When the anonymous threats against him had begun, he had tried to leave clues with trusted parties in the hope that they could follow in his footsteps if something went wrong – separating them like pieces of a broken jar that only when fitted together would give the whole picture of what he had found and so protect the secret from others.
To one colleague, Doctor Hassan from Zagazig University in Egypt, he had given a piece of the puzzle, a clue in the form of an artefact, but without provenance.
To another, Abuna, an old friend and religious recluse in the desert of the Wadi Natrun, he had sent coded clues, more pieces that could build a picture of the truth.
Abuna, a man of god.
Will his god help me now?
How ironic if I must rely on god, the god I don’t believe in, to save the work of my lifetime.
Life after death.
He had never wanted it for himself. But he did want it for his work. Don’t let that die. Not now.
Emory lurched around a corner, gasping.
Dank air filled the passages of his throat and lungs just as it filled the passages of stone.
The complex structure of walls, passages and chambers was like an underworld maze, the thought flashed through his mind, like a faint echo of that other maze of mystery that he had discovered and was to be the focus of his revelation.
Would it all be lost in this smaller maze? Would anybody ever know?
Where was she now?
Running silently in her shadowy black robe? He paused to listen.
The attacker sang out after him.
“Only one exit. Just one way out for you -will it be the final one? Come Professor, don’t you want to find out what really lies beyond?”
He felt a momentary relief.
He had put distance between them.
Her voice came from a way off, muffled and bouncing off the thick inner walls that divided the tomb.
He ran on past frozen images of the dead man, his family, agricultural estates and workers.
He spotted the misshapen figure of a dwarf. The carved figure appeared to stir with life as he flew.
He saw an irony in his peril.
He was running for his life inside a tableau of the afterlife. But he did not share the hope reflected in those confident faces pictured on the tomb walls with their eyes gazing into an imagined eternity.
There was only waste and decay after death, like the smell of the air in his throat.
A false door appeared – a phantom exit that mocked him.
It was a blank stone door cut into the wall, its frame decorated and inscribed with the name and title of the tomb owner, designed to provide a magical pathway between two realms, the living and the dead.
But it was a door going nowhere, created for an afterlife that did not exist and he could prove it - if the world would let him.
Which way to go from here in this nest of empty stone rooms?
Empty?
He fled instinctively towards a presence as if it could protect him, into the heart of the mastaba.
He reached the cult chapel, a hall with six square pillars and a relief of Mereruka standing on each face, holding his staff of office and wearing a collar.
A figure sprang forward at Emory from the serdab recess, jolting the running man.
It was the tomb owner. Framed in an entranceway, a false door behind him, the painted statue of Mereruka dominated the chapel. The vizier had broad, sun-baked shoulders, his arms held rigidly by his side and one leg stepping forward as if he were entering the tomb from the underworld to receive his offerings of food, beer and incense.
Mereruka’s soul statue.
The sightless eyes, hacked at by fearful tomb-robbers thousands of years ago, regarded the fugitive with indifference.
Emory stopped to catch his breath, his face ashen.
Which way now? Try a dash for the entrance? Hide until someone comes? Yell for help?
He hadn’t thought of crying out.
The bizarreness of the woman’s attack and his disbelief that it could occur had shut his throat like sand.
He looked over his shoulder.
Had she left the tomb?
Perhaps someone else had arrived and frightened her away.
He listened.
Nothing. No, there was something now, a soft rustle. Where was it?
Oh God, right here.
A shadow detached itself from a pillar and a gun fired, twice.
Two hammer blows struck his back.
“Die, unbeliever.”
He gasped, but no more loudly than he had done so at her first appearance.
He swayed, then shuffled to the serdab statue as if for support, but instead fell, landing on stone steps that led to an offering table of shattered porphyry.
“You do not deserve to die in a chapel,” his attacker said.
He groaned.
Who the hell was she? A crazy zealot? Did she know what she had done?
He turned his head and blinked at her in a haze.
“Help me.”
The eyes in the chador were not jewels now, but angry coals.
“Come now, Emory Hunter, do you think that you helped me?”
The veiled figure now withdrew, merging back into the shadows.
He slumped on the steps at the feet of the dead tomb owner Mereruka in a parody of adoration and humility that he had never exhibited in life.
She had gone, leaving him alone like this to die.
His long quest to penetrate the mystery of the underworld and the afterlife had ended here, inevitably, at the door of death. And, as he had always believed, death’s door went nowhere. This false-door behind Mereruka was not the boundary between two worlds.
Heaven was just a creation of the material world, like this door of unyielding stone.
He felt a pang of longing now that the hardness would somehow yield and the atoms of stone dissolve to reveal a haze of spiritual radiance beyond.
But it remained cold, hard stone.
Then, totally uncharacteristically it seemed, for the unbelieving man of archaeology, Emory let one arm fall to the ground and slowly, with a pointed finger, began to trace what looked like a religious valediction in the dust of the floor.
