T
There will be a great rebellion and the earth will be turned upside down like the potter's wheel." Recalling these words of the ancient prophet Ipuver, Yubra eagerly awaited the fulfilment of the prophecy. "What if it begins without me!" he thought, sitting in the pit. And when Khnum turned him out of the house he took a staff, slung a wallet behind his back and set off at random, looking as though he had been a homeless wanderer all his life.
He remembered his old friend Nebra, the boatman, and decided to go and see him at the Risit Harbour. But at the harbour he was told that Nebra had finished work and was having supper in a tavern next door, in the Hittite Square.
Yubra was tired; his legs ached with the stocks that he had been wearing. He sat down to rest on a heap of stones on the quay.
The sun was setting behind the bare yellow rocks of the Lybian Mountains, honeycombed with tombs. The low-lying meadows beyond the river and the City of the Dead, where the embalmers' cauldrons were perpetually boiling and black clouds of asphalt smoke rose in the air, were already in shadow; only by the funeral temple of Amenhotep, at the end of the sacred Road of the Jackals, the golden points of two obelisks shone with a dull glow like smouldering candles.
The left bank was in shadow, but the right still lay in the evening sun, which threw a coppery red glow on the dark-skinned, naked bargemen who carried from the boats down the planks earthenware pots and sacks of styrax and balm from Gilead, Arabian sandal and myrrh, fragrant incense from Punt, and cloves—burnt offerings to the gods and ointments for the dead. The quay was saturated with the fragrant odours, but through the fragrance came the smell of a carcass thrown up by the river and lying on the bank. An emaciated dog, with ribs that stood out under the skin, was devouring it.
Suddenly two white eagles pounced on the carcass with loud flapping of wings and greedy cries. The dog, frightened, jumped away with a squeal, and watched them from a distance, its tail between its legs, its teeth bared in an angry growl, its body shaking with hungry envy.
But a still greater envy glittered in the eyes of a starving beggar woman, who had come in search of food from the province of the Black Heifer, where men were devouring each other in their hunger.
She put her wrinkled, black, charred-looking breast to the lips of the baby perched in a wicker basket behind her. It was biting and chewing it furiously with its toothless gums but could not suck out a single drop of milk, and, no longer able to cry, it only moaned.
"Bread, please, sir; I have had no food for three days!" the beggar woman moaned in a voice as small as her baby's, stretching out her hand to Yubra.
"I have none, my poor woman, forgive me," he said, and he thought 'soon the hungry will be filled.'
He got up and walked on. The woman followed him at a distance as a stray dog follows a passer-by with a kind face.
Alongside of them on the smooth road, specially made for carrying heavy weights from the harbour to the town, some fifteen hundred convicts and prisoners of war were dragging, by four thick cables, something like an enormous sledge with a huge granite statue of King Akhnaton that had just been brought down the river. The superintendent of works, an old man with a stern and intelligent face, looked like a dwarf as he stood on the knees of the giant statue seated on its throne; he clapped his hands, beating the measure of the song the men were singing and sometimes he shouted at them and waved his stick, driving all this mass of men as a ploughman drives a pair of oxen. In front of them a man was watering the road with a watering can so that the runners should not be set on fire by the friction.
The cable, taut like a string, cut into men's shoulders even through the felt pads; perspiration dropped from their faces bent low over the ground; their muscles were strained; the veins on their foreheads were ready to burst; their bones seemed to crack with the incredible effort. And the giant, at rest for ever with a gentle smile on the flat lips, was only slightly moved from time to time. A doleful song, accompanied by laboured breathing, broke out like a moan from a thousand breasts:
Heigh-ho, pull and drag, pull and drag!Heigh-ho, step along, step along!When we've pulled an inch or twoWe'll have earned a drink of beer,We'll have earned a loaf of bread.On and on with steady tread!Make the heavy burden fly.Now, brothers, here we go!Have another try—Oho!
"These, too, will not have long to suffer: the slaves shall be set free," Yubra thought.
From the road he turned into Teshub Street. This part of Thebes, by the Apet Risit harbour, was populated by the worshippers of the god Teshub—boatmen, carpenters, rope-makers and other working people, as well as by tradesmen and inn-keepers.
The dark grey huts, looking like wasps' nests, made of the river mud and reeds, were so flimsy that they came to pieces after a good rain. But it only rained once in two or three years and, besides, it cost next to nothing to build such a hut afresh. Not only the poor, but people of moderate means, lived in them, in accordance with the Egyptian wisdom: our temporal home is a hut, our eternal home is the tomb.
The walls giving on to the street had no windows, except a little one with a movable shutter in the front door for the porter; the name of the owner was written over it in coloured hieroglyphics. All the other windows were at the back. On the flat roofs could be seen the conical clay granaries and the wooden frames over the skylights, facing north, "wind-catchers" for catching the north wind—"the sweetest breath of the north."
The inn of Itacama the Hittite, where Nebra was having his supper, stood at the very end of Teshub street, not far from the Hittite Square.
Instead of a signpost there was over the door a clay bas-relief representing a Canaan labourer sucking beer through a reed from a jug, and an Egyptian woman, probably a harlot or a tavern keeper, sitting opposite him; the hieroglyphic inscription said: "He comforts his heart with the beer Haket, Heart's seduction."
