Moses, Man of the Mountain (8 page)

“Sh-sh-sh!”

Everybody looked scared and glanced about them fearfully.

“Don’t you people see that I am trying to help you? Being a bossman is the last thing on earth I want to do. I want you—”

“Oh, yeah! We’re mighty proud to hear all of them sentiments out of you. Cause some of us was scared you was trying to get to be our boss. And since we ain’t heard tell of nobody putting you over us, so far as I’m concerned I’d rather have a enemy overseer that just beat me and sent me on home with a sore back than one of them friends that might kill me and bury me in the sand.”

For a moment Moses stood hurt at the lack of appreciation of his behavior and of the motives that prompted him. Then he was afraid of what might happen if such talk reached Phar
aoh. Then he saw the gloating look on the face of the one who was talking, and a brother gloat on the face of several others. So! The will to humble a man more powerful than themselves was stronger than the emotion of gratitude. It was stronger than the wish for the common brotherhood of man. It was the cruelty of chickens—fleeing with great clamor before superior force but merciless towards the helpless. It made him feel cruel himself for a moment. Then his anger passed and he felt sad again. Well, anyway, the Hebrew who had been made overseer understood. Moses could tell by his face. The whole thing was too big and sudden for quick words from him. He turned abruptly and walked away.

“Did I tell that Prince something?” he heard the voice of a man behind him. “I told his head a mess!”

“You sure did. I’ll bet you he won’t come messing around here no more. Ha! Many dogs are the death of the lion.”

“So they think I could not have answered them, or that I was afraid,” Moses mused as he strode on off. “They don’t realize that it all would have been too easy for me.”

Thinking and walking and feeling, he was at home before he knew it. He did not follow his usual pattern by stopping in the big reception hall and sending word by one of his servants to the Princess that he had arrived. He went straight to his private suite and sat down to think. But this was not the place. Observing that the door between his apartment and that of the Princess was firmly closed for the first time, it brought back all of his unpleasant happenings of the week. So he summoned his steward and commanded him to follow to his quarters in the barracks.

“You are to bring several changes of clothes to me here,” Moses told the steward, “and a well-filled purse and the most necessary ornaments. I am going to live with my men for a long while. Hurry and do as I tell you.”

“I have something to tell you, Suten-Rech, if you will listen.”

“First go and get me what I told you and then tell me whatever you want to.”

The steward hurried off in the new darkness and Moses sat and thought, and grew by inches as he thought. “The time has come for a decision in my life. I’m going to sit right here until my whiskers touch the ground, if I don’t come to some decision as to which way my life is going and why.” He sat motionless with his hands joined behind his head until the steward returned with his things.

“Suten-Rech, there are some who say that you are an enemy of Egypt.”

“They do?”

“Yessir, they say that you are stirring up the Hebrews to rise against the country.”

“They wish to destroy me, and so they have quit using sense and taken to using phrases. Slogans can be worse than swords if they are only put in the right mouths.”

“Yessir. And they say that you are going about secretly killing off the oveseers who had charge of large groups of Hebrews to give them a chance to kill us.”

“They said I killed overseers? Who said that? When?”

“I think the word was sent secretly to Pharaoh today telling him when and how you killed this particular man and where his body can be found.”

“Oh.”

“It is said that Pharaoh is very angry with you and plans to have you seized tomorrow morning when you go to that conference about troop movement. Suten-Rech, I love you and I love to serve you. It would have been better if you had not declared yourself a Hebrew.”

“I never did.”

“There are several people who swear that you told them that you were a Hebrew and would do anything at all to serve them.”

“Just one lie after another one. Somebody wants me out of the way and they are not missing a trick to get rid of me. But it does not distress me as much as it would have done a month ago, now that I have made up my mind to leave Memphis and perhaps leave Egypt.”

“But why?”

“For one thing, I suppose it is the easiest thing for me to do right now. Property always rewards its defenders and the property owners now believe that I am plotting with the Hebrew slaves against their possessions. So the people who are lying against me are in high favor now according to the signs. So I am going away.”

