Entry #7: The Music of the Spheres (1902)

Abu Simbel

The temples at Abu Simbel were built in the 13th century BC by the pharaoh Ramesses II, third pharaoh of the 19th dynasty, also known as Ramesses the Great and Ozymandias, said to be the most powerful pharaoh in Egypt’s history. They served to celebrate his victory at the Battle of Kadesh, to impress his Nubian neighbors to the south, and to immortalize himself and his queen, Nefertari. The Small Temple is, after Akhetaten’s temple to Nefertiti, the second monument in Egyptian history dedicated to a queen. The Great Temple is aligned such that the rays of the sun shine into the building and illuminate the statues of the gods in the sanctuary sixty-one days before and after the winter solstice, said respectively to be the birthday and coronation day of Ramesses II.

By the 6th century BC, the enormous statues adorning the Great Temple were already covered up to the knees with sand. Eventually, the entire complex was lost beneath the dunes of the Sahara, until they were rediscovered and uncovered by two explorers, one Swiss and one Italian. The site was named Abu Simbel in honor of the local boy who originally saw the temples poking out of the desert and led the first expeditions to the site.

*             *             *

As the century turned, so did my fortunes as the curator of the Abnormal Relics Collection. Following the advice of my friend Nikola Tesla, I rechristened the collection as a private enterprise, funded with careful investing and long-term banking strategies. I was based out of a modest but adequate office on the edge of central London, I was getting very good financial advice from a broker in the city and an accounts agent at the bank, and I was on sound financial footing given my modest requirements.

However, I still felt that my operation needed a name, some sort of entity greater than myself to lend weight to my presence at the scene of a relic-related event. Without an organization to grant me their authority in the field, I decided to invent one. I realized that a private group, perhaps a law firm or club of some kind, could theoretically wield sufficient power to fund a small retrieval operation like mine without such a public face that their activities could be easily investigated. They could conceivably operate in the shadows, with no information known about them but rumor. As long as I was careful only to drop their name in connection with relics and spread their name only by word of mouth, I could gradually build my fictitious law firm an occult reputation to be reckoned with while keeping myself safely out of the public eye.

I therefore conducted all of my official business as an employee of Cooper, Banks, and Mackenzie, purportedly a small London law firm with a very private clientele. All of my loans and investments were in their name, and my broker and banker never looked past the respectable-looking calling card I showed them. The Pinkerton Badge was a great help in getting the ball rolling, but the name made sure that it remained so.

When I had a decent amount of money at my disposal and had fully established Cooper, Banks, and Mackenzie as a small but mysterious body in the city, I went to a local maker of novelty clocks and a Blackpool electrician and commissioned from them a mechanism I had devised to allow me to work more easily on my own. I disguised the mechanism as an apparatus for taking scientific measurements, and I was able to use the name to keep him from asking too many questions. As a final touch, I requested on behalf of Cooper, Banks, and Mackenzie that he take care whom he told about the existence of this project. With a warning like that, I felt confident that he would spread the name around and add a little mystique to the image. Word was bound eventually to spread to London’s supernatural denizens, and I would gain that much more credibility with them.

In actuality, the device I had commissioned was an automatic rig for taking readings from the Novoscope if I happened to be out of the office at the time of an event. A circle of electrical contacts was aligned with the top of the Novoscope, one for each compass bearing, and a wire attached to the dragon on top would complete a circuit in the direction of the event, indicating the correct bearing. The mechanism would then activate to position a carbon ribbon and paper tape over the numeral readout beneath the dragon’s head and take a rubbing, thus recording the distance to the event. Finally, the current time would be stamped on the tape by an automatic punch clock.

The finished product was a thing of beauty, if a little ungainly. The Novoscope was nearly invisible inside the mass of wires and cogs. All I would have to do was read from the paper tape to find the position and time of the event, assuming that the clockwork monstrosity worked properly. Tesla had suggested a couple of people when I sent him a wire about my idea, and the quality of their craftsmanship did not disappoint. As soon as another event occurred, I would know whether my design concept had lived up to their engineering acumen.

