On another trip I went north, to where the Nile meets the Mediterranean Sea. There, sixty miles west of Alexandria, lie the cemeteries of El Alamein, the last resting place of those soldiers who died in 1942 in one of the most decisive battles of the Second World War—when Montgomery’s Eighth Army defeated Nazi Germany’s Rommel. It was a personal pilgrimage to remember the Rhodesians and South Africans who, it is often forgotten, played their part in that victory. Afterward, I flew south to Aswan, site of the massive modern dam across the Nile. I picked up a cruiser for a ten-day trip downriver. It was one of my life’s great experiences, sailing backward through time as the river wended its way north, bound for Luxor and Karnak, with all their temples and museums.
It was on a subsequent trip that I sailed over the Valley of the Kings in a hot air balloon and saw the ancient world reaching out to meet the modern above. As I hung there, floating serenely, I could see al-Qurn high in the Theban hills, and the place where Tutankhamen himself was discovered, as well as the burial mounds of the Theban Necropolis stretching out all around. Perhaps my love for this landscape was something I had inherited from my mother, but I could see many and varied stories of Egypt spread out on the landscape beneath me.
One day in 1988 came a moment so perfect, so thrilling, that it would echo forever after in all my fiction, and bring to life a new character who would never let me go: Taita.
•••
Egypt, the Pyramids and Great Sphinx, the mighty Nile whose waters fed half the continent: this was an Africa unlike anything I had ever written about, and now I was holding a piece of it in my hands. In 1988, I stood in the heat of the desert on the West Bank of the River Nile. Guide lines and ropes had been stretched out by the archaeologists working the dig to which I had been invited. For weeks, they had been peeling back history just as a writer peels back the layers of his story—and now, where once had been arid scrub and sand, the evidence of a former civilization rose out of the sun-blasted crust in eerie outcrops of stone. Below, in the cavernous black hole of her tomb, lay the remains of a queen unrecorded by history. The academics believed she had died and been mummified as early as 1780 BC, at a time when the Hyskos people led an invasion from the Near East and settled the eastern river delta, but it felt like she was here with me now, whispering into my ear.
The queen had been buried with all the treasures of her lifetime. I had been writing about treasures like these from the time I wrote The Eye of the Tiger, but no fiction could compare with the truth of what was unearthed in these ancient tombs. Death masks of gold, circlets inlaid with precious gems, figurines captured in intricate detail depicting the age-old gods of the river. There was no precious artifact, however, that would affect me more than the one I held in my hands today. This was no gold, no scepter with sapphires pressed into its hilt, no death mask capturing the perfect likeness of the body it kept hidden underneath. These were papyri, pieces of pith of the papyrus plant, woven together to make ancient parchment—and, across them, were inscribed hieroglyphs beyond my understanding.
My hands trembled as I touched the scrolls for the first time. These fragile pieces of papyrus contained a message from almost four millennia ago. I traced the arcane symbols with my finger. Here was a connection between me and the past. I thought about the queen, lying undisturbed in her tomb while nations rose and fell in the world above her, wars were waged, men made inconceivable machines, conquered the planet, set sail for the moon. I considered the man who might have rhapsodized about her in these scrolls and in that moment, I knew that they had been waiting for me for four thousand years.
Later, once the scrolls had been translated by experts at the University of Cairo, I was able to read what this ancient figure had committed to paper. The scrolls were written as a personal tribute to the woman the author had loved, the great queen whose body had been brought back to the light. The scrolls revealed a lot about the writer as well—it was his opportunity to extol his own genius and power, to brag about what an extraordinary person he had been. The script was not conducive to conveying subtle emotions, but there was something here, something that would tug at me for years to come. The author, whoever he had been, was an endearing braggart, and he had other qualities. He was faithful, he was loving, he was full of compassion for animals and people. There were gaps in his narrative where an author might let his imagination run free; here was a character whose skin I eagerly wanted to inhabit.
It was in that moment that Taita was born.
