She handed him his white kilt and watched without embarrassment as he clambered into it.
“I have brought food,” she said. “You will eat and then we will go.”
“Go where?”
“To the place where you will live.”
“On the temple grounds?”
“In town,” she said. “You will not stay here. The priestess Nefret has said I am to take you to a lodging in the town.”
That was upsetting. He had been hoping to stay here, to be taken into the service of the temple in some fashion. He wanted to speak with that serene, mysterious, aloof priestess again; in this profoundly unfamiliar place she had already begun to seem like an island of security and succor. He had felt a strange kind of rapport with her, some curious sort of kinship, and he would gladly have remained in her domain a little longer. But finding some safe nest to hide in, he knew, would not be a useful way of achieving the goals of his mission here.
Eyaseyab went out and returned shortly with a tray of food for him: a bowl of broth, a piece of grilled fish, some flat bread and a few sweet cakes and a little stone pot of dates. It seemed much too much food. Last night he had only been able to nibble at the meat and beer the girl had brought him. But to his surprise his appetite was enormous today; he emptied the broth bowl in gulps, gobbled the dates, went on to the fish and bread and cakes without hesitating. Vaguely he wondered what sort of microbes he might be ingesting. But of course he had been loaded to the brim with antigens before leaving downtime: one whole division of the Service did nothing but immunological research, and travelers setting out for the past went forth well protected, not just against the great obsolete plagues of yesteryear but against the subtlest of intestinal bugs. He probably had been at greater medical risk during his orientation visit to modern Cairo and Luxor than he was here.
“You want more to eat?” she asked him.
“I don’t think I should.”
“You should eat, if you’re hungry. Here at the temple there’s plenty of food.”
He understood what she was telling him. All well and good; but he couldn’t pack away a month’s worth of eating at a single sitting.
“Come, then,” she said. “I will take you to your lodging-place.”
They left the temple precinct by a side gate. A dusty unpaved path took them quickly to the river promenade, just a short walk away. The temples were much closer to the Nile than they would be thirty-five centuries later. Millennia of sedimentation had changed the river’s course to a startling extent. In this era the Nile flowed where, in modern-day Luxor, there was a broad stretch of land covering several blocks, running from the riverfront promenade to the taxi plaza that served the Karnak ruins, the ticket-booth area, the approach to the avenue of sphinxes at the temple’s first pylon.
She walked swiftly, keeping half a dozen paces in front of him, never looking back. He watched with amusement the rhythmic movements of her buttocks. She was heading south, into the bewildering maze that was the city proper.
He could see now why he had been so dazed yesterday. Not only had he had to cope with the shock of temporal displacement far beyond anything he had ever experienced on his training jumps, but the city itself was immense and immediately overpowering. Thebes of the Pharaohs was far bigger than the modern Luxor that occupied its site, and it hit you with all its force the moment you set foot in it. Luxor, its splendid ruins aside, was no more than a small provincial town: a few tourist hotels, a one-room museum, a little airport, a railway station and some shops. Thebes was a metropolis. What was the line from the Iliad? “The world’s great empress on the Egyptian plain, that spreads her conquests o’er a thousand states.” Yes.
The general shape of the place was familiar. Like everything else in Egypt it was strung out along the north-south line of the Nile. The two ends of the city were anchored by the great temples he knew as Luxor and Karnak: Luxor at the southern end, where he had made his appearance yesterday, and the vast complex of Karnak, where he had spent the night, a mile or so to the north. As he faced south now, the river was on his right, cluttered with bright-sailed vessels of every size and design, and beyond it, across the way to the west, were the jagged tawny mountains of the Valley of the Kings, where the great ones of the land had their tombs, with a long row of grand imperial palaces stretching before them in the river plain, Pharaoh’s golden house and the dwellings of his family. When he looked the other way he could see, sharp against the cloudless desert sky, the three lofty hills that marked the eastern boundary, and the massive hundred-gated walls that had still been standing in Homer’s time.
What was so overwhelming about Thebes was not so much its temples and palaces and all its other sectors of monumental grandeur—though they were impressive enough—as it was the feverish multifariousness of the sprawling streets that occupied the spaces between them. They spread out as far as he could see, a zone of habitation limited only by the river on the one side and the inexorable barrenness of the desert on the other. City planning was an unknown concept here. Incomprehensibly twisting lanes of swarming tenements stood cheek by jowl beside the villas of the rich. Here was a street of filthy little ramshackle shops, squat shanties of mud brick, and just beyond rose a huge wall that concealed cool gardened courtyards, blue pools and sparkling fountains, quiet hallways bedecked with colored frescoes; and just on the far side of that nobleman’s grand estate were the tangled alleys of the poor again. The air was so hot that it seemed to be aflame, and a shimmering haze of dust-motes danced constantly in it, however pure the sky might be in the distance. Insects buzzed unceasingly, flies and locusts and beetles making angry, ominous sounds as they whizzed past, and animals browsed casually in the streets as though they owned them. The smoke of a hundred thousand cooking-fires rose high; the smell of meat grilling on spits and fish frying in oil was everywhere. And a steady pounding of traffic was moving in all directions at once through the narrow, congested streets, the nobles in their chariots or litters, ox-carts carrying produce to the markets, nearly naked slaves jogging along beneath huge mounds of neatly wrapped bundles, donkeys staggering under untidier loads half the size of pyramids, children underfoot, vendors of pots and utensils hauling their wagons, everybody yelling, laughing, bickering, singing, hailing friends with loud whoops. He had been in big exotic cities before—Hong Kong, Honolulu, maddening gigantic Cairo itself—but even they, with all their smoke-belching trucks and autos and motorbikes, were no match for the wondrous chaos of Thebes. This was a disorder beyond anything he had ever experienced: indeed, beyond anything he had ever imagined.
They were near the southern temple now. He recognized the plaza where he had collapsed the day before. But abruptly Eyaseyab turned toward the river and led him down a flight of stone steps into a waterfront quarter that had not been visible from above, where squalid taverns and little smoky food-kiosks huddled in a cluster beside a long stone wharf.
A flat barge crowded with people was waiting at the wharf, and a burly man who seemed obviously to be an overseer was waving his arms and crying out something unintelligible in thick, guttural tones.
“It’s going to leave,” Eyaseyab said. “Quick, let’s get on board.”
“Where are we going?”
“To the other side.”
He stared at her blankly. “You said I’d be lodging in town.”
“It is also the town over there. You will be lodging near the place where you will work. The priestess has arranged everything. You are a very lucky man, Edward-Davis.”
“I don’t understand. What sort of work?”