I got my chance in mid-May in 1902. I happened to be in the office at the time, but I still sat back and watched as the new machine did its work. The electrical contacts sparked a little, the gears and belts clanked away, and at the end, a little strip of paper curled out of the mechanism printed with the distance, bearing, and time of a new event. I did my calculations on a globe, which led me to a location along the Nile in southern Egypt. I recognized the location as the site of Abu Simbel.

To tell the truth, I had been expecting a relic event for the last couple of years, when an ancient Roman shipwreck was discovered off the Greek island of Antikythera. Many statues, coins, and other artifacts had been recovered from the wreckage, and I had been keeping an eye on reports from the site in the papers. I felt sure that a relic event was due to accompany the turn of the century, and the discovery of this wreck was just too neat. Something was bound to come from this, and I would eat my hat if the event at Abu Simbel weren’t related.

Sure enough, there was an article on the front page of the paper the next day about a new discovery from the Antikythera wreck. While sifting through the detritus from the ocean floor, one of the rocks was found to have a gear embedded in it. Soon, other gears were found, appearing to belong to a device more complex than any to have existed in ancient Greece.

Among the various gears was a sealed box encrusted with sediment from the ocean floor, and when this was forced open, it was found to contain a set of scrolls, only slightly damaged from the little seawater that had penetrated the seal. The scrolls contained several diagrams of people using some kind of device, which was concluded to be the source of the gear wheels that had been found. The scrolls also mentioned the names of Hipparchus, the Greek astronomer, and Archimedes in conjunction with the device. There was a series of images of people performing rituals and astronomical measurements at the temple complex at Abu Simbel. Finally, there was a slightly smudged reference to an ancient civilization of great sophistication and powerful magic, which was claimed to refer to the lost continent of Atlantis.

These scrolls were the topic of fierce debate in the pages of the paper. Most of the academics who responded to the story doubted the interpretation of the find. They claimed that the scrolls were too damaged to discern their meaning with any certainty, and that the Atlantis connection was likely the result of local sensationalism. Several claimed that the Atlantis scrolls were a hoax, along with the mechanical device found in the wreck, since the scrolls seemed too well preserved and the gears seemed far too complex for either one to date back to ancient Greece. However, most of the responses to the article were from lay people, and it was as if the entire population of London had caught the Atlantis bug. Everyone was hailing the new find as the dawn of a new, spiritually enlightened age. People were asking to see the scrolls in more detail, hoping that they showed the location of the lost city or some other ancient secret. Some were insisting that the scrolls go on tour like Christian relics, so that everyone in the world could see them for themselves.

I was glad that these scrolls were opening people’s eyes to the possibility of a world greater than our own, but the people in actual authority were sadly having none of it, as usual. The most prominent example was a piece written by one Dr. Sergey Fyodorov, a professor from St. Petersburg University in Russia. He wanted to strike a blow for rationalism and debunk the whole Atlantis myth once and for all. To that end, he said, he intended to mount an expedition to Abu Simbel, compare the images in the scrolls to the carvings in the temple, and determine once and for all if the scrolls had any basis in fact. He ended his letter with a request that any parties interesting in sponsoring his expedition reply to his office at Oxford, where he was a visiting lecturer.

This was a problem. A competing academic at Abu Simbel seeking to debunk the supernatural was as likely to destroy or forever bury any relic to be found there out of sheer bullheadedness as he was to want to take its power for himself. I had to leave for Abu Simbel at once, before this Dr. Fyodorov could get his affairs in order. I made arrangements to leave for Alexandria on the next available ship, and I packed a bag containing some clothes, notebooks, and several of my more useful relics.

Among the items from the Apothecary that I made sure to bring along was a translation I had made years ago of one of the documents that had been inside it from the beginning: Plato’s lost dialogue, Hermocrates. Its prequels, Timaeus and Critias, had introduced the idea of Atlantis to the public consciousness, and it was theorized that Hermocrates might have gone into greater detail on the subject. I remembered Atlantis having been mentioned from when I was translating the document into English, lo those many years ago, and I would have plenty of time to refresh myself on the journey through the Mediterranean.

