VIII
When Dio had set out to see Ptamose the mutiny was just beginning beyond the river and all was quiet on this side.
Issachar was waiting for her by the Eastern Gates of the Apet-Oisit wall, where the deserted tomb-sanctuary of King Tutmose the Third lay in ruins. Stepping out of the litter and telling the bearers to wait for her at the gate, she went with Issachar into the half-destroyed porch of the sanctuary. Walking up to the wall, which was completely covered with bas-reliefs and mural paintings, he leaned his shoulder against it. A movable stone turned on its axis, revealing a dark narrow opening. They both squeezed themselves sideways through it and descended some steep steps cut in the thickness of the rock. Issachar walked in front of Dio down a slanting underground passage, carrying a torch.
It was close: the depths of the earth warmed through by the eternal Egyptian sun, never cooled; the darkness was filled with warmth. "Glory be to thee who dwelleth in darkness, O Lord!" Dio remembered. It seemed to her that here the dead were as warm lying in their tombs in the bosom of the earth as a child in its mother's womb.
The endless mural paintings represented the journey of the Sun-god down the subterranean Nile: the sail of the boat hung limply in the breathless stillness and the dead oarsmen were dragging it over dry land through the twelve caves—the twelve hours of the night, from the eternal night to the eternal morn.
The hieroglyphic inscriptions glorified the Midnight Sun, Amon the Hidden.
"When thou descendest beyond the sky
The most secret of secret Gods,
Thou bringest light to them who are in death.
Glorifying thee from within their tombs,
The dead lift up their arms
And those under the earth rejoice."
The main passage was intersected by side passages. Suddenly the red flame of torches and the black shadows of men carrying spears, swords, bows and arrows flitted across them.
"Where are they carrying the arms?" Dio asked.
"I don't know," Issachar answered reluctantly.
"It must be the rebels in the town," she guessed.
Supplies of arms and also of gold, silver and lapis-lazuli—remnants of the temple treasuries concealed from the king's spies were hidden in these subterranean recesses of Amon's temple. It was all kept there for the day of rebellion against the apostate king.
Turning into one of the side passages and walking to the end of it, they stopped at a closed door in the wall. Opening it, Issachar walked in, lit a lamp with his torch and said, putting the lamp on the floor:
"Wait here, they will come for you."
"And where are you going?" Dio asked.
"To fetch Pentaur."
"Good, bring him here!" she said joyfully: she had been thinking about him all the time.
Issachar went out, closing the door after him.
Dio looked round the empty vaulted cell, long and narrow like the tomb—and perhaps indeed it was one. The walls were covered from top to bottom with hieroglyphic script and pictures.
She sat on the floor and waited. Tired of sitting still she got up and, taking the lamp, began looking at the mural paintings and reading the hieroglyphics. She was so absorbed in this that she did not notice the passage of time.
Suddenly the flame grew dim, gave a last flicker and went out. Walls of stifling, black, and, as it were, tangible darkness, closed in upon her. She was afraid of being left and forgotten in this coffin.
She fumbled her way to the door and began knocking and calling. She listened: a deadly stillness. She felt more frightened than ever. All of a sudden she recalled Pentaur and the fear left her: if he was alive he would come.
She sat down again, leaning her back against the wall and remained so. A strange stillness came over her; she did not know whether it was dream or waking. She was filled with the black, warm, sunny darkness as a vessel is with water. With quiet ecstasy she whispered the words she had just read in the hieroglyphic inscriptions, spoken by the dead man to the Midnight Sun, the hidden god:
"He is—I am; I am—He is."
And it seemed to her that she herself were dead and lying in the bosom of the earth like a child in its mother's womb, waiting for resurrection—birth into eternal life. And the dulcet harpstrings sang
"Death is now to me like sweetest myrrh...."
All of a sudden a light flashed into her eyes. A bent, decrepit old man with a torch—a priest, to judge by his shaven head and the leopard skin thrown over his shoulder—stooping over her, took her by the hand, helped her up and led her out of the room.
"Who are you? Where are you taking me?" she asked. He said nothing and was about to lead her down some more steep narrow stairs.
"No, I don't want to go down," she said. "Take me up. Where is Pentaur? .... Why do you say nothing? Speak."
The old man made an inarticulate sound and, opening his mouth, showed her a stump in place of a tongue; he explained by signs that Pentaur would come down too and that somebody was expecting her. She understood that he meant Ptamose.
They walked further down. Again Dio did not know whether she was asleep or awake. The dumb man had such a dead face that it seemed to her Death itself was leading her to the kingdom of death.
