A story that accelerates from the beginning and slows down gently to a feel-good type of stop, The Quest is the past of Egypt with all its mystical allurement and secrets of Gods.
Taita, the Eunuch with secret longings and the wisdom of hundreds of years of his life and Fenn, the re-incarnation of a queen of Smith’s earlier novel fill the pages with their pure love for each other and a dare-devil love of adventure.
The two endeavour to find the root cause of the drying of the eternally flowing River Nile, the sacred river of the Egyptians. They cross thousands of miles and find that a cataclysmic volcanic activity attributed to the evil Eos has been responsible for the mysterious disappearance. The witchcraft of the ancient Egyptians is brought out through Eos who sucks the wisdom of seers and encourages her vassals to experiment on genetic engineering using foetuses, which is called ‘ infant eating’ by the natives.
We move with Taita’s select band of men and women warriors and share the sense of excitement as they move across the distances, braving swamps, tsetse flies, barbaric cannibals and the magic of Eos all the time percolating through the senses.
I suspect that there is an allegory hidden somewhere in the storyline, but as long as I don’t examine the literary aspect, the story lifts the veil of time over the past of Egypt and reveals intriguing aspects 9albeit imagined0 of the lives of people in ancient Egypt.
It is a quest to attain immortality, for Taita and Fenn; it is a quest to understand the ethos of an Egypt which is strange mix of science cloaked in and magic mystifying science.
A good read for two to three days.
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