WHATEVER WAS FORGOTTEN, by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
In the course of my life, I was a scribe under one pharaoh, a general under another, and finally I took the Crown of the Two Lands myself. These are some of my titles before I ascended to the double crown:
Foremost of the King’s courtiers;
Fanbearer on the right of the king;
Master of the Secrets of the Palace;
Overseer of Offices of the King;
Overseer of the Generals of the Lord of the Two Lands;
Seal Bearer of King of Upper and Lower Egypt;
High Steward;
Mouth Who Appears in the Entire Land;
True Royal Scribe;
One Who has authority over the library;
Overseer of all Overseers of Scribes of the King.
As Pharaoh, I had many other titles. I ruled after He Who Shall Never Again Be Named, and spent most of my reign righting that which had been unbalanced, restoring that which had been cast down and neglected. I cast out corruption in my government and punished those who mistreated slaves or cheated the poor. I led military campaigns to reclaim all the lands lost during the reign of He Who Shall Not Be Named.
At the end of my life, I looked back and was satisfied with all I had accomplished to the glory of Egypt and the honor of the gods. I had chosen my successor and trained him well; I left my kingdom in strong hands.
I lived long enough to prepare my tomb with all the things I would need in the life to come: spells and prayers on the walls, all the instructions and the maps I would need to navigate to the land of light; pictures of me and my chief royal wife making offerings to the gods that would renew themselves so we always had tribute to offer; images of food and drink, of the perfect garden full of trees ripe with figs and dates, of the finest blue pool with its stand of papyrus, its leaves and flowers of blue lotus, and the shadows of fish below its surface; pictures of all the things I most liked to do in life: hunting lions from my best chariot, bird-hunting in the marshes with my wife, our dead daughters, and our cat, a banquet with guests and musicians, sailing on the Nile.
Also within my tomb I put many ushabtis, statues of helpers who would do all labor in the afterlife; and fine furniture, jewelry, and clothes, perfumes and ointments, all the tools of the everyday; everything I could imagine needing in the life beyond.
My chief royal wife died a year before me. I saw that she had all the necessary ceremonies and preparations, and laid her to rest in my tomb, in hopes that we would meet again.
I set in my tomb statues of myself and my wife. I had our cartouches carved on the walls so that our names would live forever.
My priests performed all the necessary rituals for me after my death. Forty days my body lay in the preserving salts, and afterward my priests anointed it, speaking the right words, and wrapped it in pure linen, placing amulets among my wrappings where they would protect and aid me.
My priests spoke the Opening of the Mouth for me and touched me with the sacred adze to loose all my parts from the bonds of Seth so that I could use my senses after death. They sang the hymns that counseled my heart not to witness against me, and all the hymns that would let me change shape, and eternally make offerings to the gods in the afterlife. They placed my body within its three coffins and then into its granite sarcophagus. They closed my tomb and sealed it with my name.
In the underworld, I went before the Forty-Two Assessors in the Hall of the Two Truths with confidence, and declared my innocence of evil to each truthfully. As my heart was weighed on the scales of Maat, I did not worry that the Devourer of Hearts would eat it and cast me forever out of the afterlife. And indeed my heart balanced with the Feather of Truth, and the Devourer let me pass.
After the judgment, I went before the Throne of Osiris and was made welcome into the life to come.
In my tomb the six parts of my soul rejoined each other: the five names that combined to make my one name; my body, made to last forever by the attentions of my priests after my death; my shadow; my akh, that part of me from the realm of the gods, which is eternal; my ka, the vital force that gave me life and held my personality, the spirit that lived in my heart; and my ba, the part of my soul with the freedom to wander, which had left my body when I died and did not return until I had safely passed all the tests of the gods.
Then I knew paradise.
My wife had also successfully passed through the Hall of the Two Truths. She waited for me in the land of light, and even as our hymns had said, we were restored to greenness, to youth and vigor.
Every day the priests brought food to the altar in my mortuary temple so that my ka could feed. Every day chantresses and dancers came into my sanctuary and performed so my ka could watch and listen. My wife and I attended and enjoyed.
Between these devotions, we lived as I had planned, with all the images of the tomb made real, as fragrant and pleasant as anything I had known in my previous life. I hunted lions in the desert but did not suffer from the heat or sand. My wife and I hunted ducks in the marshes and brought them home for the ushabtis to prepare.
Each day we performed the rituals of offering to the gods. Each day we received the blessings of the afterlife. When my wife and I went sailing on the river, there was always a breeze, and always it was scented with the spices of the homeland. Every meal we ate, whether offered by priests or prepared by the ushabtis, tasted divine.
Each day was precious. Day piled on day, and I treasured them all.
Gradually, my wife and I stopped sending our kas to the mortuary temple, for gradually, there was less there to eat, less music to delight us, fewer people performing the funerary offices in our names. It did not matter, for we had everything we needed inside our house of eternity, which was a whole world of joy, forever.
And then the promise of eternity was broken.
