The Track Across the Desert

By Adrian McMinn

Kay, a young man has moved from the city to work in a regional centre. He lives in the countryside, in what was an abandoned 1950s house with a dog called Trail, and indulges his interest in an image of an Egyptian Princess from the Amarna period.

He creates a shrine to her on his fireplace mantle, and by his observations to it, Kay accidentally invites communication on with the Princess’ world of Egypt in 1350 BCE.

Time around Kay becomes unstable, and he finds himself waking in a forest near his house, with an enigmatic memory of a desert landscape, across which winds a track that leads to the City of Akhetaten, where the Princess lives.

In spite of this re-occurring dream, he falls in love with a waitress. He tricks himself into thinking he can walk to the princess’ city and return to love the waitress, but his solution on to reconcile his dream with reality proves glib.

Arriving in the city we find he is expected, called there, perhaps by the sorcery of a 9 year old black princess of Kush and the Egyptian an queen; however, their sorcery appears to have its own inherent instability.

Except for the authority of the sun, all parties involved in Kay’s adventure are misaligned, and they struggle to fulfil their original intentions.

After initially being arrested, Kay is given a tour of the city and encounters several notable people; the rebellious Princess of Kush, the humane Master of the Road, the outsider Chief of Police Mahu, and the haunted General Ramose.

He meets the princess of the shrine, and her sisters, and in the Mansion of the Aten, he experiences the sun-god.

Because Kay is dreaming, he cannot sleep and grows weaker, until a social catastrophe forces him to flee. Now he must discover what there is at the other end of the track across the desert.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Jul 8, 2016
• ISBN: 9781514497135

Adrian McMinn

The author was born in Australia in the 1950s, graduated from school in 1970 and later from university. He lives in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Over the years, Egypt has been a favourite destination, and ‘The Track Across The Desert’ is an exercise in invention, a romantic homage to an eighteenth-dynasty sculpture of an Amarna Princess.

Book preview

Copyright © 2016 by Adrian McMinn.

Library of Congress Control Number:      2016910120

ISBN:                     Hardcover                       978-1-5144-9712-8

                               Softcover                         978-1-5144-9714-2

                               eBook                              978-1-5144-9713-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 02/01/2018

Xlibris

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CONTENTS

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Epilogue

Prospero: O, a cherubin

Thou wast that did preserve me. Thou didst smile,

Infused with a fortitude from heaven,

When I have decked the sea with drops full salt,

Under my burden groaned, which raised in me

An undergoing stomach, to bear up

Against what should ensue.

The Tempest I.2.154-60, William Shakespeare

PROLOGUE

Above us in the night sky there is only a pantheon of distant and silent gods, who dreamily sail their barques upon the great black ocean. Their ocean is a flood upon our sleeping world, for the sun has died upon the western horizon, and is journeying through the underworld as a cold, dark light, harrowing the swamp of chaos and monsters that dwell there. These monsters conspire to eat the world’s time, to usurp the sun’s throne in the sky, and rule the world without rightness.

But now, on the eastern horizon, the night is fraying, and triumphant rays of golden light will soon herald the sun’s victory over death and chaos. Dawn is the rebirth of our world, and time is started anew with the gift of one more day for the living.

Under the blue canopy of a breathless sky, with the sun glowing newly born in the east, a party of four men and a little girl are making their way through their world. Before we follow these mortals, look to the east, to the mighty River Nile that rolls away as an endless slab of shining silver to some distant resolution in the north. See the sun shining on a city on the river’s far eastern bank—a city of colourful temples, low wide palaces, white-walled official buildings and barracks, and a great jumble of humble mud-brick houses that stretch southward some distance away from the riverbank and its verduous flood plain.

This is the City of Akhetaten, the newly built capital of Egypt, and is where this little party has travelled from this morning. Having crossed the mighty river they now move westward through the crisp green fields of the river’s western flood plain. Here farmers tend their lazy thick crops that are the river’s gift three times a year, through flood and irrigation, and where this gift cannot reach, then so begins the harsh authority of the western desert.

The girl sitting upright on the seat of a palanquin was born far beyond Egypt’s southern borders in a land called Kush, among a people known for their tallness, stamina and the shining blackness of their skin, but she lives now in Akhetaten in a palace as a guest of the king. She is almost nine years old and already she has the assured bearing of a princess.

The men carrying the palanquin and a third man who follows close behind have brown skin, shaven heads and wear simple long, white linen shirts. They live in mud-brick dwellings somewhere on the southern fringes of the city, and so closely do they resemble their homes, you might think they also were made from mixing the waters of the river with soil and straw, and left to bake in the sun until dry. The man who follows the palanquin is carrying some provisions and complains loudly. Although no one listens to him, it’s the little girl he blames for his discomfort.

