Ruined Monastery in the Necropolis of Thebes--"Mr. Hay's Tomb"--The
Coptic Carpenter--His acquirements and troubles--He agrees to show
the MSS. belonging to the ruined Monastery, which are under his
charge--Night visit to the Tomb in which they are concealed--Perils
of the way--Description of the Tomb--Probably in former times a
Christian Church--Examination of the Coptic MSS.--Alarming
interruption--Hurried flight from the Evil Spirits--Fortunate
escape--Appearance of the Evil Spirit--Observations on Ghost
Stories--The Legend of the Old Woman of Berkeley considered.
On a rocky hill, perforated on all sides by the violated sepulchres of
the ancient Egyptians, in the great Necropolis of Thebes, not far from
the ruins of the palace and temple of Medinet Habou, stand the crumbling
walls of an old Coptic monastery, which I was told had been inhabited,
almost within the memory of man, by a small community of Christian
monks. I was living at this period in a tomb, which was excavated in the
side of the precipice, above Sheick Abd el Gournoo. It had been rendered
habitable by some slight alterations, and a little garden was made on
the terrace in front of it, whence the view was very remarkable. The
whole of the vast ruins of Thebes were stretched out below it; whilst,
beyond the mighty Nile, the huge piles of Luxor and Carnac loomed dark
and mysterious in the distance, which was bounded by the arid chain of
the Arabian mountains, the outline of their wild tops showing clear and
hard against the cloudless sky. This habitation was known by the name of
"Mr. Hay's tomb." The memory of this gentleman is held in the highest
honour and reverence by the villagers of the surrounding districts, who
look back to the time of his residence among them as the only
satisfactory period of their miserable existence.
One of the numerous admirers of Mr. Hay, among the poorer inhabitants of
the neighbourhood, was a Coptic carpenter, a man of no small natural
genius and talent, who in any other country would have risen above the
sphere of his comrades if any opportunity of distinguishing himself had
offered. He could read and write Coptic and Arabic; he had some
knowledge of astronomy, and some said of magic also; and he was a very
tolerable carpenter, although the only tools which he was able to
procure were of the roughest sort. In all these accomplishments he was
entirely self-taught; while his poverty was such that his costume
consisted of nothing but a short shirt, or tunic, made of a homespun
fabric of goat's hair, or wool, and a common felt skull-cap, with some
rags twisted round it for a turban. With higher acquirements than the
governor of the district, the poor Copt was hardly able to obtain bread
to eat; and indeed it was only from the circumstance of his being a
Christian that he and the other males of his family were not swept away
in the conscription which has depopulated Egypt under the present
government more than all the pillage and massacres and internal feuds of
the followers of the Mameluke Beys.
On those numerous occasions when the carpenter had nothing else to do,
he used to come and talk to me; and endeavour to count up, upon his
fingers, how often he had "_eat stick_;" that is, had been beaten by one
Turkish officer or another for his inability to pay the tax to the
Pasha, the tooth-money to some kawass, the forced contribution to the
Nazir, or some other expected or unexpected call upon his empty
pocket,--an appendage to his dress, by the by, which he did not possess;
for having nothing in the world to put in it, a pocket was clearly of no
use to him. The carpenter related to me the history of the ruined Coptic
monastery; and I found that its library was still in existence. It was
carefully concealed from the Mahomedans, as a sacred treasure; and my
friend the carpenter was the guardian of the volumes belonging to his
fallen church. After some persuasion he agreed, in consideration of my
being a Christian, to let me see them; but he said I must go to the
place where they were concealed at night, in order that no one might
follow our steps; and he further stipulated that none of the Mahomedan
servants should accompany us, but that I should go alone with him. I
agreed to all this; and on the appointed night I sallied forth with the
carpenter after dark. There were not many stars visible; and we had only
just light enough to see our way across the plain of Thebes, or rather
among the low hills and narrow valleys above the plain, which are so
entirely honeycombed with ancient tombs and mummy pits that they
resemble a rabbit warren on a large scale. Skulls and bones were strewed
on our path; and often at the mouths of tombs the night wind would raise
up fragments of the bandages which the sacrilegious hand of the Frankish
spoilers of the dead had torn from the bodies of the Egyptian mummies in
search of the scarabæi, amulets, and ornaments which are found upon the
breast of the deceased subjects of the Pharaohs.
