The Tales of Ancient Egypt (10 Historical Novels). Georg Ebers
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one he chose was the grandson of a celebrated leech, long since dead, whose name of Nebsecht he had inherited, and a beloved school-friend and old comrade of Pentaur.
This young man had from his earliest years shown high and hereditary talent for the profession to which he had devoted himself; he had selected surgery12 for his special province at Heliopolis, and would certainly have attained the dignity of teacher there if an impediment in his speech had not debarred him from the viva voce recitation of formulas and prayers.
This circumstance, which was deeply lamented by his parents and tutors, was in fact, in the best opinions, an advantage to him; for it often happens that apparent superiority does us damage, and that from apparent defect springs the saving of our life.
Thus, while the companions of Nebsecht were employed in declaiming or in singing, he, thanks to his fettered tongue, could give himself up to his inherited and almost passionate love of observing organic life; and his teachers indulged up to a certain point his innate spirit of investigation, and derived benefit from his knowledge of the human and animal structures, and from the dexterity of his handling.
His deep aversion for the magical part of his profession would have brought him heavy punishment, nay very likely would have cost him expulsion from the craft, if he had ever given it expression in any form. But Nebsecht’s was the silent and reserved nature of the learned man, who free from all desire of external recognition, finds a rich satisfaction in the delights of investigation; and he regarded every demand on him to give proof of his capacity, as a vexatious but unavoidable intrusion on his unassuming but laborious and fruitful investigations.
Nebsecht was dearer and nearer to Pentaur than any other of his associates.
He admired his learning and skill; and when the slightly-built surgeon, who was indefatigable in his wanderings, roved through the thickets by the Nile, the desert, or the mountain range, the young poet-priest accompanied him with pleasure and with great benefit to himself, for his companion observed a thousand things to which without him he would have remained for ever blind; and the objects around him, which were known to him only by their shapes, derived connection and significance from the explanations of the naturalist, whose intractable tongue moved freely when it was required to expound to his friend the peculiarities of organic beings whose development he had been the first to detect.
The poet was dear in the sight of Nebsecht, and he loved Pentaur, who possessed all the gifts he lacked; manly beauty, childlike lightness of heart, the frankest openness, artistic power, and the gift of expressing in word and song every emotion that stirred his soul. The poet was as a novice in the order in which Nebsecht was master, but quite capable of understanding its most difficult points; so it happened that Nebsecht attached greater value to his judgment than to that of his own colleagues, who showed themselves fettered by prejudice, while Pentaur’s decision always was free and unbiassed.
The naturalist’s room lay on the ground floor, and had no living-rooms above it, being under one of the granaries attached to the temple. It was as large as a public hall, and yet Pentaur, making his way towards the silent owner of the room, found it everywhere strewed with thick bundles of every variety of plant, with cages of palm-twigs piled four or five high, and a number of jars, large and small, covered with perforated paper. Within these prisons moved all sorts of living creatures, from the jerboa, the lizard of the Nile, and a light-colored species of owl, to numerous specimens of frogs, snakes, scorpions and beetles.
On the solitary table in the middle of the room, near to a writing-stand, lay bones of animals, with various sharp flints and bronze knives.
In a corner of this room lay a mat, on which stood a wooden head-prop, indicating that the naturalist was in the habit of sleeping on it.
When Pentaur’s step was heard on the threshold of this strange abode, its owner pushed a rather large object under the table, threw a cover over it, and hid a sharp flint scalpel13 fixed into a wooden handle, which he had just been using, in the folds of his robe-as a school-boy might hide some forbidden game from his master. Then he crossed his arms, to give himself the aspect of a man who is dreaming in harmless idleness.
The solitary lamp, which was fixed on a high stand near his chair, shed a scanty light, which, however, sufficed to show him his trusted friend Pentaur, who had disturbed Nebsecht in his prohibited occupations. Nebsecht nodded to him as he entered, and, when he had seen who it was, said:
“You need not have frightened me so!” Then he drew out from under the table the object he had hidden—a living rabbit fastened down to a board-and continued his interrupted observations on the body, which he had opened and fastened back with wooden pins while the heart continued to beat.
He took no further notice of Pentaur, who for some time silently watched the investigator; then he laid his hand on his shoulder and said:
“Lock your door more carefully, when you are busy with forbidden things.”
“They took—they took away the bar of the door lately,” stammered the naturalist, “when they caught me dissecting the hand of the forger Ptahmes.”—[The law sentenced forgers to lose a hand.]
“The mummy of the poor man will find its right hand wanting,” answered the poet.
“He will not want it out there.”
“Did you bury the least bit of an image in his grave?”14
“Nonsense.”
“You go very far, Nebsecht, and are not foreseeing, ‘He who needlessly hurts an innocent animal shall be served in the same way by the spirits of the netherworld,’ says the law; but I see what you will say. You hold it lawful to put a beast to pain, when you can thereby increase that knowledge by which you alleviate the sufferings of man, and enrich—”
“And do not you?”
A gentle smile passed over Pentaur’s face; leaned over the animal and said:
“How curious! the little beast still lives and breathes; a man would have long been dead under such treatment. His organism is perhaps of a more precious, subtle, and so more fragile nature?”
Nebsecht shrugged his shoulders.
“Perhaps!” he said.
“I thought you must know.”
“I—how should I?” asked the leech. “I have told you—they would not even let me try to find out how the hand of a forger moves.”
“Consider, the scripture tells us the passage of the soul depends on the preservation of the body.”
Nebsecht looked up with his cunning little eyes and shrugging his shoulders, said:
“Then no doubt it is so: however these things do not concern me. Do what you like with the souls of men; I seek to know something of their bodies, and patch them when they are damaged as well as may be.”
“Nay-Toth be praised, at least you need not deny that you are master in that art.”15
“Who is master,” asked Nebsecht, “excepting God? I can do nothing, nothing at all, and guide my instruments with hardly more certainty than a sculptor condemned to work in the dark.”
“Something like the blind Resu then,” said Pentaur smiling, “who understood painting better than all the painters who could see.”
“In my operations there is a ‘better’ and a ‘worse;’ ” said Nebsecht, “but there is nothing ‘good.’ ”
“Then we must be satisfied with the ‘better,’ and I have come to claim it,” said Pentaur.
“Are you ill?”
“Isis be praised, I feel so well that I could uproot a palm-tree, but I would ask you to visit a sick girl. The princess Bent-Anat—”
“The royal family has its own physicians.”
“Let me speak! the princess Bent-Anat has run over a young girl, and the poor child is seriously hurt.”