Accidents of an antiquary's life

by D. G. Hogarth

I was bidden to search the tombs in part of the hill behind Siut, whose soft calcareous cliffs are honeycombed with graves of every age. The vast cemetery, lying near a large town, has been ransacked over and over again, chiefly for wooden statuettes and models, which seem to have been carved more often and more cleverly at the Wolf Town than anywhere else in old Egypt; and I was warned I must hope for no untouched burials, but content myself with raking over the leavings of hastier robbers. The event belied the warning. First and last we had the fortune to find nearly thirty sealed graves, many poor enough, and some re-used for second and humble burials, but a few of the Old Empire period, whose furniture adorns even the rich collections in Bloomsbury. But it was with all the pain in the world, amid recurring failures, and after weeks of fruitless toil, that we found those. For every profitable tomb at least twenty profitless had to be opened and, moreover, examined scrupulously, since it was hardly ever possible to be sure if the dead man had been wholly robbed till we reached his chamber itself, ten to thirty feet below the surface. The deep shaft of entry would often seem as the masons had left it in the distant days of the Twelfth Dynasty, filled to its brim with their clean limestone chips; but none the less the coffins would be found at the last smashed or removed, the best of the furniture withdrawn, and the rest heaped pell-mell in utter ruin, after the chamber had been entered from below by a passage rudely hewn from a neighbour grot. Yet even then it could not be abandoned unsearched; and for other and many days the men must turn over the piles of earth and bones and scraps in faint hope that something of value had been overlooked or despised by earlier robbers. Doing this slow, blind work, they must needs be watched by the dim light of smoky candles in the choking dust-laden air of a narrow cell, which reeked of mummy clothes and the foul rags of fellahin. Had I been an annual digger in Egypt, able to call a trained and trusted crew to Siut, and had the scene not lain so near a large town notorious for its illicit traffic in antiques, that penance might have been avoided. And even in performing it one was robbed. Dealers waited for my men at sunset below the hill and beset them all the way to the town, and one digger, a youth of brighter wit and face than most—he was half a Bedawi—gained so much in the few weeks before I turned him off that he bought him a camel, a donkey and a wife. The order of his purchases was always stated thus, whoever told the tale.

The most bitter disappointment was caused by a great collapsed grotto through whose choked portal we had quarried our way to find the central grave-pit still covered with its lid of ancient palm-trunks. We lifted these and dug into the clean chips below with ever brighter hopes; for the shaft was so virgin that the white dust made by the original chiselling hung still on its walls. Down and down the men delved, keen as their masters, and for five-and-twenty feet into the depths of the hill the filling was pure of all sign of disturbance. Then at last the chamber appeared, doorless, pure and empty as the shaft. The tomb had never been used for burial at all.

So success seemed to flee before us, and to pursue it was dangerous, where rock was rotten and screes of loose chips, thrown out from plundered tombs above, might slip at any moment over the only channels of air and escape, and condemn us to the death of trapped rats in a most unworthy cause and most unpleasant company. Crawling on all fours in the dark, one often found the passage barred by a heap of dim swaddled mummies turned out of their coffins by some earlier snatcher of bodies; and over these one had to go, feeling their breast-bones crack under one’s knees and their swathed heads shift horribly this way or that under one’s hands. And having found nothing to loot in a thrice plundered charnel-house, one crawled back by the same grisly path to the sunlight, choked with mummy dust and redolent of more rotten grave-clothes than the balms of Arabia could sweeten. Partner of the scented dinner-table, is that the trade you desire?

And how would our evening hours have seemed to you? They were spent in a huge grotto with storied walls, because the lower Nile valley is a thoroughfare of furious winds all the winter long, and tent life, a constant misery in Egypt, would have been most miserable on the face of the Siut bluff, which stands out into the winds’ track, and is buffeted by all their storms. Not that our wide-mouthed grotto, however, proved much better than a tent. The north wind struck its farther wall, and was sucked round the other two in an unceasing, unsparing draught which dropped dust by the way on everything we ate or drank or kept. Warmth after the day’s toil we never felt from December to February, even when sitting closest to the fire which we kindled nightly with unpainted slats of ancient coffins on a hearth of Old Empire bricks. The dead wood, seasoned by four thousand years of drought, threw off an ancient and corpse-like smell, which left its faint savour on the toast which we scorched at the embers; and a clear smokeless light fell fitfully on serried coffins, each hiding a gaunt tenant swathed and bound, to whose quiet presence we grew so little sensitive that we ranged our stores and bottles, our pans and our spare garments on his convenient lid.

None the less—I will avow it, dear lady, even if I wake after all your desire to dig—I used to put all these ills, the disappointments and discomforts of the work and life, to the account of things that matter not at all every time that I watched the clearance of a sealed tomb-door. I have dug for twenty years and set next foot after the sexton’s in very many ancient sepulchres; but I still feel, as at first, the flutter of poignant hope that the tomb may be virgin, and an indescribable thrill at the sight of grave furniture undisturbed since thousands of years. There lie the dead man’s bow and arrows in their place on his coffin-lid, string snapped and plumes in dust, and there his stout staff and his boomerang: the little Nile boats are propped fully manned by his side; the wooden servants who answer his call in the underworld are at their several businesses: and his effigy, with his wife’s, stands at his head. I know well that, in Egypt at least, one hardly ever opens a perfectly virgin sepulchre. Someone robbed it on the night of the burial ere the door was sealed. Some malign intruder has rumpled those grave clothes down to the waist in quest of the jewels on neck and breast, and has trampled or overturned in his guilty haste the furniture beside the coffin. But since he withdrew with his accomplices and sealed the door, all has been silence and fine rain of dust from the roof, until, after four thousand years, you come. You may talk of science and think of loot, while the chattering diggers are working like fiends to lift the last of the filling from the shaft; but the first look into the dimness of the sepulchre itself will silence them, hardened robbers though they be, and will silence you. Science and your own glory and the lust of loot are all forgotten in the awe which falls as in fairy tales on adventurers in underground chambers where kings of old time sit asleep. Yet next day, or maybe the day after, when that coffin has been packed with twenty others in the magazine, you will play cards of an evening on its head, if it happens to be handy.

MODELS OF SERVANTS AT THEIR WORK BESIDE A COFFIN.

Not too nice a trade, you see, dear lady. Best let it be!

CHAPTER VIII.
THE SAJUR.

It rained in the Syrian March of 1908 when it did not snow, and wet or fair it blew a gale. We came to Aleppo in a deluge, wallowed in mud at Mumbij, found Euphrates swinging in full flood round his mighty curves, crossed him before a wet gale, recrossed and rode all the way to Aintab head down to the same laden blast. Sleet and snow, rain and hail spent themselves in turn on that highland town during four miserable days. But on the fifth morning the sky was clear. The tracks had hardened in one fair night, and bush and tree were eager for spring. When we wheeled on the crest of a low pass for a last look into the sunlit valley, a far-away frame of dazzling peaks had risen where clouds were hanging yesterday. Life was sweet once more, and the world seemed good.