Paths made
by bare feet run from one half-tomb, half-mud-heap to the next, not much
more distinct than snail smears, but they have been used since....
Time is a dangerous thing to play with. That morning the concierge had
toiled for us among steamer-sailings to see if we could save three days.
That evening we sat with folk for whom Time had stood still since the
Ptolemies. I wondered, at first, how it concerned them or any man if
such and such a Pharaoh had used to his own glory the plinths and
columns of such another Pharaoh before or after Melchizedek. Their
whole background was too inconceivably remote for the mind to work on.
But the next morning we were taken to the painted tomb of a noble - a
Minister of Agriculture - who died four or five thousand years ago. He
said to me, in so many words: 'Observe I was very like your friend, the
late Mr. Samuel Pepys, of your Admiralty. I took an enormous interest in
life, which I most thoroughly enjoyed, on its human and on its spiritual
side. I do not think you will find many departments of State better
managed than mine, or a better-kept house, or a nicer set of young
people ... My daughters! The eldest, as you can see, takes after her
mother. The youngest, my favourite, is supposed to favour me. Now I will
show you all the things that I did, and delighted in, till it was time
for me to present my accounts elsewhere.' And he showed me, detail by
detail, in colour and in drawing, his cattle, his horses, his crops, his
tours in the district, his accountants presenting the revenue returns,
and he himself, busiest of the busy, in the good day.
But when we left that broad, gay ante-room and came to the narrower
passage where once his body had lain and where all his doom was
portrayed, I could not follow him so well. I did not see how he, so
experienced in life, could be cowed by friezes of brute-headed
apparitions or satisfied by files of repeated figures. He explained,
something to this effect:
'We live on the River - a line without breadth or thickness. Behind us
is the Desert, which nothing can affect; wither no man goes till he is
dead, (One does not use good agricultural ground for cemeteries.)
Practically, then, we only move in two dimensions - up stream or down.
Take away the Desert, which we don't consider any more than a healthy
man considers death, and you will see that we have no background
whatever. Our world is all one straight bar of brown or green earth,
and, for some months, mere sky-reflecting water that wipes out
everything You have only to look at the Colossi to realise how
enormously and extravagantly man and his works must scale in such a
country. Remember too, that our crops are sure, and our life is very,
very easy. Above all, we have no neighbours That is to say, we must give
out, for we cannot take in. Now, I put it to you, what is left for a
priest with imagination, except to develop ritual and multiply gods on
friezes? Unlimited leisure, limited space of two dimensions, divided by
the hypnotising line of the River, and bounded by visible, unalterable
death - must, ipso facto - - '
'Even so,' I interrupted. 'I do not comprehend your Gods - your direct
worship of beasts, for instance?'
'You prefer the indirect? The worship of Humanity with a capital H? My
Gods, or what I saw in them, contented me.'
'What did you see in your Gods as affecting belief and conduct?'
'You know the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx?'
'No,' I murmured. 'What is it?'
'"All sensible men are of the same religion, but no sensible man ever
tells,"' he replied. With that I had to be content, for the passage
ended in solid rock.
There were other tombs in the valley, but the owners were dumb, except
one Pharaoh, who from the highest motives had broken with the creeds and
instincts of his country, and so had all but wrecked it. One of his
discoveries was an artist, who saw men not on one plane but modelled
full or three-quarter face, with limbs suited to their loads and
postures. His vividly realised stuff leaped to the eye out of the
acreage of low-relief in the old convention, and I applauded as a
properly brought-up tourist should.
'Mine was a fatal mistake,' Pharaoh Ahkenaton sighed in my ear,' I
mistook the conventions of life for the realities.'
'Ah, those soul-crippling conventions!' I cried.
'You mistake me,' he answered more stiffly. 'I was so sure of their
reality that I thought that they were really lies, whereas they were
only invented to cover the raw facts of life.'
'Ah, those raw facts of life!' I cried, still louder; for it is not
often that one has a chance of impressing a Pharaoh.' We must face them
with open eyes and an open mind! Did you?'
'I had no opportunity of avoiding them,' he replied. 'I broke every
convention in my land.'
'Oh, noble! And what happened?'
'What happens when you strip the cover off a hornet's nest? The raw
fact of life is that mankind is just a little lower than the angels, and
the conventions are based on that fact in order that men may become
angels.
