THE SMITING TEXTS_Anson Hunter_Egyptology action adventure thrillers

by Roy Lester Pond

  Anson added more details to the sketch.

  “Now you’ve got it. It’s a plan view of the human insides - large intestine surrounding the small intestine, which twists side to side to reach the stomach, near the liver, and then above that the heart. This temple echoes the layout of the human skeleton, the Temple in Man, or the insides of the God-King.”

  “So what are you saying?” Kalila said.

  He pointed to the sketch on the floor.

  “I believe this is telling us to forget the upper levels, the outer bones of the temple and to go further below. We’ve got to go down into the lower levels of the Labyrinth - into the bowels of this place. And it gives us a guide to negotiating the Labyrinth.”

  Chapter 75

  HE ADDED finishing details to his sketch. Kalila, Daniel and the chador-covered woman came closer.

  “I know it sounds extraordinary, but in fact such a schematic layout is not unknown to theorists,” Anson said. "That’s the advantage of reading extensively outside of orthodox Egyptology. There’s a book called ‘THE TEMPLE IN MAN’ by R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz. It's a radical view - all about the temple of Luxor at Karnak, full of amazing measurements that show the temple was really the layout of the human skeleton, the Temple in Man."

  “So what are you saying?”

  He tapped the sketch with the piece of stone. “This whole thing represents the god. This structure is his body, built in imperishable stone,” he said.

  “You mean we are actually inside the body of Osiris?” Daniel whispered, looking around him in awe.

  “I believe so, and this lower region contains his organs as well as a gigantic digestive system.”

  Are we going to be swallowed by the Egyptian Lord of Death and Resurrection? Anson thought.

  The stone and darkness that surrounded them suddenly came alive in his mind. Organic, he thought. Aware of us. The play of a torch on a wall gave the stone a slimy sheen, like a secretion. “And we all know what a digestive system is meant to do,” he said. “Break us down.”

  Chapter 76

  ANSON WENT up and down twin rows of columns.

  “What are you looking for?” Daniel said.

  “That,” he replied.

  His torchlight fell on a great crack that ran like black lightning along the stone floor. The floor must have collapsed as a result of an earthquake. That’s our way down.” He went to the crack in the floor and knelt. He shone a beam down it to a level below. The light flared on a stone floor. It wasn't too far a drop.

  “We need a rope.”

  Their captors unpacked a rope from a bag. They tied one end around a column and dropped it down.

  “I'll go first,” he said. He slipped the torch into his pocket and went over the edge, sliding down, hand over hand, using his legs to slow his descent. Those above provided a light.

  Hitting a stone floor, he pulled out the torch and flicked it into life. He swung around to find himself in a large passage, the walls decorated with underworld serpents that threw endless coils into darkness.

  Daniel came next and the rest followed.

  “We’re inside the equivalent of the large intestine,” he said, his voice beating back in an echo.

  “But which part of it? Which way are we facing?”

  Trial and error. The stone smelt dank. Anson set off along the passage and Kalila came behind him. Other passages branched off it. Were these the fifteen hundred subterranean chambers that Herodotus had reported? They walked for several minutes. Now the torch beam showed the passage choking. It ended in a small tunnel and then a chamber without no way out.

  “Dead end,” he said.

  “The appendix,” Kalila said. “Now I know where we are.”

  He retraced his steps and took the first passage on the right. “This way.” The roof of the structure was lost in darkness. Restless scenes from the underworld covered its walls, a theme endlessly repeated, featuring a serpent with rippling coils. This was a far narrower passage. The small intestine? The sound of their footsteps, confined by the passage, beat in on his ears. It wasn’t an unbroken passage, he noticed. Free-standing stone walls, like screens, angled away in all directions and with gaps in between. What held up the slabs of the floor above? The torch revealed columns set cleverly between gaps in the screen walls.

  He glanced back at the others and saw the guards carefully marking the way with strips of reflector material, which they tore from a roll.

