THE SMITING TEXTS

by Roy Lester Pond

  A tomb with no walls and a tomb with no entrance...? How could such a thing be? The first requirement, no walls, was conceivable. A tomb without constructed walls meant a tomb cut out of the living rock, a cliff tomb. Such a radical departure from convention had already been taken. One such tomb had been excavated in this valley, the burial of a King’s wife and Teti’s own sister, a priestess of the goddess Hathor, Tuyu. It was this burial that had given him the idea.

  He recalled coming to this spot on another occasion, when a procession had wound its way towards the cliffs.

  He heard again the ululating wail that had accompanied them, the wails coming from women called kites, a professional class of mourners. He thought of his sister, remembering fond moments together when they carried Tuyu down into the dark rectangle of the tomb and along a passage that veered to avoid a mound of flint.

  He was glad that the king had honoured her so sumptuously. But the cliff tomb, though covered over and hidden, had failed. Within ten years it had been stripped of its funerary goods and now lay empty, abandoned.

  Maybe, today, it would be different.

  The Prophet of Ra came under a shaded palanquin, a busy man who left the affairs of the temple to journey by boat and land. Teti did not fear him, but Ra-hotep was the god’s prophet and so he wanted him to appreciate his inspired solution and comment on it favourably to the king.

  It was a bold idea that the High Prophet, loving convention, might at first dislike, but Teti would be persuasive.

  He rehearsed what he would say: “What tomb has been spared the rapacity of the tomb robber's fingers? None. Not even this one, belonging to my sister, Tuyu, a priestess of Hathor. Even those that are forgotten are found, betrayed by the very digging of the tombs, by tomb chippings and the telltale clue of chisel marks on virgin stone, by the unmistakable signs of the place of piercing. My plan is this. I have chosen an invisible tomb, a tomb without a doorway, and no place of piercing to betray it.”

  It could even contain the annihilating force of a goddess’s anger - or destructive love.

  Bek woke up first, reproving himself:

  “Wake up Bek, wake up. Are you still sleeping off the beer? Does the servant sleep while the master rises? Can't you hear stirring within the shrine?”

  He jumped up, stretched and hobbled into the shrine, scratching himself.

  Young Lord Kha was shaking the girl’s shoulder, but she could not be roused. Now the hunter felt her forehead, frowned. “She burns.” He lifted her eye-lid with a thumb and Bek saw that her eye was rolled up into her head. Unconscious. A death-sleep. Yet her breathing was calm.

  The young Lord’s heart was long, Bek could tell. The strong shoulders slumped in dismay. She had seemed so bright the night before. What would he do with her now? He dared not take her on a dangerous hunt like this, even if she stayed at a safe distance with Bek and the donkeys. But could he leave her behind alone?

  Oh no. Would he want to leave Bek behind to tend her? Bek was alarmed at the possibility. Bek was supposed to be his bearer, back-up and supply line, with donkeys, provisions, more weapons, food and water.

  “You will stay here in the shrine and care for her,” Kha told the servant. “I will go after the Great Cat alone. I will come back for you both.”

  Bek's mouth opened in surprise and alarm and he shook his head violently. “Bek, will you desert your master? Bek, will you avoid the battle to take care of a piece of fish? You are charged to support your young lord at all times. You have your orders, Bek, given to you by the High Priest himself.”

  “Now you have my orders. You are my attendant here.”

  “Bek, find a way to change your master's mind. Tell him you will be whipped if any harm should befall your master and you are not there.”

  “It is final, Bek. Stay here.”

  Bek groaned. He threw a look of hostility and distaste at the sleeping figure of the girl.

  He followed Lord Kha out the shrine, ringing his hands as the bowman set off, leading a donkey through the grove of the estate. Should he secretly follow? He could keep back at an even safer distance than usual, where he could at least rush to his master’s aid if he were mauled by the cat. Bek was still trying to decide, when he heard a snuffling grunt behind him in the shrine. He turned to see a cat of heart-stopping proportions. It filled the doorway of the shrine like the bronze doors of a temple. Bek gurgled in terror.

