Free Moses, Man of the Mountain by Zora Neale Hurston Page A

formation and crushed them by sheer weight and numbers; another time, they lured out the main army of the enemy by sending an inferior force before the gates. When the attacking Egyptian forces retreated before the defenders, the swift-striking horsemen and foot soldiers of Moses fell upon them from ambush and cut off their retreat, and hewed them down like saplings. The returning armies of Egypt staggered home under the weight of booty and led slaves in hordes. The streets of the cities teemed with strange nationalities and tongues. From the Sudan, all Asia and Greece.
    So always Moses was asking himself, “When will there be enough of conquests? When will I follow my own mind and read the pages of Thoth?”
    He came to feel, somehow, that he would never die until he had read that book hidden in the river at Koptos. So he wasreckless in his daring. The huge hope of audacity spurred him and he took chances to win that no other leader would have dared, and won because his men had come to believe that he could not fail, so they fought like fiends from hell.
    He knew what sorrow meant because old Mentu died. “Please give me the funeral and tomb of a priest,” he begged Moses at the last. “That is what I wanted to be. But I wanted to be a great one—not just another one to light fires and burn incense. I couldn’t make it from where I started. You have the power to insist—bury me as a priest.”
    “Don’t you worry, Mentu. It is going to be done just like you want it. You have been my best friend. I am very sorry you will not be going to Koptos with me as we had planned, for I shall go.”
    “Maybe I will, who knows? And, Suten-Rech, don’t forget what I told you about the monkeys and the snakes. It might be true, you know. The old folks often know things you can’t find in a book.”
    “Oh, I won’t forget. I won’t forget anything that you have ever taught me, the sayings, and the proverbs and all. They have helped me a lot.”
    “You are right to listen to proverbs. They are short sayings made out of long experience. Goodbye, son. I wanted a long life, but I didn’t mean to get old. Look out for the snakes and monkeys and find out what they say.”
    Moses astonished the court by the elaborate burial of his servant Mentu. Everything needful was inside the tomb for the Ka of Mentu, even to the picture of a Prince and his groom on a river journey to a place where a serpent lived in the water. And no one knew why it was there but Moses. The tomb was surrounded on the outside by a fenced-in garden, and Moses ordered that no creature that entered that enclosure was to be killed at any time, especially if it were a monkey or a snake.
    Sitting alone in his quarters he would picture Mentu in the Hall of the double Maati, justifying his life before the forty-two gods and crying:
    “Hail, thou who eatest shades, who cometh forth from the place where the Nile riseth, I have not committed theft.
    “Hail, Leg of Fire, who comest forth from Akhekky, I have not eaten my heart [harbored malice].”
    And so on to the forty-two deities, and Moses felt that if he could only be as pure as old Mentu when it came his time to enter the court of Osiris Nu, he would be satisfied.
    So these thoughts reminded Moses keenly of his days among the priests and he took to visiting them again. Now, he was the great soldier and a powerful Prince, and the priests behaved accordingly. By his own inclination he was better educated than any scribe in Egypt. He had read all of the books in the library, and all of the priests knew that he had read them. They were proud and happy to have him come among them. It gave new prestige to the priesthood which had declined considerably under the war party now in power.
    “Tell me, and then again show me, so I can know,” was what Moses said to them about every bit of magic in the temples. “Never mind the ceremonies. They are not important. I can learn them from the other side of the altar. They are