The Egyptian

3

It is needless to describe our voyage, which is to me now as a shade or an unquiet dream. When at last I stepped aboard the vessel that would bring me on my way to Thebes, the city of my childhood, such intense and boundless longing filled my soul that I could neither stand nor sit nor lie, but paced to and fro over the crowded deck, among the rolled-up mats and bales of merchandise. The smell of Syria lingered in my nostrils, and each passing day increased my eagerness to see, in place of the rock-bound coast, a certain low-lying land green with beds of reeds. When the vessel lay to for days on end at the quays of the cities along the coast, I had not serenity enough to explore these places or to gather information; the braying of donkeys on the shore mingled with the cries of the fish sellers and the murmur of foreign tongues into a roar that to my ears was indistinguishable from that of the sea.

Spring had come again to the Syrian valleys. Seen from offshore the hills were red as wine, and in the evenings the foaming surf of the beaches gleamed a pearly green. The priests of Baal made shrill commotion in the narrow alleys. They gashed their faces with flint knives until the blood flowed, while women with burning eyes and disheveled hair followed the priests, pushing wooden barrows. But all this I had seen many times before; their alien ways and brutish frenzy revolted me when before my eyes there floated a faint vision of my homeland. I had thought that my heart was hardened, that I had by now adapted myself to all customs and all faiths, that I understood the folk of all complexions and despised none, and that my one purpose was to gather knowledge. However, the consciousness that I was on my way home to the Black Land swept like a reviving flame through my heart.

I laid aside my foreign thoughts like foreign garments and was Egyptian once more. I longed for the smell of fried fish at dusk in the alleyways of Thebes when the women light their cooking fires before the mud huts. I longed for the savor of Egyptian wine and for the waters of the Nile with their scent of fertile mud. I longed for the whisper of the papyrus reeds in the evening breeze, for the chalice of the lotus flower unfolding on the shore, for the picture writing in the temples, for the colorful pillars with their eternal images, and for the smell of incense between those pillars. So foolish was my heart.

I was coming home although I had no home and was a stranger upon the earth. I was coming home and memory stung me no more. Time and knowledge had silted like sand over that bitterness. I felt neither sorrow nor shame; only a restless yearning gnawed at my heart.

Astern of us dropped the Syrian land: prosperous, fertile, seething with hatred and unrest. Our vessel, urged forward by the oars, glided past the red beaches of Sinai, and the desert winds blew hot and dry over our faces although it was spring. Then there came a morning when the sea was yellow, and beyond it the land lay like a narrow green ribbon. The seamen lowered a jar and brought up in it water that was not salt; it was Nile water and tasted of the mud of Egypt. No wine ever tasted so delectable to me as this muddy water, hauled up so far from land.

Kaptah said, “Water is always water, even in the Nile. Have patience, lord, until we find an honest tavern where the beer is clear and foaming, so that a man need not suck it through a straw to avoid the husks of grain. Then and then only shall I know that I am home.”

His godless talk jarred on me, and I said, “Once a slave always a slave, even when he is robed in fine wool. Have patience, Kaptah, until I find a flexible cane-such a one as can be cut only in the reed swamps of the Nile-and then, indeed, you shall know that you are home.”

He was not offended, but his eyes filled with tears, his chin quivered, and he bowed before me, stretching forth his hands at knee level.

“Truly, lord, you have the gift of hitting upon the right word at the right moment, for I had already forgotten how sweet is the caress of a slender cane on the legs and backside. Ah, my lord Sinuhe, it is an experience that I wish that you also might share. Better than water or beer, better than incense, better than wild duck among the reeds-more eloquently than these does it speak of life in Egypt, where each fills his proper place and nothing changes. Do not wonder if in my emotion I weep, for only now do I feel that I am coming home after seeing much that is alien and perplexing and contemptible. O blessed cane that sets each in his proper place and resolves all problems, there is none like you!”

He wept a little and then went to anoint his scarab, but I noted that he no longer used as fine oil as before. Land was near, and he fancied no doubt that once in Egypt his own natural guile would suffice him.

When we berthed in the great harbor of the Lower Kingdom I realized for the first time how weary I was of brightly colored, voluminous clothes, curly beards, and thick bodies. The narrow hips of the porters, their loincloths, their shaven chins, their speech which was that of the Lower Kingdom, the smell of their sweat, of the river mud, of the reeds and the harbor-all was different from Syria; all was familiar.

