The Egyptian

by Mika Waltari

  We went through the gates, and the sellers of Books of the Dead pulled at my mother’s clothes and made their offers shrilly or in a whisper. Mother took me to look at the carpenters’ shops with their display of wooden images of slaves and servants, which, after consecration by the priests, would serve their owners in the next world so that these need never lift a finger to help themselves.

  My mother paid the fee demanded of spectators, and I saw white- robed, deft-handed priests slay and quarter a bull between whose horns a braid of papyrus bore a seal, testifying that the beast was without blemish or a single black hair. The priests were fat and holy, and their shaven heads gleamed with oil. There were a hundred or so people who had come to attend the sacrifice, but the priests paid little heed to them and chatted freely to one another of their own affairs throughout the ceremony. I gazed at the warlike pictures on the temple walls and marveled at the gigantic columns, failing altogether to understand my mother’s emotion when with tear-filled eyes she led me home. There she took off my baby shoes and gave me new sandals that were uncomfortable and chafed my feet until I grew used to them.

  After the meal my father, with a grave look upon his face, laid his big, clever hand on my head and stroked with shy tenderness the soft locks at my temple.

  “Now you are seven years old, Sinuhe, and must decide what you want to be.”

  “A warrior!” I said at once, and was puzzled by the disappointed look on his good face. For the best games the street boys played were war games, and I had watched soldiers wrestle and perfect themselves in the use of arms in front of the barracks and had seen plumed war chariots race forth on thundering wheels to maneuvers outside the city. There could be nothing nobler or grander than a warrior’s career. Moreover, a soldier need not be able to write, and this was what weighed most with me, for older boys told terrible tales of how difficult the art of writing was and of how mercilessly the teachers pulled the pupils’ hair if they chanced to smash a clay tablet or break a reed pen between their unskilled fingers.

  It is likely that my father was never a notably gifted man, or he would surely have become something more than a poor man’s doctor. But he was conscientious in his work and never harmed his patients and in the course of years had become wise through experience. He knew already how touchy and self-willed I was and made no comment on my resolve.

  Presently, however, he asked my mother for a bowl, and going to his workroom, he filled the vessel with cheap wine from a jar.

  “Come, Sinuhe,” he said, and he led me out of the house and down to the river bank. By the quay we stopped to look at a barge from which stunted porters were unloading wares sewn up in matting. The sun was setting among the western hills beyond the City of the Dead, but these serfs toiled on, panting and dripping with sweat. The overseer stung them with his whip while the clerk sat placidly beneath his awning, checking off each bale on his list.

  “Would you like to be one of those?” asked my father.

  I thought this a stupid question and gaped at him without answering. No one wanted to be like the porters.

  “They labor from early morning till late at night,” said Senmut. “Their skins have coarsened like a crocodile’s; their fists are gross as crocodile’s feet. Only when darkness falls can they crawl to their miserable huts, and their food is a scrap of bread, an onion, and a mouthful of thin, bitter beer. That is the porter’s life, the ploughman’s life, the life of all who labor with their hands. Do you think they are to be envied?”

  I shook my head, still looking at him in wonder. It was a soldier I desired to be, not a porter, a scratcher of the soil, a waterer of the fields, or a dung-caked shepherd.

  “Father,” I said as we went on, “soldiers have a fine time. They live in barracks and eat good food; in the evening they drink wine in the pleasure houses, and women smile at them. The leaders among them wear golden chains about their necks although they cannot write. When they return from battle, they bring with them booty and slaves who toil and follow trades to serve them. Why shouldn’t I strive to become a warrior, too?”

  My father made no answer but hastened his step. Near the big rubbish dump where flies buzzed in a cloud about us he bent down and peered into a low mud hovel.

  “Inteb, my friend, are you there?”

  Out crawled a verminous old man leaning on a stick. His right arm had been lopped off below the shoulder, and his loincloth was stiff with dirt. His face was dried and wizened with age, and he had no teeth.

