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Leila wielded the knife, scraping hard until she hit the tooth of the canvas. She preferred working on a good, tightly woven cotton duck. She dabbed a rag soaked in turpentine on the wound. The reconstruction of the pier could wait until tomorrow. But if she left too late, Joe would be annoyed his port wine reduction for the seared tuna had broken. The sky over Cape Cod Bay was a wistful grey heading into night.
Leila put down her palette knife, turned down her radio, and listened. There was quiet, finally quiet, blissful silence. Now, at the end of the day, Leila had to steel herself for the most infuriating moment of the day: The old oak boards were punished as as Iris clomped overhead. The stomp was followed by the slam. Iris was incapable of doing anything quietly.
There was some relief in the slam—it meant Iris was no longer overhead. However, the daily drama of the swirling clamor that was Iris, like a performer doing a star turn on the stage, made it impossible not to notice her entrances and exits. Leila walked to the window. The light of an Indian summer day was fading. Sailboats moored in the bay listed drunkenly.
Leila walked back to her canvas. She recognized this as the same solitary circling as that of her neighbor overhead. She put her tools on her workbench. She should rinse them in turpentine and water in the bathroom at the end of the hall—the brushes would be tackier and difficult to clean after drying overnight. Grabbing her backpack, she turned out the lights and closed her door.
The hallway was silent. The other studio doors on her floor were closed. The stairs were poorly lit, even after Leila switched on the bare bulb dangling overhead. The whole damn place was a fire hazard. She climbed to the second floor. No Liz, no Gretchen. The crap fixture in the upstairs hall, that never worked right, was out, as usual. The damn, dusty moose head Iris had mounted above her door stared down dolefully through its blind, button eyes.
Its antlers wore a fine coat of dust. Iris worked behind closed, locked doors, all day, every day. The other Red Barn artists left their doors open at least a smidgen, not exactly an invitation, but not a deliberately antisocial act. Iris had no such compunctions. Should she leave Iris alone? She took a few steps back toward the stairs, but turned around. What harm was it peeking inside? Leila stared through the crack in the door. At first, she thought the room was empty, but as her eyes adjusted, Leila made out a shape, or maybe a shadow, in the center of the studio.
The value of the only available light source, through the far window, made it difficult to see. Iris refused to use artificial light. For a time, she had painted by candlelight, until the Red Barn got wind of it, banning burning candles before Iris burned the place down. Leila stared at the shape. Iris never left her door unlocked. Leila pushed the door open further, venturing into the silent studio, under the disapproving gaze of the mildewed moose, inching towards the shadow.
It was a body. Later, Leila recalled the body like a dead deer, abandoned on the side of the road after an accident. And later, Leila was vaguely ashamed of her observations, her detachment. Tentatively, Leila inched forward, reaching out her hand to touch the body. She yanked it back as if it was submerged in a shark tank. Iris was surprisingly warm, alive warm. The red was the red every paint manufacturer had tried, but failed, to capture in a tube.
But the eyes were dead, even if the heart was beating. Fear crept up her throat. Should she call out? But it was better she was alone, even if it was with a dead body. A small figure stood—as if on guard—over the body. Leila bent down to look at it: She recognized him immediately. Jesus, it was Fred, fucking Fred— Leila, in a fanciful mood, had painted the figure to be anatomically correct, as well as well-endowed—who had gone missing from her studio months ago. But poor Fred, as an eyewitness to a crime, could have nothing to say.
There was no doubt he was Fred, and that he belonged to her. Bending down to pick up her missing mannequin, Leila gazed into his dead eyes. In truth, she was both embarrassed by her handiwork, and concerned his presence could be construed as evidence at the scene of the crime; she pocketed Fred and in a sleight of hand he disappeared.
