In the Rearview
Voyage of the Ancient Mariner...Part I


Been years on this journey, seems like thousands…sometimes more. We find ourselves, this gypsy caravan, on a vast desert plain…thirsty wasteland…Paleolithic sea. A blizzard of hot sand...dries our eyes…scours our skin…petrifies our bones.
Looking through our dark past how we sailed the stormy sea, trudged sulfur swamps and crawled hungry and tired through thick steamed jungles. We knew there was danger all around yet forward we went, watchful and weary of trouble in the thicket, those shadows and ghosts, razor-clawed chimeras, poison-fanged serpents and beasts with breath of fire.
Our gaze turns forward now, squinting through the dust and blur of whirling and whistling sand. There’s a faint glow in the west illuminating a vaguely familiar world of golden-brown columned temples, mighty Pharaoh statues, speared obelisks offering prayers to the heavens---may the great fiery disc give us light in day, and his silver sister guide us by night. I recall those days now a stone scribe hammering invocations into earth as gifts to sky.
Closer we approach the stone city, walk with reverence by lion-faced sentries, past royal gold-guarded gates. We enter the Valley of the Kings…our home of long ago…watched by our gods, their faces perched on soaring canyon walls…our home of long ago we return to your lush green gardens, crystal sparkling springs, I tell of these things...
A palace is there, reaching to the sky, the father of all pyramids, hewn from granite red feldspar, white quartz, biotite black, starred and speckled…a collage of Earth tone...
We enter a long hallway into the great pyramid palace…torches light the dim, entering the tomb of the boy pharaoh…the greatest of kings he would be. His story is on these hallowed halls…written by the scribes of old…here his journey to the underworld is told…how he would join the gods and the souls of his people to gain immortality. But this story will wait until tomorrow, weary traveler.
Rest your heavy heads, close your tired eyes wayfarers… dream peace. For sun Ra...accompanied by Anubis of the night...now sets on his journey underworld to find the destiny of man...in the records of master scribe Thoth…as he oversees the scales that weigh the human heart against the feather of truth...
Dream peace through cries of the night and nightmares of the east weary travelers. Rest gypsy caravan…prepare for dawn’s light...