The 22 Letters (19 page)

Of course it wasn't real writing, Aleph still told himself. But he no longer cared what the priests or the gods might think. They could not condemn him to any worse punishment than that he was suffering now; bodily here in Sinai and in his imagination whenever he thought of the Egyptian armies descending upon Gebal.

When the long day's work came to an end and the exhausted workers trailed off to their quarters, Aleph pretended he had a spoiled papyrus to recopy, and stayed behind in the shed with the pens and the ink to write what he had to write. The light was fading, and in addition he was exhausted, but he forced his brain to remain clear and his hand to write neatly and clearly in tiny characters. He knew he must do it that night, for he was sure tomorrow they would take the bird from him. The guards looked curiously at the new slave working overtime, but the last thing that entered their heads was that he was writing a message of vital importance to his sister.

Aleph finished writing and hid the tiny missive safely in his dress. The sun was setting. He could not set the poor bird free unfed and in the dark. He took it to the sleeping quarters, where he presumed there would be food and water for the prisoners; indeed, by the time he got there he found barely enough even for a pigeon. He was desperately anxious lest they should take the bird from him that night. One of the soldiers threatened to do so, but Aleph managed to make it appear that the man was trying to make off with a sacrificial fowl for his own purposes, and the soldiers were just sufficiently respectful to the clerks, slaves though they were, for Aleph to have his way.

In the squalid, stifling sleeping quarters, Aleph spent a restless night during which sheer exhaustion battled with anxiety for his plan, and with desperate dreams in which he was flying over mountains or falling helplessly into deep gulfs.

He was awake before dawn, and in the dim light he managed to wrap the message round one of the pigeon's legs and tie it with a thread pulled from his garment. As the sun rose, and the rest of the workers were roused, Aleph announced that he was taking the bird to be sacrificed.

The temple was near the clerks' quarters. As he approached the priest standing outside he called out: “I have here a dove for the sacrifice.” And at the same time he opened the cage door and held the bird aloft in his hand. “See, a snow-white dove!” he cried.

Then, in front of all the guards and priests he pretended to stumble. As he did so he let the bird go. The pigeon was so astonished that it fluttered to the ground. Aleph ran at it shouting and flapping, as if to catch it, and now the bird took fright and fluttered up, up into the air. The priest cursed him for a fool, the soldiers laughed at him, and he stood there and watched the white bird, bright in the rays of the early sun, circling higher and higher into the blue sky.

“Go with the gods to Gebal!” said Aleph quietly. The sun was rising on his right hand, but the pigeon continued to circle above him, until Aleph's heart sank: how foolish it was to expect it to know in which direction its distant home lay. Then suddenly the bird straightened out on a course that lay directly in front of him. Gradually Aleph watched the pigeon dwindle out of sight, to the northward.

Only then did the thought come to him that, even if his message did get through, he would never know. Yet as he returned to the work of the sweltering copper mine, and day after day passed in relentless routine, a spark of hope kept him alive: the hope that the pigeon might survive the dangers of the desert, and arrive in the pigeon loft in Gebal to tell Beth that he had not forgotten his family; and a fainter hope that Beth might find and understand the message he had carefully composed in their private sign language, that it might even somehow help Gebal in its danger. And deeper still within him was a faith so faint that he did not yet acknowledge it to himself, that his twenty-two letters might be neither a sin against the gods nor a childish game but something for which he, Aleph, might be remembered.

There were days when these hopes were all that saved him from feeling that his spirit was being sucked from his body by the pitiless heat as water evaporates from a jar. And there were days when he felt clearer-headed and more able to think—and this was worse, for he would tell himself that all his hopes depended upon a bird, already perhaps no more than a few feathers blowing in the desert wind, a frail monument to be remembered by!

At the back of his mind during all this time, there must have been forming the idea of leaving for himself a more lasting monument. Yet what opportunity did he have? There were no holidays in this inferno, and no rest hours while the sun was in the sky. Every hour of work was organized according to the ruthlessly efficient Egyptian production system. At night the silence of exhaustion fell on the valley and a few soldiers kept guard and saw that the slaves did not move from their sleeping quarters.

When his opportunity came at last, he did not immediately recognize it. The small temple used by the overseers and soldiers needed a new inscription. Aleph, it was discovered, was not only a clerk but also an apprentice monumental mason; since there was none other on the staff of the mine he was taken from his tallying job and told to copy out an inscription in hieroglyphs on to the rock face near the temple. The Egyptian symbols had now come to stand for everything that Aleph hated, and at first he considered pretending that he was incapable of the job. But at least it would be a change from counting copper ingots, so, taking the engraving tools and the hammer and constructing for himself a rough scaffolding to stand on, he set to work.

