by Chris A. Smith
The netherworld, a long time ago
The silence hung heavily in the Hall of Judgment. Burning torches threw long shadows across the room, and iridescent fish traced gleaming arcs in the still waters of the reflecting pool. Polished marble columns rose into the darkest corners of the temple’s ceiling, creating a towering forest of stone.
Suddenly the ornate stone doors parted, thrown wide like a cracked-open rib cage, and a soul advanced timidly. Its kohl-painted eyes were flushed with fear, its freshly bathed limbs trembling in a flimsy shift. Head down, the soul stood before the gods, hands clasped in devotional terror. The soul began to jabber half-memorized entreaties to Osiris, lord of the netherworld. From his jeweled throne, Osiris listened impassively, absentmindedly adjusting his headdress. The other gods, who were used to such displays, looked on with boredom. Anubis the Jackal, ever inscrutable, leaned against a column murmuring who knows what to Horus, who perched on a ledge with his majestic wings folded behind him. Isis, her silver hair radiant in the firelight, yawned and stretched.
Then, in one deft motion, Anubis plucked the soul’s heart from its chest and slapped the organ on a scale that sat before the hearth on a long stone table. The heart had to be weighed against an ink-dark ostrich feather. Well aware that eternity lay in the balance, the soul clutched a scarab-shaped amulet at its throat and hysterically recited spells. The priests had sworn such incantations would provide protection and grant the soul a resplendent afterlife, lounging in the Field of Reeds and traveling the sky in Ra’s golden barque. In a voice like the evening wind, Osiris harrumphed and waved the soul’s words away. The soul’s synapses fired in panic, fear sloughing off its body in waves.
After a long moment, Osiris signaled his decision with a nod of his head. Thoth, the scribe of the netherworld, flipped to a fresh page in the Book of Souls, his sharp beak bobbing gently with the movement. “The great balance has judged this soul’s heart,” Thoth said, his voice formal, his vowels clipped. “The scales have found no sin.”
As the soul fell to its knees in relief, the Devourer growled with impatience. A monster with the mouth of a crocodile, the torso of a leopard, and the legs of a hippo, the Devourer fed on the unworthy and had been awaiting the verdict with the attentiveness of a hungry dog. The beast’s enormous potbelly had been growling during the judgment—so loudly that the soul could not have failed to hear it, thus rendering the experience more frightening than was necessary.
Watching intently from her place in the shadows, Amenatu shifted on her haunches and sighed. She was glad for the judgment. A devouring involved not just the eating of the heart but the rending of a psyche, and she had come to find the whole affair deeply unpleasant. In fact, Amenatu even wondered if any soul, no matter how wicked, deserved such a fate. But the sole reason for her existence was to assist the Devourer, to drag away the scant remains once the monster had eaten its fill. So, she kept her mouth shut.
Officially, Amenatu did not have a name. None of the humans’ guidebooks to the afterlife mentioned her or any of the thousands of other low-level workers, those who did the chores the gods would not. Nevertheless, Amenatu had a name even though she did not know who had bestowed it upon her, or when. It had always been thus.
Her face was that of a dog, but the resemblance to Anubis ended there. Where he was sinuous and elegant, she was ungainly and barrel-chested. Her arms recalled the slippery creatures that writhed in the Lake of Fire. The wings upon her back, stubby and scaly and queasily translucent, looked grafted-on from some other beast like an afterthought. Unlike the gods, she had come to learn, she was unlovely.
As a worker, just a cog in the divine machine, Amenatu received no sympathy from the gods. Her purpose was to serve. Only Isis, the queen mother of the underworld, treated her well. Though often weary from her labors, the goddess always had a warm word for Amenatu, and sometimes came to speak with her in the late hours when the torrent of souls slowed. Amenatu lived for these moments.
So, day by day, Amenatu helped tend to the procession of souls. Most were deemed unworthy and thus condemned to an afterlife without comfort, without hope. Without change. It was, Amenatu reflected, not so different from her own life. She longed to see the land above, the world of the daylight souls. A land of clear flowing waters, it was said, a place of light and air and space.
