After this foreboding opening, there comes to us as ludicrous the purpose of the mission. It is to demand that the hippopotami in the lake at Thebes be killed, since Pharoah Apophis has a malady his doctors have diagnosed as due to the roaring of the animals penned there! It's a power pretext, demeaning that of the region: the lake and its hippos are sacred to the Theban people and their god Amun. There is a second demand from Pharoah Apophis. He has dreamt that the god Seth, sacred to his people, is not honoured in the South's temples. A temple devoted to Seth must be built at Thebes. Third decree: the governor of Thebes, deposed Pharoah Seqenenra, appointed on the divide-and-rule principle of making a people's leader an appointee of the usurping power, must cease the presumption of wearing the White Grown of Egypt (symbol of southern sovereignty in Egypt's double crown): ‘There is only one king in this valley who has the right to wear a crown’ — conqueror Apophis.
Seqenenra calls Grown Prince Kamose and his councillors to discuss these demands. His chamberlain Hur: ‘It is the spirit of a master dictating to his slave… it is simply the ancient conflict between Thebes and Memphis in a new shape. The latter strives to enslave the former, while the former struggles to hold on to its independence by all the means at its disposal.’ Of the three novels, this one has the clearest intention to be related to the present in which it was written — British domination of Egypt, which even after Britain renounced her protectorate in 1922 was to continue to be felt, through the 1939-45 war until the deposing of King Farouk by Nasser in the 1950s. It also does not shirk the resort to reverse racism which inevitably is used to strengthen anti-colonial resolves. One of Seqenenra's military commanders: ‘Let us fight till we have liberated the North and driven the last of the white Herdsmen with their long, dirty beards from the land of the Nile!’ These are Asiatic foreigners, the Hyksos, referred to as ‘Herdsmen’ presumably because of their wealth in cattle, who dominated from northern Egypt for two hundred years.
Grown Prince Kamose is for war, as are some among the councillors. But the final decision will go to Queen Tetisheri, Seqenenra's scholarly mother, the literary ancestress of Mah-fouz's created line of revered wise matriarchs, alongside his recognition given to the embattled dignity and intelligence of courtesans. Physically, she's described with characteristics we would know as racist caricature, but that he proposes were a valid standard of African beauty, ‘the protrusion of her upper teeth… that the people of the South found so attractive'. Tetisheri's was the opinion to which ‘recourse was had in times of difficulty': ‘the sublime goal’ to which Thebans ‘must dedicate themselves was the liberation of the Nile Valley'. Thebes will go to war.
Grown Prince Kamose is downcast when told by his father that he may not serve in battle: he is to remain in Seqenenra's place of authority tasked with supplying the army with ‘men and provisions'. In one of the thrilling addresses at once oratorical and movingly personal, Seqenenra prophecies, ‘If Seq-enenra falls… Kamose will succeed his father, and if Kamose falls, little Ahmose [grandson] will follow him. And if this army of ours is wiped out, Egypt is full of men… if the whole South falls into the hands of the Herdsmen, then there is Nubia… I warn you against no enemy but one — despair.'
It is flat understatement to acknowledge that Seqenenra dies. He falls in a legendary hand-to-hand battle with javelins, the double crown of Egypt he is defiantly wearing topples, ‘blood spurted like a spring… another blow… scattering the brains', other blows ‘ripped the body to pieces’ — all as if this happens thousands of years later, before one's eyes. It is not an indulgence in gore, it's part of Mahfouz's daring to go too far in what goes too far for censorship by literary good taste, the hideous human desecration of war. The war is lost; Kamose as heir to defeat must survive by exile with the family. They take refuge in Nubia, where there are supporters from among their own Theban people.
From the horrifyingly magnificent set-piece of battle, Mahfouz turns — as Tolstoy did in War and Peace — to the personal, far from the clamour, which signifies it in individual lives. Kamose leads the family not conventionally to the broken body but to ‘bid farewell to my father's room'. To ‘face its emptiness'. With such nuance, delicacy within juggernaut destruction, does the skill of Mahfouz penetrate the depth of responses in human existence. And the emptiness of that room will become of even greater significance. Pepi, Seqenenra's defeated commander, has Seqenenra's throne taken from the palace to the temple of Amun, where the king's body lies. Prostrate before the throne, he speaks: ‘Apophis shall never sit upon you.'
Ten years have passed. The story is taken up again along the Nile. A convoy of ships is pointing North, now, from Nubia to the border with Egypt, closed since the end of the war. The sailors are Nubian, the two commanders Egyptian. Beauty and rightfulness go together in early Mahfouz's iconography. The leading commander has ‘one of those faces to which nature lends its own majesty and beauty in equal portion'. Here is Isfinis, a merchant bringing for sale the precious jewels, ivory, gold and exotic creatures that are the natural resources of Nubia. The convoy lands first at Biga, that island from which Rhadopis's siren call once sounded, where now the merchant bribes the local governor with an ivory sceptre in exchange for intercession to be received by the Pharaoh Apophis.
Isfinis is not a merchant and Isfinis is not his name. His purpose is not business but justice; we overhear him saying to his ‘agent’ Latu, ‘If we succeed in restoring the ties with Nubia… we shall have won half the battle… the Herdsman is very arrogant… but he is lazy… his only path to gold is through someone like Isfinis who volunteers to bring it to him.’ So this merchant must be disguised Kamose, Seqenenra's heir, come for retribution?
Mahfouz is the writer-magician, pulling surprise out of the expected. No, Isfinis is Ahmose, Seqenenra's grandson, last heard of going as a child into exile with the defeated family. A royal vessel sails near the merchant convoy and a princess with her slave girls is amazed at the sight on the merchant's deck of an item of cargo never seen before. It is a pygmy. Her Pharaonic Highness sends a sailor to say she will board the merchant ship to look at the ‘creature’ — if it is not dangerous. Isfmis presents the pygmy with a show of obsequiousness: ‘Greet your mistress, Zolo!’ A wryly mischievous scene of the cruel sense of absolute superiority in race, hierarchy of physique, follows. The princess asks, ‘Is he animal or human?’ Isfinis: ‘Human, Your Highness.’ ‘Why should he not be considered an animal?’ ‘He has his own language and his own religion.'
To her the pygmy is like anything else the merchant might offer, something to own or reject. ‘But he is ugly; it would give me no pleasure to acquire him.’ From some other examples of the merchant's wares she picks a necklace; it's simply assumed he will have to come to the palace to be paid. The satirical social scene explodes as Latu cries angrily, ‘She is a devil, daughter of a devil!’ In this tale of doubled-up identities Isfinis/ Ahmose realizes that this woman he's attracted to is the daughter of the ‘humiliator of his people, and his grandfather's killer'.
On land, the merchant takes lodgings at an inn among fishermen. In the bar (as later, in the Cairo trilogy) inhibitions dissolving in drink mean people reveal in banter the state of the country. It's serious social criticism and delightful entertainment, at once. ‘You're certainly a rich man, noble sir!.. But you're Egyptians, from the look of you!’ Isfinis/Ahmose: ‘Is there any contradiction between being Egyptians and being rich?’ ‘Certainly, unless you're in the rulers’ good graces'; this bar ‘is the refuge of those who have no hope… The rule in Egypt is that the rich steal from the poor, but the poor are not allowed to steal from the rich.'