The Field of Reeds , livre ebook

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd - A Aziz A.

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376 pages

English

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The monumental tale of the Old Luxor Hotel begins in the present with a ghostly meeting in the garden of this rundown and dilapidated Victorian hotel. It tells of a divine encounter a century earlier in India of the British Empire, between the young girl Flossie and Wadjet, the mystical snake of a native guru. The serpent sets her a riddle which sends her halfway across the world to the land of the pharaohs, to this very same hotel. Once there, she is cured of the terrible disease that would have ended her life, saved only by the fearsome and all-powerful cobra-headed goddess, Meretseger, whose voice can deliver both mercy and vengeance. She has the ability to warp both space and time. The book tells of this girl with the blackest of hair and the bluest of eyes and that of her son, the late Muir Birch, of their great adventures. It will speak of a three-thousand-year-old papyrus that contains sacred spells which the ancient Egyptians believed could cheat death itself and of a meeting in the hotel’s garden between a playboy English lord and a disgraced archaeologist who together would find the tomb of a long-forgotten pharaoh. You will learn that to speak the name of the dead is to make them alive again and it restores the breath of life to the one who has vanished.

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Publié par	Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd
Date de parution	26 février 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781528984010
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	3 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0175€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

T he F ield of R eeds
Where Everlasting Life Awaits
A. A. Aziz
Austin Macauley Publishers
2021-02-26
The Field of Reeds About the Author Dedication Copyright Information © Acknowledgement Prologue: The Book of Thoth 1 1. ‘The Bracelet of Khepri’: Thomas Henry William Muir Longmore Mawson Holwell Comyns Birch (1898-1998) 2. ‘The Riddle of Wadjet’: Sarah Henrietta Mawson (1845-1921) 3. ‘The Voice of Meretseger’: Thomas Cook and Son (1841-2019) 4. ‘The Reincarnation of Little Sekhmet’: Albert Ferdinand Pagnon(1847-1909) 5. ‘The Papyrus of Ani’: Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge(1857-1934) 6. ‘The Hidden Stela of Meretseger’: Margaret Benson (1865-1916) 7. ‘The Hospital of Princess Sekhmeta’: Thomas William Muir Longmore (1864-98) 8. ‘The Modern Amun-Ra’: John Mason Cook (1834-99) 9. ‘Ani’s House of Eternity’: Rev. Charles Bousfield Huleatt (1863-1908) 10. ‘The Tomb Raider of Ta-Sekhet-Ma’at’: Howard Carter (1874-1939) 11. ‘The Lord of the Valley’: George Edward Stanhope MolyneuxHerbert (1866-1923) 12. ‘The Demons of Meretseger’: Gene Gauntier (1885-1966) 13. ‘The War of Apep’: Lt. Reginald Mark Plummer’ (1886-1947) 14. ‘The Eternity of Nebkheperure’: Tutankhamun (c1341 BC-1323 BC) 15. ‘The Jaws of Ammit’: Lady Dorothy Rachel Melissa Walpole Mills (1889-1959) 16: ‘The Holy Trinity of Thebes’: Meretseger (1539 BC-1999(?) AD) 17. ‘The Missing Princess of Thebes’: Florence Averil Birch (1875-1912) 18. ‘The Path to A’aru’: A. A. Aziz Epilogue: ‘The Demonic Tablet of Apep’ Appendix A: ‘The Gods’: Glossary of Ancient Egypt Appendix B: ‘The Mortals’: Cast of Characters Photographs/Illustrations
About the Author
When in his forties, he exchanged a career in IT consultancy and retrained to become a genealogist and architectural historian when he was employed by individuals and estate agents to research the history of ‘Listed Buildings’ ranging in age from the early medieval to the Edwardian era. He was a regular contributor of articles for family history and period property magazines, as well as having his work featured in the UK National Press, radio and television. His book, The Field of Reeds, was born out of his other great passion, that for Egypt and its ancient past.
Dedication
To Patricia, my very own Flossie, whose love and support have been with me these past twenty years, ever since I first gazed upon the Old Luxor Hotel and met with my benefactor.
Copyright Information ©
A. A. Aziz (2021)
The right of A. A. Aziz to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781528984003 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781528984010 (ePub e-book)
www.austinmacauley.com
First Published (2021)
Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd
25 Canada Square
Canary Wharf
London
E14 5LQ
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank the characters of my book, who actually lived the lives described in its pages, for without them, it could never have been written; their voices speaking to me across the ages from a place we all seek but very few of us will ever find. For they have found everlasting life amongst The Field of Reeds .

