The Greatest Historical Novels of Georg Ebers. Georg Ebers
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of the rocky walls of the chasm threw sharply-defined shadows. A weird silence lay upon the desert, where yet far more life was stirring than in the noonday hour, for now bats darted like black silken threads through the night air, owls hovered aloft on wide-spread wings, small troops of jackals slipped by, one following the other up the mountain slopes. From time to time their hideous yell, or the whining laugh of the hyena, broke the stillness of the night.
Nor was human life yet at rest in the valley of tombs. A faint light glimmered in the cave of the sorceress Hekt, and in front of the paraschites’ but a fire was burning, which the grandmother of the sick Uarda now and then fed with pieces of dry manure. Two men were seated in front of the hut, and gazed in silence on the thin flame, whose impure light was almost quenched by the clearer glow of the moon; whilst the third, Uarda’s father, disembowelled a large ram, whose head he had already cut off.
“How the jackals howl!” said the old paraschites, drawing as he spoke the torn brown cotton cloth, which he had put on as a protection against the night air and the dew, closer round his bare shoulders.
“They scent the fresh meat,” answered the physician, Nebsecht. “Throw them the entrails, when you have done; the legs and back you can roast. Be careful how you cut out the heart—the heart, soldier. There it is! What a great beast.”
Nebsecht took the ram’s heart in his hand, and gazed at it with the deepest attention, whilst the old paraschites watched him anxiously. At length:
“I promised,” he said, “to do for you what you wish, if you restore the little one to health; but you ask for what is impossible.”
“Impossible?” said the physician, “why, impossible? You open the corpses, you go in and out of the house of the embalmer. Get possession of one of the canopi,72 lay this heart in it, and take out in its stead the heart of a human being. No one—no one will notice it. Nor need you do it to-morrow, or the day after tomorrow even. Your son can buy a ram to kill every day with my money till the right moment comes. Your granddaughter will soon grow strong on a good meat-diet. Take courage!”
“I am not afraid of the danger,” said the old man, “but how can I venture to steal from a dead man his life in the other world? And then—in shame and misery have I lived, and for many a year—no man has numbered them for me—have I obeyed the commandments, that I may be found righteous in that world to come, and in the fields of Aalu, and in the Sun-bark find compensation for all that I have suffered here. You are good and friendly. Why, for the sake of a whim, should you sacrifice the future bliss of a man, who in all his long life has never known happiness, and who has never done you any harm?”
“What I want with the heart,” replied the physician, “you cannot understand, but in procuring it for me, you will be furthering a great and useful purpose. I have no whims, for I am no idler. And as to what concerns your salvation, have no anxiety. I am a priest, and take your deed and its consequences upon myself; upon myself, do you understand? I tell you, as a priest, that what I demand of you is right, and if the judge of the dead shall enquire, ‘Why didst thou take the heart of a human being out of the Kanopus?’ then reply—reply to him thus, ‘Because Nebsecht, the priest, commanded me, and promised himself to answer for the deed.’ ”
The old man gazed thoughtfully on the ground, and the physician continued still more urgently:
“If you fulfil my wish, then—then I swear to you that, when you die, I will take care that your mummy is provided with all the amulets, and I myself will write you a book of the Entrance into Day, and have it wound within your mummy-cloth, as is done with the great.73
That will give you power over all demons, and you will be admitted to the hall of the twofold justice, which punishes and rewards, and your award will be bliss.”
“But the theft of a heart will make the weight of my sins heavy, when my own heart is weighed,” sighed the old man.
Nebsecht considered for a moment, and then said: “I will give you a written paper, in which I will certify that it was I who commanded the theft. You will sew it up in a little bag, carry it on your breast, and have it laid with you in the grave. Then when Techuti, the agent of the soul, receives your justification before Osiris and the judges of the dead, give him the writing. He will read it aloud, and you will be accounted just.”74
“I am not learned in writing,” muttered the paraschites with a slight mistrust that made itself felt in his voice.
“But I swear to you by the nine great Gods, that I will write nothing on the paper but what I have promised you. I will confess that I, the priest Nebsecht, commanded you to take the heart, and that your guilt is mine.”
“Let me have the writing then,” murmured the old man.
The physician wiped the perspiration from his forehead, and gave the paraschites his hand. “To-morrow you shall have it,” he said, “and I will not leave your granddaughter till she is well again.”
The soldier engaged in cutting up the ram, had heard nothing of this conversation. Now he ran a wooden spit through the legs, and held them over the fire to roast them. The jackals howled louder as the smell of the melting fat filled the air, and the old man, as he looked on, forgot the terrible task he had undertaken. For a year past, no meat had been tasted in his house.
The physician Nebsecht, himself eating nothing but a piece of bread, looked on at the feasters. They tore the meat from the bones, and the soldier, especially, devoured the costly and unwonted meal like some ravenous animal. He could be heard chewing like a horse in the manger, and a feeling of disgust filled the physician’s soul.
“Sensual beings,” he murmured to himself, “animals with consciousness! And yet human beings. Strange! They languish bound in the fetters of the world of sense, and yet how much more ardently they desire that which transcends sense than we—how much more real it is to them than to us!”
“Will you have some meat?” cried the soldier, who had remarked that Nebsecht’s lips moved, and tearing a piece of meat from the bone of the joint he was devouring, he held it out to the physician. Nebsecht shrank back; the greedy look, the glistening teeth, the dark, rough features of the man terrified him. And he thought of the white and fragile form of the sick girl lying within on the mat, and a question escaped his lips.
“Is the maiden, is Uarda, your own child?” he said.
The soldier struck himself on the breast. “So sure as the king Rameses is the son of Seti,” he answered. The men had finished their meal, and the flat cakes of bread which the wife of the paraschites gave them, and on which they had wiped their hands from the fat, were consumed, when the soldier, in whose slow brain the physician’s question still lingered, said, sighing deeply:
“Her mother was a stranger; she laid the white dove in the raven’s nest.”
“Of what country was your wife a native?” asked the physician.
“That I do not know,” replied the soldier.
“Did you never enquire about the family of your own wife?”
“Certainly I did: but how could she have answered me? But it is a long and strange story.”
“Relate it to me,” said Nebsecht, “the night is long, and I like listening better than talking. But first I will see after our patient.”
When the physician had satisfied himself that Uarda was sleeping quietly and breathing regularly, he seated himself again by the paraschites and his son, and the soldier began:
“It all happened long ago. King Seti still lived, but Rameses already reigned in his stead, when I came home from the north. They had sent me to the workmen, who were building the fortifications in Zoan, the town of Rameses.—[The Rameses of the Bible. Exodus i. ii.]—I was set over six men, Amus—[Semites]—of the Hebrew race, over whom Rameses kept such a tight hand.75
Amongst the workmen there were sons of rich cattle-holders, for in levying the people it was never: ‘What have you?’ but ‘Of what race are you?’ The fortifications and the