"Including those needed to prepare the way and bear water to moisten the path under the sledges and to carry the roller that must be inserted again and again," Joseph responded, "I would employ a good hundred men."

  "Why so many?"

  "It is a cumbersome slab," Joseph replied, "and if one chooses not to span oxen to the task, but men, because they are cheaper, one should employ a sufficient number of them so that along the way one gang of draggers can replace another at the ropes, and thereby avoid deaths resulting from a failure to sweat, or simply keep some from overexerting their innards and having the wind knocked out of them, leaving you with exhausted men tossing and turning in agony."

  "It is better to avoid that to be sure. But you forget that we have not just a choice between oxen and men, but that we also have at our disposal here vast numbers of barbarians who dwell in the red sand of the desert, from Libya, Punt, and Syria."

  "He who has been given into your hand," Joseph replied in a measured voice, "is of a similar origin, for he is a child of a king of flocks in Upper Retenu, which is called Canaan, and is here in the land of Egypt only because he was stolen away."

  "Why do you tell me this? It is here in the letter. And why do you call yourself a child, instead of saying a son? It sounds to me like a man coddling or wooing himself, which is not fitting for a man who has been sentenced, even if his offense is not one that touches his honor but is of a more delicate nature. You appear to be afraid

  that because you are originally from the wretched land of Zahi, I will yoke you to the heaviest slabs of stone, until your sweat fails and you die a dry death. That is an attempt, as impertinent as it is clumsy, to think my thoughts. I would be a poor prison warden if I did not place and make use of each according to his talents and experiences. Your answers do indeed reveal that you were once in charge of the house of a great man and understand something about industry. Nor is it exactly contrary to my own wishes that you would do your best to avoid overtaxing men, even when they are not the children— I mean, the sons—of Hapi and the Black Earth, for that gives evidence of economic thinking. I shall employ you as the overseer of a gang of convicts in the quarry or put you to work inside, in the office; for it is certain that you are faster than others at reckoning how many bushels of spelt will fit into a storeroom of such and such dimensions, or the amount of grain needed to brew a certain amount of beer or bake a given number of loaves of bread, so that one can then know the value of both in trade, and so on. I would truly welcome," he added by way of explanation to the opener of Wep-wawet's mouth, "some relief in those areas, so that I would not have to concern myself with everything and could have more leisure for my attempts to put to paper in a gratifying and perhaps even exciting fashion 'The Adventure of Three Loves That Are One and the Same.'"

  "You people of Wase," he said to Joseph's escorts, "can now be on your way again, sailing against the current, but with a north wind. But do take your rope with you, along with my respects to your master and Pharaoh's friend. Memi," he ordered in conclusion, addressing the mace-bearer who had led the visitors here, "show this royal slave who is to do hard labor as an administrative clerk a cell to himself and give him an outer garment and a staff for his hand in token of his office as an overseer. Though he once stood very high, he has let himself be brought down here to us and will have to accommodate himself to the iron regimen of Zawi-Re. But what he has brought with him from his high estate we shall ruthlessly exploit, just as we know to exploit the bodies and energies of those of low standing. For such things no longer belong to him, but to Pharaoh. Give him som.ething to eat. Till the next time, good father," he said, taking leave of the god's attendant and turning back toward his

  And this was Joseph's first meeting with Mai-Sakhme, the warden of the prison.

  Of Goodness and Cleverness

  And so, Hke Joseph, you are now reassured as to the particular qualities of the jailer into whose hand his master had delivered him. His even temperament made him an especially engaging man, and the foregoing episode of this narrative, in its attempt to illuminate all things, quite intentionally was in no hurry to shift the spotlight away from his eternally stout figure, but instead let it rest on him long enough for you to have time to imprint his essential humanity—previously as good as unknown to you—on your minds; for a not insignificant supporting role—likewise practically unknown— had been reserved for him in the story unfolding here anew with the same accuracy of detail in which it came to pass in reality. In fact, after those few years in which Mai-Sakhme served over Joseph as his taskmaster, he would stand at his side for a far longer period, sharing in the solemn management of certain grand and cheering events, for a worthy and precise description of which may the muse lend us strength.

