The Court of the King, and Other Studies
Date: 2020-02-22T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Egypt -- Description and travel

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Title: The Court of the King, and Other Studies

Author: Margaret Benson

Release date: February 22, 2020 [eBook #61478]
Most recently updated: October 17, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COURT OF THE KING, AND OTHER STUDIES ***

THE COURT OF THE KING

BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

THE SOUL OF A CAT.

THE VENTURE OF RATIONAL FAITH.

CAPITAL LABOUR AND TRADE AND THE OUTLOOK.

SUBJECT TO VANITY.

THE TEMPLE OF MUT IN ASHER. (With J. A. Gourlay.)

THE COURT OF
THE KING

AND OTHER STUDIES

By MARGARET BENSON

T. FISHER UNWIN
LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE
LEIPSIC: INSELSTRASSE 20

First published, 1913

(All rights reserved)

PREFACE

“We wake with wrists and ankles jewelled still.”

There are many ways of entering fairyland; sometimes there is a door in the ground, and he who goes through finds himself in some great hall or carved and painted chamber. Sometimes we find the morning dew on a flower and touch the eyes with it; or, like John Dietrich, catch the cap which the fairies are flinging and put it on our own heads: and immediately the little people spring into sight, we hear the sweetness of their music and see the glitter of their hidden treasure and watch the merriness of their games.

The difficulty of the first method is to find the way, of the second to find the will; and John Dietrich’s way is the venture of confidence.

Children are continually in fairyland; grubbing in mother earth they find the door; as they tumble on the grass the morning dew touches their eyes and makes them pure.

But sometimes the light of fairyland will shine suddenly about you; and you know it is no common glow though it seems but the light of day to many. So a child sauntering and playing at midday in the fields may throw back its head and look into a deep blue summer sky, and be seized on a sudden by a beauty which troubles the spirit, a greatness which weighs upon the soul and wearies it, till the will fails. Or the light may shine softer at evening through the nursery window, when roofs of houses and branches of elder purple and darken against a sky all purest primrose, and draw the young spirit with a half-comprehended longing. Sometimes it comes with raptures of sunlight in a green garden; sometimes cold and strange in moonlight when existence holds its breath, and earth is lost in shadow or refined to vapour in uncertain light; sometimes with a fullness of peace in pale emerald of evening light jewelling the latticed windows of an old house, till the enchantment thickens and the spirit pants with the presage of the moment, waiting for a revelation which still delays.

And sometimes it is filled with the very spirit of the little people: curious, amused, fantastic—as when you walk on a sea-shore, and suddenly, as with the touch of a charm, the pool at your feet becomes a little inland sea: you see the rocky shores sloping down, the sandy bottom, the submarine promontories through the blue: forests of seaweed sway; a terrible creature with claws crawls out through pale coralline; a lump of red jelly stretches out its arms and becomes now a living, crimson flower, now a horrid polypus ravaging, irresistible; a fairy being mailed in translucent armour floats on with antennæ fiercely waving; and you are back in fairyland.

Many times you may borrow the Red Cap to watch the boy Stevenson titanically carve mountains and seas in a mere mess of porridge; or to hear with Charles Kingsley when the grouse prophesies doom on the moor or the empty gnat boasts himself beside the stream. But sweetest of all it is to win for yourself the charm which opens your eyes in wood or field, and to hear with awakened ear the voices of created things.

These things should be at our command; but the things which children know we must re-learn; and there is no truth more evident to the child nor more surely proved to the philosopher than that all which we see or hear depends for all its meaning on the soul of the world that no man sees or hears. Let this book be taken as a short and simple lesson-book in hidden meanings. Life gives us many lessons hard to read, and problems painful to unriddle; but here in kind and simple wise our lesson was made plain and the page was pleasant to read: for to the eyes of everyday, in varying scenes, among diverse races, and nations long since dead “the dear old nurse” showed us the things which follow. She brought us through the Gates of Gold and sent us to float on the serene water below a pleasant pasture; she taught us daily, dwelling on the other side; led us by moonlight to the Court of the King; showed us through sordid circumstance the silent romance on the golden hill, as she had showed us romantic incidents, even in the Desert City; then she surrendered us to the guardianship of her child Imagination who, through the voices of others, brought back for us the Oriental vision of the royal boat in the mysterious midnight solemnity. And from this our older guardian led us back, and blotting out for us sight and sound of a populous city by a transparent veil, made us understand how to trust the mightiness of the life of which we were part.

Then she bade us close the book with the touch of pain and healing sent to quicken into life, and again Imagination sent us, among the scenes of daily life to look for the beautiful kingdom which endures: And we must say it in what form we may, so that we catch the meaning of the simple word, so early and so often said, from which our stubborn sense rebels, “the prison is the world of sight.”

Thus before memory should fade too much I wrote down some of the things I had under guidance witnessed and experienced, and those which the child Imagination had, as I say, taught in divers ways.

For too often we let memory lie like a rabbit in a winter burrow; and imagination buzzes on the surface of things like a fly on a pane: we narrow our vision to our purpose and our hearing to intelligible voices, till it needs a shock of strangeness or of beauty to bring us back to realities—to rouse memory to throw open the door in the hillside, to make imagination leave its sheet of glass for the world of air and light, to let the beauties and the music of the infinite creation reach the dull brain.

MARGARET BENSON.

CONTENTS

| PAGE
PREFACE | 5
I
THE GATES OF GOLD | 17
II
THE LAKE WITHIN THE WORLD | 27
III
A DESERT CITY | 37
IV
THE OTHER SIDE | 53
V
THE SILENT ROMANCE | 73
VI
THE COURT OF THE KING | 85
VII
THE GOLDEN DAHABEAH | 101
VIII
THE UNSEEN WORLD | 125
IX
FROM THE BANK OF THE RIVER | 135

THE GATES OF GOLD

I
THE GATES OF GOLD

The favourite game with Noah’s Ark was to make the nursery table an Island of Delight. The Delight must have centred in the looking-glasses, which, with frames discreetly hidden in moss, mirrored in their unruffled surfaces forms of numerous ducks and geese and other less decided species of birds. Certainly the other furnishings of the Island were not particularly delightful, for it was thickly populated with wild beasts of horrid aspect and defective limbs, and specimens of that strange pinkish animal of which Noah is so fond, and which may be classified with equal probability as a Dingo or a Wild Boar.

My earliest ideas of an Oasis were combined of this Island of Delight and of the description of Elim. The Oasis would be round as the nursery table; it would be covered with lush green grass like a water-meadow. It would have about seventy palm-trees standing at fairly regular intervals, and between the palm-trees there would be (instead of the looking-glasses) bubbling springs of water crystal-clear.

When at last I saw an Oasis it was unlike my vision—my Vision of Delight. There was no grass, but there were more palm-trees; there were no crystal fountains, but trickles of brown water in sandy channels. It came up to my ideal in one point only—there was none of that indefiniteness of outline which is so repulsive to the simple mind. Even as you can stand on the bridge above Mentone, and see a milestone with France on one side and a milestone with Italy on the other, so here you could take your stand and say “That on my right hand is Desert, and that on my left is Oasis.”

We had been travelling all day over the sandy, dusty plains of North Africa; we had found little to eat at the shed-like stations except blue cheese and musty bread; and towards evening we entered a rocky defile. At the end of this defile they said were the Gates of Gold. There was not much to see and the train loitered on.

Suddenly we saw at the end of the valley two great escarpments of reddish rock; at their foot leaned one palm-tree, behind was a glimpse of blue hills. The evening sunlight fell golden on the Golden Gates as we passed through and suddenly cried out, for everywhere below us spread a sea of waving palm-trees. This was the Oasis.

The Oasis lay on a plain so flat that the horizon to the south curved like the horizon of the sea; and like little clouds resting on the ocean here and there an oasis showed greyish green in the distance. To the north lay a range of hills, which guarded the enchanted place from the world of men. The flatness drew the soul with a strange attraction, until one longed to go out over it farther than eye could reach, anywhere or nowhere. The desert was in sandy ridges like a badly ploughed field; isolated tufts of a heath-like plant grew here and there; often there lay on the ground, as if spilled from a cart, yellow apples, reddening invitingly. Evil fruits these are, full of dust and bitterness, and even the camel will not eat them.

But within the Oasis were golden oranges, juicy, like no oranges you eat here, for they ripen on the dark, glossy trees; there were gardens of purple fig and yellow citrons large as the head of an Arab child; and the dates were sweet and large, and half transparent in their candied clusters.

But the enchanted time was when the moon was high, its silver light was faintly tinged with rose; then one walked under the palm-trees, and light and shadow lay like silver and ebony across the path, interlacing and waving if some faint breeze stirred them, and the strange, sweet odours of the East lay warm and thick, and the tinkle of Arab sounds were in our ears, and the slim brown figures moved across the path; and we went back to dream of silver lights and waving, ebon shadows.

And one morning we went away from the Oasis, and passed through the Gates of Gold, and back into the world of men, to find we had been but two days away.

THE LAKE WITHIN THE WORLD

II
THE LAKE WITHIN THE WORLD

There were other such enchanted places in this land, and one could step aside from the high-road of life into a place of fantasy and sweet illusion. The dawdling, leisured train set us down one day at a wayside station. No houses were in sight, but behind a clump of trees a cloud of steam rose into the air, as if all the world was a-washing. The train dawdled away across the plain and we went towards the trees to find ourselves in face of a shining, misty waterfall. The white stone was streaked with grey and pink; the water boiled up in little cauldrons and fell down in a cloud of steam; at the bottom of the dazzling rocks oleanders bent over the warm streams, maiden-hair fringed the banks; hoary olives with twisted trunks rose above the oleanders.

