Excerpt

    My quest began in 1995 when I went to a hypnotherapist for weight control and inadvertently connected with past life memories of Atlantis. While hypnotized, I saw myself travel to geologically stable lands in Egypt when earthquakes began to break up Atlantis. Hence, even though that great island nation had been destroyed, I believed there would be evidence of Atlanteans in Egypt. In books, I had seen pictures of paintings on the walls of the pharaohs’ tombs that looked very much like my memories of Atlantis. I wanted to see these images and photograph them.
    My hypnosis sessions had also contained dire warnings of upcoming earth upheavals. Because I had correctly predicted an earthquake a year in advance—the month, year, and location—I feared these predictions of earth upheavals might be accurate.
    Fortunately, a lot of hope also surfaced in my sessions. The most encouraging information that appeared in my trance sessions had to do with my memories of being a pure soul without a body in Atlantis. This meant I was eternal. I also saw how my soul became enmeshed with the physical.
    Since I had seen photographs of paintings in the pharaohs’ tombs that looked like my Atlantean memories, I felt excited that by finding these images I would find evidence that we are really souls manifesting in a body and therefore immortal. That is the reason I wanted to find evidence of Atlantis in the pharaohs’ tombs and the reason I had to go to Egypt.
    Although my original quest had nothing to do with apparitions of the Virgin Mary, as I would soon discover, Mary, Atlantis, and our beginnings as souls on earth are deeply intertwined. The Universe truly was in charge.

    The catalyst for my Egyptian foray occurred when my husband, John, received approval from his employer, the National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA), for travel to Barcelona, Spain. He would contribute to a symposium for which he had written a scientific paper, and I would accompany him.
    John is literally the man of my dreams. I had a dream that showed me a stranger I would marry before I met him in waking life. I wrote about these experiences in When We Were Gods, the updated, revised edition of The Golden Ones.
    Since I’ll occasionally be referring to these titles in the rest of this book, from now on, when I refer to When We Were Gods, know that I also mean The Golden Ones since the latter is the original edition.
    Because Barcelona is close to Egypt, I naturally assumed John would be as excited as I was at the thought of seeing the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx. After his symposium ended, he could take a week of vacation time and the both of us could go to Egypt. It made perfect sense.
    “Perfect nonsense!” he said.

    To my amazement, he not only declined to go to Egypt, but he absolutely refused. He cited political unrest, the spread of AIDS, garbage smells, and malaria.
    Garbage smells?
    “John,” I said, “There were garbage smells at the Great Pyramid?”
    “No,” he looked at me with exasperation. “I was never in Egypt,” as if it should be obvious.
    “Then why won’t you come to Egypt with me?”
    His exact words were, “I refuse to set foot on African soil ever again.”
    It turned out he had good reasons for his strong feelings. During his years in the Peace Corps he had taught school in Zaire.
    At the same time, the ruthless dictator Mobutu reigned supreme in this central African country, which is now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo. John had been in the midst of some life-threatening situations.
    When he told me this, I looked at him dubiously. “Come on, John,” I said, “your Peace Corps days were over 30 years ago. Things have changed in Africa.”
    “You’re right,” he said, “personal safety is much worse.”
    “Maybe in Central Africa” I said. “But not in Egypt. Millions of people come from all over the world to see the Great Pyramid.”
    “What about those tourists that were killed?” he said.
    “Which tourists?” I asked.
    “It was in the news.”
    “When?” I asked.
    “A number of years ago.”
    “A number of years ago!” I said. “Who cares? I’m going now, not a number of years ago.”
    “I made a vow,” John said. “I will never set foot on African soil again.”
    As I have often said in my lectures, when I asked the Universe to give me a man who was the other side of my puzzle—the one who had been with me from the beginning of time, my twin soul—I did not realize I would get someone who shared not only my good qualities but also some of my worst. As John has said many times, he knows of no one more stubborn than he is, except for me.
    “OK,” I said, “if you won’t come with me, I’m going myself.”
    I waited to hear him offer to accompany me. Instead he said, “Suit yourself, but you’re making a mistake. It’s too dangerous.”

