Fire in the Abyss

by Stuart Gordon

  This is the popular tale, and in time Horus got the inheritance, the son prevailed over the uncle, so that what you call the “patrilineal principle” prevailed. And there was a reason for this that transcended any local motivation, just as there was reason for what was done in my time, during the reign of Hatshepsut, and for what was done during the reign of Akhenaton a century later, when the secret teaching of One God was briefly expressed in public. Yes, we knew of what was to come, and the popular tales were ways of preparing the people. The progression of things was already written, the new principle of monotheism which led in time to the Christ was ready to be expressed openly, and we worked so that it should take up its inheritance through Moses and the Jews, in due time and course.

  The city of Per wadjet was known to the Greeks as Buto, and in time, as I have learned, there was also a temple of Apollo there.

  Per wadjet was the metropolis of the nineteenth nome of Lower Khem, Ammt, and was divided into two districts, Pe and Dep. Every year, the people of each district fought each other ceremonially at the annual reerection of the djed column, this to signify and celebrate the rising of Osiris from the dead and the reflowering of the world. As the statue is in the block, so the Christian dispensation lay in our ways, and so now a new dispensation is ready to be born.

  Per wadjet had many great temples but I went to serve the Oracle of Horns in the groves on Chemmis. And soon enough I had dreams making it clear I must embark on a very grave business.

  The realisation was slow in coming, for I resisted it and tried to pretend it was not there. But one night Our Lady herself came and chided me for my cowardice, asking if I who aspired to the Hawk could not follow the beat and direction of his wings?

  Still I doubted, and asked the Oracle, and was told:

  “The lame sparrow is devoured by the cruel Hawk. The eager sparrow flies with the Dawn, and sees with the Eye.”

  In one of the nine dreams I had, the Hawk showed me the great temple that you call the Pyramid of Khufu, or Cheops. I had been in some of the lower passages and chambers for certain of the rites whereby we were taught to wake up or die. Part of the power in such places is that each obstacle overcome opens a door in the mind—so long as there were those who knew how to operate the intricacies of such strenuous initiations. As to the power in the temple itself, that waxed and waned, but was always strong, particularly in the secret higher passages and chambers, where the concentration was much greater. And I had climbed only so far, to such a point.

  Yet in this dream the Hawk directed me to enter that temple again and seek a higher disclosure by closeting myself in one of the hidden higher chambers. This was a serious matter. Even when the currents of the land were at a low ebb, those who merged with the higher powers and lived were those who knew death already. Even so, the upper rooms were rarely empty. There were many purposes afoot behind the face of daily life and popular tales, what with the planning of ways and the planting of seed for the future. There was always a long waiting-list, and permission had to be sought from various levels of authority, and the purpose explained for approval or disapproval. Often you were told to return and ask again in five or ten years.

  That is what I was told. I followed the Hawk, I sought permission, I was told my purpose must grow stronger. I came back ten years later and they said I was still not ready. Another five years went by, then I returned, and was told that the chamber was prepared.

  I entered at the time of Sothis rising when the weather is hot and the floods ripe to come; I went in without lamp or food, wearing a light garment and carrying only a skin of water. I was led in blindfolded, and down for a long time, and then up, and up, and then through many crawling twists and turns, to the chamber, where I was shut up and left.

  There it was done. The Servant of the Hawk arose on his wings and on the power of the place, and went on a long high lonely journey to a place she could not have attained without the power, for which of course a price was demanded.

  I found what I sought, and safely returned, and stood up in my body and went out of that place after due closings and thanks were made. Then from Gizeh I went straight to Thebes, where I petitioned audience with the priestess-queen you call Hatshepsut.

  Her influence was a great change in the rhythm of the Two Lands, and many argued what it meant, and where it would lead, and was it good or bad that a woman ruled, and would Thothmes depose her?

  Many argued, few knew.

  She called me to an inner chamber in the temple she built in the western cliff of the Theban mountain, the temple called Djeser-Djeseru, the Sublime of the Sublime. She asked my business. I told her the Hawk commanded me to go by sea to the Land of the Kas, in the quarter where Osiris dwells—in the direction that you call west.

  She asked me, “Do you know the purpose?”

  “The Hawk showed me a world where wings are thick in the air.”

  “What sort of wings are these?”

  “Oddly stiff and rigid, with a strange grace, but not the grace of birds, nor the grace of understanding of the sort we know.”

