IV
The boat was brought to the gates of Khnum's garden by the Big Canal which united the southern part of the city with the north—Apet-Oisit, where the throne of the world, the Temple of Amon, stood.
Hearing that Tuta had put off his meeting with her for a few hours, Dio decided to pass these hours—perhaps the last—with Pentaur: she had not made up her mind yet whether she was going away the next day. She wanted, too, to say good-bye to Amon's Temple; she had grown to love this house of God, the largest and most beautiful in the world, because it was through it she had entered Egypt.
Surrounded by walls, three enormous sanctuaries of Amon, Khonsu, and Mut—the Father, the Son, and the Mother—towered above the endless multitude of low, grey, flat houses made of river mud, like swallows' nests. Within the walls there were copses, gardens, ponds, cattle-yards, cellars, granaries, breweries, perfumeries and other buildings, a town within the town, the City of God in the city of men.
During King Akhnaton's reign the place fell into decay: the holy enclosures had been destroyed, the treasuries robbed, the sanctuaries closed, the priests driven away and the gods desecrated.
Having reached by boat the holy Road of the Rams, Dio and her nurse Zenra, stepped into a litter and Pentaur walked by their side.
Turning to the right into a by-road to the sanctuary of Mut, they entered it through the northern gates.
The sacred lake of the god Khonsu, Osiris the Moon, shone, crescent-shaped, with a silvery brilliance. The rosy granite of the obelisks, the black basalt of the colossi, the yellow sandstone of the pylons, the green tops of the palms, bathed in the molten gold of the afternoon sun, were mirrored in the water with such clearness that one could see every feather in the rainbow-coloured Falcons of the sun at the top of the pylons and every hieroglyphic in the multi-coloured inscriptions on the yellow sandstone; it was as though there were another world down there, the reverse of this one, exactly like it and yet quite different.
By the shores of the lake some sandpits had been dug, probably in order to defile the holy waters, and bricklayers were getting clay from them. The lake in those places was shallow, its slimy bottom could be seen and the stagnant water in the pools had a dull rainbow glitter on the surface. A huge statue of the god Amon, of dark-red sandstone, had been thrown near by, face downwards, and an ox, standing knee-deep in water, was scratching its mud-coated side against the sharp end of one of the two feathers in the god's tiara; the smell of the pig-sty came from the animal.
Next to the pits was a sanctuary of immemorial antiquity consecrated to two goddess-mothers, Hekit the Frog, and Tuart the Hippopotamus.
At the beginning of the world the divine Frog, the midwife, crawled out of the primaeval slime and at once began to help all women labouring of child; she helped the birth of Khonsu-Osiris, the son of God; she helped every dead man to rise again and be born into eternal life. Tuart, the Hippopotamus, was as efficient a help in labour.
The copper doors of the sanctuary were locked and sealed, but in the entry the two goddesses were hidden from the king's spies in two vaulted niches in the wall, behind torn curtains. The huge frog made of green jade with kind and intelligent round eyes of yellow glass, was sitting on its cubical throne. The pig-faced Hippopotamus, in a woman's wig, was ferociously showing its teeth; made of grey obsidian, with hanging breasts and monstrous belly, it was standing on its hind legs, holding in its forepaws the sign of eternal life—the looped cross Ankh.
A little girl of twelve, an Ethiopian, in the last stage of pregnancy, had placed a wreath of lotus flowers round the neck of the goddess and, kneeling before her, was ardently praying with childish tears for easy travail.
Zenra wanted to sacrifice to the mother-goddesses two turtle doves for Dio, that the virgin might at last become a mother.
They went into the portico. An old priestess, who looked rather like her goddess, the Frog, was bathing in a copper basin of warm water two sacred ichneumons, water animals something between a cat and a rat, beloved by the god of the floods, Khnum-Ra. After the bath the creatures ran away, playing; the male chased the female.
