SEVEN

He was dressed like a High Priest and for all I knew he was a High Priest. His head was shaved and he seemed to inhabit the air of his own presence, as if each morning his body was sanctified. Yet he looked like no High Priest I had ever seen. He was too dirty and very old. Ashen was the color of his white linen robes and the dust of years had beaten into the cloth. Ashen was the color of his skin, even darker than his garments, but rubbed in the same dust, and the toes of his bare feet looked like fingers of stone. His bracelets had turned to shades of green. The corrosion of his anklets was black. Only his eyes were bright. His pupils were as expressionless as the painted look of a fish or a snake, but the whites were like limestone in the light of the moon. By the light of my torch, it was only the white of his eyes that enabled me to be certain he was not a statue, for he remained motionless on a chair beside his coffin, and could have passed in age for a hundred years old, a thousand years old, if not for the fierce light of those eyes.

I felt a return of the oppression I knew when looking at his coffin. He was so old! One could not even describe his features for lack of knowing where the nose reached the flesh of the cheeks. Just that wrinkled were the terraces of his skin. He seemed close to lacking existence altogether, yet made me so uneasy by his presence, that I thought to rid myself of him. Quickly. As if he were some noxious insect. So I took a step to the Canopic jar nearest to his coffin—it was Tuamutef—and twisted its lid. The top came off easily. The jar was empty. No wrapping of the heart and lungs was in the vase of the jackal. I turned to Amset. Also empty.

“I have eaten them,” said Menenhetet One.

Had the thin air of his throat not been warmed by the sun since the day he died? The echo of a cold cavern was in his voice.

“Why,” I was about to ask, “why, great-grandfather, have you eaten your own blessing?” but the impertinence of the question was pulled from my mouth before I could ask it. I had never known such an experience. It was as if a rude hand reached into my throat deep enough for me to gag, seized my tongue, and shucked it from the root to the tip.

It was then I felt a fear clear as the finest moments of my mind. For I was dead, so I understood once more (again as if for the first time) and being dead, might now be obliged to meet every terror I had fled while living. Of these terrors could it be said that my ancestor, Menenhetet, might prove the first? For I could certainly recall how often we talked of him in my family and always as a man of unspeakable strength and sinister habits.

Now, as I stared at him, he spoke. “What,” he asked, “are your sentiments?”

“My sentiments?”

“Now that we are together.”

“I hope,” I said, “that we will begin to know each other.”

“At last.”

The same keen air was in my lungs that I had known in the tomb of Khufu. The best of myself must have come back to me for I felt the curious exhilaration, even the certainty, that I was meeting my enemy. Was I meeting the enemy of my life—now that I was dead? But speak not of death. It was without meaning to me. I had never felt more vital. It was as if I had decided on some terrible day to make an end of myself and had walked to the edge of a cliff, looked down into the gorge, knew I would certainly step into the space before me and in one fall be dead. At such a moment I might know fear in every drop of my blood, yet the future would feel as alive as lightning. Just now I had that sense. It was the happiness of being next to my fear, yet separate from it, so that I could be free at last to know all the ways I had failed to live my life, all the boredom I had swallowed, and each foul sentiment of wasted flesh. It was as if I had spent my days beneath a curse, and the sign of it—despite every lively pandemonium of gambling and debauch—was the state of immutable monotony that dwelt in my heart. The sense of being dead while alive—from what could it have come but a curse? I had an inkling then of the force of the desire to die when that is the only way to encounter one’s demon. No wonder I stood before him in an apprehension as invigorating as the iciest water of a well. For on how many lovely evenings in how many lovely gardens had I told funny stories about the filthy habits of the first holder of my name? How we cried with laughter at tales of his calculation, his cunning, his sacrilegious feasts of bat dung.

But now, as if he had heard my thought, he stood up for the first time, not a big man nor so small as he had first appeared, and dusty as the loneliest roads of the desert.

“Those stories,” he murmured, “left my name repulsive,” and by the air of self-possession with which he said this, I began to wonder whether I was most certainly his moral superior. That he was the guide to my final destruction, I did not cease to believe, but that he might also have a high purpose now occurred to me. If, in these curious intoxications of knowing I was dead, I had begun to feel as splendid as a hero, still I could not remember my heroism. Nonetheless, I had hardly doubted that my purposes (if I could ever find them) would be noble. Now, I was not as confident.

“Do you think,” he asked, “I am handsome? Or ugly?”

