Voices from the Other World by Naguib Mahfouz

myself for a time by examining the exquisite food and the vintage wine in their stomachs, until I came across onion and garlic in the gut of a priest. These are both forbidden for the clergy! I asked myself, do you see how this pious man takes advantage of his fellows’ distraction to sneak down this food? In part of a nobleman’s stomach, I caught the creep of the disease that would sap away his life. At this moment, the man was talking to a general with glee and delight. Inwardly, I said to him, “May you be welcome!” Then my sight fell on the governor Tety, infamous for his cruelty and ruthlessness, to the point that Pharaoh had to admonish him to be moderate in overseeing his province. I scrutinized him carefully, immediately discovering that his body was frail, his limbs were sick, and that he complained bitterly and ceaselessly about his teeth and his joints. Each time the pain assailed him, he yearned to be able to sever the infection from his body. This explained why he was gripped by cruelty, as he did not hesitate to cut out the crooked from among his subjects with merciless brutality. In addition to Tety, I saw the vizier, Mina. That obdurate man, who fought the idea of peace with all this force, was always agitating for war. Do you see the secret of this dangerous minister’s stubbornness? I saw that his mind was brilliant but his bowels were feeble. The morsels of his food remained trapped in them a long time, corrupting his blood as it circulated, so that it reached his brain spoiled, fouling his reason. As a result, that which issued from his mouth possessed great evil! The man satisfied with his own opinion sees it as straight and rightly guided, though I saw his mind as blackened and polluted.
    Next my vision turned to the breasts of those present, looking into their hidden corners and behind their grinning faces. One was horribly bored, whispering to his companion, “When can we go back to the palace to hear the courtesans sing?” And that one over there muttered, “If the man had died from his illness, I would now be commander of the spear-throwers brigade!” And this other one pondered to himself in anguish, “When will the imbecile leave for his tour of inspection, so that I may rush to be with his gorgeous wife, whom I adore— ahhh!” And yet another told a friend from his deepest heart, “A human being doesn’t know when his appointed time will come.” And, “After today, I will not put off building my tomb.” Or, “Of what good is money, then?” Confusion so controlled his heart that he told a comrade, “Akhenaten said that the Lord is Aton, while Horemheb said that He was Amon. There is also a sect that worships Ra—so why did the Lord leave us in dissension?” I did not tarry too long at Pharaoh’s magnificent party, for I soon succumbed to ennui. I turned away from it, to find myself once more abroad in the wide world.
    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