Ancient Evenings (26 page)

Below, on the patio, a Councillor was speaking of work in the quarries. I could see by the look on my father’s face that these were not matters of grave importance. I had often heard my mother say that my father never had a thought of his own, and so his face could reflect everyone else’s. I know I did not understand what she meant until the day she told him that his manners were superb because he was never bothered by the manners he had been born with—instead, he imitated the best manners he saw. That was a true description of my father. The angle at which one nobleman might cock his wrist quickly became—if my father thought it just—his own turn of wrist. So did he copy the delicate touch by which Ptah-nem-hotep brought a finger to the side of His nose when He was contemplating which fine remark to make, but then my father would even imitate the irony with which my great-grandfather might bow his head to indicate that he did not agree with what you just said.

I do not mean to say that my father acted foolishly. Today he had most certainly been ill-at-ease while attempting to serve the Pharaoh with my mother looking on, but on calmer occasions he would appear, to those who did not know him well, as a distinguished nobleman. The white of his linen was never soiled, and the charcoal with which he painted his eyes rarely smudged. His jewelry did not miss a stone. Since gems and beads were always falling out as their fastenings loosened, not even my mother could present so impeccable an appearance as my father.

In Court, his manner, which is to say, his fine collection of manners, served him well. Because I heard much talk of it in my family, I knew that it was necessary for the Pharaoh to have a man nearby who could make clear, by no more than the change of expression on his face, whether the matter directed to His attention had been proposed in suitable language. What a look of exasperation would come upon my father’s face if the poor official speaking from the patio below had a hoarseness of throat, a stammer, or an inability to keep from repeating his facts. So it was not difficult to understand that my father was of good service to Ptah-nem-hotep. Certainly my father’s expressions kept me most aware of the Pharaoh’s immaculate sensitivity—how could that not be so when my father’s face showed pain at every improper sound and thereby caused me to feel how delicate were the Pharaoh’s ears. Any sudden interruption of mood made Him wince within as at the wanton collapse of the walls of a fine building. Now I knew why He had kept listening to Khem-Usha although He detested what was being said. Khem-Usha’s solemn voice might be as oppressive to the mind of the Pharaoh as the slow insertion of clay in His nostrils, but Khem-Usha never altered his tones, so no matter what other pains he might inflict, his voice would not irritate the Pharaoh’s ear.

The man speaking at this moment, however, was another matter. I could see by the encouragement in my father’s eyes that Ptah-nem-hotep was not without sympathy for the fellow or his office. That the Pharaoh was also confident of His ability to offer good advice in this case could be told by the light but haughty touch of my father’s finger to the side of his nose. His skill was to detect each change in the Pharaoh’s attitude, and reflect that back to the Court. So he was as quick to each whim of Ptah-nem-hotep as I to the readiness of my mother to let me come into her thoughts—I could see by the look of strain across my father’s brow that the official below, while personally inoffensive, even, in modest measure, estimable to Ptah-nem-hotep, had a voice, all the same, to bother His ears.

On the other hand, my father’s face was full of patience which told me much about the Pharaoh. The man now speaking had generations of quarrymen in his voice, all with the same powerful back and legs. It was a throat to declare that the man who spoke was sober and knew what he knew. So his speech in the main was agreeable and tasted of bread and soup and the strength of family flesh. Of course, it also had the sound of stones pounding on other stones. His brain, as a result, was sluggish—thoughts did not come to him quickly. His tongue, like a crushed and crippled leg, never knew when it would stumble; his mind, forever short of breath, would sometimes heave and fail to move. To the Pharaoh’s ear these lapses were as disturbing as the clatter of a stick smashing a jar.

Part of the difficulty was that the quarryman did not know how to read. So he had memorized the names of the men on the labor gang, the number of their injuries, their wages, the accounts for food—he was correct, but he was slow. Besides, this recital was hardly necessary. A scribe stood beside him with a roll of papyrus, and nodded his head in confirmation at each number recited by the manager of the quarries.

I wondered why the scribe did not read from the papyrus himself, but it was obvious, by the attention Ptah-nem-hotep was giving to the quarry official, that the bearing of the man and his ability to remember accounts could tell much about his honesty.