The burnished wood handle of a knife stuck in an ample left breast. Iris had been murdered. Barbara Elle grew up in Boston, but as an adult became a New Yorker. Barbara loves writing about people and places she remembers, so Death In Vermilion is set on Cape Cod, a place of many memories. She continues collecting memories and places, traveling the world with her touring musician husband, whether exploring Buddhist temples in Beijing, crypts in Vienna or Kabuki Theater in Tokyo, in search of new stories to write about. She invariably packs a notebook and her laptop.
Murder and madness infect a small town. But worse is yet to come. When she drifts ashore on the mainland, hideously burned, Ruthie has a harrowing tale to tell. It begins with the murder of a family. It ends with her being the sole survivor of a cataclysm that sweeps her little island. A burnt narrator is recounting the story in flashback from her hospital bed adding to the seriousness of the tale.
There are elements of normal teen life layered underneath powerful horror — growing up, changing friendships, sibling relationships and the hardships of divorce on children. There is lots of action in this book, keeping the story racing forward and the reader on edge. Screams You Hear has scary tense scenes mixed with gory imagery. There are some sentimental scenes between Ruthie and her brother and parents. To conclude, this is exciting, mysterious and an all round great YA horror.
Fans of horror, teens and older will really enjoy this book. I hope James writes more horror, I definitely want to read more books like this! James Morris is a television writer who now works in digital media.
He lives with his wife and dog in Los Angeles. Catch him at jamesmorriswriter. James Morris Twitter Facebook Amazon. Werewolves, vampires and the mafia, I love the sound of this book! Angel Svabodina is a rookie forensic anthropologist, enjoying the beginning of her new career. She throws herself fully into the case without thinking about the parties involved, a psychopomp associate, and paranormal mafia families made up of vampires and werewolves—or the consequences. To get what she needs from the werewolf don, Angel has to meet with the fae queen.
Can she meet her without repercussions and solve the case? She does her best writing while being bothered by her cats, taking care of her son, in dressing rooms while waiting for family to try on clothing, and at home in sunny California. Angelina loves to play goddess-dragon matchmaker, transporting readers to a place where young goddesses have lovable flaws, the Fates plan to dethrone, the universe is endless and untamed, and dragons roam free!
She also loves to write carefree romance where one can finish reading with a smile. New San Francisco is the last city standing on a world ravaged by storms of ash and debris. The city survived by putting the ideals of the American dream on steroids and inspiring its people to persevere, though they have become ruthless in the process. Its citizens are ruled by the General, who has made sure that his people understand that gentleness and pity have become weaknesses that nature no longer tolerates.
For Steve, the choice is easy. Many thousands have and will perish to get this message out, but is anyone willing to listen?
I hold all of them in such high respect. I had to read stacks of books many times, annotate them, write papers, take classes, and read many philosopher biographies to pull this off. I had to truly know who they were before I put them in the book and used their belief systems. What is nice is that excerpts of my book have been used by philosophy departments in a few colleges in London. So at least I did it well enough to where I can be present in such circles.
My characters range from a boy trying to grow up in this world, to a guilt-ridden politician, to just philosophers, to not-so-just philosophers, to the insane. Most books really just pander to one kind of mentality or life stage. The scope of my characters and their mentality is wide and evolved. There is no pandering in this book. For example, one I evolved the characters enough in my mind, I let them do whatever they would have done, which changed where I wanted the story to go many times.
They made my life hard sometimes. My Story is multi-layered and has different ways to enjoy. This will be missed by anyone who skims the book. My book has 3 levels to it. The skimmer, the engaged, the Philosophy professor. If you read the book twice and are paying attention , it will be a very different story the second time.
My book incorporates technology you may have heard of, but applies it in a painfully realistic way. But the issues grow from there over the years and it gets taken advantage of by strong capital groups like the food industry and such. I read on your website that this is loosely based on the great philosophers. When I think of philosophy I think of dead Greek guys, how how is philosophy woven through the story and made current?
