In order to put it to use as soon as possible, I placed the foot of
the divine Princess Hermonthis upon a heap of papers, scribbled over
with verses, an undecipherable mosaic work of erasures; articles just
begun; letters forgotten and mailed in the table-drawer--an error which
often occurs with absent-minded people. The whole effect was charming,
bizarre, and romantic.
Well satisfied with this embellishment, I went down into the street
with the becoming gravity and pride of one who feels that he has
the ineffable advantage over all the passers-by whom he elbows, of
possessing a fragment of the Princess Hermonthis, daughter of Pharaoh.
I looked upon as sovereignly ridiculous all those who did not possess,
like myself, a paper-weight so notoriously Egyptian; and it seemed to
me that the true occupation of every man of sense was to have a mummy’s
foot upon his desk.
Happily, my meeting some friends distracted me from my infatuation with
the recent acquisition; I went to dinner with them, for it would have
been difficult for me to dine by myself.
When I came back in the evening, my brain slightly confused by a few
glasses of wine, a vague whiff of Oriental perfume delicately tickled
my olfactory nerves: the heat of the room had warmed the sodium
carbonate, bitumen, and myrrh in which the paraschites, who cut open
the bodies of the dead, had bathed the corpse of the princess; it was a
perfume both sweet and penetrating, a perfume that four thousand years
had not been able to dissipate.
The dream of Egypt was Eternity: her odors have the solidity of
granite, and endure as long.
I soon drank to fulness from the black cup of sleep: for an hour or two
all remained opaque. Oblivion and nothingness inundated me with their
sombre emptiness.
Presently my mental obscurity cleared; dreams commenced to graze me
softly in their silent flight.
The eyes of my soul were opened, and I beheld my chamber precisely
as it was. I might have believed myself to be awake, but a vague
perception told me that I slept and that something fantastic was about
to take place.
The odor of the myrrh had intensely increased, and I felt a slight
headache, which--with great reasonableness--I attributed to several
glasses of champagne that we had drunk to the unknown gods, and our
future success.
I peered through my room with a feeling of expectation which nothing
actually justified; the furniture was precisely in place; the lamp
burned upon its bracket, softly shaded by the milky whiteness of its
dull crystal; the water-color sketches shone under their Bohemian
glass; the curtains hung languidly: everything had an air slumbrous and
tranquil.
Presently, however, this calm interior appeared to become troubled:
the woodwork cracked furtively, the log enveloped in cinders suddenly
emitted a jet of blue flame, and the circular ornaments on the frieze
seemed like metallic eyes, watching, like myself, for the things which
were about to happen.
My gaze by chance fell upon the desk where I had placed the foot of the
Princess Hermonthis.
Instead of being immobile, as became a foot which had been embalmed for
four thousand years, it moved uneasily, contracted itself and leaped
over the papers like a frightened frog: one would have imagined it to
be in contact with a galvanic battery. I could quite distinctly hear
the dry sound made by its little heel, hard as the hoof of a gazelle.
I became somewhat discontented with my acquisition, preferring my
paper-weights to be sedentary, and thought it a little unnatural that
feet should walk about without legs; indeed, I commenced to feel
something which strongly resembled fear.
Suddenly I saw the folds of one of my bed-curtains stir, and I heard
a bumping sound, like that of a person hopping on one foot. I must
confess I became alternately hot and cold, that I felt a strange
wind blow across my back, and that my suddenly rising hair caused my
nightcap to execute a leap of several yards.
The bed-curtains parted, and I beheld coming towards me the strangest
figure it is possible to imagine.
It was a young girl, of a deep _café-au-lait_ complexion, like the
bayadere[1] Amani, of a perfect beauty, and recalling the purest
Egyptian type. She had almond eyes with the corners raised, and brows
so black that they seemed blue; her nose was delicately chiselled,
almost Grecian in its fineness of outline, and indeed she might have
been taken for a statue of Corinthian bronze had not the prominence of
the cheekbones and the slightly African lips made it impossible not to
recognize her as belonging beyond doubt to the hieroglyphic race of the
banks of the Nile.
Her arms, slender and turned with the symmetry of a spindle--like
those of very young girls--were encircled by a kind of metal bands
and bracelets of glass beads; her hair was plaited in cords; and upon
her bosom was suspended a little idol of green paste, which, from its
bearing a whip with seven lashes, enabled one to recognize it as an
image of Isis, conductress of spirits. A disk of gold scintillated upon
her brow, and a few traces of rouge relieved the coppery tint of her
cheeks.
As for her costume, it was very strange. Imagine an under-wrapping of
linen strips, bedizened with black and red hieroglyphics, stiffened
with bitumen, and apparently belonging to a freshly unbandaged mummy.