The work took days, and when the Egyptians saw that he was keeping at it conscientiously they left him to it. But something was forming in his mind as he chipped away: another inscription, in different letters.

In the middle of a forenoon, he finished the hieroglyphic inscription, with its usual fulsome praise of Pharaoh and its dedications to the Egyptian gods. Then, moving his scaffolding to another smooth rock face, and with his heart thumping, he began to work, cutting his own signs into the rock and spelling out words as he went along. He carved out a dedication to his own goddess, Balaat-Gebal. Then he climbed down and stood back to admire his work. He could not feel very proud of it. It looked crude, formless, almost barbaric compared with the stylish neatness of the Egyptian writing. But it was his own!

It was at this moment that the priests of the temple came to inspect his progress. When they saw what he had done they were aghast. Was he mad to deface the approaches to the temple with this illiterate scrawl? Why had he not been supervised? Take the slave away! Give him fatigue punishment! Let him learn his place!

Aleph did not mind. His letters, and the name of the goddess of Gebal, were cut truly and deeply into the rock of Sinai. They would stand as a memorial to him for many years to come.

They stand there today.

But even today there is no one who can explain the working of the brain of a white pigeon that was carried in a wicker cage all the way from Gebal to Jericho and Sinai, and suddenly released over the desert.

For weeks now this bird had been carried southward at the slow human pace of the march, over mountains, through valleys, by the shores of seas and across deserts. Absurd to say that its small round eye had registered the details of the landscape and that its tiny brain had remembered them for the return journey. Every day the sun had wheeled overhead at right angles to the line of march. Had this perhaps been automatically recorded on some mechanism of orientation in the bird's brain? Or had it been all the while conscious of invisible forces, magnetic fields stretching from pole to pole of the globe, which its human masters had never even thought of? Or did it possess some extra sense of whose existence we still know nothing which enabled it to find its way over the surface of the earth?

The eyesight of the white pigeon was good, yet when it suddenly took off into the blue, alarmed by the clumsy behavior of the human who had set it free, its bird's-eye view showed it nothing but barren, unfamiliar mountains and featureless desert, with the hazy western arm of the Red Sea to the southwest. If it had memories of tree-clad mountains and fertile coasts, nothing the pigeon could now see recalled them. It circled upward from the inhospitable landscape, gained height, continued to circle—and then—?

And then all we can say is that the watchers on the ground saw it suddenly straighten out on a course north-northeast, and head directly for the pigeon loft in Gebal, some four hundred miles away as the pigeon flies.

For several hours, with nothing in the dry brown landscape below to tempt it down, the pigeon settled to a steady course. The keen eye of a desert hawk, perched on a stone in the middle of the flat wilderness, spotted it high in the southern sky, and took off to intercept. The pigeon was high, and moving at speed; the hawk was hard put to it to overtake its victim and gain superior height for the strike.

Suddenly the pigeon sensed the hawk above and behind it. But where to hide from its enemy in this emptiness of sky and sand? The hawk stooped out of the sun, the pigeon saw it coming and jinked wildly, the hawk missed, plummeted hundreds of feet below with the momentum of its stoop, recovered itself, and climbed again to the attack.

The pigeon was now diving very fast toward the ground. The hawk had little time to steady for its next stoop, and when it did so it had to check to avoid dashing itself against the rocks. The pigeon jinked again, dodged among boulders, close to the ground, and disappeared into a tiny cave among the eroded rocks. Aloft the hawk flapped frustratedly, but once out of sight the prey was soon out of mind, and the hawk took off again for the South.

The pigeon stayed in hiding until its feverishly beating heart settled a little, then it rose once more into the air, circling until the course established itself in its brain, and flew on northward. A tiny oasis, a mere spot of green in the desert below with a promise of water tempted it down a few hours later. It drank, but there was little in the way of food for a pigeon accustomed to the fertile fields of Gebal, and it was not long before the bird was on the wing again. But as the sun sank slowly in the west, its gleam was reflected by a sea horizon. To the east there were hills and mountains, and below was greenness and cultivated fields. The bird planed down and landed near a stream, drank, flapped over to a field of vetches, ate greedily, flew to a tree, and found a roost for the night.

