A Cloudy Day on the Western Shore

by Mohamed Mansi Qandil

  At last he came to the old royal palace, which was not far from the Temple of Karnak. The palace was cloaked in shadow, and bats swooped around it. The trees surrounding it had grown into a forest, which screened it entirely from the city. There was no one in the vicinity—as if everyone feared the palace, although his mother, the queen, had not left it, nor had she declared any antipathy for Amun. She had little faith in his new god; she had refused to leave Thebes and join him. She remained in her accustomed wing of the palace, keeping none by her but a few faithful servants. She could not have imagined living far from the city that had seen her in her glory.

  He looked about before advancing along the avenue bordered on either side by palms. The palace came into view, with its columns and its walls of stone: dark, secluded, inaccessible except by a wooden bridge that passed over an embankment of mud. In times past this was where the guards had stood, barring entry to strangers; now, however, there was no one. He ordered the attendants to stand at the access to the bridge, and proceeded alone toward the entrance. The wooden planks of the bridge creaked beneath his feet, as if threatening to give way. The air had grown cold—everything around him had taken on an aspect of wildness and desolation. Tendrils of hyacinth bean, bougainvillea, and wild brambles grew around the entryway to the palace, while on either side rose broken statuary, in whose gaping holes bats had taken up residence. On hearing his footsteps, the startled creatures burst out in a black cloud. He climbed the dirty steps and entered the palace at last.

  There was a shrill cry—of a tormented woman, in desperate pain. Could this be the voice of the queen? Had he come too late?

  He hurried on into the palace’s stony recesses. He could smell Queen Tiye’s fragrance everywhere, for she still had not given up her habit of spraying perfume all around her wherever she was; she had her own special and distinctive mixture, which came from Nubia, and she left traces of it everywhere she went. Some slave girls appeared, and were astonished at the sight of him. He did not pause, however, as the fragrance led him toward her room. He saw someone coming from the inner chambers of the palace, panting with the effort of animating his corpulent body. Catching sight of him, Akhenaten stopped at once—even in dim light, he recognized him: it was Ramouz, the governor of Thebes, who had maintained his loyalty to Akhenaten, despite pressure from Amun’s priests. Ramouz fell to his knees before him, but Akhenaten raised him up and said urgently, “How is she?”

  “The sight of you will bring her back to life, my lord,” Ramouz replied.

  This was not true. The smell of death mingled with the scent of her perfume, and the cries rose up once more. This time there was no doubt that it was she. They both shivered, and Ramouz said, “She is suffering from terrible bouts of delirium, as if the spirit of Sekhmet had taken possession of her. She destroys anything within reach, and digs her fingernails into the faces of the slave girls and servants. It’s got to where everyone fears to approach her.”

  He started walking again through the palace’s dusky corridors. When he caught sight of the door to her room, his pace slackened. He took in his surroundings: torches almost guttering out; a row of black-clad women sitting and leaning against the walls of stone; bats colliding with the walls like souls that had lost their way, and leaving traces of blood upon the stones; torn curtains and broken pottery; the air stagnant with the mixed odors of vomit and burnt pitch; the sound of things being shattered. A slave girl emerged from the room in headlong flight. He went forward hesitantly, and went in.

  It was a spacious room, lit by dozens of candles emplaced along the walls. Moonlight was reflected back from the balcony, which opened onto the Nile. He saw her bed on one side of the room; the diaphanous curtains draped around it stirred. It was the same bed in which his father had died. With trembling fingers he parted the curtains, and saw her stretched out there, her eyes closed, her body desiccated and emaciated, thin as a reed; her skull was hairless, her skin darker than he had ever seen it. Feeling his legs give way beneath him, he sat down on the edge of the bed. Her face, sallow and wrinkled though it was, retained its gravitas, its awe-inspiring dignity.

  All at once her features convulsed—was it a spasm of pain, or was she dreaming? Or had she caught his own rank odor? She opened her eyes and stared at him in astonishment. Hollow-eyed, she tried to work out who he was: this exhausted and bedraggled man, the Pharaoh of Egypt, scion of the gods, son of the most powerful of kings on earth . . . a dreary ghost such as appears only in a nightmare. Nevertheless, a sorrowful light dawned in her face, and she smiled feebly. She recognized him, even though she had dismissed him. She reached out with her fingers and clutched his hand. Frail though she was, she clung to him, not wanting to be parted from him, not now.

