Mahfouz achieves an evocation of the inner contradictions of the life she lives that no other writer whose work I know has matched. Zola's Nana must retire before her. On the evening at the end of the Nile festival, Rhadopis's admirer-clients knock on her door as usual. After dancing suggestively at the men's request, ‘dalliance and sarcasm came over her again'. To Hof, eminent philosopher among them: ‘You have seen nothing of the things I have seen.’ Pointing to the drunken throng, ‘… the cream of Egypt… prostrating themselves at my feet… It is as if I am among wolves.’ All this regarded amid laughter, as her titillating audacity. No one among these distinguished men seems to feel shame at this degradation of a woman; no one sees it as a consequence of the poverty she was born into, and from which it was perhaps her only escape. The class-based denial of the existence of any critical intelligence in menial women, including prostitutes, is always an injustice refuted convincingly by Mahfouz's women. This night she uses the only weapon they respect, capriciously withholds herself. ‘Tonight I shall belong to no man.'
A theatrical ‘storm of defiance’ is brewing in her as she lies sleepless. It may read like the cliche passing repentance of one who lives by the sale of her body. But the salutary mood is followed next night by her order that her door should be kept closed to everyone.
That is the night Pharaoh comes to her. No door may be closed to him. He is described as sensually as Mahfouz's female characters. The encounter is one of erotic beauty and meaning without necessity of scenes of sexual gyration. It is also the beginning of Pharaoh's neglect of state affairs for the power of a ‘love affair that was costing Egypt a fortune'. The price: prime minister Khnumhotep has had to carry out Pharaoh's decree to sequester temple estates. Pharaoh's choice is for tragedy, if we accept that the fall of the mighty is tragedy's definition, as against the clumsy disasters of ordinary, fallible people. Rhadopis, in conflict between passion for a man who is also a king and the epiphany of concern for the Egyptian people of whom she is one, uses her acute mind to devise means by which Pharoah may falsely claim that there is a revolt of the Maasayu tribes in the region of the priests’ lands and summon his army there to overcome the real rebellion, that of the priests. The intricate subterfuge involves exploiting an innocent boy — also in love with her — when Rhadopis resorts to her old powers of seduction to use him as messenger.
Tragedy is by definition inexorable as defeated Pharaoh speaks after the priests have exposed his actions to his people and the mob is about to storm the walls of his palace. ‘Madness will remain as long as there are people alive… I have made for myself a name that no Pharaoh before me ever was called: The Frivolous King.’ An arrow from the mob pierces his breast. ‘Rhadopis,’ he orders his men, ‘Take me to her… I want… to expire on Biga.’ We hardly have been aware of the existence of Pharaoh's unloved wife, the queen; how impressively she emerges now with a quiet command, ‘Garry out my lord's desire.’ Mahfouz's nascent brilliance as, above all political, moral, philosophical purpose, a story-teller, is revealed in the emotional pace of events by which this story meets its moving, questioning end, with the irony that Rhadopis's last demand on a man is to have the adoring boy messenger find a phial of poison with which she will join Pharaoh in death, final consummation of sexual passion. For the last, unrequited lover, asked how he obtained the phial, Mahfouz plumbs the boy's horror in the answer: “I brought it to her myself What was the young writer, Mahfouz, saying about love?
The Nile is the flowing harbinger of Egypt's destiny in the scope of Mahfouz's re-imagined pharaonic history, starting with Khufu's Wisdom, Fourth Dynasty, continuing with Rhadophis of Nubia, Sixth Dynasty, and concluding with Thebes at War, Seventeenth-Eighteenth Dynasty.
A ship from the North arrives up the Nile, at Thebes. On board not a courtesan or a princess but the chamberlain of Apophis, Pharaoh by conquest of both the North and South kingdoms. Again, through the indirection of an individual's thoughts, anticipation is roused as one reads the musing of this envoy: “I wonder, tomorrow will the trumpet sound… Will the peace of these tranquil houses be shattered…? Ah, how I wish these people knew what a warning this ship brings them and their master!’ He is the emissary of an ancient colonialism. Thebes is virtually a colony of Apophis's reign. The southerners are, within the traditional (unchanging) justification of colonization, different: darker than self-appointed superior beings — in this era the Hyksos of the North, from Memphis. Compared with these, a member of the chamberlain's mission remarks, the southerners are ‘like mud next to the glorious rays of the sun'. And the chamberlain adds, ‘Despite their colour and their nakedness… they claim they are descended from the loins of the gods and that their country is the wellspring of the true pharoahs.’ I wonder what Naguib Mahfouz, looking back to
1938 when his prescient young self wrote his novel, thought of how we know, not through any godly dispensation, but by palaeontological discovery, that black Africa — which the southerners and the Nubians represent in the story — is the home of the origin of all humankind.