As he was going into the tavern Yubra turned round to the beggar woman and called to her:
"Wait a minute, my dear; I will bring you some bread!"
But she did not hear: his voice was drowned by the song of two tipsy scholars. Thinking that he was driving her away she walked off. And the two scholars—one long and thin, nicknamed the Decanter, and another short and fat, the Beer-Pot, tumbled into the tavern nearly knocking Yubra down. Both were bawling with all their might:
"Little geese are fond of waterBut to us wine is better.We are a merry crewDrunken scholars bold and true.Sages may grow old with studyOur wisdom is to drink.Give us beer, pale or ruddyThen we have no need to think."
Yubra walked into the dark, low-pitched room full of smoke and the smell of cooking: Itacama was roasting a goose on a spit. All sorts of men of different races sat on the matting on the floor listening to two girls playing the kinnar and the flute; some were throwing dice, playing chess and 'fingers'—guessing the number of fingers opened and closed very rapidly; others were eating out of earthenware pots with their fingers—each had a washing bowl by him—and sucking wine and beer through reeds.
When Nebra saw his friend Yubra, he came forward to embrace him—the old men were very fond of each other—and ordered a luxurious supper for him: lentil broth with garlic, fried fish, sheep's cheese, a pot of beer and a cup of pomegranate wine—shedu. As often happens in times of famine even poor people—as though to give themselves courage—liked being extravagant with their last farthings.
Before sitting down to supper Yubra thought of the beggar woman; he broke off part of a loaf and went outside. But she was no longer there and he returned to Nebra disappointed.
The beggar had walked down the street and turned the corner; she stopped there smelling newly baked bread. A middle-aged woman with a wrinkled, sickly and cruel face was squatting on the ground baking barley cakes: she did it by sticking thinly rolled-out paste on the outside of an earthenware pot filled with charcoal embers.
"Give me some bread, dear, I have had no food for three days!" the beggar moaned.
The woman raised her hard eyes to her:
"Go along! There is no end of you beggars tramping about; one can't feed you all."
But the beggar stood still, looking at the bread greedily. "Give me some, please, please!" she repeated, with frenzied, almost menacing entreaty, and when the woman turned away to take some dough from another pot, she suddenly bent down and stretched out her hand.
"Ah, you plague of Canaan, you scorpion's sting, you snake, thief, robber, may you have no coffin for your body!" yelled the woman, striking her on the hand.
The beggar answered back, showing her teeth as the dog had done and retreating slowly, her eyes still fixed greedily on the bread.
The woman picked up a stone and threw it at her. The stone hit the beggar on the shoulder. She gave a dreadful dog-like howl and ran. The baby in the basket began to cry, but stopped at once as though realising that tears were of no avail now.
Running to Hittite Square, where there was the god Teshub's old timber chapel that looked like a log hut, she fell exhausted by a heap of sun-dried manure bricks for fuel. She leaned against them sideways uncomfortably: the basket was in the way but she had not the strength to take it off. The baby was so quiet that it did not seem to breathe; she had not the courage to see whether it was asleep or dead.
She suddenly remembered her neighbour in the province of the Black Heifer, a twelve-year-old child-mother who had stolen somebody else's baby, calmly cut its throat as though it had been a lamb, fed her own child with it and had some herself. "That's what I ought to have done," thought the beggar woman.
The pain in her stomach was gnawing her like a wild beast. She suddenly felt weak all over, melting with weakness as it were. "I shall soon die," she thought, and remembered: "may you have no coffin for your body." She smiled: "no coffin—no resurrection.... Well, so be it! Eternal death—eternal rest..."
She, too, though in a different way than Yubra, felt that the world had turned upside down.
And in the tavern Yubra was whispering with his friend:
"Has it begun?"
"Yes. The other side of the River people are assembling already and walking about with the holy tabernacle, singing glory to Amon. And I expect it won't be long before they start here," Nebra answered, and added, after a pause: "But what is it to us? The rebellion is about their god—not ours."
"Never mind," Yubra said. "Whichever way it begins, the end will be the same: the earth will turn upside down—and glory be to Aton!"
"Don't talk so loud, brother—if they heard you they would give you a beating."
"No danger of that!" a stupid looking youth said, with a grin, lisping as though his tongue were too big for his mouth; he was Zia, the Carpenter, nicknamed the Flea. "It is all one to us—Amon or Aton. So long as bread is cheaper than fish let the rest go hang!"
"You are a stupid man, Flea!" said the cauldron maker, Min, a sullen and pompous old man, with colorless eyes that looked very light in his face black with soot. "Who is Amon's son, Khonsu? Why, Osiris-Bata—the Spirit of Bread. If the Spirit leaves the earth, there will be no more bread and we will all perish like midges!"
"And is it true, mates," the Flea lisped, "that our dear golden Khonsu is to be melted into money to buy bread for the poor?"
"What is heavier than lead and what name has it, other than foolishness?" said Decanter, the scholar, looking at him with the self importance of a learned man.