  “Stranger that you are,” she said faintly, “you no longer much resemble him whom I once knew.”

  In silence, he held her gaze. Neither of them, any longer, looked the same as before. She attempted to rise, but could not. Catching her breath with difficulty, she said, “Are you not a rather lowly Pharaoh? Creeping back into your city in disguise. I expected you to come with your army and burn it down!”

  “I wished to come only to see you,” he replied, “not . . . not to start a war.”

  A spasm went through her body. “Are you in pain?” he asked gently.

  She tried to smile, but her voice came weak and gasping. “Pain no longer has any meaning, my son,” she said. “I’ve endured all kinds. More pain or less—it makes no difference.”

  Next to her bed was a large table covered with vials of medicine and jars of ointment and herbal powders—none of them of use anymore. She studied his face earnestly. “Isn’t it strange?” she said. “You, who at one time did not resemble your father—suddenly, just in this very moment, you’ve come to look like him. So long ago . . . how youthful and strong he was, especially when he came to me at Akhmim to take me away, as his bride, to his regal palace—ah, but this palace is not so regal without him.”

  At this moment he felt as though he ought to bend over her, take her frail body in his arms, and lay his head upon her breast for a few moments, as he had been used to do when he was small. But they stayed as they were, apart. Tiye did not feel the need to draw any nearer to him or touch him more than she had done already. She was looking at him sharply, with a searching gaze. “Why have you done all this to us?” she said suddenly. “Why did you turn the world upside down? Weren’t you strong enough to let it be?”

  In her sunken eyes was all the vitality that remained to her. So intently did she fix her gaze on him that she communicated her own fears to him. This question had long consumed her—doubtless she had deferred her own death, waiting for an answer. His throat felt dry. He had come to bid her farewell, not for a reckoning. He turned his face away and in a low voice said, “Because I hated Amun. Not for one day did I ever believe in him.”

  “Liar!” she said, her voice shaking. “You believed in him just as your father did—it was he who made Amun lord of the gods, and you yourself were about to build a great temple to him. What was it that changed you so suddenly?”

  What happened had not been sudden. For a long time he had struggled with himself and suffered from the impediments thrown up by the priests, but the moment had come when he could bear it no more—he had reached his limit—he hated Amun, and this caused him to hate them all. He said, “Why do you insist on knowing this?”

  She spoke once more, her voice still unsteady. “Because it would release me from the pain of thinking about it,” she said. “It would ease my mind a little to know that there was a reason. Everything pales beside the charge of heresy which they attach to you. Speak to me truly and tell me something that will heal my spirit.”

  She took on her queenly aspect, and the candlelight reflected in her eyes turned them to a pair of glowing coals. She would not believe anything he might say to her—she would detect the lie in his face. He did not wish to speak of his private reasons—the deep anguish that had beset him fro
m the time he was a child, right up to this moment. Hesitatingly, in sorrow both for her and for himself, he said, “You wouldn’t like to hear what I have to say.”

  “Whatever it may be,” she said firmly, “I shall bear it.”

  He spoke haltingly, uncertain of what he should say. Yet his breast was heavy with its burden—he had not dared to reveal his secret to anyone, even his new god. From the depths of his soul he summoned up the difficult words, remembering that long-ago night.

  It was the night of the full moon, when all who dwelt at Thebes turned into animals. Sirius, the Dog Star, had reached the middle of the sky and the rising waters of the Nile had surged so wildly at its banks that the bulwarks had burst, sending through the veins of the earth the first potent gush, which would fertilize the fields and rouse the dormant waterwheels. At such times all the spirits of black magic would awaken to partake of the special festivals that were mounted for Amun’s sake. At that time Akhenaten stood upon the threshold of young manhood, his veins throbbing with his own potency, with urgency, with desire. He was not yet permitted to attend the festivities being held inside the temple. His father had left off warmongering, and his powers had waned—he kept to his bed most of the time; it was Amun who relentlessly ran the city of Thebes, the priests having vanished beneath their masks. And it was his father, the king, who had elevated Amun above the rest of the country’s deities, making him the god who subsumed the characteristics of all the others combined. He made everyone in Thebes understand that he was an absolute god, and without equal. Among the priests he had a dark and hidden place in the Holy of Holies, but little was known as to what sort of rituals went on within it.