    I decided I would go to Egypt while John attended the symposium and we could tour Spain for a week afterward. To get a better idea of what to expect in the land of the pharaohs, I telephoned an old girlfriend. She had married a man from Egypt. His name was Hani (pronounced HA-nee). As it turned out, my girlfriend and her Egyptian husband had been divorced for ten years and she had moved away. Fortunately, her now ex-husband remembered me.
    “KEH-rol,” Hani said on the telephone in his lovely lilting Arabic accent. “How have you been?”
    After we spent a few minutes getting caught up on our families’ lives, I explained my intention to visit Egypt in the near future. Although I had merely called Hani for advice on how to approach my excursion to Egypt, he, like John, expressed concern that I planned to go alone.
    Things were not going well. Hani told me that Egypt was not a country in which women traveled alone. “A camel driver could drag you away,” he said.
    A camel driver! I thought. A camel driver? When would I meet a camel driver? Hani was obviously exaggerating.
    But then, I remembered a 1990 movie, Sheltering Sky, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci that starred Debra Winger and John Malkovich. In the movie, the Debra Winger character had been marooned in the desert. Members of a camel caravan had rescued her and she had become the sex slave of a Bedouin camel driver.
    A camel driver? Of course, the movie was fiction. But, I had to admit that vast deserts flanked the Nile River with the famous and treacherous Sahara Desert on its west. Camel drivers probably still wended their caravans through the sand dunes. 
    I told Hani that I had no intention of wandering anywhere near the Sahara Desert or a Bedouin camel driver.
    At this point, normally, things should not have worked out. I should have become discouraged, given up on my desire to go to Egypt, and meekly agreed to travel with my husband to Barcelona. To tell you the truth, I was just about to back down.
    However, this trip to Egypt seemed to be taking on a life of its own, because that’s when Hani said that if I insisted on stubbornly refusing to see reason, I must stay with his sister and her family.
    And that is how I ended up staying with an Egyptian family in Cairo.

    The next problem occurred when John’s employer suddenly cancelled his travel arrangements. Eek! I would no longer be meeting him in Barcelona. My travel to Egypt had truly become a solo adventure.
    Although disconcerting, John’s change of plans was nothing new. During my six years of work as a photojournalist under contract to NASA, I had repeatedly had travel arrangements cancelled or established with barely enough time to get packed. With the government there was always the slight chance that the “Powers That Be” might change their minds at the last minute and John would fly to Barcelona after all.
    Five days before my flight left for Cairo, there still was no change in plans.

    At the same time, I had been in close communication with Peggy Day, the publisher of the first edition of my first book, The Golden Ones: from Atlantis to a New World. Peggy is also the co-author of a wonderful book called, Edgar Cayce on the Indigo Children: Understanding Psychic Children which has recently been renamed Psychic Children: A Sign of Our Expanding Awareness.
    Five days before my scheduled solo departure for Egypt, Peggy called me and said three short words, “I must go.”
    Confused, I asked her, “Pardon? What did you say?”
    “In my meditations the last couple of days . . . ,” she began. Peggy made most of her decisions by consulting with Spirit.
    “I’m going with you!” she exclaimed in a gleeful voice. Perhaps because I did not reply with equal exuberance—I felt surprised at the news—she added, “if you will have me.”
    My mind reeled. “Oh!” I said, my heart pounding. I didn’t know what to say. I should have been delighted, but instead I blanched.
    It would have been OK to be in Egypt with John. However, I had heard that many travelers suffered with the Pharaoh’s Revenge, or severe gastrointestinal distress while in Egypt.
    “I would love to have a companion,” I replied wanly, “but what if we get sick?”
    “That’s OK,” Peggy replied. She told me how during her one previous trip to Egypt, when she went with a tour group, not only did one of the elderly members of their group die suddenly of a heart attack, but everyone who ate a certain tainted chicken dinner spent the next two days sick with diarrhea and vomiting. She said that if it happened again, we could simply take turns using the bathroom. She was sure the experience, if it occurred, would only bring us closer together as friends. Basically, she was game. She’d been through the worst and she knew she could manage it again.
    I was not sure if I could. Nonetheless, I did welcome a traveling companion. Furthermore, Peggy already knew my story. What better person to accompany me on a quest to find confirmation of my memories of Atlantis than Peggy—the person who had been so filled with enthusiasm for my story that she wanted to publish it?
    “I would love it if you came with me!” I replied to Peggy, once I had finished my deliberations.