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Opening of the Old Luxor Hotel in 1877
Prologue: The Book of Thoth 1
This book is like no other. It will not sit easily on a library shelf for it can never be classified. No code will ever be seen on its spine or any bytes found on a computer disc. It does not fit into any genre of literature. It is not a novel for what it says is the truth; it is not a history because it reads like a work of fiction; neither is it a biography for it spans the millennia of civilisations; or an autobiography for I am but a ghost; and in no sense is it a guide, although it contains photographs and illustrations. An epic poem it is not, despite the momentous events of which it tells and the verses found in its pages. A play it might be, for its characters are actors on a stage, but it cannot be, for its script was written by ancient gods. It is none of these and yet, it is all of them.
The monumental tale that is contained within—and I use these words with great trepidation for I have experienced much difficulty in my many attempts to accurately and faithfully describe the book you are about to read, I eventually decided that they were those best suited to describe what has been written, but with the caveat that they are used to mean a true story, especially one that might have been invented or thought difficult to believe; but also, one which is both of great importance and immense in meaning. It is in every sense a book that covers all of literature’s many facets and as such will have appeal to anyone who wishes to lose themselves in the wonder of words: those written to explain events and understand people; words that lie beyond life’s banal use of them; words that reach out across the ages to all that we should revere and cherish; words that are rarely used; those that have been sacrificed before the altar of bad education and the worship of the digital age.
When I first dipped my nib into the inkwell on my desk and wrote the first words, I felt an overwhelming urge to complete the task at hand—no matter what, and despite the many and varied restrictions placed upon me, one of which forbade the use of any form of modern tools and permitted only the media available to the great writers of the past; whose works my benefactor insists would never have been allowed to sit on booksellers’ shelves or be sold ‘ online ’, had they been penned today. A fate, I often feared, would happen to this present volume. You, my readers, may well ask why I agreed to write such a book when I could make no use of those means that make things apparently so easy nowadays and that are an accepted part of today’s world. My benefactor was of the unshakeable belief that such technological inventions have made people lazy and, above all, have deprived them of the ability to do the simplest of educational tasks; those same tasks that formed the basic tenets of learning for thousands of years—the skill of reading, the power of the spoken word, a proficiency in handwriting and the competent application of mathematics to the solution of everyday problems. Your incredulity will be further compounded if I mention that I had asked for no recompense to complete my task nor was any offered. I need no defence as to my actions in receiving no financial inducement, something of which I am aware is totally at odds with present day values; save it to say, my reward is in the book that I have written.
It is only fitting that I have used the medium of pen and paper, for these were the only means by which those featured in these pages wrote their letters, penned their books or transcribed their texts; all of which were achieved in the days before the internet or the coming of the smartphone or the explosion of digital data. My benefactor was of the opinion that his story should be told, and that my conscience should be enough to make it a great book so that as many people as possible should know of it; not just because of the incredible events it portrays—which in themselves should be enough—but because in its pages lies the key to understanding that which almost all of us fear and few truly confront: our own earthly mortality, which we cannot cheat, just postpone, in the hope that each new day is not to be our last.
I must apologise to you for I have been most remiss in failing to state the principal subject of this epic saga. It is one that would surely never come to the mind of anyone, but only to myself or its principal characters. For it is but a seemingly unimportant and scarcely heard-of small Egyptian hotel. Although now all but forgotten, the Old Luxor Hotel is one that—I must at the very outset make clear—has changed the lives of every guest that has passed through its doors and whose walls have absorbed the momentous events of its past. Although the hotel first opened in an age of empires when the British ruled a quarter of the world—some of the events of which I am about to relate took place many centuries before its very existence when pharaohs ruled the two lands of Egypt under the ever-watchful eyes of its ancient gods.
It will tell the tale of a papyrus over three thousand years old that held sacred texts, ones which the ancient Egyptians believed would cheat death itself, and how it was smuggled out of this hotel under the very noses of the Egyptian Antiquities Service and sent back to the British Museum, where it can still be seen to this day. You will hear of the earliest Christian Gospel written in the time when a rebel Jew, named Jesus, preached in Palestine and whose disciples spread his word throughout a realm that became Christendom. And of a meeting in the hotel’s garden between an English aristocrat and an out-of-work archaeologist, who together would find the tomb of the boy pharaoh, Tutankhamen, and the curse that some believed would destroy all who defiled his final resting place. There I must stop before I reveal too much and spoil the eager anticipation I hope that I have awakened in you, my reader