River God was my twenty-fourth novel, written in the pure isolation of the Seychelles, gazing out over the azure waters of the Indian Ocean. It was the first novel I had written using a word processor after handwriting all my books before that, but it had been forming in my mind for decades before I committed a word to the page. It was a novel that brought together so many of my fascinations, influences and obsessions.
River God was published in 1993. It is an epic novel, one that whisked its readers nearly four thousand years into a past I had researched exhaustively over the preceding years. This was an act of writing that owed much to The Sunbird before it—but there was one vital difference: where, in The Sunbird, I had built the city of Ophet from my imagination, in River God, Egypt had to be cultivated from hard research.
The novel shocked my readers. For a decade, I had been writing high-octane novels set in present day Africa—the final parts of the Ballantyne sequence, and the second part of the Courtney saga—but River God was a change of pace, a step beyond the boundaries my readers had come to expect. Not all the responses were positive. One woman wrote to me and said: “I read the first few pages of River God and it wasn’t you and I put the book down because I couldn’t read it and I hope you’re going to write a decent book.” I wrote back and apologized for disappointing her and about three months later, she wrote to me and said, “I did it. I read it and it’s the best book you’ve written by far.” I think that, when people got over the initial shock, they accepted it.
I wanted to take my readers into brave new lands, but some of them were finding it difficult to equate Egypt with Africa. “Oh yes, but it’s different,” they’d say. “It’s Arabic.” That may be true for Europeans and Americans, but it is never so for Africans. To us, Egypt is as African as the Cape of Good Hope. I have always seen Africa as one single horse-headed continent. All of it shares a mystique, and it is bound together by great rivers, by wild animals—historically the habitat of the African lion, for example, extended from north to south—and by a savage spirit that is all pervasive. Africa has a wildness that the cultivated lands of the northern hemisphere will never understand, and the Nile embodies that mystery, that magic. It is the most extraordinary example of living history in the world. The evidence is around you if you ever take a boat upriver. It becomes a time machine. The farmers tilling the land and working the water wheels have been doing so since the surrounding monuments were built by the pharaohs. It is here that a man can be intimately connected to the past, perceive that time is greater than any individual. Here, you truly understand how fleeting a man’s life is, how small he is compared to the great turning world all around us.
If River God didn’t appeal to some readers, there were many more who enjoyed it. I couldn’t have predicted it, but it brought me four times as many readers as any of the Ballantyne and Courtney novels before it. They came for the living, breathing world I had conjured up from painstaking research and a writer’s best weapon—willpower—but they stayed for the novel’s hero. Taita is a man unlike any I had written before. I had sown the seeds for him in Benjamin Kazin, but Taita was the antithesis of all the Courtney and Ballantyne alpha males, all swash and buckle, around whom my writing had always been focused. Taita was emasculated, gelded by his master, Lord Intef, after being discovered sleeping with a young slave girl. As a eunuch, he knows the power of love, but can never fulfill it, and he has devoted his life instead to acquiring great wisdom and wide knowledge. He was a Renaissance hero. Readers from all ove
r the world seemed to empathize with his plight. The power of unrequited love, the agony and the ecstasy, drew millions to Taita and kept them enthralled.
Taita may have emerged from the scrolls but, along the way, I had given him parts of myself as well—not my history, as I had done with the Courtneys and Ballantynes, but aspects of my personality and character. I had developed something of a soft spot for Taita, a brotherly affection perhaps, and I was as eager as my readers to know where his story would take him.
I followed River God with The Seventh Scroll, a different kind of novel which, nevertheless, continued the story of Taita’s life. Set in the modern day, The Seventh Scroll was indelibly linked to the history of River God. It was not what my readers had been expecting—but I was having too much fun. The lost worlds of Ancient Egypt had invigorated my writing as no other novel had done for decades. They renewed my confidence, allowed me to spread my wings once again.
