Nexus - 0219 - New Times Magazine-pages

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ERs Lats BY 4er p=" we could barely control ourselves to shoot a location shot of the cave mouth, before climbing up the narrow rock gap with the camera in hand. Up through the chute we found our- selves in a narrow hallway of two flat facing walls made of a giant rock shelf, split neatly in two. The far end of this natur- al hallway was roofed in with a large flat slab of rock. Almost immediately that we emerged into the rock cleft, we could see pyramidal designs, eyes and strange glyphs on the very weathered sandstone wall that faced us. Some of the carvings were so weather-worn as to be barely visible. Then, one of the crew shouted from further up the cleft: "Come and look at this! You won't believe it!" I turned on the video camera and walked the last short distance to the top of the vault. Turning the camera on the wall, there was a half life- size carving of the Egyptian god Anubis! Anubis, guardian of the underworld, complete with wolf ears and snout, in the striped skirt, holding the Ankh, symbol of cternal life. This was certainly one of the wildest rock carvings I had ever seen! And as I scanned the wall around this haunting figure, I was stunned by the sheer volume of hieroglyphic writing in symmetrical rows. This was no quick "Hi, we were here” inscription, as reported by other field researchers who have found single carvings and glyphic signatures around old coastal mining sites. The entire wall was covered with a phonetic script. Even to the uninitiated, this was clearly Egyptian writing, with many universally recognised symbols, ranging through ankhs, sphinxes, scarabs, birds and pyramids— including complete cartouche panels, naming the reigning Pharaoh of that time period as Khufu, or Cheops, circa 2,600 BC. I had been prepared for a few Egyptian characters and had been thinking about the giant Eye of Horus I had filmed in the desert the previous year—but nothing like this! We counted well over 250 characters across the two facing walls. There was obviously a full-on story to be told. Either this was a most extraordinary ancient time-capsule or an elaborate fraud. David was already beginning to unfold the tale of what he knew about the glyphs and the site in general. I had to film some of what he was telling the others—he only had limited time—but I was in an extremely surreal state of mind, anx- iously trying to decide if all this was real. I moved up and down the rock cleft, scanning the hieroglyphs with eye and camera, zooming in on particular symbols high up the wall and gingerly fingering some of those I could reach. I'm not the most psychic of people, but I got a strong feel- ing from the carvings I touched. Especially a pyramid with a deep hole in the centre of it, two-thirds down. There were cerlainly some strong vibes at this site, and David informed us it was right on one of the big energy meridians that radiat- ed out from the big NSW Power Place some distance inland, called "The Meeting of The Tribes”. Despite my astonishment, what had initially bothered me was the unusually good condition of some of the carvings. They had certainly been done with great precision and work- manship, with carefully inclined chiselling so as not to crum- ble the sandstone. Plus, you would need a very advanced education in writing phonetic Egyptian of a style about four or five thousand years old. But some of the carvings didn't seem lime-wom enough. Then I realised the carvings were partially roofed in by a huge flat rock slab placed across the top of the rock fissure. The roof had collapsed some time in the past with a landslide from the cliff above. The best preserved carvings, therefore, were under the still- intact portion of the roof, gradually deteriorating the further you went down the walls that had been longest exposed to the weather. The glyphs at the open bottom end of the vault were very badly weathered, which tended to authenticate them a great deal. When I scouted around the rocks outside the entrance, I found a handful of Egyptian glyphs that were fully weather-exposed and so badly worn as to be barely dis- APRIL - MAY 1994 18*NEXUS