Most of that is in part one, but know that I go from ancient greeks all the way to philosophers who fought in WW2 and even after. Did you base your book on events that you can imagine happening in the near future? What makes my book so relevant is the Trump administration and his followers sound eerily like an evolved version of the city I have created.
Who was your favourite character to write? He is my spirit animal. Line is a close second.
He is my anti-spirit animal. Bob is pretty dope. Firstly, his name is Bob, so…yea. Second, have you seen him rock that suit while in a maximum security prison? One suggestion before you read it and become one of those fans that leaves him roses by his doormat. This book is not Twilight. Take your time with her. Show the book you care. Cradle it and make it feel loved. Runs from May 21st to May 30th. Just for My Books Excerpt.
The Lit Cottage Review. Adventures Thu Wonderland Review. On the Shelf Reviews Excerpt. The Genre Minx Excerpt. The Cozy Pages Excerpt. J Bronder Reviews Review. Banshee Irish Horror Blog Interview. Wicked Good Reads Review. Life at 17 Review. The excerpt below will whet your appetites and there is a chance to win your very own copy at the end of this post! Emily Duran is the sole survivor of a plane crash that left her and her teenage friends stranded and alone in the jungles of the Amazon. Lost and losing hope, they struggle against the elements, and each other.
With their familiar pecking order no longer in place, a new order emerges, filled with power struggles, betrayals, secrets and lies. I have tried so hard to forget, but memory is a stubborn thing. Memories linger no matter what I do. I want to cut open my skull and dig my fingers into my brain and just pull them out. I close my eyes, but my mind runs and runs. Being in the hospital makes it harder. The white walls and sick people only remind me that I am so far from normal. The nurse, staff, doctors, everyone; they all know me for one thing. The thing that will define me for the rest of my life.
I am a survivor. The only survivor of Air Brazil, the plane that crashed in the Amazon jungle carrying passengers; 37 of them students, teachers, and chaperones from Riverdale Academy High. I used to hear about plane crashes and wondered how the victims felt in the seconds before impact, wondered what it was like to know you were about to die. She told me not to feel guilty. She warned I could expect to be angry and sad.
I could expect to be confused. I wanted to tell her I was angry and sad and confused long before I got onto that plane. My counselor told me to write my story down. By writing I could make sense of all that happened. I keep thinking if I remember everything the way I need to that the memories will fade away. That I can accept what happened. I can accept that I survived and everyone else died. I was dead to the world and when I came to I was drowning.
Water gushed into my mouth and I was tumbling, flailing, not knowing what end was up or down. I heard the sounds of screaming and the roaring of water and then nothingness. Coming up for air, I held something, something rectangular. The seat cushion I was holding kept me afloat. I kicked and kicked and it made no difference. I never believed in God, an all-powerful being that allowed so many horrible things to happen, but as I saw the rocks up ahead, I prayed.
I held onto that seat cushion for dear life and plunged into the rapids. I was a human rag doll. I started to panic. I needed air, my body screamed for it and I opened my mouth about to take in water when I bubbled up to the surface and gasped. As quickly as I was brought above, I was taken under again. I slammed against the rocks and buried my face deeper into the cushion. I saw nothing, heard nothing, and imagined I was in a womb. I could only wait for the terror to pass. It felt like an actual substance that enveloped my body, my brain, my very being.
I receded further and further within myself, a dark hole, my entire body a taut muscle. Suddenly, I took a shot to the head and saw stars. A high-pitched squeal rang in my ears. I fought the growing sensation of darkness that threatened to overcome me, but I knew to give in meant death. The water calmed and I was spit out near a bend.
I realized I had to give up the cushion, my lifeline—it was holding me back. I let go, cursing myself as it floated away and I swam, giving everything I had. My body had nothing left but I commanded it, willed it, to swim. As I approached the shore, my shoes finally touched bottom and I heaved myself onto land. But there is no greater feeling of security than the sensation of the earth beneath your stomach, hands grabbing dirt. An inherent part of that tradition, was the belief or memory of a First Time, long, long ago, when the gods had ruled in Egypt.