"Pew-pew-pew!" the priestess called them quietly and began feeding them out of her hands with bread soaked in milk, muttering a prayer about a propitious flood.
Then she went down to the lake and called:
"Sob! Sob! Sob!"
There was a splash at the other end of the lake and, thrusting out its shining, slimy black head, a huge crocodile, some nine feet long, sacred to Sobek, the god of the Midnight Sun, rapidly swam across in answer to the call. Brass rings with bells glittered on its front paws, there were rings in its ears and a piece of red glass was stuck into the thick skin of the head in the place of the ruby that had been stripped from it. The crocodile was so tame that it allowed its attendant to clean its teeth with acacia charcoal.
It crawled out of the water and stretched itself at the feet of the priestess. Squatting before it she fed it with the meat and the honey cakes brought by Zenra, fearlessly thrusting her left hand into the open jaws of the beast; her right hand had been bitten off by the crocodile while she was still a child.
"I wish it had eaten me altogether," the old lady used to say, "I then wouldn't have to see what is going on now."
She did not go on to say "under the apostate king."
To be devoured by a sacred crocodile was regarded as a most happy death: there was no need to embalm or bury the body—one went straight from the holy belly into paradise.
With motherly tenderness the old priestess stroked the monster on its scaly back, calling it 'Sobby,' 'little one,' 'ducky.' And it was strange to see the beast's pig-like eyes gleam with responsive affection.
"Well, how did you like our crocodile mother?" Pentaur asked Dio with a smile when they came out of the portico, leaving Zenra behind and telling the litter to go on.
"I liked her very much," Dio answered, smiling also.
"Does it make you laugh?"
"No. Your Mut and our Ma is the same Heavenly Mother who blesses all the creatures of the earth."
"How then could you...." he began and broke off. But she understood 'how then could you have killed the god Beast?'
"Our secret wisdom teaches," he said hurriedly, in order to hide her confusion and his own, "that animals are nearer to God than men, plants are nearer to God than animals and the dust of the ground—Mother Earth—is nearer to God than plants; a mass of flaming dust, the sun, is the heart of the world—God."
"Doesn't he know this?" Dio asked.
"No," Pentaur answered, guessing that she was speaking of King Akhnaton, "if he knew he would not desecrate the Mother."
"Perhaps there is something that I, a childless virgin, don't know either," Dio thought.
From the sanctuary of Mut they walked towards the Temple of Amon, along the sacred road of the Rams, huge creatures of black granite placed in a row on either side of the pathway. On the top of the head between the horns that curled downwards, each ram had the sun disc of Amon Ra, and between the doubled up front legs a tiny mummy of King Amenhotep, Akhnaton's father: the god-beast was embracing the dead king, carrying him, as it were, into eternal life.
It seemed to Dio they all looked at her as though they would say "Decide!"
They came up to the pylon—the huge gates shaped like a pyramid cut off at the top, with a rainbow-coloured sun disc with rays and high posts for flags; it stood at some distance from the Temple. On either side of it were two granite giants, exactly alike, representing King Tutmose the Third, Akhnaton's great-great-grandfather, the first world-conqueror. Wearing gods' tiaras, they were sitting on their thrones with their arms folded in everlasting rest, with an everlasting smile on the flat lips. Above them the wretched tatters of old flags fluttered on the broken posts. The birds nesting in the tiaras chirruped loudly, as though laughing, and the black faces of the giants were streaked with white.
Pentaur read aloud the hieroglyphic inscription on the gates—the words of the god to the king:
"Rejoice, my son, who hast honoured me. I give thee the earth in length and breadth. With a joyful heart pass through it as a conqueror."
And the king's answer to the god:
"I have made Egypt the head of all nations, for together with me it has honoured thee, god Amon on high."
From the way Pentaur read the inscription Dio understood that he was comparing the great ancestor with the insignificant descendant.
