horus

This was before there were guns in the temples, when you could wander freely up and down the Nile, get off the well-trodden and into the local.
When it was still the land of the pharaohs. The land of the pyramids.
The land of sand in your jap's eye; an itch you couldn't scratch.

I was stuck at a spaghetti-western station; a hut and a platform and a dustblown creaking, and one old man sitting on the far end draped in jalaba and headscarf, a scruff of white against the everywhere brown. He'd been there since before there were trains, and he'd used that time to learn the trick of staring blankly but intrusively at strangers from his uncovered right eye.
This is what you get when you wander; you take the bad with the good. You get to see what others don't; you get to wait at the last station at the end of the world. You get to experience those vast open spaces that don't move you, or bring you closer to god, but just make you wish you were somewhere else, or wish that someone else ' besides little old wrapped-up staring men, hacking out clumps of brown phlegm - were here with you.

And you had the time and space to get yourself in trouble in those days, if you had the inclination.
I'd made the best of it; I'd stolen this stone, and I fingered it now in my jeans pocket, cold and hard and rough.
All I needed now was a bar to relate my tale, to embellish it, polish it and get it up and running.

The winds were bearing down on the station. Two spiralling columns of dust were nearly on us, Djinns on the lookout, hunting the stone, kicking up a sandy fuss. But I don't believe in the supernatural, unless it puts the price up.
The old man shuffled himself into a smaller shape, spat, shouted one rough syllable, and disappeared into his jalaba.
Then the winds fell upon us and whipped the sand into a curtain cutting me off from the world. I'd never spot a train in this, and the sand was starting to bite so I headed for the hut. As I walked towards it something caught my leg. I looked down; the old man was on the floor at my feet, tugging at my trouser leg. I tried pulling away, but he was a tenacious old goat. He wrapped an arm round my leg, pulled back his jalaba and pointed frantically at the ragged hole in his face where his left eye should have been, all the time shouting harsh guttural sounds, his reeking breath rising up to my face.

I'd never had any time for the locals, especially the indigenous dirty old men like this. I'm not ageist, or racist, I just don't like filth and bad manners. I cuffed him round the top of the head, and told him in no uncertain terms to let go of my damn leg. He'd get worse than a cuff if he didn't. I'd kick him up and down the platform. I'd kick the last of his teeth out. You act like a dog, and I'll treat you like one, you dirty old scrote.

"You've got my fucking eye, he snarled, in an accent a long way from the Nile delta.

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Weighed down by my sand-clogged sockets I wandered, head bowed and sightless through empty quarters, away from thousand-year tortures and the echoes of my unheard pleas.

When they found me they said I was mad. They said they were old wounds.
And to argue different was to be kept from home, so I acquiesced.
Now I dangle my feet in the water once more. I can hear the trickling of water through the gaps in the pebbles. And though the sun must be low and the shadows long, I can still feel the heat on my back.
I have seen more than one man should; I will have to settle for that.

And I know to never play against the old-time gods.
Old-time gods don't care for mercy.