"And are you going to eat that bread?" Min asked, also looking at Flea with contempt.
"I? It's all one to me! I will do what everybody else does," he answered, smiling cautiously and shrugging his shoulders.
"Everybody will eat it, everybody!" the consumptive little cobbler Mar said hurriedly, waving his hands and coughing. "The pig gulps down a baby and doesn't care—it goes on grunting just the same; and so the people will eat the god and say 'that's not enough, give us some more'!"
"Well, we shall indeed be scoundrels if we give away the holy image of god to be defiled!" cried a giant with the face of a child—Hafra, the blacksmith, striking his right fist on his left palm.
"There is one thing I can't make out," Min, the cauldron-maker said, sighing heavily. "We are told that the king is a god. How can one god rise against another?"
"It's not the king, but the high and mighty gentry, greedy bloodsuckers!" the cobbler again put in hurriedly, going off into a fit of coughing. He brought up some blood and went on:
"They ought to be hanged, the lot of them, like salt fish, on one string. And the chief mischief maker is Tuta, the purring cat—he ought to be the first to be hanged!"
"Mice burying the cat," said Min, smiling bitterly. "No, my man, there's no way of doing it. The gentry talk and the people are mute; he who has the sword has the word."
"A knife may be as good, but the trouble is that the hare has the knife in its paw but cannot move for awe! That's why the fat-bellied ride rough-shod over us. And if we weren't a set of fools we might do great things at a time like this!" said a short, thick-set, broad-shouldered man of forty, with a terribly disfigured but calm and intelligent face, who had been playing dice without taking part in the conversation. He was Kiki the Noseless, the thief who had lately plundered the tomb of the ancient King Saakerra and obtained thousands of pounds worth of leaf gold and precious stones off the king's mummy. He had been seized and brought to trial, but acquitted for a large bribe.
Kiki was an assumed name and no one knew what his real name was. It was rumored that in his youth he had committed an awful crime; he was punished by being buried up to his neck in the ground, but by a miracle he escaped and ran away; then he became the chief of a robber band in the marshes of the Delta, was caught, had his nose cut off by the hangman and was deported to the gold mines in Nubia; he escaped and became a brigand once more; was seized again and sent to the copper mines of Sinai, escaped again and, after hiding for some time, appeared in Thebes just before the mutiny under the name of Noseless Kiki.
As soon as he spoke everyone was silent and turned to him. But he went on playing dice, looking as though all that was being said here were empty babble.
The musicians who had stopped for a moment began strumming the kinnar and playing the pipe again. The scholars struck up a drunken song. It had grown dark. They lighted a copper lamp suspended from the ceiling and filled with evil smelling vegetable oil, and on the floor earthenware lamps with mutton fat.
"Zen is speaking, Zen is speaking! Listen!" voices were heard suddenly.
Zen—or Zennofer—a man of thirty with a sad, gentle and sickly face and dreadful cataract on his blind eyes, was a junior priest 'uab' in the sanctuary of the god Khonsu-Osiris. He was reputed to be a seer because he knew by heart the writings of the ancient prophets and himself had visions and heard voices.
The musicians were told to stop, the drunken scholars were pushed out into the street and in the stillness that followed the gentle voice of the prophet sounded as though coming from a distance.
"To whom shall I tell of my sorrow? Whom shall I call to weep?" he spoke as though crying in his sleep. "They do not hear, they do not see, they walk in darkness; the foundations of the earth are shaking and there is no wise man to understand and no foolish man to bewail it!"
Suddenly he stretched out his arms and cried in a loud voice: "So it has been and so it shall be, so it has been and so it shall be! There shall be endless evil. The gods will grow weary of men; the gods will forsake the earth and go to heaven. The sun will be darkened, the earth will be waste. The flowers of the fields will set up a moan, the heart of the beasts will weep for men; but men will not weep—they will laugh with sorrow. An old man will say 'I would I were dead,' and the child 'That I had not been born!' There will be a great mutiny throughout the earth. The towns will say 'let us drive out the rulers!' The mob will rush into the courts of judgment; the scrolls of the law will be torn, records of estates scattered, the boundaries between fields wiped out, the frontier posts knocked down. Men will say 'nothing is private, all things are in common; other people's things are mine; I take what I like!' The poor will say to the rich, 'Thief, give me back what you have stolen from me.' The small will say to the great 'all are equal!' Those who have not built the houses will live in them; those who have not tilled the land will fill the granaries; those who have not woven will be clothed in fine raiment, and she who looked at her own reflection in water will now gaze at herself in a mirror. Slaves will wear gold, pearls and lapis-lazuli, and the mistress will go in rags, begging for bread. The beggars will be as gods and the earth will turn upside down as does a potter's wheel!"
Suddenly he stood up and fell on his knees, raising his blind eyes to the sky as though he already saw the things of which he was speaking.
"So it has been and so it shall be—there shall be a new heaven and a new earth. There the lion shall lie down with the lamb and the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp and the weaned child put his hand on the cockatrice's den. Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord! He will come down like rain on a freshly mown meadow, like dew upon the parched fields. Lo, He cometh!"
He stopped and all were silent. "That's all nonsense," the Noseless Kiki's voice was suddenly heard in the stillness. "Why do you listen to a fool's talk?"