Passing through the gate, and leaving the road ta the Khonsu sanctuary on their left, they came out into the square. Men of all classes—beggars, slaves and grand gentlemen—were standing there in separate groups without speaking, as though waiting for something, and when the town guards on duty went past looked at them sullenly from a distance. All was quiet, but Dio suddenly remembered: "Rebellion!"
Someone came up to Pentaur stealthily from behind. The man's woollen striped Canaan cloak, worn over the Egyptian white robe, his reddish goat's beard, the curly hair hanging down his cheeks, the prominent ears, hooked nose, thick lips and the hot glitter in his eyes, made Dio recognize him at once for a Jew.
Pentaur whispered something in his ear; the man nodded silently, glanced at Dio and disappeared in the crowd.
"Who is this?" Dio asked.
"Issachar, son of Hamuel, a Jewish priest of Amon."
"But how can an unclean Jew be a priest?"
"He is a Jew on his father's side, but an Egyptian on his mother's. Their prophet, Moses, was also a priest in Heliopolis."
"But why is he not shaven?"
Dio knew that all Egyptian priests shaved their heads.
"He is hiding from the king's spies," Pentaur answered.
"What did you speak to him about?"
"About your meeting Ptamose."
They came to the western gates of Amon's temple; the leaf gold that covered them glowed like fire in the light of the setting sun. Three words had been inscribed on them in hieroglyphics of dark bronze: "Amon, great spirit." The word Amon was effaced, but that made the other two words glorify the Unutterable the more.
Guards were standing by the closed and sealed gates. People going past knelt down and kissed the dust of the holy flagstones, praying in a whisper; they would be thrown into prison for calling on the name of Amon aloud.
Dio showed the chief of the guards the ring with Tutankhaton's seal and he let her and Pentaur through the side door of the gates.
They entered the inner court that had rows of such gigantic columns, shaped like sheaves of papyrus, that it was hard to believe they were the work of human hands: it seemed as though the Great Spirit had piled up these everlasting stones as a mute praise to himself, the Unutterable.
From the yard they came into a covered antechamber, where the daylight came sparsely from narrow windows right under the ceiling. There was sunshine in the yard, but here it was half dark already and the thick forest of columns, saturated with the fragrance of incense like a real forest smelling of resin, seemed all the more huge in the twilight. And it was quiet as in a forest; only up at the top one could hear a faint tapping that sounded like woodpeckers. "Knock-Knock-Knock!"—and there was stillness, and then again: "Knock-knock-knock!"
Dio raised her eyes and saw masons hung up in hammocks on long strings, like spiders on cobwebs, hammering on the walls and the pillars up above.
"What are they doing?" she asked.
"Effacing Amon's name," Pentaur answered with a smile. Dio smiled, too; the knocking seemed to her absurd: how could one efface the name of the Unutterable?
As they went further into the temple the walls narrowed down, the ceilings grew lower, darker and more menacing, and at last an almost complete darkness enveloped them; only somewhere in the far distance a lamp was burning dimly. That was the Holy of Holies—Sehem, the tabernacle, cut out in a block of red granite, where in the old days a golden statuette of god Amon, a foot high, had been kept behind linen draperies—the sails of the holy boat. Now Sehem was empty.
A narrow passage led from it to another tabernacle where in the past Amon's great Ram, the sacred Animal—the living heart of the temple—lay on a couch of purple in clouds of the ever-burning incense. But now this tabernacle too was empty; people said that a dead dog's bones had been thrown into it to defile the holy place.
"He does not know God's darkness either?" Dio asked.
"No," Pentaur answered, understanding again that 'he' meant the king. "He knows that God is light, but he does not know that darkness and light go together...."
He knelt down and Dio knelt beside him; he began to pray and she repeated after him:
"Glory to thee, who dwellest in darkness,
Amon, the Hidden,
Lord of the silent,
Help of the humble,
Saviour of those in hell!
