by Howard Fast
“Clear the chamber!”
Even the royal ambassadors tripped over their robes in their haste to be gone, and in moments the great room was empty. “So you see,” Ramses nodded, “and thus could I clear all of Egypt, if the mood took me—or people it. You mourn too readily for Kush. Other peoples have died and others will, for there is only one Egypt and only one GodKing sits on her throne—and the might of Egypt is the sorrow of others. Thus it was and thus it shall ever be—so long as the pyramids stand at Giza. And this you would throw away!”
“It was never mine to keep or throw away.”
“But it could be,” Ramses said, a note of pleading creeping into his voice.
“No—it could never be.”
Only now that the interview was over did Moses realize the purpose of it, and he felt ashamed and foolish and mawkish, with his boasting and fierce defiance. He had been allowed to peer under the curtain of loneliness that surrounded the loneliest man in Egypt, and the king of all kings had made a plea that died into a whimper. How boastful and foolish he had been to challenge Ramses with being afraid of him! The truth of the matter—which struck Moses like a sharp and ugly pain—was that this man whose children were a race in themselves desired desperately to have a son, a son like the old legends told about, a strong staff, a shield and protector. Even if there had been no reason whatever for him to believe Moses to be his child by his sister, he would have invented reasons. His last question came almost plaintively—
“You were with Seti-Keph when he died?”
“Yes, my Lord-King.”
“And how did he die?”
“As all men die, I suppose.”
“Was he—afraid?”
“He was afraid,” Moses said softly and unhappily. “He was terribly afraid.”
[15]
HIS LIFE NOW was quiet, like the still surface of the marshes at eventide. Day folded into day, and if their existence during these days after they returned to Tanis was purposeless, it was not idle. Moses had always loved the wild and far-reaching marshes of the Delta, the tang of the salt air, the endlessly different sunsets and the thick white mists of morning. Now he bought a small two-man boat, fashioned out of tightly tied bundles of papyrus, tarred against the water and lined with fragrant cedar-wood. In this boat, day after day, he and Nun would explore the marshes, hunt waterfowl, drift, when the mood took them, toward the open sea, cook their food now and then on a spit of sand—and sometimes lie under the Egyptian sun for hours, saying little or much or nothing at all to each other. Yet there was much that they taught each other. Moses learned to talk the tongue of the Levites more fluently, and Nun learned to write easily and well in the hieroglyphs. And if again and again they moved towards the Land of Goshen, it was not for Nun to press them on, and always it was Moses who turned back.
There was a time when they went out to the desert with Neph to look at the colossus of Ramses that he was constructing, the tallest piece of stone sculpture in all the world and one that was planned to last for ever. As antagonistic as Moses was to the whole concept of perpetuating the evil and lonely man who ruled the Great House, he nevertheless could not but be impressed by the scope and splendour of the project. As always when he went to one of Neph’s jobs, he felt the calm air of reason, science and logic—the laws of measurements, instruments and angles, the devotion to the job truly seen and well done. The many huge blocks of stone, some of them three times the height of a man and of even greater width than height, were scattered about the desert area, being cut and shaped and scraped and polished by a veritable army of workmen—an of them directed and watched by the master sculptor, a man named Shep-Tet. The finished model from which they copied the colossus, and which Moses learned was the eleventh Shep-Tet had created before Ramses was finally satisfied—was eight feet high, and presented Ramses in the traditional position of Egypt’s God-Kings, when they were portrayed in stone, seated upon his throne with the holy tools of authority in his lap. This model was mounted upon a wooden sledge and was dragged by six horses to wherever it was needed for comparison with the separate detail pieces of the colossus.
It was a fine and awe-inspiring, if traditional, piece of work, and Shep-Tet, a small, plain-looking and tired man, the son of peasants in Upper Egypt, glowed with pleasure as Neph praised it to Moses. “For you see,” Neph said, “it is not simply the problem of a piece of sculpture. We are building the largest and heaviest stone figure in the world, and mortar is out of the question. The joints must bind and disappear as a matter of perfection—absolute perfection—of surface and balance, and thus we have not only an artistic but a mathematical problem. The two are not as widely separated as you might think, and my friend Shep-Tet is an excellent mathematician as well as a great artist.”