They stopped at a closed door. The dumb man knocked. Someone from within asked "Who is there?" and when Dio said her name the door was opened.
In a low sepulchral chamber or sanctuary, supported by four quadrangular columns, cut out in the thickness of the rock, stood a sepulchral couch, with a mummy in a white shroud lying on it. There was, Dio thought, something terrible in its face—more terrible than death.
Her dumb guide took her past the couch into the depths of the chamber, where a vaulted niche, lined with leaf-copper, glowed, like sunset, in the light of innumerable lamps. There, in the smoke of fragrant incense, a huge black lop-eared Lybian ram—probably transferred from the upper temple—lay asleep on a couch of purple. This was the sacred animal, "the bleating prophet," the living heart of the temple.
A girl of thirteen—not an Egyptian to judge by her fair hair and skin—lay beside it, with her head on the animal's back and her eyes half-closed, like a bride on the bed of love. Completely naked, but for a narrow girdle of precious stones below the navel, shameless and innocent, she stretched herself out, pale and white on the black fleece, like a narcissus, the flower of death. She was one of the twelve priestesses of the god Ram—Amon-Ra.
At the approach of Dio, the little girl opened her eyes and looked at her intently. There was something so mournful in that look that Dio's heart was wrung; she remembered another victim of the god Beast—Pasiphae-Eoia.
Her dumb guide prostrated himself before the Ram. A young priest, with an austere meagre face, kneeling next to Dio, was burning fragrant incense in a censer.
"Bow down to the god!" he whispered, looking at her severely.
Dio looked at him, too, but said nothing and did not bow to the beast, though she knew it was dangerous—they might kill her for impiety.
When the girl opened her eyes and moved the Ram woke up and also moved slowly and heavily: one could see it was very old, almost at its last gasp. It opened one eye: the pupil, fiery-yellow like a carbuncle, glowed menacingly from under a dark heavy eyelid, with grey lashes, and looked into her eyes with an almost human look.
"The god opens his eye, the sun, and there is light in the world," the priest whispered the prayer.
When he had finished he got up, and taking Dio by the hand led her to the couch with the mummy. He bent down to the dead man and whispered something in his ear. Dio drew back horrified: the dead man opened his eyes.
His deathly, skeleton-like body, brown as a withered tree, showed through the transparent white of the winding sheet. The veins on the shrunken temples stood out as though stripped of flesh; the thin, thread-like lips of the sunk-in mouth and the gristle of the hooked nose—a vulture's beak—looked deathly under the tightly drawn shiny skin. But living, young, immortal eyes seemed to have been set in that mask of death.
The priest reverently lifted the mummy and raised its head on the couch. The dead lips opened and whispered, rustling like dry leaves.
"Listen, the Urma is speaking to you."
It was only then Dio grasped that this was the great seer—urma, watcher of the secrets of heaven and the prophet of all the gods of north and south, the high priest of Amon, Ptamose.
He was over a hundred years old—an age not infrequent in Egypt. Many people thought that he had long been dead, for during the last ten years, ever since the apostate king began to persecute the faith of his fathers, Ptamose had been hiding in subterranean hiding-places and tombs; some of those who knew him to be alive said that he would never die, while others asserted that he had died and risen again.
Dio knelt down and bending over the low couch put her ear close to the whispering lips.
"You have come at last, my dear daughter! Why have you delayed so long?"
There was an insidious caress in his voice, a magnetic power in his eyes.
"Pentaur has told me much about you, but one cannot tell all about others. Tell me yourself now."
He began asking her questions, but he seemed to know all before she had answered him and to read her heart as an open scroll.
"You poor, poor child!" he whispered when she told him how Eoia and Tammuzadad had perished through her. "To destroy those whom you love—that's your misery. Do you know this?"
"Yes, I do."
"Mind then that you don't destroy him also."
"Whom?"
"King Akhnaton."
"Well, if I do destroy him so much the better for you!" she said with a forced smile.
The shadow of a smile flitted in the eyes of the old man, too. "Do you think I am his enemy? No; God knows I am not lying—why should a dead man lie?—I love him as my own soul!"
"Why then did you rise against him?"
"I rose not against him but against Him who comes after him."
"The Son?"
"God has no Son."
"How can the Father be without the Son?"
"All are the Father's sons. Great in His love he gives birth to the gods and gives breath to the baby bird inside the egg, preserves the son of a worm, feeds the mouse in its hole and the midge in the air. The son of a worm is God's son, too. Stones, plants, animals, men, gods—all are his sons; He has no only Son. He who has said 'I am the Son' has killed the Father. Ua-en-ua, one and only is He and there is none other beside. He who says 'there are two gods' kills God. This is whom I have risen against—the deicide. He will save the world, you think? No, He will destroy it. He will sacrifice himself for the world? No, He will sacrifice the world to himself. Men will love Him and hate the world. Honey will be as wormwood to them, light as darkness, life as death. And they will perish. Then they will come to us and say 'Save us!' And we will save them again."
