Tomb Wall

The Tomb Wall is the ancient, massive stone barrier that encircles the crest of the Hill of the Place at the Tombs of Atuan, separating the sacred inner precincts of the temples and the Nine Stones from the outer areas where guards, slaves, and men dwell. It is a central spatial and symbolic boundary in the Kargad Empire's most holy site, defining who may enter the presence of the Nameless Ones and enforcing the absolute separation between the priestesses and the profane world.

Structure and Location

Behind the Hall of the Throne and encircling the whole crest of the hill ran a massive wall of rock, laid without mortar and half fallen down in many places. Inside the loop of the wall stood the nine black stones, eighteen to twenty feet high, that were the Tombs of Atuan themselves. From the Tomb Wall another, lower rock wall ran, making a long irregular semicircle about the Hill of the Place and then trailing off northward toward the river. This lower wall did not so much protect the Place as cut it in two: on one side the temples and houses of the priestesses and wardens, on the other the quarters of the guards and of the slaves who farmed and herded and foraged for the Place. The Tomb Wall itself was the innermost and most sacred of these barriers, marking the boundary of the ground where the Nameless Ones were worshipped.

The Boundary of the Sacred

The Tomb Wall enforced a strict division of space and gender. None of the guards or male slaves ever crossed the wall, except that on certain very holy festivals the guards, and their drummers and players of the horn, would attend the procession of the priestesses; but they did not enter the portals of the temples. No other men set foot upon the inner ground of the Place. The first Godking, a century and a half ago, had come to enact the rites of his own temple, yet even he could not enter among the Tombstones, even he had had to eat and sleep outside the wall around the Place. The wall thus defined a zone of absolute female religious authority, from which all men—including the most powerful ruler in the Kargad Empire—were permanently excluded.

The Wall as a Place of Transgression

Despite its sacred function, the Tomb Wall was also a site of transgression and childhood rebellion. The Eaten One, Arha, and a girl called Penthe, both twelve years old, climbed up onto the wall one afternoon in late spring. They sat on top of it, ten feet up, their bare legs dangling down on the outside, looking over the flat plains that went on and on to the east and north. When Arha's guardian Manan came looking for her, the two girls slid down partway on the men's side, clinging there just below the top, invisible from the inner side, and jeered at him, calling him "Potato face" and "Potato belly." This act of climbing the wall and hiding on the forbidden outer side was a deliberate defiance of the rules that governed the Place. The transgression was reported, and Penthe was whipped with reed canes by Kossil, the High Priestess of the Godking, and sent to bed without supper. Arha, as the One Priestess, could not be punished, but Thar reminded her sternly, "It is not fitting that you be seen climbing and running with other girls. You are Arha." The wall thus became the physical marker of the tension between Arha's human childhood and her sacred, isolated role.

Narrative Significance

The Tomb Wall functions as a spatial embodiment of the central themes of the Tombs of Atuan: separation, prohibition, and the power of the Nameless Ones. It is the boundary that the wizard Ged must eventually cross when he enters the Tombs in search of the Ring of Erreth-Akbe, an act that violates the most fundamental law of the Place. The wall's description—massive, rock, laid without mortar, half fallen down—emphasizes its ancient, pre-human origin, linking it to the Old Powers of Earth that the Tombs serve. Its ruined state also hints at the decay and isolation of the cult that maintains it. For Arha, the wall is both a prison and a refuge: it defines the limits of her world, but it is also the place where she can momentarily escape the watchful eyes of the priestesses and assert a fragile, rebellious selfhood.