Thebes of the Hundred Gates

Five

The real Egypt got even realer, much too real, in the days immediately following.

On the first morning he followed the other men of his little mud tenement when they set out for work soon after sunrise. Silently they marched single file through the rapidly awakening City of the Dead, past the residential district and out a short way into the fringe of the desert. The line of demarcation was unmistakable: no transitional zone, but rather two utterly different worlds butting up against each other, fertile humus and green vegetation and the coolness of the river air on one side, and, on the other, arid sand and rock and the blast-furnace heat of the realm of the dead, striking with the force of a punch even this early in the day. The dawn breeze brought him the briny smell of the embalmers’ chemicals, far more pungent than it had been the night before. They must be approaching the House of Purification, he realized.

And then he saw it, not any kind of house at all but a raggle-taggle pseudo-village, scores of flimsy little booths made of sheets of cloth tacked together in frameworks of wooden struts. It was spread out like a Gypsy encampment over a strip of the desert plain that was probably a thousand yards long and fifty yards or so deep. As he watched, workmen began disassembling a booth not far from him, revealing the workshop within: soiled and wadded cloths, mounds of damp sawdust, rows of phials and flasks and unpainted pottery jars, racks of fearsome-looking tools, a scattering of discarded bandages, and, in the center of the room, a ponderous rectangular table made of four huge wooden butcher’s-blocks. The workmen were carefully packing everything up, sweeping the sawdust into large jars, stuffing the cloths in on top, gathering all the tools and chemicals together and putting them in elegant wooden satchels. He thought he understood. The job was finished here; the dead man had gone to his grave; now the booth where his body had lain for the seventy days of his mummification was being dismantled and every scrap, every bit of cloth, every stray hair, was being taken away lest it fall into the hands of some enemy of his who might use it against him in an enchantment. All these booths were temporary things. Each had been constructed for a specific occupant, and it was taken down when he had been safely seen into the next world.

He looked about in wonder. The great work of preparing the dead for the glorious afterlife was proceeding with awesome alacrity on all sides.

He had studied the process, naturally. He had studied every aspect of Egyptian life while preparing for this mission: they had poured it into him, hypnogogic training day and night, a torrent of facts, an electronic encyclopedia engraved on his mind. He knew how they drew the brain out through the nostrils with an iron hook and squirted chemicals in to dissolve whatever remained. How they made an incision in the left flank through which to remove the entrails for their separate interment in stone jars. The cleansing and scouring of the body, the washing of it in palm-wine; the packing of the interior cavity with myrrh and cassia and other aromatics; the many days of curing in a tub of dry natron to purge the body of all putrefying matter, the thirsty salts devouring every drop of the body’s moisture, leaving it as hard as wood. The coating of the skin with a carapace of resinous paste. And then the bandaging, the body enveloped in its protective layers of cloth, the hundreds of yards of fine linen so carefully wrapped, each finger and toe individually, thimbles covering the nails to keep them in place, the pouring of unguents, the reciting of prayers and the uttering of magic formulas—

But still, to see it all happening right in front of him—to smell it happening—

Someone whacked him on the back.

“Move along, you! Get to work!”

He stumbled and nearly fell.

“Yes—sir—”

Work? Where was he supposed to work? What did they want him to do?

He drifted as though in a dream toward a nearby booth. Its linen door was folded back, half open, and he could see figures moving about within. A naked body lay face down on the great wooden table. Above it stood two figures out of some terrifying dream, men in golden kilts whose heads were concealed by dark Anubis masks—the dog-faced god, the black god of death, tapered narrow ears rising high, dainty pointed muzzles projecting half a foot. These must be the embalmers themselves, members of the secret hereditary guild. A priest stood to one side, droning prayers. There were three other men in the booth, maskless and dressed only in loincloths, handing tools back and forth in response to brief harsh commands. Would an apprentice be useful here? He took a deep breath and went in.

“More oil,” one of the men in loincloths said to him at once, brusquely thrusting a huge sweet-smelling red jar into his arms.

He nodded and backed out of the booth, and looked about in perplexity. An overseer glowered at him. He avoided making eye contact and turned away, trudging up the path as though he knew where he was going. But he hesitated to ask. At any moment, he thought, he would be recognized as an outsider, an impious interloper with no business here. Overseers would take him by the scruff of the neck and carry him to the river—toss him in to provide the crocodiles with breakfast—

Toward him came a boy of thirteen or fourteen, tottering under an immense roll of bandages. The boy, at least, didn’t seem to pose a threat. Davis took up a position in the middle of the path, deliberately blocking it. The boy shot him an angry glance and gestured furiously with his head, wordlessly telling him to move aside.

