Chance Encounter in a Tomb

True story. At least, it's what I remember, and we know brains are funny creatures.

The story starts in 1977, when King Tut's treasures finally came to rest in our part of the country. Nowadays, a major exhibit leaving one country and traveling to another is not as big a deal, most of the red tape is dealt with quietly behind the scenes and politics are kept to a minimum. The 1970's? Cold war, us versus the rest of the world? This was a Heaping Pile of Big Deal, and I, the daughter of people who trained to be archeologists (but got real-world jobs as a teacher and blue collar worker respectively), wanted to go soooo bad I could taste it. But my parents had to work. You *never* take off work for frivolous matters, never ever. I was heartbroken.

My grandmother, who did work as an archeologist for a time (and cursed out her toxic male boss in seven languages, only three of which were still spoken, when his arrogance spilled out of his....er...mouth), decided that she would take me to Philly to see it. Joy!

But, she was a strange creature. My grandmother decided she'd like to see it on her own first. And the day she chose, unfortunately, was the same day that Jimmy Carter chose to take a day off from running the free world and stuff, and tour the exhibit himself. The entire building was shut down for his private tour (and safety, of course). And this angered my grandmother so much that when she finally went on the day we were to go together, she totally forgot about taking me along.

You can imagine the scene that played out when my parents got home to find a sobbing kid sitting on their couch, dressed up, alone, with no souvenirs of what was supposed to be a glorious trip. I don't know what was said behind closed doors, between themselves or to my grandmother, but what was said to me was a flippant promise: "Don't worry about it, honey, we'll take you to Egypt, and you'll see the whole tomb in the museum!" (Then they fed me. A lot. Being alone all day with no adult to make food for you makes for a hungry child.)

Listen to me, parents everywhere - the power of a promise made to a little kid is never forgotten.

Fast forward about seven-eight years, sitting in church, and the pastor announces a trip to the holy lands. Two weeks in Israel, and then south to Egypt, and the first day there we'll tour Egypt's National Museum....

I didn't hear the rest. My head snapped sideways to stare full-on at my mom - which is pretty impressive, since we're both supposed to be staring straight ahead in pews - and she just sighed in defeat and bowed her head. She remembered, too.

My parents keep their promises, even when they're inconvenient. Or expensive.

I didn't leave drool prints on each and every case in the museum, especially the Tutankhamun wing, but I did leave a whole lotta fingerprints everywhere. The guards were unhappy, but they really didn't want to burst my bubble, seeing a tween-something American looking positively incandescent as she stared at All The Things. Even the reed sandals, and the wigs, and the incense cones. Not just the gold and jewelry and shiny-pretty stuff; even the everyday stuff has an important story to tell. I wanted to drink it all in.

The weirdness didn't happen till the day after.

We didn't have time to tour the Valley of Kings, so a quick drive-by of Djoser's step pyramid and the Great Pyramids would have to do.

The camel should have warned me. Maybe he did?

One of the tourist traps is the Camel Ride Experience. You step out of your tour bus, and get wafted immediately onto a camel for a short trip up to the pyramids. Neat, huh? Except that, well, critters and I have a bizarre relationship...I'll try to quietly observe, and they'll do all sorts of batstick behavior that makes everyone else mutter "Funny, I've never seen them act *that* way before." Every. Single. Time. Follow me around zoos, or get on a sightseeing boat with me, and watch the show. Get extra "random acts of crazed animal" insurance while you do so. (A whale tried to bop me out of a boat once as I tried to get its picture from the pulpit, the very tip of the prow. The whole ship jiggled with its laughter when it resubmerged. Two cetologists stared at me for the rest of the trip, wondering what I did in a former life to tick off the whale gods. Again, absolute truth. But I digress.)

Back to the camel. That camel was having the dromedarian equivalent of a bad hair day, or something. Didn't want to walk, didn't want Little Miss Foreigner on its back, didn't want to be within five hundred miles of a desert that day. It groaned, it whined, it humphed (as only a camel can) and slumped and grumphed. And just as we got to the disembarkation zone, it whipped around with teeth bared and tried to rip my kneecap off. It missed by millimeters.

