River god - Smith Wilbur (чтение книг .TXT) 📗
When Dr Al Simma asked me to assist in the transcription of the scrolls contained in the vases, I was both honoured and filled with trepidation. I was not, of course, qualified to work on the original scrolls, which were written in the hieratic script. This work was done at Cairo Museum by a team of international Egyptologists.
Dr Al Simma asked me to rewrite this original transcription in a style that would make it more accessible to the modern reader. With this end in view I have included some anachronisms in the text. For instance I have, in places, used such comparatively modern measures of distance and weight as miles and ounces. I have also indulged myself with words such as 'djinn' and 'houri' and 'hooligan' which Taita never employed, but which, I feel certain, he would have used if they had formed part of his vocabulary.
Very soon after beginning work on the texts all my reservations began to evaporate as I became totally involved in the times and character of the ancient author. Despite all his bombast and vainglory, I developed an affinity and affection for the slave Taita that reached back over the millennium.
I am left with a realization of how little the emotions and aspirations of man have changed in all that time, and a lingering excitement that to this day somewhere in the Abyssinian mountains near the source of the Blue Nile the mummy of Tanus still lies in the unviolated tomb of Pharaoh Mamose.
EXPLORE THE MYSTERIES OF THE SEVENTH SCROLL?
WILBUR SMITH'S NEXT UNFORGETTABLE
EPIC NOVEL, COMING SOON FROM
ST. MARTIN'S PRESS. AN EXCERPT FOLLOWS:
"The Seventh Scroll." She whispered, and steeled herself to touch it. It was three thousand years old, written by a genius out of time with history, a man who had been dust for all these millennia, but who she had come to know and respect as she did her own husband. His words were eternal, and they spoke to her clearly from beyond the grave, from the fields of paradise, from the presence of the great Trinity, Osiris and Isis and Horus, in whom he had believed so devoutly. As devoutly as she believed in another more recent Trinity.
She carried the scroll to the long table at which Duraid, her husband, was already at work. He looked up as she laid it on the table-top before him and for a moment she saw the same mystical mood in his eyes that had affected her. He always wanted the scroll there on the table, even when there was no real call for it. He had the photographs and the microfilm to work with. It was as though he needed the unseen presence of the ancient author close to him as he studied the texts.
Then he threw off the mood and was the dispassionate scientist once more. "Your eyes are better than mine, my flower," he said. "What do you make of this letter?"
She leaned over his shoulder and studied the hieroglyph on the photograph of the scroll that he pointed out to her. She puzzled over the character for a moment before she took the magnifying glass from Duraid's hand, and peered through it again.
"It looks as though Taita has thrown in another cryptic of his own creation just to bedevil us." She spoke of the ancient author as though he were a dear, but sometimes exasperating, friend who still lived and breathed, and played tricks upon them.
"We'll just have to puzzle it out, then," Duraid declared with obvious relish. He loved the ancient game. It was his life's work.
The two of them laboured on into the cool of the night. This was when they did their best work. Sometimes they spoke Arabic and sometimes English; for them the two languages were as one. Less often they used French, which was their third common language. They had both received their education at universities in England and the United States, so far from this Very Egypt of theirs. Royan loved the expression "This Very Egypt" that Taita used so often in the scrolls.
She felt a peculiar affinity with this ancient Egyptian in so many ways. After all she was his direct descendant. She was a Coptic Christian, not of the Arab line that had so recently conquered Egypt, less than two thousand years ago. The Arabs were newcomers in this Very Egypt of hers; while her own blood line ran back to the dawn of sanguine man, to the time of the pharaohs and the great pyramids.
At ten o'clock Royan made coffee for them, heating it on the charcoal stove that Alia had left for them before she went off to her own family in the village. They drank the sweet strong brew from thin cups that were half filled with the heavy grounds. While they sipped they talked as old friends.
For Royan that was their relationship, old friends. She had known Duraid ever since she had returned from England with her doctorate in archaeology and won her job with the Department of Antiquities, of which he was the director and professor.
She had been his assistant when he had opened the tomb in the Valley of the Nobles; the tomb of Queen Lostris of the Ramessidian line of pharaohs, the tomb that dated from 1780 BC.
She had shared his disappointment when they discovered that the tomb had been robbed in ancient times and all its treasures plundered. All that remained were the marvellous murals that covered the walls and the ceilings of the tomb.
It was Royan herself who had been working at the wall behind the plinth on which the sarcophagus had once stood, photographing the murals, when a section of the plaster had fallen away to reveal in their niche the ten alabaster jars. Each of the jars had contained a papyrus scroll. Every one of them had been written and placed there by Taita, the slave of the queen.
Since then their lives, Duraid's and her own, seemed to have revolved around those scraps of parchment. Although there was some damage and deterioration, in the main they had survived three and a half thousand years remarkably intact.
What a fascinating story they contained of a nation attacked by a superior enemy, armed with horse and chariot that were still alien to the Egyptians of that time. Crushed by the Hyksos hordes, the people of the Nile were forced to flee. Led by their queen, Lostris of the tomb, they followed the great river southwards almost to its source amongst the brutal mountains of the Ethiopian highlands.
Here amongst those forbidding mountains, Lostris had entombed the mummified body of her husband, the Pharaoh Mamose, who had been slain in battle against the Hyksos.
Long afterwards Queen Lostris had led her people back northwards to this Very Egypt. Armed now with their own horses and chariots, forged into hard warriors in the African wilderness they had come storming back down the cataracts of the great river to challenge once more the Hyksos invader, and in the end to triumph over him and wrest the double crown of upper and lower Egypt from his grasp.
It was a story that appealed to every fibre of her being, and that had fascinated her as they had unravelled each hieroglyph that the old slave had penned on the papyrus.
It had taken them all these years, working at night here in the villa of the oasis after all their daily routine work at the museum in Cairo was done, but at last all of the ten scrolls had been deciphered, all except the seventh scroll. This was the one that was the enigma, the one which the author had cloaked in layers of esoteric shorthand and allusions so obscure that they were unfathomable at this remove of time. Some of the symbols he used they had never encountered before in all the thousands of texts that they had studied in their combined lifetimes. It was obvious to them both that Taita had not intended that the scrolls should be read and understood by any eyes other than those of his beloved queen. These were his last gift for her to take with her beyond the grave.