“When?”

“Before the old man becomes a child again.” When Moses said that, he was telling his thoughts by pictures. The people said that Horus, the sun-god, the god of the two horizons, became a baby each morning at sunrise and grew older all day long. By sundown he was an old man with a beard. But during the night his youth returned and he rose the next morning in his red glory and with his watchful eye drove away all darkness.

“Oh, Suten-Rech, please take me with you.”

“No, I am going alone. I want to leave all that I was behind me for a while—perhaps forever.”

“Oh, Prince Moses! Egypt could not spare you. You are part of the King himself and he is descended from Ra. You must not think of leaving the country. Justice will win.”

“That may be so, and then again you may be right. But I’m going just the same. You must tell my wife, the Princess, first of all. Get the news to her tomorrow after breakfast, will you?”

“Oh, yes, sir, I will.”

“I trust you to do exactly as I tell you. She must be told first of all. Announce to her ladies in waiting that you have come with a message from me. Then wait until you deliver the news to her in person.”

“Where will you go?”

“To the desert, I reckon, to think. I feel something I have never been conscious of before, and I must find out from within myself what to do about it.”

“What is that?”

“I feel the cursing thought of the law and power. I had
always felt the beneficence of law and power and never stopped to consider that it had any other side. It is a sword with two edges. Never mind whether it is directed against me honestly or not. That has nothing to do with its power to injure me.”

Moses kept his steward with him until he was ready to go. His signet, his state ring, his other rings and necklaces he hid about his person with his money and went out into the darkness. He knew the steward would do as he was told to because he was afraid not to. He knew that the steward would wait a long time before the Princess would receive that message from him in the morning, and so it would be very late before anyone else knew that he was running away. He would be beyond the borders before they suspected that he was not in his quarters, or somewhere around the palace.

A
ll night he traveled and thought. He found his unformed wishes taking shape. He was wishing for a country he had never seen. He was seeing visions of a nation he had never heard of where there would be more equality of opportunity and less difference between top and bottom.

Out under the late moonlight he could see chickens roosting along the ridgepoles of barns with the arrogant tail feathers of roosters sticking out against the sky, and that brought his thoughts around to the hundreds of questions he wanted to ask of Nature. It gave him a freshening hope, as he fled for his life from Rameses. “The man who interprets Nature is always held in great honor. I am going to live and talk with Nature and know her secrets. Then I will be powerful, no matter where I may be. And now that I am free from wars and warfare, I shall go to Koptos. Not at this very moment, for if I am found in Egypt they will kill me sure. Wait a little while and grow whiskers and they won’t know me from the next one, especially if I stay away from certain vicinities. I am going to answer the questions that Mentu raised in me. Is there a box in the middle of the river at Koptos? Does it contain a book? Was the book written by the god Thoth, whose messenger is the Ibis? Is it guarded by a snake? Is the snake really deathless?
These were the questions that hurt him to hold inside him because the saw-teeth of his curiosity and impatience gave him no peace. From now on his sword should cease to think for him. He would spend the rest of his life asking Nature the why of her moods and measures. As he sailed swiftly down the river Nile, he saw many things in the water and along the banks which he would like to investigate and which he now regretted to leave. He realized now how Mentu had aroused his thought, and that once you wake up thought in a man, you can never put it to sleep again. He saw that he had merely been suppressing himself during his military period. That was over and gone. Everybody has some special road of thought along which they travel when they are alone to themselves. And his road of thought is what makes every man what he is.

Bright and soon three mornings later, Moses was standing beside the Red Sea. What he wanted was a large boat to cross over into Asia. He talked to first one man and another about renting a boat, but with no success. It was early for the rest of the world, but late so far as the fishermen were concerned. Three hours before every available boat had gone out to catch fish. So Moses finally sat down to wait until a seaworthy craft should come in with its load, or without one as the luck might be. So that is how he got to talking with the old man who said he was too old to go out with his boy any longer.

