The Anibus Gate is the classic time travel novel that took the fantasy world by storm two decades ago. Only the dazzling imagination of Tim Powers could have created such as adventure.
The Anubis Gates
Tim Powers
BOOK ONE—The Face Under the Fur
PROLOGUE: FEBRUARY 2,1802
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson
From between two trees at the crest of the hill a very old man watched, with a nostalgic longing he thought he’d lost all capacity for, as the last group of picnickers packed up their baskets, mounted their horses, and rode away south—they moved a little hastily, for it was a good six miles back to London, and the red sun was already silhouetting the branches of the trees along the River Brent, two miles to the west.
When they’d gone the old man turned around to watch the sun’s slow descent.
He had to walk carefully, for his Japanese clogs were awkward on the uneven dirt and grass.
Fires were already lit among the tents and wagons, and a weaving of wild odors whirled up to him on the cool evening breeze: a sharp, earthy reek from the tethered donkeys, wood smoke, and the aroma of roasting hedgehog, a dish his people particularly relished. Faintly, too, he thought he caught a whiff of stale breath from the crate that had arrived that afternoon—a musty fetor, as of perverse spices meant to elicit aversion rather than appetite, almost shockingly incongruous when carried on the clean breezes of Hampstead Heath. As he approached the cluster of tents he was met by a couple of the camp dogs; as always, they backed away from him when they recognized him, and one turned around and loped purposefully to the nearest tent; the other, with evident reluctance, escorted Amenophis Fikee into the camp.
Responding to the dog’s summons, a dark man in a striped corduroy coat stepped out of the tent and strode across the grass toward Fikee. Like the dogs, he halted well short of the old man. “Good evening, rya,” he said. “Will you eat some dinner? They’ve got a hotchewitchi on the fire, smells very kushto.”
“As kushto as hotchewitchi ever does smell, I suppose,” Fikee muttered absently. “But no, thank you. You all help yourselves.”
“Not I, rya—my Bessie always loved cooked hotchewitchi; so since she mullered I don’t eat it anymore.”
Fikee nodded, though he obviously hadn’t been listening. “Very well, Richard.” He paused as though hoping for an interruption, but none came. “When the sun is all the way down, have some of the chals carry that crate down the bank to the tent of Doctor Romany.”
The gypsy scratched his oiled moustache and shifted doubtfully. “The crate that the sailor chal brought today?”
“Which crate did you think I meant, Richard? Yes, that one.”
“The chals don’t like it, rya. They say there’s something in it mullo dusta beshes, dead many years.”
Amenophis Fikee frowned and pulled his cloak closer about himself. He had left the last rays of sunlight behind him at the top of the hill, and among these shadows his craggy face seemed to possess no more vitality than a stone or tree trunk. At last he spoke: “Well, what’s in it has seen dusta beshes, certainly—many many years.” He gave the timorous gypsy a smile that was like a section of hillside falling away to expose old white stone. “But it’s not mullo, I’m… I hope. Not quite mullo.”
