SIX

“On the journey, I learned, however, what it is to be lonely. I had never been so much by myself before. Now that I am coming to the end of my fourth existence, I am left with memories of people who lived near to me once and now are dead. But in my first life, I had always found myself among many people, and that permits but one kind of thinking. Others talk; we reply. It is usually without thought. On important occasions, it is true, a voice might come into my head and speak for me and sometimes it was so powerful a voice, I knew it belonged to a God or His messenger. But now, going to Tyre, there came an hour when I could no longer listen to my two horses, nor to the complaints that came from the frame and wheels of the chariot, and I became alone in such a way that whole processions of thought passed through me, as if I were no longer a man but a city through which soldiers were marching.

“Of course, these were not my feelings on the first day, nor the second or third. In the beginning, there is such terror to find oneself alone that no thought has the liberty to speak—it is rather as if you walk beneath the walls of a fortress waiting for the first stone to drop. My eyes, I remember, were like birds, and flew from sight to sight, never resting. Nor were the horses comfortable. I was not traveling in my own battle chariot which was agile and weighed little. For the rigors of this trip I had chosen a training cart used to much abuse and newly repaired. I had also selected two strong but stupid horses who would be able to work all day even if they were much confused by commands they had heard in a hundred voices. I was sure I could train them to my purposes, and did, but my first request was that the horses not wear out, and these were born with stamina.

“One was called Mu, an old word for water, and it would have been an odd name for a horse except that Mu never failed to urinate at every halt. The other was Ta. He was close to the land and always fertilizing it.

“I set out by riding across the long flat valley that leads from Gaza to Joppa, and it was near to familiar country for me. The soil was as black as our own after the Nile recedes, and the heat was no different, nor the look of the villages and huts. Except I did not see a face on all of the road, not for all of the morning and afternoon of the first day. Of course who would be about to approach me? I rode with the reins around my waist, my spear in one quiver, my bow and arrow in another, my shield hooked to the prow of the chariot, and my short sword in its scabbard. I had a scowl on my face, a helmet on my head, and a coat of mail on my chest and back. I must say that in those days we did not know how to make a coat of mail from metal. Mine was of thick quilted stuffs with strips of leather, a coat so heavy you paid for its protection as your strength wilted in the heat. Still, I wore it like a house around my heart. Although I may have looked fierce, my tongue was as dry as an old piece of meat salted in natron and I could hardly breathe. The horses and I passed through nothing but these empty villages, their silence also breathing in my ear. Since we had already pillaged everything, you could find nothing. No food, no flocks, no people. Nothing in these empty huts but the spirit of each abode. I rode on, looking to the hills on either side of the valley, and in the night, when I made camp, I could see fires in fortified towns high on the ridges, and knew that the villagers who had fled were up there standing watch on the walls. In the valley beneath, I stopped just off the road and tried to sleep and heard my heart beating beneath me all night. Then in the morning I set out to the same silence. Even the blue of the sky was like a wall above, so much did I feel alone.

“Still, it was familiar ground, and that was better than what came next. The black soil gave way to a reddish-brown country full of sand and clay, colors common enough, but then some trees began to show themselves on the low hills, and soon there were more of them, then considerably more. They were nothing like our high palms, but short trees with thick, stunted trunks and twisted limbs, the most unhappy looking creatures, as if the wind had been a torture every day of their lives. I did not feel comfortable with these woods, nor did the horses, and soon we were in our first bad place. Brush had begun to grow, and you could not see anything but the road. A thicket more dense than any of our Egyptian swamps settled in next to the trees. Sometimes we crossed little streams and hardly knew it for the road was so muddy that water was always flowing in the ditches. Now I dismounted from the chariot as often as I went up on it, and kept pushing the wheels through the mud until in one swamp of this low forest, I saw a crocodile go sliding away. That put me back on the chariot again. In the marshes I was devoured by insects.

