1Thirteen hundred years after the mountain of six steps, the Black Land was the richest country on earth, and its gods were past counting. Greatest of them was Amun, the Hidden One, whose house at Thebes was a city in itself.
2Then a king came to the throne who saw the matter differently. He said there was one god only, and it was not hidden. It was there for every eye, every morning: the disc of the sun, the Aten, that gives light and life to all that lives. He put off his old name, which had Amun's name in it. He called himself Akhenaten.
3He would not stay in Thebes, among the old temples. He sailed down the river to an empty plain where the cliffs stand back in a great bow, and no god had ever been worshipped. There he marked out a city. He named it Akhetaten, the Horizon of the Aten.
4A city needs carvers. So it was that a boy of twelve named Paneb came north on a barge, sent to be apprentice to the king's own sculptor, Thutmose.
5Paneb's father had been a painter of tombs at Thebes, in the service of Amun. He had died the year before, and lay in a small rock tomb in the western hills, which he had painted himself in his spare hours for thirty years. His name was on its doorway: Amenmose, Amun is born. Paneb's mother had wept to send the boy away. But the old temples were going hungry, and the new city was eating stone.
6He had never seen anything like it. It was being built all at once, in a fever. The blocks were cut small, so that one man could carry one on his shoulder and run. Whole temples went up in a season. And the temples had no roofs. There was no dark room at the heart with a hidden statue, as in every temple he had known. The altars stood out under the sky, hundreds of them, heaped with bread and flowers, and the sun came down and touched them.
7In Thutmose's workshop he learned that the carving had changed too. Thutmose was carving the king as he was, long in the jaw and narrow in the chest. He carved him kissing his small daughters. He carved the queen, Nefertiti, with the lines beginning at the corners of her mouth. "The king says, live in truth," Thutmose told the boy. "So carve what you see. It is harder than it sounds."
8And over every scene they carved the disc, with its long rays reaching down, and each ray ended in a small open hand.
9The king had made a hymn to the Aten, and it was sung in the roofless temples at dawn. Paneb heard it so often that he had it by heart. It told how all the world lies as if dead in the night, and the lion comes out, and the snake. Then the sun rises and men wake and wash and lift their arms. The birds fly up, the fish leap in the river, the chick speaks inside the egg. It said the god had made the far countries too, Syria and Nubia as well as the Black Land, each people with its own tongue and its own colour of skin.
10"How many are your deeds, though hidden from sight." That was a line of it.
11He was happy. It should be said. He was young, and the work was new, and it seemed to him that the whole world had been let out of a dark room into the morning.
12In the later years of the king, the order came.
13It was not enough any more that the Aten should be first. The others were to be gone. The temples of Amun were shut and their priests sent away. And gangs of carvers were to go through the whole land with chisels and cut out the name of Amun wherever it was written: from temple walls, from the tips of the tall stones, from statues, from tombs.
14Paneb was eighteen, and a fair hand by then. He was put in a gang and sent to Thebes.
15They worked through the great temple for two months. It was strange work. A name that a carver long dead had cut with love, one bruised it out with a few blows and moved on. Some of the gang liked it. Most did it as men do any day's work. There was one, an older carver named Hori, who on the fortieth day laid down his chisel before a wall and said that his grandfather had cut that wall, and he would not. The overseer did not shout. He had Hori beaten on the soles of his feet, and sent him to the gold mines in the eastern desert. After that no one laid down a chisel.
16Then the gang crossed the river to the tombs in the western hills.
17Paneb knew the path. He had walked it carrying his father's paint pots.
18The overseer had a list. They came to the doorway on the sixth day.
19His mother was there. Someone had told her. She stood beside the door in her widow's white and looked at her son with the chisel in his hand, and did not say a word.
20The name was on the lintel and both doorposts, and nine times inside, wherever the painted figure of his father stood before the offering table. Amenmose. The first half of it was the god's name. The order was plain. The half must go.
21"That one is yours, I think," said the overseer. He was not being cruel. He thought he was being kind, giving a son the chance to do it gently.
22Paneb thought of Hori's feet. He thought of the gold mines. He thought: it is only three signs. He set the chisel to the lintel.
23It took him the morning. He cut the god out of his father's name twelve times, on the stone and in the painted plaster. What was left was is born, with a bruise in front of it. A name with half of it gone is no name. In that country they believed a man lived on as long as his name was spoken. Paneb did not know if he believed it. But he knew what he had done to the thirty years of evenings on those walls.
24When he came out into the light his mother had gone. She lived eleven years more. She did not speak of the tomb, and she did not go up to it again.
25He went back to the city of the sun and carved the disc with its open hands. They were the same hands. He found that he could not look at them in the same way.
26Then the sickness came. It came up from the north with the traders and it did not care which god a man sang to. It went through the workmen's village like a fire through reeds. It went into the palace as well.
27The king's second daughter was named Meketaten. Paneb had carved her at five, sitting on her mother's knee and pointing. She died when she was about eleven.
