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| Clouds seen in the sky become Egypt Eyes. (Title of an Anson
Hunter novel in my series) |
 
I saw this image in
a concrete sidewalk while writing about the son of Rameses, the anachronistic
antiquarian prince Khaemwaset, famed as the world's first Egyptologist, (My additions)
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Egyptian tomb - or underground dwelling in Australian outback?
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| Moses at the Egyptian Exodus crossing - or 'Wave Rock'? |
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Sacred ibis in Egypt - or Australia?
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Seascape - or pyramid in the sky?
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People see things - in things.
Some people do this more than others.
Pareidolia.
The technical term for a psychological quirk where
meaningful patterns, symbols and forms coalesce in clouds, fireplaces, trees, espresso
froth in a mug, even among rocks on the surface of Mars that can appear as the
head of an ancient Egyptian sphinx.
But for me as a
fiction writer inspired by a lifetime of studying ancient Egypt, the phenomenon
is like an augmented reality app in a pair of glasses.
Ancient Egypt’s mystery bleeds into my view of life.
Dead leaves lying in a park transmogrify. Crackles of
yellow-autumn rust suddenly become a cache of ancient scrolls curled around
undeciphered texts that tease me with hidden significance.
My fictional series character Anson Hunter, a renegade
Egyptologist, experiences this in 'Hathor's Holocaust':
As
he walked back to his hotel, he felt a sense of exposure. Currents, people and
events swirled around him like the cold London air, crowding his world.
Fallen
leaves from oak trees in a park cluttered the pavement, curled up like papyrus
scrolls, archaeological spoil heaps of rust, yellow and brown. For a moment,
his sneakers vanished under this detritus of time and the seasons. Dead leaves,
yet they crackled like scrolls of power.
The
pavement narrowed, the black railings of the park pushing him closer to the
street and the passing traffic, rattling black London cabs and rumbling, red
double-decker buses that looked as if they were about to overbalance. A gust
from a passing bus scattered leaves.
What
was it that drove him?
A
desire to save the world?
He
recalled the same question put to him by the Egyptian man and the antiquities
girl.
Aren’t
you afraid you’ll trigger an apocalypse?
Was
it simply a hunger to feel the crackle of the numinous, to find the great
source of Egypt’s power heka?
Heka
was the power behind the civilisation of Egypt, behind every idol, every
execration text and smashed jar, every sweating wax effigy in the flame, every
stabbed, trampled and spat upon image, every prayer to a god, every amulet and
love spell.
He
certainly did not want power for himself, only perhaps the power that could
come from knowing that such power existed, because if that power existed and could
be held in his hands, then so did another power.
Where
there was shadow, there had also to be the light.
Yet
there could be another reason, one that he had enough honesty and
self-knowledge to recognise - a hunger for acceptance, sparked by an Egyptologist
father who had abandoned him as a child. It would be sweet to shake up the
profession and topple their ivory tower.
Maybe
a combination of all of these impulses.
In
the end, though, would it be worth taking the risk?
I 'saw' ancient Egypt as a child (a boy fascinated by the land of the
Nile), years before I started writing fiction.
More than a little of me is in my novel "One
Day I'll Tell you Something". (Including the photo used on the
cover!)
I 'saw' Egypt - and even smelled ancient Egyptian scent
memories in my everyday surroundings.
Excerpt -
'One Day I'll Tell You Something'. (A young mother's narration)
“And
this behaviour of your boy Cooper’s - does it continue?” the interviewer
encouraged me to go on.
“Disturbingly,
yes. A recent example. I won one of those automatic bread makers in a magazine
competition, and he woke up in the morning with the yeasty warm smell of baking
bread filling the air. It was still dark in the house. The aroma of baking
bread seemed to electrify him. “That’s Kemet,” he said, running into my room.
“That’s the smell of Kemet in the early morning, when it’s still dark.”
“To
Cooper it was the smell of ancient Egypt at dawn, of mud ovens and baking
bread. He breathed it in so deeply he went dizzy...
He was
around six when I took him on his first visit to the museum. He gawked at a
withered mummy in a painted wooden mummy case. There was a sky light
illuminating the Egyptian gallery and the light streaming down seemed to fall
on him like a revelation. I saw tears squeeze out of his eyes.”
“These
are my people,’ he yelled out, making heads in the museum turn.
“Sh-sh,
Cooper. You’ll scare the visitors,” I said.
“Do you
smell that?”’ he said.
I
sniffed. A sweet smell hung in the air.
“What
is it?”
“It’s
them.”
It was probably just the scent of a floor polish or the cleaner
they use on the glass cases. But my Cooper thought differently. To him it was
the memory of secret balms used in mummification. He looked in wonder at grains
of dust that floated in the light from the ceiling as if mummy dust had seeped
out of the mummy cases, the air-borne atoms of long dead Egyptians. He breathed
it in, filling his chest. It freaked me a bit, I can tell you. But he was
enraptured. I couldn’t drag him out of the place...
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| 'Seeing' Egypt from childhood. |
SEE EGYPT in the Roy Lester Pond adventure thriller collection on Amazon Kindle and paperback
