James Bond, Ian Fleming, ancient Egypt - and a villain’s lair inside a sunken Egyptian temple...

I can’t read any of those modern iterations of James Bond written by stand-ins.

I’ve tried.

Nothing against some highly regarded authors.

It’s not even that that I resent the creative licence to kill they take.

The films take far greater licence and I mostly enjoy those.

It’s just that of course when I’m reading James Bond I want Fleming. His verve and vivacity.

I make a few nods to Fleming in my Egyptology novels.

Did you know that beneath the man-made mountain of Abu Simbel is a hollow dome?

It’s like a James Bond villain’s lair in there.

It impressed me so much that I used it a scene of my novel The Smiting Texts about a renegade, alternative Egyptologist Anson Hunter

Abu Simbel villain’s lair..

The hidden dome under construction

The statues of Rameses gave no clues as they gazed out complacently over the shimmering lake.

“How is your fact-finding tour going, gentlemen?” Anson said to the Americans, who were squinting in the sunshine.

A group of intelligence community folk was not the most appreciative audience for a journey through ancient history. They looked hot and out of their element. “Maybe you’d prefer a change of scene,” he said. “Come with me. I’ll show you something that is pure spy movie territory.”

Anson had a word with the SCA woman who arranged for them to enter an anonymous doorway at the side of the giant statues of Rameses that was closed to the public. They entered a narrow tube-like passageway. It led them, footsteps ringing, into the heart of an artificially created mountain, a vast dome of reinforced concrete, built to house the entire structure of the temple.

It was like walking onto the set of a sixties James Bond movie – the wide-screen spectacle of a villain's lair hidden inside an island volcano, under a gigantic concrete roof and ringed by skeletal gantries and walkways

The young Egyptian SCA woman explained.

“The dome above this Great Temple is the largest man-made concrete dome in the world, with a circumference of sixty metres and a height of twenty-two metres. An artificially created mountain supports the temple complex and is covered with rock, soil and sand, to form the mountain, which holds these massive temples.”

They stood on a high walkway and gaped around the echoing space of the dome.

“Cool,” Ears said, impressed. “Where’s Doctor Evil?”

The Americans squinted up at the curving concrete vault as if expecting to see a sliding roof that could grind open under hydraulics to release a missile from a silo below. Here was the spectre of a threat that they could believe in.

From the walkway they could also gaze down on the interior of the temple. From their position they could see how the temple had been reassembled like a monster Lego kit. Humming air-conditioning plants explained the relative coolness of the temple interior.

Even Bloem looked impressed.

Several maintenance people were at work in the building, he noticed.

It happened in a blur, yet Anson saw it in slow motion.

Bloem moved aside to the edge of the walkway to let two Egyptian men go past. They looked like workmen, dressed in grimy blue galabeas. As Bloem leaned out at the rail, they bent. One grabbed his leg and the other grabbed him under the arm and they hefted him like a big sack over the rail, fully intending him to land head first on the concrete below. Bloem gave a yell that batted around the dome and made a wild grab with one hand as he went over. He hooked on the rail and it put a brake on his fall. His body slammed against the outside of the walkway and set it ringing....

Footnote.  I understand that way back before its rescue, when Abu Simbel was likely to drown beneath the rising waters of Lake Aswan, Fleming toyed with the idea of James Bond swimming frogman style out of a single giant eye-ball of the sunken colossus.

I would like to have seen that. 

Nefertiti James Bond girl...

Neues Museum, Museum Island, Berlin

“WHAT THE GERMAN people have, they keep,” Adolf Hitler famously responded when Egyptian authorities suggested that the famous bust of Queen Nefertiti in Berlin ought to be returned to Cairo.

Anson was standing among other admiring visitors in front of the bust of the iconic queen in a long gallery at the north cupola of the Neues Museum, when he recalled the Fuehrer’s response. The suggestions from the Egyptian authorities had risen to the level of rancorous clamour in recent years, yet there were still no signs that Nefertiti was going back to Egypt anytime soon. The queen’s image was everywhere, on postcards, in books and on publicity posters. Nefertiti had the pulling power of a superstar.

Was it James Bond’s creator Ian Fleming who’d remarked that the ancient queen of Egypt could make an entrance today in a designer gown and give the beautiful people a run for their money?

I never thought I’d agree with Hitler on any subject, Anson reflected, shaking his head in wonder at her beauty. The timeless elegance, lovely neck and airborne eyebrows produced a powerful effect on the beholder. If I had Nefertiti I wouldn’t part with her either...

