Three Novels of Ancient Egypt

That same morning, Rhadopis was lounging on a sumptuous divan, dreaming. It was one of those rare days, bursting with festive joy and promising great victory for her. What happiness, what joy. This day her heart was like a pool of clear and fragrant water, flowers sprouting around its edges, and all about in the air nightingales chirping their sweet refrains. How joyous the world is! When would she receive the news of victory? When evening came and the sun began its journey to the underworld, and her heart commenced its own journey into the realm of abandonment with her darling beloved. How marvelous was evening time. Evening time, hour of the beloved, when he will come into her with his lithe figure and glowing youth, and wrap his sinewy arms around her slender waist, as he whispers her name softly in her ear with glad tidings of victory, saying, “The pain is over. The governors have gone on their ways to amass the soldiery. Now, let us see to our love.” Ah yes, how beautiful evening time is.

And yet she hardly could believe that the day would pass. She had waited a month for the messenger to return and though the passing ofthat time had been grueling and intolerable, these few hours were cruder and more unsettling than anything she had experienced. Nevertheless, there was some relief mixed with her worry, and her fear was tempered by a touch of happiness. It was as if she wanted to pull the wool over Time's eyes and pretend the waiting did not exist. Her thoughts veered hither and thither until, in her wanderings, she alighted upon the lover kneeling in his temple, in the summer room. Benamun Ben Besar. How delicate he was, how sweet his presence, she mused, as she asked herself once again in dismay how she should reward him for the momentous service he had rendered her. He had flown on the wings of a dove to the farthest reaches of the South and had returned more swiftly than he went, borne by his passion, overcoming through it all obstacles along the way. At one point she had wondered in her confusion how she could get rid of him. But he had taught her — with his contentment a wondrous love that did not know egoism or possessiveness or greed. He was satisfied with dreams and fantasies, for he was an idealistic youth, unschooled in the ways of the world. If he had coveted a kiss for example, she would not have known how to refuse him, and she would surely have offered him her mouth. But he coveted nothing, as if afraid to touch her lest he be consumed in mysterious flames. Or perhaps he did not believe that she was something that could be touched and kissed at all. He did not look upon her with the eye of a human being and he could not see that she was human too. He desired only to live in the radiance of her splendor like the plants of the earth live by the sun as it floats through the heavens.

She sighed and said, “Truly the world of love is a marvelous place.” Her own love sprang exuberantly from the font of her being, for the force which attracted her to her lord was the very force of life itself, pristine and awesome. Benamun's love, however, was such as to shut out all reason for living, and he wandered astray, beyond sublime horizons, never announcing a trace of feeling save through his prodigious hands and sometimes on his hot and stumbling tongue. It was such a fragile love in some ways, moving like a phantom through a dream, and so strong in others, for it breathed life into solid rock. How could she contemplate getting rid of him when he did not bother her at all? She would leave him safe in his temple, depicting upon its silent walls the most beautiful embellishments to frame her ravishing face.

She cried out once again from the depths of her heart, “When is evening?” Damned Shayth. If she had stayed by her side she would have entertained her with her gossip and bawdy banter, but she had insisted on going to Abu to watch the pageant.

How beautiful memories can be. She remembered last year's festival, the day her luscious palanquin was born aloft and cut its way through the seething multitudes to see Pharaoh, the youth. When her eyes beheld him, he had moved her heart without her knowing it, and she had felt the sudden rush of love as something strange and unfamiliar, for so long had she lived with drought, that she thought it angry nervousness, or a spell breathed by a sorcerer. Then that eternal day, when the falcon soared off with her sandal, and the second day had hardly begun when Pharaoh visited her. From there, love had found its way into her heart. Her life had changed and the whole world had changed with it.