"And why do you revile God's prophet, you dog?" said Hafra the blacksmith, laying his hand on Kiki's shoulder so heavily that Kiki staggered. Freeing himself with an agile movement, he seized the knife that hung at his waist; but glancing at the giant's childish face he evidently changed his mind and said calmly, with a twinkle in his eye,
"Very well, if he is a prophet, let him tell us when this is to be?"
"For such as you—never; but for the saints—soon!" Zen answered.
"Soon? You are wrong there. No, brother, it will take a good long time for fools to grow wise."
"But do you know when it shall be?" Hafra asked.
"Yes, I do."
"Tell us then, don't beat about the bush!"
"Do you remember the inscription on King Una's tomb?" asked Kiki, the same mocking smile in his eyes.
Zen said nothing, as though he had not heard the question, but his face quivered like the face of a child in a fit of terror.
Yubra, too, was trembling: he felt that the fate of the world were being decided by this argument between the saint and the criminal. The blacksmith scowled more and more menacingly.
"You have forgotten? Well, I'll remind you," Kiki went on. "Once upon a time, very long ago, there lived a king called Una. He was a clever man, cleverer than anybody in the world, but he was a brigand, a thief, a scoundrel, no better than we are. He died and was buried and they put over his tomb the inscription he told them to write: The bones of the earth are cracking, the sky is shaking, the stars are falling, the gods are trembling: King Una, the devourer of gods comes forth from his tomb and goes hunting; he sets traps and catches the gods; he kills them; stews them, roasts them, and eats them; big ones for breakfast, middle-sized for dinner, little ones for supper, and old gods and goddesses he uses to make fragrant incense. He devoured them all and became the god of gods.'"
"What rubbish is this, you fool? Speak straight, don't wriggle!" cried Hafra, clenching his fists in a fury.
"Have it straight, then: it won't be soon, but the hour will come when the poor and wretched will say 'we are no worse than King Una, the devourer of the gods.' Scoundrels, pickpockets, brigands, dirty Jews, men with torn nostrils, the flogged, the branded, the cursed will say 'we are nothing—let us be everything! Then the earth will turn upside down and he will come..."
"Who is he?" Hafra asked.
"God and devil, the Blacky-whity, two gods in one!"
"Stop or I'll kill you!" the blacksmith shouted, raising his fist.
Kiki jumped back and pulled out his knife. There would have been a fight but shouts came from the street:
"They are coming! They are coming! They are coming!"
"Rebellion!" the cobbler was the first to guess what had happened and rushed to the door. All the others followed him.
There was a crush. The Flea was pressed to the wall and nearly suffocated. Min was knocked down. Hafra stumbled against him and fell down, too. Kiki jumped over both and, whistling like a brigand, shouted: "Have you got any knives?"
"Yes," someone in the street shouted back. Everyone was running in one direction—from the Risit Harbour to the Hittite Square.
It was dark; the moon had not yet risen; the stars twinkled in the sky and there was the red glow of a fire on the horizon.
P
People were crowded in the Square. In the vague hubbub of voices one could distinguish at times the phrases:
"Glory be to Amon on High! Glory be to Khonsu, Amon's Son!" Suddenly there came the sound of melodious singing, far off at first and then nearer and nearer. The Square was lit up with the red glow of the torches and a solemn procession appeared.
The Lybian mercenaries walked in front followed by fan-bearers and censer-bearers; then came thehoremhebs—officiating priests, and finally twenty-four senior priests—neteratephs, with shaven heads, leopard skins across the shoulder and wide, stiffly starched white skirts. Walking twelve in a row they carried on two poles the holy tabernacle—Userhet—a boat of acacia wood with linen curtains like sails, that hid a figure of Amon a foot high. Its shadow could be seen through the fine material in the flickering light of the torches: but people did not dare to look even at the shadow of the god: to see him was to die.
A crowd followed the tabernacle, singing in a chorus:
"Glory be to Amon on HighGlory to Khonsu, Amon's son!Exalt ye them above the heavens,Exalt ye them above the earth.Proclaim to all their glory!Tell men to fear the LordThroughout all generations,Tell it to the great and small,To every creature that draws breath.To fishes and fowls of the air;Tell those who know not and who know:'Fear ye the Lord!'"
Yubra sang, too, saying 'Aton' instead of 'Amon'; no one heard him in the general chorus. And sometimes he made a mistake, glorifying the god of his enemies and rejoiced: he knew that where they were going there would be no more enemies; the lion and the lamb would lie down together and the child would play on the hole of the asp.
The beggar woman from the province of the Black Heifer walked by Yubra's side. He had found her half-dead with hunger by the heap of manure-bricks in the Square, restored her to life and given her some food: Nebra procured bread for her and milk for the baby from a boatman friend of his. When she had eaten and seen that the baby was alive and sucking a comforter that Yubra cleverly made for it, she revived and followed him as a dog follows the man who has given it food. She followed him in the procession, too.