In The Seventh Scroll, Taita, who had captivated me in River God, returned with all his tricks and ploys, to conceal and safeguard the burial of Pharaoh Mamose and his vast treasure. For the first time, I wrote myself into the novel for a giggle, and fictionalized the excitement I had felt when I held those unearthed forgotten scrolls, but in typical Smith fashion I concocted a love affair, a vainglorious collector, his Teutonic muse and PA, and a fight to the death in the gorges of the Nile. The current British Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, who reviewed it, said: “It would be hard to give away the plot of the latest yarn of pharaonic pillage because there is so much of it. In the opening thirty pages the heroine and her husband are stabbed, burnt, bombed, burgled, flayed and, take it from me, it works its way up from there.”
If there were misgivings, it was that the story effectively condoned the thieving of African artworks by European collectors. That wasn’t the intention, but nonetheless at least one book reviewer argued that, even if that had been the case, there was nothing wrong with it. As James Mitchell of the Star wrote: “I have heard one complain that the behaviour of Wilbur’s heroes in The Seventh Scroll is immoral in that they are looting the artworks which should belong to Ethiopia. Whether their aim is to get them for Sir Nicholas’s private hoard or Royan’s Egyptian museums, the fabulous treasures will be leaving their geographical hosts. The unspoken agenda was that even fiction should have a moral basis. With that I agree. Yet such criticism is naive. Ethiopia is in chaos at the present time when this novel is set. Any such artworks would in real life be sold off to the highest bidder . . . undoubtedly to be hidden away in some Texan vault. If this sounds rather like the usual justification for the British retention of the Parthenon Marbles removed by Lord Elgin and whose return is frequently demanded by Greek governments, then so be it.”
In the years that followed, my beloved Taita would not let me go. His stories kept crying out to be told. Warlock, my first novel of the new millennium, continued Taita’s odyssey as I journeyed away from the true history of River God to the world of mysticism and magic that the Egyptian series would eventually become. It was H. Rider Haggard again, making himself known in my writing. In Warlock, following the death of his beloved Queen Lostris, Taita retreats to the desert to mourn, and in that inhospitable land, he transforms himself into a warlock, adept at harnessing the powers of the occult for good purposes. With his newfound talents, he returns to serve Pharaoh Tamose and to bring up his son Prince Nefer. Soon, Tamose is betrayed and murdered by his right-hand man, who then sets himself up as regent of Egypt. It is Taita who must protect not just Nefer, but the whole of Egypt as well.
When I completed the novel, I decided to change direction again. I launched into The Quest with great vigor. It was different, it danced to an unusual beat, and it was perhaps self-indulgent to give Taita his manhood back in the end, but I had become very, very fond of Taita. The Quest is an adventure further into the realms of witchcraft and magic. It was quite well received: Publishers Weekly said: “Once again Smith deftly blends history, fantasy and mythology, but newcomers should be prepared for grisly deaths and mutilations.” Another critic mentioned that the novel had created a “chronicle of otherworldliness which crosses the line from the true historical novel to a work of fantasy and, in so doing, harnesses and recaptures myths out of the mysterious dark continent with which he is so familiar.”
I have always prided myself on my research, and while writing The Quest I decided to experience fasting, to put myself in the shoes of Taita, who of course had done much the same in his journey to become an adept. Fasting is a well-documented practice, particularly among seers and sages. It is part and parcel of most of the world’s great religions: with Islam making the month-long Ramadan fast one of the five pillars, while Judaism enjoins its believers to abstain for an entire day during Yom Kippur.
But, soon after The Quest was published, perhaps the greatest heroine I had ever known, my mother Elfreda, passed away.
My mother had been on her own for more than twenty years since my father died. In all that time, not a day went by when she didn’t think about and miss him. I had always thought my mother was invincible. I thought she would reach her centenary and live beyond it but, when she turned ninety-five, she looked at me and said, “Wilbur, I am very sick.”
“You’re not, Mom,” I replied. “You’re very strong.”
“My darling,” she said, “you don’t understand. Your dad wants me—he needs me with him . . .”
“Mom,” I said, “you know you’re going to get there and his first words will be, ‘You silly woman, where the hell have you been for the last twenty years? Now go and make me a cup of tea.’”
She smiled and said: “I’ll do anything to hear him say that again.”
Before she died she made me promise I would look after my sister, Adrienne. It was no hardship whatsoever; I have always loved my little sister.
