Wednesday, December 26, 2018

"ARTEFACT" Whose viscera did the ancient Egyptian canopic jars hold?

 
NEW mystery adventure fiction (Kindle)


(excerpt)


Anson sat at a leather-topped desk with a pile of volumes and papers in front of him and began an archaeological dig into the history of a curse.

Researching a curse was like holding up a citrine, a multifaceted quartz crystal, and looking inside its dreamlike heart, he thought.
Refractions, shards of mystery, created phantoms.

In the distorted reflections familiar imagery arose - the motifs of curses that were as inevitable as doom itself.

Curses gathered tropes around themselves like victims.

They canonically began with some act of arrogance, the reckless theft by someone of an object from a sacred or forbidden place, a solemn warning issued, a doomed, aristocratic family, a wealthy estate and dynastic inheritance, revenge with numerous unusual deaths and the arrival of shadowy traditional owners seeking restitution of the artefact generations after its taking.

How was it possible that a cursed object, an inanimate artefact, could radiate such malignancy?