Sinai Tapestry

by Edward Whittemore

  Little Cairo was standing with his chin resting on the edge of the sarcophagus. Enchanting names, exotic memories, it was always like this in Menelik Ziwar’s quiet vault. A faraway look came into the little boy’s eyes.

  The Pneuma Stone? he whispered.

  Deep down in the sarcophagus amidst the stacks of books and the strange inscriptions five thousand years old, the mummy raised his magnifying glass to produce the gigantic eye of antiquity. He cackled dryly.

  Are you saying Numa or Pneuma? Breath is involved all right and a breath of fresh air at that, but the Greeks are in the game only for purposes of scholarship, or by association, you might say. Anyway, it should be Numa and Strongbow told me about it on a Sunday afternoon four or five decades ago. He was coming back from the kitchen with another carafe of wine and another plate of spiced lamb, happily swinging his portable sundial on his hip as he threaded his way between the paralyzed waiters, when all at once a devilish grin came across his face. We were getting on toward the end of the afternoon by then and I was so dizzy I almost didn’t see it. But when he collapsed in his chair and planted his enormous head in front of me, holding it in those enormous hands, there was no way to miss it. The grin was simply wicked. Roguery itself.

  Here, I said, what’s this bit of mischief?

  Menelik you notorious Nilotic ghoul, he shouted, grabbing my arm and knocking the plate of lamb to the floor as he drew me into the conspiracy, Menelik you astounding black Copt, promise me that if you’re ever asked about the Numa Stone, you won’t say a word.

  Why? I asked, mystified, having never heard of such a stone.

  All the while Strongbow was grinning ever more wildly. So wildly that anyone who didn’t know him as well as I did would have thought he was in the grip of some terminal fever. The grin was that demented. Then he suddenly made an extravagant gesture that swept across the table, his sundial going with it and sending everything flying. The carafe smashed into the duck pond and stained the water, the glasses crashed against the peacocks’ cage and ended their nervous copulations in a shower of splintering shards. He brought his fist down on the table with a roar of laughter that shook everything in the place, even the waiters, it seemed. Of course it might have been only the wine playing tricks with my vision, but I swear I actually thought I saw them quiver at that moment, the first time they’d shown any life in years.

  Why? thundered Strongbow. For the sake of Europe. We’re going to save Europe from its own unspeakable hypocrisy.

  Little Cairo listened, wide-eyed.

  Yes, hissed the mummy, the Numa Stone. That vastly controversial slab so named after its discoverer, Numa Numantius, the German erotic scholar and defender of homosexuality. His critics were in the habit of referring to him contemptuously as Aunt Magnesia. But it was also true that no one in Europe at the time was more outspoken on sexual matters than Numantius, a fact that was certain to engage Strongbow’s sympathy.

  For weeks, continued Menelik, this Numa Numantius or Aunt Magnesia had been up the Nile searching through the ruins at Karnak, trying to find some small inscription in the temple that would suggest the ancient Egyptians had disavowed the persecution of homosexuals. But without success. The hieroglyphs on the columns listed innumerable public works undertaken by various pharaohs, and the innumerable virtues of those pharaohs, without mentioning sex even once.

  Numantius was thoroughly discouraged the evening Strongbow happened to come upon him, sitting alone in the ruins of the temple and sighing over and over. Strongbow was traveling in disguise as a poor bedouin navvy from the area of the first cataract, and he began asking Numantius questions as was his habit with anyone he met. He learned what the German was seeking and decided to interrupt his journey in order to help.

  The next morning Numantius moved his operations to some ruins on the other side of the river. Strongbow, meanwhile, broke into several nearby tombs to find a basalt slab suitable for his purposes. After inscribing the slab to his satisfaction he treated it with certain chemicals, then buried it in front of the temple entrance, one corner just above the drifting sand so that its appearance would seem to be the chance work of the wind.

  A few days later, heaving with sighs and more discouraged than ever, Numantius returned to Karnak for a last reverie in the temple by moonlight. The inscribed corner of the basalt slab caught his eye and he quickly dug it up, Strongbow watching all the while from his hiding place behind a pillar.