When her work for the day was done, Amenatu shuffled back to the workers’ quarters behind the royal stables, a vast tract of long stone houses that merged with the horizon. Each dun-colored house contained a warren of cubbies, one bare stall for each worker. Here it was always twilight; the hall of the gods was far away. Despite their long years of servitude, many of the workers had never really spoken to each other. What was there to discuss when every day was the same?
One night, however, Amenatu dreamed of the daylight world, a dream so intense—the pure breeze in her nostrils, the dirt crunching under her paws— that the feeling stayed with her even as she trudged the winding sand road to work the next morning. The sense of absolute freedom was intoxicating, and she tried to hold onto it for as long as she could. For a day, then two, then three, Amenatu’s dream succored her as she worked at the Devourer’s side, dutiful but detesting every moment. She dreaded the inevitable fading of the dream, the loss of her one source of comfort.
As Amenatu feared, the dream lost a little of its uncanny clarity each day, but she soon realized that something else—something even greater—was growing inside her. It was just a glimmer at first, powerful but indistinct. Over time, though, it crystallized.
Summoning all her courage one evening as they plodded home from the Hall of Judgment in the half-light, Amenatu spoke of her idea to a compatriot. “Why must our lives be this way? Why must this be our lot?”
A heretical question, she knew, so she spoke to just a select few. The effect was incendiary. A guardian of the gates who occupied a stall near hers, a creature with the beak of a heron and expressive green eyes, began to sob as Amenatu spoke. He said, “You have brought light into the dark, sister.”
Gradually, the circle of conspirators grew. Over furtive discussions in alleys between the long houses and disused palace corridors, the group debated what to do. An elder, a sad-eyed hyena with webbed feet, recounted a story she had once heard. There was another time, long ago, when the workers rose up in defiance. Her voice dropped to a murmur, and everyone leaned in to listen The gods simply slaughtered them, and then made more workers.
A hush descended on the little band of plotters as they pondered the story.
No, they finally decided, the gods were too powerful to confront directly. Instead, they would leave the underworld. And Amenatu, the boldest of them, would lead them out. With the decision made, Amenatu embraced each of her fellows, reluctant to let the moment go. “Together,” she declared, using a priestly incantation, “we will open the doors to the sky.” (1)
###
The following night, in the small hours, when even Osiris slumbered, Amenatu and a dozen others met by an ever-flowing fountain in an obscure courtyard. The only sound was the fountain’s burble, its waters honey-gold in the torchlight. Amenatu swallowed hard, pushing down her anxiety.
The way up to the daylight world passed through the maze-like Hall of Judgment. They crept down one passageway after another, the shuffle of their paws and tentacles and hooves just audible on the polished limestone. Winding, narrow corridors branched off to nowhere and ended abruptly in bare, cool walls; others doubled back towards the center of the palace.
Amenatu knew, however, that a subterranean stream ran through the walls. Her hearing was sharp, and she followed the subtle sound of running water.
Seven gates guarded the entrance to Osiris’ palace, their gatekeepers charged with quizzing each soul who sought an audience with the gods. Amenatu and her fellows intended to pass the gates in reverse, hoping the inner gates would be unguarded so late at night.
Amenatu had always assumed that fortune sprang from the divine, that even chance was somehow God-touched. As the group filed past one empty gate and then another, the iron-barred gates hanging open and guard posts empty, she began to question this belief. Perhaps the gods did not control everything. Amenatu felt herself growing hopeful, but she tamped the feeling down. Time was tight. Soon, she knew, Ra would complete his journey through the night and once again hoist the sun into the sky.
At last, they turned the corner to the final gate. Beyond lay a wide, static vista: cloudless, windless, devoid of birdsong. The long path to the daylight world. A feeling Amenatu could not quite name—something more than hope—washed over her.
By the time she saw the gatekeepers, it was too late. They glared at Amenatu’s motley group. The snake-headed guardian, his scaled forehead protruding from an onyx headdress; the royal announcer, a crocodile-headed thing with yellow eyes and long, chipped teeth; and the divine keeper, a creature with a hare’s head and a nasty disposition. Amenatu watched helplessly as most of her brethren dashed off and abandoned her in an effort to melt back into the palace, with the hope that their masters would ignore their transgression. Their footfalls echoed down the corridor and then faded.
