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I sang before his throne, never the same song twice. They all came to hear me. I made them weep; I made them tremble. Music was not unknown to them, but they had not known music like mine. 
    Proudly Pharaoh showed me his wives, some of whom, he told me, were his sisters. The king here always marries his sisters. Well, Hera is the sister of Zeus, and the Egyptian goddess Isis is the sister of their Osiris; evidently such marriages are essential on the highest levels of the cosmos, and the kings here imitate what the gods do, for they fancy that they are gods themselves. He showed me the royal treasury, overflowing with the spoils of the nations. He allowed me to visit his great library, a lofty stone chamber full of paper scrolls that he said contained all the wisdom of the universe, though he did not allow me to look into them, not just yet. And he took me to see his tomb, which had been in the making for all the twenty years of his reign. A stone chamber, it was, on the far side of the great river that splits his land in two, or rather a whole series of chambers, descending deep into the earth so that he would sleep beyond the reach of the heat of the day when the time for him to sleep arrived. About it were many other such tombs, belonging to the earlier kings of his race. 
    On the walls of his tomb were paintings, bright and wondrous, showing the gods of his people and the judging of the dead, Pharaoh himself standing before them to offer an account of his life and his reign. A strange god with a brawny body and a bird’s head weighed the heart of the king in a balance while the presiding god looked on, judging its merit. These gods, he said, are called Thoth and Osiris. The Egyptians have a multitude of gods, whom they call by Egyptian names, though of course all gods are the same, no matter what mortals may call them, certain names for the Egyptians and certain ones for the Babylonians and different ones for the people of the yellow lands: names are only names, but the gods are the same, be they Amon and Thoth or Zeus and Hermes, the patterns are the same everywhere: Osiris is a god who is slain and resurrected, and is that not true of Dionysus as well? Thoth is Hermes; Amon is not unlike far-seeing Zeus. And in the end all of them, Poseidon and Hermes and Dionysus and Ares and Athena, Horus and Osiris and Isis and Set, must be understood as mere aspects of the One God who rules the universe. I did not discuss these matters with Pharaoh, though later I would with his priests. What I did speak of with him was the art of music, and the methods by which his tomb had been carved into the rock, and when he showed me the colossal pyramidal mountains of stone that his distant ancestors had built as their own tombs at a time when such huge funerary monuments were in fashion, he explained to me the secret of how those tremendous blocks of granite had been trundled toward the site and lifted into position, telling me of the amazing levers and hoists and engines by which the job was done. But we did not ever discuss the nature of the gods. 
    I stayed in Egypt five years, or perhaps it was ten. The days went by quickly and under that implacable sun my sadness began gradually to melt. I showed them how to make lyres from a tortoise shell and a sounding-skin, and how to attach the strings and how to affix the decorative horns. Pharaoh complained that these lyres were not like my own, and I explained that a god had fashioned mine out of gold and it was the only one of its kind in the world. “Which god?” he demanded, and I hesitated a moment and said, “Thoth,” for he knew nothing of Hermes. Since Thoth is the weigher of the souls of the dead the king did not care to have me invoke him, so nothing more was said about the making of a second lyre the equal of my own. But I could tell that he was displeased. 
    I taught his courtiers how to play the lyres that I made and how to sing to them, and they sang well enough, in their