Ancient Evenings

by Norman Mailer

  Then, indeed, I felt relief. His long speech had managed to calm me, and again I felt something like good feeling for the old man at this unexpected turn of kindness.

  Now, as the moon passed over the peak of the Pyramid of Khufu, Menenhetet raised his hand delicately, and I gasped at the beauty of that white light which came down upon us from the triangular slope.

  Menenhetet spoke in the quietest voice, as if the smallest quiver of his throat might distort the purity of the light: “This divine Pyramid,” he whispered, “is the exact equal of the First Hill that Temu brought up from the Celestial Waters. So it is the tomb to contain all other tombs. By entry into this Pyramid, you will descend into the currents of the Duad.”

  And as I looked at the great slope before us, smooth as a sheet of papyrus in the moonlight and large to my eyes as the expanses of the desert, so did I wonder how we might ever enter. The joinings of each great block of limestone must be narrower than the space between two fingers when squeezed together. But I had not long to wait. Menenhetet walked the last hundred steps to the base, and there he threw back his head and uttered a cry I had never heard before, not the long warble of a bird nor any mysterious grunt out of a beast, but a voice as shrill in its center as the piping of a bat, and a slab of stone on the slope above us revolved in its socket like a door.

  “It is time,” he said to me, and began with surprising nimbleness to mount the slope. I followed, expecting my breath to be locked with anguish; yet, I felt no fear. But then a child knows less awe before the rising of the sun than does a man. Was I entering at the moment when death could feel most natural to me? I know that as we went through the opening into the Pyramid, a change came upon the air. If I had been blind, my ears would have told me that I was passing into another domain. I listened to a delicate silence, close to the unheard quivering of a small bird’s wings. The hush of every temple was in the weight of this silence, and the lost echo of each animal sacrificed on the altar stone. I knew again the haze that rises from the dying beast, the drip of its blood bringing peace to the same air that has just been stricken by the murder of the animal. If we had wounded the stone by our entrance, the echo of our footsteps in these vaults would quiet all disorder.

  Down we went along a promenade in the dark, down some low tunnel that made us stoop, and before us was the scuttling of rats, and a scattering of insects, while bats flew so near I all but heard the menace of their brain.

  Yet these disturbances also ceased. There came, as we walked, a sense of calm heavy as the oily swell of the Nile on the flood, and I began to have an expectation of larger space opening before me, and, indeed, in the next ten steps, we entered a tall and narrow gallery. By the pipings of the bats, I supposed its ceiling must have been thirty feet above, and the gallery was dark. All the same, I could feel light about me. I did not see a thing, but the interior of my mind was so full of light I could recall how, on a given day in my childhood, I had passed once down the Nile with my parents in a barge under a sky of sunlight so brilliant that my thoughts felt exposed to the sun, as if all of me was in a golden barge afloat in a golden light. My father and mother were taking me to visit the Pharaoh, and I was so alive with the pleasure of my limbs that I even remember the color of saffron in the gown I wore. On that morning there would be sights to disrupt the eye and savage your nose—the corpse of a dog was rotting on the riverbank—but the day was begun in splendor, and each push of the boatman’s pole restored my calm even as the sound of our steps in the tunnel now overcame the rustlings of the insects and the bats.

  At this moment, Menenhetet took my hand, and I noticed that my great-grandfather’s breath was perfumed; the air he exhaled from his lungs must share the intoxication of my interior light. Some of the calm of that morning remained in the warmth of his palm as if we were sharing the loyalty of family flesh, but soon, given the narrowness of the passage which made walking side by side awkward, he had to withdraw his hand. As I went on in this darkness, bathed in light behind my eyes, I seemed to pass through vales of heat and cold, the air collecting in chill pods like the void of a tomb; yet another five steps, and I was back in the balmy Egyptian night breathing the warm perfume I had first taken in on my great-grandfather’s breath, a scent that did not seem to come from him so much as from the stone itself, until I began to feel as if we were not on our way up a steep narrow ramp so much as winding our passage from tent to tent or a mysterious bazaar, and in each tent lived a presence pure to itself. One had only to offer attention, and into one’s thoughts wisdom would seep as naturally as the infusion of an herb in water will set free its essence. Within the intoxication of this light, and the gatherings of aroma, I began to feel as if I did not move with my body, but glided along in a bark. I could still reach out an arm on either side, and the walls of the gallery were there to touch, yet I felt closer to the Nile on that one golden day I could remember of my boyhood, or, rather, as if much confused, like the Hebrew who could not separate what was to come from all that he might dream, I felt as if the river was washing along the floor, and the walls were riverbanks, and I was on the Nile once more, even as on that day of brilliant sunlight I had rested on cushions of a yellow cloth brighter than the saffron of my garment. A silver filigree in the cushion still tickled intimately against my seat, so that, unseen by my parents, I was trying to rub the tender skin of my cheeks against those tendrils of silver thread—a sweet pleasure, for I was no more than six.