My mother’s mind, when I tried to enter it again, was closed to me, or should I say closed to all I would wish to ask. With her skill—was it equal to mine?—of knowing what was in
my
thoughts, she had chosen to give
all
her attention to that poor quarry official. So, by placing myself in her mind, I was given over to nothing better than an admirable introduction to the difficulties of mining rock. She took the numbers offered by this chief workingman and tried to see what his men were doing. Yet, by the time it passed from her head to mine, my toes were wriggling. Nonetheless, by such a roundabout method of instruction, I came to understand why the Pharaoh listened so carefully, and by a worthy and most serious effort I passed beyond my boredom and came to recognize that this crude official, Rut-sekh, was respected, even as his father and grandfather before him. They had all been Overseers at the great quarries to the east of Memphi where, shortly after the Ascension of Ramses IX to the Throne, a road was begun across the desert to a great sea called Red, the Red Sea. Since we were now in the Seventh Year of the Reign, I decided that the road was as old as I was, at least if you counted the months I had lived within my mother. So this increased my interest. I now began to comprehend that the problems on this road were curious. Ptah-nem-hotep wanted to keep it a royal road, that is, wide enough for two royal carts to pass in opposite directions, which meant a breadth of eight horses. While such a width would be nothing grand in Memphi where the Avenue of Ramses II offered a breadth of twenty horses from the marketplace to the Temple of Ptah, still, the Road of Ramses IX would find difficulty as it went through the mountains. Given the steep slopes, great rocks that could have been used for monuments tumbled into the ravines below. In one place, said Rock-Cutter, they had lost a week trying to raise a large block high enough to insert a sledge beneath. Rock-Cutter confessed that the sledge, once inserted, had collapsed from the weight, and tilted the rock toward the ravine. After much consideration, they had to push it over. No sound, he confessed, was so filled with the thunder of the Gods as the echoes of that stone falling.

“It was a great loss, my Pharaoh,” stated Rut-sekh, “yet I did not know another way. One hundred eighteen men had been employed in just that place for seven days and could not proceed farther without removing the stone. During this delay, there was an expenditure of ten bags of grain, two large amphorae of oil, three amphorae of honey, twenty-two small bags of onions, five hundred forty-one loaves of bread, four amphorae of the wine of Buto …” His forehead creased with each figure recited, as if each item had been sniffed for rot, hefted for weight, and tasted for value. My father nodded gravely to indicate that Ptah-nem-hotep respected the honesty of Rock-Cutter at confessing to such mistakes.

“It is to your honor,” the Pharaoh now said, “that you present the unfinished aspects of your task as quickly as the well-faced. The virtue of your character is as fresh to Me as the virtuous odor of the pine trees in My innermost courtyard.”

“He will,” went a thought from my mother’s mind to me, clear as if she had said it aloud, “He will now certainly begin to brag about His imported pine trees.”

“In the first year of My Reign,” said Ptah-nem-hotep, “I had twenty-one young pines from the mountains of Syria brought across the sea to be planted in My innermost courtyard. There, fourteen now stand, still alive, although it was said that all would perish in a season. They are trees of the mountain and cold air, but they have a spirit of honest virtue, like your own, Rut-sekh, that speaks of clear mornings and hard work—yes, I will let you smell the fragrance of their virtue when the road is done.”

“I am honored,” said Rock-Cutter, looking at his feet. He seemed more than a little confused at the interruption of his recital. For the facts he had memorized must have been coming forward in his brain like oxen, one by one, each carrying a measured load, and whipped just often enough to keep from stopping.

“Yes,” said Ptah-nem-hotep, “it is honest to confess one’s errors. With other officials”—He swept the courtyard with His look—“I must find My way. To listen to their presentation, nothing is wrong, nothing will ever be wrong. Yet all is wrong. Yes,” said Ptah-nem-hotep.

Rock-Cutter bowed again.

“Nonetheless,” said our Pharaoh, “progress on the road is slow, injuries are numerous, and the losses in the labor force are discouraging.”

“Yes, my Lord. Many of my men have gone blind.”

“Is it from dust, or from splinters of stone?”

“It is the second, Great Two-House.”

“When you gave your last report to Me in the month of Pharmuti, I recall that we talked about the scraping of the rocks. I asked you then to employ cedar chips to make the coals.”

