The Tour Part 16

The priest, still smiling, returned; and the other priests sang their hymn.

And, by the priest's pleasant manner, Lucius seemed to observe that he ought to pay. He beckoned to Caleb; and there were mutual, smiling, roguish negotiations between Caleb and the priest. For Caleb always tried to pay the fees which he distributed on Lucius' behalf a little less liberally than he set them down on the long papyrus scroll of his bill; and he generally succeeded.

But the priest was not only roguish, but very crafty and polite; and the transaction, conducted in mysterious and jocular whispers, lasted a long time ... until Lucius said, impatiently, but still smiling:

"And may we now see Apis himself?"

So Caleb paid, grudgingly. But the priest remained pleasant and the other priests sang while conducting the strangers to Apis' own secos.

This sanctuary was even bigger and more impressive than that of the white bull-mother. There was a square in front of it, with obelisks; and the pleasant-looking priest entered between two sphinxes. But the pillars, the obelisks, the sphinxes seemed to totter, to slant, to burst with old age.

The priests sang the hymn; and suddenly, like a whirlwind, a young bull came trotting out of the stable over the gra.s.s-plot. It was Apis; and the priests lifted their hands in adoration as they sang.

But, if his mother was stately and aware of her dignity, Apis himself carried his divinity with the recklessness of his hot youth. He ran across the lawn, glad to have escaped from his stable; and the pleasant priest, laughing, ran after him. But he could not catch him by his gold collar; and, panting for breath, the little priest said, proudly:

"Isn't he beautiful and playful? Isn't he most delightful, our Apis?"

He was beautiful and playful and most delightful, the visitors granted. He was a splendid bull-calf. His coat gleamed black as jet; and he was painted in accordance with the sacred prescript without which there is no incarnation: a white moon, like a snowy little crown, shone like a sickle between his gilded horns; and two other little white crowns adorned him on either side above the forelegs. His eyes blazed as might carbuncles with a light kindled behind them; and he stared from under his curly forehead with an almost human glance. His neck already fell into powerful, heavy folds; his chest was broad; and he lashed his tail like a whip. His hoofs were vermilion. And he trotted round his gra.s.s-plot and pushed out the sods with his horns and scratched with his red hoofs. The pleasant-looking priest now went up to him, laughing, and took him, respectfully and yet firmly, by the gold collar and talked to him and laughed; and Apis shook himself; and the priest laughed; and now all the priests began to laugh and the strangers laughed and Caleb roared and Uncle Catullus held his sides. Even Lucius had to laugh and Thrasyllus too; they all laughed at Apis, because he was such a delightful, pretty, playful bull-calf, just like a merry boy, with his human eyes which looked at you naughtily and watchfully and archly ... until all of a sudden he tore himself loose from his little priest and ran, ran like a whirlwind, till the clods of earth flew all around.

"He is so pretty and playful!" said the little priest, glad and happy as a boy, when he came back panting, after locking up the little bull again in the sanctuary. "But he is wild, he is very wild: as a rule, we only show him through the windows of his secos; but, when such very distinguished strangers come to look at him, we let him out for a trot, now and again. Yes, then he may come for a trot, once in a way!... And he himself thinks it great fun, to come for a trot, now and then, in the presence of strangers."

Then the pleasant-looking little priest went up to Caleb, who was still laughing aloud because Apis was such a very delightful little bull. And there was a long and protracted discussion, mysterious, jocular and yet weighty. For Caleb was taken aback; but then the little priest knew what it cost to make Apis trot about so prettily for such very distinguished strangers.

CHAPTER XVI

They took the repast provided by Caleb outside the town, in a farmstead beside a ca.n.a.l, under a cl.u.s.ter of palm-trees. There were no dainty dishes, there were no purple-coloured wines thick as ink; but there were omelettes and there was cestreus, the sea-fish that swims up the Nile in certain months: fried in cici-oil, this is a popular, homely dish, it is true, but nevertheless toothsome for hungry travellers picnicking in the gra.s.s. There was foaming beer and hydromel, or honey-water; and Uncle Catullus, spoilt though he was, thought the simple meal anything but unpalatable and considered that an idyll of this sort was good for the stomach, once in a way.

