IN THE TOMBS OF THE APIS
The dwelling-places of the Apis, in the grim darkness beneath the
Memphite desert, are, as all the world knows, monster coffins of black
granite ranged in catacombs, hot and stifling as eternal stoves.
To reach them from the banks of the Nile we have first to traverse
the low region which the inundations of the ancient river, regularly
repeated since the beginning of time, have rendered propitious to
the growth of plants and to the development of men; an hour or two's
journey, this evening through forests of date-trees whose beautiful
palms temper the light of the March sun, which is now half veiled in
clouds and already declining. In the distance herds are grazing in the
cool shade. And we meet fellahs leading back from the field towards the
village on the river-bank their little donkeys, laden with sheaves
of corn. The air is mild and wholesome under the high tufts of these
endless green plumes, which move in the warm wind almost without noise.
We seem to be in some happy land, where the pastoral life should be
easy, and even a little paradisiacal.
But beyond, in front of us, quite a different world is gradually
revealed. Its aspect assumes the importance of a menace from the
unknown; it awes us like an apparition of chaos, of universal death.
. . . It is the desert, the conquering desert, in the midst of which
inhabited Egypt, the green valleys of the Nile, trace merely a narrow
ribbon. And here, more than elsewhere, the sight of this sovereign
desert rising up before us is startling and thrilling, so high up it
seems, and we so low in the Edenlike valley shaded by the palms. With
its yellow hues, its livid marblings, and its sands which make it look
somehow as if it lacked consistency, it rises on the whole horizon like
a kind of soft wall or a great fearsome cloud--or rather, like a long
cataclysmic wave, which does not move indeed, but which, if it did,
would overwhelm and swallow everything. It is the _Memphite desert_--a
place, that is to say, such as does not exist elsewhere on earth; a
fabulous necropolis, in which men of earlier times, heaped up for some
three thousand years the embalmed bodies of their dead, exaggerating, as
time went on, the foolish grandeur of their tombs. Now, above the sand
which looks like the front of some great tidal wave arrested in its
progress, we see on all sides, and far into the distance, triangles of
superhuman proportions which were once the tombs of mummies; pyramids,
still upright, all of them, on their sinister pedestal of sand. Some
are comparatively near; others almost lost in the background of the
solitudes--and perhaps more awesome in that they are merely outlined in
grey, high up among the clouds.
*****
The little carriages that have brought us to the necropolis of Memphis,
through the interminable forest of palm-trees, had their wheels fitted
with large pattens for their journey over the sand.
Now, arrived at the foot of the fearsome region, we commence to climb
a hill where all at once the trot of our horses ceases to be heard; the
moving felting of the soil establishes a sudden silence around us, as
indeed is always the case when we reach these sands. It seems as if it
were a silence of respect which the desert itself imposes.
The valley of life sinks and fades behind us, until at last it
disappears, hidden by a line of sandhills--the first wave, as one might
say, of this waterless sea--and we are now mounted into the kingdom of
the dead, swept at this moment by a withering and almost icy wind, which
from below one would not have expected.
This desert of Memphis has not yet been profaned by hotels or motor
roads, such as we have seen in the “little desert” of the Sphinx--whose
three pyramids indeed we can discern at the extreme limit of the view,
prolonging almost to infinity for our eyes this domain of mummies. There
is nobody to be seen, nor any indication of the present day, amongst
these mournful undulations of yellow or pale grey sand, in which we seem
lost as in the swell of an ocean. The sky is cloudy--such as you can
scarcely imagine the sky of Egypt. And in this immense nothingness of
sand and stones, which stands out now more clearly against the clouds
on the horizon, there is nothing anywhere save the silhouettes of those
eternal triangles; the pyramids, gigantic things which rise here and
there at hazard, some half in ruin, others almost intact and preserving
still their sharp point. To-day they are the only landmarks of this
necropolis, which is nearly six miles in length, and was formerly
covered by temples of a magnificence and a vastness unimaginable to the
minds of our day. Except for one which is quite near us (the fantastic
grandfather of the others, that of King Zoser, who died nearly
5000 years ago), except for this one, which is made of six colossal
superposed terraces, they are all built after that same conception of
the _Triangle_, which is at once the most mysteriously simple figure
of geometry, and the strongest and most permanently stable form of
architecture. And now that there remains no trace of the frescoed
portraits which used to adorn them, nor of their multicoloured coatings,
now that they have taken on the same dead colour as the desert, they
look like the huge bones of giant fossils, that have long outlasted
their other contemporaries on earth. Beneath the ground, however, the
case is different; there, still remain the bodies of men, and even
of cats and birds, who with their own eyes saw these vast structures
building, and who sleep intact, swathed in bandages, in the darkness
of their tunnels. _We know_, for we have penetrated there before, what
things are hidden in the womb of this old desert, on which the yellow
shroud of the sand grows thicker and thicker as the centuries pass.
