Moses, Man of the Mountain

by Zora Neale Hurston

  “And why do we have to be taking orders from him?” one of the men asked scornfully, pointing at the Hebrew foreman. “I don’t intend to let no Hebrew boss me around.”

  “And why not?” Moses asked in surprise.

  “He ain’t no better than I am. I don’t mean to take nothing off of him at all.”

  “Oh, but you are wrong there, all of you. You ought to be glad to have one of your own over you.”

  One of the men who had been fighting turned to Moses with a sneer on his lips. “We thought that this was Prince Moses, chief of the Egyptian army. We did not know that you was straw-boss of public works. In fact we didn’t know that you was our bossman at all. Nobody ain’t told us you was suppose to come round here acting like a overseer.”

  “I am not your bossman at all. I am your friend. I want you to act in such a way that I can help you,” Moses replied patiently.

  “And how come you want to help us? How much are you getting out of it? Perhaps it is just like the people say. A cousin of mine who talks with a man who has a friend who talks with a palace guard says that all the people of the court say that youse jealous of Suten-Rech Ta-Phar and that you go around stirring up trouble to make yourself a King. You want to be everybody’s boss.”

  Moses shrunk up inside like darkness at dawn. Such misunderstanding of motives! Such a will to see evil where only good was meant. Such a trampling on his sacrifices, for he had all but decided to resign from the army and to devote his time to bettering the condition of the Hebrews.

  “I don’t want to be anybody’s boss. In fact, that is the very thing I want to do away with,” he said quietly.

  “Don’t look like it,” one of the men retorted. “If what you are doing ain’t bossing then there isn’t a crocodile in the Nile! Calling yourself our friend, and liable to get anybody in Goshen killed if ever they find—”

  “Sh-sh-sh!”

  Everybody looked scared and glanced about them fearfully.

  “Don’t you people see that I am trying to help you? Being a bossman is the last thing on earth I want to do. I want you—”

  “Oh, yeah! We’re mighty proud to hear all of them sentiments out of you. Cause some of us was scared you was trying to get to be our boss. And since we ain’t heard tell of nobody putting you over us, so far as I’m concerned I’d rather have a enemy overseer that just beat me and sent me on home with a sore back than one of them friends that might kill me and bury me in the sand.”

  For a moment Moses stood hurt at the lack of appreciation of his behavior and of the motives that prompted him. Then he was afraid of what might happen if such talk reached Pharaoh. Then he saw the gloating look on the face of the one who was talking, and a brother gloat on the face of several others. So! The will to humble a man more powerful than themselves was stronger than the emotion of gratitude. It was stronger than the wish for the common brotherhood of man. It was the cruelty of chickens—fleeing with great clamor before superior force but merciless towards the helpless. It made him feel cruel himself for a moment. Then his anger passed and he felt sad again. Well, anyway, the Hebrew who had been made overseer understood. Moses could tell by his face. The whole thing was too big and sudden for quick words from him. He turned abruptly and walked away.

  “Did I tell that Prince something?” he heard the voice of a man behind him. “I told his head a mess!”

  “You sure did. I’ll bet you he won’t come messing around here no more. Ha! Many dogs are the death of the lion.”

  “So they think I could not have answered them, or that I was afraid,” Moses mused as he strode on off. “They don’t realize that it all would have been too easy for me.”

  Thinking and walking and feeling, he was at home before he knew it. He did not follow his usual pattern by stopping in the big reception hall and sending word by one of his servants to the Princess that he had arrived. He went straight to his private suite and sat down to think. But this was not the place. Observing that the door between his apartment and that of the Princess was firmly closed for the first time, it brought back all of his unpleasant happenings of the week. So he summoned his steward and commanded him to follow to his quarters in the barracks.

  “You are to bring several changes of clothes to me here,” Moses told the steward, “and a well-filled purse and the most necessary ornaments. I am going to live with my men for a long while. Hurry and do as I tell you.”

