Many scenes from the earth and the heavens passed before me. I grasped their essential truths, seeing into their deepest aspects, until I fixed upon an egg being fertilized in a womb. I beheld its flesh and bones forming, and watched its birth, while my vision ran with it toward its future. I saw it as a child, as a boy, as a youth, as a grown man, as an old man — and as a dead man. I saw the events that befell him, his pleasure and torment and contentment and anger and hope and despair and his health and his illness, his passion and his boredom. I saw all these together in just a minute, until the cries of his birth and the moans of his death were mingled together in my ears! A capricious desire to play overcame me, and I followed the lifetimes of many individuals from their birth to their demise. I savored enormously the flow of their different states of being, which were hardly divided in time. For here a face would laugh and then it would scowl and then guffaw and then frown tens and tens of times in a fraction of a second! This woman wanders about as a young beauty, then she falls in love and marries and becomes pregnant and has children and goes into senility and withers away and becomes loathsome to look upon, all in a brief interval. Loyalty and treachery are not cleaved by an instant. These and countless other things are what make a farce of life — if the deceased could laugh, then I would drown in laughter. It seemed to me as though there is no reality in the world except for change. My soul wished that all these people and their crazy lives would just go away and be gone from my sight. I regarded them from afar as a numberless, limitless horde. Their forms diminished and their features dissolved and the distinctions between them disappeared. They became a single block, silent and still, without life or movement. I continued to stare at them in shock and perplexity, that slowly lessened by degrees until a new dimension was revealed to me that had previously been concealed.
I saw this calm darkness ignite with an all-encompassing light, as the faint, fading beams that pulsated in each brain, which by themselves were weak and dying, all clung to each other in one cohesive mass, emanating a powerful, dazzling incandescence. I saw in its radiance a gleaming truth, a pure goodness, and a luminous beauty, and my wonder and bewilderment returned. O Lord, no matter how the soul suffers and is tortured, it goes on inventing and creating just the same. And Lord, Taw-ty has seen glorious things and will see yet more glorious and awesome things. I became convinced that this light that glowed upon me was but a mere speck of the heaven to which I would ascend. I looked away and turned my back to the world, to find myself once again in the Sacred Chamber for embalming — and a divine ecstasy imbued my spirit that cannot be conveyed.
The seventy days of embalming were done. The men came again. They removed my body from the trough and wrapped it in layers of cloth. They brought with them a sarcophagus, upon which an image of the youthful Taw-ty was most flatteringly engraved, and placed the body inside it. Then they hoisted it upon the back of their necks and filed outside, where they met my family and my neighbors, who struck their faces and wailed. Their shrieks were worse than those on the day my death was announced. They proceeded to the Nile and embarked on a huge boat, which bore them to the City of Immortality on the West Bank. They jostled about the sarcophagus, calling out and howling, “My tears will not dry, my heart knows no peace after you, Taw-ty!” while my wife entreated aloud, “O my husband, why was I condemned to live after you?”
The Prince’s chamberlain declared, “O glorious writer, Taw-ty, you have left your place empty!”
For a long while I watched with these eyes that had forgotten their past, as if there were no ties that bound me to this world, nor with these humans. The boat pulled up to the shore, and they hoisted up the sarcophagus once more. From there they marched with it to the mausoleum — on which I had spent the best part of my treasure — and set it down in its intended place. During all this, a band of priests intoned some verses from the Book of the Dead, lecturing me on how to behave in the afterlife! Then they began to withdraw, one after another, until the tomb was deserted. There was nothing left to hear but the sound of distant mourning. The doors were sealed and sand shoveled over them. Thus perished all relations between the world that I had bid good-bye, and the world that I now greet. .
Note: Here the hieroglyphic text breaks off. Perhaps the period of waiting to which the writer referred at the start of this document had ended, and his voyage into Eternity had begun. There he would be diverted from his much-loved pen — and from all things.
Notes
1 Roger Allen, “The Mummy Awakens,” The Worlds of Muslim Imagination, ed. Alamgir Hashmi (Islamabad: Gulhomar, 1986), pp. 15–33, commentary, pp. 212–15.
2 Richard B. Parkinson, The Tale of Sinuhe and Other Ancient Egyptian Poems, 1940–1640 BC (Oxford University Press, 1997).
Glossary
al-Arna’uti: In Arabic, “the Albanian”—an allusion to the origins of the then-regnant Muhammad ‘Ali dynasty, installed nominally under the Ottomans as rulers of Egypt in 1805. Much of the Egyptian aristocracy was subsequently of mixed Turkish — Albanian blood. The pasha in “The Mummy Awakens” is most likely based upon Mohamed Mahmoud Bey Khalil (1877–1953), a millionaire Francophile collector of art who was attacked in the Egyptian press in the late 1930s for saying he wanted to will his large private gallery of mainly French paintings to the Louvre. It is now housed in his former mansion in Giza in a museum bearing his name.
Aswan: A city at the Nile’s first cataract in Upper (southern) Egypt. Mahfouz here uses the pharaonic Egyptian name Abu (actually Elephantine Island at Aswan), which was the country’s southernmost outpost on the border with ancient Nubia. The historical Userkaf’s capital was at Mennufer (Memphis) close to present-day Cairo, rather than Aswan, though the royal annals of the Old Kingdom recorded on the Palermo Stone show that he kept a per (house, estate) at Abu. His only known pyramid— quarried into rubble in antiquity — was built near there, in northern Saqqara, rather than at Aswan.
Broad beans: Also called horse beans (and known as ful in Arabic), these are an indispensable part of the Egyptian diet.
Fuad I University: Named for King Ahmad Fuad I (r. 1917–36), who, as a prince, was one of its founders in 1908. The institution was renamed Cairo University after the Free Officers coup of 1952. Naguib Mahfouz earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy there in 1934 (when it was then called the Egyptian University), where he briefly did postgraduate work and served in the school’s administration until 1939. During this time, he occasionally attended lectures in Egyptology, some of which were likely given by Prof. Etienne Marie-Felix Drioton (1889–1961), then head of Egypt’s Department of Antiquities — and a probable model for Prof. Dorian in the story, “The Mummy Awakens.”