He stopped after writing a single word of four letters normally uttered at the end of a prayer, as if it marked the end of his life.
Amen…
Chapter 6
LATER, after his meeting at Johns Hopkins, Anson made a telephone call to his mother in Oxford, England.
“I just thought I should call and acknowledge this… do what an estranged son is supposed to do, whatever that is.”
His mother was a proud woman with a great power of silence. She went so quiet he could almost hear a grandfather clock in the hall measuring the silence with stately calm.
“Yes, Anson. I’ve heard the news about your father. And now it’s up to the new wife to arrange things. Your father wouldn’t want us anywhere near.”
“Maybe I should have made more of an effort with him, as the junior party.”
“You did try.”
“Maybe I should have tried even harder to build bridges. He was a busy man.”
“That’s very open-minded of you, but it was actually up to him. You didn’t leave him, remember, he left us.”
“And now somebody’s taken away my chance of ever getting to know him. Do you know if anyone had a reason to be hostile towards him?”
“Half of the believing world, apparently.”
“I mean personally.”
“How far back do you want to go?” she said.
“As far as it goes.”
“Your father dedicated his life to attacking cherished beliefs, like a belief in the sanctity of marriage. You might as well know now. He had an affair in Egypt many moons ago. There was a girl, a former student at Zagazig University near Cairo where he was a visiting professor. She fell pregnant. An unwed Muslim girl. She had to run and became a fugitive from
her family. She hid for quite a period of time, but they caught up with her in the end. It was an unpleasant business and it left a lot of bad feeling. Your father became quite remorseful and tried to make amends by helping young students here and in Egypt. A strange mixture, your father. He could inspire great loyalty and antipathy.”
“What happened to the girl?”
“The mother died, an accident, I heard, but probably another way of saying family honour was restored. God alone knows what happened to the baby.” His mother sighed. “I do wonder about this obsession with a pagan past, Anson. I hope you don’t end up becoming a totally godless man like your father.”
Godless? Didn’t his mother know?
Anson felt a little estranged from that father too.
“Did you ever hear him speak about a monk in the desert, a man called Abuna Daniel?” he said.
“No. It’s hard to imagine what a monk and Emory could have had in common.”
They reached the door to his father’s apartment, not far from the Johns Hopkins University campus, Anson and two Homeland men, Bloem and Browning.
They planned to force the door, but they didn’t need to.
“Someone has beaten us here,” Bloem said.
Anson hesitated. An image flashed through his mind. He pictured a false doorway from a tomb. A door that went nowhere. A magical door between two worlds, the living and the dead. This was such a door, he thought, although this one had a handle to open and bore a number in brass. His father, or some vestigial remains of his life, lay behind the door. Would it really admit him into some new knowledge or understanding of him? Now that his father’s life was over, would he finally make a contact of sorts? How he longed for that contact and had longed for it ever since he was a boy.
“You okay?” Bloem said to him. “Maybe we’d better go first.”
“No.”
He must cross the threshold.
He reached out and pushed. The door swung open at a touch.
He expected to discover the presence of his father inside. Instead he found the wreckage of his father’s life. The apartment lay in chaos. Books, journals, papers, photographs, print outs, letters and scraps of papers littered every surface, scattered over table tops, a green leather topped desk, a trestle table, even strewn out on the carpeted floor.
They went inside.
The place was deserted and a quick check around the studio apartment left him feeling empty too.
He was stricken with a childlike loneliness and regret that this ruin was all that was left of his father.
But there were personal clues left around that struck Anson like a minor revelation. In the bathroom, he learnt that his father must have taken a toiletry travel kit to Egypt on his digs, for here was another set. He saw the brand of toothpaste his father used and the methodical way he squeezed the tube, rolling it up from the base, a bright red toothbrush sitting in a glass, an antique metal scrape shaver, a striped dressing gown hanging behind a door, intimate markers of a life that his father had denied his knowing. He felt like an intruder seeing secrets never meant to be seen by others and by him in particular.
Anson felt a grief come up in his chest for the first time. He fought it down. Stop, he told himself simply. You’ve got a job to do. But where would he begin?
Torn from shelves like an avalanche of erudition, lay hundreds of volumes on ancient Egypt, medieval Egypt, archaeology, mythology and magic, piled in heaps. He came back to the door.
“Either my father was not as methodical as his reputation,” he said, “Or this place has been turned over.”
It looked as if it had been hit by a howling windstorm. Even pictures had been torn off the walls. Framed illustrations of Egypt’s ruins by nineteenth century landscape artist David Roberts lay on the floor.
Anson looked around the place in wintry bemusement.
“Not burglars, I’m guessing.”
“They were searching for information.”
Approaching the personal effects and papers of the dead Egyptologist’s life was going to be like approaching an archaeological dig, he thought. Was this how his father had felt when approaching the excavation of a ruined site?
