Thursday, June 27, 2019

I, THE MUMMY. A warrior preserved in the linen 'Tresses of Nephthys', tied with Isis' 'Magic of Knotted Cords'




Preserved in the 'Tresses of Nephthys' - the sacred wrappings of linen woven by the goddess Nephthys and tied with the 'magic of knotted cords' of Isis, an immortal soldier hero rises to fight Egypt's greatest enemy - the ruthless Hyksos invaders and occupiers...
 

Action adventure thriller.
Awakened after a thousand years in a tomb sanctuary filled with weapons...
The Ancient Defender arises to fight against a ruthless oppressor.
The Hyksos have seized Egypt at a time of weakness following the Middle Kingdom, overpowering all with their superior technology of chariots, hardened bronze weapons and compound bows.
And they are now plundering Egypt for its forbidden secrets of power.
Can ancient history's most unlikely hero stop them and resurrect a divided land before the Hyksos can gain Egypt's most powerful and dangerous secret of all?


Saturday, June 22, 2019

"Different. An archaeologist's blog-style... reads like a P.I. thriller" 5-star 'EGYPT EYES'


On Amazon Kindle and paperback (ANSON HUNTER series)

"Egypt eyes" - Anson Hunter’s blog
I’m here in Aswan, Egypt, researching one of my theories about the ancient past for a new book, when out of the blue I get an invitation to show a young blind woman around Egypt.

Now I always like the sense of being drawn into intrigue and in this case my sensors are resonating like ground-penetrating radar. 
Also, I have a flexibility reflex that keeps getting me into trouble. It lures me into accepting dubious propositions and offers of employment that help to fund my investigations in Egypt.

So there I was at The Old Cataract, the hotel where Agatha Christie penned her novel Death on the Nile.
I entered the gardened swimming pool area, which sits below a wide veranda with its famous cliff-top view over the rock-strewn Nile at Aswan.

I found the blind young woman relaxing on a poolside lounger.

“Hello, I’m Anson Hunter,” I said, approaching her.

She turned up her blonde head and her reflective dark glasses sent flashes like empty mirrors.

“Thanks for coming to meet me, Anson. I know you’ve taken groups around Egypt in the past and I am wondering… will you allow me to hire you as my personal guide for a week or so? I want you to be my eyes in Egypt.”

“Are you sure you need me?” I said.  
“You’re thinking a guide dog might be a better idea, perhaps Anubis, the dog god of the necropolis?” she said. “No, it’s you I want.”
It’s hard to believe now that even though I was standing right over her at the poolside, I was probably just an elongated smudge in her vision. Her female Egyptian assistant, who had emailed me, explained that Dr Constance Somers has degenerative retinitis pigmentosa and is now ninety percent blind. I think that’s being generous.

“Me show you Egypt?” I said, squinting against the southern Egyptian sunlight. “How does that work?”

She smiled. “How do you show Egypt to a blind person?”

“I wasn’t thinking that.”

“Then what? You’re wondering how you’d nursemaid a blind woman around Egypt? Don’t worry. As you know, I have an assistant, Saneya, to look after me when I really need help. She’s up there on the veranda trying to read a book, but watching me in case I get up and dive into the shallow end of the pool or something. Mostly I manage pretty well on my own with my cane, except when I’m walking in a crowded street in a city like Cairo and somebody bumps my shoulder and I’m spun around, then I don’t know which way I’m facing anymore and that can be interesting.”

“That’s not it, either,” I said, glancing at the long white cane lying on the grass beside her lounger. “At the risk of stating the obvious, you’re a trained Egyptologist as well as being the world’s leading space archaeologist.”

“And that’s your concern?”

“Yes. What could I possibly show you?”

“You’re different. You don’t see my condition, all you see are my qualifications.”

Well, that wasn’t exactly true, I thought. I saw other things about her.

I’ve been spending a lonely time at sites lately, poking around Aswan on the trail of one of the sons of Rameses, so I couldn’t help but notice the litheness of her figure revealed by the stretchy scraps of black spandex and imagine secret areas of humidity beneath. The tremor of tightness I felt in my stomach gave way to a twinge of guilt and I felt bad for looking.

This was like stealing from an unattended store.