(Excerpt from The Ibis Apocalypse)

EGYPTSCAPE... “RUN... against a deadly gauntlet of the gods...”

"Hits the ground running" - Amazon Kindle

Eight very different people are chosen to road test ‘EGYPTSCAPE’, an ancient Egyptian virtual reality simulator housed in a complex on the estate of tech billionaire Brandon Drake, a lifelong lover of Egypt’s past.

Then, shockingly, a journeyer dies... really dies...

They are in a race against time and a struggle against the guardians and monsters of the underworld as well as against each other.

Enthralling action adventure fiction that hits the ground running.

Like Tutankhamun, WHAT WOULD YOU TAKE WITH YOU to the next life?

A Well-Stocked Tomb.

We know the ancient Egyptians had a firm conviction that you could take it all with you when you died, provided your worldly goods were placed in your tomb with you. Food, wine, furniture, games, weapons, treasures... 

They believed that the afterlife would be a continuation of life on the Nile, only better, but with the same sorts of challenges.

Now imagine if we died and woke up in the next world to learn that they were right - only the ancient Egyptians owned any stuff. 

The rest of us arrive empty-handed. 

Mind you, not many ancient Egyptians retained their worldly goods for long with the systematic depredation of tomb robbers and of archaeology.

Picture it.

It's the Field of Reeds and a man is running plish, plash, plish  in the shallows of the riverbank in the dawn mist.

We are born alone, we die alone and we arise again alone and he is alone now, peering through the mist for another sign of life after death.

Reeds whip against his legs and body. Do scaly crocodiles lurk in here? Surely not. These are the fields of Aaru, not the menacing underworld that he has just passed through. That guardian-haunted journey of gateways, passages and passwords of the night still cling to him like a nightmare does to the newly awakened and he puts on a spurt to distance himself further from it.

Yet he longs for a weapon to defend himself.

Something. A rock. Even a stick in case he has to fight off an unknown terror.

His instinct for protection tells him to be afraid, yet he wonders what he should ever have to fear in this place. Then he recalls that here in this realm of the Field of Reeds men walk among the gods and demigods.

He hears a cracking voice that seems to bend the reeds like a breeze with its force.

“Who enters the reeds? And what riches and offerings do you bring with you?”

‘Riches?’ he thinks.

He is a poor man, a tomb guard, and he went to his grave with only a basket of food, his spear and a jar of beer, which he left behind when he ran out of the open tomb mouth to emerge into the dawn of another world.

Almost too late, he sees a figure standing in the mist like a statue. It is a giant, grim-faced being wearing a skull gap and a tightly fitting gown.

A neter, or god. Or perhaps a demi-god.

The air thins and chills and he smells a curious odour like burning gum. The perfume of divinity. The entity wears a thin curled beard and holds the symbol of a god in his hand. An axe like a flag on a long pole.

The running man drops to his belly and lies still in shallow water, plunged into shock and cold, amid a crowd of bending reeds, their acid-green pungency filling his nostrils.

“Bring wealth and you will be served,” the cracking voice said. “Bring no wealth and you must serve. You can run as they all do to escape eternal servitude, but you will be hunted down.”

What does this mean? That to those who have will be given and to those who have not, what little they have shall be taken from them?

Not paradise, but eternal servitude!

This does not seem like a fitting reward for one who has been justified by Osiris in the Hall of Judgement.

Is having a soul free of guilt not enough to earn rest and eternal bliss? Does he have to buy paradise?

“So you choose to hide and run?” the unseen god thundered. “Then the demigods will come after you. Men and women with serpent heads. Lioness women. Jackal men. And you have nothing to protect yourself with because you are one who has brought nothing... ”

‘I still have my spear back there in the tomb,’ he thinks. ‘Shall I return for it?’

No. He’s come too far now.

Better to crawl in a wide circle around the being and keep going.

There must be other tombs, other new arrivals that have brought things too. A spear. Bow and arrows. A sword.

And gold - that might be useful in this place.

Other tombs.

He is shocked by his own thoughts. Is he going steal grave goods from a tomb?

He remembers the words that he recited to Osiris in the Negative Confession:

I have wronged none…

I have not stolen.

I have done no evil.

He has sworn these things before the Judge of the Dead in order to enter the Field of Reeds and now he is planning to commit the very sins he denied.

Is it his fate to become a tomb robber in heaven...?”