1There was another river, far to the west of Uruk, that ran north through a desert. Once each year it rose and covered its fields with black mud, and when it went down the people sowed. They called their country the Black Land, and all beyond it the Red.
2In that country the marks had come too. There they were pictures of owls and reeds and open hands, and they were cut and painted with great care. And there a king ruled both banks from a city called the White Walls. His name was Netjerikhet. Later ages called him Djoser.
3Now hear about a boy named Meru, who was thirteen in the year this story begins, and about his brother Hori, who was nineteen.
4Their father had been a maker of bricks. He had died under a wall of his own making, when the mud had not dried through and the wall lay down on him like a tired ox. Hori had been a father to the boy since. He was broad and easy and sang while he worked, badly. Meru thought the sun rose because Hori got up.
5When the river rose that year and the fields went under, the king's men came through the villages, as they came every flood. A farmer has no work while his field is a lake. So the king fed him bread and beer and onions, and he worked for the king. Hori was taken, and Meru went with him.
6They were marched to the edge of the desert above the White Walls. There, on a shelf of rock where the old kings lay under their benches of brick, the king's tomb was rising. It was not like any tomb before it.
7It was made of stone. Not a stone door or a stone floor, as rich men had. All of it. Ten thousand blocks, cut small enough for two men to lift, laid in rows like bricks. Brick they understood. Brick was mud, and went back to mud. This would not go back.
8The man who had thought of it walked the ground every day. He was thin, and no longer young, and he wore the plain kilt of a working scribe though he was the first man in the land after the king. He was keeper of the king's seal, high priest of the city of the sun, master of builders and carvers. The men only called him by his name, which was Imhotep.
9He asked questions. That was what the men said of him, half in wonder and half in complaint. He would stop a hauling gang and ask the oldest man why they set the rollers so. He did not ask as a lord asks, already knowing. He asked as a man who wanted to be told.
10Hori was put to the shaft. Under the tomb they were cutting a square pit straight down into the rock, deeper than twenty men standing on each other's shoulders, and from the bottom of it passages ran out in the dark like roots. There the king would lie. Hori went down each dawn by a rope and came up each dusk, grey with dust, and still sang.
11Meru was too small for hauling. They gave him to the chisel fire. The cutters' tools were copper, and copper is soft; an hour against limestone and the edge was gone. So all day boys ran the blunt chisels to a pit of charcoal, where a smith heated them and beat them keen again, and the boys ran them back. Meru's work was to keep that fire fed and never let it sink.
12In the evenings, when the others slept, he sometimes saw a lamp moving among the stone heaps. It was Imhotep. One night Meru crept close to watch.
13The great man was sitting on the ground like a child, playing with chips of stone. He stacked them straight up, flat on flat, as high as his knee, and pushed the top with one finger. They fell. He stacked them again, but this time he leaned each layer a little inward, toward the middle, so the pile rested on itself. He pushed. It stood. He pushed harder. It stood.
14He saw the boy. "Come and push it," he said. Meru came and pushed. It stood.
15"Why does it not fall, lord?"
16"I think because each stone is trying to fall inward, and all of them cannot fall inward at once. So they hold one another up." He rubbed his eyes. "I think. No one has piled stone this high. There is no old man I can ask. If I am wrong, I will not learn it from a heap of chips. I will learn it when it comes down on four hundred men."
17Meru had never heard a great man say if I am wrong. He did not know that they could.
18The tomb was finished as a single bench of stone, broad and low. The king came in his chair to see it. He was a heavy man with a sick man's colour, and he looked at it a long time, and said that from the valley it could not be seen above its own wall.
19So Imhotep made it wider. Then he did the thing that had not been done. On top of the bench he set another, smaller, and on that another, and another: four steps going up, each course of stone leaning inward on the heart of the pile. It was becoming a hill. A hill made by hands.
20In the second flood season of the work, the roof of a passage came down.
21It was deep under the tomb, where the diggers were opening a new room off the great pit. The rock there was rotten, and nobody had known. There was a sound like a cough inside the earth. Dust came up the shaft in a slow white cloud. Then the shouting began.
22Meru was at the chisel fire. He knew the sound was Hori before anyone told him. He ran to the shaft and the rope men caught him and held him. He bit one of them. Then a hand took him by the shoulder and a quiet voice said, "Let him come. He is small. We will need someone small."
23It was Imhotep, and he was already tying the rope about his own waist.
24They went down together, with a lamp between them. The dark at the bottom was thick with dust, and men were pulling at fallen stone with their bare hands. Six had been in the passage. They could hear one of them. He was not singing. He was calling out, every little while, the same word, and the word was Meru's name.
25There was a gap under a slab, as wide as a bread basket. Imhotep held the lamp to it. He looked at the slab and at what held it, for a long cold moment, as he had looked at the chips. "That one bears the weight," he said, and laid his hand on a broken block. "Do not touch that one. Take out the small stones to the left of it, and nothing else. Boy, do you hear me? Nothing else, though he begs you."
