The Tales of Ancient Egypt (10 Historical Novels). Georg Ebers
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prescribe the paths of life are strictly defined by measure and number—but irrespective of beauty or benevolence.”
“Such views,” cried Pentaur troubled, “are the result of your strange studies. You kill and destroy, in order, as you yourself say, to come upon the track of the secrets of life. Look out upon nature, develop the faculty which you declare to be wanting, in you, and the beauty of creation will teach you without my assistance that you are praying to a false god.”
“I do not pray,” said Nebsecht, “for the law which moves the world is as little affected by prayers as the current of the sands in your hour-glass. Who tells you that I do not seek to come upon the track of the first beginning of things? I proved to you just now that I know more about the origin of Scarabei than you do. I have killed many an animal, not only to study its organism, but also to investigate how it has built up its form. But precisely in this work my organ for beauty has become blunt rather than keen. I tell you that the beginning of things is not more attractive to contemplate than their death and decomposition.”
Pentaur looked at the physician enquiringly.
“I also for once,” continued Nebsecht, “will speak in figures. Look at this wine, how pure it is, how fragrant; and yet it was trodden from the grape by the brawny feet of the vintagers. And those full ears of corn! They gleam golden yellow, and will yield us snow-white meal when they are ground, and yet they grew from a rotting seed. Lately you were praising to me the beauty of the great Hall of Columns nearly completed in the Temple of Amon over yonder in Thebes.78
How posterity will admire it! I saw that Hall arise. There lay masses of freestone in wild confusion, dust in heaps that took away my breath, and three months since I was sent over there, because above a hundred workmen engaged in stone-polishing under the burning sun had been beaten to death. Were I a poet like you, I would show you a hundred similar pictures, in which you would not find much beauty. In the meantime, we have enough to do in observing the existing order of things, and investigating the laws by which it is governed.”
“I have never clearly understood your efforts, and have difficulty in comprehending why you did not turn to the science of the haruspices,” said Pentaur. “Do you then believe that the changing, and—owing to the conditions by which they are surrounded—the dependent life of plants and animals is governed by law, rule, and numbers like the movement of the stars?”
“What a question! Is the strong and mighty hand, which compels yonder heavenly bodies to roll onward in their carefully-appointed orbits, not delicate enough to prescribe the conditions of the flight of the bird, and the beating of the human heart?”
“There we are again with the heart,” said the poet smiling, “are you any nearer your aim?”
The physician became very grave. “Perhaps tomorrow even,” he said, “I may have what I need. You have your palette there with red and black color, and a writing reed. May I use this sheet of papyrus?”
“Of course; but first tell me. …”
“Do not ask; you would not approve of my scheme, and there would only be a fresh dispute.”
“I think,” said the poet, laying his hand on his friend’s shoulder, “that we have no reason to fear disputes. So far they have been the cement, the refreshing dew of our friendship.”
“So long as they treated of ideas only, and not of deeds.”
“You intend to get possession of a human heart!” cried the poet. “Think of what you are doing! The heart is the vessel of that effluence of the universal soul, which lives in us.”
“Are you so sure of that?” cried the physician with some irritation, “then give me the proof. Have you ever examined a heart, has any one member of my profession done so? The hearts of criminals and prisoners of war even are declared sacred from touch, and when we stand helpless by a patient, and see our medicines work harm as often as good, why is it? Only because we physicians are expected to work as blindly as an astronomer, if he were required to look at the stars through a board. At Heliopolis I entreated the great Urma Rahotep, the truly learned chief of our craft, and who held me in esteem, to allow me to examine the heart of a dead Amu; but he refused me, because the great Sechet leads virtuous Semites also into the fields of the blessed.79
And then followed all the old scruples: that to cut up the heart of a beast even is sinful, because it also is the vehicle of a soul, perhaps a condemned and miserable human soul, which before it can return to the One, must undergo purification by passing through the bodies of animals. I was not satisfied, and declared to him that my great-grandfather Nebsecht, before he wrote his treatise on the heart, must certainly have examined such an organ. Then he answered me that the divinity had revealed to him what he had written, and therefore his work had been accepted amongst the sacred writings of Toth,80 which stood fast and unassailable as the laws of the world; he wished to give me peace for quiet work, and I also, he said, might be a chosen spirit, the divinity might perhaps vouchsafe revelations to me too. I was young at that time, and spent my nights in prayer, but I only wasted away, and my spirit grew darker instead of clearer. Then I killed in secret—first a fowl, then rats, then a rabbit, and cut up their hearts, and followed the vessels that lead out of them, and know little more now than I did at first; but I must get to the bottom of the truth, and I must have a human heart.”
“What will that do for you?” asked Pentaur; “you cannot hope to perceive the invisible and the infinite with your human eyes?”
“Do you know my great-grandfather’s treatise?”
“A little,” answered the poet; “he said that wherever he laid his finger, whether on the head, the hands, or the stomach, he everywhere met with the heart, because its vessels go into all the members, and the heart is the meeting point of all these vessels. Then Nebsecht proceeds to state how these are distributed in the different members, and shows—is it not so?—that the various mental states, such as anger, grief, aversion, and also the ordinary use of the word heart, declare entirely for his view.”
“That is it. We have already discussed it, and I believe that he is right, so far as the blood is concerned, and the animal sensations. But the pure and luminous intelligence in us—that has another seat,” and the physician struck his broad but low forehead with his hand. “I have observed heads by the hundred down at the place of execution, and I have also removed the top of the skulls of living animals. But now let me write, before we are disturbed.”81
The physician took the reed, moistened it with black color prepared from burnt papyrus, and in elegant hieratic characters82 wrote the paper for the paraschites, in which he confessed to having impelled him to the theft of a heart, and in the most binding manner declared himself willing to take the old man’s guilt upon himself before Osiris and the judges of the dead.
When he had finished, Pentaur held out his hand for the paper, but Nebsecht folded it together, placed it in a little bag in which lay an amulet that his dying mother had hung round his neck, and said, breathing deeply:
“That is done. Farewell, Pentaur.”
But the poet held the physician back; he spoke to him with the warmest words, and conjured him to abandon his enterprise. His prayers, however, had no power to touch Nebsecht, who only strove forcibly to disengage his finger from Pentaur’s strong hand, which held him as in a clasp of iron. The excited poet did not remark that he was hurting his friend, until after a new and vain attempt at freeing himself, Nebsecht cried out in pain, “You are crushing my finger!”
A smile passed over the poet’s face, he loosened his hold on the physician, and stroked the reddened hand like a mother who strives to divert her child from pain.
“Don’t be angry with me, Nebsecht,” he said, “you know my unlucky fists, and to-day they really ought to hold you fast, for you have too mad a purpose on hand.”
“Mad?” said the physician, whilst he smiled in his turn. “It may be so; but do you not know that we Egyptians all have a peculiar tenderness for our follies, and are ready to sacrifice house and land to them?”
“Our