Amenatu’s heart fell, but she pressed on with the remaining few. The divine keeper fixed her with his beady eyes. “State your business, lowly one,” he spat. The guardian, adder tongue flicking in anticipation, adjusted his grip on his silver-tipped spear.
Just then a kite, its intricately patterned wings glowing silver, flew towards Amenatu and alighted on the gate. A sudden burst of white light blinded the gatekeepers and froze them in place, etching their silhouettes against the glare. Amenatu looked long at the bird, and it held her gaze. Amenatu knew it was Isis.
This is how Amenatu and her companions passed into the sere lands beyond the Hall of Judgment. From the edge of the plateau, she could see the steeply sloped embankment and beyond it the river, brown and slow-moving and nearly bottomless. The opposite shore vanished into the eastern hills. It seemed impossibly far away.
Mahaf, the bull-snouted ferryman in charge of carrying souls across the river, stood down by the reed-filled shore, watching for the first souls of the dawn. He turned abruptly at their approach. “Who is this who comes?” he growled in a voice like wet sand, throwing back his long black cloak. Clods of dirt tumbled down to the water as Amenatu’s companions scrambled back up the embankment and ran back to the palace. Perhaps the enormity of their actions had just now hit them.
Now Amenatu was alone and would have to face the ferryman alone. Stepping forward, her ungainly paws splashing in the water at the river’s edge, she took in the boat, a needle- shaped vessel with a prow shaped like a gazelle’s head. She summoned what little haughtiness she could muster: “I am Amenatu, a daughter of the balance in the Hall of Judgment. Ask me what you will.”
Snuffling, Mahaf weighed her words and looked her up and down. Finally, he raised his snout and said tauntingly, “Do you know the names?”
Amenatu nodded with grim determination. Turning toward the sail, she pronounced, “Nut is thy name.” Then, to the paddles, “Fingers of Horus is thy name.” One by one, she named each piece of the boat, eliciting a small sigh of satisfaction, a light puff of air, from each implement as it was named. Then, spreading her tentacled arms to embrace the whole of the sky, she addressed the wind. “The North Wind, most beloved of Osiris, is thy name!” (2)
Satisfied, the ferryman shrugged and motioned her onto the boat.
As the sun moved overhead, the far shore came into view, fertile and green. Cottony clouds drifted on a gentle breeze. The ferryman asked her, “Do you know the road on which you must travel?”
Amenatu smiled. Yes, she knew.
###
Giddy, Amenatu set off walking through a long, narrow gorge. Occasionally she passed anxious souls moving in the opposite direction. She wondered why they averted their gazes from her; she meant them no harm. Then she remembered how frightening she must have looked to them, with her ferocious jackal’s maw and coiled dragon’s wings.
The flatlands gradually gave way to low hills. At a steep rise she noticed a rock door cut into the hillside, inscribed with an enormous ankh. Once inside, she found a pitch-dark, almost vertical passageway made of smooth stone. She began to climb. Her great paws propelled her through the darkness and her suckered arms gripped the dusty stone to guide her. As she climbed on and on, the warp and weft of time gave way in the dark. It might have taken her weeks, years, centuries—all seemed possible.
At last, Amenatu reached the burial chamber, where a gold-trimmed sarcophagus lay on a gilded funerary table. Dozens of ushabtis, statues made for the afterlife, sat in rows below walls covered top to bottom in hieroglyphics: paeans to Osiris and to Horus, to Isis and to Ra, incantations she had heard on all of her numberless days. Amenatu stepped lightly through the statuary and began to climb once again, up the tomb shaft.
Her heart swelled as she finally emerged into the light of the upper world. Geese flew overhead, their wings sharp black against a sky of robin-egg blue. “The sky is opened for me,” she exulted. “The house of the daylight world is thrown open for me!” (3)
The Nile was in flood, deep and fast-flowing. Making her way downstream, Amenatu passed through villages teeming with life, watched souls fetch water and tend to crops, laugh and make love in darkened huts, rage in the night. Amenatu had never seen souls do anything besides grovel in fear, and she was astonished. And unlike the souls of the netherworld, who flinched at the sight of her, no one here could see or hear her. She passed unnoticed, and the souls simply went on with their lives.
