#Caturday – De Cat Bastet

I love, love, love Elizabeth Peters’ Amelia Peabody mysteries! I love all the characters, especially the ones in the earlier books. My favorites are her son, “Ramses” and her first cat, Bastet.

Amelia Peabody and her husband, Radcliffe Emerson are Victorian Egyptologists, who met in the first book of the series, CROCODILE ON THE SANDBANK. My favorite book is probably THE MUMMY CASE, when Ramses, as an improbably precocious child, gets to come along and becomes inseparable from Bastet, whom everybody else generally calls “the cat Bastet” and Ramses calls, in one of his few babyisms, de cat Bastet.

Bastet from Wikipedia

The cat, of course, is named after Bastet, the Egyptian

Katya

cat-headed god of protection against infectious diseases and evil spirits. I’m all for that.

De cat Bastet was protection against anybody who wanted to hurt Peabody, Emerson, or, especially, Ramses.

This picture is from the Wikipedia entry on de goddess Bastet. I think she looks like my Katya, don’t you?

A WRITING PROMPT FOR YOU: A character is surprised to bond strongly with an animal.

MA