    Now that Peggy was coming with me, I had to call Hani again to tell him I no longer needed to burden his sister with my presence. I would not be alone. Peggy and I could stay in a hotel together.
    Again, Hani telephoned his sister in Cairo. When he called me back, he said that his sister Mohga (pronounced MOH-ga) would be happy to have both Peggy and me stay with her in Cairo.
    How generous of her, I thought.
   “But,” Hani continued, “Mohga has a request to make of you.” He explained that, by chance, for the last month or so, apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary had been appearing in their family’s home town of Asyut. Did we want to see the apparition? If so, Mohga would wait until our arrival and take us there with her.
    I knew that apparitions of the Virgin Mary were one of the most unusual supernatural events on earth. Were they real? If not, what were they? I am an innately curious person. I thought, Of course I want to see apparitions of the Virgin Mary. Who wouldn’t?
    But would Peggy agree? I telephoned her and explained the latest development. Peggy told me how she had traveled to view apparitions of the Virgin Mary with another author, Jennifer Lingda Tinsman, whose book, Not My Gift: A Story of Divine Empowerment, Peggy had published. Unfortunately, she and her friend had not seen the apparition. However, Peggy told me it was the hope of her life to see apparitions of the Virgin Mary.
    And that’s how my quest to find evidence of Atlantis in Egypt became a pilgrimage.

Apprehensions in the Airport

     I waited for Peggy in New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. Because of Peggy’s last minute addition to my excursion, my travel agent had worked hard to get the both of us on the same flight to and from Egypt. Unfortunately, this required that I leave my home in southeastern Virginia at 4:30 in the morning to catch an early flight to New York City. Our flight to Egypt would leave in the evening giving me a whole day to wander around the airport. During that time, I had a lot of time to think about my upcoming adventure.
     In addition, a couple of days before I left, John’s work had reinstated his travel to Barcelona, which meant that my return flight also had to be reworked. Because of the last minute change in the return flight, I had been up all night repacking my suitcases, this time for two climates—the scorching desert heat of Egypt and the Mediterranean climate of Barcelona. I was exhausted.

Facing the Unknown

     I also felt anxious. Talk about leaving many loose ends. Peggy and I would be flying to a Middle Eastern country without the benefit of an organized tour. We would be staying at the home of an unknown woman whose brother I had briefly met more than ten years previously.
    Once we arrived in Cairo, we had to depend upon Mohga to be at the airport and for us somehow to recognize each other. Then, we had to depend on Mohga’s good nature to pick us up and take us to her home.
    Because my travel plans from the U.S. to Egypt changed so much in the week before I left, I did not have the time to make in-country travel arrangements from Cairo to the Valley of the Kings in Luxor, the location of the pharaohs’ tombs. During our many telephone calls back and forth, Hani assured me that his family had a cousin in Cairo who was a travel agent. He could make our in-Egypt travel arrangements. I hoped this cousin knew what he was doing. What if Peggy and I did not make it back from the Valley of the Kings in time for our flight out of Cairo?
    Furthermore, sometime during our stay in Egypt, we would go to see an apparition—whatever that was.

