“That was when we felt the first moisture pass through the air. The wind came upriver from the Delta, past Memphi, and on to us. The sluggish green of the Nile, which had been like a soup thickening on the fire, began to ripple, and we used to say that a crocodile as long as the river was stirring beneath. You could not see his skin, but the surface of the water was sliding about. And everything that had died in the dry heat, lay in a scum on the top. Before our eyes the river began to fester. Carcasses and dead fish and dry vegetation floated up on the heavy skin of the new green Nile, and the air turned hot and wet. Then the new Nile came over the spits and tongues in the middle of the channel, and the river washed over the islands of reeds. Our sky was as full of birds as a field with flowers. They flew downstream with the rise, leaving each island of reeds as it went under, going down to islands still uncovered by these early waters, then on again, passing over our heads with a rush of wings louder than any current, myriads of birds. Each morning the water was higher than the day before, and the older men in the village began to measure their sticks. Although word always came from up the river that we would be higher this year, or lower, some of the old men claimed they could predict the rise by the color of the stream. As the river came up, so its surface changed into many restless waves, and you could hear the rush in the night as if these new waters were not one throat but an army, and when the color changed from green to the red we see each year in Memphi, we used to say it was heated by the flames of the Duad. And the dates in the palm trees turned red as the red water went by.
“We had no work to do now but protect our ditches, and therefore we could sit on our levees and watch where the water turned beneath in eddies so hollow you could put your arm in the hole and never get wet—so we would tell ourselves but never dared to put out an arm for fear this mouth of the million and one mouths of the river would suck us in.
“Then came the week when the river came right up over the lower banks and flowed into our fields, and on the first day the earth gave a sigh like a good cow gives to the knife in its hour of sacrifice. Even as a boy I could feel the land shiver when the water came over it and closed out the light. Now our one great river became a thousand little ones, and the fields turned to lakes and the meadows to great lagoons. At night, the red water lost the sun, and looked like the Blessed Fields and was silver in the moonlight. Our villages, built so close together along the bank that you could nearly reach one with a stone thrown from the other, were now as separated as dark islands in these fields of silver, and our dikes became the only roads. We would walk along the top and admire the basins below (which we called our rooms—our room-of-the-upper-field, our room-of-the-little-valley) for we had known how to take advantage of any hollow in the ground that was like a bowl, and around it had put our embankments and left openings for the flood, and now closed them when they were full. Rats walked on the dikes with us, even as ducks cavorted in the puddles. Out at the sides of the floodwater, in those fields closest to the desert, scorpions were looking for dry land, and rabbits fled and lynx and wolves—in different years I saw them all—fleeing the spread from the riverbanks. Each year, snakes came into our houses, and there was no hut where the damp did not come up out of the earth of our floors, while our donkeys and cattle could be heard through the night eating the forage we had piled around our walls, thereby dislodging the tarantulas. Sometimes, water rose over the lower dikes, and we could only visit other villages by using rafts of papyrus, and our basins would even wash out our villages while the cranes fed in a frenzy on the banks of the flood because insects would quit their nests as the waters crept higher. Then, there always came one hot morning, more damp, more heavy, and hotter than any that had gone before, when the water in the fields came to rest, breathed up, left a line of silt, breathed up again, and did not pass the line but touched it, did not touch it on the next breath and the ripples lay in a calm, the wind ceased, and the Nile stopped rising. That was the day when you could hear a cry go up from us in the mud on the edge of those fields, and on such hot mornings, the light came back to us from the hills on the horizon. The water was as placid as the sleep of the moon when the sun is high.” Menenhetet sighed.
“That was how my childhood passed, and I do not remember any other life than working by the banks of the water, nor do I know how often I thought of what my mother had told me about Amon. I did not see myself as different from other boys except that I was stronger, and that offered much. I remember when a deputation of Officials came one morning to our village to conscript us for the army, I knew no fear. I had been waiting for such service and wanted it. I was bored and ready. The river, I remember, was in the second week of its subsiding, and the water on our fields had become, in the sun, a lake of gold. I suppose that the Officials saw it as the best of days on which to surprise us, since it was no easy matter, with the fields in flood, for any of us to run away into the hills. I, of course, did not care. In truth, I did think of Amon the moment I saw the Officials. To me, the army was like the right arm of the God.
