Modern man is not fascinated by ancient Egypt without good reason. The Nile Civilisation is not only interesting because of its age but because of its mystery. Who can completely answer the riddle of the Sphinx, even today? What strange mysteries are still buried among the measurements of the Great Pyramid? How many wonders are yet incarcerated in the Valley of the Kings?
Johnny Cole and Chris Saunders set out for the Eye Temple at Luxor. The discovered evidence of a strange cult, hitherto quite unsuspected. The search took them to Thebes and beyond. From Necropolis to Necropolis they traced the terrifying ancient truth to learn at last that the Eye-god still lived, deadly, ruthless, malevolent.
Would twentieth century weapons work on a being older than time itself?
If not, how did a mortal fight against an evil deity?
Release date:
June 30, 2014
Publisher:
Orion Publishing Group
Print pages:
320
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Among its many mysteries, perhaps one of the most fascinating of all the Egyptian relics at Luxor was the mysterious Eye Temple. Amidst all the customary figures of ancient Egyptian mystery and magic, there gazes down upon the visitor an Eye. A hideous eye: it is strangely coloured and incredibly realistic in its workmanship. It is difficult to believe that countless centuries must have passed since that strange optic orb was frozen by the skill of some devil-inspired craftsman onto the wall of the temple … the pigments have almost defied Time. The eye has mellowed and matured; it had not decayed.
Upon the capitols of the columns surrounding the Eye are colossal fetishes of the goddess Hathor. There are also garish representations painted and carved in rather frightening colours of Mu and Atun. It seems as though all the gods of mythology have somehow found their way into the Eye temple. Here are rather derogatory images of Ra, as though they were meant to be caricatures of that great divinity.
Khepri and Shu are also depicted, yet all of them seem to be in some kind of artistic subservience to the Eye. Here are Tefnut and Amher, beside Geb, or as he is sometimes known, Seb or Keb. Nut, whom the Greeks used to identify with Rhea is also depicted. Even the great Osiris, and the mighty Isis are somewhat bereft of dignity in the presence of that great Eye. No historian has ever explained it satisfactorily. No archaeologist has ever uncovered its mysteries.
Here, engraved upon tablets of timeless stone, is the falcon-headed Horus; and Set is shown with the head of the Typhonian animal. Nephthys, with his sinister, funereal qualities, seems to be weeping strangely crocodile-like tears …
And there is a very primitive representation, just below the Eye, of Harmakhis, the great Sphinx of Gizeh. Here, too, are Haroeris Harakhtes, and Behdety, some of these gods showing decidedly Greek influences, others seeming to go back to the most primitive period in Egyptian history. The idea has been put forward from time to time that the Eye Temple of Luxor was nothing more than an ideological, or archaeological hoax, on a par, perhaps, with the discredited Piltdown Skull. And yet what hoaxer could deceive the experts for so long? Deceive the experts, perhaps; but what hoaxer could deceive the memory—tribal memory, racial memory almost, of the villagers? The oldest living inhabitants remembered that the Eye Temple had been old when they themselves were children, and they remembered that their grandfathers had spoken of it. It was a place of dread, a place of terror, a place of fear. There were no worshippers in the Eye Temple.
The Eye looked down on its craggy domain, surveying scornfully all that passed before it.
The gaze of that great orb seemed fixed on distant horizons, as though the walls of the Temple surrounding it were no barrier at all to its gaze. That, perhaps, was one of the most terrifying things about it.
It was night; dark, terrifying night. Night as it can only fall in Egypt; night as it can only fall across the ruins of ancient temples and necropoli; night, as it can be, a black, velvet terror and not a friendly herald of Morpheus. The Egyptian night of the ancient burial chambers, and of the timeless sands of the desert, was a dreadful thing; a hideous, frightening thing. Night was a living black monster whose first touch, like the first touch of the sundew that engulfs the insect, was gentle and somehow, sickly sweet. Then, with inexorable, relentless pressure, night seemed to close in upon the sleeping country.
Yet, the great eye on the temple wall glared out, as though light and darkness were all one to its time defying delineation.
Below this temple, in the darkness, glared another eye, but this one was flesh and blood. There was only one, for the other had been closed by a gunshot wound that had been intended to end the life of its owner. It was the eye of Mustapha Yusef that glared into the night below the temple. Mustapha would have been a giant had he not been a hunchback. His spine was twisted and deformed, and his shoulders were a great, rounded, knotted mass of muscle and vertebrae. His long arms trailed and dangled to the very floor, to the ground upon which he stood. His knuckles grazed the ground as he walked, like some gross, misshapen quadruped, rather than a human being.
In the belt below Mustapha’s robes was a knife, a most unpleasant looking, wickedly-curved knife, a knife that was hooked and barbed, as though it had been fashioned by the evil genius of a supreme knife-craftsman from the infernal regions. It was a torturer’s knife, a killer’s knife, not the clean, straight-bladed knife of the hunter, not the sharp, ruthless blade of a political assassin, who does at least strike with cause and with purpose, however misguided it may be. This was a sadistic knife, a perverted knife; a knife that was as twisted and repulsive as its owner. There was more terror in those barbed, curved prongs than in a hundred bayonets.
Besides the knife, Mustapha carried a gun. From his robes one might romantically expect the deformed one-eyed man to carry one of those picturesque, ornately carved Arabian rifles but this was not the case. The gun was very efficient, very modern, very up-to-date. How Mustapha had come by it was a long, and rather sinister story. The fact was that he possessed it, and the fact did not bode very much for the rest of humanity; for with or without a gun or knife, Mustapha was a singularly unsavoury specimen.
The eye in the temple, and the eye in the head of the killer continued to glare out into the darkness. The ears on either side of the hunchback’s hideous, scarred head were listening to the night, like the ears of some nocturnal beast of prey.
There was a faint sound from the narrow path across the ravine below him. It was a treacherous path, one that scarcely anybody would take in broad daylight let alone at night! By the certainty of the steps, Mustapha Yusef felt thoroughly convinced, and more than usually confident, that the user of the path was the man whom he expected. He listened again his ears supplying him with an audible image of the maker of the sound. One set of feet walked swiftly, firmly; there were others that did not walk so swiftly, did not walk so firmly, the others stumbled, tripped, slithered upon the dangerous ground, and as he continued to listen, Mustapha Yusef caught the clinking of a chain.
He heaved what might have been a sigh of relief in a normal human being. It was his apology for such a sound, the nearest his misshapen lungs and larynx could get to the appropriate noise. All the same, almost entirely convinced as he was, he still gave the challenge:
“Is that you, master?”
Silence for a second, then another voice: a voice that was as deep and powerful as the boom of a gun. A voice that sounded like thunder and erupting volcanoes singing a duet, it was the voice of Abdul Raschid.
“It is I, misshapen fool! Who else would it be upon this path by night?”
The moon rose unexpectedly from behind the mountain and illumined a scene that brought gasps of fear and terror from the chained captives that were following Abdul Raschid along the path.
“Silence, fools, or Mustapha will kill you!” snarled Abdul. As though to emphasise his master’s words, Mustapha drew the devilish knife and flashed it in the air. It gleamed in the moonlight. The gasps of the chained prisoners died away like magic. The eyes of Yusef the hunchback travelled along the line.
“There are six, master,” he commented.
“I know there are six, fool! There should have been more, bu. . .
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