BACK TO MEMPHIS
The valley in which Thebes Diospolis was situated was wide and the
overflow of the Nile did not reach the arable uplands near the Arabian
hills. Three thousand years before, Menes had established a system of
irrigation which had added hundreds of square miles to the agricultural
area of Egypt, and every monarch after him had unfailingly preserved
the institution. From Syene to Pelusium the country was ramified with
canals, and vast sums and great labor were expended yearly upon their
keeping.
Since the work was heavy and the demand for it constant, it became a
punitive part of each nome's administration. Therefore, the convicts
whose misdeeds were too serious to be punished adequately by the
bastinado or the fine, and yet not grave enough to merit a sentence to
the quarries or the mines, were sent to the canals.
So here in the canals of the eastern Thebaid, was Kenkenes, a prisoner
known only by a number. His fellows were unjust public weighers,
usurers, rioters, habitual tax-evaders, broken debtors, forgers and
housebreakers.
The season of toil had been unusually severe. The native convicts had
more to endure than the lash, the bitter fare, the terrible sun by day,
and a bed of dust by night, for the afflictions that befell all Egypt
were theirs also. The strange prisoner among them suffered these
things and had further the drawback of his own physical strength to
combat. The plagues overcame the weaker convicts and decimated the
number of laborers, so Kenkenes was put, alone, to the work that two
men had done before.
However, the accumulation of toil came upon him gradually and his
supple frame toughened as the demand upon it increased. Nor was he
sensible of pain or great weariness, for his mind was far away from the
sun-heated desert of the eastern Thebaid. He spoke seldom, and held
himself aloof from his fellow prisoners. He regarded his taskmasters
as if they were written authority no more animate than watered scrolls
of papyrus. No one doubted from the beginning that he was high-born,
and this mark of a great fall might have exposed him to abuse; but his
great strength and unusual deportment did not invite mistreatment. In
short, he was looked upon as mildly mad.
When Kenkenes had rejected the gods, hope, sundered from faith, groped
wildly and desperately. In his rare moments of cheer he could not
anticipate freedom without trusting to something, and in his
misanthropy his doubt had placed no limit on its scope, questioning the
honor of king or slave. In these better moments he wanted to believe
in something.
So constantly had his sorrows attended him that he had come to dread
the night, when there was neither event nor labor to interrupt their
dominance over his mind. He caught eagerly at any less troublous
problem that might suggest itself, for he felt that he had been
conquered by his plight.
As he lay by night, apart from the rest of the prisoners, he gazed at
one glittering star that stood in the north. About it were
scintillating clusters, single stars and faint streaks of
never-dissipated mists. Night after night that one brilliant point had
remained unmoved in its steady gaze from the uppermost, but the
clusters rotated about it; the single stars were westward moving; the
mists shifted. And a question began to trouble him: What hand had
marshaled the stars? Seb,[1] whom Toth had supplanted? Osiris, whom
Set destroyed? The young man put them aside. They were feeble.
Nothing so weak had created the mighty hosts of heaven. So he began to
weigh the question.
What hand had marshaled the stars? An accident? Since man must
worship something supernal, what more tremendous than the cataclysm, if
such it were, that evolved the stars. Had the same or a series of such
events brought forth the earth and man? Was the accident continuously
attendant? Did it spread the Nile over Egypt and call it again within
its banks every year? Did it clothe the fields and bring them to
harvest every revolution of the sun? Did it hang the moon like a
sickle in the west or lift it over the Arabian hills like a bubble of
silver every eight and twenty days?
If it were omnipotent, infinite and omnipresent, could it be an
accident? If it were, why not worship it and call it God?
The reasoning led him again in the direction of the gods, but he saw no
reason for a multiplicity of deities. Each member of the Egyptian
Pantheon presided over some special field of human interest or human
environment. To him, who had lived next to nature till her study had
become a worship, there were no flaws in her chronology, no
shortcomings or plethora. The earth responded to the skies; the waters
were in harmony with the earth, the harvests with all. There was unity
in the control over the universe and the hand that was powerful enough
to swing the moon was mighty enough to flood the Nile, was tender
enough to nourish the harvests, was wise enough to govern men. Where,
then, was any need of a superfluity of powers?
But behold, something had thrust a dread hand between the tender
ministrations of this other Thing and the benefits to men. By this
time it had reached the remotenesses of Egypt that it was the God of
the Hebrews. The young man arrived at this alternative in his
reasoning: There was a minister of good and another of evil--two powers
presiding over the earth,--or,--the sole minister was offended and had
deserted its charge, or had loosed upon Egypt the evil at its command.
Here Kenkenes paused. He could not arrive at any conclusion on the
matter or convince himself that he had not reasoned well.
Night after night, he fell asleep upon his ponderings, but they
returned to him with fresh food for thought after every sunset. The
reconstruction of something worshipful was more fascinating than had
been the demolition of the gods. It took many a night's meditation for
the evolution of any fixed idea from the bewildering convection of
thought. And at last he had concluded only that there was one
thing--Power--Purpose, which was greater than man.
