The Totems of Abydos Read Free Page B

the platform. Then, one evening, ten revolutions, and a hundred mournings and festivals, after he had inflicted his cruel injuries upon himself, that he might not again see what he saw, that his eyes should never show him such a thing again, he returned to the platform. We do not really know why he returned to that fateful place. Perhaps, in the beginning, he was curious to know if he had been mistaken on that distant night, if he had really seen what he thought he had seen, or if it were an illusion of the senses, or a dream. Perhaps, on the other hand, he was mad or labored in the grip of some monstrous compulsion. In any event he had had the string tied by the brethren during the brightness of the day and then, one evening, when the sun was sinking behind the trees and the shadows of the fence were long and jagged on the clearing, and the fruit of the lantern trees was becoming visible in the gloom, he returned to the platform. Since that time he had made the journey several times, many, many times, a great number of times, taking with him his staff and his small sack of meal. The string which was now again dried and thin, worn by the winter and the weather, pelted by the rain, sometimes sheathed with ice, chilled by snow, swaying beneath the trees, had been replaced a number of times. But it was, in a sense, you see, the same string; it was always the same string, as it always marked the same trail; it always traced the same journey. It is in that sense it was the same string. It always led to the platform. Why then did Horemheb return to the platform? We do not really know. I think it was because he suspected that in its vicinity was the secret, the memory, the truth. I think he came back to the platform because he wanted to know, because even in his age and pain, and his fear, and given the terror of what he suspected, he wanted to know, or perhaps because it was merely he had not yet been satisfied, or because he was insatiably restless, or because he was inveterately curious, that perhaps as a consequence of some ineradicable affliction inherited from some remote unknown ancestry, an ancestry he might in an earlier day have despised or found laughable had it suddenly, from a depth of bushes, peered out at him, or perhaps because he still hoped to unravel the riddles of his distant youth, that youth like an unfinished dream, so lost, yet so constantly present, so far away, yet so near. On the other hand, he may have come back to the platform because he had no choice really, because the journey called him. Perhaps the truth is as simple as that. Let those to whom journeys call speculate on the possibility of that. For myself I do not know, and I do not think others do either. Perhaps he was merely the sort who cannot refrain from digging with sticks into the sores on his own body. That is possible. The species are rare in the universe, but they exist, those which torture themselves.
    Now Horemheb continued his journey. Then, after less than one of the twenty-five segments of a rotation, the divisions of a lightness from a lightness, he felt beneath his feet not the softness of the forest trail, the crushed leaves and the dust, that curious mixture of particles wounded to powder by long treading, but the flat stones. It was there that the string ended. With his staff Horemheb tapped ahead of himself, scratching now and then at the stones to determine their setting, and the directions of the cracks between them. It was still night. Had he been able to see them the stars were full and, behind, in the forest, the lantern fruits hung like lamps from the branches of the trees. He supposed the platform looked much the same as always. No one knew its age, but it was known that there had been an innumerable number of platforms before this one, built on this same spot. That was testified to by records as old as those the brethren possessed. No one, at least as far as Horemheb knew, knew why the first one had been built here, or