The Egyptian by Mika Waltari

Posted by admin_akashic on Mar 4th, 2022 in Stories

“Why?” I asked. “Why needs the human body be preserved after death, even when it’s cold and has no feeling?”

Ramose glanced at me with his small, round turtle eyes, wiped his hands on his apron and drank beer from a jar, which was next to the brain jar.

“So it has ever been and will ever be,” he said. “Who am I to explain what has always been since time immemorial. But they say that in the grave a man’s Ka, who is his soul, returns to his body and eats the meal sacrificed to him and rejoices the flowers that were brought in front of him. But Ka consumes very little, so little that a human eye cannot see it. Therefore the same sacrifice can be done to many, and the sacrifice of a King is carried from his grave to the front of the nobles’ graves, and finally the priests eat it when the night falls. But Ba, who is a man’s spirit, flies on the moment of man’s death from his nostril, but where it flies, I cannot say. Many witnesses throughout time have assured that this happens. But Ka and a man have no difference other than that Ka casts no shadow in light, but a man has one. In all other things they are alike. So it is said.”

“Your words are nothing but buzzing of flies in my ears, Ramose,” I said. “I am not an entirely simple man and there is no need for you to babble me old things that I have grown weary hearing and reading in scriptures. But what is the truth?”

Ramose drank once more from the beer jar and watched absent-mindedly small parts of brains floating in the oil of the neighbouring jar. “You are still young and anxious to ask a thing like that,” he said and grinned to himself, opened his mouth and laughed silently. “Your heart is inflamed to ask a thing like that. But my heart is old and scarred, and your many questions do not hurt it. I cannot tell — and nobody else can either, not even the priests, — if a man benefits from having his body preserved after death. But since that has always been done and will ever be done, it is best to keep doing so, since at least it brings no harm. I only know that no one has ever returned from the Western Land to tell

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what it is like. Some say that a Ka of a loved one returns to them in their sleep to guide, teach and warn them; but dreams are but dreams, and in the morning they are no more and they have evaporated. But it is true that once a woman was revived in the House of Death and returned to her husband and her parents and lived until old age before she died again, but perhaps this happened because she was not really dead, so I believe, and someone had enchanted her to be like a corpse to steal her body and control it, because things like that do happen. The woman told others that in death she entered the gorge of the underworld, which was dark and had various horrible creatures harassing her, such as male baboons who hugged her, and crocodile- headed monsters, who bit her breasts. They have written a story about this, kept in the Temple, and they read it to whomever pays a fee. But who believes what a woman says? In any case, death had such an impression on this woman, that for the rest of her days she lived a pious life and visited the temple every day and spent her dowry and also her husband’s fortune in sacrifices, so that her children became poor and they had no money to prepare her body for death when she finally did die. But then the Temple donated a grave to her and preserved her body. They still show her grave in the City of the Dead, as you may know.”

The more he talked, the ever more firmly I wanted to preserve the bodies of my parents. Having now lived in the House of Death, I did not know if they benefited from it or not, but I owed it to them. The one hope and joy of their old age had been that of their own eternal preservation, and in my desire to fulfil this hope I embalmed them, with Ramose’s assistance, and bound them in strips of linen, remaining for this purpose forty days and nights in the House of Death. My stay was thus prolonged in order to steal enough for the proper treatment of the bodies. But I had no tomb for them — not so much as a wooden coffin — and I could do no more than sew them up in an oxhide so that they could live together until eternity.

When I was ready to leave the House of Death, I became irresolute and my heart thudded in my breast. Ramose, who had noted my skill, invited me to remain as his assistant. I could then have earned and stolen much and lived out my life in the burrows of the House of Death without the knowledge of any of my friends and free from the vexations and sufferings of a normal life. Yet I could not stay in the House of Death, and I cannot tell why I did not, since after getting used to its burrows I had no complaints and I did not long for anything.

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