Floppyshop 2/Floppyshop - 2.zip/Floppyshop - 2.iso/diskmags/3565-4.665/dmg-3609/news.txt/exodux.asc

Text File | 1989-04-05 | 125KB | 2,456 lines

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                 #         THE EXODUS         #
                 #         ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯         #
                 #        Zac Bishrey         #
                 #        ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯         #
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                           ___ooOoo___



      The Exodus from Egypt                                     (11)


      The Prologue:

      Every dot and every comma in this story is true;
      the rest, however, is another matter.

      Beware of the unauthenticated version;
      in the Book of Almighty Truths.

                              - - - - - -

      Chapter 1

      It is not widely known that Ms Tiye the second wife of Pharaoh
      Amun-Hotep III, was expecting a baby at the end of July.

      Tiye's mum was an egyptian lady of royal blood, but her father
      Yuya  (corrupted  from Yosef) was an asiatic  person  renowned
      throughout  Egypt for his precise  interpretations  of dreams,
      who  was brought to Egypt in childhood as an apprentice  slave
      when his brothers sold him to some itinerant  traders,  either
      because those dear brothers of his were strapped for cash,  or
      because they were jealous of the boy's coat of many colours.

      The Pharaoh took a look at the calendar.

      It was for 1346 BC.

      He added the numbers of the year together,  using his fingers,
      and the toes of one royal foot.

      The total came to 14.

      This pleased Amun-Hotep III no end, and made him give a little
      royal  hoot,  because unlike it is here in  these  enlightened
      times,  a  double  seven was considered by  the  superstitious
      people of ancient Egypt in those days, to be a lucky omen.

      Amun-Hotep  III  was  very  upset,  however,  about  the  most
      unfortunate timing,  as he had set his heart on having a Libra
      for a child,  because his astrologers assured him that Librans
      are generous to a fault,  have a good head on their shoulders,
      make excellent PD Librarians,   enjoy a great sense of humour,
      and are eminently suitable as Pharaohs, or indeed, Pharinas.

      It is, therefore, hardly surprising that the news of an end of
      July  birth for  a possible future Pharaoh of Upper and  Lower
      Egypt,  shook poor old  Amun-Hotep III  to the core of his Ka'
      (or soul, if you are not too familiar with hieroglyphics).

      The last thing the Pharaoh wanted in this world was to have an
      awkward Leo for a child,  because, as every person knows, they
      were then as they are to this day, the biggest trouble-makers,
      the most contrary,  cantankerous,  and argumentative sods that
      you can ever have the misfortune to have anything to do with.

      This is an absolute certainty  and you can safely take my word
      on that, established and confirmed by the fact that nearly all
      mechanical (diesel) engineers in the world  are Leos,  and one
      need not say any more than that on this subject.

      Amun-Hotep III called  a special conference  of all his senior
      astrologers to discuss this urgent matter,  commanding them to
      have only  one emergency item  on the agenda,  and  that is to
      find some means of  moving the constellations  round  a little
      bit, without anyone noticing,  so that his child would be born
      when Libra was in the right and proper quarter of the heavens.

      The Pharaoh delivered a speech, to open the conference,  which
      moved the assembled astrologers greatly,  because their wooden
      stools were very hard and uncomfortable.

      After listening to the Pharaoh for half an hour or so,   which
      was  about as long as  they could tolerate those hard  stools,
      all thirteen  senior astrologers  got up  to give His Imperial
      Highness a standing ovation lasting nine minutes exactly.

      The applause registered  103 decibels on the clapometer scale,
      thus setting an all-time record,  which was not broken until a
      handbagging Pharina with bovver boots, and expensive dentures,
      sat on the throne of a distant country, to the north of Egypt.

      The standing ovation pleased  Pharaoh Amun-Hotep III  greatly,
      not realising  of course  that they only stood up because they
      could not stand the torture of their hard seats any longer.

      It should be said in fairness, that Pharaoh Amun-Hotep III was
      by anybody's standards, a considerate, understanding, and very
      kind sort of Pharaoh,  who would not dream of asking  anything
      from his astrologers that was not humanly possible.

      He made it perfectly clear (an expression favoured by pharaohs
      and  cabinet  ministers in those days),  that  if  moving  the
      constellations round a wee little bit proved too difficult for
      them, either because the cusp of the moon was the wrong shape,
      or if Mars, Jupiter and Saturn were in the wrong houses,  then
      he  would  consider  granting them a  generous  royal  assent,
      allowing them to push the calendar forward a couple of months.

      That way, the new royal baby  would be born in the  middle  of
      October,  thus fulfilling his desire for a proper Libra child,
      fit for the red and white crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt.

      Should they fail to come up with the goods, however, or messed
      it up, such that he ended with a Taurean,  or worse still,  an
      Aquarian for a child, then he would show his right royal mercy
      by neutering them first,  followed by placing a priority order
      with the recently privateered National Fright Corporation,  to
      dump lorry loads of small frogs on their front lawns,  and all
      over their barley fields  and set-asides,  to scare the living
      daylights out of their farm produce.

      If that small token of his compassion did not do the trick, he
      said, then he would back-up these little mercies with a deluge
      of red ink to ruin their seven-year piles of good crops, after
      which he would throttle their children, wives, mothers-in-law,
      close  relatives, and  their good friends, in any  order  they
      pleased;  but would  passover  their pesky nomadic neighbours,
      just to show his right royal spite.

      There was an awful lot of weeping, wailing, gnashing of teeth,
      renting of aprons, and other juvenile tantrums like that among
      the senior astrologers.

      They were  worried to death about the red  ink,  because there
      was no demand for red grain in the free markets of Egypt, just
      at that moment,  and worse still, the EEC (Emirates Enterprise
      Club) had not yet been established,  to accept the produce  as
      tomato-flavoured barley, at four times the world market price.

      The Pharaoh gave his astrologers  leave to go home and get  on
      with it, so they went home  and locked themselves up  in their
      studies,  leafing through piles of books on the applied theory
      of gravito-magnetism, and the practical application of a small
      phase-shift to God's™ Universe,  to see  if there was anything
      in those books that might help them with their problem.

      The books were very helpful  and perfectly clear on the design
      and construction of useless (but fun) contraptions  which were
      capable of  travelling  faster than the speed of  light,   and
      on pedal-driven nuclear reactors but there was precious little
      in any of the books about messing with the constellations,  or
      fiddling with digital watches and desk-top calendars.

                              - - - - - -

      In  desperation,   the royal astrologers imported,   at  great
      expense to themselves,  some special reeds which only grow  on
      the shores of a nameless lake which is the source of the Nile.

      That lake remained without a proper name for many centuries.

      Hundreds of generations of egyptians  were forbidden,  on pain
      of death, or even  excommunication,  to call the lake anything
      other than "The Mother of the Nile".

      The  egyptian  authorities decreed that the lake must  not  be
      given a name that foreigners find difficult to pronounce,  and
      that it can wait until one day it could be christened properly
      by  a vicar from abroad with dignity and a sprinkling of  holy
      water, to give it a proper name when a queen (called  Victoria
      for  example),  sits on the throne of a distant  tribe, in  an
      island country, far to the north of Egypt.

      The reeds growing  on the shores of  "The Mother of the Nile",
      when cut  and  left  to dry in the sun,  under the tail of the
      Sphinx,  had the property of  twisting and writhing  when they
      became moist again,  such as by sticking them  under a  rather
      wet night-shirt, or a wet blanket like Willy Whiteliver, or by
      throwing them on the river or the duck pond.

      That  explains  the vigorous ripples that you  see  below  the
      surface of the Nile,  immediately after you dip your toe  into
      it, and has nothing to do with crocodiles looking for a snack.

      Wise astrologers know instinctively that it is wise always  to
      carry a dry towel disguised as an apron  pinned over rolled up
      trousers, or a large hanky disguised as a floppy hat on top of
      one's head, in order to dry the stick and to stop it writhing;
      otherwise there is always the danger of frightening  children,
      Pharaohs,  horses, and  (hopefully)  small constellations,  if
      left wet after a demonstration or a Royal Command Performance.

      That is precisely why you find  a lot of people in  the Middle
      East, walking about with large white hankies over their heads,
      held down with a black cord to use as a serpent leash.

      The Royal Astrologers  seized their opportunity one day  when,
      as if by a miracle, there was a light shower in Egypt.

      The crafty astrologers hedged their bet, however,  in case the
      magic  did not work,  by writing on  A4 papyrus sheets,  their
      resignations as first division senior civil savants.

      They tucked the resignations in the folds of their  full-dress
      ceremonial nightshirts, in the hope that  His Royal Mightiness
      the Pharaoh would find the sheets  as they were being stripped
      and  body-searched  ready for punishment,  and might have some
      pity on them by graciously accepting their humble resignations
      rather than ordering his bodyguards to flog them to death.

      The Royal Astrologers hoped  that when the constellations  see
      the sticks turning into "snakes",  they would be frightened to
      death, and make a run for it, for a couple of months' worth of
      rotation around the earth,  after which,  the foolishly simple
      constellations  would discover their  silly  mistake,  realise
      what idiots they have been, and slow down back to normal.

      That would bring Libra to the end of July,  and so the Pharaoh
      would have his Libra child, the lives of the Royal Astrologers
      would be spared for the time being, and there would be lots of
      thanksgiving services in all the temples of Thebes and Saqara.

      The Royal Astrologers put their green wellies on and rushed to
      Pharaoh's Royal Palace, arriving there just in time to see the
      changing of the guards,  which was  about  to start,  with the
      massed bands of the brass regiments  playing  a military march
      from the third act of Aida.

      They threw down their sticks  on the wet courtyard  behind the
      great wrought iron gates, after tying the sticks  with lengths
      of cord to stop them from running away.

      There was  mayhem  and total confusion  among  the guards  and
      through the ranks of  the massed bandsmen,  and even the goats
      marching in step as regimental mascots, joined in the fun when
      the sticks started to writhe and slither on the wet ground.

      Three Major-Generals of the Household Cavalry,  seven Captains
      of the 16-32 Royal Pharaohnic Lifeguards,  and two Lieutenants
      in charge of the flutes resigned their commission on the spot.

      They threw away their swagger sticks in horror and ran as fast
      as their sandals would allow them, away from the palace.

      The  other ranks of bandsmen and lifeguards bought  themselves
      out  of  the army,  with immediate effect,  back-dating  their
      hurried departure to the previous evening.

      The goats went on chewing the slithering reeds.

      His Royal Mightiness the Pharaoh was having a restless nap  at
      that moment, on top of a smallish pyramid in the front garden.

      He lifted one eyelid lazily  to see what the commotion was all
      about, and was fair gob-smacked when he saw the courtyard full
      of "snakes", and his bodyguards running in all directions.

      Contrary to popular belief, and despite an uncorroborated saga
      told in a big book of almighty truths, the sight of the sticks
      twisting and writhing on the ground  did not scare the Pharaoh
      one tiny little bit.

      Indeed, His Imperial Highness was very fond of snakes and kept
      a large collection of cobras, asps, serpents and adders in his
      library, to use as book markers.

      The  Pharaoh  slid  down the side of the pyramid  on  a  small
      prayer mat, on which he was resting and pleading with the lord
      Amun to make the constellations shift just a wee little bit.

      He collected the writhing sticks from the courtyard gleefully,
      and put them in a large asp-basket, but was rather annoyed and
      a little surprised, when one of the sticks bit him.

                              - - - - - -

      One quick glance at the clear sky later that evening confirmed
      the Pharaoh's worst fear.

      Not being a leap year,  the constellations were only disturbed
      a tiny bit (but not shaken), by the spectacle in the courtyard
      because  they were  rather  scared  of snakes,   but like  His
      Royal Mightiness the Pharaoh,  they were not at all afraid  of
      silly little sticks  twisting on the ground,  and continued to
      turn in their courses as normal  without advancing at all, not
      even for a few measly degrees.

      The following day, Egypt had thirteen fewer Royal Astrologers,
      which, to apprentice astrologers, was very good news indeed.

                              - - - - - -

      Chapter 2

      Pharaoh Amun-Hotep III was in despair, and as the time for the
      birth of the royal child drew closer,  he became progressively
      more deranged with the phobia of having a Leo in the family.

      His mind became so twisted  with  depression and fear  that he
      dreamt up a horrid little scheme to avert the disaster.

      He went into the private quarters of the royal second wife and
      stood beside the chaise-longue,  where she was having a little
      rest after doing the washing up.

      He stood there for a long while looking down at the young  Mrs
      Pharaoh, over his tinted half-moon glasses,  with a forced and
      rather blank smile playing on his distorted royal countenance.

