Tuesday, March 31, 2015

"Don't mess with me." Draconian ancient Egyptian authority

British Museum

Of course many take a less radiant view of Egypt. I had an email from an historian with a religious bent who took issue with my view of Egypt: 
 ‘Dynastic Ancient Egypt was not a land of allure, as you like to imagine; it was the most draconian civilization the world has ever known,’ he wrote. ‘Why can you not see it? The truth is there in the museum cases of the world, captured in the Egyptian paintings and carvings in wood or stone or on plaster of ordinary folk, the servant girl, the baker, the boatman, the seated scribe. The expression in their eyes, wide in their whites, is fear. They lived and died in terror. But if God punished this civilization as it was told in the Book of Exodus, why do you think you would have loved it?
‘Look at the carved Egyptian eye of Isis on the wall of a temple. Look at this eye of this goddess. You think it is a symbol of mystery, the single, feminine Egyptian eye in profile. Quintessential. But this black orb is not a symbol of allure; it is more like a dead planet in a pitiless universe. The oasis civilization of pharaonic Egypt was a hell where the sun beat down like a swordsmith’s hammer and reeds conspired in whispers at the edge of a river of tears. The land was hemmed in by deserts like the sides of a coffin and by a police, judicial, fiscal, priestly and bureaucratic system that arrested freedom like an image in diorite, the hardest of stone, which the carvers in the workshops shaped not with ease, as it seemed from their sublime achievements, but with the sacrifice of lifetimes. There is a reason why a people still celebrates their hasty exodus from this place with unleavened bread and bitter herbs 2000 years on. The Nazis of the twentieth century killed the Jews; the Ancient Egyptians ground their souls to stone dust…’ 


Friday, March 27, 2015

Tomb of Mereruka, Saqqara. Inspiration for my very first Egypt fiction (young readers)

Me, Mereruka and Tomb Travellers, circa 1997 (Now re-released on Kindle)







DYNASTY Z... A primordial clash of humans, gods and demon demigods

Opening excerpt


THE DEMON DEMIGODS surged through the Delta reeds.

They fell on our village, heavy infantry with padded armour, axes, khepesh sickle-swords and spears, as well as flaming torches. Their demigod-scent, sickeningly sweet, washed against the mud-brick houses of our Nile village and flooded down the alleys like streams from the banks of a broken dyke.

I grabbed the arm of a small girl at my side and ran between houses.

I heard a scream rise above the tumult like a panicked bird taking to the sky. My mother. She called out my name.

“Menes, run - fly to the reeds. Run!”

Run away to the reeds? When right in front of my startled eyes, an attacker’s blade fell on the neckof my poor old friend, the veteran bowman Pewero, and almost severed his head, while I stood holding the old man’s bow in my hands?

Chaos came with the attackers. There were screams, cries of warning and the drumming of feet. Villagers scattered, overturning baskets and smashing jars. Goats bleated, dogs barked and howled.

I turned to stone in the alley, along with the small girl beside me.

The khepesh-wielding demigod, with the body of old Pewero at his feet, fixed his eyes on me, at first human eyes like coals, then changing to the slivered pupils of a ram’s eyes in an animal’s head.

He was a broad-shouldered man with a ram’s head and spiral horns, yet the head of the ram kept burning and twisting into the visage of a man with a stubby beard.

Forever in a state of flux, the demon demigods were Lords of Manifestation, half-man and half-god. Born out of the licentiousness of the Neteru and the gods’ attraction to the beauty of the daughters of humankind, the Divine Misbegotten were a distortion of everything that was god and man. Because they were man and neter in equal measures, a civil war raged in their blood and their beings were locked and twisted in a perpetual struggle.

He raised his sickle-sword to strike at us.

This jolted me into action and I put an arrow to the bow. I saw fear invade the ram’s eyes as I bent the bow, drew the fletching to the anchor point of my chin and took aim.

A black, fleeing goat came bolting helter-skelter between the houses, its hooves flying. I glimpsed its darting shape from the corner of my eye and he saw it too. And then, before the command to release the arrow raced to my fingers on the bowstring, I saw the demigod shift. He cascaded from his human form towards the form of the running goat. This shift was said to be an action so fast that it was invisible to men, yet I saw it happen in a series of fluttering images.

I swung the bow and released the arrow, not at the demigod, but ahead of the fluttering images, leading my target. My arrow struck the goat high in the chest. Its forelegs crumpled without the creature giving a bleat, but now I saw the goat quiver and the demigod shifted again, this time departing the fallen goat and fluttering back towards his body. A cascade of images returned to the wall to manifest in a startled soldier who fell with a cry. My arrow pierced his body just above his armour padding.