“Are you not too old to be either?”

“It is the only answer.” He laughed. In mockery of me, his finger idled from side to side. “Well, you are dead,” he said, “and certainly in danger of expiring a second time. Then you will be gone forever. Goodbye, sweet lad. Your face was more beautiful than your heart.” Abruptly, he gave an old man’s snigger, unspeakably lewd. “Are you content to let me be your guide in Khert-Neter?” he asked.

“Do I have a choice?”

“The navel string is already prepared. The portrait of Meni standing in the water has been commissioned to an artist most esteemed in the circle of my friends, and he will also do a painting of the sails that will catch the breath of evening in the delicate lungs of my son.” His voice had taken on the self-indulgence of Hathfertiti’s voice, her arch pleasure in hearing the full sounds of herself. “Of course I’ve had so much to do that the work never gets begun. I hear the tomb is a mess and all broken into and shit upon. Poor Meni. How, I wonder, are he and Old Guano getting along?”

I laughed. I had rarely heard such mimicry. If once I mocked the Gods, and fornicated with priests, it was never with ease equal to this. I was beginning to see the stimulations of my condition: to be dead yet more alive than before—that was as intoxicating as a night when you are ready for anything.

“Tell me of Khert-Neter,” I said in a merry tone, as if asking for another drink.

The old ravaged face, wrinkled as the shell of a turtle who has walked through fire, now showed a High Priest’s love of ceremony. “Strengthen my breath,” he said in his cavernous voice.

A transformation came to him with these words, however. The dirt about his body began to look like silver dust, and his right arm was raised toward the heavens. His eyes stayed in solemn contemplation of the ground. Yet, next, he winked at me. I was shocked. He seemed to delight in flinging my thoughts about in all directions. “We need,” he said, “to prepare you. After all, you have forgotten what you know. That is common to the Ka. It keeps a poor memory of our most sacred customs.”

But his shifts gave me no time to recover my wit. Now he spoke in ceremonious tones again. “O Lord Osiris,” he began, and touched his forefingers to his thumbs as though to form two eyes: “I have passed over rivers of fire and through geysers of boiling water. I have entered the dark night of the Land of the Dead and gone through the seven halls and mansions of Sekhet-Aaru. I have learned the names of the Gods at the door to each hall. Hear of the difficulty of this beautiful young man whose Ka would accompany me. How can he obtain the patience to learn the names of the three guards at the door to each hall when his memory is infirm? Know the hazards. The Doorkeeper at the Fourth Hall is named Khesefherashtkheru, and the Herald who examines those who die in the night only replies to the sound of Neteqaherkhesefatu. And these are but two of the twenty-one names which the Ka of this boy must learn if he is to pass through the gates of Sekhet-Aaru.” My great-grandfather paused, as if to contemplate those names. “Yes,” he said in a voice of much resonance, “I, who am Osiris Menenhetet One, have survived Your judgment, Lord Osiris, so give ear to my prayer that You spare the Ka of this young man from such fires, for he is no other than the splendid Osiris Menenhetet Two, my great-grandson, son of my granddaughter, the Lady Hathfertiti, who was my concubine in life and kept in carnal knowledge of me through the years of my death, may the scorpions continue to serve me.”

I was bewildered. The prayer was devout, yet not like any I knew, and I was much confused by the remarks he had just made about my mother.

“I could tell you more,” he said. “I can say the prayers for repulsing the serpent and spearing the crocodile. I can give you the wings of a hawk so you may fly above your foes. Or show you how to drink the ale in the body of the God Ptah. I can reveal the gates to the Field of Reeds and teach you to come forth from the fishing net. Yes, I will do all this if I am your guide.”

I was drowsy before the need to sleep. That ancient subterranean voice invoked so many names. I might mock those names, but to call upon such a host in so short a time left me weak. Now I realized that the strength of my Ka seemed as short-lived as the confidence of a child to stay on its feet when first it learns to walk. I had an impulse to prostrate myself before him.

Yet he was never more repulsive. I could dine in every royal garden of the Nile with the tales I might tell if I survived this night. He was ludicrous in the extreme, this dusty old man with his deep cold voice, lonely as the loon, and yet imbued with confidence—figure the absurdity of his speech when he broke wind from his buttocks with every God he named, a cacophony of claps, pips, pops, poops, bellows, and on-booming farts, and all—by the look of his expression—of the most delicious obscenity. He gave a little aristocratic greeting of his wrist to each monster, divinity, or ogre he invoked, as though he contained carnal knowledge of them all and so could drop salutes of thunder from the ramparts of his old canal. The tomb stank; once from the litter of all those spoiled wrappings, and now from the storm of his speech with all the sulphurs of his breath and the break-winds of his body.

