"Egypt Eyes" Adventure Blog Novel - Blog 1

An adventure blog novel

Anson Hunter’s Blog 1

THE BLIND young woman lay stretched out on a poolside lounger at The Old Cataract Hotel, Aswan.

“Hello, I’m Anson Hunter,” I said, approaching her across the palm-shaded garden. She turned up her head and her reflective sunglasses sent flashes like empty semaphores.

“Thanks for coming to meet me, Anson. I want to hire you as my personal guide. I want you to show me Egypt.”

“Are you sure you need me?” I said,

“You’re thinking a guide dog might be better? Anubis, perhaps! No, I definitely want you.”

It was hard to believe that even though I was standing right over her at the poolside, I was probably just an elongated blur in her vision. Her female Egyptian assistant, who had emailed me, explained that Dr Constance Somers had degenerative retinitis pigmentosa and was now ninety percent blind.

“Me show you Egypt?" I said, squinting against the southern Egyptian sunlight. “How does that work?”

She smiled.

“How do you show Egypt’s sights to a woman who is legally blind?”

“I wasn’t thinking that.”

“Then what? You’re wondering how you’d nursemaid a blind woman around Egypt? Don’t worry. As you know, I have an assistant, Saneya, to hold my hand. She’s probably up there on the veranda, pretending to read a book, but watching me in case I get up and try to dive into the shallow end of the pool. Mostly I manage pretty well on my own, except when I’m walking down some crowded street in a city like Cairo and I get bumped by somebody and spun around, then I don’t know which way I’m facing anymore and that can be interesting.”

He glanced at the long white cane lying on the grass beside her lounger.
“That’s not it, either. At the risk of stating the obvious, you’re a professional Egyptologist.”

“And that’s your concern?”

“Yes. What could I possibly show you?” I said.

She smiled. “That’s endearing. You don’t see my condition, all you see are my qualifications.”

Well, that wasn’t exactly true, I thought. I saw other things about her. I’d been spending a parched and lonely time in the desert lately, so I couldn’t help but notice the litheness of her form revealed by the stretchy scraps of black spandex, and conversely, imagine secret areas of humidity beneath. The tremor of tightness I felt in my stomach gave way to a twinge of guilt and I felt bad for looking.

This was stealing from an unattended store.  

“Granted, I know Egypt,” she said. “Or at least one dimension of it. But I want you to show me something else, the unknown, unseen Egypt. Isn’t that what you specialise in as an alternative Egyptologist, a phenomenologist who believes in experiencing the sacred of ancient Egypt?”

I’ve taken unusual people on tours of Egypt before, New Agers, neo-pagans, fundamentalists, even Intelligence community people, but the cool, slender-faced blonde, Dr Constance Somers, was in a class of her own. Yet here she was saying that she wanted to find exactly the same thing I did, the hidden Egypt. But something else got in the way of her proposal besides her medical condition or her skills set. She was asking me to drop my current research and investigations into my latest controversial theory in order to join her.

“I will pay you well for your time,” she said. “I am not entirely a sad story. Unlike most members of my profession, I have a dollar to scratch myself with. I inherited, you see. It took away the desire to find treasures in Egypt and I could concentrate on finding more important things.”

Yes, I thought, the rich girl archaeologist had concentrated on finding much more important things, like her discovery of a celebrated stela of the Prince Khaemwaset at Saqqara.

I have been on the trail of the very same elusive magician prince for much of my life. Khaemwaset, son of Rameses The Great and the world’s first Egyptologist, loved to investigate and restore the monuments of the ancients, admiring the perfection of everything they made. Or so he claimed in the carved stone tablets he left on their monuments, ‘the world’s biggest museum labels’. But the princely tomb invader had other motives. Legend told that Khaemwaset went secretly in search of forbidden knowledge and power and he developed a reputation as Egypt’s greatest magician.

Maybe this invitation was a stroke of good fortune for me and an opportunity to work covertly from the inside of the profession, instead of on the outside.

My other project might just have to wait.

“What did you have in mind?” I said.

She smiled again. “I heard you were flexible. Just a cruise north, stopping at sites along the way to Luxor, to kill some time before the new season’s opening and the team arrives. Then after that a flight to Saqqara. We spend a week or so on site there. I’m being replaced as head of the team and this is my sort of official handover. They can’t have a blind academic…”

“Leading the blind academics?”
“Ah yes, you don’t have a high opinion of us, I’ve heard.”

“And vice versa. That’s why I’m surprised you’d take the risk of hooking up with a renegade who could tarnish your reputation.”