28Thutmose was sent for, to carve the mourning on the wall of the royal tomb in the eastern cliffs, and he took Paneb to hold the lamp. So Paneb saw the king close, by lamplight.
29He was not a god. He was a long-faced man of middle years who could not stand still. He kept putting out his hand toward the bier and taking it back. The queen stood beside him, and he held her arm above the elbow as a man holds a post in a flood. He had sung to all the world that the sun gives life to every creature. The sun had risen that morning the same as ever. It was high and bright on the cliffs outside while his child lay cold within. He had no other god to turn to. He had sent them all away.
30"Carve it as it is," the king said to Thutmose. His voice was hoarse. "Do not make it fair."
31They carved it as it was: the king and queen bent with grief, their arms flung up, in a way no king of that land had ever let himself be shown. Paneb held the lamp. He had hated this man, since the lintel. He found that he could not go on doing it with a whole heart. He thought: he has cut a thing out of himself too, and now he feels the place where it was.
32The king died a few years after. A boy was set on the throne, and the men who stood behind the boy were tired of the new city and afraid of the old priests. Within a few seasons the court took ship for the south. The boy changed his name back, to one with Amun in it. Thutmose packed his best tools and went with them. The city of the Horizon emptied like a cracked jar.
33Paneb went back to Thebes and cut tombs for the newly great. He married. He grew old. The roofless temples stood open to the sand.
34When he was past sixty, another king reigned, a general, who meant to set the land in order. In his order there was no place for the man who had shut the temples. Carvers were wanted again.
35They found Paneb because he was the last man living who knew that city stone by stone. He was to show the gangs where everything was, so that nothing would be missed.
36He stood in the great temple and watched. The young carvers went along the walls. Wherever the king's name stood in its ring, they bruised it out with a few blows and moved on. Some liked it. Most did it as men do any day's work. In the lists of kings that were cut afterward at the holy places, his reign was left out, as though the years themselves had not been. When men had to speak of him, they called him the enemy, and did not say his name.
37A boy in the gang, no more than eighteen, saw the old man watching him and stopped, with his chisel up. "Did you know him, grandfather?"
38"I held a lamp for him once," said Paneb.
39"Was he as wicked as they say?"
40Paneb looked at the bruise on the wall where the name had been. He had made a bruise like that. He knew its shape as he knew his own hand. "He saw one true thing more clearly than any man of his time," he said slowly. "And he could not bear that others saw other things. So he took a chisel to them. That is all his wickedness. It is the same as yours, and it was the same as mine." He nodded at the wall. "Go on. They will beat you if you stop. I know that too."
41The boy went on, but more slowly.
42Paneb was asked for his list. He gave them the temples, and the palace, and the great road. He did not lie to them. But he was old, and his memory, he said, was not what it had been.
43He did not remember to them a certain tomb in the northern cliffs, cut for a courtier and never finished, where the king's whole hymn stood carved on the wall of the doorway from the lion in the night to the chick in the egg. And when they came to the house of Thutmose, he told them the truth, that the master had taken everything of worth away to the south.
44He went in alone that evening. In the small storeroom behind the workshop, on a shelf, stood the things Thutmose had not thought worth the freight: trial pieces, plaster faces, a head of the queen in painted stone that had been the pattern for the others. She wore her tall blue crown. One eye was inlaid, and the other had never been finished. She looked past him at something a long way off, with the lines beginning at the corners of her mouth.
45He could not carry it. So he did what a builder can do. He closed the storeroom door, and he piled brick and rubble against it, a little each evening for a week, until it was a wall like the other walls. Then he went home to Thebes.
46The gangs pulled the temples down for their stone. The king's small blocks, so easy to carry, were just the size to pack into the hollow hearts of new gate-towers that the general was raising for Amun. They went in by the tens of thousands, still carved and painted, the disc and the open hands, the king kissing his daughters. They were shut in the dark behind new walls. The men who put them there thought that was the end of them.
47On his way to the barge, Paneb climbed to his father's tomb. It was the first time in forty years.
48The bruise was on the lintel. He had brought his tools. He was the best hand in Thebes and it took him three days. He cut the god's name back in front of is born, all twelve times, and on the last evening he said the whole name aloud in the doorway, though there was no one to hear it but the swifts.
49It was not the same. Anyone could see where the new cutting was. He did not try to hide it.
50Now hear what came of the rest.
51For three thousand years no one knew there had been such a king. His name was in no list. Then the sand was dug away from the plain of the bowed cliffs, and there was the city. The hymn was read on the wall of the unfinished tomb. The new gate-towers at Thebes grew old in their turn and were opened, and the small blocks came out of their hearts with the paint still on them. And one winter day, diggers cleared the rubble from a small storeroom, and a workman lifted out of the dust a queen in a tall blue crown.
52His enemies took great pains, and for a time they had their way. He had taken the same pains himself with a god's name on a painter's door. None of it held.