“I did not know it,” said my great-grandfather, “but I was waiting for my career to begin. I laughed at our village mayor when he trembled in his place between two bailiffs, each beside him with a heavy stick. As our names were read, we would lift an arm and call out ‘Ho!’ to show that we were present, but twice there was no answer. Two boys had run off. The bailiffs at a sign from the Pharaoh’s Officer beat the mayor until he was groaning on the ground, and many of us snickered. That mayor had punished us often enough that we did not mind to see him suffer. Then of the eighteen present, the Officials picked us over, looked at our teeth, felt our arms, kneaded our thighs, hefted our genitals and picked the fifteen strongest. While our mothers watched and, I confess, most of them wept, we marched away along the dike and put into their boats and rowed upstream to the South for all of that day until we came to a bend with a great fort and store-house. There we were locked in together with recruits from other villages, and that night the bakers in the compound gave us round hard black bread.” He smiled at the recollection. “I was a poor boy and had eaten hard bakings, but this bread was older than the dead.” His mouth worked as if chewing the stuff again.
“To the fort,” said Menenhetet, “other recruits came, and we were taught to march, and to wrestle and to use swords. Mine, Good and Great God, was the stroke that was strongest from overhead, and I smashed five shields in such training. They taught us much on the art of the shield for we had large ones then, larger than we use today, and it could cover a man from his eyes to his knees. Yet it was poor protection at best. For unlike Your small shields with their many metal plates, ours, given their big wood frame and their leather, were so heavy that they held only one disc of metal no larger than our face, and it was set in position to protect our arm where it held the shield.
“One by one, we would go up to face the archer and from a distance of fifty long steps he would shoot an arrow at us, and we were obliged, for his aim was good, to catch it on the metal plate so that the arrow would glance away. We were taught to do this with our chest facing to the side so that should the arrow pierce the leather, chances were still good it would miss our body. And of course the leather was strong enough to keep some of the arrows from going through. But it was a sport—to hold that shield and block what you could not dodge. At the end of training, fifty of us faced one hundred archers, and were ordered to advance into their bows. I was busy that morning, I can promise. It was known that I had become skillful with my shield, so many of the archers took pleasure to aim at me.”
“Were numbers of men lost in such training?” asked Ptah-nem-hotep.
“There were many scratches, and some wounds, and two men died, but we were skillful dodgers and it helped to make soldiers of us. Besides, we wore quilting thick enough to stop many an arrow although not as much as is worn today. The training was harder then because we were always told to get ready for lands we would soon go to conquer, and were so ignorant we did not know t
hey were lands we had already conquered one hundred years before and they were now in rebellion. Good training, however. We were infantry and our weapons were the dagger and the lance, but they taught us to use the bow as well and the sword. Since I excelled in all contests, in wrestling first, and with dagger, spear, sword, shield, and bow, I was even allowed to enter a special game held to choose one man from our ranks to become a charioteer. In those days, it was only the sons of nobles who could enter such a service.”
“And were our chariots at all different then?” asked Ptah-nem-hotep.
“They were beautiful, as now. Unlike our shields, the present chariots do not differ from the ones I knew, not by one bend in the wood, but they were not yet a familiar sight in those days. The oldest man of my village used to talk of how the oldest man he had known when he was a boy could remember the first horse he saw, for that was when they began to bring horses into Egypt from the lands to the East. How it terrified him! But then who would not have been frightened by such strange animals? They heard only the voices of foreign Gods, and spoke in loud snorts, or with a long screaming of wind in their cries. This old man of my village used to say that to approach a chariot with its two horses, was the closest one could get to the Pharaoh. To us, charioteers were soldiers sent from the Pharaoh! They may as well have been dressed in gold. For when they got up behind those four-legged Gods and went off at a gallop, we respected them more than the captain of a great barge going down the Nile. You can see how it was still a rare skill to a common soldier in the years when I was trained, and You may know I dreamed of becoming a charioteer. To decide the one common soldier among us who would be selected, we were put in a race, and it was the greatest contest we ever knew. Because we were told that the winner would yet ride a chariot like a nobleman. Since we were ignorant and could not command horses, we were made to hold a chariot over our heads and run up one side of a mountain and down the other, carrying the cart with us, wheels and all. The chariots were as light then as they are today, no heavier than a ten-year-old boy, but it was not easy to jog up that great hill with the vehicle on your shoulder and come down the other side unscratched. You did not dare to fall. Be certain if you broke anything, they would break your own back with their sticks.