Lucius told Caleb to have his luncheon with them; and Caleb, after much deprecation and many salaams at the honour shown him, squatted down and crossed his legs and ate with relish and kept on laughing at the thought of dear little Apis trotting round his secos for the strangers who paid so generously. The travellers were to rest under the palm-trees and allow the midday heat to pa.s.s before going on to the pyramids. For Caleb had sent the litters back to the barge and had now hired four good camels at the farm, including two with comfortable saddles of bright tapestry, for his two n.o.ble clients.

The farmer and his wife, glad at the visit that brought them in money, spread awnings under which the travellers could enjoy their siesta and laid mats on the ground; and Uncle Catullus called for a fly-net, which he wound round his head. And, while he slept and Caleb also closed his eyes, Lucius, with Thrasyllus by his side, gazed at the wonderful, divinely geometrical lines in the distance, the lightly-traced triangles against the golden noonday sky.

"The base is square," said Thrasyllus, "and the summit is square, but looks pointed."

"To me they seem strange, mysterious embodiments of vastness," said Lucius. "What are they actually?"

"We don't altogether know," replied Thrasyllus. "Some of the pyramids were sepulchres of kings and sacred animals. Those are the pyramids of Cheops, or Khufu, of Chephren and of Mencheres; and we shall see the kings' chambers inside them. They were built twenty, perhaps thirty centuries ago. Herodotus says that the pyramid of Cheops, which is the biggest, took thirty years to build with a hundred thousand slaves, who were changed every three months. The name is derived from pyr fire, because, like a flame, the pyramid ends in a point. Many were used as store-houses in the long years of famine; others were d.y.k.es against the sands of the desert, which blew towards Memphis and threatened to bury the city, in a succession of ages. Many pyramids have already been swallowed up in the sands."

"What are those ruined palaces over there?" asked Lucius, pointing to crumbled rows of pylons and pillars, surmounted by cracked architraves, impressive ruins which stood on a hill at the outskirts of the town and seemed to be tumbling into the Nile.

"The old palaces of the Pharaohs," said Thrasyllus. "They were ten in number. Joseph, the Jewish interpreter of dreams, was a powerful governor under one of them; Moses, who knew Hermes Trismegistus and learned the occult wisdom from him, all the wisdom that can be known, was saved, as a babe, by the daughter of a Pharaoh, where his sister had exposed him in a basket made of bulrushes at the place where the princess was wont to bathe: she was the daughter of Amenophis III., who saw his people smitten with ten plagues sent over Egypt by Jahve, the G.o.d of the Jews, because the Pharaoh would not suffer them to leave the country. This Pharaoh was drowned in the Red Sea and was the father of Sesostris.... I have written on these scrolls everything that is more or less interesting."

And Thrasyllus, glad to see that Lucius' attention was attracted, handed him the scrolls. Lucius began reading:

"This all happened here!" he said, startled and arrested. "This is all ... the past! The age-old past, which is gone, which was swallowed up by the sands ... thousands of years ago!... How small we are when we look into the past ... and when we gaze into the centuries, the centuries that have buried themselves so deeply!"

"My son," said the old tutor, "I am so thankful that your mind is once more capable of receiving these impressions. For the beauty of the past is a comfort for the future; and the sick soul is healed in that beauty when it understands that its own grief is but a grain of sand in a desert which blows in the wind and conceals all things."

Lucius made no further reply, absorbed in what he was reading about Joseph and Moses, about Jahve and Pharaoh Amenophis, who was the father of Sesostris....

CHAPTER XVII

The golden noonday sky paled; the blinding topaz of the heavens melted away into amber honey; and the sands of the desert stretched out wide, far and endless to the last glittering streak of the horizon, on which the sun had set. Behind the group formed by the travellers--four camels surrounded by drivers and guards, Arabs and Libyans--between the darkening palm-trees the gigantic city of Memphis sank into shadow like some vast extinct monster; and the crumbling palaces of the kings sloped down the hill, as it were tumbling into the Nile, and mirrored their ruins in the clear sapphire of the stream, where the pools lay pink and gold among the tall reeds and the lotuses closing on the face of the water. The last fallen pillars lay, round and immense, in the luxuriant gra.s.s, amid a riot of scarlet and crimson poppies. Mysteriously carved with hieroglyphics, they were as felled t.i.tans of rose-red granite; and they pressed heavily on the ground wherein they were sinking. They were of a melancholy majesty, those huge overthrown pillars which had supported the golden roofs above the might of the Pharaohs.