  “I have something to tell you, Suten-Rech, if you will listen.”

  “First go and get me what I told you and then tell me whatever you want to.”

  The steward hurried off in the new darkness and Moses sat and thought, and grew by inches as he thought. “The time has come for a decision in my life. I’m going to sit right here until my whiskers touch the ground, if I don’t come to some decision as to which way my life is going and why.” He sat motionless with his hands joined behind his head until the steward returned with his things.

  “Suten-Rech, there are some who say that you are an enemy of Egypt.”

  “They do?”

  “Yessir, they say that you are stirring up the Hebrews to rise against the country.”

  “They wish to destroy me, and so they have quit using sense and taken to using phrases. Slogans can be worse than swords if they are only put in the right mouths.”

  “Yessir. And they say that you are going about secretly killing off the oveseers who had charge of large groups of Hebrews to give them a chance to kill us.”

  “They said I killed overseers? Who said that? When?”

  “I think the word was sent secretly to Pharaoh today telling him when and how you killed this particular man and where his body can be found.”

  “Oh.”

  “It is said that Pharaoh is very angry with you and plans to have you seized tomorrow morning when you go to that conference about troop movement. Suten-Rech, I love you and I love to serve you. It would have been better if you had not declared yourself a Hebrew.”

  “I never did.”

  “There are several people who swear that you told them that you were a Hebrew and would do anything at all to serve them.”

  “Just one lie after another one. Somebody wants me out of the way and they are not missing a trick to get rid of me. But it does not distress me as much as it would have done a month ago, now that I have made up my mind to leave Memphis and perhaps leave Egypt.”

  “But why?”

  “For one thing, I suppose it is the easiest thing for me to do right now. Property always rewards its defenders and the property owners now believe that I am plotting with the Hebrew slaves against their possessions. So the people who are lying against me are in high favor now according to the signs. So I am going away.”

  “When?”

  “Before the old man becomes a child again.” When Moses said that, he was telling his thoughts by pictures. The people said that Horus, the sun-god, the god of the two horizons, became a baby each morning at sunrise and grew older all day long. By sundown he was an old man with a beard. But during the night his youth returned and he rose the next morning in his red glory and with his watchful eye drove away all darkness.

  “Oh, Suten-Rech, please take me with you.”

  “No, I am going alone. I want to leave all that I was behind me for a while—perhaps forever.”

  “Oh, Prince Moses! Egypt could not spare you. You are part of the King himself and he is descended from Ra. You must not think of leaving the country. Justice will win.”

  “That may be so, and then again you may be right. But I’m going just the same. You must tell my wife, the Princess, first of all. Get the news to her tomorrow after breakfast, will you?”

  “Oh, yes, sir, I will.”

  “I trust you to do exactly as I tell you. She must be told first of all. Announce to her ladies in waiting that you have come with a message from me. Then wait until you deliver the news to her in person.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “To t
he desert, I reckon, to think. I feel something I have never been conscious of before, and I must find out from within myself what to do about it.”

  “What is that?”

  “I feel the cursing thought of the law and power. I had always felt the beneficence of law and power and never stopped to consider that it had any other side. It is a sword with two edges. Never mind whether it is directed against me honestly or not. That has nothing to do with its power to injure me.”

  Moses kept his steward with him until he was ready to go. His signet, his state ring, his other rings and necklaces he hid about his person with his money and went out into the darkness. He knew the steward would do as he was told to because he was afraid not to. He knew that the steward would wait a long time before the Princess would receive that message from him in the morning, and so it would be very late before anyone else knew that he was running away. He would be beyond the borders before they suspected that he was not in his quarters, or somewhere around the palace.

  CHAPTER 10

  All night he traveled and thought. He found his unformed wishes taking shape. He was wishing for a country he had never seen. He was seeing visions of a nation he had never heard of where there would be more equality of opportunity and less difference between top and bottom.

