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| False door... The Tomb of Mereruka, Sakkara |
The Egyptologist slumped
on the steps at the feet of the dead tomb owner Mereruka in a parody of
adoration and humility that he had never exhibited in life.
She had
gone, leaving him alone like this to die.
His long
quest to penetrate the mystery of the underworld and the afterlife had ended
here, inevitably, at the door of death. And, as he had always believed, death’s
door went nowhere. This false-door behind Mereruka was not the boundary between
two worlds.
Heaven was
just a creation of the material world, like this door of unyielding stone.
He felt a
pang of longing now that the hardness would somehow yield and the atoms of
stone dissolve to reveal a haze of spiritual radiance beyond.
But it
remained cold, hard stone.
Then,
totally uncharacteristically it seemed, for the unbelieving man of archaeology,
Emory let one arm fall to the ground and slowly, with a pointed finger, began
to trace what looked like a religious valediction in the dust of the floor.
He stopped
after writing a single word of four letters normally uttered at the end of a
prayer, as if it marked the end of his life.
Amen…
Author’s note:
Who killed Anson Hunter's father in
And what did the clue Amen mean? A prayer? Or perhaps the name of a pharaoh? There
were four Amenhoteps and three Amenemhats, also
Amenemesse, Amenemope and Amenrud, and there was the god Amen-re, from whom the word ‘amen’ originated...
