Chance, or co-incidence,
is of course something a writer of fiction may never employ in devising the machinery
of a plot. Too convenient, too easy, readers think.
Yet
chance is the flywheel of life.
Did
you know, for example, that chance is the world’s greatest archaeologist?
More successful than Indiana Jones, or Howard Carter, who revealed to the world the contents of the tomb of the boy king Tutankhamun. More successful even than Anson Hunter, the renegade, independent Egyptologist in my series of adventure thrillers.
Chance has always been at work – in Napoleon's troops stumbling upon the Rosetta Stone, the key to the decipherment of hieroglyphs.
More successful than Indiana Jones, or Howard Carter, who revealed to the world the contents of the tomb of the boy king Tutankhamun. More successful even than Anson Hunter, the renegade, independent Egyptologist in my series of adventure thrillers.
Chance has always been at work – in Napoleon's troops stumbling upon the Rosetta Stone, the key to the decipherment of hieroglyphs.
In
a water boy in the Valley of the Kings, unknowingly setting down a water jar and
revealing the first stone step that led to the lost tomb of Tutankhamun.
In a donkey's hoof that broke through the desert floor to reveal the hollow of a hidden tomb below.
In a donkey's hoof that broke through the desert floor to reveal the hollow of a hidden tomb below.
Or
in a metal leg of a camera tripod that revealed a cache of statues buried
beneath the temple courtyard of Luxor.
Chance
is the secret cog that turns the universe, a shadow law behind all laws, the
great invariable variable.
Even
God may be thought of in terms of chance.
Consider.
If
nobody created God and he was always just there, then he’s the greatest example
of chance that you can possibly imagine. What are the odds...?
And
chance doesn't stop there.
We
do not choose, but are chosen, we are told.
How
is that for chance?
Salvation,
eternal life - matters of chance?
