by Mika Waltari
The Egyptian
Mika Waltari
The Egyptian
Mika Waltari
BOOK I
The Reed Boat
1
I,Sinuhe, the son of Senmut and of his wife Kipa, write this. I do not write it to the glory of the gods in the land of Kem, for I am weary of gods, nor to the glory of the Pharaohs, for I am weary of their deeds. I write neither from fear nor from any hope of the future but for myself alone. During my life I have seen, known, and lost too much to be the prey of vain dread; and, as for the hope of immortality, I am as weary of that as I am of gods and kings. For my own sake only I write this; and herein I differ from all other writers, past and to come.
I begin this book in the third year of my exile on the shores of the Eastern Sea, whence ships put out for the land of Punt, near the desert, near those hills from which stone was quarried to build the statues of former kings. I write it because wine is bitter to my tongue, because I have lost my pleasure in women, and because neither gardens nor fish pools delight me any more. I have driven away the singers, and the sound of pipes and strings is torment to my ear. Therefore, I write this, I, Sinuhe, who make no use of my wealth, my golden cups, my ebony, ivory, and myrrh.
They have not been taken from me. Slaves still fear my rod; guards bow their heads and stretch out their hands at knee level before me. But bounds have been set to my walking, and no ships can put in through the surf of these shores; never again shall I smell the smell of black earth on a night in spring.
My name was once inscribed in Pharaoh’s golden book, and I dwelt at his right hand. My words outweighed those of the mighty in the land of Kem; nobles sent me gifts, and chains of gold were hung about, my neck. I possessed all that a man can desire, but like a man I desired more-therefore, I am what I am. I was driven from Thebes in the sixth year of the reign of Pharaoh Horemheb, to be beaten to death like a cur if I returned-to be crushed like a frog between the stones if I took one step beyond the area prescribed for my dwelling place. This is by command of the King, of Pharaoh who was once my friend.
But before I begin my book I will let my heart cry out in lamentation, for so an exile’s heart must cry when it is black with sorrow.
He who has once drunk of Nile water will forever yearn to be by the Kile again; his thirst cannot be quenched by the waters of any other land.
I would exchange my cup for an earthenware mug if my feet might once more tread the soft dust in the land of Kem. I would give my linen clothes for the skins of a slave if once more I might hear the reeds of the river rustling in the spring wind.
Clear were the waters of my youth; sweet was my folly. Bitter is the wine of age, and not the choicest honeycomb can equal the coarse bread of my poverty. Turn, O you years-roll again, you vanished years-sail, Ammon, from west to east across the heavens and bring again my youth! Not one word of it will I alter, not my least action will I amend. O brittle pen, smooth papyrus, give me back my folly and my youth!
2
Senmut, whom I called my father, was physician to the poor of Thebes, and Kipa was his wife. They had no children, and they were old when I came to them. In their simplicity they said I was a gift from the gods, little guessing what evil the gift would bring them. Kipa named me Sinuhe after someone in a story, for she loved stories, and it seemed to her that I had come fleeing from, danger like my namesake of the legend, who by chance overheard a frightful secret in Pharaoh’s tent and fled, to live for many adventurous years in foreign lands.
This was but a childish notion of hers; she hoped that I, too, would always run from danger and avoid misfortune. But the priests of Ammon hold that a name is an omen, and it may be that mine brought me peril and adventure and sent me into foreign lands. It made me a sharer in dreadful secrets-secrets of kings and their wives-secrets that may be the bearers of death. And at the last my name made me a fugitive and an exile.
Yet I should be as childish as poor Kipa to fancy that a name can influence one’s destiny; would it not have been the same if I had been called Kepru or Kafran or Moses? So I believe-yet Sinuhe was indeed exiled whereas Heb, the son of the Falcon, was crowned as Horemheb with the red and white crown, to be king over the Upper and Lower Kingdoms. As to the significance of names, therefore, each must judge for himself; each in his own faith will find solace against the evils and reverses of this life.