  Numantius clapped his hands. There on the unearthed basalt slab were three long neat rows of language carved one beside the other, in hieroglyphs and ancient demotic Egyptian and Greek, simultaneous translations of a legal statute from the XXXI Dynasty. In impressive detail the statute guaranteed the right of consenting adults to practice homosexuality to the best of their abilities, when said acts were performed in view of the Nile and were witnessed by a baboon or a dung beetle or some other sacred creature, said best abilities in no way to contravene the pharaoh’s divine right to wage interminable wars of aggression in order to acquire more slaves to build more public works to honor the pharaoh.

  The statute had been formally promulgated by the priests of Ptolemy V to revive a traditional law of the land that had fallen into disrepute over recent millennia, when recurring conquests from the barbaric north had introduced uncivilized sexual attitudes into the eternal kingdom of the sun.

  Specifically un-Egyptian attitudes, emphasized the carved inscriptions, the word heavily underscored with chisel marks in the Greek and demotic texts and deeply circled in the hieroglyphs.

  Numantius was triumphant. He sailed down the Nile with his precious slab and at once returned victoriously to Europe, where his unique find shocked scholars everywhere. The debate raged and raged, and although the authenticity of the Numa Stone was eventually disproved, Numantius by then had firmly established his reputation in the fields of antique homosexual jurisprudence and homosexual Egyptology.

  Yes indeed, mused Menelik Ziwar happily at the bottom of his sarcophagus, smiling up at little Cairo through his magnifying glass, his unblinking eye two inches wide.

  Yes, son. A fateful stone from antiquity discovered in a temple beside the Nile. Fate breathing variety into life.

  Cairo was twenty before Menelik Ziwar chose to discuss the books he kept stacked in his sarcophagus, which in fact were none other than the thirty-three volumes of Strongbow’s monumental study of Levantine sex, published in Basle about the time Cairo was born, and banned throughout the British Empire in perpetuity for being despicably un-English.

  There were tears in the old man’s eyes when he told Martyr how he had spent months smuggling a complete edition of the work into Egypt, using a giant hollow stone scarab Strongbow had lent him for that purpose. And how, on the very day he had at last assembled the entire set and safely stored it away in his sarcophagus, a special courier had arrived from Constantinople bearing a note from Strongbow along with the explorer’s huge magnifying glass, a memento from his old friend who explained he wanted Menelik to have the glass now that he had decided to disappear into the desert forever, to live the life of an Arab holy man.

  Included in the note was a request that the giant stone scarab be returned to a certain party in Jerusalem from whom Strongbow had borrowed it, which Ziwar had done.

  But never to see him again? croaked the mummy, tears running down his cheeks. Never to listen to him roaring with laughter and pounding the table over some recent discovery? Eating and drinking away those glorious Sunday afternoons beside the Nile when we were young and had our hopes before us? Instead just this magnifying glass, even though it had traveled so far and seen so much?

  As the old man wept Cairo realized the deep sadness that gripped the scholar even now, two decades later, when he recalled the loss of his friend. But he also knew Menelik Ziwar would always have the memories of his forty-year conversation with Strongbow, those long Sunday afternoons of wine and scurrilous evidence so richly woven under the trellises of leafy vines and flowers,
among placid ducks and statuesque waiters and squawking peacocks, in a filthy open-air restaurant on the banks of the Nile, always ending with drunken plunges into the cooling water.

  Yes, Menelik had those memories, thought Martyr, and he also had Strongbow’s magnificent study. And a magnifying glass powerful enough to read it.

  At the bottom of the sarcophagus the mummy wiped the tears from his eyes. It was New Year’s Day, 1900. The mummy sighed and opened one of Strongbow’s volumes. Briefly he gazed at Martyr through the magnifying glass, then lowered it to the page.

  A new century today, he said. I thought I might read to you a few excerpts from the last one.

  I’d like that, Menelik.

  Good. Here we are then, Volume One.

