The Egyptian (29 page)

When I had cured him he said, “What shall I give you, Sinuhe, for your great skill?”

I replied, “I do not want your gold. Give me the knife in your girdle, and the obligation will be mine; I shall also have a lasting gift by which to remember you.”

But be objected, saying, “The knife is a common one; no wolves run along its edge, nor is there silver inlay in the handle.”

But he said this because the knife was of Hittite metal, of which it was forbidden to give or sell any to strangers. I had been unable to buy such a weapon, not liking to insist for fear of arousing suspicion. In Mitanni such knives were to be seen only among the most distinguished persons, and their price was ten times their weight in gold—and even then their possessors would not sell them because there were but few of them in the known world. But for a Hittite such a knife had no great value since he was forbidden to sell it to a foreigner.

The harbor master knew that I was soon to leave the country, and reflecting that he could find better use for his gold than to give it away to a doctor, he did in the end present me with the knife. It was so sharp that it shaved hair more easily than the finest flint blade and could make nicks in copper without damaging its own edge. I was delighted with it and resolved to silver-wash the blade and fit to it a handle of gold as did the Mitannians when they had acquired such a knife. The harbor master bore no grudge but was my friend because I had wrought him a lasting cure.

In this town there was a field in which wild bulls were kept as was often the case at seaports, and the youth of the place were Wont to display their litheness and valor in encounters with these beasts, hurling darts into their shoulders and leaping over them. Minea was overjoyed to see them and desired to test her skill. In this way I first saw her dance among wild bulls; it was like nothing I had ever seen before, and my heart froze as I watched. For a wild bull is the most terrible of all savage beasts—worse even than an elephant, which is gentle when not irritated—and its horns are long and sharp as brad awls; with one stroke it will slit a man’s body or toss him high in the air and trample him underfoot.

But Minea danced before them wearing only a flimsy garment, and she stepped lightly aside when they lowered their heads and charged at her with dreadful bellowings. Her face was flushed, and with growing excitement she threw off her silver hair net so that her hair floated in the wind. Her dance was so rapid that the eye could not follow all her movements as she leaped up between the horns of an attacking beast, held fast to them and then, thrusting with her feet against its forehead, threw herself upward in a somersault, to land on its back. I gazed spellbound at her performance; I believe her awareness of this urged her on to do things I could never have believed a human being could accomplish. So I looked on with my body streaming with sweat, and I could not sit still, although those who sat behind me on the benches swore at me and tugged at my shoulder cloth.

On her return from the field she was loudly applauded. Garlands were set upon her head and about her neck, and the other young people presented her with a bowl on which bulls were painted in red and black. All exclaimed, “We have seen nothing like it!” and the sea captains who had been to Crete said, as they blew wine fumes through their nostrils, “Even in Crete there is hardly such another to be seen.”

But she came to me and leaned against me, and her thin dress was wet with sweat. She leaned against me, and every muscle in her strong, slender body was quivering with weariness and pride. I said to her, “I have never seen anyone like you.” My heart was weighed down with grief, for now that I had seen her dance before the bulls, I knew that they had come between us like some evil sorcery.

Soon after this a ship from Crete put into the harbor; she was neither too small nor too large, and the captain’s eyes were not evil. He spoke Minea’s own language; and she said to me, “This ship will take me safely home to my god, so now you will leave me gladly, because I have caused you much vexation and loss.”

“You know very well, Minea, that I am coming to Crete with you.”

She looked at me with eyes like the sea in moonlight; she had colored her lips, and her eyebrows were thin black lines.

“I do not know why you would come with me, Sinuhe, since the ship will take me straight home in safety, and no further evil can befall me.”

“You know as well as I do, Minea.”

She laid her long, strong fingers in mine and sighed.

“We have gone through much together, Sinuhe, and I have seen so many people that my mother country has grown dim in my memory like some fair dream, and I do not yearn after my god as I did formerly. Therefore, I have put off this voyage with empty excuses as you well know—but when I danced once more before the bulls, I knew that I must die if you were to possess me.”

