Temple of the Inscriptions

by Humphrey Price

Table of Contents

Chapter 6: Reunited

In my benign captivity, I was well fed, had a real bathroom with a shower and a toilet seat, and was provided with a few current newspapers and magazines in English. As I caught up with the present, I was surprised by how much the world had changed and how much it was still the same. In the mornings, I was allowed to walk and run outside within the perimeter of the fence. Guard Man watched from a respectful distance.

I would be back inside before the sun was far above the horizon to avoid the severe heat of the day. At night, it cooled down, and I would open the window in the apartment to welcome the fresh temperate air. The desert at night was silent and restful.

Two weeks into my stay, I was wakened in the middle of the night to the thrum of vehicles whose sound carried through my window. I heard doors open and slam and then several voices in Egyptian and one frustrated female voice in English: Karyn.

I threw on my clothes and excitedly rushed downstairs. When I got to the long hallway, I saw Walkie-Talkie Man burst through the door at the far end with Karyn in tow. I was happy to see that she was not handcuffed. There were other uniformed men following her, but at least they were not brandishing weapons. I ran toward Karyn, and she looked at me in alarm. I slowed down and yelled, “Karyn, you’re alive!”

She had a puzzled expression and then tentatively responded, “Scott, is that you?!” Her eyes searched my face, then my body, and looked confused. “What happened? How... how did you get a beard?”

Of course! I hadn’t shaved and was wearing different clothes that she had never seen before.

She was incredulous and whispered, “How could you grow a beard in... in six hours?”

“It’s me. Man, I’m so glad to see you alive and safe. It’s been two weeks!”

“It’s been six hours.”

She threw her arms around me and buried her face in my chest. She began crying, and I could feel my shirt getting wet from her tears. “I was so scared. You left a note for me at the second door. Then you left the other notes. That kept me going. Scott, where are we? This isn’t Yucatan.”

“We’re in Egypt.”

“That’s impossible!”

The men left Karyn with me, and I brought her up to my apartment just as the sun was rising. She wanted to bathe and change into clean clothes. When she emerged, wearing men’s jeans and a shirt that had been provided for me, I had breakfast waiting for her. She was famished and, as she ate, I filled her in on some of what had happened.

When I related the names of the hosts, she put her hand on my arm and said, “Wait.” She contemplated for a few seconds, and then her eyes got big. “Sneferu and Hetepheres are historical characters. I took a class on ancient Egypt. He was a pharaoh, and Hetepheres was his wife. He built the first true pyramid, the Red Pyramid.”

“That’s where you arrived a couple of hours ago. Sneferu calls it his pyramid, the Red Pyramid.”

“His first attempt failed. It started out too steep, and they realized it was going to fail so they shallowed the angle for the top half. It’s called the Bent Pyramid.”

“I saw that!” I responded. “You came here at night and couldn’t see, but from the Red Pyramid, I saw the Bent Pyramid you’re describing. He said that all this land has been in his family for a long time.”

“So, our hosts, or captors, are weird or delusional. They’ve adopted the names of these ancient historical figures.”

I had saved my shocker. I reached over and handed her copies of the International Herald Tribune and Time magazine pointing to the dates. She looked very confused, so I said, “We teleported here from Mexico and, in doing so, traveled sixteen years into the future. Hetepheres said we had the time travel selector set to the lowest setting. If Sneferu and Hetepheres are the real McCoy, they could have just jumped ahead to the future, and that’s how they are here today.”

She grabbed the newspaper and started rifling through it, skimming various articles. After a minute, she carefully folder the paper, set it down, and said, “Scott, do you have any beer?”

I went over to the fridge and grabbed two Egyptian beers. I popped the tops and handed one to Karyn. She took a long pull and plopped back in her chair. “Man, am I thirsty. Scott, I was so worried about you. And me. I really didn’t think we were going to get out of there alive.”

We were silent for a while, sipping our beers. Then she asked the obvious questions about contacting her family and the American embassy. I replayed what Hetepheres had told me. She nodded and sipped more beer.

