Edward Whittemore: Jerusalem Poker

The statute had been formally promulgated by the priests of Ptolemy V to revive a traditional law of the land that had fallen into disrepute over recent millennia, when recurring conquests from the barbaric north had introduced uncivilized sexual attitudes into the eternal kingdom of the sun.

Specifically un-Egyptian attitudes, emphasized the carved inscriptions, the word heavily underscored with chisel marks in the Greek and demotic texts and deeply circled in the hieroglyphs.

Numantius was triumphant. He sailed down the Nile with his precious slab and at once returned victoriously to Europe, where his unique find shocked scholars everywhere. The debate raged and raged, and although the authenticity of the Numa Stone was eventually disproved, Numantius by then had firmly established his reputation in the fields of antique homosexual jurisprudence and homosexual Egyptology.

Yes indeed, mused Menelik Ziwar happily at the bottom of his sarcophagus, smiling up at little Cairo through his magnifying glass, his unblinking eye two inches wide.

Yes, son. A fateful stone from antiquity discovered in a temple beside the Nile. Fate breathing variety into life.

Cairo was twenty before Menelik Ziwar chose to discuss the books he kept stacked in his sarcophagus, which in fact were none other than the thirty-three volumes of Strongbow's monumental study of Levantine sex, published in Basle about the time Cairo was born, and banned throughout the British Empire in perpetuity for being despicably un-English.

There were tears in the old man's eyes when he told Martyr how he had spent months smuggling a complete edition of the work into Egypt, using a giant hollow stone scarab Strongbow had lent him for that purpose. And how, on the very day he had at last assembled the entire set and safely stored it away in his sarcophagus, a special courier had arrived from Constantinople bearing a note from Strongbow along with the explorer's huge magnifying glass, a memento from his old friend who explained he wanted Menelik to have the glass now that he had decided to disappear into the desert forever, to live the life of an Arab holy man.

Included in the note was a request that the giant stone scarab be returned to a certain party in Jerusalem from whom Strongbow had borrowed it, which Ziwar had done.

But never to see him again? croaked the mummy, tears running down his cheeks. Never to listen to him roaring with laughter and pounding the table over some recent discovery? Eating and drinking away those glorious Sunday afternoons beside the Nile when we were young and had our hopes before us? Instead just this magnifying glass, even though it had traveled so far and seen so much?

As the old man wept Cairo realized the deep sadness that gripped the scholar even now, two decades later, when he recalled the loss of his friend. But he also knew Menelik Ziwar would always have the memories of his forty-year conversation with Strongbow, those long Sunday afternoons of wine and scurrilous evidence so richly woven under the trellises of leafy vines and flowers, among placid ducks and statuesque waiters and squawking peacocks, in a filthy open-air restaurant on the banks of the Nile, always ending with drunken plunges into the cooling water.

Yes, Menelik had those memories, thought Martyr, and he also had Strongbow's magnificent study. And a magnifying glass powerful enough to read it.

At the bottom of the sarcophagus the mummy wiped the tears from his eyes. It was New Year's Day, 1900. The mummy sighed and opened one of Strongbow's volumes. Briefly he gazed at Martyr through the magnifying glass, then lowered it to the page.

A new century today, he said. I thought I might read to you a few excerpts from the last one.

I'd like that, Menelik.

Good. Here we are then, Volume One.

The author's preface wherein he lays forth his reasons for discussing in three hundred million words an historical topic of general interest heretofore ignored and denied, sex in the Levant or what might more accurately be called Levantine sex, some two-thirds of the entire endeavor being devoted to the author's personal experiences with a gentle Persian girl, once his beloved common-law wife, many years distant but never forgotten.

Magnifying glass in hand, Ziwar read on.

And so it went for the next fourteen years when Martyr made his weekly visits to the sepulcher beneath the public garden beside the river, the old Egyptologist lying at the bottom of his sarcophagus reading aloud passages from Strongbow's study, laughing when he came across incidents he recognized from things Strongbow had said on Sunday afternoons in the course of their forty-year conversation, Martyr totally absorbed as he leaned dreamily against the massive block of stone, listening and listening to the improbable events of an heroic past.

Thus Strongbow's tales were the abiding dreams of Cairo Martyr's early years, yet somehow he was never able to direct his own destiny as Strongbow had done. Decades passed and he was still a common dragoman.

As for Menelik Ziwar, he had taken a special interest in Martyr from the beginning because of a long-ago love affair at the age of sixteen, his first experience with a woman.

She had been much older than he was. Indeed, her blue-eyed daughter was older than he was. Like Menelik, she had been a slave in the delta, although originally she came from a village on the fringe of the Nubian desert. And he would always lovingly remember the gentle way she had initiated him into manhood.

The woman had also told him about her lost husband, and how soon after meeting him she had been carried away by a Mameluke raiding party, and after the birth of her blue-eyed daughter, sold into slavery.

She would never forget that, she said. One day she intended to repay the Mamelukes for their savagery.

Years later when he was able to do so, Ziwar had looked into the background of her dead husband, in his day well known as an expert in Islamic law in Egypt, and discovered that the wanderer known as Sheik Ibrahim ibn Harun had actually been a Swiss linguist traveling in disguise.

So when a frightened Nubian boy came to him some six decades later seeking advice, an ex-slave with blue eyes called Cairo Martyr, Ziwar immediately understood the significance of the peculiar name bestowed on him by his great-grandmother. Here, in the form of her great-grandson, was the means of revenge against the Mamelukes chosen by that proud and gentle older woman who had introduced Ziwar to sex at the age of sixteen.

Ziwar was determined to honor her memory by helping Martyr when the time came. Yet he remained patient with Martyr, knowing that the tasks his great-grandmother had secretly willed upon him could only be undertaken by a mature man with much experience behind him.

In fact not until 1914 did he decide to act, and even then he did so in a roundabout manner.

It was during one of Martyr's weekly visits and Ziwar had just finished reading aloud a footnote on the gentle Persian girl whom Strongbow had loved in his youth for a few weeks, no more, before she was carried away in a cholera epidemic. Ziwar sighed and laid aside his magnifying glass. He licked his lips thoughtfully. After the silence had gone on for several minutes, Martyr shook himself and emerged from his trance.

What is it, Menelik?

That recurring phrase in Strongbow's study, a few weeks, no more. Isn't it extraordinary how such a brief period of time could have come to mean so much to him? Think of the tens of thousands of experiences he had in the course of a haj spread over a lifetime, yet always he comes back to those few weeks. Don't you find it odd in a way?

Yes, said Martyr.

So do I, in a way. But then, time itself is odd. I learned that when I was younger than you, working in tombs. Did you know mummies can grow hairs?