There’s a voyeuristic aspect to staring at someone who doesn’t know it and the experience is further tainted by a sense of guilt when you’re looking at a person with a disability, albeit a person as attractive as all hell.

“Granted, I know Egypt,” she said. “Or at least one dimension of it.

But I want you to show me something different, the unknown, unseen Egypt. Isn’t that what you specialise in as an alternative Egyptologist, a phenomenologist who experiences the sacred of ancient Egypt?”

I’ve taken unusual people on tours of Egypt before, New Agers, neo-pagans, fundamentalists, even Intelligence community people, but the cool, slender-faced blonde, Doctor Constance Somers, is in a class of her own. Yet here she is, a celebrated Egyptologist, saying that she wants to find exactly the same thing that I do, the hidden Egypt.

But something else got in the way of her proposal besides her medical condition or her skills set. She was asking me to drop my personal research and investigations in order to accompany her.

“I’ll pay you well for your time,” she said. “I am not entirely a sad case. Unlike most members of my profession, I do have a dollar to scratch myself with. I inherited, you see. It took away the desire to find treasures in Egypt and I could concentrate on finding more important things.”

This well-heeled Egyptologist certainly has concentrated on finding much more important things, like her discovery of a celebrated stela of the Prince Khaemwaset at Saqqara.

I have been on the trail of the very same elusive magician prince for most of my career. Khaemwaset, son of Rameses The Great, and the world’s first Egyptologist, loved to investigate and restore the monuments of the ancients, admiring the perfection of everything they made. Or so he claimed in the carved stone tablets he left behind on their monuments, ‘the world’s biggest museum labels’. But the princely tomb raider had other motives.

Legend told that Khaemwaset went secretly in search of forbidden knowledge and power and he developed a reputation as Egypt’s greatest magician.

Maybe this invitation from Constance Somers is a stroke of good fortune for me.

It’s an opportunity to work covertly from inside the tent of the profession instead of outside in the wilderness.

My other project will have to wait. There is a secret lying buried beneath the surface of this attractive and ill-fated young academic and I am growing more and more intrigued with her.

“What do you have in mind?” I said.

“I heard you’re flexible. We’re going on a cruise to Luxor, to kill a little time before our new archaeological season’s opening and the team’s arrival. Then after that, we fly to Saqqara. We spend a week or so on site there. I’m being replaced as head of the team and this is my sort of unofficial handover. They can’t have a blind academic…”

“Leading the blind academics?”

“You don’t have a high opinion of us, I’ve heard.”

“And vice versa. That’s why I’m surprised you’d take the risk of associating with me. I could tarnish your reputation.”

“I’ll take that risk. Maybe I want you because you’re a renegade.”

“Intriguing.”

“It may surprise you,” she said, “but while I could still read, I read your blogs and your books and theories and this will be a more intimate sharing than with any other reader and no reader could feed on your words more hungrily than I will. Like The Bard’s Dark Lady of the Sonnets, I’ll be your lady in darkness that you can dedicate your musings to... even though I happen to be a blonde and I can still see some light and blurry shapes! Allow me to see your Egypt through your words and inspire me with the Egypt of your imagination.”

“I admit it would be a career first to have a mainstream Egyptologist hanging on my words. But I must warn you I’m no poet.”

“I’m no lady. I don’t want censorship, be warned. I want your sensual reactions, too. I know you feel a powerful attraction to the feminine allure of ancient Egypt, so if something turns you on, turn me on!”

“Wow. And I felt guilty for looking at you lying there on that lounger!”

“The way you’re looking at me now?”

“It does seem a bit like stealing.”

“You think I can’t feel it?”

I was going to have to work at this I was beginning to learn.             

“I can see this may be a bit unnerving and I could be the one walking on uncertain ground.”

“Good! That’s the kind of frankness I want from you.”

Might she be hiding more than fading eyesight behind those silvery dark lenses? Maybe things were not as they seemed and this woman’s request for a guided tour had a secret motive. Was a blind woman planning to lead me along some unknown path? Towards what...?
(Excerpt. "Egypt Eyes")
*****5-Stars Amazon US

Why "OUTSIDER EGYPTOLOGIST" Anson Hunter brings a refreshing angle to modern archaeological thrillers


Anson Hunter makes "refreshing company" in a series of mystery investigative thrillers

Anson Hunter, independent Egyptologist, is an investigative character who brings a fresh angle to archaeological detective work.