He was holding her firmly and kindly by the hand, as though he were leading this sorrowful and perishing daughter of the earth to the new earth, to the Comforter. She understood but vaguely what was going on, and not daring to look at the shadow of the god behind the veil, simply repeated with the rest of the crowd:
"Glory be to thee, god of mercy,The Lord of the silent,The help of the humble,The saviour of those in hell!When they call unto theeThou comest to them from afarThou sayest to them 'I am here.'"
She, too, was in hell; perhaps He would come to her, too, and say 'I am here,' she thought joyfully, as though knowing that in the place where they were going there would be no famine and the mothers would not have to steal other people's children and kill them like lambs in order to feed their own.
Pentaur was walking on the left in the first row of the twelve priests, neteratephs, who carried the tabernacle. Yubra saw him and they looked at one another. "How did you come here, servant of Aton? Are you a spy?" Yubra read the question in Pentaur's eyes. "Come, there can be no spies now! We are all brothers," was the answer in Yubra's eyes, and Pentaur seemed to understand—he smiled at him like a brother.
Zen, the prophet, was also with the crowd; a little boy was leading him by the hand. His face was sorrowful unto death: maybe he knew that Kiki was right and that the earth would turn upside down only in order that the worst might come.
After passing Coppersmiths' Street they came into the sacred Road of the Rams. At the very end of it the dull red disc of the moon, cut across by the black needle of the obelisk, like a cat's eye by the narrowed pupil, was slowly rising behind the sanctuary of Mut.
Suddenly the procession stopped. The blast of trumpets and the rattle of drums was heard in front; arrows and stones from slings flew about with a hissing sound: it was an ambush of the Nubian soldiers sent against the rebels.
One arrow struck the foot of the tabernacle. The priests lowered it to the ground; men crowded round it, defending the body of the god with their own bodies.
The attack of the Nubians was so violent that the Lybian mercenaries flinched and would have run away had not help arrived just in time.
Kiki, with a few desperadoes like himself, had gone from the Hittite Square to the raised road where the workmen, who had been dragging the giant statue of King Akhnaton during the day, had gone to sleep, some on straw and others on the bare earth. Kiki could not wake many of them: they slept so heavily that if the very earth under them had caught fire they would hardly have wakened. But he did rouse some three hundred by the mere cry of 'Plunder!'; leading them against the Nubians' ambush he attacked it from behind and so won the battle for the rebels.
The procession moved on with a song of victory:
"Woe to be to thine enemies, Lord!Their dwelling place is in darkness,But the rest of the earth in thy light.The sun of them that hate thee is darkened,The sun of them that love thee is rising!"
Reaching Amon's temple they walked past it and turned to the right, to Khonsu's sanctuary, easily scattering a small detachment of Midian archers on the way. But at the sanctuary they learned that at the first news of mutiny the golden figure of Khonsu had been removed and hidden in the treasury of Amon's temple.
"Come, good people, you have been saving the god long enough, it is time you thought about yourselves!" Kiki the Noseless shouted to the crowd, jumping on the empty pedestal of Khonsu's statue. "There is nothing to be got here, Aton's rabble have cleared the place, but on the other side of the river in the Chanik Palace there is still plenty of stuff left. Let's make for the river, mates!"
There arose a dispute, almost a fight, as to what they were to do—save the god or plunder.
As Yubra listened, he grew uneasy: was this what he had been hoping for or something utterly different?
After much wrangling the crowd divided into two: the bigger part went to the other side of the river with Kiki and the smaller set out towards Amon's temple.
Pentaur led them. Expecting another ambush they put out the torches. Men walked in silence, with stern faces; they knew that perhaps they were going to their death. "We shall all die for Him!" Yubra thought, with quiet joy.
When they reached the temple they saw there were no guards there. Two granite colossi and two obelisks, as though keeping watch, threw black, menacing shadows on to the square of white stone bathed in moonlight.
Pentaur and Hafra, the blacksmith, walked up to the temple gates; the gold, with the hieroglyphics of dark bronze upon it, the two words 'Great Spirit,' dimly glistened in the moonlight.
"Hack them!" Pentaur said.
Hafra raised the axe, but let it down again, not daring to strike. Pentaur seized the axe from him and cried:
"Lift up your heads, oh ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in!"
He lifted the axe and struck; the ponderous echo rolled through the empty, resonant air behind the gates, as though the Great Spirit himself had answered him.
"Achaeans, Achaeans, the devils!" was heard in the crowd.
Achaeans, the half-savage mercenaries from the North, had just arrived in Egypt to serve the king. They had come straight to the City of the Sun, and were hardly known at Thebes, but there were terrible rumours about their ferocity and mad courage.
Rushing out from three ambushes at once they surrounded the crowd on all sides, pressing it to the walls of the temple so that escape was impossible. And above the gates on the flat roof of the temple copper helmets and spears were glistening, too. Ethiopian slingers were ambushed there. Arrows, stones and lead fell from there like hail.
Pentaur raised his eyes and saw just above him, in a narrow window of the temple wall, a boy of fifteen, with a black monkey-like face, white teeth bared like those of a beast of prey, and two feathers, a green and a red one, stuck aslant in the black frizzy hair. Placing an arrow on the bowstring, he aimed at Pentaur slowly bending a huge bow made of rhinoceros bone.