      He told her that  he had  given  a certain forthcoming  event,
      which concerned both of them,  a  great deal of  very  careful
      consideration after consulting with Amun, and that both he and
      the divine Amun had a good look at the constellations and came
      to the firm conclusion  that it was not right for her  to give
      birth to the new royal baby in the heat of the capital, during
      the tourist season.

      He insisted that she should pack her rucksack and vanity case,
      take one of the Royal Midwives with her, and go to deliver the
      child at the Summer Palace in cool and fashionable  Sidi-Bishr
      on the outskirts of Alexandria  (where all the most awkward of
      mechanical (diesel) engineers can trace their ancestors).

      Young  Mrs Amun-Hotep was not too happy  about  travelling all
      that  way  in her condition,  and was rather  puzzled  at  the
      Pharaoh's insistence to make her go, but as he was the earthly
      representative of the divine Amun,  therefore  a royal command
      carried a lot of weight  (even more than  a  Babylonian Bull),
      and disobeying it would have dire and very nasty consequences.

      As soon as  the  Intercity 125  camel-train  taking his second
      wife had disappeared beyond the horizon,  the Pharaoh summoned
      the Lord Chief Executioner and whispered something in his ear.

                              - - - - - -

      Despite the Pharaoh's reputation  for  having made  the trains
      run on time,   and  despite the  Citizens' Train Charter which
      His Imperial Mightiness had devised  (a month or so before the
      previous  general elections in Egypt),  the train was  delayed
      for seven hours in arriving at the station in Sidi-Bishr.

      The Pharaoh cobbled the "Train Charter" primarily as a private
      joke at the expense of the voting gumbies  of Egypt,  but also
      to stimulate the papyrus trade,  by making all the disgruntled
      punters write hundreds of useless letters to BR (Bedouin Rail)
      who wouldn't send any replies, let alone pay any compensation.

      The BR announcer at the Sidi-Bishr railway station pinched his
      nose with the thumb and index finger of his left hand,  cupped
      his right hand over his mouth, stuck his head into a large tin
      bucket  (with the bucket handle dangling close to the  lip  of
      the  bucket, to  make it rattle), then dragged  himself  to  a
      distance of seven feet and seven inches from the megaphone.

      He waited until someone went out to stampede a herd of  cattle
      waiting patiently just outside the station,  to announce in  a
      language  carefully chosen so that nobody could  understand  a
      word of it; a clever language which does not have in its words
      any vowels between the consonants.

      He announced against the background of stampeding cattle and a
      rattling bucket that the reason for the delay on that occasion
      was because  a lot  of the wrong type of unseasonal  sand  had
      settled  on the track,  and that contingency plans were in  an
      advanced state of preparation to clear the sand from the line;
      as soon as a shipment of the right type of brooms arrived from
      the Democratic People's Republic of the Sudan.

                              - - - - - -

      As we all know, bad news travels very fast indeed (even faster
      than the speed of light  if you want to be  precise about it),
      unless you were foolish enough to use an electric telephone in
      Peterborough,  instead of a loud hailer,  or two plastic  cups
      and a length of string between them;  because every  telephone
      line  in Peterborough is rigged to ring a golden 0898  number,
      regardless of whatever number you may have dialled.

      That explains why  Petriburgian  telephone bills  are so huge,
      and has nothing whatever to do with using the Fax machine,  or
      down-loading  bulletin boards,  or  the youngsters having very
      long chats with new friends introduced to them by the telly.

      Word came to Pharaoh's second wife  that  His Majesty intended
      to have something really nasty happen to her expected baby.

      She didn't believe the rumour of course, but just to be on the
      safe  side, she packed a few things into a  shopping  trolley,
      and left the Summer Palace with the Royal Midwife.

      They unpacked their belongings  in a small apartment  provided
      for  them by  a battered-wives organisation,  just a few  days
      before that establishment was privateered by the prudent local
      council, and turned into a youth training centre.

      Mrs Pharaoh was delivered of her baby, a bouncing boy weighing
      seven pounds and seven ounces,  in the battered-wives shelter,
      at 7 am on Saturday 31st July 1346 BC.

                              - - - - - -

      The Lord High Executioner got on his Honda (VFR-750) motorbike
      and went on quarter throttle the whole way to Sidi-Bishr, thus
      overtaking  every  express train,  Hardley-Davison,  Sawakaki,
      Turbo-Metro, XR3i, and other rubbish like that on the road.

      When he arrived in Sidi-Bishr,  he stopped at Ah-So (a station
      which sells japanese petrol) because those stations gave their
      customers a coupon  for every six thousand piasters they spent
      on any grade of petrol.

      The  Lord High Executioner would not buy his petrol  from  any
      other station, even if it was cheaper, and would ride for many
      extra miles on his bike looking for an Ah-So station,  because
      he needed to collect forty thousand coupons, for a mug.

      The  Lord High Executioner put a couple of drops in  the  tank
      (the Honda VFR  being  very economical with the fuel),  washed
      the squashed flies off the screen,  helmet,  and tinted visor;
      then polished the beautiful mudguard and fairings, cleaned and
      re-lubricated the drive-chain, balanced the four carburettors,
      changed the oil and filter, and had a cup of tea.

      After that he headed for the Summer Palace, showed his warrant
      card to the dozy copper,   who was having a quiet smoke at the
      gate, and went in, but not before he chained and padlocked the
      Honda to the huge gate; because unlike it is here today, there
      was a lot of motorbike thieving in Egypt, in those days.

      The Lord High Executioner looked in every  nook and cranny  in
      the  Summer Palace without finding Mrs Amun-Hotep or the Royal
      Midwife,  so he  went around  the market squares, the shopping
      precincts, and the warm sandy beeches of beautiful Sidi-Bishr,
      asking people  if they  had  seen  a couple of women  carrying
      a baby with a Ankh in one hand and a Flail in the other.

      They were ever so sorry they said, but they couldn't help him,
      though they dearly wished to oblige  if they could,  and asked
      him, nevertheless, to have a nice day.

      The Lord High Executioner gave up  after a while and went back
      to  the Summer Palace  to unchain his bike  from the gate  and
      ride back to Thebes,  but  the bike had disappeared, and there
      was a wide gaping hole in the wall, where the gate once stood.

      Bike ? what bike ? said the dozy copper.  Don't you start that
      lark with me mate, I am not being paid the princely sum of six
      piasters a week to look after your bleeding bike, sod off.

      The Lord High Executioner  was in  a bit of a tizwoz,  because
      the  small print  on the back of  his insurance policy clearly
      stated in grammatically correct hieroglyphics, that:

      "no settlement would be honoured  by this  fully comprehensive
      insurance policy in respect of any claim following an incident
      without prejudice to the nature of said incident  if any motor
      vehicle with fewer than seven wheels with the exception of any
      wheels that may from time to time  be carried as spare therein
      as described  hereinbefore in schedule D  paragraph 8  if said
      vehicle was left unattended without giving fourteen days prior
      notice in writing to the insurers  or their  accredited agents
      notwithstanding whether or not the vehicle was  at the time of
      the reported incident  chained and padlocked to an  ornamental
      wrought iron gate  with or without  the express consent of the
      keeper and/or registered owner of said vehicle"

      The Lord High Executioner cursed his luck, the whole motorbike
      thieving fraternity and all insurance companies in Egypt.

      He could not believe that such a thing could happen to a Honda
      belonging to the Lord High Executioner himself,  so he went to
      give the police a real piece of his mind,  and to register his
      disgust in no uncertain manner.

      He hitched a hike on the back of a sports camel  which dropped
      him outside the Lindisfarne Road Police Station,  stepped over
      the trench and the barbed wire barricades, patted the friendly
      pair of Doberman-Pinschers on the head, and went in.

      He tapped the desk hard  with the knuckles of his left hand to
      attract attention to himself,  produced his  warrant-card  and
      stuck it under the nose of the duty sergeant, who was having a
      quiet smoke and minding his own business.

      The sergeant eyed the Lord High Executioner suspiciously, took
      a few more drags on his cigarette and waited for seven minutes
      before he spoke, muttering something about there being a spate
      of forged warrant-cards lately;  which made His Excellency the
      Lord High Executioner rather nervous.

      Can't you see we are busy ?
      What do you want ?
      asked the sergeant ever so politely.

      I am the Lord High Executioner, sergeant.

      NAME ?

      Oh yes, it is Zac-Ankh-Amun, son of Ausar-Meren-Ptah sergeant;
      I am ever so sorry but there is only one pee in Ptah sergeant.

      WHAT is the nature of your complaint ? asked the duty sergeant
      impatiently, rubbing out the second pee from Ptah and exhaling
      the smoke  in a long hard puff;  which made it come out of his
      ears and started the fire-alarm going.

                              - - - - - -

      Three weeks later,  the message about the fire was transmitted
      by the newly installed "fire-alarm-computer",  at fire-control
      headquarters,  when  a fire engine  was dispatched immediately
      to the  Lindisfarne Road Police Station;  to find  that it was
      only a false alarm.

      It is sad to relate that Egypt,  in those days,  did not enjoy
      the great privilege of having a Fire-Alarm Charter.

      Consequently, the fire station could not sue  Virginia Knumbum
      (who was born under the sign of Virgo), the Secretary of State
      for Fire-Alarms,  who dumped on the poor fire-fighters a lousy
      eight-bit computer which she bought from a second-hand chariot
      dealer, specialising in clapped out Volvo Station Wagons.

                              - - - - - -

      The Lord High Executioner gave the officer  full details about
      the nature and purpose of the trip,  the route that he took to
      come to  Sidi-Bishr,  where he left the bike,  how much he was
      charged  for the few drops of  lead-free petrol,  the depth of
      tread on the radial tyres, and how he meticulously checked the
      tyre-pressure before leaving the Ah-So petrol station.

      He threw in, for good measure,  the fascinating fact that East
      Anglia Windows plc  had grossly overcharged him for doing  the
      double-glazing on his chalet-bungalow in Thebes, despite their
      promise to charge him half price, for allowing his property to
      be used by them as a show house.

      Vehicle registration number ?  asked the sergeant.

      It's  a  cherished number actually sergeant,  the  Executioner
      started to explain, but the sergeant cut him off sharply:

      NUM-BER !

      ZAC 750, said the Lord High Executioner rather sheepishly, and
      felt very foolish for paying a small fortune at a DVLC auction
      in Swansea, to get the lousy number-plate.

      Do you have  a driving licence,  current  MOT certificate, and
      valid insurance; the sergeant wanted to know.

      Oh yes, yes, here they are, sir, except for the MOT, you see I
      don't have one, because the bike isn't three years old yet, in
      fact I only bought it last August, the first of August...

      RIGHT, screamed the sergeant, you are in for it mate;

      The driving licence isn't signed,  and I don't  want the rider
      insurance POLICY, nor do I want to hear a sob story about your
      bleeding double-glazing,  they are not healthy anyway,  what I
      want is the insurance CERTIFICATE;

      At any rate this USELESS piece of paper, shouted the sergeant,
      is for motorbikes with engine capacity NOT exceeding 739 cc;

      I ought to apprehend you for not wearing a seat-belt,  using a
      tinted visor after dark,  wilfully chaining your motor vehicle
      to  an  ornamental iron gate  without due care  and attention,
      causing an obstruction in front of the gate,  riding with more
      than  80 milligrams of tea in your system,  and for disturbing
      the Pharaoh's peace  during siesta time;  threatened  the duty
      sergeant, and very nearly fulfilled his promise.

      Instead,  he told the Lord High Executioner,  that he ought to
      bless the almighty Amun and thank his lucky stars, because all
      the detention cells in his station were full to capacity  with
      five villains to a cell, each one of them charged with illegal
      possession of a forged warrant card.

      Leave your name and address with the scribe outside;

      We  will ask the Victims' Support Group to drop you a line  or
      come round for a cup of tea, and will let you know IF anything
      turns  up  from our enquiries,  smiled  the  sergeant  sickly,
      screwing-up the incident report  and filing it very carefully,
      in the large waste papyrus basket under the enquiry desk.

      The Lord High Executioner hitched a lift  back to Thebes on an
      articulated ox-cart  carrying cotton-waste for export  to some
      dark satanic mills in Bradford and Burnley.

      He headed straight for the palace,  stormed into the office of
      the Pharaoh's  Shoe Polisher and Private Secretary,  demanding
      an immediate audience with the Pharaoh,  who was busy having a
      little nap on top of the small pyramid in the front garden.

      He told the Pharaoh all about his abortive mission,  and asked
      His Majesty to sign the travel expenses form, please.

      The following day Egypt was short of  a Lord High Executioner,
      which, to apprentice executioners, was very good news indeed.

                              - - - - - -

      Chapter 3

      Pharaoh Amun-Hotep III had a number of items on the agenda for
      the next meeting of cabinet ministers.

      The item on top of the agenda was a request from the NCB (Nile
      Crocodile Board) to close down 31 uncompetitive stone pits.