“Where is your vulture pectoral?” I asked my wife one perfect morning.
She placed her hand to her breast. “I don’t know. What has become of your golden flies of valor necklace?”
“Where are your carnelian earplugs?”
“Where is our blue faience senet set?” She set her hand against my chest. “What has become of your green jasper heart scarab?”
I looked away from my wife, gazed from our columned portico across the river toward the desert above the cliffs, where the sun was just rising, its light driving the stars before it from the sky.
“Our table,” she said. “Our breakfast. Our servants.”
I looked toward the inner court, where at this time every day the ushabtis set our breakfast, bread, beer, pomegranates and figs and dates. No table stood there, and there was not even the smell of bread in the air, only the scent of dust. I closed my eyes.
When I opened them, we were in darkness, and I stood on my head.
“Djeser!” cried my wife.
“Mut!” I tried to reached for her. Oh, how weak were my arms! How dark were my eyes! How came we to be in the land of night? Had our shadows swallowed us?
She wailed, a high thin cry like a mourner in a funeral procession.
I reached for my beloved but found her not. After a moment, I fell. I lay on my stomach. I searched for strength, and found only a little. Never had I been so weak, not even when I had died.
I crawled toward my wife. “Osiris. Son of Nut. Ruler of Eternity. King of Gods. Lord of the Living, and King of the Dead! Help us, we pray,” I said. I felt feeble and battered and older than I had in life, and my nose and mouth were full of dust. My wife’s wail went on without interruption.
How had we lost our morning and our light? Had we done something to offend the gods?
There was a taste in the air, the sour taste of deceit and betrayal, desecration.
I found my wife’s hand and gripped it. Her skin was dry and rough; I could feel all the bones beneath it. She stopped wailing and choked, then sobbed.
Then we were gathered up into the hands of the god. He set us back into our morning in our
house on the west shore of the river. He did not speak to us, but left us there.
Mutnodjmet and I held each other. In the embrace, we felt as though we were still ourselves, but when I finally released her and we stared into each others’ eyes, I saw that she was old, and her hair was white as it had never been in life, when we had recourse to our favorite wigs and all the powers of the dyers’ arts.
“Djeser,” she whispered, staring at my left side below my ribs. She traced the incision the priests of Anubis had made to remove my inner parts. In all our life since death, that wound had been invisible; the priests had placed a wax plate incised with a wadjet eye over the cut, and made it go away.
I stroked her hair and studied her age in the lines of her face, the sag of her chin and breasts.
She smiled. Her beauty was still there.
Holding hands, we went into our house. All our treasures were gone: our games, our jewelry, our furniture, our servants.
On the back wall of the house, though, were the images I had had scribed onto the walls of my tomb: the loaves of bread that stood for a thousand loaves; the offering trays piled high with haunches of beef, plucked ducks, figs, grapes, lotus blossoms; stands with bottles of wine in them…there were our names, and there were our images, images of us doing things we loved.
I went to the wall and touched the image of bread, felt its crust come alive under my hand. I closed my fingers over it and pulled it from the wall.
I held a loaf of bread in my hand.
My wife touched it. She stared up at me.
I broke the loaf and handed half to her.
We ate.
The bread was not as fresh as that baked every morning by our ushabtis, nor even that the priests had left for us in the mortuary temple, but it was bread. It was sustenance.
My wife took figs from the wall and handed one to me. If it tasted a little dusty, still it was sweet.
Best of all, when we studied the wall after our meal, all the images were still there.
We had lost much, but we still had life.
We were old, but we grew no older.
The sun still shone on us; we still had the river, the desert, and each other. And so we lived, as day piled on day.
One day I woke and she was not there.
I knew before I opened my eyes. Her warmth, her breath, her presence, all aspects of her were gone.
I opened my eyes and discovered that I was gone.
Where I have gone, I do not know. The air tastes different, and the voices I hear speak in tongues I do not recognize. The world is cold. I am without the power of speech or movement; all my powers except those of perception have vanished. People I do not know touch me without my permission, and worse.
It comes to me after a short eternity in this place that they have violated what little of my soul is left.
My name is not here. My body no longer responds to me. My akh has fled, so that I cannot even approach the gods with a plea for help or mercy. The lights are brighter here than any I have seen before, so that my shadow is strong beneath me, but it cannot move unless someone moves me. My ka flickers. My ba has taken its outer shape: a human-headed bird, the form of exploration. It sits on my chest, staring into my face.
I see in my ba’s eyes that I no longer look like myself. When it can no longer recognize me, it will leave me and wander the earth, homeless for eternity.
Here comes the woman again, the one in a white tunic. She holds a knife in her hand. It is not the first time she has come to me with a knife.
My ba’s head lifts. It stretches one wing, then another.
As the woman leans forward and touches my side with the knife, my ba takes flight. It rises up through the vault of the ceiling and is gone.
The woman is the Devourer of Hearts.
I let my ka blow out.
Then I am flying, high above a city larger than any I have ever seen.
