Ancient Evenings

by Norman Mailer

  “ ‘I am as Your dog,’ said my Pharaoh, ‘even as the soldiers are My dogs, and the soldiers of the Hittites are My soldiers’ dogs.’ He bowed again and the God was silent. Soon we left the Sanctuary for the banquet room and there ate part of the meat of the ram that Amon had left for us after His own meal was done. I was much impressed by the superior taste of this food and thought His saliva might still be flavoring it.

  “ ‘Come,’ said Ramses the Second before I was finished with the meal, and His eyes were still red from weeping, ‘come with Me to cross the river. I want to visit My tomb.’ ”

  FOUR

  “I Had much to think about,” my great-grandfather told us, “as we were rowed across to the Western Bank of Thebes. I had just heard the most powerful voice ever to enter my head, and my ears rang. In other years, when I became a priest and was instructed in the mysteries of language, I came to learn that the sounds uttered by a God are equal to what He desires. So in ancient days, a God could say: ‘chair,’ and lo!, there was a chair.

  “Of course, in these years, we are not close to the Gods. We can roar like a lion, but we can never call the beast forth.

  “I, however, on this morning of which I speak, had just heard a mighty voice issue from a heart of gold. It had captured the lips and throat of Bak-ne-khon-su, and made him serve as the voice of Amon. So we knew that victory would be ours if we were faithful.

  “That, all the same, was what dismayed me now. Today, our religious ceremonies had been different from other occasions. Usually, ten or more priests entered with a bull, not a ram, and a Reciter-Priest would stand at my Pharaoh’s elbow to whisper which prayer came next, or how many steps to take.”

  “They have such a fellow today,” said Ptah-nem-hotep, “but his manner is not altogether civil.”

  “It was otherwise, then,” said Menenhetet, “and done with great respect. Once, I counted a hundred separate gestures accompanying one prayer and, in my ignorance, missed another hundred I would learn later as a priest. How then could a Monarch like Ramses the Second, with His mind fixed on war, remember the order? Yet if the King could avoid all mistakes during the service, it was our belief—we were simple in those days, I repeat—that Amon would not ignore our request. In truth, I remember how at the beginning of many a service, Bak-ne-khon-su would often place into the golden hand of Amon a roll of papyrus on which the High Priest had written a petition. Then, at the completion of prayers, Bak-ne-khon-su would take it back. Feeling its presence in his palm, he would be able to state whether the Great God wished to say yes or no to the request. Of course, I always believed Bak-ne-khon-su could interpret the word of Amon. There were other High Priests, however, in other years whom I did not trust as well. I thought the answers to their petitions told me more about the servant than about the wisdom of Amon. All the same, when I became a High Priest myself (and I was, I must say, no model of purity like Bak-ne-khon-su, but reached such a position only by my nearness to Ramses the Second in my second life when I was young and He was very old) I learned that I, too, was not ready to pass over the word of the God. No, the feelings of Amon were too fearsome to ignore when the roll of papyrus quivered in one’s hand.”

  “Your lives are as strange as the taste of a new spice,” said our Pharaoh and smiled at my mother. At this sign of attention given to her, first in some time, she was quick to smile back, but in her mind (and I, listening to our great-grandfather with all of my attention, had not been near to her mind for a while) now saw her hand move forward in her thoughts to touch her Fingertips to a surface as lovely as her own skin, but it was under the skirt of Ptah-nem-hotep that her hand would travel, and His thigh was the one she stroked in her thoughts, upon which the Pharaoh sat up in His chair and felt for His leopard tail. “You were speaking,” He said to Menenhetet, “of the power of petition of a High Priest.”

  “Yes,” said my great-grandfather. “If my request asked the Pharaoh to enrich the Temple of Thebes, I would know the answer I desired. A High Priest must increase the wealth of his Temple. Amon’s confidence being gained by gifts, it is gained best by great gifts. So, my petition might beg Amon to instruct our old Ramses to give over to the Temple a tenth more of the tribute He had received from Libya in the last year. My hand, as it touched the petition, expected to hear no response from Amon but Yes, yet with all my desire for such a result, I could feel the clear displeasure of the Hidden One if on a given morning He did not desire such added tribute.”

