VI
There will be a great rebellion and the earth will be turned upside down like the potter's wheel." Recalling these words of the ancient prophet Ipuver, Yubra eagerly awaited the fulfilment of the prophecy. "What if it begins without me!" he thought, sitting in the pit. And when Khnum turned him out of the house he took a staff, slung a wallet behind his back and set off at random, looking as though he had been a homeless wanderer all his life.
He remembered his old friend Nebra, the boatman, and decided to go and see him at the Risit Harbour. But at the harbour he was told that Nebra had finished work and was having supper in a tavern next door, in the Hittite Square.
Yubra was tired; his legs ached with the stocks that he had been wearing. He sat down to rest on a heap of stones on the quay.
The sun was setting behind the bare yellow rocks of the Lybian Mountains, honeycombed with tombs. The low-lying meadows beyond the river and the City of the Dead, where the embalmers' cauldrons were perpetually boiling and black clouds of asphalt smoke rose in the air, were already in shadow; only by the funeral temple of Amenhotep, at the end of the sacred Road of the Jackals, the golden points of two obelisks shone with a dull glow like smouldering candles.
The left bank was in shadow, but the right still lay in the evening sun, which threw a coppery red glow on the dark-skinned, naked bargemen who carried from the boats down the planks earthenware pots and sacks of styrax and balm from Gilead, Arabian sandal and myrrh, fragrant incense from Punt, and cloves—burnt offerings to the gods and ointments for the dead. The quay was saturated with the fragrant odours, but through the fragrance came the smell of a carcass thrown up by the river and lying on the bank. An emaciated dog, with ribs that stood out under the skin, was devouring it.
Suddenly two white eagles pounced on the carcass with loud flapping of wings and greedy cries. The dog, frightened, jumped away with a squeal, and watched them from a distance, its tail between its legs, its teeth bared in an angry growl, its body shaking with hungry envy.
But a still greater envy glittered in the eyes of a starving beggar woman, who had come in search of food from the province of the Black Heifer, where men were devouring each other in their hunger.
She put her wrinkled, black, charred-looking breast to the lips of the baby perched in a wicker basket behind her. It was biting and chewing it furiously with its toothless gums but could not suck out a single drop of milk, and, no longer able to cry, it only moaned.
"Bread, please, sir; I have had no food for three days!" the beggar woman moaned in a voice as small as her baby's, stretching out her hand to Yubra.
"I have none, my poor woman, forgive me," he said, and he thought 'soon the hungry will be filled.'
He got up and walked on. The woman followed him at a distance as a stray dog follows a passer-by with a kind face.
Alongside of them on the smooth road, specially made for carrying heavy weights from the harbour to the town, some fifteen hundred convicts and prisoners of war were dragging, by four thick cables, something like an enormous sledge with a huge granite statue of King Akhnaton that had just been brought down the river. The superintendent of works, an old man with a stern and intelligent face, looked like a dwarf as he stood on the knees of the giant statue seated on its throne; he clapped his hands, beating the measure of the song the men were singing and sometimes he shouted at them and waved his stick, driving all this mass of men as a ploughman drives a pair of oxen. In front of them a man was watering the road with a watering can so that the runners should not be set on fire by the friction.
The cable, taut like a string, cut into men's shoulders even through the felt pads; perspiration dropped from their faces bent low over the ground; their muscles were strained; the veins on their foreheads were ready to burst; their bones seemed to crack with the incredible effort. And the giant, at rest for ever with a gentle smile on the flat lips, was only slightly moved from time to time. A doleful song, accompanied by laboured breathing, broke out like a moan from a thousand breasts:
Heigh-ho, pull and drag, pull and drag!
Heigh-ho, step along, step along!
When we've pulled an inch or two
We'll have earned a drink of beer,
We'll have earned a loaf of bread.
On and on with steady tread!
Make the heavy burden fly.
Now, brothers, here we go!
Have another try—
Oho!
"These, too, will not have long to suffer: the slaves shall be set free," Yubra thought.
From the road he turned into Teshub Street. This part of Thebes, by the Apet Risit harbour, was populated by the worshippers of the god Teshub—boatmen, carpenters, rope-makers and other working people, as well as by tradesmen and inn-keepers.
The dark grey huts, looking like wasps' nests, made of the river mud and reeds, were so flimsy that they came to pieces after a good rain. But it only rained once in two or three years and, besides, it cost next to nothing to build such a hut afresh. Not only the poor, but people of moderate means, lived in them, in accordance with the Egyptian wisdom: our temporal home is a hut, our eternal home is the tomb.
