Mrs. Belzoni having lingered in Cairo, the explorer now and then accepted the hospitality of natives dwelling in the outer tombs. “I was sure of a supper of milk served in a wooden bowl,” he wrote, “but whenever they supposed I should stay all night they killed a couple of fowls for me which were baked in a small oven heated with pieces of mummy cases, and sometimes with the bones and rags of the mummies themselves.” It is a far cry from the sun-helmeted professors, the great officials, and the electric lights of Tutankhamen’s tomb.
On this second journey, the explorer began the clearing of Abu Simbel, and discovered the tomb of Seti I in the Valley of the Kings, still the most beautifully decorated sepulchre in Egypt. Old usage called it Belzoni’s tomb; new days have forgotten the explorer. Then followed expeditions to Philæ, to the site of the Roman city of Berenike on the Red Sea, and a journey to the oasis of Elwah which Belzoni mistook for the historic oasis of Jupiter Ammon. The fever of exploration now descended on Mrs. B., and the intrepid lady, disguised as a man, went off by herself on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem,—a feat of extraordinary fortitude and daring.
At the close of his second journey, Belzoni had cleared and opened Abu Simbel, discovered the tomb of Seti I, and explored Philæ, the Theban necropolis and the Valley of the Kings. He had shown himself venturesome, courageous, and resolute. He had a way of getting things done, not by shouts and the whip, but by a certain steadiness of pressure, as if he were putting his giant shoulders to a door and slowly forcing it inward from its frame. There are passages in his account of his work which seem to reveal a quality of suspicion in the giant’s mind; he could see the hand of rival gatherers of antiquities in every check and delay. Twenty-five years ago the trait would have required a moral explanation; the wiser and more travelled present simply points to the thermometer.
By an ironic turn of the wheel of fate, it chanced that the rival collector to whom Belzoni attributed his vexations was himself an Italian. Bernardino Drouetti, agent of France and gatherer of antiquities for the Louvre, had been born in Leghorn. The competition between this Frenchman from Leghorn and this Briton from Padua had thus a certain raciness and emotional quality. Keen as it was, the amenities were outwardly preserved, and Drouetti even went so far as to present Belzoni with the “rights” to a sarcophagus it was impossible to extricate. At Philæ, however, the duel became a battle, for Drouetti’s henchmen rushed Belzoni and his party as the giant was making off with an obelisk. If Drouetti’s indignant lament is to be believed, Belzoni snatched a shrieking, jabbering “Arab” out of the mob swarming about him, swung him up by the ankles, and used him à la Samson on the heads and shoulders of his fellow country men. The novel weapon, it is said, won a headlong victory, and the giant carried off his obelisk in peace.
Returning to Cairo during the inundation, Belzoni paused by night at the pyramids. So vividly were the stars of the Egyptian sky mirrored in the flood, that there seemed to be two heavens, one above and below. Awesome, even a little terrible, the vast and ancient shapes of the pyramids rose seemingly from the starry water to the splendour overhead.
The Pyramids. Mystery of ancient mystery! Belzoni resolved to match his knowledge and skill with this riddle of the years.
III
He went first to Gizeh, and wandered about the three pyramids, studying and observing.
From the sands of the Egyptian desert, which are cornelian in hue and strewn with colored pebbles much like fragments of ancient pottery, the pyramids rise as masses of old ivory stone suffused with a certain golden rust; the description is laboured, but the effect is not to be given in a word. Belzoni, trudging the sand, watched the late afternoon light bring out the grey. The second great pyramid, the pyramid of Chephren, had taken his eye, and round it and about he went, now gazing up to the cap of reddish surfacing still in place about the peak, now pausing to study the huge confusion of sand and wreckage washed up about the base like a wave of shattered stone. Was there an opening, and if so, where? Or was the pyramid a solid hill of stone as the Egyptians had told Herodotus twenty-five hundred years before? The French scholars attached to Napoleon’s expedition had sought an entrance in vain, and the Europeans resident in Cairo were meditating a scheme of collecting 20,000 pounds “at various European courts,” and “forcing their way into the centre of this pyramid by explosions.”
“It seems little short of madness,” wrote Belzoni, “to renew the enterprise.” The giant had now grown a fine black beard, and taken to wearing Eastern dress, huge white turban and all. It was the proper thing to do then when travelling in the East.