When they cry aloud to thee,
Thou comest to them from afar,
Thou sayest to them 'I am here!'"
They bowed down to the ground and Dio felt that the hair on her head moved with awe: 'He is here!'
They left the temple through the eastern gates where the litter was waiting for them. They got into it and were carried to the small temple Gem-Aton—Sun's Radiance—which had only just been built by King Akhnaton.
It had taken a thousand years to build Amon's temple of huge blocks of rock, and this one had been built quickly of small stones; Amon's temple was dark and mysterious, and this one was all open and sunny. There were no divine images in it except Aton's disc, with rays like hands descending from it.
They entered one of the porticos, on the wall of which there was a bas-relief of King Akhnaton making a sacrifice to the Sun god.
Dio looked at it dumb foundered. Who was it? What was it? A human being? No, it was some unearthly creature in human form. Neither a man nor a woman, neither an old man nor a child; a eunuch, a decrepit still-born baby. The arms and legs were so thin that they seemed to be nothing but bone; narrow childish shoulders and wide, well-covered hips; a big belly; a huge head shaped like a vegetable-marrow, bent down under its own weight on a long thin neck, flexible like the stem of a flower; a receding forehead, a drooping chin, a fixed stare and the smile of a madman.
Dio gazed at this face, trying in vain to recall something. All of a sudden she remembered.
In the Charuk Palace near Thebes, where Akhnaton was born and spent his childhood, she had seen his sculptured head: a boy looking like a girl; an oval, egg-shaped face, childishly, girlishly charming, quiet and gentle as that of the god whose name is Quiet-Heart.
A man dreams sometimes a dream of paradise, as though his soul returned to its heavenly home; and long after waking he refuses to believe that it had only been a dream and is full of sadness and yearning. Such was the sadness in that face. The drooping eyelids were heavy as though with sleep, the long eye-lashes seemed wet with tears and the lips wore a smile—a trace of paradise—heavenly joy through earthly sadness, like sunshine through a cloud.
"Can it be the same face?" Dio wondered. As in delirium the beautiful face was distorted, grown decrepit and monstrous, and, most awful of all, one could still see that young face in this changed one.
"Well, don't you know him?" Pentaur whispered. There was horror in his voice and mockery, too—triumph over an enemy. "No, he is not easy to recognize. But it is he, Joy of the Sun, Akhnaton!"
"How did they dare insult him like this!" Dio cried out.
"No one would have dared if he had not asked for it himself. It is he who teaches painters not to lie, not to flatter. 'Living in Truth'—Ankh-em-Maat—so he calls himself, and this is what truth is; he did not want to be a man, so this is what he has become!"
"No, that's not it, that's not it!" a voice said behind Dio.
She turned round and recognized Issachar, son of Hamuel. "No, that's not it. The deception is worse and more subtle!" he said looking at the face of the bas-relief.
"What deception?" Dio asked.
"Why, this: listen to the prophecy. 'As many were astonied at Him: His visage was so marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men. And we hid our faces from Him. But He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. The chastisement of our peace was upon Him: and with His stripes we are healed.' Do you know of whom this has been said? ... And who is this man? Accursed, accursed, accursed is the deceiver who said 'I am the Son'!"
Slowly, as though with an effort, he averted his eyes from the bas-relief and looking at Dio bent down to whisper in her ear:
"The high priest of Amon expects you to-day at the third hour after sunset." And covering his head with his cloak he walked out of the temple.
For a few minutes Dio stood as though spellbound. She was so lost in thought that she did not hear Pentaur call her twice and when he gently touched her hand, she started.
"What is it? What are you thinking of?" he asked.
"I hardly know myself..." she answered, with a shy, as it were, guilty smile, and then added, after a pause:
"Perhaps we don't any of us know the most important thing about him...."
She paused again and then cried with such agony that Pentaur thought she was like one dying of thirst and asking for water:
"Oh, if I only knew, if I only knew who he is!"