Pentaur remembered the tame monkey on the top of the palm tree over Khnum's house, throwing the shells of the pods at the sleeping dancer, Miruit, and he smiled. He might have jumped behind the projecting wall, but he thought "what for? I shall be killed anyway, and it is good to die for Him Who has been!"
The bowstring sounded.
"Has been or will be?" he had time to ask and to answer: "Has been, is and will be," while the arrow whistled through the air. Its copper sting pierced him just under the left breast. He fell on the threshold of the closed gates. For him the gates lifted their heads, the everlasting doors were lifted up and the King of Glory came in.
Standing by the tabernacle Yubra was watching the last batch of the Lybians fighting. Suddenly the leaden bullet from a sling struck him on the temple. He fell and thought he was dying. But a minute later he propped himself up on his elbow and saw that the Achaean devils were hacking the tabernacle.
The white curtains flapped like broken wings laying bare the small, worm-eaten, wooden figure of the god, blackened with the smoke of incense, polished with the kisses of the worshippers. A soldier seized it, and lifting it up, flung it upon the ground and trampled it underfoot. The god's body cracked like a crushed insect.
Yubra fell upon his face so as not to see.
Pentaur was dying happily. Some one gentle as the god whose name is Quiet-Heart was bending over him—he could not tell whether it was a boy who looked like a girl or a girl who looked like a boy. He wanted to ask 'Who are you?' when the kiss of eternity sealed his lips. And the dulcet chords played on:
"Death is now to me like sweetest myrrh,Death is now to me like healing,Death is now to me like refreshing rain,Death is now to me like a home to an exile!"
W
When Dio had set out to see Ptamose the mutiny was just beginning beyond the river and all was quiet on this side.
Issachar was waiting for her by the Eastern Gates of the Apet-Oisit wall, where the deserted tomb-sanctuary of King Tutmose the Third lay in ruins. Stepping out of the litter and telling the bearers to wait for her at the gate, she went with Issachar into the half-destroyed porch of the sanctuary. Walking up to the wall, which was completely covered with bas-reliefs and mural paintings, he leaned his shoulder against it. A movable stone turned on its axis, revealing a dark narrow opening. They both squeezed themselves sideways through it and descended some steep steps cut in the thickness of the rock. Issachar walked in front of Dio down a slanting underground passage, carrying a torch.
It was close: the depths of the earth warmed through by the eternal Egyptian sun, never cooled; the darkness was filled with warmth. "Glory be to thee who dwelleth in darkness, O Lord!" Dio remembered. It seemed to her that here the dead were as warm lying in their tombs in the bosom of the earth as a child in its mother's womb.
The endless mural paintings represented the journey of the Sun-god down the subterranean Nile: the sail of the boat hung limply in the breathless stillness and the dead oarsmen were dragging it over dry land through the twelve caves—the twelve hours of the night, from the eternal night to the eternal morn.
The hieroglyphic inscriptions glorified the Midnight Sun, Amon the Hidden.
"When thou descendest beyond the skyThe most secret of secret Gods,Thou bringest light to them who are in death.Glorifying thee from within their tombs,The dead lift up their armsAnd those under the earth rejoice."
The main passage was intersected by side passages. Suddenly the red flame of torches and the black shadows of men carrying spears, swords, bows and arrows flitted across them.
"Where are they carrying the arms?" Dio asked.
"I don't know," Issachar answered reluctantly.
"It must be the rebels in the town," she guessed.
Supplies of arms and also of gold, silver and lapis-lazuli—remnants of the temple treasuries concealed from the king's spies were hidden in these subterranean recesses of Amon's temple. It was all kept there for the day of rebellion against the apostate king.
Turning into one of the side passages and walking to the end of it, they stopped at a closed door in the wall. Opening it, Issachar walked in, lit a lamp with his torch and said, putting the lamp on the floor:
"Wait here, they will come for you."
"And where are you going?" Dio asked.
"To fetch Pentaur."
"Good, bring him here!" she said joyfully: she had been thinking about him all the time.
Issachar went out, closing the door after him.
Dio looked round the empty vaulted cell, long and narrow like the tomb—and perhaps indeed it was one. The walls were covered from top to bottom with hieroglyphic script and pictures.
She sat on the floor and waited. Tired of sitting still she got up and, taking the lamp, began looking at the mural paintings and reading the hieroglyphics. She was so absorbed in this that she did not notice the passage of time.
Suddenly the flame grew dim, gave a last flicker and went out. Walls of stifling, black, and, as it were, tangible darkness, closed in upon her. She was afraid of being left and forgotten in this coffin.
She fumbled her way to the door and began knocking and calling. She listened: a deadly stillness. She felt more frightened than ever. All of a sudden she recalled Pentaur and the fear left her: if he was alive he would come.
She sat down again, leaning her back against the wall and remained so. A strange stillness came over her; she did not know whether it was dream or waking. She was filled with the black, warm, sunny darkness as a vessel is with water. With quiet ecstasy she whispered the words she had just read in the hieroglyphic inscriptions, spoken by the dead man to the Midnight Sun, the hidden god:
"He is—I am; I am—He is."