While he waited he noticed what he had not noticed before—that whoever was about the water front had left off what they were doing and were collected about him. They were respectful, even reverential to a degree, but everybody’s thoughts and actions were influenced by his presence. Under the circumstances it began to worry him a little. Several of the men withdrew into a knot down the beach a little way. Then the old man crept up to him.

“Suten-Rech,” he said in a low tone, “them men is figuring out how to make some money out of you.”

“They do? And how do they plan to do it?”

The old man scratched his head and regarded Moses shrewdly. “We don’t see a Prince in a hurry often.”

“How do they know that I am a Prince? And why do they think I am in a hurry?”

“All anybody needs to do is to look at you and they would know you was a Prince. The way you act proves that you’re in a big hurry to cross over on the other side. So them men—yonder, Suten-Rech—done agreed not to find you a boat until you are ready to pay a large price for it. None of us ain’t got nothing, you know.”

“I wish they would hurry and make up their minds on the price.”

The old man crept closer and murmured in the ear of Moses.

“Some folks got minds already made up that could help you.”

“Why don’t they let me know, then? I am really in a big hurry to cross over.”

“Take me for instance—I am poor and old too, so that the money would do me more good than anybody else around here.”

“Have you a boat?”

“No, my Prince. But I have something to tell you which you don’t need a boat to do if you will give me the money whilst the others are too far off to hear what we are saying.”

Moses reached for his purse and gave generously. The man kissed the money in a sort of ecstasy and hid it in his clothes.

“I never expected to be so rich!” he said in an exalted tone. “Now, I can have a funeral of the second class with a tomb. Oh, yes, my Prince, it is all a matter of the hour and the tide and you can wade across the sea.”

“The Red Sea is a mighty place of waters. You are joking with me and I am in no mood for jokes.”

“Don’t kill me, Suten-Rech, I wouldn’t dare to joke with such a big man as you. Look, you walk down the beach about two miles north and you come to a narrow neck of water, where the Red Sea joins the outer sea. It ain’t never very deep there at no time, and at certain times at low tide, the strait is just about dry. If a man started at the hour when the tide is
lowest, before it rushes back he could be on the other side—if the man was right peart in his walking. A sort of light trot would put you across there in no time.”

Moses hurried away and broke into a run as soon as he was out of sight. The tide was receding, but he did not stand and wait for it. He pulled off his shoes and his shenti, the short skirt worn by the military men and began to wade across. All the time the water was shrinking away before him. So Moses felt himself moving Godward with an understanding of force and time. So he walked out with clean feet on the other side.

Moses had crossed over. He was not in Egypt. He had crossed over and now he was not an Egyptian. He had crossed over. The short sword at his thigh had a jewelled hilt but he had crossed over and so it was no longer the sign of high birth and power. He had crossed over, so he sat down on a rock near the seashore to rest himself. He had crossed over so he was not of the house of Pharaoh. He did not own a palace because he had crossed over. He did not have an Ethiopian Princess for a wife. He had crossed over. He did not have friends to sustain him. He had crossed over. He did not have enemies to strain against his strength and power. He had crossed over. He was subject to no law except the laws of tooth and talon. He had crossed over. The sun who was his friend and ancestor in Egypt was arrogant and bitter in Asia. He had crossed over. He felt as empty as a post hole for he was none of the things he once had been. He was a man sitting on a rock. He had crossed over.

W
hich way he was going when he got rested, Moses didn’t know. He knew where he had come from and what it meant, but where he was going was something else again. Oh, well, he had the rest of his life to strain with that subject. So he sat on a rock in the morning sun on the far side of the Red Sea and conferred with the Never Untrue, which in a common way of speaking people call Experience. In this way he walked backwards over his road from the palace to the seat on the rock in a strange nation. He looked back and the glance changed him like Lot’s wife.