The walls giving on to the street had no windows, except a little one with a movable shutter in the front door for the porter; the name of the owner was written over it in coloured hieroglyphics. All the other windows were at the back. On the flat roofs could be seen the conical clay granaries and the wooden frames over the skylights, facing north, "wind-catchers" for catching the north wind—"the sweetest breath of the north."
The inn of Itacama the Hittite, where Nebra was having his supper, stood at the very end of Teshub street, not far from the Hittite Square.
Instead of a signpost there was over the door a clay bas-relief representing a Canaan labourer sucking beer through a reed from a jug, and an Egyptian woman, probably a harlot or a tavern keeper, sitting opposite him; the hieroglyphic inscription said: "He comforts his heart with the beer Haket, Heart's seduction."
As he was going into the tavern Yubra turned round to the beggar woman and called to her:
"Wait a minute, my dear; I will bring you some bread!"
But she did not hear: his voice was drowned by the song of two tipsy scholars. Thinking that he was driving her away she walked off. And the two scholars—one long and thin, nicknamed the Decanter, and another short and fat, the Beer-Pot, tumbled into the tavern nearly knocking Yubra down. Both were bawling with all their might:
"Little geese are fond of water
But to us wine is better.
We are a merry crew
Drunken scholars bold and true.
Sages may grow old with study
Our wisdom is to drink.
Give us beer, pale or ruddy
Then we have no need to think."
Yubra walked into the dark, low-pitched room full of smoke and the smell of cooking: Itacama was roasting a goose on a spit. All sorts of men of different races sat on the matting on the floor listening to two girls playing the kinnar and the flute; some were throwing dice, playing chess and 'fingers'—guessing the number of fingers opened and closed very rapidly; others were eating out of earthenware pots with their fingers—each had a washing bowl by him—and sucking wine and beer through reeds.
When Nebra saw his friend Yubra, he came forward to embrace him—the old men were very fond of each other—and ordered a luxurious supper for him: lentil broth with garlic, fried fish, sheep's cheese, a pot of beer and a cup of pomegranate wine—shedu. As often happens in times of famine even poor people—as though to give themselves courage—liked being extravagant with their last farthings.
Before sitting down to supper Yubra thought of the beggar woman; he broke off part of a loaf and went outside. But she was no longer there and he returned to Nebra disappointed.
The beggar had walked down the street and turned the corner; she stopped there smelling newly baked bread. A middle-aged woman with a wrinkled, sickly and cruel face was squatting on the ground baking barley cakes: she did it by sticking thinly rolled-out paste on the outside of an earthenware pot filled with charcoal embers.
"Give me some bread, dear, I have had no food for three days!" the beggar moaned.
The woman raised her hard eyes to her:
"Go along! There is no end of you beggars tramping about; one can't feed you all."
But the beggar stood still, looking at the bread greedily. "Give me some, please, please!" she repeated, with frenzied, almost menacing entreaty, and when the woman turned away to take some dough from another pot, she suddenly bent down and stretched out her hand.
"Ah, you plague of Canaan, you scorpion's sting, you snake, thief, robber, may you have no coffin for your body!" yelled the woman, striking her on the hand.
The beggar answered back, showing her teeth as the dog had done and retreating slowly, her eyes still fixed greedily on the bread.
The woman picked up a stone and threw it at her. The stone hit the beggar on the shoulder. She gave a dreadful dog-like howl and ran. The baby in the basket began to cry, but stopped at once as though realising that tears were of no avail now.
Running to Hittite Square, where there was the god Teshub's old timber chapel that looked like a log hut, she fell exhausted by a heap of sun-dried manure bricks for fuel. She leaned against them sideways uncomfortably: the basket was in the way but she had not the strength to take it off. The baby was so quiet that it did not seem to breathe; she had not the courage to see whether it was asleep or dead.
She suddenly remembered her neighbour in the province of the Black Heifer, a twelve-year-old child-mother who had stolen somebody else's baby, calmly cut its throat as though it had been a lamb, fed her own child with it and had some herself. "That's what I ought to have done," thought the beggar woman.
The pain in her stomach was gnawing her like a wild beast. She suddenly felt weak all over, melting with weakness as it were. "I shall soon die," she thought, and remembered: "may you have no coffin for your body." She smiled: "no coffin—no resurrection.... Well, so be it! Eternal death—eternal rest..."
She, too, though in a different way than Yubra, felt that the world had turned upside down.
And in the tavern Yubra was whispering with his friend:
"Has it begun?"
"Yes. The other side of the River people are assembling already and walking about with the holy tabernacle, singing glory to Amon. And I expect it won't be long before they start here," Nebra answered, and added, after a pause: "But what is it to us? The rebellion is about their god—not ours."
