Read The Sleeper in the Sands for Free Online

him in bemusement, then shook my head. ‘I confess, I cannot imagine a reason.’
    Petrie narrowed his eyes. ‘You have not yet, I assume, had the chance to visit the site of Thebes?’
    ‘Not yet.’
    ‘Then I trust that one day you will have the opportunity. For when you go there, you will discover that its crowning glory is the temple of Karnak, a place of stupefying, overwhelming size, a place still so vast, despite the ravages of time, that you will wonder by what power it was ever built. And yet indeed, the answer is quite simple -- it was built with the tribute paid to superstition. Karnak was the home to Amen-Ra, the King of Egypt’s great galaxy of gods -- and therefore the focus of all the country’s hopes and fears.’
    ‘And yet Akh-en-Aten . . .’
    ‘Abandoned it.’ A faint smile flickered beneath Petrie’s moustache as he knelt down almost tenderly beside the fragment of stone. ‘For did I not tell you,’ he asked, looking up again, ‘that he had been a rebel against more than just the conventions of art?’
    ‘What . . .’ I frowned -- ‘so he abandoned the worship of Amen-Ra as well?’
    ‘Proscribed him. Erased his name throughout the length of the land. That of Amen, and Osiris, and all the gods, all the ancient and myriad divinities - save only one . . .’ Petrie paused and turned again to gaze at the carving. ‘Save only one.’ He pointed to the top of the stone, where a fragment had broken away. There were still traces there of what appeared to be hands raised in blessing over the head of the King, the arms radiating downwards like the spokes of a wheel. ‘These represent the rays of the sun,’ said Petrie, pointing to what I had mistaken for arms. ‘The other half of the stone would have portrayed its disk.’
    I gazed at the fragment’s broken edge. ‘So that was Akh-en-Aten’s god?’
    Petrie nodded. ‘The sun -- the Aten - the life-giving Aten, in whose honour the Pharaoh even changed his name. For once, like his father, he had been Amen-hetep -- “Amen is content” -- but when he came here such a title would no longer do. “Akh-en-Aten”.’ Petrie gazed a moment more at the figure of the King, then lumbered back to his feet. ‘Which means, very simply -- “the Glory of the Sun”.’
    He stepped out from the tent. Newberry and I joined him, and we stood there together in silence for a while. Beyond the dust-humped mounds of El-Amarna and the silhouetted palm trees of the distant Nile, the sky was clouding into dusk, and I knew that all of us were gazing at the red disk of the sun. ‘ “Living in Truth”,’ murmured Petrie at length, ‘that was Akh-en-Aten’s motto - “Ankh em maat”. And truthful, I think, he could indeed claim to be, when he chose to enshrine the sun’s radiant energy. There is not a rag of superstition or of falsity to be found in such a worship, but rather a philosophy which our own modern science can confirm. For what is the sun indeed, if not the source of all life, power and force in our world?’
    Newberry shivered suddenly. ‘And yet still,’ he said, pointing, ‘you see how it sets.’
    Petrie glanced at him strangely. ‘Yes.’ He grunted. ‘Yet only so that it may rise once again.’
    Newberry did not answer, and we left soon afterwards, for the shadows were indeed beginning to lengthen. Petrie accompanied us to our camels, and as we walked Newberry extracted solemn promises from our host that he would keep nothing from us of what he might find. Yet still the precise object of Newberry’s ambitions was kept veiled from me, and I began to despair that it might ever be revealed. Once we had mounted our steeds, however, he did not retrace the path by which we had arrived but rather spurred his camel along the side of the cliffs, so that he remained upon the plain, following the edge of its curve. I assumed that this meant he had something more to show to me, and so I urged my camel after him and, once by his side, dared to ask