According to Plato, Atlantis was indeed an island in the ocean that would later be named for it, located just west of the Straits of Gibraltar. It had been approximately the size of the United Kingdom and had supported a powerful maritime empire that had stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to the Caspian Sea, although they had strongholds and outposts on nearly every coastline in the world. They were masters of metallurgy, astronomy, meteorology, engineering, and many other sciences, and they were also well versed in all sorts of magic. It was even possible that they were the first to understand the roots of magic, the forces from which all the other forms of magic derived, the prime mover that made all the worlds turn.

As their power grew, so did their hubris. They began to perform experiments in both science and magic, to push the bounds of possibility. Ultimately, it was their study of magic that did them in, when an experiment caused the entire island to slowly disintegrate and vanish from the world into the swirling void between worlds. Of the inhabitants of the island that managed to escape by water, most were lost at sea and never made landfall. The fragments of their culture that they carried with them were forever consigned to the ocean floor, never to be seen again. A few, however, managed a safe escape using a magical device that sent them to various of their settlements around the world via a portal. Some of them escaped to Greece, some to the Yucatan Peninsula, and others to Babylon. The last one to leave opened a final portal to Egypt, dismantled the key components of the device, and brought them with him, stepping through the portal just as the device was destroyed behind him and the connection severed for all time.

That must have been what was waiting for me at Abu Simbel: the key components of a device that would allow a man to travel anywhere in the world instantly. That would certainly be a saving on ship passage. But if there was really a relic from Atlantis at Abu Simbel, then there may well be more. There could be all sorts of artifacts and artwork from Atlantis. I couldn’t let it fall into the hands of someone set on disproving it, not without careful handling.

I spent the rest of the journey poring over Hermocrates, making sure I had every detail pat. When the ship docked at Alexandria, I had a pretty firm idea of what I ought to do, so I gathered my belongings and headed for the river docks to catch a steamer up the Nile. When I got there, there was a crowd gathered. Lots of locals and several newspaper people were on hand, apparently to see someone off. I headed closer, and as I got in line to board the steamer, I spotted the face of Dr. Fyodorov among the throng. We were heading to Abu Simbel on the same steamer. Perhaps I could use the time to have a chat with him and suss out his motivations.

The steamer had a decent bar onboard, and Dr. Fyodorov had a table to himself. From what I had read about Dr. Fyodorov, he seemed a congenial man, more than willing to talk with anyone who shared his interests, so I took the seat across from him at his table.

“Excuse me, but would you be the celebrated Dr. Sergey Fyodorov?”

“I am indeed, sir.”

“I thought so. I saw your picture in the paper, where it said that you are traveling to Abu Simbel to resolve this Atlantis business. Is that true?”

“It is, sir. Are you with a newspaper yourself?”

“No, sir, in fact I am a fellow academic. Dr. Israel St. James, formerly of Cambridge University.” We shook hands. He had a firm handshake and an easy smile. I could tell that he had ample practice with them.

“A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Dr. St. James. What brings you to Egypt? Are you also investigating the Atlantis story?”

“I am indeed.”

“But if not for Cambridge, then for whom?”

“I am here on behalf of my employers, the firm of Cooper, Banks, and Mackenzie. They want me to investigate the connection between Abu Simbel and the legend of Atlantis, and if it is valid, to recover or document anything that may be of interest.”

“Cooper, Banks, and Mackenzie? I’ve not heard of them. What sort of business are they in?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.” I had used that reply dozens of times. It seemed to do the trick.

“And do your employers believe that the stories of Atlantis may be true?”

“Suffice it to say that they are willing to keep their minds open,” I said. “I take it that you do not hold with the popular belief in Atlantis?”

“As a scientist, I must avoid forming opinions ahead of the facts.” Despite the standoffish response, he was clearly hoping that I would pursue my questioning further. I could tell that he enjoyed talking to a receptive audience.

“Oh, certainly. You would not want to taint your observations with a preconceived notion. But as a human being, surely you must have some hypothesis about Atlantis. Doesn’t the idea intrigue you that there may have been a great civilization before us with astounding secrets that have been lost to time and tide?”

“I admit that the idea does hold a certain boyish fascination with me, but this is the twentieth century. We must move beyond such superstitions and focus on the facts, the things that are real and can be proven. These beliefs cannot benefit us without evidence.”

