The London Obelisk: Cleopatra's Ghosts

The next time you visit London, walk from the Houses of Parliament and

Big Ben along the Thames Embankment until you are next to the seventy foot long Cleopatra's Needle.

At 186 tons, it weighs about ten times as much as the largest stone in Stonehenge, and was already 1500 years old before Stonehenge was built.

Eight feet at the base, it is five feet wide at the top, before its seven foot high pyramidion starts.

London Obelisk from the Millenium Wheel

Take a moment to admire the two bronze sphinxes that stand guard over her. 

Your question to the Obelisk:

Then turn your eyes to the small pyramidion on the very top of the giant obelisk, and say out loud:

"I call spirits from the vasty deep!"

 Listen carefully for an answer.

Before we tell you what you might hear, we need to touch on a fascinating tapestry of history and legend.

The tapestry thread:

This thread of mystery, and of ghosts, runs through and joins together Braveheart; the Gunpowder Plot; Thutmose III and his son, Thutmose IV; a stone slab between the giant paws of the Great Sphinx in Egypt; Cleopatra; the London obelisk; and a noble family we can call the Fighting Percy's, whose swords were ever close to hand throughout the centuries.

Knowing this thread of wonder that joins these people, events and times, you will never look on this wonderful obelisk the same way again.


Thutmose IV:

Let's start with Pharaoh Thutmose III, the maker of the Cleopatra's Needles which were moved from Egypt by Freemasons and are now found in  London and Central Park in New York.

Sphinx by David Roberts

In Egypt these two obelisks had stood together.

Gradually the restless sea closed in on the shore where they stood, and the obelisk which one day would grace London, teetered under the waves washing ashore, and about three hundred years ago it fell. 

It served for a while as a bridge over a small ravine it had fallen over, while its twin – destined to be moved to Central Park - stayed upright.

When Thutmose III died, he left several sons including one who became known as Thutmose IV when he became pharaoh.

The Great Sphinx:

When we visited Egypt as part of  our research for our thriller, Obelisk Seven, we paid a visit to the magnificent Great Sphinx.

The biggest monument in a land of big monuments, the sphinx has a human head on the body of a lion.

Nestling between the huge paws of the Sphinx is a stone tablet, called the Dream Stela, placed there by Thutmose IV.

The tablet tells the story of the younger son of Thutmose III who was hunting in the desert, and stopped to rest at the Sphinx, which was covered in sand up to its head.

The prince fell asleep between the paws, and in his dream the sphinx spoke to him, promising him the throne of Egypt if he would clear the sand covering it:

The kingdom shall be given to you ... The world shall be yours in its length and in its breadth, as far as the light of the eye of the lord of the universe shines... My countenance is gracious towards you, and my heart clings to you.

Thutmose IV cleared the sand, became Pharaoh when his older brother – who was first in line for the throne – died before he could inherit it, and ruled for just under ten years.

Glenn & one London Obelisk Sphinx

Now let's make the connection between Thutmose IV and the Great Sphinx, and the London obelisk.

Look to her left and her right.

Two seven ton bronze guardian sphinxes, nineteen feet long, six feet wide and nine feet tall, flank her, for her protection.

There are shrapnel wounds in the body and paw of the sphinx to her right, from a German bombing raid during the First World War.

These two guardian sphinxes are copies of a small foot-long sphinx of Thutmose IV,  in the collection of the Duke of Northumberland at Alnwick Castle (pronounced Annick). The Alnwick Castle sphinx has the face of Thutmose IV, on a lion's body, with the tail curling around the right hind leg.


Alnwick Castle:

Alnwick Castle was used for interior and exterior shots of the Hogwarts Castle in the Harry Potter films.

The castle is the second largest inhabited castle in England, and since 1309 – for 700 years - has belonged to the powerful Percy family.

The Percys have had a long history of intrigue and warring for centuries, fighting their own king as well as the Scots.

A cousin of the earl of Percy played a part in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, commemorated on Guy Fawkes Day each year. In 1297 Braveheart – William Wallace – launched an unsuccessful attack on the castle.

