Ancient Evenings (59 page)

“It is true,” said Ptah-nem-hotep, “that I asked you to tell us of the battle and you have done this well. Yet I cannot say that My desire is to hear no more.”

“Praise from the Pharaoh is a blessing,” replied Menenhetet, but his voice remained dry. “Good and Great God,” he said, “a life of monotony and foul work were now my reward. Do You truly wish an account of my years in the desert?”

My mother, who had been listening to my great-grandfather with more patience than she usually possessed, said, “I agree that we may not wish to hear this.” She laughed at the boldness of her remark, and looked into the Pharaoh’s eyes, indeed, lay her long black eyes on Him much as she might have ensconced her breasts upon His chest. “I wonder,” she murmured, “that I do not flee in panic for daring to decide what might be of interest to You.”

He gave a tender smile, but spoke to Menenhetet.

“How long,” He asked, “were you at Eshuranib?”

“For fourteen years. They were long years.”

“And the gold mines were already there?”

“They were.”

Our Pharaoh told Menenhetet: “I would hear what you will say. For how could you live in any place and not see what others fail to observe? Besides, gold is never without interest.”

Menenhetet gave a curious bow, and by the light of the fireflies I was aware suddenly of all that shone of gold, of the flat collar around my father’s chest and the snake of gold on my mother’s head, the gold bracelets of Menenhetet, or, for that matter, the gold in the houses of all nobles we would visit. It was then I thought I heard, like a faint cry, some echo of the labor that had delivered this wondrous metal, and I saw the Pharaoh nod wisely as though He had also heard such groans and they were part of the curious value of gold.

Much like moistening the memory of old dust, did my great-grandfather move his tongue. “Your desires,” he said reluctantly, “are the source of my wisdom.”

“Spoken like a Vizier,” said Ptah-nem-hotep.

Now, Menenhetet took a swallow of his beer. “I will say,” he told us, “that there was never a time in my four lives when my throat suffered so. If there was an affliction worse than others in the mountainous deserts of Nubia, it was the dust on one’s tongue. I remember that my sufferings began on that twenty-four-day march through the desert. My detachment was sent off without any better company than our platoon of prisoners, my few fellow-soldiers, and two guides who seemed to live on a handful of grain a day, drank little water, and took pains to defecate once a week. They prayed at dawn and at dusk. That was their nearest approach to a vice. What soldiers they would have made. I needed those guides, for in the heat of the march, which was greater by far than any that I had known in Egypt or at war, the desert was full of dangers, and I saw many Gods and demons in the air, and knew Osiris was accompanying me since I heard His voice tell me that when I died I would not have to take the long trek to the Land of the Dead inasmuch as I had already crossed the desert. I believe I even saw Him. (Although who could know what was seen in these valleys when great mountains of rock quivered before your view as if ravished like wood in a fire?)

“We arrived in Eshuranib at last. I saw a cliff with stone huts at its foot, but the quarry had neither a stream nor an oasis. Before us were no more than two great bowls of soft stone, cisterns to hold our water. We were free to drink every drop of rain that fell from the eyes of Nut when She wept for Geb, but even this water, so vital to our throats, had to be used first for the ore. So our thirst continued and lived with us like an illness through all our work. We used to dig our shafts into the quartz of the cliffs before us, setting a fire at the head of the passage—as if Eshuranib were not fire enough—and then the children of our miners would crawl forward into the fissures to pick out the ore that had cracked loose from the rock and was now brought forth to be ground on a wheel of granite. When the rocks were too large and would not crumble, they would be raised by means of a leather rope as thick as my arm, then shattered on a great flat stone. The leather rope, I remember, was always breaking. So the curses and the beatings never stopped. Nor did the sound of running water ever end. It flowed from our cisterns to inclined beds of stone where the ore was washed. Afterward, when the sediment had settled, we would drink a little, then carry what was left back to the cistern. When I think of Eshuranib I can still taste that water.” Since my great-grandfather now paused again, Ptah-nem-hotep said, “Yes, I am most interested.”

