Joseph and his brothers, p.144
Joseph and His Brothers, page 144
Surrounded by these men of the solar calendar in the temple of Re, Pharaoh could not get enough of discussing this subject and the significance it had for further understanding of the nature of the Aton. He talked about it with them until deep into the night, talked to the point of excess, he luxuriated in golden immateriality and paternal spirituality, and even after the god's attendants were worn out and their shiny heads were nodding, he still had not had enough and could not bring himself to dismiss them, as if afraid to be left alone. Nevertheless he finally granted the nodding, tottering priests leave to go and sought out his own bedchamber, where the slave who
dressed and undressed him—an older man, who had been assigned to him when Meni was a httle boy and who still called him "Meni," though he showed him all other formal demonstrations of respect— had long been waiting in the lampUght. He quickly and tenderly made him comfortable for the night, bowed low, pressing his forehead to the floor, and withdrew to sleep just outside on the threshold. Nestled in the pillows of his artfully crafted bed—which stood on a platform in the middle of the room, its headboard ornamented with the most delicate ivory carvings of jackals, ibexes, and figures of the god Bes—Pharaoh fell almost at once into an exhausted sleep, but only for a short time. For after a few hours of heavy stupor, he began to dream—topsy-turvy, alarming, and absurdly vivid dreams of a kind he had known only as a child with a fever and a sore throat. He did not dream, however, of Bennu's weightless father or the sun's immaterial rays, but of quite the opposite.
In his dream he was standing at a lonely spot, a place of swamp and reeds, along the banks of Hapi, the Provider. He was wearing his red cap, the crown of Upper Egypt, and his beard was tied on and the animal tail dangled from his upper garment. He was standing all alone at this spot, his heart heavy, his crooked staff clutched in his arm. Then he heard splashing not very far from the bank, and out of the flood seven shapes emerged—climbing on land were seven cows that must have been lying in the river the way water buffalo cows do, and they walked past, one after the other in single file, seven of them, but without a bull. There was no bull, but just the seven cows. Splendid cows—white, black with a paler back, gray with a paler belly, and two dappled ones, splotched with markings—such beautiful, sleek, fat cows, with bulging udders and the heavily lashed eyes of Hathor and tall, curving lyre-shaped horns; and they began to graze contentedly among the reed grass. The king had never seen such magnificent cattle, not in all the land; what a great show of sheer prosperity their bodies were, and Meni's heart wanted to rejoice at the sight, but could not, and instead felt heavy and anxious— and was very quickly filled now with fear and dread. For the line of cattle did not end with these first seven. More cows emerged from the water, and there was no break between the one group and the next. Seven more cows climbed on land, likewise without a bull— but what bull would have wanted them? Pharaoh shuddered at these cattle, they were the ugliest, leanest, gauntest cows he had ever seen
in his life—their bones stuck out from under their wrinkled hide, their udders were empty sacks with teats Uke cord; the sight was terrifying and thoroughly demoralizing, for the miserable creatures seemed scarcely able to stay on their feet; but their behavior was shamelessly impudent, viciously hostile, quite out of keeping with their frailty, yet somehow only too appropriate to it as well, for it was the savagery of starvation. As Pharaoh watches the wretched herd attack the sleek one: the hideous cows climb onto the beautiful ones, the way cows do when they play bull; then the wretched animals devour the splendid ones, wolf them down, simply wipe the meadow clean of them—but afterward stand there as emaciated as before, showing no sign whatever of having eaten their fill.
With that the dream ended, and Pharaoh started from his sleep bathed in the sweat of anxiety. His heart pounding, he sat up, looked around the softly lit chamber, and realized it had been a dream, but a dream so eloquent and immediate that it seemed as hostile as those starved cows from the river, and its icy grip lingered in the dreamer's bones. He did not want to stay in bed, but stood up, pulled on his white woolen nightshirt and paced the room, thinking about his vicious, absurd, but palpably clear dream. He would have liked to awaken his valet, to tell him his dream, or rather, to find out if what he had beheld could be put into words. But he was too tenderhearted to disturb the old man, whom he had kept waiting until late into the night, and so sat down in the cow-legged armchair that stood beside his bed, wrapped his nightshirt, its wool soft as moonlight, tighter around him and, snuggling into one corner of the chair, his feet resting on a footstool, dozed off again.
