“Two things,” Sommers laughed. “First, it’s been a week or two since I last dropped in, and—” he paused.
“And?”
“And I’ve brought something to show you.” The smile passed from Sommers’s face as swiftly as it had come.
“Oh?” Arnott prompted. “Well, then, why so hesitant about it? Show me.”
Sommers nodded. “Put down those weights and sit up.”
“Hmm? All right.” Arnott gritted his teeth and forced himself upright. Bending at the waist, he allowed the dumbbells to thump down onto the rubber mat. “I have to admit, they were starting to get a bit heavy,” he said ruefully. Then he looked quizzically at his visitor. “All right, what’s your big surprise?”
For a moment Sommers said nothing, just stood and looked down at his friend. For all that Paul Arnott was an Englishman of a long line of Englishmen, no one meeting him for the first time could help mistaking him for a “foreigner.” Even knowing him as he did, Sommers still occasionally regarded him that way. His looks were proud, hawkish, dark … Arabic. A man of the sands, a chief of wandering desert tribes, the son of a sheik, perhaps, or an educated emissary of the new, oil-rich Middle East—but surely not an Englishman.
He was English, however, and quite well-to-do; but much more important where Sommers was concerned, they shared a common interest. Along with the fact that they were both fairly young men, their mutual interest was the one thing they did share, for in everything else they might almost be opposites.
But in the three years of their acquaintance, a mutual fascination with Egyptology had made of them firm friends. Wilfred Sommers, following in the footsteps of his famous Egyptologist father, Sir George Sommers, was by profession an archeologist specializing in the NileValley; by contrast Paul Arnott was an “amateur” Egyptologist, albeit the most amazingly knowledgeable and controversial amateur one could possibly imagine. Certain of his theories concerning Ancient Egypt were, to say the very least, “unorthodox.”
“Well?” Arnott prompted his visitor again, staring up at him.
“Paul—now I mean this,” Sommers said. “I’m not joking at all. This thing might shock you.”
Arnott’s eyes searched the other’s face, then went to the large manila envelope he carried. “Is that it?”
Sommers nodded. “It is.”
“What’s in it?”
“Just a photograph.”
“A photograph is going to shock me?”
“It might. Certainly it will fascinate you.” Sommers handed the envelope over. “There you are, see for yourself.”
Arnott opened the envelope’s flap and pulled out a colored photograph.
Sommers watched his face as he studied the picture, a photograph of a beautifully worked funerary mask in glowing gold. At first Arnott’s face portrayed surprise__a little shock—then astonishment and disbelief. His mouth fell open and he turned his gaze once more upon his visitor.
“Paul?” Sommers crouched down and gripped the other’s shoulder. “What is it?”
“Sh’tarra!” Arnott finally gasped.
“What? What did you say, Paul?”
“I said—” Arnott shook his head. His eyes were very wide, misted almost. For a moment, they seemed to shine on another place, another time. Then they cleared. “I said ... Sh’tarra!”
“Is that a name, a place?”
“I … it’s a name,” and again he shook his head. “Wilf, where did you get this?”
“You’ve noticed the likeness, obviously.”
“Likeness? To Julie, you mean? My God, man, I’d have to be blind not to notice it!” He made to get to his feet and Sommers helped him. “And yet—”
“Yes?”
Again Arnott seemed to gaze into space and time. “It wasn’t just the likeness that stopped me. I don’t know what it was, really.” He shrugged half-apologetically. “Give me a hand, will you?”
He wore tracksuit trousers. Now, with Sommers’s assistance, he began to struggle into the jacket. Holding the jacket for him, his friend considered Arnott’s remarkable powers of recuperation (his accident had been a very bad one) and thought back on what he knew of the man, particularly of those unconventional “theories” of his.
For instance: Arnott shared the Russian magus Gurdjieff’s belief in an unrecorded, sophisticated pre-dynastic civilization which was as ancient to the Ancient Egyptians as they themselves were to the Greeks; and his firm conviction, without a shred of hard evidence, that indeed Egypt was the forgotten source of all Man’s wisdom, must surely place him alongside the most exotic or esoteric of theosophists and half-baked cultists and their apostles. And yet, Sommers knew that Paul Arnott was no crank.
His education and background alone were such as to preclude any suggestion of irresponsible quirkiness; his instinctive and deep knowledge of the accepted areas of his subject fully demonstrated his credibility as an authority; Sir George himself had made him a standing offer of work in the field based on his own estimation of the man’s ability, and accepted Egyptologists of more than merely perfunctory note had found occasion to seek his advice as an expert. All of which only served to highlight those areas where Arnott’s beliefs were less than orthodox.
He himself insisted upon his purely amateur status—no, not even that, he professed himself to have merely “an interest” in Ancient Egypt—but certain so-called “masters” in the field would give their eyeteeth to be able to learn those things which Paul Arnott seemed instinctively to know. He had his detractors, of course, and if he had ever attempted to project himself as a professional, then these would certainly have made profit of those peculiar anomalies in his reasoning concerning a much earlier Egypt. Sommers could readily understand why….
III
Memories out of Time
For example: Arnott was emphatic in his belief that the wheel had not been developed as a work tool but as a true wheel for use in conveyances and vehicles of war, specifically the chariot. Its war use, he said, must have preceded any domestic application by many centuries, though certainly it had been lost to Egypt’s armies by the time of the Hyrksos invasions.
He agreed that the entire area now falling within the boundaries of the Sahara, including all of Egypt and lands adjacent, had once been a green and fertile belt as recently as 7,000 years ec, but disagreed with current concepts which relied upon gradually changing weather conditions and declining rain patterns to account for the rapid encroachment of the deserts. According to Arnott, the dessication of the land had occurred much more speedily than that—in a matter of weeks or even days—when vast herds of elephants, ponies, buffalo, hippos, perhaps even Bos primigenius had been surprised by the sun no less rapidly than the Siberian mammoth, equally mysteriously, had once fallen prey to the ice.
He argued that the iron sword had not been introduced into the NileValley by invaders, but that they had simply re-introduced it. The use of iron in weapons had arisen in Egypt or a bordering land and had spread outwards; the original center had somehow “lost” the art of forging iron; and the iron sword had finally come back again thousands of years later with blood and fire and the black thunder of war.
The pyramids (according to Arnott) were not merely fantastic tombs, but were all examples or inferior copies of an earlier monument long ago destroyed or lost in vast ergs of drifted sand. He had it that the “original” Egyptians—or rather their rulers, Pharaohs of conjectural lineage—had built their pyramids for an entirely different reason, in imitation of something which had stood there in an even older epoch.