“I felt I was not only in a strange place, but at war. There was a most unfriendly spirit in these low trees, and I wondered at the animals I might find, the bears and the boars, and remembered talk of a hideous hyena native to these parts. The forest made me feel as if I voyaged through the maw of a beast. I perspired from the gloom and heat and felt the absence of Ra, and wondered what foreign Gods were here in such dark marshy land. Every time a small branch snapped across my face, the horses gave a lurch. My fears went through them like arrows. On we went, bumping from rut to rut and back to the mud again. Often I had to get out and dare the crocodiles.

“Then this narrow road mounted above the wetlands and the thicket diminished, the trees grew taller. Now it was easier to ride, except for great roots that grew across the road and near upended my vehicle whenever I put the horses in a trot. The height of the trees grew awesome, and I could no longer see the sun very well but merely felt Him above. My head was full of the oppression of all these bowers of leaves, and then I passed a terrible place where a great tree had fallen over. I could see that the roots were nearly as long as the branches, and the cavity left in the ground was as large as a cave and ugly like the mouth of a serpent. I knew the entrance to the Land of the Dead must look like this hole. Even the worms that crawled at the base were odious to me, and I began to shiver with fright at the thought of the battle to come. The naked roots of this tree made me know how my shoulder would look if my arm were chopped off by an axe.

“What fear I knew of such weapons. The Overseer of Carpenters in our squadron of charioteers was a wizard at working with wood and now I remembered him telling me that black people in the jungles would never cut down a tree unless they sacrificed a chicken first, and its blood was dripped on the roots. Then, after the first blow of the blade, you had to put your mouth to the cut and suck the sap until you were in brotherhood with the tree. But I knew I would never dare to put my tongue on the sap of these strange trees. They were too fierce. My horses trembled when we stopped, and Mu could no longer urinate, or did not dare.

“Still, I began to think of the goose we roasted on those dry silver boughs in the desert. Ra had held each branch in His hand and given heat to it. If I died in the sand, I might become as dry as my bones, but I would not burn for much. Yet each one of these trees would blaze with flames as high as themselves. It was then I had a vision of all the fire that lived in the forest, and felt again like a city through which soldiers were marching.

“By evening, I was completely out of the marshes and crossed my first ridge which gave me a sight I had never known before. Ahead were nothing but mountains covered with trees. These lands ahead must be as much unlike Egypt as a Syrian with his thick beard is different from our clean cheeks, and that made me sigh at the weight of this view. I could not believe how alone I was. For two days, no caravans had passed me in either direction—no merchants, it was evident, dared to be on the road—and every village through which I went was empty. What fear they kept of our army!

“On the next day, I learned much for I came to a place in the mountains where three roads could be taken to Megiddo, and it brought back the voice of my Pharaoh telling me of Thutmose the Third. For He was the Monarch who had come to this same fork with His armies only to learn that He could approach Megiddo by the long route to the north through Zefti, or by the open southern road through Taanash. There was also the Pass of Megiddo between, but that went over the Ridge of Carmel to the gates of the city itself, a dangerous trail, and narrow. ‘Horse will have to pass behind horse,’ said His officers, ‘and man behind man. Our advance guard will have to fight their armies on the other side while our rearguard is still here.’ I, having brooded so long on the nature of these strange trees and forests, must have come to live in the echo of the voices of these long-dead officers of Thutmose the Third, for I knew I would choose the route taken by Thutmose. ‘I shall go forth at the head of My army,’ Thutmose had said, ‘and I will show the way by My footsteps,’ and He brought most of His army through the pass before the Kings of Kadesh and Megiddo were ready to meet Him since they had thought He would go by the long southern road to Taanash.

“Now I had to take my own way through the pass. If I had not known that an army had gone through already, I might have given up. The hills were steep and the trees grew as high as the columns of the Temple of Karnak. So, it was cool in this forest, and strange. The road kept climbing upward and the hill on one side of the trail was high above, but to the other it fell away so steeply I could see the tops of trees beneath me, and that was different from what I expected, and soft to the eye like pillows. I felt faint and wished to fall upon them so powerful was the spirit of those trees calling me down to them (and I did not even know the names of the spirits!). I had only been in this kind of forest for a morning, yet I felt as if I had lived here half so long as the years of my life in Egypt, and my heart never stopped beating in fear, not for a moment, as I rode through. There was no place where you could feel close to the sun. Instead of the pale gold of the desert, everything was green, and even the sky, where I could see it, looked more white to me than the blue of our sky above the Nile. How twisted were the spirits of this forest. The horses kept crying to one another.

