Ancient Evenings Read online

  Praise for Norman Mailer

  “[Norman Mailer] loomed over American letters longer and larger than any writer of his generation.”

  —The New York Times

  “A writer of the greatest and most reckless talent.”

  —The New Yorker

  “Mailer is indispensable, an American treasure.”

  —The Washington Post

  “A devastatingly alive and original creative mind.”

  —Life

  “Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance.”

  —The New York Review of Books

  “The largest mind and imagination at work [in modern] American literature … Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Mailer is a master of his craft. His language carries you through the story like a leaf on a stream.”

  —The Cincinnati Post

  2013 Random House eBook Edition

  Copyright © 1983 by Norman Mailer

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, New York, a Penguin Random House Company.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Little, Brown & Co., Boston, in 1983.

  eISBN: 978-0-8129-8607-5

  www.atrandom.com

  v3.1

  I believe in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic, in what I must call the evocation of spirits, though I do not know what they are, in the power of creating magical illusions, in the visions of truth in the depths of the mind when the eyes are closed; and I believe … that the borders of our mind are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy … and that our memories are part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.

  W. B. YEATS

  Ideas of Good and Evil

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  I

  THE BOOK OF ONE MAN DEAD

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  II

  THE BOOK OF THE GODS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  III

  THE BOOK OF THE CHILD

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  IV

  THE BOOK OF THE CHARIOTEER

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  V

  THE BOOK OF QUEENS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  VI

  THE BOOK OF THE PHARAOH

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  VII

  THE BOOK OF SECRETS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  I

  THE BOOK OF ONE MAN DEAD

  Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state. I do not know who I am. Nor what I was. I cannot hear a sound. Pain is near that will be like no pain felt before.

  Is this the fear that holds the universe? Is pain the fundament? All the rivers veins of pain? The oceans my mind awash? I have a thirst like the heat of earth on fire. Mountains writhe. I see waves of flame. Washes, flashes, waves of flame.

  Thirst is in the rivers of the body. The rivers burn but do not move. Flesh—is it flesh?—lies beneath some heated stone. Lava rises in burned-out fields.

  Where, in what cavern, have such disruptions taken place? Volcanic lips give fire, wells bubble. Bone lies like rubble upon the wound.

  Is one human? Or merely alive? Like a blade of grass equal to all existence in the moment it is torn? Yes. If pain is fundament, then a blade of grass can know all there is.

  A burning number came before me. The flame showed an edge as unflickering as a knife, and I passed into that fiery sign. In fire I began to stream through the clear and blazing existence of the number 2.

  Pain entered on a pulse. Each rest between each pang was not enough—oh, the twisting of hope, the tearing of fiber. My organs had surely distorted, yes, and the shriek of bone when it cracked. Doors opened into blasts.

  Pain took abode in the most brilliant light. I was exposed to burning rock. Demonic, the heat of the sun, and blood boiling in the veins. Would it never be blood again? The current of the highest fires told me then—by the intensity itself—that I would not be destroyed. There had to be some existence on the other side. So I let go of my powers as they charred in my heart. These dying powers might yet give life to other parts of me. For I could see a thread quivering in the darkness, a tendril alive in the smoked-up carbon of my meats, fine as the most exquisite nerve, and through each pain, I looked for this filament in every refinement of anguish, until pain itself took on such radiance that I knew a revelation. The filament was not one thread, but two, wound about each other in immaculate delicacy. They twisted together during the most intolerable spasms, yet were quick to draw apart at the first relief, and with such subtlety of movement that I was certain I witnessed the life of my soul (seen at last!) dancing like a dust-tail above the flame.

  Then all was lost again. My bowels quaked with oceanic disruption, ready to jettison whole fats, sweetmeats and gravies of the old pleasure-soaked flesh, frantic as a traitor springing his leaks under torture. I would give up anything to ride lighter in the next wave of odium, and in the darkness of waves of flesh smacking raw waters of sound, I labored.

  I could not bury myself in such sulphurs. It was not the fumes, but the terror
of suffocation; not death by fire, but the soil burying me. It was the clay! A vision came forward of clay sealing the nostrils and the mouth, my ears, and into the sockets of my eyes—I had lost all vision of the double filament. There was only myself in these buried caves and the hammering of my gut. Yet if I were to be buried in the murk of these screaming scalding wastes, I had gained a vision with which to torment myself. For I comprehended the beauty of my soul at just the moment I could not reach its use. I would perish with such ideas even as I gained them!

