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| The Map of Two Ways, British Museum |
The others crowded inside and their lights revealed two paths painted on the floor and winding into darkness. One was an empty path, the other filled with blue wavy lines representing a river and in between the two paths, a fiery area of red and yellow.
“What do we do?”
“It’s a cosmography of the underworld, usually painted on the inside base of coffins. A map if you like. It comes from a tract called the ‘Book of Two Ways’ or the ‘Guide to the Ways of Rosetau’, said to have been discovered by the Egyptians ‘under the flanks of the Thoth'. One is a river. It travels from the rising sun in the east to the setting sun in the west and the other is a road that travels the opposite way.”
“So we take the road, I guess,” Thompson Rush said. Anson heard his heavy tread shifting towards it.
“Normally you’d expect to. In the Book of the Dead, the soul travels from the setting sun in the west to the east. But, as I recall, the Book of Two Ways is different. We must go from east to the west, which means taking the river.”
“What’s that red painted area in between the paths?” she said to him.
“That’s the ‘Lake of Flame’ that lies between the two roads. No one can survive falling into it, according to the Book of Two Ways.”
“But it’s just a painting.”
“I think this section is filled with psychological danger, an internal journey of the mind…” He broke off. “Do you hear that?”
“What?”
“Wailing.” It was faint, yet it sounded like the far-off wailing of millions, ineffably sad and draining to the spirit.
They listened.
“Nothing.”
Couldn’t they hear it and feel the waves of sorrow?
(The Ibis Apocalypse, third in my series of 9 investigative Egyptian adventure novels)
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