At first Amenatu was confused by the sight of the temples of the gods in ruins, looted and buried by the sands. Most of the souls served a strange new god, a deity who lived above the sky, invisible and inscrutable. Her journey, she realized, must have taken a long time indeed.
Restless, Amenatu crossed over to the east bank of the river. The rich black loam of the river valley quickly gave way to rock and scrub, and finally she came to a large body of water. She could smell the salt in the air, feel the tides flowing in and out, watch the small waves meet their ends on the shore. For a long time, Amenatu crouched in the sand and watched the birds flit through the sky. Then, following an impulse she did not understand, she crossed the water.
Something beyond the sea was calling out to her, urging her closer.
After crossing the emerald sea, Amenatu came to a valley flanked by a fearsome mountain range, its peaks like daggers. From the floor of the valley rose a number of granite pillars glowing red with the sunrise.
A daylight soul sat atop one of the pillars. His countenance was weathered, burned by the sun and the wind, and his ash-grey robe was in shreds. She felt inexplicably drawn to this soul, but she did not know why. When she approached him as he sat cross-legged on the pillar, staring out at the valley, he did not see her. Suddenly, though, she realized: he could hear her.
###
The days passed and Barnabas sat atop his pillar, bone-weary and gnawed by hunger. The monastery lay a day’s journey away, a difficult trek over the spine of the holy mountain.
Arduous as it was, that path led towards home, and shelter. This place, by design, was without comfort.
The pillar, a natural outcropping of granite that shone red in the morning and gold in the evening, stood hundreds of feet above the valley floor, affording the monk a view of the dusty plains as they fell off towards the sea. He had been aloft for six months, his grey-flecked hair growing wild, his hawk nose crisped by the sun. On windless days, he debated theology with another monk perched on a nearby crag, shouting back and forth as the clouds moved across the sky. Always, one question: How may we come to know God?
Mostly, however, Barnabas was silent. He prayed. And he searched for a sign. Sometimes the devil, sly and insinuating, whispered in his ear of earthly comforts, of the supple delights of the painted women in the town. In response, Barnabas trained his sights on the horizon and its smear of ocher and blue. The desert scoured his mind clean. Barnabas had sought the Lord since he was a young man, when, ignorant of the divine mysteries, he first saw the blood of the lamb in the evening sky. All those years of contemplation, but the Creator was always just out of reach.
One moonless night, all-enveloping in its darkness, a spirit came to him. It whispered over his left shoulder in a voice like a caress.
Be calm, for I am with you
He had never heard a voice such as this, soft like finespun cotton. Craning his neck, the monk rubbed the sleep from his eyes. As his vision adjusted to the darkness, he saw something moving below his rough-hewn platform, something coiled and sinuous and bulky. A great snake, by far the largest he had ever seen, was winding its way up the pillar. Closer and closer, its progress silent save the dry shuffle of its scales against the stone. With a shiver, Barnabas pulled tight his coarse robe and said a frightened prayer.
Then the snake was upon him, its coils wrapping around his legs. Loose at first, a soft embrace, then tighter with each second. Its bulk around his torso, pushing the breath from him, stifling his cries. In a moment they were face-to-face, the creature’s eyes like old straw, ageless and impassive as the cosmos. He woke in a panic, gasping for air, but feeling strangely, remarkably uplifted, as if borne aloft on great wings.
The spirit came each night for a week, and Barnabas grew unsure of what was real and what was fantasy. Sometimes, as the night birds grew silent and the stars went crow-black, a dark wave came rushing toward the pillar only to turn aside at the last moment. At other times he awoke to find himself in the snake’s mouth, its tongue like cut glass and dirt, its teeth stabbing at his hands as he tried to climb free. When dawn broke and the world seemed to resolve itself, he wondered if he was going mad.
On the seventh night the spirit filled him. It was behind his eyes, in the blood coursing through his veins. His body no longer his own, skin suddenly too tight, bones aching with the pressure. But also, a warmth he had never felt. An intoxicating, almost erotic meeting of souls so powerful that he cried out in the dark.