The world is so wide!
Who was I a moment ago?
It is gone. It is gone.
Below me sun gleams on the river. I fly south.
THE FORSAKEN TEMPLE, by C. W. Leadbeater
Many years ago, I was living in a little village seven or eight miles from London—a quiet, straggling, old-fashioned place that might from its appearance have been a hundred miles at least from any of the busy centres of commerce. Now it is a village no longer, for the giant city, in its steady, resistless expansion, has absorbed it into itself; the old coach-road, once an avenue of great elm-trees as fine as any in the kingdom, is now flanked by trim suburban villas; a new railway station has been opened, and cheap workmen’s tickets are issued; and the dear old picturesque, draughty, wooden cottages have been pulled down to make way for model artisans’ dwellings. Well, I suppose it is the march of improvement—the advance of civilisation; and yet, perhaps, an old inhabitant may be excused for doubting whether the people were not healthier and happier in the quiet village days.
I had not been long in the place before I made the acquaintance of the clergyman of the district, and offered him such assistance as lay in my power in his parish work. This he was kind enough to accept, and finding that I was fond of children, appointed me a teacher in, and eventually superintendent of, his Sunday schools. This of course brought me into very close relations with the youth of the village, and especially with those who had been selected as choristers for the church. Among these latter I found two brothers, Lionel and Edgar St. Aubyn, who so evidently showed signs of a special musical talent that I offered to give them occasional instruction at my house to encourage them to develop it. Needless to say, they eagerly accepted the offer, and thus in time quite an attachment sprang up between us.
At this period I was much interested in the study of spiritualistic phenomena; and as I accidentally discovered that these two boys were good physical mediums, I had occasional quiet seances at my own house after the music lesson was over. Very curious some of our experiences were, but it is not of those I wish to speak now. I should mention that after these evening sittings it was my custom to walk home with my two choristers, who lived perhaps a mile and a half from my house.
Once, after such an evening, I had occasion to sit up writing until a late hour in the library where the sitting had taken place. I always observed that after a séance the furniture had an unpleasant way of creaking (sometimes even moving slightly at intervals) for some hours; and on this particular night this was specially noticeable. However, I wrote away, little heeding it, until about two o’clock, when suddenly, with out being conscious of the slightest reason for doing so, I felt an uncontrollable impulse to go to my bedroom, which was close by. Wondering what this might mean, I laid down my pen, opened the door, and stepped out into the passage.
What was my surprise to see the door of my bedroom ajar, and a light shining from it, where I knew that no light ought to be! I promptly went to the door, and without pushing it further open, looked cautiously round it. What I saw so far astonished me as to keep me in that position for some little time, staring helplessly. Although there was no apparent source of light—nothing like a lamp or a candle—the room was full of a soft silvery radiance that made every object clearly visible. Nothing unfamiliar met my hasty glance around the room until it fell upon the bed; but there—and as I write I can feel again the sudden chill which crept down my back at the sight— there lay the form of Lionel St. Aubyn, whom I had seen safely enter his mother’s house five hours before!
I am bound to admit that my first impulse was a most unheroic one—to slam the door and rush back headlong into my cosy library; however, I resisted it, mustered up my courage, pushed open the door a little further, and walked slowly to the foot of the bed. Yes, there he lay; unmistakably Lionel, and yet not looking in the least as I had ever seen him look before. His hands were crossed upon his breast, and his wide-open eyes looked full into mine, but with no ordinary expression; and though I had not till then seen it, I felt at once instinctively that their bright fixed gaze
was that of supreme clairvoyant vision, and that the boy was in that highest state of ecstatic trance, which even great mesmerists can but rarely superinduce in their best subjects.
I thought I saw recognition come into his eyes, but there was not the slightest movement of face or limb; the spell seemed far too deep for that. He was dressed in a long white robe not unlike the ecclesiastical alb, and across his breast there was a broad crimson sash, edged and heavily embroidered with gold. The feelings with which I regarded this extraordinary apparition are more easily imagined than described; so prominent among them, I know, was the thought that surely I must be asleep, and dreaming all this, that I distinctly remember pinching my left arm, as men do in novels, to find out whether I was really awake. The result seemed to prove that I was, so I leaned my folded arms on the foot of the bedstead for a moment, trying to muster up courage to step forward and touch my unexpected guest.
But as I paused, a change seemed to take place in my surroundings; the walls of my room appeared somehow to expand, and suddenly—though still leaning on the foot of the bed, and still closely watching its mysterious occupant—I found that we were in the centre of some vast, gloomy temple, such as those of ancient Egypt, whose massive pillars stretched away on all sides, while its roof was so lofty as to be scarcely discernible in the dim religious light. As I looked round in astonishment I could just distinguish that the walls were covered with huge paintings (some at least of the figures being considerably above life-size) though the light was not strong enough to show them clearly. We were quite alone, and my wandering glance soon fixed itself again on the incredible presence of my entranced companion.
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