Edward Whittemore: Jerusalem Poker

He stepped forward smiling. As Strongbow automatically raised his club, Menelik shouted out an earthy Coptic greeting unheard in over a thousand years, an intricately vulgar expression once used by Nile boatmen who were on the most intimate terms with one another. Strongbow couldn't understand the words of course, but he sensed their trend and liked it. He lowered his club and smiled, whereupon Menelik switched to a raffish Arab dialect and launched into a scandalous diatribe against certain Englishmen involved with criminal elements along the riverfront, which Strongbow enjoyed even more.

The oppressive heat in the bazaar was becoming intolerable. The two young men decided they needed something to drink and entered the first place they came to beside the Nile, as it happened a refuge for off-duty dragomen, a filthy open-air restaurant with trellises of leafy vines and flowers overhead, a pool where drowsy ducks paddled and a cage housing squawking peacocks listlessly twitching their tails. The cheap wine was strong, the spiced lamb tasty, the shrunken Arab waiters somnambulant as they puffed opium and drifted ever more helplessly with the hours.

There in the soothing hum of the shade Strongbow and Menelik spent a long summer Sunday afternoon, eating and drinking and feeding the placid ducks, watching the nervous peacocks mate and enthusiastically discussing whatever stray topic came to mind, the two of them so drunk by the end of the afternoon they threw themselves over the railing into the muddy river before staggering off to late naps.

A firm friendship was established that afternoon by the Nile. Thereafter, when he was in Lower Egypt, Strongbow always sent a runner to notify Menelik and the two of them would meet again on a Sunday in the same filthy open-air restaurant under the trellises of leafy vines and flowers, always at the same table where they had sprawled the first time, picking up their swirling raucous conversation as if they had never left it, heckling the peacocks and feeding the ducks as they gorged themselves on spiced lamb and endless carafes of wine, which they had to replenish themselves, the waiters having become too weak to carry anything as the years went by, Menelik making his way in a career of increasingly brilliant scholarship, Strongbow forever broadening the track of his daring explorations that reached from Timbuktu to the Hindu Kush.

On his weekly visits to the sepulcher beneath the public garden, little Cairo listened in awe to the stories recounted by Menelik Ziwar, these seemingly unimaginable adventures and bewildering changes of fortune that were far beyond anything a lonely boy, only twelve years old and a stranger in a great city, could ever hope to know.

Or so little Cairo felt. Old Menelik thought differently.

Not so, said the wrinkled mummy at the bottom of the sarcophagus, smiling and encouraging the little boy. It may look that way now, son, but we can never be sure what fate may breathe into life.

Achievements? Startling transformations? Just consider the Numa Stone for a moment.

Little Cairo was standing with his chin resting on the edge of the sarcophagus. Enchanting names, exotic memories, it was always like this in Menelik Ziwar's quiet vault. A faraway look came into the little boy's eyes.

The Pneuma Stone? he whispered.

Deep down in the sarcophagus amidst the stacks of books and the strange inscriptions five thousand years old, the mummy raised his magnifying glass to produce the gigantic eye of antiquity. He cackled dryly.

Are you saying Numa or Pneuma? Breath is involved all right and a breath of fresh air at that, but the Greeks are in the game only for purposes of scholarship, or by association, you might say. Anyway, it should be Numa and Strongbow told me about it on a Sunday afternoon four or five decades ago. He was coming back from the kitchen with another carafe of wine and another plate of spiced lamb, happily swinging his portable sundial on his hip as he threaded his way between the paralyzed waiters, when all at once a devilish grin came across his face. We were getting on toward the end of the afternoon by then and I was so dizzy I almost didn't see it. But when he collapsed in his chair and planted his enormous head in front of me, holding it in those enormous hands, there was no way to miss it. The grin was simply wicked. Roguery itself.

Here, I said, what's this bit of mischief?

Menelik you notorious Nilotic ghoul, he shouted, grabbing my arm and knocking the plate of lamb to the floor as he drew me into the conspiracy, Menelik you astounding black Copt, promise me that if you're ever asked about the Numa Stone, you won't say a word.

Why? I asked, mystified, having never heard of such a stone.

All the while Strongbow was grinning ever more wildly. So wildly that anyone who didn't know him as well as I did would have thought he was in the grip of some terminal fever. The grin was that demented.

Then he suddenly made an extravagant gesture that swept across the table, his sundial going with it and sending everything flying. The carafe smashed into the duck pond and stained the water, the glasses crashed against the peacocks' cage and ended their nervous copulations in a shower of splintering shards.

He brought his fist down on the table with a roar of laughter that shook everything in the place, even the waiters, it seemed. Of course it might have been only the wine playing tricks with my vision, but I swear I actually thought I saw them quiver at that moment, the first time they'd shown any life in years.

Why? thundered Strongbow. For the sake of Europe. We're going to save Europe from its own unspeakable hypocrisy.

Little Cairo listened, wide-eyed.

Yes, hissed the mummy, the Numa Stone. That vastly controversial slab so named after its discoverer, Numa Numantius, the German erotic scholar and defender of homosexuality. His critics were in the habit of referring to him contemptuously as Aunt Magnesia. But it was also true that no one in Europe at the time was more outspoken on sexual matters than Numantius, a fact that was certain to engage Strongbow's sympathy.

For weeks, continued Menelik, this Numa Numantius or Aunt Magnesia had been up the Nile searching through the ruins at Karnak, trying to find some small inscription in the temple that would suggest the ancient Egyptians had disavowed the persecution of homosexuals. But without success. The hieroglyphs on the columns listed innumerable public works undertaken by various pharaohs, and the innumerable virtues of those pharaohs, without mentioning sex even once.

Numantius was thoroughly discouraged the evening Strongbow happened to come upon him, sitting alone in the ruins of the temple and sighing over and over. Strongbow was traveling in disguise as a poor bedouin navvy from the area of the first cataract, and he began asking Numantius questions as was his habit with anyone he met. He learned what the German was seeking and decided to interrupt his journey in order to help.

The next morning Numantius moved his operations to some ruins on the other side of the river.

Strongbow, meanwhile, broke into several nearby tombs to find a basalt slab suitable for his purposes.

After inscribing the slab to his satisfaction he treated it with certain chemicals, then buried it in front of the temple entrance, one corner just above the drifting sand so that its appearance would seem to be the chance work of the wind.

A few days later, heaving with sighs and more discouraged than ever, Numantius returned to Karnak for a last reverie in the temple by moonlight. The inscribed corner of the basalt slab caught his eye and he quickly dug it up, Strongbow watching all the while from his hiding place behind a pillar.

Numantius clapped his hands. There on the unearthed basalt slab were three long neat rows of language carved one beside the other, in hieroglyphs and ancient demotic Egyptian and Greek, simultaneous translations of a legal statute from the XXXI Dynasty. In impressive detail the statute guaranteed the right of consenting adults to practice homosexuality to the best of their abilities, when said acts were performed in view of the Nile and were witnessed by a baboon or a dung beetle or some other sacred creature, said best abilities in no way to contravene the pharaoh's divine right to wage interminable wars of aggression in order to acquire more slaves to build more public works to honor the pharaoh.