Hats off to the world's greatest archaeologist. WHO HAPPENS TO BE...?

To me this striking ad for a ‘Jones’ fedora hat can almost talk. (My words supered over the hats as a headline.) What would it say about fiction’s greatest Egyptologist? Who would it be?

Not Indiana Jones, although I take my hat off to Indy obviously. Not even Rick O‘Connell, even though I have an abiding affection for his role in the Mummy movies. Not my own fiction hero, Anson Hunter, a conflicted, independent Egyptologist who has a deep respect for the ancient sacred and for hidden dangers from the ancient past, yet ironically seeks them out before others can get their evil hands on them.

Not even my Egyptologist hero Daniel Cane, a guest Egyptologist on Nile cruises who finds himself ineluctably playing the role of murder detective.

No. The world’s greatest archaeologist is...

”Chance.” Chance, or co-incidence, is of course something a writer of fiction may never employ in devising the machinery of a plot. Too convenient, too easy, readers think. Yet chance is the flywheel of life. Did you know, for example, that chance is the world’s greatest archaeologist? More successful than Indiana Jones, or Howard Carter, who revealed to the world the contents of the tomb of the boy king Tutankhamun. More successful even than Anson Hunter, the renegade, independent Egyptologist in my series of adventure thrillers. Chance has always been at work – in Napoleon's troops stumbling upon the Rosetta Stone, the key to the decipherment of hieroglyphs. In a water boy in the Valley of the Kings, unknowingly setting down a water jar and revealing the first stone step that led to the lost tomb of Tutankhamun. In a donkey's hoof that broke through the desert floor to reveal the hollow of a hidden tomb below. Or in a metal leg of a camera tripod that revealed a cache of statues buried beneath the temple courtyard of Luxor. Chance is the secret cog that turns the universe, a shadow law behind all laws, the great invariable variable. Even God may be thought of in terms of chance. Consider. If nobody created God and he was always just there, then he’s the greatest example of chance that you can possibly imagine. What are the odds...? And chance doesn't stop there. We do not choose, but are chosen, we are told. How is that for chance? Salvation, eternal life - matters of chance? I hope I am not talking through my hat.

ROY LESTER POND FICTION - ON AMAZON