“Yes, yes, I know. We have been all through this before; it is a tedious, pointless, and oft-repeated tale. I do not mean to ravish you, for the matter is not worth the plaguing of your god. Any slave girl can give me what you refuse—there is no difference, as Kaptah says.”

Then her eyes glistened green as a wild cat’s eyes in the dark; she drove her nails into my hand and hissed, “Make haste then and find your slave girl, for the sight of you revolts me. Run away now to the grimy girls in the harbor whom you so desire, but know that thereafter I shall not recognize you and will perhaps even shed your blood with your own knife. What I can forgo you also can forgo.”

I smiled at her.

“No god has forbidden me this thing!”

“I forbid it—and dare you to come to me afterward!”

“Be easy, Minea, for really I am weary of the matter. There is nothing more monotonous than taking pleasure with a woman, and having tried it, I feel no desire to repeat the experience.”

But she flared up again and said, “Your talk wounds the woman in me, and I fancy you would not find—everyone—so monotonous.”

I found I could say nothing to please her, though I did my best. That night she did not lie beside me as usual but took her mat into another room and covered her head to sleep.

I called to her, “Minea! Why don’t you warm me? You are younger than I am; the nights are cold, and I shiver.”

“That is not true, for my body burns as if I were in a fever, and I cannot breathe in this stifling heat. I would rather sleep alone—but if you are cold, have a brazier brought to your room, or take a cat to lie beside you, and trouble me no more.”

I went and felt her, and her body was hot and shivery under the blanket. I said, “You are ill, perhaps. Let me tend you.”

She kicked and pushed me away, saying angrily, “Be off now! I do not doubt that my god will heal this sickness.”

But after a little while she said, “Give me something, Sinuhe, or my heart will break.”

I gave her a soothing medicine, and at last she slept; but I watched until the harbor dogs began barking in the wan light of dawn.

Then came the day of departure, and I said to Kaptah, “Pack up our belongings, for we are going aboard a ship bound for Keftiu’s island, which is also Minea’s.”

“I guessed this, but I did not rend my clothes, for then I should have had to mend them—and it is not worth strewing ashes in my hair for such a false dealer as you! Didn’t you swear when we left Mitanni that we need not put to sea? Nevertheless, I have resigned myself and will say nothing; I will not even weep lest I lose the sight of my one remaining eye—so bitterly have I already wept on your account in the countries to which your folly has led us. I merely say at once, to avoid subsequent mistakes, that this is my last voyage—my stomach tells me so. But I shall not trouble even to reproach you, for the bare sight of you and the physician’s smell of you are revolting to me. I have put our things together and am ready to depart, for without the scarab you cannot venture forth in a ship, and without the scarab I cannot hope to travel the land route to Smyrna and preserve my life. Therefore, I go with the scarab and either die on board or drown in the sea with you.”

I marveled at Kaptah’s reasonable attitude—until I learned that he had inquired among the seafarers in the harbor concerning remedies for seasickness and had bought magic talismans from them. Before wc sailed, he tied these objects about his neck, drew his girdle tight, and drank an intoxicating herbal mixture so that when he stepped aboard his eye was staring like that of a boiled fish. He begged in a thick voice for fat pork, which the sailors had assured him was the best preventive of seasickness. He lay down on his bunk and fell asleep with a pig’s shoulder blade in one hand and the scarab gripped in the other. The harbor master took our clay tablet and bade us farewell; then the oarsmen unshipped their oars and rowed us out of the bay.

Thus began the voyage to Crete. The captain made sacrifice in his cabin to the sea god and others, then gave the command to hoist sail; the vessel heeled over and began to cleave the water while my stomach rose to my throat—for ahead there was no shore line. Ahead was but the endless, rolling sea.

