He gazed into the depths of the black void and felt both dread and his old sense of surrender to the unknown sliding over him.

Thunder erupted and the crash of falling metal and rock. The Egyptian probably invented hell, Anson thought, and this was it. They had just opened its gates. He gazed into the depths of the black void and felt both dread and his old sense of surrender to the unknown sliding over him. He had always found it easy to slip into the shadows of Egypt’s mystery with its frisson of death, magic and unseen forces, but there were dangers, he knew. ‘When you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you,’ the philosopher said. The slippery descent into hell? Damnation certainly anointed much of its activity with a kind of divine unction, he’d often reflected. In the lubricity of sex (how could sin ever feel so tender?) In the flow of whisky, the softness of a kiss, or even, the slip of playing cards in the gambler’s hands, the smoothly spreading glow of a narcotic, the squeeze of the assassin’s trigger or the slide of a knife point into flesh. They went inside... Excerpt from the Anson Hunter archaeology adventure thriller series (‘The Night of Anubis Cruise’ - Amazon)