  “Then where was the Hawk?”

  “Not in the sky, save in a few parts left to him. For the most part locked up, striving for new life like his father before him.”

  “What will he do if he comes to life, or is brought to life?”

  “Catch fire again in the hearts of many who are oppressed by Set, who has perverted even the coming principle, so that there is much knowledge of one sort, but not enough of another.”

  “How far is this world? How many times will Osiris die?”

  “Many times. It is at the end of our records, on the edge of a new sign. It seems that some of our ways soon to be forgotten will see light again, and marry with what’s been learned through the new principle, so that another step will be made.”

  “You are sure of this?”

  “I am sure of nothing save what the Hawk showed me.”

  “Has he shown how you will go to this new world?”

  “It is not clear. I will take ship. Then there’s confusion I could not understand, but after it I saw myself bald in a prison, trapped in very strange dress one can see through yet that covers head and body completely. I’ll not be alone there, and an escape will be necessary for the work to begin. I do not know how all this will come about. I know only that I must take ship towards Osiris, and that the Hawk and his Mother wish me to submit this matter to your judgment.”

  “What is your own mind?”

  “To serve the Hawk, and the Dawn.”

  “What is your own mind?”

  “To take ship and go, if you’ll have it.”

  “What is your own mind?”

  “I have pictured the alternative,” I said. “I could run away from this and from my vows and marry a man who stinks of garlic and onions, and get fat and old and watch my hair and teeth fall out. I think not. I ask you for ship and crew. But those who come as crew must know that very likely they’ll go straight to Osiris at journey’s end. It must be their own choice.”

  “You have the ship. If the purpose is good, you’ll get your crew, and reach this place where they make you bald, and then—were you vouchsafed no vision at all beyond that?”

  “Only that a lame sparrow will not survive,” I said, “but that the eager little bird may fly high enough to witness new Dawn.”

  That is how I, Nefertari Mery-Isis, came to this world.

  18. Circle Learns to See What’s Behind Its Nose

  Yes, Tari and Masanva brought us purpose and strength, and if I have little to say of the Dancer, this is not because he did little, but because his activity among us was not of the sort that is easily apparent. Utak assessed him accurately that first day we met them, but thereafter, as Circle became conscious and active, we became much split in our opinions of him, and among our Moderns particularly we soon had insistence that the Dancer should come off his shrouded Olympian heights to sport with us ordinary mortals sometimes. But Tari always said that h
is function demanded remoteness: that he was in pure tune with energies he had channeled to her, without which she would not have reached us with her visions at all. “So what the hell are these energies?” Herbie demanded of her one day, quite unguardedly. But she simply smiled at him, whereupon later he asked me in a kind of rueful despair, “How can you argue with her when she looks at you like that?”

  Yet in time, amid our crisis, the Dancer unbent, showing more than many of us cared to see, shocking us back towards the unity we almost lost, demonstrating that he was as much in harmony with his own function as Tari was with hers, come to Dance the End of the Fourth World, as he called this age.

  So, let me testify truthfully to these mysteries!

  In regard to that first meeting with Tari and Masanva, each of us was pointedly interrogated by our chaperones.

  “What were Herbie and the Egyptian woman talking about?”

  Ernstein demanded that evening. “Birds, long-eared asses—are we the asses?”

  “I believe she was telling the Director that she dislikes him,” I replied steadily, “I don’t know. Ask her, not me.”

  Ernstein stared at me most unsympathetically.

  “Let’s get something straight, Sir Humphrey. Some resentment on your part is very understandable in this situation, but by now you should know—we’re on your side. It would make things needlessly hard if any of you felt you had something to hide from us.”

  “Sir,” I said, “what could we hide from you but little things?”

  “I don’t know,” he replied. “That’s what worries me.”

  It worried us too. It was that night we began to realise Circle by the making and receiving of pictures in the mind. Few of us knew what we were doing, or realised that the image-making was not an end in itself. Tari, Masanva, Utak, and Othoon had been trained to this skill in their societies (though their symbol-systems were not quite the same). The rest of us had to learn not only that such communication is possible, but that its development involves overcoming much disbelief, self-regard, and fear… and we all had problems, of which, in one form or another, self-regard was the chief. If you chatter to yourself all the time, of course you can’t see or hear anyone else, and they won’t want to see or hear you. The Power not of Christ? It was in me all along. MINE! ME! MYSELF!

