Robert Silverberg - Thebes of the Hundred Gates

He wondered what he was supposed to do next. Report for work? Where? To whom?

Pewero said, “In the morning. Go with them, when they leave.”

“Who?”

But Pewero had already lost interest in him.

He made his way back through the confusion that was the village, staring about him in wonder at the frantic intensity of it all. He had known, of course, that to an Egyptian death was the most important part of life, the beginning of one’s true existence, one’s long residence in eternity: but still it was astonishing to see these hordes of men hard at work, turning out a seemingly endless stream of coffins, scrolls, grave-goods, carvings. It was like a gigantic factory. Death was big business in this country. A dozen guilds were at work here. Only the embalmers were not to be seen, though he suspected their workshops would not be far away; but doubtless they kept to one side, in some quieter quarter, out of respect for the corpses over whom they toiled. The dead here were an active and ever-present part of the population, after all. Their sensibilities had to be considered.

He wandered down toward the river and stood by the quay for a while, looking for crocodiles. There didn’t seem to be any here, only long ugly fish. Unexpectedly he felt calmness settle over him. He was growing accustomed to the heat; he barely heard the noise of the town. The river, even though at low ebb, was strikingly beautiful, a great smooth green ribbon coming out of the inconceivably remote south and vanishing serenely into the unimaginable north, an elemental force cutting through the desert like the will of God. But it stank of decay; he was astounded, standing by it, to see what was unmistakably a dead body go floating by, perhaps a hundred yards out from the bank. No mummifying for that one, no tomb, no eternal life. A beggar, he supposed, an outcast, the merest debris of society: yet what thoughts had gone through his mind at the last moment, knowing as he did that for him death was the end of everything and not the grand beginning?

A trick of the sunlight turned the muddy banks to gold. The corpse drifted past and the river was beautiful again. When Davis returned to the lodging-house, four men were squatting outside, roasting strips of fish over a charcoal fire. They offered him one, asking him no questions, and gave him a little mug of warm rancid beer. He was one of them, the new apprentice. Perhaps they noticed that his features were those of a foreigner and his accent was an odd one, perhaps not. They were incurious, and why not? Their lives were heading nowhere. They understood that he was as unimportant as they were. Important men did not become apprentices in the House of Purification. The priestess Nefret, meaning to do well by the stranger, had buried him in the obscurity of the most menial of labor over here.

It was going to be a long thirty days, he thought. Here in the real Egypt.

To his utter amazement Eyaseyab appeared in his doorway not long after dark as he sat somberly staring at nothing in particular.

“Edward-Davis,” she said, grinning.

“You? But—”

“I said I would be back.”

So at least there would be some consolations.

The real Egypt got even realer, much too real, in the days immediately following.

On the first morning he followed the other men of his little mud tenement when they set out for work soon after sunrise. Silently they marched single file through the rapidly awakening City of the Dead, past the residential district and out a short way into the fringe of the desert. The line of demarcation was unmistakable: no transitional zone, but rather two utterly different worlds butting up against each other, fertile humus and green vegetation and the coolness of the river air on one side, and, on the other, arid sand and rock and the blast-furnace heat of the realm of the dead, striking with the force of a punch even this early in the day. The dawn breeze brought him the briny smell of the embalmers’ chemicals, far more pungent than it had been the night before. They must be approaching the House of Purification, he realized.

And then he saw it, not any kind of house at all but a raggle-taggle pseudo-village, scores of flimsy little booths made of sheets of cloth tacked together in frameworks of wooden struts. It was spread out like a Gypsy encampment over a strip of the desert plain that was probably a thousand yards long and fifty yards or so deep. As he watched, workmen began disassembling a booth not far from him, revealing the workshop within: soiled and wadded cloths, mounds of damp sawdust, rows of phials and flasks and unpainted pottery jars, racks of fearsome-looking tools, a scattering of discarded bandages, and, in the center of the room, a ponderous rectangular table made of four huge wooden butcher’s-blocks. The workmen were carefully packing everything up, sweeping the sawdust into large jars, stuffing the cloths in on top, gathering all the tools and chemicals together and putting them in elegant wooden satchels. He thought he understood. The job was finished here; the dead man had gone to his grave; now the booth where his body had lain for the seventy days of his mummification was being dismantled and every scrap, every bit of cloth, every stray hair, was being taken away lest it fall into the hands of some enemy of his who might use it against him in an enchantment. All these booths were temporary things. Each had been constructed for a specific occupant, and it was taken down when he had been safely seen into the next world.

He looked about in wonder. The great work of preparing the dead for the glorious afterlife was proceeding with awesome alacrity on all sides.

He had studied the process, naturally. He had studied every aspect of Egyptian life while preparing for this mission: they had poured it into him, hypnogogic training day and night, a torrent of facts, an electronic encyclopedia engraved on his mind. He knew how they drew the brain out through the nostrils with an iron hook and squirted chemicals in to dissolve whatever remained. How they made an incision in the left flank through which to remove the entrails for their separate interment in stone jars. The cleansing and scouring of the body, the washing of it in palm-wine; the packing of the interior cavity with myrrh and cassia and other aromatics; the many days of curing in a tub of dry natron to purge the body of all putrefying matter, the thirsty salts devouring every drop of the body’s moisture, leaving it as hard as wood. The coating of the skin with a carapace of resinous paste. And then the bandaging, the body enveloped in its protective layers of cloth, the hundreds of yards of fine linen so carefully wrapped, each finger and toe individually, thimbles covering the nails to keep them in place, the pouring of unguents, the reciting of prayers and the uttering of magic formulas—

But still, to see it all happening right in front of him—to smell it happening—

Someone whacked him on the back.

“Move along, you! Get to work!”

He stumbled and nearly fell.

“Yes—sir—”

Work? Where was he supposed to work? What did they want him to do?

He drifted as though in a dream toward a nearby booth. Its linen door was folded back, half open, and he could see figures moving about within. A naked body lay face down on the great wooden table. Above it stood two figures out of some terrifying dream, men in golden kilts whose heads were concealed by dark Anubis masks—the dog-faced god, the black god of death, tapered narrow ears rising high, dainty pointed muzzles projecting half a foot. These must be the embalmers themselves, members of the secret hereditary guild. A priest stood to one side, droning prayers. There were three other men in the booth, maskless and dressed only in loincloths, handing tools back and forth in response to brief harsh commands. Would an apprentice be useful here? He took a deep breath and went in.