  “Did you then announce this conclusion?” Ptah-nem-hotep asked.

  “I cannot remember, my Lord. My only recollection is that I would dread such a reply when it came on me. How awful was the touch of the petition when it said: No! The papyrus could feel as unpleasant as a snakeskin.

  “Now, I, of course, on the day we crossed the river to visit the tomb of Ramses the Second, knew little of these fine matters. I only understood that nothing had taken place as on other mornings.

  “I was not surprised, therefore, that it became a day where every event was unexpected. No sooner had we landed at the wharf on the Western Bank of Thebes than my Pharaoh invited me into His Chariot for the first time, and the horses were as shocked as myself to recognize that Nefertiri was not present. The names of these horses, I remember, were Strength-of-Thebes and Maat-is-Satisfied, a stallion and a mare, and the mare, as you would expect, was remarkably like Nefertiri. She never liked to be separated from her mate. You had only to command Strength-of-Thebes and it was as if you had spoken to the eight legs of both beasts. Nor were these horses ever happier than when the Queen rode with the King.

  “But, my Ramses drove off with me, leaving all who had come with us behind. So I now learned that the people of Western Thebes, accustomed to see their King only in a procession, did not know to look up when His Chariot was unaccompanied. They were left with no more than a glimpse of the War-Crown on His head, thereby to realize that the Good and Great God had passed, O Double-House of Egypt,” said my great-grandfather, as if apologizing that a Pharaoh could ride anywhere in Egypt without everyone being aware of His passage. Menenhetet then struck the table seven times with his hand as if to ward off any disrespect in what he would next say. “On this, the Night of the Pig, I could speak of many Pharaohs. I have known Them as Gods and I have known Them as men. Of Them all—if it please Your interest—”

  “It does.”

  “—Ramses the Second was least difficult to know as a Pharaoh, and most difficult to comprehend as a man. Of His piety I have just given You good measure, yet when He was away from the Temple, He was indifferent to who might hear His voice. He swore as simply as a soldier. And when with Nefertiri, He was more like a man in love than a King. Yet if She was not with us, He hardly spoke of Her with respect. On this morning, as we started off in His Chariot, He even said, ‘Do you know She had a Fit because I told Her to stay on the Eastern Bank? “Go back,” I told Her. “Nurse what You must nurse. I want to be alone.” ’ My Pharaoh laughed. ‘She does not like to nurse,’ He added, ‘She doesn’t even like Her wet-nurse,’ and He gave a great whoop to the horses, and a crack of the reins on their back so we were in a gallop right out of a trot and tearing down the Boulevard of Osiris on the Western Bank like two charioteers with an afternoon to spend on beer, yes, now I see how He was different from other Kings. The weight of other Pharaohs can be seen in Their presence on all occasions, but my good Ramses the Second thought little of that. Like a boy, He would take off His clothes if it suited Him. He had a mouth that would look at you as if it did not know whether it wanted a kiss or a bite out of your best parts.”

  My mother gave a laugh so full of the depths of her own flesh that I could all but feel the black hair between her legs and the red face of a young man with golden hair and lips as red as my mother’s smiling at the sight. I felt Sweet Finger again—except there were a hundred sweet Fingers up her belly and down mine and I wondered if this man with the golden hair could be Ramses the Second come forward from the dead, and tha
t confused me so thoroughly that I only returned to what my great-grandfather was saying on these words: “I never liked the Western Bank.”