      The second item was about selling off five  opted-out teaching
      ossuaries in the capital,  because of a sharp reduction in the
      demand for skilled mummification surgeons.

      Next, an item about presenting a white paper to parliament for
      an  enabling bill,  to sell off the pyramid  construction  and
      maintenance factories to a firm of property developers.

                              - - - - - -

      You may find it interesting to know, that there was an ancient
      egyptian custom which concerned cabinet ministers.

      The  custom was that after leaving government  (to spend  more
      time with  his great grand  children), the  vizier responsible
      for  privateering  publicly owned firms   was  guaranteed  two
      things, a knighthood from the pharaoh, and a seat on the board
      of the firm that he had just privateered.

      And so it was with the vizier responsible for privateering the
      pyramid construction and maintenance factories.

      He tied the Pharaoh's garter round his leg and accepted a seat
      on the board of the firm of property developers,  at a nominal
      consultative fee of half a million piasters per annum.

      The firm was famous throughout Egypt as an outfit specialising
      in leisure parks, bingo halls, massage parlours, flats for six
      therapists,  and other such vital property  developments,  but
      knew naff-all about building or maintaining pyramids.

                              - - - - - -

      Amun-Hotep III  started hopping  with a considerable degree of
      madness when he realised  that his inner cabinet  was short of
      thirteen Royal Astrologers, and a Lord High Executioner.

      That just left the Royal Speech-Maker and Press Secretary, his
      Private Shoe Polisher,  and his Personal Carrier of the  Royal
      Brief Case, available to attend the cabinet meeting.

      He picked up the telephone and re-dialled the Royal Book-Maker
      telling him to place a fiver (each way) on a camel he fancied,
      which was running at 3.30  that afternoon  in the 2000 guineas
      at Aswan, and while he was at it, to please send 14 runners to
      the  cabinet office  straight away,  because  he had  a bit of
      bother  with certain members  of the cabinet,  and wanted some
      suitably qualified replacements.

      The bookie obliged instantly.

      The Chief Usher  issued  the bookie's runners  with  red brief
      cases  (to keep their sandwiches fresh),  and  a young private
      secretary each to carry their diplomatic bags, then asked them
      to see the PST (Principal Speech Therapist) to elocute them on
      the use of 'ear 'ear  (the only words allowed to be uttered by
      cabinet ministers in the royal presence),  and ordered them to
      take their shoes off before entering the cabinet office.

      Oh good,  said the Pharaoh,  now that we have a quorum  we can
      proceed with the day's business,  er,  gentlemen;  lets  start
      with the Speech-Maker who is in charge of the stone pits.

      The Royal Speech-Maker cleared his throat, put his gold-plated
      half moon glasses as far down on his nose on as he could,  and
      said that the economic and enviwonmental case for closing down
      the stone pits is not only self-evident but also unansewable;

      So,  to avoid a negative circular causation syndwome, the wise
      closure plans  should  pwoceed  mutatis mutandis,  by  way  of
      dewogation, applying the pwinciple of subsidiawity of course;

      There is no need, therefore,  to confuse the voting gumbies of
      Upper and Lower Egypt with unnecessawy facts and whatnots, and
      with  bags  of superfluous evidence;   said  the  Speech-Maker
      robustly,  forgetting  for a moment  that he was not  actually
      delivering a speech at a party conference.

      The Royal Shoe Polisher,  started fidgeting  and playing  with
      the double-sided brush (his badge of office) on the table.

      The Polisher's constituency was in the  East Anglia Region  of
      the middle bit of Egypt.

      It consisted mainly of stone mining communities and small, but
      very powerful, pyramid building lobbies.

      He was worried to death  about closing down the pits  in  full
      view of the voters, in case those gumbies (over whose eyes the
      wool can never be pulled)  noticed  that their pits were being
      closed,  and showed their displeasure  by staying at home  and
      not actually voting for him at the next general elections.

      The Pharaoh  saw  the fidgeting  through the corner of his eye
      but totally ignored it.

      After a long period of sustained fidgeting,  the Shoe Polisher
      could not contain himself any longer.

      He  waited  until the Pharaoh stopped talking for a minute (to
      light up a cigarette), then put his hand up,  at half mast, to
      request permission to squeak, shivering slightly.

      When  the Pharaoh  heard the interruption to his  fag-lighting
      activity, he nearly fell off his mastaba, and his hand reached
      out to the drawer where he kept a portable Official Sacred Axe
      with the intention of chopping off the Shoe Polisher's tongue.

      WHAT is it Polisher ? asked His Majesty impatiently.

      Well,  er,  your highness,  you see,  many people and a number
      of  prominent experts have put forward a scheme (that is  what
      politicians say, when they daren't take risks with new ideas);

      They call it the Common Stone Policy, which is a clever system
      of mining stone  and building a huge number of small  pyramids
      at the tax-payers' expense whether there was a market for them
      or not, then sorting these pyramids into piles,  for recycling
      back into sand at a later date, or storing them in huge silos,
      for  an indefinite period,  or selling them at seven  piasters
      each to the impoverished and pyramid-starved people of Bosnia.

      The idea was so mind-bogglingly stupid, that the Pharaoh could
      not believe his ears, and could not even imagine that any sane
      person could come up with a hare-brained scheme like that.

      He came  to the conclusion  that  no one  actually spoke those
      idiotic words, and that he was rather delirious from the after
      effect of the antibiotic with which his herbalist treated that
      small stick bite, the day there was a light shower in Egypt.

      All those in favour of closing down the 31 stone pits say aye.

      In unison, all the new cabinet ministers shouted 'ear 'ear.

      Oh God...  murmured the Pharaoh,  surely not another  bunch of
      asp-licking toadies. I must have a word with the Chief Usher.

      The following day, Egypt was short of a Chief Usher, which, to
      all aspiring young ushers, was very good news indeed.

      The rest of the day's business went smoothly with every motion
      carried by a qualified majority of seventeen to nil, in favour
      of the resolution, without dissent from the  cabinet ministers
      (or even a sham rebellion later, from the back benchers),  who
      knew perfectly well on which side their bread was buttered.

      No more stone was mined in Egypt  after that  cabinet meeting,
      and all pyramids thereafter  were built with  open-cast marble
      imported from  South Africa,  which was  very good news indeed
      for the conservationists (and South African miners) because it
      is  common knowledge that South African marble  contains fewer
      particles of dust than local stone, doesn't require the use of
      a dust-mask when worked and is a full two piasters per hundred
      weight cheaper than the locally mined egyptian stone.

      To keep the egyptian stone miners reasonably happy and to stop
      them from demonstrating  in Trafalgar Square  and marching  to
      Hyde Park, the Pharaoh made them an offer which they could not
      refuse (in lieu of severance pay and a pension).    He awarded
      them a re-cycled linen burnous,   a pair of  imitation-leather
      sandals, and a cardboard box each, to keep them warm and dry.

                              - - - - - -

      Chapter 4

      Amun-Hotep III was fascinated by a bed-time story, invented by
      a writer of fables and fairy tales, known as Willie the Bard.

      The story was about  a horse fancier called  Richard 111  who,
      shortly before his abdication,  used to be a king in a country
      far to the north of Egypt,  and who made a sport of throttling
      his tiny nephews (allegedly),  dumping their little bones into
      a wine-cellar (may be), and getting away with it (probably).

      A brilliant idea flashed through His Majesty's head, aided and
      abetted by the  Royal First Wife  who was wiley enough to cook
      for him a dish of his favourite kuskus.

      She didn't have any kids of her own  to inherit  the throne of
      Upper  and Lower Egypt,  and was jealous of  Tiye,  the  young
      number two wife, providing that service.

      The Pharaoh  finished the kuskus  which he enjoyed  very much,
      then sent for the newly appointed  Lord High Executioner,  who
      was very keen to show his willingness to carry out  the horrid
      instructions which the Pharaoh whispered in his ear.

      On the Pharaoh's orders,  the  Lord High Executioner  selected
      some idle gendarmes  who were playing  the newly invented game
      of backgammon, in a coffee shop by the Nile.

      These  gendarmes  were  recently suspended from  duty  for  an
      indefinite period,  on suspicion of  planting lotus flowers on
      naughty LSE (Luxor School of Economics) students.

      He armed these men with sticks which he thought would be handy
      for doing finger-searches in papyrus marshes and for defending
      themselves against  unarmed stone miners  and  their  children
      who were having a sing-song and a picnic in Hyde Park.

      The  Lord High Executioner  took the men  in hired  self-drive
      double-decker  ox-drawn  chariots,  with the oxen  and all the
      windows covered with wire mesh,  to protect the gendarmes from
      South African marbles  that might be  thrown at them,  by  the
      discontented stone miners, or their supportive wives and kids.

      Young Mrs Pharaoh,  heard rumour  of  this  search-and-destroy
      mission, which she refused to believe of course,  but to be on
      the safe side, she had  the Royal Midwife  weave a reed basket
      which she covered with tar and pitch, to make it waterproof.

      She put a pram-cushion and  a little red teddy bear inside the
      basket  with a bottle of milk in a bottle-warmer,  then placed
      His Royal Highness  the infant prince  in the basket,  bid him
      au-revoir and hid the basket with its precious cargo among the
      reeds and lotus flowers, on the eastern shore of the Nile.

      That done,  she went back  to her flat  for a cup of tea and a
      chocolate biscuit,  but asked the Royal Midwife to stay on the
      shore to keep  an eye on him,  pretending  to be fishing for a
      small crocodile to turn it into a pair of shoes and a handbag.

      Between  coffee breaks  and friendly  backgammon competitions,
      the gendarmes  tried ever so hard  to find  the infant prince;
      but, being a lucky Leo, he remained  in his  waterproof basket
      undetected, and the gendarmes went back to Thebes.

      They went back as expert backgammon players, but empty handed.

      The  following day,  Egypt was short  of  a  battalion of idle
      gendarmes, which to a lot of unemployed territorial squaddies,
      was very good news indeed.

                              - - - - - -

      Chapter 5

      Young Mrs Pharaoh,   having learned a trick or two  from   her
      partner Amun-Hotep III and Sit-Amun, his wily number one wife;
      thought of a ruse which would save her young son's life.

      She asked the Royal Midwife to go to the clump of reeds on the
      bank of the Nile in the middle of the night, when there was no
      one about, stick a dummy in the little royal mouth to stop the
      prince from yelling his head off, and bring him back to her.

      When the baby  was tucked away  fast asleep  under  an ossuary
      in the corner of the room,  she rang the Pharaoh  to  tell him
      that the young Royal Midwife had made a mistake in calculating
      the  time  when his  royal son  was due to come to this world,
      because of her inexperience.

      She crossed her fingers as she told the Pharaoh  that the baby
      was not due for another ten weeks or so !

      Amun-Hotep III  made a quick calculation with his fingers  and
      yelled with joy  when he realised that the child was due to be
      born smack in the middle of October; Amun be praised, a Libra.

      He was nevertheless, very annoyed, because the Royal Midwife's
      "miscalculation"  had cost Egypt thirteen royal astrologers, a
      Lord High Executioner, and a battalion of idle gendarmes.

      The following day, the Pharaoh put a black hanky over his head
      to announce that Egypt will be short of a Royal Midwife  soon;
      which was very good news indeed, to all the unemployed nurses.

      Young Mrs Pharaoh  contrived one excuse after another  for not
      going back to Thebes until the end of October, when she packed
      her  rucksack  and  vanity case,  put  the baby  in a  plastic
      carrier bag and returned to the Royal Palace in Thebes.

      She arrived in Thebes seven hours late because the wrong  type
      of crocodile eggs were lodged in the points at Giza junction.

      Amun-Hotep III  was delighted to see the little bundle of joy,
      and amazed at how fast he had grown in just a few days !

      Give us it, said the Pharaoh taking the infant from its mother
      and bouncing it on his royal knee.

      Has your majesty decided on a name yet ? asked the mother.

      How's about "Ah-Moses" ? said the Pharaoh without expecting or
      waiting for an answer.

      Brilliantly original, answered the mother anyway.

      (Ah-Moses, as anyone who learned any hieroglyphic at all knows
      that it means "Aha we now have - a Son",  yes that is what the
      word Moses means,  a son or child,  as in Ra'-Moses, corrupted
      to Ramesis, or T'Hut-Moses, corrupted to Toth-Moses, etc etc).

      Amun-Hotep III   was  flabbergasted  when  the  little  rascal
      reached out to his father's head,  grabbed the double crown of
      Upper and Lower Egypt,  placed it on his own head, and gurgled
      what sounded like   "me Pir'a"   (which in hieroglyphic means;
      me Pharaoh),  and told his astounded father  that he wanted to
      study Mechanical Engineering at Loughborough, when he grew up.

