Egypt Read Free

it might seem, I had no choice but to remain true to myself.
    Up on the roof, the large terrace was set out with many trays on stands, piled high with the finest of foods in ostentatious quantities: whole ducks in thick glazes; big roasted haunches of gazelle, sliced finely to reveal the pink meat; roasted gourds and shallots; bread rolls; honeycombs; olives glistening in oil on decorated platters; lustrous bunches of shining grapes that caught the evening sunlight; and mountains of figs and dates. Servants dispensed fine wine from the Dakhla oasis. I would dearly have loved a goblet of decent wine, as I could no longer indulge such luxuries at home. My mouth watered; I stopped myself from smuggling a handful of almonds from a dish. After the last guests had departed, Nakht would insist that I take as many of the leftovers as I wished home for the children. ‘Otherwise it will just be thrown away,’ he would say, trying to find a way to make his charity acceptable, while pressing a small cask of excellent wine upon me. We would eat like kings for the next few days; and for a little while we would not have to suffer the same old onions, garlic, bony fish and gritty bread that had become our staple diet.
    As Nakht made elegantly witty conversation with a rich couple, while they fawned over and flattered each other, I gazed out over the city in the glorious evening light. The grey, red and yellow flat rooftops of Thebes, crowded with drying vegetables and broken bits and pieces of household furniture, spread away in every direction. The Avenue of Sphinxes, the vast, straight, paved processional, ran to the north, joining the Temple of Karnak and the Southern Temple, whose towering, painted mud-brick walls reared up near by. I watched as a temple army phalanx laboriously conducted the handover to the night guards in the open ground before the vast pylon. To the west ran the Great River, the source of all life, like a brown and green serpent, glittering silver now as the sunset flowed on its ever-changing surfaces. Further, beyond the cultivation on the west bank, and the stark borderline where the Black Land of the cultivation and the Red Lands of the desert divided, lay the long stone mortuary temples; and beyond them the hills and valleys, now painted in the blacks, yellows and reds of sunset, where the royal tombs preserved the great kings in their stone sarcophagi and gold coffins, timeless and secret. To the south, also on the west bank, I could just make out the squat shapes of the Malkata Palace, home of the royal family, hidden at the heart of the extensive labyrinth of overseers’, administrators’ and officials’ accommodation. And beyond the city’s boundaries, beyond the green and black fields, beyond all the monuments and statues made by men upon the face of the earth, lay the great unknown of the Red Lands, that other world of dust and sandstorms and dangerous spirits and death, which had always held such power for me.
    The evening sun had dropped low now, and the sky was turquoise, indigo, crimson and gold; the sweet northern breeze of the evening hour had begun to cool the air. At a discreet nod from Nakht, the servants took down the exquisitely embroidered awnings, and lit many little oil lamps. The guests settled on chairs–with low chaises for the women–set out for comfort. I looked at their affluent faces and opulent outfits, gilded by the last of the evening light. They lived in a different world from those in the streets all around them.
    I shadowed Nakht as he moved over to a small coterie of close friends who frequented his mansion. Hor the poet was talking, as usual; wittily and bitchily entertaining his friends with scurrilous accounts of high-level indiscretions and scandals, usually of a sexual nature. I used to think poets were dreamers of truth and beauty, with their heads in the Otherworld. But Hor was chubby and self-satisfied, worldly and successful. His little