While we still waited there came up from the side of the steaming river a splendid figure—a woman all in scarlet hung about with silvery chains. “That,” said the guide, “is the washer-woman.” We climbed up behind the waterfall, where it sprang in its strange excitement out of the earth, and found a stone courtyard, built round with little empty houses, one of these prepared for us.

While we paused at the door a moment, I saw between the stones a tiny plant—a plant to conjure with. It is like clover, splashed with crimson. A poet who wore the Red Cap has said that this crimson is the blood of Spring, and, to him, a drop of his own heart’s blood.

A French family were living here in a clean, empty house with airy guest-rooms; and while they regaled us with wild-boar’s flesh they talked of the topics of their day: how the jackals howled about the courtyard in winter; how the rugged way to the Roman City was not yet open; how the locusts came down ten years ago, swarm upon swarm, till you could hear the sound of the eating of their hosts by night; how they devoured fruit and leaf and bark like the “army” in Joel, and then melted like snow under the sun.

In this strange, quiet land we slept well, and went out next day over the pleasant undulating plain, watered by warm streams with their bordering of oleander and fern, and sheltered by olive and carob.

At last we came to a place where a grassy bank swept round us in a half circle. “Fourteen years ago,” said the guide “the shepherds feeding their flocks close by heard a great noise, and running hither saw the earth had fallen in,” and he pointed as he spoke to a crack in the side of the bank, just such a rent as a great tree makes when it falls, tearing its roots out of the ground. “Into that,” he said, “you must go.”

So we went towards it in faith, and found when we got there a man could easily pass in. As we descended into the hot twilight inside the ground a bat flew out. We went down-hill until the guide stopped us, where there seemed to lie at our feet a little blue dust over the stones, for this was the still blue water of a lake that stretched away into deep and deeper darkness. As we stood we heard out of the darkness the splash of oars, a light shone on the water, and round the sheer wall of rock on the right came a boat with a lantern at its prow.

Into this we stepped, and it moved on into the deep shadows. Out of the dark water rose great stalagmites like columns, and stalactites dropped to meet them like heavy pendants from some vaulted roof. We moved round rocky chambers where the lantern shone on the walls, and through halls whose boundaries were unrevealed; all sense of direction and of time was lost till a flash of lightning seemed to fall on the water. It was only the reflected light of a grey day, filtered through the rent in the earth down which we had come, but after that great darkness it seemed dazzling.

So we went up again to the light of day, and back through that pleasant land. But when we came away, I brought with me a leaf of the crimson-splashed clover “to witness if I lie.”

A DESERT CITY

III
A DESERT CITY

“He seems as one whose footsteps halt
Toiling in immeasurable sand
And o’er a weary sultry land
Sown in a wrinkle of the monstrous hill
The city sparkles like a grain of salt.”

In the desert not twenty miles from Cairo there has sprung up the mushroom growth of a wonder-working Health Resort. It possesses several hotels, an “Establishment,” a golf links, and everything which a really desirable Health Resort must possess.[1] But at the time when I first knew that tract of sand on which it stands the case was far otherwise. If one must have summarized the attractions of the place they would have run:—

Fifteen pyramids | Distant
One palm-tree | Distant
Several ill-smelling streams | Quite close
Flat sandy desert | Near and distant

A perfectly bare range of low hills beginning half
a mile away and reaching to Arabia.

An English advertisement of foreign appearance bore witness to these charms and ended with a striking appeal to leave for desert air “the filthy, stinking city,” as it characterized Grand Cairo.

We responded to the appeal, and went to stay in a hotel of large corridors and wide balconies which looked out upon the fifteen pyramids. Opposite was a small, bare house called Villa Mon Bijou. The town was planted on a desert so flat that it seemed a German toy town set upon a table; only there were no trees with curly green foliage to be seen, because no one might plant a living thing unless by order from Government.[2] Neat little pavements with new little gas lamps traversed it rectangularly, and came every way to an abrupt stop in heavy desert sand. There was a tiny English church, in which the few English Christians staying in the place assembled. Little flat-roofed villas like coloured cardboard boxes stood back from the pavement with strange ornaments above the gate; here a stone eagle with knees turned outwards, there a stuffed fox. Backwards and forwards we went under noontide sun to the baths, and were told to rest in the Khedive’s sitting-room, upholstered with yellow satin.

One would have thought that nothing so brand-new could have been found in sight of the pyramid of Unas and the cemetery of Sakkara. Even death seemed glaringly recent. One day we drove in the desert and searched the horizon for objects of interest. “What is that?” we said, pointing to a small building on the outskirts of the town. “That,” replied Saïd with pride, “is the new slaughter-house.” “And this enclosure?” “The English cemetery.” “And that yonder?” “The Italian mortuary.” “What is that which looks like a village on the hill?” “That is the Mahommedan burying-place.” “And that beyond?” “Another graveyard.” Then he drove us through a valley of Hinnom, where we marked, among other things, a dead camel and a dead calf; and as we passed between the windmill and the ill-smelling stream we saw three coffins lie, brand-new, unguarded and alone.

But towards evening a certain magic fell upon the place. We had gone one day towards the single palm-tree in the desert. Miles and miles of sand and air, unstirred by any slightest sound, seemed to lie between us and that solitary tree, and when we reached it nothing could be seen but the slot of beasts around it.

Then as we turned the light began to change. Behind the fifteen pyramids the sky glowed scarlet till it tinged the water of the Nile with blood. Far up in the blue hung an ethereal arc of crimson light; the heaven deepened to indigo where it met night; kindled into indescribable sapphire where it touched the dying day; the conflagration grew till at last earth glowed its answer to the sky with a purple flood rising and deluging sand-hills and valley.

As we neared the toy town with its twinkling lights the glow had died away, and there gloomed before us dimly a knoll round which knelt the camels of the Bedawîn; the figures which moved beside them with dark, fine profile and the white cloths round their heads seemed like Magi come to greet the Royal Child.

Again we went up the hills which, like a low rampart, bordered the plain to the east. At the foot they were carved into quarries of a stone so white that it seemed like wedges cut in a great cream cheese. The hills were barren, but for a few straggling plants and grasses about; like a raised map or the skeleton of the world. Yet as we went on we still found always in front, like the marks on the carriage drive, a curving, trodden road, winding up vanishing out of sight.

While we stood looking at the loneliness there came daintily stepping, with embroidered shoes and black silk mantles round them, a party of women to meet us; in front a man carried a child. I cannot but think that they vanished into thin air when they had passed us.

Or again one might descend towards the river, on the road between the fields. There as the sky lights its fires towards evening the men would leave their work and stand with dripping feet on their coarse outer garment by the water’s edge to say the evening prayer. Near the town stood a sycamore, under which, on a raised platform, some men prayed loud and lustily five times a day. “God likit them very much,” said the donkey-boy; but with cynical estimation of the importance of this fact he added, “If I bray, where is my business?”

A brougham on the road as we returned: Europe is at one side. But within sat a woman golden haired, with her veil pushed back and a cigarette between her teeth. That one passing, demure and dignified, with an attendant wrinkled and stately, is a Princess walking for her health. Here two in a victoria, with transparent veils and Paris bonnets, show Turkish emancipation; and the shut and blinded brougham with a Sudanese on the box gives sign of Arab propriety.

And now as the town is reached we begin to see the meaning of this modern city; those high walls are not merely meant to hide a garden of flowers, nor does the lattice serve only to keep the sunlight from fading Eastern fabrics. But behind the pierced work of that window peers some Scheherazade at her story-weaving, wondering what life means, “half sick of shadows.” There is the Pasha’s house, and the whisper goes that these are slaves.

A strange, pathetic figure trod this road daily, a man of aquiline face, brown skin, and pointed beard, dressed in a fine embroidered garment of scarlet with white cloth falling on his shoulders.

Evening by evening he left the town, and squatting by one of the sulphur streams looked out with level eyes towards the farthest horizon of the south, his beads held idly in his hands. That man, we learned, was the Pasha’s gatekeeper and came from the Sudan.

One day a crowd ran and digged by the side of this stream. “What are they doing?” we asked, and the answer was that they were making a garden. It will surely blossom like the rose—but not on those flowers will the gatekeeper gaze.

In the evening when the moon has risen, and a great star close to her tip hangs the banner of the Moslems in heaven, the magic is most potent. Then the flat-roofed houses become palaces of marble, and among the dark figures stealing through the street you look for Mesrour on his secret errands, that he may show you the mysteries of life and death behind veil and wall and lattice. Then one may well believe that over at Sakkara under the sand-hills the dead are sitting in their carven chambers, to play their games and cast their spells and eat and drink.

And yet in Europe they talk of freeing Egypt, and speak of the “patriot” dervish; and at Gordon’s death-place, where the gatekeeper was born and from which he was stolen, they entertain the Pasha with the honours of a burgess.

Who wakes? who dreams? Surely the Western eye sees clear, which looks on the place in the searching noonday light; for it is the hand of the Western that planted Villa Mon Bijou and raised the gas lamps.

