Katie Reynolds, a young veterinary doctor from California, and her colleague René were sent to war-torn Kurdistan to find a disease spreading from animals to people. Unexpectedly caught in a firestorm, she is blown back to the ancient Middle East, where she has only her intelligence to keep her alive in the extraordinary and archaic time of the Egyptian Pharaohs. Following a lengthy convalescence in a primitive and foreign place, it takes Katie a while to realize she has been cast into a very ancient time. Luckily she finds two things to help her maintain a grip on her sanity; these ancients believe she is a goddess who has come to earth and treat her accordingly, and she is thrilled when she discovers René, her twentieth-century colleague, miraculously passed through the same time portal she did during the firestorm. Katie's real acceptance as Ištar could not begin until she came to understand the ancients truly believed she was their divine Goddess sent from heaven. They took her earthly appearance in stride. The priests left meals for their deities three times a day so they would protect them. It was natural to assume a Goddess visiting earth would take on the form of a woman. But no previous god had ever deigned to walk among men. When Katie’s accident cast her inside the ancient temple in Lalish, the head priest immediately felt this was divine intervention. Wise enough to see how this could work to his advantage, he championed the goddess in human form.