The little girl at my side shrank against me.

A group of three attackers came upon us.

“There he is!” an ape-headed one chattered to others. “The godling child!”



In ancient Egypt the dead and the living lived in community

Visit mysterious Egypt... in a range of mystery adventure thrillers on Amazon Kindle

Thursday, March 26, 2015

Adventure Fantasy "HUNTING HATHOR"... "Great reading". 5 stars, Amazon

The lioness of destruction pursues humankind with claws and pestilence... then a hunter is given the impossible task of hunting her down.



A mythic novella. "Wonderfully clever and original."
Can one bowman hunt down and stop the Egyptian goddess Hathor-Sekhmet, sent by Ra to destroy humankind? Was it the most impossible mission in all of creation?
This novella first appeared in the archaeological adventure thriller The Smiting Texts,(as a tale within the novel) but is published here separately for lovers of mythology and ancient romance.


http://amzn.to/oWVTPV

Sunday, March 22, 2015

AIDA on the harbour - reminds me of seeing Opera AIDA at Luxor, Egypt, some years ago.


Egypt on the far side of the world


News of the Opera Aida being performed in Sydney http://bit.ly/19dEjF7 reminds me of seeing it in the desert under Egypt's stars with the floodlit temple of Hatshepsut in the background... a few years back.
The stage setting - day after the Opera AIDA in the Valley of the Queens





Friday, March 20, 2015

Egypt to build new capital beyond Cairo? Imagine what might be found/built over!

I hope the builders of a new Egyptian capital remember this truth
I think about it every time I visit Egypt to research my novels.
“Underneath Egypt is ancient Egypt.”
It sounds like a statement of the obvious, but for me it’s a heady reminder of the hidden. What mysteries lie beneath, buried by thousands of years of drift sand and detritus?
It makes me imagine the soles of my shoes are ground-penetrating electrodes. (Or wish it.)
This is what inspires me to explore with the tools of fact (research) and imagination.
Is there still a Great Lost Labyrinth to be found? (as I dramatise in “The Smiting Texts”)
Is there a ‘holocaust sun’ of Sekhmet-Hathor lying hidden, ready to trigger an ancient apocalypse on humankind? (‘The Hathor Holocaust’)
Is there a forbidden stone Book of Thoth, a Destiny Stela, hidden in a sanctuary beneath the sands as I revealed in ‘The Ibis Apocalypse’?
And of course, under ancient Egypt, there is yet another layer, the underworld of Egypt, another mythological element that tantalizes me and lies beneath the surface of my ancient Egypt series of adventure thrillers – and other novels such as ‘The Delta Dilemma'.
Come join me on a dig in the Egypt of the mind.


Sunday, March 15, 2015

Mythological thrillers, action adventures - Egypt based fiction

Amazon Kindle

Meet Roy Lester Pond - Egypt fiction author (Amazon Kindle and paperback)


Roy Lester Pond’s depth of knowledge as a writer of fiction on Egypt comes from a lifetime spent studying ancient Egypt and Egyptian archaeology. He and his wife Brenda have been to Egypt on numerous research trips. Roy is fascinated by the mystery of ancient Egypt and its potency and relevance for today’s world. ‘The Smiting Texts’ was his first archaeological thriller, followed by a series featuring renegade Egyptologist Anson Hunter, as well as other stand-alone adventures. Roy spent much of his life in Africa and now lives in Australia where, as an advertising Creative Director, he wrote internationally recognised campaigns for various causes, charities and brands. "Writing Egypt fiction was my second job in the beginning. Now it's my second career." Roy Tweets regularly about Egypt, adventure fiction and facts - at “Egyptsnippets”. 

Discover his titles at Amazon Kindle

Saturday, March 7, 2015

New novella. "That was a monumental kiss," he said as she posed before the Great Sphinx. 'The Tomb Trap of Nitocris'

Getting carried away by the Sphinx






































Seems tourists are going a bit far at the site of the Great Sphinx.

Yet it reminds me of the opening scene in my latest novella...




CHAPTER 1                             





The girl moved through a straggle of tourists to the edge of a great pit.

Dan Loader felt his muscles tense.

She was standing above the Great Sphinx enclosure at Giza in Egypt, where the stone monster crouched inside a lion’s den of stone, its head and upper body emerging into a metal hot sky.

He stopped and willed her back from the edge. She fiddled with a camera. Could she slip and fall?

She looked around.

Freezing on the spot gave him away and she noticed him standing there doing an impression of a statue.

“Do I have to do a selfie?” she said.

They had crossed the invisible frontier between observer and the observed.

“Sorry?”

