Roy Lester Pond Mystery, Egypt, FICTION&Fact: UPDATE VIDEO 'How ancient EGYPT'S mystery BLEEDS INTO a thriller author's LIFE...'

Clouds seen in the sky become Egypt Eyes. (Title of an Anson Hunter novel in my series)

I saw this image in a concrete sidewalk while writing about the son of Rameses, the anachronistic antiquarian prince Khaemwaset, famed as the world's first Egyptologist, (My additions)

Egyptian tomb - or underground dwelling in Australian outback?

Moses at the Egyptian Exodus crossing - or 'Wave Rock'?

Sacred ibis in Egypt - or Australia?

Seascape - or pyramid in the sky?

People see things - in things.

Some people do this more than others.

Pareidolia.

The technical term for a psychological quirk where meaningful patterns, symbols and forms coalesce in clouds, fireplaces, trees, espresso froth in a mug, even among rocks on the surface of Mars that can appear as the head of an ancient Egyptian sphinx.

But for me as a fiction writer inspired by a lifetime of studying ancient Egypt, the phenomenon is like an augmented reality app in a pair of glasses.

Ancient Egypt’s mystery bleeds into my view of life.

Dead leaves lying in a park transmogrify. Crackles of yellow-autumn rust suddenly become a cache of ancient scrolls curled around undeciphered texts that tease me with hidden significance.

My fictional series character Anson Hunter, a renegade Egyptologist, experiences this in 'Hathor's Holocaust':

As he walked back to his hotel, 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 sneakers 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?

I 'saw' ancient Egypt as a child (a boy fascinated by the land of the Nile), years before I started writing fiction.
More than a little of me is in my novel "One Day I'll Tell you Something". (Including the photo used on the cover!)
I 'saw' Egypt - and even smelled ancient Egyptian scent memories in my everyday surroundings.

Excerpt - 'One Day I'll Tell You Something'. (A young mother's narration)

“And this behaviour of your boy Cooper’s - does it continue?” the interviewer encouraged me to go on.

“Disturbingly, yes. A recent example. I won one of those automatic bread makers in a magazine competition, and he woke up in the morning with the yeasty warm smell of baking bread filling the air. It was still dark in the house. The aroma of baking bread seemed to electrify him. “That’s Kemet,” he said, running into my room. “That’s the smell of Kemet in the early morning, when it’s still dark.”

“To Cooper it was the smell of ancient Egypt at dawn, of mud ovens and baking bread. He breathed it in so deeply he went dizzy...

He was around six when I took him on his first visit to the museum. He gawked at a withered mummy in a painted wooden mummy case. There was a sky light illuminating the Egyptian gallery and the light streaming down seemed to fall on him like a revelation. I saw tears squeeze out of his eyes.”

“These are my people,’ he yelled out, making heads in the museum turn.

“Sh-sh, Cooper. You’ll scare the visitors,” I said.

“Do you smell that?”’ he said.

I sniffed. A sweet smell hung in the air.

“What is it?”

“It’s them.”

It was probably just the scent of a floor polish or the cleaner they use on the glass cases. But my Cooper thought differently. To him it was the memory of secret balms used in mummification. He looked in wonder at grains of dust that floated in the light from the ceiling as if mummy dust had seeped out of the mummy cases, the air-borne atoms of long dead Egyptians. He breathed it in, filling his chest. It freaked me a bit, I can tell you. But he was enraptured. I couldn’t drag him out of the place...