Then Karyn remembered, “From my history class I know that Sneferu and Hetepheres had a son. His name was Khufu, also known as Cheops, and he built the three famous pyramids just outside of Cairo. Those are the ones you always see pictures of. He learned how to build them from his dad. If Sneferu and Hetepheres really are still alive, I wonder if their son is also?” Then we slipped back into silence and stared at each other.

A firm knocking on the door shook us from our contemplative reverie. I got up and opened the door to find Walkie-Talkie Man with another gentleman whom I had not yet encountered. Walkie-Talkie gestured to come in, so I waved them inside.

The new guy was an elderly Asian with an understated grey Fu Manchu moustache and neatly trimmed beard. Although he was slightly stooped over, I could tell that he had once been a tall man, and he carried himself with great dignity. His dark brown eyes were sharp and alive.

He spoke to Karyn in Chinese. She listened, and I thought she might be having a bit of trouble following him, but she responded back, and he nodded his head in understanding. They jabbered in Chinese for a couple of minutes, and then the Chinese guy sent Walkie-Talkie Man on his way. Karyn introduced me to Jangsu. He didn’t seem to want to shake hands, so we politely nodded to each other.

I told Karyn, “Sneferu mentioned him as being a friend. He controls a teleportation site in China.”

“Scott, I think I’m going to need to talk to him for quite some time in Chinese. We have trouble understanding each other’s dialects, but I think we’ll get used to it.” I directed them both over to the table and cleared off the dishes and other debris. The two of them conversed in Chinese for an hour while I occupied myself by washing the dishes and tidying up the place.

Jangsu was extremely interested in Karyn’s meteorite pendant. He seemed reluctant to actually touch it, but he held it by the mount and studied it closely. He fished from his pocket a jeweler’s magnifying glass and examined the pendant from all sides.

They spoke a bit more, then Jangsu was ready to leave. He nodded to me politely, giving the slightest of bows, then was out the door. Karyn plopped on the couch, and I pulled over a chair so I could sit facing her. She stared straight ahead for a minute. I waited. Then she shifted her gaze to look me in the eye and started to talk.

“This guy, Jangsu, is the real deal, Scott. He was born in Korea in the fourth century, and he’s still alive today. He told me a lot of things, unbelievable things, but he was very convincing. I don’t think he’s lying or delusional. I haven’t met Sneferu and Hetepheres, but I’ll bet they’re the real deal, too. They are thousands of years old.” She leaned forward and spoke with an intense expression on her face.

“Look, these guys aren’t just traveling forward in time. They do so every now and then, just to get the jump on things, but even so, they would all be dead by now. Jangsu told me what this is really all about. Each of these guys, these ancients, was visited by this being. From what you told me, Sneferu calls him Horus, one of the classic Egyptian gods. Jangsu calls him Hwanung. But it’s the same being. He’s been around a long time, but he only makes an appearance every few hundred years or so. He’s not a human. Maybe he’s a space alien. Who knows? But nobody’s seen him for over eight hundred years now. Is he gone for good? Will he ever come back? These guys don’t know, and they’re worried.

“Horus had each of these men build a pyramid to house a teleportation device in a secret chamber. He’s been doing this throughout history. The whole burial thing in each case was just misdirection so that robbers would be looking for the wrong treasure. Horus needed humans to build these pyramids so that they would be seen as man-made structures. He also needed chosen people to guard and maintain the pyramids so that they would be available to Horus over these long time spans. Jangsu wasn’t able to tell me why Horus wanted these stations built and maintained, but they must be there for some important reason.

“So... how does Horus get these guys to do all this, and how does he get them to stick around for thousands of years? Well, he has something very enticing to offer.” Karyn paused and smiled. “Immortality.”

She plopped back on the sofa and waited for me to digest this information. When I had gathered my thoughts I asked, “How does he make them immortal?” Something else occurred to me. “Then why does Jangsu look so old and decrepit?”