And so it remained, out of sight and out of mind, until the beginning of the twentieth century, when the archaeologists Flinders Petrie and Margaret Murray began excavations. In their season of digging they uncovered parts of a hall and passageway, lying in the desert about feet south-west of the Seti I Temple and built in the recognizable architectural style of the Nineteenth Dynasty. Shortage of cash, however, meant that their theory of a buried building was not tested until the digging season of Then, under the direction of Professor Naville of the Egypt Exploration Fund, a long transverse chamber was cleared, at the end of which, to the north-east, was found a massive stone gateway made up of cyclopean blocks of granite and sandstone.
The next season, , Naville and his team returned with local helpers and diligently cleared the whole of the huge underground building:. What we discovered [Naville wrote] is a gigantic construction of about feet in length and 60 in width, built with the most enormous stones that may be seen in Egypt.
In the four sides of the enclosure walls are cells, 17 in number, of the height of a man and without ornamentation of any kind. The building itself is divided into three naves, the middle one being wider than those of the sides; the division is produced by two colonnades made of huge granite monoliths supporting architraves of equal size. The cells are connected by a narrow ledge between two and three feet wide; there is a ledge also on the opposite side of the nave, but no floor at all, and in digging to a depth of 12 feet we reached infiltrated water. Even below the great gateway there is no floor, and when there was water in front of it the cells were probably reached with a small boat.
Water, water, everywhere-this seemed to be the theme of the Osireion, which lay at the bottom of the huge crater Yaville and his men had excavated in It was positioned some 50 feet below the level of the floor of the Seti I Temple, almost flush with the water-table, and was approached by a modern stairway curving down to the south-east. Having descended this stairway, I passed under the hulking lintel slabs of the great gateway Naville and Strabo had described and crossed a narrow wooden footbridge-again modern-which brought me to a large sandstone plinth.
Measuring about 80 feet in length by 40 in width, this plinth was composed of enormous paving blocks and was entirely surrounded by water. Two pools, one rectangular and the other square, had been cut into the plinth along the centre of its long axis and at either end stairways led down to a depth of about 12 feet below the water level.
The plinth also supported the two massive colonnades Naville mentioned in his report, each of which consisted of five chunky rose-coloured granite monoliths about eight feet square by 12 feet high and weighing, on average, around tons. Plan of the Osireion. This exercise was assisted by the absence of the original roof which made it easier to envisage the whole edifice in plan.
Looking down in this manner, it was immediately apparent that the plinth formed a rectangular island, surrounded on all four sides by a water-filled moat about 10 feet wide. The moat was contained by an immense, rectangular enclosure wall, no less than 20 feet thick , [ 19 ] made of very large blocks of red sandstone disposed in polygonal jigsaw-puzzle patterns.
Six lay to the east, six to the west, two to the south and three to the north. Off the central of the three northern cells lay a long transverse chamber, roofed with and composed of limestone. A similar transverse chamber, also of limestone but no longer with an intact roof, lay immediately south of the great gateway. Finally, the whole structure was enclosed within an outer wall of limestone, thus completing a sequence of inter-nested rectangles, i. Reconstruction of the Osireion.
Another notable and outstandingly unusual feature of the Osireion was that it was not even approximately aligned to the cardinal points. Instead, like the Way of the Dead at Teotihuacan in Mexico, it was oriented to the east of due north. Since Ancient Egypt had been a civilization that could and normally did achieve precise alignments for its buildings, it seemed to me improbable that this apparently skewed orientation was accidental. Moreover, although 50 feet higher, the Seti I Temple was oriented along exactly the same axis-and again not by accident. Had the axis of the Osireion been predetermined by the axis of the Temple or vice versa?