After this foreboding opening, there comes to us as ludicrous the purpose of the mission. It is to demand that the hippopotami in the lake at Thebes be killed, since Pharoah Apophis has a malady his doctors have diagnosed as due to the roaring of the animals penned there! It's a power pretext, demeaning that of the region: the lake and its hippos are sacred to the Theban people and their god Amun. There is a second demand from Pharoah Apophis. He has dreamt that the god Seth, sacred to his people, is not honoured in the South's temples. A temple devoted to Seth must be built at Thebes. Third decree: the governor of Thebes, deposed Pharoah Seqenenra, appointed on the divide-and-rule principle of making a people's leader an appointee of the usurping power, must cease the presumption of wearing the White Grown of Egypt (symbol of southern sovereignty in Egypt's double crown): ‘There is only one king in this valley who has the right to wear a crown’ — conqueror Apophis.
Seqenenra calls Grown Prince Kamose and his councillors to discuss these demands. His chamberlain Hur: ‘It is the spirit of a master dictating to his slave… it is simply the ancient conflict between Thebes and Memphis in a new shape. The latter strives to enslave the former, while the former struggles to hold on to its independence by all the means at its disposal.’ Of the three novels, this one has the clearest intention to be related to the present in which it was written — British domination of Egypt, which even after Britain renounced her protectorate in 1922 was to continue to be felt, through the 1939-45 war until the deposing of King Farouk by Nasser in the 1950s. It also does not shirk the resort to reverse racism which inevitably is used to strengthen anti-colonial resolves. One of Seqenenra's military commanders: ‘Let us fight till we have liberated the North and driven the last of the white Herdsmen with their long, dirty beards from the land of the Nile!’ These are Asiatic foreigners, the Hyksos, referred to as ‘Herdsmen’ presumably because of their wealth in cattle, who dominated from northern Egypt for two hundred years.
Grown Prince Kamose is for war, as are some among the councillors. But the final decision will go to Queen Tetisheri, Seqenenra's scholarly mother, the literary ancestress of Mah-fouz's created line of revered wise matriarchs, alongside his recognition given to the embattled dignity and intelligence of courtesans. Physically, she's described with characteristics we would know as racist caricature, but that he proposes were a valid standard of African beauty, ‘the protrusion of her upper teeth… that the people of the South found so attractive'. Tetisheri's was the opinion to which ‘recourse was had in times of difficulty': ‘the sublime goal’ to which Thebans ‘must dedicate themselves was the liberation of the Nile Valley'. Thebes will go to war.
Grown Prince Kamose is downcast when told by his father that he may not serve in battle: he is to remain in Seqenenra's place of authority tasked with supplying the army with ‘men and provisions'. In one of the thrilling addresses at once oratorical and movingly personal, Seqenenra prophecies, ‘If Seq-enenra falls… Kamose will succeed his father, and if Kamose falls, little Ahmose [grandson] will follow him. And if this army of ours is wiped out, Egypt is full of men… if the whole South falls into the hands of the Herdsmen, then there is Nubia… I warn you against no enemy but one — despair.'
It is flat understatement to acknowledge that Seqenenra dies. He falls in a legendary hand-to-hand battle with javelins, the double crown of Egypt he is defiantly wearing topples, ‘blood spurted like a spring… another blow… scattering the brains', other blows ‘ripped the body to pieces’ — all as if this happens thousands of years later, before one's eyes. It is not an indulgence in gore, it's part of Mahfouz's daring to go too far in what goes too far for censorship by literary good taste, the hideous human desecration of war. The war is lost; Kamose as heir to defeat must survive by exile with the family. They take refuge in Nubia, where there are supporters from among their own Theban people.
From the horrifyingly magnificent set-piece of battle, Mahfouz turns — as Tolstoy did in War and Peace — to the personal, far from the clamour, which signifies it in individual lives. Kamose leads the family not conventionally to the broken body but to ‘bid farewell to my father's room'. To ‘face its emptiness'. With such nuance, delicacy within juggernaut destruction, does the skill of Mahfouz penetrate the depth of responses in human existence. And