BEFORE us rolled the boundless waters, but I feared nothing for Minea was with me, Minea who breathed the sea air and was herself again, with moonlight in her eyes. She stood in the bows by the figurehead, leaning forward and drinking in the air as if with her own strength she would draw us more speedily along our course. The sky over us was blue, and the sun shone; the wind was not too boisterous but fresh and steady and blowing from the right quarter—or so the captain said. Having become accustomed to the motion of the vessel, I suffered no sickness, though fear of the unknown assailed my heart when on the second day out the last of the white-winged, circling sea birds forsook the ship. Instead, the dolphin team of the sea god attended us, their smooth backs flashing as they tumbled in the water. Minea shouted aloud and hailed them in her own tongue, for they brought her greetings from her god.

Nor were we alone on the waters; we sighted a Cretan warship whose hull was hung with copper shields and who dipped her pennant when she saw that ours was not a pirate vessel. Kaptah rose from his bunk when he found himself able to stand and talked to the sailors, boasting of his journeys in many lands. He told of his voyage from Egypt to Smyrna, of a storm that ripped the sail from the mast, and of how he and the captain were the only ones aboard who could eat, while the rest lay about the deck groaning and puking into the wind. He told also of most fearful sea monsters that haunted the Nile delta and would engulf any fishing boat which ventured too far out to sea. The sailors gave him as good again and described certain pillars at the farthest ends of the ocean, which supported the heavens, and of fishtailed maidens who lay in wait for seafarers and put spells on them to seduce them. They told tales of sea monsters that made the hair rise on Kaptah’s head and sent him running to me with a gray face, to cling to my shoulder cloth.

Minea grew daily more radiant. Her hair floated in the wind, her eyes were like moonlight on the waters, and she was so slender and beautiful to see that my heart melted within me as I beheld her and remembered how soon she would be gone. To return to Smyrna or to Egypt without her seemed an empty thing. Life was like ashes in my mouth at the thought of the time when she would not put her hands in mine or press against my side and when I should behold her no longer.

The captain and his men held her in deep veneration when they heard that she danced before bulls and that the lot had fallen to her to enter the god’s house at the full moon, although she had hitherto been prevented by shipwreck. When I tried to ask them about their god, they made no answer; some said, “We do not know” and others, “We do not understand your tongue, stranger.” I knew only that the Cretan god ruled the sea and that the islands in the sea sent their young men and their maidens to dance before his horned beasts.

The day came when Crete rose like a blue cloud from the ocean and the seamen uttered cries of joy, while the captain made sacrifice to the god of the sea who had sent us fair weather and a following wind. The mountains of Crete and its steep, olive-clad shores rose before my eyes, and I saw a strange land of which I knew nothing, though I was to leave my heart buried there. But Minea saw in it her homeland and wept with joy at the bare hills and the tender green of the earth within the sea’s embrace. Then the sail was lowered; the oarsmen unshipped their oars and rowed the ship alongside the quay, past other craft from every land—both warships and merchantmen—which lay at anchor in the roads. There must have been a thousand vessels, and Kaptah surveying them said he could not have believed there were so many in the world. Here were neither towers nor walls nor any fortifications, and the city adjoined the port; so assured was Crete’s sovereignty of the seas—so powerful its god.

I shall now speak of Crete and of what I have seen there, but of what I think of the country and its god I shall say nothing; I shall seal my heart and let my eyes report. Nowhere in the world, then, have I beheld anything so strange and fair as Crete, though I have journeyed in all known lands. As glistening spume is blown ashore, as bubbles glow in all five colors of the rainbow, as mussel shells are bright with mother of pearl, so was Crete lucent to my eyes. Nowhere are human pleasures so immediate, so capricious, as here. No one acts but by the impulse of the moment, and the minds of the people veer from hour to hour. For this reason it is difficult to extract promises from them or make agreements. They are fair of speech and of great charm, because they delight in the music of words; death is not acknowledged among them, nor do I believe they have named it. It is concealed, and when a man dies, he is removed in secret that others be not oppressed. I believe they burn the bodies of their dead, though of this I cannot be sure, for throughout my stay I saw not one dead person nor any graves save those of former kings. These had been built of huge :tcnes in some bygone age, and today people go far out of their way to avoid them as if by turning their thoughts away from death they might escape it.