THE HATHOR HOLOCAUST Page 2

  “I need to take a closer look,” Anson said to the attractive stranger sitting beside him on the train to London.

  “Not at me, I’m sure you mean. You’re more interested in this.”

  He sized up his new travelling companion. Fair skinned yet darkly alluring. Yes, she fitted the bill. A little daring and mysterious.

  She held up her arm for his inspection and he caught a wisp of perfume as he cradled it in his hand and drew it closer for scrutiny. The arm felt cool and creamily soft in texture.

  The heavy gold bracelet was hinged on a gold pin, two half-cylinders that clipped together in a band, another gold pin forming the clasp. On alternate panels were turquoise inlaid images of Hathor in a very early form, a female face, cow-eared and horned, and beside each Hathor-head an image of her alter-ego, Sekhmet, a lioness in fiery red carnelian.

  It was as jolting as seeing a snake coiled on her arm.

  The implications made his thoughts blur like the passing greenery.

  History, or a sensational episode of it, was repeating itself.

  Did this girl plan to lead him from the train to a promised revelation, just as Anna Papastrati had done, virtually abducting him by means of an irresistible lure? The Treasures of Dorak expose had caused a sensation when it broke in the London Illustrated News, accompanied by a spread of illustrations. Many asserted that Anna worked for an antiquities gang and had used Mellaart’s international credibility to authenticate an illegally recovered hoard and so elevate its value on the illegal antiquities market.

  Anna disappeared following the liaison with the professor. Later she sent him a typed note permitting him to release his story and the drawings, archly commenting that he was always more interested in these old things than in her. Goodbye and good luck.

  Yet no Dorak artefacts had ever surfaced on the antiquities market, nor had they appeared in any museum.

  Gone - like Anna herself, he thought, and like the oak tree in the countryside outside the train window throwing up its boughs like arms in bafflement as it flashed past.

  In the end, few experts believed Professor Mellaart’s account. They labelled the affair a hoax, a fantasy dreamed up by an academic hitting his middle years and hungry to regain past glories, yet the former British Institute of Archaeology scholar clung to the story of Anna and the lost treasures of Dorak into his old age.

  Anson wondered: is this to be my Dorak Affair?

  "Tell me this, Alexia, if that’s your real name,” he said, adding the pressure of his fingers to her arm. “Why me? My specialty is the esoteric - the sacred, magic, religion and the spiritual powers of ancient Egypt. Why not pick on some dry academic who specializes in pre-dynastic Egypt?"

  "Because this is not dry academic material.” Her dark eyes flashed a challenge. “It’s deeply esoteric and so it is going to attract very different interests.”

  He could not restrain the unwelcome stirring of excitement inside his stomach.

  “What if I don’t play along?”

  “You want to see more.”

  He surrendered her arm.

  “Yes, I do. I’m up for this.”

  “I thought you might be. You are a flexible man.” “When can I see it?” he said. “Not just yet. You’re staying in London for a few days.

  You are going to do some research for a new book.”

  He noticed that rather than ask questions she made statements, assumptions. There was more than an element of the flashing-eyed gypsy about this young woman. She spoke as if she were revealing his future from a deck of cards or from the lines of his palm. She clearly knew his movements.

  It was his turn to make assumptions. “You’ve been reading my blog.” “I will email you to come to a certain address in London.

  But you will guarantee discretion or you will never see me again, nor will you see what I can show you. You will tell no one.”

  “The authorities? They’re no friends of mine. I’ll agree to anything. What have you got to show me?”

  “It depends on how much you want to see.”

  “Everything you’ve got.”

  She smiled. “Let’s take one step at a time. I will return to my seat now. Goodbye for the present. Please don’t follow.” She was gone. He regarded the empty seat, then his computer screen for a few moments, before closing the lid. Outside the train window, the passing greenery looked not so much blurred now as shredded, like his state of mind.

  A breathtaking ancient discovery. A beguiling antiquities thief. A menace to the world now looking like a reality.

  His speculations about dangerous esoteric forces emerging from the ancient past had once again collided with real-world danger and conspiracy.

