At the monastery in Thebes there lived a monk named Apa Pisentius. The other monks spoke of him with great esteem, but he did not walk among them, and never once did I encounter him in the halls. Many times they would speak of saving rations and delivering food to his abode, which I reckoned could not have been far away given the speed with which the brothers offering him charity would return. "The work of Apa Pisentius is of rare and great importance." Apa Boutros said to me, "Apa Pisentius is in power to save more neglected souls than any man alive".
I tried to take all this in, until finally one day Apa Boutros handed me a hemp basket of bread and beer and told me to bring them across the river to Apa Pisentius. "If you travel upstream on the bank you will see a shed for farming, and if you hike up the dunes from there you will find Pisentius' dwelling". "Do not feel compelled to rush home, for it may be good that you dally and offer the father companionship. He is a lonely man on a singular mission, though he may not claim so."
And so I did this, and wandered through the bright and shining world, to snake my path to the desert and find the only feature the shadowy maw of a monolithic and ancient stone tomb jutting deep into the earth.
As I walked through the entrance of the tomb I saw Apa Pisentius' posessions at the threshold where he could still catch some luminance from the sun. His belongings consisted of a plate, a goblet of wine, and a bible codice and here passed a spectacular wall-fresco of the old Pharaoh in a barge-scene accompanied by a series of hieroglyphs. I had not heard of the cthonic nature of Apa Pisentius' dwellings, yet sure he rested further in the tomb, I continued my descent without the aid of torchlight. Deeper and deeper into the darkness, my every footstep echoing through the chasm.
From the room at the end of the hall I heard the muffled voice of a man shouting and chanting.
"Oh spirits of the damned, confined in corporeal torpor until the day of judgment, I ask to hear ye chant once more! Do ye not wish to be saved?"
and I froze where I stood, and a silence gripped the room as I concentrated my ears on the void, and there arose slowly, a rasping, like the exhalation of wind, a shriek of pain in many voices that rose to a fever pitch and dissipated instantaneously.
"Father Pisentius?" I inquired into the darkness.
I heard a cough before collect his attention. "What is it my son?" replied the old man, his baggy old features and shaggy facial hair now visible in the darkness.
"I was asked by Apa Boutros to bring you some food and drink."
"I have not met you before, my son, would you join me at my meal?"
"Of course, father."
Apa Pisentius and I returned to his dwelling at the mouth of the tomb. I joined him in a prayer of thanks for the food and watched as he began to inspect the contents of the basket. "As always, Apa Boutros is excessive in his rations, and an old monk like me has hardly any need for so much food. Please, break bread with me."
I hesitated for a moment, so as not to seem ungracious, but acquiesced to this ceremony of charity. "Of course father." I replied and began to nibble and tear at my piece while Father Pisentius dunked his head into the loaf slowly removing sizable chunks to digest.
We watched the dying of the light as the sun set to the west behind the banks of the Nile, and the final glints of its shimmer vanished under the sandy horizon.
"What lies on your heart, my brother?" he asked me with a smile of camaraderie as he finished his portion.
"Father, what was that sound which moaned through the tomb which your prayers elicited?" I asked.
"It was the anguish of the damned souls that rest here in these tombs." he repplied curtly.
I sat trying to grasp Pisentius' claim.
"Father, I must confess that I have spent much time in the company of the dead, and have not known them to pronounce their passions so."
Apa Pisentius grunted with a kind of private satisfaction.
"Well, it would be my pleasure, Brother Ammonious, if you would join me in my works once you have finished your food." and Apa Pisentius, who had already finished his meal before me, got up and walked back to the central chamber of the tomb as I paused for a moment to finish my meal while watching the pink clouds pass over the Nile sunset.
I retreated to the inner chamber where Apa Pisentius had lit a small clay lamp. The central chamber was mostly empty, save the sand and rocks before our feet, but was covered wall to wall in hieroglyphs and mythological scenes I recognized as the journey of Osiris upon his barge through the houses of the netherworld. The wall was orderly laid out as scenes separated by registers. Apa Pisentius motioned me to accompany him through the passageway first to the left, one of the three doorways which jutted from this reception room.
"He used to have so many toys in there." Apa Pisentius commented as we walked to the first room off the main chamber. "Enough to fill the room from floor to ceiling: Gold, Silver, Ivory. Thieves stole them all many many years ago. What hubris we of Aegyptus had, that we thought we could bring the bounty won by our sins on earth with us to heaven."
We entered a small chamber jutting out from the narrow, dark hallway which we had passed through. Pisentius' light cast shadows across the walls of the room catching the wooden sarcophagus and the false door painted on the wall. Inside the sarcophagus lay the mummy of a man of average height. Its arms crossed over its chest lying in repose. Its skin was stained darkened by centuries of rest. Apa Pisentius sat down and pinched the flame of the lamp with his finger. The tomb was cast in darkness.
"Speak to me now, O king of old, what is thy name?" called Pisentius,
and out of the darkness came a raspy whisper.