In one of those flights of thought so frequent in dreams, I heard
the rough falsetto of the bric-à-brac dealer, which repeated like
a monotonous refrain the phrase he had uttered in his shop with an
intonation so enigmatical:
“Old Pharaoh will not be pleased--he loved his daughter, that dear man!”
Strange circumstance--and one which scarcely reassured me--the
apparition had but one foot; the other was broken off at the ankle!
She approached the desk where the foot was moving and wriggling with
redoubled liveliness. Once there, she supported herself upon the edge,
and I saw tears form and grow pearly in her eyes.
Although she had not as yet spoken, I clearly discerned her thoughts:
she looked at her foot--for it was indeed her own--with an infinitely
graceful expression of coquettish sadness; but the foot leaped and
coursed hither and yon, as though driven by steel springs.
Two or three times she extended her hand to seize it, but she did not
succeed.
Then commenced between the Princess Hermonthis and her foot--which
appeared to be endowed with a life of its own--a very fantastic
dialogue in a most ancient Coptic dialect, such as might have been
spoken some thirty centuries ago by voices of the land of Ser: luckily,
that night I understood Coptic to perfection.
The Princess Hermonthis cried, in a voice sweet and vibrant as a
crystal bell:
“Well, my dear little foot, you flee from me always, though I have
taken good care of you. I bathed you with perfumed water in a basin of
alabaster; I smoothed your heel with pumice-stone mixed with oil of
palms; your nails were cut with golden scissors and polished with a
hippopotamus tooth; I was careful to select sandals for you, broidered
and painted and turned up at the toes, which made all the young girls
in Egypt envious; you wore on your great toe rings representing the
sacred Scarabæus, and you carried about the lightest body it was
possible for a lazy foot to sustain.”
The foot replied, in a tone pouting and chagrined:
“You well know that I do not belong to myself any longer. I have been
bought and paid for. The old merchant knew perfectly what he was doing;
he always bore you a grudge for having refused to espouse him: this
is an ill turn which he has done you. The Arab who robbed your royal
sarcophagus in the subterranean pits of the necropolis of Thebes was
sent by him: he desired to prevent you from going to the reunion of the
shadowy peoples in the cities below. Have you five pieces of gold for
my ransom?”
“Alas, no! My jewels, my rings, my purses of gold and silver, were all
stolen from me,” answered the Princess Hermonthis, with a sigh.
“Princess,” I then exclaimed, “I never retained anybody’s foot
unjustly; even though you have not got the five louis which it cost me,
I give it to you gladly: I should be in despair to make so amiable a
person as the Princess Hermonthis lame.”
I delivered this discourse in a tone so royal and gallant that it must
have astonished the beautiful Egyptian.
She turned toward me a look charged with gratitude, and her eyes shone
with bluish gleams.
She took her foot--which, this time, let itself be taken--like a woman
about to put on her little shoe, and adjusted it to her leg with much
address.
This operation ended, she took two or three steps about the room, as if
to assure herself that she really was no longer lame.
“Ah, how happy my father will be--he who was so desolated because of my
mutilation, and who had, from the day of my birth, put a whole people
at work to hollow out for me a tomb so deep that he would be able to
preserve me intact until that supreme day when souls must be weighed in
the balances of Amenthi! Come with me to my father--he will receive you
well, for you have given me back my foot.”
I found this proposition natural enough. I enveloped myself in
a dressing-gown of large flowered pattern, which gave me a very
Pharaohesque appearance, hurriedly put on a pair of Turkish slippers,
and told the Princess Hermonthis that I was ready to follow her.
Hermonthis, before starting, took from her neck the tiny figurine of
green paste and laid it on the scattered sheets of paper which covered
the table.
“It is only fair,” she said smilingly, “that I should replace your
paper-weight.”
She gave me her hand, which was soft and cold, like the skin of a
serpent, and we departed.
For some time we spun with the rapidity of an arrow through a fluid and
grayish medium, in which faintly outlined silhouettes were passing to
right and left.
For an instant, we saw only sea and sky.
Some moments afterward, obelisks commenced to rise, porches and flights
of steps guarded by sphinxes were outlined against the horizon.
We had arrived.
The princess conducted me toward the mountain of rosy granite, where we
found an opening so narrow and low that it would have been difficult to
distinguish it from the fissures in the rock, if two sculptured columns
had not enabled us to recognize it.
Hermonthis lighted a torch and walked before me.
There were corridors hewn through the living rock; the walls, covered
with hieroglyphic paintings and allegorical processions, might
well have occupied thousands of arms for thousands of years; these
corridors, of an interminable length, ended in square chambers, in the
midst of which pits had been contrived, through which we descended by
means of cramp-hooks or spiral stairways; these pits conducted us into
other chambers, from which other corridors opened, equally decorated
with painted sparrow-hawks, serpents coiled in circles, and those
mystic symbols, the _tau_, the _pedum_, and the _bari_--prodigious
works which no living eye would ever examine, endless legends in
granite which only the dead have time to read throughout eternity.
