couldn’t have known that they could trust the young girl with their secrets. Even years later she couldn’t explain why the Gypsy clan near her grandmother’s farm should have left such an indelible mark on her life.
Dorothy received an unexpected letter from Dr. Budge. There were only a few lines, the old man asking his student prodigy how she was doing in the village and encouraging her to keep up her studies. It showed a grandfatherly regard for his perplexing and amusing child-scholar. Since the British Museum was closed for the duration of the war and Dr. Budge’s letter had no return address, she knew it was futile to try to escape from the farm and go to London. But it was certainly in her mind to do it if she could have.
During the war, Sussex suffered almost nothing from the incessant air raids over the British Isles. The comparative peace gave Dorothy a unique opportunity to read and to explore the depths of her thoughts and perceptions. It was a time also when she became increasingly aware of her inexplicable power to “see” events taking place hundreds of miles away.
“My real problem,” she said later, “was those horrible dreams in which I could clearly see pictures of what was going on at the Western Front. It was as though some part of me left my body and traveled far away to become a sort of war correspondent. Oh, Lord, how I hated those dreams, because they never failed to come true.”
Twenty young men from the village had been recruited to serve in the army. Dorothy knew many of them from years of summer holidays there with her family. Some of the soldiers she saw in her terrifying dreams were boys she knew from those summers.
Once in a dream she watched a boy named Ralph being blown to pieces in the Somme Valley. He never came back. In her sleep she was helpless as she saw another young man, Robert, lose his left leg. A few weeks later a military ambulance arrived in the village and there was Robert, with one leg, struggling to walk with his crutches.
Another night she woke up screaming, “Leave the ship! Leave the ship!! Where are the lifeboats!” The housekeeper woke to the noise and ran to Dorothy’s room to find the girl crying hysterically. Whether the cause of the nightmare was psychic sight or sheer coincidence, on that same night a British battleship had been sunk by the notorious German ship Graf Spee. There were other dreams, so disturbing that she dreaded going to sleep at night for fear of the awful knowledge that awaited her.
When she described her dreams for me many years later, I believed her. I thought that she was among those few who are destined from childhood to be sensitive, and maybe privileged by a certain gift which we in Egypt call “seeing ahead of one’s time.”
The war dragged on, and then it was over. During the long stay on the farm Dorothy had grown into a healthy, but rather plump young lady. Back home again in London her parents teased her about her size. Her mother thought she could benefit from dancing school, which Dorothy detested. She had quite different plans for herself anyway, plans that had had years to grow and ferment in her mind.
Strongly influenced by her readings in Egyptology and the esoteric and spiritual sciences, she searched out her old teacher at the British Museum. Their first encounter, a year after the end of the war, was an emotional one. She was wildly enthusiastic about resuming her lessons, and Dr. Budge gave her as much time as he could, but he was immersed in studying the results of several reports on field research that had recently come to his desk. The latest excavations in Egypt were providing great entertainment for a war-weary world ready to be dazzled by new discoveries.
Dorothy worked hard to advance her knowledge of hieroglyphs, but at school she was an indifferent student. Her mind was completely focused on Egyptology and the dream of returning to her heart’s home. At 16, having barely finished her secondary schooling, she simply discarded any ambition to go on to university. The one question in her mind was how and when she would get to Egypt. An event two years earlier had only cemented her determination. It was something she could not tell a soul about, because nobody would have believed it.
the visitor
One night she had been roused from sleep, feeling a weight on her chest. She opened her eyes to see the figure of a man, bending over her silently, staring fiercely at her. There was no doubt who it was; she had never forgotten that photo of Sety I’s mummy. This man at her bedside was in mummy wrappings, with only his face and arms free. His face was a dead man’s but his eyes were alive and filled with the most terrible torment. Omm Sety described the visitation to me years later: “You could only say that the eyes had the look of somebody in hell who had suddenly found a way out.”* She wasn’t frightened, she recalled; it was a shock and a joy, all at the same time. When he reached down and tore at her nightdress she cried out, which brought her mother running to her room. The startling visitor was gone, and Dorothy told her mother that it was a nightmare and that she had torn her nightdress herself. But she knew exactly who had done it.
“After that,” she told me, “I was always longing for him to come again. As I got a bit older I used to go to spiritualists, trying to get in touch with him. This went on and on and on, until I must have been 26 or 27 – always searching, always hoping he would come again. People in these spiritualist societies with whom I spoke about it said it’s not a king, it’s an evil spirit, and things like that – but I knew it wasn’t. I was never persuaded that it was an evil spirit, but I did begin to think maybe it was just to be that one occurrence.
“I did know I’d always been attracted to Sety, and I’d always been attracted to this place, to Abydos, since I was a very, very small child, before I even knew who built it. I mean, I was drawn to this temple. And that’s why, when men came to ask to marry me and asked my father, I would never accept. I was always looking for this one man. I never fell in love – I thought, oh, they don’t make them like that any more!”
Without a doubt Dorothy loved this man, but why? And why had he come to her that one night and not again? The answers would elude her for a while yet, until after she had left England. For the moment she would have to be content with what was written in her scholarly books, which she scoured for clues among the scattered facts of Sety’s life.
*as quoted in The Search for Omm Sety, by Jonathan Cott
THREE
Sety
“He appears not so much preserved as sleeping –but sleeping in the way that a leopard might…”
How Sety became a pharaoh of Egypt is a tale of the ebb and flow of dynastic fortunes. He was born towards the end of the 18th Dynasty, a golden age of expansion and empire lasting from 1550 – 1319 BC. In the beginning it was a dynasty of extraordinary exploration, temple building and high art, presided over by kings named Ahmose, Thutmosis and Amenhotep, and the female pharaoh Hatshepsut. A seemingly endless tide of tribute flowed into the royal coffers from Egypt’s vassal states, which stretched from Nubia in the south to the Euphrates in the east.
And then, two hundred years into this brilliant age, around the time that Sety was born, the vital energy of the empire suddenly made a dramatic shift with the rise of Amenhotep III’s son, Akhenaten. Whatever Akhenaten was – religious zealot or visionary – he was responsible for one of the most puzzling and misunderstood periods of Egypt’s long history. Within a few years of his ascension to the throne, he had upended the traditional priesthoods and worship and set himself up as the only son of the only supreme god, from whom all life emanated. But the old gods and centuries of tradition could not be wiped out in a stroke. Many voices privately