  A moment of peace arrived then in this storm and tumult of the pipes. I knew the solemn desolation of the subsided center of the hurricane, and in that calm I saw with sorrow that I might now be wise without a life on which to work my wisdom. For I had a view of old dialogues. Once I had lived like master and slave—now both were lost to each new seizure—oh, the lost dialogue that had never taken place between the bravest part of me and the rest. The coward had been the master. Something came apart then in the long aisles of my pride, and I had a view into the fundament of pain, the view as beautiful as it was narrow. But now the mills of vituperation were turning again. Like a serpent whose insides have blown apart, I gave up, sued for peace, and gave birth to my bloody clotting history of coiled and twisted eviscerate. Some totality of me went out of my belly, and I saw the burning figure of the 2 dissolve in flame. I would be no longer what I had been. My soul felt pained, humbled, furious at loss, and still arrogant as beauty itself. For the pain had ceased and I was new. I had a body again.

  ONE

  The darkness was deep. Yet I had no doubt. I was in an underground chamber ten paces in length by half in width, and I even knew (just as quickly as a bat) that the room was all but empty. Stone was the surface of the walls and the floor. As if I could see with my fingers, I had only to wave an arm to feel the size of the space beyond my reach. It was exactly so remarkable as to hear voices by the hairs of one’s nose. For that matter, I could smell the scent of stone. Say that an absence was in the air, some hollow that dwelt within another hollow. Now I was aware of a granite coffer near to me, as aware, indeed, of its presence as if my body had walked within—it was huge enough to be my bed! But a step away, as if on guard, were some aged droppings on the floor, pellets from a small fierce animal who had managed like myself to find its way here, and left its deposit and gone. For there was no skeleton to speak of the beast. Just the scent of some old urine-cursed dung—But where was the passage by which the animal could have entered? I breathed in the horror that comes when the air is close with an animal’s mean excrement. That has its own message to give!

  Yet, I could also recognize a pure bouquet of fresh night air that had chosen to enter this chamber. Had it come from a shaft in the rock used by the cat?

  In the dark, between two blocks of stone, my fingers soon found a niche not much greater in width than a man’s head. Still, by its fresh breath, it must lead outside. The air that arrived through the shaft was only a whisper, not strong enough to stir one hair on a feather, but it offered the cool of the desert when the sun has been down for much of the night. Toward that cool murmur, I stretched, and to my surprise was able to follow my arm up the niche. It was a long shaft between great blocks of stone, and in places seemed no wider than my head, but it went in a straight line at a steep angle upward, a filthy trip. The dead shells of countless beetles cluttered my way. Ants went by my skin. Rats piped in high terror. Still, I climbed with no panic, only in surprise at the narrow dimensions of this passage. Surely I was not able to make my way through—it was hardly larger than the burrow of a snake—yet I might as well have been without shoulders or hips. Cunning was in my touch as if, like a snake, there was no fear of being caught in the passage ahead. I was capable of becoming narrower. But that is no better than to say I traveled with my thoughts through the long narrow shaft, my body sufficiently supple to obey—a most peculiar sensation. I felt altogether alive. The whisper of the air before me had phosphorescence. Particles of light glowed in my nose and throat. I was more alive than I could ever remember and yet felt no yoke of muscle and bone. It was as if I had been reduced to the size of a small boy.

  When I lay at last near the mouth of the passage, my view was of the sky at the end of the shaft and moonlight slanted over the edge. As I rested, the moon passed full into view and anointed me. From orchards in the distance came a scent of date and fig trees, and the clear refreshment of the vines. The air on this night gave intimations to me of gardens where once I made love. I knew again the smell of rose and jasmine. Far below, by the riverbank, the palms by the shore would be black in outline against the silver water of the river.

  So I came out at last from the end of the shaft in that great hill of stone. I stuck my head and shoulders into the open night, pulled through my legs, and gasped. Beneath the light of the moon was a long white slope of stone with the earth far below, but out there on the plateau of the desert, mute as a mountain of silver, there at the end of my gaze, was a Pyramid. Beyond it, another. Nearer to me, all but covered in sand, was a stone lion with the head of a man. I was perched on the slope of the Great Pyramid! I had just been—it could be nowhere else—in the burial chamber of the Pharaoh Khufu.

  Harsh as the sound of a man’s snore was the name of Khufu. He was gone a thousand years, and more. Yet, at the thought of having been in His tomb, my body was too weak to move. The sarcophagus of Khufu had been empty. His tomb had been found and robbed!

