Текст книги "The Seven Wonders: A Novel of the Ancient World (Novels of Ancient Rome)"

Автор книги: Steven Saylor

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“Explain it all to me again,” said Darius. He seemed unable to grasp that the lemur that had haunted the old temple had never been a lemur at all, so strong was his superstitious dread of the place.

I lubricated my throat with another swallow of beer, then proceeded. “At some point—we don’t know exactly how or when, but not too long ago—the innkeeper or his wife went digging around the ruined temple grounds. Literally digging, I mean. And what should they discover but a previously unknown cache of ancient glazed bricks, undoubtedly from the long-demolished wall of Nebuchadnezzar that used to run along the riverfront, where a newer, plainer wall now stands. They knew at once that those bricks must be worth a fortune. But their discovery was located in an old temple precinct; the land itself is common property and not for sale, and any artifacts or treasure found there would almost certainly belong to the priesthood of Ishtar.

“The innkeeper clearly had no right to the bricks, but he intended to get his hands on them nonetheless. The best way to do that, he decided, was to purchase the derelict property adjacent to the temple, from which he and his wife could gain access to the courtyard and the buried bricks without being observed. But negotiating to buy that property was taking time, and the innkeeper was fearful that someone else might go nosing about and find those buried bricks. The old tales about the place being haunted gave him a perfect way to frighten others away.

“The innkeeper’s wife played the lemur. As we now know, she was part of an Egyptian mime troupe in her younger days. She’s an intimidating woman to start with; with the right makeup, and calling on her skills as an actress, she could be truly terrifying, as I experienced for myself. But the lemur didn’t frighten everyone away; at least one man must have dared to enter the courtyard a few nights ago, perhaps out of simple curiosity, and he was the first to die.”

“Was it the innkeeper’s wife who broke the first victim’s neck?” asked Antipater.

“She’s probably strong enough, and we’ve seen what she’s capable of doing when roused, but her husband confessed to the killing. Those brawny arms of his are strong enough to break any man’s neck.”

“And Mushezib? What was the astrologer doing in the courtyard in the middle of the night?” said Darius.

“I think it wasn’t until after we all went to bed that night that Mushezib’s thoughts led him to the same conclusion I reached, a day later. He had no belief in a lemur; what, then, had I actually seen? Perhaps someone pretending to be a lemur—but why? In the middle of the night, Mushezib broke the lock on the gate, slipped inside, and started snooping around. He even did a bit of digging, and found this, which he slipped under his hat.” I held up the little tile. “If I’d seen his hands, and the dirt that must have been on his fingers, I might have realized the truth sooner, but his arms were folded beneath him, and the body was carried off by the priests before I could take a closer look.”

“You were looking mostly at the priestess of Ishtar, I think,” said Darius.

I cleared my throat. “Anyway, the innkeeper must have come upon Mushezib, there in the courtyard. There was a struggle—I heard Mushezib scream, but I thought I was dreaming—and the innkeeper broke his neck. As he had done with his previous victim, he left the body on the temple steps as a warning, and there we found poor Mushezib the next day.

“It wasn’t until we went to the ziggurat, and I was unable to find any tiles that matched the one in Mushezib’s hat, that I began to think he must have found that tile elsewhere. It occurred to me that he might have found it on the old temple grounds—and the rest of the tale unfolded in my mind. Early this morning I stole into the courtyard and found the spot where the bricks are buried. I also discovered a concealed and crudely made opening in the wall of the vacant building next to the temple.

“I went at once to the priestess of Ishtar to tell her of my suspicions. She gathered some armed men and followed me back to the inn. Along with the tiles the innkeeper had already dug up, the priestess’s men also found a secret passage the innkeeper had made between his private quarters and the vacant building next door, which, as I had discovered, had its own concealed access to the temple courtyard, also made by the innkeeper. That was how he and his wife managed to enter the courtyard even when the gate was locked. By passing through the vacant building, the so-called lemur could appear and disappear—and the killer was able to surprise his victims and then vanish, never stepping into the street.”

“What will become of that murderous innkeeper and his monster of a wife?” asked Antipater.

“The priestess says they must pay for their crimes with their lives.”

“And what will become of all those lovely bricks?” asked Darius, his eyes twinkling at the thought of so much loot.