  Out under the late moonlight he could see chickens roosting along the ridgepoles of barns with the arrogant tail feathers of roosters sticking out against the sky, and that brought his thoughts around to the hundreds of questions he wanted to ask of Nature. It gave him a freshening hope, as he fled for his life from Rameses. “The man who interprets Nature is always held in great honor. I am going to live and talk with Nature and know her secrets. Then I will be powerful, no matter where I may be. And now that I am free from wars and warfare, I shall go to Koptos. Not at this very moment, for if I am found in Egypt they will kill me sure. Wait a little while and grow whiskers and they won’t know me from the next one, especially if I stay away from certain vicinities. I am going to answer the questions that Mentu raised in me. Is there a box in the middle of the river at Koptos? Does it contain a book? Was the book written by the god Thoth, whose messenger is the Ibis? Is it guarded by a snake? Is the snake really deathless? These were the questions that hurt him to hold inside him because the saw-teeth of his curiosity and impatience gave him no peace. From now on his sword should cease to think for him. He would spend the rest of his life asking Nature the why of her moods and measures. As he sailed swiftly down the river Nile, he saw many things in the water and along the banks which he would like to investigate and which he now regretted to leave. He realized now how Mentu had aroused his thought, and that once you wake up thought in a man, you can never put it to sleep again. He saw that he had merely been suppressing himself during his military period. That was over and gone. Everybody has some special road of thought along which they travel when they are alone to themselves. And his road of thought is what makes every man what he is.

  Bright and soon three mornings later, Moses was standing beside the Red Sea. What he wanted was a large boat to cross over into Asia. He talked to first one man and another about renting a boat, but with no success. It was early for the rest of the world, but late so far as the fishermen were concerned. Three hours before every available boat had gone out to catch fish. So Moses finally sat down to wait until a seaworthy craft should come in with its load, or without one as the luck might be. So that is how he got to talking with the old man who said he was too old to go out with his boy any longer.

  While he waited he noticed what he had not noticed before—that whoever was about the water front had left off what they were doing and were collected about him. They were respectful, even reverential to a degree, but everybody’s thoughts and actions were influenced by his presence. Under the circumstances it began to worry him a little. Several of the men withdrew into a knot down the beach a little way. Then the old man crept up to him.

  “Suten-Rech,” he said in a low tone, “them men is figuring out how to make some money out of you.”

  “They do? And how do they plan to do it?”

  The old man scratched his head and regarded Moses shrewdly. “We don’t see a Prince in a hurry often.”

  “How do they know that I am a Prince? And why do they think I am in a hurry?”

  “All anybody needs to do is to look at you and they would know you was a Prince. The way you act proves that you’re in a big hurry to cross over on the other side. So them men—yonder, Suten-Rech—done agreed not to find you a boat until you are ready to pay a large price for it. None of us ain’t got nothing, you know.”

  “I wish they would hurry and make up their minds on the price.”

  The old man crept closer and murmured in the ear of Moses.

  “Some folks got minds already made up that could help you.”

  “Why don’t they let me know, then? I am really in a big hurry to cross over.”

  “Take me for instance—I am poor and old too, so that the money would do me more good than anybody else around here.”

  “Have you a boat?”

  “No, my Prince. But I have something to tell you which you don’t need a boat to do if you will give me the money whilst the others are too far off to hear what we are saying.”

  Moses reached for his purse and gave generously. The man kissed the money in a sort of ecstasy and hid it in his clothes.

  “I never expected to be so rich!” he said in an exalted tone. “Now, I can have a funeral of the second class with a tomb. Oh, yes, my Prince, it is all a matter of the hour and the tide and you can wade across the sea.”

  “The Red Sea is a mighty place of waters. You are joking with me and I am in no mood for jokes.”