  My parents were speaking. What they said left their lips with many a twist (since now I remember how deceitful they were often to one another) and the curve of their words must have traveled with us on the serpentine of the Nile awash in golden light upon the brown waters of the river, and we passed by green and mud-gold banks, even the gold inlay on the cedar wood of the fine seats of our barge still journeyed with me in the curve of their words and my mother was speaking, I remember, of a sacred bull (and I was hearing her voice even now as I stood with my hands on the wall of this stone gallery as near to me as a palm tree one could reach on the bank) and her voice was no ordinary voice, but full of the command of every sensuous instinct, deep as the voice of a man but full of tender and mysterious resonance. She had only to hum a note with that voice, say no more than “The crook and the flail of the Pharaoh Ptah-nem-hotep,” and my belly felt as dusky as the colors of a dark rose.

  My father rarely replied to what she said. Speech between himself and my mother was not their common practice, and they were now together for excellent but separate reasons—they were each paying a call on this same Ptah-nem-hotep, our own Ramses Nine, my father on a trip that took place nearly every day, and my mother on a rare visit, although I did not know as I thought of it now why she did not, given her beauty, visit with the Pharaoh more often. But the cynicism of this thought—so far from the understanding of a boy of six—proved enough to dispel the memory. My mind was brought back to our ascent up the gallery, and I ceased to live on that morning and no longer floated within it.

  Menenhetet now led me to an alcove by one of the walls. Since I still felt, in some measure, the sensation of being on a boat, it was not unlike floating into a harbor on a dark night. The presence of light in my body was certainly gone. Then I gave an exclamation. In front of me was water at the level of my waist. I could see a star within this water—had the floor become my sky? I felt a clear thrill as if I were falling into depths yet would never smash; the thrill ceased, and I realized I was looking into a large bowl of water, and the star was a reflection. The heavens were beyond, still beyond!—Menenhetet had only led me to a place in the Pyramid where a shaft came down to us at a sharp angle from the sky. When I now peered upward I could see the star in the aperture at the top. Even as I looked, it moved away from the center. In the interval I had studied it, this star had traveled enough to shift its position a palm’s width in the water. How remarkable that Menenhetet could lead me to the reflection at the instant its light lived in the center of the bowl.

  “Tha
t star has not been seen in this place for three hundred and seventy-two years,” he told me now. “We have a night for wonders between us all,” and for some reason this pious thought put a stimulation on my loins, and a curl of the happiest anticipation commenced at the root of my spine and curled upward like incense. An incantation came to me, from where, I do not know, but I said aloud: “The Pharaoh takes the blood of His beloved, and He plants therewith by the light of the sun.

  “What grows from the earth,” I heard myself say, “is the blessed plant of papyrus, and beneath the hands of men it becomes a field for scribes. And they plant their messages on this field. All the plants of the papyrus dwell in the clamor of all the writings that will ride upon that field like chariots, yet the field remembers a riverbank and every bud is like the lips of a mouth and every leaf a tongue of honey.”

  I saw the Nile again, and the heats were rising off the indolence of the river.

  This incantation, out of impulses as curious as I had ever known, for I had never heard the words before, produced a power sufficient to draw back into me the golden light of the Nile. Then I said, “Papyrus is a plant abhorred by crocodiles,” and had one moment of childish joy merry as the desire long ago to sprinkle flowers with the golden waters of my urine, and clear as that day, I also saw the flutter of a tiny spurwing as she nibbled at river worms embedded in the mouth of a crocodile, yes, saw that armored beast on the muddy banks, its mouth open in good-humored languor at the cleaning of its teeth by the spurwing, an improbable couple, but domesticity was in the fanning of her wings and the sleepy grunts of the great lizard. Some boatmen were singing on the Nile, “Oh, papyrus is a plant abhorred by crocodiles,” and nodded as they rowed upstream. Our boatmen, reduced by the heat to no more than a breechcloth to cover the purse of their penis and testicles, pushed against the long poles guiding us downstream, and the marvelous tickling in the skin of my seat began again, and I, in my turn, pushed against the silver filigree of the cushion. “Mud,” said my mother then, “is in my nostrils and my pores,” and she turned the fine curve of her nostril to the sight of a chariot, a horse, and a rider galloping in the heat of the day and in the dust of the road beside the riverbank, and I had then, as a child of six, even while full of delight at the passing of the charioteer, a clear glimpse forward into myself at twenty-one, as if I was not only the child but could see the life I was yet to live.

  As I stared at that star which hovered in the mirror of the water, the sentiment became so real that the past came back to me as if I were truly six, and yet could see myself at twenty-one, and I was again with that priest at his sister’s house and saw a view of the Nile from her window and heard the sounds of river water stroking the bank even as the body of the priest gave intent slaps against her flesh.