At last we issued into a hall so vast, so enormous, so immeasurable,
that the eye could not perceive its confines. Flooding the sight were
files of monstrous columns between which twinkled livid stars of yellow
flame, and these points of light revealed further incalculable depths.
The Princess Hermonthis always held me by the hand, and graciously
saluted the mummies of her acquaintance.
My eyes accustomed themselves to the crepuscular light, and objects
became discernible.
I beheld, seated upon their thrones, the kings of the subterranean
races: they were magnificent, dry old men, withered, wrinkled,
parchmented, blackened with naphtha and bitumen--all wearing golden
headdresses, breast-plates, and gorgets starry with precious stones,
eyes of a sphinx-like fixity, and long beards whitened by the snows of
the centuries. Behind them, their embalmed people stood, in the rigid
and constrained pose of Egyptian art, preserving eternally the attitude
prescribed by the hieratic code. Behind these peoples, contemporary
cats mewed, ibises flapped their wings, and crocodiles grinned, all
rendered still more monstrous by their swathing bands.
All the Pharaohs were there--Cheops, Chephrenes, Psammetichus,
Sesostris, Amenotaph--all the dark rulers of the pyramids and the
nymphs. On the yet higher thrones sat King Chronos, Xixouthros, who was
contemporary with the deluge, and Tubal Cain, who preceded it.
The beard of King Xixouthros had grown so full that it already wound
seven times around the granite table upon which he leaned, lost in a
somnolent revery.
Further back, through a dusty cloud across the dim centuries, I beheld
vaguely the seventy-two preadamite Kings, with their seventy-two
peoples, forever passed away.
After allowing me to gaze upon this astounding spectacle a few moments,
the Princess Hermonthis presented me to Pharaoh, her father, who
vouchsafed me a majestic nod.
“I have recovered my foot again! I have recovered my foot!” cried the
Princess, as she clapped her little hands one against the other with
all the signs of playful joy. “Here is the gentleman who restored it to
me.”
The races of Kemi, the races of Nahasi, all the black, bronze, and
copper-colored nations, repeated in chorus:
“The Princess Hermonthis has recovered her foot!”
Even Xixouthros was visibly affected: he raised his dull eyelids,
passed his fingers over his mustache, and bent upon me his look weighty
with centuries.
“By Oms, the dog of Hell, and by Tmei, daughter of the Sun and of
Truth, there is a brave and worthy fellow!” exclaimed Pharaoh,
extending toward me his sceptre, terminated with a lotus-flower. “What
do you desire for recompense?”
Strong in that audacity which is inspired by dreams, where nothing
seems impossible, I asked the hand of Hermonthis: the hand seemed to me
a very proper antithetic recompense for such a good foot.
Pharaoh opened wide his eyes of glass, astonished by my pleasantry and
my request.
“From what country do you come, and what is your age?”
“I am a Frenchman, and I am twenty-seven years old, venerable Pharaoh.”
“Twenty-seven years old--and he wishes to espouse the Princess
Hermonthis, who is thirty centuries old!” exclaimed at once all the
thrones and all the circles of nations.
Hermonthis alone did not seem to find my request unreasonable.
“If only you were even two thousand years old,” replied the ancient
King, “I would quite willingly give you the Princess; but the
disproportion is too great; and, besides, we must give our daughters
husbands who are durable--you no longer know how to preserve
yourselves: the oldest people that you can produce are scarcely fifteen
hundred years old, and they are no more than a pinch of dust. See
here--my flesh is hard as basalt, my bones are bars of steel!
“I shall be present on the last day of the world with the body and the
features which were mine in life; my daughter Hermonthis will endure
longer than a statue of bronze.
“Then the winds will have dispersed the last particles of your dust,
and Isis herself, who was able to recover the atoms of Osiris, would be
embarrassed to recompose your being.
“See how vigorous I still am, and how well my hands can grip,” he said
to me as he shook my hand _à l’Anglaise_, in a manner that cut my
fingers with my rings.
He squeezed me so hard that I awoke, and found it was my friend Alfred
who was shaking me by the arm to make me get up.
“Ah, you maddening sleepyhead! Must I have you carried out into the
middle of the street, and fireworks exploded in your ears? It’s
afternoon; don’t you remember that you promised to take me with you to
see M. Aguado’s Spanish pictures?”
“_Mon Dieu!_ I didn’t remember it any more!” I answered as I dressed
myself. “We will go there at once; I have the permit here on my desk.”
I went forward to take it; but judge of my astonishment when instead
of the mummy’s foot I had purchased the evening before, I saw the tiny
figurine of green paste left in its place by the Princess Hermonthis!