“How was a young man to know these things?” he thought out loud. “You have to go to life to know life. God! It costs you something to do good! You learn that by experience, too. If you want that good feeling that comes from doing things for other folks then you have to pay for it in abuse and misunderstanding. It seems like the first law of Nature is that everybody likes to receive things, but nobody likes to feel grateful. And the very next law is that people talk about tenderness and mercy, but they love force. If you feed a thousand people you are a nice man with suspicious motives. If you kill a thousand you are a hero. Continue to get them killed by the thousands and you are a great conqueror, than which nothing on earth is greater. Oppress them and you are a great ruler. Rob them
by law and they are proud and happy if you let them glimpse you occasionally surrounded by the riches that you have trampled out of their hides. You are truly divine if you meet their weakness with the sword to slay and the dogs to tear. The only time you run a great risk is when you serve them. The most repulsive thing to all men is gratitude. Men give up property, freedom and even life before they will have the obligation laid on them. Yet they make offerings at every altar and pray fervently to every god they have ever made to make them thankful. But no god has ever twisted Nature to that extent. So they often rush out of temples to destroy those who have served them too well.

Two hours passed by Moses and gave him eye-looks. Then the strange sun drove him from his rock to find some shelter and some food. And since everything moves ever west, Moses buckled on his shoes and his shenti and went on across the world with the sun.

That night he came to a place where caravans rested for the night. There was a squat stone and mud house and several tents. Men from the four directions gathered around a fire outside and let their night selves live. They laughed a lot and drank to bring on feelings and talked. Many races and tongues like the streets of Memphis and Rameses. One woman particularly was conscious of the approval of men. She had fine eyes and she rocked her upper body in the saddle of her hips as she walked about the fire from group to group, feinting at men with her eyes and attacking them with her body. One man played upon a stringed instrument and finally the woman danced in a way that Moses liked. The man played again and another man sang a song with sad words but funny gestures and intonations. “I had a good woman but the fool laid down and died—” and the audience made him sing the details over and over and over.

Late in the night two camel drivers got into a quarrel over their beasts. They drew knives but did not use them. They grabbed up rocks and made all the motions of throwing but didn’t throw. Their threats were terrible. They had everything
for a good fight except the courage. They imitated a frenzy to rush upon each other so successfully that they actually did. The shock of actually having to do what they had threatened to do was too much. They sprang apart and ran several yards in opposite directions before they went back into character.

“Ha!” one screamed back, “it is a good thing you didn’t catch me. If you had they would have toted you across three yards—this yard, the church yard and the graveyard.”

“I don’t beat up bums like you. I pass you up and call you lucky. I’m bad! and if you hit me they’ll give you four names—Nubby, Peggy, Bad-eyed and Shorty, cause you’ll look like all of them.”

“Humph! Nobody is scared of you. They tell me you stick pegs in tigers’ hips, but I’ll make you pull this peg out.”

“Oh, you’re not so bad! If I jumped on you I might not beat you but scarce as people is around here, we’ll draw a crowd.”

They kept this up at a safe distance from each other until they both ran out of threats. Then they returned to the circle about the fire and drank together as if not a word had passed between them. When they turned in to sleep they rolled themselves in their separate blankets and slept side by side.

Moses took no active part in anything that went on though he was interested and entertained by all that he could understand. After the passage of threats between the camel drivers Moses thought: “Here it is just like it is in Egypt—the scared people do all of the biggest talk.”

A party of travelers from the Sudan played their drums and danced. One man with a dirk in his hand danced a marvelous pantomime of a hunter going through a jungle. He trod the jungle path. He was on the lookout for sudden death from the brush and the trees. He thought he heard sounds and stopped to listen. He suddenly hid himself behind a tree. False alarm. He proceeded swiftly and leaped over impediments in his path. He carefully parted shrubbery and looked for danger before he ventured further. He whirled about when he sensed danger behind him. A leopard! It attacked and he fought it off and killed it after a terrible struggle and ended the dance with
a triumphant flinging of his shiny black body about. It was so realistic that Moses felt he could hear the snarl of the beast as it fought.

Late that night when most of the travelers were asleep the chief of an Arab caravan of traders called across the fire to Moses.

“Well, how do you do, soldier?” he asked.

Moses listened to his mode of speech and decided the man had been educated by books or travels, probably both. He was well-dressed in a manner and bore himself with an air that proved he was accustomed to commanding others. Moses noted all this quickly, in the space of time it took to form an answer.