  This simply by way of introduction. But since tradition uses the same formula for the prison warden that it applies to Potiphar in saying that he "had no concern for anything," until very soon whatever happened in that hole had to happen through Joseph, some explanation is in order, for the phrase carries a very different sense from what it did in the case of that courtier of the sun and consecrated tower of flesh, who did not concern himself with anything because in his titular inauthenticity he stood outside of humanity and in his perpetually closed existence was a stranger to all that was real, his sole concern being pure formality. In contrast Mai-Sakhme was a thoroughly responsible man, who took a warm, if quite unruffled concern in a great many things, and especially in people. For he was a very dedicated physician, who arose early every day in order to examine what had been passed from the rectums of the ailing soldiers and convicts quartered in the infirmary shed, and his office, a well-secured room in the citadel tower of Zawi-Re, was a regular laboratory where, surrounded by his apparatus—a herbarium, uten-

  sils for grinding and grating, vials and crucibles, goatskins, distilling flasks, and evaporation basins—the captain would get that same sleepy but clever look in his eyes with which he had told his story of the three loves on the day of Joseph's reception and then proceed to prepare his agent for flushing the stomach, his decoctions, pills, and poultices for combatting retention of urine, tumors on the neck, stiffening of the spine, and burning in the heart, for some of which remedies he would consult the work For the Benefit of Man or other such tried and true manuals; but where he also would read and think of more general, overarching issues beyond individual cases, such as whether the number of paired blood vessels that ran from the heart to the various members of the human body and were so very susceptible to hardening, occlusions, and inflammations often resistant to any medicine, were really only twenty-two in number, or if in fact, as he was more and more inclined to believe, they came to a total of forty-six, or would ponder whether worms in the body, which he had tried to kill with several different electuaries, were the cause of certain illnesses or should more correctly be understood as their consequence, inasmuch as the blockage of one or several blood vessels led to tumorous growths, which, because they permitted no outlet for drainage would then putrefy and, as could only be expected, transform themselves into worms.

  It was a good thing that the captain devoted himself to these matters, for although officially they were less his concern as a soldier and more the business of his opponent at board games, the priest of Wepwawet, the latter's knowledge in regard to the nature of the body did not go much beyond the inspection of sacrificial animals slaughtered to oblige his god, and his therapeutic methods were always far too one-sidedly oriented toward the world of magic and charms—a necessary element, to be sure, inasmuch as a malady affecting an organ, be it spleen or spine, could unarguably be attributed to whether its tutelary divinity had departed from that body part, willingly or otherwise, leaving the field clear for some hostile demon, which then went about its destructive work and had to be forced to depart by the appropriate exorcism. The god's attendant did, however, have a cobra he kept in a basket, and by applying pressure to its neck he could turn it into a magic wand, a feat that persuaded Mai-Sakhme to borrow the animal from him on occasion.

  But on the whole it was the warden's conviction, based on experience, that magic employed by itself and for its own ends rarely accomplished much, and instead required the material support of profane knowledge and remedies, so that it might enter and penetrate them and thereby achieve its effect. For instance, when it came to the excess of fleas that afflicted everyone at Zawi-Re, the charms of the god's guardian had never been of much help, or the relief so temporary that it might have been merely an illusion; and only after Mai-Sakhme—though, to be sure, with the aid of charms—had ordered natron water sprinkled and a mixture of charcoal and a pulverized form of the plant hehet strewn about, did the plague abate. He was likewise the one who had had the lids on food supplies in the storerooms smeared with cat fat—to ward off the mice, which were almost as numerous as the fleas. Upon calm reflection, he had concluded that the mice would think they smelled the cats themselves and out of fear would leave the supplies alone, which proved true.

