I finished at the right moment. I heard Mahmoud's voice approaching and with him Ibraheem, and saw them as they came closer.
Then, all of a sudden, there was a slight shaking under my feet and at the same time the sound of stone breaking reached me. Instinctively I raised my head and saw the capstones that held together the two halves of the sundered gateway slowly coming apart. Then I saw them fly and screamed and ran to get away.
A large stone was falling from the ceiling like a missile, making for the boy sleeping under the palm tree.
I ran towards him screaming and he roused himself and sat watching the falling stone.
I would never reach him. It was a matter of seconds!
I saw Mahmoud and Ibraheem shouting and flinging themselves at the boy, who was sitting paralysed, staring upwards.
Then I saw the three of them throwing themselves to the ground, but couldn't tell which of them the stone, which was now rolling near by, had struck.
I went on running towards them and suddenly there were children and adults everywhere, all yelling and all rushing towards the three persons lying in a heap.
8. Alexander the Great
The snake bit my mother with the bite of love, and I came into this world. The Divine Ram appeared to her as a snake, and I was the fruit of that holy conception. My earthly father, Philip, King of Macedon, was about to go in unto my mother, Olympias, when he witnessed through the half-open door her intercourse with the slithery god. He saw the huge black snake slithering over her marble-white belly as she embraced it in love and he saw it enter into her. So he withdrew, closing the door behind him in reverence and holy awe. Then he sent an offering to the temple of Amun-Zeus, the Snake God, the Ram, the Hawk of Hidden Names.
Such am I and such is my ancestry. Who, then, are you, you stranger to my country and to the land of Amun? Are you a man or a woman? I have no certain knowledge but I think you are a woman. I will think of you as a woman. That kind of unceasing insistence I have known since I was a boy from my mother, and then from every woman after her. Why, then, do you disturb my spirit, which has chosen this wild land in which to wander? You are insistent in your calls to me from your world and you seek something of which I have no knowledge.
It is your reckoning that I know more than you. No. Our spirits after death roam in the darkness, and now I am like a blind fish that knows of the vast ocean only that it is swimming in black water beyond which follows more of the same. Thus do I grope aimlessly in darkness beyond which lies darkness. Is this the hell of Hades that the Greeks held to be the resting place of evildoers, while the spirits of the good floated in light with their lords? Or is it the sinners' void described by the priests of the Egyptians? I do not know. I cannot say. From the moment I departed life, I could see you mortals for forty days, no more. After that, the darkness fell and it has lasted for a time I cannot calculate. Is it a day, or an aeon?
I see no one from your world. I hear no voice and I do not speak. I do not encounter good spirits or evil and I do not believe that I can reach you or inspire you with anything. Nevertheless, from time to time, someone like you comes and calls to me, and wakens my spirit without my being able to understand what it is that it wants. I know nothing here beyond what I knew on Earth. I go over it time after time, and each time the picture of my life that I see is at odds with what I saw the time before.
Is this a limbo that will open up in the end to reveal mercy and ease, or a new torment? I do not know. I cannot say.
I do not know even the nature of Amun, with whom I seek refuge. Was he a divinity, or a delusion?
And was the priest who conveyed to me the oracle's message a guide who could pass through the veil of the unseen or an impostor concocting lies? All the same, my spirit followed behind my corpse for weeks and I made haste to reach here before the forty days so that I might see the temple of Amun for a final time. I want it to be the first thing I see when the light shines again, should it ever shine, so that I can know the truth.
From the moment that I became conscious of the world, my mother sowed in my soul the certainty that I was the son of the god. And how could I deny Olympias's claims when she had been raised as a priestess in the temples of the gods? She had penetrated the worlds of the hidden secrets and in my childhood I saw her pass through into those worlds unknown to mankind. A spellbinding gleam would light up in her green eyes. Then, little by little, her look would cloud over as she gazed on what we cannot see, and finally her body would go rigid and she would fall to the ground, speaking in a language unlike any we know. After a while, she would return to us, a limpid gaze in her bewitching eyes and her face clear and beautiful. The oracles of the gods would come to her from the rustling of the leaves of the trees, from the whispering of the breeze, from the singing of the birds, from the scintillating of the stars, and from a world we do not know. Then she would declare to us what had passed and what was to come.
When I was ten years old, in the palace of her royal brother, she revived after one of her journeys to the unknown and said, as one who brings glad and certain tidings, 'I saw you as a white eagle hovering in the sky with silver wings that reached out and grew and grew until their shadow covered the whole world. You will be the shadow and the light. You will be the sun and you will be all that is and all that will be. You will rule the earth and no one shall defeat you and you will be blessed with the immortality of the gods.'
I was a sad child then, and an angry one too, because my father had married another woman and divorced my mother, so that she accompanied me to the palace of her brother the king, far from Philip and Macedonia. She told me, 'Do not be sad. Philip is not your father. You are the son of Amun-Zeus. And yet we shall return to Macedonia before months have passed. You will spend ten years with your earthly father before inheriting from him the throne. Then you shall rule the world and all who are upon it.' None of her earthly prophecies had ever lied, so how could I doubt that I was the son of a god? But how could I have two fathers, Philip on Earth and Amun in Heaven? Who was I and what was demanded of me in this world?
No one was more capable of helping me to understand these mysteries than Aristotle, the greatest philosopher of the Greeks, whom Philip had summoned to teach me since I was a child and heir to the throne, but he did not guide me easily to the answers. He was accustomed to delivering his wisdom in short, obscure utterances. He venerated the gods of the Greeks, or made a show of venerating them, and had nothing to say about the gods of the Egyptians. He must certainly have been scared of meeting the fate of his predecessor Socrates, who talked so much about the gods that Athens punished him, seeing in him a blasphemer and an unbeliever and forced him to swallow poison. I, though, was thirsty for knowledge and to understand the strange happenings that had accompanied my life from birth. Aristotle wanted me for philosophy and politics, but I was preparing for other lessons.
On some, rare, occasions, I was able to apply my teacher's most important lesson, which was to hold in check the raging passions of the appetite and master my mind, but his greatest gifts to me were poetry and music. I read Homer's epic the Iliad to him and the copy of it that he himself had corrected stayed with me all through my life. It was always beneath my pillow, in peace and in war. And one of his puzzling sayings — that tragic verse, with the feelings of pity and fear that it provokes, serves to purge us — stuck in my mind.