Nefertiti Read Online Free Page A

the success of the new capital.'
    I did not respond. Instead, the handsome woman gracefully changed the subject. She turned to the young man to her left, who had remained silent throughout these exchanges. He was an apprentice architect.
    'So, what can you tell us about the construction of the city?' she asked. 'And more importantly whether the bigger houses have gardens, for little else would have persuaded me to sacrifice my own home and friends for the desert.'
    'I believe the villas are luxurious. And the supply of water to the gardens is prodigious. So although the city is surrounded by the desert, and would seem an arid and unpropitious place to build a new world, yet it is now green and fertile. But alas, I am working only in a minor capacity.' He paused, embarrassed.
    'And what is that?' I asked.
    'I am designing the toilet area near the Great Aten Temple.' Everyone laughed at that. Encouraged, he added, 'Even Priests must take their libatory shits in sacred surroundings!'
    'Don't talk to me about the Priests,' Moon Man said. 'Their calling is riches. And that's all there is to it. The least Akhenaten will have achieved is the destruction of their great temples to the gods of profit!'
    We all fell into silence. It is dangerous to criticize the Priests, or let us say the Old Families who have commanded so much inherited power for so many generations and are now in turmoil, like an enraged monster, at their losses of status, land and income. Likewise the Medjay: many believe that elements within the force are compelling the less orthodox members of society to accept and conform to the new religion by the use of the old techniques - intimidation, violence and suffering. I have heard stories of people disappearing, of unidentifiable bodies washing up in the river, their hands chopped off, their eyes plucked out. But it is hearsay. We are a force for order over chaos, for the harmony of maat and the rightness of things. It is how things must be.
    We retired, with bids and nods of goodnight, to our hammocks and blankets. I found some solitude in my couch in the stern of the boat, among the coils of rope, beneath the great guiding oars now driven into the mud of the riverbed. The captain lay in the prow in a hammock, with a candle. Soon all the passengers were snoring beneath tents of cloth and insect nets.
    And so I sit here now with this journal and think about what I may encounter in the city of Akhetaten. Essentially, I have no idea. It is a blank. Akhenaten's so-called great idea, to initiate a new religion and to forbid the old, strikes me as insane. It is a revolution against sense. This is not an original thought: I doubt if there are more than a handful of people - the close circle of the King, and those like the builders and architects who have jobs for life - who think he has not lost his mind. A new religion, based upon himself and Nefertiti as th e in carnations and only intermediaries of the Aten, the sun disc? Akhenaten has banished the minor gods the people have worshipped all their lives, as well as the major deities of the Otherworld, the World and the Sky. These days I only believe what I can see with my own eyes, or glean from the clues available to me here in this world, so he may well be right to disclaim the power of the invisible. And indeed he may be right to play the Priests at their own game, which they have been winning, at enormous personal gain, for generations. But then to take all power from them unto himself at one stroke, to drive them from their ancient temples at Karnak, and (worst of all) to leave them at large in the country wandering without employment or purpose other than inventing revenge? How is this possible? How can it end but in disaster? We hear he is hardly a god to look at. They say he is as unusual in body as he is curious in mind. His limbs long and spindly as a grasshopper, his belly like a water butt. But this is from those who have not seen the man himself. The only thing