  “Well, I do not like it today,” said Ptah-nem-hotep, and with such vehemence that I saw the picture in His brain, that is, saw the Western Bank as it would look to me now from a boat in the middle of the river. Thereby, I had the sight of a plain with high cliffs to the west and many temples in the valley. There were great broad avenues going in every direction. Yet it did not look like a city so much as a park, and then not at all a royal park for there were swamps between some of the avenues, and long empty diggings of foundations where great buildings must have been planned and never finished. I could see very few people on the boulevards and only one or two wagons. This meant the Western Bank must be altogether different from the East Bank of Thebes which, if it were at all like Memphi, had to be crowded and friendly and full of narrow alleys. Whereas on the Western Bank, there was so much space that you could see a number of new towns built in regular rows between the great boulevards, and climbing into the foothills. But since each stone house in these places had a little pyramid for its roof, I realized they were not houses but tombs in the Great Necropolis of Western Thebes, and indeed looked like a thousand hats planted in the desert, with over there, another thousand hats. Yet the plan of each street was so much the same that my eyes began to water, and I wondered if living people really thought the dead liked to live on streets that did not curve.

  My great-grandfather must have heard each of my thoughts (unless I was living in his) for now I heard him say: “The streets of the Necropolis were laid out in right angles on the calculation that the best return is brought back from land sold in small square pieces.”

  “Menenhetet, you are wicked,” the Pharaoh remarked. “I always thought these streets were kept straight to discourage thieves and evil spirits.”

  “That is also true,” said my great-grandfather. “Fewer guards are necessary when one can see from one end of a lane to the other, and spirits are certainly weakened when they cannot dodge and turn. Yet when the decision was first made in the Temple of Amon at Karnak to lay out square plots, none of us knew they would prove so popular. I was High Priest at the time, and can tell You we needed the revenue. I speak of a period fifty years and more after the Battle of Kadesh when Ramses the Second was very old and had no interest in war. So, the Temple could only count on the tribute that still came in from the sons of old conquered Princes. Thereby, we had fewer gifts for Amon. Contemplate the labors of a High Priest like myself when each morning the Great God sneered at me each time I wiped off His old rouge, and Tongue and Pure put on the new.

  “I came to the simple conclusion that gifts to make Amon happy did not have to come only from the Pharaoh. Many of the people were wealthy enough to buy plots in the Necropolis.

  “Now, I must explain that even on the strange morning of which I speak when Ramses the Second gave me the honor of accompanying Him, there was a Necropolis on the Western Bank. Only it was not like the one today with its thousands of tombs. In that time, there were only a few great avenues. The Necropolis itself was small, and no one but nobles of the best family could be buried in it. I remember the envy I felt at the thought I would never rest on the Western Bank. It seemed to me that a man who has been welcomed into the company of a Pharaoh ought to be entitled to a tomb, and have the history of his life written on the walls. But I knew that was impossible. If you were not a great noble, you could not begin in those years to think of a life in the Land of the Dead. Among the peasants with whom I grew up, we always heard that the pits of Khert-Neter were so terrible, and you encountered such serpents, scorpions and evil Gods, that only a Pharaoh or a few of His royal brothers would dare to make the trip down the Duad. For any ordinary man, the journey was impossible. So, as soon as you died, you expected your family to take you out in the desert, dig a hole, and cover you with sand. If you were a peasant, you did not even brood about it much. But when I became a charioteer, it irked me how many relatives of the Pharaoh had a tomb and could take treasures with them through Khert-Neter, and after this day when I rode in His Chariot, the desire to have a plot in the Royal City of the Dead arose in me.

  “So, when I became a High Priest many years later, I knew that rich commoners would want to purchase land in this Necropolis. Because of a special element, however—if I may so speak—in the character of Ramses the Great which developed after the Battle of Kadesh, we did not have to sell to commoners after all. For by His old age, thousands of people in Thebes could claim to be His children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren. At the least, they were married to His descendants. By then, only the poorest commoner could not claim to be some kind of kin to Usermare-Setpenere, that Sun-who-is-powerful-through-Truth, Ramses the Second.

