And at precisely this point, the epoch of those absurd theatricals, the sparkle and comedy of Athenian existence was overshadowed or enlightened for me by the birth of a great friendship. Regie Lister had the greatest genius for friendship of any man I ever met; no one, not even Alfred Lyttelton, had a finer gift or a more irresistible charm for men and women alike. The two, extraordinarily dissimilar in most respects, were identical in this, that they compelled others to love them, because they loved so magnificently themselves. Alfred Lyttelton, for all his exuberant virility, had the feminine quality of giving himself instead of taking, which is what I mean by magnificent love, and Regie’s genius in friendship sprang from precisely the same abandonment. There they diverged north and south, for Regie had practically none of the manliness that was so characteristic of the other. But he had superbly the qualities of his defects; in matters of intellect, the direct masculine attack was represented by intuition and diplomacy and extreme quickness, and in matters of affection by a certain robust tenderness, quite devoid of sentimentality. All mankind, whether male or female, is compounded of both sexes: the man without any womanly instincts would be a mere monster; the woman without any grit of manliness in her, a mere jelly-fish, and in Regie’s nature the woman had a large share. One quality supposed to be a defect of women rather than men he was quite without: he had no notion whatever of “spite,” and was incapable of taking revenge on anyone who had annoyed or crossed him. Most shining of all among his delightful gifts was his instinct of seeing the best in everyone. Wherever he went in his diplomatic posts, Athens, Constantinople, Copenhagen, Rome, Paris, or Tangiers, he found, without the least “setting to work” about it, that there never was so heavenly a place, nor so delightful an entourage. At heart he was really Parisian; that city, with its keen kaleidoscopic gaiety, its intellectual and artistic atmosphere, dry and defined as its own air, suited him best, but this instinct to find everyone with whom he came in contact delightful, brought out, as was natural, all that there was delightful in them, and thus his instinct was justified. He was incapable of being bored for more than a couple of minutes together, and would have found something that could be commuted into cheerfulness in the trials of Job. Whether he liked a person or not, he always gave his best, not with the idea of making himself popular, but because that was the natural expression of his temperament. His amiability made the ripe plums easily drop for him, but when he had determined to get something which did not come off its stalk for the wishing, he had indomitable perseverance, and that rather rare gift of being able to sit down and think until a method clarified itself.
With him, then, I struck up a friendship which dispensed with all the preliminaries of acquaintanceship: there was no gradual drawing together about it, it leaped into being, and there it remained, poised and effortless. Often during the ensuing years after he had left Athens and was at his post in some European capital, we did not meet for months together, but when the meeting came, relations were taken up again, owing to some flame-like quality in him which warmed you as soon as you got near him, without break or sense of there having been a break. Morning by morning he came down to the museum where I was studying sculpture with his paints and sketching-block, and made the most admirable pictures of some Greek head; we took excursions round Athens up Hymettus or Pentelicus, we usually dined together at some house of an evening, where he made cosmopolitan diplomatists act charades or play some childish and uproarious game. Best of all was it to leave Athens, and wander three or four days at a time in the Peloponnese. We cast pennies into the Styx, we lost our way and our mules and their drivers on the slopes of Cyllene, and were rescued by a priest who tucked up his skirts, and hurled huge stones at the savage shepherd-dogs; we slept in indescribable inns, where were all manner of beasts, we bathed in the Eurotas, and lay that night among goats in a shed on the Langarda Pass, and the sorriest surroundings were powerless to abate Regie’s enjoyment. And on one unique and memorable day we hunted for the temple at Bassae in a thick fog, and almost despaired of finding it, when out of the heart of the enshrouding mist there came the roar of a great wind that tore the fog into tatters, and lo, not a hundred yards away was the grave grey temple. The flying vapours vanished, chased like frightened sheep along steaming hillsides and through the valleys below, and all the Peloponnese swam into sight, from the Gulf of Corinth to the western sea, and from the west to the bays of the south, and from the south to the waters of Nauplia.... Did two more ecstatic pilgrims ever behold the shrine of Apollo?
For the next three winters slices of Egypt were sandwiched between visits to Greece. I started with Greece, went on with Maggie, or on other occasions joined her at Luxor, and came back to Greece, living, after Regie’s departure for Constantinople, at the Legation with Sir Edwin Egerton, the most hospitable of mankind. But the magic of Egypt, potent and compelling as it was, was a waving of a black wand compared to the joyful spell of Greece. “All who run may read; only run” was the Greek injunction: “All who read must run away” seemed the equivalent in the Nilotic incantation. To get under the spell of Greece implied a rejuvenation into a world that was like dawn on dewdrops and gave so sunny an answer to the “obstinate questionings” that there was no need even to ask what the riddle had been.
“All is beauty,
And knowing this is love, and love is duty,
What further can be sought for or declared?”