If it had not been for the boy with the herd of goats, the Giblite pigeon might have stayed in that fertile plain instead of returning home, and this story might not have been written. Indeed, it may be that no stories would have been written in this manner, for the bird carried with him a secret that was then unique in the world.

The little goatherd came on the scene next morning, while the pigeon was sitting on a branch idly surveying the cultivated crops all round him. The boy was armed with a leather sling, and fitting a smooth round stone into it, he whirled the sling round, and let the stone fly at the bird on the bough. The stone crashed noisily through the leaves, but missed its mark. The pigeon took off in alarm and rocketed into the sky. Then, as it circled doubtfully in the clear morning air, the mysterious mechanism came into action again, the longing for home made itself felt, and it settled once more on to its north-northeasterly course.

This day, as the bird flew, it could see to the East a hot misty depression filled with a dead salt sea, then a muddy river wriggling along the bottom of a deep valley, then a sparkling blue lake, then a snow-streaked mountain. But these features of the landscape meant little to the bird's brain, though it was the country through which, in the cage, it had made the painful march south. The little clusters of sunbaked brick or stone, that were the towns, meant even less. And who knows what the bird made of the dust clouds raised by columns of men, whose weapons and armor glinted in the sun—Pharaoh's armies marching north?

Still on its dead-straight course, the bird found itself between mountain and sea over a coastal strip that grew narrower, and also more familiar. Late that day it came to a limestone rock standing in the sea, through which the waves had begun to carve an archway. It was swarming with pigeons, its own wild cousins. But it did not stay to pass the time of evening. Every feature now was well known. Two more blue bays to cross in the light of the sunset, and there was Gebal, lit by the last rays of the sun.

9

The Day of the Offering

A festival in Gebal—The tomb of the King—Return of Zayin with the secret of horsemanship—Return of Nun with the secret of navigation—Return of the pigeon with the alphabetical message

It was the Day of the Offering, the day when Abishram, King of Gebal, was to count his people and learn how rich his kingdom was in worldly goods. And for Beth it was her last day at home, the day when she was to begin her duties as a Temple Maiden, in the Temple of Balaat-Gebal.

There was a stir in the streets of the town from earliest dawn. Peasants were arriving from the countryside with donkeys bearing well-filled panniers, flocks and herds were being driven through the town gates, porters were carrying up bales of merchandise from the harbor, and every craftsman wanted to be first in the queue to deposit his offering and avoid the long wait in the heat of the day.

Only in the house of Resh, it seemed, was there no last-minute bustle to prepare a gift. And yet Resh himself was nervous, irritable, pacing up and down in the house and refusing to touch his morning meal. Beth herself felt strangely calm, full of expectation though she was, but she was worried to see her father so unhappy.

“Father,” she said tentatively, “your gift—it is ready, isn't it?”

“My offering?” Resh snapped. “Of course it's ready. I trust His Majesty will be well aware of what my services are worth to him.”

“Are you thinking of Zayin and Nun and Aleph, Father?” Beth asked.

“Of course I am,” said her father. “What else would I be thinking of on a day like this? It is a day when a man needs his sons.”

“Perhaps we shall have news of them today,” said Beth comfortingly. “Who knows, perhaps today Nun's ship will come in, and the army will return, and—and Aleph will come down the mountains, and they will all bring rich offerings for the King. Wouldn't that be wonderful, Father?”

“Wonderful indeed!” muttered Resh. “I am too old to believe in wonders.”

Beth felt it was a little unfair that her father should be brooding in this way over her absent brothers, while apparently forgetting what an important day it was for her too.

“Father,” she said again meekly, “when should I go to the Temple?”

“You?” said her father, apparently surprised. “Ah, child, I was forgetting. I am also losing a daughter today.” The thought did not seem to make him any happier.

“I shall not be far away, Father,” she said. For herself, she was looking forward to living in the Temple quarters, though she was still a little vague about what her duties would be. “But should I go this morning?” she asked.

“Oh, any time today, child,” her father answered. Beth became impatient.

“Please, Father,” she said. “Take me to the palace and the Temple now. We can see the first ceremonies, and find out what I should do.” And it would be better for him, she thought, than standing around at home. He must have felt the same, for he agreed, and they went together to where the offerings were already being made.