This, it turned out, was an issue over which considerable controversy, now long forgotten, had once raged. In a debate which had many connections with that surrounding the Sphinx and the Valley Temple at Giza, eminent archaeologists had initially argued that the Osireion was a building of truly immense antiquity, a view expressed by Professor Naville in the London Times of 10 March This monument raises several important questions. As to its date, its great similarity with the Temple of the Sphinx [as the Valley Temple was then known] shows it to be of the same epoch when building was made with enormous stones without any ornament.
This is characteristic of the oldest architecture in Egypt. I should even say that we may call it the most ancient stone building in Egypt. Curious indeed, and well worth investigating further; something Naville hoped to do the following season. Unfortunately, the First World War intervened and no archaeology could be undertaken in Egypt for several years.
As a result, it was not until that the Egypt Exploration Fund was able to send out another mission, which was led not by Naville but by a young Egyptologist named Henry Frankfort. Later to enjoy great prestige and influence as professor of Pre-Classical Antiquity at the University of London, Frankfort spent several consecutive digging seasons re-clearing and thoroughly excavating the Osireion between and The reader will recall the lemming behaviour which led to a dramatic change of scholarly opinion about the antiquity of the Sphinx and the Valley Temple due to the discovery of a few statues and a single cartouche which seemed to imply some sort of connection with Khafre.
By , it had been beamed forward in time to the reign of Seti I-around BC-whose cenotaph it was now believed to be. Within a decade, the standard Egyptological texts began to print the attribution to Seti I as though it were a fact, verifiable by experience or observation. The only facts are that certain inscriptions and decorations left by Seti appear in an otherwise completely anonymous structure. One plausible explanation is that the structure must have been built by Seti, as Frankfort proposed. What are the merits of these mutually contradictory propositions which identify the Osireion as a the oldest building in Egypt, and b a relatively late New Kingdom structure?
Proposition b -that it is the cenotaph of Seti I-is the only attribution accepted by Egyptologists. On close inspection, however, it rests on the circumstantial evidence of the cartouches and inscriptions which prove nothing. And another awkward little matter has also been overlooked. It was made for the celebration of the mysteries of Osiris, and so far is unique among all the surviving buildings of Egypt. It is clearly early, for the great blocks of which it is built are of the style of the Old Kingdom; the simplicity of the actual building also points to it being of that early date.
The decoration was added by Seti I, who in that way laid claim to the building, but seeing how often a Pharaoh claimed the work of his predecessors by putting his name on it, this fact does not carry much weight. It is the style of the building, the type of the masonry, the tooling of the stone, and not the name of a king, which date a building in Egypt. Indeed it is not just a matter of the Nineteenth Dynasty. This handful of supposedly Old Kingdom structures, built out of giant megaliths, seems to belong in a unique category. They resemble one another much more than they resemble any other known style of architecture and in all cases there are question-marks over their identity.
Before leaving Abydos, there was one other puzzle that I wanted to remind myself of. It lay buried in the desert, about a kilometre north-west of the Osireion, across sands littered with the rolling, cluttered tumuli of ancient graveyards. Out among these cemeteries, many of which dated back to early dynastic and pre-dynastic times, the jackal gods Anubis and Upuaut had traditionally reigned supreme. Openers of the way, guardians of the spirits of the dead, I knew that they had played a central role in the mysteries of Osiris that had been enacted each year at Abydos-apparently throughout the span of Ancient Egyptian history.
It seemed to me that there was a sense in which they guarded the mysteries still. For what was the Osireion if was not a huge, unsolved mystery that deserved closer scrutiny than it has received from the scholars whose job it is to look into these matters? And what was the burial in the desert of twelve high-prowed, seagoing ships if not also a mystery that cried out, loudly, for solution?
It was the burial place of those ships I was now crossing the cemeteries of the jackal gods to see:.
