Moses by Howard Fast Page B

level at least two spans, we can be assured of permanent dryness.”
    â€œAll that just to dry the land?” Moses said unbelievingly.
    â€œThat was not a problem, Moses, but a matter-of-fact business that Egyptians have been practising for two thousand years. That is why Mother Nile is our servant and not our master. The problem was to build a warehouse in this damp swamp that would not sweat and rot the wheat.” As they talked, Neph led Moses to the building and inside the walls; where slaves mixed mortar in flat troughs and carried it up the scaffolding to the bricklayers. “You see, Moses,” Neph went on, “in our land, where the public granaries mean the difference between famine and survival, we have always built these storehouses of stone. Since they were built in the desert, they not only stayed cool, but dry as well. But when you build in stone here in this morass, the inside or cooler surface of the stone will sweat—that is, the dampness in the morning air will turn into water and rot whatever grain you have inside. Even if we lined the stone with cedar planks this would still happen, for the wood then turns wet and sour. So, after thinking the matter through, we decided that we would build with brick and we set the slave people in Goshen to making bricks out of the clay pits there, mixing the clay with chopped straw, which gives it great firmness and lasting quality.
    â€œFirst we had to experiment with a small structure to see whether the brick would sweat in this climate. It did not sweat. Brick is a marvellous building material, as the Babylonians learned long ago; for while stone is dead, so to speak, brick lives and breathes and adjusts. Well, first we drove piles into the ground while it was still wet; then on the piles we laid a limestone foundation, bringing the dressed stones here on barges and fitting them into place. Then, on the limestone, we laid a floor of mortar to seal it, and on the mortar a second floor of brick. The brick walls will rise twenty feet high, after which we will line the walls in a veneer of cedar. We will roof the granary with cedar beams and planks and then weatherproof it with pitch, which we must bring from the bitter Sea of Canaan, even as we must bring the cedar from the mountains of Lebanon. So, Moses, you will know that it is easier to look at a house than make one, and while the God Ramses waves his hand and says, ‘Let it be done’, there are others who must do it. If you are ever the god-king, I hope you will remember this day,” he finished lightly.
    â€œWhy do you say that, Neph?” Moses asked, his face tight with annoyance and misery too.
    â€œI’m sorry. I didn’t mean to give you hurt.”
    â€œDon’t say it again.”
    â€œThen I will never say it again, Moses. I told you that I have a provoking tongue. Don’t let it come between us.”
    â€œI won’t,” Moses agreed, less upset at Neph than at himself and the depression into which he had been cast through watching the slave people of Goshen at work.

[12]
    YET MOSES WAS as little given to depression as he was to fancied slight or insult. Life and health burned too strongly, and if his cousins made no friend of him, they did not exclude him from their pack-like testing of manhood. With a dozen of them he took the long journey across the Delta to the ancient city of Buto, which was once, long ago, the capital of Lower Egypt, but now a poor and provincial place given over in great part to the breeding and sale of horses. There was also in Buto, to entertain the horse merchants and buyers, a great house of prostitution, known throughout Egypt for the variety and beauty of its women, who were purchased by special agents in the slave markets of Philistia, as well as in those of Egypt.
    There, for the first time, Moses chewed the famous khat of Arabia, drank wine with it, and spent the hours of darkness in a nightmare of wild debauchery,