Omm Sety's Egypt. Hanny el Zeini
it was, her father’s tolerance had finally been worn away. His only hope was that a proper and sober schooling would fill her mind with more normal ideas. He enrolled her in a good school and hoped for the best, but Reuben Eady was no match for his daughter’s stubborn determination. Every chance she got she would sneak out of school, a truant, and go to the British Museum.
the famous Dr. Budge
By the age of ten she had become something of a fixture in the Egyptian Galleries, and Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, the renowned Egyptologist and director of the collection, had noticed her. He wondered what on earth the child could be doing, staring at the hieroglyphic inscriptions with such intensity.
One day he asked her why she wasn’t in school. She replied that she was not particularly interested in what she was taught there. “And what is it you wish to learn?”
She answered with a single, emphatic word: “Hieroglyphs!” And so it was that Dorothy Eady became the youngest and most unusual student of the great Dr. Budge. He immediately recognized her talent for copying the complex hieroglyphic figures and gave her some chapters of The Book of the Dead to copy and translate, rewarding her with bars of chocolate for work done properly. He was at a loss to explain such early aptitude and passion for an extremely difficult subject. And why would a girl from a good Christian family care to learn about a pagan religion that had been dead for 2000 years? As far as his new student was concerned, Dr. Budge knew everything she felt urgent to know about: the language, the gods and goddesses, especially Isis and Osiris – in whom she now fervently believed – and the magic. Dr. Budge was the keeper of mysterious and powerful secrets.
Omm Sety would recall Dr. Budge with great warmth. “He was my first and most earnest tutor. He adopted the ancient religion and deftly used Egyptian magic for benevolent ends. In fact, he wrote books on both subjects. He once said to me, ‘My child, Egypt taught us everything. I follow all the Egyptian teachings, and when you go there one day I am sure you will do the same.’”
She once asked him to teach her about magic and he asked her why. “Well,” she said, “I have an uncle who says awful things to me about Egypt and I want to get rid of him.”
He drew back in pretend horror. “Oh, no, no, no – you’re not the one to learn magic!” But magic – heka – was something that continued to fascinate her.
That same year, 1914, the Great War broke out. For two more years Dorothy continued her studies with her doting mentor at the museum, immersing herself in a wondrous world that was far more vivid to her than this one. But in 1916 when the air raids began over London, many families sent their children away to safer havens for the duration of the war. The Eadys made arrangements to send their daughter to the countryside, to her grandmother’s farm in Sussex, where she had spent many summer holidays among the horses, cows and chickens.
Near the day of departure, just as the government was preparing to shut down the museum as a precaution, Dorothy paid a call on her tutor to bid him farewell. Budge was touched. He apologized for not having a bar of chocolate to offer her. “Will you study your hieroglyphs when you are with your granny?”
“Every day,” she replied.
“What makes you so keen to continue, my child?”
“Because I used to know, and now I must remember it all again.”
The old man regarded her silently. He was probably the first person besides her skeptical parents to become aware of her peculiar relationship with the far past. A diminutive man, he got down from his chair and held her affectionately at arm’s length, saying sternly, “Don’t you do anything foolish when you are in Sussex, and I don’t want to hear about any problems you make for your granny. Now run along, child, and God bless you!”
She reluctantly said her goodbye and kissed the old man on both cheeks.
Sussex
From the first day, life in the countryside was uneventful and often tiresome for the city child. There was school with the village children and there were chores, which put her in contact with more animals. And there was the white horse. Whatever its original English name, it now had a new Egyptian name, Mut Hotep, after the favorite horse of Ramesses II.
“It was as if he smelled a friend,” she said of their first meeting. The horse, who had been grazing, saw her and walked towards her until his head touched her arm and stayed there.
Mut Hotep was her ticket to a certain degree of freedom. A few miles from the village was the seaside town of Eastbourne with a well stocked public library. Every week or two she rode the obliging Mut Hotep to the library, where she would borrow all the books on Egyptology she could carry back with her. Fortunately, there were many, written by the prominent Egyptologists of the time – Sir William Flinders Petrie, a prolific scholar who regularly published his great discoveries in the Fayyum, Thebes, Memphis and, most important for Dorothy, Abydos; and Dr. Budge, whose long list of books was an absolute must for beginners and scholars alike. Of course she had already devoured some of Budge’s books.
Still, despite the comfort of her books and the large country house, her loneliness was sometimes acute. She longed to see her young aunt and have more nights of laughter and storytelling. No one here in the country, not even her dear granny, could know the thoughts that occupied her mind. Her affinity for animals would always be a solace to her, even if it was not always wise or prudent. There was one particular instance she recalled from that time:
“One day on the farm,” she said, “a man saw an adder, a very poisonous snake. It was close to the house and he wanted to kill it, so I snatched up the snake and ran off with it. The man pursued me but I could run faster and I got right away. When I was far out of sight of the house I sat down with the snake in my lap and was patting it and petting it when a voice behind me said, ‘What are you doing with that snake, Miss?’ I looked up and there was a Gypsy man. ‘Do leave my snake alone,’ I said.
“ ‘I won’t hurt it,’ he promised. ‘What are you doing with it?’
“I told him that they were trying to kill it and I’d run away with it. ‘But aren’t you afraid of it?’ he said, and I replied, ‘No – not at all.’
“ ‘Don’t you ever want to kill snakes?’ he said. ‘No,’ I said firmly.
“ ‘Well, kiss it on its head and swear that you will never harm any snake, and no snake will ever harm you.’ So I promptly kissed the snake and swore on its head that I would never harm any of its friends and relatives. ‘Now let it go,’ he said. I let the snake go and it went away.
“ ‘But when I grow up,’ I told him, ‘I’m going to live in Egypt, and there are poisonous snakes there, too.’
“ ‘So long as you don’t break the truce they will never harm you.’
“ ‘But how can a snake in England give news to snakes in Egypt?’
“ ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘but they can – and you will find it so.’
“And it has been so.”
A band of Gypsies had made their encampment on the outskirts of the village, just a few families living in rather casual tents surrounded by their carts and shabby horses. Dorothy decided one morning to visit them, but knew enough not to tell her grandmother. Gypsies were not welcome company anywhere. People in the English countryside kept their distance from them and were suspicious of their strange ways and reputed lack of cleanliness. The Gypsy camp did have a very peculiar smell about it, she recalled, but not nearly as awful as she had been told.
Dorothy approached the camp with some caution; Gypsies were known to resent intrusions on their privacy. The first thing that drew her attention was a handsome, dark-haired young man who was bent over, holding the right front hoof of his horse as if something were wrong. Dorothy watched from a safe distance as the man pulled something from the hoof, a nail or sharp piece of splintered wood.
“Is the horse badly hurt?” she called out and