Egypt: A Fable

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...كان يا ماكان، في قديم الزمان، وسالف العصر والأوان

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There once was a mighty Kingdom through which ran a Great River, bringing with it much munificence, so that the Kingdom was fertile and rich. This was a time before men, when animals alone roamed the land. Many who lived outside this region were mired in arid desert lands, which were forbidding, bleak, and niggardly. Accounts reached them of the Kingdom from sojourners' enraptured recollections, but they could not quite believe that a landscape could be so rich. It was known of the Kingdom's inhabitants that theirs were languages of superlatives, so that, it was said, they could not help but exaggerate. Still, interests were piqued, and many endeavored to see for themselves.

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These pilgrims found it to be full of wonders, just as told. The Kingdom was filled with trees of every variety, and the trees had developed a reputation for beneficence, for giving of themselves to any and all who passed. A branch would stir as soon as the rustling of a passerby was heard, agile and flexible as an animal appendage, and at the end of it would be proffered fruit plucked from a higher limb. Ripe, juicy mangoes, persimmons, dates, glistening with promise and bursting through their skins; all of these and more were distributed to any and all who passed.

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The berries of the land, being less conspicuous in size, begged the birds to sing their praises, and the birds obliged, in exchange for partaking themselves of the fruit until fullness. Travelers began to know that to find strawberries, one need but follow the robin, and for blackcurrants, the nightingale.

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The edible roots and tubers of things, being less conspicuous still, begged the pawed and clawed for their assistance in uncovering them. The rodents obliged, in exchange for partaking themselves of the roots and tubers until fullness. So the potatoes came to be unearthed by the mole, the carrots by the rabbit, and the yams by the field mouse, who compensated for his small stature with unceasing industriousness.

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The flowers, wanting also to be noticed and their nectar consumed, grew bold and cloaked themselves in the richest, most extravagant of hues, and it was their palette that gave the Kingdom its reputation for lush, verdant beauty. Wanting to be advertised no less than the bough and the tuber, the flowers begged the bee, the wasp, and the hummingbird to announce them wherever they went. The three obliged, in exchange for partaking themselves of the nectar until fullness, and their buzzing came to be a trail of sound that the weary could follow in search of nectar.

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As with most stories involving kingdoms, there is in this one a King. His subjects were loyal to him, and while the Kingdom was young, he was known to be gentle and just. He was a lion, and while the Kingdom was in its infancy he spent much of his time eating, napping, copulating, and doing the things that large cats are wont to do. For the Kingdom, while young, needed no heavy hand in ruling it. It was a place of plenty, and it was the land's lavish bounty that kept discord to a minimum.

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But as we all know, tongues all too often wag too much, and news of this land of riches spread far and wide to other, less fortunate landscapes. Creatures from all around bid hasty farewells to their homesteads, seeking lives of opulence. They came in droves, following the gurgling sparkle of the Great River, and made their dwellings on its tree-lined banks.

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The trees and bushes noticed that their fruit was growing scarce, and that they themselves were suffering to make them swell to ripeness. Their roots were weak, their branches less sturdy, their leaves yellow. They began to produce less, and grew protective, no longer offering of what they had freely, so that animals had to wrest the fruit away by force. The roots and tubers were overtaxed as well, and began to hide themselves, burrowing deeper underground, spreading stronger, more intricate roots to fasten themselves to the womb of the dark, damp earth. The burrowers were forced to dig deeper for them, into rockier, less rewarding patches of land. The flowers were likewise feeling overburdened with others' hunger, and released a vapor into the air that made nectar-seekers colorblind, so that they could not find them. They allowed only the bee and the wasp and the hummingbird full sight, for they had long forgotten how to reproduce without the help of those three.

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Violence came quickly to the land as its providers closed their fists. The inhabitants, desperate and driven mad by hunger after such fullness, resorted to feasting on each other, and developed a taste for the flesh and blood of their cousins. The King, driven to hunger himself and away from slumber, took action. What the land would not give him, he thought, he would take. He enslaved the most intelligent of the species he could find, requiring them to spend their days in agricultural and horticultural research. They developed methods by which to plant, to fertilize, and to harvest. So it was that the trees and bushes were impregnated unwillingly, and their fruit stolen for the mouths of others. And so it was that the tubers were uprooted from their native soils, and planted in rows, to be fed at calculated intervals what they needed in water and fertilizer. And so it was that the bee, having found a way to create liquid gold out of the simple nectar of flowers, was imprisoned in wood and mesh, forced to synthesize nectar all day, and to keep it cool with the beating of its wings at night.

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The King did not stop at this, for his appetite grew as it was fed, and he became jealous all the more of his possessions from those around him. He forced the badgers into servitude, threatening them with a perpetuity of isolation, and bade them use the strength of their teeth to cut the trees down. They labored, day and night, until their teeth were filed down into useless nubbins, after which they were imprisoned for high treason. Generations of badgers and empty Kingdom coffers later, there was finally enough wood, and the King bade the elephants and the monkeys to work in concert to dam(n) the Great River. He no longer needed to threaten, for his populace had quickly learned what was at stake, and took orders quickly and quietly.

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He called it, simply, the "High Dam", for though strong of limb and sharp of tooth, the King was not known for mental inventiveness.

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And so the years passed, and lost was the Kingdom's happiness day by day. Equally receding was the sphere of civil life the King allowed to exist outside of his control. As a human would warn many thousands of years later, when his kind ruled the earth, absolute power had corrupted absolutely. The King's paranoia grew with the discontent of his subjects, and he created ways to control them further. He prescribed to them who and what they could worship, and in which ways. He told them who they could love, and in loving how many children beget.

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He used spies, and magical orbs that could watch them, record and report their political transgressions. He divided them into sects, turned them against each other, fearing that one day they would recognize their enemy to be a common one. He busied them with the task of survival, thinking that the indigent would have little time to worry about self-governance.

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But he, in many ways, was a short-sighted lion, and he and his magical instruments of espionage and sedition could not be everywhere all at once. The animals, over the generations and with their discontent fueling them, developed a common language, having before this unifying experience considered themselves different tribes. The birds trilled of freedom, the wolves growled of the tortures inflicted, and the woodpeckers tapped a Morse code advertising burgeoning movements of resistance. The King, deaf and dumb to this common language, had little idea of the uprising taking place around him.

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Among this general uprising there were heroes, creatures who chirped and growled and pecked louder than the rest. They had code names by which their compatriots came to know them, for to call them by their true names would have fingered them to the King as traitors. And so it was whispered that Saad Eddin and Bahgat had reported the lion's violations, and that Nour had stood up and demanded a choice between more than one eternal ruler. Younger voices too began to speak loudly.

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The Revolution began when the Great River, no longer content with the confines of its High Dam, broke free. For if the lion had let wisdom speak freely into the ears of his hunger and his thirst, he would have heard it said that the spirit, free by its very nature, could not help but rebel against the despot.

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