  “How long will this passage run?” Kalila whispered. “If it is anything like a representation of the human body, it could run for miles.”

  Fragments from a school biology lesson come back to Anson’s mind. The so-called small intestine was an organ twenty feet long. Puckered with tiny villi, it contained a vast surface area. If you could open up your small intestine and spread it out, it would cover two tennis courts. If you wanted to do such a thing…

  This would only be a schematic small intestine, he supposed, and one-dimensional like a map, but, with the branching walls and passages, it looked just as convoluted as the real thing. If the ancients understood human anatomy, and their famed surgical and funerary skills suggested that they did, then this passage would describe a series of sweeps and convolutions going back and forth across an imaginary belly.

  They reached a tight bend, the end of one sweep and then followed a curve that took them back in the opposite direction.

  “We are doubling back on ourselves,” the chador woman said from behind. “Are you lost?”

  “If you know a better way, fine. If not, just follow him,” Kalila suggested. “We don’t need distractions. One slip and we’re in alien territory.”

  “Just understand that I will not tolerate delaying tactics.”

  Chapter 77

  ODD, THESE WALLS, he thought. Anson twisted his torch up to the ceiling. None of the walls reached the ceiling.

  “Extraordinary,” he heard Daniel mutter behind them. “It’s almost as if this subterranean temple - if it is a temple - was set down for a symbolic or teaching purpose. Why else mirror the body? Was De Lubicz right? I’ve read his book too, his theory about the temple in man, that temples had a symbolic directive and represent the human microcosm and its spiritual anatomy.”

  We’re going through the spiritual anatomy of a god, Anson thought, feeling excitement and dread jostle for space in his mind. He made an effort to concentrate his thoughts like the beam of his torch.

  Keep looking ahead.

  “Perhaps this place was built to teach a way of truth, the geometry of the building’s plan being symbolic of the god, these twists and turns representing the tumult of experience that led to higher awareness,” Daniel mused. “It seemed a far-fetched notion once, and I’ve always been sceptical of theorists who pepper their books with abstractions using capital letters, like the ‘Way of Truth’, ‘Laws of Life’, the ‘Golden Number’, the ‘Cause Origin of the Universe’ and ‘God and the Creator of Polarised Energy’ as if capital letters conferred credibility on their concepts. But now I find my doubts retreating! I wonder what Emory made of this when he saw it. What was going through his mind? I’m sure it occurred to him that, following the Greeks, Christianity spoke of the body being the temple of the soul. It would have proved to him that the ‘temple of the soul’ concept had its roots in ancient Egypt too.”

  Anson felt dazed.

  “What a structure!” Kalila said. “We are penetrating into the heart of a building that rivaled the great pyramid. I wonder how Emory found his way through? Perhaps he figured out the secret from another source.”

  They reached the end of the corridor and rounded a bend to double back. How far had they come?

  "I think we are going in a circle," the shadow-woman said.

  Anson’s probing beam picked out an image of a goddess painted on the wall. She held a pair of crossed arrows in her hand. The air was brackish here, as ominous as a graveyard.

  “Did anything monstrous ever live down here?” Daniel w
ondered aloud.

  The bump of his footfall and the steps of others behind him, the sliding canyon walls, the stretch of the passage, the run of his thoughts and the glow of their torches spread a kind of hypnotic glaze over Anson’s eyes. They reached the end of the passage and rounded a bend to double back. How far had they come? Anson’s probing beam picked out an image of a goddess painted on a fragment of wall. She held a pair of crossed arrows in her hand. Neith, the mother of Sobek, the croc god. Her body, wrapped in a tight dress, was as slender as a rolled up umbrella. The air was heavier now, as if thickening with mystery.