  The apparition came out. Bek shrivelled before its scorching yellow glare. “Bek, what will you do?” he gibbered. “Ra, save your Purified One!”

  The cat bounded past him and went into the shadows of the grove.

  “Merciful Ra!” he whispered. “Bek, you have seen the eyes of hell and lived. But... the girl. The cat came from within. What of the piece of fish inside? Has the cat fallen on her already while our backs were turned?”

  Bek's heart quaked and his legs were stiff with fright. He ran back through the doorway of the shrine and into the gloom.

  The woman lay still. Bek bent over her, shook her arm. Her head fell slackly aside. She was still lying there in a death-sleep.

  “What evil is this?” he muttered. “How is it that the monster came out of this shrine where the woman lies undisturbed?” Then an answer struck him with a palsy of terror. Could the great cat be the girl's familiar? “Oh, Ra protect me, your favoured servant! You are in a bad situation, Bek. And so is your Lord Kha. You are supposed to stay here, but the cat has gone off to stalk your Lord. You must go after him and warn him.”

  Chapter 36

  IT WAS A SHORT WALK up a rise to reach the temple of Kom Ombo. Swarms of hawkers soon gathered like flies around the group.

  "Hello. You Engleesh? American?” a cheeky Egyptian boy in a white galabea blocked their way, goggling at Anson. “How are you? Welcome, Sir. You want eebees?” Eebees, he knew, referred to ibis birds carved in stone.

  “Mish awiz,” Saneya said in Arabic. “Imshi.”

  “You want Poskaart?” another hawker persisted. “You want scar-rab?"

  "Imshi!"

  They drew back, but continued to circle.

  “You feel a bit sorry for them,” Bloem said. “Shouldn’t we encourage microenterprise?”

  “Maybe, but it’s no good being too polite. You won’t make much progress in Egypt. They love the English and Americans. They think we’re soft touches. Saying ‘no’ in English is rarely effective. A better alternative, if you don’t speak Arabic, is to say "nein" instead. Something about the German negative convinces them you mean business - or at least ‘no business’.”

  “They've got to make a living,” he said.

  “That’s fine, if all you want to take away from Egypt is the memory of hordes of clamouring hawkers.”

  “Want Horus bird, Suh?” a man startled them by springing out in front of them.

  “Nein!" Anson said.

  The hawker vanished.

  They crested the rise to the temple of Kom Ombo.

  “The ancients called this ‘The Mound of Ombos’, built on this bend in the river,” Saneya informed the group. “The temple of Kom Ombo is unusual since it is a temple dedicated to two deities, Horus the Elder and the crocodile-headed god Sobek. It is split along an imaginary line and has two separate shrines.”

  They went through brightly painted and incised columns and the walls of a forecourt, a hall of dwarfing hypostyle pillars and vestibules and to the rear where they found the twin shrines, damaged but still visible.

  Even though it was early, the place echoed with footsteps and the voices of tourists and guides speaking in half a dozen different languages. A fresh breath came off the river.

  Gods and pharaohs carved in reliefs thronged the walls.

  Anson glanced at a carved face of the pharaoh Ptolemy. The face stared, calm and bulging-eyed into the void of time.

  They paused at a relief of Sobek, the crocodile-headed god. The serrations of the crocodile’s teeth caught his eye.

  “The Kom Ombo region wa
s once infested with crocodiles,” he commented. “Right up until the turn of the century. But there is another surprise at Kom Ombo.” He drew them along an ambulatory on the northern side of the temple. “There’s a relief of scientific interest.”

  They stopped at a wall; the stone, warmed already by the sun, reflected against their faces.

  The group of visitors ran their eyes over carvings - boxes and tables and, carefully laid out in the Egyptian manner, rows of instruments, some with hooks, others with blades, others like pincers.

  “Doctor’s equipment,” Bloem said.

