And as I watched, the landscape itself was changing, too: the Great River had begun to divide up into its five branches, from which the many smaller branches subdivided into the fertile fields and vast marshes of the delta. The ancient dividing line between the Black Land of the valley and the Red of the desert, which draws the great division of life and death, had vanished; the distinction between land and water had become blurred. Beyond this outpost lay the sea, that mysterious frontier where the Two Lands of Egypt end, and all that is not Egypt begins. I was looking forward to crossing it.
13
The next day we reached Bubastis, the trading and temple capital of the eighteenth
I was impatient for the feel of solid ground beneath my feet again. But Bubastis only amplified the sensations of strangeness that had begun to haunt me, and which I had been unable to brush aside. Despite the fame of the grand centre of the city, what I could see of the place was overwhelmingly awful: improvised out of mud and water and sun, and dominated by a terrible damp heat that clung at our skins. The docks smelt of decay and filth. Commodities lay piled up in great heaps of confusion and noise; thousands of indistinguishable labourers and dock-workers merged together into one seething mass of humanity, toiling and shouting in the oppressive heat. And the flies and mosquitoes! Nakht insisted we each carried heads of fresh garlic to chew continuously as a remedy against the fever sickness. But their ceaseless buzzing and aggressive attentions irritated me intensely, giving me no peace; and I was forever swatting away at them, and slapping myself like a lunatic.
I asked Nakht for permission to take a tour of the town. Assuming I wished to visit the city’s sights, he agreed, saying Bubastis had ‘many temples and monuments of interest’, and he looked forward to my account over dinner. I did not tell him I had no interest whatsoever in temples and monuments. If opium jars were being imported into Thebes via the Great River, they would almost certainly not be brought ashore to be secretly traded in Memphis, because it was the most secure, and carefully controlled, military city in Egypt. It would make more sense to trade and transfer them here, to smaller ships among whose consignments the jars could be hidden. I decided I would see what I could find. But as I was preparing to set off, Simut appeared and asked if he could join me. I tried to refuse, but he smiled, and accompanied me anyway.
Leaving the ship, we descended into the chaos of the docks. Instantly, my skin burst with perspiration. We commandeered the best transport we could find to carry us into the city: a poor chariot of crudely hewn wood, undecorated, and without any suspension, driven by a toothless and incomprehensible local man. He stared at us in wonder and joy, as if we were visiting gods come to be fleeced on earth by him. We set off towards the dock gate, our bones grinding in their sockets with every jolt, while the man screamed vile curses in his unfathomable accent at the crowds.
As soon as we passed through the great gate of the docks, a vast, pathetic crowd of supplicants and beggars, young and old, raised a well-practised wail of hope and despair, clamouring for our attention and pity. Desperate and mostly unlovely young girls and boys smiled winningly, offering themselves to us; weeping mothers held up scrawny, mewling infants; deliberately crippled children begged for charity with rehearsed smiles and tears, crying out for pity, for the Gods’ sake. They were all beaten back by the dock guards, who casually set about them with their truncheons, and we quickly moved ahead.
The city’s main street ran into the baking, shimmering distance. Through the humid air, we could see the walls of a large, square temple rising above the grander houses that surrounded it. The green tops of trees appeared above the enclosure walls-a welcome sight amid the dry dirt. But I ordered the driver to turn away in the direction of the less salubrious quarters of the city. He grinned at me, spat in surprise, and headed down a dusty, narrow street, which led to the poor districts crowding the water’s edge. Hovels packed its sides in dark piles of crumbling, unstable mud-brick several floors high, most indistinguishable from the decomposing heaps of ordure and junk that lay everywhere, playgrounds for filthy children, feral cats, wild dogs and vicious birds.
‘I thought you wanted to see the sights?’ said Simut.
‘I do. I thought we’d take the scenic route.’
He glanced at me suspiciously.
‘What are you up to, Rahotep?’ he asked.
‘Just satisfying a private curiosity,’ I replied.
Narrow alleyways ran off into dark warrens and grim tenements. Tiny dark stores sold vegetables in piles on woven mats-but these were not the beautiful fruits we were used to in Thebes. These were the cheapest leftovers, most already bruised or rotting under a cloud of flies, unfit for sale in the central markets of the great cities. And every other shop front and narrow passageway offered young, human flesh. Countless young girls displayed themselves to us, calling offers and imprecations, and, when we passed without responding, they cried after us the filthiest, most inventively abusive insults I have ever heard, mostly about the superiority of dogs over Simut and myself as potential lovers.
Simut shouted over the noise of the street, and the creaking of the cart: ‘I heard this place was called the Way of Shame. Now I know why! I suppose most of them come from small delta villages, and end up in this fly- ridden dump for the rest of their lives.’
‘Most of them have been abandoned by their families, and here they are, selling the only thing they have left…’ I replied.
In our fine linens we were an unusual sight in this ghetto; children chased after us, shouting and yelling expletives, and women’s voices, rough and caustic, called out to each other from hovel to hovel, laughing and mocking. We drove on, and I saw no sign of what I was looking for, until suddenly I glimpsed something near a tavern. I commanded the driver to stop. Instantly more young women and girls crowded around us, offering their naked breasts with exaggerated smiles of seduction, which only served to display the rotten teeth in their mouths. Many of them bore the black spots and marks of the diseases of their trade. Simut shouted at them, but the women were not afraid; they just laughed louder, pushing their bodies even more ostentatiously forward, playful but forceful.
‘We can’t stop here!’ said Simut.
‘Wait in the chariot. I won’t be long,’ I replied.
‘I think we should go back right now,’ he replied, gripping my arm.
‘Just give me a moment,’ I said, and jumped down from the chariot. Simut jumped down after me.
‘I’m coming with you. But I don’t like this…’ he said.
We entered the tavern. I looked around, but the young man with the dazed eyes and languid movement, who had caught my attention as he entered from the street, was nowhere to be seen. The proprietor, a vast man in filthy linens, couldn’t believe his luck; he shambled forward to greet us, bowing subserviently and yelling at his tiny wife to bring beer. The place was a dump. The few crude benches and stools had been broken and mended many times over, the floor was filthy with bits of food and duckshit trodden into the muck, and the clientele were a motley band of low-ranked sailors and dock-workers; a few Egyptian, but most Nubian or Syrian. Young women called from the staircase leading up to the brothel on the first floor. Simut surveyed the surroundings with utter contempt.
The proprietor kicked two mangy cats off a bench, and bade us be seated. He set out two chipped bowls of beer and a dish of bread and chickpeas. The whole place watched as expectantly as an audience at a performance as we received these offerings. The beer was thick and cloudy, and the bread and chickpeas full of grit from the crumbling grindstones.
‘This is not what we want,’ I said. ‘We are looking for other pleasures…’
He scowled sourly, but when he grasped my meaning, his jowly face lifted itself into an ugly grin. He jerked his thumb up at the ceiling.
‘Only the best for you, sir. Only the best. Go on up, please…’
‘If I wanted a woman, I wouldn’t come here…’ I muttered into his filthy ear.
His eyes narrowed. He considered us both, and then nodded, throwing his filthy cloth over his shoulder, and