  The fortress's infirmary shed always had plenty of injured and sick patients, for labor in the quarry five miles inland from the river was truly hard labor, as Joseph soon learned, since on numerous occasions he had to spend several weeks out there supervising a detachment of soldiers and convicts as they hacked, cleaved, hewed, and dragged. The soldiers had things no better than the others, and those members of the garrison of Zawi-Re, both native Egyptians and foreigners, not on guard duty were put to the same use as the convicts, were urged on with the same blows of the rod. At best, injuries or instances of exhaustion or failure to sweat were more readily recognized in their case, orders for them to return to the fortress hospital given somewhat sooner than for men under sentence, who had to keep on giving their utmost—that is, until they collapsed, and then only the third time, for on principle a first or second collapse was held to be a sham.

  In this regard, by the way, there was some easing of conditions under Joseph's supervision—at first only in his own work gang. Later, however, when, as recorded, it had come to pass that the warden committed into his hand all the prisoners that were in the prison, and he would come out to the quarry, now as a kind of chief inspector and immediate deputy of the commandant, conditions were eased in general. Joseph remembered Jacob, his distant father,

  for whom he was dead, and how he had always disapproved of the Egyptian house of bondage, and so he introduced the rule that a man be pulled out and brought back to the island at the second collapse, for the first was still held to be a sham—that is, unless death immediately followed.

  And so the infirmary shed was never empty of those who tossed and turned—whether it was a man who had broken a bone or could "no longer look down at his own belly," or whose body was covered with swollen stings from flies and gnats that were like leprous sores, or whose stomach, if one placed one's fingers on it, shifted back and forth like oil in a goatskin, or whose eyes were inflamed and festering from the dust of the quarry; and the captain took charge of all these cases, never shrinking from any of them, and knew some remedy for each—that is, if it was not death itself with which he had to contend. He splinted broken bones with planks and tried to alleviate the problem of a man's being unable to see his own belly with mild mushy poultices; he treated those leprous stings with goose fat mixed with a soothing vegetable powder, ordered the patient with that nasty shifting around of the stomach to chew castor beans washed down with beer, and for the great many cases of inflamed eyes he had a fine salve from Byblos. But some magic was always involved as well, lending support to medicine and playing its role in vexing whatever demon had sneaked its way in; but the magic came not so much in the form of spoken charms or the patient's being touched with the stiffened cobra, as in the power that emanated from Mai-Sakhme personally, a calm that flowed from him and spread through the patient, soothing him until he no longer felt afraid of his illness, which could only be harmful, and instead stopped tossing and turning and automatically adopted the captain's own facial expression—the rounded lips slightly open, the eyebrows raised in knowing composure. His patients would lie there like that and, armed with his calm, gaze ahead to recuperation or to death— for Mai-Sakhme's influence taught them not to fear the latter either, and even when a man's face had taken on the pallor of a corpse, he would lie with hands and mouth at rest, still imitating the composed expression of his physician, and from under wise raised brows gaze steadily ahead to the life after life.

  And so it happened that Joseph would enter this infirmary, pervaded by calm and a lack of fear, as the warden's right-hand man.

  sometimes even lending him a hand. For Mai-Sakhme soon called him back from oversight at the quarry to work inside the fortress; and the statement that he committed all the prisoners that were in the prison into Joseph's hand and that whatever was done there Joseph was the doer of it, should be taken to mean that Potiphar's former steward very quickly, within six months after being sent there, rose—as if as a matter of course and without any special appointment—to the post of chief administrator and supervisor of provisions for the entire fortress, so that, much to the relief of those who had previously dealt with such matters, there passed through his hands all the correspondence and accounts (of which, as everywhere in Egypt, there was an endless stream) dealing with purchases of grain, oil, barley, and cattle and their distribution among the guards and convicts, with the operations of Zawi-Re's brewery and bakery, even with the income and expenditures of Wepwawet's temple, as well as with the delivery of hewn stone and so forth. He alone was required to render an account of these things to the fortress's commandant, to the calm man with whom his relationship had been friendly from the start and over time came to be very cordial.

