“Here, take this dagger, if ever you dare… and this will remind you of me if a miracle happens and you gain your liberty.” Yakhmos placed a smooth, cold object in Pandion’s hand.
“What’s that? What do I want it for?” “It’s a stone I found in the underground rooms of an old temple hidden amongst the rocks.”
Yakhmos, glad of an opportunity to forget the present in reminiscences of the past, told Pandion of a mysterious old temple that he had come across, during his search for rich tombs, at a bend in the Great River many thousands of cubits below the “City,” the capital, Waset.
Yakhmos had noticed traces of an old path that led to steep cliffs from the shore of a small cove densely overgrown with rushes. The place was far from any village and was never visited by anybody since there was nothing to interest the farmer or the shepherd in those barren, rocky cliffs.
There was no danger in continuing his search and Yakhmos immediately plunged into a narrow canyon strewn with huge boulders. The boulders covered the path and had apparently fallen after it had ceased to serve as a means of communication with the river-bank. For a long time Yakhmos roamed amongst the rocks, hollows washed out by water, and thorn bushes. The canyon was swarming with spiders and their webs, stretching across the path, clung to the perspiring face of the plunderer of royal tombs.
At last the canyon widened to form an enclosed valley amidst the high hills. In the middle there was a small eminence surrounded by double rows of irrigation ditches — apparently there had formerly been a spring there that was used to water the gardens. Silence reigned in the gloom of that stifling, windless valley around which gleaming black cliffs rose in a solid wall. At the far end there was another narrow canyon similar to that by which Yakhmos had entered a place forgotten by all.
The tomb robber climbed up a hill and from there noticed an entry cut in the cliffside that had been hidden before by the eminence. The entry was blocked by fallen stones and Yakhmos had to work for a long time before he could get inside. At last he found himself in the cool darkness of a cave. After he had rested a little, he lit the lamp that he always carried with him and made his way along a high corridor, carefully examining the statues on either side, afraid of cunning traps that threatened him with a tormenting death. His fears, however, were unfounded: either the old-time builders had not prepared any traps, relying on the remoteness of the temple to keep it from the eyes of strangers, or the thousands of years that had elapsed had rendered the traps ineffective. Without any hindrance Yakhmos entered a big, round underground chamber in the centre of which was a statue of the god Thoth, his long beak stretching down from the height of his pedestal. In the walls Yakhmos found ten narrow slits of doorways, arranged at equal distances round the chamber. They led to rooms filled with half-rotted objects: scrolls, papyri and wooden tablets covered with drawings and inscriptions. One of the rooms was filled with dried grasses that turned to dust the moment he touched them; in another lay a pile of stones. In this way Yakhmos inspected eight of the rooms, all of them square, without finding anything that interested him. The ninth doorway lea Yakhmos into a long room surrounded by granite columns. Between the columns were slabs of black diabase covered with writing in the ancient language of Tha-Quem. In the middle of this room stood another statue of the long-beaked, ibis-headed god Thoth; in a flat bronze bowl on the pedestal of the idol lay a precious stone that glittered in the light of the lamp. Yakhmos seized it avariciously, brought it close to the light — and could not restrain an exclamation of disappointment. The stone was not of those that were valued in Tha-Quem. The experienced eye of the tomb robber immediately told him that the stone would be of no value to the merchants. The strange thing was, however, that the more he looked at the stone, the more it pleased him. It was a blue-green fragment of crystal about the size of a spearhead, flat, polished and unusually transparent. Yakhmos grew interested and resolved to read the writing on the walls hoping to find an explanation of the stone’s origin. He still had not forgotten the ancient language of Tha-Quem that he had learned in the school for chief scribes, and set about deciphering hieroglyphs that were in a splendid state of preservation on the hard diabase. There was little air in the underground chamber, the ventilation channels had long since collapsed, the lamp began to burn low, but still Yakhmos read stubbornly on. Gradually the story of a great deed of valour, performed shortly after the building of the Great Pyramid of Cheops, was unfolded before this professional tomb robber. Pharaoh Jedephra (Jedephra — a Pharaoh of the IV Dynasty (2877–2869 B.C.). sent his treasurer Baurjed on an expedition far to the south, to Tha-Nuter, the Land of Spirits, to discover the bounds of the earth and of the Great Arc, the ocean. Baurjed left from the harbour of Suu, on the Blue Waters, (Blue Waters — the Red Sea. Suu — the modern El-Qoseir.) on seven of the biggest ships. For seven years the sons of the Black Land were absent. Half of the men and four of the ships were lost in terrible storms on the Great Arc, but the others sailed on and on to the south, along unknown coasts, until they eventually reached the fabulous Land of Punt. Pharaoh’s orders, however, drove them still farther south. They had to find the end of the earth. The sons of the Black Land left their ships and continued their way south overland.