Leave it then with its neat realities and its fancied magic; draw away over the sand towards the Great River and the dwellings of the dead; and as one might see across the great ocean a line of reef built up by tiny busy insects, so look back once to see over “immeasurable sand,” “the city sparkle like a grain of salt.”

THE OTHER SIDE

IV
THE OTHER SIDE

When Alice went through the Looking-glass, she sprang down into a world where a change had passed on all familiar things; so that she must walk away from the things she wanted to arrive at, and time ran backwards and stopped. When a merman brought a girl through the translucent mirror of the water to be his wife in the great caves below the sea, she heard but dimly the church bell and the sounds of the world above, and saw but seldom its sights when she rose through the bay. And when Tom slipped into the stream he found himself in a great empty world below the water; and it was not for some time that he was able even to see the crowds of merry water-babies with which it was peopled.

We had often looked into the looking-glass from a little village on the bank of a great river. Sometimes this river was only a river of muddy water; sometimes towards evening, when no wind ruffled its surface, it was a mirror of burnished metal, reflecting the fires of the west; sometimes a river of molten gold. Sometimes, when the sky was bright above, it was a stretch of sapphire, edged with gold and set in emerald, for beyond the sandy shore of the river lay a great sea of green corn—few trees were there, but the waving corn, and animals pasturing in luxuriant vetch; and beyond this again began the sandy desert, which stretched away to the bases of the hills.

So the River ran, dividing the country, and the two sides of it have been called since the beginning of history the two lands. The River was broad, and so deep that the reptiles of the one side have never been able to cross to the other, and the lizards of the two lands are of quite different kinds.

But just at the edge of the desert you begin to see traces of quite a different kind of life, the giant images of people long dead, and their temples; behind in the cliff you may see, even from across the river, the doors of rock-hewn chambers which are called the Eternal Habitations. That side of the river is called the City of the Dead.

Now the people of the village opposite used to speak of going over to the “Other Side.” They crossed the river, and rode through the fields of waving corn, and the men and women who moved among the fields, who tethered the beasts to pasture, the little children who drove oxen in the creaking sakhieh seemed like figures of a picture to them; and when they reached the City of the Dead, the desert places of the Eternal Habitations, the Silent Citizens were unperceived by them, their voices were unheard; or they seemed to see but rude stone figures of an earlier age, dead bodies, unskilful paintings on the wall. Before they could recognize the living men they had turned back and recrossed the river, and never knew that they had been so near the mysteries of the “Other Side.”

But when you came to live in the country on the Other Side the aspect of it was altogether different. At the back, the country was walled in by precipices of rock, a great golden wall from which spurs ran down on to the desert. If you climbed up the first ridge to get a farther view you saw ridge on ridge of the same barren hills, with golden rocky defiles, reflecting back and back again the eastern sunlight. At certain hours of the day a stream of people, like small ants, poured up one valley, over a hill and back again across the river; otherwise there was never a sign of human life, except that, from peak to peak, at far distances, you might see a little rock-built shelter, and the solitary figure of a watchman who guarded the chambers of the dead.

Between the hills and the cultivated lands are lower hills, half rock, half sand, with sandy slopes. In the sand there gaped holes about the paths as you rode or walked, and looking down you might peer into a chamber, sculptured with images of men and women sitting at feasts; or higher up in the hill you would see a squared doorway of stone facing sometimes a great courtyard, and entering, you might find a pillared chamber, gold vessels and jewelled boats painted on the wall; here a picture of a man propelling his bark through marshy groves populous with birds, there one driving the plough, and a woman sowing corn; here a kingly child on his nurse’s knee; there the antelope caught by the dogs and dripping blood from the hunter’s arrow. The longer one lived here the more one began to see of these doors in the hillside and holes in the ground, until it seemed that the whole mountain was honeycombed with the rock-hewn chambers. Sometimes you might cross a courtyard where the eastern slope of a hill lay in cool shadow; pass through one painted room after another, chapel and shrine, shrine and chapel, and so come out on the other side of the hill still golden in the light of the setting sun.[3]

Down below these rocks, clustering round the doorways of the lowest slopes, are brown houses that a day’s rain can bring to ruin, villages like a child’s building in sand; open yards, sheds thatched with straw, erections in mud like gigantic mushrooms with upturned brim; and for the more permanent part of the habitation these childish builders have borrowed the rocky chambers.

For the truth is that two races of people inhabit this country. The one race are like merry, selfish children, though a mystery of simplicity hangs about them like the mystery of the hidden life of a child. In their villages ring sounds of men and animals all day and all night; voices are hoarse with talking and singing; it seems like a great orchestra of the inhabitants. Up to the middle of the night donkeys chant their canon, cocks blow their clarion; all day you hear the groaning of camels, the agitated voices of kids and lambs, the lamentable cries of their mothers; towards evening the lowing of kine as they return from the sakhieh, the fury of the dogs, the provocative cry of the jackal, and sometimes as night falls the long, weird howling of the wolf. Then when the moon is full the children sing in chorus, apeing the elder boys at their work; the workers of the day are the feasters of the night, and drum and song help on the fantasia. Here is merriment and noise, complaint, vociferous demand, swift anger, cheerfulness again; the ragged children and young animals race and play from simple excess of vitality.

Yet all this noise is like the chattering of a brook in a quiet place, though it beats loud upon the ear it is as powerless against the great quiet of the desert as lapping waves against a rocky shore.

For the other race that lives here is silent, yet their words have gone out into the ends of the world. You leave the villages and mount the hill, and the noise comes fainter from below. You pass through the chambers and see these greater people live their lives and learn from the writing on the wall what “he saith.” You go towards evening up some valley of golden rocks, where the sunlight reflected from the sand shines on the shadowed cliff like the shining of a hidden lake, and find in a fold of the hill a little empty temple of old time; or descending rocky steps pass into a chamber where the walls present great deeds of state, ambassadors clad in fine embroidered dresses bring foreign tribute of nations long perished, precious things of gold and gem, strange beasts from far countries. Or when clouds are chasing through a moonlit sky you pass up a road between sand-hills towards a temple of these silent races; its white pillars and colonnades now flash out silver in a sudden gleam of light; and now the shadow of a cloud passing with purple bloom over the hill above annihilates courts and terraces, until it seems a magician’s wand is at work, destroying and re-creating this ghostly building.

Or at evening you ride through the place of tombs; the sun has sunk, and a glow, orange and red, gives a sharp outline to the hills. Out of the holes in the ground come an army of little shadows, sweeping faster than the eye can follow them over the unlevel ground; and from the rocks on the left peers out a sharp nose and ears, and the jackal runs with heavy drooping tail across the path, and dodges behind a big stone to peer out with insatiable curiosity as you pass; or in the night one hears the cry of a wild cat caught and torn by the dogs.

There are no merry flocks of birds here as in the cultivated land below, and but little sound of their voices. The sparrow indeed, who holds nothing sacred, chatters his minute affairs in the great silence; the discreet wagtail runs about the ledges of the rocks, the black and white chat bows on a stone. But the most part are seen on the wing; the soft grey martin, with its atmosphere of domestic peace, hovers about the Eternal Habitations, thinking to rear its young in the chambers of the dead; the swallows made wild by their long flight, and loosed from the restraints of the North, build their nests on the cliff, and sweep at sunset, with musical screams, up and down the face of the rock; great kites circle above in the hot noonday, let fall sometimes their weird whistling cry, circling on and on till the vast blue engulfs them; and once, high in the sky towards evening, there came a flight of cranes, who wheeled, split, and recrossed, then gathered decision and moved stately in black and white northwards.

All luxuriance of life had vanished. Even as time seemed to have stood still, and the people learnt their arts and crafts from those who died six thousand years ago, so growth seemed to have vanished from the visible world. Now and then as you wandered up a valley a single blade of barley shone like a gem half hidden by a stone; or some plant, desert-coloured, spread, dry greyish tufts, where the ground retained invisible moisture. But life hung suspended, and the longer you dwelt in the country the more you perceived that you were living in the City of the Dead. Sometimes one forgot how days and weeks were passing, and again a thousand years were but as yesterday, a watch in the night. The noises of the outside world came but faintly: once, we heard the sound of a nation weeping and the nations of the earth sorrowing with it, and again the sober welcome to one who came to take upon him the burden of the State.

So they sorrowed four thousand years ago—not without hope. “A hawk has soared—the follower of the god met his maker.” So the officers of State welcomed the son who should take its cares upon him. And on that very night when with grief and praise the nation laid to rest a Queen and mother in the fullness of her age, our eyes looked on, resting untouched, deep in the recesses of the rock, among the mystic symbols of his faith, the body of a king swathed still and garlanded who died three thousand years before that Queen was born.

The sounds of war came dimly, for the pictures of far earlier wars might meet the eyes day by day; and when we came on the bodies of those men who warred and taught and lived and enjoyed, alert in the chase, quiescent in the cool breath of their gardens, they lay quiet with their ornaments perhaps upon them, a garland round their neck, a book between their feet.

But when at last returning we came down to the fields, we saw that time indeed had passed. The corn which was but sprouting when we came, was full in the ear, and the barley was yellowing to harvest; the bean-flower had opened, spread its fragrance and passed; the purple vetch still lingered; the poppy raised an imperial head. Clouds of gay, thieving sparrows rose as we passed; the crested lark ran before us, sprang and hovered with a few notes of liquid song; tiny birds hung on the barley blades; the whistle of the quail came from the deep green where it hid. The river spread before us like a highway paved with sapphire; so we passed along it to the north and the voices of the world we belonged to rung out clearer as we moved; and behind us there faded like a dream that world whose present is four thousand years of time with the insistence of its silent voices, the permanence of the dead, the fleeting brightness of the living.