“He praises me too much, O Prince of Egypt,” the little man said with some embarrassment, “but I won’t deny that the praise is sweet, coming as it does from Neph. He will not tell you that for all his talk of my mathematics, I could not solve the problem of projection to the ultimate size. This he did, and when praise falls from the lips of the wisest builder Egypt has ever known—” Suddenly, he was lost in confusion and fear, and begged Moses’ pardon, for surely the Prince of Egypt understood that the true builder of all the current wonders of Egypt was the God-King of the Great House—
Moses noticed the mixture of contempt and pity on Nun’s face, and afraid that Shep-Tet would prostrate himself before him, he said bluntly and almost roughly,
“Stop that kind of talk, Shep-Tet! I am no priest or clerk, and Neph here is like a brother to me, and a teacher as well as a brother. I know the worth of an artist or engineer, and the stud-bull whose portrait you have fashioned, giving him dignity and beauty that he never possessed, could not build a brush shelter in a forest. Stop being frightened, for I would also talk this way to his face; and I will not see a great artist crawl and belittle himself! What else but men like you is left of the glory that was Egypt?”
The confusion was compounded, and Shep-Tet made his retreat, muttering that his work needed him. Neph, not a little disturbed, told Moses that to talk as he had was more insanity than bravado, but Moses shrugged it off and answered sourly,
“I have a sickness called Egypt, and either I will die from it or heal myself. The man would have been on his belly before me in another moment.”
“He would have survived that.”
“But would I?” Moses smiled ruefully and shook his head. “Neph, Neph—I try you sorely, don’t I? We’ll talk about your work. It’s the only sanity I find today in Egypt.”
Neph nodded, but the dark shadow remained on his face. “I hope no other heard.”
“That’s done. Tell me, how will you mount those great blocks of stone? I see no scaffolding or rigging. The housing for that would have to be gigantic, wouldn’t it?”
He had touched the proper point, and in a few minutes Neph was lost in the explanation of how the colossus would be reared over the desert sands. He led Nun and Moses to the place where the foundation had been dug, through the sand and down to the bedrock, where a footing of hard granite had been shaped precisely to fit the undulations in the rock below. “Since we cannot use a binder, like mortar, with blocks of such great weight, they must bind of themselves, surface against surface—which to my way of thinking is the best method of construction for oversized stonework. The two surfaces must be smooth enough to blend into one—to a point where a hair cannot be inserted between any joint. Given the proper fitting, the stones will adhere for ever—or for as much of for ever as a human being cares to contemplate—providing they are not thrown over and providing that the foundation does not sink. The first we leave to time; the second, we can see to ourselves.” He went on to point out the terraces, walks and gardens that would be built around the colossus, once it was standing.
“If you can make it stand, O Engineer Neph,” Nun put in, “for, as far as I am concerned, no force on earth can lift those mountains of stone into the ai
r and set them one on top of another.”
“No? Then a good thing the job is mine and not yours, Nun, for if I want my head to continue to rest on my shoulders, the colossus must be in one piece ninety days from today. As a matter of fact, raising it up is the simplest part of the whole thing, as our ancestors who built the pyramids at Giza learned, and we will raise these stones just as they raised the pyramids. No crane or rigging within our power to make could ever move such weight. Instead we will move the first layer of stone to the foundation on rollers. When this is in place, we will simply raise the desert level to the top of the first layer. When that time comes, I’ll have three thousand slaves out here, and they’ll raise up the desert level in just about four hours. Then I use the same men to roll the second course of stone into place, and once again we raise the desert level. All told, it will take no more than six days to raise the figure and four days more to remove the sand, and for centuries to come people like yourself will speculate on how we lifted the stones into place.”