Alnwick, and Alnwick Castle itself, have links to ghosts.

Sphinx of Thutmose IV at Alnwick Castle

From the eleventh century A.D., the castle was famous for a vampire – known locally as the Creature from the Tomb, and formerly a lord of the estate – that lived beneath the castle, coming out at night to attack the villagers.

The vampire caused an outbreak of plague, and the angry villagers dug it up from its shallow grave and burned its body.

In the village of Alnwick, the public house known as Ye Olde Cross has its own ghosts: a collection of bottles that are cursed.

Touch them and you die.

The bottles are now apparently covered up to prevent further deaths.

Enter Sir Lancelot:

Lancelot, the famous Knight of the Round Castle, lover of King Arthur's wife, Guinevere, and searcher for the Holy Grail, was sent to King Arthur's court by the Lady of the Lake.

As a young man, Lancelot, then known as the White Knight, came across a castle called the Dolorous Guard, guarded by the Copper Knight, ten knights at the first wall, ten at the second wall, and then the Copper Knight  himself.

But that knight fled; Lancelot is taken to a cemetery and shown a metal slab with writing on it.

Only one knight, says the writing, can lift this weighty slab, and his name is written on the other side of it.

Lancelot flips over the slab and finds his name: Lancelot.

Lancelot then took the Dolorous Guard as his home, changing it to Joyous Guard; on his death, he was buried there.

Legend has it that Alnwick Castle is Joyous Guard, home and burial site of Lancelot.

So: Alnwick Castle is home to ghosts, and to Sir Lancelot.

Hotspur in Alnwick Castle

Young Prince Hotspur:

And it was home to the famous Harry Hotspur. 

A statue of Hotspur astride his horse is found inside the castle. 

In 1403 Hotspur tried to depose Henry IV and was killed at the Battle of Shrewsbury when he raised his visor and an arrow penetrated his mouth. 

His body was shown to King Henry IV, who wept.

After his burial, rumors spread that he was still alive, so Henry IV had his body dug up, impaled on a spear, displayed in public, then cut into four pieces and sent around all of England; his head was then  stuck on a pole at the gates of the city of York.

In Shakespeare's Henry IV Part I, Hotspur and his the Welsh rebel Glendower plot together against King Henry IV, and Hotspur mocks Glendower for his outrageous claims to control the devil and his spirits in the underworld.

And this brings us to the question you are to ask the London obelisk.

Glendower, in Henry IV, says:

I can call the spirits from the vasty deep.

Hotspur replies:

Why, so can I, or so can any man;

But will they come when you do call for them?

If you listen carefully, you just might – if your quest is pure and the water of the Thames runs clean that day or night – hear a soft voice, seeming to come from one of the two bronze sphinxes, or perhaps from the obelisk itself, repeating what Shakespeare recorded that Hotspur had said.

Cleopatra's Needle Ghosts:

London 1917: The Night of Terror for Cleopatra's Needle

After centuries of peace on the banks of the Nile River, the obelisk known as Cleopatra's Needle was moved to the banks of another river – the Thames, in London. 

And here, on the night of 4 September 1917, the German air force launched a bombing raid, and the obelisk base  and one of the two sphinxes was hit by shrapnel.

Zeppelin raids on London in WWI

Enter Kaiser Wilhelm II

During the first World War French planes bombed German towns, and Kaiser Wilhelm II agreed that the German air force should retaliate, and allowed Zeppelins to be used in bombing London for the first time on May 31, 1915.

Enter the Count

The first large-scale builder of airships, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin (1838 – 1917), had served a stint in the Union army during the U.S. Civil War, and conducted balloon trials there as a military oberserver. 

He spent his life building the rigid dirigibles, with the first successful flight of his airship in 1900; within eight years Zeppelins were delivering mail and passengers over Germany.

Enter the German armed forces

In 1909 the German army used the first Zeppelin; during the first World War they used 115 Zeppelins for various missions,  including bombing raids – the Zeppelins  bombed England at the rate of about two per month.

