26
I ran back through the halls and out into the desert, gasping to restore my breath and slow my heart. But then I stopped. If the cat had found a way forward, then perhaps I was meant to follow. If I fled this dark place now, I would never know. I hit the wall of the chapel with my fists, forcing myself back to reality, these actions helping me to achieve a state that felt enough like clarity to enable me to make a decision. It was as if I heard Tanefert in my head urging me, ‘Don’t let your fear conquer you. Use your fear. Think.’
I gathered up all my courage-some Medjay officer, some detective, who was suddenly afraid of the dark! — and re-entered the chapel sanctuary. I felt around the back of the stele. Nothing but builders’ dust. So much for the materials of eternity. I felt along the edges of the wall. I licked my finger and held it just slightly off the wall. Was I imagining it? A cooling, the remotest possibility of a current of air where there should be none?
I slipped with difficulty into the narrow space behind the stele and found a gap, barely wide enough for me to pass through to a dark and dusty space, lit, strangely, by a single oil lamp. What little light this gave revealed the cat sitting in the dark, waiting. It turned, its tail curled as elegantly as a temple dancer’s finger, and slipped down some stone steps and disappeared. I picked up the lamp. It had an exquisite beauty that reminded me of other sophisticated and elegant things I had seen in the city. I put the thought to one side and raised the lamp, revealing more of the way. By its wavering light I took my first steps down into the deep shadows.
At the bottom, perhaps twenty steps down, I found the cat waiting for me. I greeted her, but she darted away down a tunnel that vanished into a yet deeper darkness. The little tinkle of the charm around her neck was quickly lost. I held up the lamp. Its flame struggled against little gusts of hot air charged with the scents of sand and humid blackness that rose up to me from the region of spirits. I was afraid. But what choice did I have now? ‘Do you go down into the Otherworld, as it is said in the Chapters of Coming Forth by Day.’ So I began to walk.
It was not a straight path, but a winding serpent, sometimes sinuous, sometimes zig-zagged, and soon my orientation was baffled. The Otherworld is said to be populated by monstrous-headed beings who haunt its terrible caverns and treacherous passing points. The Book of the Dead has efficacious prayers and spells to be spoken to those monstrous guardians who will yield only to their secret names. But could I recall any of those prayers now? Not one. I shivered, hoping no monster would rise up invisibly in this darkness to block my path and demand the fatal passwords.
I had walked now for a long time in my circle of light. The lamp was growing fainter and weaker. I could not estimate, even from a rough count of my paces, where I was. Then the wick guttered, flared for a moment in its last struggle for life, and died. I was plunged into a far deeper blindness than I had ever encountered; always, no matter how obscure the last corner of the alleyway or the deepest room in a deserted house, some light from the world had suggested itself somewhere, but not here. My eyes swam with half-ghosts, the strange, jumbled imaginings of my mind. I dropped the useless thing, and as it hit the stone it jarred horribly. Echoes noisy enough to wake the dead ran like banshees up and down the passageway.
I put out my hands either side of me, but they were invisible, as if numb in the dark. Then I touched the wall of the tunnel, and like a blind man who feels the world only through the point of his stick, and not through the hand that holds it, I began to edge my way onwards into the chaos of the dark. I tried to keep count of my paces as I had no other way of gauging my progress in time or space. But soon the numbers blurred, and I felt disorientated by the slow count.
I walked on like a dead man without his spirit, grazing and bruising myself on unseen corners, banging into the twists and turns of the walls. What few crumbs of comfort I had had-the lit lamp, the presence of the now- vanished cat, the enigmatic message-now lost all meaning and all hope.
Then, as I peered ahead into the endless blackness, it seemed to me I could see a star low in the dark. I walked on, concentrating on it, my lost hands still struggling to guide me between the walls. The more I wanted to believe it was brightening, the more it did. But could my imagination be tricking me with shadows? Or was this the approach of the moment of death, the bright light shining described by those who claim to have approached the threshold of the Otherworld and returned? The star then became a shape, a threshold of light framing a figure- waiting, it seemed in my madness, for me. I began to panic, afraid the opening would slam shut before I could reach it. I struggled on, my knuckles grazing sharply against the walls. I licked the blood and its saltiness shocked me back to a sense of life.
And then I was running, running, my breath rasping, my heart thudding, through the darkness towards the changing, expanding star, reaching out to the figure of a waiting woman. Tanefert? I heard myself shouting her name: ‘
And then I collapsed through a doorway into light.
27
Everything went dark. Words went round and round in my head like a little dream of nonsense: ‘O my heart which I had from my mother. O my heart of my different ages…’ Then I came back to myself, opened my eyes, and slowly sat up. The cat was sniffing my hand delicately.
I struggled to my feet and looked around me. I was in a long stone chamber illuminated by lamps, hundreds of them. The walls and ceilings were decorated with hieroglyph panels and the Aten and the many little hands reaching down with the Gift of the Ankh to the divine and royal worshippers. In niches all along the walls were set solitary figurines and statuettes in crowns and masks, and I knew them: the forty-two gods holding their symbols of judgement. And I knew too that all of this, the old religion, was banned at Akhetaten.
In the centre was a large set of scales, bigger than a man, made of gold and ebony, surmounted by a carving of a seated woman-the goddess Maat, the regulator of the seasons and the stars, of earthly and divine justice. How often had I seen her image on the gold chains worn by all-too-human judges, below their gaunt and jowly faces, compromised and corrupted by luxury, brutality and time? The scales hung at this moment in equilibrium. The atmosphere was perfectly still around them. Then there was a motion. The cat looked up, her eyes green and clear, then ran off into the dark.
Next to the scales appeared a tall, black-skinned figure in a gold girdle, with the large black and silver head- mask of a jackal. Anubis. The figure stared at me, waiting. He said nothing, so I spoke.
‘Where am I?’
‘This is the Hall of the Two Truths.’
The voice came not from the mask but from the deeper shadows of the chamber. It was a woman’s voice, confident, direct, beautiful. I knew at once I had found her.
I said, ‘I thought the thing about truth was there is only one truth.’
‘There are many truths. Even here. There is your truth, there is my truth.’
‘And then there is the Truth.’
It was as if I could see her smile, though she remained invisible in the shadows.
‘How wise you are,’ she said. ‘You and all the others who speak of such things as the Truth. I wonder what you have been writing about me in your little journal. Which truths have you recorded there?’
She knew everything already. I tried to keep up with her.
‘Not truths, necessarily. Stories.’
‘Ah, stories. And how do they help us?’
‘They are versions of things. Possibilities. Of you.’
‘How many sides are there to that story? I would say many. I would say perhaps an infinite number.’
Was she right?
‘Perhaps.’
‘So every story has an infinite number of sides. A circle, perhaps. Is every story a circle?’
‘Every true story, perhaps.’
‘Perhaps we arrive at the end only to find it is a beginning, but now we know this truly for the first time.’
Neither of us spoke for a moment. I was a little enchanted by our cleverness. There was a quickness to it all, an intimacy, as if already we were thinking and completing each other’s thoughts. Suddenly I needed to see this