  I, next to Menenhetet, looking down through the darkness at the star, was overcome with the force of two such memories, myself at six, myself at twenty-one, and felt faint. It was then that my great-grandfather took my hand again. A vine grew foliage in my belly, curled along my limbs, and flowed out of my hand into the knuckles and thumb of Menenhetet, and my mind turned back to that gilded barge that drew my mother, my father, and myself down the Nile so that I understood at last why our Egyptian word for the eye is most certainly the same as our word for love and both are identical to our word for tomb. Whether love or the depth of mood which arose from such a tomb, the sensation that came from his fingers was certainly carrying me along the river, and belonged more to the brilliance of that long-departed day than to this niche off a pitch-black gallery in the depths of the Pyramid of Khufu.

  Then, with a twist to my memory as simple as pulling a lemon from a tree, so did I discover that Menenhetet was on the barge, and that was most certainly at odds with what I could remember. Yet I had only to give up the feeling—it was no longer a certainty—that Menenhetet had died in the year before I was born, and he was, yes, on the boat, and speaking to my mother. If I had seen the barge at first with my father and mother next to me, and with clarity more vivid than a temple painting, now I saw Menenhetet as well. He, too, sat beside me and his hair showed the silver of a virile maturity while the lines on his face had not yet become a myriad of wrinkles, terraces, and webs, but exhibited, instead, that look of character supported by triumph which comes to powerful men when they are sixty and still strong.

  Yet to see him with us was to give me as well some confusion as to where we were on the river. I knew we were on our way to visit the Pharaoh but now I could not understand why we did not travel up the river when my parents’ villa had its grounds located a long walk downstream from the Palace. Yet now we were going with the current, no sails set, and no oarsmen at work.

  There was only the boatman we called Stinking Body at the bow with his long pole to fend us off the bars, and Head-on-Backwards at the helm (that Head-on-Backwards who was also called Eater-of-Shadows for whenever we sailed upstream to the south, the tiller was in the shade of the sail). But now we were drifting down into the brunt of that prevailing breeze that came up out of the Delta, a wind strong enough to let us sail without oars upstream against the current. Today, however, we drifted down, lazily, NehaHau in the bow and Unem-Khaibitu, the Eater-of-Shadows, in the stern, while the rest of the crew—Bone-Smasher, White-Teeth, Eater-of-Blood and He-of-the-Nose—a tremendous nose—were lolling against the gunwales, an easy day for them.

  I was thinking that boatmen had ugly faces when at rest. If obliged to row upstream under the worst of conditions (when the river was in flood and they were working too hard to sing in unison) then the sound of their breath came close to the anguish of weeping, and they had the maniacal expression of horses in a frightened gallop, such an intensity of expression, such torture in the effort, that they could not be wholly ugly. At rest, however, their faces usually looked swollen. Nobody knew why rivermen when ashore were always in more fights than any other kind of laborer in Memphi, unless it was that they drank more beer, but it was true. Most of them had faces which looked as if a lion had been chewing on their cheeks. Besides, there was the whip. That was forever laying the welt of new scars over the old ones on their shoulders. Now and again it flicked around their neck to reach their face. As a result, half the boatmen were blind in an eye. (If blinded in both, they went to other labor.)

  Set-Qesu, the head boatman, not named Bone-Smasher for too little, was the one to apply the whip. When the winds were strong, my great-grandfather would on occasion take the lash. He could make the tip dance, crack it around a man’s waist and flick his navel, or if an oarsman ever stopped to scratch himself, sting the boatman’s armpit with such precision that a few hairs would fly off. Unfortunately, there was every reason to scratch. Where was the boatman without his lice?

  That bothered my mother considerably. She had a detestation of body-insects so intense that she could lose her composure at mention of them. While this was hardly an unusual attitude for a young matron of Memphi (since many in their fear of infestations would crop their heads and wear wigs for every public appearance) my mother was proud of her hair. It was vigorous and dark, and had a wave that curled with the sinuosity of the snake. So she preferred to keep it long and live in fear of head-lice. Indeed, there had been an episode just the night before. But now as I recollected, so was it also clear why we did not row upstream toward the Pharaoh’s Palace, but rather drifted down. My mother, my father, and I had spent last night with Menenhetet who lived up the river south of Memphi in a great house one hundred paces in width, an equal number in depth, and three stories high. It was said he had fifty rooms, and I knew he had a roof garden with awnings made of the material of tents, for there was a view from that roof at evening when the sun filled the river with a million red and dancing fish, and the desert to the east turned to indigo, even as the sandstone hills to the west became pink and carmine and orange and glowing gold, like the blood-fire of an oven as the sun went into the hills.

  My great-grandfather spoke to me at that moment—a rare o
ccasion. I was used to relatives and servants recognizing that I was not an ordinary child, indeed I could even feel again the sweet purity of the admiration I used to evoke in men and women to whom I spoke, for they were usually delighting in how adult I was for six. Menenhetet, however, had never indicated I was of any interest to him. Yet, now, he put a hand on my waist and drew me forward.