  “People communicate this way all the time,” said Tari later, “but you have to be very quiet inside to realise it, and very calm to tell which are your own pictures and which come from someone or somewhere else. Moderns call it telepathy, and think it something unusual, but that’s only because they talk and write and think and rush about so much they can’t see what’s behind their own noses.”

  Perhaps. Yet I think the bizarre severity of our situation had much to do with it. Apart from our deep need to find a private mode of communication, the fact is that we were utterly disoriented, cast out of our accustomed modes of thought, feeling, and experience; our self-structures cracked by Vulcan and the rest of it. We had no chance to retain habitual beliefs and complacent outlook. All that was destroyed. Without this destruction I believe that most of us (certainly myself) would have continued to “screen out” these subtle images, calling them illusions, and never realising what was going on in our very own minds.

  It did not come easily. The first few nights I tried to do it consciously, knowing that others were doing likewise, I found images quickly forming, but had no way to tell if they were mine or if they came from someone else—except if they were from Tari. Likewise I found it hard to form and hold in mind any clear and deliberate image. I would make a picture—of myself, or some episode in my life—then forget it without realising, or lose the will to hold it, or find it squirming uncontrollably into something else. To relax and be like a bird, not like a long-eared ass? I soon grew frustrated, learning nothing from the relaxed mood of Tari’s images—and those early nights she sent many: she was like a beacon, a point of reference, a steady strong light through our fogs. Yes, I got angry, and thought the answer lay in trying harder, and for several nights struggled and strained my brain until my mind rebelled and said it was all nonsense. Then I stopped trying, and next day I snapped at Ernstein, who decided I needed to be tranquillised to sleep, so that I was put out of action for nearly a week. But one night after that, near sleep, I lay idly picturing my boyhood days, and Devon land, and the tossing sea… then suddenly through me rushed a flood of images so real they had me in tears, to have lost so much. Silently I shouted with them, then fell quiet, feeling drained. And as soon as I was quiet, I saw Tari’s signature-face—with the raven hair, which image she would not abandon; no doubt partly out of vanity (for she had her vanity); but also, as she explained, because this was her usual signature or seal in such communication, and she saw no reason to change it because of baldness imposed—anyway, I saw her image, and she winked and gave me a thumbs-up. Without realising what had happened I fell asleep, but next day during Walkabout she did the same, discreetly, and also Herbie came up and nudged me. “Okay, Humf, you’ve proved what I said, it was a helluva lot better in your time.” So then I knew I’d put out pictures which she and he had received; and also Coningham, Azurara, Utak, Masanva, and others had picked up some of my sending, as I duly learned.

  So I began to see that emotion is the root and fuel of such sending—not anger, but passionate feeling that drives forth, directed by the will from a mind relaxed and free of noisy argument.

  “Enflame thyself with prayer!”—that’s the principle.

  Others among us were discovering the same thing, so that on the succeeding nights, relaxing, I began to pick up glimpses and flashes from DTIs other than Tari. At first these flashes were inconsistent and confusing, the sending being vague, and my mind still not clear or quiet enough to make much sense of them.

  Yet finally one night came a strong reception, of images that were terrible and wonderful to me.

  War. War of a sort I never knew, fought in a desert between huge metal behemoths that clank and wheel and fire big guns at each other and at running foot-soldiers. There are great explosions, gouts of flame, smoke and dust everywhere. Then abruptly I’m high in the air, swooping down out of the sky at terrifying speed in a flying machine, a propellor plane. My finger’s pressed hard on a black button; hot streams of flaming bullets arc down from the wings of the plane into the battle below. I see them tracking over the sands, exploding amid a convoy of trucks as I go hurtling at dizzy low speed through the smoke and flame, the plane screaming as it pulls out of the dive.

  It was too much for me.

  I shut out these pictures and sat up in bed, sweating and dizzy—yet not before glimpsing Coningham’s face, and a blue cap on his head with wings on it, and a latin motto that loomed up close in Italic:

  Per Ardua Ad Astra.