I was born in the reign of the great King Amenhotep III and in the same year as that one who desired to live by truth and whose name may no longer be named because it is accursed-though at the time nothing of this was known. There was great rejoicing at the palace when he was born, and the King brought many sacrifices to the great temple of Ammon that he had built; the people also were glad, not knowing what was to come. The royal consort Taia had until then hoped vainly for a son, though she had been consort for twenty-two years and her name was written beside that of the King in the temples and upon the statues. Therefore, he whose name may no longer be named was proclaimed heir with elaborate ceremonial as soon as the priests had performed the circumcision.
He was not born until the spring in the sowing season, whereas I had come the previous autumn when the floods stood at their highest. The day of my birth is unknown, for I came drifting down the Nile in a little reed boat daubed with pitch, and my mother Kipa found me among the reeds on the shore close by her own doorstep. The swallows had just returned and were twittering above me, but I lay so still that she believed me dead. She brought me to her house and warmed me by the charcoal fire and blew into my mouth until I whimpered.
My father Senmut came back from visiting his patients, carrying two ducks and a bushel of flour. When he heard me crying, he thought Kipa had adopted a kitten and was about to rebuke her, but my mother said, “It is not a cat-I have a son! Rejoice, Senmut my husband, for a son has been born to us!”
My father called her an idiot and was angry until she showed me to him, and then he was moved by my helplessness. So they adopted me as their own child and even put it about among the neighbors that Kipa had borne me. This was foolish, and I do not know how many believed her. But Kipa kept the reed boat that brought me and hung it up in the roof above my bed. My father took his best copper bowl to the temple and had me registered in the book of births as his own son born of Kipa, but the circumcision he did himself, for he was a doctor and feared the priests’ knives because they left infected wounds. He did not let the priests touch me. Also he may have wanted to save money, for a poor people’s doctor is not a wealthy man.
I cannot, of course, recall these things, but my parents have told me of them so often and in such unvarying phrases that I must believe them and have no reason to suppose they lied. Throughout my childhood I never doubted that they were my parents, and no sadness darkened those years. They did not tell me the truth until my boy’s locks were shorn and I became a youth. They told me then because they feared and honored the gods, and my father did not want me to live a lie my whole life through.
But who I was, whence I came, and who my parents were I never learned, though-for reasons I shall speak of later-I believe I know.
One thing is certain: I was not the only one to be carried down the river in a pitched-reed boat. Thebes with its palaces and its temples was a big city, and the mud hovels of the poor clustered thickly about the statelier buildings. In the time of the great Pharaohs Egypt had brought many nations under its sway, and with power and wealth came altered customs. Foreigners came to Thebes: merchants and craftsmen built temples there to their own gods. Great was the splendor and wealth of the temples and the palaces, great also the poverty outside the walls. Many poor people put their children out; many a rich wife, whose husband was away on his travels, abandoned the proof of her adultery to the river. Per
haps I was the son of a seaman’s wife who had deceived her husband with some Syrian merchant. Perhaps-as I had not been circumcised-I was some foreigner’s child. When my hair was cut and my mother had put it away in a little wooden box with my first sandals, I looked long at the reed boat she showed me. The struts were yellowed and broken and sooty with smoke from the brazier. It was tied with fowler’s knots, but that was all it could tell me of my parentage. It was then that my heart felt its first wound.
3
With the approach of age the soul flies like a bird back to the days of childhood. Now those days shine bright and clear in my memory until it seems as if everything then must have been better, lovelier than in the world of today. In this rich and poor do not differ, for there is surely none so destitute but his childhood shows some glint of happiness when he remembers it in age.
My father Senmut lived upstream from the temple walls, in a squalid, noisy quarter. Near his house lay the big stone wharves where the Nile boats discharged their cargoes, and in the narrow alley ways were the seamen’s and merchants’ taverns and the brothels to which the wealthy also came, borne on chairs from the inner city. Our neighbors were tax collectors, barge masters, noncommissioned officers, and a few priests of the fifth grade. Like my father, they belonged to the more respected part of the population, rising above it as a wall rises above the surface of the water.