Of the 115 Zeppelins, 53 were destroyed and another 24 so damaged they could not be used again.

With a little bit of help from the cows

The airships used an outer envelope and several separate gasbags inside, containing helium; about 200,000 sheets made from the intestines of cows were used to make the the goldbeater's skin of the gasbags of each airship.

The Zeppelins flew so high above London that the British fighter planes could not reach them, and when they did, their ammunition did not damage the airships – it was only in mid-1916 that the British planes were successful in using the new explosive bullets to punch holes into the outer skin of the Zeppelins and the incendiary bullets to set them on fire.

Only about ten percent of the bombs dropped from the Zeppelins hit their targets because bomb aiming was inaccurate, but the psychological impact was significant.

Gotha bomber - World War One

And now for the Gothas

When Zeppelin losses mounted, the German forces switched to airplanes, including the Gotha biplane aircraft, which flew at night and sometimes reached 20,000 feet, beyond reach of the British fighter planes. 

Landing a Gotha was tough – one estimate attributes 70% of Gotha losses to bad landings. 

The first flight of a Gotha took place only 13 years after the Orville Brothers first airplane flight in the Kitty Hawk. Gothas made 22 raids on England, and lost 61 aircraft. 

The Harvest Moon raids

Starting in September 1917, the Gothas and another large German bomber, the Giants, began what was called the "harvest moon" raids, attacking London nearly every night for a week.

Some shops let their staff go home early to escape the raids; some people gathered in parks to watch the raids, while others slept in the Tube stations.

The Obelisk's Turn

The ancient Egyptian obelisks feature in our thriller Obelisk Seven, so we were very interested in the history of the one in London.

On 4 September 1917 the Gothas made their first night-time raid on London. Four bombs were dropped around Charing Cross station near the Strand, with one landing on a tram traveling along the Thames Embankment. 

The bomb crater broke through the road's surface, exposing the circle/district underground line beneath the road.

Shrapnel from the bomb punched holes into one of the two large sphinxes that stand guard over the obelisk, and damaged the base of the obelisk - see our two photos below. The obelisk itself was not harmed.

Gotha bombing raid in WWI

Zeppelin watery end in WWI

Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin stamp

Cleopatra's Needle,  London: Gotha bomb damage to sphinx 1917

Shrapnel wound to Sphinx of London obelisk - 1917

London obelisk - sphinx with shrapnel wounds from Gotha bombing raid in 1917

Loraine and Sphinx of the London obelisk

Nefertiti – Torn between the Iron Lady and "Raider" Hawass

"Raider" Hawass

Is it High Noon in Berlin?

Has the head of the Supreme Council of the Antiquities of Egypt exposed a deep fear of the Chancellor of Germany?

Perhaps.

Dr. Hawass' Question

Dr. Zahi Hawass had this question for the Chancellor, when his request for the bust of Nefertiti to be loaned to Egypt was refused:

“They think we will be like the Raiders of the Lost Ark, that we will take it and not return it,” said Mr Hawass, who has been a vociferous champion for the permanent return of Egyptian artefacts.

Is this what the Iron Lady - as Chancellor Angela Merkel has been called - fears?

That Hawass will don his famous hat, put on his dusty boots, strap his pistol to his waist, pick up his trusty horsewhip, and beat off any attempts by the Germans to have the Nefertiti bust returned to Germany after the loan period expires?

Part of the German family?

It seems that the Germans have decided that the Beautiful One is fitting in well in Berlin, according to one Museum official:

The bust, [Dietrich Wildung, head of the Egyptian Museum], says, has become globally famous in a way that it would not have had it stayed in Egypt. “Nefertiti has become an outstanding example of how the foreign can be integrated into society,” Dr Wildung says. “She is accepted, not assimilated. She keeps her separateness and her uniqueness, yet she belongs here.”

The Fragile Queen?

And the Germans raised another reason why they just could not allow the bust of Nefertiti to be sent to Egypt for a short vacation in her homeland:

German officials say that the bust is too fragile to travel. “Nefertiti is not a pop star that can simply go on tour,” a senior official said.