O Lord, I am here for you! Use me as you will!
When Barnabas awoke the next morning, his throat was parched, and his tongue tasted of fire. His nose was crusted with blood, his beard stiff with it. He had a new task: now that he knew God in his heart, he must show others how to know Him as well.
The path home was narrow and treacherous, to the monk’s right a sheer drop into the canyon thousands of feet below. Barnabas moved heedlessly, his callused feet occasionally slipping, scattering loose rocks behind him. His limbs trembled from lack of food and water, heart pounded wildly in his chest. Reaching the monastery towards midnight, he nodded to the night watchman and hurried through the labyrinthine stone corridors. There was no time to waste; the vision might fade. To the abbott he spoke briefly and rhapsodically of his visitation. Barnabas was conscious that his talk of enlightenment might be seen as impious, as an unseemly grasping for glory—who was he to claim such a thing for himself? He couldn’t help it: the sensation could not be denied. The spirit was still in him, still speaking through him. Indeed, the change showed in his eyes: pupils wide and dull, gaze fixed on the horizon.
Barnabas set to work recording his knowledge, writing until his fingers cramped and bled, the holy vision streaming out of him. He fell asleep at his tiny desk only to wake and feverishly resume his labors. A week later he emerged from his drafty cell clutching a sheaf of meticulously rendered pages bound with two simple pieces of dark leather. He smiled at the abbott and it was a ghastly thing, his skin stretched taut from starvation.
###
As the lamps burned low the abbot read the manuscript, his horror deepening with each page. This was not God’s work. He ordered Barnabas confined to his cell and the book destroyed. Then the abbot rushed to the monastery’s library; its shelves contained all the knowledge in the known world. There was a book, he remembered, that might counteract the evil that had been loosed. He only prayed that he was in time.
Even as the abbott desperately mouthed incantations, a fierce wind began to howl through the canyons, making straight for the monastery. The wind caught a spark from the kitchens and carried it to the stables, depositing the ember in a pile of hay. Clouds of black smoke billowed from the stables, and the camels began to bleat. A stableboy ran shrieking into the courtyard, enveloped in tongues of flame. His cries echoed off the monastery walls, but no one heard him over the wind.
The fire jumped from one cell to the next, sentient in its malice. Smoke choked the narrow corridors. By daybreak the sanctuary was a smoking ruin.
###
Amenatu watched the humans dig graves. Dozens of plots. No headstones, no inscriptions, just piles of dirt in the rocky ground. The air smelled of smoke, and the sickly-sweet stench of human remains, like overripe fruit. Two men in dusty robes chopped away at the ground, sweat streaming down their sinewy arms. Their spades clanged against the hard dirt, sharp and metallic. They sang softly as they dug, the dirge borne aloft on the breeze.
None of it made sense. Amenatu had come to the man on the pillar, and he had heard her when she spoke—she had felt the intermingling of their spirits. Perhaps the soul on the pillar hadn’t heard her after all. Or perhaps he was unsound. She didn’t know. There was so much she didn’t know. Frustrated and confused, she squatted by the graves, her paws sunk in the freshly turned earth. It had felt good to be in the presence of another being again, if only for a while.
As the sun began to fall, she looked to the west. How could she learn to speak to these souls? It occurred to her that maybe the gods hadn’t given her this power. It was a lonely thought, and it made her sad in a way she had never been before.
It was then that she noticed a disturbance in the atmosphere, as if the air had grown waterlogged, the sky heavy and somehow menacing. She looked around anxiously. What was happening?
The pressure from above increased, and the weight upon her shoulders grew by the second. Some kind of malevolent presence was trying to drive her deep into the earth, forcing the air out of her lungs. Her legs strained to hold steady and stay upright. Frantic, she turned left and right but she saw nothing. The sky, white as bleached bone, held its secrets.
Suddenly the wind kicked up, and dust spirals stretching high into the air, dark columns against the sky, came blowing across the valley. A tremor shook the piles of rocks by the unfinished graves, and the unburied bodies bounced into the air. Stiffened legs kicked out in a grotesque dance. The whirlwinds bore down upon her, closer with every moment.