  Monsters and labyrinths seemed to go together. It was certainly true of the Cretan labyrinth, where earthquakes in ancient times gave birth to the idea of a monster thundering and bellowing beneath the earth. At the heart of the Cretan labyrinth lived the Minotaur, a creature, half-man and half-bull, that fed on human flesh. Every nine years, fourteen young Athenian men were sacrificed to the labyrinth. None who entered ever returned, except the hero Theseus who entered with his magic ball of twine, defeated the beast and afterwards followed the trail of twine out to freedom. If the Cretans took their idea of a labyrinth from Egypt, maybe they also borrowed the legend of a monster.

  Images of Egyptian monsters crept into the light of Anson’s imagination. He pictured Ammit, the Devourer of Souls, part crocodile, part lion, part hippopotamus. Then he saw the shining lidless eyes of the Great Serpent of the underworld, Apophis.

  He moved past a painted fragment of stone. It showed a crocodile-headed man, wearing a crown of ram’s horns that had a disc and a pair of plumes on top. To the ancient Egyptian mind, reptiles such as serpents and crocodiles were the personifications of the powers of death.

  His light, flashing ahead to the floor, threw a shadow monster on the floor in front of them - a crocodile that lifted itself on stubby legs, before rushing forward in a waddle to attack, its jaws apart.

  He slammed to a halt and the others telescoped into him.

  “What is it?”

  “Just shadows and an overactive imagination. Sorry.”

  Yet he'd even heard a sound like a hiss come from open jaws. Just the rasp of a shoes brushing on floor, he supposed.

  They moved on, but his heart was fluttering. Don't go getting even more jumpy than you are now, he told himself, but he felt the darkness surround him with new danger.

  Chapter 78

  NOTHING could be alive down here, not after thousands of years, Anson told himself.

  They threaded their way along a section of passage. He turned his glance left and right as he walked. Where did these other passages lead? To dead ends? More likely they met up with their present passage at a further point. There were cracks in the walls in places, he noted, but in the main they had survived better than the columned court after the earthquake. Perhaps these walls, standing free of the ceiling, had more flex and were able to move without collapsing in the cataclysm and aftershock of an earthquake.

  But now the terrors start.

  At last, the inner shrine.

  But will the prize be thine?

  For now the walls excrete

  And death comes to defeat.

  What did the last part mean? It seemed to suggest that there were real dangers besides the problems of negotiating a maze, a trap set thousands of years earlier. What could the walls excrete?

  Hindrances were more likely to be practical in nature, mechanical tricks and traps, false doors, sliding boulders and hidden pits. Such traps were commonly built into ancient Egyptian tombs and it was likely that they existed here. The labyrinthine design, in itself, was clearly evidence of the ancients’ intention to guard against intruders.

  The winding passage turned in a long curve and ended at a pyloned entrance. He drew up.

  “Why have you stopped?” the woman called from behind.

  “What is it?” Daniel said.

  “Pylons. I think I know what they are.”

  They gathered around the entrance. The veiled woman and her men illuminated it with their beams.

  “A gateway, I take it.”

  “They look like the pylons of a bridge,” Kalila remarked.

  “And it is a kind of bridge,” Anson agreed. “It regulates a crossing from one organ to another. These pylons represent the pyloric sphincter. In the human body there’s a thickened ring of muscle that works like the drawstring of a purse to keep the contents of the stomach inside until they're ready to move on. It’s the same thing here."

  “You think it's designed to keep us out?” Daniel said dubiously. “Some kind of obstruction?”

  “I don't know. It’s possible, and it would certainly suit the scheme behind the Labyrinth’s construction.”

  “A protective device or mechanism,” Daniel said thoughtfully. “Maybe. But even if you’re right, I doubt it would still be in operation after thousands of years. Perhaps we are being over cautious.”

  “Think so? Then you go first.” Anson stepped aside and invited the bulky man to take his place.

  Abuna Daniel Jacoub hesitated, then decided to accept the challenge. He gave a shrug and moved towards the entrance. He had almost stepped into the wedge of darkness when Anson grabbed him by the shoulder and hauled him back.

  Out of the darkness, there came the grind of metal and stone and from the lintel and floor, hinged jaws with teeth of bronze slammed shut with a thunderous roar. They sprang clear.