The Syrian clothes I wore began to irk and stifle me. When I had finished my business with the harbor clerks and had written my name on many papers, I went at once to buy new clothes. After so much wool, fine linen was sweet to the skin. But Kaptah resolved to continue as a Syrian, for he feared lest his name might still figure on the list of runaway slaves, though he had obtained a clay tablet from the authorities in Smyrna, certifying that he had been born a slave in Syria, where I had lawfully bought him.

Next we embarked with our baggage on a river boat to continue our voyage up the Nile. Days went by and carried us further into the life of Egypt. On either side of the river lay the drying fields where slow oxen drew the wooden plows and laborers walked the furrows with bowed heads, sowing their grain. Swallows skimmed with anxious twitterings above the leisurely flowing water and the mud into which they would soon vanish during the heat of the year. Curving palms lined the banks, and in the shade of tall sycamores clustered the low huts of the village. The boat touched at the landing stages of towns great and small, and there was not a harbor tavern to which Kaptah did not run, to moisten his throat with Egyptian beer, to boast and tell fantastic tales of his travels and my skill, while his audience of dock laborers listened and laughed and jested and invoked the gods.

So I saw again the peaks of the three hills against the eastern sky, the eternal guardians of Thebes. Buildings now stood closer together; poor villages gave place to rich suburbs until the city walls rose up like hills. I saw the roof of the great temple and its pillars, the countless buildings about it, and the sacred lake. Westward the City of the Dead stretched away to the hills. The death temple of the Pharaohs glowed white against the yellow slopes, and the rows of pillars in the temple of the great queen still bore up a sea of flowering trees. Beyond the hills lay the forbidden valley with its snakes and scorpions where, in the sand at the entrance to the tomb of the great Pharaoh, the dried bodies of my parents Senmut and Kipa lay in eternal rest. Further south along the shore rose the golden, airy house of Pharaoh, hazy among its walls and gardens. I wondered whether my friend Horemheb dwelt there.

The boat came alongside a familiar stone quay. Nothing was changed, and not many streets away was the place where I had spent my childhood, little dreaming that one day I was to lay waste my parents’ life. The sands of time, which had drifted over these bitter memories, stirred a little. I longed to hide myself and cover my face and felt no joy, though the noise of a great city was in my ears once more, and though the haste and restless movements of the people brought to my own senses the feverish pulse of Thebes. I had made no plans for my return, having resolved to let all depend upon my meeting with Horemheb and upon his position at court. But when my feet touched the stones of the quay a plan sprang ready formed into my head, a plan that promised neither fame nor wealth-no lavish gifts in return for all the knowledge I had amassed, as had formerly been my dream-but obscurity and a simple life among poor patients. Yet my mind was filled with a strange serenity when I saw my future revealed. This resolve, this hidden fruit of experience, had ripened within me unseen. When I heard the roar of Thebes about me and my feet touched the burning stones of the wharf, I was a child again, watching with solemn, curious eyes the work of my father Senmut among the sick.

I drove away the porters who noisily importuned me, squabbling among themselves the while, and I said to Kaptah, “Leave our baggage in the boat and hasten to buy me a house-no matter which-a house near the harbor in the poor quarter, near the place where my father’s house stood before they pulled it down. Do this in haste that I may take up my dwelling there today and tomorrow begin to ply my trade.”

Kaptah’s jaw dropped, and his face was a blank mask. He had fancied that we should first put up at the best inn and be waited on by slaves. Yet for once he uttered no word of protest, but having gazed into my face, he shut his mouth and went his way with a drooping head.

That evening I moved into a house in the poor quarter that had belonged to a copperfounder. My baggage was conveyed thither, and there I spread my mat on the earthen floor. Cooking fires were glowing before the huts of the poor, and the smell of fried fish floated over all that dirty, wretched, sickly quarter. Then the lamps were lit above the doors of the pleasure houses, and Syrian music began to jangle from the taverns, blending with the roars of tipsy seamen, and the sky over Thebes glowed red from the countless lights i{i the center of the city.

I had traveled many outlandish roads to their end, gathering wisdom and fleeing eternally from myself, and I had come home.