It Happened in Egypt

by C. N. Williamson; A. M. Williamson

"I am. Oh, he must come back! I thought on board the Candace we were as good as engaged. I—I submitted to his kisses, and now—"

"'Submitted' is a good word," I sneered to my inner self, but outwardly I submitted a handkerchief to the lady, as she had lost hers in one of the last donkey jolts, and ventured to insert sympathetically into a pause a small suggestion. It was usual, I reminded Miss Biddell, if a gentleman's intentions had to be asked, that the father did the asking. This hint, however, fell flatter than a flounder; and all the way to Abydos, most sacred temple of ancient Egypt, I was persecuted with Enid Biddell's woes, when I should have been free to meditate upon the tragic history of Isis and Osiris. It was here that the head of the murdered god was buried, and perhaps his whole body, when the magic secret of Thoth had enabled Isis to collect the fourteen separate pieces Set had hidden. Many temples claimed the sacred body of Osiris, ruler over departed spirits and Amenti, their dim dwelling place beyond the western desert; Philae and Memphis among others; but it was Abydos to which the Egyptians give their most reverent faith, as the true burial place of the Beloved One. It was there they wished to lie when they died and were mummied, in order to rest through eternity near the relic of their most precious god. Thus a necropolis grew like a poppy-garden of sleep, round the temple; and a city rose also. But even in the long-ago time of Strabo, the city was reduced to a village, and all traces of the shrine had vanished. The great white jewel of the temples—temple of Seti I, and the temple of his son Rameses II—remain to this day, however, with the Tablet of Ancestors which has helped in the tracing of Egyptian history. Therefore is it that this treasure of the Nile-desert is still a shrine for travellers from the four corners of the earth.

After the long, straight road, and a high, sudden hill, we came face to face with the marble-white columns of the outer court. If I had been with Brigit or Monny, I could have run back into the past, hand in hand with either, to see with my mind's eyes the white limestone palace of Memnon, copied from the Labyrinth, standing above the city between the canal and the desert. I should have peered into the depths of its fountain; and with a hand shading my eyeballs from the sun I should have gazed at the grove of Horus' sacred acanthus trees, dark against the burning blue. I should have found the Royal tombs which Rameses restored, grouped near the buried body of Osiris. But bad luck gave me Enid Biddell for my companion. She would not let any one else come near me, even had the Right Somebody wished to dispute my battered remains with her. "Antoun Effendi" had the others hypnotized, and I wondered if they noticed how like his boldly cut profile was to certain portraits of the youthful Rameses carved on the glittering white walls. So splendid were they that had I been a woman my spirit would have rushed back along the sand-obliterated, devious paths of Egypt's history, to find and fall at the feet of their original. But—there was Antoun, much easier to get at, and perhaps better worth the gift of a woman's heart than Rameses the Great with all his faults and cruelties!

Crowds of birds lived in interstices of the broken columns, and their tiny faces peeped out like flowers growing among rocks, their eyes bright and arresting as personal anecdotes in long, dull chapters of history. They seemed to look at me, and sympathize, cocking their heads on one side as if to say, "Poor, foolish, modern man, why don't you make a virtue of necessity and get rid of this still more foolish modern maid, by promising her anything she asks? Then you can go listen to that princely looking person in the green turban, who might be descended from the kings our ancestors used to behold. He does seem to know something about the history of this place, on which we are authorities! The dragomans who bring crowds of tourists to our temple and gabble nonsense, put us really off our feed. Peep, peep! Just hear him tell about the staircase we're so proud of. Did you know there was a picture of it in the Book of The Dead, with Osiris standing at the top, like a good host waiting to receive his guests? Well, then, if you didn't, do anything you must to escape from that lovesick girl, while there's time to hear a real scholar talk of 'Him who is at the Head of the Staircase!' Peep, peep! Hurry up, or you'll lose it all, you Silly. Of course, the real staircase is in Amenti, which your Roman Catholics call Purgatory; and no doubt Osiris is standing on it to this day."

