Naguib Mahfouz - Voices from the Other World

With this my spirit left my house, and I stopped on the wayside at the sweet Prince’s palace. I peered into the Prince’s consciousness and found him, who had appreciated me and prized me in the most moving manner, feeling sorry for my loss. His mind was preoccupied with choosing my successor. I read within his memory the name of the new candidate: Ab-Ra, one of my more promising subordinates, though we had not been intimate.

All this was fine. But why remain in my village today, when Pharaoh is to receive the envoy of the Hittites, come to sign a pact of peace and reconciliation? I saw Memphis, in a glance of the eye, clamoring with her teeming multitudes, and the palace at the height of its splendor. The King, the ambassador, the priests, the nobles, and the generals were gathered in the hall of the Great Throne. All of these masters of the world were met in one place. The triumphant monarch was speaking to the representative of the mighty Hittites with an air of warm civility. But the King’s breast was filled with scorn, and a single expression recurred in his mind, “There’s no avoiding the unavoidable.” As for the envoy, his heart was brimming over with hate, and this thought was dammed up with it: “Be patient until this powerful ruler dies.”

My eyes wandered everywhere. I saw the faces and the clothes and the hearts and the minds and the bellies. I saw the outer world and the inner one without any hindrance, and amused myself for a time by examining the exquisite food and the vintage wine in their stomachs, until I came across onion and garlic in the gut of a priest. These are both forbidden for the clergy! I asked myself, do you see how this pious man takes advantage of his fellows’ distraction to sneak down this food? In part of a nobleman’s stomach, I caught the creep of the disease that would sap away his life. At this moment, the man was talking to a general with glee and delight. Inwardly, I said to him, “May you be welcome!” Then my sight fell on the governor Tety, infamous for his cruelty and ruthlessness, to the point that Pharaoh had to admonish him to be moderate in overseeing his province. I scrutinized him carefully, immediately discovering that his body was frail, his limbs were sick, and that he complained bitterly and ceaselessly about his teeth and his joints. Each time the pain assailed him, he yearned to be able to sever the infection from his body. This explained why he was gripped by cruelty, as he did not hesitate to cut out the crooked from among his subjects with merciless brutality. In addition to Tety, I saw the vizier, Mina. That obdurate man, who fought the idea of peace with all this force, was always agitating for war. Do you see the secret of this dangerous minister’s stubbornness? I saw that his mind was brilliant but his bowels were feeble. The morsels of his food remained trapped in them a long time, corrupting his blood as it circulated, so that it reached his brain spoiled, fouling his reason. As a result, that which issued from his mouth possessed great evil! The man satisfied with his own opinion sees it as straight and rightly guided, though I saw his mind as blackened and polluted.

Next my vision turned to the breasts of those present, looking into their hidden corners and behind their grinning faces. One was horribly bored, whispering to his companion, “When can we go back to the palace to hear the courtesans sing?” And that one over there muttered, “If the man had died from his illness, I would now be commander of the spear-throwers brigade!” And this other one pondered to himself in anguish, “When will the imbecile leave for his tour of inspection, so that I may rush to be with his gorgeous wife, whom I adore— ahhh!” And yet another told a friend from his deepest heart, “A human being doesn’t know when his appointed time will come.” And, “After today, I will not put off building my tomb.” Or, “Of what good is money, then?” Confusion so controlled his heart that he told a comrade, “Akhenaten said that the Lord is Aton, while Horemheb said that He was Amon. There is also a sect that worships Ra — so why did the Lord leave us in dissension?” I did not tarry too long at Pharaoh’s magnificent party, for I soon succumbed to ennui. I turned away from it, to find myself once more abroad in the wide world.

Many scenes from the earth and the heavens passed before me. I grasped their essential truths, seeing into their deepest aspects, until I fixed upon an egg being fertilized in a womb. I beheld its flesh and bones forming, and watched its birth, while my vision ran with it toward its future. I saw it as a child, as a boy, as a youth, as a grown man, as an old man — and as a dead man. I saw the events that befell him, his pleasure and torment and contentment and anger and hope and despair and his health and his illness, his passion and his boredom. I saw all these together in just a minute, until the cries of his birth and the moans of his death were mingled together in my ears! A capricious desire to play overcame me, and I followed the lifetimes of many individuals from their birth to their demise. I savored enormously the flow of their different states of being, which were hardly divided in time. For here a face would laugh and then it would scowl and then guffaw and then frown tens and tens of times in a fraction of a second! This woman wanders about as a young beauty, then she falls in love and marries and becomes pregnant and has children and goes into senility and withers away and becomes loathsome to look upon, all in a brief interval. Loyalty and treachery are not cleaved by an instant. These and countless other things are what make a farce of life — if the deceased could laugh, then I would drown in laughter. It seemed to me as though there is no reality in the world except for change. My soul wished that all these people and their crazy lives would just go away and be gone from my sight. I regarded them from afar as a numberless, limitless horde. Their forms diminished and their features dissolved and the distinctions between them disappeared. They became a single block, silent and still, without life or movement. I continued to stare at them in shock and perplexity, that slowly lessened by degrees until a new dimension was revealed to me that had previously been concealed.

I saw this calm darkness ignite with an all-encompassing light, as the faint, fading beams that pulsated in each brain, which by themselves were weak and dying, all clung to each other in one cohesive mass, emanating a powerful, dazzling incandescence. I saw in its radiance a gleaming truth, a pure goodness, and a luminous beauty, and my wonder and bewilderment returned. O Lord, no matter how the soul suffers and is tortured, it goes on inventing and creating just the same. And Lord, Taw-ty has seen glorious things and will see yet more glorious and awesome things. I became convinced that this light that glowed upon me was but a mere speck of the heaven to which I would ascend. I looked away and turned my back to the world, to find myself once again in the Sacred Chamber for embalming — and a divine ecstasy imbued my spirit that cannot be conveyed.

The seventy days of embalming were done. The men came again. They removed my body from the trough and wrapped it in layers of cloth. They brought with them a sarcophagus, upon which an image of the youthful Taw-ty was most flatteringly engraved, and placed the body inside it. Then they hoisted it upon the back of their necks and filed outside, where they met my family and my neighbors, who struck their faces and wailed. Their shrieks were worse than those on the day my death was announced. They proceeded to the Nile and embarked on a huge boat, which bore them to the City of Immortality on the West Bank. They jostled about the sarcophagus, calling out and howling, “My tears will not dry, my heart knows no peace after you, Taw-ty!” while my wife entreated aloud, “O my husband, why was I condemned to live after you?”