“We set out at a trot. The fools among us tried to go as fast as a horse and soon collapsed on the first slopes, but I set out as if I were the son of Amon and could draw new strength from every breath. I stepped along as if Nut fed my nose, and Geb my feet, while Maat took care of the nausea in my stomach by instructing me not to go faster until I could find a balance between the utmost effort of my body and the demons in my lungs. Still, the earth turned blue, and the sky was as orange as the sun and sometimes became black to me. Then the sand of the desert also turned black and the sky became white. The rocks of the mountain, as I went up, step after step, were no longer rocks to me, but fierce dogs with open teeth and some rocks were beasts large as wild boars—one great stone was a hippopotamus to me—and my heart was before my eyes as I came over the summit, and I thought I would die, but I was over the top, and still ahead of everyone else. On the trip down, another soldier came near to passing me for his legs were long, and he took great bounds and came closer and my perspiration was cold. I shivered in the heat and the chariot weighed on my shoulders like a lion. I swear it had claws that tore into my back. Some of my strength was returning, however, and my breath with it, and I even saw the sky and earth as they were supposed to be, but the spear remained in my chest and the crown of pain around my head. I knew I could not hold off the other fellow unless I tricked him. He was long and thin and built to make this kind of race, but I knew he was vain, so I summoned the last of my legs and leaped with one great bound after another down ten rocks in a row. He was right behind and would soon have passed, for I had nothing left after those ten leaps, but he could not bear the audacity of such long jumps, he must be more daring than me, so he tried to better what I had done, and fell and cracked his chariot. I came down the last slope of the hill by myself.
“That was how I became a charioteer, and went to the Royal School of Charioteers of King Thutmose the Third, and You may be certain I became the best. Although not so soon. First, I had to be taught the care of a horse, how to speak to them and clean them, and horses were mysterious creatures. For the longest time I did not know if they were beasts or Gods, I only knew that they did not like me. They would rear up as I approached. I could not understand their intelligence nor whether they were stupid. By the delicacy of their lower legs, I could see they were animals of some refinement, and the light in their eyes made me believe their minds must travel as fast as an arrow. Given the long curve of their nose I supposed they took their knowledge of what to do next by what they could smell over the next hill. Yet by their teeth they were flat and stubborn. So I did not understand them. But then I was a village boy. Although I did not know it, I was like a horse myself. I did not think, and could barely obey strange commands.
“Learning to guide the reins and turn the horse smoothly became a turn in my own life greater than winning the chariot race,” said my great-grandfather, “for the more I attempted to overcome my terrible clumsiness with these horses, the more I became the recipient of much laughter. The noblemen’s sons, among whom I now found myself, were born graceful, I used to think, and still do—as witness the beauties of my beloved great-grandson Menenhetet the Second,” which he said with a little nod in my direction—“but that only made me more determined to learn. I found myself thinking of a saying we used to have in the fields—it will sound crude to You—but it is a phrase on every farm. ‘Know your animal’s smell,’ we say. It was then, working in the stables, that I understood how much I was in awe of the peculiar odor of horses. Their stables smelled different and better than the fields and coops around our farm. It seemed almost a blessed smell to me, full of the odor of the sun on a field of wheat. Yet part of my fear of horses was that I thought they were more like Gods than other beasts.
“The animal I curried in our stables was a stallion, and particularly fierce to handle. Yet the scent of his hide on my finger proved sweet and friendly, like the odor of the first village girl to whom I made love. She had smelled more of the earth than of the river and most of all she smelled of wheat fields and her own good sweat, strong as a horse, so I had the thought with such a smell on my hands that horses were not Gods but rather might be like men or women who had died, and come back as horses. So far as I knew, no one ever had a thought like that before, and I was sure it was blasphemous. Yet, fortified by the smell of that stallion’s soul, as I sniffed it clearly through all the mash of grain and straw, I could feel near to somebody who lived in my horse—whoever it was—that might be a little like the girl to whom I had made love. That morning I began to change the way in which I spoke to the horse. I no longer tried to placate the animal, nor pray to the God in him, and this saved much trouble. For how did one offer prayers to a strange God? On the other hand, I no longer tried to beat this horse like a beast. Not often. No, now, I thought rather of the man who was in the animal, and comprehended that this stallion was envious of me. I spoke and walked upright as he once had done—so I could feel how a punishment had been visited upon a strong soul. In my thoughts, I began to say to him, ‘You want to be a man again? Try listening to me. I can be your friend.’ Do you know? The animal heard my thoughts. I could tell by the difference in the handling.
“Now, in the beginning of our training, we did not use chariots with two steeds, but small carts suitable for one horse, and they had thick wooden wheels and made a terrible clatter. The sound was atrocious on one’s ear, and the jolts of the cart were ferocious to the spine. Only a peasant as strong as myself could have taken such blows as it took me to learn to steer one horse properly. The other students had passed on to chariots long before I could get out of my work-cart. Yet, in the last week, I amazed my drill-major. I had learned how to do tricks with that heavy cart and could even coax my stallion
to move it backward. So they promoted me to two horses. Immediately my troubles began again. I had to learn that I was now not like a friend or a brother nor even a man telling another man how to live but more like a father who must teach two creatures to act like brother and sister.” He stopped for a moment to clear his throat in the way common people do when their voice is husky. “One cannot build a chair without a saw to cut the wood, one needs one’s tool, and I had it now. I lived with these horses and spoke to them with my voice and sometimes with my thoughts, and I taught them how to move together.
Ancient Evenings Page 28