Later in this same year Father took Neyah and me with him on his Royal Progress, in which he went up river as far as the southern garrison of Na-kish. My mother remained in the Royal City, for when he went upon a journey it was in her hands alone that my father placed the authority of the Royal Seal.
When I knew that Father was taking me as well as Neyah, I was very excited, for I had never been further south than Abidwa, and even that was when I was much younger. My clothes were packed in five trunks, which had curved lids; three were of painted wood and two were of leather studded with nails.
The Royal Barge was of fifty oars. The oarsmen sat on the narrow deck on either side of our rooms, whose walls were of cool reed-matting, with coloured linen curtains hung inside. At the stern of the boat, just in front of the great steering oar, there were mats and cushions for us to sit on, and when the sun was high it was covered with an awning striped in green and scarlet.
Sometimes we played a game with coloured pegs, which fitted into a chequered board; or I practised on a four-stringed harp while Neyah made a model of the barge, carving it from cedarwood, with thin strips of ivory for oars. Often we stopped at villages along the bank, and then the headman brought to Pharaoh a tally of all the people and animals under his care, and of the height of corn in the granaries. In some places my father gave judgment; and he always took us with him.
In one village there were two men who disputed the ownership of a wild-ass, which both claimed to have seen first. One man was more prosperous than the other, yet he kept crying out about his poverty and the number of his children and the poorness of his fields; and he protested that his was far the greater need. My father knew he lied, and he said, “You tell me your need is the greater because you are poor and this other man is evil and a liar. I shall give judgment and adjust your wrong. You, who are the poor man, shall have the wild-ass; and to show how much you are favoured, you and this other man shall exchange all your possessions.”
Then the man cried out in great self-pity, and said that he had been robbed. At this my father pretended to be surprised, “Robbed! When I have given to you the great possessions of your neighbour, which you so greatly envied? See, he is content under my judgment, although he has got for his share the fields and herds that you yourself claim to be the poorest in the land.”
Afterwards my father said to us, “Sometimes a man must lose all that he has before he realises the value of what he has lost; even as some, who loudly bewail about a scratch, need a cut from a sword before they appreciate a healthy body.”
At another village my father inspected all the animals; and he saw that one man’s oxen were in bad condition and had deep sores upon their shoulders from an ill-fitting yoke. He told their owner that this was not well, thinking perhaps that he was ignorant or stupid and had not seen the hurt of his animals. But the man protested that his oxen were thin because they were too lazy to eat, that the work they did in the fields was light enough for a child and that he envied his oxen their contentment. And my father said, “There is no need to envy them—you shall share it with them. You shall be yoked to the plough and draw it back and forwards under the hot sun until the field is furrowed.” And the oxen my father took away from him and gave to another, whose beasts were sleek and well cared for.
Some days later we came to a village where there was much grumbling among the people. This was found to be due to the arrogance of the headman, so my father deprived him of his office and appointed another in his stead.
When we asked him how he decided which man to give the office to, he told us, “It seemed that three men had equal claims, until I saw their gardens. In one garden the plants sprang strongly from the earth; but in the other two, the plants were wilting from lack of water, although the river flowed within fifty cubits of them. A man whose plants wilt within reach of water must be both lazy and a fool; and he shows ingratitude to the Weather-goddess under whose protection are all things that grow from the soil. A man is greater than the cow, whose milk he drinks; and the cow is greater than the pasture: yet, lowly as the pasture seems, if that should perish, then all the links in the chain of life that leads from it would perish also. So remember this, and in gratitude succour all growing things.”
Sometimes, when we had anchored for the night, Neyah and I used to fish from the stern of the barge. We had bronze hooks, baited with mud-worms or lumps of putrid meat. Once Neyah caught a large eel, and a sailor said it was the spirit of one who had died on purpose in the river. We didn’t believe him, but Neyah cut the line and lost the hook, and the eel fell back into the water like a long silver snake.
But what we liked best was when we went with Father to shoot wild-fowl in the reeds at sunset. His long arrows went much further than ours. I have seen him fly an arrow through the outstretched neck of a fast-flying swan.
We stayed at Abidwa, which was the royal city in the time of the Meniss, for five days. I got very tired of being there after the first two days, for I had to spend all my time with girls and women. They sat up very straight in their best clothes and talked about buildings and new embroideries for dresses. There was one girl, she was the chief noble’s daughter, who was like a very rich doll, the kind that is too good to play with. I said to Neyah, “Do you think she’s a real person underneath?”
And he said, “She’s only behaving like this because she keeps on remembering you are Pharaoh’s daughter.”
“Do you think, if I put a lizard in her bed, she would forget who I am, and be more use to play with?”
And he got quite angry and said, “If you go putting lizards in people’s beds I won’t have you as my co-ruler.”
“Well, if you get cross with me I shan’t have you as my co-ruler.” And we nearly had a quarrel, but just in time Neyah remembered something funny he wanted to tell me. “In the house where I’m staying, instead of lying down in a bath in the floor and having people to rub you with oil afterwards, you have to go into a little room, like a box without a lid, and suddenly somebody pours water over you from the other side of the wall. It’s not a very good idea, because it’s always either too hot or too cold.”
The day we left Abidwa, there was a procession down to the river. Father led the way in a chariot, standing in it alone; and after him came Neyah and I in a double chariot with two horses.
The north winds were strong, so the oarsmen rested in the shade of the curving sail; and in four days we reached Nekht-an, the chief city of the South. It had been founded by Na-mer, who before the Two Lands were united had subjugated the King of the North for ten years. He called this city Nekht-an, ‘the place that shall be remembered for its power’. It was in rivalry to this that the capital of the North was called Iss-an, ‘the place that shall be remembered for its wisdom’.