 

Angela (Iron Lady) Merkel with Nefertiti Bust

So the bust is too delicate to travel home for a vacation?

The bust that survived being buried in the hot desert sands of Egypt for over 1,500 years, that was then dug up in 1912 and taken to the home of James Simon in Berlin in Germany, hidden in flack tower and later deep down in a salt mine during the Second World War to avoid Allied bombing, then after the war ended was moved first to Frankfurt then to a central warehouse of the Wiesbaden State Museum, then back to Berlin to the Old Museum and now to the New Museum?

She sure sounds pretty tough to me!

Chancellor Merkel, who lives just across the street from the New (Neues) Museum, Nefertiti's new prison in Berlin, can pop in to see her any time she wants to, but the people of Egypt have been denied the chance to see their famous queen for a few weeks.

The Nefertiti Standoff

Nefertiti's bust is one of "Raider" Hawass' Famous Five targets for return to Egypt (another one is the Rosetta Stone).

It seems we have a standoff between the German Iron Lady and the Egyptian Raider.

Our view - Set Her Free

Our view is in our novel, Obelisk Seven: Nefertiti should be set free, and returned to her home. Our compromise between the "No negotiations" stance of Chancellor Merkel and the "Unconditional Surrender" of Dr. Hawass uses something Kaiser Wilhelm II owned as part of our solution.

It is time for people of good will thoughout the world to rally behind "Raider" Hawass and insist on the return to Egypt of the bust of Nefertiti.

Set her free, Chancellor Merkel.

Let her go home.

James Simon - backer of Ludwig Borchardt who found Nefertiti Bust

Berlin flack tower - home of Nefertiti bust in 1941

   

Set Them Free! But keep the Kaiser's copy ...

We invite you to stand a while, and think.

Stand on the embankment of the Thames on a sunny weekday afternoon, Big Ben at your back, the Thames to your right, and watch the crowds scurrying past the twin Sphinxes standing guard over Cleopatra's Needle.

Observe how people stop and stare at the two giant statues, and then let their gazes drift upwards, to the small pyramidion on top of the obelisk.

Or stand on the plaque marking the spot where the guillotine first tasted blood during the French Revolution, and watch the cluster of people beneath the beautiful obelisk in the Place de la Concorde, and then let your gaze wander from them to the huge fountains with their leaping waters, and on past them along the most attractive street in the world, the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, up to the proud Arc de Triomphe.

Or stand before the uncarved beauty of the obelisk in St. Peter's Square in Rome, and see how the colonnades sweep outwards to embrace the granite spear.

And think of these monuments, torn from their desert homeland and moved to these foreign spots.

By what moral right are they kept there?

The sight of these lonely giants, standing lost in the peace of millenia amidst the hustle and bustle of the huge cities they now find themselves in cannot but move you.

They moved us.

And so as part of our novel Obelisk Seven, we are hoping that we can add to a movement to Set Them Free. To return them – along with the bust of Nefertiti now in her new Berlin prison – to Egypt.

We are proud to join the company of H. Rider Haggard (1856 – 1925), the famous author of She, and King Soloman's Mines, in calling for their return.

Haggard, whose book She sold an incredible 83 million copies, wrote his first novel while struggling as a newly admitted lawyer, and established a genre of lost worlds. Haggard wrote She in a "white heat", he said, in February and March 1886.

In The Days of My Life, Haggard describes his meeting with Budge Snippets:

Only ought not the thing to stop somewhere? For my part I should like to see the bodies of the Pharaohs, after they had been reproduced in wax, reverently laid in the chambers and passages of the Great Pyramids and there sealed up for ever, in such a fashion that no future thief could break in and steal.

Haggard writes poignantly about the scene which E.A. Wallis Budge (1857 – 1934) found in one ancient tomb he had opened:

Dr. Budge told me of a certain tomb which he and his guide were the first to enter since it had been closed, I think about 4,000 years before. He said that it was absolutely perfect. There lay the coffin of the lady, there stood the funeral jars of offering, there on the breast was a fan of which the ostrich plumes were turned to feathers of dust. There, too, in the sand of the floor were the footprints of those who had borne the corpse to burial. Those footprints always impressed me very much.