But no sooner had he fallen sleep than he began to dream again—he could not help it, once more, or perhaps still, he is standing on the riverbank with his crown and tail, and there lies a tilled patch of field with its black soil. And he watches as the fertile earth ripples and rolls a little, and a stalk grows from it, on which seven ears of grain sprout, one after the other, all on one stalk, fat, plump ears of grain, bursting with richness and nodding in the golden fullness of their yield. And his heart tries to rejoice, but cannot, for what follows is more sprouting from the stalk—another seven ears of grain emerge, miserable ears, barren, dead, and sere, blighted by the east wind, blackened by smut and rust, and as they emerge in their shabbiness below the fat ones, these then dwindle, as if vanishing
into the others, and it's as if the bUghted ears are devouring the plump ones, just as before the wretched cows devoured the sleek ones, and this time, too, grow no fatter and fuller than before. Pharaoh saw it all palpable before his eyes, started up in his chair, and found that once again it had been a dream.
Another absurdly topsy-turvy dream, silent in its frenzy, but with a hostility that spoke almost directly to his heart, as both warning and instruction, so that Pharaoh could no longer sleep at all until dawn, which fortunately was near now, nor did he want to sleep, but instead he constantly shifted between bed and armchair, pondering the clarity of this pair of dreams grown from one stalk and crying out for interpretation; and now he firmly resolved that in no case would he keep such dreams to himself and allow them to fade into silence, but that he would make an issue of them and sound an alarm on their behalf. In them he had been wearing crown, crooked staff, and tail, which beyond any doubt made them royal dreams of imperial significance, highly peculiar dreams drenched in care. He had no choice but to make them public and exert every effort to come to grips with them and to get to the bottom of their obviously menacing import. Meni was in fact outraged at his dreams and increasingly despised them with each passing moment. A king could not put up with such dreams—although, on the other hand, they could only have come to a king. Under his reign, under Nefer-khe-peru-Re-Wanre-Amenhotep, this sort of thing dared not happen—ghastly cows eating up fat ones and miserable smut-ridden ears of grain devouring plump, golden ones—nothing dared occur in the realm of real events that corresponded to anything like those ghost-ridden images. For he would be blamed, his prestige would suffer a severe decline, ears and hearts would be closed to the message of the Aton, and Amun would be the one to profit. Light was endangered by a threat from the blackness, weightless spirituality menaced by danger from the material world—there was no doubt of it. His distress was very great; it assumed the form of an anger that steadily gathered into a determination that this danger first had to be recognized and exposed so that one could then meet it head-on.
The first person to whom he told his dream, as well as it could be put into words, was the old man who had slept at his threshold and now dressed him, fixing his hair and binding it in a scarf. He had only shaken his head in amazement and remarked that that was what
happened when the Good God went to bed so late after having heated his brain with endless "spectulating"—as he put it in his foolish, commonplace way. Actually it is likely he automatically considered these worrisome dreams to be a kind of punishment for Meni*s having made his old servant stay up waiting for him so long. "Oh, you old muttonhead!" Pharaoh had replied, smiling in annoyance and lightly slapping the old man's brow with the palm of his hand, and had then gone to the queen, who was feeling sick because of her pregnancy and so paid scant attention. Whereupon he sought out Tiy, the divine mother, and found her being tended to by her chambermaids at her dressing table. He had told her his dreams as well, discovering that as time went on they were not easier to tell, but only made his foul mood worse with each telling—nor did he find much consolation or encouragement from her. Tiy always scoffed a little when he came to her with his royal cares—but he was certain that this was something for a king to worry about and had said so right off, and in response her maternal face had at once taken on that mocking smile. Although, after much deliberation. King Neb-maat-Re's widow had voluntarily relinquished her regency and ceded to her son the full sovereignty of his noonday zenith, she could not conceal her jealousy of that sovereignty; and what pained Meni was that he was aware of this—it did not escape him that he evoked just such demonstrations of bitterness whenever he attempted to mollify her with a childlike request for assistance and advice.