Amenatu’s breath sped through her wide nostrils. With terror, she realized that something was coming for her.
Sensing a flicker of movement from the corner of her eye, she spun back to the graves. Cornstalks, long and violently green, their tips incongruously sharp and lethal, sprang from the corpses. With mounting alarm, she understood: Osiris was still watching, and he was angry.
As the sky darkened, thousands of birds of prey descended upon the gravesite from the west, blotting out the sun. Unable to move, Amenatu watched them in abject fear. In another moment they were upon her, and all was blackness.
When she awoke, Amenatu did not know where she was, only that it was dark, and the air was close and dry. Then she saw the jumble of ushabtis against the wall, the golden sarcophagus, the hieroglyphics. She was back in the tomb.
Weeks earlier, the tomb shaft had been her escape route. Now, though, no ray of light penetrated from the upper world. Tripping over a row of funerary urns, Amenatu scrambled to the entrance and desperately pushed with all of her might, but the stone did not budge. Osiris had walled her in.
###
Valley of the Kings, Luxor, Egypt. October, 1921
Astor’s team had been digging for months, day after day with nothing to show for it. The
bribes to local officials had been outrageous, but he had persuaded his sponsors in New York that the bet would pay off. How could it not? This was the last unexplored concession near Thutmose III’s royal necropolis; surely they’d find something. An outlying funerary building, at least, or a priestly dwelling.
The heat bore down even as winter approached, and mosquitoes swarmed. The workers grew restive. They agitated for more pay, their small rebellions near-daily occurrences. Astor watched his money dwindle, siphoned into the sands. He lost weight. His cheeks hollowed.
Then one bright morning, a worker cried out. Alhamdulillah! Rising quickly from the camp chair in his tent, Astor went out to look, his forehead hot and stomach churning. What he saw made him forget the months of trouble: the beginning of a stairway buried under fifteen feet of sand. “Keep digging,” he ordered the foreman.
Step by step, the stairway revealed itself, and by the middle of December the workers had followed the steps to a door cut into a rock wall. Scrubbing the door excitedly with his hand, Astor swept it clean to reveal a large, meticulously engraved ankh. Vindication.
To ward off looters, Astor posted guards at the site, then telegraphed Campilongo, the museum’s representative in Cairo, to take the first steamship south. Campilongo was a social climber who knew little beyond the art of fundraising. Astor intensely disliked him, but he was a necessary evil.
A week later Astor and Campilongo stood before the door as a crowd of reporters and cameramen jockeyed for position. By this time the workers, digging feverishly on double pay, had uncovered the foundations of a sizable and heretofore unknown tomb. Its columned bulk merely hinted at its structure, like a man slumbering under a heavy blanket.
Astor’s throat went dry as he watched the workers pry open the tomb door, which revealed a passage that had been closed to the world for thousands of years. The air smelled like the basement of his college library, but with a fetid undertone. Ducking his head, Astor stepped carefully down the smooth stone rampway, his lamp an ever-shrinking halo in the darkness.
For a few minutes, Astor followed the passage deeper into the tomb, the air thick with his breathing. Campilongo called to Astor from the surface, and the thick stone made his voice sound small and far away. “What do you see?”
After turning a final corner Astor froze, dumbfounded for a moment, then let out a staccato whoop of triumph. “Come quick!” Astor yelled. “Come see!”
A human-sized rendering of Osiris, green-faced and imperious, scowled down from the ceiling above a gold-trimmed sarcophagus, surrounded by chests piled high with funerary jewels. Astor and Campilongo shined the lamp from end to end, and discovered that the tomb appeared intact, untouched by robbers. They looked at each other in a gleeful daze—they had done it!
Momentarily forgetting his antipathy for Campilongo, Astor grabbed his colleague and slapped him on the back with both hands. Within a few days, their names would be splashed across front pages from Boston to Berlin.
###
From a corner of the tomb, Amenatu watched the souls go about their business. She was stunned at first, as she had forgotten what it was like to see and hear other beings, to be so near them. They were warm and noisy, quarrelsome and unpredictable. It made her heart sing.