26Meru went into the gap on his belly. He passed out stones behind him, one and one and one, until his fingers were open and bleeding. He found a hand in the dark, and it closed on his. He knew it by the scar across the thumb.
27It took until the lamp had been filled three times. They brought out two living men and four dead. Hori was one of the living. But the rock had lain across his body from the hips down for half a day, and when they carried him up into the light, Meru saw the smith look at him once and look away.
28He lived two days. He was clear in his mind, and that was the hard part. Meru sat by him in the shade of the stone heaps and kept the flies off and gave him beer through a reed.
29On the second evening Hori said, "It is a strange thing. I have cut out a house for the king that will stand ten thousand years. And I have no son. I have no field in my name. Go home in a year, and the dust will have filled in where I stood." He tried to laugh. "The king will have his mountain. There will be nothing to say Hori was here at all."
30"I will say it," said Meru.
31"You will say it for as long as you live. And then?"
32Meru had no answer. In the night Hori's breathing changed, and before dawn it stopped. They buried him in the sand at the desert's edge with the other three. The sand keeps a body well. It keeps no name.
33After that the boy would not work. He sat by the cold chisel pit and let the fire go out. He had made up his mind to walk home when the river fell, and plant barley, and never look at a stone again as long as he lived.
34Imhotep came and stood over the dead fire. He did not speak of the beating or the work. He said, "Come. I want to show you a thing no one but the carver has seen."
35He led Meru to a shed where the king's statue was being made. At its foot was the base, and on the base the king's name was cut, deep and fine, in its ring. And beside the king's name, on the king's own statue, were cut a second name and its titles.
36Meru could not read. Imhotep read it to him, touching each sign. It was his own name.
37"This has not been done before," Imhotep said. "A servant's name on his master's stone. The king allowed it. I did not sleep the night he said so." He was silent a moment. "I will tell you why I asked. It was not to be praised. I am a builder, and I know what holds. I have seen my father die and my teachers die, and what they knew went with them, unless they had put it into someone's hands or cut it where it could be read. I am afraid of that more than I am afraid of the dying. So I cut."
38"You are a lord," said Meru. "The king gives you a stone to cut on. My brother dug in the dark."
39"Yes," said Imhotep. "That is so, and it is not just, and I cannot mend it this year." "But the stone is not only the king's. Do you think it knows whose name is on the gate? Every block in that hill was squared by some man's hands. Take one out, and those above it come down. Your brother's passage holds up its share. That is not nothing. It is only not written." He held out a chisel, handle first. It was copper, newly sharpened by some other boy. "I can teach you to write it."
40Meru did not take the chisel that day. He took it three days after.
41He learned to cut stone as other boys learn to swim. He learned to read the grain, and where a block wished to split. And in the evenings, Imhotep or one of his scribes taught him signs, a few at a time: the owl, the reed, the mouth, the quail chick.
42The king looked at his hill of four steps and wished it higher still. So it was widened again, and raised to six. And when the third step was being laid on the north side, a cutter of fifteen years brought a block to its place and asked the setters to wait.
43On the inner face, the face that would be turned to the heart of the mountain and never see the sun, he had cut four signs. They were not well cut. They said Hori. Beneath them, smaller, he had cut a man with his arms raised, which was the sign for a man rejoicing; for his brother had sung.
44The setters looked at it. Not one of them could read. But they were men who had lost brothers too. They said nothing, and they turned the face inward with great gentleness, and slid the block home, and the next course went down on top of it. It is there now. No one has seen it since that day, and no one will. It is there.
45The mountain was finished late in the king's reign. It stood higher than anything that hands had made since the world began. It was white as salt, six great steps into the sky, and round it ran a wall with one true gate.
46The king died not long after, as kings do. He was carried down the great pit and sealed under a plug of red stone. He had believed the mountain would carry him through death as a boat carries a man through the flood. It did not. In later days thieves found the way in.
47But hear what did last.
48Meru grew old as a master of cutters. He taught his sons to square a block, and they taught theirs. A hundred years on, the grandsons of those sons raised mountains with smooth sides, far greater than the six steps, and every one of them stood because of what had been learned on that shelf of rock. Not one of those builders had known Hori. Every one of them worked with his hands.
49And Imhotep? No one has found his grave. They have looked for a long time. But for two thousand years after him, the scribes of the Black Land, before they began to write, would tip a drop of water from the bowl for his sake. In the end the people made him a god of healing. Whether he ever set a bone, no one can now say for certain.
50He would have asked them a question about that. He was a man who asked.
51The mountain of six steps is standing yet. You may go and put your hand on it. And if you do, remember that the name on the gate is the king's, and the name beside it is the builder's; and that inside, in the dark, turned toward the heart where no one reads, there are four small signs and a man with his arms raised.