It was more like a market than a ceremony. As the priests and clerks checked and tallied, peasants were unloading sacks of corn or dried lentils—nothing perishable, Resh said, was accepted on the Offering Day—fishermen laid down piles of sun-dried fish, owners of olive orchards delivered great jars of oil. Potters were queuing up with samples of their best decorated pots, weavers of flax and wool were standing with lengths of useful cloth in their arms. There were even wild mountaineers, bringing pots of honey, and Resh explained that, although they might have avoided the offering if they wished, they would be considered as slaves if they were unable to produce as a gift something that could be weighed or measured. The merchants and traders, of course, made the best show. They paraded, family by family, offering bales of purple cloth from Tyre, copper vessels from Cyprus, spices from Southern Arabia, gems from Egypt and gold from the far corners of the earth. There was one rather ragged sailor who had recently returned from a coasting trip to the North. All he had was a long skewer-like poignard of a strange hard metal: most of its shaft was blackish, tinged with red rust, but its tip was sharpened and polished to a silvery point. The simple sailor did not know the name of the metal, and the clerks were doubtful of its utility, but they accepted it contemptuously and put it among the bronze tools and weapons.

There was a stir among the watching crowds in the public places, and suddenly they saw people making for parts of the town overlooking the sea. Resh explained that the shipwrights were making a communal offering of a new vessel for His Majesty's Navy. It was too big, of course, to be brought to the Temple, so it was to be rowed in review round the point. It came into sight, gaily decked, with a band of musicians on board. The music floated across the waters, but the occasion was spoiled by a quarrel that broke out among the representatives of the shipwrights on the shore. Resh said that there was a group of men, mere laborers who had felled the trees and carried the timber, who were trying to get a share of credit for the finished job of the master shipwrights. But they were told that they would no more get credit than the galley slaves who rowed the ship, or the musicians, and were sent packing. Beth wondered if this was fair, but her father merely said that a craftsman was a craftsman.

As the morning went on the piles of produce and stacks of manufactured goods grew in the royal courtyard; clerks were kept busy tallying the quantity of each sort; slaves labored to carry it all to the warehouses. The herds of sheep and goats and cattle began to be troublesome. Animals, Resh explained, were accepted from the herdsmen on Offering Day: they were needed for the sacrifices in the Temple, but it was a nuisance to keep so many of them near the palace. They had to be farmed out again to landowners to be looked after—and some envious people said that these were better off after Offering Day than before.

Beth had been excited by the crowds of people thronging in to the town and by the market-day feeling in the air, but after a time she began to tire. There was so much merchandise, so many animals. “When are you making your offering, Father?” she asked. “And when—?”

“The mason's offering will be a special one, like the shipwrights',” said Resh. “There will be a ceremony.”

“And when will you take me to the priestesses?”

“Don't be impatient, child,” said her father testily. “You don't want to make it look as if I'm offering a daughter because I've nothing better to give, do you?”

Beth felt shamed and angry. “Am I nothing better than a cow or a sack of corn, Father?” she exclaimed.

“I did not mean that, my daughter,” Resh said in a milder tone. “Come, perhaps I could take you now to the inner court, and ask the priestess what you should do.”

They passed through an entry guarded by sentries, who recognized Resh, and Beth saw that they were in the courtyard in which she had confronted the King. There stood the mysterious square object, and there stood the tall obelisk, both swathed in cloth. Beth felt her courage ebbing at the sight, but her father escorted her through to the Temple, where they found one of the priestesses. Beth was still awed by the surroundings, but the conversation was very matter-of-fact. She was told which of her belongings she should bring, and that she would have to present two white doves as a sacrifice.

“That is easy,” said Resh. “Beth, remember to bring two pigeons from your flock.”

But at that moment the courtyard began to fill with people, priests, scribes, and notables of the sort whom Beth had seen in the procession when she had been there, illegally, before. Her feelings of terrible guilt returned, but the priestess quite kindly said that she could wait in a colonnade at the back, with the other novices who would be watching the ceremony.

A hush came over the assembly, as the King entered at the far end of the court, and took his seat on a throne placed there for him. Then the High Priest mounted the steps, bowed before the King, and spoke.

“Most High and Sacred Majesty,” began the High Priest. “May you live for ever, and may the abundance of your kingdom never grow less! On this auspicious day your devoted people have brought the good things of this world to lay at your feet. They have offered them in the sight of the gods to bear witness to the prosperity of Your Majesty and of your kingdom. Nowhere in the world is there found a prince more favored with richness of belongings: your fields produce corn and beasts, your enterprising merchants bring to your shores rich materials purchased on very favorable terms. Your Majesty's servants care only for your welfare, day by day, and it is their joyful duty to do so. But we, your priests, think of Your Majesty's glory, not for today and the next day only but for all eternity. The goods that are brought to Your Majesty today will last while they are needed, but the corn will be eaten, pots will be broken, robes of fine tissue will wear out, beasts will die or must be killed. What Your Majesty's devoted priests have to offer, however, are things that will not be consumed or outworn. They are such that generations yet unborn will look upon them and say ‘Great is Abishram, King of Gebal!' They are such as will enshrine the name and person of the High and Mighty King Abishram for all eternity!”

