558 - The Temple and the Tomb

n June 1990, Jenny and I went on a belated honeymoon to Egypt. We have not been able to afford one before. We were 'led' to Aswan where we met an Egyptian who had been at Lockerbie only a day or two after the plane crash. How many Egyptians have even heard of Lockerbie, let alone been there, and particularly just before Christmas in 1988? This very same man was instrumental in arranging a trip for us to the Great Temple of Abu SimbeL I had been glancing in a book about Egyptian monuments and my eye had been drawn to a reference to the sunlight penetrating sixty-five metres from the main door to the inner sanctuary. According to the booklet this occurred twice a year on 21st March and 21st September at 5.58 am. I commented how curious it was that it should be out by one minute, i.e. one minute on from 5-57 am. My attention had somehow been drawn to make me find a 558 instead of 557. A few days later, we made our way north, following the Signs. En route to Luxor we visited the temples of Esna and Edfu.

In the temple of Horus at Edfu, as I looked at a sun boat, I found the words of a hymn come into my mind. The tune is the background to this page.  One word was changed in the words that came to me. The lamp was burning dim before the sacred barque... Here is the full hymn. Note too the last line.  For the full significance of it, read the book.

Once in Luxor, we had to find a hotel. We would have liked to be in the Winter Palace, where we had stayed on my first trip to Egypt in 1986.  But upon enquiry in 1990, we discovered that our finances precluded this.  We opted for a more realistically priced alternative further along the Cornishe .  At least it had Nile views, if not the wonderful garden of the Winter Palace.  But at sunset and at dawn, we could look across to the Valley, the land of the West. The name of our hotel was the Mina Palace Hotel. It was where we were meant to stay.  The one thing that marred our stay was the Nile cruise boats moored nearby with theirs throbbing air-conditioning systems destroying the peace of the Egyptian night The date quoted was not correct. The date should have been 23rd February and 23rd October.

From Luxor We travelled home on Thursday, 28th June. It was not without significance that this was also the very same day that Prince Charles broke his arm playing polo. On Sunday, 1st July 1990, 557 days after the Lockerbie plane crash and long after Lockerbie had disappeared from the headlines, the 'Sunday Express' carried a front page headline about a fake bomb taken onto another 747 airliner by Dr. Jim Swire whose daughter died on PA 103. He felt this was some kind of great triumph, illustrating the ease with which a bomb could be taken onto a plane. All that antics such as his achieve is to make security even more onerous and air travel in general more and more of a nightmare. It did not bring his daughter back, nor save others. It was not a bomb that killed his daughter anyway, but shoddy maintenance and massive structiral failure. Perhaps like Diana Flora Swires Fate was known all along because of the stange coincidence in the name of an earlier generation of Pan Am Jets.

On Monday, 2nd July, the Mecca tunnel disaster occurred. 1426 pilgrims died in a tunnel connecting the tent city of Mina to Mecca. It was thought to have been caused by a stampede following the failure of an air-conditioning system. 2nd July was 558 days after the Lockerbie plane crash. So, the coded message in the sunrise at Abu Simbel was not out by even one minute. It was absolutely precise when it rose on the shrine at 5.58 am on 23rd October, c.1290 BC. Was it known then by whatever intelligence inspired the builder that this would be a pointer to events 3,100 years into the future?

I noticed that both the '557 event' and the '558 event' occurred fourteen days after huge earthquakes. The Lockerbie crash occurred in a notionally Christian country involving the national airline of another notionally Christian country very close to the main Christian festival of Christmas. It had followed hard on the heels of the earthquake in Christian Armenia very close to the spot where Noah's Ark was said to have finally grounded. Could it have been a warning that God was now about to repeat the destruction of mankind? The Mecca disaster occurred at the Feast of the Sacrifice, Eid-eI-Adha - the holiest time of the Moslem year. It followed a terrible earthquake in Iran, a Moslem country. Could all this be just a coincidence, or could it be that the Source of intelligence links somehow to God, or is God, the same God who inspired both Christ and Mohammed?  The link to the sun, Akhenaten's Aten was also inescapable.