Ancient Evenings Read online

  Now the buyer to whom Hathfertiti was selling this plot, an ambitious little official, was not untypical. He knew the best protection against any evil spell was for a petty Ramesside like himself to own a fine tomb. So long as he had none to offer his family, every visit of his wife and daughters to the better homes of Memphi was bound to fail. They simply had no position in the ranks of the dead. So they were living already with a curse—they were snubbed. For what is a curse but an unfair theft of strength? (Whatever is attempted in the way of improving your position brings back less than the effort exerted.) This Ramesside’s wife and daughters began to weep so often that he was ready to take his chances with the wrath of the dead grandfather. Maybe if he knew more about the old man, Menenhetet, ne would have waited, but he felt the awe of acquiring a possession that is beyond one’s means but absolutely fashionable.

  My recollections of these transactions seem to have had a purpose. Now I remember my friend’s name! It is Menenhetet the Second. (The name is, by the way, a typical example of family affectation—Menenhetet the Second—as though his mother were a queen.) Yet I do not know if he was so royal as that. All I remember is that he was a hellion among us, his friends, and on certain nights was so full of wild impulses that he could have summoned demons. I think some of us began to regret the nickname, Ka, that we gave him. It seemed clever at the time, since it not only means twice (for Menenhetet Two) but is also our good Egyptian name for your Double when you are dead, and the Double has a changeable personality, it is said. So it fit him. With our friend Ka, you could never know when he would take on a lion, but then he also liked to swear vile things against the Gods and that left us uneasy. There was not much piety among us, far from it, and part of our pride was to be man enough to take the name of a God in vain, but Ka went too far. We did not like to share his blasphemies when they were uttered, after all, for no better reason than ungovernable rage at his mother. For when Hathfertiti sold the tomb of Menenhetet the First to the petty Ramesside, Ka soon learned that it had been his tomb as well. At least by the terms of the will of his great-grandfather, Menenhetet the First.

  Now, standing in the moonlight of the Necropolis, full of a sorrow I could hardly comprehend for the death of Menenhetet the Second, I do not know if I was there when Hathfertiti spoke to him about the tomb—although I would suppose that Ka was left nothing. All the same, the details are not clear to me. It is better to state that this is what I seem to recall. Should we say I was like a boat poling my way into the harbor through the openings of a fog? Now, even as I took stock of my position here on one of the meanest alleys of the Necropolis, I had the impression that I was not far from the cheap plot Hathfertiti had had to purchase in a great hurry after his sudden death. Recollections came again of a pious funeral but a mean tomb. Into my ear now came the sound of Hathfertiti’s voice telling all who would listen that Ka’s desire was to be on the lowest edge of the Western Shade. That was a scandal. As everyone knew, Hathfertiti was simply too stingy to pay the price for a decent chamber. Still, Hathfertiti kept to the same sad tale: Meni had kept having a dream, she said, that he must rest at first in a mean abode. But when he was ready to move, she would receive a message in her sleep. Then she would shift him to a fine property. All this was uttered in such loud lamentation that those who heard her were repelled. It was no part of our etiquette, after all, to encourage any of the seven souls, shades, and spirits of a dead man to pay visits back to the living. The aim, supposedly, of a funeral is to send all seven off with comfort to the Land of the Dead. So we had a natural fear of a man who had gone out violently. His ghost could keep up an obstreperous relation to his family. It is precisely at such funerals that the bereaved must take great pains to placate the dead man rather than scorn him. It was foolhardy, in that case, for Hathfertiti to avow that she would soon shift her son’s coffin to her best crypt. Everyone knew she was keeping that tomb for herself. We even wondered if her real intent might be to goad our Menenhetet Two into the tormented journeys of a ghost! Worse! The funeral might have been lavish, but the tomb itself was so mean that grave robbers would hardly fear to break it open. (The curse that robbers take on themselves at the door of a poor tomb is, after all, rarely forceful. That is because the greater malevolence is between the poor departed and the relatives who left him so poor!) One had to wonder then if Hathfertiti was making certain that the vault of her son would be defiled.