  He looked down at the vacated seat and with it came a sense of emptiness.

  Why was he not only excited and alarmed by the revelation, but also powerfully attracted to the messenger herself?

  And then the truth came to him. There had come into his life of late a sense of weariness with ideas, theories and writing, and with it had even come depression.

  He was hungry for a different kind of union, he thought. A marriage of the spirit and of the flesh, not just a cerebral union with ideas. He had married once before, but his ex-wife May had chosen an alternative life rather than carry on living with an alternative Egyptologist lost in eternal theorising.

  The face of another more recent attachment, Kalila, an Egyptian Coptic girl and an Egyptologist, appeared in the passing greenery. She was an archaeologist and philologist and always seemed to be in the field, as removed from him as if she had gone to another world.

  All of his life he had sought a radiance and mystery and mostly he had tried to find it in an underworld away from the light, in the deep cut passages of Egyptian tombs and in the glimmer of ruined temples, but now he wanted to find it in the warmth of a passionate human relationship.

  His hand dropped down to the empty seat.

  The warmth of the stranger was fading, but not the memory of her.

  He checked into a hotel near his favourite haunt, the British Museum, and in the privacy of his room, checked his computer for emails.

  No message from Alexia yet.

  He wondered if he should update his alternative ancient Egypt blog, uploading the piece he had recently written on the train.

  Not yet.

  Just the thought of the train threw his thoughts into a headlong rush.

  He was hurtling along to some kind of a collision with the truth to a point where the lines of speculation and reality shockingly converged.

  Chapter 3

  HE STAYED with Alexia, studying, sketching and speculating.

  Then he was right. A sanctuary of Sekhmet had been discovered.

  The influence of Sekhmet had once nearly wiped out Egypt. And it could also spell chaos today.

  Alexia prepared a light meal of pasta and salads, and he tore himself away from the hoard and even lingered with her afterwards at the table over a glass of Frascati.

  “We are both renegades you could say. We both steal from the past. A pity our loyalties must keep us apart. I like you, Anson.”

  She touched his hand lightly. His skin tingled. They looked into each other’s eyes and he wondered.

  Should he take this Dorak Affair to a horizontal conclusion?

  Why not make it an affair to remember? If events followed the example of The Dorak incident, he would never see her again.

  What was he thinking? Did the breath of chaos still cling to the relics so that just the act of examining them had disrupted clear thought processes? This was a reckless step. He would be jumping into bed with antiquities thieves, or at least it might look that way to unsympathetic eyes.

  Not a bad way to guarantee his silence, the thought occurred to him.

  He wondered what she would look like wearing the jewels.

  “I believe the ancients, royalty, used to adorn their bodies with gold jewellery before they took their pleasure,” she said.

&
nbsp; She was a mind reader. There was definitely something of the gypsy about this girl.

  “You’d like me to model the pieces for you,” she said. Her eyes sparkled with daring. “Go into the bedroom. Wait in there and I may surprise you.”

  Surprise him? What was the worst that she could do? Disappear? Take the jewels and run? Why? Maybe she planned to open the apartment door and call in an accomplice - a sociopathic Greek-Egyptian boyfriend who would knife him now that he’d served his usefulness.

  Too much speculation. It was an occupational risk. He got up, went through to the bedroom and sat on the bed. He’d always prided himself on his flexibility.

  It felt as if thousands of years elapsed before she arrived and appeared like a vision in the bedroom doorway. She leaned, daringly, against the doorjamb in pagan nakedness. No, so much more than nakedness, he decided. The collection of gold and inlaid jewellery clinging to her body, a jewelled broad collar around her neck and bangles on her arms as well as golden anklets, along with the primeval age of the pieces, accentuated her nakedness and took it to a new dimension. Gold anklets, each with claws or talons, caught his eye. They could be interesting.

  “I hope there are no cameras in here too,” he said.

  “Do you care?”

  “Not really.” Was it the effect of these heka-infused treasures overpowering caution?