“The priesthood of Ishtar has claimed them. I imagine they’re digging them up even now,” I said.

“Too bad you didn’t get to claim those bricks.” Darius sighed. “You know, I hate to speak of such a thing, but not since the day we met have I been given even a single coin for the many excellent favors I have rendered to my new friends.”

I laughed. “Never fear, Darius, you will be paid for your services!” I patted the heavy coin purse at my waist. That afternoon, after the arrest of the innkeeper and his wife, I had been called back to the sacred precinct of Ishtar for a private interview with the priestess. She warmly praised my perspicacity, and insisted that I accept a very generous reward.

Darius looked at the money bag, then raised an eyebrow. “Was that the only reward she gave you, young Roman?”

Antipater also looked at me intently.

My face turned hot. Was I blushing? “As a matter of fact, it was not,” I said, but of whatever else took place between the priestess and me that afternoon, I chose to say no more.

VIII

THE RETURN OF THE MUMMY

(The Great Pyramid of Egypt)

From Babylon, Antipater and I journeyed overland to Egypt, threading our way through rugged mountain passes and traversing sandy deserts. In my imagination I had assumed this corner of the world to be a trackless, unpopulated wilderness, but in truth it was quite the opposite. Our route, so Antipater informed me, had been laid out hundreds if not thousands of years ago by traders carrying goods between Egypt and Persia, some venturing as far as fabled India and Serica. We encountered many caravans going in both directions, transporting cargoes of ivory, incense, spices, precious stones, fabrics, and other commodities.

The accommodations along the way were well organized. At each stop we hired a new beast to carry us to the next—mostly mules and horses, but occasionally I was forced to ride a spiteful creature called a camel. At day’s end, there was always an inn waiting for us.

At last, at the ancient port of Gaza, we reached the sea, and reentered that part of the world where one may expect to hear Greek spoken, and even a bit of Latin. It was in Gaza that I first heard the alarming news of what was happening in Rome.

While Antipater and I had been off in Babylon, dreadful omens had been witnessed all over Italy. Mountains crashed together like Titans wrestling, sending shock waves that ruptured roads and caused buildings to collapse. The earth itself cracked open and spat flames into the sky. Domesticated animals turned feral; dogs behaved like wolves and even sheep turned vicious and attacked their owners. After so many awful omens, no one was surprised when war at last broke out between Rome and the subordinate cities of her restive Italian confederation. Now the entire peninsula was in tumult. Roman magistrates across Italy had been assassinated. In retaliation, and to quell the revolt, Rome’s armies had besieged and sacked rebellious cities and put entire regions to the torch.

Worried and homesick, I dispatched a letter to my father back in Rome, asking him to reassure me that he was well and to send his reply to a professional receiver of letters in Alexandria, the city that was to be our destination after we sailed up the Nile to see the Great Pyramid.

Antipater seemed to be far less agitated than I was by the news from Italy. Indeed, whenever a shopkeeper or a fellow traveler imparted the latest gossip about the situation in Rome, I thought I saw a fleeting smile on Antipater’s lips. He was a Greek, after all, proud of his heritage and, as I had learned in the course of our journey, suspicious and even disdainful of Roman power. Having now seen with my own eyes so many glorious achievements of Greek civilization, I understood the nostalgia felt by many Greeks for the days before Rome intruded on their world.

From Gaza, we journeyed due east along a flat, featureless stretch of sandy coast, until we came to that region of Egypt called the Delta, where the desert abruptly gives way to a land of lush greenery watered by the mouth of the Nile.

Before the Nile reaches the sea, it spreads out in many channels, like the fingers of a wide-open hand. On maps, this vast, watery region forms a triangular shape not unlike the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet, inverted: Δ. Thus it acquired its name: the Delta.

In the coastal town of Pelusium we booked passage on a boat to take us up the Nile and all the way to Memphis, which lies a few miles south of the apex of the Delta, and from which we would make an excursion to see the fabled pyramids.

The heat was stifling as we sailed upriver on the crowded boat, passing quaint villages and ancient temples. The rank smell of Delta mud filled my nostrils. I spotted crocodiles in the shallows, heard the call of the ibis and the bellow of hippopotami, and felt very far from my father and the war that was raging in Italy.

