Robert Silverberg - To the Promised Land

They came for me at high noon, the hour of Apollo, when only a crazy man would want to go out into the desert. I was hard at work and in no mood to be kidnapped. But to get them to listen to reason was like trying to get the Nile to flow south. They weren’t reasonable men. Their eyes had a wild metallic sheen and they held their jaws and mouths clamped in that special constipated way that fanatics like to affect. As they swaggered about in my little cluttered study, poking at the tottering stacks of books and pawing through the manuscript of my nearly finished history of the collapse of the Empire, they were like two immense irresistible forces, as remote and terrifying as gods of old Aiguptos come to life. I felt helpless before them.

The older and taller one called himself Eleazar. To me he was Horus, because of his great hawk nose. He looked like an Aiguptian and he was wearing the white linen robe of an Aiguptian. The other, squat and heavily muscled, with a baboon face worthy of Thoth, told me he was Leonardo di Filippo, which is of course a Roman name, and he had an oily Roman look about him. But I knew he was no more Roman than I am. Nor the other, Aiguptian. Both of them spoke in Hebrew, and with an ease that no outsider could ever attain. These were two Israelites, men of my own obscure tribe. Perhaps di Filippo had been born to a father not of the faith, or perhaps he simply liked to pretend that he was one of the world’s masters and not one of God’s forgotten people. I will never know.

Eleazar stared at me, at the photograph of me on the jacket of my account of the Wars of the Reunification, and at me again, as though trying to satisfy himself that I really was Nathan ben-Simeon. The picture was fifteen years old. My beard had been black then. He tapped the book and pointed questioningly to me and I nodded. “Good,” he said. He told me to pack a suitcase, fast, as though I were going down to Alexandria for a weekend holiday. “Moshe sent us to get you,” he said. “Moshe wants you. Moshe needs you. He has important work for you.”

“Moshe?”

“The Leader,” Eleazar said, in tones that you would ordinarily reserve for Pharaoh, or perhaps the First Consul. “You don’t know anything about him yet, but you will. All of Aiguptos will know him soon. The whole world.”

“What does your Moshe want with me?”

“You’re going to write an account of the Exodus for him,” said di Filippo.

“Ancient history isn’t my field,” I told him.

“We’re not talking about ancient history.”

“The Exodus was three thousand years ago, and what can you say about it at this late date except that it’s a damned shame that it didn’t work out?”

Di Filippo looked blank for a moment. Then he said, “We’re not talking about that one. The Exodus is now. It’s about to happen, the new one, the real one. That other one long ago was a mistake, a false try.”

“And this new Moshe of yours wants to do it all over again? Why? Can’t he be satisfied with the first fiasco? Do we need another? Where could we possibly go that would be any better than Aiguptos?”

“You’ll see. What Moshe is doing will be the biggest news since the burning bush.”

“Enough,” Eleazar said. “We ought to be hitting the road. Get your things together, Dr. Ben-Simeon.”

So they really meant to take me away. I felt fear and disbelief. Was this actually happening? Could I resist them? I would not let it happen. Time for some show of firmness, I thought. The scholar standing on his authority. Surely they wouldn’t attempt force. Whatever else they might be, they were Hebrews. They would respect a scholar. Brusque, crisp, fatherly, the melamed , the man of learning. I shook my head. “I’m afraid not. It’s simply not possible.”

Eleazar made a small gesture with one hand. Di Filippo moved ominously close to me and his stocky body seemed to expand in a frightening way. “Come on,” he said quietly. “We’ve got a car waiting right outside. It’s a four-hour drive, and Moshe said to get you there before sundown.”

My sense of helplessness came sweeping back. “Please. I have work to do, and—”

“Screw your work, professor. Start packing, or we’ll take you just as you are.”

The street was silent and empty, with that forlorn midday look that makes Menfe seem like an abandoned city when the sun is at its height. I walked between them, a prisoner, trying to remain calm. When I glanced back at the battered old gray facades of the Hebrew Quarter where I had lived all my life, I wondered if I would ever see them again, what would happen to my books, who would preserve my papers. It was like a dream.

A sharp dusty wind was blowing out of the west, reddening the sky so that it seemed that the whole Delta must be aflame, and the noontime heat was enough to kosher a pig. The air smelled of cooking oil, of orange blossoms, of camel dung, of smoke. They had parked on the far side of Amenhotep Plaza just behind the vast ruined statue of Pharaoh, probably in hope of catching the shadows, but at this hour there were no shadows and the car was like an oven. Di Filippo drove, Eleazar sat in back with me. I kept myself completely still, hardly even breathing, as though I could construct a sphere of invulnerability around me by remaining motionless. But when Eleazar offered me a cigarette I snatched it from him with such sudden ferocity that he looked at me in amazement.

We circled the Hippodrome and the Great Basilica where the judges of the Republic hold court, and joined the sparse flow of traffic that was entering the Sacred Way. So our route lay eastward out of the city, across the river and into the desert. I asked no questions. I was frightened, numbed, angry, and—I suppose—to some degree curious. It was a paralyzing combination of emotions. So I sat quietly, praying only that these men and their Leader would be done with me in short order and return me to my home and my studies.

“This filthy city,” Eleazar muttered. “How I despise it!”

In fact it had always seemed grand and beautiful to me: a measure of my assimilation, some might say, though inwardly I feel very much the Israelite, not in the least Aiguptian. Even a Hebrew must concede that Menfe is one of the world’s great cities. It is the most majestic city this side of Roma, so everyone says, and so I am willing to believe, though I have never been beyond the borders of the province of Aiguptos in my life.

The splendid old temples of the Sacred Way went by on both sides, the Temple of Isis and the Temple of Sarapis and the Temple of Jupiter Ammon and all the rest, fifty or a hundred of them on that great boulevard whose pavements are lined with sphinxes and bulls: Dagon’s temple, Mithra’s and Cybele’s, Baal’s, Marduk’s, Zarathustra’s, a temple for every god and goddess anyone had ever imagined, except, of course, the One True God, whom we few Hebrews prefer to worship in our private way behind the walls of our own Quarter. The gods of all the Earth have washed up here in Menfe like so much Nile mud. Of course hardly anyone takes them very seriously these days, even the supposed faithful. It would be folly to pretend that this is a religious age. Mithra’s shrine still gets some worshippers, and of course that of Jupiter Ammon. People go to those to do business, to see their friends, maybe to ask favors on high. The rest of the temples might as well be museums. No one goes into them except Roman and Japanese tourists. Yet here they still stand, many of them thousands of years old. Nothing is ever thrown away in the land of Misr.

“Look at them,” Eleazar said scornfully, as we passed the huge half-ruined Sarapion. “I hate the sight of them. The foolishness! The waste! And all of them built with our forefathers’ sweat.”