“Then we came to a place where the hill fell away on one side; on the other it rose straight up. I could see the sun at last. We had climbed above the trees. The trail was now so narrow I did not know if I could take the chariot through. To the one side was a wall of rock, by the other a precipice, and the horses would not move. I had to free Mu, who was nearest to the fall, from her harness, and then tied the tail of Ta to her bridle so that Mu could walk behind. The chariot I pushed myself. In that way we proceeded, step by step, the outside wheel of the chariot hanging—it happened—over the abyss. I, at the rear, leaned all my weight to the side of the chariot that was near to the wall. You may be sure I cursed in terror whenever a rock made us stop, and I had to lift the chariot over. Before we were through, I knew why Thutmose the Third was a great King.

“Yes, it was difficult. Never once, may I say, did I think of that other wall in the Place of Truth where we climbed up to the tomb of Usermare, nor did I want such memories, although I believe the fear in which I lived on this trip, a fear so great as to make me think of myself as another person, and a weak one—came from my abject silence when He took me by the hair. No matter, I was one sweating charioteer by the time the horses and I came through and reached a rise from which I could see ahead. Below, the pass widened, and there on a hill in the distance up the other side of the valley across green forests and plowed fields was the town of Megiddo. I saw it through the battlement of the mountains.

“Thutmose the Third had descended this pass, and gone into battle, and captured chariots of gold and silver and left the champions of the enemy ‘stretched out like fish’—such was the word of Ramses. Thutmose took thousands of cattle and two thousand horses and much gold and silver. Hearing of such plunder I had supposed the city would be a rich sight with white marble palaces like our own Memphi, or temples of gold, or, at the least, wooden mansions painted in the richest of colors. Yet, on the next day, as I came near, it was only a poor town, and dirty in appearance. Maybe it had been poor ever since Thutmose had conquered it. All the same, it was a fort, the first Syrian fort I had seen, and it was not built square like ours with our straight brick walls. These palisades were made of rough stone, and went up and down with the land, the walls following the hills. Every few hundred steps was a high tower so that you could not charge the doors of Megiddo without a hundred arrows shooting down. A mean place. You would look to starve it out. I began to see the argument of Amen-khep-shu-ef.

“On this day, however, the gates were open and the market was busy. I did not enter. There was no need. The King of Kadesh would not be hiding an army inside the walls of Megiddo when you could walk into the city and look about. So I knew that Monarch was not here with his men. Besides, Usermare would reach Megiddo in a few days, although by an easier road, and He would ask the questions that receive good answers. Whereas one dirty soldier with a battered chariot and two unseemly horses was more likely to be tortured himself than coax any truth out of strange tongues. So I drove around the walls of the town which took a long time, for the lanes were muddy, and it was a big town, but then I found a road on the other side that some had spoken of in Gaza. This road was easy to recognize, for it had paving stones and oak trees planted on each side, a royal road straight out of Megiddo to the north, yet I was the only vehicle on it.

“I soon knew why. The paving stones ended on the other side of the first hill and now I was on a wagon trail that had to be renowned for its ruts. Soon the fields disappeared and the forest grew in on me, and the horses and myself were afraid again. We were on the direct road to Tyre, but it was not direct. It curved like a snake and even coiled back and forth on itself to climb the higher hills. In the dark of late afternoon, I thought again of all I had heard of this road and its bandits. Even before I left Gaza, I listened to stories of how they raided caravans, and any merchant who did not know them well enough to pay tribute, was sold as a slave. Usually a merchant could write, and thereby serve as a scribe—a valuable slave! Then the bandits kept the horses and sold the goods. There were so many thieves that it gave occupation to the men of Megiddo. They could always hire out as an armed guard on a caravan.