Long before Romulus founded Rome, even before the heroes of Homer sacked Troy, the civilization of Egypt was already ancient. Some of the monuments we passed on the riverbank were unimaginably old, and they looked it. Weathered granite slabs depicted animal-headed gods in stiff poses alongside images of the Egyptian kings of old, called pharaohs, who wore bizarre headdresses and wielded crooks and flails.

While I gazed at Egypt passing by, Antipater kept his head down and read about it. During our stay with his cousin Bitto in Halicarnassus, Antipater had arranged to have several scrolls of The Historiesof Herodotus copied from her library, including the chapters that described Egypt and its people.

Along a quiet stretch of the river, we passed a little boy who stood atop the steep bank. I smiled and waved to him. The boy waved back, then hitched up his long, loose garments and relieved himself in the water below. The stream glittered under the bright sunlight and the boy made a game of aiming it this way and that. He grinned and looked quite proud of himself.

Antipater, poring over a scroll, never looked up.

“According to Herodotus,” he said, “no one has yet determined the source of the Nile. Those who travel as far as possible upriver, a journey of many months, eventually arrive in a region of vast swamps and impassable forests where the people are all sorcerers; they are also extremely short and as black as ebony, and speak a language incomprehensible to outsiders. Farther than that, no traveler has ever ventured and come back alive. Nor, according to Herodotus, can anyone adequately explain why the Nile, unlike all other rivers, is at it lowest in the spring, then floods at the time of the summer solstice.”

“The solstice is still a few days away,” I said. “I suppose that means we’re seeing the Nile at its lowest. Will it actually rise high enough to flood the banks on either side?”

Antipater looked up, shading his eyes from the bright sunlight. “Hopefully, Gordianus, we shall witness this famous phenomenon for ourselves. The river is said to rise so dramatically that the banks are flooded for hundreds of miles, irrigating a vast amount of cultivated land and creating the most fertile region on earth. The inundation should begin any day now.”

He returned his attention to the scroll in his lap. “Herodotus goes on to say that, just as the Nile is different from all other rivers, so the people who live along its banks follow customs contrary to other people. The women go to market and carry on trade, while the men stay at home and weave. There are no priestesses, only priests, and while holy men in other lands grow beards and wear their hair long, in Egypt they shave their heads—and every other part of their bodies, as well. The Egyptians write from right to left, not left to right. They knead dough with their feet and clay with their hands. They invented the peculiar practice called circumcision. And listen to this: the women make water standing up, while the men do so crouching down!”

I frowned. “I have to wonder if that’s completely accurate. If you’d bothered to look up, you’d have seen that little boy—”

“I assure you, Gordianus, no historian was ever more scrupulous than Herodotus. He traveled extensively in Egypt, saw everything, and consulted all the best authorities.”

“Yes, but didn’t Herodotus write that book over three hundred years ago? The information might be a bit out of date.”

“My dear boy, there’s a reason Herodotus remains our best authority on all matters pertaining to Egypt. No other writer can match his insight and attention to detail. Now, where was I? Ah, yes—on the subject of worship, Herodotus tells us that the Egyptians are the most religious of all people. They can trace their practices back many thousands of years. Since the Egyptians were the first race of mortals, they built the first temples. It was from Egypt that we Greeks received our first knowledge of the gods, though we know them by other names. Thus the Egyptian god Ammon is our Zeus, their Osiris is our Dionysus, Anubis is the same as Hermes, and so on.”

I frowned. “Isn’t Anubis the one who has the head of dog? Whereas Hermes—or Mercury, as we Romans call him—is a handsome youth; at least that’s how the statues in Greek and Roman temples always show him. How can Anubis and Hermes be the same god?”

“You touch upon a problem that has puzzled even the wisest philosophers. What are we to make of the fact that the Egyptians worship animals, and give animal characteristics to certain gods in their statues and pictures? Some believe their use of such imagery is purely symbolic. Thus, Anubis doesn’t really have a dog’s head, but is only shown that way because he acts as the loyal guardian of the other gods—their watchdog, so to speak.”

“I shouldn’t think any god would care to have himself depicted as a dog, no matter what the reasoning.”

