After exhibiting “Samson” through Portugal and Spain, the Belzonis drifted to Malta, then a dependency of Egypt, and there Belzoni attracted the friendly attention of the Mohammedan governor. The adventurer’s old interest in hydraulics was becoming practical; he had devised certain irrigating machines intended for agricultural use, and the governor advised him to go to Cairo, and bring these contrivances to the attention of Mehmet Ali, the quasi-independent governor of Egypt.
It is the month of August in the year 1815; the heat in Egypt is the heat of a dry oven; a little wind blows, but merely serves to pour the heat upon the flesh. There is no sun in the cloudless sky, only an inundation of tremendous light whose source is no more to be looked at than a god. Circling higher and higher, vultures ride the furnace of the air, eyeing the broad, low-lying plain, the winding Nile, the shrunken marshes, the cornelian sands, and the broken tops of the Memphian pyramids. At a landing in Cairo, three Europeans are disembarking from a Nile boat,—they are Gianbattista and Sarah Belzoni and James Curtain, their little Irish serving lad.
The monk whom Destiny had turned into a bohemian was now thirty-seven years old, and the many influences he had undergone had moulded an exceptional mind and character. On the one hand, he was a strolling mountebank; on the other, an educated man with churchly learning and a genuine respect for scholarship. He was an Italian with an Italian’s suppleness, ingenuity, and Latin sense of making the best of what life affords; he was an Englishman as well, with the English language on his lips, and ten years’ experience of life in the English way. He wrote English extraordinarily well; he could draw passably, and from his years as a stroller he had gained a knack of getting along with men of all conditions and kinds. A stroller, a scholar, a Roman, an Englishman—was there ever such another Hercules? Through the streets of Cairo he rides, with a giant’s aloof peaceableness and a giant’s propriety.
He was weary now, it would seem, of Samson’s roars and tuggings. He had accepted the cards which life had dealt him and done his best to play them well,—what else was there to do? Here in this new land, the game should begin again, and the showman vanish into the vagrant engineer.
In the dark underworld of vanished deities, the animal-headed gods of Egypt, the cow Hathor, the cat Pasht, and the jackal Anubis stir in their ancient dreams, for the first of the awakeners of their civilization is setting foot beside the Nile.
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.