"Never mind," Yubra said. "Whichever way it begins, the end will be the same: the earth will turn upside down—and glory be to Aton!"
"Don't talk so loud, brother—if they heard you they would give you a beating."
"No danger of that!" a stupid looking youth said, with a grin, lisping as though his tongue were too big for his mouth; he was Zia, the Carpenter, nicknamed the Flea. "It is all one to us—Amon or Aton. So long as bread is cheaper than fish let the rest go hang!"
"You are a stupid man, Flea!" said the cauldron maker, Min, a sullen and pompous old man, with colorless eyes that looked very light in his face black with soot. "Who is Amon's son, Khonsu? Why, Osiris-Bata—the Spirit of Bread. If the Spirit leaves the earth, there will be no more bread and we will all perish like midges!"
"And is it true, mates," the Flea lisped, "that our dear golden Khonsu is to be melted into money to buy bread for the poor?"
"What is heavier than lead and what name has it, other than foolishness?" said Decanter, the scholar, looking at him with the self importance of a learned man.
"And are you going to eat that bread?" Min asked, also looking at Flea with contempt.
"I? It's all one to me! I will do what everybody else does," he answered, smiling cautiously and shrugging his shoulders.
"Everybody will eat it, everybody!" the consumptive little cobbler Mar said hurriedly, waving his hands and coughing. "The pig gulps down a baby and doesn't care—it goes on grunting just the same; and so the people will eat the god and say 'that's not enough, give us some more'!"
"Well, we shall indeed be scoundrels if we give away the holy image of god to be defiled!" cried a giant with the face of a child—Hafra, the blacksmith, striking his right fist on his left palm.
"There is one thing I can't make out," Min, the cauldron-maker said, sighing heavily. "We are told that the king is a god. How can one god rise against another?"
"It's not the king, but the high and mighty gentry, greedy bloodsuckers!" the cobbler again put in hurriedly, going off into a fit of coughing. He brought up some blood and went on:
"They ought to be hanged, the lot of them, like salt fish, on one string. And the chief mischief maker is Tuta, the purring cat—he ought to be the first to be hanged!"
"Mice burying the cat," said Min, smiling bitterly. "No, my man, there's no way of doing it. The gentry talk and the people are mute; he who has the sword has the word."
"A knife may be as good, but the trouble is that the hare has the knife in its paw but cannot move for awe! That's why the fat-bellied ride rough-shod over us. And if we weren't a set of fools we might do great things at a time like this!" said a short, thick-set, broad-shouldered man of forty, with a terribly disfigured but calm and intelligent face, who had been playing dice without taking part in the conversation. He was Kiki the Noseless, the thief who had lately plundered the tomb of the ancient King Saakerra and obtained thousands of pounds worth of leaf gold and precious stones off the king's mummy. He had been seized and brought to trial, but acquitted for a large bribe.
Kiki was an assumed name and no one knew what his real name was. It was rumored that in his youth he had committed an awful crime; he was punished by being buried up to his neck in the ground, but by a miracle he escaped and ran away; then he became the chief of a robber band in the marshes of the Delta, was caught, had his nose cut off by the hangman and was deported to the gold mines in Nubia; he escaped and became a brigand once more; was seized again and sent to the copper mines of Sinai, escaped again and, after hiding for some time, appeared in Thebes just before the mutiny under the name of Noseless Kiki.
As soon as he spoke everyone was silent and turned to him. But he went on playing dice, looking as though all that was being said here were empty babble.
The musicians who had stopped for a moment began strumming the kinnar and playing the pipe again. The scholars struck up a drunken song. It had grown dark. They lighted a copper lamp suspended from the ceiling and filled with evil smelling vegetable oil, and on the floor earthenware lamps with mutton fat.
"Zen is speaking, Zen is speaking! Listen!" voices were heard suddenly.
Zen—or Zennofer—a man of thirty with a sad, gentle and sickly face and dreadful cataract on his blind eyes, was a junior priest 'uab' in the sanctuary of the god Khonsu-Osiris. He was reputed to be a seer because he knew by heart the writings of the ancient prophets and himself had visions and heard voices.
The musicians were told to stop, the drunken scholars were pushed out into the street and in the stillness that followed the gentle voice of the prophet sounded as though coming from a distance.
"To whom shall I tell of my sorrow? Whom shall I call to weep?" he spoke as though crying in his sleep. "They do not hear, they do not see, they walk in darkness; the foundations of the earth are shaking and there is no wise man to understand and no foolish man to bewail it!"
