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| Sobek, Luxor Museum |
THEY MOVED
carefully through the next section of the labyrinth.
The
passage abruptly widened into a cavern filled with water. They saw two lakes,
like large swimming pools, one shaped like a stomach, the other like the liver.
The water, stale and brackish, looked as dark as oil slicks. They went around
them.
Scatterings
of yellowed bones encrusted the edges of the lakes.
“Crocodiles,”
Anson said. “The reptiles lived down here once. Perhaps the priests fed them,
drawing them here along a secret channel that once linked up with ancient Lake
Moeris.”
They
circled the lakes.
Did
something still live there? What would it be? He pictured saurian eyes,
slivered like moons, breaking the surface of the water to watch them, then a
crocodile head emerging, and then a body, but not the body of a reptile, but a
slab-chested man, streaming water. Half man, half crocodile. Sobek.
They
reached another passage that opened up around them into a vestibule and then
passed into a vast porticoed hall.
It was a
hall that represented the chest cavity of the god. It was also a treasure chest
of staggering proportions.
“Dear God
of our Fathers!” the Coptic monk Daniel said in a gasp.
“Out of
the magic of its gold, heaven was born,” Anson said.
They were
looking at the amassed hoard of the Neteru.
