AN AUDIENCE OF AMENOPHIS II.
King Amenophis II. has resumed his receptions, which he found himself
obliged to suspend for three thousand, three hundred and some odd years,
by reason of his decease. They are very well attended; court dress
is not insisted upon, and the Grand Master of ceremonies is not above
taking a tip. He holds them every morning in the winter from eight
o'clock, in the bowels of a mountain in the desert of Libya; and if he
rests himself during the remainder of the day it is only because, as
soon as midday sounds, they turn off the electric light.
Happy Amenophis! Out of so many kings who tried so hard to hide for ever
their mummies in the depths of impenetrable caverns he is the only one
who has been left in his tomb. And he “makes the most of it” every time
he opens his funeral salons.
*****
It is important to arrive before midday at the dwelling of this Pharaoh,
and at eight o'clock sharp, therefore, on a clear February morning,
I set out from Luxor, where for many days my dahabiya had slumbered
against the bank of the Nile. It is necessary first of all to cross the
river, for the Theban kings of the Middle Empire all established their
eternal habitations on the opposite bank--far beyond the plains of the
river shore, right away in those mountains which bound the horizon
as with a wall of adorable rose-colour. Other canoes, which are
also crossing, glide by the side of mine on the tranquil water. The
passengers seem to belong to that variety of Anglo-Saxons which is
equipped by Thomas Cook & Sons (Egypt Ltd.), and like me, no doubt, they
are bound for the royal presence.
We land on the sand of the opposite bank, which to-day is almost
deserted. Formerly there stretched here a regular suburb of
Thebes--that, namely, of the preparers of mummies, with thousands of
ovens wherein to heat the natron and the oils, which preserved the
bodies from corruption. In this Thebes, where for some fifty centuries,
everything that died, whether man or beast, was minutely prepared and
swathed in bandages, it will readily be understood what importance this
quarter of the embalmers came to assume. And it was to the neighbouring
mountains that the products of so many careful wrappings were borne for
burial, while the Nile carried away the blood from the bodies and the
filth of their entrails. That chain of living rocks that rises before
us, coloured each morning with the same rose, as of a tender flower, is
literally stuffed with dead bodies.
We have to cross a wide plain before reaching the mountains, and on
our way cornfields alternate with stretches of sand already desertlike.
Behind us extends the old Nile and the opposite bank which we have
lately quitted--the bank of Luxor, whose gigantic Pharaonic colonnades
are as it were lengthened below by their own reflection in the mirror of
the river. And in this radiant morning, in this pure light, it would be
admirable, this eternal temple, with its image reversed in the depth of
the blue water, were it not that at its sides, and to twice its height,
rises the impudent Winter Palace, that monster hotel built last year
for the fastidious tourists. And yet, who knows? The jackanapes who
deposited this abomination on the sacred soil of Egypt perhaps imagines
that he equals the merit of the artist who is now restoring the
sanctuaries of Thebes, or even the glory of the Pharaohs who built them.
As we draw nearer to the chain of Libya, where this king awaits us, we
traverse fields still green with growing corn--and sparrows and larks
sing around us in the impetuous spring of this land of Thebes.
And now beyond two menhirs, as it were, become gradually distinct. Of
the same height and shape, alike indeed in every respect, they rise side
by side in the clear distance in the midst of these green plains, which
recall so well our fields of France. They wear the headgear of the
Sphinx, and are gigantic human forms seated on thrones--the colossal
statues of Memnon. We recognise them at once, for the picture-makers
of succeeding ages have popularised their aspect, as in the case of the
pyramids. What is strange is that they should stand there so simply in
the midst of these fields of growing corn, which reach to their very
feet, and be surrounded by these humble birds we know so well, who sing
without ceremony on their shoulders.
They do not seem to be scandalised even at seeing now, passing quite
close to them, the trucks of a playful little railway belonging to a
local industry, that are laden with sugar-canes and gourds.
The chain of Libya, during the last hour, has been growing gradually
larger against the profound and excessively blue sky. And now that it
rises up quite near to us, overheated, and as it were incandescent,
under this ten o'clock sun, we begin to see on all sides, in front
of the first rocky spurs of the mountains, the debris of palaces,
colonnades, staircases and pylons. Headless giants, swathed like dead
Pharaohs, stand upright, with hands crossed beneath their shroud of
sandstone. They are the temples and statues for the manes of numberless
kings and queens, who during three or four thousand years had their
mummies buried hard by in the heart of the mountains, in the deepest of
the walled and secret galleries.
