Whatever has my soul does not have it all; I can still feel, think, and function normally, but I feel myself growing less and less coherent, and the need for blood now and again fills me to the exclusion of every other thought or sensation. I cannot even seek help, as there are no longer men who are versed in the practice of white magic and magical curing; and any doctor would attribute the whole thing to some sort of fabulous psychosis, and put me in a madhouse.
Thank God there is enough of my soul and mind left at my own command so that I was able to burn the last work of Pietro of Apono. I hope that the place in which Girolamo chose to bury the original parchment will forever remain undiscovered.
Though I had unwittingly committed the first required acts of desecration, and had unwittingly undergone a sort of indecent communion with the dead spirits that apparently abound in San Giueseppe church, I had not completed the first rite. My only hope now is to die while the good in me can still overpower the steadily growing evil influence that is corrupting my mind and body like a leprosy. I have lost all that I was and all that I could have been; but my will to good is greater than my will to evil, and thus I hope to salvage my soul while I still can.
To any readers that this may have, I ask that they pray for my soul, and not exhibit curiosity of unwholesome things. Civilized man has lost the knowledge and ability necessary to combat this kind of evil. If some unwitting fool like me should find the entire Gloriae Cruoris, listen to me, the latest man to be destroyed by it; do not experiment with it, do not even read it. Burn it, or God help you and humanity.
I shall now take poison, and go out into the Italian sunshine and look once more at the lovely poplar trees, which I shall miss dearly.
THE EYE OF HORUS
BY STEFFAN B. ALETTI
THIS MANUSCRIPT IS HERE PRESENTED BY ME IN ITS ORIGINAL form, as handed to me on an incredibly hot June day by George Warren, an amateur Egyptologist from New York. My name is Michael Kearton; I am an importer of dyes and was staying in a town named Wadi Hadalfa for business purposes. It is the last stop before the train tracks cross through the terrible Nubian desert to Abu Hamed.
Warren had just returned from an expedition to a spot several miles outside of Akasha, a smaller town about seventy-five miles away. He was in a state of shock and fever, and was badly cut and bruised; but in the week and a half left to him, he typed the following report and gave me the carbon for safekeeping. It is well he did so, as the original unaccountably disappeared with his death. As I barely knew the man, I will not make any statements as to my opinion of his mental condition at the time directly before his death; all I will say is that whatever had happened in the heat of the Nubian desert had been terrible, for his physical condition was very bad. Yet, to me, he seemed lucid. At any rate, the reader must form his own conclusions from the manuscript.
M.K.
“I have risen, I have risen like the mighty hawk (of gold) that cometh forth from his egg; I fly and I alight like the hawk which hath a back of four cubits width, and the wings which are like unto the mother-of-emerald of the South.”
So begins the chapter of performing the transformation into a Hawk of Gold, from the great Egyptian Book of the Dead.
“O grant thou (speaking to Osiris) that I may be feared, and make thou me to be a terror.”
These words—I first read them when I was a boy—have now taken on a new and immensely terrifying dimension, a dimension that stretches back in time and touches the most archaic fear of men—the fear of death, and their resulting need for gods. Man still dies, but his gods live on endlessly—I know that now. Some day we will discover Isis and Osiris, Ptah and Anubis, Ishtar, Chemosh, and even Zeus and Jupiter. They are all waiting.
I don’t know precisely where to begin this narrative, but should it turn out to be the only record of this whole affair, I shall start at the beginning.
Suffice it to say that I arrived in Cairo five years ago, an amateur Egyptologist who, by fortune or fate, had come into an immense sum of money by the age of thirty.
By offering money, I immediately became attached to the Cairo Museum expedition to the lower portion of Nubia. There it became obvious that the only reason I was along was that I financed the business, and therefore had a right to go along—but only as an observer. Though I became a friend of Mustafa, the native foreman of the diggers, the staff was no more than coldly polite to me, and my prying into their affairs was regarded with scorn.
Nevertheless I stayed with the museum expeditions and staff for three digging seasons, and got none of the credit for having been in on the discoveries of numerous early and predynastic grave sites.
Sick of being the silent partner with the money, I withdrew my support and went to Nubia on my own, accompanied by Mustafa, who was now too old for the museum’s liking.
Thus we arrived at Aswan. Once there, I found that my fame (that is, my reputation for having a lot of money) preceded me, and shortly I became acquainted with William Kirk and Andriju Kalatis.
Kirk is a British Egyptologist, now a very old man, and generally rather drunk. Among his papers and papyri he found several bills of sale dealing with shipments of grain for the priests to the Temple of Horus, the Falcon God. One papyrus also gives explicit directions on the whereabouts of the temple, and, to my surprise, it was close to a city of which a few ruins still remain, about ten miles outside of a town called Akasha, not far from Aswan.
Kalatis, a young Greek soldier of fortune, proposed to accompany me on an expedition, financed by me, to find the temple.
After checking on Kirk’s background and reputation and, after seeing the papyrus (it was undeniably authentic), I decided to give the business a try. Success would bring me worldwide fame and recognition as an Egyptologist. I did not particularly trust Kalatis, but I can take care of myself, and Mustafa would be along as foreman of the diggings. At any rate, I did not anticipate trouble from Kalatis unless we found something valuable enough to steal rather than give to the Egyptian government.
The first digging season was spent partly in research and partly in the digging of long rows of trenches in the chosen area. Kirk was too old to come, but Kalatis, much to my surprise, proved an admirable companion and a good worker despite his disappointment at finding no great treasure.
The second season went essentially the same way until one day early this month, when Mustafa came running to our tent to announce that he had found the top of what seemed to be a flight of steps. By that afternoon we had uncovered seven stone steps, and a small, narrow door.
II
THE SEAL WAS UNBROKEN! KALATIS AND I LOOKED AT EACH other in astonishment. An unopened tomb meant for me an unparalleled archaeological find, and for Kalatis it could mean the wealth that he so continually dreamed of.
I look the chisel, and, there, in the midday heat of Nubia, in a few moments I broke a seal that had remained perfectly intact since its placement there thousands of years earlier.
Curiously enough, once inside the foetid darkness, there was only an empty chamber less than five feet long, and only about three feet wide. At the end of the room was another very narrow stone stairway.
Our porters and diggers, of course, were too superstitious to enter with us, so, leaving Mustafa to keep an eye on them (these were not the trained museum expedition diggers), Kalatis and I had no recourse but to climb down alone. We were both slightly unnerved, being amateurs, and not a little worried about the condition in which the tomb might be after so many centuries. Also, as the tomb was unopened, there might still be some unsprung grave-robber trap awaiting us.