“I’ll take that risk. Maybe I want to hire you because you’re a renegade.”

“Intriguing,” I said.

“It may surprise you, but while I could still read, I read your blogs and your books and theories and this will be a more intimate sharing than with any other reader and no reader could feed on your words more hungrily. Like The Bard’s Dark Lady, I’ll be your lady in darkness... even though I happen to be a blonde and I can still see light and blurry shapes! Let me see your Egypt through your words and inspire me with the Egypt of your imagination.”

“I’m no poet.”

“I’m no lady. I don’t want censorship. I want your sensual reactions, too. I know you feel a powerful attraction for the feminine allure of ancient Egypt, so if something turns you on, turn me on!”

“Wow. And I felt guilty looking at you lying on that lounger!”
“Why guilty?”

“It was a bit like stealing.”

“You think I didn’t feel it?”

I was going to have to work at this, I was beginning to realize.

“I can see this may be a bit unnerving and I could be the one walking over uncertain ground.”

She laughed.

“Good! That's the kind of honesty I want from you.”

Might she be hiding more than fading eyesight behind those silvery lenses? Maybe things were not as they seemed and this woman’s request for a guided tour had a secret motive.

Was a blind woman planning to lead me along some unknown path? Towards what?

I’ve always liked the sense of being drawn into intrigue and my sensors warned me now of a hidden secret lying buried beneath the surface of this attractive and ill-fated young academic. In fact, my sensors were resonating like ground-penetrating radar.

I turned to look up at the long veranda in front of the hotel. I saw her assistant give us a wave.  I also saw a man in the shadows watching us through a pair of binoculars.

(Blog 2 to follow - by Anson Hunter, alternative Egyptologist who features in The Smiting Texts, The Hathor Holocaust, The Ibis Apocalypse and The Anubis Intervention, Amazon Kindle)

Egypt Eyes. Copyright © Roy Lester Pond, 2012

Egypt fact - or sensational Egypt fiction?

You decide. If I ever want to work again in Egypt as an independent Egyptologist and investigator, I'd be wise not to countenance these unauthorized accounts by Roy Lester Pond.

Ancient Egypt's government-funded research into the ‘first mystery’- death and the afterlife

Everyone knows that the Egyptians were preoccupied with the afterlife, but they took it even more seriously than many imagined.

Humans, they say, are the only creatures that must live life with the knowledge that one day they’re going to die and our culture was the world of distraction we create around ourselves to shield us from this knowledge. But the Egyptians’ culture did not serve as a mere distraction to the pitiless cruelty of death. Instead their culture came to grips with death in an attempt to overcome its tyranny.

The glowing underworlds of the tombs, the Books of Coming Forth By Day, or the Book of the Dead as they called these religious texts - were the results of government-funded research into the ‘first mystery’- death and the afterlife. The early pyramids were like nationally financed space-shots designed to launch the god-king pharaoh into the hereafter. The Egyptians even had maps showing the routes to the underworld painted on the bases of coffins.

Ancient Egypt's Abu Simbel vs USA's Mt Rushmore

Carved colossi like these of Rameses II at Abu Simbel were also loci for survival, another hope for life after death, transmuting materiality into spirit. Likenesses provided alternative houses for the soul.

Unlike say the images of American Presidents depicted in giant scale at Mt Rushmore, these statues are not decorative or even memorial. Through magic, the Egyptians attempted to transmute matter into spirit. Statues like this were vehicles through which the dead pharaoh could take material shape. In front of these lips, priests performed the most important ritual in Egyptian religion, the ceremonial opening of the mouth. Using either an adze or two little fingers of meteoric iron they would touch the lips four times, re-enacting the clearing of a baby’s mouth at birth, and this would be accompanied by the sacrifice of a bull and the presentation of a foreleg and heart. A similar ceremony opened the king’s eyes. Statues were imbued with life, which explains why they called the Egyptian sculptor: 'he who makes to live’.

There was no art for art’s sake. Nothing was fashioned for its sheer aesthetics. Everything was fashioned for a magical purpose and charged with the purpose for which it was made. That’s why their work defies reproduction. And that’s why their art holds such a fascination. It is imbued with heka, magical force, the animistic, motive power of the universe. Jewellery was not just jewellery, but prophylactic charms, statues were never vanity portraits, but houses for the soul, tombs were not painted to brighten the darkness of the underworld but to harness the power of heka. Death, ultimately, was the inspiration of all Egyptian art, or at least eternal life after death, about embodying eternity to create a home in which the soul of the dead could survive. In place of flesh they built themselves bodies in paint, wood and stone.

