And then I hear her in a calmer mood saying matter-of-factly, “I know where the tomb of Nefertiti exists.”
When I open the pages of her diaries, I find evidence of a love that is beyond our normal definition of it: His Majesty came again last night. I was asleep and he woke me with many kisses.… Here was Sety, apparently flesh and blood, visiting his lover in her tiny garden, coming to her from his abode in Amenti, the strange interpenetrating world beyond that somehow allowed them to touch. And here was Omm Sety, a woman well past middle age, whom Sety still saw as the young girl he loved and lost and found again.
A number of years ago I had the privilege of collaborating with journalist and author Jonathan Cott on a book about Omm Sety’s life.* But, as always with a life so complex and layered, there is more to be told. In Omm Sety’s case, I feel I owe it to her and to history to tell the rest of her story, especially as it relates to the unsolved mysteries of Egypt’s past. I am joined in this present book by Catherine Dees, a friend and writer who shares my deep love of Egypt.
Our own friendship extends back nearly twenty years to a dinner party in Cairo where we were seated next to each other at a table with several Egyptologists, whom I knew very well. Catherine had been to Egypt twice before and was doing research for a historical novel. As she jokingly told my wife and me that evening, she was looking for an excuse to stay in Egypt and not have to return home to the “real world.”
At one point the conversation around us turned to the frustrating problems of archaeological exploration and the usefulness of some of the modern non-invasive techniques. A Japanese team had just been in Cairo to scan the Great Pyramid with a sophisticated sensing device, looking for hidden chambers.
One of the Egyptologists, an Englishman, made a doubting face. “If Omm Sety were still here I’d take her word for where things can be found, any day, over the most state-of-the-art equipment out there.” Others nodded.
It was a private opinion given in a private setting. Such blasphemy would never be uttered in public, no matter how much these scholarly men might have admired the mysterious ways of Omm Sety’s mind. Much of her knowledge had come from decidedly unscientific sources and could not be acknowledged as anything but intriguing speculation. But after a little wine around a convivial table they had to admit that Omm Sety knew things that no one could possibly know.
She had been gone seven years by then, but she had left a vivid imprint on many people’s lives, including mine. For the rest of the evening we took turns recalling some of her exploits and achievements. “I wish I could have known her,” Catherine said with obvious regret.
The following year I invited Catherine and two friends to join me on a driving trip to Abydos. She and I had been enjoying a brisk correspondence about Egyptian history and I had a feeling that my new friend could use some first-hand exposure to many of the things we had been talking about in our letters. We traveled south from modern Cairo into the heart of old Egypt, observing a way of life little changed from pharaonic days. We visited the site of Akhenaten’s sacred city of the sun at Amarna and lingered in the haunted ruins.
When we reached Abydos all of us could feel the looming presence of the distant escarpment called Pega. Entering the Sety Temple, we removed our shoes – out of respect, as Omm Sety always did. We took our time visiting every hall and court of the temple, admiring the beautiful sculptured figures of the gods to whom Omm Sety made her offerings on feast days, including “My Lady Isis.” This was a tour like the countless tours Omm Sety had given to anyone who wanted to understand the wonders of the temple.
At the end of one passage we faced the exterior wall of the Hall of the Sacred Barques – the room that once contained the ceremonial boats used in sacred processions for carrying the statues of the gods. The hall was closed. We peered through the iron grating in the heavy metal door. This was the domain of Omm Sety, her “office.” I asked one of the watchmen to ask the chief ghaffir* to bring the key and open the door for us to go inside. The ghaffir came in a hurry, apologizing earnestly for not having the key. “Omm Sety always had the key in a small handbag that she kept fixed around her waist,” he explained. “I think it must have been buried along with her.” We had no choice but to continue looking through the bars. There was the bench at which she used to sit to make her drawings of the temple fragments, with paper still on it and two unfinished colored scenes, the last things she had been working on.
We left the temple and came out into the open air. A few yards to the west, deep inside an enormous depression, is one of the most imposing, majestically serene monuments of ancient Egypt: the Osirion. We stood at the top looking down at the architectural wonder. Peace and a sense of the holy infused this place. I could imagine the frail form I had last seen eight years earlier, a few months before her death. Her presence was always powerful, even at the end. Omm Sety was with us here. As we left Abydos, Catherine said, “Now I feel that I’ve met her.”
When I decided to write this book, the memory of that visit came vividly to my mind. I asked Catherine to be my coauthor and she graciously accepted. In this book there will be two identifiable voices, Omm Sety’s and my own. This is only part of the truth. My co-author’s contribution has been substantial and invaluable.
I pray that Omm Sety is pleased with our efforts and is living in great joy with His Majesty in the heavenly halls of Amenti.
*European woman
*Jonathan Cott, The Search for Omm Sety, Doubleday, 1987, Warner, 1989
*watchman
ONE
The Way It Was
“If you could only imagine how beautiful it was.How can I tell you…?” OS
It is said that the Nile resembles a lotus plant, with its roots buried deep in the African continent and its flower opening into the broad delta far to the north. If you look at a map, it is very easy to make that small leap into symbolism. The ancients would have seen that and more, because for them the lotus had layers of meaning beyond simply its beautiful form. Modern culture is not always comfortable with blurring the lines between what we call “reality” and wishful thinking. But if you were living in the Egypt of 1300 BC, everything was more than it appeared. Every place you set your foot was filled with the energy of the neteru, the gods.
That was then, you could say, but even today there are signs of the old gods lingering among the ruined temples and shrines that lie along the river’s banks. When you leave the cities and go out into the countryside, if you know how to listen and observe, you find echoes of that distant past in the villages, though less and less now. Newer forms of religious devotions may have swept away the old, but the folk practices speak of an elder time – like women still leaving offerings before images of the goddess Hathor, praying for a son, and married couples reverently touching an ancient statue of Sekhmet for help with infertility.
Omm Sety knew only too well how the past can haunt the present.
Sometime in the early 1970s Omm Sety and I were sitting together in the small cafeteria near the Sety Temple when a group of French tourists arrived, filling all the empty tables. Someone turned on a cassette recorder and we heard the famous Franco-Egyptian singer Dalida crooning a melancholy Gypsy song in which a girl asks a handsome man,
And you, beautiful Gypsy prince –
