John Crowley - Aegypt

ElectricStory.com
www.electricstory.com

Copyright 1987 by John Crowley

AEgypt

Copyright 1987 by John Crowley. All rights reserved.

ISBN: 1-930815-18-2

ElectricStory.com and the ES design are trademarks of ElectricStory.com, Inc.

This novel is a work of fiction. All characters, events, organizations, and locales are either the product of the author's imagination or used fictitiously to convey a sense of realism.

Cover art copyright 2001 Cory and Catska Ench.

Edited by Ron Drummond in close consultation with the author. As of 2001, this eBook comprises the definitive text of AEgypt by John Crowley.

eBook conversion by Ron Drummond and Robert Kruger.

eBook edition of AEgypt copyright 2001 by ElectricStory.com.

For our full catalog, visit our site at www.electricstory.com.

Image18.jpg

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following: The Solitudes of Luis de Gngora, translated by Gilbert F. Cunningham, Copyright 1968 by Johns Hopkins University Press. The Story of Champions of the Round Table, by Howard Pyle, published by Dover Publications, Inc.

Author's Note

More even than most books are, this is a book made out of other books. The author wishes to acknowledge his profound debt to those authors whose books he has chiefly plundered, and to offer his apologies for the uses to which he has put their work: to Joseph Campbell, to Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, to Mircea Eliade, to Peter French, to Hans Jonas, to Frank E. and Fritzie P. Manuel, to Giorgio di Santillana, to Stephen Schoenbaum, to Wayne Shumaker, to Keith Thomas, to Lynn Thorndike, to D. P. Walker, and, most of all, to the late Dame Frances Yates, out of whose rich scholarship this fantasia on her themes has been largely quarried.

I have also put to use the speculations of John Michell and Katherine Maltwood, Robert Graves, Lois Rose, and Richard Deacon. I have used the translations and notes to the Hermetica of Walter Scott, and Gilbert P. Cunningham's translation of the Soledades of Luis de Gngora.

But what follows is, still, a fiction, and the books that are mentioned, sought for, read, and quoted from within it must not be thought of as being any more real than the people and places, the cities, towns, and roads, the figures of history, the stars, stones, and roses which it also purports to contain.

The Prologue in Heaven

There were angels in the glass, two four six many of them, each one shuffling into his place in line like an alderman at the Lord Mayor's show. None was dressed in white; some wore fillets or wreaths of flowers and green leaves in their loose hair; all their eyes were strangely gay. They kept pressing in by one and two, always room for more, they linked arms or clasped their hands behind them, they looked out smiling at the two mortals who looked in at them. All their names began with A.

See! said one of the two men. Listen!

I see nothing, said the other, the elder of them, who had often spent fruitless hours alone before this very showstone, fruitless though he prepared himself with long prayer and intense concentration: I see nothing. I hear nothing.

Annael. And Annachor. And Anilos. And Agobel, said the younger man. God keep us and protect us from every harm.

The stone they looked into was a globe of moleskin-colored quartz the size of a fist, and the skryer who looked into it came so close to it that his nose nearly touched it, and his eyes crossed; he lifted his hands up to it, enclosing it as a man might enclose a fluttering candle-flame, to keep it steady.

They had been at work not a quarter of an hour before the stone when the first creature appeared: their soft prayers and invocations had ceased, and for a time the only sound was the rattle of the mullions in a hard March wind that filled up the night. When the younger of them, Mr. Talbot, who knelt before the stone, began to tremble as though with cold, the other hugged his shoulder to still him; and when the shivering had not ceased, he had risen to stir the fire; and it was just then that the skryer said: Look. Here is one. Here is another.

Doctor Deethe older man, whose stone it wasturned back from the fire. He felt a quick shiver, the hair rose on his neck, and a warmth started in his breastbone. He stood still, looking to where the candle flame glittered doubly, on the surface of the glass and in its depths. He felt the breaths in the room of the wind that blew outside, and heard its soft hoot in the chimney. But he saw nothing, no one, in his gray glass.

Do you tell me, he said softly, and I will write what you say.

He put down the poker, and snatched up an old pen and dipped it. At the top of a paper he scribbled the date: March 8th, 1582. And waited, his wide round eyes gazing through round black-bound spectacles, for what he would be told. His own heartbeat was loud in his ears. Never before had a spirit come to a glass of his so quickly. He could not, himself, ever see the beings who were summoned, but he was accustomed to sitting or kneeling in prayer beside his mediums or skryers for an hour, two hours before some ambiguous glimpse was caught. Or none at all.

Not on this night: not on this night. Through the house, as though the March wind outside had now got in and was roaming the rooms, there was heard a patter of raps, thumps, and knockings; in the library the pages of books left open turned one by one. In her bedchamber Doctor Dee's wife awoke, and pulled aside the bed curtains to see the candle she had left burning for her husband gutter and go out.

Then the noises and the wind ceased, and there was a pause over the house and the town (over London and all England too, a still windless silence as of a held breath, a pause so sudden and complete that the Queen at Richmond awoke, and looked out her window to see the moon's face looking in at her). The young man held his hands up to the stone, and in a soft and indistinct voice, only a little louder than the skritching of the doctor's pen, he began to speak.

Here is Annael, he said. Annael who says he is answerable to this stone. God his mercy on us.

Annael, said Doctor Dee, and wrote. Yes.

Annael who is the father of Michael and of Uriel. Annael who is the Explainer of God's works. He must answer what questions are put to him.

Yes. The Explainer.

Look now. Look how he opens his clothes and points to his bosom. God help us and keep us from every harm. In his bosom a glass; in the glass a window, a window that is like this window.

I make speed to write.

In the window, a little armed child, as it were a soldier infant, and she bearing a glass again, no a showstone like this one but not this one. And in that stone...

In that stone, Doctor Dee said. He looked up from the shuddery scribble with which he had covered half a sheet. In that stone...

God our father in heaven hallowed be thy name. Christ Jesus only begotten son our Lord have mercy on us. There is a greater thing now coming.

The skryer no longer saw or heard but was: in the center of the little stone that the little smiling child held out was a space so immense that the legions of Michael could not fill it. Into that space with awful speed his seeing soul was drawn, his throat tightened and his ears sang, he shot helplessly that way as though slipping over a precipice. There was not anything then but nothing.