My mother had been a staunch Anglican throughout her life. It was one of the only distinctions between her and my father. An agnostic through and through, Africa was my father’s only god. After she passed away, I stood in the crematorium with my wife Niso and Adrienne, and committed her body to the flames. Later that day, I returned to my study in Cape Town with her ashes sealed in a special box.
I placed her on my desk, surrounded by all the novels of my lifetime. It had been my mother who first showed me how books could be the doorways into magical worlds. It had been my mother who weaned me on stories, who inspired my fascination with Egypt, who had encouraged me to follow this seemingly impossible dream. Without her, there would have been no Courtneys, no Ballantynes—no Taita. And so, every day, as I picked up my pen and continued to write, she sat alongside me again. The woman who had first stoked my love for reading had not gone, there were still many stories to tell.
A couple of years later though, I felt she wanted her remains joined with Dad’s. He hadn’t wanted to be cremated. He said, “No cremation, thank you very much, that might hurt! I’m not taking any chances, just do me the old way.” He is buried at Somerset West, so we opened a small shaft in the grave and placed my mother’s ashes next to his coffin and put a little sign on the gravestone. The first thing we do when we come back to South Africa each year is go out to say hello to them and put some proteas on their resting place. It’s a very good feeling. Peaceful.
15
THIS AMERICAN LIFE
The motorboat roared along the river as I sat in its prow, the breeze reddening my face, making me feel as raw as the country we sped through. On either side, the riverbanks gave way to forested hillsides, black spruce and tamarack clinging to the slopes. In my lap rested the prize catch of the morning—seventeen pounds of gleaming river trout. It had been a good day’s fishing.
This corner of the world, far removed from the sun-burnished scrub and bush of my childhood, had a special appeal to me. Alaska still had a frontier spirit about it, an elder world of rugged individualists where the wilderness prevailed and mankind was in the minority. It is the largest state in the United Sta
tes by area and one of the least populated, a place where lonely souls can seek solitude, or eke out a living in the wilds far from the prying eyes of neighbors or everyday interference. I had been coming here every year. We would fly into Anchorage from London, a night flight taking us over the North Pole and the barren outreaches of the Arctic Circle, and from there make our way to the distant King Salmon, a place with a population of about 700 people. Staying at the remote King Salmon Inn, where travelers mingled with the men who worked the red salmon in the rivers and the bay, we would gather our supplies before heading out into the wild. By sea plane we would fly out to a location we were sworn to keep secret—no local fisherman wanted the prime sites of the salmon in these rivers to be revealed—and from there we would follow the rolling waters, our days filled with fishing and cookfires at night.
When we steered the motorboat to the riverbank and waded up to shore, the low sun was shining brightly above the tamaracks. We tramped across the rocks, toward the trees where our packs had been stored, and suddenly I glimpsed a dark looming shadow towering over the provisions we had left behind that morning. It was one of the biggest grizzly bears I had ever seen. I stopped in my tracks and stared. Perhaps he hadn’t seen me yet, for he did not look up, nor seem to notice us at all. My first thought was, “What a beautiful beast.” His fur was brown with darker coloring on his legs, blond-tipped on his flank and back, and he had a prominent shoulder hump typical of his species. Then I saw his claws like curved daggers, which had to be three or four inches long. His snout was down, and his front paws were engaged in ripping something to shreds. It looked like a man’s torso, but I couldn’t see the glisten of blood and I did not sense the death throes of some poor victim. I should have backed away but curiosity got the better of me and then I realized what had lured the bear into our camp. In King Salmon, I had provisioned for the trip by buying an expensive anorak to keep out the often ice-flecked wind of this part of the world. With the sun so strong this morning, I had left the anorak behind and had forgotten I’d stashed several bars of chocolate in the pockets. Bears have an excellent sense of smell, better than that of a dog, and he must have sniffed out this unexpected treat from a long way off. He looked pretty content tearing my anorak to pieces, with his nose and half his face covered in the sticky, melting chocolate. I hoped his appetite was sufficiently sated for him not to decide that his main course could be human flesh.