The Egyptian by Mika Waltari

Posted by admin_akashic on Mar 4th, 2022 in Stories

travellers to visit their temples, and do they not prepare all manner of banquets and diversions to attract them and bring their gold to the residents? You are welcome everywhere if you bring gold. Your arts also are welcome in lands where they slay the aged with an ax and expose the sick in the desert to die, as I have heard. Kings are proud of their might and love to parade their soldiers to impress the stranger. You do no evil in noting how the soldiers march and in what manner they are armed, and in counting chariots and bearing in mind whether they are large and heavy or small and light and whether they carry two or three men for I have heard that some employ a shield bearer as well as a charioteer. It is also important to note whether the troops are well fed and gleaming with oil or gaunt and verminous, with diseased eyes, like my own dung snouts. There is a rumour that the Hittites have discovered some new metal and that weapons made of this can chip the edges of the finest copper ax, and this metal is blue and they call it iron, but whether this is true I don’t know for it is possible that they have discovered some new way of hardening copper. However it may be, I should like to know more. But above all, I would learn the hearts of the rulers and of their counsellors.”

I looked at him, but he no longer looked at me, only waved his golden whip indifferently in his hand and stared pass me through a window hole at Jerusalem’s mud walls and the rocks glowing red in the heat of the day and the olive trees whose leaves were grey from dust. But he also stared past all that, as if reaching into strange lands, and his back rose, and there was a grim gloom in his eyes.

“I well understand what you are saying,” I said after giving it a good thought. “Also my own heart has recently been uneasy and brisk like a bird in a gage. I came to you to have a taste of war, even if my servant warned me not to. And I have nothing against travelling to strange lands, not visited by many Egyptians, for Zemar is small, and I have grown tired of Zemar, and while you were talking, I wondered what made me stay there this long. But maybe man is slow to decide and slow to leave, unless someone tells him so and sends him off. But you are not my master and I do not know why you want to know all that and what use it is for you when you sit in Pharaoh’s golden house and play with women.”

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He said, “Look at me.”

I looked at him, and while I was looking at him, he appeared to grow before my eyes, and there was a grim fire in his eyes, and he was like a god, so that my heart quailed and I bowed before him lowering my hands at my knees, and he said, “Do you believe now that I am your master?”

“My heart tells me that you are my master, but I do not know why this should be,” I said to him, and my tongue was thick in my mouth, and I was afraid. “Doubtless it is true that you are destined to hold command over many, as you said. I go, therefore, on a journey, and my eyes shall be your eyes and my ears your ears, but I don’t know whether you will gain by what I see and hear, for in the matters you wish to learn of I am a dunce and only more skilled than others are as a doctor. Yet I will do it as well as I may and not for gold but because you are my friend and because plainly the gods have so willed it, if indeed there be any gods.”

He said, “I don’t think you will repent of being my friend, but in any case I will give you gold for your journey for if I know anything of men, you will have need of it. You do not need to ask why this knowledge is more precious to me than gold, but I can tell you that the great Pharaohs sent clever men to foreign courts; but the envoys of the present Pharaoh are muttonheads who know no more than how to pleat their robes and wear their honours and in what order they must stand on the right or left hand of Pharaoh. So pay no heed to them if you should meet with any, but let their talk be as the buzz of flies in your ear.”

When we parted, he laid aside his dignity and stroked my cheek with his hand and touched my shoulders with his face, saying, “My heart is heavy because of your going, Sinuhe, for if you are alone, why, so am I. No man knows the secrets of my heart.” I believed that as he said this his thoughts were with the princess Beketamun whose beauty had bewitched him.

He gave me much gold, more than I could have imagined, and I believe he gave me all the gold he had won in the Syrian campaign, and he furnished me with an escort as far as the coast so that I could travel without fear of robbers. As soon as I arrived to the coast, I placed the gold with a large trading company, exchanging it for clay tablets, which were safer to carry, being useless to thieves, after which I boarded a ship for Zemar.

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