In the Valley of the Kings: Stories by Holt Terrence

Author:Holt, Terrence [Holt, Terrence]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2009-09-13T16:00:00+00:00

THE———FOUNDATION———Fifth Avenue

New York, NY———

14 May 19—

Dr.——

Department of Archaeology——University——,———

Dear Dr.——:

We regret

From the King-lists of the chroniclers a name was stricken—as over the three millennia the chronicles record so many were expunged. Khufu, who bled the kingdom for his pyramid, finds his name written in only four instances—and none of those upon the tomb itself. This was the revenge of those who followed him: he descended nameless into his horizon; nameless, into a realm where possession of a name was the last defense against annihilation. Without a name, not even a mountain of stone could ensure his immortality. Today the sarcophagus of Khufu is an empty tub of granite within an empty chamber.

Worse befell Radedef, who followed Khufu, ruining the Black Land to build his pyramid on an eminence above the plain of Giza, from the top of which he hoped to look down upon the pyramid we call the Great, in the days when it stood gleaming, white and perfect. Radedef’s monument they toppled, and left not even rubble. Akhenaten’s great city lay in ruin within a century of his death, razed by the Ramesside kings in their campaign to eradicate the memory of “That Criminal.” The blocks of his temples, the stelae celebrating the founding of his holy city, have been found shoring up the foundations of Horemheb’s pylons at Karnak, of Seti’s hypostyle hall: the name of the heretic king has been gouged from his cartouche. The bodies of the royal family were removed from the tomb at Amarna, brought to Thebes and there desecrated in an official rite, the monuments, the name, the flesh, the soul scattered on the Libyan wind.

But something else—no mere censorship after the fact—transpired in the twenty-fifth century B.C.E., somewhere between Thebes and Memphis. For it is not, I know, merely the effacement of a despot’s name I have discovered. Not a word has survived. Surely such an absolute void speaks more loudly of a secret than any muttering of fragments ever did. I am convinced that something silenced the Egyptian people themselves, and held them so enthralled over a generation. What else could account for this perfect silence? Something—someone—must have silenced the entire people.

I say again: for an entire generation not a word was spoken. Stop for a moment and consider. Not whatever you see rise before you even now—how dismally flapped the sails along the wharfs, how fearfully the echoes fled among the lotus-headed columns, how balefully glared the priests at their only hope of power in the world to come denied them—not those, not those at all. I do not speak figuratively. But consider how this smoke that rises from the page blinds you: how, in the clamor of speech, the thing almost escaped you. The words might have passed before your eyes and you gone on unknowing, incapable of recognizing the thing itself without its ceremental shroud, this dull dreaming we do instead of thinking, and the silence gone unrecognized. In a moment such as that, I stopped, I listened, and heard what none before me had.

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