“Do you know anything that is true of my life?” he asked.

I replied, “You tortured prisoners, prayed to the filthiest Gods, and feasted on substances no one could tolerate.”

“I prayed to Gods Whose powers were so fearsome that others shunned Their works. And ate many a forbidden substance. The secrets of the universe are there. Do you think I became Overseer of the Lord God Osiris by daring too little?”

“I have no trust,” I said, “in the idea that you are the Overseer of Osiris. I witness no superiority to your knowledge.” But the remark was too bold. I shivered even as I spoke.

He smiled as if our conversation had passed wholly into his domain. “What do you witness?” he remarked. “You do not know the story of Osiris. You do not even remember what you were taught by the priests.”

I nodded unhappily. I did not. I could think of tales I had been told in my childhood about Isis and Osiris and others of those Gods from Whom we all began, but now, as if the depths of such stories were as lost and far apart from me as the wrappings of my organs in their Canopic jars, I sighed and felt as hollow within as a cave. While I could not say why I thought this was so, it seemed to me as if nothing could be more important than to know these Gods well, as if, indeed, They could fill all that was empty in my marrow and so serve as true guides to the treacheries I would yet have to face in the Land of the Dead. For now I remembered an old saying: Death is more treacherous than life!

When Menenhetet, however, nodded back at me in mockery of my need, I felt obliged—in some last rally of my pride—to speak my most determined criticism. “I cannot believe you are an emissary of Osiris,” I told him. Your stench would repel the nostrils of the God.”

Menenhetet One gave a sad smile. “I have the power to offer any smell you desire.” And in the silence that followed, he was clean as perfume and sweet as grass. I bowed my head. Osiris, most beautiful of the Gods, must have concern for me if His Overseer was Menenhetet One. What an appeal to my vanity was such a thought.

Therefore, I asked my great-grandfather if he would tell the story of Osiris and of all the Gods Who lived at the beginning of our land, and to prove I was sincere, I moved across to sit by him. He smiled, but did not welcome me in any other way. Instead, he reached into a fold of his long dusty skirt and, one by one, removed a number of scorpions, each of which he held in turn with a practiced and tender hand. One scorpion he placed upon the lid of each eye, two at the gates of his nostrils, one for each of his ears, and he laid the last scorpion on his lower lip, seven scorpions for the seven orifices of his head. Then he gave one more nod, grave as a stone.

“In the beginning,” he said, “before our earth was here and the Gods were not born, before there was a river or a Land of the Dead, and you could see no sky, it is still true that Amon the Hidden rested within His invisible splendor.” Here, Menenhetet raised a hand as if to remind me of the elegant gesture the High Priest would use in the Temple when I was a child.

“Yes, it is from Amon that we know our beginning. He withdrew from the Hidden to come forth as Temu, and it was Temu Who made the first sound. That was a cry for light.” The solemnity of the priests by whom I had been instructed in my childhood was upon me, and my limbs had no power. “The cry of Temu,” Menenhetet said, “quivered across the body of His Wife, Who was Nu, and She became our Celestial Waters. Temu spoke in so great a voice that the first wave stirred in Her, and these Celestial Waters brought forth the light. So was Ra born out of the first wave of the waters. Out of the great calm of the Celestial Waters was born the fiery wave of Ra, and He lifted Himself into the heaven and became the sun even as Temu disappeared back into the body of His Wife, and was Amon again.” Menenhetet exhaled his breath. “That is the beginning,” he said.

I was feeling the same respect I used to know when priests spoke of the first sound and the first light. “I will listen,” I told him.

So soon as I uttered these words, however, he removed the scorpions, replaced them in the fold of the skirt from which he had brought them forth, and began to talk in another tone of voice, as if the solemnity of what was said in the Land of the Dead could not endure more than one part in seven against our most solemn hours in life. For now, with hardly a warning, he became most disrespectful of the Gods, even scandalous in what he had to say as if They were all his brothers in a large and disreputable family. With all I had heard of his capacity for sacrilege, I could still not believe how obscene the story of Osiris soon became.

Nor was I prepared for how long it would take. Before we were done I would be obliged to know Them well.