“We had,” said Menenhetet, “hundreds of workers, mostly Egyptians. Some were criminals from Memphi and Thebes who had been sent to this place for crimes they could no longer remember. They were soon stupefied by the heat, and blinded in the sharp dust of the mine shafts. Yet children were born in this place, and I saw a few who had grown to manhood here although they only spoke in some mixture of language I cannot describe, but that is because the soldiers who guarded these criminals were wild Syrians with great beards, Ethiopians with painted scars, and pale-colored blacks from Punt with curved Egyptian noses. Their languages mixed together until I knew the meaning of no sound, yet I was the commanding officer of this paltry legion.”

“Why,” asked our Pharaoh, “did Eshuranib have need of a charioteer?”

“In the reign of King Amenhotep the Second when they began to dig, it is said that three were assigned. I know what purpose those charioteers served in their day no more than I know why I was needed there. Soon, the other two charioteers and myself grew so bored we took to driving a cart filled with quartz from the mines out to the stone tables where the ore was washed. Then I grew so bored I even tried to improve our methods for crushing the larger pieces of quartz. The leather rope, as I said, was always breaking, so I worked at tying knots until I found one that would hold better and not snap the rope like a knife. Some hard years began, and for the longest time I learned nothing but the secret of boredom which tells you that no Gods, good or ill, are near.

“But, even as I was brooding, the rock would drop on the stone, and our river of gold would be dug out of the earth, pebble by pebble. It was a fever.” Menenhetet sighed. “All the same,” he told us, “the search kept some kind of fire alive in the heart, even if it was never our own gold. Still, it was cruel. There may be no torture like the years when one learns little after years when one has learned much.”

“And you learned nothing?” Ptah-nem-hotep asked.

My great-grandfather was silent.

Now I saw how fine was the mind of our Pharaoh. He said, “Can this be true? I feel as if you are keeping knowledge to yourself.”

“What I could tell You,” my great-grandfather said in reply, “is not large.”

“Yet I would suppose there is as much to learn from this small matter as in all you have told us tonight.”

My great-grandfather’s voice showed admiration. I do not know that I had heard such a tone come from him before. “You hear what I have kept beneath my thoughts,” he said into the eyes of our Pharaoh. “Yes, You have searched it forth. I was not about to tell, but Your knowledge of me is as powerful as a command. I may as well confess that there was indeed a small matter from which I learned much. For I found a prisoner in those gold mines who passed on to me one secret that is more valuable than any other I have acquired.” Here, he paused as if he had already said too much, and yet, reluctant to say more, must therefore say it quickly. “This prisoner was nothing but a poor Hebrew sent here for a crime his friends had committed. All the same, he interested me from the moment I saw him inasmuch as he looked like the Hittite who fought alone with Usermare at the Battle of Kadesh. Like that warrior, he had two different eyes. It was as if one looked on yesterday, and the other would see tomorrow. His name was Nefesh-Besher, which are the words of his people for Spirit of Flesh. I called him, therefore, by the good Egyptian name: Ukhu-As. After all, he had been born in our Eastern Desert near Tumilat, and therefore the truth of his name could come just as well with
our
Spirit of Flesh as with the Hebrews’. I may say he came to hear it often for I gave him as much attention as if he were the Hittite. People who look alike are alike. They are formed by the same agreement among the Gods.” Now, Menenhetet nodded again. “Yes, I owe much to that man.

“He was very sick when I met him, yet his wife—who was the nearest to what you might call a good-looking woman in this place—still thought enough of her mate to share his captivity and march across the desert by his side. How she nursed him. Ordinarily, a fellow like this would have been buried in a few weeks. However, I was curious enough to keep him alive, and, as a result of the good share of food I sent their way, Ukhu-As became confiding. He was going to perish, he said, yet he would live. So he said. At first I thought he must be in fever, but he was so quiet, and so sure of what he said, that I began to listen. He had been given the secret by a Hebrew magician named Moses whom he had come to know in the city called Pithom, which the Hebrews had been building for Usermare ever since He became Pharaoh. Moses had been sent out to the Eastern Desert to serve as leader of these people. For that matter, I thought I remembered a tall Hebrew by the same name—Moses—in Thebes. If that was the man, he used to ride among the hundreds of nobles who followed Usermare on visits to the Temple of Karnak. Since he was Hebrew, this Moses had to wait outside, but some thought he might be a son of one of the little queens in the House of the Secluded from the time when Seti the First was Pharaoh. We never knew. I did not see him often. Now Ukhu-As told me that in the same season when Usermare marched to Kadesh, Moses arrived in Pithom dressed as an Egyptian officer and told the Hebrews he would take them to a land in the East they could conquer. Ukhu-As said he got that tribe to march into the desert early one morning without one of them being caught. Yet this feat was simple. During the night, Moses had taken a few of the strongest young Hebrews on a raid and they killed the Egyptian guards of Pithom in their sleep. So, no pursuit was possible.

