In his hotel room in a tower block, Anson poured himself a whisky and water and for a while he stood in dreamy reflection, gazing at the wavy lines of alcohol in the glass. What a day. After his meeting at the Supreme Council of Antiquities and tour of the Cairo museum, they had visited the pyramids at Saqqara - the ancient Egyptians’ most convincing bid for eternity - and finally the mastaba tomb of Mereruka.
He ferried his drink out onto the balcony. His room looked out over sculpted gardens that lay shrouded by the same heavy Cairo smog as the original palace buildings, the view filtered by the haze in the air. Further beyond, to his left, lights moved sluggishly on the ripples of an oily-looking Nile. The river of eternity.
Images of the day flooded his mind, the crowded Cairo museum, spectral figures of the royal mummies in their cases, the treasures of the boy king, the cloud-touching pyramids.
What did he know? He went over the bare facts reported to him. Emory Hunter had visited the mastaba tomb alone. The police, called by a guard, had found him sprawled on the steps as if making obeisance to the long-dead Mereruka. Who fired the weapon? Nobody knew. Authorities discovered no clues at the scene of the murder, or none that they would reveal. Yet someone knew the truth.
Did the Coptic monk, a friend of his father, know more? Did they both know about a curious threat to America?
Anson should have felt closer to answers here in Egypt, yet the truth seemed veiled, like this view from his balcony. He sipped his whisky.
There were so many puzzling elements in his father’s life and death, not the least of them being his father’s friendship with the mysterious monk. A Coptic monk and an iconoclastic Egyptologist. Bizarre really. It was hard to imagine a more unlikely collaboration. What a gulf must have stretched between them.
Yes, he thought, the biggest gulf of all, the mysterious gulf of eternity, and perhaps this same gulf was the one thing that united them.
Chapter 21
IT WAS ALMOST too easy. They had slipped out from under the noses of the group, including that of the SCA watchdog. Maybe they were tired out after the day’s excursions, Anson thought.
“I feel bad sneaking away from the group like this,” Kalila said, picking up his thoughts.
They sat in the back seat of a traveling taxi that had been waiting outside for them and had flashed its lights to attract them.
“I don’t. If they want to work with a renegade like me, this is what they must expect… as long as they don’t actually expect it and they’re trailing us right now.”
He twisted round to look out of the back window of the taxi. “Not much point looking for pursuers at full chase,” he murmured. “We’ve got half of Cairo trying to catch us. No, it’s a bit unlikely our group will tail us.”
Anson experienced a sense of momentum for the first time as he travelled with Kalila, going from the island of Zamalek across the Nile and heading to an address in Subra, a Coptic quarter in Northern Cairo.
Momentum was the word, he thought, in every sense. The driver, Daniel’s cousin, was a saturnine man who avoided any attempts to engage in words. But he was not averse to sound. At high speed, he appeared to probe the traffic by means of sound from his horn, like a blind man tap-tapping with a stick, and so did the rest of the traffic, none apparently taking offence at the liberal use of sonic blasts.
“Don’t worry,” Kalila said in a calming tone. “Cairo drivers are quite safe.”
“So I’m often told. Fearless might be a better word.”
“You will hardly ever come upon the scene of an accident.”
He was attempting to reassure himself with this information when she spoilt it by adding: “if there is by chance a motor accident, the police arrest both parties and impound their cars on the spot, with the result that if cars should be involved in a collision, nobody hangs around to debate the finer points. They simply move on.”
And move on they did.
They pulled up in a darkened street. Anson paid the driver and they climbed out of the taxi to find themselves outside an unfinished-looking concrete four-storey building. Bare steel girders poked up from the roof.
Anson looked up dubiously.
“Are you sure this is the place? It’s still under construction.”
She smiled.
“Haven’t you noticed? Many buildings in Cairo look like this. Once a new building is finally completed it attracts a hefty government tax. As a result, in order to avoid the tax, half of Cairo deliberately remains a work in progress.”
Logical, he supposed, and apparently she was right for now he noticed that the building was in fact inhabited. Lights peeped from windows above and an unlit jewellery shop with barred windows occupied the ground floor.
The two went through doors and tramped up stairs to the top floor. There was a smell of cooking in the air. Falafels, he guessed, spiced chickpea fritters deep-fried, a Middle Eastern favourite.
“Here it is,” Kalila said.
She knocked. A closed door, he thought. Would this one open to bring him closer to his father?
Abuna Daniel Yacoub opened the door.
“I am honoured to meet the son of my good friend Emory Hunter. Welcome to the home of my cousin.”
That’ll be the second cousin of the night, Anson thought.
They shook hands. Anson was surprised to find the monk dressed in a suit.
Chapter 22
THE APARTMENT was modest, middle class and comfortably furnished. No hint of the East here, except for a photo of the whiskered Coptic Pope on a wall as well as a carved Coptic cross on a shelf. A family area adjoined the kitchen, where a pair of small girls sat on a mat in front of a flickering television set, doing what appeared to be school homework.
Daniel introduced Anson and Kalila to his cousin David, owner of the jewellery shop below, and his smiling wife Ruth, who made them a pot of coffee, after which the pair withdrew, leaving the three to talk in private.
