Egypt
Egypt has held me in thrall since a young age. Perhaps the first time that I encountered this fabled land was when my mother used to read me bedtime bible stories. I didn’t care much for the plight of the disciples but I could hear about Moses over and over again. Egypt was a land of decadence, of linen-wrapped mummies, papyrus scrolls and animal-headed gods that paraded in rows on the walls of tombs. It was a forgotten land, a forbidden place, associated with idolatry and tumbled stone pillars. At the age of six, I was in love. When the pharaoh’s army succumbed to the waves when the Israelites made good their escape, I mourned for the young men; their bright chariots drawn by foam-flecked horses. The rest of the bible paled in comparison.
The next moment that stands out in my memory is a visit we made to the then Transvaal, to stay with family and friends while on holiday. I had a choice. I could either visit the museum that had a blue whale skeleton or I could visit the museum that housed a small collection of Egyptian mummies.
There are no prizes guessing which option I selected. However, upon arrival at the museum, I absolutely refused to enter that room with the dead people in it. I was convinced that I’d be confronted with an unwrapped Ramesside horror. After a storm of tears and assorted threats, my long-suffering parents succeeded in dragging a reluctant child into that chamber of horrors.
What a disappointment. The closest thing to dead limbs that awaited me was the toe of one of the long-dead inhabitants that poked through the bandages. No skeletal grins pulled into a rictus of pain awaited me.
The next chapter in my lifelong obsession with the land of Khem occurred during that fragile time in a girl’s life when she crosses that gap between childhood and womanhood. Bast was there for me, haunting me from the pages of library books with my fervent wish that the old religions hadn’t died with the advent of a martyred saviour. Of course it didn’t help that my sister kept cats, of the persuasion that were supposed to inhabit the temples and palaces of that faraway land.
In later years, studying art and esoteric literature, Egypt still calls out to me. It is not the Egypt of today, with busy Cairo and a buzz of dust-snarled alleyways. She is the Egypt of the soul, who speaks to me in dreams, of a land where the Nile still enriches with its annual inundation, where maidens dance, draped in the finest of gauzes, in time to the swish of sistrums. Nobles still raise lotus flowers to breathe in the intoxicating scents of the blooms. Fresh bread nourishes me. Beer refreshes me. Isis still smiles her secret, enigmatic smile and beckons for me to dance one more time in her sanctuary. When I look up to the river in the sky, the Lady of the Stars arches her back and upholds a thousand pinpricks of light. When the sun sets in the west, I am reminded of Anubis, the jackal who waits to guide me through the land of the dead. Ibis-headed Thoth presides over my writing, nodding in agreement as my fingers play out the words that will allow Egypt to live again in the hearts and minds of all those who still believe in her.
