Egyptian paintings

My memory is flawed.

What a bummer!

Although I recall quite clearly thinking as I was reading, man oh man, if I ever run out of ideas for Egyptian style paintings of daily life, not rituals, then I can return to this book for endless ideas.

My library was dispersed when my health was its lowest. So my copy of Ancient Evenings is now elsewhere. That's okay. It was paperback anyway. And I tore it in half. It was too thick to hold comfortably to read. Abebooks sold me another copy. Now I have it again in hardback this time. For a pittance of $5.00.

The section that impressed me so hard back then was easy to find. The scene is the narrator as child. His parents are visiting his great-grandfather, the Pharaoh at the Pharaoh's palace. I recall them having a party outside, couples pairing off, wife-swapping, then the boy being put in room to sleep. The room is painted as tombs are, except a lot better and brighter. I recall a seeming endless series of descriptions of animals in nature interacting. Page after page up to five pages or so. As I read it back then, went wow, this Mailer guy really gets it. I recalled the animals fading to sleep. But now I'm not seeing that in the book.

I didn't recall anything about the Pharaoh calling for his dog, then the dog doing a mind trick of being directed to go to the individual thinking their own name. The Pharaoh told the guests to each think their own name. "Go to Hathfertiri" and the dog goes right up to Hathfertiri because Hathfertiri was thinking her own name. Then the Pharaoh japed about not being able to teach the dog to talk. Then he told the dog to go to the boy.

The boy senses thoughts of others. I did not recall that essential bit. The dog scene did not impress on my memory. When the dog walked up to the boy, the boy saw the dog's thoughts and he saw gloomy desperate existence, he saw lives that he did not want to live, he saw himself debauched in the future at twenty-four years of age, and he felt intense shame. The dog made the boy cry.

In front of the Pharaoh. Bad scene.

Re-reading, the scene of the painted walls is not so impressive as recalled. I'm disappointed. The book is divided into sections as if separate books; the Book of the Gods, the book of the Charioteer, the Book of Queens, and so on. I went straight to the Book of the Child and bang there it is.




    By the way I was carried, I could feel her fury. My stomach was on her shoulder, and my head below her breast. The ground rose toward me and dropped away on every step as if I were swinging upside-down. But I was so scalded with fright that I might as well have been a small beast just dropped into boiling water, my life screaming out of me even as my flesh was being cooked. When we came to a stop and she set me down, I thought for a moment I had died -- we were standing in a room so beautiful I did not know at first if we were in a house, a garden, or a pond.
   Trees surrounded me. They were painted on every wall. I stood upon a watery marsh-green floor, a golden marsh grass, and painted fish were swimming between the painted blades of grass. Above stars were shining out of a painted evening sky, and in the reed light of the western wall, the sun was setting, even as it had set last night to the west of my great-grandfather's roof, only now the view was of the Pyramids, and they were red as the meat of the pomegranate in this light, sitting on the painted plain of Jizeh between two of the four golden trees that held up the corners of this rom. Doves and butterflies hovered in the streaming air, lapwings and green siskins flew in and out of the horns of oxen in the swamp reeds on the wall, water-lilies bloomed beneath my feet, and blue lotus almost concealed the rat who was stealing eggs from  a crocodile's nest. In the midst of my weeping I began to laugh at the expression on the crocodile's face.
    Now my mother put an arm around my waist and asked me to look at her, but I was staring at the ivory leg of the couch on which she sat. It was like the limb and hoof of an ox, or would have been if the hoof did not rest upon the polished floor instead of sinking into it, although  as I continued to stare, the glaze was so high on painted water that I could see my own reflection and my mother's which gave, therefore, the look of light on water after all.
    We stood among all the birds and animals who lived in the paint and I could even see flies and scorpions placed by the artist in the roots of the grass through which the fish were swimming. I smiled finally at my mother.
    "I'm ready to go back," I said.
    She looked at me, and asked, "Do you like this room?"
    I nodded.
    "It is my favorite room," she said, "I used to play here when I was a child."
    "I think I would like to play here, " I said.
    "In this room I learned that I was supposed to marry the Pharaoh."
    I could see my mother on a throne beside Ptah-nem-hotep and they were both wearing blue wigs. A boy with a face different from mine played between them
    "If you had married Him," I said, "I wouldn't be here."
    My mother's deep black eyes stared for a long while into my eyes. "You would still be my son," she said. Now she put me on her thigh and I fet myself sink very slowly into the flesh of her lap, a tender settling that did not seem to stop even when her flesh gave way no more; the reverberation of this delicious sensation went out like the last remembrance of evening and now I lived with bliss to equal the desolation I had known while staring in the face of the dog. How I loved the red light of the Pyramids as they reflected on the marsh-green polish of the floor.
    "Yes, I was supposed to have married the Pharaoh. Would you have liked Him for a father? Is that why you began to cry?"
    I lied. "I do not now why the dog made me sad," I told her.
    "I think it is because you could have been a Prince."
    "I do not think so."
    "I was supposed to be the first wife of the Pharaoh."
    "But you married my father instead."
    "Yes."
    "Why did you do that?"
    Hathfertiri, as if aware of my power to visit -- I never knew when -- into the thoughts of others, now seemed to have no thoughts at all.
    "Yes, you married my father, and I am his son, and now I'm happy you took me to this room." I did not know really what I was saying, except I knew I had somehow been sly enough to say what would encourage her to tell me more.
    "You are not your father's son," she said, and her eyes looked for an instant into her own terror, so she added, "That is you are, but you are not," and I knew she had thought of Menenhetet, "It does not matter," she went on, "whose son you are, since I called for you. I prayed for you to come forth, and in truth, I will never again be so splendid as I was in the hour when all that was inside me called for you." She held my face in her palms, and her hands were so alive that it felt as though I lay in bed between two lovely bodies. "You came forth into my belief that I would give birth to a Pharaoh, and that is a belief I have continued to have even after I married your father."
    "Do you still have such a belief?"
    "I don't know. You have never been like other children. When I am alone with you, I do not feel a large difference in age between us. And when we are not together, I often think of what you say. Sometimes I believe thoughts come to you from other people's thoughts. Indeed, you see into the mind of others. You are most noble in such powers. Yet I do not think you will ever be a Pharaoh. In my dreams, I do not see the Double-Crown on you."
    "What do you see for me?"
    I had never been more sensitive to each wind that stirred in her mind, and so I saw again the black speck of the body louse that had frightened her, and I knew her fear. A worm might just as well have crawled over my own throat.
    That, however, was only one of the two houses of my mother. The blood of a warrior like my great-grandfather must have inhabited the other, because when she looked at me again her eyes were as flat as an officer measuring the value of a captive. "Why did you begin to cry?" she asked. "Did the dog's eyes speak of a poor future?"
    "They spoke to me of shame," I said, and thought of my mother and Menenhetet in their embrace on the roof garden. I must have sent my thoughts to her for the blood came to my mother's cheeks and she was angry.

They get into an exchange of wits beyond the ability of a child about the child's father, his position in the court, his relation to Pharaoh, the class position of the mother, their calculated loveless relationship, the uncanny abilities of the boy and so on. It's all character development. While it's all splendidly Egyptian, and as reader you're left thinking, if life in Egyptian court wasn't exactly like this, it cannot possibly be, but the thought processes certainly were something very close to this. This is the nearest to comprehension we're likely to see. It was a superstitious age and everything was controlled by magic. This book puts the reader in that style of magic.