      Are you sure this kid is a Libra ? asked the Pharaoh;
      he seems rather forward for his age;
      more like a Leo I'd say.

      The young number two queen kept her fingers crossed;
      and her mouth tightly shut.

                              - - - - - -

      When  Ah-Moses  was a couple of weeks short of his seventeenth
      "official" birthday, his father sent him off  to Loughborough,
      to study  the  arcane art  of  mechanical engineering,  as the
      young prince had requested when he was on his father's knee.

      He patted Ah-Moses on the shoulder,  shook his hand, wiped the
      tears from his eyes and uttered a few compulsory clichés like:

      Work hard and make your father proud of you my son;  and...
      Egypt expects you to do your duty;  and...
      Don't do anything that I wouldn't do;  and...
      Don't get mixed up in politics;  and...
      Keep away from the lower classes and loony lefties;  and...
      etc etc etc

      His mother chipped in, by advising her young son to always put
      on clean underwear, in case he was run over by a lorry.

      Amun-Hotep III escorted the young prince,  between rows of new
      Lifeguards,  Theban Fusiliers,  Bookie's Runners,  and a large
      assortment of Royal Lackies, to the steps of Airforce 1, which
      was waiting on the tarmac.

                              - - - - - -

      We all know that the first thing young undergraduates do  when
      they arrive at their  academies,  colleges,  universities, and
      other venerated seats of learning, is to ask:

      "Where is the action tonight then ?"...

      Young  aspiring  mechanical engineers  who happen  to be  born
      under the sign of Leo, go even further than that.

      They forget what they went over there for, completely !

      Instead, they join loony political  parties,  small-bore rifle
      associations,  ancient-history classes,   and secret societies
      delving in the black art of turning sticks into serpents.

      Young Ah-Moses was a confirmed Leo of course (despite what his
      father thought) and was, therefore, no exception to this basic
      and time-honoured rule.

      Instead of knuckling down to learn the mysteries of such lurid
      and delightful subjects as the  analysis of  non-linear finite
      elements,  and mastering the science of  Schlieren photography
      of the combustion process in internal combustion engines, etc;
      he mis-spent his youth  researching the discoveries of various
      countries,  writing  the authentic history of the  creation of
      God's™ universe, and other useless (but fun) items like that.

      Between political debates, and cleaning his Feinwerkbau rifle,
      and bouncing  a yellow spotted squash ball  off a portrait  of
      his  father  the Pharaoh (hanging on the wall in his  room  at
      Loughborough),  young Ah-Moses would be found stretched out on
      a sun-lounger  in the garden of the residential hall,  with  a
      sun-hat over his face, dreaming up all sorts of tales, fables,
      and sagas, and contemplating the mysteries of heaven.

      For all these non-academic activities, Loughborough University
      awarded him  a first class honours in  mechanical engineering,
      and promised him a Master's Degree  if he went back to Thebes,
      waited three years, then sent them  a fee of five guineas plus
      p&p and VAT to cover the cost of the calligraphed parchment.

                              - - - - - -

      Chapter 6

      The bite from the stick  which Amun-Hotep III  suffered in the
      courtyard of  his palace,  the day there was a light shower in
      Egypt, caused the Pharaoh a lot of bother over the years.

      None of his magicians could do anything to cure the sting, and
      the wound eventually festered and poor old Amun-Hotep III died
      from  a rather unfortunate complication of  toxoplasmosis  and
      malignant  dry-rot,  a week before the graduation ceremony  at
      the campus of Loughborough University in Karnak.

      He passed away without having the joy and bliss  of seeing his
      son graduate as a fully fledged mechanical (diesel) engineer.

      He was buried  under  a smallish pyramid  in the Valley of the
      Kings, which, over the years,  became a tourist attraction for
      prominent archaeologists and their man-servants from abroad.

      After the burial ceremony, the pyramid was covered under heaps
      of fine sand specially imported from Saudi Arabia, to disguise
      the pyramid as a small hill that no one would notice among the
      multitude of hills in the valley.

      No one in olden times got his thieving fingers on Amun-Hotep's
      gold mask, his jewels, or the Ercol furniture,  and other such
      precious and very very expensive articles buried with him.

      The reason for that  is because  he left in his  last will and
      testament,  a codicil with clear instructions  "to whom it may
      concern",  that  a placard should be erected on the hill  over
      his burial chamber,  stating that no one  is to open  the tomb
      and pinch his mummy and his precious things until  a Mr Carter
      comes from a far off island to the north of Egypt, some thirty
      three centuries later,  to dig it all up and carry the goodies
      away with him, for safe-keeping in the British Museum.

                              - - - - - -

      Young Ah-Moses graduated from Loughborough on his twenty first
      birthday, which was good news to all his mean friends, because
      each one of the miserable sods needed to send only one present
      (a PD disk containing bed-time stories,  if you really want to
      know),  and one postcard to congratulate him on his graduation
      AND  on getting the  "key to the door"  whatever on earth that
      ancient ritual was supposed to mean when it was at home;  for,
      they asked, where was the money to come from dear ?

      Ah-Moses had  a farewell party  lasting  seven days  and seven
      nights,  which was the third such party in succession, because
      he made a lot of friends at Loughborough.

      He returned home to Thebes after the last party,  expecting to
      be installed as the new Pharaoh of Upper and Lower Egypt.

      Instead,  he found that his uncle  Horem-Heb  had usurped  the
      throne, on the spurious pretence that since young Ah-Moses was
      only the first son of the second wife of the late Pharaoh, and
      he himself was the second son of the first wife of his father,
      and since he had  a large army of followers  with  long  sharp
      sabres  (as was the custom  in a far off country to the north,
      for  settling disputes  over kingships);  then it  must be the
      will  of the  divine Amun  that it is HE who shall be the  new
      Pharaoh of Upper and Lower Egypt.

      Horem-Heb  was willing, however,  to negotiate away the middle
      bit of Egypt on condition that someone would make him an offer
      that he could not refuse.

      He threw in craftily,  as a loss-leader,   his solemn  promise
      (cross my fingers and hope to die), that Upper and Lower Egypt
      (the  most powerful nation on earth)  would have   "a  special
      relationship" with the middle bit of Egypt.

      The  special relationship being that the tiny piece of  Middle
      Egypt would damn well do exactly what its huge cousin tells it
      to (in a good cause), whenever it snapped its fingers.

      No one made an offer,  because  ruling the middle bit of Egypt
      was as much a pain in the asp then, as it is today.

                              - - - - - -

      Chapter 7

      When young Ah-Moses found that he could not become pharaoh, he
      sulked in a small, double-glazed, centrally heated  apartment,
      in  a high-rise tenement block with a  swimming  pool,  nicely
      situated in Longthorpe, the money-belt area of Sidi-Bishr.

      He married a sweetheart from his school days,  a lovely  young
      princess called Nefer-Titi (which in hieroglyphic  means;  The
      Beautiful-Came).  They had three daughters, then a son who was
      born on the 18th of July,  Amun be praised, a Cancerian,  whom
      he christened Tut-Ankh-Amun (in honour of the state god Amun).

      He spent most of his time  by the swimming pool,  playing with
      little  Tut,  sucking  Nefer-Titi's  toes,  contemplating  the
      mysteries of heaven, and trying at the same time, to develop a
      viable hypothesis  for an economical alternative  to the state
      religion of Egypt, which was in common practice at that time.

      He came to the rather obvious conclusion that carving out huge
      monuments for the gods,  and mummifying cats, and jackals, and
      nile-alligators, and baboons etc etc, was a mug's game really.

      Instead,  he should try to convince the people  of Egypt  (and
      anyone else who cared to listen to him) that stuffing animals,
      carving great stone needles and statues, building pyramids and
      suchlike,  was a ruse devised by a proliferation of priests in
      temples up and down  the country,  to keep the stone-miners in
      employment  at the tax-payers' expense,  and  for making  easy
      money by breeding and selling cats and jackals and alligators.

      The  whole problem  could  be  swept aside  at  a  stroke,  by
      believing that the great god who created Egypt  and later  the
      rest of the universe,  was in fact so huge that even the whole
      stone-mines of Turah near Cairo could not produce enough stone
      for making a scale-model that would represent Him adequately.

      Anyway,  even if enough stone  could be mined in Turah for the
      job, no one had the foggiest idea what He looked like,  so, he
      thought,  why not make a virtue out of necessity,  by claiming
      that He ordered that no photographs or even sketches are to be
      taken of Him,  but exempted italian painters from this  edict,
      because  He rather liked their style;  and at any rate,  these
      italian artists  could be excluded  from this command,  on the
      grounds that they didn't understand a word of hieroglyphic.

      All the cats, jackals, hippos, baboons and crocodiles in Egypt
      heaved a huge sigh of relief, for not having to be stuffed.

      What worried Ah-Moses  though,  was that the  egyptian gumbies
      might not believe all this codswallop,  and would continue  to
      stuff cats, jackals, hippos, baboons, and nile-crocodiles, and
      melt down their earrings to make statues of heifers.

      Ah-Moses quickly dismissed  these misgivings  from  his  mind,
      because, he thought (correctly),  that gumbies who believed in
      green shoots of miraculous recoveries, claims of unprecedented
      prosperities, remotely controlled immaculate conceptions,  and
      stories about a star 1,299,311 times larger than the earth and
      332,960 times heavier than this miserable little planet, going
      walkies in front of three middle eastern blokes (riding camels
      in broad daylight),  then stopping over  a grotty old  manger;
      would believe anything.

      Convinced of his correct assessment  of the gumbies' powers of
      logic and reason, Ah-Moses went ahead and created a god.

      A god created he, in his own image and likeness,  i.e.  a Leo,
      and he saw that He was good,  which was very good news  to all
      of us Leonids, and sucks and yah-boo to the rest of you lot.

      He was stuck for a name to call his new god  (whom he credited
      with  creating Egypt,  and a few days later,  the rest of  the
      universe), but came to the conclusion that the new god must be
      a male person,  with white hair and beard,  looking  something
      like Santa Claus but without the schmacker,  and that his name
      must role easily off the tongue.

      He thought  (like the Babylonians)  he would call his god  EL,
      so it could be incorporated into handsome names like  Samu-EL,
      Micha-El, Ishma-EL, Shealti-EL, ELi-sabeth,  etc etc,  but the
      Babylonians and other Akkadians told him that if he so much as
      dared use their copyright even for use in a demo version, then
      they would send arseholes from the  Trailing Standards Office,
      to sue him in court and close down his Public Domain Library.

      When  all those who were mouthing their support for  Ah-Moses,
      sat down,  refused to stand up and be counted,  then  vanished
      into thin air,  he decided to drop the idea of challenging the
      arseholes in court, because he could not afford the outrageous
      solicitors' fees out of his own pocket.

      He settled for an egyptian name,  and called his brand new god
      "Atun", and promptly took out a copyright for it.

      This proved to be  a stroke of genius on the part of Ah-Moses,
      because  it was not only easy  on egyptian ears,  but also  on
      greek ears,  who corrupted it ever so slightly to Adonis,  but
      Ah-Moses didn't mind about that too much.

      It was rather different when the name Atun fell easily on  the
      ears of certain groups of nomadic tribespersons, who corrupted
      it to Adonai, meaning "My Atun", because they could only speak
      a form of  broken akkadian,  and could not spell a single word
      of proper hieroglyphic, no matter how hard they tried.

      Their Atun ? THEIR Atun ! that's a bit rich,  whined Ah-Moses,
      coming  from that bunch of pesky nomadic shepherds  who  can't
      tell the difference between a god and a flying saucer.

      They never even bothered to ask for permission, or respect the
      copyright. Why don't they invent their own god eh ? he moaned.

      He  swore that if he ever became  Pharaoh of  Egypt,  then  he
      would  send arseholes  from the  Trailing Standards Office  to
      close down all their PD libraries, and force them to get their
      own floppies and play with them at inflated commercial prices.

      Ah-Moses put his thoughts  about the creation of Egypt  (and a
      few days later the rest of the universe),  on a master floppy,
      and sent a copy of it to his favourite  Public Domain Library,
      which  was  run by a young lady,  who had a good head  on  her
      shoulders,  enjoyed a great sense of humour, and was eminently
      suitable as a Pharina.

      Millions  of copies of this floppy were made  and  distributed
      throughout  Egypt,  in new jiffy-bags,  at the remarkably  low
      price of just  £1.50 each,  including package  and first class
      post, which was very good news indeed for all PD punters.

      The floppies were placed, free of charge,  by the Good-ones in
      millions  of hotel bedrooms,   given away as prizes on  Speech
      Days at schools up and down the country,  and handed over with
      the  complete  works of  Shakespeare, to celebrities  who were
      ready to travel to a desert island after an interview with Sue
      Lawley; whether they wanted the blessed floppy or not.

