Omm Sety's Egypt. Hanny el Zeini
man looked up at her. “It needs treatment. Can you keep him steady for me?”
While the man went to his tent to get something Dorothy held the horse with great concentration. The man returned with a thick ointment and a piece of clean linen to bind the foot.
“Can I come again tomorrow and see how he is doing?”
The man nodded and turned away, saying under his breath, “Thank you, Miss.”
That was the first of many visits to the Gypsy camp. Now another horse had become a good friend, always offering his head for a kiss. He was a beautiful beast, deep bronze with a white triangle on his face. She discovered that its owner was also a skillful juggler and Dorothy watched, captivated, as he performed his tricks for her. He tried to teach her some of them but she could never do them well.
She envied this clan of outsiders for the freedom they enjoyed and for the warmth of their feeling towards each other – which gradually came to include the lonely girl with the bright gold hair. She loved them, every one of them, even though she could never pronounce any of their names. She didn’t really know why she loved them. It certainly wasn’t for the juggling tricks – she had given up hope of learning them anyway. But she had heard the stories that they had come from Egypt long ago.
Her granny, a reasonably observant woman, was beginning to wonder where the child was disappearing to on horseback for hours on end. When she learned about the visitations to the Gypsy camp she was horrified and told her never to go there again. Dorothy simply ignored the order. Early the next morning she set out from her house to pay a visit to the camp. Nearly there, she stopped short, her heart beating wildly. Her eyes strained to make out familiar forms in the mist, but there were none to be seen. The entire camp had just vanished. She ran around the site, frantically looking for any trace of her friends, and then she collapsed onto the wet ground, sobbing.
Not long after, news ran through the Sussex village that an unexploded German bomb had fallen close to the main road outside of town and was lying half-buried in the ground. German planes rarely ventured that far from their London raids, but somehow a bomb had landed here with its head three feet into the earth at a sharp angle.
Learning about it from one of the workers on the farm, Dorothy went straightaway to find a friend, an older boy of 17. Together they rode their horses to have a look at the bomb. On their way they met a man on horseback who was galloping furiously in the opposite direction. “There’s a big bomb close to this road up ahead!” he yelled as he passed. “It could go off any moment. Turn round and go back!”
The young riders kept on going. When they got to within a hundred yards of the bomb site they spotted it sticking out of the ground, quite visible. Dorothy dismounted, but the boy was not so sure. Her mind was set on one thing: rendering the bomb harmless by doing whatever it was that people did to troublesome bombs. As for the boy, he suddenly became aware of the terrible danger they were in. A lengthy argument ensued before help finally arrived: A truck full of civil defense men and explosives experts pulled up next to them. “What the hell do you think you are doing here?” shouted the officer in charge. “Off with you both!”
Dorothy remounted her horse and followed her companion, already well down the road ahead of her. If she could have found a way to stay and join the fun she would have.
On their way home they passed several carts belonging to Gypsies about to settle in for the night. Dorothy eagerly asked their leader if they had seen her vanished friends, but the answer was no. Gypsies have learned through the centuries never to tell about each other to strangers. They couldn’t have known that they could trust the young girl with their secrets. Even years later she couldn’t explain why the Gypsy clan near her grandmother’s farm should have left such an indelible mark on her life.
Dorothy received an unexpected letter from Dr. Budge. There were only a few lines, the old man asking his student prodigy how she was doing in the village and encouraging her to keep up her studies. It showed a grandfatherly regard for his perplexing and amusing child-scholar. Since the British Museum was closed for the duration of the war and Dr. Budge’s letter had no return address, she knew it was futile to try to escape from the farm and go to London. But it was certainly in her mind to do it if she could have.
During the war, Sussex suffered almost nothing from the incessant air raids over the British Isles. The comparative peace gave Dorothy a unique opportunity to read and to explore the depths of her thoughts and perceptions. It was a time also when she became increasingly aware of her inexplicable power to “see” events taking place hundreds of miles away.
“My real problem,” she said later, “was those horrible dreams in which I could clearly see pictures of what was going on at the Western Front. It was as though some part of me left my body and traveled far away to become a sort of war correspondent. Oh, Lord, how I hated those dreams, because they never failed to come true.”
Twenty young men from the village had been recruited to serve in the army. Dorothy knew many of them from years of summer holidays there with her family. Some of the soldiers she saw in her terrifying dreams were boys she knew from those summers.
Once in a dream she watched a boy named Ralph being blown to pieces in the Somme Valley. He never came back. In her sleep she was helpless as she saw another young man, Robert, lose his left leg. A few weeks later a military ambulance arrived in the village and there was Robert, with one leg, struggling to walk with his crutches.
Another night she woke up screaming, “Leave the ship! Leave the ship!! Where are the lifeboats!” The housekeeper woke to the noise and ran to Dorothy’s room to find the girl crying hysterically. Whether the cause of the nightmare was psychic sight or sheer coincidence, on that same night a British battleship had been sunk by the notorious German ship Graf Spee. There were other dreams, so disturbing that she dreaded going to sleep at night for fear of the awful knowledge that awaited her.
When she described her dreams for me many years later, I believed her. I thought that she was among those few who are destined from childhood to be sensitive, and maybe privileged by a certain gift which we in Egypt call “seeing ahead of one’s time.”
The war dragged on, and then it was over. During the long stay on the farm Dorothy had grown into a healthy, but rather plump young lady. Back home again in London her parents teased her about her size. Her mother thought she could benefit from dancing school, which Dorothy detested. She had quite different plans for herself anyway, plans that had had years to grow and ferment in her mind.
Strongly influenced by her readings in Egyptology and the esoteric and spiritual sciences, she searched out her old teacher at the British Museum. Their first encounter, a year after the end of the war, was an emotional one. She was wildly enthusiastic about resuming her lessons, and Dr. Budge gave her as much time as he could, but he was immersed in studying the results of several reports on field research that had recently come to his desk. The latest excavations in Egypt were providing great entertainment for a war-weary world ready to be dazzled by new discoveries.
Dorothy worked hard to advance her knowledge of hieroglyphs, but at school she was an indifferent student. Her mind was completely focused on Egyptology and the dream of returning to her heart’s home. At 16, having barely finished her secondary schooling, she simply discarded any ambition to go on to university. The one question in her mind was how and when she would get to Egypt. An event two years earlier had only cemented her determination. It was something she could not tell a soul about, because nobody would have believed it.
the visitor
One night she had been roused from sleep, feeling a weight on her chest. She opened her eyes to see the figure of a man, bending over her silently, staring fiercely at her. There was no doubt who it was; she had never forgotten that photo of Sety I’s mummy. This man at her bedside was in mummy wrappings, with only his face and arms free. His face was a dead man’s but his eyes were alive and filled with the most terrible torment. Omm Sety described the visitation to me years later: “You could only say that the eyes had the look of somebody in hell who had suddenly found a way out.”*