 

H. Rider Haggard

In Obelisk Seven our hero,  Kate, argues for the return of the obelisks to Egypt.

She suggests that one way to do this is for the current host countries to provide the funding for Egyptian carvers to cut out of the granite quarries on the banks of the Nile new blocks of stone, and – using the old techniques – to carve exact copies of the obelisks.

These copies the host countries could move to London, and Paris,  and Rome, and New York, and then return the originals to their rightful places in Egypt.

We have a suggestion for the bust of Nefertiti.

It, too, should be returned to Egypt.

However, there is a copy already in existence – the one made in 1913 for James Simon when the bust was taken to Berlin in 1912 and gifted to Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Why not let Berlin keep the Kaiser's copy, and return the original Nefertiti bust to her homeland?

The Gayer Anderson Cat – Our first sight

In London Loraine and I set out to see for ourselves the wonderful Gayer Anderson Cat, that our research for our thriller Obelisk Seven had unearthed, and just like our quest to see for ourselves the bust of Nefertiti in Berlin, it seemed that the fates had conspired to prevent us doing so.

The British Museum - home of the Gayer Anderson Cat

We marched into the British Museum, straight up to the main desk, and asked if we could see the Cat.

The woman behind the desk clicked through the computer and announced in a no-nonsense voice that the Gayer-Anderson Cat was not on display, and probably would not be on display for many months.

Disappointed, we joined our museum tour group, and trailed through behind our guide.

When we had a moment at the Rosetta Stone, we asked the guide if she knew where the Cat might be. No, came the answer. She had been guiding tours through the museum for almost two decades, and had never heard of, never mind seen, the Gayer Anderson Cat. Perhaps we were mistaken ...

Twice disappointed, we followed her to a large statue of Rameses the Great. Loraine slipped behind the pharaoh, and soon popped back into sight, a broad grin on her face as she beckoned to me.

I pushed through the crowds and she motioned behind her.

There it stood, in all its glory: the famous Cat.

And milling around her, snapping photographs furiously, were dozens of tourists.

Gayer-Anderson

We spent half an hour admiring the Cat, reading about its x-rays, photographing it from all angles.

Once again, the gods had smiled on us.

Or should we say, the cat goddess, Bastet?

Cat mummy from Ancient Egypt

Our research unearthed several interesting facts about cats in ancient Egypt.

The Persians knew of the love the Egyptians had for cats, and so during a battle in 525 BC or so they placed cats before their army; and the Egyptians left the battlefield because they feared that they might harm the cats if they fought.

The Egyptians never worshipped the cats as such; they did see echoes of their god Bast in them, though.

Cats had an important place in Egyptian life because they protected Egypt's granaries from rats.

The goddess Bastet - she was the goddess of family and protector of cats - is often shown with a woman's body and a cat's head; she sometimes had the eye of Ra, a wadjet, in her left hand - the all-seeing eye.

Loraine & the Gayer Anderson Cat

In the later period of ancient Egyptian history people who wanted a favor from the cat goddess would go to the Bastet temple to buy one of the cats kept at the temple.

The priest would break the cat's neck and have it embalmed before stuffing it into a jar and burying it in the cat cemetery. The theory was that the cat would then seek out the goddess Bastet in its afterlife and deliver the petitioner's message to the goddess.

Cat's were significant to families, and a family would mourn its death. They would shave off their eyebrows as a sign of their grief, and chant. Sometimes cats would be buried with their owners.

Gayer Anderson Cat with its guardian in British Museum

Gayer Anderson Cat from the side

Gayer Anderson Cat - photoshopped

Gayer Anderson Cat with base

Gayer Anderson Cat from side on its base

The Eye of Ra

Care for a martini with Cleopatra and Nefertiti? Then Philly's the place!

Cleopatra is one of the most famous pharaohs of them all, and Nefertiti has the well-deserved reputation of being the most beautiful woman in all of Egypt.