      Mind you, after an interview with Sue (apologies to Neil), who
      can  blame the poor sods for wanting to abandon the world  and
      become recluses on a desert island; even if they had to suffer
      the  whole of eternity with the works of  Shakespeare,  and  a
      floppy full of almighty truths !

      To his utter amazement, he discovered that a great many people
      "believed" his cock (apologies to Edwina) and bull story.

      Many centuries later, a mechanical (diesel) engineer from Eye,
      used a TI-59 programmable calculator to work out the number of
      people who followed the teachings of young Ah-Moses.

      He used the book of almighty truths as his source of reference
      and concluded that no fewer than 2,502,200 souls had swallowed
      the  tale that Ah-Moses had spun,  and became  his  followers,
      including all the tribes of nomadic shepherds who were  having
      a  sojourning holiday in Egypt at that time,  and couldn't  go
      back home, because Horem-Heb refused to grant them exit visas.

      Word of these  floppies,  which were infested  with subversive
      truths and spread among PD punters, reached the ear of Pharaoh
      Horem-Heb and the priests in the multitude of temples.

      They were annoyed,  because they had large stocks of  jackals,
      cats, hippos, baboons, crocodiles, etc and didn't know what to
      do with them,  when the bottom (apologies to Virginia Knumbum)
      fell out of the market for freshly stuffed gods.

      That, they thought,  would start a run  on the piaster,  whose
      value  had already dropped  to the point where it was reaching
      parity with the drachma, due to a huge surfeit of new economic
      miracles, and a painful pile of unprecedented prosperities.

      There was only one course of action for Horem-Heb to take, and
      that is  to chase Ah-Moses out of Egypt, together with all his
      followers who  "believed"  in this brand-new god Atun, whom he
      had so brazenly created in his own image.

      Not wishing to have any unnecessary trouble  with a prince  of
      the royal blood,  Horem-Heb decided to give his wayward nephew
      Ah-Moses just one last chance.

      He sent the Royal Speech Maker as a plenipotentiary lackey, to
      advise Ah-Moses to return to the worship of Amun,  to continue
      stuffing cats, jackals, hippos etc,  and to drop this nonsense
      about this new god Atun; or else...

      Being a  trouble-making and cantankerous Leo,  Ah-Moses didn't
      take too kindly to the demands of this speech-maker who, being
      a Scorpian, could not compose three sentences of grammatically
      correct hieroglyphic without splitting an infinitive.

      There was a scuffle of course (there always is,  if you put  a
      Leo  next to a Scorpio,   or next to almost any other sign  of
      the zodiac for that matter),  and the  Royal Speech Maker fell
      down dead, when Ah-Moses hit him with a stiff serpent.

      When  Horem-Heb  heard of  the tragic news,  he was absolutely
      furious, because he needed the speech-maker to write an ad-hoc
      and off-the-cuff speech which the Pharaoh was going to make in
      a party political broadcast on prime-time TV that evening.

      He decided to teach Ah-Moses a severe lesson as punishment for
      messing about  with the gods of Egypt,  and a sober example to
      anyone who dared dabble with matters of divinity.

      Horem-Heb assembled an army of many millions of idle gendarmes
      and hundreds of thousands of unemployed charioteers,  then put
      his  bullet-proof  flak-jacket on,  got into his armour-plated
      personnel chariot, and lead the troops against Ah-Moses.

      Bad news travels fast,   as we all know,  so  Ah-Moses decided
      to get his 2,502,200 followers together, and headed east,  but
      found a great deal of difficulty in communicating his marching
      orders  to  the vast numbers of nomadic  shepherds  among  his
      followers, who could only speak a broken form of akkadian.

      He solved the language problem by employing the services of  a
      union official,  a "brother" called Haroun  who was born under
      the sign of Pisces and was, therefore, fluent with languages.

      Ah-Moses ordered the multitude of escapees  through  "brother"
      Haroun to frog-march as fast as the old men, women and infants
      could run in a southerly direction, towards a summer resort on
      the  southern  tip of Sinai,  which was a long way  away  from
      their assembly point on the eastern shore of the Nile.

      Ah-Moses knew he would have some difficulty crossing the  Suez
      Canal, but kept his worries to himself, so as not to panic the
      escapees, and decided to fret about the problem later.

      He did not allow any of his followers  to stop for one minute,
      not even for a cup of tea, or to answer any natural calls.

      They quick marched non-stop for exactly 40 hours, to reach the
      Suez Canal, and they did it all, their way, in broad daylight.

      Every step of the way  they marched in daylight throughout the
      whole 40 hours because Ah-Moses prayed to Atun to stop the sun
      from going round the earth for the duration of the march,  and
      Atun obliged by making it stop in mid-heaven, not advancing to
      the west or to the east, not even for a finger's breadth.

      When they reached the  Suez Canal,  Atun released the sun  and
      let it carry on going round the earth in the usual manner, but
      warned Ah-Moses  not to expect him to repeat that trick again,
      and to keep quiet about it,  otherwise  he would be  inundated
      with requests from all kinds of fools who might go trekking on
      Ben Nevis after dark and expect to be rescued with daylight.

      Ah-Moses thanked Atun ever so much  for that valuable service,
      and, tapping the side of his nose, promised to keep mum.

      That was only the good news, the bad news was that none of his
      followers, except one,  a bloke called Younis (later corrupted
      to Jonah) could swim a stroke, not even the new born babies.

      The water in the canal was seven feet deep, so wading  was out
      of the question,  except for those among the escapees who were
      seven feet and seven inches tall (or more).

      Ah-Moses,  however,  wanted to keep them all together,  so  he
      stopped the  tall chaps from wading across  on their own,   in
      case they got lost in Sinai,  which would serve them right, if
      you ask me, for leaving their compasses back at home.

      He wondered if a prayer might help,  by asking his  mightiness
      the divine Atun to send a wind to divide the waters, perhaps.

      A wind from the west,  however,  would make Sinai rather soggy
      and unpleasant to walk on without wellies.

      On the other hand,  a wind from the east would blow the waters
      in their faces and ruin their anoraks.

      Why not a wind coming vertically downwards ? he wondered.

      Brilliant idea, even if I say so myself, chuntered Ah-Moses to
      himself quietly, and started praying hard for just such a wind
      but  stopped  short before his words filtered upwards  to  the
      divine Atun, to do a spot of rather complex calculations.

      He took his cunning right hand out of his pocket,  counted his
      fingers  to  make sure they were all there,   snapped  them  a
      couple of times to get rid of the floating decimal point, then
      did some quick (digital) arithmetic.

      Taking air density,  ambient temperature,  the width and depth
      of  the Suez Canal,  and the viscosity of the prevailing  wind
      into the calculation,  he worked out Reynolds Number and saved
      it  on his little finger,  then inserted this number into  the
      formula held by his index finger to obtain the speed at  which
      the wind would part the waters.

      It  turned out that wind speed of not less than 529 miles  per
      hour  (ignoring the decimal point)  would  be required to part
      the waters to the left and to the right of the crossing point.

      Clever fingers, he thought.

      So far so good,  that should not be beyond  the technical  and
      physical capabilities of Atun, which was the good news.

      The bit of bad news however, was that wind of that force would
      impart  2592 pounds  on the average adult,  which is about the
      weight of a small BMW with a Metro carried on its roof-rack.

      That, he thought, was just a tiny bit too much for the average
      adult exodite to support while crossing the soggy floor of the
      Suez Canal,  so he withdrew retrospectively, whatever words of
      prayer that may have floated upwards towards Atun.

                              - - - - - -

      Since  Younis  (being an Aquarian)  was the only  exodite  who
      could swim,  Ah-Moses asked him (nicely)  to take the  sandals
      off  his  feet,  the nightshirt off  his back, and  the  large
      hanky off his head,  then jump into the canal water,  and swim
      (in either direction), until he could find a spot in the canal
      where the waters were shallow enough to wade across.

      Why me ? asked Younis despairingly, its always me;

      Here is a lake Younis, jump into it, and see if it's bitter;

      There is a river, jump into it Younis and see if there are any
      crocodiles lurking about;

      Younis,  can  you see that tiny stone over there ?   then  why
      don't you dive into it, to see if it's full of sweet water;

      I am getting sick and fed up with it, I wanna go back home.

      Shut  up Younis and do as you are told,  otherwise I will  put
      you  on porta-loo cleaning duties for the rest of  the  march,
      said Ah-Moses threateningly.

                              - - - - - -

      Muttering  various  new oaths that no one ever  heard  of,  or
      could understand,  (because he invented them on the spot,  for
      just that occasion), Younis took his clothes off (save for the
      long johns), and jumped into the icy waters of the Suez Canal.

      Look  out !   look out !   shouted the two and a half  million
      exodites;  there is a whale behind you, its gonna swallow you.

      There was no such thing as a whale  swimming in the Suez Canal
      of course,  it was in fact a miniature submarine on its way to
      Ninua  (later corrupted to Nineveh),  the capital of  Assyria;
      after paying a friendly visit to the Egyptian navy at Aswan.

      The Captain's view in the periscope was obstructed by the face
      of a man who seemed to be gurgling loudly into the  hydrophone
      what sounded like "open the ruddy hatch immediately and let me
      in you stupid punt,  my long johns are caught in your bleeding
      sonar"; or words to that effect.

      The Captain ordered the escape hatch  to be opened  and let in
      poor old Younis, who was soaking wet, as anyone who had fallen
      into the Suez Canal would be.

      Younis was offered a large mug of hot tea and a  naval uniform
      which was about two sizes too large, but it was a considerable
      improvement on being in a wet long john.

      I don't know where you want to get off mate, said the Captain,
      but I am afraid we are sailing non-stop to Ninua.

      Oh  that is perfectly alright by me,  said Younis  thankfully;
      take me as far as you can,  and take as long as you like about
      it, I am in no hurry to go back to cleaning porta-loos thanks.

      The submarine gave way to a hi-jacked super-tanker then turned
      left as it entered the mediterranean, twenty one minutes after
      leaving the Suez Canal at Port Said.

      It sailed past Crete, manoeuvred between Malta and Sicily, and
      dodged  Sardinia before it slowed down to a  slow  paddle,  to
      show  the  crew's happy faces to the garrison  at  Gebel-Tariq
      (later corrupted to Gibraltar),  in order to avoid being fired
      at, by the friendly gun emplacements.

      After leaving the narrow strait of Atlas, the submarine turned
      left into the South Atlantic.

      The submariners had a little fancy-dress party as they crossed
      the equator,  then turned left at Cape Town without  stopping,
      because the Captain had orders not to stop there,  in case  he
      got involved in the politics of South African marbles.

      As  the  submarine  sailed up the Indian Ocean  and  into  the
      Arabian  Sea,  the crew watched the happy singing and  enjoyed
      the dancing on the shore of an island,  whose inhabitants were
      celebrating a change of name from Madagascar to the much  more
      handsome name of "The People's Republic of Malagasy".

      The submarine headed north east,  went through the straight of
      Hormuz  and passed the island of Dilmun (corrupted to  Bahrain
      by the a-rabs), where Ziusudra lived.

      Ziusudra  (corrupted to Noah,  by a bunch of nomadic shepherds
      who couldn't pronounce Sumerian names), arrived in Dilmun many
      centuries  earlier with his family and farm animals in a  huge
      barge,  to re-establish himself on a small holding,  after the
      Tigris  and Euphrates burst their banks and flooded  Shurupak,
      the city of his birth, earlier on in the history of the earth.

      The crew of the submarine together with Younis and the Captain
      waved at Ziusudra as they sailed past Dilmun.

      Ziusudra smiled graciously and wished them to have a nice day.

      After dodging some aircraft carriers who were out on a  picnic
      (in  a just cause),  and asking permission to proceed from  an
      assortment of desert shields,  our little submarine sailed  up
      the Shatt-il-Arab, took the starboard fork into the Tigris and
      sailed right through the marshes, passing Gurnah (which is the
      site  of  the garden of eden - honest),  and sailed  past  Kut
      (from which the diminutive form of Kuwait was taken).

      The  submariners stopped for a few minutes to  have  delicious
      buffalo cream with freshly baked  Khubuz bread  for breakfast,
      and exchanged pleasantries with some Sumerian scribes  wearing
      lambskin kilts and writing stories (in cuniform of course what
      else),  about the creation of the universe,  and about old man
      Ziusudra who dodged a great and devastating local flood.

      They  sailed past Amara northwards,  through Babylonia on  the
      port side and Akkad to starboard, on the fast flowing Idiglat,
      which means arrow-swift in Akkadian, but corrupted for no good
      reason at all, to Tigris, by a macedonian called Alexander.

