Chapter 5: Tenebrae

Part 2: The Song of the Stars

Moses sat by the campfire, his eyes affixed to the dark sky above as the stars twinkled like diamonds on a black canvas, telling their silent stories while screaming loudly with their brightness with that which people marveled. Sadly, though, those earthbound couldn’t comprehend their language of light.

Nearby, the sheep grazed under the full moon, he sighed as he thought about who he really was. An outcast; he was never an Egyptian so it seemed, but an Israelite. Like the ones enslaved by Pharaoh. Yet he felt that he knew that all along.

He looked in the distance and could swear that he could see the pyramids from where he was sitting. Highly unlikely, perhaps an illusion... But before he could look away he saw a thin figure walking towards the camp.

Moses blinked a few times, thinking that he was somehow hallucinating, but the figure was getting closer and closer.

"I am looking for a prince." The young boy said.

"A prince? Of Sinai?" Moses asked.

"No. Of Egypt." The boy said. Moses was about to say that there weren’t any but his heart skipped a beat as the boy said: "An exiled prince of Egypt."

"You have found him. But who wants to know?" Moses said cautiously.

"I bring you a letter from the Prefect of Amarna, Lord Akhenaten." The boy said.

"Akhenaten? You mean to say Akhenamen?" Moses asked.

The boy shook his head: "No. We now worship One God. His name is Aten."

"Impossible!" Moses exclaimed as he grabbed the letter and quickly scanned through it. "My dearest brother Moses…" Moses read aloud, "I am writing you this to inform you that I have gathered the courage to defy the ancient but corrupt traditions of Amarna and institute a priesthood that worships the one true God. I have had a dream, you see, in which the rays of the sun had touched my face and declared that there is but one lord. And hence, I have ordered the scribes to replace all holy chants to the ancient false Gods with chants to Aten. My people were blessed enough to accept my message and we have passed a decree banning the enslavement of the Hebrews in our prefecture. As I write this, hundreds of Hebrew people from all over Egypt are migrating to our prefecture, seeking the peace found herein. I hope you accept my invitation and come witness this for yourself; you have been exiled long enough and we have found that you’ve paid your debt to society and are now welcome to return."

Moses’ hands trembles as tears streamed down his face: "So this is all true?" He asked the boy. The boy nodded with a smile: "Yes, my lord."

Moses grabbed a bag of gold coins and gave it to the boy: "Here, child. Take this. Thank you for traveling all the way to Sinai to find me. Inform your Prefect that I shall return to Amarna soon. I just have a few things to take care of here first. Before you leave, go talk to Yezan, he will give you some water and some food for your trip home."

The boy looked at the gold coins with gleaming eyes as he exclaimed: "Thank you lord! I will tell Akhenaten that you are coming!" He ran off towards Yezan.

Moses sat down and shook his head with disbelief. After all these years, his step-brother had truly done the most amazing thing imaginable, abolish the false idols and free the Hebrew slaves.

During his moment of deep though, an old man had approached to stand next to him "Hello father." Moses said respectfully to his father-in-law as he stood. "There is great news!" He said.

Jethro nodded: "I know, Moses. I heard you reading the letter. I am very pleased, but at the same time sad that you will be leaving."

Moses: "I will return, I am only…" Jethro interrupted: "Moses. There is something I've been meaning to say. And now, I am convinced that you.... Need to know. I’ve been holding it back for the past twenty or so years, but now, I have this feeling that tells me that now is the right time." Jethro said.

Moses looked at him, his brow perked in a quizzical manner as his voice held a tinge of curiosity, "What is it, lord?" He turned around to look at his Midianite wife Zippora, she was sleeping soundly in the tent next to the camp-fire.

Jethro smiled, the action causing his lips to spread across his cheeks with a sparkle behind his wizened eyes. "Moses, you know me as the Priest of Midian, Lord Jethro. But, the title of priest sometimes confuses people."

Moses was slightly confused upon this statement, and shook his head accordingly. "So, you're not a priest?"

Giving the man a slight grin, Jethro replied to his son-in-law’s query. "No, I am. But not of the sense that you know Pharaoh’s priests by. Come, follow me. I'll show you."

