Goodbye, Stranger

The land of ancient Egypt, as with most ancient cultures, was described in terms of its fertility, flooding, and available fresh water. The fertile flood plains of the Nile and the Delta that begins at Giza and Cairo was called Kemet, meaning the black land. The harsh landscape of the Sahara that surrounds the Nile valley was call Deshret, or the red land. The ancient Egyptians referred to themselves as remt-en-Kemet. The story of the ancient kingdoms of Egypt is the story of the various kings' untiring and mostly fruitless efforts to unite these two kingdoms, these two worlds, the find the third land. It is also well known that the ancient Egyptians had some very definite ideas about the afterlife, and the separation of those two worlds. However, the multiple and ever-changing pantheon of gods, and the kings and great pharaohs (along with a few Queens) were able to exist simultaneously in the two lands at once; to live in the third land. In this novel, Dr Walter Rothschild is one of the premier Egyptologists and cryptographers in the world, working at the British Museum in London. His assignment is to crack the Stela of Paser, a real work that has stymied translators for centuries, a cryptographic puzzle that dangles the possibility of a third way of reading it. This turns out to be a possible key to not only discovering a new way of understanding the ancient Egyptians, but also offers strange glimpses at history, time, and space, and regret; ultimately how we all seek the third way, and how this search can defeat or liberate us.