  “Well done! Scalpels, hooks, even needles for sutures. Look quite painful, don’t they?” Anson said. “The surgeons of ancient times used a range of instruments. They performed numerous operations, including brain surgery. There were all sorts of specialists. The tooth doctor, the eye doctor, the bowel doctor... ”

  “See how precisely these hieroglyphs are cut in the stone,” Saneya said. All achieved with bronze chisels. Of course bronze can be become quite hardened. Repeated hitting and sharpening changes the molecular structure of the tip so it bites into stone like steel.”

  “I suppose we can’t tour Kom Ombo without letting you see the mummified crocodiles kept in this chapel of Hathor,” Anson said, leading the way.

  Inside a dim room they gathered around several stuffed crocodiles sealed in a glass case. The reptiles looked shabby like mildewed logs. It was a small room and suffocating. Visitors rubbed shoulders to peer inside the display.

  Anson bent to look at a pointy-jawed crocodile, wrapped in peeling bandages.

  “How can we hope to uncover all of Egypt’s secrets?” he said rhetorically. “The place is stuffed with them. Take these saurians, for example. The ancient Egyptians stuffed mummified animals with old pieces of cloth and papyrus that had once been used for writing. There could well be lost texts hidden in their bellies.”

  They emerged and went along a walkway between stone walls.

  Anson stopped to admire a relief on a wall. It was an image of a goddess in profile, long-legged, her body tapering like a vase in a form-revealing sheath dress. She wore a vulture head-dress and carried an ankh in her hand.

  Bloem did not connect with the scene.

  “She has big feet,” he said.

  “Long, narrow, bare feet were typical of goddesses, fashioned to increase connection with the ground and charge the ground with her musk,” Anson said.

  “I hope this is going to get us somewhere.”

  “We’ve seen the Cairo museum, the Pyramids, and three major temples – all in a couple of days,” Anson said. “What more do you want? Another temple?”

  In the land of eternity, time was slipping by and they had no idea if they were getting any closer or in fact moving further away from the truth.

  They would soon be leaving Kom Ombo, a site where the sacred crocodile was especially revered, yet they had nothing to show for it. Anson recalled his meeting with the secret collector in New York, and the description of a golden crocodile, symbol of the power of the pharaoh. Like a crocodile, the answers lay submerged.

  Chapter 37

  YET ANOTHER TEMPLE was exactly what the group got.

  The twin-towered pylons of the temple of Horus at Edfu, Egypt’s best-preserved temple, reared austerely in front of them like a fortress.

  “Reminds me of a prison,” Bloem said.

  “Funny you should say that, because the goddess Hathor used to come here to have ‘conjugal visits’ with her husband Horus, once a year,” Anson said. “I suppose that’s a long time between dancing, but it was a big occasion in ancient Egypt. They called it the ‘Feast of the Beautiful Meeting’. The priests would bring the golden image of the goddess by river up from Dendera and reunite her with Horus, and the whole country would go wild and get drunk.”

  The massive twin-pylon facade formed a mirror image, showing the falcon god Horus on each side as well as the obligatory pharaonic smiting scene.

  “There he is again, gentlemen, the welcoming figure of pharaoh, weapon upraised to smash in the heads of foreigners,” Anson said.

  This time it was Ptolemy, not Rameses, shown in the act of smashing the foreign nations, but the impact and the message was the same.

  Bloem regarded the scene with an expression of dislike. He was not a man who took kindly to menace, not even from pharaohs, Anson guessed.

  “I’m getting tired of that pose,” he said.

  This was not the most appreciative audience I’ve ever taken through Egypt, Anson thought. It was hard enough leading gullible fringe groups around sites of antiquity, but it was even worse touring with sceptics. There’d be no group bonding on this tour.

  Anson had noted a phenomenon with captive tour groups, rather like Stockholm Syndrome, where abducted hostages started developing loyalty and friendships with the wrong people. Travelling in each other’s company, day in and day out, members of a tour group started to bond. They’d begin to wonder how they had ever managed to live their lives apart. By the end of the tour, they were buddies for life. They’d part with protestations of affection, swap addresses and promise to stay in touch forever, though it seldom happened. It certainly won’t be happening this time, Anson decided.