“Ah, well, a man can dream, can he not? Personally, I always cherished the possibility that I might one day discover something truly unexpected, something that changed everything that we thought we knew and shifted the course of human knowledge in a whole new direction.”

“Well, of course,” said Dr. Fyodorov. “It is the dream of every academic to make a discovery to shake the halls of learning. As schoolboys, we are surrounded with the names of great men, names that are attached to laws and theories and are carved into marble busts. It is the only way for a man to achieve true immortality.” I chuckled to myself at his desire for academic immortality while I had already achieved the more literal version.

“Who knows?” I said. “Perhaps such immortality awaits us at Abu Simbel, if these rumors of Atlantis are true.”

“In a truly infinite universe, I must concede that such a thing is possible, Dr. St. James. However, I must yield to Occam’s Razor and assume the more logical outcome, otherwise I would surely be laughed out of my university.”

As a man who actually had been laughed out of a university, I began to bridle at that statement, but I managed to keep the bile out of my voice. Mostly. “You mean to say that you take the road of the non-believer because it is safer? If Atlantis is a myth, then you are proven right, and if not, then you are the first man to prove it?”

He bowed his head slightly as if to concede the point. “The important thing is not who is right and who is wrong, but that the truth is revealed. It is not particularly important to me that Atlantis exists, merely that I can resolve the issue before the world once and for all.”

“You need not do it alone, Dr. Fyodorov. I will of course be there to serve as a witness, if necessary.”

“Certainly, but I think the reporting of this find would be better suited to a university than to a group of lawyers, would you not agree? No offense intended, of course.”

“None taken.” It always amused me that people found it so easy to say “no offense intended” and so difficult to avoid being offensive. “As long as I can fulfill my assignment for my employers, I don’t much care where the credit lies.”

“Well, if you would like to accompany me on my journey, you would of course be welcome. If there do turn out to be artifacts of interest at the temple, I’m sure the university can come to an arrangement with your employers regarding their custody. It is better that we work together in this endeavor, rather than obstruct each other so that neither of us succeeds.”

“Excellent. Then I believe I shall see you at the temple, Dr. Fyodorov.” We shook hands, and I returned to my room.

Not only was Dr. Fyodorov resistant to the idea of the supernatural, but it now seemed that he was a shameless self-promoter as well. He seemed less concerned with the nature of the connection between Abu Simbel and Atlantis than that it be he who uncovered it. I was no longer worried that he might hide or destroy the relic if he reached it first. The greater risk now was that he would parade it before the world for a shot at glory and let it fall into the hands of some dangerous idiot. And with his treasured faith in rationality, I dared not risk revealing the true nature of my expertise, lest he change his tune and attempt to keep me from the temple entirely. Best to play along for the moment and bide my time until I could get the relic out from under him.

After a few days of leisurely steamboat travel, we arrived at Abu Simbel, near the southern border of Egypt. I discovered that Dr. Fyodorov hadn’t been traveling alone; he was joined on the dock by a photographer and a research assistant, who had evidently been traveling in more humble circumstances, possibly in cargo for all I knew. Dr. Fyodorov was certainly treating them like luggage. As far as he was concerned, their only purpose on this expedition was as a vehicle for him to achieve his glory.

We weren’t even off the boat for ten minutes before Dr. Fyodorov had his photographer set up a shot of him posing in front of the temple. Dr. Fyodorov offered me a place in the picture next to him, in what I’m sure he meant as a gesture of generosity, but I declined. It may well have been good publicity for Cooper, Banks, and Mackenzie to be officially associated with this expedition, but I didn’t want to see my picture in any newspapers. After the brief photo session, which inevitably took nearly an hour, we proceeded into the temple. Dr. Fyodorov made a show of examining the statues and the bas-reliefs and dictating notes to his assistant while the photographer took pictures, and I merely examined the walls and inscriptions for any sign of a secret Atlantean sigil that might mark the location of the relic. Every so often, when I felt confident that Dr. Fyodorov had everyone’s attention, I would sneak a peek around the room with the Mary Celeste Sextant to aid in my search.

