At dawn she picked her way carefully down the great, uneven stones at the northeast corner of the pyramid, said goodnight to a surprised guard, and returned to her apartment to gather up her few possessions.
Abydos was the ancient name of the place she remembered, but in 1956 Abydos did not appear on most Egyptian maps. Instead, about 350 miles south of Cairo there was a barely visible dot labeled el Araba el Madfouna – The Buried Hamlet.
When the woman presented herself at the ticket counter of the Cairo central station the clerk assumed she would purchase a round-trip ticket, but she said no. He tried to explain in English the economy of buying a two-way ticket. Again she said no, but he persisted. To put an end to this futile discussion she told him she was going to el Araba el Madfouna and nowhere else.
“And where the devil is this Araba?” he said.
She informed him it was quite simply the most important place in Egypt.
“Believe me, Madame, I have never heard of it. Is it one of the villages – a dependency of el Baliana?”
“Yes,” she said with perverse pleasure, “and to satisfy your curiosity, I am going to live there, too.”
The poor man, incredulous, turned to the senior clerk on the bench behind and whispered in Arabic: This blue-eyed khawagaya* is going to live in a place called el Araba el Madfouna. She must be suffering from the sun. She laughed to herself and pretended she hadn’t understood a word of it, but of course she had. “So it is a one-way ticket to Baliana,” he said, handing her the change. “May God protect you, Madame!”
As the train pulled away from the station heading south, she piled her things around her in the compartment and watched the sprawling old city recede from her sight. She would miss Cairo and the people in it, her friends of many adventures. And she would miss the old museum with its dusty, busy rooms where she had prowled so freely these past twenty years.
Now, all the farewell cups of tea had been drunk, the teary hugs dispensed with, and she had taken her last nostalgic walk through the museum’s cluttered corridors. Goodbyes were hard, but there were no regrets. Her thoughts were on Abydos.
Through the grimy veil of her train car window the modern world was soon left behind and a far older one began moving slowly across the passenger’s field of vision. She had purposely taken a seat on the right side of the train where she could see the silhouettes of the many pyramids that stood in a 40-mile chain along the edge of the Western Desert – first Khufu’s, Menkhaure’s, and Khafra’s, and then Zoser’s Step Pyramid, glimpsed through thick groves of palms, with the crumbling pyramids of Abusir beyond. And then the pyramids of Dahshur – the ones she knew intimately from her years with the great archaeologist Dr. Ahmed Fakhri. Of all the people she had worked with since she came to Egypt, Dr. Fakhri had been the kindest to her. It was because of him she was on her way to Abydos today.
Her train sped south, a noisy iron creature disturbing the quiet of the scattered mud-brick villages, causing sudden eruptions of white egrets from the lush green fields and earthen canals as it passed. After a while the patchworks of village cultivation began to change, and now there were monochromatic tracts of tall sugarcane that extended all the way to the sheer limestone cliffs to the west.
Three hundred and forty miles from Cairo, at the provincial town of el Baliana, the woman left the train and took a taxi the final miles to her destination.
It was late afternoon when the car made its dusty, bumpy entry into the dun-colored settlement, with dogs and children chasing after. Foreigners were a rarity here, except for the ones who sometimes came for a while to work in the ruins of the Sety Temple, but they never stayed. Tourist amenities – let alone electricity and running water – had yet to come to this Godforsaken village in the middle of nowhere. That day, nobody in the village of el Araba el Madfouna could have guessed that the khawagaya was coming to stay for good.
She told the driver to leave her at the outskirts of the Sety Temple precincts. As she stepped out she was greeted with curious stares, but that didn’t concern her; there was something she needed to do before anything else. Immediately, she set down her modest belongings and entered a small cafeteria where she paid the proprietor for some bread and beer. Outside again, she pulled a handful of wildflowers from the banks of the irrigation canal – and with this collection of beer, bread and flowers she walked with determined steps towards the temple.
It was the rule then to close the main gate before sunset, which the guards were only too happy to do. In the Buried Hamlet one didn’t linger near the haunted ruins after sundown. There were many things to fear here, not the least being the distant escarpment called Pega that each night cast its ominous shadow over miles of ancient burial grounds and engulfed the temple, gathering up the souls of the dead.
With the sun still well above Pega, the stranger calmly removed her shoes, entered the temple through the first court, walked until she came to the small chapel of Osiris, and there laid out her humble offering.
To this woman who remembered – who had known it when it was newly built – it was still beautiful beyond words. No matter that the temple’s roof was missing and that the outer courts were a shambles, or that her glorious gardens were nowhere to be seen. She was home.
Her name was Dorothy Eady, but the world would know her as Omm Sety.
From the BBC announcement of its 1981 film, “Omm Sety and her Egypt”:
Omm Sety has become one of the most famous characters in Egypt. Tourists go to Abydos not just to see the monuments, but to see Omm Sety herself.
Of all the adventuring Englishwomen of the 20th century, none ever ventured into the exotic realms of past and present in quite the way Dorothy Eady did.
Dorothy was the name she was given at her birth in 1904. When she died in the Egyptian village of Abydos she had long been known as Omm Sety, the intriguing, unconventional, out-spoken woman who was devoted to the worship of Isis and Osiris. She had another name as well, an ancient one that had once belonged to a young, blue-eyed priestess of Isis: Bentreshyt – Harp-of-Joy.
She was all of these.
Not to be confused with the many born-again Nefertitis, Hatshepsuts and Cleopatras among us, Omm Sety had her feet planted firmly on sensible ground, scholarly ground. She was a largely self-taught Egyptologist who had worked under some of the greatest archaeologists of her time. Omm Sety’s resourceful, original mind won her respect and regard in the community of Egyptologists. Though she had a cautious disdain for other people’s paranormal claims, especially when they involved past lives in ancient Egypt, the inescapable truth was this: All the while she was working in the temples and pyramids of Egypt she was living a secret double life as the beloved of a 3300-year-old pharaoh who could materialize at will from the Beyond.
During her long career with the Egyptian Antiquities Department she was responsible for a number of significant finds. However, almost no one knew that her uncanny gift for analysis and discovery was at times aided by something, and someone, “extra” – and by her own vivid memories of a life in 19th Dynasty Egypt.
Ever since she was a child growing up in England she had had uninvited paranormal experiences – visitations, visions, unnerving premonitions. She was reluctant to speak of them, knowing what people would think. It was her business and no one else’s what went on inside her private world. And for much of her life she was happy to keep it that way, until she found a confidant to whom she could finally tell everything. Even after years of our knowing one another, she was reluctant to call me by my first name alone, preferring to call me Dr. Hani.
Omm Sety was my friend. I use that word to the fullest extent of its meaning. To an outsider, our friendship must have seemed an unlikely one. She was the eccentric, the outrageously frank, the impenetrable – while I was the scientist, the practical one with heavy responsibilities in the world of industry. Nevertheless, we became friends almost immediately