And here, gazing down on us in monumental stone, is Egypt’s confidence, writ large, in the existence of the afterlife.

Ancient Egypt's temptations of the flesh

The anchorites of the fourth century who took up habitation in the abandoned tombs of the Egyptians found beautiful carvings of women, Egyptian goddesses, a call to perdition - tormenting as a thorn in the flesh, a thorn from which they found it hard to escape.

What temptation they faced every day.

These cowled men, faces lined with the rigours of asceticism, tried to obliterate the image of the goddesses. They tried not to see or to think about the goddesses with their painted eyes and their feminine curves wrapped in sheath dresses.

The monks raised their hands against these images, hacking away at their breasts and their sex and their painted faces. Most of all they feared those dark, knowing eyes of the goddesses, painted like the outlines of fish, their own Christian symbol. They felt the eyes reach into them and make them quiver, provoking them, vibrating against the life of loneliness in the tombs. When they closed their eyes, the goddesses were still there, slender as Old Kingdom vases, filled with temptation like honey and wine. So they took chisels and hacked their crosses into the walls, as though to nullify them, to cross them out. But the memories of the goddesses played on in their dreams…

Did the eyes on the walls watch the holy men’s struggle with amusement? How deeply the thorn must have pierced! The monks prayed long on their knees on the hard stone floor for escape from their temptation, just as Saint Bishoi did, an ascetic who tied his long hair to the ceiling in an effort to keep himself awake while praying. But they never escaped the temptation.

A macabre surprise cake...in the form of an ancient Egyptian coffin

The most macabre surprise cake I've ever seen... in the Anubis Intervention affair...

As the audience of Egyptologists aboard the cruise boat watched, bearers brought a giant cake into the banqueting room. It was an ancient Egyptian mummy case lying on its back, I saw with surprise.

Sparklers sprinkled shower points of light onto the mummy case. The cake was decorated in the vulture-winged, rishi style, the feathers veined with red, green and blue icing. The bearers carried the confectionery coffin cheerfully around the room, each table of delegates breaking into applause as they passed.

The dancers stopped on the wooden dance floor and stage area at the front of the room. They stood the mummy case on its feet. The spotlight pooled on crystalline features, a round face cutting a keyhole in the enveloping surrounds of a great wig that fell to the chest. Rounded eyes in brilliant orbits gave the audience a soulful stare. The arms were folded across the breast, while on the front of the body a sky goddess enfolded the case with outspread wings. The cake was evidently reinforced, I thought, for it managed to stand on its base.

The Nubian band now struck a pulse-like beat.

The lid was going to open and someone was going to pop out of the cake, in true convention style, I thought. Belly dancing again? The last pair had been Egyptian twin girls who had performed a snaky dance, entwining their bodies and doing gravity defying back bends in the ancient Egyptian manner to the beat of a trio with lute harp and percussion. They seemed to have stepped straight out of the ancient party scene on the screen behind the delegates.

Would this Egyptian dancer inside the coffin cake make a concession to such a specialised audience? I tried to guess. Perhaps she'd pop out dressed as Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile. The eager smile on the face of the boat manager Mr Aboud encouraged my suspicion.

Now the drumming died.

The Nubian musicians paused. They waited. Building up the tension, I thought. Their leader slid an anxious glance towards the standing coffin. A hitch in the performance? Mr Aboud cleared his throat. The room grew quiet.

There was a whispered exchange of words between members of the Nubian group. Two of them broke away and went to either side of the cake and their fingers hunted for the edges of a concealed lid. There was amusement in the dining room and then disbelief as the lid came away.

That was when bangs like rolling thunder split the room and an ugly shadow like an eclipse came to take over our lives.

Egyptologist - or Investigator of Ancient Egypt's Secrets?

When you're outside of the mainstream you fall into the role of private investigator.
Egyptology prefers to ignore me. Even the Supreme Council of Antiquities has taken a supreme disinterest in me (until very recently).

But governments, intelligence agencies and sinister New Age and New World Order groups have a different attitude to what I can offer by way of investigations.

Unlike the agnostic knee-jerk mentality of many tenured Egyptologists, I take the sacred and the forbidden secrets of the ancient past seriously.

My various archaeological investigations have appeared unauthorised in a series of books described as 'fiction' - The Smiting Texts, The Hathor Holocaust, The Ibis Apocalypse and The Anubis Intervention...