The Egyptian (28 page)

In my heart I knew that I deceived her, for my desire to visit the land of Hatti was simply my desire to keep her with me longer before relinquishing her to her god.

But she replied, “Who am I to meddle with your plans? I go with you willingly wherever it may be since you have promised to take me back to my country. Where you go, I go, and should death overtake us, I will mourn not for my sake but for yours.”

I therefore resolved to join the caravan as a physician and so travel under the protection of the King of Mitanni to the land of Hatti, which is also called Cheta. When Kaptah heard this, he broke out in imprecations and invoked the gods to his aid.

“Hardly are we out of the jaws of one death before my lord yearns to plunge down the gullet of another. Everyone knows that the Hittites are wild beasts and worse. By the scarab! Cursed be the day I was born into this world to suffer the whims of my lunatic master!”

I had to call him to order with a stick, after which I said, “Be it as you wish! I will send you in company with some merchants direct to Smyrna, and pay for your journey. Look after my house there until I return, for I am sick to death of your eternal lamentations.”

But Kaptah blazed up again, saying, “And where would be the sense in that? How can I allow my lord to journey alone to the land of Hatti? I might as well loose a newborn kid among hounds, and my heart would never cease to upbraid me for the crime. I ask but one question: Is the land of Hatti reached by sea?”

I told him that so far as I knew there was no sea between the lands of Hatti and Mitanni.

“Blessed be my scarab,” Kaptah replied, “for if it had been necessary to go by sea I could not have accompanied you since I have sworn to the gods never to set foot on a sea-going ship.”

He then began to gather our things together and make ready for our departure, and I left all to his care, for in these matters he was handier than myself.

The journey with the Mitannian envoy was uneventful, and there is little to say about it, for the Hittites escorted us the whoje way in their chariots and saw to it that we had food and drink at every stopping place. The Hittites are hardy, caring for neither cold nor heat, for they live among barren hills and are trained to hardship and privation from their childhood. They are fearless and dogged in battle; they scorn the weaker nations and subdue them, while they honor the valorous and seek their friendship.

Their nation is divided into many clans and villages ruled by princes whose power over them is absolute, but who are in turn subject to the great king who dwells in his city of Hattushash, among the mountains. He is their high priest, their commander-in-chief, and their supreme judge. In him is united all the authority by which men are ruled, divine as well as temporal, and I know of no king in whom is vested equal power, absolute though all royal authority is held to be. In other countries, Egypt included, the priests and judges have more control over the king’s actions than is generally supposed.

In speaking of the great cities of the world men will mention Thebes and Babylon and sometimes Nineveh, which I have not seen. But I have never heard them speak of Hattushash, which is the great city of the Hittites and the seat of authority, set in the mountains like an eagle’s eyrie at the heart of the hunting grounds. Yet this city may well be compared with others; and when I remember that its gigantic buildings are of hewn stone and its walls impregnable and more massive than any I have seen, I must acknowledge this city to be one of the greatest. It remains a secret from the world because the King has closed it to foreigners. Only accredited envoys are admitted to have audience of the King and deliver to him their gifts, and even these men are closely watched during the time they remain in Hattushash. Therefore, the citizens do not willingly talk to strangers even if they know their language. Should one make inquiry of them, they reply, “I do not understand” or “I do not know,” and look about them uneasily lest someone should see them in converse with a stranger. They are not churlish by nature, however, but friendly, and they love to see foreign clothes, if these are handsome, and follow the wearers about the streets.

They do not hire soldiers, as do civilized peoples, but are themselves warriors, the men being divided into classes corresponding to their military rank. Thus the most distinguished are those who can afford to keep a chariot, and their status is determined not by their origins but by their proficiency in arms. All men of fighting age gather yearly for military exercises under the direction of their commanders. Hattushash is not a city of commerce like the other great cities but is full of forges and workshops from which come a steady clang of hammers, for in these workshops are forged arrowheads and spear heads and the wheels and frames of chariots.