"I am Amenmesses, Once King of the Two Lands"
"Spirit, speak to us of your life!"
The mummy exhaled a low growl, as if to clear its throat. "I was son of a king and he the son of a king before me. I lived a life of luxury and pleasures, decadent and sentimental. I was strong. I crushed the enemies of the two lands beneath the soles of my feet. I never knew want or hardship."
"Speak to me of your sins, O Amenmesses."
There was a pause in the mummy's speech. "I was proud, and after some time, I came to realize that I was the image of my people, and my privilege was without exception. I came to see people as objects. I came to use them in selfish ways for my convenience which has forever stained my soul."
"Why did you do these things to your fellow man, O Amenmesses?"
The mummy's response here was curt and seemed to follow without hesitation. "Because they allowed me to do so."
"and how do you regret these sins, O king?"
"Here. In this place. It has been so long. There is so little left of me as me. For I see that my pride did not belong to me. It was not forged by my love of my fellow man, but by the love that was offered to me, that I neither returned nor fully embodied, and it is that dream, that hollow image to which this mortal body is to be sacrificed.”
"Do you this day repent before the Lord Jesus Christ, renouncing your pagan gods, and seek his charity when you are resurrected on the day of judgment?"
The mummy let out a slow, raspy whisper. "Yesssss..."
"Peace be upon you Amenmesses." concluded Pisentius who struck up the lamp and stood up. In the light the mummy still lay in its sarcophagus unstirred. Pisentius nodded towards me. "Let us make round to the next soul, Ammonius."
And so we returned to the main chamber, and proceeded to the next doorway on the left. As we walked Apa Pisentius warned me to be cautious of the occupant in the next room. "This next one has a temper. She is most obstinate in her refusal of the gospel, and every day do we quarrel."
And finally at the end of the passage we found ourselves in a room similar in size and layout to the last. The walls were decorated with paintings of mother Isis suckling Horus the child, and in the center of the room lay a wooden sarcophagus. The mummy was smaller and more slender than the last, more feminine, but most striking was its face which was petrified into some pained contorted expression. Apa Pisentius snuffed out the lamp.
"Once again I ask ye, O lost soul, what is thy name?"
and a voice more frantic and high-pitched than the last pronounced itself in the room. "I am Bintanath, Queen of The Two Lands, wife of Amenmesses"
"Speak to us of your life."
"Mine was a life of longing. For though in life I was never lacking in my desires of the body or the affections of others, I stood always in the shadow of my brother. For I and Amenmesses had grown up together, destined to wed, yet our roles would be different. Whence I gave birth to his child I was to be discarded, while he toyed with a country he was too drunk on power to rule. I was filled with envy and spite."
"And speak to us of your sins?"
"In my time of living I played with the desire of my brother and other men, and conspired finally to slit his throat as he slept. None of his heirs were of age to govern the kingdom, I having poisoned my only son, and I knew my role was to rule in his stead."
"A grave sin. What of your death?"
"Not one year from my plot I was murdered by the next in line to the throne. A mere boy my brother had sired with a Nubian princess."
"Do you this day repent before the Lord Jesus Christ, renouncing your pagan gods, and seek his charity when you are ressurected on the day of judgment?"
The mummy's voice paused. "Never."
"Why?"
The voice began screeching in irritation "Because the few months I spent on the throne gave my life meaning, and even an eternity of damnation and loneliness was worth that fleeting moment! The name of your Lord Jesus Christ is shit, and I piss on him!"
I heard Apa Pisentius let out a frustrated sigh. "Peace be upon you, Bintanath. I will return tomorrow."
Without even lighting the lamp, Apa Pisentius got up and made his way through the passage way in the dark. I followed by tracking the sound of his footsteps, and eventually once again met with his lamp light in the central chamber.
"Now we are to visit my flock proper, watch your step here Ammonius, it is a sharp decline."
To the end of the central chamber we now descended down a staircase deeper into the tomb shaft. I cautiously followed Pisentius in ever step, careful not to trip and spill down the chasm. In not long we had reached the sandy bottom of slope, and now stared out onto a large room. There were no decorations on the walls here, nothing unique in its architecture, merely an empty chamber, but when my eyes turned to the floor I was rapt with horror.
There before us lay a massive and mangled pile of human bones, a turbid mixture of ribs, skulls, and femurs.
Apa Pisentius addressed me: "They used to all be laid out here neatly in rows. I visit them every day and I still don't know quite how many there are here. The thieves that ransacked the loot of the nobles upstairs also went through the servant's chamber, and when they were done they threw the bodies in one big heap. All kinds of people lay here: Slaves, retainers, litter-carriers, hand-maidens, and harem girls. These are my children Ammonius, I read to them the gospel every day."
"And they long for it?"
"Oh yes, Ammonius. For though the ones upstairs may also receive my blessings, though they are damned and prideful, they few found their expression in life. Christ cherishes these men and women, though they were born before his words, they also knew themselves to be estranged from the powers and abuses of this world. It is his messaage of salvation and deliverance that they have craved for hundreds of years."
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