They walked up the Sinai mountain range and went up the peak of Mount Horeb. Scaling the mountain wasn’t difficult as there were special paths made to reach the monastery on top with little effort.

Two hours later, as they reached the summit, Jethro pushed a stone slab at the entrance of the monastery and entered a chamber. "Take your shoes off please." Moses nodded as he removed the sandals from his feet (accepting that perhaps it was a religious ritual) and stepped on the cold ground. As they walked in, Jethro nodded as he held the manner of one whose mind was in the planes of deep focus and hidden text.

After a brief consideration, he looked over to the man behind him and asked, "Moses, tell me. Who is God?"

Moses sighed. "Well... As an Egyptian, we worshipped the Egyptian Parthenon, but of course, I've never believed in that..."

"Why not?" Jethro asked.

Moses brushed his beard, as if he were a world-renowned philosopher. "Ahh. Well, I just can't imagine omnipotence represented by animals or men that walk and birds that fly. God should be more than that. I don't know what though... Maybe I'm not making any sense."

"What if I told you that you are making sense? I will show you, Moses. Show you God." Jethro had remarked quite concretely as he went towards a stone ark, pushing the slab that covered it and looked at the liquid within. He then placed a piece of papyrus, or something that looked like it at least, and it began to change color. "Ah... It is ready." He uttered with satisfaction.

Moses, however, had reached out to touch the liquid. "NO!" Jethro exclaimed with a haste and sense of warning that overpowered the relatively calmness of his nature, "Not unless you want your hand to disintegrate."

Moses shrugged and stepped back.

Jethro placed the slab back atop the container before opening a chest to reveal two golden objects. Each had a top part that was all golden and had a dark grey wire that ran towards the wings. Moses reached towards that wire and touched it. It was very cold.

"Ahh.. Very perceptive, you are." Jethro said. "I have never seen such a metal." Moses explained.

"That is correct. You’ve never seen it because that metal is created by a special process. All the secrets and tools of which are housed right here in this monastery." Jethro explained as he put the golden object down and walked to a group of colored and marked jars and boxes and a small duct that apparently ran discarded things and liquids to the back of the building.

"You see, none of the existing metals have the power to conduct its energy at the same time be able to sustain so much power without exploding into bits. Therefore, we had to form it with a mixture of gold fused with air and other elements."

"Fused with air?!" Moses exclaimed, thinking remotely that this old man had finally turned senile.

Jethro grinned. He opened up a large barrel and using a ladle, filled it up with water and showed it to Moses. "See this?" Jethro asked. "Yes, it’s water." Moses said.

"Ah, correct, but you’re also wrong." Jethro replied.

Jethro poured the ladle in a glass cup and mixed it with a liquid stored in a red vase. The two liquids blended together and formed a cloud! The old man was creating a potion!

"You see, Moses. This is spring water found not far from here. The water is impure. In fact, all of water that is found in nature is impure. It is mixed with hundreds of elements, some which we don’t know about yet. We know how to extract elements from within it." Jethro dropped a small white stone into the mix. The potion started to fizz. Jethro used a spoon and mixed the liquid together.

He then placed the glass cup on top of a black coil. He waited a few moments and the black coil mysteriously started turning into red. Moses reached for it but Jethro stopped him. "No. Hot." He said aptly.

A few minutes later, Jethro used a tong to pull the cup from the coil, the latter turning back into black color; next Jethro carefully poured the liquid onto a sewage duct. Moses wondered what the point of all that was. Jethro looked at the cup, covering one side with his hand so that Moses couldn’t see what was inside it. Jethro smiled and nodded to himself.

"Open your hands." Jethro said. Moses blinked.

"Trust me." Jethro said calmly.

Moses reached his hands forward. Jethro poured something onto his hands. They were small cold pieces of metal and still wet from the remaining drops of the liquid. Moses looked closely and saw a remarkable luster from the beautiful yellow metal. "Oh my God." Moses said. "These are bits of pure gold!"

Jethro nodded with a smile: "Correct."

Moses was in utter disbelief: "You turned water into gold? I’ve never seen such magic!"

Jethro laughed: "No, no, Moses. Not magic. Science. In this case Alchemy. And we didn’t turn water into gold; we simply drew the element of inert gold out of the water by the process of Alchemy."