The country here is very different from that nearer the Delta. After several days we came to a place where the river runs between rocky hills; here there is a great quarry of red granite, which had been discovered three years before because of a dream of my father’s. In his dream he had remembered that hundreds of years before he had been a vizier under Na-mer, and that it was here that the stone for the King’s sarcophagus was quarried. As the dream was fragmentary, my father authorized a priest of Anubis to search his records, so that this place might be found again. And so, three years before our present journey, my father returned to this same quarry that he had last seen in the reign of Na-mer. And he caused this place to be called Za-an, ‘the place of the memory of Za’.
I had never before seen stone of this colour. A block of it was being cut for a statue of my father and my mother, which was to be set up in the Temple of Atet in the Royal City.
Then we came to the First Cataract, which the sailors call ‘The Hill of Angry Water’. We stayed here three days for the ceremony of the official birth of ‘The Gentle Slope of Smooth Water’, a canal, where in future boats could pass up and down the river without danger from the cataract.
When we arrived the canal was dry. Part of it was cut out of the rock, but in some places the walls were of dressed stone. There was a path on each side of it for the teams of oxen that would draw the boats upstream, and at the top of the cutting two great pillars of stone still joined the solid rock; from them ran deepcut grooves, filled with grease, in which slid heavy stones attached to ropes thicker than a man’s arm. These ropes passed round the pillars and were tied to a boat going downstream; as the heavy stones were drawn up, so would the boat quietly descend. This method was only used when the river was high, or when boats were so heavily laden that they would be swamped if they did not ride smoothly.
The head of the canal was closed by a wall of heavy timbers, in front of which were hundreds of bags filled with sand, each with a long rope attached to it.
Most of the timbers had been removed before the day of the ceremony. Five thousand workmen waited by the ropes, and at Pharaoh’s signal they pulled away the bags of sand that held back the water, which then plunged down the canal. And while some of the river went onward to dash itself upon the rocks of its customary channel, the rest of it glided smoothly upon this gentle hill of stone, until at last the sliding silver joined the quiet waters below the fall.
Then in the Royal Barge we passed up this mighty roadway of Pharaoh, to the chanting of the men who had built it.
That night at sunset there was a feast, and all who had worked to make these things come to pass sat down together in companionship; Neyah and I sat beside Father on a lion-skin by one of the many fires. Oxen and gazelles were roasted whole; and there were jars of beer and wine, and platters of cakes and honey and baked fish. The men sang their working songs, in which they tell their picks to split the rock, or the soil to leap into their carrying-baskets; just as the people of the fields sing to their oxen to thresh out the grain. And when the fires burnt low, dawn was already in the sky.
The next morning we returned to the barge, and we journeyed five days upstream to Na-kish.
This garrison, which guards the southern boundary of Kam, is on the west bank of the river. It is irregular in shape, having the semblance of a crouching lion, for it follows the outline of the outcrop of rock on which it is built. The walls, between the six square towers, are faced with baked brick, glazed like pottery, and rise sheer from the natural rock; they are higher than five men standing upon each other’s shoulders, and of the thickness of a tall man when he lies down in sleep. They surround a courtyard, where five hundred cattle and a thousand goats can be driven to safety. Leading up to the entrance is a narrow ramp, with a sheer drop on either side, which three swordsmen could defend against an army. The gateway is approached through a tunnel cut in the rock, which is closed in times of danger by three drop-gates of stone. These are each lifted by twenty raw-hide rope, which run over metal staples to a flat rimless wheel of sixteen spokes, on each of which two men must bear their strength to turn it. In the middle of the main courtyard is a well of sweet water, and round it are the storehouses, in which are kept wine and grain and other food that grows not here; and also arrows and maceheads and the blades of spears.
Na-kish is garrisoned by two thousand soldiers from the north, and eight thousand other soldiers, whose land this is. They are half as high again as other men, or so they seem; their bodies are black as bitumen and shine like statues of polished ebony. Their heads are shaven except for a tuft of hair on the top of their long skulls; and in their smiling faces their teeth look whiter than ivory or shell. They wear nothing but a breechclout held by a leather thong about their waists. These are our people, and they guard Kam from others of their colour, who are not of their race nor of their hearts, being cruel and treacherous and skilled in sorcery—that food of filth of little evil ones. Also do they guard us against invasion from Punt in the south-east.
The garrison must be strong, for here is stored the tribute that comes from peoples to the south of Kam: the gold and ivory, the precious woods and dyes, copper and silver, and marble of the sky; amethyst and wine-stone and rare plants; awaiting the yearly journey on the new rising river. Then when the river ebbs, the boats return heavy with grain to trade with the people beyond our boundaries.
It is well that gold should be protected by strong walls, for stone and gold are of the same company. And why should a wall of men risk their lives for the youngest things of Earth? Yet if these warriors heard that a child suffered from cruelty, then would they bring retribution with their spears, and, if need be, fight until not one of them was left alive to protect the mighty Laws of Kam.
Neyah told me that when he had grown his strength, it was with these people that he wished to gain his captaincy; he would learn their minds and try to win their hearts, so they would follow him to victory if hostile neighbours challenged us to war.
And I, too, loved these people; and the songs they sang at home about their fires. In their songs were curious harmonies, which stirred the heart like none that I had heard; some would drone like bees as loud as lions, as though a tempest blew on mighty reeds and thunders muttered to a moaning sea.
We stayed there for nine days, and on the tenth day we started downstream on our homeward journey to Men-atet-iss.