  “Is-is that Inteb?” I gasped, looking at the old man in horror. Inteb was a hero who had fought in the Syrian campaigns under Thothmes III, the greatest of the Pharaohs, and stories were still told of his prowess and of the rewards that Pharaoh had given him.

  The old man raised his hand in a soldier’s salute, and my father handed him the bowl of wine. Then they sat down on the ground for there was not even a bench outside the hut, and Inteb raised the wine to his lips with a trembling hand, careful not to waste a drop.

  “My son Sinuhe means to be a warrior,” my father smiled. “I brought him to you, Inteb, because you are the last survivor of the heroes of the great wars and can tell him of the proud life and splendid feats of soldiers.”

  “In the name of Set and Baal and all other devils!” cackled the other, turning his nearsighted gaze upon me. “Is the boy mad?”

  His toothless mouth, dim eyes, dangling arm stump, and wrinkled, grimy breast were so terrifying that I crept behind my father and gripped his arm.

  “Boy, boy,” tittered Inteb, “if I had a mouthful of wine for every curse I have uttered upon my life and upon fate-miserable fate that made a soldier of me-I could fill the lake that Pharaoh has had made for his old woman. True, I have never seen it because I cannot afford to be ferried across the river, but I doubt not I could fill it- ay, and that there would be enough over to fuddle an army.”

  He drank again, sparingly.

  “But,” said I, my chin quivering, “the soldier’s profession is the most honorable of all.”

  “Honor! Renown!” said Inteb, hero of the armies of Thothmes. “Droppings-ordure where flies are bred-no more! Many a lie have I told in my time to get wine out of the goggling blockheads who listened to me, but your father is an upright man whom I will not deceive. Therefore, son, I tell you that of all professions the warrior’s is the most wretched and most degraded.”

  The wine was smoothing out the wrinkles in his face and kindling a glow in his wild old eyes. He rose and gripped his neck with his one hand.

  “Look, boy! This scraggy neck was once hung with golden chains-five loops of them. Pharaoh himself hung them there. Who can reckon the lopped-off hands I have heaped before his tent? Who was the first to scale the walls of Kadesh? Who burst through the enemy ranks like a trumpeting elephant? It was I-I, Inteb the hero! And who thanks me for it now? My gold went the way of all earthly things, and the slaves I took in battle ran away or perished miserably. My right hand I left behind in the land of Mitanni, and I should long ago have been begging at street corners were it not for the charitable people who give me dried fish and beer now and then for telling their children the truth about war. I am Inteb, the great hero-look at me! I left my youth in the desert, robbed of it by starvation, privation, and hardship. There the flesh melted from my limbs, my skin toughened, and my heart hardened to stone. Worst of all, the parched desert dried my tongue, and I became the prey of unquenchable thirst, like every other soldier who returns alive from foreign wars. And life has been like the valley of death since I. lost my arm. I need not s° much as mention the pain of the wound and the agony when the army surgeons scalded the stump in boiling oil after the amputation-that is something your father can appreciate. Blessed be your name,

  Senmut! You are a just man, a good man-but the wine is finished.”

  The old fellow fell silent, panted a little, and sitting down again upon the ground, he turned the earthenware bowl sadly upside down. His eyes were glowing embers, and he was once more
an old, unhappy man.

  “But a warrior need not know how to write,” came my faltering whisper.

  “H’m,” said the old man and looked sideways at my father, who quickly took a copper bangle from his arm and handed it to him. Inteb called loudly, and at once a grimy boy ran up, took the ring and the bowl, and started for the tavern after more wine.

  “Not the best!” shouted Inteb to him. “Get the sour-they’ll give you more of it.” He looked at me again reflectively. “A warrior need not write, only fight. If he could write, he would be an officer with command over the most valiant, whom he would send before him into battle. Anyone who can write is fit for command, but a man who cannot scribble pothooks will never have even so many as a hundred under him. What joy can he take in gold chains and honors when it is the fellow with the reed pen in his hand who gives the orders? Thus it is, and thus it will be-and so, my lad, if you would command men and lead them, learn to write. Then those with the gold chains will bow down before you, and slaves will carry you in a chair to the field of battle.”

