The Egyptian by Mika Waltari

Posted by admin_akashic on Mar 4th, 2022 in Stories

by your side all his days, even should you die first, and he should die there too. Dangerous thoughts are like a plague and readily transmitted from one to another. I do not desire your sickness to return to Egypt with any other man. And if by your friends you mean a certain mill slave whose fingers have grown together and a drunken artist who portrays gods squatting by the roadside and a couple of black men who have frequented your house, then you need not seek to take farewell of them for they have gone on a long journey and will never return.”

At that moment, I hated Horemheb, but I hated myself more, because my hands still sowed death though I did not want it, and my friends had suffered for my sake. Doubtless, Horemheb had those few friends I gathered around me — since they remembered Aten — killed or sent to the copper mines in Sinai. I said nothing to Horemheb but stretched forth my hands at knee level and left him, and the guards took me away from him. Twice he opened his mouth to speak to me before I went, and he took a step forward after me but then stopped and lashed his legs with the whip and said, “Pharaoh has spoken.”

Then the guards shut me into a chair and carried me away from Thebes and took me past the three mountains of Thebes eastward into the desert along a stone-paved road that had been built at Horemheb’s command. They escorted me for twenty days until we came to the harbour where ships once a year took cargoes bound for the land of Punt, having first sailed downstream from Thebes and then along a canal to the eastern sea. But there were people living here, and so the guards escorted me for a three days’ journey from the harbour along the coast to a deserted village where fishermen had once dwelt. Here they measured out an area for my walking and built me a house in which I have lived all these years until I became an old and tired man; and I have lacked nothing that I have asked for but lived the life of a rich man in my house — and I have writing materials and the finest paper and caskets of black wood in which I keep the books I have written and my physician’s equipment. But this book will be the last I write and the fifteenth that I have written, and I have no more to say, for I am tired of writing — and my hand is tired, and my eyes are tired, so that I scarcely distinguish the characters on the paper any more.

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I do not think I would have cared to live, had I not written and through writing lived my life over again — though I don’t have much good to tell of my life. I have written all this for my own sake to have a reason to live and to make clear to myself the reason why I have lived. But I don’t know why I have lived, and when I now finish my last book, I know it less than when I started writing. Nevertheless, writing has greatly comforted me during these years, since every day the sea has been before my eyes; and I have seen the sea red and black, green in the daytime and white during the night, and on the days of searing heat bluer than blue stones. I am greatly weary of watching the sea, for the sea is too vast and too terrible for a man to have before his eyes forever, and watching the greatness of the sea makes his heart hurt — and his heart falls to the bottom of the well when he watches the sea at sunset.

I have also beheld the red hills about me, all these years, and have examined sand fleas; and the scorpions and serpents have become my friends so that they no longer flee from me but listen when I speak to them. Yet I believe serpents and scorpions are bad friends to man. I have become as entirely weary of them as I have become of all the endless, rolling billows of the sea.

I should however mention that in the course of my first year in this village of whitened bones and tumbledown huts, while ships sailed past once again to Punt, Muti came to me from Thebes with one of Pharaoh’s caravans. She greeted me and lowered her hands at her knees and wept wistfully at the sight of my wretched state: my cheeks had fallen in, my belly had melted, and nothing mattered to me any more, for I spent my days staring at the sea until my head hurt. But soon Muti straightened herself up and began to scold me, and she said to me, nagging fiercely:

“Have I not warned you a thousand times, Sinuhe, not to put your head into a snare, but men are deafer than stones, and men are boys who must crack their heads against the wall though the wall does not budge from it. Truly, you have run your head against the wall often enough, my master Sinuhe, and it is time you settled down and led the life of a wise man until that small thing which men hide under their loincloths, ashamed of it themselves too, stops bothering you and raising fever to your head — for all the evil in the world is its doing.”

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