"Why does Your Majesty come to me, the abdicated queen?" was Tiy's usual response. "You are Pharaoh; then be it and stand on your two feet, instead of on mine. Hold fast to your servants, the Viziers of North and South, if you do not know what to do, and let them tell you what your will is, if you are unsure of it, but do not turn to me, for I am old and have retired."
She had responded to his dreams now in much the same way. "I have been weaned from power and responsibility, my friend," she had repHed with a smile, "and so cannot judge whether you are correct in placing so much weight on these events. 'Darkness,' so it is written, 'lies hidden if there is abundant light.' Allow your mother to hide herself. Allow me likewise to hide my opinion whether these dreams are worthy dreams and suitable to your position. Devoured? Wolfed down? One group of cows ate another? Blighted ears of
grain ate plump ones? These are no real dream visions, for one cannot see them or picture them, either waking or, in my opinion, sleeping. Presumably Your Majesty dreamt something quite different, which you have forgotten and have now replaced with this nonsensical image of impossible gluttony."
It was to no avail that Meni had tried to assure her that this and not something else was what he had really and clearly beheld with the eyes of his dream, and that this clarity was full of a significance that cried out for interpretation. It was to no avail that he spoke to her of his deep-felt fear of the damage that "his teachings"—that is, the Aton—would suffer if these dreams were to interpret themselves without hindrance, by which he meant were to be fulfilled and take the shape of the reality of which they had been only the prophetic disguise. He had once again learned the lesson that ultimately his mother had no heart for his god, and that her partisanship was purely intellectual, a matter of political and dynastic concerns. She had always supported her son in his tender love, his spiritual passion for the Aton; but today, yet again, he saw, as he had long since come to see—just as, unfortunately, thanks to his sensitive nature, he saw everything—that she did so only out of calculation, that she was exploiting his heart as a woman who saw the whole world solely from the viewpoint of political expediency and not, like himself, from that of rehgion above all else. This offended Meni and hurt him. He left his mother, though only after first being told that if he truly thought his cow and grain visions were of national importance he should approach Ptahemheb, the Vizier of the North, about them during his morning audience. Besides, there was no lack of interpreters of dreams around here.
He had already sent for interpreters some time before and was impatiently awaiting them. But their audience was preceded by that of the great official, who arrived with the intention of informing Pharaoh about certain concerns of the Red House, that is, of the treasury of Lower Egypt, but was interrupted right after his hymn of greeting and forced to listen to the story of the dreams—told in a pinched, anxious voice that faltered in its search for words—followed by the demand that he answer two questions: first, whether he, like his lord, considered this of imperial significance, and, second, if yes, in what regard and to what extent. Ptahemheb had not
known what to say, or rather, had said in a flood of very carefully chosen words that he was incapable of saying anything and knew not the first thing about such dreams, and then concluded by trying to return to matters of the treasury. But, apparently impatient and incapable of speaking about or listening to anything else, Amen-hotep had made him stick to dreams and kept trying to make it clear to him how eloquently urgent or urgently eloquent they had been— and still had not abandoned the topic when the experts and prophets were announced.
