Endless Things (8 page)

"Really?"

"Half a millennium before. Not all of them, of course, maybe not even all of any one, but large parts of them. It may be that some of them date to a time when the temples of Egypt were still standing, the priesthood still functioning."

"But everybody says. Not just Yates. Everybody agrees."

"Well, of course there's good philological evidence that the writings
as we have them
are late Greek. But that doesn't mean they don't contain older materials. Much older.” He drank. “Anyway, everybody
doesn't
agree. Flinders Petrie didn't agree."

That impossible name, a name for an archæologist in a comic book, breaker of stones, studier of fragments, Flinders Petrie. Pierce had got Petrie's books from the State Library in Kentucky, back when he had himself first set out for those realms. In childhood: that long ago. The sand-colored photographs, sand-colored man in pith helmet and wrinkled shorts.

"Petrie thought that the writings, the core writings, dated to the fifth century BCE. And because the Egyptian religion was so insular—remember, the Greeks held the Egyptians in high regard, but the Egyptians didn't have much regard for the Greeks—you could at that date still have found remote temples in Upper Egypt where the scribes were writing in hieroglyphics, copying magical and theological papyri, ‘writings of Thoth,’ as some are described in Greek. Kom Ombo. The Temple of Isis at Philæ. And the Hermetic manuscripts we know, even if they were written in Greek and collected in the first centuries AD, might have been based on what was still a living tradition. Might well."

"But don't they incorporate a lot of Platonic philosophy? Or stuff that sounds like Plato, or even the Gospel of John?"

"Sure. And scholars have assumed that the Egyptians had no such metaphysics, only ritual and myth, and so the metaphysics of the Hermetica must derive from Plato, and not the other way around."

"Even though Plato said it
was
the other way around, that he owed Egypt."

"Yes. That's the new view. That Plato—and Thucydides and Herodotus and Pliny—knew what they were talking about when they said that their knowledge of the gods and the cosmos derived from Egypt. Their laws even. Certainly their writing. The historian's rule being this: that if a people's culture retains lots of stories about their history or origins that are not particularly to their credit, they ought to be taken seriously as likely to have some factual basis."

"So maybe they aren't wrong."

"They? Which they?"

"The Hermeticists. The Renaissance Egyptophiles. Bruno and Fludd and Kircher. The Rosicrucians and the Masons, who think they all come from Egypt, because of the Hermetic stuff."

"There is,” said Barr, “that possibility. Yes."

Gentle voices had been speaking while the two men conversed, like spirit informants, telling of the world and the air, planes landing from Africa, Asia, Europe, and now they were told that Barr's to Athens, Cairo, and Delhi was ready for boarding. Barr looked at his watch and stood up.

"Maybe I'll learn more,” he said. “It's all very controversial. A lot of people don't like this downgrading of the Greeks and Greek originality in favor of Africans. When new Hermetic manuscripts were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, Father Festugière, the great student of Hermeticism, said he was sure not much could be learned from
une jarre d'Egypt
."

"But you do think so,” Pierce said. “That it might be so. As the Renaissance thought. At least a little."

"Well, it's a new age,” Barr said. He yanked out the handle of his nifty trundle and turned to go, lifting a parting hand. “All that stuff is coming back."

No word yet from out of the air for Pierce, and (though uncertain it was permitted him) he sat in the Olympic Club while the ice in his drink turned to water, listening still to Barr's words and feeling the strangest feeling as he repeated them, the feeling of something healed, or knitted, or resealed, within him but not only within him: a thing that had once been one, and was then divided, becoming one again.

He'd thought that if you went back, went back through the centuries far enough, at a certain point the way to Egypt—to the Egypt of archæology, the long-lived culture of the dead, the hard-headed small brown people with their revolting rituals of mummification and their gods ever multiplying as in a children's game—that way would part from the way that led to a land he called Ægypt: a name he'd found in that dictionary of the old or other world, the alphabetic world within the world. Ægypt: dream country of philosophers and healers, speaking statues, teachers of Plato and Pythagoras. But what if—like the Nile—this Y was actually right side up, and he alone had got it upside down; what if it had all always been one country, and only divided in two as it came close to the present, and you could reach it again by going back from here along either horn?