That glittered from the fading shores of Attica, and then after a few miles of sea, there arose the low and sinister coast, and as you began to guess at the mystery of the desert-bounded land you quaked at the conclusion. There was something old and evil there and as tired as Ecclesiastes: it preached Vanitas Vanitatum instead of singing the sunny love-spell of Greece, and while its mouth mumbled the syllables, its relentless hands reared the pyramids which must stand for ever to the astonishment of the world as a monument of unimaginative construction and lost labour. There too it set the Sphinx whose totally blank and meaningless face, innocent of any riddle except that of its own soullessness, defies the rising glory of the sun and the moon of lovers to instil any spark of animation into its stony countenance. What monsters to an Attic pilgrim were these gods conceived not in the kindly image of humanity but as out of some incestuous menagerie! Here was no deep-bosomed Hera, queen of gods and men, for the royalty of motherhood; no helmeted Athene for the royalty of wisdom; no Aphrodite for the excellence of love sent her herald Eros to announce her epiphany from the wine-dark sea. The Egyptian artificers hewed no images of joy and mirth, they set no Faun nor Satyr dancing in the twilight, no Hermes held the winds in the flower-like pinions of his heels, or nursed the god after whom the Bacchantes revelled, with the smile that so quivered on his mouth that next moment surely the vitality with which he tingled, would break through that momentary marble arrest. Far other were these incongruous composite divinities, all as dead as a hangman’s noose, all incapable of summoning up one quiver of a kindly mirth. As by some disordered dream of a religious maniac the hawk-faced god had a cobra for symbol of his divinity; a cow or a cat or a lion had mated with a man and the offspring sat there, bleak and appalling, to be worshipped. And in matter of material, for the glow of the white Pentelic that holds the sunshine in solution within, even as a noble vintage is redolent of Provençal summers, these monstrous forms were presented in dead black basalt, a frozen opacity of ink.
Into these tight-fisted inexorable hands were given the jail-keys of death. Egypt was ever the land of graves, Memento Mori, the sad gospel of its religion. A little honey, a little pulse, blue-glazed images of slaves who might still toil for their master in that dim underworld, images of food in the chambers of the dead, were all that the pious could provide for the desolate whimpering soul, feeble as a moth, that went forth on its lonely journey through dubious twilight. The crowns and the sceptres, the gold and precious stones that were buried with the kings were but a mockery to them of all that they had quitted; the mightiest monument that Pharaoh had raised was no more than a flickering beacon behind him as he trod the dark passage, which cast in front the shadow of the man that he had been. The gigantic and hopeless art, bound hand and foot by the fetters of hieratic tradition could do no more than multiply monoliths, incredulous of its own greatness and untinged with the living colour of humanity. Yet out of this mere piling up of dead on dead there arose a musty necromantic magic, awful and old and corrupt, that sat like a vulture on the sandbanks and was wafted, eternally fecund, down the waters of the Nile. All the way up to Luxor, where we settled down for a time, through the splendour of noon and the last ray of sunset that turns the stream into a sheet of patinated bronze, there was present that underlying sense of woe; and to this day my nightmares are set on the Nile in the sweet scent of bean fields beneath the waving of mimosa and of palms, where, by the terrible river there crouches some abominable granite god.
I have given a wrong notion of this curious psychic horror if I have represented it as interfering with enjoyment and interest. It lay couched and in concealment, seldom stirring, and belonged I suppose to that subconscious world which, somewhere within us, is absorbed in its own constructive energies, and only rarely lets news of itself rise, like a bubble through dark water, into our controlled and effective consciousness. But cell by cell was stored with its bitter honey, and my bees must have been busy, for when a few years later I began to write a book called The Image in the Sand I found the combs full and ready for my despoiling. How such invention as is implied in writing a book, exercises itself in others, I do not know, but I have a very clear idea of my own case. The material, the stuff out of which the threads are woven, or, if you will, the stock-pot out of which the pottage comes, has long been simmering and stewing before the planning, the conscious invention begins. These two stages, so I take it, are widely severed from each other; the storing and the stewing have long preceded this rummage and inspection of what the author wants for his purpose. But there is, practically always, a second pot on the fire, subconsciously stewing, the contents of which concern him not at all, while he is exercising such culinary art as may be his over the contents of the first. Thus, while subconsciously I was gathering and shredding into this second pot, some of these secret and bitter herbs of Egypt to be used years afterwards, my conscious cooking powers were altogether absorbed with the stuff I had long before collected in Greece. In other words, I was busy with writing The Vintage while my subconscious mind was just as busy on its own office of making ready for The Image in the Sand. Every morning, and all morning, as we went up the Nile in the post-boat, I used to carry book and pen and ink to some sequestered corner where the sun beat full on me, and, while the sandbanks and the vultures and the wicked old spell of Egypt were working on my subconscious mind, I exuded on to paper what I had captured of the sunnier spell of Greece. I fancy that this must be a mental process common to most people, and that nobody writes of the interests and experiences which at the moment absorb him. They have to be kept and stored and stewed before they are fit for use; the harvest in fact has long been completed before the grain is ground, or before the baker, later still, is at his oven.
