THE SMITING TEXTS by Roy Lester Pond

Author:Roy Lester Pond [Pond, Roy Lester]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-12-16T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 42

THE NEXT DAY, the mountains of the Valley of the Kings soared across the river, golden and monumental against a blue-enamel sky that looked streaked with haze in the morning light. Rising above everything was the peak, shaped like a pyramid, overlooking the tombs of the most famous pharaohs in history - Amenhotep, Rameses, Thutmosis and the boy king Tutankhamun.

“The peak has a name - do you know it?” Saneya told the group. “Meretseger - She Who Loves Silence”.

It was five a.m when they left their hotel, the Hilton in new Karnak, travelling by coach. On their route to the Valley of the Kings, they passed flotillas of moored cruise boats and the grand old colonial solidity of the Winter Palace hotel and the towering columns of Luxor temple. Rising from its heart, Anson noticed the minarets of the Sufi mosque built by Abu al-Haggag, a Sufi shaykh, piercing the sky. A bizarre accretion - a Sufi mosque built in the heart of the Old Religion. Did that say something about Sufi affinities?

The Mighty Hundred-Gated Thebes, now just a river town, would soon be reverberating to the clip of horses’ hooves as carts and horse-drawn gharries scurried among the tourist buses and local traffic along the Nile Corniche.

The locals had spruced up Luxor with a coat of paint since his last visit, but the place still had a farming town feel to it, Anson thought. It was hard to believe that it was once the seat of pharaohs, the most powerful city on earth.

He smiled at the incongruous sight of an ancient fellahin perched on his donkey-cart, laden with straw, while holding a mobile telephone to his ear.

They planned to reach the barren region of the Valley of the Kings before the heat of the day grew too intense and they crossed over the Nile Bridge just as the sun rose. A thin mist spread itself across the river.

High in the sky above the valley, a pair of hot-air balloons, one golden like a sun, the other electric blue, drifted over the distant temple of Deir el Bahari. They were like ideas in the sky, huge shining light bulbs that brought back a memory of the previous day.

Anson looked out of the window of the coach as they travelled though emerald cane fields. The two colossal seated statues of Memnon, sitting stranded in an empty field, flashed past. Crumbled giants. These colossi had once guarded the entrance to a vast temple complex now completely vanished.

They reached the Valley and climbed off the bus. A touch of Universal Studios had invaded the valley these days, he noted, giving a shake of his head. Lamentable. Visitors clambered aboard trolleys like motorized trains to approach the pyramid-shaped peak that presided over the valley. But the same golden light still suffused the rocky cliffs and hills that rose scarred by paths and penetrated by the shadowy black doorways of tombs.

They agreed to split into groups.

“For me, entering and walking through these tombs is like passing through a magical, mythological underworld,” Kalila said, going with him.

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