And it seemed to her that she herself were dead and lying in the bosom of the earth like a child in its mother's womb, waiting for resurrection—birth into eternal life. And the dulcet harpstrings sang
"Death is now to me like sweetest myrrh...."
All of a sudden a light flashed into her eyes. A bent, decrepit old man with a torch—a priest, to judge by his shaven head and the leopard skin thrown over his shoulder—stooping over her, took her by the hand, helped her up and led her out of the room.
"Who are you? Where are you taking me?" she asked. He said nothing and was about to lead her down some more steep narrow stairs.
"No, I don't want to go down," she said. "Take me up. Where is Pentaur? .... Why do you say nothing? Speak."
The old man made an inarticulate sound and, opening his mouth, showed her a stump in place of a tongue; he explained by signs that Pentaur would come down too and that somebody was expecting her. She understood that he meant Ptamose.
They walked further down. Again Dio did not know whether she was asleep or awake. The dumb man had such a dead face that it seemed to her Death itself was leading her to the kingdom of death.
They stopped at a closed door. The dumb man knocked. Someone from within asked "Who is there?" and when Dio said her name the door was opened.
In a low sepulchral chamber or sanctuary, supported by four quadrangular columns, cut out in the thickness of the rock, stood a sepulchral couch, with a mummy in a white shroud lying on it. There was, Dio thought, something terrible in its face—more terrible than death.
Her dumb guide took her past the couch into the depths of the chamber, where a vaulted niche, lined with leaf-copper, glowed, like sunset, in the light of innumerable lamps. There, in the smoke of fragrant incense, a huge black lop-eared Lybian ram—probably transferred from the upper temple—lay asleep on a couch of purple. This was the sacred animal, "the bleating prophet," the living heart of the temple.
A girl of thirteen—not an Egyptian to judge by her fair hair and skin—lay beside it, with her head on the animal's back and her eyes half-closed, like a bride on the bed of love. Completely naked, but for a narrow girdle of precious stones below the navel, shameless and innocent, she stretched herself out, pale and white on the black fleece, like a narcissus, the flower of death. She was one of the twelve priestesses of the god Ram—Amon-Ra.
At the approach of Dio, the little girl opened her eyes and looked at her intently. There was something so mournful in that look that Dio's heart was wrung; she remembered another victim of the god Beast—Pasiphae-Eoia.
Her dumb guide prostrated himself before the Ram. A young priest, with an austere meagre face, kneeling next to Dio, was burning fragrant incense in a censer.
"Bow down to the god!" he whispered, looking at her severely.
Dio looked at him, too, but said nothing and did not bow to the beast, though she knew it was dangerous—they might kill her for impiety.
When the girl opened her eyes and moved the Ram woke up and also moved slowly and heavily: one could see it was very old, almost at its last gasp. It opened one eye: the pupil, fiery-yellow like a carbuncle, glowed menacingly from under a dark heavy eyelid, with grey lashes, and looked into her eyes with an almost human look.
"The god opens his eye, the sun, and there is light in the world," the priest whispered the prayer.
When he had finished he got up, and taking Dio by the hand led her to the couch with the mummy. He bent down to the dead man and whispered something in his ear. Dio drew back horrified: the dead man opened his eyes.
His deathly, skeleton-like body, brown as a withered tree, showed through the transparent white of the winding sheet. The veins on the shrunken temples stood out as though stripped of flesh; the thin, thread-like lips of the sunk-in mouth and the gristle of the hooked nose—a vulture's beak—looked deathly under the tightly drawn shiny skin. But living, young, immortal eyes seemed to have been set in that mask of death.
The priest reverently lifted the mummy and raised its head on the couch. The dead lips opened and whispered, rustling like dry leaves.
"Listen, the Urma is speaking to you."
It was only then Dio grasped that this was the great seer—urma, watcher of the secrets of heaven and the prophet of all the gods of north and south, the high priest of Amon, Ptamose.
He was over a hundred years old—an age not infrequent in Egypt. Many people thought that he had long been dead, for during the last ten years, ever since the apostate king began to persecute the faith of his fathers, Ptamose had been hiding in subterranean hiding-places and tombs; some of those who knew him to be alive said that he would never die, while others asserted that he had died and risen again.
Dio knelt down and bending over the low couch put her ear close to the whispering lips.
"You have come at last, my dear daughter! Why have you delayed so long?"
There was an insidious caress in his voice, a magnetic power in his eyes.
"Pentaur has told me much about you, but one cannot tell all about others. Tell me yourself now."
He began asking her questions, but he seemed to know all before she had answered him and to read her heart as an open scroll.
"You poor, poor child!" he whispered when she told him how Eoia and Tammuzadad had perished through her. "To destroy those whom you love—that's your misery. Do you know this?"
"Yes, I do."
"Mind then that you don't destroy him also."
"Whom?"
"King Akhnaton."
"Well, if I do destroy him so much the better for you!" she said with a forced smile.
The shadow of a smile flitted in the eyes of the old man, too. "Do you think I am his enemy? No; God knows I am not lying—why should a dead man lie?—I love him as my own soul!"
"Why then did you rise against him?"
