Her tongue was sharper than the sting of a wasp as she said sarcastically, “I thought I knew you, Sinuhe, but it seems there are abysses in your heart that I never even suspected. You do well to protect the woman’s honour, and far be it from me to pry into your secret. No, I certainly won’t, and I thank all the gods that I was wise enough to preserve my freedom and refused to break a jar with you — if you ever meant anything with those words. Ah, Sinuhe, how foolish I have been to believe your lying words, for you must have been whispering those same words into beautiful ears all this evening. I would rather be dead now.”

I would have stroked her soothingly, but she drew back and said, “Keep your hands away from me, Sinuhe, for you must be weary after rolling on the soft mats of the palace. I have no doubt that they are softer than my mat and that you found there younger and more beautiful playmates than myself.”

So she went on, piercing my heart with small, smarting wounds until I thought I would go raving mad. Only then did she leave, forbidding me even to accompany her to The Crocodile’s Tail. I should have suffered more keenly still at her going if my thoughts had not been raging within me like tempestuous seas and if I had not longed to be alone with them. So I let her go, and I fancy she was amazed that I did so without protesting much longer.

I lay awake all that night on my mat, and as the hours went by, my thoughts became colder and more detached with the wine evaporating from my head, and my limbs shook with cold because I had no one next to me to warm me. I listened to the gentle trickle of the water clock, and the water never ceased its flow, and time went by unmeasured over me so that I felt distant even from myself. So I said to my heart, “I, Sinuhe, am what my own actions have made me, and nothing else is of any significance. I, Sinuhe, brought my foster parents to an untimely death for the sake of a cruel woman. I, Sinuhe, still keep the silver ribbon from the hair of Minea, my sister. I, Sinuhe, have seen a dead sea bull floating on the water and the face of my beloved moving as crabs tore at her flesh. Of what importance is my blood, for all was written in the stars already before I was born, and I was predestined to be a stranger in the world. Therefore the peace of Akhetaten was only a golden lie to me, and I needed this most terrible knowledge so that my heart would awake from its slumber and that I would know I was always going to be alone.”

489

But when the sun rose in gold beyond the eastern mountains, and the shadows fled and — so strange is the heart of man — I laughed bitterly at my own phantoms. Even though I had drifted with the current in a reed boat that same night and even though the sooty reeds of the reed boat had been tied with fowler’s knots, every night several abandoned children must have drifted with the current in reed boats in those times, and perhaps sailors from the Lower Kingdom taught the knots to the women they had seduced, and it was no evidence at all if my skin was ashen coloured and paler than the skin of the common people since a physician passes his days under shelters and his complexion becomes pale. No, in the light of day I could find no conclusive proof of my origin.

I also thought how I had seen Pharaoh Amenhotep on his death bed, and nothing had moved in my heart upon watching the dying, old man, but I had only rejoiced about the skill of my hands, cleaning and giving Ptahor his tools as a pupil of the House of Life, and my heart had not stirred when he had drilled Pharaoh’s skull open. Had he really been my father — if his seed had really inseminated me in the womb of princess of Mitanni — then my heart should have stirred when I lay my eyes on him for the first time during the night of his death. But no emotion in me had greeted him, and all I had seen was an old man, dying — apart from all his power. I also thought that if Queen Tiye’s black fingers had once held me on the night of my birth and pushed me to the river to die in a reed boat, my heart should have shrank upon seeing her, but I had always watched her feeling nothing but curiosity, and before she had died, I had conversed with her calmly and nothing had risen in my heart against her. Thus I thought, and these thoughts were stronger than any proof from eyes or from other senses, so that I wanted to imagine I had only seen a dream and removed the phantom of my birth from my mind.

490 

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