Except For One Which Is
Quite Near Us (The Fantastic Grandfather Of The Others, That Of King
Zoser, Who Died
Nearly 5000 years ago), except for this one, which is
made of six colossal superposed terraces, they are all built
After
that same conception of the /Triangle/, which is at once the most
mysteriously simple figure of geometry, and the strongest and most
permanently stable form of architecture. And now that there remains no
trace of the frescoed portraits which used to adorn them, nor of their
multicoloured coatings, now that they have taken on the same dead
colour as the desert, they look like the huge bones of giant fossils,
that have long outlasted their other contemporaries on earth. Beneath
the ground, however, the case is different; there, still remain the
bodies of men, and even of cats and birds, who with their own eyes saw
these vast structures building, and who sleep intact, swathed in
bandages, in the darkness of their tunnels. /We know/, for we have
penetrated there before, what things are hidden in the womb of this
old desert, on which the yellow shroud of the sand grows thicker and
thicker as the centuries pass. The whole deep rock had been perforated
patiently to make hypogea and sepulchral chambers, great and small,
and veritable palaces for the dead, adorned with innumerable painted
figures. And though now, for some two thousand years, men have set
themselves furiously to exhume the sarcophagi and the treasures that
are buried here, the subterranean reserves are not yet exhausted.
There still remain, no doubt, pleiads of undisturbed sleepers, who
will never be discovered.
As we advance the wind grows stronger and colder beneath a sky that
becomes increasingly cloudy, and the sand is flying on all sides. The
sand is the undisputed sovereign of the necropolis; if it does not
surge and roll like some enormous tidal wave, as it appears to do when
seen from the green valley below, it nevertheless covers everything
with an obstinate persistence which has continued since the beginning
of time. Already at Memphis it has buried innumerable statues and
colossi and temples of the Sphinx. It comes without a pause, from
Libya, from the great Sahara, which contain enough to powder the
universe. It harmonises well with the tall skeletons of the pyramids,
which form immutable rocks on its always shifting extent; and if one
thinks of it, it gives a more thrilling sense of anterior eternities
even than all these Egyptian ruins, which, in comparison with it, are
things of yesterday. The sand - the sand of the primitive seas - which
represents a labour of erosion of a duration impossible to conceive,
and bears witness to a continuity of destruction which, one might say,
had no beginning.
Here, in the midst of these solitudes, is a humble habitation, old and
half buried in sand, at which we have to stop. It was once the house
of the Egyptologist Mariette, and still shelters the director of the
excavations, from whom we have to obtain permission to descend amongst
the Apis. The whitewashed room in which he receives us is encumbered
with the age-old debris which he is continually bringing to light. The
parting rays of the sun, which shines low down from between two
clouds, enter through a window opening on to the surrounding
desolation; and the light comes mournfully, yellowed by the sand and
the evening.
The master of the house, while his Bedouin servants are gone to open
and light up for us the underground habitations of the Apis, shows us
his latest astonishing find, made this morning in a hypogeum of one of
the most ancient dynasties. It is there on a table, a group of little
people of wood, of the size of the marionettes of our theatres. And
since it was the custom to put in a tomb only those figures or objects
which were most pleasing to him who dwelt in it, the man-mummy to whom
this toy was offered in times anterior to all precise chronology must
have been extremely partial to dancing-girls. In the middle of the
group the man himself is represented, sitting in an armchair, and on
his knee he holds his favourite dancing-girl. Other girls posture
before him in a dance of the period; and on the ground sit musicians
touching tambourines and strangely fashioned harps. All wear their
hair in a long plait, which falls below their shoulders like the
pigtail of the Chinese. It was the distinguishing mark of these kinds
of courtesans. And these little people had kept their pose in the
darkness for some three thousand years before the commencement of the
Christian era. . . . In order to show it to us better the group is
brought to the window, and the mournful light which enters from across
the infinite solitudes of the desert colours them yellow and shows us
in detail their little doll-like attitudes and their comical and
frightened appearance - frightened perhaps to find themselves so old
and issuing from so deep a night. They had not seen a setting of the
sun, such as they now regard with their queer eyes, too long and too
wide oepn, they had not seen such a thing for some five thousand
years. . . .
The habitation of the Apis, the lords of the necropolis, is little
more than two hundred yards away. We are told that the place is now
lighted up and that we may betake ourselves thither.
The descent is by a narrow, rapidly sloping passage, dug in the soil,
between banks of sand and broken stones. We are now completely
sheltered from the bitter wind which blows across the desert, and from
the dark doorway that opens before us comes a breath of air as from an
oven. It is always dry and hot in the underground funeral places of
Egypt, which make indeed admirable stoves for mummies. The threshold
once crossed we are plunged first of all in darkness and, preceded by
a lantern, make our way, by devious turnings, over large flagstones,
passing obelisks, fallen blocks of stone and other gigantic debris, in
a heat that continually increases.
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