Nefertiti

2

Great Thebes, your lights and shadows, your corrupt businesses and your chattering parties, your shops and your luxuries; your rotten, squalid quarters and your youthful, fashionable beauties; your crimes and miseries and murders. I never know whether I hate or love you. But at least I know you. Above the low rooftops of my neighbourhood I can see the blue, gold, red and green of the temple facades, their colonnades and pylons standing to the sun. The holy sycamore groves around them like dark green candles. Orchards and hidden gardens. And next to them rubbish in piles between dark shacks, and in dangerous passageways. Behind the costly villas and great palaces and temples lie the shanties made from the cast-offs and detritus of the rich where the multitudes scrape meagre livings. The niches of the household gods, each dish with its daily offering. They say there are more gods than mortals in the city, yet I have never seen one that was not shaped from the materials of this world. No, I do not hold with gods. They are selfish, in their temples and heavens. They have too much to answer for, in their relish of our sufferings and misfortunes, and their neglect of the petitions of our hearts. But this is sacrilege, and I must silence my thought-although I will write it here, and who reads this must honour my stupid trust.

I walked down the streets towards the docks, beneath the dusty white awnings that protect us from the noon sun. I saw the local kids running along the rooftops, shouting and darting between the piles of drying crops and fruit, jostling the cages of birds causing tiny uproars of shrieks and songs, jumping over the afternoon sleepers and leaping the crazy gaps between the buildings. I passed by the stalls piled with colourful produce and walked down the Alley of Fruit and then into the shadowy passages under the patterned awnings where the expensive shops sell rare clever monkeys, giraffe skins, ostrich eggs and tusks engraved with prayers. The whole world brings its tributes and its wonders to us: the remarkable fruits of its endless labours are presented at our doors. Or, at least, the doors of those who do not have to wait so many months for their gift of pay (note to self: reapply to treasurer for unpaid salary gifts).

I prefer this great chaos of the living streets to the hushed and ordered temples, courts and sanctuaries of the gods and the hierarchies of the Priests. I prefer noise and mess and dirt, even the workers’ suburbs in the east, and the smelly pig yards, and the dogs on chains in the miserable dark hovels these people must call home. Those are the places we enter with the caution of experience, knowing we are hated and in danger. The law of the Medjay, whose authority to maintain order stretches through all the Provinces of the Two Lands, has no power there, although few of us would admit it. When we approach, kites, their stretched canvases painted with the eyes of angry gods, rise, dart and swoop in the sky, to warn of our approach. But then I think our law has no sway in the palaces and temples either. They too have their definitive powers. I will no doubt find this where I am bound.

I arrived, finally, at the docks, and found among the thousands of vessels the boat which was to carry me on the first stage of this journey. I was the last to board, and as soon as I was installed the sailors pushed off, the oars came out, and we began to merge into the life of the Great River, which now spread out wide with all its traffic of people and goods, as far as the eye can travel to the horizon where the Black Land meets the Red and holds it back for all time.

Lightland, our world of light. The triumph of time. Countless boats, sails bowed to the invisible wind: the fishing men, the larger transports of stones and cattle, the ferries that travel between the banks of the river, between the temples to the east and the tombs to the west, between the rising and the setting of the sun, with their mortal passengers. Flocks of ibis wading in the shallows. Votive blue lotus flowers bobbing in the waters beside the remains of everyday life: bits of food, clothing, rubbish, dead fish and dogs, and dog fish, and cat fish. The endless quiet creaking of the shadoufs. The ceaseless gifts of the Great River. Thebes survives for and by it. Or rather, the river grants the waters of life to the city. Where would we be without water? We would be nothing but the desert that fears the river.

They say the gods possess the river, and that the river is a god, but I think its owners are the Priests in the offices, and the rich with their villas and terraces where the cool water laps at their soft and lazy feet. And he who owns the water, owns the city-indeed owns life itself. But no-one in truth owns the river. It is greater, more enduring and more powerful than any of us, almost more than any god. It can tear us apart with its force or starve us by withholding its yearly inundation. It is full of death. It carries corpses of beasts and men and children whose dwelling time in its depths has shocked them green. Sometimes I believe I sense their hopeless and unfinished spirits as they touch upon the water, sending out silent concentric rings as signs to tell us they were here and are gone without rest. And yet it sustains our rich black earth from which spring our green crops, our barley and emmer wheat.

As the city of my birth and life dwindled in our wake, I left the world I know, where we live out our brief stories between the Black and the Red, between the land of the living and the rising sun and the land of long shadows and death, between the little moments and luxuries of our life and the western desert, that wilderness where we send our criminals to die only for them to return as demons to haunt us as we sleep. Once, they say, before time began the whole of the land was green, with herds of water buffalo, gazelles and elephants. And suddenly I remembered years ago, when my father and I rode into the desert. A great storm had changed again the landscape of the dunes. We found revealed the skeleton of a crocodile, so far from any kind of water. What else lies hidden there? Great cities, strange statues, lost peoples, their ships built to sail the Otherworld’s eternal sea of sand.

Alas, I am carried away again. I must be sober as the great serpent of water carries me away from all I know, and all I love, on its blackness, its perpetual glittering scales, with its sightless memory of a long journey from high in the unknown stones of Nubia, down through the great cataracts, and into the fields, into the fruit and the vegetables, into the wine, into the sea; and somewhere into snow.