Our house, therefore, was spacious in comparison with the mud huts of the very poor that huddled sadly along the narrow alleys. We had even a garden a few paces long with a sycamore in it that my father had planted. The garden was fenced from the street by acacia bushes, and for a pool we had a stone trough that contained water only at floodtime. There were four rooms to the house, and in one of them my mother prepared our food, which we ate on a veranda opening out of my father’s surgery. Twice a week a woman came to help my mother clean the house-for Kipa was very cleanly-and once a week a washerwoman fetched our linen to her wash place on the river bank.
In this rowdy quarter, where there were many foreigners-a quarter whose degradation was revealed to me only as I grew out of childhood-my father and his neighbors upheld tradition and all venerable customs. At a time when among even the aristocrats of the city these customs lapsed, he and his class continued rigidly to represent the Egypt of the past in their reverence for the gods, their purity of heart, and selflessness. It seemed as if they desired to dissociate themselves by their behavior from those with whom they were obliged to live and work.
But why speak now of what I only later understood? Why not rather remember the gnarled trunk of the sycamore, and the soughing of the leaves when I sought shelter at its foot from the scorching sun, and my favorite toy, the wooden crocodile that snapped its jaws and showed its red gullet when I pulled it along the paved street on a string? The neighbors’ children would gather to stare at it in wonder. I won many a honey sweetmeat, many a shiny stone and snippet of copper wire by letting others drag it along and play with it. Only children of high rank had such toys as a rule, but my father was given it by the palace carpenter, whom he had cured of a boil that prevented him from sitting down.
In the morning my mother would take me with her to the vegetable market. She never had many purchases to make, yet she could spend a water measure’s time choosing a bunch of onions and the whole of every morning for a week if it were a matter of choosing new shoes. By the way she talked one might have judged her to be rich and concerned merely with having the best; if she did not buy all that took her fancy-why, then it was because she wished to bring me up in thrifty ways. She would declare, “It is not the man with silver and gold who is rich, but the man who is content with little.” So she would assure me, while her poor old eyes dwelt longingly upon the brightly colored woolen stuffs from Sidon and Byblos, as fine and light as down. Her brown, work-hardened hands caressed the ostrich feathers and the ornaments of ivory. It was all vanity, she told me-and herself. But the child’s mind rebelled against these precepts; I longed to own a monkey that put its arm about its master’s neck or a brilliant-feathered bird that shrieked Syrian and Egyptian words. And I should have had nothing against gold chains and gilded sandals. It was not until much later that I realized how dearly poor old Kipa longed to be rich.
Being but the wife of a poor physician, she stilled her yearnings with stories. Before we fell asleep at night she would tell me in a low voice all the tales she knew. She told of Sinuhe and of the shipwrecked man who returned from the Serpent King with countless riches, of gods and evil spirits, of sorcerers, and of the Pharaohs of old. My father often murmured at this and said she was filling my head with nonsense, but when it was evening and he had begun to snore, she would continue, as much for her own pleasure as for mine. I remember those stifling summer nights when the pallet scorched my bare body and sleep would not come; I hear her hushed, soothing voice; I am safe with her once more… My own mother could hardly have been kinder or more tender than simple, superstitious Kipa, at whose hands blind and crippled storytellers were sure of a good meal.
The stories pleased me, but as a counterweight there was the lively street, that haunt of flies, the street that was filled with a thousand scents and smells. From the harbor the wind would bring the fresh tang of cedarwood and myrrh, or a breath of perfumed oil when a noble lady passing in her chair leaned out to curse the street boys. In the evenings, when Ammons golden boat swung down to the western hills, there arose from all the nearby huts and verandas the smell of fried fish mingled with the aroma of newly baked bread. This smell of the poor quarter in Thebes I learned to love as a child, and I have never forgotten it.
