. “It seems strange to think of the world become such a poor place that so many men still travel here from afar to hunt for gold. Has the breed of man become too lazy to dig their own mines? Or do they build their cities of gold and, having run dry the veins within the earth, seek the gold of ancients?”
“Not just for gold, beloved brother, do they come. It might be common stone shaped by human hand, so long as it is five thousand years old they covet it. It is antiquity they seek.” Five thousand years. Near two million sunrises had passed since her lord was first chained here. How could so much be endured?
They spoke of tomb-robbers, of such matters of little significance, to keep their minds from the dreadful hour that approached, when the burning golden barge would break through
the barriers of night ferrying the Oppressor on to the throne of his realm—the Usurper who had chained his brother, the rightful Lord of the Land, and condemned him to this eternal suffering. Nothing could hold back the hours, not even a god, and the moment came at last when the darkness lifted at the back of the cave, and the stone Serpent moved.
First its eyes shifted, then its head rose, and its tongue flicked the air, searching for the scent of its appointed prey. She watched her lord, unable to avert her eyes as the vast head turned toward him, as the fanged jaws slowly opened. So she had watched for century after century, helpless to stop it, powerless to help him while the cruel jaws bit and severed his limbs, one by one, devouring them as the Usurper’s curse had decreed: Like the Serpent thou shalt be limbless, by the Serpent thou shalt be dismembered.
As it had been spoken, thus it was done.
And for all those centuries she had searched through the most secret archives of the temples, the hidden tombs of priests and magicians, through the scrolls and inscriptions, searching for the spell to save him. And found it at last, though the cost was high—the cost was a life, for every sunrise.
Yet why were mortals born, except to die? And to serve their gods?
So this night as on so many others she had gone forth to take life, and now she gave it up, straining to give birth, uttering the words of the spell as it had been written: O thou shabti! As my lord is called, as my lord is adjudged, behold! Let the judgment fall not upon him, but upon thee!
And into her hands it came, wet from the birth-passage between her legs, the homunculus, a perfect copy of her lord, who as god of the barren desert could never himself father a child. The Serpent’s cruel jaws gaped wide, about to strike, and she forestalled it, offering this small piece of flesh as a sacrifice in the place of her lord. So it was done, the sacrifice taken, and her lord spared his suffering until another sunrise came.
Dr Archibald E. Wordsley turned up the flame of his lamp and drew it closer to the fragment of papyrus that lay on an Arab table he had appropriated as a desk. Why did the beggars always have to come here by night, like thieves? Of course, thieves they certainly were, and the meanest sort—grave-robbers.