  This experience greatly increased my respect for the man, and also increased my horror at the modern world, so that it was a night or two before I was willing to risk the Circle again. But once I returned, I found that some obstructive barrier in myself was gone, for from then on the images began coming from all quarters, mostly with identifiable signature-images. Thus gradually it became possible to make primitive image-conversation by this method… and almost every night during June and July the picture-tales of our lost familiar worlds came floating silently from each to others. So Circle grew… and at the same time, on most days, at library sessions and in suited groups in other Institute rooms, we were encouraged to tell our tales, and write them down, and get to know each other. It was difficult for those of us in Circle to disguise the true and increasing extent of our familiarity with each other, but we managed, and other DTIs who sensed something of what was going on said nothing, they being in Circle too, though in a vague, less specific way. It was a perpetual worry, that one of us in our sleep or in a drugged state might blurt out something suspicious. In Circle we learned to preface our sendings with the crossed-out image of a white-suit so that, should any of our captors be open-minded enough
to pick up and recognise our hidden activity, our collective will blocked their reception. Yet Ernstein and some others were suspicious as to what we did in the late evenings, sitting in chair or lying in bed but not asleep, as apparently their instruments told them. Meditating, or praying, or dreaming, we told them, with which they had to be content. Because of the interest they had vested in their own beliefs and theories, they explored this occult “non-scientific” side of things only in a half-hearted way, as in October, when a team of “parapsychologists” came to test some of us. This was done by means of machines to find in us something called “biokinetic energy,” and with objects hidden in boxes that we were supposed to guess, and so on. It was easy enough to fool them, for mostly they were of a mind to believe that if something cannot be weighed and measured, then it does not exist. They refused to look “behind their own noses” for what they knew was not possible… and of course this suited us very well.

  Thus, night after night as summer became hot and sweltering outside the Institute and our immunity-suits, with trouble in the land and in the world that meant little to any of us yet, the picture-tales flowed ever more freely through and between us. At first it was all very innocent, devoid of dissension, and we got much delight through fooling our captors and learning about each other in this way. As our skill increased we became playful, even with Vulcan, as when Herbie pictured his final rum-smuggling flight with the comic image of what initially he thought had happened—he showed us a dirty duck in a big pond being blown skyhigh by a mobster tiptoeing up behind him and tossing a bomb attached to a big clock—and after this he used the Duck-in-a-Pond as his personal signature. Then Lucie showed us Hollywood: a snow-capped mountain turning into a pyramid of white powder on a mirror, and the powder being sniffed through a rolled-up hundred-dollar bill into her nose, followed by a riot of images that I could not comprehend at all, but which apparently our Moderns found very funny. And Van Roornevink showed himself sitting, yawning with boredom, having his portrait painted by a warty-faced man he claimed was Rembrandt… and so on… yet of course many sendings were not so comic. Jud Daraul showed us childhood in ghetto streets; while John Kent the banker portrayed the good life of a wealthy American in the nineteen-sixties. Kent was another demoralised man: the system which had paid him so well had suddenly jumped on his back and shaved off his hair: he didn’t know now whether to become religious or join the Peoples’ Revolution. I could sympathise. Kazan Watanabe from 1921 and the Raifuku Maru sent delicately beautiful images of Japan; Ketil Blund showed us the last of the green on Greenland; through the eyes of Jean-Marie Leclerc we saw the storming of the Bastille in 1789; after which we met Ekapalon of the Yoruba in West Africa—another who was kept in his room for “medical reasons” and not allowed Outside. Through him we were seized by slavers and carried west in a stinking ship until Vulcan completed the horror: he was a fine man, and had no hate in him, which then I could not understand. We met Diarmaid, an Irish anchorite from fifteen hundred years ago, who had sailed west from his rocky Atlantic islet in search of greater solitude, only now to find himself packed in with us. He sent only once, telling us that our mind-pictures were disturbing his communion with God, and thereafter he wrapped a shield of silence about himself. And Howell Rees (named “Howell the Glower” by Herbie), at the edge of Circle and now somewhat unbent, sent enthusiastic images of his prayer-meetings in poor and rainy Mid-Wales. He also sent images caricaturing Frank Lubick, indicating that from now on he would talk to any non-Methodists as long as they weren’t Mormons. And Hyperia: running away from home in the cornfields of the Sahara when her father tried to marry her to a Roman senator’s “greasy son”—she’d wanted to go to the Platonist school of Ammonius Saccas in Alexandria, but, as she said in the library one day: “I knew they’d look for me there, so I took the opposite road and in time reached Pretania. I had many strange adventures, and at last, seeking I know not what, I went with a man I loved on a ship of fools captained by a mad Gaul who swore he’d lead us to a land where “there is no imperial taxman, slavemastery or soldier to bind us.” Well, hah! To that!”