II
Negotiations with Mehmet Ali and the building and the test of Belzoni’s water-lifting wheel consumed the greater part of a year; it was wasted time, for the Pasha decided against the use of the device.
From the uncertainty which followed, the adventurer was rescued by his old friend, John Lewis Burckhardt, the traveller, who now persuaded the British Consul General, Henry Salt, to send Belzoni on a special expedition up the Nile. A colossal head of “Memnon” (in reality a head of Ramses II) was lying in the sands at Thebes, and Salt wished to have it carried down the river, and shipped off to the British Museum. Belzoni accepted the charge gladly, and going to Thebes, surmounted a thousand difficulties, and carried off the prize. It was anything but an easy task, for the giant head, or more properly the bust, measured some six by eight feet and weighed over seven tons. Belzoni handled it with home-made machinery. The engineer side of him was real; it is a quality often found just below the surface in Italians.
Mrs. Belzoni was with him, and shared with her “Mr. B.” a hut built of stones in the portico of the Memnonium. All the long hot summer, the giant lady cooked her Titan’s rice and mutton, and kept a practical eye on everything. The British matron was the terror of rival French explorers,—“Madame Belzoni, Amazone formidable,” they wrote in their accounts.
Other voyages followed which can not here be set down in detail. The first voyage saw the removal of the head and an exploring trip up the river to Abu Simbel and the cataracts. At Abu Simbel, it was “Ypsambul” to Belzoni, that greatest of rock temples was clogged with a vast fanslope of fallen stones and sand in which the colossi sat up to their necks. A second journey carried the explorer back to Thebes. The labyrinth of mountain tombs was still full of the ancient dead, some lying on the floors of their cave sepulchres, some standing, some on their heads,—all surfaced with a very fine and choking dust.
Mrs. Belzoni having lingered in Cairo, the explorer now and then accepted the hospitality of natives dwelling in the outer tombs. “I was sure of a supper of milk served in a wooden bowl,” he wrote, “but whenever they supposed I should stay all night they killed a couple of fowls for me which were baked in a small oven heated with pieces of mummy cases, and sometimes with the bones and rags of the mummies themselves.” It is a far cry from the sun-helmeted professors, the great officials, and the electric lights of Tutankhamen’s tomb.
On this second journey, the explorer began the clearing of Abu Simbel, and discovered the tomb of Seti I in the Valley of the Kings, still the most beautifully decorated sepulchre in Egypt. Old usage called it Belzoni’s tomb; new days have forgotten the explorer. Then followed expeditions to Philæ, to the site of the Roman city of Berenike on the Red Sea, and a journey to the oasis of Elwah which Belzoni mistook for the historic oasis of Jupiter Ammon. The fever of exploration now descended on Mrs. B., and the intrepid lady, disguised as a man, went off by herself on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem,—a feat of extraordinary fortitude and daring.
At the close of his second journey, Belzoni had cleared and opened Abu Simbel, discovered the tomb of Seti I, and explored Philæ, the Theban necropolis and the Valley of the Kings. He had shown himself venturesome, courageous, and resolute. He had a way of getting things done, not by shouts and the whip, but by a certain steadiness of pressure, as if he were putting his giant shoulders to a door and slowly forcing it inward from its frame. There are passages in his account of his work which seem to reveal a quality of suspicion in the giant’s mind; he could see the hand of rival gatherers of antiquities in every check and delay. Twenty-five years ago the trait would have required a moral explanation; the wiser and more travelled present simply points to the thermometer.
By an ironic turn of the wheel of fate, it chanced that the rival collector to whom Belzoni attributed his vexations was himself an Italian. Bernardino Drouetti, agent of France and gatherer of antiquities for the Louvre, had been born in Leghorn. The competition between this Frenchman from Leghorn and this Briton from Padua had thus a certain raciness and emotional quality. Keen as it was, the amenities were outwardly preserved, and Drouetti even went so far as to present Belzoni with the “rights” to a sarcophagus it was impossible to extricate. At Philæ, however, the duel became a battle, for Drouetti’s henchmen rushed Belzoni and his party as the giant was making off with an obelisk. If Drouetti’s indignant lament is to be believed, Belzoni snatched a shrieking, jabbering “Arab” out of the mob swarming about him, swung him up by the ankles, and used him à la Samson on the heads and shoulders of his fellow country men. The novel weapon, it is said, won a headlong victory, and the giant carried off his obelisk in peace.
Returning to Cairo during the inundation, Belzoni paused by night at the pyramids. So vividly were the stars of the Egyptian sky mirrored in the flood, that there seemed to be two heavens, one above and below. Awesome, even a little terrible, the vast and ancient shapes of the pyramids rose seemingly from the starry water to the splendour overhead.
The Pyramids. Mystery of ancient mystery! Belzoni resolved to match his knowledge and skill with this riddle of the years.