At the time of my arrival in the land of Hatti the great King Shubbiluliuma had reigned for twenty-eight years. His name was so dreaded that people bowed and held up their hands when they heard it, crying aloud his praises, for he had brought order to the land of Hatti and subjugated many peoples. He lived in a stone palace in the middle of the city, and many stories were told of his birth and his heroic deeds, as they are told of all great rulers. I never saw him though; not even the envoys from Mitanni saw him. They had to leave their gifts on the floor of the reception hall, amid the jeers of the soldiers.

At first there seemed little for a physician to do in Hattushash, for as I understood it, the Hittites were ashamed of illness and concealed it as long as they could. Puny and deformed children were killed at birth, and ailing slaves were also put to death. For this reason their doctors had little skill and were ignorant, illiterate men, though they treated wounds and contusions well enough and had effective remedies also for the ailments peculiar to mountain districts, remedies that rapidly diminished the heat of the body and of which I was glad to learn. But if any man found himself afflicted with a disease that threatened to be fatal, he chose death rather than a cure, lest he should be maimed or feeble for the rest of his life. For the Hittites had no fear of death as civilized people have, but they held debility in great dread.

Yet in the main all great cities are alike, and the eminent and wealthy of every country are alike. When my fame spread among the people, a number of them came to my inn seeking cures; their maladies were known to me and I could treat them. But they preferred to come to me disguised, secretly and under cover of darkness, that their dignity might not be diminished. For this reason also they gave me munificent presents, and in the end I acquired much gold and silver in Hattushash, though at first I had feared to leave it as a beggar.

The Hittites were strict in their behavior, and men of the better class could not appear drunk in the streets without loss of dignity, but as in all other great cities, they did drink a great quantity of wine and also pernicious mixed wines. I treated the cramps resulting from this and stilled their trembling hands when they were to appear before the King. I let Minea dance for their entertainment; they admired her greatly and gave her rich presents without desiring more of her—for the Hittites were generous when anything pleased them. Having won their good will in this way I ventured to ask them about many things I could not openly have inquired into. I learned most from the King’s Keeper of the Archives, who spoke and wrote many languages, dealt with the King’s foreign correspondence, and was not bound by custom. I let him believe that I had been banished from Egypt never to return, and that I had no other object in traveling abroad than to acquire wealth and learning. He trusted me and was willing to answer my questions in return for good wine and Minea’s dancing.

“Why is Hattushash closed to foreigners?” I asked him. “And why must caravans and merchants keep to certain roads, although your country is rich and your city vies with any other in marvels? Would it not be better for others to learn of your might and sing your praises. among themselves as your land well merits?”

He tasted his wine and said, as his eyes strayed greedily to Minea’s slender limbs, “Shubbiluliuma, our great king, said when he ascended the throne, ‘Give me thirty years and I will make the land of Hatti the most powerful realm the world has ever seen.’ Those thirty years will soon have expired, and I think that before long the world will hear more about the land of Haiti than it cares to know.”

“But in Babylon I saw sixty times sixty times sixty men march past their king, and the sound of their feet was as the roar of the sea. Here perhaps I have seen as many as ten times ten men at once, and I cannot understand what you do with all the chariots that are being built in the city workshops. Of what use are chariots in mountain country? They are intended for fighting in the plains.”

He laughed.

“For a physician you are very inquisitive, Sinuhe the Egyptian! Perhaps we earn our little crust of bread by selling chariots to the kings of the flat countries.” He narrowed his eyes knowingly.

“That I do not believe!” I said boldly. “As readily would a wolf lend his fangs to a hare.”

He roared with laughter, smiting his knees till the wine slopped out of his cup.

“I must tell the King that! Perhaps even during your lifetime you may see a great coursing of hares, for the justice of the Hittites is. different from the justice of the plains. In your land I believe the rick rule the poor; in ours the strong rule the weak. The world will learn a new lesson before your hair is gray, Sinuhe.”