The Guardian, London, 21 December A fleet of year-old royal ships has been found buried eight miles from the Nile. The boats were buried in the shadow of a gigantic mud-brick enclosure, thought to have been the mortuary temple of a Second Dynasty pharaoh named Khasekhemwy, who had ruled Egypt in the twenty-seventh century BC. The boat graves are not likely to be earlier than this and may in fact have been built for Djer, but this remains to be proven. A sudden strong gust of wind blew across the desert, scattering sheets of sand.
I took refuge for a while in the lee of the looming walls of the Khasekhemwy enclosure, close to the point where the University of Pennsylvania archaeologists had, for legitimate security reasons, reburied the twelve mysterious boats they had stumbled on in They had hoped to return in to continue the excavations, but there had been various hitches and, in , the dig was still being postponed.
These boulders could not have been there naturally or by accident; their placement seems deliberate, not random. Like the foot ocean-going vessel found buried beside the Great Pyramid at Giza see Chapter Thirty-three , one thing was immediately clear about the Abydos boats-they were of an advanced design capable of riding out the most powerful waves and the worst weather of the open seas.
Moreover I knew that the earliest wall paintings found in the Nile Valley, dating back perhaps as much as years before the burial of the Abydos fleet to around BC showed the same long, sleek, high-prowed vessels in action. Could an experienced race of ancient seafarers have become involved with the indigenous inhabitants of the Nile Valley at some indeterminate period before the official beginning of history at around BC? Nevertheless that symbolism did not solve the problem posed by the high level of technological achievement of the buried ships; such evolved and sophisticated designs called for a long period of development.
Such seafarers could have been expected to be navigators who would have known how to set a course by the stars and who would perhaps also have developed the skills necessary to draw up accurate maps and charts of the oceans they had traversed. Might they also have been architects and stonemasons whose characteristic medium had been polygonal, megalithic blocks like those of the Valley Temple and the Osireion?
And might they have been associated in some way with the legendary gods of the First Time, said to have brought to Egypt not only civilization and astronomy and architecture, and the knowledge of mathematics and writing, but a host of other useful skills and gifts, by far the most notable and the most significant of which had been the gift of agriculture? There is evidence of an astonishingly early period of agricultural advance and experimentation in the Nile Valley at about the end of the last Ice Age in the northern hemisphere.
By Graham Hancock Like a Thief in the Night There are certain structures in the world, certain ideas, certain intellectual treasures, that are truly mysterious. I am beginning to suspect that the human race may have placed itself in grave jeopardy by failing to consider the implications of these mysteries.
We have the ability, unique in the animal kingdom, to learn from the experiences of our predecessors. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for example, two generations have grown to adulthood in awareness of the horrific destruction that nuclear weapons unleash. Our children will be aware of this too, without experiencing it directly, and they will pass it on to their children. Theoretically, therefore, the knowledge of what atom bombs do has become part of the permanent historical legacy of mankind. Whether we choose to benefit from that legacy or not is up to us.
Nevertheless the knowledge is there, should we wish to use it, because it has been preserved and transmitted in written records, in film archives, in allegorical paintings, in war memorials, and so on. Not all testimony from the past is accorded the same stature as the records of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In particular, references to human experiences prior to the invention of writing around years ago have been omitted in their entirety and myth has become a synonym for delusion.
Suppose that a tremendous cataclysm were to overtake the earth today, obliterating the achievements of our civilization and wiping out almost all of us. Under such circumstances, ten or twelve thousand years from now with all written records and film archives long since destroyed what testimony might our descendants still preserve concerning the events at the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of the Christian era? The flames of the Brahmastra-charged missiles mingled with each other and surrounded by fiery arrows they covered the earth, heaven and space between and increased the conflagration like the fire and the Sun at the end of the world … All beings who were scorched by the Brahmastras, and saw the terrible fire of their missiles, felt that it was the fire of Pralaya [the cataclysm] that burns down the world.