THE SILENT ROMANCE

V
THE SILENT ROMANCE

The cock has been defying Achmet Bukdadi again to-day.

It is a very little cock, hardly larger than a bantam; its plumage betokens a fine disregard of race; if you were pressed you might suggest a remote relationship to a game-cock. The cries of Achmet Bukdadi drew me to the window to see the cock, feathers raised, parading angrily and scornfully in front of him. Achmet’s cries attracted two or three other children, and they ran about on our terrace trying to hustle the cock off the edge of it. Finally one courageous boy lifted him by the wings, and put him on the back of another, whence he descended with feathers and dignity ruffled to the ground, while the children dispersed shrieking and laughing.

Achmet had a more prompt ally two days ago, when the cock was doing sentry-go before their front yard gate and would not let Achmet go home. His cries called his mother to his aid, and she came evidently prepared for the crisis, for she straightway threw the wand which was in her hand with unerring aim, and the cock fled vanquished down the village rubbish-heap.

Achmet’s mother is the most silent and most graceful woman in the village. She is the youngest of Bukdadi’s two wives; the other must be the mother of the sullen looking boy who lounges after our water-donkey up and down the hill, for she is grey haired, while Achmet’s mother has thick black plaits under her blue head veil. She is not indifferent to matters of dress, for her outer wrapping is edged with crimson. She seems far more active than the other woman, and all her movements, in the most menial occupation, show an unconscious grace which tempts one to the full use of unusual advantages of observation. Her grace is not the tender quality often so-called, but a robust deftness and certainty of action. She had to drive a lame donkey to the water the other day, and in the strokes of her staff there was no more pity for the little beast, halting and hurrying between two diverse pains, than for her own burdened womanhood. The donkey must drink; she herself would bring water for the household in the great earthenware pot balanced on her head. Hesitation for the animal was as much out of the question as help for her from the stepson who lounged past her with his stick held behind his shoulders.

So she urged the animal to the pool beneath the tamarisks, and I doubt not mounted the hill again with all the speed that nature would allow.

It is well, perhaps, that she is taciturn in a yard so populous—the other wife, the two sons, Bukdadi himself, seldom seen, a girl, daughter or slave, and the little Achmet, not to speak of the animals—the white camel in the corner nearest the gate, the neat black water-donkey next him, for the invalid one occupies the innermost corner, the bullocks who move with deference at her bidding, besides Achmet’s enemy the cock with his harîm, and the pigeons. I cannot be sure that the brown sheep belong to this yard; they are always being driven out, it is true, but whenever they are not being driven out they are going in; and it appeared that the black goat with two kids was preparing to spend the night in the hollow stem of the mud fungus, on the family platform. What makes conclusions less certain, however, is that the grey kid now dances up and down hill with the boy in the yellow-striped dress, and that the sheep have more than once called on us in our dining-room.

Among all these Achmet’s mother moves, sober, taciturn, efficient. One wonders when the transition comes from the laughing children to the serious, burdened woman. Marriage is not the turning-point, for little Saïda, with her round face and dark eyes and blue-patterned little chin, is married, though she still prefers to live with her father and be an occasional visitor at her husband’s house. And what there is of demureness in Saïda compared to the ragged Ahm Ibrahim in wild neglected gaiety is produced evidently not by her marriage but by her blue dress and her red dress, her necklace and her earrings.

The burden of the household, but above all the care of the children, must work the change, and the trace of tenderness that there is about Achmet’s mother seems all for Achmet. She exercises no repressive influence on him, for Achmet, with his grubby black dress, his thin, merry, ugly little face with even rows of little white teeth as he lisps his greeting—Achmet, whether cantering about on a dhurra stalk, or pretending to be a man carrying stones with his grandfather, or climbing over his neighbours’ walls, is always gay.

He takes the unexpected gift without that deliberate anticipation of favours to come which is the first acquirement of the Arab baby; and in his pleasures and his woes alike Achmet flies to his mother, conveys to her his bakshîsh of sugar-cane; wails to her when the cock is warlike and threatening.

She had him with her one evening in the great mud chalice which forms larder, barn, and summer chamber of the Arab house.

The sun had gone down, but a certain unreal glow lay on the hill behind the village; night was purpling the sky; her figure rose out of the shadowy cup powerful and graceful, with the child crouched at her feet; the work of the day was over, her heart’s desire was with her.

To-day she could not come to the child when he called, for but two nights ago there was a movement and whispering at midnight in the yard of Bukdadi, and the wail arose of a voice smaller and younger than that of little Achmet. So the mother rests.

THE COURT OF THE KING

VI
THE COURT OF THE KING

“Sealed within the iron hills.”

The Approach

The moon had risen as we rode down the steep, sandy road and threaded our way through the little mud enclosures, where dogs, alive for the excitement of the night, were prowling on the walls, listening with ears pricked up for warnings of enemies, looking with vigilant eyes for some alien to draw near. As we crossed into that part of the village where they did not know us, a hoarse storm of barking filled the air, but in a minute or two we had passed beyond this, and were out among the sand-hills between the tombs, where the whole plain was flooded with a misty, uncertain light.

Song and merry-making had begun in the villages, for the full moon is festival for those who have no artificial light; but the thud of the drums, the sound of children’s voices, and the barking of dogs faded and died away, and we came out into a great emptiness, threading a narrow path between the tumbled heaps; on each side the tombs gaped dimly at our feet. On the right hand we looked far away over desert and field to the great dark pylons of a temple across the river: on the left rose sharply the sandy spur of the hill we were rounding. No one was in sight and on no side could we see any human habitation.

We turned round the spur of the hill into a boulder-strewn valley, arid and silent. Even at midday there is little sign of life here, except on certain days when a stream of people traverse it and return; otherwise you find but a chance sown seed, dropped in a favourable spot; a withering leaf let fall by some traveller, a stray pigeon, an “evil bird” the Arabs think, who has left the abode of men and foresworn its final service for their use, to live its hermit life in the wilderness. Otherwise you see but the golden limestone rocks, radiating back the golden Egyptian sunshine. Then all is bare and keeps no secret, for the very shadows are broken by reflected light.

But now the colour of the limestone showed but faintly in the white light, and the shadows fell dark from boulder and rocks. The valley was empty of life, penetrated with mystery.

There, as we turned, at an angle of the path was a figure, solitary in the moonlight, a man in a long, dark garment, holding by him his donkey with a sheepskin over its saddle. He stood waiting here to give us a message, and having delivered it went back by the way we had come. And now looking back we could see nothing of mud village or vast old temple, no living man of the present, no stone memorial of the past; we were alone in a world half lit, wholly empty, stone and sand as far as eye could see, with an empty sky above where the moon had quenched all lesser lights.

The valley, which we began to see more clearly, was narrow and rose steeply on each side; the ground beneath our feet looked like a river-bed, on each side of which were large boulders casting deep black shadows. From time to time the rocks which walled the valley so crossed one another that it seemed the way was barred in front of us, until, as we neared it, we found the road swept round a corner of rock. Turning such a corner, again we found three people silently awaiting us, two of them the companions who had preceded us; the third a slim figure all in white, on foot with a staff in his hand. He was a man of some authority over the guard, who, as we learned later, had lain seven years in jail for a murder. He ran with noiseless steps in front of us, and so heralded we went on to where the valley broadened out a little, branching to the right; and at the entrance a great rock jutting out of the cliff seemed in the moonlight to take a fantastic likeness to some colossal statue of a king, carved, you would have said, by an Egyptian of old.

Our path led us to the left, and here the cliffs began to close in on us, until they rose like a wall on each side of a narrow way, at once so steep and so rugged that we could not tell whether the defile was natural or the work of man. It led at last to where a wall of rock, barring the way, had been rudely cut through. In this rough gateway we halted—behind us the rocky passage through which we had come; before us, as far as we could see, the hills ran down, like a great amphitheatre, to a floor of tumbled sand-heaps.

Here, as we halted, one of our companions blew a whistle, and the next moment the hills re-echoed to the sound of a gun. After a moment’s pause he blew again, and now dark-draped figures suddenly appeared among the desolate rocks, running noiselessly towards us. After a moment all but two or three dispersed again, and we rode forward with the white, slim figure still in front and two men in flowing dark garments following us behind.

The great emptiness, the silence, the white, uncertain light by which the rocks showed faintly tinged with the rose and golden colour of the limestone, the dark figures suddenly appearing, noiselessly moving, dispersing into the night; the strange, desolate valley winding through all apparent barriers into the heart of the hills seemed like a dream. Surprise vanished; even observation was dulled.

So we went forward to the head of the valley, ringed about with sheer mountain walls, and perceived that here the mounds which lay about the way gaped with open mouths, and we could see the moonlight shining through grated doors on the painted walls of galleries that ran down deep into the hill.

These we passed, and dismounting from our beasts, climbed a little mound, turned behind a projecting buttress of rock, and found ourselves opposite to a door cut in the cliff. One of the men who had followed us went in and left us for a while sitting without in the moonlight.