“Ah, but that’s because you think like a Roman, Gordianus. You look for plain facts and practical solutions. And I think like a Greek; I delight in beauty and paradox. But the Egyptians have their own way of thinking, which often seems quite strange to us, even fantastical. Perhaps it’s because they care so little for this world, and so much for the next. They are obsessed with death. Their religion prescribes intricate rituals to safely guide their spirit, or ka,to the Land of the Dead. To achieve this, they must keep their mortal bodies intact. Whereas we cremate our dead, the Egyptians go to great lengths to preserve the corpses of their loved ones and to make them appear as lifelike as possible. The process is called mummification. Those who can afford to do so keep the mummies of their dead relatives in special rooms where they go to visit them, offer them food, and even dine with them, as if they were still alive.”

“You must be joking!” I said.

“Romans may wish to rule this world, Gordianus, but Egyptians are far more concerned with the Land of the Dead. We must keep that in mind when at last we see the largest tomb ever built, the Great Pyramid.”

The Great Pyramid! With anticipation we drew near the final destination of our journey. I had seen all six of the other Wonders now, and would be able to judge for myself whether the Great Pyramid was truly the most marvelous of them all, as many asserted. Could it possibly surpass the soaring height of the Mausoleum, or the splendor of the Temple of Artemis, or the ambition of the fallen Colossus? Everyone on earth had heard of the pyramids, even barbarians in the farthest reaches of Gaul and Scythia. Now I was about to see them.

*   *   *

The branch of the river on which we were traveling joined with others, growing wider and wider, until all the many branches converged into their common source, the great Nile itself. Suddenly—ahead of us and to the right, shimmering in the distance—I caught my first glimpse of the Great Pyramid. Beside me, Antipater gasped. He, too, was seeing the monument for the first time.

“Am I seeing double?” I whispered, for it seemed to me that I could see not one but two enormous pyramids.

“I think not,” said Antipater. “According to Herodotus, there are three major pyramids on the plateau west of the river. One of them is relatively small, but the other is very nearly as large as the Great Pyramid.”

“They must be enormous!” I said.

Some of the passengers on the boat joined us in gaping at the monuments, but others gave them only a glance. The boatmen, for whom the pyramids were an everyday sight, paid them no attention, even as they loomed ever larger to our right.

Then we passed the plateau and sailed on, and the pyramids receded behind us. A little later we arrived at the ancient capital of Egypt, Memphis.

The cities of Greece had been foreign to me, but also familiar, for Romans and Greeks worship the same gods and construct the same types of buildings. Babylon had been more exotic, but it was a city in decline, long past its glory. But Memphis—ah, Memphis! This city was truly like another world.

At first, nothing seemed familiar and I could hardly take in the strangeness of it all—the way the people dressed (I had no names for such garments), the things they ate (I recognized nothing, but the aromas were enticing), the tunes played in the public squares (which sounded like noise to me), the statues of the gods (animal heads, bizarre postures), the colorful picture-writing on the temple walls (beautiful but indecipherable). To be sure, Greek was spoken—by some. The common people spoke another, older language, the likes of which I had never heard before.

We found accommodations at an inn not far from the river, and were given a room on the upper floor. Antipater complained about the steep steps, but when I opened the shutters and raised my eyes above the nearby rooftops, I saw the Great Pyramid looming in the distance

Antipater joined me in gazing at the sight. “Wonderful!” he whispered.

“Shall we set out to see it at once?” I said eagerly.

“No, no!” said Antipater. “The day is far too hot, and the hour too late, and I need my rest.”

“Rest? All you did today was lie in the boat and read Herodotus!”

“How lucky you are to be nineteen, Gordianus. Someday you’ll understand how an old man can grow tired simply by drawing a day’s ration of breath. Leave the shutters open, but draw the curtains. It’s time for my nap.”

*   *   *

We did not go to see the pyramids that day, or the next, or even the next. Antipater insisted that we acquaint ourselves with the city of Memphis first. To be sure, it was a place of marvels, decorated with shrines, temples, ceremonial gates, colossal stone statues, and towering obelisks the likes of which I had never seen before, all constructed on an enormous scale. The strange architecture of the city exuded an air of mystery and great antiquity. It was easy to believe that mortals had been living and building in this spot since the beginning of time.

