Morning Star by H. Rider (Henry Rider) Haggard
page 3 of 300 (01%)
page 3 of 300 (01%)
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in his "Egyptian Tales," the _Ka_ plays a very distinct part of its own.
Thus the husband is buried at Memphis and the wife in Koptos, yet the _Ka_ of the wife goes to live in her husband's tomb hundreds of miles away, and converses with the prince who comes to steal the magic book. Although I know no actual precedent for it, in the case of a particularly powerful Double, such as was given in this romance to Queen Neter-Tua by her spiritual father, Amen, the greatest of the Egyptian gods, it seems, therefore, legitimate to suppose that, in order to save her from the abomination of a forced marriage with her uncle and her father's murderer, the _Ka_ would be allowed to anticipate matters a little, and to play the part recorded in these pages. It must not be understood, however, that the fact of marriage with an uncle would have shocked the Egyptian mind, since these people, and especially their royal Houses, made a habit of wedding their own brothers and sisters, as in this tale Mermes wed his half sister Asti. I may add that there is authority for the magic waxen image which the sorcerer Kaku and his accomplice used to bewitch Pharaoh. In the days of Rameses III., over three thousand years ago, a plot was made to murder the king in pursuance of which such images were used. "Gods of wax . . . . . . for enfeebling the limbs of people," which were "great crimes of death, the great abomination of the land." Also a certain "magic roll" was brought into play which enabled its user to "employ the magic powers of the gods." Still, the end of these wizards was not encouraging to others, for they were found guilty and obliged to take their own lives. |
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