The Presence

The great square doorway of the tomb showed inky black on the face of the cliff, golden in the moonlight; the shaft plunged steeply downwards into the rock, with short, high steps roughly cut against one wall. Down these we slowly made our way, the utter darkness pricked here and there by the flame of a candle in some one’s hand. A flame shone for a moment on the little shelf cut back into the rock, where the string bed and wooden pillow of the guard still wait his return, just where he went out and left them so many thousand years ago. The steps stopped suddenly on the edge of a pit deep and broad; by the light of a candle held high we could dimly see the red and blue patterns painted on its plastered walls. A hole had been broken through them on the opposite side of the chasm, and crossing by a little plank bridge we crept through, still deeper into the heart of the cliff. On the other side of the wall the tunnel still went downwards, but the faint light showed a deep alcove to the right. On the rocky floor lay a man, bound upon a crumbling wooden boat; the painful bonds still held the brown and shrivelled limbs, his knees drawn up, his head pressed back.

Again down the steep stairway we climbed, feeling along the rough-cut wall, and again at the bottom a chamber opened to the right. A man, a woman, and a girl lie here, side by side in the middle of the floor. They have suffered the indignity of stripping; wounds are in their breasts; the thick black hair upon their heads makes the small faces and limbs seem the more withered and unhuman. It is a pitiful sight.

For the third time the rock-hewn ladder led us down to the square-cut doorway which opened to the presence-chamber of a king of Egypt. The great hall stretched back into the darkness, dimly lighted by hidden candles, heavy with the silence of three thousand years. The faint gleam fell upon the painted walls and pillars of the eternal dwelling-place, the work of such far-off hands clear and fresh with the freshness of yesterday. On the great square pillars Amenhetep still feels the fullness of his earthly life and draws strength from mysterious communing with the life-giving god. On the walls a huge papyrus seems unrolled where the spirit of the King, in the depth of the nether world, may learn to wrestle with and overthrow the serpent-monsters brought by each gloomy Hour. At the back of the hall two steps lead down to the high vaulted space where stands the great rose-granite sarcophagus. In the darkness and the silence the lid or the inner coffin was raised and we were in the presence of the King.

The dim-veiled figure lay before us, wrapt in an inexpressible mystery, the impress of his kingship still upon him, crowned with the greater dignity of death. Far from the loved Egyptian sunshine, from the sweet breath of the north wind, from the fleeting ways of men, the inhabitant of the rock holds his solemn court through the centuries which have no power upon him, with the records of his life and warfare around him and the mimosa wreaths upon his breast.

[Since the above was written plunderers penetrated into the tomb in the absence of the guard, and the body of Amenhetep II. no longer rests in his Eternal Habitation.]

THE GOLDEN DAHABEAH

VII
THE GOLDEN DAHABEAH

I

Mahmoud was crouched on the hot sand, in the shade of a great granite figure of an old Egyptian king. On the temple wall at his right hand was incised the figure of a large hawk, which had a certain life-like stare and stride. Below lay the thick green lake; a little pied kingfisher fluttered and poised over it. Mahmoud’s donkey had strayed a little from his owner, and was pulling at some few blades of thin, straggling weed. The Father of the Box, who had ridden him out to Karnak, had some foolish prejudice against tying up donkeys’ heads. Mahmoud explained that it prevented the donkey from having a headache; but Englishmen always want things done in their own way.

Yet as Mahmoud sat dreaming, his eyes fixed on the water, he was thinking of none of these things. Rather he was dreaming of little Fatma, Fatma whom he had run and played with as a little girl—but now she was old enough to be married. He had seen Fatma as they came out; she was carrying a waterpot on her head, and the slender fingers were tipped with henna; her hair was plaited over her brow, and the large blue-studded rings in her ears swayed as she ran. She held her veil firmly in her small, white teeth, and only gave him one look, half shy, half merry, as she passed.

Mahmoud’s father and mother said he must be married this year. He wished to marry no one but little Fatma; but ah! the marriage-gift.

He stared at the smooth, thick water, and droned a little song—“Oh, great holy gardener, let me into the garden.”

The sun was just going down, and as Mahmoud turned idly, half lost in his dreaming, the rays struck the wall where was the image of the hawk, and the boy stood breathless, for the hawk was all of gold, and as he looked the fierce head turned a little.

Through his maze came the voice of the Father of the Box, crying to him to get the donkey.

A moment he started and turned, but when he looked again there was nothing but the stone hawk carved on the wall; and again came the call, as the Englishman and the “box” came round the corner.

Mahmoud gasped and panted: “The chicken is all gold.”

“Oh, the Golden Horus,” said the Father of the Box, giving the precious camera into Mahmoud’s hand. “Hurry up and fetch the donkey, it is getting dark and damp.”

But he did not ask how a donkey-boy should know the Golden Horus.

II

The donkey-boys were sitting outside the garden gate of the hotel. Mahmoud was against the wall, and taking little part in the flow of conversation.

“Achmet Effendi will make a big feast to-morrow,” said one. “He has killed two sheep for his feast.”

“Achmet Effendi is a very rich man,” said Maouad. “Twenty years ago he sent his servant Gameel Gameel to dig up stones to burn and lay on his field, there where the English ‘sidi matre’ (cemetery) is. But Gameel Gameel found a big pot of golden coins and he brought them all back to Achmet Effendi. For ten years they kept them hidden, then Achmet Effendi sold them for much money and became a rich man. That is why he loves Gameel Gameel better than his son.”

“Gameel Gameel was a great fool,” said Hassan flippantly. “Why should he not become a rich man himself?”

Kuku was speaking aside to Gorgius.

“I tell my lady that I am going to be married to Fatma. I say to her: ‘I see Fatma in the market; I like her very much and she likes me very much. My mother has arranged it for me. If you give me an English handkerchief,’ I say to my lady, ‘you shall come to my wedding.’”

“Liar-boy!” said Gorgius scornfully; but Mahmoud feared and sighed in himself.

A small figure passed, and the light from the gas lamp showed a withered old man with a white beard and smiling face. He wore a red tarbûsh turbaned about with white, and trailed a green Mecca robe.

“Mohammed Mohassib will have a big feast,” said one. “He has killed a camel and made soup with it. The Father of the Beard said to Mohammed, ‘You will feed three hundred men to-morrow.’ Mohammed said, ‘I hope more than that.’”

“Mohammed Mohassib slept in the temple of Mut,” said Maouad; “that was fifty years ago, when he was a boy. When the sun rose Mohammed saw the golden hawk. He ran to catch it, but it flew away into the sky. One feather fell from it, and Mohammed Mohassib picked it up. Then he was a lucky man and became rich, and went to Mecca, and to-morrow he will feed more than three hundred men.”

Mahmoud’s ear was caught for the second time. “If a man sees the golden bird will he be a lucky man?” he asked.

“Oh, it is Mahmoud who will be the lucky man,” said Hassan, with a laugh. “To-morrow when Abu el Haggag has done with his boat we shall set it to float on the Lake of Karnak, and Mahmoud shall see it all golden at night and shall swim out to it. But Mahmoud, he never speaks, so when the sun strikes it the boat of Abu el Haggag will be for Mahmoud.”

A short silence followed this profane speech, for Abu el Haggag is the great Saint of Luxor, and next day they held the procession of his sacred boat.

But Hassan rattled on. “I make no feast to-morrow. Everybody else makes a feast. Nasr says every time he sees his lady he says, ‘I have bought some sheep and some rice, and my wife has mixed them together like so; my wife has made balls of them, and she will put them in the oven to bake them. And I will bring you some.’ Every time he says that. I would not eat Nasr’s balls. I will go to Rameses Bar and spend money and drink whisky.”

His audacity succeeded in making itself heard, which was chiefly what he wanted. And he went on: “Mahmoud gets little money from the Father of the Box. I say to the Father of the Box when he rides my donkey, ‘Give me more money, this is too little.’ He says, ‘Then I will beat you.’ But I say to the Mother of the Nose, ‘I am a very poor boy; I am only ten years old. My father send away my mother. Who shall give my mother money?’ Then she says, ‘Oh, poor boy! here is some money.’ I like these ladies. They are very foolish.”

“Did you say to the Mother of the Nose ‘My mother is married again to a rich man,’ oh liar?” asked Mahmoud.

But at this moment the garden gate opened and a babel of voices arose:—“Take my donkey; take my donkey; de best donkey in Luxor.” “Here is Whisky and Soda; no donkey like so.” “Never you believe nobody. Liar boy. Here is Rameses. Every day he win a race....”

III

Abu el Haggag’s boat had come and passed, poor starveling representative of the longest pedigree in the world. Here passed of old the Sacred Bark of the gods, carrying the precious images and emblems, the king burning incense before it, the oxen lotus-garlanded for the sacrifice.

And later this sacred bark lent its outward form to the Ark of the Most High God, bearing the simple symbols of justice and mercy, in the long desert wanderings and in the Holy Land.

And now the poor, sordid boat on its little truck passed round; charcoal burned instead of incense. With the feeble tradition the Arabs tell that it was the boat in which Abu the Saint went to see his friends. This is all that is left in their minds of that most ancient idea—this and the golden vision of the boat at midnight on Karnak Lake.

The droning noises of Arab music had died down as Mahmoud ran through Luxor; a few beggars cleared the remnants of the feast of Mohammed Mohassib; while the old man stood smiling in his doorway over the memory of his lordly hospitality. He nodded kindly to Mahmoud running by.