“Why do you call me a soldier?” Moses countered.

“Because you look like one. But like an officer soldier more than the common kind.”

“Well, I have seen some service.”

“Egyptian soldiers are very good fighters. I know from experience.”

“Not the worst in the world.”

“Well, what is on your mind?”

“Oh, nothing much. This place and the next one I suppose. I am just on the loose for a while.”

“That is fine. I have a job for you.”

“What kind of a job is it?”

“Right in your line—fighting.”

“Where is the war?”

“Anywhere that we find booty that is takeable. Can you ride?”

“Anything with four legs under it.”

“Better come along then. A lot of stuff could be picked up along the route, by fighting men.”

“Thanks, but I’ve just made up my mind to never fight again except in self-defense. It seems that fighting is a game where everybody is the loser. I have simply abandoned the idea of force. I want to sit and think.”

“That is a crying shame with the build you got on you.
Great big frame, fine legs, beautiful muscles—perfect fighting machine.”

“Thanks. I’ve been told that before and I have led many a battle and chopped down my share of men. But I doubt that any life I have ever taken benefited anybody. The property I took from conquered countries didn’t make anybody rich. It just whetted their appetites for more. No, no more soldiering for me.”

“Where are you headed for now? It is odd to see a high-born Egyptian around here. That outfit you got on cost aplenty, too.”

“Just walking away, and following my toes.”

“You can ride in my caravan tomorrow morning. Ride as far as you like and leave us whenever you want to. Of course, I’m hoping you will stay. We need a man like you for both offensive and defensive fighting. But you can have your way.”

“Thanks. Believe I will ride with you for a while. No telling what I might think by tomorrow this time.”

All day the next day Moses rode in the caravan of the desert Nomads. He sat a fine stallion and rode with pleasure. Everybody in the band seemed eager to win him over. As they went on, however, he became a little ill at ease. Too many of the men wanted to feel the texture of his fine linen with their rough hands. Too many of them wanted to heft the fine steel of his jewelled sword, which he never presented by its hilt. Always he held it by the hilt and let them pass their hands along its beautiful blade. Then again there was too much curiosity about the jewels on his hands and neck. He felt the bite of the tiny fear known as suspicion. If he did not join the robber-traders, they but waited until night to take him. He could picture his stripped corpse being casually left behind at the next encampment. The prospect did not worry him too much because he knew that he didn’t have to make that encampment. So long as they were on the march, he had a distinct advantage, mounted the way he was. The chief thought that he was at his mercy. All right, let him think it. But when he got ready to leave the caravan, nothing could be
done about it. The first large settlement that they passed he would rein in and announce off-hand that he was stopping there.

But early in the afternoon he saw his first mountain. It made him feel as if he had been lacking in something vital to life all along. He saw the great mountain at a distance lifting its rocky crown above the world and he was dumbstruck with awe. To him it had its being in grandeur, so it was right and proper to draw itself apart from the surrounding country and hide its mysteries in its heart. It was near; it was far. It called. It forbade. It was all things to his inner consciousness. He must believe in gods again, for here was the tomb of a god a thousand greater than the pyramids. No, it was not a negative and vain thing like a pyramid, whose builders were puny pigmies about the toes of this mountain. This was not a mere pile of stone. It had an aura of clouds upon its brow. This sublime earth form was the living place of a god, certainly. It had peace and fury in its face. Moses slowed his mount to gaze on the eminence.

“What is the name of that mountain?” he asked the man nearest him.

“It’s according to where you live. The people on one side of it call it Horeb. On the other side they call it Sinai.”

For more than an hour the train of men and animals wound close to the mountain and it changed its aspect every few minutes as it drew near, but gaining in glory and never losing. Then the way veered off to the right and the distance.

So Moses got down off his horse suddenly and walked away by himself and the riders nearest him were too surprised to act until he had gained ground in rocky territory. So Moses walked towards the mountain for some time. When he found water he quenched his thirst and sat down by the well.