I didn't have to tip the driver. He was too busy beating the camel to take it anyway, and I slid off the far side and wobbled off to my parents and the rest of the group.

From there, we got back on the bus to go to the tomb of Ptah-Hotep. Can't remember whose priest he was, or if he even got to enjoy his tomb, because it was in an unfinished state. Perfect for tourists whose breath might destroy some of the other more fragile tombs of the higher-ups. No gold leaf, no lapis paint, but a really cool ramp that formed the long stem of a T-shaped tomb. The hieroglyphs were beautifully carved and painted at the bottom of the ramp, but the closer you got to the entrance, the more they faded to bare sketches on the wall in reddish ink marks. You truly did feel like you were stepping back in time, the farther you walked down the ramp.

Funny that I would describe it that way...

I was right behind the guide, a cheerful local Muslim man who would shepherd flocks of tourists like ours through this particular tomb for a living. Our group, about as white Anglo-Saxon Protestant as they come, was cheerfully gabbling away in the middle of the ramp as they peered at the carvings in the light of the flashlight and tomb entrance. I remember looking back at them from near the right side wall.

And it started to get cold. Really, really cold.

The light dimmed from the entrance. It was as if a cloud had suddenly blocked the sun. In the Eastern Desert, a subset of the Sahara. Sure.

A blob of grayness formed near the entrance. I could see my breath, and the hair on the back of my arms stood up. From the cold, I think, not the eerieness. Fear came much, much later, when I looked back on what happened.

The grayness grew, and concentrated itself, and coalesced into - Anubis. Egyptian god of judging the dead.

He was walking down the ramp, in classic Egyptian pose. Arms straight at the sides of his hips, palms flat, kilt of crisp white linen. Skin black as night, dark eyes that stared straight ahead. I could see the individual hairs on his ears, the sheen on his skin as if his body was made of obsidian. The body faded out near the knees, though, I thought it strange that wisps of the gray fog drifted away like they weren't important. He seemed more real than everything else, more solid, and we were the grayed-out spirit world, even without his lower legs. He walked through the tour group like they weren't there, down to the bottom of the ramp, turned left, and vanished in the dark.

I found myself flat against the wall. The guide's warning about not disturbing anything was still in my head, so I didn't touch the wall at all, but if there was one molecule of air between me and the paint on the hieroglyphs, I'd call you a liar. Then I looked to my right, and the poor guide was right aside of me, in the same exact pose. We stared at each other, wondering if we just saw what we think we saw.

He was so pale it looked like he lost his tan. We just stared. What do you say? What could a local Muslim say to an American Christian, half a world away from what she knows? What did *he* see, coming down the ramp? Last I checked, neither of our religions believes in the old gods of Egypt, much less sees one walk past like it's a busy downtown street.

It was like we weren't even there. Anubis never looked at us. Thinking about it, it was as if he took a shortcut through space and time to get somewhere or somewhen, and the shaft of a tomb just happened to be the best method.

The poor guide babbled his way through the rest of the tour, though he did snap the flashlight on and shine it down the left side passage as he led us into the right side one. He got us out of his hair as quickly as he could, and safely onto our bus and out of his life.

I have never felt so out of time, and place, and even like I was on the wrong planet, for just a moment. And every time I've thought of it since.

The implications for my life have been profound. Have I changed my faith? In some ways - not who, but how. It has certainly had made me question bombastic fools who like to say "God said this" or "God wants you to do this or that." Really? On whose authority? I now know for certain what a higher being looks like. Charisma doesn't hold a candle to what I experienced. Unless I see someone shining with divine light (well, okay, then too), I take a hard look at what they say and do. Do actions match words? Are they saying things to soothe or inflame the crowd? Are they phoning it in for the paycheck? Being cynical, and fact checking, doesn't make me bitter. But humans better not demand blind obedience from me, because they're really barking up the wrong tree.

Shakespeare was right, when he had Hamlet speak those famous words: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Indeed.