The Field of Reeds

The monumental tale of the Old Luxor Hotel begins in the present with a ghostly meeting in the garden of this rundown and dilapidated Victorian hotel. It tells of a divine encounter a century earlier in India of the British Empire, between the young girl Flossie and Wadjet, the mystical snake of a native guru. The serpent sets her a riddle which sends her halfway across the world to the land of the pharaohs, to this very same hotel. Once there, she is cured of the terrible disease that would have ended her life, saved only by the fearsome and all-powerful cobra-headed goddess, Meretseger, whose voice can deliver both mercy and vengeance. She has the ability to warp both space and time. The book tells of this girl with the blackest of hair and the bluest of eyes and that of her son, the late Muir Birch, of their great adventures. It will speak of a three-thousand-year-old papyrus that contains sacred spells which the ancient Egyptians believed could cheat death itself and of a meeting in the hotel's garden between a playboy English lord and a disgraced archaeologist who together would find the tomb of a long-forgotten pharaoh. You will learn that to speak the name of the dead is to make them alive again and it restores the breath of life to the one who has vanished.