After he passed the house Mahmoud paused; he did not dare to go on this way—highway though it was—for he feared above all the afreet-haunted bridge that he would have to pass. So he turned, and running down a narrow way crossed the empty market-place and came out on the field road.

The light was dying down and the sky was cloudy; there was little mist, but the scent of beanfields hung heavy on the air; the corn-blades rustled as his dress swept them, running. The barking of the village dogs died down behind him into silence, so that he started and nearly fell when a little cue-owl mewed suddenly from a carob-tree.

Down into the cutting, and as he mounted again his heart leaped into his mouth, for a dark figure rose up above the corn. Then he remembered that it was only the great lion-headed statue that sat lonely in the fields, and he took courage again.

When he came to the road he paused, debating. Which of the two ways to the Lake? By the one he would have to pass the spot where that fierce golden bird had turned to look at him yesterday. By the other way he must go up the dark sphinx avenue, a very haunt of afreets. To go on either way was dreadful; to stay here not less so; to go back, he was persuaded now, would be to lose Fatma.

He turned to the left and entered the sphinx avenue. A half-grown moon struggling with the clouds now and again threw straggling and sharp shadows of the palm leaves across his path, but more dreadful was the dry rustling of the leaves on high when a cloud passed; before him loomed the great arch. On each side the sphinxes—crouched like strange creatures with narrow, beak-like noses—seemed in the darkness ready to spring. And that great black nodding palm-tree, surely that was an afreet too, and might catch him. But up the path bordered with horror he still ran.

Now he must turn to the right, before the arch is reached; and but a short way farther pass those four images of great old kings mutilated, but not the less uncanny and fearful in this dim light. They seemed to look down on the little figure still running; but he had passed in safety, and there lay the lake, black and still like the pool of ink in which men saw strange visions.

Mahmoud said his prayer and praise and lay down to sleep by the lake....

IV

The first time Mahmoud woke the moon had won the battle, and was shining on the temple, turning all to unreal, ethereal building, faintly roseate, a temple seen in a dream. Mahmoud looked towards the lake and all was still; the moon made a white sheet of water.

The second time Mahmoud woke the moon was down, but from the lake came a light—soft, lambent, golden. He looked towards it, and oh the glory, the wonder! a golden boat was riding on the water.

Mahmoud had often seen under the hot sun, in some ripple of desert sand, a sudden sheet of water. In the middle it was clear water, bright, reflecting the edge of cultivated land. At the margin it was uncertain; no eye could tell where it melted into the shaking haze of heat. So here, the middle of the boat was clear and distinct, and on the deck was standing one single figure; but at the stern and prow, though he saw figures he saw them dimly, the outlines of them melted into the gold reflection of the water.

The central figure on the deck he marked from head to foot. He says he has seen the face outlined on some temple wall, but he can never find it. He says, too, it was not unlike the father of Gorgius the Copt donkey-boy. But the father of Gorgius, he added, was only a fellah-man; this was a great man, greater than the Khedive of Egypt, as great as a King of England.

But of one thing he is certain: not only had the figure a strange erection on his head, but he wore a lion’s tail behind. Mahmoud’s eyes were so riveted to the figure that he could not tell how the boat moved. He said something about a sail and something about oars; but this he knew, that though it moved on with its golden reflection over the lake, it stirred no water in front and no widening ripple ran out behind.

It was drawing to the shore, and suddenly, as if it had come within focus, the prow was clear to him, with a man leaping down to the land, a coil of golden rope upon his arm.

What passed next was but the work of an instant. Without rising to his feet Mahmoud shot down like a snake among the stones, and as the man coiled the rope round a rock he seized it.

As the lightning flash strikes across the sky, so the man with this golden light upon him leaped back; and into the waters of the lake, into the golden reflection, sank the boat, without sound or ripple.

Mahmoud was standing alone by the black pool in the light of the stars under the lonely night. But by the light of the stars he saw in his scarred and bleeding hand the strands of the golden rope.

Now Mahmoud trails the Mecca robe through the streets of Luxor, but they say that Fatma wears the golden rope.

THE UNSEEN WORLD

VIII
THE UNSEEN WORLD

The whole world had faded and darkened to a uniform tint, black and dingy. The woman who stood there could hardly say whether this tint were brown or grey, for there was no colour to contrast it with, nothing but her own black dress seen through the same sordid medium. In front of her, rather lighter in tint, she could see a few inches of parapet, on which her hands were lying, and dimly could discern the ground at her feet. If she leant over the parapet she could not see the water, but where she believed it to be, something like the shadow of a ripple moved across the dusk.

And as for want of contrast she could determine no colour, so for want of distance she could determine no size. All she saw could be enclosed by four small walls; all she could not see might reveal miles of river-bank, streets of stately houses. It was not the Infinite but the Indetermined that she looked upon. Noises had sunk into a hoarse murmur and swell, dulled as by this thick, heavy medium. No such monotony of existence could be conceived; a world of shadows, an Isle of Voices, would be life itself to this. And yet she believed herself to be standing in the heart of the greatest city in the world, but a few paces removed from streets where men and women were moving up and down; where her face was turned across the water stood (she believed) a great house, a town garden where wood-pigeons built, and where she had seen lilies of the valley flower, saying softly to herself:—

“Here in dust and dirt, oh here,

The lilies of His love appear.”

How was it possible that in so short a time such a change should fall, such a swallowing up of life as the centuries cannot bring to the cities of the south? Truly she was living by faith in a blank world of existence. A foot or two of parapet each side of her hands; a foot or two of gravel each side of her feet—beyond that limit nothingness. Yet by faith she would move in this void.

She turned to the left and walked along the path which appeared step by step as she paced, until in front of her the shadow of a building fell upon the fog: cornerwise it rose, fading into mist, and likewise vanished a few feet above her head.

Yet she believed that this was a great tower; she believed that the building stretched away from her, and that at that moment, gathered inside its halls, was the Council of the Nation. It is strange if you think of it, how firmly she believed in that invisible building, in those inaudible deliberations, in the reality of its connection with the isolated fragments of parapet and path—fragments without visible support, the only things she could see and the least of all she believed in.

For as she believed in a present invisible, so she believed in a future uncreated; that she should presently return from where she stood to her own house, the fragment of visible world opening before her and above her, closing behind her as she went. If she could not find the way, other figures dawning on her, fog-enwrapped, would direct her. Strange—how she believed in their existence, though she could neither see nor hear them, how she trusted in their good faith, though she knew neither who they were nor whence they would come, in their greater knowledge, though all men were more or less astray in the same fog.

So resting peaceably in this belief she looked again over the parapet.

A shadow on blank colourlessness in front; a splash as of water to the ear. The shadow deepened, defined itself, and out of nothingness grew a great black barge; it seemed to float on water that she could not see. Two men, one with body bent forward, one with body swayed back, swung a great oar at the stern. They were steering in this indistinguishable world; in this chaos of a world, threading their way between dangers undiscerned till ruin was impending. Now the black outline was opposite to her and now the barge was shortened, and still the two figures swayed and bent, swayed and bent, at their steering. The dark vision faded into darkness again. Out of nothing grew that barge, into nothing it went.

The third thing she saw was this: just below the parapet where the fog was least thick, out of nothingness came a bird, like a little white spirit. It was smaller than a seagull; its wings, delicately shaded with brown, showed a sharper outline, and round them ran a dark line; the head too was dark.

A moment it hung below her lightly poised, white wings uplifted, head down-bent, feet down-dropped towards the flood below. Then this too vanished in the mist.

And having seen that she went away content.

FROM THE BANK OF THE RIVER

IX
FROM THE BANK OF THE RIVER

I

In a room in an hotel of the south some one was lying ill. It was March, and an airless, parching heat lay outside, the palms drooped yellow leaves, the bee-eaters chattering on a carob-bush dived luxuriantly into corn so green that they were in no wise distinguished from it; they turned and fluttered like butterflies, and from the bronze wing feathers a sheen of gold rippled over their emerald in the sun.

Inside the room was as cool as it might be; when, from time to time, the shutters were opened the glory of gold and green outside flashed into sight. Outside life was heavy with heat, luxuriant, substantial; bounded, limited and weighed down by its very fullness.

Inside life had dwindled to a thin thread of consciousness, or rather it seemed like two strands worn nearly to breaking lying side by side. The one, the actual physical consciousness of a corporal life ebbing, of breath drawn with difficulty; of physical sensation not perhaps actually painful, but almost altogether wearying—a consciousness close to that mysterious land of delusions, where the physical symptoms are set apart from the personal consciousness and become external antagonistic forces. It was not intolerable because it was becoming a thing more and more external, more separate from that other spiritual consciousness with which it was still lightly entwined.

And that other thread of being, how shall one describe it? It was not quite continuous, for now and again the physical sensation numbed it; now and then, when times of refreshment came, the other like a stream rose and engulfed it.

Compare that old image of the Rhone and the Saone. The one flows on, blue, clear, transparent; the other side by side, turbulent, muddy and swift. The man lying here seemed to himself to be both, but most of all the clearer thinner stream. The turbulence, the force of the other is daily less and less himself, more and more an alien power to which he yet jealously clings in the body of this death, and will not, cannot part from it.

And from time to time comes a new impulse of the stronger torrent—its yellowing waters tinge the blue—it is fuller, and there is a sense of well-being; and yet that transparent river of spiritual being, clear as crystal, has been sullied, it has disappeared.

