He was always alert and constantly restless. Spools of blue sand whirled past his boots in the moonlight. It was bright outside—almost as bright as daytime, only the light was clear, pale silver.

The whiskered goddess had two natures; as Sekhmet the lioness, she was a mighty queen of sun-fire and war, and a harbinger of raw spiritual powers. As Bast the cat, she was the gentle bringer of love and domestic joy.

No law. No order. No time or space. Danger was the desert’s breath, and the landscape changed with every wind.

Hieroglyphs and dark painted figures covered the walls in patterns. Bestial, doe-eyed faces peered out above archways. Half-naked, animal-headed people. Some had wings. They knelt, crouched, played board games, raised their bare arms towards heaven.

His mind returned to a place and time he could never forget. That late afternoon lived on. It was an eternal day. Perhaps like some ancient Egyptian curse carved upon the walls of the hallowed tombs he plundered. That bloody, gold-dusted afternoon never faded. It stood like an immortal pillar in the shifting sands of his turbulent lifetime. It could not be undone. It could not be amended. That day changed his life forever.

One woman appeared everywhere. A barefoot, black-haired beauty in robes of white. She wore strange horned crowns—feathers of gold sprouted from her forehead. The walls told her story. She played board games with the animal-headed monsters, bowed to jackal-faced men and danced among winged serpents. Sunrays enveloped her figure. Her beady white eyes stared from all surfaces. No corner of the underground maze was free of her strange spell.

They were a corps of aggressive British soldiers living in the wastelands who spent all their time sabotaging enemy operations and hiding in oases.

Egypt was no longer the garden of desert gods—it was an empire of warring foreigners.

The ancient and the modern blended together in haunting harmony. The war looked like a dream here; a fantasy dwarfed by the sands of time.