“It is very simple,” Nun nodded.
“As all things are, when you understand them …”
Twice more they went out to the desert to watch the work in progress. Other times, they wandered through the markets, buying something only occasionally, for their needs were few. One evening there was an assembly throughout the city to the Goddess Isis and her brother, Osiris. Few indeed could hold back from the heady and wild carnival joy of an assembly, and because they felt that Moses must turn away once and for all from thoughts of the dead, Neph and Nun dragged him with them. They bought torches and paper masks from the street-vendors; they munched the delicious hot delicacies for sale on every corner, pieces of fried fish, shrimp cooked in butter, cheese, hot bread, cakes of honey and almonds, honey and raisins, savoury stews of goat meat—and again and again, they stooped under fat wineskins and let the liquid run down their throats.
As Moses ate and drank and joined in the mass singing of the high-pitched hymns, the bonds he had tied around himself broke and fell away. He returned to the sunlit memories of an Egyptian childhood, and he remembered standing on the walls of the Great House and watching the assemblies swirl through the streets—longing to be a part of them, a part of that vast and formless crowd, suddenly communal and singular under its sea of smoking torches. Now he was glad that he had removed every symbol of rank before he left the house. Tonight he would be a kutah, another one of the thousands of poor and landless folk who lived in the hovels of Old Tanis, and he would drink and laugh and sing like a kutah. Yet his tall, big-boned figure stood out, and when the procession to the temple formed, he found a girl on each arm.
Somewhere, he had lost Nun and Neph—just as well, for he had clung to misery so long that he felt it like an obligation. Everyone was a little drunk by now, and as the procession moved singing towards the temple, the love-making began. It was said that wives and husbands knew not each other in the assembly, but they knew others; and as the ritual proceeded, the strange blending of the old fertility rites with the sophisticated polytheism of this Egypt, the mass release from all the pressures and bleakness of living moved toward hysteria. Here, noble mingled with commoner, princess with peasant, the paper masks levelling all to their common, vaguely remembered tribal origin. Moses knew the quick, passing love of women, not for a man but for any man, and in like indiscriminateness did they know his passion.
It was a night full of passionless passion, and a night without regrets.
[16]
AND FINALLY, NUN said it, curiosity being greater, in the long run, than deference—and homesickness a quality from which not even slaves are exempt. They had been too many times on the edge of the grassy meadows known as the Land of Goshen; and one day as their boat drifted through the papyrus-walled channels, Nun said,
“I would see my birthplace again, master, for like yourself, I am becoming too much of an Egyptian without being one at all.”
“My birthplace as well,” Moses said to himself, but did not answer Nun, who claimed aggrievedly that if he said one word out of the way nowadays, Moses became offended.
“I’m not offended and don’t be such a fool! Don’t you think I’ve thought of the same thing?”
“If I were in your place, I would not think of it.”
“No?”
“I’d put it out of my mind if I were in your place.”
“Oh? And why?” Moses asked.
“It’s better to be a prince than a slave.” Nun shrugged. “It’s better to be an Egyptian than a Levite.”
“I think a man should be what he is,” Moses said slowly.
“Why, master? Is it his doing that makes him what he is? It was Nehushtan who made me to be born out of the Levites, a slave. And maybe it was Nehushtan who made you to be lifted out of the river and turned into a prince. Was it your doing or mine? You yourself turned me against Nehushtan, and maybe some day he will kill me for that, but until then I will give him more grief than he bargained for.”
Moses grinned, sprawling in the prow of the boat and watching Nun deftly move it through the waterway with his single long sweep. “There are ways,” Nun nodded sagely. “The gods are sensitive, as everyone knows. Even to insult them causes a certain amount of discomfort.”