  “Thank you,” Daniel said shaken, relieved and horrified all at once, his voice disturbing the silence that settled like dust.

  Chapter 79

  IT WAS A GATE, shaped like a crocodile’s jaws, their torchlight revealed. Daniel gave a shaky sigh.

  The jaws were moving again. A rumble shook the gateway. Under the sway of a delayed mechanism, perhaps shifting levers under weights of pouring sand, the jaws parted, the lower one vanishing into the floor, the upper one into the darkness of the top of the lintel.

  The jaws of Sobek? How were they going to get through?

  The shadowy form had already decided that. “We'll use explosives,” she said. “A small charge will blow the jaws apart.”

  “And bring the whole place down on top of us,” Kalila protested. “Who knows how weakened this section may be after earthquakes. You'd also be destroying a rare piece of ancient machinery."

  “This is not a study trip. I will give you two minutes to find another answer - or we will use a charge.”

  “Maybe we could jam something into the jaws to keep them apart,” Anson suggested.

  “Such as?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We could try binding the jaws together, the way they secure a real crocodile,” Kalila suggested.

  It gave Anson an idea. “I’ll need a rope.” A man came forward with a rope. Anson made a noose. “Who's going to be the bait?” he said.

  “Allow me again,” Daniel said. “But I shall be rather more careful this time.”

  “Don't go too close,” Anson said. “Just edge close enough to set it off.” He passed the other end of the rope to the group of Egyptian captors. “Take hold of the rope,” he told them. “As soon as I've thrown it over the jaws, pull hard and take in the slack.”

  The men looked at each other, reluctant to take orders from him.

  “Do it,” the woman said.

  They put their guns and torches down near the wall, while another kepthis weapon trained.

  “Ready?” Anson said. “Ready.”

  Daniel, the crocodile bait, wiped his forehead on a shirtsleeve and edged nearer the black square of the gateway.

  “Just edge your foot in - carefully,” Anson said, “or you're going to require a different size of shoe. And leave me room to swing the rope.” He turned to the men with the other end of the rope. “Take up slack. Hold tight.”

  “You're nearly at the spot where you set it off,” he warned Daniel. “Just inch your foot out. But whip it back fast if you want to keep your toes.”

  The monk
slid his shoe along the flagstones on the floor while Anson swung the loop of rope in his hand. There was a rumble and roar and a flash of descending spikes in the flashlight directed on the doorway.

  Daniel whipped back his foot.

  Clang. The jaws crashed shut.

  Anson tossed the loop of rope. It went cleanly over the jaws.

  “Pull!” he shouted.

  He had seen the force of the mechanism and had heard the grind of powerfully machinery.

  His fingers released the rope. The force of the jaws springing apart a moment later brought such a wrench on the rope that it snapped the two men forward. They grunted in surprise and slammed into a pillar.

  That was when Anson surprised another guard, hitting him with his shoulder in the chest. The force knocked the rifle and the wind from him. His torch also clattered to the floor. Anson dived after the weapon.

  Almost had it.

  His fingers stretched out to close around the butt.

  But the sandaled foot of the woman slammed down on his fingers and her torchlight stabbed in his eyes. She bent swiftly and picked up the weapon.

  “We were beginning to trust you,” she said.

  Anson sat up.

  The guards had picked themselves up and collected their weapons and torches. Their lights caged Anson in accusing interrogation.

  “Sorry,” he said, shrugging innocently. “The force took me completely by surprise. Shall we try again?” He got up.

  A guard shoved him aside.

  They were going to do it their way.

  The others drew back into the darkness of the tunnel.

  It was only a small charge, neat and efficient. The man tossed it into the jaws of the gate just as they closed and it swallowed the explosion, taking it into itself and down through the ground where it made the passage tremble under their feet.

  When they went back, they saw that the upper jaw had been wrenched off a pair of mighty hinges. Smoke and dust issued from the gateway.