But his ambiguous position in his field has its difficulties.

As he reflects in "POWER of an ORACLE", where he is chosen to join a team of experts on a televised dig and tomb opening in Egypt.


"A truly open mind never won many friends, as the saying went, and all sides would probably disapprove of his approach, he guessed, which might make for interesting television. He was too flexible for mainstream Egyptologists, and for fringe historians, frustratingly dubious about theories such as aliens and Atlantean pyramid builders..."

Anson Hunter is someone who respects hidden dangers and forbidden secrets from the ancient past, and he grants value to the ancient sacred, unlike today's Egyptologists with their knee-jerk agnostic reflex against religion.

It makes him "refreshing company" in a series of esoteric archaeological mystery thrillers on Amazon Kindle and paperback.http://amzn.to/oWVTPV







In the tradition of 'The Ibis Apocalypse' - search for an artefact even more dangerous to the world

New POWER of the ORACLE on Amazon Kindle
Potentially even more dangerous to the world than the Stone Book of Thoth... the lost Oracle stone of Siwa Oasis... sought out by military leaders like Alexander The Great, Lysander the Spartan, Hannibal and clues that this list might include the Nazi Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, who mysteriously seized the distant oasis on three occasions in World War II...

Now Anson Hunter, outsider Egyptologist, needs to find it before
today's world powers do... 

Latest in the Anson Hunter series:- 



 

Friday, June 21, 2019

Nature's GLYPHS... in the sand. (Mission Beach, Far North Queensland)

Dragon glyph?
Flying insect
Mountain (or a Japanese landscape?)
Palms
Tropical bird
Nature's glyphs on a beach... 
Nature's finessed artwork created by tiny, industriously digging crabs.
Indecipherable beauty. 
Then the Pacific Ocean's tide comes in and washes it away.
And they do it all again tomorrow.


Bringing "ancient Egypt [and ancient Egyptians]... compellingly to life..." In fiction



There can be no greater praise for a writer who specializes in ancient Egypt fiction than: "Roy Lester Pond brings ancient Egypt compellingly to life." (Review: 'The Smiting Texts', The Truth About Books). 

This is perhaps even more satisfying when the story literally sets out to bring an ancient Egyptian (mummy) to life as in 'THE EGYPTIAN MYTHOLOGY MURDERS' about the return of an ancient cycle of love and murder in modern day London.
"5-stars"  "Love this genre"... Amazon...
Paperback and Kindle

I followed this mystery mummy genre novel with one set in ancient times, 'I, THE MUMMY' a high-adventure novel about an ancient avenger who rose - from the tomb - to defend Egypt against invaders (The Hyksos).

And going back even further, I wrote a series for young readers that seemed to have come to life, and enjoyed a rather permanent life in the imaginations of younger readers, in 'THE MUMMY MONSTER GAME' series, as Roy Pond. ('Published as The Mummy's Revenge' Scholastic, USA).
To bring ancient Egypt compellingly to life in your life, discover a whole library waiting for you to read on AMAZON (Kindle and paperback).



Sunday, June 9, 2019

A LIVE tomb opening event... a shock for the world... Latest mystery thriller in series




The LATEST Anson Hunter archaeological adventure  AMAZON  http://amzn.to/oWVTPV



'DEATH IN EGYPT LIVE' The Egypt Thriller

A live tomb-opening event broadcast to the world... at Egypt’s remote Siwa Oasis, in the Western Desert, site of the legendary Temple of the Oracle.
But who could predict the turn of events?
A panel of experts, ‘modern day Oracles’ - historical theorists and Egyptologists – gather to make astonishing predictions about the contents of a mysterious tomb.
Including Anson Hunter, independent Egyptologist.
He fears the discovery of the most powerful, and dangerous, military weapon in history. The Oracle Stone - source of infallible prophecy that inspired arduous desert treks by Alexander the Great, Lysander the Spartan, Hannibal... and just possibly by Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Korps?
Alternative scenarios - and mysteries - thicken and swirl like a violent dust storm as deadly crisis strikes.