“Therefore he was not dropped from an altitude of a hundred feet, and the same object which lowers the criminal into the valley of death will be the means of our effecting an entrance into the fortress.”
Hugh was quite right, of course. Obviously there was nothing else we could do but wait. I had no other suggestion to make, and set to work to revise our commissariat. We found that, by the strictest economy, we could divide our water and food supply into eight equal parts. Eight days we could sit and wait opposite that slab of burnished copper, waiting for admittance to the strange and mysterious land which, now that we were near it, seemed farther off than ever. It was a curious vigil, for we never moved out of sight of the glowing gate, but watched it ceaselessly, never both sleeping at the same time. But day followed day in endless monotony beneath hot noonday sun and cool silvery moon. At times we thought that our ears caught strange sounds of sweet music, and every now and then the air was filled with the penetrating odour of myrrh and lotus blossom.
Day followed day, while we lived, as it were, only through our eyes; we were no longer conscious of heat or cold, of the terrible wilderness around us, the thousands of skeletons which told a tale of inexorable justice and vengeance, of a great people, indomitable and masterful, of the weird cries of the hyenas, and the vultures which hovered over our heads, scenting the approach of death. We fought against Nature, who tried to conquer us by hunger and thirst, by weakened nerves and by drowsiness; we allowed our minds free play, and through that grey and frowning barrier, our eyes rendered far-seeing by suffering and enforced asceticism, we saw the marble halls, the gardens of lotus blossoms, the endless rivers and fragrant glades; we saw the procession of priests and priestesses, heard the sound of the sistrum and the harp, smelled the incense, and gazed at the dark-eyed dwellers of this land of paradise, and in these visions and these dreams forgot the awful doom which, with slow and sure footsteps, approached stealthily and threatened to close our eyes for ever in the sight of the opening paradise.
CHAPTER VI.
THE TEMPLE OF RA
I have no wish to dwell over that vigil in sight of goal. The sufferings of two men, tortured morally and physically, by anxiety and vanishing hope, by hunger and by thirst, by heat and by cold, are neither pleasant nor interesting reading. Personally, all through those dreadful days I never once lost the belief that we should succeed in the end. As a medical student, my faith in an all-guiding Providence, in the God of our childhood, had necessarily become sadly mauled about by my own dissecting knife, but I had spent now nearly sixty days in the desert between earth and sky, away from civilisation, twentieth century, and modern thought, and in the wilderness had forgotten how to scoff, and begun once more to learn how to believe and how to pray; and now in the face of coming success I refused to believe that the same hand which had guided us unerringly so far, would snatch the glorious prize from us, at the moment when our enfeebled arms were stretched out ready to grasp it.
Throughout the long days of suffering, when gnawing hunger and raging thirst made paltry creatures of us both, Hugh’s wonderful buoyancy of spirits never forsook him entirely, and many a weary hour did he help to lighten with his picturesque descriptions of the people, whom all the world believed to be dead, but which we knew to be living behind those impenetrable walls.
As I said before, I have no wish to dwell on those ten days during which we incessantly watched that brilliant copper gate glistening with a myriad golden tints in the rising and the setting sun, but my thoughts love to linger on that memorable dawn when, suddenly, as the first rays of the sun peeped out across the immensity of the desert, our ears caught a sound, soft, and low, and distant, which made our hearts stop beating and made our weakened pulses thrill with a newly-awakened hope.
It was a chant, melancholy and monotonous, which reached us like the noise of a swarm of myriads of bees, while at intervals there came the roll of muffled drums far away.
“Can you hear it, Mark?” whispered Hugh.
I nodded.