  “That, however, was after the Battle of Kadesh. On this day, riding with pride in His Chariot, who could think of all that was to come? I merely looked at what there was to see while He took us along on a fast gallop down the empty boulevards of Western Thebes. There were not many people there then, as I say, and they all worked for the Necropolis and in the mortuary temples and looked sicklier somehow to my good eyes than people of the East Bank. Even the priests of the mortuary temple seemed thin and drawn compared to those priests who came walking through the Great Hall that is like a forest in the Temple of Karnak. Although these fellows at Karnak also live much in the shade, they grow plump from the sacrifices they consume and the gold they weigh in the vaults, whereas, the ones of the Western Bank, while quite free to enjoy the quiet sun of all their fine gardens and plazas, were bored, I think, by the peace of the ages that you had to breathe in Western Thebes. I think most of these priests wanted to be across the river at Karnak and so their unhappiness came into the air. By late afternoon, I knew it would be mournful. So long as the sun was still high, it was all right, but soon terrible shadows would flow like water from the cliffs to cover the temple gardens with gloom.

  “All the while I did not know where my Pharaoh was taking me, but He had decided to visit no place less splendid than the Temple of Hat-shep-sut, and as we drove up, there were, to my surprise, not a dozen priests to turn out. But then there was not even the smell of a sacrifice burning. I think we might have been the first people to visit in days. Of course, it had been built by a woman and looked more like a palace than a temple. My Pharaoh said, ‘I used to laugh at this place. Only a woman would build a temple with nothing but cocks,’ and clapped me on the back like we were two infantrymen. I was shocked at how He spoke, but then He did say, ‘Count the cocks,’ and I did, and there were twenty-four columns all holding up a roof, and above was another row of shorter columns, altogether a white and beautiful temple and very large, and the cliffs went straight up to the sky just back of the temple. When my King had chased away the priests who came to greet Him, we mounted onto a patio above the first roof, and there was a garden with hundreds of myrrh trees. I had smelled myrrh in every incense that ever smoked in a temple and knew the power of its odor, but here in the shadow of these cliffs which must have been higher than a hundred men standing on top of each other’s shoulders, in the sun of midday with the desert-yellow of the hills all around us, the scent of myrrh from each of these little trees was an odor to fill my head and make me think that the middle of my thoughts could be as clear and empty as the sky. When a priest brought out two gold stools, one for the Pharaoh, and one, to my delight, for myself, together with a golden cup of wine for each of us, I could also taste the myrrh in the wine and it was like a sniff of funeral wrappings with their spices. So, all the while that I felt as alive as the light in the sky, I was still drinking a wine which spoke to me of the middle of the night and strange thoughts.

  “ ‘These myrrh trees,’ said Ramses the Second, ‘are from Her,’ and I thought at first He could only mean His own Queen Nefertiri, but He added, ‘Hat-shep-sut,’ and was silent. Then He told me they had been carried here for Amon Who had ordered Queen Hat-s
hep-sut shep-sut to bring this Land of Punt to His House. Despite the heat, I shivered as I listened, for the scent of myrrh made me cold, and my King told me that a good many expeditions had failed before Hat-shep-sut sent Her fleet. The Queen’s five ships came back, however, with myrrh, and ebony and ivory and cinnamon wood and the first baboons and unique monkeys never seen before as well as new kinds of dogs, the skins of the southern panther, and natives from Punt with skins so black they looked more purple than the snails of Tyre. ‘Hat-shep-sut was that pleased She told Her lover Sen-mut to build this temple to Her honor. Two rows of cocks.’ He started to laugh, but then grasped me by the arm and said, ‘One night, I came here with Nefertiri and We were alone on this terrace. Amon spoke to Me and said: It is dark but You will see My Light. When Nefertiri and I made love, I saw Our first child, being made, for We were connected as a rainbow to the earth. So I do not laugh at this temple all the time, although I hate the odor of myrrh.’ With this He stood up, and we left, and He rode at such a gallop I could not speak a word. I did not know why, but He was as furious as if we were in battle already.