They sat on chairs with the coffee on a table between them.
“I have a very helpful and well-placed family. All over Egypt, in fact,” Daniel told them. “Believe me it was not for want of a good and loyal family that I chose a life of solitude. I have quite a number of cousins and nephews.”
“Thank you for inviting us here,” Anson said, getting to the point of their visit. “You wanted to speak to me about my father.”
“A long day for you,” Daniel said, looking at their tired faces.
“I’m a bit surprised my father even mentioned me to you.”
“You might be surprised by what I learnt about you. For example, that you are someone who is not averse to alternative ideas and also that you are one who does not attract official attention.”
“Go on.”
“Did you know that your father left a message… a word scratched in the dust of the floor where he died?”
“A cryptic last message from my father? “Anson sat up. “You’re not testing my well-proven credulousness are you?”
“He wrote a single word, ‘Amen’. I have a cousin in antiquities who assures me of this fact. The message was there, beside the steps, where they found him.”
Anson struggled with this information.
“Amen? Seriously? A strange time for my father to indulge in irony, don’t you think? Unless … it’s the beginning of a pharaoh’s name…”
“Indeed. There were four Amenhoteps and three Amenemhats… and then there is also the god Amen-re, from whom the word ‘amen’ originates.”
“Not to mention pharaohs Amenemesse, Amenemope and Amenrud,” Kalila put in.
“Thank you, Kalila,” Daniel said. “It does not seem much to go on, but a very good thought all the same. I am pursuing it in my research. But there are more clues. This.”
Daniel unrolled a cloth that lay on a table beside his chair to reveal a shattered piece of red clay potsherd with roughly scrawled hieratic script on it.
“Your father mailed it to me. A note says it was found beneath th
e site of the late-period temple Emory discovered in the Fayoum and he even provided a translation: “the angry gods above, and the power of Osiris and the forty-two gods who reside with him in the Duat (Egyptian netherworld) below, will seize Egypt’s enemies like trapped birds.”
“That sounds like threat formulae,” Anson said.
“Yes. A further note with it says ‘If anything should happen to me, seek the guidance of Osiris first, at the seventh step of the Stairway of the God, and that will lead you, via a zig-zag path, to a discovery more impressive than the pyramids, in the farthest reaches of Egypt.’ Whatever that means. An aerial photo shows where he excavated the temple. And finally, this. ‘Thank St. Shenouda for his pearls of wisdom.’”
Kalila gave a chuckle of disbelief.
“Emory would hardly give thanks to a Coptic saint! Are you sure this came from him?”
“It came from Emory all right. I know his hand. Puzzling though.”
“When I said cryptic, I didn’t expect that cryptic,” Anson said. “I’m intrigued by the ‘stairway of the god’ reference. According to legend, the stairway of Osiris was meant to be in ancient Abydos and the throne of Osiris sat on a dais with seven steps. My father also worked there at one point, I’m told. Do you suppose he could have found that mythical stairway? Where exactly did he work in Abydos?”
“He found traces of an old, rising causeway in the west,” Kalila put in. “I was working with him on and off at the time. He hoped it would lead to a middle kingdom temple, but if it did at one time, it’s no longer there. Our team was quite disappointed.”
The Coptic monk shrugged. “Code, perhaps. He feared the information might fall into other hands. He posted this to me from Cairo, the day before he died. But I fear he has overestimated my acumen or scholarship. Perhaps you can make something of it.”
Anson was puzzled. “He posted this to you? But you live a secluded life in a cave. Don’t tell me you have a postal address.”
Daniel laughed.
“Yes and cable television and broadband Internet. No, but I have an intermediary. Perhaps you do not understand about hermit monks. Monks have to live in a monastery under close supervision for fifteen years before they are allowed to go out and find a cave, or dig one out, to pursue the life of solitude. Any contact with me normally takes place through the nearby Baramous monastery, where I am pleased to go now and then, not only for their library of ancient codices but also for their very good reference library. Their library contains many extensive volumes on Coptic history, archaeology, and much more. These clues from your father arrived for me at the monastery, where I kept them, with a view to doing a bit more research.”
Chapter 23
“THIS IS ALL very fascinating,” Anson said, “but, if you don’t mind my saying so, a bigger fascination for me is your friendship with my father. What could you two possibly have had in common?”
“A disbelief in heaven, for one.”
“Of course, you’re a Christian monk, why should you believe in heaven?”
“Not the automatic variety that comes to everyone after death, regardless of how they have lived their lives, no. The notion of a life after death is a stratagem of the Devil, my friend. Satan tricked the whole world. Remember it was the fallen angel Satan who first introduced the idea that man does not really die, but is inherently immortal. Ye shall not surely die, he told Eve in the Garden of Eden. This was the first diabolical lie. We all die and only the resurrection of our dear Lord can save us.”
“Then you do believe in an afterlife of sorts,” Anson said, looking relieved. “I started to wonder if all my notions about eternity were on a slippery slope, that the Judaeo-Christian beliefs we inherit in the west were just hand-me-downs from a pagan past.”