  The dirty boy came back with a jar of wine and had the bowl full as well. The old man’s face shone with joy.

  “Your father Senmut is a good man. He can write, and he tended me in my palmy days when wine was plentiful and I used to see crocodiles and hippopotamuses where none were. A good man, though he is only a doctor and cannot handle a bow. He has my thanks.”

  I stared nervously at the wine jar to which Inteb plainly meant to turn his full attention and began to tug at my father’s wide, drug- stained sleeve, fearful lest so much wine might result in our waking, bruised and beaten, in some gutter. Senmut looked at the jar also, sighed a little, and led me away. Inteb lifted up his shrill old voice in a Syrian song while the naked, sun-blackened boy laughed.

  So I buried my martial dreams and no longer resisted when my father and mother took me next day to school.

  4

  My father could not afford to send me to any of the big temple schools where the sons-and sometimes daughters-of rich men, nobles, and eminent priests were taught. My teacher was the old priest Oneh, who lived not far away and held classes on his tumble-down veranda. His pupils were the children of artisans, merchants, dock foremen, and noncommissioned officers whose ambition sought to open a scribe’s career for their sons. Oneh had in his time been steward to the Celestial Mut in the temple and was therefore well fitted to give elementary writing lessons to children who later on would be keeping tally of merchandise, measures of grain, head of cattle, or provisions for the army. There were hundreds of such little schools in the great city of Thebes. Instruction was cheap, the pupils merely having to maintain the teacher. The charcoal seller’s son replenished his brazier in winter, the weaver’s son kept him in clothes, the corn chandler’s boy saw that he never ran short of flour, and my father treated his many aches and pains and gave him herbal anodynes to take in his wine.

  His dependence upon us made Oneh a gentle teacher. A boy who fell asleep over his tablets never had his ears boxed; he had but to filch some titbit for the old man next morning. Sometimes the corn merchant’s son would bring a jug of beer. On such days we were all attention, for old Oneh would be inspired to tell us strange stories of the other world: of the Celestial Mut, of the Creator, of Ptah and his companion gods. We would giggle, believing that we had distracted him from our difficult tasks and wearisome writing characters for the rest of the day; it was only later that I perceived old Oneh to be a wiser teacher than we took him for. There was a purpose in his recital of the legends to which his pious, childlike spirit gave life: they taught us the traditions of ancient Egypt. In them no evil deed went unpunished. Relentlessly each human heart was weighed before the high throne of Osiris. That mortal whose evil deeds were disclosed upon the scales of the Jackal-Headed One was thrown to the Devourer who was crocodile and hippopotamus combined, but more terrifying than either.

  He told also of the surly Backward-Gazer, that dread ferryman without whose help no one could attain the fields of the blessed. When he rowed, he faced aft, never forward like the earthly boatmen the Nile. Oneh would make us repeat by heart the phrases with which this being might be bribed and propitiated. He taught us to C0Py them out and then write them down from memory, correcting our faults with the gentle warning that the smallest error would wipe out all chance of a happy life in the hereafter Were we to hand the Backward-Gazer a letter containing even a trivial mistake, we should be forced to wander like shadows for all eternity by the banks of those somber waters or, worse still, be engulfed in the hideous abysses of the realms of death.