Suddenly he stretched out his arms and cried in a loud voice: "So it has been and so it shall be, so it has been and so it shall be! There shall be endless evil. The gods will grow weary of men; the gods will forsake the earth and go to heaven. The sun will be darkened, the earth will be waste. The flowers of the fields will set up a moan, the heart of the beasts will weep for men; but men will not weep—they will laugh with sorrow. An old man will say 'I would I were dead,' and the child 'That I had not been born!' There will be a great mutiny throughout the earth. The towns will say 'let us drive out the rulers!' The mob will rush into the courts of judgment; the scrolls of the law will be torn, records of estates scattered, the boundaries between fields wiped out, the frontier posts knocked down. Men will say 'nothing is private, all things are in common; other people's things are mine; I take what I like!' The poor will say to the rich, 'Thief, give me back what you have stolen from me.' The small will say to the great 'all are equal!' Those who have not built the houses will live in them; those who have not tilled the land will fill the granaries; those who have not woven will be clothed in fine raiment, and she who looked at her own reflection in water will now gaze at herself in a mirror. Slaves will wear gold, pearls and lapis-lazuli, and the mistress will go in rags, begging for bread. The beggars will be as gods and the earth will turn upside down as does a potter's wheel!"
Suddenly he stood up and fell on his knees, raising his blind eyes to the sky as though he already saw the things of which he was speaking.
"So it has been and so it shall be—there shall be a new heaven and a new earth. There the lion shall lie down with the lamb and the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp and the weaned child put his hand on the cockatrice's den. Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord! He will come down like rain on a freshly mown meadow, like dew upon the parched fields. Lo, He cometh!"
He stopped and all were silent. "That's all nonsense," the Noseless Kiki's voice was suddenly heard in the stillness. "Why do you listen to a fool's talk?"
"And why do you revile God's prophet, you dog?" said Hafra the blacksmith, laying his hand on Kiki's shoulder so heavily that Kiki staggered. Freeing himself with an agile movement, he seized the knife that hung at his waist; but glancing at the giant's childish face he evidently changed his mind and said calmly, with a twinkle in his eye,
"Very well, if he is a prophet, let him tell us when this is to be?"
"For such as you—never; but for the saints—soon!" Zen answered.
"Soon? You are wrong there. No, brother, it will take a good long time for fools to grow wise."
"But do you know when it shall be?" Hafra asked.
"Yes, I do."
"Tell us then, don't beat about the bush!"
"Do you remember the inscription on King Una's tomb?" asked Kiki, the same mocking smile in his eyes.
Zen said nothing, as though he had not heard the question, but his face quivered like the face of a child in a fit of terror.
Yubra, too, was trembling: he felt that the fate of the world were being decided by this argument between the saint and the criminal. The blacksmith scowled more and more menacingly.
"You have forgotten? Well, I'll remind you," Kiki went on. "Once upon a time, very long ago, there lived a king called Una. He was a clever man, cleverer than anybody in the world, but he was a brigand, a thief, a scoundrel, no better than we are. He died and was buried and they put over his tomb the inscription he told them to write: The bones of the earth are cracking, the sky is shaking, the stars are falling, the gods are trembling: King Una, the devourer of gods comes forth from his tomb and goes hunting; he sets traps and catches the gods; he kills them; stews them, roasts them, and eats them; big ones for breakfast, middle-sized for dinner, little ones for supper, and old gods and goddesses he uses to make fragrant incense. He devoured them all and became the god of gods.'"
"What rubbish is this, you fool? Speak straight, don't wriggle!" cried Hafra, clenching his fists in a fury.
"Have it straight, then: it won't be soon, but the hour will come when the poor and wretched will say 'we are no worse than King Una, the devourer of the gods.' Scoundrels, pickpockets, brigands, dirty Jews, men with torn nostrils, the flogged, the branded, the cursed will say 'we are nothing—let us be everything! Then the earth will turn upside down and he will come..."
"Who is he?" Hafra asked.
"God and devil, the Blacky-whity, two gods in one!"
"Stop or I'll kill you!" the blacksmith shouted, raising his fist.
Kiki jumped back and pulled out his knife. There would have been a fight but shouts came from the street:
"They are coming! They are coming! They are coming!"
"Rebellion!" the cobbler was the first to guess what had happened and rushed to the door. All the others followed him.
There was a crush. The Flea was pressed to the wall and nearly suffocated. Min was knocked down. Hafra stumbled against him and fell down, too. Kiki jumped over both and, whistling like a brigand, shouted: "Have you got any knives?"
"Yes," someone in the street shouted back. Everyone was running in one direction—from the Risit Harbour to the Hittite Square.
It was dark; the moon had not yet risen; the stars twinkled in the sky and there was the red glow of a fire on the horizon.