They took the repast provided by Caleb outside the town, in a farmstead
beside a canal, under a cluster of palm-trees. There were no dainty
dishes, there were no purple-coloured wines thick as ink; but there
were omelettes and there was cestreus, the sea-fish that swims up the
Nile in certain months: fried in cici-oil, this is a popular, homely
dish, it is true, but nevertheless toothsome for hungry travellers
picnicking in the grass. There was foaming beer and hydromel, or
honey-water; and Uncle Catullus, spoilt though he was, thought the
simple meal anything but unpalatable and considered that an idyll of
this sort was good for the stomach, once in a way.
Lucius told Caleb to have his luncheon with them; and Caleb, after
much deprecation and many salaams at the honour shown him, squatted
down and crossed his legs and ate with relish and kept on laughing
at the thought of dear little Apis trotting round his secos for the
strangers who paid so generously. The travellers were to rest under
the palm-trees and allow the midday heat to pass before going on
to the pyramids. For Caleb had sent the litters back to the barge
and had now hired four good camels at the farm, including two with
comfortable saddles of bright tapestry, for his two noble clients.
The farmer and his wife, glad at the visit that brought them in
money, spread awnings under which the travellers could enjoy their
siesta and laid mats on the ground; and Uncle Catullus called for
a fly-net, which he wound round his head. And, while he slept and
Caleb also closed his eyes, Lucius, with Thrasyllus by his side,
gazed at the wonderful, divinely geometrical lines in the distance,
the lightly-traced triangles against the golden noonday sky.
"The base is square," said Thrasyllus, "and the summit is square,
but looks pointed."
"To me they seem strange, mysterious embodiments of vastness," said
Lucius. "What are they actually?"
"We don't altogether know," replied Thrasyllus. "Some of the pyramids
were sepulchres of kings and sacred animals. Those are the pyramids
of Cheops, or Khufu, of Chephren and of Mencheres; and we shall see
the kings' chambers inside them. They were built twenty, perhaps
thirty centuries ago. Herodotus says that the pyramid of Cheops,
which is the biggest, took thirty years to build with a hundred
thousand slaves, who were changed every three months. The name is
derived from pyr fire, because, like a flame, the pyramid ends in
a point. Many were used as store-houses in the long years of famine;
others were dykes against the sands of the desert, which blew towards
Memphis and threatened to bury the city, in a succession of ages. Many
pyramids have already been swallowed up in the sands."
"What are those ruined palaces over there?" asked Lucius, pointing to
crumbled rows of pylons and pillars, surmounted by cracked architraves,
impressive ruins which stood on a hill at the outskirts of the town
and seemed to be tumbling into the Nile.
"The old palaces of the Pharaohs," said Thrasyllus. "They were ten
in number. Joseph, the Jewish interpreter of dreams, was a powerful
governor under one of them; Moses, who knew Hermes Trismegistus and
learned the occult wisdom from him, all the wisdom that can be known,
was saved, as a babe, by the daughter of a Pharaoh, where his sister
had exposed him in a basket made of bulrushes at the place where the
princess was wont to bathe: she was the daughter of Amenophis III.,
who saw his people smitten with ten plagues sent over Egypt by Jahve,
the God of the Jews, because the Pharaoh would not suffer them to
leave the country. This Pharaoh was drowned in the Red Sea and was
the father of Sesostris.... I have written on these scrolls everything
that is more or less interesting."
And Thrasyllus, glad to see that Lucius' attention was attracted,
handed him the scrolls. Lucius began reading:
"This all happened here!" he said, startled and arrested. "This is
all ... the past! The age-old past, which is gone, which was swallowed
up by the sands ... thousands of years ago!... How small we are when
we look into the past ... and when we gaze into the centuries, the
centuries that have buried themselves so deeply!"
"My son," said the old tutor, "I am so thankful that your mind is
once more capable of receiving these impressions. For the beauty of
the past is a comfort for the future; and the sick soul is healed in
that beauty when it understands that its own grief is but a grain of
sand in a desert which blows in the wind and conceals all things."
Lucius made no further reply, absorbed in what he was reading about
Joseph and Moses, about Jahve and Pharaoh Amenophis, who was the
father of Sesostris....