  “Let’s shock them. I see you have other treasures,” he said. “I may need to take a closer look.” He was only a man, an ordinary, red-blooded man, he thought, and every man had limits to his resistance.

  Ordinary man?

  For ‘ordinary’ read an obsessive alternative Egyptologist who was in love with the seductive allure of ancient Egypt, he thought. This was what he lived for as a phenomenologist, one who believed it was important to engage experientially with the sacred, to draw near to the flame of Egypt’s divine and here was Egypt in the flesh, offering herself to him.

  As he sank over Alexia, the treasures of Sekhmet-Hathor both chilled and scalded his flesh. She rose to him and her legs wrapped around him. He felt the dig of her claws on the anklets pulling him down into her parted legs.

  He found her softness inside the hard jewels on her body a shock.

  The Glorious One. The One Who Places Love in the Hearts of Men, Lady of Turquoise, Lady of the Southern Sycamore, Lady of the Tresses, Lady of the Vulva, Lady of the West, Lady of Dendera.

  He began to move and she with him.

  Mistress of the Systrum, Mistress of Exultation, Mistress of Fertility, Mistress of Myrrh, Mistress of Intoxication, Mistress of Joy, Mistress of Life, Mistress of Love, Mistress of Agony.

  The claws on her ankles bit deeper and now he was filled with thoughts of Sekhmet, the lioness.

  The One Who Takes Possession by Force, The One Who Takes Wing as the Female Falcon, The One Who Penetrates the Orb of the Sun in the Sky, Mistress of Terror, Mistress of Transformation in front of the One Who Created Her, Mistress of the Uraeus, The One Whose Face Shines with Anger, The One Whose Fire is Great, The Powerful One…

  The end came with a roar like a lioness in his ears and a whimpering came from her lips.

  As they rested, he touched a row of lapis Hathor heads, goddess images set into the broad collar of gold, turquoise and carnelian above her breasts.

  “Marry me, Alexia. We’ll run away to Egypt together and investigate the ancient origins of this find.”

  “You think we’d be safe fleeing to Egypt. I work in a dangerous business.”

  “So do I.”

  “And I deal with dangerous people. I can’t change course. You can’t climb off when you’re riding a tiger.”

  “Or the lioness of destruction? If I can’t stop you, won’t you at least come clean with me? Are there elements of this find still hidden away? What else did you find? A discovery of such staggering importance is crying out to be analysed and recorded before it’s disturbed too much. Once everything is moved, the ritual importance of context and relationships will be lost forever.”

  “Don’t get all archaeological on me. You must forget what you have seen.”

  “You think that’s possible? I’ve seen an unforgettable sight today. Including a cache of treasure.”

  “At least for a while.”

  “Even less likely.”

  She placed a finger briefly on his lips.

  “You must do, and say, nothing until I contact you. Keep faith with me,” she urged him. “Remember, images of you with the collection and of your association with me could look awkward for you. I will contact you and say when it is okay for you to tell your story. Let us have an agreement.”

  “At this stage it seems a bit formal to shake on it.” He reached out across her belly to her warmth below. “But I can think of a better way to seal our agreement.”

  She smiled.

  “Yes, that would be more binding.”

  Chapter 4

  ‘A MUSEUM is a dangerous place.’

  Sir Flinders Petrie, pioneer British Egyptologist, first said those words, but today Anson was thinking them.

  A man had followed him to the British Museum.

  Who was he?

  Petrie had been thinking about another kind of danger when he’d made his famous remark about the dangers of museums. The founder of modern scientific Egyptology had been alluding to the manner in which the early Cairo museum had dealt with a royal mummy fragment found at Abydos, a single, bandaged arm, covered in jewels, the only remains of First Dynasty king Zer.

  The curators took the jewels and tossed the arm way, the earliest royal mummy remains ever to come to light. It was a mummy horror story to eclipse any devised by the most febrile imagination, Anson had always thought, but right at that moment his mind was on the other worry.

  Anson went up the steps and between the Ionic-style columns into the building. He passed through a crowded reception hall to arrive in the Great Court beyond.