“The new Pharaoh in Egypt also has a new god,” I said with feigned simplicity.

“That I know, for I read all the King’s letters. This god is a great lover of peace and declares that there is no dispute between nations that cannot be settled peaceably. We have nothing against this god; on the contrary we like him very well—so long as he rules in Egypt and in the plains. Your Pharaoh has sent our great king an Egyptian cross that he calls the symbol of life, and he will certainly have peace for some years to come provided he sends us plenty of gold, that we may store up still more copper and iron and grain, build new workshops, and fashion more and heavier chariots than before. For all of these much gold is needed, and our king has gathered together here in Hattushash the cleverest armorers of many different countries and rewards them lavishly. But why he does this I believe no doctor’s wisdom can divine!”

“The future you foretell may please crows and jackals, but it does not cheer me, and I find in it no cause for laughter. In Mitanni stories are told of your crimes in the border country—stories so frightful that I will not repeat them, for they are unbecoming a cultured people.”

“What is culture ?” he asked, refilling his wine cup. “We also can read and write and amass numbered clay tablets in our archives. Our aim is to instill fear among the enemy peoples so that when the time comes they will submit to us without a struggle and so save themselves needless injury and loss. For we do not love destruction for its own sake; we prefer to annex countries and cities in as undamaged a state as possible. A timid foe is a foe half vanquished.”

“Is everyone then your enemy? Have you no friends at all?”

“Our friends are all those who make submission to us and pay us tribute,” he explained. “We let them live in their own way and do not interfere much with their customs and their gods so long as we are the rulers. Our friends are also all those who are not our neighbors—at least until such time as they become our neighbors, for then we tend to discover offensive traits in them that disturb harmony and force us into war against them. So it has been hitherto, and so I fear it will be henceforth, from what I know of our great king.”

“Have your gods nothing to say about this? In other countries it is often they who determine what is right and what wrong.”

“Right and wrong? Right is what we desire, and wrong is what our neighbors desire. That is a very simple principle that facilitates both life and statesmanship and that in my opinion differs little from the teaching of the gods in the plains. As I understand it, these gods hold that to be right which the wealthy desire and that wrong which the poor desire.”

“The more I learn about the gods the sadder I become,” I said dejectedly.

That evening I told Minea, “I have learned enough about the land of Hatti and have found what I came to seek. I am ready to leave, for there is a smell of corpses here, and it stifles me. Death broods over me like an oppressive shade while I remain, and I don’t doubt the King would have me impaled on a stake if he knew what I have discovered. Let us flee from this corruption; it makes me feel that I would rather have been born a crow than a man.”

With the help of some of my more eminent patients I succeeded in getting a permit to travel by a prescribed route to the coast and there to board a ship. My patients bewailed my departure and urged me to stay, assuring me that if I continued to practice among them I should be wealthy in a few years. However, no one sought to prevent my going, and I laughed and joked with them and told them the stories they enjoyed so that we parted friends and they gave me many presents in farewell. We left the fearful ramparts of Hattushash, behind which lurked the world of the future, and rode on our donkeys past the blinded slaves who turned the thundering millstones, past the corpses of sorcerers impaled on either side of the road. I made all possible speed, and in twenty days we arrived at the port.

We tarried there for a while—though it was a noisy town, full of vice and crime—for when we saw a ship bound for Crete, Minea would say, “That one is too small and will sink, and I have no wish to be shipwrecked a second time.” And when we saw a larger one, she would say, “That is a Syrian ship, and I will not sail in her.” And of a third she would object, “The master of the vessel has evil eyes, and I fear he will sell us as slaves in a foreign land.”

So we stayed on in the seaport, and I for one did not regret this. I had plenty to do there, cleansing and stitching up gashes and opening crushed skulls. The harbor master himself eventually came to me, for he was suffering from a pox. I knew the disease from my Smyrna days and was able to cure it with a remedy used by the physicians there.