Free The Egypt Code by Robert Bauval Page A

are flooded and I ferry across on the Winding Waterway; I am ferried over to the eastern side of the horizon, I am ferried over to the eastern side of the sky . . . 1
     
     
     
    The Winding Waterway is flooded that I may be ferried over thereon to the horizon, to Horakhti . . . 2
     
     
     
    The Winding Waterway is flooded, that I may be ferried over to the eastern side of the sky, to the place where the gods were born . . . 3
     
    The eastern horizon, then, was that place where ‘the gods were born’ which, in the context of the rebirth rituals, is where the celestial bodies rise, i.e. are reborn. But the apotheosis of royal rebirth was reached not on any day but at the moment of the heliacal rising of Sirius, which took place during the start of the flood season. This is when Osiris-Orion emerges from the underworld Duat (is reborn), and also when his son, the new Horus-king, succeeds him - an event marked by the rebirth of the star Sirius, rising heliacally after 70 days in the underworld Duat.
     

    Plan of the ‘Birth of Isis’ temple at Dendera
     
    During those crucial 70 days the Nile became swollen like a pregnant sow. And when its waters began to mysteriously turn red (due to the red laterite dust of Central Africa that had dissolved in the water and was carried by the flood all the way to Egypt), it was as if the goddess Isis herself was discharging her birth-waters and placenta when giving birth to Horus in the bulrushes of the Delta. An inscription in the temple known as the Birthplace of Isis at Dendera tells us that the goddess ‘loves the colour red’, which clearly alludes to the redness of the Nile during the rising of Sirius-aphenomenon that was witnessed by many in modern times, including the distinguished English traveller Lady Duff Gordon, who, in 1867, saw the coming flood and described its waters as ‘really red as blood’. 4 Indeed, this phenomenon took place every year around the time of the summer solstice and was only disrupted in 1902 when the first modern dam was built at Aswan. It was finally ended in 1965 with the completion of the High Dam at Aswan. This changed for ever the cycle of the Nile that had kept Egypt in ecological balance. In the perception of an ancient Egyptian, it would have meant that the cosmic order was disrupted and calamity would befall the land. In a dramatic passage of the Hermetic Texts known as the Lament, the god Thoth paints a dark and grim picture of the pollution and chaos that would befall Egypt if its people ceased to respect the Nile and stopped revering the ancient gods and the cosmos. 5
     
    The economic and social conditions of modern Egypt are perhaps evidence of this ancient prophecy. Today the contamination of the Nile and its canals by toxic and sewage waste constitutes Egypt’s worst self-inflicted plague, and the chaos caused by its exponentially growing population (20 million in Cairo today compared with one million 50 years ago) and unchecked fume emissions has made its capital, Cairo, one of the unhealthiest and most polluted cities in the world according to the latest UNESCO figures. No more do the people of Egypt witness the splendour and enchantment that the flood season brought to their countryside. In this respect, the eye-witness account of a nineteenth-century traveller is worth quoting here, as it describes the joy that gripped the whole of Egypt when the flood came in midsummer:
    Perhaps there is not in Nature a more exhilarating sight or one more strongly exciting to confidence of God, than the rise of the Nile . . . its bounding waters . . . diffusing life and joy through another desert. There are few impressions I have received upon the remembrance of which I dwell with more pleasure than of seeing the first burst of the Nile . . . All Nature shouts for joy. The men, the children, the buffaloes, gambol in its refreshing waters, the broad waves sparkle with shoals of fish, and fowl of every wing flutter over them in clouds. Nor