He said it more as an apology for breaking into her world. When you shadowed someone you did so from an objective distance, like viewing a movie or play, with the understanding that you did not belong in that reality and must never enter it.

Too late to move away.

The familiar snake of anxiety coiled inside him.

The creeping serpent of fear had come into his life after an abduction and assault over three days by an antiquities gang.

He saw it happening again as if in a flash of sunlight glancing off the stone sphinx. His partner Carl shot in the head execution style in an antiquities case gone wrong in London’s docklands. The way Carl dropped slackly, without a sound or a look of surprise in his eyes.

Two men then wrestling him into a van and driving him to a hideaway. Then the pain of hard fists and even harder steel gun barrels smashing into his head and face as they pistol-whipped him for information about a haul he had hidden away for protection.

The snake had slid into his insides and taken up residence there where his guts used to be and it moved at the slightest fear, setting up weakening tremors. The authorities had rescued him, but later, when there was no reason to be afraid any more, the snake was still there.

“Will you immortalise me?” she said.

Her voice, hazy sounding, had an overlay of beguiling mystery like a veil.

“Okay,” he said, shrugging.

Too late to back away now. Just do the business in a perfunctory way and hope she doesn't get too close a look at you.

His wrap-around dark glasses might help to hide him.

She held out the camera and he took it from her, a compact black digital model.

First contact.

A gentle brush with her skin, her hand cool and light – his, like a big stone paw of the sphinx.

“You know the shot I’m after, I suppose,” she said. “Sorry, it’s cheesy, but I can’t resist it.”

He nodded.

He understood. It was the compulsory tourist shot that young women always wanted taken of themselves in front of Egypt’s Great Sphinx.

“Maybe move away from the edge. Good,” he said, letting the tension ease from his shoulders. “Now lean your head forward.”

She posed in profile in front of the calm face of the stone beast and bent her neck, making her dark hair swing. He looked at the camera display screen.

“Head a bit higher and move in. A little closer. That’s it.”

She pouted her crimson lips and moved in so that she appeared to kiss the stone lips of the most famous face in the world.

“That was a monumental kiss,” he said.

He had it, an image of a girl’s face, the same size as the sphinx’s, planting a big smooch right on the lips of an ancient wonder of the world.

It was a trick of perspective.

Or so it usually appeared, but this was also a trick of time for the scene appeared to be an image of Egypt itself kissing the ancient past. The girl, along with a quality of classic loveliness, possessed an unmistakeable aura of ancient Egypt, her eyes darkly edged and swept up in fantails at the side, shadowed with malachite green, and her cascade of dark hair rippling to her shoulders.

He had a fleeting moment of envying the sphinx. 


Friday, March 6, 2015

"HUNTING HATHOR" - "Great reading" 5-star Amazon Kindle. Adventure, Fantasy. Mythology.

The female soul with two faces, one a young woman, Hathor, the other Sekhmet, lioness of destruction


















A Mythic Novella


Author’s note: This story first appeared as a tale within a novel in the archaeological adventure thriller ‘The Smiting Texts’, but is released here in a separate edition for lovers of mythology and ancient romance.

“This tale of an ancient hunter's fate to recapture the goddess of devastation in order to save Egypt is particularly beautiful. Wonderfully clever and original.” THE TRUTH ABOUT BOOKS

Hathor-Sekhmet was the goddess with two faces, one, Hathor, the Sweet One, goddess of sexual love, joy, music and intoxication, the other, Hathor-Sekhmet, the terrible lioness of annihilation, sent by Ra to destroy humankind for their rebelliousness.
In her marauding stage they called her The Confused One in the Night.
Were there times when Hathor slipped from one state to another? One phase, goddess of love, shining in her beauty, and the next a wild and dreadful lioness of destruction? What would it have been like to come across Hathor, the young woman, and not know that she hid another side?
A young bowman is given the impossible task of trying to hunt her down.

Wednesday, March 4, 2015

THE EGYPTIAN MUMMY vs THE DINOSAUR. Who wins?

Who would win in the museum visitors' popularity stakes?

 
Parents, and anyone who has ever taught children, would know the difficulty of choosing a winner.
Ask most children what they'd most like to see in a museum and they will have two answers. The dinosaur and the mummy!

But I suspect it wouldn't be much easier with adult museum visitors.


I know that my mummy children's novels, such as The Mummy Monster Game (The Mummy's Revenge) have always been popular). (Now also on Kindle, written as Roy Pond, rather than Roy Lester Pond for adults).

But 'The Egyptian Mythology Murders' for adults is also a favourite.


What do you think?
 




ON AMAZON KINDLE and PAPERBACK