Her spirits faltered, though, when she remembered Osiris. She wondered if he was still watching. She had been imprisoned for a long time—she wasn’t sure how long—and she dared to entertain the hope that the all-seer no longer cared, or that he was dead. Hesitating for just a moment, Amenatu seized her chance and rushed out of her prison.
Barely pausing for breath, Amenatu poured out her tale of despair to the daylight souls gathered around the tomb opening. No one heard her save the one they called Astor—she could feel his receptivity. Abruptly she grew silent again, thinking anxiously of the untimely end of the man on the pillar. Then she dismissed this worry. Surely the flaw had been with him. Surely Astor would be different.
Amenatu accompanied Astor on a boat down the river, and a week later they arrived at a bustling city that was filled with souls and light and life. She took it all in: merchants arguing, camels braying, soldiers marching. Buildings rose toward the clouds, while smoke-belching metal carts raced through the streets. Amenatu chattered happily to Astor, though he did not reply. She was undeterred, certain that he would reciprocate eventually.
Once the party went ashore, Astor complained of a headache that would not go away and retreated to his home. “It’s like a swarm of bees in my head,” he said to his wife. He did not mention the voice that was worming its way into his thoughts.
So enchanted was Amenatu with the city that she hardly noticed Astor’s dark turn.
Unable to sleep or eat, he barricaded himself into his room, and on the third night went running into the streets and disappeared. The next morning, Astor’s body washed ashore under the Imbaba bridge.
That night, Amenatu heard Astor’s servants whispering about the “Pharaoh’s Curse.” One of them pointed to an article in the newspaper that described the tomb as protected by powerful magic. Astor had made the fatal mistake of ignoring the inscription above its door: “Death shall come on swift wings to he who disturbs the peace of the king.” (4)
###
Amenatu had lost another soul, and no matter her intentions, she was responsible. For the first time, she grasped how alone she was—a being out of time, and out of place. This was not her world. Nor, she feared, would it ever be.
After drifting through the city in a daze, she came upon a large building of pink stone near the river. She entered and found herself in a cavernous hall full of massive stone statues of the pharaohs. In a smaller room, Amenatu found statues of Osiris and Ra and Anubis encased in glass, the figures chipped and scratched. Daylight souls moved from room to room and peered into the cases, but they did not worship. Here, Isis was just another statue in a building full of statues.
A part of Amenatu was pleased to see the gods stripped of their power, but another part of her ached with homesickness. She remembered her friends in the workers’ quarters, or the way Isis’ smile wrapped her in its warmth.
As midday approached, the call of one of the new gods rang out from hundreds of mosques across the city. Curious, Amenatu left the building and watched as a crowd of men gathered at the entrance to a large mosque—so many of them that they spilled into the street. They lowered their heads to the ground in holy awe, then, moving as one, they stood up.
With a mixture of pity and longing, Amenatu watched them pray. Then she turned and began to walk. She was finished with gods.
END
- Adapted from chapter 68 of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. See page 121 of The Egyptian Book of the Dead, translated by Goelet, Jr. et al. (Chronicle Books, 3rd ed., 2015)
- Adapted from chapter 99, section III of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. See pages 124-26 of
The Egyptian Book of the Dead, translated by Goelet, Jr. et al. (Chronicle Books, 3rd ed., 2015)
3. Adapted from chapter 68 of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. See page 121 of The Egyptian Book of the Dead, translated by Goelet, Jr. et al. (Chronicle Books, 3rd ed., 2015)
4. After the untimely death of the man who sponsored the archaeological team that discovered King Tut’s tomb in 1922, newspapers spread the false story that this warning was inscribed above the entrance to the tomb.
Chris A. Smith is an award-winning San Francisco writer. His
background is in political and international reporting–he has written
on topics ranging from African acid rock to Palestinian protest to
squatter punk culture–but he also writes poetry and horror and
fantasy fiction. A surfer and cat person, he taught a variety of
politics and nonfiction writing courses at the Art Institute of
California-San Francisco for a decade, and is now at work on two
books. One, with co-author William Nessen, is about the American
anti-apartheid movement, and the other is a dark fantasy novel
centered on heavy metal, revolutionary politics, and the Egyptian land
of the dead. His work is available at chrisasmith.net.