But he did not weep, for we were drinking mixed wine in brightly colored goblets, and each time the landlord of the Syrian Jar refilled them he bowed and stretched forth his hands at knee level. From time to time a slave came to pour water over our hands. My heart grew light as a swallow on the threshold of winter; I could have declaimed verse and taken the whole world into my arms.
“Let us go to a pleasure house,” said Thothmes laughing. “Let us hear music and watch girls dancing and gladden our hearts-let us not ask ‘why’ any more or demand that our cup be full.”
We walked along the streets. The sun had set, and I met for the first time that Thebes where it is never night. In this flaring, noisy quarter torches flamed before the pleasure houses, and lamps burned on columns at the street corners. Slaves ran here and there with carrying chairs, and the shouts of runners mingled with the music from the houses and the roarings of the drunk.
Never in my life had I set foot in a pleasure house, and I was a little scared. The one to which Thothmes led me was called the Cat and Grapes. It was a pretty little house, full of soft, golden lamplight. There were soft mats to sit on, and young-and in my eyes lovely-girls beat time to the music of flutes and strings. When the music stopped, they sat with us and begged me to buy them wine, as their throats were as dry as chaff. Then two naked dancers performed a complicated dance requiring great skill, and I followed it with interest. As a doctor I was accustomed to the sight of naked girls and yet had never seen breasts swaying or little bellies and bottoms moving so seductively as these.
But the music saddened me again, and I began to long for I knew not what. A beautiful girl took my hand and pressed her side to mine and said my eyes were those of a wise man. But her eyes were not as green as the Nile in the heat of summer, and her dress, though it left her bosom bare, was not of royal linen. So I drank wine and neither looked into her eyes nor felt any wish to call her “my sister,” or take pleasure with her. And the last I remember of that place is a vicious kick from a Negro and a lump I got on my head when I fell down the steps. So it came about just as my mother Kipa had foretold: I lay in the street without a copper piece in my pocket until Thothmes drew my arm over his strong shoulder and led me to the jetty, where I could drink my fill of Nile water and bathe my face and my hands and my feet.
That morning I entered the House of Life with swollen eyes and a smarting lump on my head, a dirty shoulder cloth, and without the smallest wish to ask, “Why?” I was to be on duty among the deaf and those with ear diseases, so I washed myself quickly and put on the white robe. On the way I met my chief, who began to upbraid me in phrases I had read in the books and knew by heart.
“What is to become of you if you run along the walls by night and drink without keeping tally of your cups? What is to become of you if you idle away your time in pleasure houses, smiting wine jars with your stick to the alarm of honest citizens? What is to become of you if you shed blood and run from the watchmen?”
But when he had done his duty, he smiled to himself with relief, took me to his room, and gave me a potion to cleanse my stomach. My spirits rose as I realized that wine and pleasure houses were winked at in the House of Life provided one stopped asking why.
6
So, I, too, was smitten with Thebes fever and began to love the night more than the day, the flickering of torches more than sunlight, Syrian music more than the moans of the sick, and the whispering of pretty girls more than crabbed old writings on yellow papers. But no one had anything to say against this as I fulfilled my tasks in the House of Life, satisfied my examiners, and kept a steady hand. It was all part of the initiate’s life; few students could afford to set up house on their own and marry during their training, and my teacher gave me to understand that I would do well to sow my wild oats, give rein to my body, and be of a merry heart. But I meddled with no woman though I thought I knew that their bodies did not really bum worse than fire.
The times were full of unrest, and great Pharaoh was ill. I saw his shriveled old man’s face when he was carried to the temple at the autumn festival adorned with gold and precious stones, motionless as a statue with his head bowed beneath the weight of the double crown. The physicians could not longer help him; rumor had it that his days were numbered and that his heir would soon succeed him-and the heir was but a stripling like myself.
There were services and sacrifices in the temple of Ammon, and Ammon could not help his divine son though Pharaoh Amenhotep III had built for him the mightiest temple of all time. It was said that the King had grown wroth with the Egyptian gods and that he had sent swift messengers to his father-in-law, the king of Mitanni in Nahara, desiring that the miracle-working Ishtar of Niniveh be sent to heal him. But to the joy of the priests even foreign gods could not cure Pharaoh. When the river began to rise, the royal skull surgeon was summoned to the palace.
In all the time I had been in the House of Life I had not once seen Ptahor, for trepanning was rare and during my training period I had not been allowed to attend the specialists at their treatments and operations. Now the old man was carried in haste from his villa to the House of Life, and I was careful to be at hand when he entered the purifying room. He was as bald as ever, his face had grown wrinkled, and his cheeks hung lugubriously on either side of his discontented old mouth. He recognized me, smiled and said, “Ah, is it you, Sinuhe? Have you come so far, son of Senmut?”
He handed me a black wooden box in which he kept his instruments and bade me follow him. This was an unmerited honor that even a royal physician might have envied me, and I bore myself accordingly.
“I must test the steadiness of my hand,” said Ptahor, “and open a skull or two here, to see how it goes.”
His eyes were watery, and his hand trembled slightly. We went into a room in which lay incurables, paralytics, and those with head injuries. Ptahor examined a few and chose an old man for whom death would come as a release, also a strong slave who had lost his speech and the use of his limbs from a blow on the head in a street brawl. They were given narcotics to drink and were then taken to the operating theater and cleansed. Ptahor washed his own instruments and purified them in fire.
My task was to shave the heads of both patients with the keenest of razors. Then the heads were cleaned and washed once more, the scalps massaged with a numbing salve, and Ptahor was ready for his work. First he made an incision in the scalp of the old man and pushed the edges back regardless of the copious flow of blood. Then with swift movements he bored a hole in the bared skull with a large tubular bore and lifted out the circle of bone. The old man began to groan, and his face turned blue.
“I see nothing the matter with his head,” said Ptahor. He replaced the bit of bone, stitched the edges of the scalp together, and bandaged the head; whereupon the old man gave up the ghost.
“My hands appear to tremble somewhat,” remarked Ptahor. “Perhaps one of the young men would bring me a cup of wine.”
The onlookers, besides the teachers in the House of Life, consisted of all the students who were to become head surgeons. When Ptahor had had his wine, he turned his attention to the slave, who had been bound and drugged, yet still sat savagely glowering at us. Ptahor asked that he might be bound yet more firmly and that his head might be gripped in a vice that not even a giant could have shifted. He then opened up the scalp and this time was careful to stanch the flow of blood. The veins at the edges of the incision were cauterized and the blood stopped by special medicaments. Ptahor let other doctors do this, to spare his own hands. In the House of Life there was as a rule a “blood stauncher,” a man of no education whose mere presence would stop a flow of blood in a short time, but Ptahor wished this to be a demonstration and desired also to save his strength for Pharaoh.