  Above the court, a tessellated glass and steel roof spread out overhead like a vast, glowing net, catching clouds, blue sky and a spirit of illumination, while the round, central building swelled like an ivory tower of learning. He crossed the clean bright space before heading left to the door of the Egyptian section.

  Inside the dimmer light of the hall, a group of school children crowded around the Rosetta Stone in its glass display case. Two little black girls peered inside, their heads close together as they examined the stone, their hair braided in cornrows. An African look, he thought. It linked his thoughts to Africa’s greatest river, the Nile, and to Egypt’s irrigated fields that bounded it and made Egypt the breadbasket of the ancient world.

  He made for the sculpture gallery.

  Egypt, both divinely monumental and naturalistic, surrounded him. Two statues of Pharaoh Amenhotep III, powerfully formed in dark granodiorite, flanked the entranceway to a hall, granting admittance, and inside, as stone slid by, other familiar sights came into view, a red granite lion with charmingly crossed forepaws, and further on, the statue of the Chief Steward Senenmut tenderly holding the daughter of Queen Hatshepsut, the little princess Neferure, on his lap - the child wrapped within his cloak and her face peeping out - then a soaring, crowned head of Pharaoh Amenhotep in the background. And people everywhere, creating a sound of buzzing like voices in a cathedral at prayer time.

  But he barely saw or heard them. He paused at a figure standing on a pedestal near a wall on the right hand side, almost overshadowed by a colossal granite torso of Rameses the Great in the centre of the hall.

  Khaemwaset, the priest-prince and magician.

  Anson confronted the figure. The sculpture depicted the prince in a pleated kilt, stepping forward while holding a pair of emblematic staves at his sides. The conglomerate stone must have presented a technical challenge to the sculptor as it was shot through with multi-coloured pebbles. It made Khaemwaset look as if galaxies were exploding out of his chest.

  A museum label said:

  Red breccia standing figur
e... one of the favourite sons of Rameses II, the legendary Khaemwese…

  The label used a variant spelling of the name Khaemwaset.

  He looked up at the face. Intelligent, sensitive features, faintly saddened. An air as haunted as the face of the sphinx.

  Anson silently interrogated the statue.

  Open up, Khaemwaset. As one renegade to another, what do you really know? As a seeker of forbidden power, did you open the sanctuary of Hathor, provoking fiery destruction, plagues and pestilence on your father Rameses and his kingdom? Legend tells that you found the magical Book of Thoth, so why not the disc of Ra, too?

  Egyptologists agreed on one thing. Prince Khaemwaset was a kindred spirit. ‘The world’s first Egyptologist’ they called him, as a result of the prince’s peculiar antiquarian interests. Khaemwaset lived a few thousand years before his time and had a fondness for digging up and restoring ancient tombs and monuments in the Memphis and Saqqara areas, some already more than a thousand years old at the time of his attentions. He did this he said, because of his ‘love of the ancient days and the noble ones who dwelt in antiquity and the perfection of everything they made’.

  But another reason was his love and pursuit of secret, forbidden power. This led to his being venerated by future generations as a great magician and remembered in a cycle of stories. Khaemwaset, seeker of illumination, put a good official complexion on his activities by dedicating the exploration and conservation work to the honour of his vainglorious father, Rameses, yet he did not shy away from leaving his own name recorded on the monuments.

  “I did not expect to see an alternative theorist looking up to the figure of an Egyptologist with such respect,” a voice said, interrupting his contemplation.

  A man joined him and shared his inspection of Khaemwaset.

  He was a Middle Eastern man with tight, curly hair and a widow’s peak and he had a whiff of tobacco smoke on his leather jacket.

  He was the man who had shadowed him to the museum.

  “I can accept the tag of part-time conservationist for him if you press me,” Anson said. “But not Egyptologist. Khaemwaset was first and foremost a metaphysician. His reputation as a powerful magician lasted for thousands of years. In fact even in the nineteen thirties, a group calling itself the Society of the Inner Light beat a regular path to this very statue in the British Museum, believing that it exuded powers and acted as a medium for metaphysical activity. And your interest? You know something about Khaemwaset. And about me.”