  I had come to the head of the alley that led to Meni’s vault, and from there had a view. Many of these tombs were no larger than shepherds’ huts (although only in the Necropolis do you find such huts of marble) but each roof was a miniature pyramid with a hole on the steep front. By that alone you could know you were in the Necropolis since the hole was the window for the Ba. If every dead man had a Double and we knew it as his Ka, he also had his own intimate little soul, the Ba, the most intimate of the seven powers and spirits. This Ba had the body of a bird and the face of the deceased. That was the reason I remembered now for the arched little window in these steep little pyramids. An exit for the Ba. Yes, it was coming back to me. Of course! Any bird I could see in a tower window here would be the Ba of whoever was in the sarcophagus below. For which common bird was likely to come near when Necropolis ghosts were about? And I shivered. Necropolis ghosts were hideous—all those unappeased officials and unrewarded warriors, priests unjustly punished and noblemen betrayed by near relatives, or, even more common, the ghost of robbers killed in the act of violating a tomb. Worst of all, the victims of the robbers—all those mummies whose wrappings had been violated while the thieves poked about for jewels. Such mummies proved to smell the worst. Think of what vengeful corruption has to be present in any well-wrapped corpse that succumbs eventually to rot, after rot has been prevented. That has to double the effect. Whatever!

  I now met a ghost. He was not three doors from Meni’s tomb, and I must say he had a malignity to leave me faint. Close to the worst kind, he was recognizable by his rags as a grave robber. He was also proprietor of a stench beyond measure. It now descended on me.

  In the moonlight, I saw a wretch with no hands and a leper’s nose collapsed into three tatters. A misery, that nose, a mockery of the triple phallus of Osiris, Lord of the Dead, yet a nose still able to twitch beneath his wild yellow eyes. He was certainly a full ghost. I could see him as clearly as my hand, yet I could see through him.

  “For whom do you look?” he cried out, and his breath, if it had consisted of dead crabs rotting in the worst mud of the Nile, would have been a fragrance compared to the horrors that lived on his wind.

  I merely lifted my hand to drive him away. He scuttled backward.

  “Do not go into the tomb of Menenhetet One,” he said.

  He should have terrified me but did not. I could not understand why. If he had failed to retreat and I had been obliged to drive him away, it might have been worse than plunging my fist into a thigh gone on gangrene. He was a pale of repulsion into which you did not dare advance. Yet he was afraid of me. He would not approach any closer.

  All the same, I had hardly escaped without cost. His words entered my head with his reek. I did not know what he meant. Had Menenhetet One also been moved into this cheap tomb bought for Menenhetet Two? Was that a new event? Or was I in the wrong street? But if my memory had a foundation, this was the narrow alley to which the mourners had marched on that high sun-filled day when prize white oxen with their horns gilded gold and their white flanks decorated in green and scarlet paint had pulled the golden sledge of Meni Two to his last appalling home. Was this ghost attempting to mislead me?

  “Do not enter the tomb of Menenhetet One,” he intoned again. “Too much disturbance will result.”

  That he, this invader of graves, was now ready to warn others, made me laugh. In the moonlight, my merriment must, however, have stirred the shadows, for the ghost recoiled. “There is more I could tell you,” he blurted out, “but I cannot bear your stench,” and he was gone. The subtlest punishment h
e had suffered was to think his own odor came from others. So he would go blundering through every encounter.

  Now, right on his disappearance, I saw the Ba of Meni Two. It appeared at the window. The Ba was not even the size of a hawk, and its face was as small as a newborn child, yet it was Meni’s face, the most handsome I had ever seen on a man. Now reduced, his features were exquisite, as if an infant had been born with the intelligence of a full-grown adult. What a face! If it now gazed on me, it looked away immediately. Then the Ba of Menenhetet Two opened its wings and with a doleful sound, ugly as a crow in its full funds of pessimism, cawed once, cawed twice, and flew away. Depressed by such indifference to me, I moved to the door of the tomb.

  As I stood in the portal, I was drenched in the most sudden and lamentable sorrow, huge and simpleminded, as though his own grief came to me from my dead friend Meni. I sighed. My last memory of this place was the slattern appearance of the entrance, and that had not changed. I remember thinking it would be easy to violate, and once again I felt that sense of accommodation which allowed me earlier this night to pass out of the narrow shaft from Khufu’s chamber. Now, my finger flowed, or so it felt, into the grooves of the wooden keyhole. When I turned my hand, the prong rose, and with it, the bolt.