“I don’t know if a snake can be a god,” Moses answered lazily. “A snake is an animal that crawls on its belly. If you are quick with your sword, you can cut its head off, and that’s the end of the snake. If you are not quick enough, the snake can bite you, and that may well be the end of you—as it was almost the end of me when we were in that jungle in the South. But it was not Nehushtan who did it—only a snake. Anyway, I am sick to death of the gods and I would rather talk of something else.”
“The Land of Goshen? We are moving in that direction now.”
“Go there if you wish,” Moses nodded.
“Then please, master,” Nun said, “take off your jewels and bracelets and things of gold and take off the sacred kilt. Go in a loincloth, so that even if an Egyptian comes among them, it will not be a prince.”
Without replying, Moses divested himself of his royal insignia. He was suddenly subdued and afraid, and he was glad that Nun was with him. He wrapped the jewels and gold in the white linen kilt, and stuffed it all into the basket where they kept their food. Then, for the next hour as they moved towards Goshen, he sat in silence, his thoughts a turmoil of strange emotion. It seemed to him that the strong arms of Nun were a part of fate and destiny; at the same time, he knew that this was only his own fantasy, and that a single word from him would turn the papyrus boat around and send it back to Tanis. That he did not speak that word must remain his responsibility and not Nun’s—and whether he charged it to curiosity or to a desperate longing to be an integral and unapologetic part of a people, a place, a time or a history, it remained a necessity which he recognized. He did not know how it would have been had deserts, mountains and great distances separated him from the people of his birth—as would have been the case had he been born a Babylonian—but no such barriers existed. His whole life had been lived only a few miles from the Land of Goshen, cheek by cheek, as it might be put, with these poor devils who in their filth, ignorance and wretchedness sought solace in their primitive worship. In a manner of speaking, he had lived upon a tower, looking down into their valley of grief.
As to what they were, he had no illusions. He had heard then, and their ways described by Amon-Teph, erudite, sophisticated and knowledgeable—the civilized man who tried to keep the loathing out of his voice and judgment. He himself, Moses, had watched them labour under the whips of Neph’s overseers—the good and gentle Neph who was like his brother and father in one—yet neither to himself nor to Neph had it appeared wrong that the long whips of plaited bullhide should nag and tear at the mud-coated skin of these bearded Bedouins. For if slaves were born human, once put out to work under the sun upon the mighty creations of Egypt, they soon were divested of their human qualities.
Not yet on
earth had the thought taken root that men were equal in the eyes of the gods, under the sun, or under the starry sky.
So Moses knew what they were, and a thousand times had worn the mental badge of their shame and misery on his own smooth and healthy skin. Perhaps if the course of his own life had gone differently, if he had learned to love the sheen of gold and the glitter of jewels, if he had developed a taste for power, a lust for domination—if he had been able to have contempt and anger towards Enekhas-Amon, that vain and ambitious woman who was the only mother he had ever known—if he had never come under the spell of Amon-Teph and the old priests of the high tower, if he had not one day walked into a room where an engineer planned the glories of man’s civilization—perhaps if these things had not happened to him, he might have been able to wipe away the image and memory of who he was and from whence he had come.
But had the memory gone, he would not have been Moses of the half-name. This was, in good part, his own speculation and reverie as the boat was steered through the papyrus labyrinth; and he wondered, as he had so often before, what force traces and maps the paths of men. During the formative years of his life, he had been steeped all too deeply in the dualism that exists between gods and men in the Egyptian theology, not to seize, if inadvertently, upon symbolism as explanation. These waterways in the papyrus were a mysterious network in which a man could be lost for weeks, yet Nun knew his way, and every turn and twist of the canals was imprinted somewhere in his mind. Howsoever he might appear to deviate, his destination remained firm and unchanged.
So then, it appeared to Moses, that his own wanderings had led him here, not home; because he had come to believe as did Neph that there could be only search but no true destination for people like himself. In his own way and within the crippling limitations of his own time, Moses had become a rationalist—but it was a rationalism limited and stunted within the implacable framework of the gods; and now he saw himself, the enemy of the gods, as the captive of the gods too.