And now the cornfields have ceased; there is no longer any
herbage--nothing. We have crossed the desolate threshold, we are in the
desert, and tread suddenly upon a disquieting funereal soil, half sand,
half ashes, that is pitted on all sides with gaping holes. It looks like
some region that had long been undermined by burrowing beasts. But it is
men who, for more than fifty centuries, have vexed this ground, first
to hide the mummies in it, and afterwards, and until our day, to exhume
them. Each of these holes has enclosed its corpse, and if you peer
within you may see yellow-coloured rags still trailing there; and
bandages, or legs and vertebrae of thousands of years ago. Some lean
Bedouins, who exercise the office of excavators, and sleep hard by in
holes like jackals, advance to sell us scarabaei, blue-glass trinkets
that are half fossilised, and feet or hands of the dead.
And now farewell to the fresh morning. Every minute the heat becomes
more oppressive. The pathway that is marked only by a row of stones
turns at last and leads into the depths of the mountain by a tragical
passage. We enter now into that “Valley of the Kings” which was the
place of the last rendezvous of the most august mummies. The breaths of
air that reach us between these rocks are become suddenly burning, and
the site seems to belong no longer to earth but to some calcined planet
which had for ever lost its clouds and atmosphere. This Libyan chain,
in the distance so delicately rose, is positively frightful now that
it overhangs us. It looks what it is--an enormous and fantastic tomb, a
natural necropolis, whose vastness and horror nothing human could
equal, an ideal stove for corpses that wanted to endure for ever.
The limestone, on which for that matter no rain ever falls from the
changeless sky, looks to be in one single piece from summit to base, and
betrays no crack or crevice by which anything might penetrate into the
sepulchres within. The dead could sleep, therefore, in the heart of
these monstrous blocks as sheltered as under vaults of lead. And of what
there is of magnificence the centuries have taken care. The continual
passage of winds laden with dust has scaled and worn away the face of
the rocks, so as to leave only the denser veins of stone, and thus
have reappeared strange architectural fantasies such as Matter, in the
beginning, might have dimly conceived. Subsequently the sun of Egypt has
lavished on the whole its ardent reddish patines. And now the mountains
imitate in places great organ-pipes, badigeoned with yellow and carmine,
and elsewhere huge bloodstained skeletons and masses of dead flesh.
Outlined upon the excessive blue of the sky, the summits, illumined
to the point of dazzling, rise up in the light--like red cinders of a
glowing fire, splendours of living coal, against the pure indigo that
turns almost to darkness. We seem to be walking in some valley of the
Apocalypse with flaming walls. Silence and death, beneath a transcendent
clearness, in the constant radiance of a kind of mournful apotheosis--it
was such surroundings as these that the Egyptians chose for their
necropoles.
The pathway plunges deeper and deeper in the stifling defiles, and
at the end of this “Valley of the Kings,” under the sun now nearly
meridian, which grows each minute more mournful and terrible, we
expected to come upon a dread silence. But what is this?
At a turning, beyond there, at the bottom of a sinister-looking recess,
what does this crowd of people, what does this uproar mean? Is it a
meeting, a fair? Under awnings to protect them from the sun stand some
fifty donkeys, saddled in the English fashion. In a corner an electrical
workshop, built of new bricks, shoots forth the black smoke, and all
about, between the high blood-coloured walls, coming and going, making a
great stir and gabbling to their hearts' content, are a number of Cook's
tourists of both sexes, and some even who verily seem to have no sex
at all. They are come for the royal audience; some on asses, some in
jaunting cars, and some, the stout ladies who are grown short of wind,
in chairs carried by the Bedouins. From the four points of Europe they
have assembled in this desert ravine to see an old dried-up corpse at
the bottom of a hole.
Here and there the hidden palaces reveal their dark, square-shaped
entrances, hewn in the massive rock, and over each a board indicates the
name of a kingly mummy--Ramses IV., Seti I., Thothmes III., Ramses IX.,
etc. Although all these kings, except Amenophis II., have recently been
removed and carried away to Lower Egypt, to people the glass cases of
the museum of Cairo, their last dwellings have not ceased to attract
crowds. From each underground habitation are emerging now a number of
perspiring Cooks and Cookesses. And from that of Amenophis, especially,
they issue rapidly. Suppose that we have come too late and that the
audience is over!