Davis said, “I need to get some more oil.”

“Then get more oil,” the boy said. “You’re standing in my way.”

“I’m new. I don’t know where to go.”

“Fool,” the boy said in disgust. Then he softened a little. “Cedar oil, is it?”

“Yes,” said Davis, hoping he was right.

“Over there.” The boy nodded toward the side. “Now get out of the path.”

He saw a dispensing station of some sort where an old withered man, as parched as a mummy himself, was dispensing a dark fluid from a clay jar nearly as tall as he was. A line of workmen stood before it. Davis waited his turn and presented the jar, and the old man ladled the new supply in, splashing it about so liberally that Davis’ arms and chest were covered with it.

“You took your time about it,” grunted one of the men in the booth, relieving him of the jar.

“Sorry.”

“Start loading those pipes, will you?”

They were tubes—syringes of a sort—stacked on the floor of the booth. It took a moment for Davis to figure out how they worked; but then he got the knack of it and began filling them with oil and handing them up to the other men, who passed them along to the Anubis-headed embalmers. Who deftly unloaded them into the corpse on the table through the anus.

What was taking place here, he realized, was a bargain-rate mummification. No incisions had been made in this man, no internal organs withdrawn. They were simply pumping him full of a powerful solvent that would leach away the bowels. Then they would sew him up and cover him with natron to dry him out while the oil inside did its work; and when the prescribed number of days had elapsed, they would cut the stitches and let the oil out and send the new Osiris to his final resting-place. There was a cheaper kind of mummification yet, Davis knew, in which they dispensed even with the cedar oil, and simply treated the corpse with natron until it was properly dry. He wondered whether those who were given such skimpy treatment could hope to live forever in the afterlife also, and ride through the heavens with the gods on the boat of the sun. No doubt they did. He began to see why these Egyptians were all so exuberant. So long as they could give their bodies some sort of preparation for the life to come, they were guaranteed virtual immortality, not only the kings but even the humble merchants, the boatmen, the peasants. No reason to be bitter about one’s lot in life: better times were coming, and they would endure forever.

His first day in the necropolis seemed to endure forever also. He drifted from booth to booth, filling in wherever he seemed to be needed, doing whatever they seemed to want him to do. The day was a fever-dream of intestines and stinks, of salts and oils, of dead bodies lying like meat on wooden blocks. It astonished him that death had undone so many this day in Thebes. But then he reminded himself that this wasn’t only one day’s crop; the mummification process lasted a couple of months and there were bodies here in all stages of preparation, ranging from those who had just undergone their preliminary cleaning to those who had attained the requisite level of desiccation and were ready to be carried to their resting places in the hills. Several times during the day new deads arrived at the necropolis, borne on litters with their friends and members of their family grieving by their sides and parties of professional mourners, women with bare breasts and disheveled hair, sobbing along behind. Davis helped to construct the embalmers’ booth for one of these new arrivals; it was the most pleasing thing he had done all day, swift, neat, clean work. In late afternoon just as the sky was beginning to redden behind the jagged hills he witnessed the other end of the process, the departure of a funeral cortege toward the actual place of burial. It must have been someone of note who had died, for the procession was extensive: first servants carrying intricately carved alabaster jars that very likely contained foodstuffs and perfumed oils for the use of the dead man in the next world, and then men bearing heavy, ornately decorated wooden chests that must hold his fine clothing, his prized possessions, all the treasure that he was taking with him to the afterlife; and after them came the four jars of polished stone containing the deceased’s embalmed viscera, carried upon a sled. A priest was alongside, chanting. The mummy itself was next, handsomely encased and resting on a couch beneath a canopy, all mounted upon another sled, this one gilded, with ebony runners. Four more priests accompanied it: and then the family and friends, not grieving now, but looking calm and rather proud of the fine show of which they were a part. In the rear once again were the professional mourners, a dozen of them wailing desperately and beating their breasts, each of them every bit as distraught as though it was her own husband or father who had been taken from her that very morning.

The procession passed through the embalmers’ village and out the far side, heading toward the looming cliffs just to the west. It was grand enough, Davis thought, for a vizier, a judge, a high priest, at the very least. A prince, perhaps.