"Again? Has it all happened before?"
"Yes. It has been and it will be. Do you know the meaning of Nem-ankh, eternal recurrence? Eternity spins round and round and repeats its cycles. All that has been in time shall be in eternity. He has been, too. His first name was Osiris. He came to us but we killed Him and destroyed His work. He wanted to make His kingdom in the land of the living but we drove Him to the Kingdom of the dead, Amenti, the eternal West: we gave Him that world and kept this one for ourselves. He will come again and we will kill Him once more and destroy His work. We have conquered the world and not He."
"There is no Son and perhaps there is no Father either?" Dio asked, looking at him defiantly. "Tell me the truth, don't lie: is there a God or no?"
"God is—there is no God; say what you like—it all comes to nothing; all men's words about God are vain."
"There now! I have caught the thief!" Dio cried, laughing into his face. "I knew all along you did not believe in God."
"Silly girl!" he said, as gently and kindly as before, "I am dead: the dead see God. I adjure you by the living God, consider before you go to Him whether there isn't truth in my words!"
"And if there is, what then?"
"Leave Him and stay with us!"
"No, even then I shall remain with Him!"
"You love Him more than the truth?"
"More."
"Go to Him, then, to the tempter, the son of perdition, the devil!"
"It's you who are the devil!" she cried, raising her hand as though she would strike him.
The dumb man rushed up to her, seized her by the arm and raised a knife over her.
"Leave her alone!" Ptamose said, and the old man drew back.
Suddenly there was a sound of bleating, low as the weeping of a child but old and feeble: it was the Ram. Ptamose looked at the animal and the animal at him and they seemed to understand each other.
"The Great One foretells woe, woe to the earth with its bleating!" the old man exclaimed, raising his eyes to Dio. "Go up—you will see what He is doing. It has begun already and will not end until He comes!"
Then he glanced at the dumb priest and said:
"Take her upstairs and don't molest her, you answer for her with your life!"
He shut his eyes and again looked like one dead.
Dio was running upstairs, with one thought only in her mind: "Where is Pentaur, what has happened to him?"
Going out of the catacomb by the same door as she had entered, she went past the ruins of Tutmose's tomb and walked along the south wall of Amon's temple. On the white stones of the temple square, bathed in moonlight, dead bodies lay about as on a battlefield. Half-savage, hyena-like dogs were worrying them. An emaciated looking dog, with a blood-stained mouth, was sitting on its hind legs howling at the moon.
Dio stopped suddenly. The needle of the obelisk showed black against the moonlit sky: the hieroglyphics on the mirror-like polished surface of its granite glorified King Akhnaton, the Joy of the Sun, and someone was sitting hunched up against the base of it—-dead or alive Dio could not make out. She came nearer and, bending down, saw a dead woman, thin as a skeleton, stiffly pressing a dead baby to her wrinkled, black, charred-looking breasts, as she gazed at it with glassy eyes; her white teeth were bared as though she were laughing. It was the beggar woman from the province of the Black Heifer.
Dio recalled a black granite figure she had once seen of the goddess Isis, the Mother with her son Horus, and it suddenly seemed to her that this dead woman was Mother Isis herself, accursed and killed—by whom?
"Go up, you will see what He is doing," the words of Ptamose sounded in her ears.
She turned round at the sound of footsteps. Issachar came up to her.
"Where is Pentaur? What has happened?" she cried, and, before he had time to answer, she understood from his face that Pentaur had been killed.
The familiar pain of inexpiable guilt, insatiable pity pierced her heart. "To destroy those whom you love—that's your misery," the words of the seer sounded in her ears again.
It took her some time to grasp what Issachar was saying; at last she understood: they would not give Pentaur's body to him, but perhaps they might give it to her.
She followed him. A cordon of sentries guarded the approach to the gates of Amon's temple. The centurion recognised Dio: he had seen her at the Viceroy's white house; he let them both through and told the soldiers to give her Pentaur's body.
He was lying where he had been killed—by the threshold of the western gates. Their gold with the hieroglyphics of dark bronze—two words 'Great Spirit'—dimly glittered in the moonlight.
Dio knelt down, and looking into the dead man's face, kissed him on the lips. Their cold penetrated down to her very heart.
"It is my doing—His doing," she thought and the word 'He' had a double meaning for her: he—the king, and He—the Son.