Egyptian tour guides will tell you
that it’s good luck to walk in a complete circle around the Step Pyramid of
Saqqara.
It’s even luckier if you’re able to
run, Anson Hunter, thought after two bullets in quick succession spat dust from
the ground at his feet.
The independent Egyptologist felt
his skin tingling in shock like the effects of a close lightning strike.
“What was that?” the girl said.
“Gunshots.”
He swept the courtyard and sandy
perimeter of the monument. The pagan mass in stone was already twisting in the
early morning heat.
The place was empty of visitors
today, except for the girl. It looked like an abandoned building site with
scaffolding clinging in places to the pyramid’s sides, evidence of uncompleted
restoration work on the crumbling outer blocks, but somebody unseen was out
there and had fired at them.
A guard? Why? It made no sense.
Besides there were no guards in evidence today.
Some extremist taking pot shots at
visitors?
The shots had been a little too
carefully placed perhaps.
The question in his mind: was it
meant to send them running? Or was it an instruction to stop?
He grabbed the girl’s hand and broke
into a zigzag run, tugging her after him.
They were on the eastern side of the
step pyramid, sprinting alongside the heb sed
court.
A dark irony, he thought.
The heb sed court was a ceremonial running course that a reigning
pharaoh used to complete at a Jubilee held every thirty years in order to prove
his athleticism and his continued fitness for office. Failure to complete the
run successfully in an earlier epoch saw the old king murdered.
Now they were running a circuit of
survival too, not around a course with pre-set stone markers, but around the
world’s first stone pyramid, a protest against death and a monumental stake in
the sand for the belief in an eternal afterlife.
He flicked a glance at the girl he’d
only met minutes earlier.
Her dark hair was flying and the
anger in her face said: ‘it’s happening again…’
Excerpt from THE GOD DIG (Amazon paperback and Kindle)