“Who’s being carried there, do you know?” Davis asked the man by his side.

“Mahu, I think. Overseer of the royal granaries, he was.”

“A rich man?”

“Rich? Mahu? No, not really. Too honest, Mahu was.”

Davis stared at the retreating cortege. How splendid it looked against the light of the setting sun! And this was only a bureaucrat’s funeral. He wondered what a nobleman’s must be like, or a king’s.

He had seen some of the royal tombs during his orientation visit to Luxor, those haunting surreal catacombs endlessly decorated with the bewildering profuse mysteries of the Book of Gates and the Book of the Night and the Book of the Underworld, and he had seen the smaller but jollier tombs of nobles and high officials as well. Had Mahu’s tomb survived to come before the eyes of modern-day archeologists and tourists? He had no idea. Perhaps it had, but no one cared. Mahu had been an honest man; his tomb must not have compared with those of the great lords.

The great ones, Davis already knew, did not undergo their mummifications amidst the vulgar hubbub of the embalmers’ village. For them the booths were set up closer to the tomb sites, well away from the stares of the curious; and they were guarded day and night until they were at last safely packed away underground amidst all their worldly wealth. Which had made no difference in the long run, for all the tombs had been plundered eventually, all but insignificant Tut-ankh-Amen’s, and even his had been broken into a couple of times, though the thieves had left most of the treasure behind. But the mummies themselves, some of them, had survived. In the Cairo Museum Davis had looked upon the actual face of Rameses the Great, stern and fierce, ninety years old and still outraged by the idea of dying: he was one who had meant to stay on the throne forever, to have his afterlife and his first life at the same time. My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair! And—shivering now—he realized that he had seen Amenhotep III’s mummy in the museum also, the mortal remains of the plump sleek-cheeked man whom he had watched, only two days before, as he came forth from Luxor Temple, a living god, happy and well, becrowned and bejeweled, who had clambered into his royal chariot and driven off while his adoring subjects cheered—Life! Health! Strength!

Davis trembled. He had been with the Service for five years; and it seemed to him that it was only in this moment that the full power of the meaning of being able to travel in time came home to him. The awesome privilege, the utter magnificence of having the gates of the past rolled back for him. For him!

I must not have much of an imagination, he thought.

“You! Standing and watching!”

A whip came out of somewhere and coiled around his bare shoulders like a fiery cobra.

He turned. An overseer was laughing at him.

“Work to do. Who do you think you are?”

Work, yes. Soiled rags to collect. Blood-stained rags, left-over salts, broken pots. He entered one booth where a fat man lay on his back, staring through empty sockets at the darkening sky. A vivid line of stitches crossed his belly, holding in the packing of myrrh and cassia. The fat man’s jaw sagged in the stupefaction of death. All those fine dinners: what did they matter now? Look on my works, ye mighty! On a table in the adjoining booth was a woman, a girl, perhaps fifteen or twenty years old, small-breasted and slender. She had just arrived; the craftsmen of the necropolis had not yet begun their work on her. The elaborate wig of dense midnight-blue hair that she had worn in life sat beside her on the table. Her shaven skull was like porcelain. Her fingernails and toenails were dyed dark red with henna and there was blue-green eye-paint around her sightless eyes. A gold bracelet encircled her lovely arm: maybe she had worn it since a child and it could no longer be removed. Her nakedness was heartbreaking. He felt an impulse to cover it. But he moved on, only remotely aware now of the odor of death and of the chemicals of the embalmers. It was dark now. The Anubis-masked embalmers had gone home. His body ached everywhere from his day’s work, and he knew the pain was just beginning. He was stained with oils and assorted aromatics. His shoulders burned from the sting of the overseer’s whip. The real Egypt, all right. Seen from the underside. Could he leave now, or would he be whipped again? No, no, all the workers were leaving. Night-guards were coming on duty; one of them glanced at him and made a jerking motion with his head, telling him to get out, go back to his village, call it a day.

He had grilled fish for dinner again, and rancid beer.

Later he sat up, staring at the impossibly brilliant stars in the astonishingly clear sky, and wondered whether Eyaseyab would come to him again. But why should she? What was he to her? A comet in the night, a random visitor to whom she had granted a moment of kindness. After a time he went inside his foul little cubicle and lay down on the straw that was his bed.

I must get back across the river, he told himself. I need to find—

And sleep came up in the midst of the thought and took him like a bandit who had thrown a heavy hood over his head.