Free Moses by Howard Fast

display of goods were the men who sold them; for the Egypt of Ramses was no longer the hidden land, walled in by desert and sea. Quite the contrary, it was the hub and market place of the whole world—the land of knowledge, tolerance for all strangers, and worldly sophistication. Here Moses saw painted barbarian Caucasians pleading for someone to trade them iron, bits of iron, any iron—the magic metal which the Egyptians were now beginning to work—for their beautiful furs, so unnecessary in this land of everlasting sunshine; here were the merchant lords of Mesopotamia with their long woollen robes, their conical hats, their greased, curled hair and beards, their round faces and their curling nostrils; here were the Sea Rovers, with their tenfoot spears and their huge, circular and brightly painted shields; here were desert Bedouins, in their dirty, torn robes, haughty suspicious and reserved; here were men of Kush, coal-black and deep-voiced; Philistines, superior and disdainful; hard-handed, hard-muscled sea captains and supercargoes of Phoenicia; Hittites; Canaanites; painted, half-savage traders from Shekelesh and Sherden; and even the haughty, bronzed-clad princes of distant Etruria.
    And here, too, was the slave mart, where only Egyptians were the sellers; for this was a family and hereditary monopoly in Lower Egypt and all foreign dealers were forced to deal with them and through them. Here Moses would stand in fascination—not in moral judgment, for this was as much a part of his life as the sand and the sky—but held by a feeling that was not without moral content and guilt; watching the huddles of poor, naked, chained wretches, the children, the babes drinking their mothers’ milk of servitude, the boys and girls, the maidens and young men, the old and the sick and the stricken—and it was a new feeling that Moses experienced when, with the twilight and end of a market day, he saw the servants of the slave-dealers thrust knives into the hearts of the unsaleable, the weak and diseased beyond repair, so as to save the cost of feeding them through future markets.
    It was an awakening feeling of horror and disgust, without logic or social condemnation to support it, and therefore it was no more than an emotional current in the boy—and not a very deep one at that. But it was also part of his growth and part of the effect upon him of the strange and dangerous religion of Aton. His emotional response was fed by other impressions as well. For the first time in his life) he consciously reflected on the fact that few people in Egypt were like the inhabitants of the Great House, tall and full-fleshed and healthy. The Egyptians he saw in the city were smaller and thinner; unperfumed, strong with the odour of body and filth; often toothless, diseased; often skinny, with bloated bellies. The children ran naked like animals in the market—a jungle in which they fought for scraps, for crusts of bread; in which they begged and pleaded and stole.
    But not from Moses or his cousins did they beg; they fled his path and covered their faces; and their elders bowed deeply or effaced themselves in one way or another. Where a prince of Egypt walked, a path was clear, and if by some accident one of the peasants touched one of the royal brothers, he would fling himself down and plead for forgiveness.
    At first Moses enjoyed this, but he was unable to be habitually disdainful, as his cousins were. Very well for his mother, in her impassioned speech, to tell him to bear himself like a god; the notion sat poorly with him and in time the obeisance of the market place came to bore and even to irritate him. Then he went there only to buy. But buying was a great pleasure. Manhood called for something more than a boy’s loincloth; and one of his first purchases was a dozen pleated linen kilts—the garment sacred to Egyptian nobility. Sandals followed, and then his fancy was caught by golden collars, with