Every winter then, for those three years, and indeed for one year more, tragic and final—I went across to Egypt from Greece, firm in the protection of the sunny gods when I started, and hastening to swing the incense again when I returned. And I must surely have been inoculated with the poison of the darker deities, so that for two years I was immune from their attacks, or perhaps Maggie’s excavations in the temple of Mut in Karnak were so thrilling and surprising that “the plague was stayed,” or perhaps I made some truce and reconciliation with the hawk-faced gods and the cats and the baboons, or perhaps (as seemed most probable of all) I had imagined a vain thing when for the first time I thought that the iron of these malignant conceptions had entered into my soul, for the early months of the new year in 1895 and 1896 were weeks of incessant exhilaration, the glory of which was this concession, given to Maggie by the Ministry of Antiquities, that she might conduct the excavation of a temple.
Did ever an invalid plan and carry out so sumptuous an activity? She was wintering in Egypt for her health, being threatened with a crippling form of rheumatism; she was suffering also from an internal malady, depressing and deadly: a chill was a serious thing for her, fatigue must be avoided, and yet with the most glorious contempt of bodily ailments which I have ever seen, she continued to employ some amazing mental vitality that brushed disabilities aside, and, while it conformed to medical orders, crammed the minutes with such sowings and reapings as the most robust might envy. When I got to Egypt in the first of these three years she had already obtained permission to excavate the temple of Mut in the horse-shoe lake at Karnak, with the proviso that the museum at Gizeh was to claim anything it desired out of the finds; she had got together sufficient funds to conduct a six weeks’ exploration with a moderate staff of workers, and there she was with her fly-whisk and her white donkey, using a dozen words of Arabic to the workers with astonishing effect. She had begun by trenching the site diagonally in order to cut across any walls that were covered by the soil, and another diagonal soon gave the general plan of the unknown temple. All the local English archæologists were, so to speak, at her feet, partly from the entire novelty of an English girl conducting an excavation of her own, but more because of her grateful and enthusiastic personality, and M. Naville, who was engaged at Deir-el-Bahari across the river, came and sat like a benignant eagle on a corner stone, while Mr. Newberry deciphered some freshly exposed inscription. I was given a general supervision, with the object of discovering the most economical method of clearing, of arranging the “throws” of earth (so that those going to the chucking heap should not use the same path as those returning with empty baskets, a plan which entailed collisions and much pleasant conversation between the workmen who were going to and fro) and with making a plan to scale of the temple. A friend of Maggie’s kept an eye wide open for possible thefts of small objects, but the genius, the organizer, the chairman of it all was Maggie. After a morning there, she had to get back to Pagnon’s Hotel, lunch quietly and rest afterwards, but presently she would be out again, cantering on her white donkey without fatigue owing to her admirable seat, with a tea-basket on the crupper, and Mohammed the devoted donkey-boy trotting behind with encouraging cries so that the donkey should not lapse into that jog-trot which was so bad for tea-things. At sunset, the work was over, and we made our leisurely way back to the hotel. Maggie rested a tired body before dinner, but exercised an indefatigible mind, working at what was familiarly known as “her philosophy,” which eventually took shape in her book, The Venture of Rational Faith, or scribbling at one of the charming animal stories, which she published later under the title of Subject to Vanity. Then after dinner, the old habits reasserted themselves and we played games with pencil and paper, producing poetical answers to preposterous questions or rooking each other at picquet. Each Saturday, she jingled out with money-bags to the temple of Mut, and paid her workmen, while her native overseer checked the tale of piastres, and waved the whisk to keep the flies off his mistress.
Sometimes there were days off, when one of the three was left in charge, and the two others went far through the fertile land, or ferrying across the Nile, spent the day with M. Naville at Deir-el-Bahari to see what fresh sculptured wall had been reclaimed from the blown sand of the desert, showing the pictured ivory and gold which the expedition of Queen Hatasoo had brought back from the mysterious land of Punt; or we crawled dustily into some newly discovered malodorous tomb in the valley where the kings of Egypt were buried, or visited Professor Petrie at the Ramesseum and exchanged the news of fresh finds. Sometimes I took a holiday from the remote and swarming past, and with a horse in place of the demurer donkey, went far out into the desert on the other side of the Nile. Pebbles and soft sand, hard sand and rocks succeeded each other in slope and level, and the horse whinnied as he sniffed the utter emptiness of the unbreathed air. One kite hung, a remote speck in the brazen sky, and the silence and the solitude wove the unutterable spell of the desert. There, out of sight of all that makes the planet habitable, your horse alone made the link with the ephemeral living world; all else was as it had been through uncounted centuries, and as it would remain for centuries to come, until the spinning earth grew still. In the desert the past and the future are one, and the present, dwindled to a microscopical point, is but a shadow of time in the timeless circle of eternity. Old wicked Egypt was no more than that; the dynasties were whisked away like an unquiet fly, that persists for a little, but not for long.