  They entered through the massive, pyloned gateway and found themselves in a colonnaded courtyard, a place of flaring light and contrasting, deep shadows between peristyle columns. Light and shade. Life and death. Truth and falsehood. The lushness of the fields, the desolation of the desert. Was this why the Egyptians seemed to think of everything in terms of duality? Perhaps it was this contrast that gave them a sharper understanding of life and death and a heightened longing for immortality.

  They stopped at a ten-foot high stone falcon, carved in stone and wearing the double crown of Egypt. It stood outside the facade of the first hypostyle hall.

  “Like the bird? It’s ripped straight off the American eagle on your dollar bill,” Anson said to the young pair. “These ancient Egyptians stopped at nothing. They stole all your best ideas - the nation state, the twenty-four hours of the day, the 365 days of the year, great buildings in stone, architecture, astronomy, medicine, paper, writing, the invention of fictional stories being recorded in writing…”

  It was dim and moody and a sense of enclosing mystery grew as they went through a series of halls that led them through to a vestibule where a smooth naos shrine stood, carved out of a single block of polished grey granite.

  A maze of chapels and rooms ran off on either side. They wandered through them.

  “Secrets could be everywhere and anywhere in these places,” he told Bloem in a low voice. “Temples are honeycombed with crypts and secret passages, ancient repositories for objects of ritual power.”

  “That doesn’t make our search any easier.”

  We’re stumbling around in a maze, Anson thought. Another temple, another day.

  Agreeable enough for me, but where is this hidden threat? Still here in Egypt? Or on its way to an intended target?

  The next stop of their tour would be Luxor, ancient site of a city once known as Thebes of the Hundred Gates.

  Chapter 38

  THE SUN ROSE over the Nile, yellow and steaming, only minutes before their golden balloon lifted into the sky like a second sun.

  Anson, Kalila, the SCA woman, Saneya, and the Americans took off in a field not far from the Ramesseum, with a couple of guards along, AK47s cradled in their arms, all crowding a wicker basket that their Egyptian captain assured them could hold up to twelve passengers.

  They climbed into a cloudless sky. Anson expected a sensation of losing his stomach. Instead, the ascent was smooth and steady, yet all the more breathtaking.

  The captain, who stood in the middle, drowned out their excited murmurs by releasing a blast from the balloon’s gas jet burners. A flame of dragon’s breath seared up into the belly of the balloon, lifting them higher. When the burners were silent, they could suddenly hear roosters down below and a dog bar
king. Anson saw a dog go between close-walled houses in a village huddled next to the Ramesseum. The untidy roofs were strewn with dry palm leaves.

  They gained altitude and he had the feeling that their balloon, in the shape of a giant light bulb, was like a golden idea of Egypt rising in his mind, a bubble containing memories of the past and his dreams of finding a link with his father that had buoyed him since he was a child.

  They left the acid-green swathe of vegetation that edged the Nile, drifting in a current of air. Below them, the Ramesseum mortuary temple shrank to the size of a child’s toy blocks and the seated twin statues of Memnon appeared like children perched on stools.

  Kalila pointed to the north-west, to the curving bay of cliffs of the Temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el Bahari and beyond that the Valley of the Kings, a golden valley cobwebbed with paths like keloid scars, running to and from the buried treasure houses of the dead.

  Anson scanned the caramel-coloured hills that were rapidly turning golden as the sun rose higher. This spread of cliffs and desert below their basket hid the dream of immortality of Egypt’s greatest pharaohs, each tomb a private heaven of riches, comforts and splendour.

  Was there one place that began it all, the magic of its gold giving birth to heaven? His father’s eye had roamed all over Egypt. Where could he have made such a discovery?

  Is it here? Am I looking down on heaven, hidden below?

  Probably not, he decided, but it was a heavenly view.

  The dragon roared, spewing gas flame up into the cavern of the balloon.

  They were looking down on the greatest necropolis of all, yet it looked as innocuous as a wrinkled blanket.

  We are drifting, not just in a balloon, but in our progress, the thought occurred to him.

  I am halfway through this tour and still I have no real answers.