Such little trivial things too will give him back the life which is his power and his bondage;—the cup of iced coffee, that he looks for and can drink when other food nauseates, this makes him feel that he lives again and yet kills that clearer, sweeter, finer, life;—as much, in a sense, as overpowering bodily discomfort kills it—more, perhaps, for the more it overpowers the more external it is, the less it is himself.

If only he can keep from fear, for that kills all. And yet this thread of consciousness, which I have called spiritual, is not thinking any thought, it is seeing visions, and these visions are not of another world but of the sweeter, purer things of this world, transfigured and serene. He is a child again in a Cornish lane, and the grass is deep and dewy, the banks are high, crowned with little bushes nearly bare of leaf, for it is spring; deep in the grass are primroses, long stalked and growing by the handful, you can thrust your hand into the damp grass, rich in little ferns and unnamed leaves, and pluck them so; between the primroses there are violets—are they purple or grey or blue?—and here and there a celandine, golden yellow. Or he is a boy sitting on a rock; his feet are bare, the sea is shallow round him, the ripples run out, and the sun shining through them laces the fine sand below with gold. He tells the nurses that as soon as he is well he will go to the sea and dip his feet in it.

Then he thinks of music that he knows, and it comes with unutterable sweetness of cadence like music heard in dreams.

And this radiance lies not only on things imagined but on things seen. The roses brought into the room are the roses of Dorothea; the scent of the palm, in blossom outside, fills the room with an ethereal fragrance; and oh, those clusters of waxen palm flowers that his friends bring in and place in the green jug, surely it must come from that tree whose very leaves are for the healing of the nations!

It is only at night that the horror comes—no nameless horror, but the horror of fighting with the darkness; it is hot, and it stifles. The doctors have been, and he knows their report is not good though no one has told him so. The medicine bottles begin to change; there is one like a knight’s head near the candle, he knows it is only a cork in it, but it is very like the armoured head of a knight; and the darkness comes near, it oppresses all, laying a heavy hand on the world: it is too near, too heavy, all round us and weighing on us above.

He sleeps, to shout at the people in the room—he asks the nurse to expel the Arab who is beside the bed. He knows they are not there at all, but he does not want to sleep, for he will wake in that horrible strangle of breath. It is so long, if only there were any light at all! Weary, interminable length, and some lines of a poem run in his mind:

“An hour or two more and God is so kind

The day will be blue in the window blind.”

“Thank the kind God the carts come in.”

They come in so early in London.—Only an hour or two is quiet in the night, and you would know that the world is alive again, one would not have to keep the darkness long at bay; but here the night is day-long. Brandy—what is the good? The smell is nauseating; but it is at his lips, and he drinks. Has he slept? but it is black and still and dark, the dogs howl and scuffle past the window. Hours more to come, hours of the blackness. One of these people who is about the room sits down by the bed. She is not terrifying. She is only an old lady with grey hair, but she expects something. She must be told to go away; they will not tell her, and he is angry with urging. But of course she was not really there, it was only a dream; so he must have slept again, and the minutes must have passed.

There is a hint of grey in the sky, the whisper of a breeze in the palm leaves—dawn is coming. Now there is one hour of horror to go through, for the windows must be shut; he cannot breathe—he cannot live like this for an hour. The door into the passage may be opened, and the nurse’s step falls cold and echoing on the stone outside; no one else is moving, it is all grey and cold; he knows how that empty passage must look. This is better, for the blackness is going.

He sees the palm-trees outside above the muslin blinds; all the world is still and dead, its light gone out, but it can be rekindled. From the other window nothing can be seen but colourless sky, but the sky itself begins to kindle into life.

Suddenly something falls across the muslin blind; a bar, and a dot of sunlight, of that molten gold of Egyptian sunshine before the day has dried it into dust of gold. Oh the extraordinary beauty of that gold! Has sunshine been always in the world before, and yet we never knew it was like that? The darkness has passed, the light shines, the rapture and the beauty of the light spreads and broadens; the sky is awake, the garden is alive, the night is gone—and now the window towards the south is thrown open, and very faint and fair, a delicate violet light lies on the hills beyond the river. The air is blown in sweet, fragrant, unspeakably pure; and that carob-tree on which the birds sat yesterday is green and fresh, and below is the blue-green of the corn into which they dropped.

An Arab is riding on his camel along the dyke, they are outlined against that purple hill. So people still live and move outside; they can move then, they can go where they wish. But he sees the sun, and the breath of heaven comes in, and the night is passed. He is tired with this warring against the night, but the light has come and the clearer, brighter river is flowing again. This is day.

What is this land where the spirit has been living? Is it the land of Beulah or the Valley of the Shadow? Which is most real? He knows which is most substantial, but why is it most real? The instrument is more substantial than the melody and infinitely less real. Yet when the veil grows thin which hides the glory of the vision, agonizing we entreat that it may not be removed and show the glory of the face.

II

“The luminous
Star-inwrought, beautiful
Folds of the Veil.”

Many have written of the journey down to the dark river; few have told of the road backward from the river’s brink; a road of sudden ecstasies and sordid pitfalls.

For the radiance lay over the earth when he turned his face to it again. Nothing was ever sweeter than the sight of palm leaves against the blue upon the banks of the Nile. As the shores streamed past, with the rosy hills and yellow lights above them, winged feluccas furling sail, or sweeping like birds across the blue, with the roaring of the swiftness of their motion, he could lie and look—weary with rapture—watching the figures sprung from the old Palestinian story—a rugged Peter wrapping his fisher’s cloak about him, or urging his fellows “I go a-fishing.” But slowly, imperceptibly, the walls of the world closed in again; the sun beat pitilessly down; the heavens were brass, the earth iron. Now and again they would open out at the sight of the sapphire sparkle of the Mediterranean, or the deep, green growth under blossoming orchards of France. The wind became the life-giving breath of the spirit, and the soul would “beat” against “mortal bars,” seeing infinite power, infinite possibility, lying but just beyond the frail partition; a touch, and he might glide from the mountain side down over the trees that slept in the noonday of the valley; a hand on the eyes, and they would see to the truth that lies beneath form and colour of earthly things; a finger on the ear, and he would hear the very meaning of the wind and of the trickle of the stream—the gift of tongues would be an imaginably natural incident.

Yet next day, at some trifling ailment, death and its terrors compass him about, and the man shakes as with ague under the fear of it and shame of cowardice. Or he wakes every morning seemingly refreshed, only to fall by midday into a gulf of blackness and mistrust, sordid, not tragic, not dignified; and he sits tongue-tied, seeing a sneer in every smile, marvelling that men do not see the loathsomeness and terror that lie around them, but walk unconcerned among the dangers that encompass. Then again life returns in full flood, and the fears and the terrors are as the fabric of a dream.

A long, strange way, full of inexplicable joys and sorrows, hopes and fears—a far longer path to travel in the spirit than that by which he came “out of the iron furnace, even out of Egypt,” to the cool airs and sweet quiet of an old English country house in wooded downs touched by the freshness of the sea. There in the south, after the first bound towards health, life had stood still; the parched, sapless land could yield dry, clear air, sharp bright sunlight, but no refreshment of health and of spirit, nothing that could be compared to the misty mornings, and soft dewy evenings of a mild English spring. There the spring brings no refreshment; March reaps her harvest and the palm leaves hang dry and yellowish: here all life was stirring after the winter sleep, and earth was striving in her own finite way to make all things new. It was long since he had seen an English spring, and the eye could not be satisfied with gazing.

He first noticed it when, looking on the wintry copses, he saw that a thin ripple of life had run over the ground; among brown stalks and withered leaves so slight a flush of green that you could hardly say, “It is here” or “It is there,” nor surely know the change was worked to the outer eye or noted by the reanimate perception. Then the fine veil of skeleton branches against the sky, through, under, beyond which he could see the blue downs of the coast, thickened, and they warmed in colour; till the brown of the elm became purple, and the brown of the beeches red, and the willow golden: then the elm burst into its little purple rosettes but the others stayed. And now crept out those little silvery creatures which the children call palms; like little downy animals, so sweet, so comfortable that the child must half believe they are alive. Early in April the clumps of crocus in the turf, purple and yellow, were dying, but the daffodils were beginning to take their place, strewing the rough grass with flowers of milky gold. A week later the snake-heads were drawing themselves out of the turf, with head curved downwards like a swan preening its breast; primroses were waking in the lanes, the larch was hanging “rosy plumelets,” the silver leaf buds of the apple were out, and the flower of the peach.

This was cuckoo day, and punctual to the moment they hooted in the wood below; they had come in good time for the later nests, for the wagtails had taken their last year’s tenement again in the ivied wall, and the untidy sparrows were littering lawn and garden.

Again a week, and the cherry buds showed fawn coloured; two days they stayed so, then a little tree burst into flower. Two days more, and the orchard looked as if a snow shower had lightly fallen. At last one windy day white blossoms came drifting down among the scarlet tulips, and after this a rose-tinge passed over the trees, like a faint sunset on the snow, and then the glory was gone. But the expanding spirit could not bewail the glory gone, for warmer weather came with sun like summer, so that the plum-tree on the wall burst into flower one morning while one sat under it; a purple iris appeared, the blackthorn whitened, and in the garden beds the peonies and lilies shot up, anemones dozed half their radiant life away in royal groups, purple and scarlet. The remembrance of trembling and helplessness fell from the man, and he laughed to see the peacock’s grave and measured dance and the fierce cock chaffinch wooing in his bright spring coat.