We examined the carvings and pillars in the main chamber of the temple, followed by the hypostyle hall and second pillared hall. Finally, we made our way to the sanctuary, the room that was aligned to catch the rays of the sun on exactly two days of every year. The rest of the temple was filled with art to glorify Ramesses II, but this was where the gods were depicted. Dr. Fyodorov was at his most poetic in this room, and he was thoroughly enjoying the sound of his own voice. Meanwhile, I simply stood and considered how I would be regarded if I were an emissary from Atlantis in a fledgling culture.

The Atlantean exodus had helped to seed civilizations around the world, as they sought to find fertile ground for the ideas that they had rescued from the cataclysm. How might such a man be received upon his arrival? I imagined a man arriving through unknown means, carrying highly advanced technology and speaking of advanced philosophy, in a settlement of primitive farmers and herders. How might I myself be received in a poor aboriginal village, were I to arrive in a hot-air balloon carrying a revolver and a paraffin lantern? I hesitated to believe that they might do something as simple as worshipping the newcomer like a god, but then Egypt was well known among archaeologists for the breadth of their pantheon.

I took a good look at the statues in the sanctuary: Ra-Horakhty, the god of the sunrise; the deified form of Ramesses himself as the god-king; Amun-Ra, the king of the gods; and Ptah, said to be the creator of the universe. The first three were all associated with the sun in some way, but Ptah was associated with the underworld. When the sun illuminated the sanctuary, the first three statues would be lit, but Ptah always remained in shadow.

The Atlantean visitor would have helped to shape the rise of Egypt from behind the scenes, always remaining in shadow, just like Ptah. He would have carried knowledge of the fundamental forces that governed the cosmos, just like Ptah. And he would have brought with him devices the likes of which no one had seen before, perhaps demonstrating their function to the craftsmen of the day. Ptah was a god of craftsmen, especially stonemasons and tomb builders. Could Ptah have been the deified version of the Atlantean visitor?

I took out the sextant and examined the Ptah statue on the side against the wall, the part of the statue that absolutely would have stayed perpetually in the dark. Through the eyepiece, I could just make out a faint aura on the wall behind the statue. I brushed my fingers against the spot, and I made a discovery that I truly had not been expecting.

I received a rush of knowledge about a secret maze of tunnels beneath the temple. The statue concealed a lever that, when pulled, would reveal the entrance to the lower temple. Beyond that, I saw nothing, but it seemed that more information would be forthcoming once I had ventured further. I couldn’t believe it. The entire place was an enormous relic.

I called out to Dr. Fyodorov, interrupting him in mid-speech. I pulled the lever, and the entire statue of Ptah slid backward into the wall, along with the section of wall next to it, revealing a ramp that sloped down and around a corner into the bedrock. He gave me a brief look that almost seemed like admiration, but the look quickly faded as he directed his photographer to take a shot of him next to the secret door. I just managed to turn away from the camera and close my eyes as the flash went off.

The lot of us descended into the catacombs, Fyodorov narrating to his assistant the whole way. Unlike the rest of the temple, there were no carvings on the walls down here. As we proceeded, I brushed my fingers along the walls, waiting for the maze to tell me the right way forward, but no such luck. I remained uninformed until we came to a hallway with passages leading off in all directions. Dr. Fyodorov took his assistant, his photographer, and his lantern and headed off along one of the passages, leaving me in absolute blackness.

I thought he’d never leave.

I opened my case and took out an object I’d been given by a geologist when I was still at Cambridge: a piece of rough marble that gave off a gentle white glow, regardless of the ambient light conditions. It helped to be able to see the walls in natural white light, rather than the dirty yellow of Fyodorov’s lantern. It also helped to be away from his constant nattering and self-aggrandizing. With the air clear of his speeches, I could finally hear myself think.

I took a quick sweep of the area with the Sextant, which revealed an aura on one of the flagstones in the floor. I ran my fingers along the stone, and the catacombs gave me the rest of the information I needed. I got back up and put my weight on the stone, and it gave an inch, causing a bronze ring to descend from the ceiling on a rope. I placed my foot in the ring and held onto the rope, and a few seconds after it had descended, it retracted back up to the ceiling. I stepped off the ring when it was halfway through its journey, and I stepped on top of the wall of the maze.