Moses shook his head as he examined each of the pure but tiny gold pieces closely. "This is amazing! So this is how you priests came to make so much gold for the Pharaonic palaces. From water!"

Jethro nodded with a smile: "It is amazing, isn’t it? Air, water. Any element in this universe can be fused or broken up in alchemy. It is not easy to discover what combinations work with what, and what elements, such as gold are hidden in what materials and at which concentrations. But we did manage to create an Elemental Table of all the known materials, and create a Deposits Table of the nearby "mining" spots if you will. That information is passed down generation to generation for perfecting that knowledge."

Moses was still shaking his head: "So Alchemy does exist. I always thought it was a fairy-tale or at worst the doings of dark, mysterious magicians locked up in far away towers in the lands of Cush or Babylon."

Jethro laughed.

"If you think that’s amazing, wait till I show you my experiment! Come!" They walked back to the room that the ark sat in.

Jethro grabbed the two large objects again. The bottom of the first object that he held was of yellow metal and the other was brown. He handed one of the objects to Moses and motioned for him to insert it into a slot on the ark as he performed the same with the other into a separate location.

Jethro looked at his creation and smiled. "Moses, my son. This is the result of generations of research and passing down of divine knowledge."

"Alchemy is divine knowledge?" Moses asked.

Jethro nodded with a somber demeanor. "I am the anointed one, and one of the last remaining priests of this arcane guild." He paused for a brief moment, a hint of depression entering his voice as he spoke once again, "We are, sadly, dying and being run into non-existence."

Moses perked a brow in interest, noting the sudden human quality that had overtaken his host as he allowed the word to drift from his lips, "Why?"

Jethro replied as honestly and as stoically as he could manage, "Our foundation is secrecy, my dear son, however, money is an ever-pouring expense that we did not foresee. Insomuch that we were forced to produce secret ceremonial things and sell it to the pharaoh in order to be given the money to pay for the materials we need, and that is, of course, apart from all the gold material and gold-coated ornaments we also make for the Pharaoh. The rising costs were so high that we were forced to introduce the Godly Bread to Pharaoh, under closely guarded secrets."

"You mean Mafkuzti?" Moses asked.

"Yes, we are the makers of Mafkuzti." He replied. "You see, it all started with one of the former priests. His name was Zamin who lived during the reign of Tuthmosis the fourth. He is the one who went down to the Pharaoh and offered him the revitalizing powdered gold in exchange for much needed finances. Tuthmosis was so impressed that he made Zamin the national treasurer of Egypt and was responsible in drawing gold from water for the purposes that Pharaoh could use to adorn his palaces. Although Zamin cut his links with the priesthood and changed his name to the Egyptian name Sobekhotep, he still had the heart to provide us with money. Thankfully as well, he had never broken the oath of giving out the secrets of making Mafkuzti, drawing gold from water or any of the other secrets. And the Pharaoh respected that oath of secrecy."

Moses shrugged, "So it is true that ingesting this powdered gold will make you a God and take you to the world of the Egyptian Gods after death?"

Jethro sighed, his eyes drifting towards his feet as he sought for the correct words to give his new guest. "Well, not exactly. We didn't lie when we said that Mafkuzti builds your inner light, but it is very basic really, such as all of science. The Mafkuzti that you ingest simply rebuilds your body structure and increases your abilities to heal. Although unproven, we believe that it also repairs your aura and takes you to the left side of the spectrum, so in death, you will, in essence, be light enough to be admitted into the fields of Mafkuzti, the upper afterworld. Although, the strange thing is that ever since the time of Tuthmosis and Cheops, there has been this strange affixation with funerals. The Egyptian kings had suddenly turned to the worship of Anubis, a new Egyptian God whom the older generations never really respected before. It was as if Anubis was helping them build a gateway to this so-called after-world. It was strange, but nevertheless not of our concern. As far as we know, they have never been successful, that is, if all this talk about afterworlds is true."

Moses looked at the ground with a concerned look. He was wondering whether he was grasping the last piece of the puzzle, but didn’t know where to put it.

Jethro simply smiled; noticing Moses’ worried look. "Don’t you worry, Moses. Nothing can stop us research the secrets of the universe, not if we have divine knowledge on our side."

(Continued...)