      The submarine had to wait a few hours  before sailing  through
      Baghdad.   The reason for the delay was because the Baghdadees
      were carrying out some repairs on a number of  bridges,  which
      were  damaged accidentally by having smartie bombs falling  on
      them from a great height, due to an unfortunate combination of
      bloody-mindedness, just causes,  and the forthcoming elections
      in a country far to the north-west of Baghdad.

      After leaving that ancient city,  the submariners were careful
      not to turn east into the Adhaim river, which pours its waters
      into Idiglat; or later on, into the Lesser Zab, which does the
      same thing with its waters, but not so generously.

      The  Captain declared himself pleased with the performance  of
      the rechargeable batteries  which had propelled his  submarine
      on a single charge,  all the way from Aswan,  through the Suez
      Canal,  the Mediterranean, the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, the
      Arabian Sea, the Gulf, and Tigris, to the borders of Assyria.

      It was getting rather dark, so the Captain decided not to push
      his luck too far because the Tigris would become rather tricky
      through Assyria, which they were about to enter.

      He slowed the submarine down a bit, forced compressed air into
      the  buoyancy tanks to allow it to surface,  and  started  the
      reliable diesel engines to recharge the batteries.

      The engines were developed by a  mechanical (diesel) engineer,
      who was a Leo by birth (what else) whose ancestors hailed from
      Sidi-Bishr (where else), therefore, the Captain knew that they
      were at least 100% reliable and could trust them with his life

      Extra care was required as the submarine entered Assyria,  and
      while it was negotiating the rocky rapids beyond the mouth  of
      the Greater Zab,  whose waters poured into Idiglat  also,  but
      much more generously than its lesser brother.

      After that, it was, more or less,  straight sailing into Ninua
      (on the outskirts of Mosul),  where they were greeted by  king
      Sinharib  himself  (later  corrupted by  those  pesky  nomadic
      shepherds again, to Sennachereb),  and were entertained by the
      massed  bands of the Royal Assyrian Army,  playing a  military
      march from the first act of Semiramide,  which was a favourite
      tune of the Assyrian monarch,  because it was named after  his
      mum Semiramis (corrupted from Samu-Ramat ie Queen of Heaven).

      The journey from the Suez Canal to Ninua took just three days.

      Some  cynical historians have cast doubt on the fact  that  it
      only took three days for Younis  and the submarine,  to travel
      from the Suez Canal round Africa and Arabia, to Ninua.

      They used the unconvincing argument that no small submarine in
      existence at that time, or even a large whale for that matter,
      could average 150 miles an hour when submerged, or jump like a
      love-starved and over-enthusiastic salmon,  over rocky  rapids
      in the northern stretches of the Tigris.

      Such objections however, should be ignored completely or taken
      with a large pinch of salt (at least),  because none of  those
      historians  have  heard the latest re-interpretations  of  the
      stories in the great book of almighty truths, from the experts
      on "Thought for the Day" on Radio 4, to re-discover the latest
      undisputed facts,  and the most recently updated and  entirely
      unalterable truths about the stories contained therein.

                              - - - - - -

      Younis worked in Ninua, on orders from the Lord Atun, as a lay
      preacher,  and made a fortune from selling alms to passers-by;
      stopping them in the streets to tell them stories (as only  he
      knew  how) about the comings and goings of heavenly  kingdoms,
      and the green shoots of impending disasters.

      But Younis found that he had  a bit of a dilemma on his hands.

      His problem was that Atun knew everything, in advance, OK ?

      So, if the Assyrians did not believe that such disasters would
      happen, as Atun knew perfectly well, and in advance, that they
      would  not believe it (wouldn't he ?),   so what on earth  was
      the  point  of asking Younis to deliver the  useless  message,
      since it was going to be ignored anyway.

      But  if  they did heed the warnings of Atun  and  avoided  the
      guaranteed  disasters,  then they would not suffer  the  total
      destruction and assorted calamities,  as predicted by Atun  in
      advance; which would make Atun a rather unconvincing fibber.

      Younis consulted the chief euphemist, asking him for a form of
      words which were neither one thing nor the other, or both; but
      the  euphemist  had not yet received the  latest  update  from
      Central Office in Smith Square, because the satellite link was
      completely out of focus,  after receiving a direct hit from  a
      smartie bomb which was dropped on it from above, by accident.

      In  the absence of any help from the euphemist,  Younis  mixed
      his words together into a form of thick broth, then dished the
      stuff out to anyone who cared to listen.

      He  insisted that his advice and each of Atun's dire  warnings
      were non-profit making;  indeed, they were (like Public Domain
      goodies), free of charge, gratis, and for exactly nothing, but
      that passers-by could,  if they so wished, make a donation (to
      cover his costs), by dropping a few shekels of silver or minas
      of copper, into his very large hat.

      The shoppers and passers-by would smile at him kindly,  or nod
      agreeably and tell him how right they thought he was,  and ask
      him  to keep up the good work,  then apologise for not  having
      any change at just that precise moment, but that they would be
      sure to contribute on the way back from the shops;  then hurry
      on to do their shopping, and return home by a different route.

      Younis lived in Ninua for the rest of his life,  and was given
      a  grand funeral when he died,  in gratitude for all the  dire
      warnings of the guaranteed disasters, which never happened.

      He was buried ceremoniously under a large shrine situated in a
      prominent position  (which can be seen from miles around),  on
      the south-eastern side of Ninua.

      The shrine has been looked after extremely well throughout the
      centuries and to this day, by successive generations of devout
      and grateful Assyrians and others (honest).

                              - - - - - -

      Ah-Moses  and the exodites waited for Younis  to  return,  for
      exactly seven days and seven nights,  but when he did not show
      up,  they entered his name into the book of almighty truths as
      being absent without leave.

      In the meantime,  Horem-Heb and the entire egyptian army  were
      getting dangerously close to the exodites; so Ah-Moses ordered
      his  congregation (which was a bit larger than the  population
      of Greater Manchester), to march southwards.

      The new route confused the elders  who started whingeing about
      the peculiar zigzag march on which Ah-Moses was taking them.

      But since none of the elders (twelve in all) had a better idea
      for avoiding a dust-up with the egyptian army, they decided to
      shut up for a while,  and wait until the march went sour, when
      they  would have the great satisfaction of informing  Ah-Moses
      (without being too specific), that they told him so.

      When the two and a half million exodites  reached  Ismailia on
      the  Suez Canal,  Ah-Moses ordered  a quick march  across  the
      single-span suspension bridge over the Canal, closely followed
      by the Pharaoh and his enormous army.

      Ah-Moses and every one of the old men, women, infants, and the
      physically-challenged (in wheel-chairs), crossed over safely.

      But when Horem-Heb,  his generals, field-marshals and millions
      of gendarmes,  and hundreds of thousands of war chariots  were
      smack in the middle of the single-span suspension bridge,  Ah-
      Moses gave a signal, by waving a little red hanky.

      An aide-de-camp of Ah-Moses,  a chap called Shamgar (who was a
      Cancerian) pushed down the plunger of a portable detonator.

      Thousands of  kilos of  semtex fireworks  and  set-aside grade
      sodium nitrate fertiliser  went up in a huge column of  smoke,
      taking the bridge,  the Pharaoh,  and every single man  in the
      whole of the egyptian army up with it.

      The  shock-wave from the explosion went round the world  seven
      times, then got fed up and stopped when it became dizzy.

      The column of fire (by night) and smoke (by day) could be seen
      from as far as Lindisfarne, even when the tide was in.

      The force of the explosion was so violent,  that the waters of
      the Canal parted to the north and to the south of the crossing
      point and yea, the waters stood like an heap on either side of
      where the bridge used to be, almost reaching to the firmament.

      It was a marvellous and truly unbelievable sight...

      Knowing full well that no one was ever going to believe such a
      cock (apologies to Edwina) and bull story,  Ah-Moses loaded an
      Ektar 125 into his Canon EOS 650 autofocus camera,  and took a
      couple of dozen photographs, as proof of the incident.

      Unfortunately, he left the Canon (a present from his dad) with
      the film inside it,  and all his photographic equipment in the
      boot of his chariot, outside an oriental restaurant  (where he
      was having a curry with friends to celebrate the safe crossing
      of the Canal),  when a light-fingered boot-comber  whipped the
      lot away;  and that is why there is no  photographic  evidence
      whatsoever of that miraculous crossing of the Suez Canal.

      However,  we know  for certain that the story is  the absolute
      truth,  not so much because it is told in the book of almighty
      truths   (though that  should  be  sufficient evidence for any
      cynics and doubting thomases), but because if you go  to   the
      Suez Canal at Ismailia, you will not find any trace of a great
      single-span suspension bridge whatsoever;  which proves beyond
      any  shadow  of a doubt,  that the bridge  must  have  totally
      disintegrated and blown away without a trace;  thus confirming
      the veracity of the story in the book of almighty truths.

      On the Sinai side of the canal, every single exodite was safe.

      Yaaa Hu, cried the men.
      Helahil (later corrupted to Hallelujah) trilled the women.
      Every infant shouted Ameen (later changed slightly to Amen).

      Praise be to Atun, replied Ah-Moses, with a sigh of relief.

      Thank Atun, all the exodites had exuded safely from Egypt.

                              - - - - - -

      Chapter 8

      Ah-Moses  was feeling very smug  about this idea  of  his,  of
      creating a non-existent Atun  in his own personal image,   and
      was very pleased to see that none of the "believers" following
      him, had cottoned-on to his clever and economical ruse.

      You can, therefore, imagine the shock  that Ah-Moses suffered,
      which would have given him a cardiac arrest (he was 80 at that
      time,  or twice forty, if you want to be precise about it), if
      such  a phrase existed in any medical dictionary available  at
      that time, when Atun spake unto him, saying:

      "Verily Ah-Moses my boy, I say unto you my son, that thou hast
      done what is pleasing in mine eye, by taking mine flock out of
      the land of Egypt safely,  but what bothereth the hell out  of
      me greatly is that thou shouldst continue to call thine  first
      born and only begotten son,  Tut-Ankh-AMUN,  when you shouldst
      have renamed him after me.  What sayest thou ?  hmmm ?"

      Sorry, said Ah-Moses,  I am ever so sorry my lord,  who art in
      heaven, thou art absolutely right of course, Sir.

      I  really  should have thought of that without  any  prompting
      from thee;  but you see master, I was rather busy planning the
      route march, buying semtex fireworks and showing young Shamgar
      here how to fit the fuses, and wire up the detonator properly.

      I also had to organise tens of thousands of porta-loos for the
      grown-ups, and nappies for the kiddies, said Ah-Moses wearily.

      Your holy mightiness just won't believe how much trouble I had
      in trying to locate and haggle over these camping necessities,
      at caravan bazaars scattered all over Upper and Lower Egypt...

      In thine infinite mercy thou mayest, perhaps, find a tiny spot
      of spare compassion with which to forgive my transgression...

      I shall do something about it straight away... honest...

      I  promise  thee that steps will be taken so that such  a  sad
      occurrence  can never happen again (as they say in  a  country
      far to the north of Egypt after every bureaucratic cock-up,  a
      mine disaster, or a train crash).

      Oh alright then,  said the divine Atun,  but I really ought to
      punish thee and thine, just a tiny wee little bit...

      I tell you what, how's about not allowing you to set a foot in
      the land of the Zacharites ? how's that for punishment ? hmm ?

      Ah-Moses wasn't entirely certain  whether he was dreaming,  or
      talking to himself, or that he really was speaking with Atun.

      At any rate,  he did not think that  being deprived of  having
      the  great  pleasure of dwelling,  for the rest of  his  life,
      among a bunch of loony Zacharites, was any kind of  punishment
      to speak of.

      Ah-Moses,  nevertheless, decided (wisely) to be smart and play
      it safe all the same.

      He was rather keen on Tut as a first name for his son,  and no
      self-respecting prince of Egypt (or any peace marcher for that
      matter),  would go around without an Ankh;  so he waited seven
      days, then re-christened his born-again-son: Tut-Ankh-ATUN.

      He did that by criticising a small piece  of Tut (with a sharp
      knife), and downloading it on a floppy (there is no need to go
      into more detail here); to symbolise the birth of a New-Age.

      All the "believers" followed the example set by Ah-Moses.

      They did that by ritually criticising their sons,  whether the
      name  of Amun  was incorporated in their sons' names  or  not;
      because none of the parents could read or write hieroglyphic.

      That ritual became a custom  applied to every  male descendant
      of the followers of Ah-Moses, even as unto this day.

                              - - - - - -

      Chapter 9

      When the tragic news of the great disaster on the  single-span
      suspension  bridge over the Suez Canal  at  Ismailia,  reached
      Thebes, the Royal Speech-Maker, the Carrier of the Royal Brief
      Case,  the  Lord High Executioner,  and all thirteen  bookies'
      runners  held an emergency meeting in the cabinet  office,  to
      decide on what to do about the empty gold-plated Ercol throne.