Away we went stumbling over ruins, and escaping narrowly the fate of
those who descend into the tomb before their time. Sometimes we heard a
howl, which the carpenter said came from a hyena, prowling like
ourselves among the graves, though on a very different errand. We kept
on our way, by many a dark ruin and yawning cave, breaking our shins
against the fallen stones until I was almost tired of the journey, which
in the darkness seemed interminable; nor had I any idea where the
carpenter was leading me. At last, after a fatiguing walk, we descended
suddenly into a place something like a gravel pit, one side of which was
closed by the perpendicular face of a low cliff, in which a doorway half
filled up with rubbish betokened the existence of an ancient tomb. By
the side of this doorway sat a little boy, whom I discovered by the
light of the moon, which had just risen, to be the carpenter's son, an
intelligent lad, who often came to pay me a visit in company with his
father. It was here that the Coptic manuscripts were concealed, and it
was a spot well chosen for the purpose; for although I thought I had
wandered about the Necropolis of Thebes in every direction, I had never
stumbled upon this place before, neither could I ever find it
afterwards, although I rode in that direction several times.
I now produced from my pocket three candles, which the carpenter had
desired me to bring, one for him, one for his son, and one for myself.
Having lit them, we entered into the doorway of the tomb, and passing
through a short passage, found ourselves in a great sepulchral hall. The
earth and sand which had been blown into the entrance formed an inclined
plane, sloping downwards to another door sculptured with hieroglyphics,
through which we passed into a second chamber, on the other side of
which was a third doorway, leading into a magnificent subterranean hall,
divided into three aisles by four square columns, two on each side.
There may have been six columns, but I think there were only four. The
walls and columns, or rather square piers which supported the roof,
retained the brilliant white which is so much to be admired in the tombs
of the kings and other stately sepulchres. On the walls were various
hieroglyphics, and on the square piers tall figures of the gods of the
infernal regions--Kneph, Khonso, and Osiris--were portrayed in brilliant
colours, with their immense caps or crowns, and the heads of the jackal
and other beasts. At the further end of this chamber was a stone altar,
standing upon one or two steps, in an apsis or semicircular recess. As
this is not usual in Egyptian tombs, I have since thought that this had
probably been altered by the Copts in early times, and that, like the
Christians of the West in the days of their persecution, they had met in
secret in the tombs for the celebration of their rites, and had made use
of this hall as a church, in the same way as we see the remains of
chapels and places of worship in the catacombs of Rome and Syracuse. The
inner court of the Temple of Medinet Habou has also been converted into
a Christian church; and the worthy Copts have daubed over the
beautifully executed pictures of Rameses II. with a coat of plaster,
upon which they have painted the grim figures of St. George, and various
old frightful saints and hermits, whose uncouth forms would almost give
one the idea of their having served for a system of idolatry much less
refined than the worship of the ancient gods of the heathen, whose
places they have usurped in these gigantic temples.
The Coptic manuscripts, of which I was in search, were lying upon the
steps of the altar, except one, larger than the rest, which was placed
upon the altar itself. They were about eight or nine in number, all
brown and musty looking books, written on cotton paper, or charta
bombycina, a material in use in very early times. An edict or charter,
on paper, exists, or at least did exist two years ago, in the museum of
the Jesuits' College, called the Colleggio Romano, at Rome: its date was
of the sixth century; and I have a Coptic manuscript written on paper of
this kind, which was finished, as appears by a note at the end, in the
year 1018: these are the oldest dates that I have met with in any
manuscripts on paper.
Having found these ancient books we proceeded to examine their contents,
and to accomplish this at our ease, we stuck the candles on the ground,
and the carpenter and I sat down before them, while his son brought us
the volumes from the steps of the altar, one by one.
The first which came to hand was a dusty quarto, smelling of incense,
and well spotted with yellow wax, with all its leaves dogs-eared or worn
round with constant use: this was a MS. of the lesser festivals. Another
appeared to be of the same kind; a third was also a book for the church
service. We puzzled over the next two or three, which seemed to be
martyrologies, or lives of the saints; but while we were poring over
them, we thought we heard a noise. "Oh! father of hammers," said I to
the carpenter, "I think I heard a noise: what could it be?--I thought I
heard something move." "Did you, hawaja?" (O merchant), said the
carpenter; "it must have been my son moving the books, for what else
could there be here?--No one knows of this tomb or of the holy
manuscripts which it contains. Surely there can be nothing here to make
a noise, for are we not here alone, a hundred feet under the earth, in a
place where no one comes?--It is nothing: certainly it is nothing;" and
so saying, he lifted up one of the candles and peered about in the
darkness; but as there was nothing to be seen, and all was silent as the
grave, he sat down again, and at our leisure we completed our
examination of all the books which lay upon the steps.
They proved to be all church books, liturgies for different seasons, or
homilies; and not historical, nor of any particular interest, either
from their age or subject. There now remained only the great book upon
the altar, a ponderous quarto, bound either in brown leather or wooden
boards; and this the carpenter's son with difficulty lifted from its
place, and laid it down before us on the ground; but, as he did so, we
heard the noise again. The carpenter and I looked at each other: he
turned pale--perhaps I did so too; and we looked over our shoulders in
a sort of anxious, nervous kind of way, expecting to see something--we
did not know what. However, we saw nothing; and, feeling a little
ashamed, I again settled myself before the three candle-ends, and opened
the book, which was written in large black characters of unusual size.