The whole deep rock had been perforated patiently to make hypogea and
sepulchral chambers, great and small, and veritable palaces for the
dead, adorned with innumerable painted figures. And though now, for
some two thousand years, men have set themselves furiously to exhume
the sarcophagi and the treasures that are buried here, the subterranean
reserves are not yet exhausted. There still remain, no doubt, pleiads of
undisturbed sleepers, who will never be discovered.
As we advance the wind grows stronger and colder beneath a sky that
becomes increasingly cloudy, and the sand is flying on all sides. The
sand is the undisputed sovereign of the necropolis; if it does not surge
and roll like some enormous tidal wave, as it appears to do when seen
from the green valley below, it nevertheless covers everything with an
obstinate persistence which has continued since the beginning of time.
Already at Memphis it has buried innumerable statues and colossi and
temples of the Sphinx. It comes without a pause, from Libya, from the
great Sahara, which contain enough to powder the universe. It harmonises
well with the tall skeletons of the pyramids, which form immutable rocks
on its always shifting extent; and if one thinks of it, it gives a more
thrilling sense of anterior eternities even than all these Egyptian
ruins, which, in comparison with it, are things of yesterday. The
sand--the sand of the primitive seas--which represents a labour of
erosion of a duration impossible to conceive, and bears witness to a
continuity of destruction which, one might say, had no beginning.
Here, in the midst of these solitudes, is a humble habitation, old and
half buried in sand, at which we have to stop. It was once the house
of the Egyptologist Mariette, and still shelters the director of the
excavations, from whom we have to obtain permission to descend amongst
the Apis. The whitewashed room in which he receives us is encumbered
with the age-old debris which he is continually bringing to light. The
parting rays of the sun, which shines low down from between two clouds,
enter through a window opening on to the surrounding desolation; and the
light comes mournfully, yellowed by the sand and the evening.
The master of the house, while his Bedouin servants are gone to open and
light up for us the underground habitations of the Apis, shows us his
latest astonishing find, made this morning in a hypogeum of one of the
most ancient dynasties. It is there on a table, a group of little people
of wood, of the size of the marionettes of our theatres. And since it
was the custom to put in a tomb only those figures or objects which were
most pleasing to him who dwelt in it, the man-mummy to whom this toy
was offered in times anterior to all precise chronology must have been
extremely partial to dancing-girls. In the middle of the group the man
himself is represented, sitting in an armchair, and on his knee he holds
his favourite dancing-girl. Other girls posture before him in a dance
of the period; and on the ground sit musicians touching tambourines and
strangely fashioned harps. All wear their hair in a long plait, which
falls below their shoulders like the pigtail of the Chinese. It was
the distinguishing mark of these kinds of courtesans. And these little
people had kept their pose in the darkness for some three thousand years
before the commencement of the Christian era. . . . In order to show it
to us better the group is brought to the window, and the mournful light
which enters from across the infinite solitudes of the desert colours
them yellow and shows us in detail their little doll-like attitudes
and their comical and frightened appearance--frightened perhaps to find
themselves so old and issuing from so deep a night. They had not seen a
setting of the sun, such as they now regard with their queer eyes, too
long and too wide oepn, they had not seen such a thing for some five
thousand years. . . .
The habitation of the Apis, the lords of the necropolis, is little more
than two hundred yards away. We are told that the place is now lighted
up and that we may betake ourselves thither.
The descent is by a narrow, rapidly sloping passage, dug in the soil,
between banks of sand and broken stones. We are now completely sheltered
from the bitter wind which blows across the desert, and from the dark
doorway that opens before us comes a breath of air as from an oven. It
is always dry and hot in the underground funeral places of Egypt, which
make indeed admirable stoves for mummies. The threshold once crossed we
are plunged first of all in darkness and, preceded by a lantern, make
our way, by devious turnings, over large flagstones, passing obelisks,
fallen blocks of stone and other gigantic debris, in a heat that
continually increases.
At last the principal artery of the hypogeum appears, a thoroughfare
more than five hundred yards long, cut in the rock, where the Bedouins
have prepared for us the customary feeble light.
It is a place of fearful aspect. As soon as one enters one is seized
by the sense of a mournfulness beyond words, by an oppression as of
something too heavy, too crushing, almost superhuman. The impotent
little flames of the candles, placed in a row, in groups of fifty, on
tripods of wood from one end of the route to the other, show on the
right and left of the immense avenue rectangular sepulchral caverns,
containing each a black coffin, but a coffin as if for a mastodon.
And all these coffins, so sombre and so alike, are square shaped too,
severely simple like so many boxes; but made out of a single block
of rare granite that gleams like marble. They are entirely without
ornament. It is necessary to look closely to distinguish on the smooth
walls the hieroglyphic inscriptions, the rows of little figures, little
owls, little jackals, that tell in a lost language the history of
ancient peoples. Here is the signature of King Amasis; beyond, that of
King Cambyses. . . . Who were the Titans who, century after century,
were able to hew these coffins (they are at least twelve feet long by
ten feet high), and, having hewn them, to carry them underground (they
weigh on an average between sixty and seventy tons), and finally to
range them in rows here in these strange chambers, where they stand as
if in ambuscade on either side of us as we pass? Each in its turn has
contained quite comfortably the mummy of a bull Apis, armoured in plates
of gold. But in spite of their weight, in spite of their solidity which
effectively defies destruction, they have been despoiled[*]--when is
not precisely known, probably by the soldiers of the King of Persia.
And this notwithstanding that merely to open them represents a labour
of astonishing strength and patience. In some cases the thieves have
succeeded, by the aid of levers, in moving a few inches the formidable
lid; in others, by persevering with blows of pickaxes, they have
pierced, in the thickness of the granite, a hole through which a man has
been enabled to crawl like a rat, or a worm, and then, groping his way,
to plunder the sacred mummy.
[*] One, however, remains intact in the walled cavern, and
thus preserves for us the only Apis which has come down to
our days. And one recalls the emotion of Mariette, when, on
entering it, he saw on the sandy ground the imprint of the
naked feet of the last Egyptian who left it thirty-seven
centuries before.
What strikes us most of all in the colossal hypogeum is the meeting
there, in the middle of the stairway by which we leave, with yet another
black coffin, which lies across our path as if to bar it. It is as
monstrous and as simple as the others, its seniors, which many centuries
before, as the deified bulls died, had commenced to line the great
straight thoroughfare. But this one has never reached its place and
never held its mummy. It was the last. Even while men were slowly
rolling it, with tense muscles and panting cries, towards what might
well have seemed its eternal chamber, others gods were born, and the
cult of the Apis had come to an end--suddenly, then and there! Such a
fate may happen indeed to each and all of the religions and institutions
of men, even to those most deeply rooted in their hearts and their
ancestral past. . . . That perhaps is the most disturbing of all our
positive notions: to know that there will be a _last_ of all things,
not only a last temple, and a last priest, but a last birth of a human
child, a last sunrise, a last day. . . .
*****
In these hot catacombs we had forgotten the cold wind that blew outside,
and the physiognomy of the Memphite desert, the aspects of horror that
were awaiting us above had vanished from our mind. Sinister as it is
under a blue sky, this desert becomes absolutely intolerable to look
upon if by chance the sky is cloudy when the daylight fails.
On our return to it, from the subterranean darkness, everything in its
dead immensity has begun to take on the blue tint of the night. On the
top of the sandhills, of which the yellow colour has greatly paled since
we went below, the wind amuses itself by raising little vortices of sand
that imitate the spray of an angry sea. On all sides dark clouds stretch
themselves as at the moment of our descent. The horizon detaches itself
more and more clearly from them, and, farther towards the east, it
actually seems to be tilted up; one of the highest of the waves of this
waterless sea, a mountain of sand whose soft contours are deceptive in
the distance, makes it look as if it sloped towards us, so as almost to
produce a sensation of vertigo. The sun itself has deigned to remain on
the scene a few seconds longer, held beyond its time by the effect of
mirage; but it is so changed behind its thick veils that we would prefer
that it should not be there. Of the colour of dying embers, it seems
too near and too large; it has ceased to give any light, and is become a
mere rose-coloured globe, that is losing its shape and becoming oval.
No longer in the free heavens, but stranded there on the extreme edge of
the desert, it watches the scene like a large dull eye, about to close
itself in death. And the mysterious superhuman triangles, they too, of
course, are there, waiting for us on our return from underground, some
near, some far, posted in their eternal places; but surely they have
grown gradually more blue. . . .
Such a night, in such a place, it seems the _last_ night.