The Egyptian (3 page)

“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, drugstained 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.

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 tumbledown 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 of the Nile. Oneh would make us repeat by heart the phrases with which this being might be bribed and propitiated. He taught us to copy 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 styius. He revolted me for he had an evil smell, but I liked to be with Thothmes, who never touched me. One day 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.

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.

I do not think it can have been easy for my father to humble himself before them. All his life he had been a poor man’s physician in the poor man’s quarter—a stranger to the temple and the House of Life—and now like other penniless fathers he had to wait in line outside the administrative department until it should please some holiness or other to receive him. I can see these poor fathers now, squatting in the temple courtyard in their best robes, dreaming ambitious dreams for their sons, for whom they coveted a better existence than their own. Many of them had come a long way on river boats, carrying their food with them. They spent their substance on bribes to doorkeeper and clerk for the privilege of a word with a gold-embroidered, perfumed, and anointed priest, who wrinkled his nose at the smell of them and gave them harsh words. And yet—Ammon stands in continual need of new servants. The greater his wealth and power, the greater the numbers of scribes he wears out in his service. However, there is not a father who does not regard it as a divine favor for his son to be received into the temple—ay, though in bringing the boy he brings a gift more precious than gold.

My father was fortunate in his visit, for noon had scarcely passed when his old fellow student Ptahor came by. In the course of time Ptahor had become skull opener to Pharaoh’s household. My father ventured to address him, and he promised to honor our house in person and inspect me.

The day being fixed, my father saved up for a goose and the best wine. Kipa baked—and nagged. A luscious odor of goose fat floated out into the street till blind men and beggars gathered there to sing and play for their share of the feast. Kipa, hissing with rage, charged out with a bit of bread dipped in the fat for each of them and sent them packing. Thothmes and I swept the street from our door far into the city. My father had asked Thothmes to be at hand when the guest came, in the hope that he also might be favored with the great man’s attention. Boys though we were, when my father lit the censer and set it to perfume the entrance way, we felt as awestruck as if we had been in a temple. I guarded the can of scented water and kept the flies off the dazzling white linen cloth Kipa had set aside for her own burial, but which was now brought forth as a towel for Ptahor.

We had long to wait. The sun set, and the air grew cooler. The incense in the porch all burned away, and the goose sizzled sorrowfully in the roasting pit. I grew hungry, and Kipa’s face lengthened and stiffened. My father said nothing but would not light the lamps when darkness fell. We all sat down on stools in the porch and avoided one another’s eyes, and it was then I learned what bitter grief and disappointment the rich and mighty in their thoughtlessness can bring upon the poor.

But at last there came the glow of a torch along the street. My father jumped up and hastened to the kitchen for an ember to light both the lamps. I raised the water pitcher in trembling hands while Thothmes breathed heavily beside me.

Ptahor, the opener of royal skulls, arrived unpretentiously in a chair borne by two Negro slaves and preceded by a fat torchbearer who was evidently drunk. With puffings and cheerful cries of greeting Ptahor stepped from the chair to hail my father, who bowed and stretched forth his hands at knee level. The guest laid his hands on Senmut’s shoulders, either to show him that ceremony was needless or to steady himself. Thus supported he kicked at the torchbearer and told him to sleep it off under the sycamore. The Negroes, without waiting for orders, dumped the chair in the acacia bushes and squatted on the ground.

Still leaning on my father’s shoulder, Ptahor stepped into the porch, where I poured water over his hands despite his protests. When I handed him the linen cloth, he said that as I had rinsed his hands I might now dry them. When I had done this, he thanked me and said I was a handsome boy. My father led him to the seat of honor—a chair with a back, borrowed from the spice merchant—and he sat down, his inquisitive little eyes peering about him in the light of the suet lamps. For a time there was silence. Then, clearing his throat apologetically, he asked for something to drink as the long journey had made him dry. My father, delighted, poured out wine for him. Ptahor sniffed at it and tasted it suspiciously, then emptied the cup with evident enjoyment and gave a contented sigh.