As I bent over the huge volume, to see what it was about, suddenly there
arose a sound somewhere in the cavern, but from whence it came I could
not comprehend; it seemed all round us at the same moment. There was no
room for doubt now: it was a fearful howling, like the roar of a hundred
wild beasts. The carpenter looked aghast: the tall and grisly figures of
the Egyptian gods seemed to stare at us from the walls. I thought of
Cornelius Agrippa, and felt a gentle perspiration coming on which would
have betokened a favourable crisis in a fever. Suddenly the dreadful
roar ceased, and as its echoes died away in the tomb, we felt
considerably relieved, and were beginning to try and put a good face
upon the matter, when, to our unutterable horror, it began again, and
waxed louder and louder, as if legions of infernal spirits were let
loose upon us. We could stand this no longer: the carpenter and I jumped
up from the ground, and his son in his terror stumbled over the great
Coptic manuscript, and fell upon the candles, which were all put out in
a moment; his screams were now added to the uproar which resounded in
the cave: seeing the twinkling of a star through the vista of the two
outer chambers, we all set off as hard as we could run, our feelings of
alarm being increased to desperation when we perceived that something
was chasing us in the darkness, while the roar seemed to increase every
moment. How we did tear along! The devil take the hindmost seemed about
to be literally fulfilled; and we raised stifling clouds of dust, as we
scrambled up the steep slope which led to the outer door. "So then,"
thought I, "the stories of gins, and ghouls, and goblins, that I have
read of and never believed, must be true after all, and in this city of
the dead it has been our evil lot to fall upon a haunted tomb!"
Breathless and bewildered, the carpenter and I bolted out of this
infernal palace into the open air, mightily relieved at our escape from
the darkness and the terrors of the subterranean vaults. We had not been
out a moment, and had by no means collected our ideas, before our alarm
was again excited to its utmost pitch.
The evil one came forth in bodily shape, and stood revealed to our eyes
distinctly in the pale light of the moon.
While we were gazing upon the appearance, the carpenter's son, whom we
had quite forgotten in our hurry, came creeping out of the doorway of
the tomb upon his hands and knees.
"Why, father!" said he, after a moment's silence, "if that is not old
Fatima's donkey, which has been lost these two days! It is lucky that we
have found it, for it must have wandered into this tomb, and it might
have been starved if we had not met with it to-night."
The carpenter looked rather ashamed of the adventure; and as for myself,
though I was glad that nothing worse had come of it, I took comfort in
the reflection that I was not the first person who had been alarmed by
the proceedings of an ass.
I have related the history of this adventure because I think that, on
some foundation like this, many well-accredited ghost stories may have
been founded. Numerous legends and traditions, which appear to be
supernatural or miraculous, and the truth of which has been attested and
sworn to by credible witnesses, have doubtless arisen out of facts which
actually did occur, but of which some essential particulars have been
either concealed, or had escaped notice; and thus many marvellous
histories have gone abroad, which are so well attested, that although
common sense forbids their being believed, they cannot be proved to be
false. In this case, if the donkey had not fortunately come out and
shown himself, I should certainly have returned to Europe half impressed
with the belief that something supernatural had occurred, which was in
some mysterious manner connected with the opening of the magic volume
which we had taken from the altar in the tomb. The echoes of the
subterranean cave so altered the sound of the donkey's bray, that I
never should have discovered that these fearful sounds had so
undignified an origin; a story never loses by telling, and with a little
gradual exaggeration it would soon have become one of the best
accredited supernatural histories in the country.
The well-known story of the old woman of Berkeley has been read with
wonder and dread for at least four hundred years: it is to be found in
early manuscripts; it is related by Olaus Magnus, and is to be seen
illustrated by a woodcut, both in the German and Latin editions of the
'Nuremberg Chronicle,' which was printed in the year 1493. There is no
variation in the legend, which is circumstantially the same in all these
books. Without doubt it was partly founded upon fact, or, as in the case
of the story of the Theban tomb, some circumstances have been omitted
which make all the difference; and a natural though perhaps
extraordinary occurrence has been handed down for centuries, as a
fearful instance of the power of the evil one in this world over those
who have given themselves up to the practice of tremendous crimes.
There are many supernatural stories, which we are certain cannot by any
possibility be true; but which nevertheless are as well attested, and
apparently as fully proved, as any facts in the most veracious history.
Under circumstances of alarm or temporary hallucination people
frequently believe that they have had supernatural visitations. Even the
tricks of conjurers, which have been witnessed by a hundred persons at a
time, are totally incomprehensible to the uninitiated; and in the middle
ages, when these practices were resorted to for religious or political
ends, it is more than probable that many occurrences which were supposed
to be supernatural might have been explained, if all the circumstances
connected with them had been fairly and openly detailed by an impartial
witness.
THE WHITE MONASTERY.