Robert Silverberg - Thebes of the Hundred Gates

The sensory impact pressed in on him from all sides at once in the first dazzling moment of his arrival: a fierce bombardment of smells, sights, sounds, everything alien, everything much too intense, animated by a strange inner life. Luminous visions assailed him. He wandered for some indeterminate span of astounded time in shimmering dream-forests. Even the air had texture, contradictory and confusing, a softness and a roughness, a heaviness and a giddy lightness. Egypt coursed through him like an uncheckable river, sparking and fizzing, stunning him with its immensity, with its stupefying aliveness.

He was inhaling magic, and he was choking on it. Breathing was a struggle—he was so stunned that he had to remind himself how it was done—but the real problem was the disorientation. There was too much information and he was having trouble processing it. It was like sticking not just your fingertip but your whole head into the light-socket. He was a dozen different sizes and he was experiencing every moment of his life, including moments he hadn’t yet lived, in a single simultaneous flash.

He had prepared for this moment for months—for nearly all his life, you might almost say—and yet nothing could really prepare anyone for this , not really. He had made three training jumps, two hundred years, then four hundred, then six hundred, and he thought he knew what to expect, that sickening sense of breathlessness, of dizziness, of having crashed into the side of a mountain at full tilt; but everyone had warned him that even the impact of a six-C jump was nothing at all compared with the zap of a really big one, and everyone had been right. This one was thirty-five C’s, and it was a killer. Just hold on and try to catch your breath , that’s what the old hands had told him, Charlie Farhad who had made the Babylon jump and Nick Efthimiou who had seen the dancers leaping over bulls at the court of King Minos and Amiel Gordon who had attended a royal bar mitzvah at the temple of Solomon when the paint was still fresh. It’s a parachute jump without the parachute , Efthimiou had said. The trick is to roll with the punch and not try to offer any resistance. If you live through the first five minutes you’ll be okay. You built up a charge of temporal potential as you went, and the farther back in time you went, the stiffer the charge, in more ways than one.

Gradually the world stopped spinning wildly around him. Gradually the dizziness ebbed.

The actual extent of what he could see was quite limited. They did their best to drop you off someplace where your arrival wouldn’t be noticed. He was in an unpaved alleyway maybe six feet wide, flanked by high walls of dirty whitewashed mud-brick that blocked his view to either side. The last bright traces of the golden aura of the jump field were still visible as a series of concentric rings with him at its center, a glittering spiderweb of light, but they were dwindling fast. Two donkeys stood just in front of him, chewing on straw, studying him with no great curiosity. A dozen yards or so behind him was some sort of rubble-heap, filling the alley almost completely. His sandal-clad left foot was inches from a row of warm green turds that one of the donkeys must have laid down not very long before. To his right flowed a thin runnel of brownish water so foul that it seemed to him he could make out the movements of giant microorganisms in it, huge amoebas and paramecia, grim predatory rotifers swimming angrily against the tide. Of the city that lay beyond the nasty, scruffy little slot where he had materialized, nothing was visible except a single tall, skinny palm tree, rising like an arrow against the blank blue sky above the alley wall. He could have been anywhere in any of a hundred Asian or African or Latin American countries. But when he glanced a second time at the wall to his left he caught sight of a scrawled graffito, a scribbled line of faded words hastily applied; and the script was the vaguely Arabic-looking squiggles and dots and boxes of Eighteenth Dynasty hieratic and his well-trained mind instantly provided a translation: May the serpent Amakhu devourer of spirits swallow the soul of Ipuky the wine-merchant, may he fall into the Lake of Fire, may he be trapped in the Room of Monsters, may he die for a million years, may his ka perish eternally, may his tomb be full of scorpions, for he is a cheat and a teller of falsehoods. In that moment the totality of the world which he had just entered, the inescapable bizarre reality of it, came sweeping in on him in tidal surges of sensation, Thoth and Amon, Isis and Osiris, temples and tombs, obelisks and pyramids, hawkfaced gods, black earth, beetles that talked, snakes with legs, baboon-gods, vulture-gods, winking sphinxes, incense fumes drifting upward, the smell of sweet beer, sacks of barley and beans, half-mummified bodies lying in tubs of natron, birds with the heads of women, women with the heads of birds, processions of masked priests moving through forests of fat-bellied stone columns, water-wheels turning slowly at the river’s edge, oxen and jackals, cattle and dogs, alabaster vessels and breastplates of gold, plump Pharaoh on his throne sweating beneath the weight of his two-toned crown, and above all else the sun, the sun, the sun, the inescapable implacable sun, reaching down with insinuating fingers to caress everything that lived or did not live in this land of the living and the dead. The whole of it was coming through to him in one great shot. His head was expanding like a balloon. He was drowning in data.

He wanted to cry. He was so dazed, so weakened by the impact of his leap through time, so overwhelmed. There was so much he needed to defend himself against, and he had so few resources with which to do it. He was frightened. He was eight years old again, suddenly promoted to a higher grade in school because of his quick mind and his restless spirit, and abruptly confronted with the mysteries of subjects that for once were too difficult for him instead of too easy—long division, geography—and a classroom full of unfamiliar new classmates, older than he was, dumber, bigger, hostile.

His cheeks blazed with the shame of it. Failure wasn’t a permissible mode.

Maybe it was time to start moving out of this alleyway, he decided. The worst of the somatics seemed to be past, now, pulse more or less normal, vision unblurred —if you live through the first five minutes you’ll be okay —and he felt steady enough on his feet. Warily he made his way around the two donkeys. There was barely enough clearance between the beasts and the wall. One of the donkeys rubbed his shoulder with its bristly nose. He was bare to the waist, wearing a white linen kilt, sandals of red leather, a woven skullcap to protect his head. He didn’t for a moment think he looked convincingly Egyptian, but he didn’t have to; here in the great age of the New Empire the place was full of foreigners—Hittites, Cretans, Assyrians, Babylonians, maybe even a Chinaman or two or some sleek little Dravidian voyager from far-off India— tell them you’re a Hebrew , Amiel had advised, tell them you’re Moses’ great-grandfather and they’d better not fuck around with you or you’ll hit them with the twelve plagues a hundred years ahead of schedule . All he had to do was find some short-term way of fitting in, keep himself fed somehow until he had completed his mission, sign on for work of any sort where he could simulate a skill—a scribe, a butler, a maker of pots, a fashioner of bricks. Anything. He only had to cope for thirty days.