Through An Iron Gate, Guarded By Two Tall Bedouin Guards In
Black Robes, We Plunge At Once Into The Shadow Of Enormous Stones.
We
are in the house of the god, in a forest of heavy Osiridean columns,
surrounded by a world
Of people in high coiffures, carved in bas-
relief on the pillars and walls - people who seem to be signalling one
to another and exchanging amongst themselves mysterious signs,
silently and for ever.
But what is this noise in the sanctuary? It seems to be full of
people. There, sure enough, beyond a second row of columns, is quite a
little crowd talking loudly in English. I fancy that I can hear the
clinking of glasses and the tapping of knives and forks.
Oh! poor, poor temple, to what strange uses are you come. . . . This
excess of grotesqueness in profanation is more insulting surely than
to be sacked by barbarians! Behold a table set for some thirty guests,
and the guests themselves - of both sexes - merry and lighthearted,
belong to that special type of humanity which patronises Thomas Cook &
Son (Egypt Ltd.). They wear cork helmets, and the classic green
spectacles; drink whisky and soda, and eat voraciously sandwiches and
other viands out of greasy paper, which now litters the floor. And the
women! Heavens! what scarecrows they are! And this kind of thing, so
the black-robed Bedouin guards inform us, is repeated every day so
long as the season lasts. A luncheon in the temple of Osiris is part
of the programme of pleasure trips. Each day at noon a new band
arrives, on heedless and unfortunate donkeys. The tables and the
crockery remain, of course, in the old temple!
Let us escape quickly, if possible before the sight shall have become
graven on our memory.
But alas! even when we are outside, alone again on the expanse of
dazzling sands, we can no longer take things seriously. Abydos and the
desert have ceased to exist. The faces of those women remain to haunt
us, their faces and their hats, and those looks which they vouchsafed
us from over their solar spectacles. . . . The ugliness associated
with the name of Cook was once explained to me in this wise, and the
explanation at first sight seemed satisfactory: "The United Kingdom,
justifiably jealous of the beauty of its daughters, submits them to a
jury when they reach the age of puberty; and those who are classed as
too ugly to reproduce their kind are accorded an unlimited account at
Thomas Cook & Sons, and thus vowed to a course of perpetual travel,
which leaves them no time to think of certain trifles incidental to
life." The explanation, as I say, seduced me for the time being. But a
more attentive examination of the bands who infest the valley of the
Nile enables me to aver that all these good English ladies are of an
age notoriously canonical; and the catastrophe of procreation
therefore, supposing that such an accident could ever have happened to
them, must date back to a time long anterior to their enrolment.
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