  The author’s preface wherein he lays forth his reasons for discussing in three hundred million words an historical topic of general interest heretofore ignored and denied, sex in the Levant or what might more accurately be called Levantine sex, some two-thirds of the entire endeavor being devoted to the author’s personal experiences with a gentle Persian girl, once his beloved common-law wife, many years distant but never forgotten.

  Magnifying glass in hand, Ziwar read on.

  And so it went for the next fourteen years when Martyr made his weekly visits to the sepulcher beneath the public garden beside the river, the old Egyptologist lying at the bottom of his sarcophagus reading aloud passages from Strongbow’s study, laughing when he came across incidents he recognized from things Strongbow had said on Sunday afternoons in the course of their forty-year conversation, Martyr totally absorbed as he leaned dreamily against the massive block of stone, listening and listening to the improbable events of an heroic past.

  Thus Strongbow’s tales were the abiding dreams of Cairo Martyr’s early years, yet somehow he was never able to direct his own destiny as Strongbow had done. Decades passed and he was still a common dragoman.

  As for Menelik Ziwar, he had taken a special interest in Martyr from the beginning because of a long-ago love affair at the age of sixteen, his first experience with a woman.

  She had been much older than he was. Indeed, her blue-eyed daughter was older than he was. Like Menelik, she had been a slave in the delta, although originally she came from a village on the fringe of the Nubian desert. And he would always lovingly remember the gentle way she had initiated him into manhood.

  The woman had also told him about her lost husband, and how soon after meeting him she had been carried away by a Mameluke raiding party, and after the birth of her blue-eyed daughter, sold into slavery.

  She would never forget that, she said. One day she intended to repay the Mamelukes for their savagery.

  Years later when he was able to do so, Ziwar had looked into the background of her dead husband, in his day well known as an expert in Islamic law in Egypt, and discovered that the wanderer known as Sheik Ibrahim ibn Harun had actually been a Swiss linguist traveling in disguise.

  So when a frightened Nubian boy came to him some six decades later seeking advice, an ex-slave with blue eyes called Cairo Martyr, Ziwar immediately understood the significance of the peculiar name bestowed on him by his great-grandmother. Here, in the form of her great-grandson, was the means of revenge against the Mamelukes chosen by that proud and gentle older woman who had introduced Ziwar to sex at the age of sixteen.

  Ziwar was determined to honor her memory by helping Martyr when the time came. Yet he remained patient with Martyr, knowing that the tasks his great-grandmother had secretly willed upon him could only be undertaken by a mature man with much experience behind him.

  In fact not until 1914 did he decide to act, and even then he did so in a roundabout manner.

  It was during one of Martyr’s weekly visits and Ziwar had just finished reading aloud a footnote on the gentle Persian girl whom Strongbow had loved in his youth for a few weeks, no more, before she was carried away in a cholera epidemic. Ziwar sighed and laid aside his magnifying glass. He licked his lips thoughtfully. After the silence had gone on for several minutes, Martyr shook himself and emerged from his trance.

  What is it, Menelik?

  That recurring phrase in Strongbow’s study, a few weeks, no more. Isn’t it extraordinary how such a brief period of time could have come to mean so much to him? Think of the tens of thousands of experiences he had in the course of a haj spread over a lifetime, yet always he comes back to those few weeks. Don’t you find it odd in a way?

  Yes, said Martyr.

  So do I, in a way. But then, time itself is odd. I learned that when I was younger than you, working in tombs. Did you know mummies can grow hairs?

  No.

  They can. All at once you’ll find a fresh hair growing right in the middle of a bald head that’s three or four thousand years old. Now that’s odd too. By the way, Cairo, how old were you when your great-grandmother died and you first came here?

  Twelve.

  Yes that’s right, and now you’re already in your middle thirties. A dragoman then, a dragoman still. What should we make of that? Not stuck in time, are you?

  I don’t know. I seem to be but I just don’t know what else to do.

  You’re not looking forward to becoming the Clerk of the Acts, are you? To be the senior dragoman in the city in your old age? Is that your ambition?

  Certainly not.

  I wouldn’t think so. I would think you’d want something more meaningful in life than that, and if you do it’s about time you got started. When I was your age my name was already famous throughout Europe. Although of course nobody knew it belonged to me.

