Roy Lester Pond Egypt FICTION&Fact: EGYPT’S FORBIDDEN BOOK OF THOTH. What did it feel like to translate the most dangerous tome ever written? (Excerpt from THE IBIS APOCALYPSE)

The rolled out paper rubbings taken from the original stone tablet lay on the table and it reminded her of her discovery. Not only the copied texts had lain hidden inside the jar’s dark interior, but a hand-written message from a more recent era. It was a note, written in German that told an incredible story of the document’s journey to Nazi Germany and its return to Egypt. Ironically, the note in German, badly foxed and crumbled, seemed more deteriorated than the rubbings of the ancient texts. She circled the long table where the rolled out texts lay, recruiting her energy. She was in awe at the magnitude of her task. Like Champollion, who had unlocked the mystery of hieroglyphs, she was about to unlock the secrets of a mystery. Just as the Frenchman’s original decipherment of hieroglyphs had resulted in the discovery of a whole new civilisation, her translation of this source book of heka would open up a whole new world of esoteric knowledge and power. Next would come the technical problems of wrestling with the translation itself. The prospect both excited her and made her temples throb. The Egyptians considered the transformation of spoken words into glyphs to be an act of magic. An alchemical process. Now she faced the difficulty of turning glyphs into a modern language, while ensuring that her translation did not turn gold into the base metal of lead. As she knew, hieroglyphs ran the whole gamut of complexity. Some, particularly cartouches, were easy to translate, other texts less tractable and some deliberately obscured in order to keep their true meaning away from the profane and understood only by the initiated. Many scrolls of great antiquity had ceased to be intelligible at all, even to scribes of later times. Carelessness by a copyist, garbled portions, mistakes and clerical errors could creep in. But these were not the only hurdles. Syntax brought its own problems. No punctuation. No spaces. No vowels. Over a thousand known hieroglyphs to identify, although in Old Kingdom times fewer were in use. The texts were calling to her. It was time to begin Kalila had read accounts of linguists describing their experiences when translating the Bible into other languages. They reported feeling more than its beauty, consolation and its power to inspire. A conviction overcame them that here in front of them was no ordinary book. This was like no other translation work they had ever experienced in their lives. The words of scripture seemed mysteriously alive under their hands. So it was with these texts under her hand now. They crackled with life like the paper rubbings that held them. She felt excited, exalted, beyond hunger and thirst, beyond tiredness and stiffness of body and joints and aching eyes. These were spells, words of mighty power, and they cast a spell over her. Drawing out their meaning was like drawing the baby Moses out of the river. This was the Source Document, the source of the Nile’s mystery, the source of Egypt’s power - and if Anson Hunter was correct in his theories, a source of God’s anger. Just as the river was the source of life for Egypt, this composition was the source of the magical inner life of the Egyptians and, if the ancients were right, then it was also the source of all the magic in the world. What does my God think of this and about what I am doing? The Christian Copt quaked. Will I bring God’s anger upon Egypt again - and upon myself? Why has this task fallen to me, such a young person? Yet the young Frenchman Champollion, who spoke a dozen languages by the age of sixteen, was barely in his thirties when he first cracked the secret of hieroglyphic script, she reminded herself. This was such a task, not cracking the secret of hieroglyphs, but the secret of Egypt’s magical heart. How odd that it had turned up here in ancient Hermopolis, the first Egyptian city linked with the Flight of Joseph, Mary and the baby Jesus, one that a Coptic scholar called the ‘place of origin’ for all traditions about the family's journeying while in Egypt. The conviction seized her that mighty forces were converging on her and on this work. She trembled and murmured the words of an ancient Greek and Coptic utterance: “Christ! I adjure you, O Lord, almighty, first begotten, self-begotten and all seeing… Keep me as a daughter, protect me from every evil spirit and from every spirit of impurity, destroying demons on the earth, under the earth, of the waters and of the land and every phantom. Christ!” But wait, that utterance was also a spell. I am turning from the presence of pagan magic to that of Christian magic. Truly, the territory between pious supplication and pagan spells was a fine one, and that was the territory she must now enter. She glanced away from the texts to a small Coptic cross that was tattooed on her wrist. She recalled Anson saying, when he first noticed it, that on such a young woman it could have looked like punk ornamentation, but it was a sign worn by many Copts. She tried to centre herself in the intersecting lines of the cross. Protect me… Have I opened the contents of a stone book, or the gates of hell? She went back to her work on the laptop. Legend said that the Texts of Thoth shed a radiance of their own, so dazzling that they could light the way like a lamp. To the Coptic Christian girl, when she eventually rested on a bed, a prisoner aboard the houseboat on the Nile, the paper stretching out in view on the trestle table, shed not radiance, but darkness, if that were possible. Her mind swarmed with hieroglyphs. She heard them chanted in her head in a language that was distantly familiar but softer than either modern Coptic or Arabic, the sound of Ancient Egyptian. Words from the Book of Job came back to her: Have the gates of death been opened to you? Or have you seen the doors of the shadow of death? Yes, I feel the gates have been opened and I have seen the doors and even beyond them. Something had come out of that place and was trying to enter her. She must pray without ceasing. And so she did, until sleep came and rolled her up in itself like a scroll. It carried her away from the room into an etheric blue region of space then clouds of darkness came and flashes of profound meaning like lightning surrounded her body. She was like a glowing electrode, lit by the secret and forbidden wisdom of the ages. But a thunder came and she wondered if it could be the thunder of God’s anger.