      Flog it to the Kuwaitis, in a just-cause,  said his excellency
      the Royal Shoe-Polisher, they'll buy anything that glitters.

      Shut up, said the Carrier of the Royal Brief Case;
      How about returning it to Ercol for a refund ?
      That should pay off the entire national debt and still leave a
      handy sum for building a half dozen pyramids, at least.

      'ear 'ear cried the bookies' runners, in unison.

      Ahm, Ahm, muttered his excellency the Royal Speech-Maker;

      I do not wish to appear to be ambitious, Amun forbid, nor do I
      intend  to put an idea forward that you,  in your prudent  and
      wise deliberations had not considered carefully, BUT, my right
      honourable and honourable friends would surely agree that what
      Egypt needs above all else, in these dire circumstances, which
      are entirely due to international forces  and beyond  anyone's
      control,  is an eloquent and qualified spokesperson to put the
      case clearly to the cats,  jackals, baboons, hippos, and nile-
      crocodiles;  someone experienced in speech making,  hmmm ?

      Shut up the lot of you, shouted the Lord High Executioner;

      Only a genuine, and legitimate, member of the royal pharaohnic
      blood may occupy the throne of Upper and Lower Egypt;

      We can't recall  Ah-Moses,  obviously,  because  there is this
      matter of a warrant for his arrest, following that unfortunate
      incident in Sidi-Bishr;

      I tell you there is no alternative but to send for his son Tut
      and persuade him to be our new Pharaoh.

      He will have to change his name  back to  Tut-Ankh-AMUN,  said
      the Carrier of the Royal Brief Case.

      We can promise him  a decent burial  when his time comes,  in,
      say, seven years from now,  with lots of gold masks,  and fine
      paintings, and Ercol furniture, said the Royal Shoe Polisher.

      He is only sixteen, said the Lord High Executioner, so I shall
      have to be Regent OK !   but only until he comes to his senses
      and  knocks out of his  silly little head,  all that  nonsense
      about Atun, that his father Ah-Moses had drummed into it.

      The Lord High Executioner used the opportunity provided by the
      coffee  break,  to  confirm  his  credentials  thoroughly,  by
      informing the ministers sitting on the foot-stools, and on the
      floor  of the cabinet office;  that never in the whole of  his
      life  had  he heard such a load of unmitigated  codswallop  as
      this idea of Ah-Moses,   about a huge and invisible creator of
      Egypt and the rest of the universe;

      Next,  I  suppose,  the silly old fool will come up  with  the
      ridiculous notion that the earth goes aimlessly round the sun,
      like a blind-folded footballer in Gaza;

      Why doesn't the idiot go  the whole hog  and come up  with the
      fable that one day,  Amun forbid,  women will be admitted into
      the temples of Amarna and Thebes, as ordained priests... Jeez;

      All that claptrap; whatever next;

      We shall have to put an end to all this rubbish soon,  with an
      excommunication or two perhaps, or even a Pharaohnic Bull.

      'ear 'ear replied the bookies' runners, in unison.

      The Carrier of the  Royal Brief Case,  being an intellectually
      thrusting  sort of chap mumbled something which  sounded  like
      "nobody  gives a damn about what I have to say",  but  no  one
      replied because nobody gave a damn about what he had to say.

      The Royal Speech-Maker lost his voice and didn't say a word.

      All the cats, jackals, baboons, hippos, and nile-crocodiles in
      the  whole of Upper and Lower Egypt,  worried for their lives,
      once again,  and started moaning, barking,  and snapping their
      teeth with mortal fear.

                              - - - - - -

      The cabinet sent a press officer with a  Corporation Coach  to
      Sinai, to give Tut the good news and bring him back to Thebes.

      Ah-Moses did not object very much to his son going back to the
      capital, because Tut promised to send his dad reems of letter-
      headed  palace papyrus,  a load of pre-paid  envelopes,  a  PC
      emulator for his Mega ST2,  and some car stickers  advertising
      equal opportunities year.

      Ah-Moses and Tut gave each other one of their peculiar hugs by
      crossing their arms over the other's shoulder and  waist,  and
      patting  each other on the back until every last  particle  of
      dust was shaken off their Stein leather jackets.

      Ah-Moses told his son to be careful out there,  to look  after
      himself,  and not to get mixed up with loony lefties,  or  the
      lower classes, and other clichés like that.

      He bade his son good bye,  and prayed for Atun to be with him,
      whilst wiping the tears from his eyes and pretending that they
      were caused by the smoke from the Sumerian  cigarettes,  which
      his aunt sent him, as a special treat for his birthday.

      Nefer-Titi chipped in, by advising her young son to always put
      on clean underwear, in case he was run over by a lorry.

                              - - - - - -

      Tut changed his name back to Tut-Ankh-AMUN, by deed poll.

      He sat on the throne of Egypt, and enjoyed playing with semtex
      while punting on the Nile, with the royal band of flutes, tin-
      whistles, harps and drums were playing strains from the  Water
      Music Suite, and the Music for the Royal Fireworks, by Handel.

      Behind the throne,  the Lord High Executioner ran the country,
      and made all the  important decisions  about stuffing animals,
      carving stone needles, erecting pyramids, and building a large
      silo to hold seven years' worth of tomato flavoured barley.

      He was particularly proud of a large stone needle,  carved for
      export to  a country  far to the north of Egypt;  so he had it
      made from the finest egyptian granite,  and wouldn't allow any
      marble rubbish from South Africa to be used for the monument.

      He asked Neil,  the chief stone-scriptwriter,  to engrave some
      laudable exploits of the late lamented, and much loved Pharaoh
      on  the monument,  and asked the scrivener to be  particularly
      careful, when chiselling out the cartouche containing the name
      Neb-Kheper-Ra';  which was the holy ecclesiastical name of the
      Pharaoh Amun-Hotep III.

      When the needle was unwrapped, by those who received the gift;
      they called it Cleopatra's needle, for reasons better known to
      themselves, but unclear to anyone else !  since that "lady" of
      dubious greek origin not only never had any needles carved for
      her use,  but she also had to wait  nine hundred years for her
      birth, after the last stone needle was ever carved in Egypt !

                              - - - - - -

      Chapter 10

      In the meantime, Ah-Moses was having a rough time in Sinai.

      He was foresighted enough to borrow 217 Royal Airforce bowsers
      (of 4500 gallons capacity each),  to carry  976,500 gallons of
      water to the camp each day, from a tiny stone.

      That satisfied the immediate daily needs of more than  two and
      a half million followers, who had accompanied him from Egypt.

      That  water though,  was just enough to quench  their  thirst,
      without leaving one single drop to spare, for shampooing their
      hair, or flushing the loo, or washing the nappies.

      They, however, had gone forth and multiplied beyond count, and
      their number increased greatly until they became like unto the
      sand on the shore, and like the stars in Atun's heaven.

      This created a small problem for Ah-Moses, or rather,  lots of
      little problems...

      He took his cunning right hand out of his pocket again,  to do
      another (digital) calculation.

      He concluded that if:

      (N) was the number of his followers, and,
      (Y) was the number of years that passed  since his great great
          grandad was born, then:

      N = 3.2 times 10 raised to the power of minus 12 multiplied by
          Y raised to the power of 6.416

      He was rather pleased  with that digital exercise,  but wanted
      an analogue confirmation,  so he took his left hand out of the
      back pocket of his combat trousers, to do his sums.

      The left hand was not quite as cunning as the right hand,  but
      adequate enough for doing simple calculations, so he did a few
      deft manipulations with it...

      He discovered  that each female  over the age of two years and
      four months, from the tribes that followed his teachings, must
      have given birth to 9.16 babies in each and every single year,
      since his great great grandad was born;  which was pretty good
      going by any standard, but it worried him a bit.

      What concerned him  was that if they  kept on  going forth and
      multiplying  at that rate of knots,  then within a  couple  of
      hundred years there may not be enough room for everyone on the
      planet,  and that the extra weight would make the earth topple
      over and spill all the water from the lakes and oceans.

      However,  that was not the most urgent problem  exercising his
      mind just at that moment.

      Food was the immediate, and much more serious problem to worry
      about,  because within just two or three decades, every single
      one of the exodites  was fed up  with the  sickly sweet  stuff
      that Atun was parachuting down on them, day in and day out.

      The consequence of that  was that all their teeth went rotten,
      and the cost of  visiting the dentist  (for all those who were
      not on income support, or unemployed and claiming benefit) was
      horrendous, but as if that was not enough, there was more...

      Let's face it, most of the sickly sweet stuff was contaminated
      with salmonella (apologies to Edwina), causing severe cases of
      gastro-enteritis, thus demonstrating the wisdom of Ah-Moses in
      organising all those porta-loos which they needed so urgently.

      Atun,  being a Leo with a twisted sense of humour,  decided to
      punish the two  and a half million  exodites,   for eating the
      contaminated sickly sweet stuff,   which he was showering down
      on them daily,  and for drinking the unfiltered water  from  a
      small stone,  rather  than  a mixture of  stagnant  water  and
      delicious benzin, which comes in up-market green bottles.

      His punishment was to refuse all the exodites who  accompanied
      Ah-Moses from Egypt, permission to obtain entry visas into the
      land of the loony Zacharites.

      However, he tempered his sense of humour a little, by allowing
      their sons and daughters,  who were born in Sinai,  to proceed
      thither, and obtain the required entry permits.

                              - - - - - -

      Despite  the plentiful supply of the sickly sweet stuff  which
      was  coming down from heaven,  or perhaps because of  it,  the
      needs  and demands of the increasing multitudes,  became  more
      urgent, and certainly much more sophisticated.

      The limited patience of Ah-Moses  was on the verge of snapping
      (being  a short-tempered  Leo),  when  his  followers  started
      asking for (nay, demanding)  bran flakes for breakfast,  roast
      beef  and yorkshire pudding  with onion gravy  for lunch,   or
      alternatively  some  micro-waved lamb  with mint  sauce for  a
      change, followed by fruit jelly or helpings of bread-of-heaven
      pudding, or turkish delight, or bars of chocolate to help them
      work, rest, and pray.

      Why could they not have a few lumps of sugar, or some honey to
      sweeten their tea ?  they wanted to know, urgently.

      Did he remember to bring some condensed milk with him ?

      Had he thought about breeding some asses for transport ?

      What was wrong  with hiring a few  dancing girls  from Lebanon
      for entertainment ? asked some of them, seriously.

      All that without once saying please.

      Ah-Moses was fed up  with the moaning and groaning  of all the
      exodites, so he took some leave, which was due to him, put his
      climbing boots on, and went for a trek, up an extinct volcano.

      That is a fine mess you got me into Atun, said Ah-Moses.

      Ho Ho Ho  laughed Atun  with a voice that shook the very roots
      and foundation of the mountain,  which scared the followers of
      Ah-Moses down below, greatly.

      So you think you have problems do you ?   asked Atun,  without
      really expecting, or waiting, for an answer.

      Wait and see what  a heap of trouble  I shall be investing  on
      the islanders  to the north of here,  when I shall infest them
      with truth economists, and saatcherite policies, and a host of
      lamontable normans,  and other plagues  that would  make  your
      little sojourn in Sinai seem like a picnic in the desert.

      Never mind,  continued Atun,  I have scribbled  a few commands
      on a couple of  slabs of stone,  for you to take back  to your
      people;  mind you, I don't expect  that they will be paying  a
      blind bit of notice to any of them;

      Now go back to thine people;
      Your leave expired two hours ago.

      Ho Ho Ho  laughed Atun (which shook the mountain), as Ah-Moses
      started descending the north face of the extinct volcano.

      Ah-Moses took one last look behind him (at the risk of turning
      into  a  pillar of salt),  to see that Atun had  switched  the
      garden lights on,  which made the bushes in the garden seem as
      though they were on fire, but without actually being consumed.

      When he arrived back at the camp,  he showed his followers the
      commands that Atun had given him,  and asked the elders of the
      tribes to frame them and hang them up on the conference tent.

      The elders took one look  at the stones,  shook their heads in
      total disbelief, and quickly threw them away,  wondering sadly
      about the state of mental hygiene of poor old Ah-Moses.

      Useless, they said;  WHAT are we supposed to do with them ?

      You can't smoke these damn tablets of stone or take them for a
      walk in the park, or put them in a building society, can you ?

      Well ?  CAN you ?  Take them back, we don't want them;

      Why can't you just concentrate on the list of supplies that we
      gave you ?  What have you done about it ?  eh ?

      Ah-Moses thought there was no point in arguing with the elders
      (though, being a Leo, he dearly loved to),  so he sent  one of
      his companions,  a chap called Josh (the son of a lapsed Nun),
      to boldly go  where he might find  some powdered milk  for the
      kiddies and jars of honey from the local co-op shop in Jericho
      and to see if he could hire some donkeys for transport.