  For in all this Mai-Sakhme found confirmed what Joseph had said to him at that first interrogation by announcing himself in that primal and dramatic phrase that for once had ruffled the commandant's composure and in some very broad and vague way had so alarmed him that even he was aware of the tip of his nose turning a shade of white; and the captain was in some sense grateful to the man who had helped to shock him, for at its most fundamental level his composure demanded such a shock, which in his clever modesty he felt he had never given its due and so had stood in wait for it, just as he awaited the reappearance of the girl Nekhbet in her granddaughter and being stirred by her yet a third time. His sense of the truth embedded in the words with which Joseph had announced himself was equally broad and vague, nor would he have been able to say what meaning he ought to impute to the "he" in that always shocking phrase "I am he"—indeed it never even dawned on him that he would not have known what to say, for he was not the sort of man who would have thought it necessary or desirable to account for it. That is the difference between his obligations and our own. Mai-Sakhme, living in that earlier, if also already much later, day, was totally exempted from rendering such an account and, with all due

  calmness, if also a fair amount of shock, could confine himself to surmises and faith. Our ancient document puts it this way: that the Lord showed Joseph steadfast love and gave him favor in the sight of the keeper of the prison. That "and" might be read to imply that the steadfast love God showed to Rachel's son consisted in his taskmaster's finding favor in his heart for him. That, however, would somewhat misrepresent the relationship between the steadfast love and the favor. It was not that God showed Joseph His steadfast love by causing the captain to feel favorable toward him, but that instead the sympathy and trust—in a word, the faith—that Joseph's appearance and conduct instilled in him came from the unerring instinct a good man has for divine steadfast love, which is to say, for the divine power that was with this prisoner—just as it is the way, indeed the mark, of every good man that he is clever enough to perceive the divine with reverence, a state of affairs that closely links goodness and cleverness, and in fact makes them appear to be one and the same.

  What, then, did Mai-Sakhme take Joseph for? For something right and true, for the right and long-awaited one, the bringer of a new age, though for now only in the modest sense of the man who had been banished for very interesting reasons to this boring place— where the captain had been ordered to serve for a such a long time now, and for who knew how much longer—and had brought with him a certain interruption in its rampant monotony. If the commandant of Zawi-Re was so fierce in his condemnation of the confusion of speech and reality, rejecting it as base ignorance, that may well have come from his laboring so mightily under the same confusion and, if he did not pay close attention, from poor skill at distinguishing between metaphor and actuality. Put another way: even the gentlest traces, memories, and hints in the traits of some phenomenon were sufficient for him to see in it the fullness and reality of what was merely hinted at—and in Joseph's case that was the figure of the long-expected bringer of salvation, who comes to put an end to all that is old and boring and, amid the jubilation of all mankind, to establish a new epoch. About such a figure, of which Joseph showed some traces, there hovers the nimbus of the divine—and that is just one more notion that carries with it the temptation to confuse the metaphorical with the actual, the particular with something from which all particularity has been removed. And is that such a mislead-

  ing temptation? Where the divine is, there God is—there, as Mai-Sakhme would have said (if he had said anything at all and not simply let surmises and faith prevail), is a god, though at most wrapped in a disguise that needs to be respected outwardly and, what's more, in one's mind, even when that disguise, given its naturally beautiful and handsome appearance, is inadequate or, so to speak, not quite successful. Mai-Sakhme would not have been a child of the Black Earth had he not known that there are images of god, breathing divine images, that are to be seen as fundamentally different from those without life or breath and are to be worshiped as images of god—like Hapi, the bull of Menfe, and like Pharaoh himself in the horizon of his palace. That he was familiar with this fact helped more than a little in forming the surmises he cherished in regard to Joseph's nature and appearance—and of course we know that Joseph himself was not exactly anxious to curb such surmises but, on the contrary, loved to take people aback.

 

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