    I knew very little about supernormal events. Although articles about apparitions of the Virgin blasted out from the front pages of newspaper tabloids in the checkout line at the grocery store, I really knew very little about the Holy Mother’s appearances. The headlines usually contained the words, “Fatima” and “Final Secret,” with the sensational pronouncement that the end of the world was at hand. What was I getting into?
    I also had a vague recollection of a place called Lourdes in the Pyrenees Mountains in France close to the border of Spain. While traveling in France with John a number of years previously, I had read about Lourdes in a travel guidebook. According to the book, the Virgin had created a spring with miraculous healing powers. This spring still exists and people flock to Lourdes for cures.

    I also felt uneasy about Peggy. We had met only once before. All the preparation of my manuscript had been accomplished over the telephone, via email, using the postal service, and through overnight courier. Although it was true that we had become close during this professional relationship, still, she was hardly a person I knew well enough with whom to undertake a week-long travel adventure.
    Furthermore, what if I did not find her in the airport? JFK is huge! In the end, it turned out that Peggy and I had circled each other in the terminal for hours without knowing the other was there. I looked for a woman of about five-feet-six-inches (1.7 meters) in height with short ash blonde hair. I had reminded her that I was five-feet-three-inches (1.6 meters tall), chubby, and had dark curly hair.
    When I finally saw Peggy’s sweet face, I felt so relieved. We talked as we stood in line to obtain boarding passes. Then, we boarded the Lufthansa plane for a non-stop flight to Cairo.

    As the Lufthansa stewardess tucked soft blankets around us in the dimly lit cabin of the plane, I could not help but wonder. We were supposed to arrive in Cairo in the middle of the night. Would strangers bother to meet people they did not know in the middle of the night?
    Hani assured me that all of Cairo stayed awake at night in the hot months. Since Peggy and I would be arriving at the end of September, the days would still be scorching, with temperatures well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 degrees Celsius). Hani said his sister and her family would be up anyway. Everyone was. It was the only decent time of day to be awake. I hoped he was right.

    As we approached Cairo International Airport, I looked out my window hoping I could see the pyramids from the air. However, I only saw the blackness of night. As the plane descended over Cairo, no pyramids came to view, only city lights.
    After we landed I discovered, to my surprise, that the airport was empty . . . totally and completely empty . . . with nothing but white walls, white ceilings, and white floors.
    How different. Where were the restaurants, magazine stands, and souvenir shops? Where were the video games, fast food outlets, and gift stores? Where were the neon signs and the hot dog stands? Where were fellow passengers waiting for their flights? I saw nothing familiar.
    We were part of a group of about 20 passengers who shuffled along the vacant hallway. Where were the rest of the passengers from the plane? The plane had been full. We huddled together as we walked. Our footsteps echoed along the floor. The tunnel-like corridor curved so we could not see ahead.
    As we progressed forward, we encountered a couple of machine-gun-armed guards in the otherwise empty corridor. My mind wanted to make the judgment that Egypt must be a much less safe country than the United States. Then I reminded myself that U.S. airports also contain security guards. Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, our airports now contain machine-gun-toting National Guardsmen as well.
    Back in September 2000, my mind wanted to pronounce Egypt substandard to the U.S. However, I remembered a trip I made to Nicaragua a number of years earlier. I had discovered that, despite the abject poverty, the people possessed a richness of spirit with which I was unfamiliar in the United States in spite of its affluence. I thought about Mohga welcoming me and Peggy—virtual strangers—into her home. Would I do the same given a similar situation?
    A swarthy-skinned, black-haired guard wearing a khaki uniform stood beside the wall. He motioned at us with the tip of his machine gun to turn left at a juncture in the corridor. We shuffled past him, keeping well out of the way of the gun.
    Before long, the hallway opened up into a large area where a number of men stood on our right. Behind them, I saw painted signs hanging on the wall proclaiming the names of hotels. I guessed that the men must be drivers sent to pick up passengers registered at their hotels. A number of passengers walked over to the drivers. I made a mental note of the sign saying, “Mena House,” because I had heard about Mena House before. It was supposed to be a hotel that was situated within walking distance of the Great Pyramid. At the time, I did not know that there are many hotels situated within walking distance of the Pyramid.
    My fear that Hani’s sister would not turn up at the airport intensified. What if she was not there? How easy it would be to walk over to one of the hotel drivers and get a room at a hotel. I decided that if Mohga did not appear by the time we came to the exit doors, I would walk back through the airport to the Mena House driver and arrange to stay at the hotel.
    After we passed the drivers, we saw the lighted booths of money changers on our left. They could change our money from U.S. dollars to Egyptian currency. In all the panic of the last-minute travel arrangements, it had not even occurred to me to get Egyptian money. These money changers were opened in the middle of the night. That suited me just fine.

