ON THE WAY TO THEBES
The moon was ampler and its light stronger. The Nile was a vast and
faintly silvered expanse, roughened with countless ripples blown
opposite the direction of the current. The north wind had risen and
swept through the crevice between the hills with more than usual
strength, adding its reedy music to the sound of the swiftly flowing
waters.
After launching his bari, Kenkenes gazed a moment, and then, with a
prayer to Ptah for aid, struck out for the south, rowing with powerful
strokes.
At the western shore lighted barges swayed at their moorings or
journeyed slowly, but the Nile was wide, and the craft, blinded by
their own brilliance, had no thought of what might be hugging the
Arabian shore. Yet Kenkenes, with the inordinate apprehension of the
fugitive, lurked in the shadows, dashed across open spaces and imagined
in every drifting, drowsy fisher's raft a pursuing party. He prayed
for the well-remembered end of the white dike, where the Nile curved
about the southernmost limits of the capital. The day had not yet
broken when he passed the last flambeau burning at the juncture of the
dike with the city wall. He rowed on steadily for Memphis, and
immediate danger was at last behind him.
The towers of the city had sunk below the northern horizon when,
opposite a poor little shrine for cowherds on the shore, a brazen gong
sounded musically for the sunrise prayers. The Libyan hilltops were,
at that instant, illuminated by the sun, and Kenkenes, in obedience to
lifelong training, rested his oars and bent his head. When he pulled
on again he did not realize that he had been, with the stubbornness of
habit, maintaining the breach between him and Rachel. There was no
thought in his mind to give over his faith.
At noon, weary with heat, hunger and heavy labor, he drew up at
Hak-heb, on the western side of the Nile, fifty miles above Memphis.
The town was the commercial center for the pastoral districts of the
posterior Arsinoëite nome--Nehapehu. Here were brought for shipment
the wine, wheat and cattle of the fertile pocket in the Libyan desert.
Being at a season of commercial inactivity, when the farmers were
awaiting the harvest, the sunburnt wharves were almost deserted.
Few saw Kenkenes arrive. Most of the inhabitants were taking the
midday rest, and every moored boat was manned by a sleeping crew. He
made a landing and went up through the sand and dust of the hot street
to the only inn. Here he ate and slept till night had come again.
Refreshed and invigorated, he continued his journey. At noon the next
day he stopped to sleep at another town and to buy a lamp, materials
for making fire, ropes and a plummet of bronze sufficiently heavy to
anchor his boat. He was entering a long stretch of distance wherein
there was no inhabited town, and he was making ready to sleep in the
bari. Then he began to travel by day, for he was too far from Memphis
to fear pursuit, and rest in an open boat under a blazing sun would be
impossible.
The third evening he paused opposite a ruined city on the eastern bank
of the Nile. Hunters not infrequently went inland at this point for
large game, and although the place was in a state of partial
demolishment, Kenkenes hoped that there might be an inn. He tied his
boat to a stake and entered Khu-aten,[1] the destroyed capital of
Amenophis IV, self-styled Khu-n-Aten.
Here under a noble king, who loved beauty and had it not, the barbarous
rites of the Egyptian religion were overthrown and sensuous and
esthetic ceremonies were established and made obligatory all over the
kingdom. In his blind groping after the One God, the king had directed
worship to the most fitting symbol of Him--the sun.
He appeased the luminous divinity by offerings of flowers, regaled it
with simmerings from censers, besought it with the tremulous harp and
had it pictured with grace and vested with charm. And since the power
of the national faith was all-permeating, its reconstruction was
far-reaching in effect. Egypt was swept into a tremendous and
beautiful heresy by a homely king, whose word was law.
But at his death the reaction was vast and vindictive. The orthodox
faith reasserted itself with a violence that carried every monument to
the apostasy and the very name of the apostate into dust. Now the
remaining houses of Khu-ayen were the homes of the fishers--its ruins
the habitation of criminals and refugees.
The hand of the insulted zealot, of the envious successor, of the
invader and conqueror, had done what the reluctant hand of nature might
not have accomplished in a millennium. The ruins showed themselves,
stretching afar toward and across the eastern sky, in ragged and
indefinable lines. The oblique rays of the newly risen moon slanted a
light that was weird and ghostly because it fell across a ruin.
Kenkenes climbed over a chaos of prostrate columns, fallen architraves
and broken colossi, and the sounds of his advance stirred the rat, the
huge spider, the snake and the hiding beast from the dark debris. Here
and there were solitary walls standing out of heaps of wreckage, which
had been palaces, and frequent arid open spaces marked the site of
groves. In complex ramifications throughout the city sandy troughs
were still distinguishable, where canals had been, and in places of
peculiarly complete destruction the strips of uneven pavement showed
the location of temples.
There was not a house at which Kenkenes dared to ask hospitality.
Those that lived so precariously would have little conscience about
stripping him of his possessions.
He retraced his steps to the wharves and drew away, prepared to spend
the night in his boat.
