Field
Report. Plague in the Reign Amenhotep III
The
dry, sterile heat of the Egyptian desert preserves everything, so why not a
hard drive?
Maybe
at some time in the distant future, this laptop, ironically charged by solar
power (the sun God Ra!), will be
found by archaeologists and the record of a population disaster, and my
nightmare intervention and investigation, will be revealed.
Who
knows the future? (Well, I do, to some degree.)
If
you are reading these notes, Giulietta, then they will be the longest and most
elaborately hidden notes I have ever left hidden for you to find.
It’s
only been a day since we were last together, yet this gap of separation from
you by a chasm of centuries makes me giddy with loneliness. I love you and ache
for you beyond my capacity to tell.
It’s
almost unbearable to think that I cannot simply call you, or send you a text,
or hide another little message for you to discover later.
(Well,
I have an idea about that. A long shot, but then I have always thought that the
longer my hidden notes take to ‘go off’ the better and this one may take over
three thousand years.)
But
on with the report.
The
word epidemiology means ‘the study of what lies on the people’ and I am
presently studying, yet failing to comprehend, the terrible outbreak that has
visited the population here.
What
novel pathogen are we dealing with? Virus? Bacteria? Where did it start? How is
it transmitted? Clearly it is highly contagious.
It
presents like porphyria, with acute photosensitivity, yet porphyria does not
ravage populations, being genetically transmitted and occurring in no more that
1 in 50,000 people.
Is
the virus or bacteria magnifying the production of some compound with exposure
to the sun, causing severe illness, psychosis and ultimate fatality?
Those whom the gods wish to destroy
they first make mad, the saying goes and
a worrying symptom of the outbreak is mental instability.
How
do the people account for the outbreak?
They
see it as a judgement by the gods - specifically the sun god Ra - punishing
Egypt for its capitulating to no less than the Habiru god of the desert - Yahweh.
Exodus
really happened… Moses, the plagues and the whole cosmic drama unfolded right
here and these people lived through it.
And
now, on the tail of these cataclysmic events, they are smitten by an eleventh
plague, perhaps the most deadly of all…
Excerpt from the novel TEXT MESSAGES FROM ETERNITY (Amazon Kindle)
