A CONSCIOUS MUMMY.
I sat under the old elm trees reading a work on Early Egyptian Civilization, which declared that the recorded history of that ancient people began when Menes was king, about 4300 B. C.
Placing the book, back up on the ground, I thought of their strange faith; the reverent care with which they embalmed the body to be again occupied by the soul, when, after many transmigrations from one animal to another, having expiated all sins done in the body, it should return purified to the old body. Assuming their belief true, where now might be those ancient believers in Osiris, Ra, Horus, Isis, Set and other nature gods, having ages before bowed in submission to Bes, the god of death?
How limited is sense; how weak intellect; how short bodily life. Yet the very frailty and uncertainty of life establishes the immortality of the soul and the soul, in turn, gives spontaneous testimony to God and of a life within which the body does not own.
Nature was enjoying her afternoon siesta. Over the hills so far away as to make it a picture, a threshing machine was eating wheat shocks and blowing forth a golden dust-like breath of straw. The incessant sawing of harvest flies, a heavy country dinner and the afternoon glow and heat conspired to drive me into the springhouse, where the coolness and peace of the place brought a bodily laziness, and, lying down on the old stone shelf, I slept.
Three walls of the springhouse grew as the palace walls of Aladdin; the front rolled up as the curtain for a drama; and between great columns of red granite and porphyry, chiseled with hieroglyphics and decorated with the symbols of Amun and Osiris, I looked out upon a grove of date palms, the pyramid of Sneferru, an island sea of yellow flood water, and yet beyond, the low hills of Arabia. A view seemingly as familiar as the one from my bedroom window.
It was the Nile valley at Meidoom; Aur-Aa was at flood stage, then nearly fifty feet above the normal level, Now, after centuries, the valley has been filled by river silt and the tide is much shallower.
The beauty and changefulness of that narrow valley by comparison with the monotonous lands which flank it gave promise of a happy people. Hemmed in on the west by the sand hills of Libya and on the east by the equally bare, dry, never-changing hills of Arabia; teeming with people as the channels of an ant hill with ants; intensively cultivated, some of the crops like the dhourra or millet, the principal food of the poor, returning to the sower two hundred and fifty times its seed; shaded by date palms which yield abundant and delicious fruit; a land with a delightful climate seasonably watered, fertilized by yearly tides and protected from invasion by wide deserts of soft sand; why should we not have been a happy people?
Because no one is free. We are enslaved by caste, a most merciless master, by the priesthood, by our king. We work continually, but for others. Happy he, who when life is done, after contributing to the priesthood and the king, after sacrificing to a hundred gods, leaves sufficient estate to pay for the embalming of and a safe resting place for his body.
This is the best of a short life, with the sad hope that after you have been many times a lower form of life, you may return to your old body if, perchance, it may be found. Far better off the unclean fish, which, when the flood recedes, gasp themselves to death in shallow pools, choked by the sand.