And what of the Enola Gay which carried the Hiroshima bomb? How might our descendants remember that strange aircraft and the squadrons of others like it that swarmed through the skies of planet earth during the twentieth century of the Christian era? If they did, would they perhaps speak of such wonders in mythical terms a little like these:. All these quotations have been taken from the Bhagavata Puranu and from the Mahabaratha , two drops in the ocean of the ancient wisdom literature of the Indian subcontinent. And such images are replicated in many other archaic traditions.
To give one example as we saw in Chapter Forty-two , the Pyramid Texts are replete with anachronistic images of flight:. The King is a flame, moving before the wind to the end of the sky and to the end of the earth … the King travels the air and traverses the earth … there is brought to him a way of ascent to the sky …. Is it possible that the constant references in archaic literatures to something like aviation could be valid historical testimony concerning the achievements of a forgotten and remote technological age? We will never know unless we try to find out. No doubt many are unhistorical, but at the end of the investigation that underlies this book, I am certain that many others are not ….
Of course there would at first be much panic and despair. Nevertheless — if there were sufficient advance warning — steps would be taken to ensure that there would be some survivors and that some of what was most valuable in our high scientific knowledge would be preserved for the benefit of future generations. They also were the inventors of that peculiar sort of wisdom which is concerned with the heavenly bodies, and their order.
Likewise, when the Oxford astronomer John Greaves visited Egypt in the seventeenth century he collected ancient local traditions which attributed the construction of the three Giza pyramids to a mythical antediluvian king:. The occasion of this was because he saw in his sleep that the whole earth was turned over, with the inhabitants of it lying upon their faces and the stars falling down and striking one another with a terrible noise … And he awaked with great feare, and assembled the chief priests of all the provinces of Egypt … He related the whole matter to them and they took the altitude of the stars, and made their prognostication, and they foretold of a deluge.
The king said, will it come to our country?
They answered yes, and will destroy it. And there remained a certain number of years to come, and he commanded in the mean space to build the Pyramids … And he engraved in these Pyramids all things that were told by wise men, as also all profound sciences — the science of Astrology, and of Arithmeticke, and of Geometry, and of Physicke. All this may be interpreted by him that knowes their characters and language …. Taken at face value, the message of both of these myths seems crystal clear: Could this be so?
And what are we to make of other strange traditions that have come to us from the dark vault of prehistory? What are we to make, for example, of the Popol Vuh , which speaks in veiled language about a great secret of the human past: The secret of what happened was never entirely forgotten because a record of those distant First Times was preserved, until the coming of the Spaniards, in the sacred texts of the original Popol Vuh. On the other side of the world, among the myths and traditions of the Indian subcontinent, there are further tantalizing suggestions of hidden secrets.
Strangely enough, it was the City of the Sun in Egypt, Innu, known by the Greeks as Heliopolis — which was regarded throughout the dynastic period as the source and centre of the high wisdom handed down to mortal men from the fabled First Time of the gods. It was at Heliopolis that the Pyramid Texts were collated, and it was the Heliopolitan priesthood — or rather the Heliopolitan cult — that had custody of the monuments of the Giza necropolis.
We start by preparing for the worst. We assume that there will be survivors but that they will be blasted back into the Stone Age by the cataclysm. Realizing that it may take ten or twelve thousand years for a civilization as advanced as our own to rise again like a phoenix from the ashes, one of our top priorities is to find a way to communicate with that postulated future civilization. At the least we would want to say to them: How would we do that? How would we express, say, AD of the Christian era in a language universal enough to be worked out and understood twelve thousand years hence by a civilization that would know nothing of the Christian or of any of the other eras by which we express chronology?
From the predictability of this motion it follows that if we can find a way to declare: The only drawback to this scheme would evident if a civilization equivalent to our own failed to arise within 12, or even 20, years of the cataclysm, but took much longer — perhaps as much as 30, years.
The Sagittarian archaeologists would not only have to use their wits to work out the meaning of the message i.