“All the same, I was more afraid of the forest than the thieves. It would take four or five such robbers to bring me down. Afterward, one would be without an arm, another a foot, and maybe a third would never see again. I would die with my thumbs in somebody’s eyes. They would gain nothing but a body, two mediocre horses, and a chariot they probably could not sell. The cart was close to coming apart. Unless I was carrying a sum of gold—which I was, but hardly looked so prosperous—I was not worth attacking. They would see me as a soldier who was lost, or a deserter ready to join any pack of thieves, or even as the scout I was indeed. And if they saw me as the last, why, they could do worse than offer a favor to an Egyptian scout in the army of Ramses the Second. Among our allies in Gaza had been a few Asiatics from nearby tribes, and by what they said, I knew there was a large fear of the new Pharaoh. Syrians might be used to Egyptian garrisons living among them, but in a quiet year no more than a few envoys would arrive from Thebes to collect tribute and talk to the Prince of the territory. They did not try to change the laws, nor interfere with the foreign temples. We Egyptians had a saying, ‘Amon is interested in your gold, not your God.’ A sensible arrangement. Usually there was no trouble.

“When a new Pharaoh ascended the Throne, however, it was different. The young Princes of Asia were more defiant. So, in all these lands of Lebanon and Syria had come the word: Ramses the Second was arriving with the largest army ever to march out of Egypt. If I were a thief, in that case, hiding in these dark hollows, with many a merchant offering a bounty for me, I would look to make an Egyptian my friend. Therefore, I did not hesitate. I took the most dangerous road to Tyre. Maybe I would fall in with a few brigands who could give me information. My fear of travel might be great, but even larger was my fear of rejoining Usermare-Setpenere with no information to offer.

“So I kept moving. Here, the trail was wide enough for both my horses. Yet by evening the forest and hills were still around me. I bedded down in a grove, fed my horses some grain, ate of it myself with care not to crack my teeth on any pebble, and then prepared to sleep, using my charioteer’s cloak for a ground-cloth. It proved, however, too cold, and I soon preferred to sit with my back against a tree. That was better. The trunk felt like a friend behind me. It was as if we sat on watch, back against back, and searched the darkness. To my surprise there was more to see than I would have thought. No farther away than four or five long throws of a stone, a spark flew up in the darkness, and watching, I soon saw a small campfire.

“The spirits in this wood were silent. They encouraged silence. I could feel those spirits going deep into the earth, yet I could also feel them returning to the tree, and they were light as the feather of Maat. I heard the leaves speak to them on every little wind. So, too, was I able to hear the quiet of these woods, and by their hush did I pass through the wall of my own ears and into the movements of every small animal. The keenness of my hearing was so fine that I wondered if I had been blessed by the spirits of my tree since I felt no fear, and was strong for the first time in weeks.

“I kept looking at the campfire. I could see little more than its light, yet by the sound, there could not be more than three men around it, probably two, and they spoke in a language whose tones were strange.

“In the wild of this forest, I found it peaceful to hear these thieves’ voices. I knew it was the peace that comes when you can choose what to do with another man. You can kill, or let him go. There is no peace so calm as that. Indeed, my Pharaoh always seemed to live in just such a way.

“Now I felt the same power. My arm was ready to slay the first thief before the second would know I was there.

“I stood up then. The horses were asleep and I sent them a thought as sure as the flick of my reins. ‘Sleep in peace,’ I told them, ‘and blow no wind through any hole.’ I meant it. Then I took off the coat of mail so that my skin could feel the nearness of any low bush, and in the darkness I began to walk toward the fire. Almost at once I lost my strength. My hearing disappeared. The fear came back. The forest was no longer my friend, and I had to sit down once more against a tree.

“Now I could hear the voices of the men again. Courage returned to my loins and my back. I was eager to move, but so soon as I was on my feet, these powers departed. Only the touch of the tree, it seemed, could give me strength. Was I not like a blind priest in the Temple of Karnak feeling his way from column to column?

“Unable, therefore, to move, I told myself I could hardly approach the campfire if I did not have my strength.