“I obeyed You, My Lord.”

I do not know if I would have been able to understand what they now said, but by way of my mother’s thoughts, I was able to see a thick bed of stone on which were laid hot coals in a narrow channel. When the bed had taken the heat of the coals, water was poured on. I listened to the hiss of steam, and saw the wet ash wiped away. A myriad of cracks were left in the groove, numerous as the cracks in clay when the flood is gone and the sun bakes the earth. I saw men chipping at these cracks with copper chisels and wooden mallets. After they were done, the channel, wide as a man’s hand, had been deepened by the thickness of a finger. That was half a morning’s work for two men. They would do it until the channel was deep enough to split the rock, sometimes, cubits deep.

I had already been taught to make measurements by these cubits, and was told the size had first been taken from the tip of Ramses II’s middle finger to His elbow. I went around telling everyone that I measured more than two cubits tall—two cubits, one hand, two fingers—large for a child my age, was it not? and kept doing it until my mother told me to cease. Two cubits was nothing, she let me know, next to a man of four cubits. She had even seen a giant of five cubits. I ceased then to be concerned with this measure. But such talk now between the Pharaoh and Rock-Cutter refreshed my mother’s memory of a cubit and she began to think about a great Pharaoh, tall and beautiful and vastly more like a God than Ptah-nem-hotep. I knew this could be no other than Ramses II but my mother saw Him as if He were alive before us, His arm extended and prayers said by the priests as the measurement was taken by the Royal String of the Royal Scribe. This was my mother’s offering to me of how the cubit had first been measured, but she was so full of pleasure, the late afternoon sun on the balcony now shining on her thighs, that she took her own measure of the cubit, and held the Royal String herself. Lo, the mighty phallus of Ramses II was equal to half the length, but since she saw Him, equal to Himself, before a mirror, the two phalluses, nose to nose, were the perfect royal measure if you took it from the root of one set of testicles over completely to the other. Then my mother left off thinking of cubits. She had just recognized that my mind was again in hers. I, in my turn, realized why she could never do arithmetic. She was not certain whether to be pleased at our closeness, or appalled at the rush of my education, but she smiled at me, and most tenderly (a naughty smile) and opening her mind to me again as easily as she might open her arms, so I rushed into the trap of her amusement for she now saw it as her motherly duty to instruct me in sad thoughts. I was therefore now obliged to contemplate all the poor stone-cutters who were going blind from the dust that flew out of pounding one stone upon another while dressing the face of an extracted rock. I saw some with red-rimmed eyes and others with blood from open cuts above their brows. One danced in pain, a stone splinter sticking to his eyeball, an atrocious set of sights until I realized my mother had put them together for me, and I was seeing, all at once, the quarry injuries of a full year.

Now, my mother, as if to make amends for her scandalous thoughts about the length of the cubit of Ramses II, began to listen again to Ptah-nem-hotep. He wished to know the time it took to make a channel in stone when cedar chips were used for the coals, as compared to how long it required when chips from date-palm, sycamore, tamarisk or acacia were employed. So he questioned Rut-sekh closely.

Rut-sekh assured our Pharaoh that he had put three of his best men on the cut while using the cedar chips. It still had taken fourteen days for a cut two cubits long and four deep to be accomplished by this gang. That had only been one day less than a cut of equal size done with sycamore chips whose coals had already been found superior to acacia, date-palm or tamarisk.

“If your fastest gang,” said Ptah-nem-hotep, “is only one day faster than your average gang, the fires of cedar can hardly be more effective than the fires of sycamore.”

Rut-sekh touched his forehead to the ground.

“Yet your first reports,” said Ptah-nem-hotep, “told of cracks made by coals of cedar that were half a finger deeper than the hottest embers of sycamore.”

“That is still true, Great Two-House.”

“Then why is the job not done faster?”

As if the intimate discussion of these matters allowed Rut-sekh to forget to whom he spoke, he shrugged. It was the gesture of one workingman speaking to another, and only a momentary flaw in the immense respect he showed the Pharaoh, but, by the measure of disgust on my father’s face, Rock-Cutter might as well have allowed an indiscreet sound to come popping out of his buttocks.