"I rose not against him but against Him who comes after him."
"The Son?"
"God has no Son."
"How can the Father be without the Son?"
"All are the Father's sons. Great in His love he gives birth to the gods and gives breath to the baby bird inside the egg, preserves the son of a worm, feeds the mouse in its hole and the midge in the air. The son of a worm is God's son, too. Stones, plants, animals, men, gods—all are his sons; He has no only Son. He who has said 'I am the Son' has killed the Father.Ua-en-ua, one and only is He and there is none other beside. He who says 'there are two gods' kills God. This is whom I have risen against—the deicide. He will save the world, you think? No, He will destroy it. He will sacrifice himself for the world? No, He will sacrifice the world to himself. Men will love Him and hate the world. Honey will be as wormwood to them, light as darkness, life as death. And they will perish. Then they will come to us and say 'Save us!' And we will save them again."
"Again? Has it all happened before?"
"Yes. It has been and it will be. Do you know the meaning ofNem-ankh, eternal recurrence? Eternity spins round and round and repeats its cycles. All that has been in time shall be in eternity.Hehas been, too. His first name was Osiris. He came to us but we killed Him and destroyed His work. He wanted to make His kingdom in the land of the living but we drove Him to the Kingdom of the dead, Amenti, the eternal West: we gave Him that world and kept this one for ourselves. He will come again and we will kill Him once more and destroy His work. We have conquered the world and not He."
"There is no Son and perhaps there is no Father either?" Dio asked, looking at him defiantly. "Tell me the truth, don't lie: is there a God or no?"
"God is—there is no God; say what you like—it all comes to nothing; all men's words about God are vain."
"There now! I have caught the thief!" Dio cried, laughing into his face. "I knew all along you did not believe in God."
"Silly girl!" he said, as gently and kindly as before, "I am dead: the dead see God. I adjure you by the living God, consider before you go to Him whether there isn't truth in my words!"
"And if there is, what then?"
"Leave Him and stay with us!"
"No, even then I shall remain with Him!"
"You love Him more than the truth?"
"More."
"Go to Him, then, to the tempter, the son of perdition, the devil!"
"It's you who are the devil!" she cried, raising her hand as though she would strike him.
The dumb man rushed up to her, seized her by the arm and raised a knife over her.
"Leave her alone!" Ptamose said, and the old man drew back.
Suddenly there was a sound of bleating, low as the weeping of a child but old and feeble: it was the Ram. Ptamose looked at the animal and the animal at him and they seemed to understand each other.
"The Great One foretells woe, woe to the earth with its bleating!" the old man exclaimed, raising his eyes to Dio. "Go up—you will see what He is doing. It has begun already and will not end until He comes!"
Then he glanced at the dumb priest and said:
"Take her upstairs and don't molest her, you answer for her with your life!"
He shut his eyes and again looked like one dead.
Dio was running upstairs, with one thought only in her mind: "Where is Pentaur, what has happened to him?"
Going out of the catacomb by the same door as she had entered, she went past the ruins of Tutmose's tomb and walked along the south wall of Amon's temple. On the white stones of the temple square, bathed in moonlight, dead bodies lay about as on a battlefield. Half-savage, hyena-like dogs were worrying them. An emaciated looking dog, with a blood-stained mouth, was sitting on its hind legs howling at the moon.
Dio stopped suddenly. The needle of the obelisk showed black against the moonlit sky: the hieroglyphics on the mirror-like polished surface of its granite glorified King Akhnaton, the Joy of the Sun, and someone was sitting hunched up against the base of it—-dead or alive Dio could not make out. She came nearer and, bending down, saw a dead woman, thin as a skeleton, stiffly pressing a dead baby to her wrinkled, black, charred-looking breasts, as she gazed at it with glassy eyes; her white teeth were bared as though she were laughing. It was the beggar woman from the province of the Black Heifer.
Dio recalled a black granite figure she had once seen of the goddess Isis, the Mother with her son Horus, and it suddenly seemed to her that this dead woman was Mother Isis herself, accursed and killed—by whom?
"Go up, you will see what He is doing," the words of Ptamose sounded in her ears.
She turned round at the sound of footsteps. Issachar came up to her.
"Where is Pentaur? What has happened?" she cried, and, before he had time to answer, she understood from his face that Pentaur had been killed.
The familiar pain of inexpiable guilt, insatiable pity pierced her heart. "To destroy those whom you love—that's your misery," the words of the seer sounded in her ears again.
It took her some time to grasp what Issachar was saying; at last she understood: they would not give Pentaur's body to him, but perhaps they might give it to her.
She followed him. A cordon of sentries guarded the approach to the gates of Amon's temple. The centurion recognised Dio: he had seen her at the Viceroy's white house; he let them both through and told the soldiers to give her Pentaur's body.
He was lying where he had been killed—by the threshold of the western gates. Their gold with the hieroglyphics of dark bronze—two words 'Great Spirit'—dimly glittered in the moonlight.
Dio knelt down, and looking into the dead man's face, kissed him on the lips. Their cold penetrated down to her very heart.
"It is my doing—His doing," she thought and the word 'He' had a double meaning for her: he—the king, and He—the Son.