  I stepped into the tomb. It made me aware of my skin as if a fingernail had touched my scalp. A cat’s tongue could have been scraping the soles of my feet. They tingled. I had a frightful sense of disorder and stink. The moon was shining through the open door, and by that light I could see that any offerings of food which had been left were long ago gorged by robbers. Valuables were broken or gone. The thieves’ passion to besmirch was evident all over the place. What an outpouring of the coffers of the gut! Full payment! I was in a fury. The slovenliness of the caretakers! In that instant, my eye saw a charred stick in a bronze sconce on the wall and on the full rise of my rage I glared at it so fiercely that I was hardly surprised when smoke unfolded, the charcoal at the tip began to gleam, and the torch was lit. I had heard of priests who could concentrate their wrath enough to start a fire by the light of their eye, but rarely believed such tales. Now, it seemed, if anything, more natural than striking sparks on dried wood.

  What a waste! Floods of future chaos lived in the discontents of these unruly thieves. Beware of those who live at the bottom of the kingdom! They had smashed as much as they had stolen. It obliged me to think of how exquisite Meni’s apartment had been in the last years of his life, and, on the instant, I could recollect Hathfertiti sobbing even as she tried to consult me on which of his alabaster vases and collarplates, his bracelets and jeweled girdles were to be buried with him. Should she inter his long box of ebony or his chest of redwood, his blond wig, his white wig, his red, his green, his silver, or his black wig, his cosmetic case, his linen loincloths, his full linen skirts, even his ebony bed (which I knew she was desperate to keep for herself, and did). Then, how to choose among the weapons, the gilt bow and gold-painted arrows, the spear with the jewels in the shaft—were all these delightful items to accompany him to the tomb? In the middle of such reveries, she would cry out, “Poor Meni!” and added pious lamentations that would have sounded absurd in any voice less deep than her own. “The fruit of my eye has been eaten,” she would scream at the white walls in this serene wing of their villa, his superb wing, his eye for the finest works he could afford never more evident than by his absence, and she, a picture! debauched by her sense of loss, her heart twisted by the obligation to bury so many of these jeweled prizes and golden beauties. She wept over his baby chair, a masterpiece of bronze with gold foil laid in, wept so long she kept it. Even his knives, his palette box, and brushes she could hardly bear to entomb, while his axe blade—a treasure from the reign of Thutmose the Third with a hollow grillwork within the blade to depict a wild dog eating a gazelle from behind—well, Hathfertiti’s nose began to bleed before she could recognize that this, having been a gift to her son, could not be taken back. Of course, this enabled her to keep other objects, particularly his crown of feathers, his leopard skin, and his scarab of green onyx with all six of the beetle’s legs in gold. Be certain that whichever part of Meni’s collection was finally sent to the tomb turned out to be the true ratio between Hathfertiti’s greed (eight parts) and Hathfertiti’s belief in the power of an after-world (five parts). But then she would never allow herself to succumb altogether to greed. That could leave a hole through which demons would pour. Once, she had even given me a lecture on Maat, predictably the most pious sermon you could receive. For Maat was right-thinking, and never cheating one’s neighbor. Maat was the virtue of balance, yes, Hathfertiti in the midst of the roaring waters of her greed could still speak respectfully of Maat. Without it, what is there she would not have kept for herself?

  Yet with the torch in my hand, I would never accuse Hathfertiti of any excess of right-thinking. Witness the scatter on the floor! At the least, she had given a welcome to robbers who had no sense of Maat at all. Their urine was on the food, and do not speak of what was caked on the gold plates they left behind.

  The next room proved worse. The burial chamber had not even been dug beneath, but was merely a continuation of this room. There was no more for partition than a wall of mud-brick. Cheap! There was no barrier to passing from the offering chamber right into the burial chamber. Still, I hesitated. I did not want to go in.