  It was Nephru, his attendant and friend, who had given him the inspiration for the idea. Nephru was the son of Ramouz, Thebes’s administrative chief, and it had fallen to him, out of all the noblemen’s sons, to serve as companion to the Pharaoh from childhood, sitting with him at his lessons and accompanying him on hunting trips. They had remained close, growing up together, learning to read and write, going out to hunt, sometimes even wearing the same clothes. It was Nephru who had awakened him on that moonlit night and suggested that they sneak into the temple to observe the fertility rites that were being held for Amun. Nephru was brimming with restless vitality. The palace slave girls pursued him relentlessly—unlike the young Pharaoh, solitary and severe, who avoided everyone. Nephru knew the location of the secret passageway that connected the palace with the Temple of Karnak—in a moment of passion, one of the slave girls had told him.

  He followed Nephru nervously, fearfully—but Nephru was eager and excited, precocious in his physical maturity and possessed by a craving to learn the secret of these rites. They went down to the garden, where the moon flooded the lawns with light and everything was touched with magic, and a sense of anticipation. They entered the dark tunnel, where the air was close and hot. They dared not carry a torch, but set off groping their way along. The tunnel was clean, paved in stone, and spacious enough to accommodate a man on horseback, or a woman borne in a sedan chair. It sloped downward, as if leading them to another world.

  At the end of the tunnel a faint light appeared, and when they emerged from its mouth they found themselves right in the temple’s central hall, which opened before them as if inviting them to proceed still further. They passed among dozens of torches, watched by the eyes of immense stone statues. The sacred lake came into view, its surface stirred by the night breezes. There were no priests, and guards were not allowed this far into the temple. They circled the obelisks, which stood like drawn swords, and stole into the marble-tiled inner corridors. They observed a statue of Amun with a ram’s head and curved horns, which stared at them as if in collusion with them. The young Pharaoh’s heart beat rapidly, but on he went, following Nephru.

  The sound of music and drumbeats rose from somewhere within the temple. The two youths advanced, hiding behind columns, until before them stood the inner chamber of the Holy of Holies, the deepest and most secret realm of the temple. The hall was blazing with torchlight and redolent with incense. The wooden ceiling, inlaid with sculpted patterns and perched upon towering columns, had the design of a lotus blossom. The space was teeming with men and women, but no one noticed the two of them—the rites had reached a frenzied climax. There were nude women, their bodies gleaming in the torchlight, performing a circular dance to the rhythm of the boisterous music under the gaze of dozens of priests, who stood in a line next to the wall feverishly ogling them.

  He stared at the women, shocked—he knew all of them, although he had never seen them naked before. Still, he knew their faces well—they frequented the palace, where they would spend long hours in the queen’s wing and the Pharaoh’s garden. They were the wives of Thebes’s luminaries, its dignitaries and leaders—respectable, influential women. Who had stripped them of their clothing and exposed them this way? Amid the din, they kept turning. Then a very tall woman stepped forward and stopped in front of the altar. She was draped in a gown of sheer linen. She stood there in silence, motionless, until a new group of priests entered. They themselves were bare-chested, with short garments below. They were driving a fat ram that had been raised inside the temple—it evoked the head of Amun. They lifted it onto the high altar, constructed of marble. As they set it down they bound its legs. The high priest came forward—a man well-known to the young Pharaoh. Grasping a sharp knife, he stood before the ram and began to recite prayers. Then he brought the knife down upon its neck, taking its head off in one stroke, as a fountain of blood gushed forth. The woman now stepped forward, removed the gown that clothed her, and poured blood over her naked body. Nephru drew back with a gasp, not daring to continue watching the spectacle. He sensed that he had got in over his head, and seen more than was fitting. He turned his back and hurried away, vanishing even as the young Pharaoh stood on, transfixed, incapable of movement.