So I took the birds' advice, and promised Enid to have a "heart to heart" talk with Harry Snell. Satisfied that she had got all that was to be got out of me, she powdered her nose (in the same spirit that David anointed his head) and attached herself to Rachel, in whose train was the Desired One. Thus basely did I free myself to enjoy the society of Biddy and Osiris, with lovely carved glimpses of Isis thrown in, to say nothing of Seti I and Rameses II. Trying to push into the background of my mind the nauseating thought of my vow and its fulfillment, I helped Brigit and Monny take snapshots of King Seti showing his son Rameses how to lasso, and also to catch by its tail the most fascinating of bulls. They were on the wall, of course (Rameses and Seti, I mean, not Brigit and Monny), but seemed so real they might leap off at any instant; and so charmed was Monny with Rameses' braided "lock of youth" that she resolved to try one over her left temple in connection with an Egyptian Princess costume she was having made for some future fancy-dress ball. "I can't take a grain of interest in any one but Egyptian Princes and Princesses and their profiles," she exclaimed; then blushed faintly and added, "I mean Princes and Princesses of the past."

We got some good pictures of the temple of Seti, for Monny had an apparatus for natural colour photography which gave sensational results in ancient wall-paintings—when any one except Monny herself did the taking. It was better still in the Seven Chapels, the holy of holies at Abydos, and in the joy of my first colour photography I forgot the doom ahead. Appropriately, the sword I had hung up over my own cranium descended in the Necropolis, at that place of tombs called Umm el-Ka'ab, "Mother of Pots." Nobody wanted to see the fragments of this mother's pots, but I insisted on a brief visit, as important discoveries have been made there, among the most important in Egypt. It was a dreary place where Harry Snell strolled up and caught me alone, gazing at a desolation of sandy hillocks, full of undiscovered treasure.

"Look here," said he. "You're supposed to know everything. Tell me why they call seats outside shops in bazaars, and tombs of the Ancient Empire by the same name: mastaba?"

I explained that mastaba was an Arab word meaning bench. Then, realizing that it would be flying in the face of Providence not to get the ordeal over while my blood was up, I spoke of Enid. Among the shattered pots and yawning sepulchres, I racked up her broken heart and blighted affections. I talked to Snell like a brother, and when he had heard me through in silence, to the place where words and breath failed, I thought that I had moved him. His eyes were downcast. I fancied that I saw a mist as of tears, a man's slow tears. Then suddenly he opened his eyelids wide, and glared—a glare stony as the pots, and as the desert hills. "Borrow," he said, "I thought you were a good fellow and a man of the world. I see now that you're a damned sentimental ass."

With this he stalked off, and I could not run after him to bash his head, because what he said was perfectly true. I was almost sorry that evening, on board the boat, when he apologized and the Nile-dream went on as if I hadn't broken it by being the sort of fool Snell had said that I was.

In the dream were Nile cities, with crowding houses whose walls were heightened by tier upon tier of rose-and-white pots, moulded in with honey-coloured mud. There were stretches of sandy shore, and green gloom of palm groves. There were domed tombs of saints, glittering like snow-palaces in the sun. There were great golden mounds inlaid with strips of paler gold picked out with ebony. There were sinister hillsides cut into squarely by door-holes, leading to cave-dwellings. There were always shadoofs, where giant soup-ladles everlastingly dipped water and threw it out again, mounting up from level to level of the brown, dyke-like shore. The wistful, musical wail of the men at the wells was as near to the voice of Nature as the sighing of wind, or the breaking of waves which has never ceased since the world began. Sometimes the horizon was opal, sometimes it throbbed with azure fire, or blazed ruby red, as the torch of sunset swept west and east before the emerald darkness fell. When our Enchantress landed, great flocks of kites, like in form and wing to the sacred vulture of Egypt, flew to welcome us with swoopings of wide purple wings. Their shadows on the water were like passing spirits; and at night when the Nubian boatmen danced, their feet thudding on the lower deck to the cry of the darabukah, the Nile whispered of the past, with a tinkling whisper, like the music of Hathor's sacred sistrum. Gyassas glided by, loaded with pots like magic melons, long masts pointing as though they had been wands in the hands of astrologers: and the reflection of the piled pots as they moved gave vague glimpses as of sunken treasure.