“One thought, however, did come. If I was in a strange land, why did the Gods who lived in these trees offer Their confidence to me? Why did They not give it to the thieves by the campfire? It was their country. Maybe it was because those two good fellows—I could hear now that there were no more than two—were drunk, and so their minds were like a swamp and seeped out in all directions. Such is the power of wine. It is, after all, the juice that comes from a dying grape—to get drunk is to know how it is to begin to die. So they were far away from nearby Gods. But I was close, as close as the touch of the leaves overhead. It was then I understood that the Gods of these trees were offended by the rudeness of those who dared to get drunk among Them. So I might not need to touch a tree if I thought less of the task ahead and stayed close instead to the spirits of the nearest branch. At this moment I felt blessed by the forest. I could even smell those trees who were happy, and know those who were not well—what a difference! One complained of its roots which were growing between many rocks, another was fresh and young but shadowed by a taller tree. Still one other had been split by lightning and grew to a great size after being struck. It stood there like a crippled giant and inspired silence. I bowed my head as if truly passing a giant of a fellow who now stared only at the sky. Now I could understand that these trees would give me their good force if I showed respect, and I paid attention to each step before me. Feeling, thereby, a fine peace, I passed through what these trees had to offer me (and their thoughts were so pure they came to my senses like perfume) and at last I reached the edge of a very small clearing where the fire burned. I saw two drunk thieves. They were wrestling with each other in a kind of dance, and laughing, and wet from the heat of the fire, each with his member sticking out through the old animal skins they wore.

“They gave a shriek when they saw my sword, then flew apart, a wise move. Now I could not attack one without showing my back to the other. Yet it gave the choice of who to attack first. Both were tall, but one was slender and sly as a quick animal while the other was rich in his muscles, a body I could recognize as near to my own, and on the calm instinct, the wisdom, if I may speak of it so, that the trees had offered, I nodded to both, smiled, and with a speed of arm faster than any I had shown before, put my sword through the slim man’s chest and felt his heart go right up my arm. I blazed within as if touched by Usermare-Setpenere. Until then, never, not even with my King had I known such a moment, equal to lightning, I would say, if lightning were bliss, and then the slim thief’s face began to change. The tricks he had played on others came over his expression one by one—thievery, betrayal, and ambush were his hidden faces—but by the end, I saw a good man, not without bravery, and he died with a peaceful look.

“The other thief could have run away in the time I took to look at what I had done, but he seized a rock instead, and threw it at my head. I ducked, and by then he had two more rocks, and I laughed in the happiness that we would have a contest, and advanced on him. He threw one rock. Again I ducked. Then he hurled another at my chest, which I caught with my free hand. As he reached to the ground to pick up another, I knocked him flat with the stone I held, a good blow to the neck that finished his fight. As he lay on his knees, groggy as a cow given a blow in preparation for the knife, I took my sword and with the flat beat him on the back until he was soft like a steak that is pounded, very much alive, I promise you, for he yowled like a wounded beast, but soft. He had no will to send to his muscles.

“It was then I discovered the gift Usermare-Setpenere had left in my bowels. Gift it was. I had known from the time He seized me by the hair and took me by the place no other man had ever reached, that something new had been left in me and I did not know how to use it, but then I had never had such an hour before. Now, I could feel the gift. It was nothing to take a boy from the rear, or a man, for that matter, if he were weak enough. I had done as much ever since I was a boy myself—weaker boys, animals, girls when I could find them. You had to find a girl whose father and brothers were more afraid of you than you of them, but, in any case, it had all been nothing, I was a soldier, not a lover, not even a soldier but a river. A flood rose, and I rose with it.”