This was not a great achievement. He had simply permitted the
universal, indefinable claim to piety, inherent in every reasoning
thing, to assert itself.
Great and sincere and beyond expression was his amazement and his joy
when a taskmaster called him from the canal-bed one day and informed
him that he was free.
The order was shown him at his request, and the name of the Princess
Ta-user as his champion filled him with puzzlement. State news
filtered slowly down even to the level he had occupied for the past
eight months. He had heard that it was Masanath whom the Hathors had
destined to wear the crown of queen to Rameses; the convicts had known
of the supremacy of Har-hat. He could not understand how it came that
Ta-user, lately discarded, could prevail upon the crown prince to
persuade Meneptah, or could herself persuade the king to the overthrow
of the fan-bearer's wishes in the matter. Furthermore, why should the
princess have taken up his cause? But he did not tarry while he
pondered.
His raiment and his money, conscientiously preserved for him by the
authorities, had been sent to him, and a little way outside the camp he
stepped from the lowest to his rightful rank, swifter than he had
descended from it. Covering his sun-burnt shoulders with his robes,
assuming the circlet once again, he went toward the distant city of
Thebes, once more in spirit and dress the son of the royal murket.
At the heavy-walled prison across the Nile he asked after the signet.
It had not been returned with the writing. Neither was there any word
to him concerning his prayer to Pharaoh for the liberty of Rachel. It
began to dawn on him that he had been released only after he had been
sufficiently punished; that he had failed in the most vital aims of his
mission; that the signet, having been found, seemed now to be lost
irretrievably. For a space his relief at his freedom was overshadowed
by chagrin, but after a little he recovered himself. "At least I am
free to care for her, now," he reflected.
Just as he emerged from the imposing doorway of the house of the
governor of police, he was jostled by a half-grown boy. To Kenkenes,
it seemed that the youth had been on the point of entering, but instead
he apologized inaudibly and walked away.
A great rush of impatience, suspense, eagerness and heart-hunger fell
on the young artist the instant he knew his footsteps were turned
toward Memphis and Rachel. The six days that must intervene between
the present time and the moment he entered the old capital seemed
insufferable. Never did a lover so fume against the inexorable
deliberation of time and the obstinate length of distance. The
preliminaries to departure seemed to accumulate and lengthen--and
lessen in importance. Haste consumed him. Under a momentary impulse,
with all seriousness he began to consider his own fleetness of foot as
more expedient than travel by boat. But he put the thought aside, and
summoning as much patience as was possible, set about with all speed
preparing to depart.
Thebes had not awakened from the coma of horror into which it had
lapsed during the great plagues. It was Kenkenes' first visit to the
city since he had left it for the desert, eight months before. Now,
the change in the great capital of the south impressed itself upon him,
in spite of his haste and his all-absorbing thought of Memphis. The
activities of life seemed to be suspended. The call to prayers could
be heard hourly from the great gongs of the temple at Karnak, when in
happier days the sound had been lost in the city's noises within the
very shadow of the pylons. He could hear strains of music in religious
processions, when the wind was fair, but he missed the acclaim of the
populace. Besides these sounds, silence had settled over Thebes.
Booths were closed in many instances; the streets, which ordinarily
were quiet, were now deserted; there were no carpets swinging from
balconies and housetops, and the citizens he saw were sober of
countenance and of garb. So few, indeed, he met, that he noted each
passer-by as an event. Once, some distance away from him, he saw again
the youth whom he had met in the doorway of the prison.
At a caterer's he purchased supplies for a day's journey and looked
about him for a carrier. Catching the boy's eye, he beckoned him, but
the youth turned on his heel and disappeared. The son of the merchant
offering himself, Kenkenes continued rapidly toward the river where he
engaged a vessel to take him to Memphis.
He roused the boatmen into immediate activity by promises of reward for
every mile gained over the average day's journey. Their passenger and
cargo shipped, the men fell to their oars and the craft shot out of the
still waters by the landings into midstream and turned toward the north.
As they cleared, the private passage boat belonging to a nobleman swept
up near to them and crossing their track took the same direction
several hundred yards nearer the Libyan shore. Kenkenes noted that it
was a bari of elegant pattern, deep draft and more numerously manned
than his. He noted further that one of the boat's crew was the youth
he had met thrice in a short space at Thebes.
"Small wonder that he was not willing to serve me," he commented to
himself.
If he observed the companion boat during the next five days it was to
remark that since his own vessel kept sturdily alongside one of
superior rowing force his men were of a surety earning the promised
reward. When they entered the long straight stretches of the Middle
country the elegant stranger dropped behind and attended Kenkenes and
his crew more distantly thereafter.
Except for these few occasions, Kenkenes had no thought of his
surroundings. He stood in the prow and looked down the shimmering
width of river, in the direction his heart had taken long before him.
And when the white cliffs that proved him close to Memphis came
shouldering up from the northern horizon, he had forgotten the stranger
in the eager, trembling anticipations that possessed him.
[1] Seb--The Egyptian Chronos.