Voices from the Other World by Naguib Mahfouz Page A

tens of times in a fraction of a second! This woman wanders about as a young beauty, then she falls in love and marries and becomes pregnant and has children and goes into senility and withers away and becomes loathsome to look upon, all in a brief interval. Loyalty and treachery are not cleaved by an instant. These and countless other things are what make a farce of life—if the deceased could laugh, then I would drown in laughter. It seemed to me as though there is no reality in the world except for change. My soul wished that all these people and their crazy lives would just go away and be gone from my sight. I regarded them from afar as a numberless, limitless horde. Their forms diminished and their features dissolved and the distinctions between them disappeared. They became a single block, silent and still, without life or movement. I continued to stare at them in shock and perplexity, that slowly lessened by degrees until a new dimension was revealed to me that had previously been concealed.
    I saw this calm darkness ignite with an all-encompassing light, as the faint, fading beams that pulsated in each brain, which by themselves were weak and dying, all clung to each other in one cohesive mass, emanating a powerful, dazzling incandescence. I saw in its radiance a gleaming truth, a pure goodness, and a luminous beauty, and my wonder and bewilderment returned. O Lord, no matter how the soul suffers and is tortured, it goes on inventing and creating just the same. And Lord, Taw-ty has seen glorious things and will see yet more glorious and awesome things. I became convinced that this light that glowed upon me was but a mere speck of the heaven to which I would ascend. I looked away and turned my back to the world, to find myself once again in the Sacred Chamber for embalming—and a divine ecstasy imbued my spirit that cannot be conveyed.
    The seventy days of embalming were done. The men came again. They removed my body from the trough and wrapped it in layers of cloth. They brought with them a sarcophagus, upon which an image of the youthful Taw-ty was most flatteringly engraved, and placed the body inside it. Then they hoisted it upon the back of their necks and filed outside, where they met my family and my neighbors, who struck their faces and wailed. Their shrieks were worse than those on the day my death was announced. They proceeded to the Nile and embarked on a huge boat, which bore them to the City of Immortality on the West Bank. They jostled about the sarcophagus, calling out and howling, “My tears will not dry, my heart knows no peace after you, Taw-ty!” while my wife entreated aloud, “O my husband, why was I condemned to live after you?”
    The Prince’s chamberlain declared, “O glorious writer, Taw-ty, you have left your place empty!”
    For a long while I watched with these eyes that had forgotten their past, as if there were no ties that bound me to this world, nor with these humans. The boat pulled up to the shore, and they hoisted up the sarcophagus once more. From there they marched with it to the mausoleum—on which I had spent the best part of my treasure—and set it down in its intended place. During all this, a band of priests intoned some verses from the Book of the Dead, lecturing me on how to behave in the afterlife! Then they began to withdraw, one after another, until the tomb was deserted. There was nothing left to hear but the sound of distant mourning. The doors were sealed and sand shoveled over them. Thus perished all relations between the world that I had bid good-bye, and the world that I now greet. . . .
    Note:
Here the hieroglyphic text breaks off. Perhaps the period of waiting to which the writer referred at the start of this document had ended, and his voyage into Eternity had begun. There he would be diverted from his much-loved pen—and from all things.

Glossary
    al-Arna’uti: In Arabic, “the Albanian”—an allusion