Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight

by Mathew Joseph Holt

(Nefermat) "As you like. I am through with the sacrilegious beast as soon as he is dead. I would not give his body tomb room in the temple of the dead."

Whereupon the two high priests departed, leaving me with very sober thoughts.

Within an hour, three priests of our order, the death watch, took up their abode in my chambers, which I was not permitted to leave, and this watch was continued to the end.

On the next day the body of the queen arrived from Men-nefer and I was directed to complete the embalming already begun. This occupied a fortnight.

The day the embalming was completed Rahotep came to my chamber and, sending the guards from the room, said:

"On the morrow at sunrise you will be strangled to death, after which your body will be delivered to me for disposition. When it is carefully embalmed I shall place it in a new tomb in the temple of Amun and it shall become sacred to him. The tomb is so constructed that light and air penetrates through slits in the portal and it may be entered from the temple by members of our order. Amun will permit your soul to occupy and grow in your mummied body. You have said you are not afraid of death. Neither you nor any other man knows what lies beyond. It is not the end of things as you declare but the beginning of the thought life. Living through the ages in your old shell you shall learn that the infinite is the author of all things and from the order and harmony of nature you shall deduce the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. You shall learn that the soul is an immaterial being which can go where the body can not and can live where the body cannot live and is so sometimes punished. That its controlling force is not the body nor even the mind but a power which pervades all space, which has existed from the beginning, looking after the universe and each creature therein. This is the infinite, the beginning, the end of all things, which, lacking a better name and light to discern, I call Amun, The Great, The Only One. The wind has not a body, yet you know the wind blows; light has not substance, yet you feel and see it and know it comes from the worlds in the skies. Your soul has existed from the beginning as a part of the infinite. It came into existence as the angels of light and darkness. It is of the size of the faith that is in you and yours is quite small. Yours shall grow during the ages, as Amun is about to begin its experience, which each soul is to have, though the experience given each is different, being judged and punished or rewarded according to the light given, which in every case is dim. You are first to be turned over to Phtha, the great father of beginnings. Your little seed of a soul, assuming the form of a beetle, shall remain in your mummified body. Your embalming robes shall be decorated with his sign, the scarabeus. Your body will be carefully watched by our priesthood to observe the growth of your soul and know that you finally believe in its existence and the infinite power of God. You shall pass through the valley of humiliation, living as the Chelas live upon your own soul. Your suffering shall bring improvement and growth until your soul shall prove sufficient unto itself, since it shall know God and itself. Finally it shall part company with your mummied body and become a part of the light of the world."

I arose at daylight the next morning and, after carefully bathing, rubbed my whole body with a preparation for closing the pores; then, retiring to a couch, drank a vial of most precious and potent embalming fluid, which, knowing death to be near, I had secreted when preparing the mummy of the queen.

I felt a contraction of my stomach, an icy chill, a gradual though rapid cessation of consciousness and being. For what period I know not I slept the sleep of death.

Sluggishly in my dead frame fluttered a something. For days or years, I know not, there was a mere sense of spiritual life or being and a fluttering of body as of a small numbed insect; was it a scarabeus? This was succeeded in time by an acuter consciousness, when I saw my puny soul in its bare weakness.

Then began the journey through the valley of humiliation and suffering, when soul lived upon and thought only of self and its escape. Through ages of suffering and loneliness and blackness, my only thought was a constant prayer for absolute non-existence. Within the heart of my tiny soul there began to grow a germ-like conception and reverence for God. With this thought the soul seemed to take unto itself strength to make feeble efforts to tear a way through its coffin of flinty skin and in feeble flight bounded and pounded incessantly on its case of parchment, as a drummer on his drum, with a ceaseless, monotonous, drum, drum, drum.