Chapter Six: The Words That Came Before Us

We stepped back from the stone wall we had stopped at in the first passage, but none of us felt the journey had ended.

Silence now held more weight than any words – as if the mountain had not yet finished saying what it had to say.

Girgis opened the car door, then turned toward us calmly and said in an unhurried voice:

“There’s another place… more like what your friend described. Not far from here, but people rarely go there.

As if the place itself doesn’t want to be visited.”

No one responded. We all climbed in.

And as soon as the car began descending the winding path, Girgis reached for the phone mounted beside the steering wheel,

lifted the heavy black handset, dialed a short number, and waited.

“Good evening… This is vehicle 822.

We’re currently heading to the eastern sector of Mokattam, via inner route number three…

Yes, the terrain is a bit rough, and the area is empty…

Just wanted to log our location, in case anything unusual happens.”

He ended the call and placed the handset back in its cradle.

It all seemed normal – just a safety protocol, a precaution.

But something inside me… shivered.

It didn’t feel like he was reassuring the hotel.

It felt like something else – like a message.

As if he wasn’t just calming us…

He was preparing us.

Not because the road ahead was dangerous.

But because it wasn’t really a road.

It was a threshold.

A threshold between what we thought we knew,

and what we were never meant to understand.

A step we couldn’t undo – one you didn’t just cross…

You had to believe in it.

It was as if he was saying, without uttering a word:

“Do not fear the path… Do not fear me.

This is the moment when all doubts must be silenced.

Forget every secondary fear.

What lies ahead is too important to face in hesitation.

You are… in steady hands.”

We stopped at a narrow gap between two massive stones – no sign, no path, no indication of anything.

Girgis pointed toward the dark cleft and said, simply:

“Through here.”

He entered first, bending slightly, walking with quiet confidence.

We followed, one by one, and the silence followed us.

The carving looked familiar… just like the dream.

But it wasn’t an exact match.

Now I saw it with greater clarity.

Details that had gone unseen began to reveal themselves.

As if the dream had only ever been a shadow –

and here, carved in stone,

the shape was finally whispering what it had never dared to say.

At the top: an inverted pyramid, its tip gripped by a precisely carved human hand.

Just below it, a half-open eye –

not seeing, but remembering.

Beside it, three vertical lines, falling like beams of light,

but they did not illuminate…

they darkened all they touched.

Then a curled human form, fetal in shape –

not in death,

but as if preparing to rise.

And in the upper corner,

a sun disk spinning backward,

trailing upturned birds behind it,

as if fleeing a cycle of time that had deceived them.

It all seemed to tell a story – not of the past, but of what had not yet come.

Then, just beneath that intricate tableau, my father spotted a line carved softly into a smoother band of stone.

A reversed script – not in traditional hieroglyphs, but clearer.

As if someone had come later, and tried to translate the message for those who couldn’t read the image.

My father whispered as he examined it:

“These aren’t traditional hieroglyphs… some resemble older systems, but they’re reversed…”

And then – suddenly, without warning – Girgis spoke.

He didn’t look at us.

He didn’t turn.

He simply stared at the wall, and the words flowed from him as though they had been waiting inside him all along:

“If the pyramid is not inverted, mankind will not rise.

And if you believe you’ve reached the peak of civilization,

then you have only climbed to the summit of your own inventions –

not to the summit of yourselves.

What you see as the future… is a forgotten past.

And what you think is the end…

is only a beginning not yet written.”

Time froze.

My father whispered – his voice the echo of sudden memory:

“These… are the same words.

The old man said them… in Ramses Station.”

Then, he recited them again – his hand hovering in the air,

as if brushing the edge of meaning itself, afraid to disturb it by touch.

As though the words weren’t returning from memory, but from the stone itself:

“We think we are living the height of civilization,

measuring our progress by satellites and skyscrapers,

but what if we’ve never reached the peak of awareness?

What if we’ve only reached the peak of the machine –

while true consciousness has been eroding for thousands of years?

We may not be at the height of humanity…

but at the height of what humanity has made.”

Then he added, in a tone colored with the awe of realization:

“They weren’t his words…

He was only passing them on.”

My mother spoke – in a voice I had never heard from her before, low and calm, but soaked in certainty:

“He brought them from here.”

She paused – her eyes scanning the chamber, not as if reading the wall, but the time carved within it.

Then she spoke again, slower now,

as though uttering truth for the first time:

“This is no passing phrase…

no ordinary inscription.

It is a prophecy, carved deep into the stone…

thousands of years ago.”

A silent tremor gripped my chest

as I watched Girgis stare through the wall,

his eyes not fixed on it, but looking through it.

Then I remembered…

the whispers in the hotel,

my mother’s voice behind the door, that one sentence that had never left me:

“Your father was killed in Rome…

and no one to this day dares to say why.”

Could it be?

Was my grandfather killed… for this?

For this place?

Did he die because he knew?

Because he came too close?

A storm of certainty overtook me –

Girgis was not alone.

And this journey… from the very beginning… had not been a coincidence.

It was never a meaningless trip.

And perhaps it hadn’t begun with a drive from the hotel to the mountain –

but from our home in London to this very ground we now walked.

Doubt erupted within me –

Who is Girgis?

Who… is my father?

Who was my grandfather?

And for a moment…

I felt as though I had just been born

into a family I had never truly known.

A family whose real face had stayed hidden – until now.

My father raised his head and looked at Girgis directly,

as though pulling a thread from memory that had never loosened:

“You mentioned on the way…

a new monastery they plan to build here…

in this mountain…

Is this the place?”

Girgis didn’t hesitate.

He answered with confidence, and a single smile –

a smile that stripped him of every trace of being a hotel driver, and cloaked him instead in the shape of a man who knew us better than we knew ourselves.

“Not exactly here…

But nearby.

And once it’s built… everything will be hidden.”

He turned again toward the wall, eyes that looked not at it – but beyond it.

My father stepped closer,

his gaze digging into Girgis as if to tear the truth from him:

“Was he here?

The old man…

Did he come to this place?

Do you know him?”

Girgis didn’t answer.

He only smiled.

And that smile was not kind.

It was… an admission.