It was during meals on the veranda that I received the first teachings from my father. He would enter the garden wearily from the street or come from his surgery with the sharp odor of ointments and drugs clinging to his clothes. My mother poured water over his hands, and we sat on stools to eat while she served us. Sometimes while we were sitting there, a gang of sailors would reel along the street, yelling drunkenly, beating with sticks upon the walls of the houses, or stopping to relieve themselves by our acacias. My father, being a discreet man, said nothing until they had gone by; then he would tell me, “Only a Negro or a dirty Syrian does that in the street. An Egyptian goes between walls.”
Or he would say, “Wine enjoyed in moderation is the gods’ gift to us, and rejoices our hearts. One beaker hurts no one. Two loosen the tongue, but the man who drinks a jar of it wakes to find himself in the gutter, robbed and beaten.”
Sometimes a breath of perfumed ointments would reach the veranda when a lovely woman went by on foot, robed transparently, with cheeks, lips, and eyebrows beautifully painted and in her liquid eyes a glint never seen in those of the virtuous. When I gazed spellbound upon such a one, my father would say gravely, “Beware of a woman who calls you ‘pretty boy’ and entices you, for her heart is a net and a snare, and her body burns worse than fire.”
It was no wonder that after such teachings my childish soul began to fear the wine jar and beautiful women who were not like ordinary women, though both became endowed with the perilous charm of feared and forbidden things.
While I was yet a child, my father let me attend his consultations; he showed me his scalpels, forceps, and jars of medicine and explained their uses to me. When he examined his patients, I had to stand beside him and hand him bowls of water, dressings, oil and wine. My mother could not endure to see wounds and sores and never understood my interest in disease. A child does not appreciate suffering until he has experienced it. To me, the lancing of a boil was a thrilling operation, and I would proudly tell the other boys all I had seen to win their respect. Whenever a new patient arrived, I would follow my father’s examination and questions with close attention until at last he said, “This disease can be cured,” or “I will undertake your treatment.” There were also those whom he did not feel competent to treat. Then he would write a few lines on a strip of papyrus and send them to the House of Life, in the temple. When s
uch a patient had left him, he would usually sigh, shake his head, and say, “Poor creature!”
Not all my father’s patients were needy. Patrons of nearby pleasure houses were sent to him now and again to be bandaged after some brawl, and their clothes were of finest linen. Masters of Syrian ships came sometimes when they had boils or toothache. I was not surprised, therefore, when the wife of a spice dealer came for examination one day wearing jewelry and a collar sparkling with precious stones. She sighed and moaned and lamented over her many afflictions while my father listened attentively. I was greatly disappointed when at last he took up a strip of paper to write upon, for I had hoped he would be able to cure her and so acquire many fine presents. I sighed, shook my head, and whispered to myself, “Poor creature!”
The sick woman gave a frightened start and looked uneasily at my father. He wrote a line in ancient characters copied from a worn papyrus scroll, then poured oil and wine into a mixing bowl and soaked the paper in it until the ink had been dissolved by the wine. Then he poured the liquid into an earthenware jar and gave it to the spice dealer’s wife as a medicine, telling her to take some of it whenever head or stomach began to pain her. When the woman had gone, I looked at my father, who seemed embarrassed. He coughed once or twice and said, “Many diseases can be cured with ink that has been used for a powerful invocation.”
He said no more aloud, but muttered to himself after a time, “At least it can do the patient no harm.”
When I was seven years old, I was given a boy’s loincloth and my mother took me to the temple to attend a sacrifice. Ammon’s temple in Thebes was at that time the mightiest in all Egypt. An avenue bordered with ram’s-headed sphinxes carved in stone led to it, right through the city from the temple and pool of the moon goddess. The temple area was surrounded by massive brick walls and with its many buildings formed a city within the city. From the tops of the towering pylons floated colored pennants, and gigantic statues of kings guarded the copper gates on each side of the enclosure.