After leaving Khu-aten, the Nile wound through wild country, the hills
approaching its course so closely as to suggest the confines of a
gorge. The narrow strip of level land on the eastern side lay under a
receding shadow cast by the hills, but the river and the western shore
were in the broad brilliance of the moon. The night promised to be one
of exceeding brightness and Kenkenes shared the resulting wakefulness
of the wild life on land.
The half of his up-journey was done and the conflict of hope and doubt
marshaled feasible argument for and against the success of his mission.
In some manner the destruction of Khu-aten offered, in its example of
Egypt's fury against progress, a parallel to his own straits.
In his boyhood he had heard the Pharaoh Khu-n-Aten anathematized by the
shaven priests, and in the depths of his heart he had been startled to
find no sympathy for their rage against the artist-king.
Ritual-bound Egypt had resented liberty of worship--a liberalism that
lacked naught in zeal or piety, but added grace to the Osirian faith.
In his beauty-worship, Kenkenes was not narrow. He would not confine
it to glyptic art, nor indeed to art alone--all the uses of life might
be bettered by it. His appreciation of Khu-n-Aten's ambition had been
passive before, but when his own spirit experienced the same fire and
the same reproach, his sympathy became hearty partizanship.
His mind wandered back again to the ruin. How fiercely Egypt had
resented the schism of a Pharaoh, a demi-god, the Vicar of Osiris! The
words of Rachel came back to him like an inspiration:
"Thou hast nation-wide, nation-old, nation-defended prejudice to
overcome, and thou art but one, Kenkenes."
But one, indeed, and only a nobleman. Could he hope to change Egypt
when a king might not? Behold, how he was suffering for a single and
simple breach of the law. At the thought he paused and asked himself:
"Am I suffering for the sacrilege?"
The admission would entail a terrifying complexity.
If he were suffering punishment for the statue, what punishment had
been his for the sacrilegious execution of the Judgment of the Dead in
the tomb of Rameses II? What, other than the reclamation of the signet
by the Incomparable Pharaoh, even as Mentu had said? If the hypothesis
held, he had committed sacrilege, he had offended the gods, and might
not the accumulated penalty be--O unspeakable--the loss of Rachel?
On the other hand, if the signet were still in the tomb, Rameses had
not reclaimed it--Rameses had not been offended. The ritual condemned
his act, but if Rameses in the realm of inexorable justice and supernal
wisdom did not, how should he reconcile the threats of the ritual and
the evident passiveness of the royal soul? If he found the signet and
achieved his ends, aside from its civil power over him, what weight
would the canonical thunderings have to his inner heart?
Once again he paused. The deductions of his free reasoning led him
upon perilous ground. They made innuendoes concerning the stability of
the other articles of hieratical law. He was startled and afraid of
his own arguments.
"Nay, by the gods," he muttered to himself, "it is not safe to reason
with religion."
But every stroke of his oar was active persistence in his heresy.
He believed he should find the signet.
Thereafter he could turn a deaf ear to any renegade ideas such an event
might suggest.
It was an unlucky chance that befell the theological institutions of
Egypt as far as this devotee was concerned, that Kenkenes had landed at
the capital of the hated Pharaoh.
But he shook himself and tried to fix his attention on the night. The
stars were few--the multitude obliterated by the moon, the luminaries
abashed thereby. The light fell through a high haze of dust and was
therefore wondrously refracted and diffused. The hills made high
lifted horizons, undulating toward the east, serrated toward the west.
In the sag between there was no human companionship abroad.
Throughout great lengths of shore-line the tuneless stridulation of
frogs, the guttural cries of water-birds and the general movement in
the sedge indicated a serene content among small life. But sometimes
he would find silence on one bank for a goodly stretch where there was
neither marsh-chorus nor cadences of insects. The hush would be
profound and an affrighted air of suspense was apparent. And there at
the river-brink the author of this breathless dismay, some lithe
flesh-eater, would stride, shadow-like, through the high reeds to
drink. Now and then the woman-like scream of the wildcat, or the harsh
staccato laugh of the hyena would startle the marshes into silence.
Sometimes retiring shapes would halt and gaze with emberous eyes at the
boat moving in midstream.
Kenkenes admitted with a grim smile that the great powers of the world
and the wild were against him. But Rachel's face came to him as
comfort--the memory of it when it was tender and yielding--and with a
lover's buoyancy he forgot his sorrows in remembering that she loved
him. He dropped the anchor and, lying down in the bottom of his boat,
dreamed happily into the dawn.
During the day he landed for supplies at a miserable town of
pottery-makers, leaving his boat at the crazy wharves.
When he returned the bari was gone. A negro, the only one near the
river who was awake, told him that a dhow, laden with clay, in making a
landing had struck the bari, staved in its side, upset it and sent it
adrift.
The mischance did not trouble Kenkenes.
After some effort he aroused a crew of oarsmen, procured a boat, and
continued at once to Thebes.
[1] Khu-aten--Tel-el-Amarna.