As Anson
walked back to his hotel from the Egyptian galleries of the British Museum, he
felt a sense of exposure. Currents, people and events swirled around him like
the cold London air, crowding his world.
Fallen
leaves from oak trees in a park cluttered the pavement, curled up like papyrus
scrolls, archaeological spoil heaps of rust, yellow and brown. For a moment,
his shoes vanished under this detritus of time and the seasons. Dead leaves,
yet they crackled like scrolls of power.
The
pavement narrowed, the black railings of the park pushing him closer to the
street and the passing traffic, rattling black London cabs and rumbling, red
double decker buses that looked as if they were about to overbalance. A gust
from a passing bus scattered leaves.
What was
it that drove him?
A desire
to save the world?
He recalled
the same question put to him by the Egyptian man and the antiquities girl.
Aren’t
you afraid you’ll trigger an apocalypse?
Was it
simply a hunger to feel the crackle of the numinous, to find the great source
of Egypt’s power heka?
Heka was the power behind
the civilisation of Egypt, behind every idol, every execration text and smashed
jar, every sweating wax effigy in the flame, every stabbed, trampled and spat
upon image, every prayer to a god, every amulet and love spell.
He
certainly did not want power for himself, only perhaps the power that could
come from knowing that such power existed, because if that power existed and
could be held in his hands, then so did another power.
Where
there was shadow, there had also to be the light.
Yet there
could be another reason, one that he had enough honesty and self-knowledge to
recognise - a hunger for acceptance, sparked by an Egyptologist father who had
abandoned him as a child. It would be sweet to shake up the profession and
topple their ivory tower.
Maybe a
combination of all of these impulses.
In the
end, though, would it be worth taking the risk?
Why did
he imagine that he could encounter and experience such terrifying psychological
and existential danger and remain immune to its effects?
And how
did he think he was going to avoid the consequences for the region and the
world that others feared?
He
crossed a street and had the distinct feeling in the nape of his neck that
somebody was watching him. Was he being followed?
(Excerpt from the adventure thriller HATHOR'S HOLOCAUST (second book in the Anson Hunter 9 novel series)