He did not so much budge from the occasionally bumpy ride of his army jeep. The general of the Egyptian army, Muhammad Heishin Mubarak, contemplated all of these thoughts on his journey to the great valley. Now it was an age of darkness, of people reaching out blindly for their sustenance, not unlike the scorpions of the desert night, but how much electricity there was in the air! Life flowed forever onward as the Nile always had and always will, indifferent to the vainglories of one species.
Even the most ancient and sacred things of this world lost their power to living humans who, restlessly, brutally, inexorably, carried the fiery torch of life. The pharaohs of the deep past, convinced of their immortality and the irrevocable legacy of their rights and traditions, were evicted from their tombs by robbers and archeologists. The shades of the pharaohs lived in the earth itself, in the geological time of millions of years. The ancient pharaohs who slept there since time immemorial were beyond the world of light above them, beyond the busy potters and masons who sold their handiwork to tourists for their daily bread, beyond the incessant trade of the small villages nearby, beyond even the rise of modern Cairo in the last two centuries. The silence was so great it nearly matched the darkness in the ancient stone cliffs that slumbered, unwavering, with their secrets. It was the dead of midnight in the Valley of the Kings.
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