“The priesthood of Ishtar has claimed them. I imagine they’re digging them up even now,” I said.
“Too bad you didn’t get to claim those bricks.” Darius sighed. “You know, I hate to speak of such a thing, but not since the day we met have I been given even a single coin for the many excellent favors I have rendered to my new friends.”
I laughed. “Never fear, Darius, you will be paid for your services!” I patted the heavy coin purse at my waist. That afternoon, after the arrest of the innkeeper and his wife, I had been called back to the sacred precinct of Ishtar for a private interview with the priestess. She warmly praised my perspicacity, and insisted that I accept a very generous reward.
Darius looked at the money bag, then raised an eyebrow. “Was that the only reward she gave you, young Roman?”
Antipater also looked at me intently.
My face turned hot. Was I blushing? “As a matter of fact, it was not,” I said, but of whatever else took place between the priestess and me that afternoon, I chose to say no more.
VIII
THE RETURN OF THE MUMMY
From Babylon, Antipater and I journeyed overland to Egypt, threading our way through rugged mountain passes and traversing sandy deserts. In my imagination I had assumed this corner of the world to be a trackless, unpopulated wilderness, but in truth it was quite the opposite. Our route, so Antipater informed me, had been laid out hundreds if not thousands of years ago by traders carrying goods between Egypt and Persia, some venturing as far as fabled India and Serica. We encountered many caravans going in both directions, transporting cargoes of ivory, incense, spices, precious stones, fabrics, and other commodities.
The accommodations along the way were well organized. At each stop we hired a new beast to carry us to the next—mostly mules and horses, but occasionally I was forced to ride a spiteful creature called a camel. At day’s end, there was always an inn waiting for us.
At last, at the ancient port of Gaza, we reached the sea, and reentered that part of the world where one may expect to hear Greek spoken, and even a bit of Latin. It was in Gaza that I first heard the alarming news of what was happening in Rome.
While Antipater and I had been off in Babylon, dreadful omens had been witnessed all over Italy. Mountains crashed together like Titans wrestling, sending shock waves that ruptured roads and caused buildings to collapse. The earth itself cracked open and spat flames into the sky. Domesticated animals turned feral; dogs behaved like wolves and even sheep turned vicious and attacked their owners. After so many awful omens, no one was surprised when war at last broke out between Rome and the subordinate cities of her restive Italian confederation. Now the entire peninsula was in tumult. Roman magistrates across Italy had been assassinated. In retaliation, and to quell the revolt, Rome’s armies had besieged and sacked rebellious cities and put entire regions to the torch.
Worried and homesick, I dispatched a letter to my father back in Rome, asking him to reassure me that he was well and to send his reply to a professional receiver of letters in Alexandria, the city that was to be our destination after we sailed up the Nile to see the Great Pyramid.
Antipater seemed to be far less agitated than I was by the news from Italy. Indeed, whenever a shopkeeper or a fellow traveler imparted the latest gossip about the situation in Rome, I thought I saw a fleeting smile on Antipater’s lips. He was a Greek, after all, proud of his heritage and, as I had learned in the course of our journey, suspicious and even disdainful of Roman power. Having now seen with my own eyes so many glorious achievements of Greek civilization, I understood the nostalgia felt by many Greeks for the days before Rome intruded on their world.
From Gaza, we journeyed due east along a flat, featureless stretch of sandy coast, until we came to that region of Egypt called the Delta, where the desert abruptly gives way to a land of lush greenery watered by the mouth of the Nile.
Before the Nile reaches the sea, it spreads out in many channels, like the fingers of a wide-open hand. On maps, this vast, watery region forms a triangular shape not unlike the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet, inverted: ?. Thus it acquired its name: the Delta.
In the coastal town of Pelusium we booked passage on a boat to take us up the Nile and all the way to Memphis, which lies a few miles south of the apex of the Delta, and from which we would make an excursion to see the fabled pyramids.
The heat was stifling as we sailed upriver on the crowded boat, passing quaint villages and ancient temples. The rank smell of Delta mud filled my nostrils. I spotted crocodiles in the shallows, heard the call of the ibis and the bellow of hippopotami, and felt very far from my father and the war that was raging in Italy.
Long before Romulus founded Rome, even before the heroes of Homer sacked Troy, the civilization of Egypt was already ancient. Some of the monuments we passed on the riverbank were unimaginably old, and they looked it. Weathered granite slabs depicted animal-headed gods in stiff poses alongside images of the Egyptian kings of old, called pharaohs, who wore bizarre headdresses and wielded crooks and flails.
While I gazed at Egypt passing by, Antipater kept his head down and read about it. During our stay with his cousin Bitto in Halicarnassus, Antipater had arranged to have several scrolls of
Along a quiet stretch of the river, we passed a little boy who stood atop the steep bank. I smiled and waved to him. The boy waved back, then hitched up his long, loose garments and relieved himself in the water below. The stream glittered under the bright sunlight and the boy made a game of aiming it this way and that. He grinned and looked quite proud of himself.
Antipater, poring over a scroll, never looked up.
“According to Herodotus,” he said, “no one has yet determined the source of the Nile. Those who travel as far as possible upriver, a journey of many months, eventually arrive in a region of vast swamps and impassable forests where the people are all sorcerers; they are also extremely short and as black as ebony, and speak a language incomprehensible to outsiders. Farther than that, no traveler has ever ventured and come back alive. Nor, according to Herodotus, can anyone adequately explain why the Nile, unlike all other rivers, is at it lowest in the spring, then
