Hanit the Enchantress

FOREWORD

My reader. Perhaps you have had the good fortune to visit Egypt! If such be the case, you have undoubtedly stood among the giant columns of the Temple to the Sun-god Amen in the Northern Apt (Karnak). You have marveled at the ever changing colors which light up the walls and columns of the Temple of the Southern Apt (Luxor), so that at one moment they seem to have been carved from blocks of amber, at another from coral, jasper, amethyst or, as the last bright rays of the sinking sun fall full upon them, from colossal bars of red Nubian gold.

You have gazed in awe and reverence at the mummy of King Amenhotep, lying in his granite sarcophagus, peacefully asleep he seemed, deep down in the very heart of the Theban Hills.

In an alcove nearby you may recall the three bodies lying, uncoffined, upon the bare rock of the tomb chamber. You were informed that the


 bodies had been removed from their own tombs to this secret chamber of a dead Pharaoh, that they might be saved from the hands of tomb-robbers.

“The mummies of unknown royal personages,” your Arab guide informed you.

Perhaps the guide permitted you to touch the long black tresses of one of the three. He pointed out what he called the mark of an arrow, which caused the death of another. He told you that the boy had undoubtedly met his death at the hands of a strangler. He hinted at foul murder!

If what he said of the three was true, he might well have attempted to identify the bodies. They are, perhaps, those of Wazmes, Queen Hanit’s murdered son, the beautiful slave girl Bhanar, and her one-time mistress, the Princess Sesen, whose wavy black hair appears as soft to-day as when Ramses and Menna wooed her, as when Renny the Syrian died for her.

All this, and more, you have doubtless seen.


Yet, it is safe to say, you have never so much as heard of the mystery surrounding the tomb of Menna, son of Menna, that most baffling among the many mysterious tombs in and about the great Theban cemeteries.

Undoubtedly, Menna, son of Menna, had in life an enemy, a most vindictive enemy; one whose malignant hatred followed Menna into his very tomb.

Enter that tomb to-day, and you see at a glance that this enemy sought to nullify and make ineffectual the entire series of engraved prayers and magic formulæ which witness to Menna’s hopes for an eternity of bliss upon the banks of the Celestial Nile. Yes, Menna’s implacable foe sought to destroy him, both body and soul!

Menna’s body was not found when, recently, his tomb was discovered and opened. We may thus infer that Menna’s arch-enemy accomplished the destruction of Menna’s body as successfully, as fiendishly we may suppose, as he did that of Menna’s soul.


Examine the sculptures upon the walls of his tomb. You will find that Menna’s eyes have been cut out; that the lips of his servants and field hands are missing; that the tips of his hunting arrows have been blunted; that the knots in his “measuring-rope” have been destroyed. Yet, worse than all, the plumb of the scales, upon which Menna’s heart will be weighed at the Judgment, has vanished.

Let us suppose that Menna’s mummy had been found, found intact; at the opening of his tomb. That empty shell would have been of little use to Menna. Since, following his enemy’s work of desecration upon the ordered prayers, incantations and scenes painted or engraved upon the walls of his tomb, Menna’s body was doomed to inevitable destruction, and with it, that of his ka or “double,” that other self which, from the day of his birth, awaited him in the heavens.

Without eyes Menna could not find his way among the flint-strewn valleys and precipitous heights of the Underworld. Without arrows

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 Menna would be unable to obtain food. Menna’s servants had all perished, as without mouths they could neither eat nor drink. And Menna might never measure off an allotted acreage among the ever fertile fields of Heaven if, in spite of all, he somehow managed to win through to the Celestial Nile.

Alas! this success Menna could never hope to achieve. The breaking of the plumb of the scales rendered it impossible that Menna’s trembling soul could pass Osiris, Judge of the Dead, or the fierce hound Amemet, which, with open mouth, awaited his victims beside that great god’s throne.

No! Menna could never hope to feast at the Table of the Gods. Menna could never enjoy that eternity of bliss among the Blessed Fields of Aaru which a beneficent Sun-god had promised to the faithful.

But, Menna’s body was not found at the time of the discovery of his tomb, though his body had evidently been placed in the white sarcophagus prepared for it by royal command.


Who so bitterly hated Menna, the King’s Overseer? Who so relentlessly sought not alone the destruction of his mortal body but the very annihilation of his soul?