So when a new exhibition, Cleopatra: The Search for the Last Queen of Egypt, had its premiere at The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia in June 2010, the owner of Frog Commissary Catering, Steve Poses, decided to invent two drinks to be served at the new pop-up bar/resto at The Franklin Institute, Cleo’s Portico, in honor of these two famous women.

Poses, who has catered more than 15,000 events and served more than 15 million guests, cares passionately about home entertaining. 

Moving from Yonkers, NY to Philadephia University in 1968, he read The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, and was inspired to build communities through restraurants.

He has shared his philosophy of home entertaining so that you can benefit from it, too:

Steve Poses

Here’s the single most important part of my philosophy: Home entertaining is about creating a sense of welcome, warmth and hospitality for your guests. It’s not about how good the food is or how beautifully the table is set. It’s not the culinary Olympics or Iron Chef meets Main Street. It’s about human connection and good conversation. Whatever you do to welcome friends and family into your home is good enough. So relax. Plan. Make an effort. Care. But just do it.

And now for the two drinks he invented to honor the two queens.

The Cleopolitan is simple: vodka and Goldwasser, with Goldwasser-soaked watermelon cubes topped with gold dust.

And for the Nefertini, you mix raspberry vodka, Chambord and pomegranate topped with prosecco and a rosemary sprig.

And then drink a toast to the two queens of ancient Egypt.

PS Our friend April (that's her, on the left in the sparkly photo) made a few changes to the Nefertini for us, and the result is worthy of the queen!

Her recipe - for 4 people - is 6 oz raspberry vodka, 6 oz plain vodka, 1 oz cointreau (more if you want a sweeter Nefertini), 1 1/2 oz of lemon or lime juice, and 5 oz of pomegranate juice.

A wonderful concoction, built on the foundation of Steve Poses' creation!

April & Carly sparkling

Our Next Novel: Born in a Crowded Basement

Where do the ideas for a new book come from? Are there Book Fairies who float around, like Tooth Fairies, circling around those seeking ideas for a new novel, and swooping down to tap them on the nose with their wands?

If there are, there must be a flock of Book Fairies living in the crowded basement of what must be one of the most wonderful bookstores on the face of the earth.

That bookstore is Macleods, on Pender Street, Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Macleods, Vancouver, BC, Canada

From the outside it looks rather drab, with its entrace facing a city parking lot, and its windows barely keeping the books lined up behind them from bursting out into the street. But step inside and an organized madhouse greets you. Set up in 1982 by owner Don Stewart, there are more than 220,000 books inside – crammed into floor to ceiling shelves, piled helter skelter in the aisles, flowing along the sides of the stairway leading down into the basement.

One day I made my way downstairs, and stood stunned. Every shelf was full. And in the centre of the open spaces between the various groupings of bookshelves were huge piles of books, pyramids rising five or six feet high.

A book lovers dream come true. Thousands and thousands of second hand books, just waiting to be picked up.

At the bottom of the stairs I turned to the right, and ducked down to check what was on the lower shelves. It was the section on the Second World War, and soon I was clutching a slightly battered copy of Munich: The Phony Peace, by Henri Nogueres, published in 1963. On the bright red and white cover were four separate photographs of Hitler, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, Mussolini, and the French President Daladier: each man had a pen in hand and was signing what came to be known as The Munich Agreement.

I took it home with me and was lost in it – 423 pages later I put it down with a satisfied sigh.

Diana & Unity Mitford

From knowing vaguely about Chamberlain's trips to cut a deal with Hitler in 1938, I was now more familiar with every meeting and every manufactured crisis of those desparate days. I fell in love with the tension that crackled through the words on the pages of the book, feeling myself drawn into the incredibly strung danger of the times.

The thought was born: could I wrap a thriller around these three meetings between Hitler and Chamberlain?

I dived into some research about the times and the people involved, and when I came across a black and white photograph of two of the Mitford sisters giving the Nazi salute, I was won over.

 I had the setting, and some of the characters. Now what I needed was a plot, a hero or two, and a villain or two.

Thank you, Macleods.