Free Tutankhamun: The Book of Shadows by Nick Drake Page A

cargo. No torches were lit to illuminate the work–but the moon’s light was almost adequate. The men worked silently, efficiently transferring a number of clay containers from the ships to a convoy of carts. I saw a tall, thin man walking among them, directing affairs. Smugglers, probably, for no one else dared to navigate the dangerous river in the dark. Well, it was none of my business. I had other concerns.
    Walking is my cure for confusion; it is the only thing that makes me feel sane sometimes. I made my way back through the deserted streets, and now the night city felt like a vacant theatre, a construction of papyrus, shadows and dreams. I set myself to a proper consideration of everything this extraordinary day had laid before me. The festival ceremonials with their strangely repressed atmosphere; the astonishing act of sacrilege; the girl in the cells, and her rage, which had matured like a wine into something dark and powerful; this night meeting with the Queen of the kingdom–anxious with fear; the encounter with the King’s wet nurse. And perhaps most shocking of all, the dead boy, his cruelly shattered limbs, his appalling posture of perfection, arranged for death, and the linen spell. What did these things, the events of this day, have to do with each other? If, indeed, they had anything to do with each other–for I am given to finding patterns where, perhaps, none exist. Still, I sensed something–an intuition, elusive, just out of the reach of thought, like the glinting edge of a shard flashing for a moment among ruins–but then it was gone again. At this moment nothing added up. I know I love to consider the ways disparate thingsmay be surprisingly related–more as in a dream or a poem than in reality. My colleagues ridicule me, and perhaps they are right, and yet somehow I do not find the mystery at the heart of human beings is ever as logically fathomable as they say it is. But then again, what use was that to me now?
    Next, I considered the carving. Superficially, it expressed animosity towards the previous regime of the Aten, of which the King was the inheritor, survivor and (as had been made clear by his public pronouncements, acts and new buildings) now the destroyer. The iconoclasm, however, was not exceptional, and the interesting question was: why had it been delivered in such a deliberate, even intimate, manner to the King? More subtly, it expressed a severe threat: for the annihilation of the sign represented the annihilation of the reality. The King was also the Sun. And the Sun destroyed, and still worse the royal names destroyed, represented the destruction of the King and Queen in the afterlife. And there was something else: the sheer fury of those chisel-marks spoke of deep, almost mad, anger. It was as if each stab of the chisel was a stab into the King’s eternal spirit. But why, and who was responsible?
    I looked up at the moon, now sunk low over the rooftops and the temple pylons, like the sickle of light in the left eye of Horus; and I remembered the old fable we tell our children about how this was the last missing fragment of the God’s destroyed eye, which was finally restored by Thoth, God of Writing and Secrets. Now we know better–we know the actions and movements of the celestial forms from observation; our star calendars record their perpetual motions and great returns over the year, and over infinities of time. And then–suddenly it occurred to me: what if the stone represented a more obvious meaning? What if it said: eclipse ? Perhaps it meant a true eclipse? Perhaps the eclipse of the Living Sun was just a metaphor. But what if it wasn’t? It seemed a possible link, and somehow I liked the thought. I would talk to Nakht, who knew all about such things.
    I walked up my street, pushed open the gate, and entered the courtyard. Thoth was waiting for me, alert on his haunches, as if he knew Iwas about to arrive and had prepared to