A tall fourth man, who follows several paces behind, seems to glide over the land. He is long-limbed, has a powerful physique, and wears his short hair in coils styled with animal fat. His white linen kilt is tied with a knot around his waist where a fearsome long knife is sheathed. He lives in the barracks as a soldier of the king and is as shining black as a crow, for he is a kinsman of the girl.

The soldier, like the girl, often sits by the river looking south, comforted in knowing the waters have flowed freely through their lost homeland, past the bones of their ancestors.

The travellers arrive at an abrupt border where the green fields transition to barren desert, as if the river has spoken, ‘These green fields are my gift to you mortals, and not one handspan more.’

For the Egyptian porters, the desert is a forlorn place fit only for cemeteries, or for the mad and desperate to escape to for a temporary sanctuary. That the king has set up an altar to the sun on its bleached carcass did not concern them.

Leaving the green fields, the little party enters the desert, following a faint track that ribbons its way westward towards the pile of rock and dried mud that is the escarpment. As they walk, dust rises around their footsteps.

A raised hand from the girl halts the procession and the chair is set down a short distance from the cliffs of the escarpment. The men move under the meagre shade offered by a lonely bush that stands so stark among the desolation that one might suspect it was saying to the sun, ‘I can bear this, do you hear?’ That might be its conceited stoicism, because few things could survive while making so few demands.

Though the sun still has a way to climb towards its zenith, the three men under the tree consider their work to be half done. The soldier, however, sits nearby but does not share the shade, their society, nor the leather bags of wine the complaining man will be sharing with his friends.

The girl surveys the scene and begins her wandering. She wears a sleeveless white tunic with a green band on the neckline and on the hem above her knees. Her hair is cropped short into three layers, each layer gathered into a series of plaits terminating with a colourful stone. A golden snake with ruby eyes curls three times around her right upper arm and shines against the solid black of her skin, while a silver anklet containing a winged scarab beetle in lapis lazuli is fastened around her left ankle.

She has come to this barren place to find things that might spring ephemerally from the ground after morning dew, or a rare light shower of rain. She might use the bark from one of the few bushes that cling for life in the rock crevices, which live on nothing except hardship, giving testimony that the individual’s life is a difficult one. Her finds will be the ingredients for secret formulae, that when combined with magic words, she can cast spells with—to ward off evil, to persuade good fortune, to vanquish one’s enemies, even to learn of the future. The magic arts had been taught to her by her mother and grandmother when she dwelt eight hundred kilometres south of Akhetaten, by the white waters of the fourth Nile cataract, in the glorious tribal land of Kush.

Under the tree, the unhappy man’s discontent is growing loud with the sweet haze of wine. He calls to the little girl, imagining that his slanders are clever victories, for it is supported by the laughter of the porters.

The girl has found no ingredients, as the heat of her own lust for revenge has erased the purpose of this journey. She gazes inward, concentrating on a place in her mind revealed to her by her grandmother, where are stored voices of power, that are not human, that are barely controllable, and it’s to this place she now says the words that will awaken them. Her knock is answered by a cold trance that overtakes her, loosening all traces of ambiguity, as a pulsating wind rises within her and blows away all that was once tightly bound.

The noise of the party is lost to her, for now she is sick with possession, and her little body resumes its wandering. It finds a bush from which bark is stripped and rubbed into its hands.

A tiny trail in the sand is followed leading to a tiny hidden door. As a stick is poked gently past the door, a creature rushes to attack but is calmed by a wave of the stick and made a prisoner in a little black hand. Its eyes are obsidian reflections of a vengeful, unfulfilled, weak, petty, stupid, dishonest, cruel, insecure world.

With exhausted steps, the spectre drags the stick along the ground in a wide arc around the tree that shelters the party of men. The black soldier looks at the thing and is startled from his rest. He jumps up in shock, moves through the closing gap of the incomplete circle and sits down in the sun, resuming his disinterest.

Having closed the circle, its hand is lowered and the released creature scuttles away, boiling with purpose in the direction of the pointing stick.

Another noise has entered the possessed girl, releasing her from the pulsating wind that flees through her ears and blows away to the escarpment.

She has recovered herself and has forgotten the circle. She is concentrating on the noise she has heard among the rubble of the escarpment. She is insensible to the eruption of panic among the partying men, and takes no notice of the unhappy man as he is bundled onto the palanquin and carried away, cursing and begging for swift deliverance to a doctor. The panic recedes eastward, back through the desert, through the fields, to the river.

The soldier creeps up behind the girl, prostrates himself to her, knowing that this little girl could crush his entirety in an instant.

Without shifting her westward gaze, she says as if addressing the world, ‘I am Tu-Fe, Princess of Kush. I am the rightful ruler of Kush, and I will reign