Caleb rode his camel with a swagger, as though he were bestriding his Sabaean mare. He dug his heel into the camel's side; and the startled brute took great strides, snorting and grunting; Caleb roared with delight. The Libyans, big-limbed and powerful, went silently; the Arab drivers yelled and shouted.

Forty stadia from Memphis rose a broad, hilly d.y.k.e, on which the pyramids stood. And Caleb, who, as the guide, also knew a thing or two, cried:

"My lord, two of the pyramids yonder, the largest, belong to the seven wonders of the world! They are a stadium high; and the length of their sides is equal to their height. They are the two tombs of the Pharaohs; but the smaller pyramid, higher up on the hill and, as you see, built entirely of black stone, was the costliest of all."

He trotted on his startled camel around the others and cried:

"Master Thrasyllus won't deny it, learned though he is!"

Thrasyllus smiled; and Caleb, glad at being allowed to speak, continued:

"That black stone comes from Southern Ethiopia and is heavier than any other stone and incredibly hard! That is why the pyramid cost so much. But then it was erected by all the lovers of Queen Cleopatra; and it is she who is buried there!"

"Caleb," cried Master Thrasyllus, "what you have been telling about the black stone I accept; but Cleopatra, who died in Alexandria, was not buried at Memphis."

"Cleopatra, Cleopatra!" Caleb insisted, vigorously; but he now rushed away on his bewildered camel, because he wanted to warn the priest-custodian of the pyramids that there were great lords approaching.

"Caleb is wrong," said Thrasyllus, as the three camels stepped along sedately, among the gigantic Libyans and shouting Arabs, while Caleb tore fantastically over the sands. "The black pyramid yonder is really not the tomb of Cleopatra. The historians speak of Doricha, an hetaira mentioned by Sappho, the famous poetess, as the mistress of her brother Charaxus, who was a wine-merchant at Lesbos and travelled constantly to Naucratis. This costly black tomb is said to have been dedicated to Doricha, who died young, by her lovers...."

The cavalcade had drawn near; the camels, in obedience to the drivers'

orders, knelt down; the travellers slipped to the ground. And Caleb at once came to meet them, smiling, at the head of six priest-custodians, whose business it was to keep up the interior of the pyramids and show the shrines to foreigners.

"Do many foreigners come here?" Uncle Catullus asked of the oldest priest.

"Not a week pa.s.ses in this present month," said the old priest, "but foreigners come to admire the sacred pyramids. You are Latins, but we receive visits also from Greek lords and Persians and Indians. When the Nile has subsided to its lowest gauge, however, when the autumnal winds blow and the sand-storms begin, then no more foreigners come. For then death and destruction blow out of the desert, as the hurricanes of fate which one day will cover Memphis with a sandy shroud. See these few sphinxes, whose heads alone still project above these downs. Once they numbered hundreds; and an avenue stretched between their silence to the Pyramids. But the desert swallowed them up, the hurricanes spread them with dust, the sandy shroud covered up the wisdom of Neith. One day the shroud will cover up all Egypt and veil all her wisdom. What was known will be known no longer. That will be the punishment of the G.o.ds, inflicted upon unworthy man, who will be plunged into a night of ignorance and the b.e.s.t.i.a.lity of primitive desire. The centuries will turn about!"

The priests in attendance, with a simple pressure of the hand, had caused a heavy monolithic door to turn on its hinges in the largest of the pyramids. They lighted torches and went through the syrinx, a winding tunnel painted with gigantic figures of G.o.ds and with hieroglyphics. It was strange, but there was a humming and murmur of voices, though the pyramid was uninhabited. It was as though a swarm of ghosts were whirling around like a gale of wind. The impression was given immediately; and, when the travellers exchanged glances, they saw in one another's eyes that they were all four thinking the same thing; and Caleb muttered saving incantations and repeatedly kissed his amulets.

The priests led the way, while the flames of the torches blew and blew in the mysterious draught, as though ghosts were hovering around. The travellers entered an enormous square room; huge statues were sculptured in the stone walls; and, though the room was empty, there was a smell of spices, as if the smells of old had lingered eternally. Two bats fluttered to the ceiling and whirled round in a circle.