Filled or, better, obsessed as he was with his experience of the night before, the king made a ceremony of the first rank out of their reception—which then, in terms of its substance, turned out miserably. Not only had he commanded Ptahemheb to remain behind for it, but he had also decreed that all the dignitaries of the court who had accompanied him to On attend this audience of interpretation. There were about a dozen very elegant gentlemen: the Great Steward, the Steward of the Royal Garments, the Palace's Chief Laun-derer and Bleacher, the so-called Sandal Bearer to the King (a very respectable office), the Supervisor of the God's Wigs (who was also the Protector of the Magic Empires, meaning that he was the keeper of the two crowns and the councilor in charge of royal jewels), the Supervisor of All Pharaoh's Horses, the new Chief Baker and Prince of Menfe (whose name was Amenemopet), the Supervisor of the Stewards of the Sideboard (Nefer-em-Wese, who for a while had been called Bin-em-Wese), and a few Fan-Bearers at the King's Right Hand. They had all had to find their way to the Hall of Council and Interrogation and now gathered in two equal groups on either side of Pharaoh's beautiful throne, which stood one step higher under a baldachin borne by slender, ribboned columns. The prophets and dream specialists were led before it, six in number, all of whom had some more or less intimate relationship with the temple of Him Who Dwells on the Horizons, and a couple of them had even taken part in yesterday's phoenix discussions. People such as these no longer, as had long ago been the custom, threw themselves upon their belly to kiss the ground before the throne. Apart from a few more ornaments and figures than it had had in those ancient days, it was still the same throne as the one used in the days of the pyramid builders and even before that: a boxlike chair with a low back, before which lay a cushion. But although the
throne had become sHghtly more magnificent and Pharaoh much more omnipotent, one no longer kissed the ground before them— that was no longer done. Its status was much like that of the practice of burying the court alive in the royal grave—it was simply no longer the fashionable thing to do. These magicians merely raised their arms in adoration and, in a rather unrhythmical muddle, murmured a long formula of pious greeting in which they assured the king that his form was like that of his father Re and that both of the Two Lands were illuminated by his beauty. For the rays of His Majesty pierced darkest caves, and no place was removed from the penetrating gaze of his eyes, nor was there anywhere that the delicate hearing of his million ears did not reach—he heard and saw everything, and whatever came from his mouth was like the words of Horus in his horizon, for his tongue was the balance scale of the world and his lips truer than the tongue on the just scales of Thoth. He was Re in all his limbs, they said in a jumble of louder and softer voices, and Kheper in his true form, the living image of his father Atum of On in Lower Egypt—"Oh Nefer-khe-peru-Re-Wanre, Lord of Beauty, through whom we breathe!"
A few were finished before the others. Then they all fell silent and listened. Amenhotep thanked them, told them first in general the reason why he had called them, and then, before this assemblage of roughly twenty, some quite elegant, some quite learned, men, began to tell his peculiar dreams—for the fourth time. He found it painful, he blushed and stuttered through his narrative. An all-pervading sense of the menacing significance of his dreams had moved him to make them public. But now he repented this, for he could not help noticing that what had been of such high seriousness and was still a matter of innermost seriousness, looked ridiculous to the world at large. And indeed, how could such beautiful and strong cows allow themselves to be devoured by such weak and wretched ones? And how and by what means could one ear of grain devour another? But that, and not some other way, is how he had dreamt it. The dreams had still been fresh, natural, and impressive by night; by day and put into words they looked like poorly prepared mummies with distorted faces—one couldn't be seen in their company. He was ashamed and finished his story only with some effort. Then he gazed in shy expectation at his dream experts.
They had all nodded their heads solemnly; but gradually, one
after the other, their thoughtful nods had changed into the side-to-side motion of heads shaken in amazement. These were queer, virtually unprecedented dreams, the eldest explained on their behalf, any interpretation would be difficult. Not that they doubted there was one—the dreams were yet to be dreamt that they could not expound. They did, however, need time for consideration and begged Pharaoh's gracious leave to withdraw for a conference. They also needed to send for certain compendia that had to be consulted. No man was so learned that he had a purview of all dream case histories. Being learned, if they might be so free to remark, did not mean having all knowledge in one's head—there was not room enough in a man's head for that; but rather it meant possessing the books in which such knowledge stood written. And those they possessed.