  I attended Oneh’s school for some years. My best friend there was Thothmes, who was a year or so older than myself and who had been brought up from infancy to wrestle and to handle horses. His father was leader of a squadron of chariots and wielded a whip of office braided with copper wire: he had hopes that his son might become a high-ranking officer and therefore wished him to learn to write. But there was nothing prophetic about the illustrious name of Thothmes, despite his father’s ambitions, for as soon as the boy began his schooling, he ceased to care for javelin throwing and charioteering. He learned his characters easily, and while the other boys struggled grimly with them, he drew pictures on his tablets: pictures of chariots, rearing horses, and wrestling soldiers. He brought clay to school, and while the ale jug told stories through Oneh’s mouth, he modeled a comic little image of the Devourer snapping with clumsy jaws at a little bald old man whose humped back and pot belly could belong to none other than Oneh. But Oneh was not angry. No one could be angry with Thothmes. He had the broad face and short, thick legs of a peasant, but his eyes held a joyful glint that was infectious, and the birds and beasts he formed from clay with his clever hands delighted us all. I had sought his friendship first because he was soldierly, but the friendship persisted after he had ceased to show a trace of warlike ambition.

  A miracle happened during my school days and happened so suddenly that I still remember that hour as one of revelation. It was a fair, cool day in spring when the air was full of bird song and storks were repairing their old nests on the roofs of the mud huts. The waters had gone down, and fresh green shoots were springing from the earth. In all the gardens seeds were being sown and plants bedded out. It was a day for adventure, and we could not sit still on Oneh’s rickety old veranda, where the mud bricks crumbled under one’s hand. I was scratching at those everlasting symbols-letters for cutting in stone and beside them the abbreviated signs used for writing on paper-when suddenly some forgotten word of Oneh’s, some queer flash within myself, spoke and brought these characters to life. The pictures became a word, the word a syllable, the syllable a letter. When I set picture to picture, new words leaped forth-living words, quite distinct from the symbols. Any yokel can understand one picture, but two together have meaning only for the literate. I believe that everyone who has studied writing and learned to read knows what I am trying to say. The experience was to me more exciting, more fascinating than snatching a pomegranate from a fruit seller’s basket-sweeter than a dried date, delicious as water to the thirsty.

  From that time I needed no urging but soaked up Oneh’s learning as dry earth soaks up the flood waters of the Nile, and I quickly learned to write. In a little while I began to read what others had written, and by the third year I could already spell my way through tattered scrolls and read aloud instructive fables for the others to write down.

  About this time I noticed that I did not look like the rest. My face was narrower, my skin lighter, and my limbs more slender than those of the other lads and of the people among whom I dwelt. But for the difference in dress, hardly anyone could have distinguished me from the boys who were carried in chairs or walked the streets attended by slaves. I was sneered at for this; the corn merchant’s son would try to put his arm round my neck and called me a girl until I had to jab him with my stylus. He revolted me for he had an evil smell, but I liked to be with Thothmes, who never touched me. One da
y Thothmes said shyly, “I will model your likeness if you will sit for me.”

  I took him home, and there under the sycamore he made a likeness of me in clay and scratched the characters of my name upon it with a stylus. My mother Kipa, coming out with cakes for us, was badly frightened when she saw the image and called it witchcraft. But my father said that Thothmes might become artist to the royal household if he could only join the temple school, and jokingly I bowed down before Thothmes and stretched forth my hand at knee level as one does in the presence of distinguished persons. His eyes shone; then he sighed that it could never be, for his father thought it was time he came back to barracks and joined the school for charioteers. He could already write as well as was required of any future officer. My father left us then, and we heard Kipa muttering to herself in the kitchen; but Thothmes and I ate the cakes, which were greasy and good, and we were well content.

  I was still happy then.

  5

  The day came when my father put on his newly washed best robe and set about his neck a broad collar embroidered by Kipa. He went to the great temple of Ammon, though privately he had no love for priests. But nothing ever happened in Thebes or indeed in the whole of Egypt at this time without their help and intervention. They administered justice so that a bold man against whom judgment had been given by Pharaoh’s own court could appeal to them for redress. In their hands lay all instruction for the higher administrative posts. They foretold the height of the flood waters and the size of the harvest and from this assessed the taxes for the whole country.