Memphis was no longer the capital of Egypt—the heir of Alexander the Great, Ptolemy, had chosen to move the royal administration to Alexandria—but its monuments were well kept, and the city was bustling and vibrant. I had thought that in Egypt we would arrive at the edge of the world, but Memphis seemed to be its center, the crossroads of all the earth. Among the people I saw every shade of hair color and complexion; I had never known that mortals came in so many hues. The city seemed at once impossibly ancient and incredibly alive.

We dined on tilapia and exotic fruits in the palm grove next to the Temple of Selene (who is also Aphrodite, according to Antipater). We observed the sacred Apis bull dozing in its luxurious enclosure; it seemed quite strange to me that a mere animal should be treated as a god. But the grandest of the temples was that of Serapis, the god most favored by the Ptolemy dynasty. To reach it, we traversed a broad ceremonial walkway lined on both sides by life-sized statues of a creature with the head of a man and the body of a lion. These, Antipater explained, were sphinxes.

“Like the sphinx that guarded the Greek city of Thebes and posed the famous riddle to Oedipus?” I asked. Antipater himself had taught me the story.

“I suppose. But if Oedipus truly met a sphinx, the creature must have come from Egypt. No Greek I know has ever seen a sphinx, but their images are all over Egypt. These statues look as if they’ve been here forever.”

The long walkway was exposed to a strong wind from the west, and drifts of sand, some quite high, had gathered around the bases of the statues. One of the sphinxes was buried up to its chin, so that sand covered the lower portion of its nemesheaddress and its long, narrow beard. I paused to look at the sphinx’s enigmatic face, and recalled the famous riddle: What creature in the morning goes on four legs, at midday on two, and in the evening on three?Had Oedipus given the wrong reply, the sphinx would have strangled him, but he deduced the answer: Man, who first crawls on all fours, then strides on two feet, then walks with a cane.

At every turn we were accosted by men who offered to serve as guides to the local sites. Antipater eventually picked the one who struck him as the least unscrupulous, a fellow named Kemsa, and charged the man with arranging our transportation to the pyramids. Kemsa, who spoke passable Greek, advised us to wait a while longer, for soon a three-day festival to celebrate the summer solstice would claim the attention of all the locals and tourists in the city; during those three days we might be able to visit the pyramids in peace, without hordes of sightseers around us. The guide also insisted that we buy long white robes and linen headdresses, not unlike those worn by the sphinxes, saying that such garments would protect us from the desert heat.

At last, early on the appointed morning, dressed in our desert apparel, we set out to see the pyramids.

Kemsa supplied a camel for each of us—to my dismay, for I had yet to meet a camel that did not dislike me on sight. This beast was no different. Almost at once, he tried to bite me. The guide chastised the camel by striking him soundly on his enormous nose. After that the creature seemed content to turn his long neck, give me a baleful stare, and spit at me from time to time. Despite his sullen nature, the camel was an obedient mount, and we made steady progress.

First we took a road that followed the west bank of the Nile downriver for a few miles, then we took a sharp turn to the left and ascended to a dry, sandy plateau. We hardly needed the guide to show us the way, for at every moment the Great Pyramid was visible, looming ever larger as we drew closer. By the early light of morning it appeared pale pink in color, and as flat as if it were a drawing cut from a piece of papyrus; but as the sun rose, and the heat increased, the pyramid appeared white and began to shimmer. At times it seemed to levitate above the earth, and at other times it quivered so much that I thought it might miraculously disappear before our eyes, but the guide explained that these uncanny visions were merely illusions caused by the waves of heat rising from the sand.

Larger the pyramid loomed, and then larger still. I glanced at Antipater and saw that he was as astonished as I was. It was one thing to be told that the Great Pyramid is the largest object ever made by men, and another to actually see it. My imagination had been inadequate to prepare me for the awesome scale of what I beheld.

The plateau was crisscrossed with ceremonial roadways and dotted with temples, altars, and shrines, but because of the festival in Memphis there was not a person in sight. The solitude was uncanny. A part of me was glad we had waited for this day, to have the pyramids to ourselves. But I also felt slightly unsettled, that we three should be the only specks of humanity on that vast, sandy plain. My sense of perspective was undone; in vain I looked for some way to judge size and distance.