      Josh took forty  men  with  him,  and they  spent  forty  days
      on their journey into the land of the loony Zacharites, taking
      their tin-whistles with them for entertainment.

      It was three days actually,  but there is this Pharaohnic Bull
      which dictates that the number 40 or the number 7 or multiples
      or combinations thereof,  must be used in all genuine  stories
      of history, regardless of how they looked in print.

      Josh (who was born under the sign of Taurus the Bull) returned
      with his forty companions empty handed.

      However,  knowing full well how irritable and short tempered a
      Leo like Ah-Moses can be, he gave Ah-Moses a lot of Bull about
      capturing (single handed),  675,000 sheep, 72,000 cows, 61,000
      asses (for transport), and 32,000 dancing girls from the tribe
      of the Midianites.

      Josh said all that with a straight face (as only Taureans know
      how), without bothering to explain to Ah-Moses  just what that
      tiny tribe of nomads  was doing  with every farm animal in the
      whole of the Middle East ! or how,  pray,  did they  manage to
      remain afloat on the end-product of all those animals,  in the
      absence, in those days, of any farmyard porta-loos.

      Josh told Ah-Moses also that the co-op supermarket was stuffed
      full with jars of mexican honey,  and enough powdered milk  to
      last all the kids in the camp for life.

      And oh yes before I forget, said Josh, I suppose I better tell
      you now, that we had a bit of an accident;

      We were resting, see, against the wall of Jericho, and tooting
      on our tin-whistles to while the time away, when, guess what !

      Oh this'll make you laugh, honest, you'll really enjoy this;

      The whole wall  surrounding the city of Jericho  came tumbling
      down.  I tell you it was hilarious,  but don't worry,  none of
      us was injured by all the falling masonry;

      We managed to run away from the city, continued Josh, when the
      irate Jerrycans came after us,  demanding with menaces and the
      filthiest language you ever heard in your life, that we should
      rebuild the great wall again, with our bare hands;

      We kept on running until nightfall,  then we sat down to  rest
      under some haystacks near the Ah-So petrol station in Eye;

      And oh yes,  listen to this.   I tell you this is really gonna
      tickle you Ah-Moses, you are gonna die laughing;

      We got our fags out and lit them for a drag, then guess what !
      the haystacks caught fire,   and the whole of Eye  burned down
      to the ground, sparks everywhere, what a sight;

      I still have a painful stitch here from laughing so much;

      It was hilarious really, but,  unfortunately, the fire brigade
      was on strike,  and the flames scared  the 675,000 sheep,  the
      72,000 cows, the 61,000 asses,  and  the 32,000 dancing girls.
      They all ran away, into the desert...  really...  honest...

      I don't believe a word of it, said Ah-Moses.

      Atun resumed sending down  showers  of the sickly sweet stuff,
      from  his enormous stock in heaven,   but would not send  down
      any  dancing  girls,  or allow extra rations of  water  to  be
      extracted from the tiny stone, for flushing the porta-loos.

                              - - - - - -

      To get down to the bottom of it, Ah-Moses sent Shamgar, a keen
      and intelligent young man  who was a designer of weapons  born
      under the sign of Cancer, so he knew he could rely on him.

      Shamgar visited  some  professors of  animal husbandry  at the
      University of Beirut,  who confirmed  that the story about the
      sheep, cows and asses was indeed a load of bull, because it is
      a well known fact  that all sixty three Midianites  had camels
      for transport, were all vegans who never touch meat,  and none
      of their young ladies could dance a step.

      Shamgar left Beirut on the orient express and went to see some
      archaeologists at Imperial College in Gad who dig with a spade
      in one hand and the book of almighty truths in the other.

      They stated categorically that Jericho and Eye were  destroyed
      by a huge earthquake about a thousand years previously, but if
      he chose not to believe them,  then he should go and see  Kate
      Kenyon  the senior archaeologist at  Glasgow University,   who
      would confirm their findings.

      Shamgar did just that,  and Ms Kenyon  confirmed unequivocally
      that he would be lucky to find the site where  Jericho and Eye
      once stood, let alone see any city walls or haystacks.

      They were buried, she said,  by a huge earthquake  more than a
      thousand years ago, so go away and stop wasting my time.

      The story  was  rather  similar  at the co-op shop  in Hebron,
      where the store detective  told Shamgar  that they did  indeed
      have  fine mexican honey, over there on the top shelf,  by the
      fresh fruit and vegetable stands.

      Would you like me to bring you a jar sir ?
      It won't take me longer than an hour or two.

      Shamgar thanked him, but declined the offer, because he wanted
      to return to the camp before nightfall, that Friday evening.

      The store detective told Shamgar  that  he knew nothing  about
      any Josh, but a fellow  who claimed that his name was Ali Baba
      came with 40 accomplices,  pretending to be  Health and Safety
      Inspectors from the Ministry of Milk and Honey;

      They came up with a cock (apologies to Edwina) and bull story,
      that they had orders from Gumar the Minister of Agriculture to
      take away with them 256,000 jars of honey  and thirty two tons
      of powdered milk,  to subject them to some hygiene tests, at a
      health laboratory in Sinai, said the co-op store detective;

      Just imagine Gumar Sherif wanting to do hygiene tests  ?  that
      really  WOULD be hilarious if it wasn't so  pathetic,  because
      that  nurd Gumar couldn't tell the difference between  a  germ
      and the back of a double-decker ox-cart, to save his life;

      Have you heard this one about him, oh it'll make you laugh;

      He  used  to be an amateur ventriloquist  who  specialised  in
      imitating noises from either end of a cow,  until he lost  his
      gottle  when  they threw rotten eggs at him  during  his  last
      performance at the amphitheatre in Beersheba;

      He gave up that job,  went on a three-day course for  bookies'
      runners,  and  was appointed the following week  as a  cabinet
      minister for agriculture and fishy foods;

      He tried to show off what he learned  on the three-day course,
      and to prove himself in his new job, by issuing a departmental
      order which required all eggs to be opened up, for inspection,
      before allowing them to be sold to the public;

      You  can imagine the uproar when housewives went to  buy  some
      proper eggs,  but were offered tomato flavoured scrambled eggs
      in plastic bottles instead;

      The  shop keepers dumped all the bottles of scrambled eggs  on
      his porch,  so he came out to the front door  with his  little
      daughter and forced all the liquid eggs down her throat;

      The shop keepers were amazed and speechless when they saw  his
      daughter drinking the eggs,  AND, at the same time, repeating:
      "gimme another gottle of eggs", without moving her lips.

      Anyway,  said the store detective, this bloke Ali Baba and his
      forty companions left empty handed, of course,  with a flea in
      their  ear,  though they did buy some cigarettes and a box  of
      matches, and paid for them with an expired Berkleycard.

      Shamgar returned to Sinai and told Ah-Moses all about it.

                              - - - - - -

      When confronted with the evidence, Josh thought about it for a
      minute then, on advice from his defending barrister, said:

      "Well alright then so I didn't knock down the walls of Jericho
      with my tin-whistle,  but  would you believe  that the name of
      the earthquake that knocked it down might well have been Josh"

      Josh asked for 39 other fibs  to be taken  into consideration,
      pleading  guilty  but with diminished responsibility,  brought
      about  by  eating too much  sickly sweet stuff,  and  drinking
      unfiltered water from a small stone.

      Ah-Moses refused the 40 accomplices  bail on their cognisance,
      but after taking their immature years into consideration,  and
      also the fact that they were all Capricornians, who are easily
      misled by a Taurean rascal, he sentenced them to 40 days house
      arrest, suspended for 40 days;  adding that he did not want to
      see their faces in his court again.

      When it was Josh's turn to be sentenced, Ah-Moses said that he
      found Josh guilty of the most heinous villainy  that ever came
      before him in his court.

      He said that the culprit did not show any sign of remorse  for
      perjuring  himself in his court by telling a pack  of  blatant
      lies under oath;  instead, he was content to waste the court's
      time  by  doing crossword puzzles  whilst  in  the  dock,  and
      demonstrated his prurience by wishing the clerk of the court a
      happy christmas, in the middle of July.

      Ah-Moses concluded his summing up by telling the court that he
      was constrained to make an example of Josh the son of a lapsed
      Nun, for thousands of generations yet to come;

      He thanked the  twelve men of the jury  (one from each tribe),
      and told them that they would not be required for jury service
      again,  and that they were now free to sell their versions  of
      the trial to any scribbling Ezra with a journalistic licence.

      He then directed his words to the prisoner in the dock:

      Your name shall be entered into 197 verses of the huge book of
      almighty truths, which is the maximum sentence allowed by law;

      I am also making the recommendation to the Home Secretary that
      your sentence  may not be reviewed until  Ezra the Scribe  re-
      writes whole chunks of the book of almighty truths,  whilst in
      exile somewhere near Babylon, in the year of our Atun 587 BC.

      Leave to appeal is refused, take the culprit away.

                              - - - - - -

      Chapter 11

      After 40 years,  since all  the exodites  departed from Egypt,
      Ah-Moses became sick and fed up to the back teeth with all the
      sun in his eyes and the sand in his sandals.

      He bought a plot of land on the slope of the  extinct volcano,
      and built a chalet-bungalow, with a fibre-glass swimming pool.

      Ah-Moses took one last look at the land of the Zacharites with
      a pair of powerful binoculars,  then returned back to the side
      of the volcano, to settle down and write his memoirs,  in five
      large volumes.

      After completing the mammoth task, and sending the manuscripts
      away to the printers,  he spent the rest of his days in peace,
      with his wife Nefer-Titi, and whiled the time away by making a
      very handsome statuette of her beautiful head, which he posted
      to the Berlin Museum, where it resides to this day.

      He died at the ripe old age of 120, and was buried...

      However, he wrote in one of his great books that "no one knows
      where he was buried, even as unto this day" !

      Many historians, disk-magazine editors and mechanical (diesel)
      engineers,  have scratched their heads in puzzlement over this
      statement  ever since  the books of  Ah-Moses  were published,
      wondering what on earth he meant by "he" and "unto this day" !

      Some very  clever computer clerics  from  Bristol Polytechnic,
      came  to the simple conclusion  that he must have written  his
      five books after he died.

      The more cynical Leos among the  mechanical (diesel) engineers
      from Loughborough University,  however,  dismissed that  story
      outright, on the rather shaky and unconvincing argument,  that
      if he had written his five books after he died,  then he WOULD
      know where he was buried, wouldn't he ?

      Instead, they came to the provisional conclusion that, being a
      Leo,  he only put these amazing puzzles in the last one of his
      five  books,  as a huge practical joke  at the expense of  the
      billions of future readers of his very popular novels.

      The matter is still being investigated by hand-writing experts
      of the Theban Police.

                              - - - - - -

      The Epilogue:

      None of the exodites who crossed the Suez Canal with Ah-Moses,
      lived long enough  to enter  the land of the loony Zacharites,
      as  a punishment from Atun for eating the sickly  sweet  stuff
      that  he showered down on them from heaven,  and for  drinking
      the unfiltered water from the tiny stone.

      They all  (with the exception of only two)  died in Sinai  and
      were buried in a huge cemetery the size of Birmingham,  at the
      foot of the extinct volcano.

      The exceptions to those exodites, were Shamgar and Josh.

      Shamgar was exempt from the ruling  because he was  a designer
      of weapons, a cancerian, and ever such a nice chap.

      Josh  was obliged to carry on,   because he had to  serve  his
      sentence of having his name entered 197 times into the book of
      almighty truths.

      The sons and daughters of the original exodites trudged on  as
      best they could, without Ah-Moses, or their mums and dads,  to
      the land of the loony Zacharites.

      It  is a remarkable fact that the pace at which  the  exodites
      were moving in Sinai  was no more than about the width of  one
      medium-sized little finger per day.

      That is precisely the reason why it took them 40 years (not  a
      single  day  longer  or a single day  shorter)  to  reach  the
      borders  of the land of the loony Zacharites,  after  crossing
      the Suez Canal over the great single-span suspension bridge.

      When the sons and daughters  of the original exodites  arrived
      at the immigration huts,  the Zacharite border guards  greeted
      them with open arms and wide smiles (because they were insane)
      and offered each and every one of them a valid immigrant visa,
      and welcomed them, with big mugs of tea, into their country as
      dispersed persons, guest workers, and economic migrants.

      Some of them studied the arcane art of wordprocessing but most
      of them took up the black magic of mechanical engineering, and
      settled down among the Zacharites in perfect peace and harmony
      for ever and ever, loving their neighbours, even to this day !

      Happy Rosh Ha Shana and a prosperous 1346 BC                ZB