  I thought my heart would strike its last sound. My stomach had never felt so pure a slop of cowardice. Yet I was a man of valor, as I seemed to remember, perhaps a soldier, renowned for something—so, I could swear—all the same, I could not move a step. In shame I shivered beneath the moon. There I was, on the slope of our greatest Pyramid, moonlight on my head and heart, the statue of the immense lion below, and the Pyramids of the Pharaoh Khaef-ra and the Pharaoh Men-kau-ra to the south. To the east, I saw the moon on the Nile and far to the south, I even saw the last of the lights in the lamps of Memphi where mistresses were waiting for me. Or were they waiting for another by now? I was so reduced as to think it did not matter. Had I ever had a thought like this before?—I, whose first fear used to be that I was too ready to kill any man who looked at my woman? How exhausted I felt. Was this the price I paid for entering the tomb of Khufu? In gloom, I began to make my way down, sliding from crack to crack in the limestone, and knew some foul change had taken place in me already. My memory, which had given every promise (in the first glow of moonlight) that it would return, was still a sludge. Now the air was heavy with the odor of mud. That was the aroma of these lands, mud and barley, sweat and husbandry. By noon tomorrow, the riverbank would be an oven of moldering reeds. Domestic animals would leave their gifts on the mud of the bank—sheep and pigs, goats, asses, oxen, dogs and cats, even the foul odor of the goose, a filthy bird. I thought of tombs, and of friends in tombs. Like the plucking of a heavy string came a first intimation of sorrow.

  TWO

  I was in the most peculiar situation. I still did not know who I was, nor how old I might be. Was I mature and powerful, or young and in the beginning of my strength? It hardly seemed to matter. I shrugged, and began to walk, taking, for whatever reason, a path through the Necropolis, and as I meandered, I began to explain to myself what I saw, or so I would put it, for I felt in the oddest position, and like a stranger to my own everyday knowledge.

  Before me, I must say, was no more to see than the straight streets of this cemetery in the moonlight, a view without great charm, unless there is charm to be found in high value. Cubit for cubit, the city of the dead had the dearest plots in all of Memphi, or at least that is what I certainly remember.

  Wandering down the alleys of our monotonous Necropolis, sauntering past the shuttered door of one tomb, then another, I began—for no reason I could give—to think of a friend who had died recently, the dearest of my friends, this memory seemed to say, and the most absurd and violent death. Now, I had no more than to wo
nder whether his tomb was anywhere near about, and was visited with more recollections. My friend, I was ready to think, came from a powerful family. His father, if I could recall, had once served as Overseer of the Cosmetic Box—I would die, I thought, before lusting after such titles myself. Still, that was not a career to be sneered at altogether. Our Ramses, if I remembered correctly, was as vain as a beautiful girl, and detested any flaw in His appearance.

  Of course, with such a father, my friend (whose name, I fear, still eluded me) was certainly wealthy and noble. Poor entombed bugger! He must be, at the least, a descendant of the great Ramses, yes, the one, I could recall, who died something like a hundred years ago, our own Ramses the Second. He had ended as a very old man with a great many wives and more than a hundred recorded sons and fifty daughters. They produced ancestors in such numbers that today you cannot begin to estimate how many officers and priests are Ramessides by at least half of their line. For truth, hardly a rich woman in Memphi or Thebes will fail to offer one bona-fide cheek of her buttocks, royal as the Pharaohs, and she will not fail to let you know. To be descended from Ramses the Second may not be exceptional, but it is indispensable—at least if she wants a family plot in the Necropolis. Then, she had better be, at least by half, a Ramesside. In fact, you cannot even buy a tomb in the Western Shade if you are not, and that is only the first requirement in such commerce among Memphi matrons. There are not enough plots. So they go to great lengths. For instance, the mother of my dead friend, the matron Hathfertiti, was always prepared to trade. If the price was good enough, the sarcophagus of an ancestor could be transferred to an inferior tomb, or even shipped downriver to another necropolis. Of course one had to ask: Who was the deceased? How substantial was his curse? That was the unspoken part of the transaction—you had to be ready to take on a few malevolent oaths. But some were ready to welcome them if they were terrible enough to bring the price down. For example, Hathfertiti had been bold enough to sell the tomb of her dead grandfather. Concerning this dead relative, her husband’s grandfather (who happened incidentally to be her own grandfather since she was certainly her husband’s sister) it was told to the buyer that old man Menenhetet had been the kindest and most benign of men. His vice was that he could not harm his enemies. His curse need hardly be feared. What torture of the truth! In secret, it was whispered that Menenhetet had been known to eat fried scorpions with bat dung—just so great was his need to protect himself against the curses of the powerful. He had had a mighty life, I seemed to remember.