    Once we obtained Egyptian currency, Peggy and I murmured to each other, wondering where and when we would find the place to connect with Mohga. I felt as if we were two little children lost in the woods.
    So far we had seen only guards, airport personnel, money-changers, and hotel drivers. Where was the place where friends and family waited to greet loved ones?
    In a U.S. airport, people can meet with passengers within the airport at the baggage claim area. But we had long since claimed our baggage and gone through customs. Where was the area in the Cairo airport designated for meeting friends and family?
    Hani had said that Mohga would be waiting for us outside the airport. What if she and her family were not there? What if we stepped out of the airport and were not allowed back in? Already we had seen that only passengers and airport personnel were allowed within the walls of the building.
    I kept looking for the large floor-to-ceiling glass doors and windows that denote the outside of a U.S. airport. Would Mohga be standing there, her face pressed against the glass, hoping to recognize us?
    As Peggy and I searched for the place where passengers greeted family and friends, I suddenly remembered that I had probably met Mohga before. If memory served me right, we had met long ago when Hani and his wife were still married. His now-estranged wife, my friend, was a wonderful cook. Both she and Hani loved to have large outdoor extravaganzas where they roasted a lamb or a piglet on a spit. She would also cook endless delectable cakes and confections. The purpose of one of these super-picnics was to welcome Hani’s sisters and brothers-in-law to a vacation in Canada.
    If I remembered Mohga correctly, she had an impish sense of humor and dimples. Would I be able to recognize a face I had seen only briefly over 10 years previously? Would I even be able to see her through a glass door as she stood outside in the dark of the night?
    As it turned out, I did not need to look through a glass door. The doorway to the parking lot of the Cairo airport did not have doors, glass or otherwise. At the end of the hallway, I saw two openings that represented doorways in the cement walls of the airport. Beyond them, I saw Cairo. Dim lights shone over a parking lot full of cars. The sky looked black.
    In front of the open doorways I saw a barricade made of the kind of thigh-high cement barriers you see at construction sites. Leaning over the barricade, various men and women called out in Arabic to friends and loved ones. Most of the women wore long Muslim dresses and head coverings. Many of the men wore turbans.
    Anxiously I scanned their faces for a woman with an impish grin and dimples.
    She was not there! We were alone in Cairo! Thank God Peggy had come with me. Together we could rent a room at one of the hotels. I hoped the airport officials would allow us to make our way back through the white corridors to the Mena House shuttle driver. Hopefully the hotel had some vacancies.
    Just then, from behind the crowd pressed along the cement barriers I heard a lilting woman’s voice intone, as if she was calling a child, “Keh-rol . . . Keh-rol.”
    I swallowed. Could it be? Mohga? Was she hidden in the darkness? Peggy and I crept along the line of people to the end of the cement barrier. Here the people stood three or four individuals deep. We saw three people—a woman and two men. I could hardly see their faces because they stood in darkness. However, I could see well enough to discern they wore smiles and hopeful expressions on their faces.
    My heart beat rapidly. Could this be them?
    The woman waved to us. Could it be Mohga? When I came closer, she smiled . . . a lovely dimpled smile. Mohga!

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