It, the real country. Not Ægypt but Egypt.

Maybe there was indeed something of Egypt—the place where actual men and women had lived and died and prayed and thought for centuries—preserved in the
conversazione
of Florentine Platonists, in the rituals and costumes of Freemasons. Not all that they
thought
there was, of course, but more than the scholars he'd been reading would allow. The real arcana of the real priests of Thoth and Asclæpius might have lived on, a slight, slim thread but never broken, tangled up in Hermes, passing down to Bruno and to Mozart and George Washington and the French Revolution, down to the Thursday night rituals in the halls of midwestern cities, the bankers and businessmen with their trowels and embroidered aprons, their eyeglasses and dentures.

Another thing Barr had once said to him. Strange, he'd said, strange how the past continually enlarges, rather than shrinking with distance.

Maybe that's because we actually move toward it rather than away. There is no world of tomorrow, no such thing: we move always toward what we were, to know it again. He did, anyway.

What about that for an ending to his nonexistent book, the revelation that sober historians of the new age had made old Ægypt real again, and proved mad Bruno right. And they had done that because the making of new ages—in past as well as future—is what we do with the dark backward and abysm of time.
Cosmopoeia.
If he were a historian, he thought, a real historian, that's what he'd do, or help to do.

Meanwhile Frank Walker Barr went down along the wide stream of travelers, thinking too: thinking of the basements of the library at Noate, a day a couple of months before when he'd sat at one of the long scarred wooden tables there, with a box open before him, one of the boxes that the Noate library used to store fragile and ephemeral things, worth it or otherwise, always worth it if you happened to be in search of one such, as Barr on that day was.

He'd been reading those new polemical accounts of Egyptian and Greek history, which exposed the old standard histories as having a bias toward the North and the light-skinned peoples, against the South and the dark-skinned. Understandable but long unchallenged. He, Barr, though always glad to see the past reimagined, and older visions brought forward again in the course of time, hadn't himself made up his mind on the issues; but a note referring to a surprising source had struck him. W. M. F. Petrie, “Historical References in the Hermetic Writings,”
Transactions of the Third International Congress of the History of Religions
(1908), pp. 196-225.

The library didn't have that volume, but it had, here in the basement, the same paper in pamphlet form, from a time when intellectual and political controversy was carried on by means of publications like these, gray cheap paper not meant to last, salvos or squibs. Ancient smell as of tomb dust or cerements. Petrie's argument for an early date for the so-called Hermetica was based on the fact that the Greek conquerors, or inheritors, of Pharaonic Egypt were demonstrably fascinated by the Egyptian past, and restored many temples and religious sites, and collected codices. He thought that the Hermetica were simply a small part of the copying of ancient Egyptian sacred manuscripts that the Greeks did. Most of those manuscripts were then lost, and the Greek copies lost too, lost with so much of everything. But not these. Found and not lost; not all.

Barr had put down the pamphlet then, captured by the sudden unfolding of an inward image: desert, and a buried temple uncovered. A familiar image, an image he had been profoundly gratified and thrilled by once, as he was gratified by it now. From where had he acquired it to store it away untasted for so long? From the movies, of course, but which one? Movie sand, wind-disturbed, moving away to show the tips of pillars, then the heads of idols: so, the ground we stand on is not the floor of earth, there are floors beneath us. Look, now it's coming clear as the wind, what a wind, pushes the sand away: it's a door, like a cellar door, a black block, and in its center a ring to grasp and pull it up by. Barr knew that when it was lifted there would be stairs that led down, and those stairs would lead somewhere we can't help but go.

A little later that day, in Barr's house up on the heights of the Morningside Hills, where many famed scholars and teachers live backyard to backyard, Taffy B. Barr stood before her open refrigerator, one arm akimbo. On the counter by her lay a heap of tomatoes, a brain-shaped cauliflower, a cantaloupe and a clutch of beets with spreading red-veined greens. She had forgotten why she had opened the refrigerator and was pondering or pausing to see if the reason would return to her when the phone rang. She shut the great vault (the light within winking off and plunging the foodstuffs within again into darkness) and answered. It was Frank, calling from his office, with a plan to announce.