The Atlantean had designed this little puzzle quite well. Anyone who managed to find this place would be so focused on the walls of the maze that they would not think to consider the ceiling, especially without a ladder or any other obvious pointers, and the ceiling in here was higher than it seemed in the dark. By the light of the glowing rock, I could see the tops of all the walls, forming a pathway into the secret sanctuary in the center of the massive room. If I shielded my eyes from my light, I could just see the lantern light where Fyodorov was, still dictating to his assistant as he wandered around in circles in the dark.

I walked along the tops of the walls and up a narrow set of steps, and I found myself in a room above the center of the maze, the location of the relic that the maze had shown me. It was a simple, cylindrical room, its walls carved with bas-reliefs depicting the history of Atlantis, from rise to fall to destruction. At the center was a large stone doorway, slightly elevated above the floor on a scaffold of bronze. At the top of the doorway was an iridescent black sphere, about the size of a football. Surrounding the door was a series of interconnected, concentric bronze hoops, supported by a brass mechanism of gears and worms in the pedestal beneath the doorway. Set into one of the hoops was another sphere, this one a translucent white and about the size of an apple.

I laid my hand on the white sphere, and I had another vision. The device that occupied this room was an orrery, except that instead of aligning planets, it aligned locations. It caused doorways in two places on Earth to become connected to each other by exploiting the metaphysical nature of doorways. According to Atlantean cosmology, there were many planes of existence beyond the eight that Tesla had shown me, and one of these planes was devoted to travel and crossing boundaries. The orrery allowed one to travel between doorways that were thousands of miles apart by connecting one to the other through this plane of travel.

I remembered what I had read in Hermocrates about this device. The man who came here from Atlantis had aligned his location with that of a doorway in ancient Egypt, and once the doors were connected, he had brought the vital components with him and destroyed the doorway behind him, severing the connection. I wouldn’t able to fit the stones into my case, so if I were going to get this relic out of here without alerting Dr. Fyodorov to its existence, I would have to do something similar.

I knelt down by the brass mechanism, and I spotted a small globe among the various parts. The globe had a small sliding pointer that could be moved to indicate anywhere on its surface. I slid the pointer to indicate London, and I felt my mind being drawn to memories of my office. It was almost as if the orrery was trying to narrow down my destination for me, like it wanted to make sure that I got where I really wanted to go. I turned a key in the mechanism, and the bronze hoops began to rotate. The white sphere spun around me and came to rest, and then both spheres began to give off a faint hum. I stepped up to the doorway in the middle of the orrery and opened the door.

As I stepped through the doorway, I found myself in a space surrounded by white light on all sides. There was no floor, no walls, and no ceiling, just the stone door behind me, whiteness all around me, and a familiar wooden door before me. I opened the door, and I found myself stepping into my office in London. I could hear the sounds of activity outside my window. It was raining.

I stepped back into the orrery room and gently disengaged the stones from their mounts. I was vaguely worried that this would terminate the connection, that I had misjudged what I had seen in Hermocrates and the Atlantean refugee had moved the stones some other way, but the stones’ hum remained steady. I carried the stones into my office and set them down next to the Apothecary. Cataloguing them properly would have to wait until I concluded my business with Dr. Fyodorov. After all, he might get suspicious if I didn’t return soon, and if he thought I was lost down here, he might come back with a search party. I couldn’t have that.

I left my office and closed the orrery doorway. I then turned the key back and moved the pointer away from London. When I opened the doorway, I saw nothing but the back of the room. The connection was severed, and the stones were safely away in London. I took a notebook from my bag and made a few sketched of the orrery mechanism so that I could have it replicated when I got back.

I made my way back to the entrance to the maze in time for Dr. Fyodorov and his team to meet me there. “Ah, Dr. St. James,” he said, “did you find anything of interest for your employers?”

“I’m afraid not. It seems that you were right, Dr. Fyodorov. There is nothing here related to Atlantis at all.”

“I must concur. The existence of this catacomb is interesting, but I must return to Oxford and relate the news that the story of Atlantis is nothing but a myth.”

“Fair enough, Dr. Fyodorov. Fair enough.”