The sun had passed the zenith—this far south, almost literally—and was sliding down the western half of the sky when Pasos nudged him, pointed southwest, and said, “You look hard, you see them now.”
Shading his eyes with his hand and wishing again he’d bought a hat like Menedemos’, Sostratos did look hard. Sure enough, three pointed bumps sticking up from the desert could only be …. Looking at the desert and the fertile land between the Pyramids and him, Sostratos whistled softly. “By the gods, they’re huge!” he murmured. Then he laughed again. How many travelers before him would have said the same thing?
“We keep going, they look more bigger,” Pasos said.
“I’m sure they will. Memphis lies beyond them, is that right?”
“Malista.” Pasos used a Greek word and a barbarous nod.
“How far beyond?”
The Egyptian said something in his own language: a distance, presumably. Sostratos spread his hands to show he didn’t know what that distance was. Pasos thought for a moment, then offered, “Two parasangs. Little less, maybe.”
“Ah.” Sostratos dipped his head. The parasang was a Persian measure. It meant how far someone could travel in an hour. It stretched or shrank depending on territory, but was usually about thirty stadia. So the Pyramids lay only a couple of hours’ journey outside Memphis. “I’ll have to visit them while I’m here.”
“You take care. Take water or beer or wine with you,” Pasos said. “You Hellenes, you not know how to live here. Sun bake you dead, you no watch out.”
“Hellas isn’t an oven,” Sostratos said with dignity. Yes, Rhodes got hot weather as summer wore along, but not the kind of relentless heat Egypt saw. He tried to imagine how Pasos would react to snow. He’d seen it only two or three times himself, but he knew what it was. When he did his best to explain it to the Egyptian, he ran headlong into a wall of blank incomprehension.
“Water is … water,” Pasos said. “Not turn to flakes like gods got—” He brushed at his hair; Sostratos realized he meant dandruff. “You Hellenes, you tell funny stories. Or you tell lies, laugh when people believe.”
Hellenes had that reputation among many different kinds of barbarians. Sostratos briefly wondered whether that reflected on them or on his own folk. Only briefly—he needed to answer, and he did: “By the gods, O best one, I’m telling the truth here. In northern lands, snow is real. Water can freeze there, too, the way liquid copper does when it cools. Frozen water—ice, it’s called—is very cold. It’s slippery to walk on. Sometimes, you can see through it. When the weather gets warmer, it turns back into ordinary water again. It melts, we say.”
Pasos laughed at him. The Egyptian had never seen anything like that, so he didn’t believe it could possibly be real. None of Sostratos’ protests or oaths would persuade him. Neither did the way the rowers agreed with Sostratos. “You all Hellenes,” Pasos insisted. “Of course you all say same thing.”
After a while, Sostratos gave up. “Think whatever you want to think,” he growled, and turned away. It was either quit or pitch Pasos into the Nile. That would have meant an all-out brawl between Hellenes and Egyptians, and the barge crew outnumbered his men. He wasn’t even sure he could pitch the barge captain into the river. Pasos might be short, but he had a solid frame and didn’t seem like someone who shrank from trouble.
Slowly, slowly, the barge crawled past the Pyramids and the ramp or causeway that led up to them from the Nile. The closer the look Sostratos got, the more tremendous they seemed. He couldn’t see all of the famous Sphinx nearby, only the upper part. What he could see made him want to see more.
The sun was just about to set when they reached the riverside wharves at Memphis. The city was bigger than Sostratos had expected: not so big as Alexandria, but bigger than any polis in Hellas save possibly Athens. Temples of antiquity unimaginable stood not far from the Nile.
At Egyptian Thebes, farther south yet, the almost-historian Hekataios had told the priests he was sixteen generations removed from a god. They’d laughed at him and shown him the statues of 341 generations of high priest, each of purely human origin. Next to the Egyptians, what were Hellenes but a pack of noisy children?
The sun went down. Aphrodite’s wandering star blazed in the western sky. Pasos said, “We unload with day tomorrow. You all right your cargo stay aboard this night?”
“I think so. That may even work out better for us.” Sostratos did his best not to show how relieved he was. He didn’t want to take the olive oil off the barge till he knew where he could store it.
None of the rowers complained. “Don’t mind a good night’s sleep before I go back to work,” Thersandros said.
“Been sleeping aboard so much this trip, I may buy me a little fishing boat and live on her when we get back to Rhodes,” Leskhaios added.
They had beer and cheap wine on the barge. They hadn’t been aboard it so long, they felt an urgent need to go whoring. It was less comfortable than a bed ashore, but not much less. And they were used to living rough anyhow. If they hadn’t been, they never would have signed on with the Aphrodite.
Sostratos had an easier life ashore than the other Hellenes did. Money shaded you from misfortune the way a roofed colonnade shaded you from the sun. As long as you had some silver and you kept your health, life looked good.
He curled up on the planking like an Egyptian cat, closed his eyes, and soon fell asleep. Even a straw pallet would have been softer, but he didn’t worry about it. He had more room to toss and turn here than he did in the cramped confines of the akatos.
He was awakened in the night to do his turn as watchman. When it ended, he pissed into the Nile and slept again. Next thing he knew, twilight turned the eastern sky a red that soon brightened to gold. Some of the bargemen were already awake. One gave him a chunk of barley bread and a mug of beer. They had no words in common, but Sostratos let the fellow know he was glad to have breakfast.
When Pasos got up soon after, Sostratos asked him, “What god does that temple near the river serve?”
“Osiris,” the barge skipper answered.
“Ah.” Sostratos dipped his head. It wasn’t just a name to him. He remembered from Herodotos that Osiris was for the Egyptians what Zeus was for Hellenes: the chief god, the most powerful one. Were they two names for the same deity, or were two different gods doing the same job in different parts of the world? He had no idea how to answer that. He also wondered whether the question meant enough to matter.
What did matter was getting the amphorai of oil out of the barge and onto the riverbank. Sostratos joined the rowers in taking them out of the barge. Menedemos probably would have let them do the work, and from him they probably would have accepted that. Sostratos had less of the air of the kalos kagathos about him; he couldn’t play the nobleman the way his cousin did.
Egyptians and Hellenes gathered to watch the show. Nothing gave men so much pleasure as watching other men work. Sostratos took a couple of oboloi from his belt pouch. He pointed at a skinny little Hellene who looked like a tout. “Do you know the way to Psosneus’ warehouse?” He’d got the name from Pasos.
“Malista, my master!” the man said.
“An obolos for you now, and another when you’ve taken me to him,” Sostratos said.
“Such generosity,” the Hellene said sourly. “Slow with your silver, aren’t ye?” By his accent, he sprang from Thessaly or somewhere else in the north.
“I can always give the job to someone else,” Sostratos said. Sure enough, two other Hellenes and an Egyptian who followed Greek were waving their hands.