  The queen sat up—a strange animation had come over her. She stared at him, a peculiar expression on her face. “You sneaked in and saw me naked?” she exclaimed.

  But she was unable to get out of bed. She floundered weakly, waving her hand at him. “Stop,” she said. “No more.”

  But he could not have stopped now, even if the words were to freeze on his tongue. He was helpless to stop the flow of images that were passing through his memory. The secret his mind had striven for all these years to erase had awoken, as if a hole had opened up in the wall of his memory and everything had begun to spill out of it. Without any conscious desire on his part, the horrifying details of that night had come back to assail him.

  Her body, covered with blood, lay across the altar, red and gleaming and inflamed with desire. The high priest removed his clothing as well; he appeared huge in his nakedness. He wore a mask resembling the face of the ram—accursed symbol of Amun. As the priest approached the altar, she made ready for him, parting her legs. The young Pharaoh was on the point of losing consciousness. He could never have imagined his mother—a Pharaoh of Egypt who terrified everyone, offspring of the sacred gods and wife of the Pharaoh who had conquered half the earth—laid out like a common prostitute before a man with the head of a ram. He set upon her, and she, bloodied as she was, welcomed him with an urgency that mounted together with her cries, as they moved together to a single rhythm. The priests’ voices rose in a hoarse cacophony, as if in a summons to the other naked women, who now all hastened to anoint themselves with the bloody residue. Trembling with desire, they lay down beneath the feet of the younger, shaven-headed priests.

  Akhenaten’s tears fell as he watched his mother crushed beneath the weight of the enormous priest, who now turned her over onto her stomach, and continued ravishing her without a pause. Akhenaten sobbed out loud, but no one noticed him, the sound of his anguish overwhelmed by the orgy of bodies in their feverish revels. He retreated back into the long, desolate tunnel, and sat there for the rest of the night, weeping and shivering. He would never be able to look any of them in the face again�
�not the high priest who had lain with the woman who held the throne, nor the younger priests, who had violated the noblewomen of Thebes.

  His tears flowed: before Queen Tiye’s eyes the Pharaoh was weeping, as the memories of his youth—corrupted and lost—awoke within him.

  “That was a sacred rite,” she said bleakly. “We had to perform it each time the Nile flooded. I regarded my body as not my own. Once it was covered in blood, it became a body that belonged to the goddess Yamout, and he was her husband, the god Amun.”

  “No!” he replied, shaking. “It was a rite borne of Amun’s debauched priests! I hated him from that moment, and I hated Thebes, and I hated . . .”

  He fell silent, not finishing his thought, but the queen got up, her limbs overtaken by an extraordinary energy. She tried to get as far away from him as possible, coming to a halt at the wall of the balcony overlooking the river. She leaned against it and wept. It was the first time he had ever seen her weep. “Woe to you, Tiye!” she moaned. “You’ll die with your son hating you, you’ll pass into the shadows of the other realm wrapped in the bitterest kind of hatred . . .”

  Silence fell between them. The only sound he could hear was her struggle for breath. All at once she realized that he had done what he did because he was ashamed of her: he was trying to salvage his own throne from the fiasco that had been ordained for it. It was not simply to prove his authority that he opposed priests who were stronger than he was; it was also that they harbored a secret contempt for him. He had begun his reign in fear of them, had decided to build a temple to Amun—easily the greatest temple ever built—and had chosen a location far from Karnak, in the hope that it would be relatively unsullied. A great portion of the construction was completed as he tried to persuade himself that he was more devoted to Amun than all the rest of them, but when the builders began construction of the Holy of Holies, with all its gloomy rooms and tortuous vaults and hidden altars, the odor of blood rose to his nostrils, and he knew that he could go no further. He could not deceive himself by establishing yet another place for the enactment of ritual orgies. He halted the construction, so that he might reconsider. But the priests wouldn’t hear of it—they spoke to him in soft, sorrowful tones: he must resume construction, appropriate more land to cover expenses, and guarantee them a greater portion of the spoils from the wars he would wage in the future. He did not want war, nor did he want to acquiesce in robbing the innocent, or to be half a Pharaoh, fit only to be the son of a dishonored mother. It was then he came to his decision, then that he stood up to them. No matter what it cost him, he would not finish building this temple.