“Many are. The similarities with modern faith and ancient Egypt bother many. Let me tell you this,” Daniel said. “I am absolutely convinced that God did not suddenly stumble out of a sleep when the Israelites came along. He was already working through mankind in ancient times and in ancient civilizations, especially Egypt, where he breathed his presence into myth, poetry, and yes, religion. Egypt was the first gentile nation to embrace Christianity. And it was Egypt’s St Antony whose renunciation of the world and retirement to the eastern desert of Egypt started monasticism as a movement that altered world history. The world has the spread of Egyptian monasticism to thank for the monasteries of medieval Europe, citadels that preserved religion, culture, arts and enlightenment during the Dark Ages.
“Through the Church of Alexandria, Egypt became world leader in the Christian faith for about 450 years years, giving Christendom, among other things, the Nicene Creed that is proclaimed in all churches to this day as well as the ordering of the Holy Bible.
“Where would Christianity be without Egypt – Moses, Joseph and the succour of Israel in famine, without the safe refuge provided by Egypt for the holy family? According to our Coptic tradition the boy Jesus lived in Egypt until the age of seven and here he performed his first miracles as the holy family moved about Egypt.”
“And these gods, represented by idols - who do you think they were in the cosmological scheme?”
The Coptic priest shrugged. “I do not profess to know where they fit into creation. I often wonder. Were they the fallen Elohim? God’s fallen council? Intriguingly, Genesis mentions early sons of god who walked the earth: Now it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves of all whom they chose. There were giants on the earth in those days, the Bible relates, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.
“How many sermons have men of the cloth preached over the centuries about the soul’s immortality?” the monk said. “But interrogate the biblical texts closely and you have to conclude that scholarship has been wanting, even shoddy. The concept of the soul goes back long before the birth of faith-based religions. The Greek historian Herodotus records in the fifth century BCE that the ancient Egyptians were the first to teach that the soul of man is separable from the body and immortal and the Egyptians taught their belief to the Greeks. They also gave it to the Jews and to Christians, with Augustine syncretising the tradition of Greek philosophy with the New Testament so that today it has found its way into Western beliefs.”
Kalila looked shocked to hear this coming from a man of the cloth.
“But the Egyptians were pagans in the eyes of the Jews and Christians. How could they have allowed Egyptian ideas to influence them?”
“The civilization of Egypt dominated the Eastern Mediterranean. Egypt’s neighbours could scarcely have avoided its impact. No people described so fully in written descriptions and illustrations their ideas about the afterlife as the Egyptians. Ancient Israel was no stranger to this religious milieu and it could be said that ‘Israel came out of Egypt’ in more than the literal sense. Significantly, heaven and hell are just rudimentary concepts in the Old Testament, only in the New Testament do we begin to recognise them. It would never have crossed the minds of early biblical people that they might live again in heaven. At best, they expected to enter a gloomy netherworld at death.
“In the Christian Era that followed, Egypt’s influence grew even more. At the risk of being controversial, Egypt probably had a greater influence on the newly born Christian religion than Judaism. There are endless examples of the startling similarities between Egyptian religion and Christianity. There is the same story of God creating the world out of the formless void through the agency of the word. As the Gospel writer John said: In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through Him all things came to be, not one thing had its being but through Him. Compare this with earlier Egyptian mythology that said: The world itself came into existence through
the utterance of a word by Thoth.
“Both Osiris and Jesus died after a Last Supper or Banquet, involving a conspiracy, where they were betrayed, Osiris by his evil brother Seth and Jesus by his disciple Judas. Both died on the tree, so to speak, Osiris sealed alive in a wooden coffin and Jesus nailed to a cross. Then there is the parallel resurrection of Jesus and the resurrection of Osiris. The symbols of both dying gods are almost identical. Each had a cross. The Egyptians had the ankh, symbol of life-eternal, Christianity the cross of Calvary. Certain psalms in the Bible are almost identical to ancient Egyptian Wisdom Texts and to hymns written in adoration of the god Aton, thousands of years older than the Bible, yet the Bible is considered to be the font of all spiritual inspiration. You can see Egypt’s religious legacy today in the living traditions, symbols and practices of Catholicism. Is it simply synchronicity that the Pope wears a trinitarious mitre much like a pharaoh’s triple crown and carries the shepherd’s crozier like the crook of pharaoh? That both Mary and Isis are called the ‘Mother of God’? Egypt also invented trinities. Isis, Osiris and Horus were the precursors of Mary, Joseph and Jesus.”
Anson’s eyes widened in surprise.
“And I thought I was the alternative theorist. So, in spite of the beliefs that billions hold today, according to my father’s line of thinking, the dead are just that - dead? I’m skidding a bit, looking for help, for a steadying handhold of familiar belief.”
“Not from me. It’s been known for centuries. Martin Luther, leader of the Protestant Reformation in Germany, could find no doctrinal support for a soul and its immortality in the pages of scripture. Luther said: It is probable, in my opinion, that, with very few exceptions, indeed, the dead sleep in utter insensibility till the day of judgment... On what authority can it be said that the souls of the dead may not sleep... in the same way that the living pass in profound slumber the interval between their downlying at night and their uprising in the morning?"
“No biblical authority?”
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