For more than two years they continued their journey through dark forests, crossed gigantic plains and high mountains — the home of the lightning — and, by the time their strength was almost exhausted, reached a big river on which lived a powerful people, builders of stone temples. Here they discovered that the end of the earth was still immeasurably distant — far, far away to the south, across plains of blue grass and through forests of silver-leaved trees. It was there, beyond the ends of the earth, that the Great Arc flowed, the ocean, whose bounds were known to no man. The travellers, realizing that they were helpless to carry out Pharaoh’s orders to the letter, returned to the Land of Punt and built and equipped a new ship in place of their old ones, worm-eaten and battered by storms on the Great Arc. There were scarcely enough survivors to man one ship. The bold adventurers, however, loaded the vessel with gifts from Punt and set out on their unbelievably difficult journey. The urge to return to their native land lent them strength — they conquered wind and waves, sandstorms and submerged rocks, hunger and thirst and returned to the harbour of Sun in the Blue Waters seven years after their departure.
Much had changed in the Black Land: the new Pharaoh, the ruthless Khafre, made the country forget everything except the building of a second gigantic pyramid that was to exalt his name for thousands of years. The return of the travellers was quite unexpected and Pharaoh was disappointed to learn that the earth and the ocean were immeasurable and that the peoples inhabiting the regions to the south were numerous and strong. Baurjed showed Pharaoh, who considered himself the ruler of the world, that the Land of Quemt was nothing but a tiny corner of a huge world, abounding in forests and rivers, fruits and animals, and inhabited by numerous peoples skilled in all manner of work and hunting.
The wrath of Pharaoh descended upon the travellers and Baurjed’s companions were exiled to distant provinces.” It was forbidden, on pain of death, to make any mention of the journey; passages in the writings left by Jedephra where the dispatch of the expedition southwards to the Land of Spirits was mentioned, were all expunged. Baurjed himself would have been a victim of the wrath of Pharaoh and all memory of his journey would have disappeared for all time, had it not been for a wise old priest of Thoth, the god of learning, art and writing. This was the priest who had inspired the dead Pharaoh to investigate the bounds of the earth and seek new sources of wealth for a country that had become impoverished by the building of a huge pyramid. He was forced to leave the court of the new Pharaoh by the priests of Ra (Ra — the sun god, chief deity of the Egyptians in the Pyramid period.) and helped the traveller by offering him asylum in a hidden Temple of Thoth where secret books, plans and samples of stones and plants from distant lands were stored. On the orders of the priest, Baurjed’s great journey was recorded on stone slabs so that it might be preserved in an unapproachable underground chamber until such times as the country stood in need of that knowledge. Baurjed brought a blue-green transparent stone, unknown to the people of Tha-Quem, from the most distant land he reached beyond the great southern river. Such stones were obtained in the Land of the Blue Plains, three months journey south of the great river. Baurjed offered this symbol of the extreme ends of the earth to the god Thoth — this was the stone Yakhmos had taken from the pedestal of the statue.