  “Don’t kill me, Suten-Rech, I wouldn’t dare to joke with such a big man as you. Look, you walk down the beach about two miles north and you come to a narrow neck of water, where the Red Sea joins the outer sea. It ain’t never very deep there at no time, and at certain times at low tide, the strait is just about dry. If a man started at the hour when the tide is lowest, before it rushes back he could be on the other side—if the man was right peart in his walking. A sort of light trot would put you across there in no time.”

  Moses hurried away and broke into a run as soon as he was out of sight. The tide was receding, but he did not stand and wait for it. He pulled off his shoes and his shenti, the short skirt worn by the military men and began to wade across. All the time the water was shrinking away before him. So Moses felt himself moving Godward with an understanding of force and time. So he walked out with clean feet on the other side.

  Moses had crossed over. He was not in Egypt. He had crossed over and now he was not an Egyptian. He had crossed over. The short sword at his thigh had a jewelled hilt but he had crossed over and so it was no longer the sign of high birth and power. He had crossed over, so he sat down on a rock near the seashore to rest himself. He had crossed over so he was not of the house of Pharaoh. He did not own a palace because he had crossed over. He did not have an Ethiopian Princess for a wife. He had crossed over. He did not have friends to sustain him. He had crossed over. He did not have enemies to strain against his strength and power. He had crossed over. He was subject to no law except the laws of tooth and talon. He had crossed over. The sun who was his friend and ancestor in Egypt was arrogant and bitter in Asia. He had crossed over. He felt as empty as a post hole for he was none of the things he once had been. He was a man sitting on a rock. He had crossed over.

  CHAPTER 11

  Which way he was going when he got rested, Moses didn’t know. He knew where he had come from and what it meant, but where he was going was something else again. Oh, well, he had the rest of his life to strain with that subject. So he sat on a rock in the morning sun on the far side of the Red Sea and conferred with the Never Untrue, which in a common way of speaking people call Experience. In this way he walked backwards over his road from the palace to the seat on the rock in a strange nation. He looked
back and the glance changed him like Lot’s wife.

  “How was a young man to know these things?” he thought out loud. “You have to go to life to know life. God! It costs you something to do good! You learn that by experience, too. If you want that good feeling that comes from doing things for other folks then you have to pay for it in abuse and misunderstanding. It seems like the first law of Nature is that everybody likes to receive things, but nobody likes to feel grateful. And the very next law is that people talk about tenderness and mercy, but they love force. If you feed a thousand people you are a nice man with suspicious motives. If you kill a thousand you are a hero. Continue to get them killed by the thousands and you are a great conqueror, than which nothing on earth is greater. Oppress them and you are a great ruler. Rob them by law and they are proud and happy if you let them glimpse you occasionally surrounded by the riches that you have trampled out of their hides. You are truly divine if you meet their weakness with the sword to slay and the dogs to tear. The only time you run a great risk is when you serve them. The most repulsive thing to all men is gratitude. Men give up property, freedom and even life before they will have the obligation laid on them. Yet they make offerings at every altar and pray fervently to every god they have ever made to make them thankful. But no god has ever twisted Nature to that extent. So they often rush out of temples to destroy those who have served them too well.

  Two hours passed by Moses and gave him eye-looks. Then the strange sun drove him from his rock to find some shelter and some food. And since everything moves ever west, Moses buckled on his shoes and his shenti and went on across the world with the sun.

  That night he came to a place where caravans rested for the night. There was a squat stone and mud house and several tents. Men from the four directions gathered around a fire outside and let their night selves live. They laughed a lot and drank to bring on feelings and talked. Many races and tongues like the streets of Memphis and Rameses. One woman particularly was conscious of the approval of men. She had fine eyes and she rocked her upper body in the saddle of her hips as she walked about the fire from group to group, feinting at men with her eyes and attacking them with her body. One man played upon a stringed instrument and finally the woman danced in a way that Moses liked. The man played again and another man sang a song with sad words but funny gestures and intonations. “I had a good woman but the fool laid down and died—” and the audience made him sing the details over and over and over.