"Frank, let's talk,” she said when he paused.

"We're talking."

"At dinner."

"I need to find my passport,” he said. “I move it from place to place in order to remember where I put it, but it associates logically with nothing else. It's sui generis."

"Frank. It's a bad idea."

"It's a good idea. My best in months."

"Okay. We'll talk."

"Love you."

"Love you too."

Taffy hung up the phone; she looked up at the clock on the wall (a Regulator) and down at the vegetables on her counter, and remembered: aioli.

She'd tried, his good wife, at dinner that night and at the breakfast and lunch that followed, to talk him out of it, and failed. And so (Frank Barr in Kennedy Airport said to himself) the youth arose, and took a plane. No youth any longer, but still hale; he patted ritually the pocket where his pills were kept.

He would stop in Athens and be met there by an old—no, better say a
former
—graduate student of his, a woman dark and sloe-eyed enough to be Greek but in fact a Jewess from Schenectady. Zoe.
Zoe mu sas agapo
. Thence to Egypt, from where the gods of Greece had come at first, where the Greek wise men used to go to consult with the priests of Isis and Osiris, to sleep in the temples of Asclæpius and there dream a good dream. His colleagues had written that they might leave the conference for a day or two, rent a Land Rover, hire a guide. Make an expedition up the Nile to the temple island of Philæ. Would Frank like to come? He would. And may he (Frank Walker Barr prayed, to no particular god or goddess) dream there a good dream of his own.

Rosie—I am going on the train today to meet Frances Yates, Dame Frances Yates, you've heard me talk about her. If anybody can tell me what I'm supposed to do next, she can. She lives with her sister and her dogs and cats an hour from London, and we're to have tea. I can't explain here how it happened. Excuse the postcard. Pierce

"Now tell me where you've been,” she said, clasping her hands before her as though in supplication. “And where you mean to go."

Everyone who's seen her says she looked just like Margaret Rutherford, but in her shabby overcoat buttoned one button wrong (she'd just come in from the potting shed) and her hair coming loose from its great pins, she was the White Queen more exactly.

"Well,” Pierce said, “I've been to Glastonbury, and..."

"You've bean to Glostonbrie?” Her mobile eyebrows rose. “Why, you might be in search of the Grail."

He had gone to Glastonbury, the first of all his memory places, or Kraft's, starred in the guide, and site of more than one scene in Kraft's last novel. The Isle of Avalon. He would enter many churches in the coming months, very many, and of them all it was this ruined one alone that didn't inspire in him an awful trepidation: guilt, threat, pity. Its nave and transept frozen grass, its lead roof the leaden English sky. Nice. He had imagined, without thinking it through, that the places he was to go to would be somehow lost in remoteness, fallen and neglected, like ziggurats in Yucatán. This was so mown and tidied, so worked up and mapped and labeled and furnished with souvenirs, that what mystery it might once have had could not reach him, and for that he was grateful. In Kraft's old guidebook, he read about Joseph of Arimathea, Aldhelm and Dunstan, Arthur and Guinevere. He walked the ruins, the vanished cloister, fratery, library. He went out to Chalice Hill and the Holy Well.
The masonry of the Well has been the cause of much discussion. Possibly it is connected with the Druids, associated with ancient rituals of sun and water. Certainly it is orientated, as has been proved by measurements on Midsummer Day. The stones are placed in wedge formation, as in the Pyramids. Sir Flinders Petrie was of the opinion that the Well might have been rock hewn by Egyptian colonists in about the year 200 BC.

Well, okay. He let the icy bloodred waters flow over his hand (
chalybeate, radioactive, neverfailing
) and then went up the bare Tor on a spiral track (
the ascent from Chilkwell Street is easy
) toward the tower on top. Soon the air was sharp as knives in his throat.

"You didn't quite reach it,” said the Dame. She let her folded hands fall in her lap, his own spirit or lame body dropping from the unscaled height. “Well. A shame. You have such a view from there. That's the reward."