  But you’re Menelik Ziwar.

  True. And it’s also true that notoriety, known or unknown, is worthless. Perhaps no one will ever hear of you when you decide what it is you want to do. Perhaps that’s why you’ll be so successful at it.

  At what, Menelik? What can I do? What should I do?

  Hm, let’s give it some thought. But in the meantime could you do me a small favor?

  Of course.

  It concerns a theory of mine. Recently I’ve begun to wonder whether there isn’t a secret cache of royal mummies somewhere. We made a great deal of progress in the last century but it still seems to me the number of pharaohs discovered to date is just too small. Can you get up to Thebes now and then in the course of your work? Luxor, I mean?

  Yes.

  Well there’s a tomb on the west bank that’s being excavated. If you can, take your clients there and poke around near the entrance. At night naturally. Unwitnessed. We don’t want to alert anyone.

  Naturally.

  Yes. Just see if you can find anything that looks like it might be covering up a secret passageway. Frankly I’m sure this theory of mine is correct.

  In the next few months Cairo Martyr took all his clients to Luxor, to the excavation on the west bank where he said the entranceway to a tomb was especially romantic in the moonlight. There, while squatting and standing and crouching in the entranceway servicing his clients, he dug behind their backs and over their heads but discovered nothing.

  Until one night a heavy Italian woman turned her face to the mud brick wall and whispered that she wanted him to mount her from behind, which he did. The woman then redirected him higher according to her pleasure and pushed against the wall with her powerful arms for added thrust, the first outward heaves of her huge thumping buttocks so ferocious Martyr had to grab the wall himself to keep from being thrown backward onto the ground.

  He grabbed and his fist went straight through a brick into a hole, around something stiff and straight and thick.

  He had his balance now, there was no need for a handhold. As the woman bucked and groaned he removed the object from the hole and gazed at the silver rings and wrappings in the moonlight, at the bracelets of gold and cornelian inlaid with lapis lazuli and light green malachite.

  A mummy’s arm. Perhaps that of a queen?

  Cairo Martyr removed his shirt and carefully wrapped the arm in it. Meanwhile the Italian
woman went through four or five howling spasms, shrieked her praise for the mother of God and collapsed on the ground, beginning to snore immediately. Cairo Martyr fixed another brick in the hole he had uncovered and filled the chinks around it.

  Had he actually discovered a secret cache of buried pharaohs?

  Indeed you have, said Menelik Ziwar, so excited he sat up in his sarcophagus to examine the arm more closely through his magnifying glass, the first time Martyr had seen him rise from his pillows since the old scholar had begun reading Strongbow’s study aloud to him fourteen years earlier.

  To be exact, continued Ziwar, this belongs to a third-ranked concubine of a pharaoh by the name of Djer. Know him? No? Just as well, rather a drunken dolt. Anyway the history of the tomb is this. It became a shrine to Osiris during the XVIII Dynasty, and since then innumerable people have passed by that brick wall where you found the arm and never suspected it was there. Who was your client by the way?

  An Italian woman.

  Large and heavy?

  Very.

  Enormous buttocks?

  Yes.

  Wanting it in the Mediterranean manner?

  Yes.

  And with that massive hindside suddenly bucking against you, you had to reach out for support? Your fist smashed through a brick into the hole in the wall? That’s how you found the concubine’s arm?

  Yes.

  Menelik Ziwar nodded. He laughed.

  What a fine headline that would make in an academic journal. Picture it in impressive type.

  In hindside, Mediterranean manner leads to most important archeological discovery of twentieth century.

  Well I congratulate that heavy Italian woman. She’s proved my theory.

  She has?

  Yes. You see the mummies of Djer and his women have never been found. Now that shrine to Osiris is of no interest to us. What is of interest is that around 1300 B.C. grave-robbing was becoming such a problem that the high priests had to take steps, because without his mummy a pharaoh’s not a god, he’s nothing. So they gathered up all the mummies they could and carried them off for reinterment to a secret chamber they’d dug across from Thebes, the present home of our missing mummies. That was my theory and now it’s been proved correct.