The folds of cloth were pulled away from the obelisk, and the inscription, now neatly finished and painted in gorgeous colors, was revealed. At the same time the cloth was removed from the great square object, and a vast and magnificent burial sarcophagus, a huge stone coffin, was revealed with its massive lid propped open to show the rich lining of the inside.

A murmur of appreciation rose from the crowd, the King spoke a few words of thanks, and the ceremony seemed to be over. Then Beth noticed her father making his way through the throng to the High Priest and plucking in an agitated manner at his sleeve. But the High Priest seemed to be ignoring him and brushing him aside, for the King was now condescending to examine at closer quarters the great stone box in which he was to spend eternity. Resh turned away and retired to the back of the assembly. There seemed to be something so strange in the way he was standing that Beth slipped away from her colonnade and went to his side. Her father was weeping.

“What is it, Father dear?” Beth asked, taking his hand.

Her father spoke, but he seemed to be talking to himself. “The ingratitude of priests! Yet what should I, a poor master mason, expect in the way of gratitude or recognition? I, a man with no sons at my side! What have I to do with the King's gift? I only saw the stones cut from the quarried blocks, hewed, hollowed, fitted, and smoothed. Why should I be proud? There are many men who could do that—none in Gebal, but perhaps in Egypt, in Babylon. But, Beth, my daughter”—and here he took Beth by the arm and pointed to the great sarcophagus—“do you not see! See how the cover of the coffin, in white stone, fits on to the body of black basalt. What king in the world has a coffin in two colors? And this
I
thought of, this was my idea entirely!” He choked with indignation. “And see the High Priest, how he shows it to His Majesty as if it were his own creation! Not a word of credit to the masons for their work! Oh no, it is the priests' gift. And I, I have nothing to offer of my own, and I have no sons to bring gifts for me, and what is to become of me I do not know. I am finished, and my sons are all dead!”

Beth did what she could to comfort him as they walked sadly home, but there was little she could say. He had expressed what she had been trying to ignore, that her three brothers who had been away for such a long time might never return, that, they might already be dead. And she must leave her father in the empty house and go to the Temple.

When they got home she remembered the two white birds which she must bring as an offering to the Temple. It made her no happier to think that two of her little flock must be sacrificed, but in this sad hour it was only one more thing to regret. Then it struck her: she
used
to have, two white pigeons, but now there was only one.

The birds had not yet returned from their day's foraging. Beth climbed up on to the city wall above the house, from where she often used to call the flock down out of the sky. She could not see her flock against the mountains, where every tree showed clearly in the level rays of the setting sun. She shaded her eyes and looked along the sea horizon, into the low sun's glare. A lonely sail stood up against the glow of the sky, but there were no birds. But there, yes!—from the North, where the headlands receded into the blue distance, a little flock was approaching.

The birds circled round between the town and the mountains, and with the sun behind her Beth could see plainly—yes, there were two white birds, so—but no, she was not looking for a flock with two white birds! It was strange how she still forgot. The flock swept round and made for where she stood, and she thought she could recognize some of the other birds of her flock. There were certainly two white ones among them now, and that morning there had been only one. Well, no … That morning she had been too busy thinking of the day's events to look at her pigeons. Now she was surrounded by a flutter of wings, and they were alighting around her. She held out her hands to the white birds and called to them. “Lady Snow, come, come to me! And is it—can it be your husband, White Snow returned? Come, don't be shy!” And now the two white birds were perching on her hands, and as she looked at them her heart leaped and she saw that to the leg of one was tied a golden ring, and to the other a tiny scroll. And at once she said to the one in her left hand, “You have come from Zayin, for that is his ring, and he cannot be far away.” And to the bird in her right hand she said, “And you have come from Aleph, and what that strange scroll you have brought can mean I cannot imagine, but perhaps it will tell me what has happened to my brother.” And as she stood on the city wall, something made her raise her eyes to the lone sail she had seen, and something told her that at this happy time it must be Nun's ship homing on the wings of the wind over the sea.