a mysterious, vital tension. Sir G. Elliot Smith, the famous anatomist, took special note of Sety’s appearance in his 1912 book, The Royal Mummies. It was, he wrote, “one of the most perfect examples of manly dignity displayed in a mummy that has come from ancient Egypt.”
It was that face that Dorothy Eady held in her heart. The rest of the memories hadn’t begun to unfold yet, but they would.
*Set was not always a symbol of evil. While it was Set who slew his brother Osiris, Set was also the god of the desert and was called the Great-of-Strength. As such, he was the patron of the military.
*by Omm Sety and Hanny el Zeini, LL Company, 1981
FOUR
Signs of Egypt Everywhere
“We were – King Sety and I – on the verge of startingan odyssey of some sort.” OS
London, 1920. Ever since Sety’s appearance to her two years earlier, Dorothy had been having a recurring dream. It excited her and disturbed her deeply, and she knew it was true. She was an Egyptian girl and she was lying on a woven mat in a very large room with other women and girls. It was night. Then the dream would shift to another room, this one underground, with a channel of water flowing around the perimeter. It was a very sacred place, she knew, but she had not been brought here to take part in a ritual. She was being confronted by an austere man in high priest’s garb, and there were others in the room too, looking at her as if in judgment. The man was beating her because she would not tell him what he demanded. Nothing could make her say what he wanted her to say, and the beating continued. When she woke she would be drenched in sweat and screaming, and the family would know that Dorothy had had another of “those dreams.”
Dorothy was now 16, pursuing her independent studies and living at home. England was not where she wanted to be, but for the time being it would have to do.
The war had taken an awful toll on the country in every way. For Dorothy’s father, a master tailor, it meant a drastic falling-off of his previously well-heeled clientele. But Reuben Eady saw it as a chance to re-invent himself and do something he had always dreamed of. Off and on through the years he had performed on stage as a juggler and magician; not that he had been able to make a living at it, but he knew a thing or two about music halls and theaters, and he loved them. His wife, Caroline, had already put up with a lot from her eccentric little family, so when Reuben came home one day and announced that he had just closed his shop for good she could only look at him and sigh, “What next?”
He didn’t really know, exactly. He had ideas in his head, something to do with the newly emerging cinema industry. He could imagine having his own theater. But before he decided on anything he had to give himself some breathing space, take the family on a trip, look around the British Isles to see where the opportunities lay. If Caroline initially resisted the plan, Dorothy didn’t; she didn’t need convincing to set off on an adventure into the unknown.
Early in the Eady family’s exploratory tour, as they were driving west through the Wiltshire countryside, they stopped at Stonehenge. Of course Dorothy had seen pictures of it before, but to be standing right there, with the morning light casting eerie shadows over the great towering stones – there was something so Egyptian about it all, she thought. To her eyes the roughly shaped obelisks had been arranged into a temple for worshipping the sun, like the obelisks of Egypt. She was sure there must have been an “Egyptian intervention” here.
While her parents strolled, Dorothy’s curiosity led her to a nearby group of Bronze Age barrows and graves. Catching a glint of color at her feet, she bent down and picked up a handful of earth that contained a number of blue and green particles, and she shouted for her mother and father to come quickly to see what she had found. When the Eadys looked at her discovery they were not impressed, but Dorothy knew what she had: Egyptian mummy beads, and she was right. She was not the first person to have found mummy beads in the area of Stonehenge, or even scarabs. At the very least they were proof of ancient trade between the Mediterranean and the British Isles, not to mention even more intriguing possibilities.
She carefully placed her finds in a small box, intending to add this new treasure to her tiny collection of Egyptian artifacts that had made their way into her hands. Egypt seemed to be constantly reminding her that sooner or later she would board a ship heading for the Black Land. She felt stranded in the British Isles. There was so much yet to know, so much she couldn’t truly understand until she had kissed the precious soil of Egypt and begun to unravel the mystery of herself.
The family tour did not interrupt her study of Egyptology; there were modest museums and libraries all along the way. The science of Egyptology was still in its infancy, but a prodigious quantity of publications about Egyptian history and archaeology were streaming onto the book market, written by world famous pioneers such as J. H. Breasted, Hermann Junker and Dr. Budge. As much as Dorothy appreciated their work – and Dr. Budge’s especial kindness to her – there was one Egyptologist who warranted her highest esteem: W. Flinders Petrie (he would be knighted in 1923 for his work). On this giant of archaeology she bestowed her silent adoration for his meticulous attention to the protocols of excavation. In fact, he created many of the modern protocols, including systematic surveying methods and the use of seriation* to date sites and the artifacts found with them. Dorothy was interested in Flinders Petrie for another reason as well: He was the first archaeologist to dig in the early dynasty tombs in the ancient burial fields of Abydos.
I once asked Omm Sety what school of archaeology she belonged to, and she promptly replied, “First of all, I belong to the school of life, but if you are asking me specifically about excavating technique, my answer would be, I belong to the Flinders Petrie school.”
More and more, Abydos haunted her thoughts and dreams, and not because Abydos was famous; it wasn’t. Few people outside the Egyptological fraternity cared very much about Professor Petrie’s excavations at Abydos. His discoveries in Thebes and Memphis, Dendera and Giza were far more glamorous to the average Briton in the 1920s. At that time there weren’t even many Egyptians who had heard of Abydos. But thousands of years ago every Egyptian dreamed of making a pilgrimage to Abydos to witness the ancient passion play and see the blessed Lady Isis and Lord Osiris.
Isis in Plymouth
Reuben Eady’s instincts told him he could make a go of it as a movie house impresario, and the port city of Plymouth seemed just the place. With his head fairly bursting with original ideas for such a venture he found the financing to set himself up in business.
His New Palladium Theatre was popular from the day it opened. He showed silent films and staged theatrical events that he wrote and directed. Often he featured his daughter, who would come out in costume and sing popular songs of the day in her high soprano voice. She was not always an enthusiastic participant in these musical interludes at the New Palladium; she was drawn to another kind of performance entirely.
Dorothy was part of a little theater group that once put on a play based on the story of Isis and Osiris. To anyone who knew of her obsession with Egypt it was no surprise that she took the role of Isis. When it came time for her to sing the words of the ancient Lament for the death of Osiris, she didn’t use the music from the prepared score, but instead set the words to a melody she had sung over and over to herself when she was a child in London. The crooning melody had been in her head for as long as she could recall, and now she applied it to the rhyming lines that the writer Andrew Lang had adapted from a translation of the old hieroglyphic text. It begins with these words:
