Ancient Evenings (37 page)

“By this one remark,” said Ptah-nem-hotep, “I understand My peasants more closely. So, I comprehend your desire to tell the story with deliberation. I would even say that I am prepared to listen with the same repose I might give to watching the river as it drifts by.”

“Your Ear,” said Menenhetet, “has divined my next words. For I wish to speak of our Nile. It was always in my thoughts and passed through me on every breath. I was born, I may say, at the height of our flood, and the end of my first life was to come on a night when the river had just receded from its highest mark. The last sound I heard was of its waters.”

Menenhetet’s breath was short, as if this recollection remained arduous. “Now, those who live in the cities have forgotten the extremities of drought and flood. Here in Memphi, we may feel some heat before the river begins to rise, but our discomfort is small. Our noble parks are watered through the year and surround us with their green. We are apart from the desert. But in the land from which I came, midway between Memphi and Thebes, the desert is like …” He paused. “No-dwelling-can-contain-it.”

I noticed that my great-grandfather’s voice, which had most certainly put away its customary edge of mockery, now altered even more, and was outright solemn. But, then, no-dwelling-can-contain-it was an expression used by field workers when they did not dare to speak directly of a ghost which I happened to know because my mother had told me just two days ago, full of her rich laugh at the cautions of country people.

But then, I also noticed that my great-grandfather, having passed through this change of manner, was considerably less like a lord to us now and more like a dignified man of the people, even a village mayor of the sort he would scorn, and I noticed how he only employed words appropriate to a simple man. “Before I tell,” he said, “of my military career which began at the age of fifteen when I was plucked up from my village like a weed from the riverbank, I must inform You first of how we lived and the knowledge we had of the river, how it would rise and fall. That was all we knew, and it was all of our lives. I grew up by its laws. Here, in the cities, we speak of whether the flood will be a good height for the crops, and we celebrate our greatest festivals to the rise of our river, we praise it, we think we know it, but that is not like being born to the sound of it, and fearing the river when it rises.

“So, let me try to tell You, and I will speak as if You had never seen it, for in truth to know its anger is like sleeping with Your hand on the belly of a lion.”

I saw my mother give one small look at my father as if to say, “I hope he knows enough to amuse our Pharaoh.”

Ptah-nem-hotep, however, nodded. “Yes, let Me hear of our great stream in such a way. I find that as you speak of matters familiar to Me, I come to know them again and they are of different interest.”

Menenhetet nodded. “During my boyhood, the air in my country, when the Nile was low, became as dry as wood-fire. You must think of how dry was that air. We know nothing like it here, or at Thebes, but in my country which is between, the fields dried fast after the harvest. And almost immediately the earth turned old and began to wrinkle. A thin crack which in the morning was too small for your big toe was wide enough by the same night to break a cow’s ankle. We lived in our huts and watched our cracks widen, and as they did, these cracks moved toward us across the fields. Each day, sand filled them more. The desert was nearer to our scorched meadows. Then there came a day when the sand surrounded us and the leaves hung like dead fingers from the trees. The smallest wind blew a fine dust over our houses and our tables, and we breathed it in our straw when we slept. Searching over the stubble, our cattle walked with their tongues out. You could hear them cry, ‘I am thirsty, oh, I am suffering from thirst.’ We were thirstier. We had worked in the ditches, even the children, trying to clean out the bottoms of our narrow canals before the flood, repairing the dikes, smoothing their top for our carts, restoring the walls of our basins, every last one of us working while the river was low. And at night when we rested, too tired to play, you could walk from one island of reeds to another. Every kind of dead rodent was to be found in the silt of our canals, and up and down the river came the sounds of neighboring villages at the same work, all of us filling sledges with sift that our oxen would haul to the dikes. There we would pack it with straw and lay such bricks on the embankments. I tell you, an awful stink was on the land then! Everything dried with the leathery mean stench of old people. A stinginess is in such corruption, a urine!, and it takes forever. Those hard odors used to go right up the nose and live under our eyes with the dust and the heat. They said that to breathe such a smell could cause blindness, and I know my eyes would pucker. I still remember the bones of one dead fish on the riverbank by a tongue of sand—each night the crocodile who lived nearby must have blazed on it with his breath, for there was less of the fish each day, less of the dried skin near the head and the milky stones of its eyes, yet the bones had an odor so powerful you would have sworn the fish had traveled all of the river bottom for its smell to know so much. I went back day after day to walk around it. The rot in the bones of that fish Knew more evil than any I had ever encountered and I thought the moon must be in it with the river mud. Each day that skeleton became more of a withered plant until the bones themselves dried in their joints and the last of the fish blew away.

“That was when we felt the first moisture pass through the air. The wind came upriver from the Delta, past Memphi, and on to us. The sluggish green of the Nile, which had been like a soup thickening on the fire, began to ripple, and we used to say that a crocodile as long as the river was stirring beneath. You could not see his skin, but the surface of the water was sliding about. And everything that had died in the dry heat, lay in a scum on the top. Before our eyes the river began to fester. Carcasses and dead fish and dry vegetation floated up on the heavy skin of the new green Nile, and the air turned hot and wet. Then the new Nile came over the spits and tongues in the middle of the channel, and the river washed over the islands of reeds. Our sky was as full of birds as a field with flowers. They flew downstream with the rise, leaving each island of reeds as it went under, going down to islands still uncovered by these early waters, then on again, passing over our heads with a rush of wings louder than any current, myriads of birds. Each morning the water was higher than the day before, and the older men in the village began to measure their sticks. Although word always came from up the river that we would be higher this year, or lower, some of the old men claimed they could predict the rise by the color of the stream. As the river came up, so its surface changed into many restless waves, and you could hear the rush in the night as if these new waters were not one throat but an army, and when the color changed from green to the red we see each year in Memphi, we used to say it was heated by the flames of the Duad. And the dates in the palm trees turned red as the red water went by.

“We had no work to do now but protect our ditches, and therefore we could sit on our levees and watch where the water turned beneath in eddies so hollow you could put your arm in the hole and never get wet—so we would tell ourselves but never dared to put out an arm for fear this mouth of the million and one mouths of the river would suck us in.

“Then came the week when the river came right up over the lower banks and flowed into our fields, and on the first day the earth gave a sigh like a good cow gives to the knife in its hour of sacrifice. Even as a boy I could feel the land shiver when the water came over it and closed out the light. Now our one great river became a thousand little ones, and the fields turned to lakes and the meadows to great lagoons. At night, the red water lost the sun, and looked like the Blessed Fields and was silver in the moonlight. Our villages, built so close together along the bank that you could nearly reach one with a stone thrown from the other, were now as separated as dark islands in these fields of silver, and our dikes became the only roads. We would walk along the top and admire the basins below (which we called our rooms—our room-of-the-upper-field, our room-of-the-little-valley) for we had known how to take advantage of any hollow in the ground that was like a bowl, and around it had put our embankments and left openings for the flood, and now closed them when they were full. Rats walked on the dikes with us, even as ducks cavorted in the puddles. Out at the sides of the floodwater, in those fields closest to the desert, scorpions were looking for dry land, and rabbits fled and lynx and wolves—in different years I saw them all—fleeing the spread from the riverbanks. Each year, snakes came into our houses, and there was no hut where the damp did not come up out of the earth of our floors, while our donkeys and cattle could be heard through the night eating the forage we had piled around our walls, thereby dislodging the tarantulas. Sometimes, water rose over the lower dikes, and we could only visit other villages by using rafts of papyrus, and our basins would even wash out our villages while the cranes fed in a frenzy on the banks of the flood because insects would quit their nests as the waters crept higher. Then, there always came one hot morning, more damp, more heavy, and hotter than any that had gone before, when the water in the fields came to rest, breathed up, left a line of silt, breathed up again, and did not pass the line but touched it, did not touch it on the next breath and the ripples lay in a calm, the wind ceased, and the Nile stopped rising. That was the day when you could hear a cry go up from us in the mud on the edge of those fields, and on such hot mornings, the light came back to us from the hills on the horizon. The water was as placid as the sleep of the moon when the sun is high.” Menenhetet sighed.

“That was how my childhood passed, and I do not remember any other life than working by the banks of the water, nor do I know how often I thought of what my mother had told me about Amon. I did not see myself as different from other boys except that I was stronger, and that offered much. I remember when a deputation of Officials came one morning to our village to conscript us for the army, I knew no fear. I had been waiting for such service and wanted it. I was bored and ready. The river, I remember, was in the second week of its subsiding, and the water on our fields had become, in the sun, a lake of gold. I suppose that the Officials saw it as the best of days on which to surprise us, since it was no easy matter, with the fields in flood, for any of us to run away into the hills. I, of course, did not care. In truth, I did think of Amon the moment I saw the Officials. To me, the army was like the right arm of the God.

“I did not know it,” said my great-grandfather, “but I was waiting for my career to begin. I laughed at our village mayor when he trembled in his place between two bailiffs, each beside him with a heavy stick. As our names were read, we would lift an arm and call out ‘Ho!’ to show that we were present, but twice there was no answer. Two boys had run off. The bailiffs at a sign from the Pharaoh’s Officer beat the mayor until he was groaning on the ground, and many of us snickered. That mayor had punished us often enough that we did not mind to see him suffer. Then of the eighteen present, the Officials picked us over, looked at our teeth, felt our arms, kneaded our thighs, hefted our genitals and picked the fifteen strongest. While our mothers watched and, I confess, most of them wept, we marched away along the dike and put into their boats and rowed upstream to the South for all of that day until we came to a bend with a great fort and store-house. There we were locked in together with recruits from other villages, and that night the bakers in the compound gave us round hard black bread.” He smiled at the recollection. “I was a poor boy and had eaten hard bakings, but this bread was older than the dead.” His mouth worked as if chewing the stuff again.

“To the fort,” said Menenhetet, “other recruits came, and we were taught to march, and to wrestle and to use swords. Mine, Good and Great God, was the stroke that was strongest from overhead, and I smashed five shields in such training. They taught us much on the art of the shield for we had large ones then, larger than we use today, and it could cover a man from his eyes to his knees. Yet it was poor protection at best. For unlike Your small shields with their many metal plates, ours, given their big wood frame and their leather, were so heavy that they held only one disc of metal no larger than our face, and it was set in position to protect our arm where it held the shield.

“One by one, we would go up to face the archer and from a distance of fifty long steps he would shoot an arrow at us, and we were obliged, for his aim was good, to catch it on the metal plate so that the arrow would glance away. We were taught to do this with our chest facing to the side so that should the arrow pierce the leather, chances were still good it would miss our body. And of course the leather was strong enough to keep some of the arrows from going through. But it was a sport—to hold that shield and block what you could not dodge. At the end of training, fifty of us faced one hundred archers, and were ordered to advance into their bows. I was busy that morning, I can promise. It was known that I had become skillful with my shield, so many of the archers took pleasure to aim at me.”

“Were numbers of men lost in such training?” asked Ptah-nem-hotep.

“There were many scratches, and some wounds, and two men died, but we were skillful dodgers and it helped to make soldiers of us. Besides, we wore quilting thick enough to stop many an arrow although not as much as is worn today. The training was harder then because we were always told to get ready for lands we would soon go to conquer, and were so ignorant we did not know they were lands we had already conquered one hundred years before and they were now in rebellion. Good training, however. We were infantry and our weapons were the dagger and the lance, but they taught us to use the bow as well and the sword. Since I excelled in all contests, in wrestling first, and with dagger, spear, sword, shield, and bow, I was even allowed to enter a special game held to choose one man from our ranks to become a charioteer. In those days, it was only the sons of nobles who could enter such a service.”