  The air was different as I crossed the second threshold. There was the faintest suggestion of an odor so fearful I came to a stop. My torch was not steady and shook with twice the upheaval I expected. Of course. Not one sarcophagus but two. Both smashed. The outer coffins had their covers thrown into a corner. The lid of each inner coffin was also torn off. And the mummy cases, now exposed, revealed the thefts. Wherever a gem had been plucked, the high patina of the surface was marred with a small crater of plaster. All the collars and amulets were gone. Of course. And the painted face and chest of Meni (the portrait as beautiful as he had once been beautiful) was scarred. Three vertical slashes distorted the nose. Some crude attempt had been made to knife through the wrappings on the chest.

  Such damage was small compared to the feet! The robbers had started to undo the windings there. A hopeless tatter of linen wrappings covered the floor, some in bandages of endless length, others in squares and scraps. A litter underfoot. An animal might have been collecting materials for a nest. Even the bones of a chicken. The robbers had eaten in here. If my nose was true, they had not dared to defecate as well, not in here with the wrapped bodies! Still, the origin of that faint but unsettling odor was clear. One of the exposed feet was beginning to molder.

  In a corner, the other sarcophagus was equally disturbed. It could belong only to Menenhetet One. He had been moved here by Hathfertiti in time to be violated. My legs, however, were not about to take me in his direction. No. I did not dare to go near the mummy of the great-grandfather.

  Near to me, however, was Meni, his feet uncovered and his tomb despoiled. The food for his Ka had been gobbled by the thieves. That infuriated me. I could see his aura well, and its three bands of light were of a pale violet hue as near to invisible as three ridges of hills behind one another on a misty evening.

  I did not like to look at it. There was every message to be read in the color of an aura. Hathfertiti in a rage had an unmistakable separation of orange, blood-red, and brown, whereas the former Pharaoh, they said, had an aura of pure white, pure silver, and gold. This pale violet light about my friend’s wrapped body spoke, however, of exhaustion, as if what little was left of him might be trying to maintain some calm among many horrors. Be it said, the first of these had to be the presence of the other sarcophagus. At the thought of looking at the great-grandfather’s remains, I put my torch down in confusion. Immediately, it went out. I had a sense of how much strength must be used by Meni Two merely to withstand the presence of the other.

  Yet now this oppression seemed to ease. I do not know if it was due to my effort—suddenly, I felt very tired—but
in any case, Meni’s aura brightened. The air eased. I felt an impulse to study what was left of his poor foot.

  That was the worst choice I could have made. In the hole at the toe was a feast of worms. In those pullulations who could know how much of his foot was gone? The aura was absent here. Near the toes, no glow was left but for the faint pale-green light that rose from the body of the maggots themselves.

  Then, as I watched, the aura swelled again. I saw a snake crawl into the doorway of the burial chamber. Seizing the torch, I struck one overhead blow at its head, then another, and caught it. The body whipped in a final dance. Right after the last quiver, my torch began to burn. Nor did I hesitate to carry the light back with me. I had an impulse to look again at the worms.

  But studying the cavity of Meni’s foot, that white and feeding mill, I was aware suddenly of a bruise on the ball of my own foot. To what length must friendship be pursued that I must now limp in company with my old companion? A detestation rose in me against the corruption of his body. I was ready to put my torch to the hole in his foot, fry his worms, seal the putrefying flesh. In fact, I started to do so, but drew back from the fear I might suffer a scorched foot myself. Now I was hungry, suddenly and maniacally hungry. I clamped my jaws against the beginning of this prodigious desire for it would have had me sniffing like a dog at the Canopic jars beside the coffin, those four jars of the Sons of Horus each the size of a fat cat, but the carved head of Hep, the ape, held the carefully wrapped small intestines of the dead man, and the jar watched over by Tuamutef, the jackal, could offer the same for the heart and the lungs, while Amset, with the head of a man, now owned the stomach and large intestines, even as Qebhsenuf, the hawk, carried the liver and the gall bladder. To my horror, thoughts of a broth to be boiled out of these preserved organs would not leave my head, no matter how I drew back from so hideous a temptation. On the other hand, I had to satisfy my hunger I could hardly leave the tomb, cross the Necropolis, walk all the way to the Nile, then find a food shop with a fire and some old witch to feed me, no, not at this hour. Food had to be found here. Near to panic from the onslaught of such obscene desires, I found myself on my knees and I was praying. The wonder was that I remembered. But, oh, those worms in the unwrapped and swarming hole of the foot. They provided the prayer.