On a Balcony Page 23

  It was not so bad to die.

  But it is harder to kill a building than a man. Of course properly speaking a city has no thoughts: a city is only an aggregate of men. If it has any consciousness at all, it has only the group consciousness of those who lived there. So says reason. And yet an abandoned city is full of thoughts.

  For the world is strewn with our abandoned dolls. More even than our idols, they attest to our belief. A dead city is as sad, as futile, and as empty as a rusty suit of armour. Everything we do outlives us. It has always been so. It always will be so. Each man is only a skeleton within this accreted shell.

  Yet standing on the cliffs above Aketaten, one can look across the faint mounds and the excavated streets, towards the sluggish river, at dawn, and face all that emptiness with some assurance. For after all it is not dead. It lived once. It has been imagined. Or perhaps, come to think of it, it imagined us. Every valley and empty plain of it is haunted. It is only that we do not know the name of what it is haunted by, which is just as well, for give the ghost a name and it vanishes.

  For the rest, it smiles, like those forgotten gods standing about in jungles and museums. And we recognize that smile. It is the same smile our own gods will have when we are gone, the smile of survival, of perfect knowledge, the smile people always have when we have left the room. The city waits.

  In the past it had to wait quite a long time.

  Then, in 1335, when Horemheb was a vigorous man of seventy-five at the peak of his powers, it happened that he passed Aketaten on his way down to Memphis. From the river the city almost looked real, and he decided to go ashore.

  He wandered for a while through the decaying streets, empty except for a single greyhound, which would have nothing to do with him. It feinted in a wide circle always ahead of him, and must be the descendant of one of the royal ones, but what on earth had it found to breed with here?

  So, at last, he came to Tutmose’s studio, and after some hesitation, entered it. Tutmose had never taken his face, nor had he ever wished Tutmose to do so, but now he was curious.

  To see dust and sand piled up here and there against the floor, and in the studio itself, open to the sky, almost as high as his thighs, was not unexpected. But to find all those masks there was.

  Tutmose had not outlived his art. His art had outlived him. From four walls these faces jeered Horemheb down, and he thought it better to leave. Merely by their existence he found the place disturbing. It brought them all back again.

  Before going back to his boat, he paused to look over the desert outskirts of the city. And from somewhere out there, as he had heard it fifty years before, came the voice of silence. It was only a delusion, for nothing stirred. And yet he had heard it. It was there.

  But he had not caught what it had to say, and the voice of silence can never be repeated. It can only be heard once, and in the works of a few artists, seen. Besides, it does not really speak. It only sighs and says, “I know”.

  Nor had those masks told him anything. They were not really the people they depicted. They were only what Tutmose had learned from the people they depicted. And as for himself, he was not sure after all that he had learned anything from them.

  It upset him. But he continued on his journey, after a last look round. For after all, even there, too, at Aketaten, it had only been a game. The voice of silence was only a game, as the emotions were only a game, sincerity was a game, and even Man was only a game that something else was playing. As for the voice of silence, it was only the sigh of something that had found the game a little long. And that was all it meant. But that meant a good deal, for to tell the truth, he found it a little long himself.

  For no, it was not difficult to be a god, but it was very hard to be worshipped, when one knew one was not one, and even harder to be loved personally, if one’s capacity for love was small.

  He should never have set foot there again.

  For he was a very old man, and was to become even older. It made no difference. From the moment of birth our life grows daily a little shorter, and we soon grow accustomed to that. But his thoughts could not help but turn back to that long ago time, even without this unforeseen prompting. And he could remember very well how as a young and eager body, he had wanted also to stand naked in the rain. The patter was reassuring. It was like silver fingertips in the middle of the night. Feeling it, we want to say: I am. But those who need us will not let us be. And so we come to say: farewell, I am never now, I was; which alas is true of all of us, except that some of us cannot even say that much.

  He could have used the convenience, right then, of Ay’s amused philosophy, as the boat drifted down towards Memphis and responsibility.

  For it was all very well for the priests to shout Life! Prosperity! Health! but just by inconveniently believing, Ikhnaton had robbed his successors of all the comforts of convenient belief.

  Who more than Horemheb, who had restored the public power of Pharaoh, could more see through that fiction that Pharaoh was a god? And yet he was still worshipped as one, he who believed in no gods, and yet still believed in the power of Pharaoh, which in part derived from that worship. So more than anybody else, more than any of them ever had been, he was left with the worst question of all, the one that can never be answered.

  Twenty-Two

  Who was this Horemheb, this God?

  Copyright

  This ebook edition first published in 2012

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

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  © The Estate of David Derek Stacton, 1958

  The right of David Stacton to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

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  ISBN 978–0–571–29580–7