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| What is it about ancient Egypt's fascination and gold? |
Visiting the Tutankhamun 'Golden Age of the Pharaohs' Exhibition, reminded me of the strong association of gold and ancient Egypt in the public imagination...
Howard Carter, on peering into the tomb of Tutankhamun, summed it up with his description...."everywhere the glint of gold."
The lustre of gold glows in the mysteries of The Smiting Texts trilogy of adventure novels and others in my Egypt series... as it does in this scene...
They reached another passage that opened up around them into a vestibule and then passed into a vast porticoed hall.
It was a hall that represented the chest cavity of the god. It was also a treasure chest of staggering proportions.
“Dear God of our Fathers!” Daniel said in a gasp.
“Out of the magic of its gold, heaven was born,” Anson said.
They were looking at the amassed hoard of the Neteru.
“Truly this is the Mother of all Treasures,” the veiled woman whispered.
Chapter 81
IT STRUCK HIS EYES with the impact of an eruption.
It was as if a mountain of gold had exploded and disgorged rivers of golden magma into the hall.
Gold choked the place like a glittering slag heap, spewed from chests in chains and necklaces, crusted in heaps of gorgets, amulets, cups, urns and crowns, pooled in dishes and plates, twisted and writhed in a tangle of statues thrown together like corpses. The excrescence solidified in thrones and tables and chairs and erupted in great shrines jammed together like a golden shantytown. Gold winked, flashed, lusted and glowered sullenly in darker corners. A fleet of golden boats lay in a tangle of masts and oars like the aftermath of a naval battle among the gods. More boats lay foundered among jeweled caskets.
In the Book of Revelation, God sat with the firmament beneath Him, and the brilliance of gemstones sparkling in His presence. Heaven was blinding in its beauty! There was no heaven after death. Instead, the traditions of a material heaven, handed down by untold generations, were true. This was it and his father had found it, stealing the hopes of all mankind.
A feeling came over Anson that he was about to vomit.
A sorrow washed over him with the force of a wave and when the shock receded, an undercurrent ripped him back to long ago.
My father left me as a child to chase after this glory. A man-made heaven.
Seek first the kingdom of heaven, Jesus said.
But my father had sought it on earth. Dig into your father’s ideas too deeply and you risk undermining your own foundations, his mother had said. Am I doomed to follow his trajectory? There seemed to be an inevitability about finding this, astounding as it was, a pattern that had to be made, like the changing of the seasons and the wheeling of the stars through the sky.
Fortune had turned like a grinding stone and now it was the son who stood in front of the terror of this golden realm.
When his Egyptologist father had left him as a child, Anson had tried to keep a piece of him by interiorizing him, creating a kind of inner shrine for him where he imagined his father sat alone in darkness like a god carved in stone. But his father was not a god and, if there were no heaven, was there even a god at all?
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