So the spring returned, unfolding infinite new delights, sometimes hurrying, sometimes delaying; the copses clothed themselves in foliage as light as a birch grove, with all fine gradations of colour from the grey palms grown old, to the golden oaks beginning, and all life and all activity responded. Though storms and chill might check the budding, the renewal of the spring moved in man and nature, as man and nature shook off the memory of death and winter, warmed and revivified in the waxing power of the sun.

And the world found voice for its joy, and it was joy to lie awake in the hour before dawn, while the last fine song of the nightingale still lingered in the memory, and hear the untutored song echo from bush to bush; when the thrush and the blackbird waked, and the starling chattered, and the cock chimed in with the lusty bar of music of his bugle call, and all in chorus welcomed the day, and ceased.

And one morning, as the man leaned out of his window to drink the sweet air of growing things, he saw suddenly, that the desire of spring was satiate. The trees had burst their buds and made a glory of golden leaves. Life no longer pulsed, stayed, hurried on, but flowed in the full tide of summer. Summer would burst into glories of beauty and odour on this side and on that, but the fresh impulse of spring was over. And the man leaned out and revelled in it. The rough bank had covered its scars with lush green grass; and leaves, stems, and branches were hidden. He revelled in the odorous, sun-warmed air, in the pleasant kindly earth with its beauties, in the sight and sound of the happy living things, and he looked away towards the hills, but they were hidden. Then all at once he saw the blindness of content, and he cried out “Oh my soul, where are the heavenly horizons and the distant misty hills?”

For while he gazed, the veil had fallen; at first translucent, radiant; threads fine as gossamer shining with light, so that they seemed but to illuminate the distance. Then the veil was inwrought with flowers and as each new beauty came, he said “This is God’s work, and I can see Him in this; all this symbolizes the light of His countenance, and I see Him in His world.” And of each human interest and activity he said, “This is God’s work, for it is the work of His children.” So it fell fold on fold, thickening imperceptibly, full of sweet odours as it fell, and the voices of birds; and he did not know that the focus of his view was contracting, and that he was beginning to look not through the veil but at it. And he did not see that there was another hand at work and other threads in the web, grosser, more earthly, and darker yet; and that as it was woven, warp and woof, other hands threw the shuttle.

So it fell, closing out the heavenly vision, hiding too the clouds and darkness round God’s seat; and he found himself gazing on the veil which men call this world. Then with a great struggle he cried, “In the time of our wealth, good Lord deliver us.”

III

The year came round again, and this man had found no contentment for mind or heart. He was such a one as had always believed in the unity of God and nature, had held the visible universe to be the robe of His glory and the material to be like clothing which partly hides and partly reveals the form.

He was a man whom God had chastened a little in the flesh, so that He might know the Hand that touched him, yet had given him no loathsome evil thing to be with him, so that he must hate even the body that served him. God had given him amply of the good things of life and sufficiently of its sorrows to make him know the first were good. He had early looked into the empty tomb and seen that since even the body can in time elude it, it would be beyond reason and belief to dream that the soul can be prisoned by it. For the soul is not even prisoned by the body, seeing that it can walk among the stars, thread the secret places of the earth, or dive into the seas, while the eyes of the body stare upon a book; or it can fight battles and go through many strange adventures and visit distant lands while the eyes are closed and the body is laid upon the bed. Therefore this man had long believed in his soul, though he had not taught his life and his fancies that though the material sometimes appears to be greater and stronger and older than the spiritual, yet that this is merely as the flower seems to one who looks not below the ground to be more vital than the root. So though he believed this, the man could not understand what the truth of the world might be. For he saw that although one may rejoice in its beauties and delight even in wholly innocent things, believing truly that they come from God, yet many men thus go astray. And when he listened to the voices of the dearest of God’s servants he became all the more perplexed. For one cried “All things are yours, things present as well as things to come”; but another said “Love not the world.” Again he heard one say “It is good to be here; let us build three tabernacles”; and saw him that said it straightway led into the dust and turmoil of the incredulous crowd. And the sweetest voice said now “Deny yourself,” and now “Consider the lilies, consider the birds.”

This man was a man who always loved the water. It made a great calm in his mind to see the sea spread calm before his feet; the storm of the sea filled him with life, and to die in the sea would, he thought, be like a child sinking to sleep in its mother’s arms. Clear, translucent water drew him with a great longing, and he dreamt often that he should bathe, but as his feet touched the water it ebbed away.

Now near his home there spread, embowered in trees, a great lake; on one side ran a road neglected and seldom used, from this the lake ran up curving out of sight. Half-way up towards the curve there stood a great oak, and beneath this he often bathed. So being in this perplexity he went out one summer morning, passed through the sleeping village and by the church, and went down to the lake.

And in the turn of the year again the woods were lightly foliaged, and the branches shone golden between the leaves; the ground beneath the oak was carpeted with hyacinths and primroses, here and there a late anemone starred it.

Here he undressed and plunged from a little height into a pool. His hands parted the water, which rushed up him as he plunged; then he gave himself up to the element and it lifted him to the surface. Again he warred with it, yet moved by means of it, with steady stroke parting it, and again he turned over and yielded himself up to it, and the least movement was enough to keep him floating on the surface, and he rejoiced in the coolness and the purity. So when he had finished he returned and clothed himself, and moved on through the edge of the wood, looking at the water, wondering at a transparency that was so deep and the strength of the fleeting thing, till he came to where a little wooden bridge spanned the overflow from the lake; and upon the bridge a boy of about eight years old was sitting.

He was not dressed like a village child; his cap lay beside him with a little spray of reddening oak stuck into it, and he was staring at the water.

“Who are you, my son?” said the man as he passed.

“I’m a king,” the child replied; “but I’m an outlaw just now, you see,” he went on, laying his hand on his cap. “I can’t get into my kingdom.”

“Where is your kingdom?” asked the man.

“Come down here and you’ll see,” he said.

The man sat down beside him on the plank.

“I can’t see much,” he said, “the water is dazzling.”

“Ah, those are the sun’s messengers,” said the boy; “the sun sends messengers millions and millions of miles to the lake and they telegraph back to him. But you must look in another place.”

The man slipped into the humour of the child.

“Now I see your kingdom,” he said; “it has greenish forests waving, strange transparent creatures move silently about.”

“No, that’s not my kingdom,” the child answered, “why, I can get in there; but it is not like what you think. Those are slippery fishes and the bottom is all slimy. You must fix your eyes tight and not let them slip to see my kingdom.”

“Now I see it,” said the other; “it has beautiful blue sky, trees stretch twigs into it which glisten like gold—one spreads leaves like jewelled glass with the sun shining through; one stretches budding twigs made of ruby; it is far, far below the shine and the fishes; and yet when I look it is quite close to us.”

“Yes, that’s my kingdom!” cried the child.

“But isn’t it just like that behind us?” said the man, to test him.

The boy looked round. “No, that’s out-of-doors,” he said. “My kingdom is much more happy and safe, and the sky is more shining and the leaves glitter.”

“But it’s the sun’s kingdom down there even where the shine is,” said the man.

“Yes, I know it’s his,” said the boy; “if he didn’t send messengers down there it would be all inky black and dreadful; but they won’t let his messengers get through, only a few of them, a little yellowish, greenish light.”

“Is out-of-doors his kingdom too?” then said the man.

“Of course it’s his,” said the child; “if he wasn’t there it would be dark, and the wind would sob and the trees shake their branches.”

“And what about your kingdom?”

“Oh, he makes that for me,” said the child, “to be all my own.”

The man sat a moment looking at the water and was silent; a starling chattered on the boughs above; far away came the cry of the cuckoo; at the right hand of them there was a little rustle as a snake slipped over dead leaves and through the new living shoots of spring, and paused.

The man turned to the child.

“But is it real?” he said.

“It’s just as real as the sun and the water and out-of-doors,” said the boy steadily.

“But you said some day you would get in,” answered the man, tempting him.

The boy turned and looked at him, and his eyes were like a great stream with the sun shining through. “And that’s just as real as me,” he said.

The man snapped the twig he held in his hand, the snake silently slipped through the brake and was gone, and the man stood up, yet paused a moment looking down at the shining world, then he got up.

“Goodbye,” he said, “I must go and look for my kingdom. I had one once but I lost it.”

“Shall you be able to get in?” asked the boy.

“Not just yet, perhaps,” he said, “but I can look at it till I find the way in.”

So he went back through the wood, remembering that it was written, “Out of the mouth of babes thou hast perfected praise.”

The Gresham Press,
UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED,
WOKING AND LONDON.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Some of the descriptions which follow include things seen on our later visits.

[2] In later years we found a garden open to the public, and even trees in it.

[3] More than one such outer chapel of a tomb we made to serve as a place for Christian worship.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Archaic or alternate spelling which may have been in use at the time of publication has been retained.

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Table of Contents

- THE COURT OF THE KING
- PREFACE
- CONTENTS
- I THE GATES OF GOLD
- II THE LAKE WITHIN THE WORLD
- III A DESERT CITY
- IV THE OTHER SIDE
- V THE SILENT ROMANCE

- VI THE COURT OF THE KING

- The Approach

- The Presence

- VII THE GOLDEN DAHABEAH

- I
- II
- III
- IV

- VIII THE UNSEEN WORLD

- IX FROM THE BANK OF THE RIVER

- I
- II
- III

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE