THE HALL OF THE MUMMIES
There are two of us, and as we light our way by the aid of a lantern
through these vast halls we might be taken for a night watch on its
round. We have just shut behind us and doubly locked the door by which
we entered, and we know that we are alone, rigorously alone, although
this place is so vast, with its endless, communicating halls, its high
vestibules and great flights of stairs; mathematically alone, one might
say, for this palace that we are in is one quite out of the ordinary,
and all its outlets were closed and sealed at nightfall. Every night
indeed the doors are sealed, on account of the priceless relics that
are collected here. So we shall not meet with any living being in these
halls to-night, in spite of their vast extent and endless turnings, and
in spite too of all these mysterious things that are ranged on every
side and fill the place with shadows and hiding-places.
Our round takes us first along the ground floor over flagstones that
resound to our footsteps. It is about ten of the clock. Here and there
through some stray windows gleams a small patch of luminous blue sky,
lit by the stars which for the good folk outside lend transparency to
the night; but there, none the less, the place is filled with a solemn
gloom, and we lower our voices, remembering perhaps the dead that fill
the glass cases in the halls above.
And these things which line the walls on either side of us as we pass
also seem to be in the nature of receptacles for the dead. For the most
part they are sarcophagi of granite, proud and indestructible: some of
them, in the shape of gigantic boxes, are laid out in line on pedestals;
others, in the form of mummies, stand upright against the walls and
display enormous faces, surmounted by equally enormous head-dresses.
Assembled there they look like a lot of malformed giants, with oversized
heads sunk curiously in their shoulders. There are, besides, some that
are merely statues, colossal figures that have never held a corpse in
their interiors; these all wear a strange, scarcely perceptible smile;
in their huge sphinxlike headgear they reach nearly to the ceiling and
their set stare passes high above our heads. And there are others that
are not larger than ourselves, some even quite little, with the stature
of gnomes. And, every now and then, at some sudden turning, we encounter
a pair of eyes of enamel, wide-open eyes, that pierce straight into the
depths of ours, that seem to follow us as we pass and make us shiver as
if by the contact of a thought that comes from the abysm of the ages.
We pass on rapidly, however, and somewhat inattentively, for our
business here to-night is not with these simulacra on the ground floor,
but with the more redoubtable hosts above. Besides our lantern sheds so
little light in these great halls that all these people of granite and
sandstone and marble appear only at the precise moment of our passage,
appear only to disappear, and, spreading their fantastic shadows on the
walls, mingle the next moment with the great mute crowd, that grows ever
more numerous behind us.
Placed at intervals are apparatus for use in case of fire, coils of hose
and standpipes that shine with the warm glow of burnished copper, and I
ask my companion of the watch: “What is there that could burn here? Are
not these good people all of stone?” And he answers: “Not here indeed;
but consider how the things that are above would blaze.” Ah! yes.
The “things that are above”--which are indeed the object of my visit
to-night. I had no thought of fire catching hold in an assembly of
mummies; of the old withered flesh, the dead, dry hair, the venerable
carcasses of kings and queens, soaked as they are in natron and oils,
crackling like so many boxes of matches. It is chiefly on account of
this danger indeed that the seals are put upon the doors at nightfall,
and that it needs a special favour to be allowed to penetrate into this
place at night with a lantern.
In the daytime this “Museum of Egyptian Antiquities” is as vulgar a
thing as you can conceive, filled though it is with priceless treasures.
It is the most pompous, the most outrageous of those buildings, of no
style at all, by which each year the New Cairo is enriched; open to all
who care to gaze at close quarters, in a light that is almost brutal,
upon these august dead, who fondly thought that they had hidden
themselves for ever.
But at night! . . . Ah! at night when all the doors are closed, it
is the palace of nightmare and of fear. At night, so say the Arab
guardians, who would not enter it at the price of gold--no, not even
after offering up a prayer--at night, horrible “forms” escape, not only
from the embalmed bodies that sleep in the glass cases above, but also
from the great statues, from the papyri, and the thousand and one things
that, at the bottom of the tombs, have long been impregnated with human
essence. And these “forms” are like unto dead bodies, and sometimes to
strange beasts, even to beasts that crawl. And, after having wandered
about the halls, they end by assembling for their nocturnal conferences
on the roofs.
We next ascend a staircase of monumental proportions, empty in the whole
extent, where we are delivered for a little while from the obsession of
those rigid figures, from the stares and smiles of the good people in
white stone and black granite who throng the galleries and vestibules on
the ground floor. None of them, to be sure, will follow us; but all the
same they guard in force and perplex with their shadows the only way by
which we can retreat, if the formidable hosts above have in store for us
too sinister a welcome.
He to whose courtesy I owe the relaxation of the orders of the night is
the illustrious savant to whose care has been entrusted the direction
of the excavations in Egyptian soil; he is also the comptroller of this
vast museum, and it is he himself who has kindly consented to act as my
guide to-night through its mazy labyrinth.
Across the silent halls above we now proceed straight towards those of
whom I have demanded this nocturnal audience.
To-night the succession of these rooms, filled with glass cases, which
cover more than four hundred yards along the four sides of the building,
seems to be without end. After passing, in turn, the papyri, the
enamels, the vases that contain human entrails, we reach the mummies
of the sacred beasts: cats, ibises, dogs, hawks, all with their mummy
cloths and sarcophagi; and monkeys, too, that remain grotesque even
in death. Then commence the human masks, and, upright in glass-fronted
cupboards, the mummy cases in which the body, swathed in its mummy
cloths, was moulded, and which reproduced, more or less enlarged, the
figure of the deceased. Quite a lot of courtesans of the Greco-Roman
epoch, moulded in paste in this wise after death and crowned with roses,
smile at us provokingly from behind their windows. Masks of the colour
of dead flesh alternate with others of gold which gleam as the light of
our lantern plays upon them momentarily in our rapid passage. Their eyes
are always too large, the eyelids too wide open and the dilated pupils
seem to stare at us with alarm. Amongst these mummy cases and these
coffin lids fashioned in the shape of the human figure, there are some
that seem to have been made for giants; the head especially, beneath its
cumbrous head-dress, the head stuffed as it were between the hunchback
shoulders, looks enormous, out of all proportion to the body which,
towards the feet, narrows like a scabbard.
Although our little lantern maintains its light we seem to see here
less and less: the darkness around us in these vast rooms becomes almost
overpowering--and these are the rooms, too, that, leading one into the
other, facilitate the midnight promenade of those dread “forms” which,
every evening, are released and roam about. . . .
On a table in the middle of one of these rooms a thing to make you
shudder gleams in a glass box, a fragile thing that failed of life some
two thousand years ago. It is the mummy of a human embryo, and someone,
to appease the malice of this born-dead thing, had covered its face with
a coating of gold--for, according to the belief of the Egyptians, these
little abortions became the evil genii of their families if proper
honour was not paid to them. At the end of its negligible body, the
gilded head, with its great foetus eyes, is unforgettable for its
suffering ugliness, for its frustrated and ferocious expression.
In the halls into which we next penetrate there are veritable dead
bodies ranged on either side of us as we pass; their coffins are
displayed in tiers one above the other; the air is heavy with the
sickly odour of mummies; and on the ground, curled always like some
huge serpent, the leather hoses are in readiness, for here indeed is the
danger spot for fire.
And the master of this strange house whispers to me: “This is the place.
Look! There they are.”
In truth I recognise the place, having often come here in the daytime,
like other people. In spite of the darkness, which commences at some ten
paces from us--so small is the circle of light cast by our lantern--I
can distinguish the double row of the great royal coffins, open without
shame in their glass cases. And standing against the walls, upright,
like so many sentinels, are the coffin lids, fashioned in the shape of
the human figure.
We are there at last, admitted at this unseasonable hour into the
guest-chamber of kings and queens, for an audience that is private
indeed.
And there, first of all, is the woman with the baby, upon whom, without
stopping, we throw the light of our lantern. A woman who died in giving
to the world a little dead prince. Since the old embalmers no one has
seen the face of this Queen Makeri. In her coffin there she is simply
a tall female figure, outlined beneath the close-bound swathings of
brown-coloured bandages. At her feet lies the fatal baby, grotesquely
shrivelled, and veiled and mysterious as the mother herself; a sort
of doll, it seems, put there to keep her eternal company in the slow
passing of endless years.
More fearsome to approach is the row of unswathed mummies that follow.
Here, in each coffin over which we bend, there is a face which stares at
us--or else closes its eyes in order that it may not see us; and meagre
shoulders and lean arms, and hands with overgrown nails that protrude
from miserable rags. And each royal mummy that our lantern lights
reserves for us a fresh surprise and the shudder of a different
fear--they resemble one another so little. Some of them seem to laugh,
showing their yellow teeth; others have an expression of infinite
sadness and suffering. Sometimes the faces are small, refined and still
beautiful despite the pinching of the nostrils; sometimes they are
excessively enlarged by putrid swelling, with the tip of the nose eaten
away. The embalmers, we know, were not sure of their means, and the
mummies were not always a success. In some cases putrefaction ensued,
and corruption and even sudden hatchings of larvae, those “companions
without ears and without eyes,” which died indeed in time but only after
they had perforated all the flesh.
Hard by are ranked according to dynasty, and in chronological order, the
proud Pharaohs in a piteous row: father, son, grandson, great-grandson.
And common paper tickets tell their tremendous names, Seti I., Ramses
II., Seti II., Ramses III., Ramses IV. . . . Soon the muster will be
complete, with such energy have men dug in the heart of the rocks
to find them all; and these glass cases will no doubt be their final
resting-place. In olden days, however, they made many pilgrimages after
their death, for in the troubled times of the history of Egypt it was
one of the harassing preoccupations of the reigning sovereign to hide,
to hide at all costs, the mummies of his ancestors, which filled the
earth increasingly, and which the violators of tombs were so swift to
track. Then they were carried clandestinely from one grave to another,
raised each from his own pompous sepulchre, to be buried at last
together in some humble and less conspicuous vault. But it is here, in
this museum of Egyptian antiquities, that they are about to accomplish
their return to dust, which has been deferred, as if by miracle, for
so many centuries. Now, stripped of their bandages, their days are
numbered, and it behoves us to hasten to draw these physiognomies of
three or four thousand years ago, which are about to perish.
In that coffin--the last but one of the row on the left--it is the great
Sesostris himself who awaits us. We know of old that face of ninety
years, with its nose hooked like the beak of a falcon; and the gaps
between those old man's teeth; the meagre, birdlike neck, and the hand
raised in a gesture of menace. Twenty years have elapsed since he was
brought back to the light, this master of the world. He was wrapped
_thousands of times_ in a marvellous winding-sheet, woven of aloe
fibres, finer than the muslin of India, which must have taken years in
the making and measured more than 400 yards in length. The unswathing,
done in the presence of the Khedive Tewfik and the great personages of
Egypt, lasted two hours, and after the last turn, when the illustrious
figure appeared, the emotion amongst the assistants was such that they
stampeded like a herd of cattle, and the Pharaoh was overturned. He has,
moreover, given much cause for conversation, this great Sesostris, since
his installation in the museum. Suddenly one day with a brusque gesture,
in the presence of the attendants, who fled howling with fear, he raised
that hand which is still in the air, and which he has not deigned since
to lower.[*] And subsequently there supervened, beginning in the old
yellowish-white hair, and then swarming over the whole body, a hatching
of cadaveric fauna, which necessitated a complete bath in mercury. He
also has his paper ticket, pasted on the end of his box, and one may
read there, written in a careless hand, that name which once caused the
whole world to tremble--“Ramses II. (Sesostris)”! It need not be said
that he has greatly fallen away and blackened even in the fifteen yeas
that I have known him. He is a phantom that is about to disappear; in
spite of all the care lavished upon him, a poor phantom about to fall to
pieces, to sink into nothingness. We move our lantern about his hooked
nose, the better to decipher, in the play of shadow, his expression,
that still remains authoritative. . . . To think that once the destinies
of the world were ruled, without appeal, by the nod of this head, which
looks now somewhat narrow, under the dry skin and the horrible whitish
hair. What force of will, of passion and colossal pride must once have
dwelt therein! Not to mention the anxiety, which to us now is scarcely
conceivable, but which in his time overmastered all others--the anxiety,
that is to say, of assuring the magnificence and inviolability of
sepulture! . . . And this horrible scarecrow, toothless and senile,
lying here in its filthy rags, with the hand raised in an impotent
menace, was once the brilliant Sesostris, the master of kings, and by
virtue of his strength and beauty the demigod also, whose muscular limbs
and deep athletic chest many colossal statues at Memphis, at Thebes, at
Luxor, reproduce and try to make eternal. . . .
[*] This movement is explained by the action of the sun,
which, falling on the unclothed arm, is supposed to have
expanded the bone of the elbow.
In the next coffin lies his father, Seti I., who reigned for a much
shorter period, and died much younger than he. This youthfulness is
apparent still in the features of the mummy, which are impressed besides
with a persistent beauty. Indeed this good King Seti looks the picture
of calm and serene reverie. There is nothing shocking in his dead
face, with its long closed eyes, its delicate lips, its noble chin
and unblemished profile. It is soothing and pleasant even to see him
sleeping there with his hands crossed upon his breast. And it seems
strange, that he, who looks so young, should have for son the old man,
almost a centenarian, who lies beside him.
In our passage we have gazed on many other royal mummies, some tranquil
and some grimacing. But, to finish, there is one of them (the third
coffin there, in the row in front of us), a certain Queen Nsitanebashru,
whom I approach with fear, albeit it is mainly on her account that I
have ventured to make this fantastical round. Even in the daytime she
attains to the maximum of horror that a spectral figure can evoke. What
will she be like to-night in the uncertain light of our little lantern?
There she is indeed, the dishevelled vampire in her place right enough,
stretched at full length, but looking always as if she were about to
leap up; and straightway I meet the sidelong glance of her enamelled
pupils, shining out of half-closed eyelids, with lashes that are still
almost perfect. Oh! the terrifying person! Not that she is ugly, on the
contrary we can see that she was rather pretty and was mummied young.
What distinguishes her from the others is her air of thwarted anger, of
fury, as it were, at being dead. The embalmers have coloured her very
religiously, but the pink, under the action of the salts of the skin,
has become decomposed here and there and given place to a number of
green spots. Her naked shoulders, the height of the arms above the
rags which were once her splendid shroud, have still a certain sleek
roundness, but they, too, are stained with greenish and black splotches,
such as may be seen on the skins of snakes. Assuredly no corpse, either
here or elsewhere, has ever preserved such an expression of intense
life, of ironical, implacable ferocity. Her mouth is twisted in a little
smile of defiance; her nostrils pinched like those of a ghoul on the
scent of blood, and her eyes seem to say to each one who approaches:
“Yes, I am laid in my coffin; but you will very soon see I can get out
of it.” There is something confusing in the thought that the menace of
this terrible expression, and this appearance of ill-restrained ferocity
had endured for some hundreds of years before the commencement of our
era, and endured to no purpose in the secret darkness of a closed coffin
at the bottom of some doorless vault.
Now that we are about to retire, what will happen here, with the
complicity of silence, in the darkest hours of the night? Will they
remain inert and rigid, all these embalmed bodies, once left to
themselves, who pretended to be so quiet because we were there? What
exchanges of old human fluid will recommence, as who can doubt they
do each night between one coffin and another. Formerly these kings and
queens, in their anxiety as to the future of their mummy, had foreseen
violation, pillage and scattering amongst the sands of the desert, but
never this: that they would be reunited one day, almost all unveiled,
so near to one another under panes of glass. Those who governed Egypt in
the lost centuries and were never known except by history, by the papyri
inscribed with hieroglyphics, brought thus together, how many things
will they have to say to one another, how many ardent questions to
ask about their loves, about their crimes! As soon as we shall have
departed, nay, as soon as our lantern, at the end of the long galleries,
shall seem no more than a foolish, vanishing spot of fire, will not the
“forms” of whom the attendants are so afraid, will they not start
their nightly rumblings and in their hollow mummy voices, whisper, with
difficulty, words? . . .
Heavens! How dark it is! Yet our lantern has not gone out. But it seems
to grow darker and darker. And at night, when all is shut up, how one
smells the odour of the oils in which the shrouds are saturated, and,
more intolerable still, the sickly stealthy stench, almost, of all these
dead bodies! . . .
As I traverse the obscurity of these endless halls, a vague instinct of
self-preservation induces me to turn back again, and look behind. And
it seems to me that already the woman with the baby is slowly raising
herself, with a thousand precautions and stratagems, her head still
completely covered. While farther down, that dishevelled hair. . . . Oh!
I can see her well, sitting up with a sudden jerk, the ghoul with the
enamel eyes, the lady Nsitanebashru!