“Ukhu-As told me that he, however, did not flee with the others. His wife was away that night visiting her parents in the next oasis, and he loved her so much that he did not want to leave her. Since he surrendered himself to the authorities, he was not sentenced to death, only to Eshuranib.

“When I asked him if he hated Moses, he shook his head. Not at all. Moses had passed on a great secret. It was how, on your last breath, you could put yourself into the belly of your wife.

“Here he was. This Nefesh-Besher, this Ukhu-As—dying—yet he spoke of living. And not at all in the way some speak of continuing one’s name through the respect of one’s descendants. No, he told me, the child you make in your last moments of life can become a new body for yourself. To hear this said with confidence out of the mouth of a sick man was unforgettable. While he could not give me the Hebrew words for the last prayer to be said within your woman’s body, there, at the last moment, still, I had been his benefactor, so he would pass it on to me through his flesh. And he instructed me to do something most disagreeable, but I did it on the night after he died. It is not easy to tell. I have explained how Hera-Ra taught me the ferocious virtues to be obtained from eating the flesh of others, but that was in the thick of the night which followed the day at Kadesh. When you grabbed a bite from a roasted limb, you did not ask from where it came—blood mixed as easily with blood as meat with meat. Here, however, the fellow had been sickly, now he was gone. And he had told me to wait no longer than one day after he expired. In that way, he could serve as my guide without a prayer.”

“How disgusting and unforgettable is this thought,” said Hathfertiti, but her voice was without strength. Menenhetet merely looked solemn. “I could not,” he said, “have done what he asked except there was nothing to greet me at Eshuranib but the old boredom. Still, I approached this little meal with such revulsion that it took many attempts to swallow one morsel. Yet I held it down. I felt no new knowledge within me, yet I did—I could not say.

“A few weeks after Ukhu-As died, his wife told me she was pregnant. Nefesh-Besher had been well named. His spirit was certainly in her flesh. It was just that he did not survive as well in her loyalty. She had taken such good care of him that she had used up her affection. When I saw the look in her eye, I began to do little favors for the widow. Soon enough, she became my mistress.

“I was weary of the smell that rose from the cheeks of men weaker than myself. So I kept this woman. Her name was Renpu-Rept, and that was a good name. When she gave herself up to the joys of making love, she was to me—in these harsh ovens of Eshuranib—like a young plant and a Goddess of the Nile. How I enjoyed speaking to the little Ukhu-As who was now within her. Soon I came to realize that one’s member can say much to an unborn child. Do you know, I felt the ambition and the great rage of the new Ukhu-As, still unborn. Of course I had no fear of him, and I laughed. His former wife was such a pleasure. Why, Renpu-Rept taught me as much of his wisdom as he had known himself. He used to make love without letting his seed come forth, she told me, and I was quick to acquire his practice. To believe that the longer one waits, the greater will be your reward, was the only belief to keep you alive at Eshuranib. So I became acquainted with living at length in the cave of a woman, and many were the litanies she taught me to say to myself until I was the master of my own river and could send it curling back to my groin. That offered me one more road to the Land of the Dead. There were times, lying with her through those hours, when I felt as if I floated on the brink of my own extinction so long and so well did I hold my breath, and my heart within it, indeed, so high did I rise on the very roar of the sounds within myself that I could have been above a cataract that would wash me out of myself forever into her. So I knew the way. I could run those waters. So I speak of it, but I was not curious to try. For steeped in the sentiments that rose from her flesh, I was happier to meditate through the night, and such hours were sweet for me. I felt as fortunate as a Pharaoh in the House of the Secluded and had splendid thoughts, and lived in the reverberation of all things.