Only once was the Great Pyramid blocked from view, as we passed close by a very large sand dune that seemed out of place amid the surrounding temples. Once we passed the dune, the Great Pyramid reappeared and filled my whole range of vision, not only from side to side but up and down, for the structure was nearly as tall as it was wide. From a distance, the pyramid had appeared to be made from a single block of stone, so smooth was the surface. Closer up, I could see that it was actually faced with many different stones expertly fitted together, and that these stones were of many different colors and textures—pale violet and glossy blue, sea green and apple gold, some as opaque as marble and others as translucent as sunlight captured in a wave. At a distance all these various stones merged together and appeared scintillating white. I had expected the Great Pyramid to be immense, but I had not expected it to be so beautiful and so finely made, as fascinating to behold close up as it was at a distance.

Around the bottom of the pyramid, great drifts of sand had accumulated. We remained on our camels and began slowly to circle the base. The eastern face of the pyramid was dazzling in the full morning sunlight, the southern face ablaze with slanting rays, and the western face entirely in shadow. Looking up, I watched the sun surmount the tip of the pyramid, where it seemed to hover like a ball of flame on its point.

“Who built such a marvel?” I exclaimed. “And how was it done?”

Kemsa opened his mouth to answer, but Antipater was quicker. “According to Herodotus, the pharaoh Kheops employed a hundred thousand men just to build the roadway to transport the stones from Arabia. That labor alone took ten years; another twenty years were needed to build the pyramid itself. First the structure was built up in tiers, like steps, and then the tiers were fitted from the top down with enormous finishing stones lifted into place by a series of ingenious levers, then the whole surface was polished to a bright luster.”

“Is Kheops buried inside?” I asked.

“Herodotus states that Kheops was laid to rest in a chamber deep beneath the pyramid, a sort of subterranean island surrounded by water channeled underground from the Nile.”

As I tried to visualize such a bizarre funeral chamber, Kemsa loudly cleared his throat. “Actually,” he said, “the stones of the pyramids were not raised into place by cranes or levers, but pulled up huge ramps of earth built especially for the purpose.”

“Nonsense!” said Antipater. “Such ramps would have needed to be enormous, larger in volume than the pyramid itself. If such massive earthworks were ever constructed, why do we see no remains of them?” It was true that there were no huge mounds of earth anywhere on the plateau. There were sand dunes here and there, including the large one amid the temples we had passed on our way, but even that mound was minuscule in comparison to the Great Pyramid.

“Those who built up the ramps disposed of them when they were done,” said the guide. “The earth was carted to the Nile, which carried it downstream to create the many islands of the Delta. And since you ask if Kheops is buried inside, young Roman, I will tell you that he is not. The Pharaoh so abused his people when he forced them to build this enormous tomb, that when he died they refused to put him in the pyramid and buried him elsewhere. The pyramid is empty.”

“How could you possibly know such a thing?” said Antipater.

The guide smiled. “Did I not tell you that I, Kemsa, am the best of all the guides? I know what others do not. Follow me.”

Kemsa led us back to the south face of the pyramid, where he gave a sign that brought all three camels to a halt. I would have sat there indefinitely, gaping at the pyramid, had my camel not folded its knees and pitched forward, making clear its desire to be rid of me. As the creature turned its head and prepared to spit, I hurriedly dismounted. Antipater did likewise, though with more dignity.

“Shall we go inside?” said our guide.

“Is it possible to do so?” Antipater’s eyes grew wide.

“With Kemsa as your guide, all things are possible. Follow me!”

The face of the pyramid must once have been as smooth as glass—impossible to climb—but time had worn and pitted the stones, making it possible to clamber up by staying low and gaining purchase amid tiny cracks and fissures. I worried that Antipater would find the effort too strenuous, but, as he had done so often before on our journey, my old tutor displayed amazing dexterity and stamina for a man of his years. Antipater would complain of having to climb a few stairs to our room at the inn, but nothing could stop him from scrambling up the pyramid!

Perhaps two-thirds of the way to the top, Kemsa showed us a spot where a flat slab of stone could be lifted on a pivot. The hidden doorway was so expertly fitted that it was practically invisible. Antipater and I would never have found it on our own.

“Astonishing! Herodotus makes no mention of an entrance to the Great Pyramid,” said Antipater.

“No?” said Kemsa. “That’s because this fellow Herodotus did not have me for a guide. Watch your head!”