Here, Menenhetet paused before he said: “I would make it clear again, Good God, that I speak out of the innocence of mind I knew in my first life. In those years I never had a thought for the body I entered. Rather I did it to find the peace that comes from the Gods. An animal knows as much. I may say that I have seen such light in an animal’s body. So there was nothing new about this thief except that he had a back and ribs that would have looked like my own if not so thoroughly marinated by the flat of my sword. Yet I never enjoyed a buggery so much. My hand flew into the thick hair at the back of his head, and I felt my member swell to the size of a King. I was large with the gift of Ramses the Second. No door could have withstood my horn. The thief shrieked like a beast disemboweled. The first slash of the butcher has gone wrong and the poor animal runs around the shop with its tripe falling out while the customers scream and the butcher curses. Those were the sounds this fellow made beneath me and I even felt the last of his strength—that power which is attached to each man’s Secret Name, if so I may put it—for it came right into my belly, as if my loins were drinking it from him, oh, how I loved his ass. It belonged to me. I could hardly take air through my nostrils so thick were my feelings. I had used holes before, but only to give me peace, as I have said. This time I was ready to steal the seven souls and spirits of this wretch, and when I came forth it was with all that had been put into me by Ramses the Great, the very message He inscribed on the walls of my insides Even as the very center of me had been stolen by my Pharaoh, so did I steal it from another, and knew it could never stop. I had an appetite as strong as the color of my blood and knew I would keep trying to steal the seven souls of all I met, indeed when I was done, I kissed this fellow on the lips, and wiped my prick on his buttocks as a courtesy for the pleasure he had given me, then slapped it into his mouth in order to grow hard again.

“But you need no more in the way of such description. I took him through the night as if I possessed the Royal Member of Ramses the Great—may I speak with the truth that is found in the balance of Maat—I came to know the strength and the bravery and the cheap treacherous shit of this cutthroat whose name I never asked (I spoke none of his language and he knew fifty words of Egyptian) but before I was done, I had acquired all of his character that I would care to use and a few of his bad habits as well, or so I would have to think when I would find my fingers looking into the possessions of others, yes, I took him so thoroughly that there was a thief in me for the next ten years, yet by the time I left him sobbing on the ground, grateful for the tenth time that he was not dead, he was also mourning all those qualities in himself he would never know again, and I had learned one matter of interest about the King of Kadesh—it was that he had a woman on the Street of the Jewelers in the city of Tyre, of New Tyre, not the Old, and she was his secret whore. Of the armies of the King of Kadesh, this thief knew nothing except that there were armies.

“I speak of this knowledge as if the thief and I both owned the same language and had met in a beer-house for a drink, but getting him to tell me took half the night, and a few tortures of the hair on his head. I ripped away half his scalp before all desire for him was out of me, and even then he stammered forth whatever words he had. Maybe he would have answered sooner if not for his lack of Egyptian words. They have narrow ears, these Syrians, so it took long. I would ask a question, but then I would enjoy the power of my body over his body so much that he could not even try to give the answer. I felt as if I had grown a tree out of my crotch and it was on fire and this tree was being rammed into those secret turns of the bowel where the Secret Name is held.” He paused for breath and I felt my own Sweet Finger stirring.

“I always knew that men took a great deal of pleasure in each other,” said my mother, “but I never understood the price.”

“It is not always like that,” said Menenhetet. “Indeed, the night was unusual.”

Ptah-nem-hotep said: “Perhaps our good Menenhetet also takes pleasure from the recollection.”

“One must,” said Menenhetet. He shrugged. “In the morning, I kissed that poor thief again and sent him limping back to Megiddo, and worked the horses toward Tyre. I was over the worst of the mountains and it was a quick trip down—too quick—coming out of one of the ravines, we were going fast around a turn, hit a rock, and spilled. I went leaping off the road but landed on my feet with no more than a bruise for the bone of my heel. The horses were screaming in their traces and the shaft that goes from their harness to the cart had split at the fastening. In my pouch I had two hardwood spikes and leather thongs, but still lost half the day. Let me say I was no carpenter.

“By the time Mu and Ta were harnessed again, the sun was overhead. What a ride was ahead of me! The road became no smoother and the chariot groaned through every one of its fastenings. I did not know if I could get it all the way to Tyre and hardly knew why I wanted to. At this point, it would be faster to travel on one horse with my weapons on the other, but then no charioteer wants to lose his cart. Mine, of course, had little to distinguish it—just a wood wagon. Still, it had the lines of a chariot, so my sense of what was proper did not suffer. While only a few specks of paint still stuck to the wood, and it certainly looked—with those thongs around the shaft—as though it was waiting to fall apart again, I liked it enough to laugh, for my own post was sore at its root. ‘Better you than me, old soldier,’ I said to the chariot, and we went on.