To go over this wreckage carefully almost called for the methodology of grid method excavation, he thought, groaning inwardly. To do it properly wasn’t just a matter of clearance. Like an archaeologist working on an excavation, he should probably establish relationships in time between the objects, a relative chronology and that almost meant calling on the same disciplines of stratigraphy and superimposition that his father wrote about using in his diggings. Maybe he should establish a datum point, like the desk where his father worked. Anson sighed. No time for that. This is my father’s apartment, not a tomb site.
Yet these personal books and papers were parts of his father and, like the body of the god Osiris, who had been ripped into pieces by his enemy, the intruders had scattered Emory Hunter’s life all over the floor.
Chapter 7
‘The Other Egypt’– Anson Hunter’s blog
THE INTERNET is the natural breeding ground for speculative Egyptology and controversial theories, and my regular blog runs through my life like a stream of consciousness – or maybe I should say, River Nile of consciousness.
Sooner than I planned, I am heading back to Egypt, taking another tour group. Can’t say much about this tour, or this little band, but they’re definitely not mainstream Nile travellers.
As usual, I will be in search of the unseen Egypt, the Nile of the mind and of the senses. However, this time I will also be trying to come to grips with the existential problem of death in my personal life, as I visit the land of death and eternity. I was a child when my father Emory left home and it was as if the archaeologist had died and gone to another life. He made a clean break with the past, as if it had never occurred, and, from the day of his leaving, made few personal contacts with the family, spending more and more of his time in the field in Egypt.
My reaction to news of his dying surprises me; I’ve studied death, tombs and mummies for the better part of my life. Yet now I discover that death - the first mystery - does not come any easier to me than to any other person, even though death is my stock in trade. Without death and the Egyptians’ love of life and determination to prolong it eternally, little of what I know and love about those distant days would have reached me. Death was the silent teacher and guide that led me through the wonders of Egypt. Why, then, has my lifetime contemplation of the funerary habits of a long-dead people not prepared me better for this?
Death in your personal life is a different matter, it seems.
And, on the subject of death, some speculation… did death actually inspire the structure of Egyptian tombs?
There is a theory about Palaeolithic cave art, that it is the result of a cave in the mind, created there by the wiring of the human nervous system, and that deep caves inspired the idea of a subterranean spirit-world. In a cave, the mind is said to fill the space with spirit-animals and beings.
Are the tombs of Egypt also the result of our internal wiring? The tomb in the mind?
Or is the Egyptian tomb the mirror of something else – death itself?
I am interested in the theory that the Egyptian tomb may have been inspired by the so-called Near Death Experience. Consider how closely an Egyptian tomb echoes the classic NDE. Both involve a journey along a tube-like passage, with surrounding ministering beings, and both come to a scene of judgement where the dead person reflects on his life and answers for his actions. Was it something experiential, and not just spiritual and intellectual, that inspired the Egyptian tomb and religion?
On the eve of my departure, I find myself wondering: are there any lost secrets still to be found in Egypt?
I must conclude that there are, countless secrets. Even pyramids, astonishingly, can be lost. A new, unknown pyramid was discovered not so long ago on the highly excavated Giza plateau, of all places, in the immediate area of the Great Pyramid of
Khufu. A ruined pyramid, yet three courses of limestone remained. It was only discovered by accident. Egypt's ninety-sixth pyramid, built in the time of the Queens’ pyramids, lay hidden by an asphalt road running alongside Khufu's monument. If a road can hide a pyramid on an overworked plateau like Giza, what can the shifting sands of the desert hide?
An Egyptian government estimate suggests that up to sixty percent of the country’s artefacts and tombs may still remain undiscovered. Think how many millions lived and died over Egypt’s long history. While other empires lasted a century or so, Egypt’s lasted for thousands of years.
Consider some recent estimates. If you take the average population of ancient Egypt at around three million and you say the civilization spanned around three thousand five hundred years, then some five and a quarter billion people lived and died on the Nile. Many secrets still lie hidden under the sands.
And that’s part of the wonder of Egypt, things half-hidden or lost. There’s nothing more mysterious and beautiful than that line where a ruin of Egypt’s past rises from the conquering empire of sand, the horizon where an ancient world meets a modern one and graven glyphs emerge to send text messages from eternity. It’s the power of the partly veiled, like a barely risen - or set - sun on the horizon.
Chapter 8
IN SEARCH of answers, Anson decided to pay a visit to the Egyptian underworld, or at least to a modern-day aspect of it – to the underworld of the rich, illegal, antiquities collector.
Some ancient Egyptian antiquities found their way into the underworld twice, Anson had learnt.
The first time occurred when the tomb owner died and when the antiquities were buried in the ground. The second time came when an illegal collector bought them and hid them in a vault. This underworld and second burial was often the final one. They were hidden even more assiduously than before and were much harder to unearth.
Anson had known a few secret collectors in his time and had even swapped notes with a few, but the greatest of them all was ‘the Diplomat.’
Anson flew to New York, having arranged to meet with him in the Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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