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| Was the alluring young woman on the train to London bait for an Egyptologist? |
SPEED blurred the Oxfordshire greenery flashing by outside the train window as Anson Hunter sat at work on a laptop.
“You won’t mind if I sit next to you,” the voice of a young woman said.
His fingers stopped tapping the keys.
A sultry young woman in black slid into the seat beside him.
Irksome. Did she have to box him in? There were other seats in the carriage. Still, it could be worse - a man. Not homophobia on his part, he reasoned, more a sort of bonhomie phobia, an aversion to garrulous fellow travellers who interrupted his theorising. He vastly preferred the more reserved company of females on trains, buses and aeroplanes.
He tried to ignore her arrival and continued writing the blog:
Anson Hunter’s Blog -The Other Egypt
The sun disc of Ra, symbol of life and searing death, was central to the mythology of the Egyptians. Ironically today in the twenty-first century, we are again obsessed with the sun, heart of the burning issue of climate change.
Our lives and our future revolve around the sun, just as they did in the most ancient times of Egypt.
And now I fear a return attack of an ancient, holocaust sun and the reactivation of an apocalypse of global scorching, plague and pestilence…
The new arrival brushed against Anson’s arm and he glimpsed a flash of jewellery on her wrist. He did not look at her, but kept working.
But now the letters on the keyboard dissolved and swam.
His glance swung aside to her bracelet, lingered there, then tracked up the arm and body of a curvy young woman dressed in black to dark eyes under amused brows and then travelled back down to the bracelet again.
Shining on her wrist was a solid gold, rigid bracelet, inset with images. Profoundly archaic. Undoubtedly authentic. The carriage seemed to give a judder as if jolted by a locomotive in a shunting yard. Synchronicity? Or was this a sign of what he feared? He met the eyes of the stranger.
“Genuine Egyptian?” he said.
She smiled. “I’m Egyptian born. But of Greek ancestry, like Cleopatra.”
“I meant the bracelet.”
“You noticed it before you noticed me,” she said.
“I’m in the ancient Egypt trade.”
She sighed. “Yes, this is Egyptian. And I’m Alexia.”
His mind raced ahead of the train. Where was this going? She had ambushed him to show him the relic. Why? Because of his obsessive theorizing on the Internet? Recollections of a notorious event in archaeological history flashed through his mind like the country house in a field outside the train window.
The Dorak Affair.
A British professor of archaeology, James Mellaart, while travelling on a train to the port of Izmir in Turkey, noticed a bracelet on the arm of an attractive young woman. The piece bore the typological style of jewellery found at Troy -the first glimpse of a tantalising treasure recovered from an unknown site. Mellaart had little difficulty in engaging her in conversation and she introduced herself as Anna Papastrati. Yes, this bracelet was part of an ancient collection and she had more to show him if he really wanted to see it.
Under conditions of secrecy, Anna took the professor back to her apartment in Izmir. Here she revealed evidence of a staggering hoard, bronze-age objects from an Anatolian seafaring civilization neighbouring the Trojans that existed at the time of the Egyptians, four and a half thousand years ago. He saw statuettes of an electrum goddess and her handmaidens, fabulous golden jewellery, swords, daggers and ceremonial axe heads, including a sheet of gold embossed with hieroglyphs identifying Pharaoh Sahure, revealing early links with Egypt.
Mellaart must have felt the breath of good fortune on his neck, yet doubtless he could scarcely breathe. Might he borrow an object or two, take photos?
No. Anna was firm. She was not yet ready to release the story of the collection. But she would permit him to stay and make drawings of the artefacts, so long as he agreed to an embargo. He must wait for her approval before releasing information about the find. Mellaart agreed readily to her terms. He stayed with Anna for almost four days, making drawings of the artefacts.
“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…
(Excerpt from The Hathor Holocaust)
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| Goodreads 5 and 4 star |
