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Dr Duck drinks his fill of the Queen’s beauty Nefertiti’s feet and looking up adoringly at the queen. Gnose swung a torch across the walls and we saw even more penguins in friezes with Nefertiti in household and outdoor exploits.
Former Echo drudge Michael McDonald has not been entirely idle in his retirement; he has been editing the memoirs of the noted herpetologist Dr Edwin J Duck. What follows is an excerpt.
I
t was while we were in Egypt to research the Egyptian cobra, Naja haje, the snake that in August 30BC allegedly killed Cleopatra – though she also kept a dose of poison in a jewelled hairpin – that a member of the Muslim Brotherhood attempted to silence the secular voice of the great reformer, Gamal Abdel Nasser Hussein, known generally as Nasser, who at the time was a lieutenant colonel. Mahmoud Abdel-Latif fired eight shots at Nasser while he was giving a speech at Alexandria. All eight shots missed, which is a terrible record from only eight metres away. We were in Cairo at the time and missed the excitement. I had sent my faithful retainer Roger Wolff to the souk in search of hashish when the news came on the radio. Nasser’s rallying call to the masses after the pitiful attempt at murder was electrifying. The less of the gods and the more of the real world the better, I thought, though my research later led me into the path of demigods in unexpected ways.
Daffodils dance like young women Reliable Roger returned with the hashish, an import from Lebanon, and we were joined in our rooms high above Al Haram by Prof Joseph Gnose, a keen archeologist whose family made its fortune in textiles, leaving him free to meander from dig to dig on all continents, and sometimes on a lonely island. Roger packed the hookah bowl, we settled back with our individual pipes and, through the bubbling water, drew in fragrant smoke and dreams. Roger had purchased well. With every inhalation the bliss grew stronger, waves of ecstasy mingled with moments of revelation. The wallpaper of the room – I usually rented rooms with wallpaper – was decorated with a peculiar, somewhat faded pattern of daffodils and torch lilies. As the drug took hold, the flowers began to move and sway – in my mind at least. The daffodils, with their bright yellow heads, danced like young women practising
Eurythmy, Steiner’s pathetic art so lampooned by DH Lawrence. Their movements were far more wanton than those of Wordsworth’s swaying beauties. As the effects of the hashish began to lessen, Roger fetched iced lemon water and raisin cake. ‘I say,’ said Gnose, crumbs decorating his beard, ‘I meant to tell you of an exciting new find. ‘You know that for some years now I have been visiting Amarna and the site of Akhenaten’s royal temple. Well, only the other day we broke through into a room that has gone unnoticed for millennia!’ ‘How exciting for you,’ I said. ‘What did you find there?’ ‘Rather than tell you,’ replied Gnose, ‘I thought we could hop into my car and go there tomorrow.’ At the civilised hour of 10 the next morning we three climbed into Gnose’s tan Rolls Royce Phantom II Continental, which if not for its ostentation would have blended almost perfectly with the desert. We headed south for several hours, the vast expanse of sand on our left in stark contrast to the tilled fields on our right, watered by the Nile courtesy of the shaduf. Occasionally a felucca, laden with goods, would sail by, and now and then we would see a tourist-infested sidewheel paddle steamer of the kind Mrs Christie described in her 1937 detective fiction Death On The Nile. The river has seen many more deaths since then, and many wicked secrets are hidden beneath its waters.
Fascinated with the sun ‘Akhenaten is peculiar in that he abandoned polytheism, is that not so?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ replied Gnose. ‘He became fascinated with the sun, the Aten, and erected several temples dedicated to it. Later on Christian evangelists, with the aid of Hollywood, attempted to depict Akhenaten as a convert to their god, but there is no reason to think so. Theories abound on his fascination with the sun. Obviously the ancient Egyptians understood its importance to agriculture.’
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Penguin of possibility
A colossal statue of Akhenaten from his Aten Temple at Karnak. Photo Egyptian Museum of Cairo/Wikimedia Commons
Aten’s adored sunlight was a bit too much for me in the confines of a luxury vehicle hour after hour and I was indeed glad when we arrived in a cloud of dust at the Royal Wadi in Amarna. Though ravaged by time and flood the stone temples were still magnificent. Gnose took us down a flight of twenty steps into the royal tomb, past rooms left unfinished by long-dead masons. The main corridor continued to descend and we arrived in a pillared chamber. ‘This is the burial chamber,’ said Gnose, ‘where sat the sarcophagus of Akhenaten, protected by the sun-disks of Aten. It was decorated by carvings of Nefertiti acting as a protective goddess.’ We breathed it all in silently for a while, the life and culture travelling as art and memory down more than two thousand years to us. ‘And now to this.’ Gnose was visibly excited. He touched a carving of a lotus on one of the ornate pillars and a section of the chamber wall shuddered and swung slowly open, revealing another room. We entered, and stood in awe. Before us was a life-size statue of Nefertiti, looking even more gorgeous than in the iconic limestone bust created by Thutmose and now in the Neues Museum in Berlin. We supposed this work, too, was by Thutmose, the king’s favourite at Armana.
Nefertiti was seated on a golden throne decorated with lotuses. Even more surprising, however, was the limestone penguin standing at
‘Penguins!’ exclaimed Roger. ‘How is this possible?’ ‘We have a few theories,’ replied Gnose. ‘Trading sailors might have brought the royal court a penguin or penguins from cooler climes. More radical still is the idea that penguins might have abounded in the Mediterranean when the weather was cooler, which could have been the case in Nefertiti’s day.’ ‘Extraordinary,’ I said. ‘What now for this room?’ ‘I shall report it to the Egyptian antiquities bureau and hope it might be preserved,’ said Gnose. ‘There is no guarantee it will not be looted or Nefertiti traded into the hands of a rich American who understands the value of ashaan ad-dukhaan.’ After we had drunk our fill of the queen’s beauty we piled
Q Footnote: Surprisingly, Dr Duck seems to be correct about the presence of penguins in ancient Egypt. In a 1992 report by Marlise Simons in the New York Times (http://nyti.ms/2j1fdjN) she noted that researchers found prehistoric rock paintings of penguins in a cave deep inside a cliff on the edge of the Mediterranean at Cap Morgiou, some 12 kilometres southeast of Marseilles. ‘Its murals have surprised specialists,’ wrote Simons, ‘because they include drawings of seals and penguins, the first images of such sea creatures ever found in western Europe’s prehistoric caves. ‘Seals still exist here today but the penguins are an unusual souvenir from an era when much of Europe was under ice and the Mediterranean was a chilly region with a climate more like today’s Scandinavia.’
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1954: From Cairo to Amarna
into the Roller and made our long way back to Cairo. Once there it was cool showers and colder drinks all round, followed by a rejuvenating session at the hookah and a long sleep.
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The Byron Shire Echo December 20, 2017 53