“The road dipped, it climbed, it turned, but the forest began to open into fields, and around a knoll I could look down through the ravines to the sea. There was air in my lungs of a sort I had never breathed before, not even on the Delta, a smell—it had to be—of the Very Green itself, and wholly composed of fish, with an odor refreshing to my nose, not like the fish that rotted on the mud flats of the Nile. No, this good smell that came up into the hills from the loveliness of the Very Green was amazing to me, as clean as if I were breathing the very scent of Nut when She holds up the sky, so dainty, so different from the meat that gets into the sweat of men and some women. I began to cry because I had never known a lady like that. I do not mean that I wept like a child nor in weakness, but with a healthy longing now that my pride (because of what I had done to the thief) felt much restored. Besides, the water went out to a great distance, extending beyond the strength of my eyes until I could not find the place where the sky overhead came down to meet the sea and that was part of why I wept, as if a sight of the greatest beauty was being withheld from me. Then there were the ships. I was used to our own sailboats on the river, and the royal barks with their huge red and purple sailcloth, and their gold and silver hulls that gave more show of our great wealth than watching a royal procession, but these boats here on the Very Green—so far away I could not even see the color of their hulls—had white sails, and that was also a sight I had never known before. They rode through long curves of water that almost buried them, and their sails spread out like the wings of white butterflies. I could not believe how many I saw, and some by their direction were rowing away from Tyre and some were sailing to it, although, as I descended, I could not see Tyre itself, only the stones by the shore.

“Now, riding by the rocky coast, the road would sometimes climb over a spur of mountain that moved right into the sea like an arm in front of your nose, and sometimes our wheels would wobble along a trail that almost came down to the rocks of the sea, and these low roads were wet. I had never before seen such streams of water to come at you. The sea was like a serpent rolling down a hill, if a serpent were to do such, then smashing on the rocks. I was covered with spray from the Very Green and what a taste it had—of minerals and fish and the soft little devils that live in shells and something mysterious as well—maybe it was the smell of everything I did not know. All I can say is that the feel of the Very Green as it sprayed on me still had much to do with a lady for it was also light and contemptuous and playful, but could leave you chilled.

“Then it grew dark and I realized there were many Gods and Goddesses in this sea, and Their feelings could shift. Certainly the serpents that rose from the water now smashed with more force on the shore, and left a noise like thunder. The spray began to sting my eyes. I was happy to climb a hill that lifted me above such spite, but realized even as I got out of the chariot to lift the wheels from one smooth bump to the next that here the hill was of solid rock, and workmen—back so long ago as Thutmose the Third, or was it nearer to the beginning with Khufu?—must have labored for years to cut these steps on the road to Tyre. It was truly a stairway and would have impressed me more if not for our Egyptian works that are so much greater. Still, I learned another truth about the sea. For in the dark, the water struck the wall below the road, and this shock was like standing on the parapet of a fort while a siege army pounds on your gates with a battering ram. The spray flew up here to the height even of fifty or a hundred cubits above the sea, and when I looked down in the near dark, the Very Green had a million and infinity of mouths with white spit on all of them, and it growled and sucked at the ledge like a lion tearing at its prey. Even while I watched, came one massive blow of the largest serpent of water I had yet seen, a snake as large as the Nile, and it smashed the cliff so well that a full slab of rock gave a groaning sound, wrenched forth from its socket and fell into the sea. I was trembling so much at this encroachment on my road, and at the endless anger I could feel in the true Gods of the Very Green, that I wondered how I would even dare tomorrow to embark on a ship and ride over such serpents to the Island of New Tyre. I can only say that so soon as we were past the hill, the road, to my relief, moved inland, and I made camp, ate some wet grain with the horses, then slept shivering in my damp clothes.

“In the morning, I had another fine view. The mountains now moved away from the sea, and I could look across a long valley that had fields tended like gardens, and orchards of olive trees. In the distance, a city stretched out along the sand. Across from it, far away in the water, were the towers of another city seeming to grow out of the Very Green itself. I knew the place on the beach was Tyre, and the one in the water was New Tyre, and there I would learn much about the King of Kadesh, or so I hoped. My chariot had a comfortable sound despite the groaning of the shaft against the leather on our way back to the shore.”