“Well, that’s just it. Their immortality is running out. When Horus set up these pyramids with secret chambers, he also built small vaults that held something else. There were vials of a liquid substance. If I try and translate what Jangsu said, I guess you would call it the Elixir of Immortality. When you get old, you just have to drink a little bit, and aging is reversed. Somehow it resets your body to think you should be nineteen years old, and within a few months you basically become nineteen again. Your hair grows back or stops being grey. If you’ve got a bent spine, it straightens up. If you have a bum knee or hip, it fixes itself.”

“What if you have cancer?” I interjected, “or pneumonia or Alzheimer’s?”

“It cures all those ailments, according to Jangsu. Any kind of disease or bodily deterioration. But, if someone runs you through with a sword, or you get hit by a truck, it can’t cure that. If your arm gets chopped off, it won’t grow back.”

“So why is Jangsu so frail?”

“No more elixir. It’s all gone. Hetepheres was very old and ill, and they let her drink the last of what they had. All of these ancient people are desperate for more. Horus has been a no-show. But then you and I come along out of the blue, and guess what?” She picked up her meteorite pendant and dangled it back and forth. “This is their last great hope.”

“How so? Can your pendant make more Elixir of Immortality?”

“Nope, but they think it might open some doors that they can’t.” She leaned forward again. “There are some vaults that they can’t open with their ‘magic stones.’ In the past, Jangsu’s stone has opened a vault that Sneferu’s couldn’t. So, this stone,” she dangled it again, “just might open one that they can’t.”

“Are there specific vaults they know of that they can’t open?”

“Yes. There is one in the Red Pyramid. They want to see if my magic stone will open it up.”

“You didn’t tell them that your magic stone is...” I paused.

“No.”

“I didn’t either.”

“Good. It’s a magic stone.”

“So how many vaults are there that they can’t open?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think they know, either. And Jangsu said that some vaults were hidden by Horus, so none of our immortal friends here know where they are. Anyway, he told me that there was a vault in his pyramid in China.”

“I didn’t know there were any pyramids in China.”

“Well, Jangsu says he has one. There was a vault he couldn’t open, and neither could Sneferu. He was really desperate to open it, so he broke into it with a masonry drill.”

“What happened?”

“It self-destructed. If there was any elixir inside, it was destroyed. So, the moral of the story is, if you can’t open something with your magic stone, then don’t try and open it. Jangsu knows he can’t live much longer without more elixir, so he has a tough call to make. If my stone won’t open up the vault in the Red Pyramid, then he may have to make a jump into the future to see if any elixir has shown up. If it didn’t, then he would have to keep jumping farther into the future until he reached a time when there was some.”

“Chasing immortality through time,” I pondered. “Maybe he would get to a time a thousand years from now when people know how to make an elixir of immortality without Horus.”

“Or, maybe this is it for them, the end of the road, if I can’t open the vault and Horus doesn’t show up soon.” Karyn yawned and rested her head back on the sofa. “Oh, I’m so tired.” Her eyes closed, and she mumbled, “I think Sneferu is returning from a trip now that word has been sent of my arrival. Then it will be show time.” She had been through a very long physically, mentally, and emotionally draining ordeal. She was fading fast. I set her up in the bed, and I lay down on the sofa.

We slept until the afternoon, talked through the rest of the day and into the night, and finally went to sleep. I awoke as soon as the harsh desert light came streaming through the window, brewed a strong pot of coffee, and heated up some flatbread with olive oil and feta cheese. Then I made sure we were packed up for a quick exit. I let Karyn sleep until the knock came on the door.

It was Walkie Talkie Man. He was going to escort us to the Red Pyramid without weaponry or backup. A bold move on his part. I had him wait out in the hall while I got Karyn up and ready to depart, possibly never to return here. The two of us were out the door in five minutes with Karyn munching on flatbread to go. We were packed light, each with our backpack and a belt canteen.

Walkie Talkie Man led us outside to a jeep, and we were off, kicking up a rooster tail of sand behind us. I was sitting beside Karyn in the backseat, and there was an electric excitement in the air as we anticipated a great adventure ahead of us. I reached over and grabbed Karyn’s hand. She held on and gave me a squeeze. Ahead of us the Red Pyramid loomed larger and larger.

Proceed to Chapter 7...

Copyright © 2023 by Humphrey Price

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