And to think that these entrances had been walled up, had been masked
with so much care, and lost for centuries! And of all the perseverance
that was needed to discover them, the observation, the gropings, the
soundings and random discoveries!
But now they are being closed. We loitered too long around the colossi
of Memnon and the palaces of the plain. It is nearly noon, a noon
consuming and mournful, which falls perpendicularly upon the red
summits, and is burning to its deepest recesses the valley of stone.
At the door of Amenophis we have to cajole, beseech. By the help of a
gratuity the Bedouin Grand Master of Ceremonies allows himself to be
persuaded. We are to descend with him, but quickly, quickly, for the
electric light will soon be extinguished. It will be a short audience,
but at least it will be a private one. We shall be alone with the king.
In the darkness, where at first, after so much sunlight, the little
electric lamps seem to us scarcely more than glow-worms, we expected a
certain amount of chilliness as in the undergrounds of our climate. But
here there is only a more oppressive heat, stifling and withering, and
we long to return to the open air, which was burning indeed, but was at
least the air of life.
Hastily we descend: by steep staircases, by passages which slope so
rapidly that they hurry us along of themselves, like slides; and it
seems that we shall never ascend again, any more than the great mummy
who passed here so long ago on his way to his eternal chamber. All this
brings us, first of all, to a deep well--dug there to swallow up the
desecrators in their passage--and it is on one of the sides of this
oubliette, behind a casual stone carefully sealed, that the continuation
of these funeral galleries was discovered. Then, when we have passed
the well, by a narrow bridge that has been thrown across it, the stairs
begin again, and the steep passages that almost make you run; but
now, by a sharp bend, they have changed their direction. And still we
descend, descend. Heavens! how deep down this king dwells! And at each
step of our descent we feel more and more imprisoned under the sovereign
mass of stone, in the centre of all this compact and silent thickness.
*****
The little electric globes, placed apart like a garland, suffice now for
our eyes which have forgotten the sun. And we can distinguish around us
myriad figures inviting us to solemnity and silence. They are inscribed
everywhere on the smooth, spotless walls of the colour of old ivory.
They follow one another in regular order, repeating themselves
obstinately in parallel rows, as if the better to impose upon our
spirit, with gestures and symbols that are eternally the same. The gods
and demons, the representatives of Anubis, with his black jackal's head
and his long erect ears, seem to make signs to us with their long
arms and long fingers: “No noise! Look, there are mummies here!” The
wonderful preservation of all this, the vivid colours, the clearness of
the outlines, begin to cause a kind of stupor and bewilderment. Verily
you would think that the painter of these figures of the shades had only
just quitted the hypogeum. All this past seems to draw you to itself
like an abyss to which you have approached too closely. It surrounds
you, and little by little masters you. It is so much at home here that
it has _remained the present_. Over and above the mere descent into the
secret bowels of the rock there has been a kind of seizure with vertigo,
which we had not anticipated and which has whirled us far away into the
depths of the ages.
These interminable, oppressive passages, by which we have crawled to the
innermost depths of the mountain, lead at length to something vast, the
walls divide, the vault expands and we are in the great funeral hall,
of which the blue ceiling, all bestrewn with stars like the sky, is
supported by six pillars hewn in the rock itself. On either side open
other chambers into which the electricity permits us to see quite
clearly, and opposite, at the end of the hall, a large crypt is
revealed, which one divines instinctively must be the resting-place of
the Pharaoh. What a prodigious labour must have been entailed by this
perforation of the living rock! And this hypogeum is not unique. All
along the “Valley of the Kings” little insignificant doors--which to
the initiated reveal the “Sign of the Shadow,” inscribed on their
lintels--lead to other subterranean places, just as sumptuous and
perfidiously profound, with their snares, their hidden wells, their
oubliettes and the bewildering multiplicity of their mural figures. And
all these tombs this morning were full of people, and, if we had not
had the good fortune to arrive after the usual hour, we should have
met here, even in this dwelling of Amenophis, a battalion equipped by
Messrs. Cook.
In this hall, with its blue ceiling, the frescoes multiply their
riddles: scenes from the book of Hades, all the funeral ritual
translated into pictures. On the pillars and walls crowd the different
demons that an Egyptian soul was likely to meet in its passage through
the country of shadows, and underneath the passwords which were to be
given to each of them are recapitulated so as not to be forgotten.
For the soul used to depart simultaneously under the two forms of a
flame[*] and a falcon[+] respectively. And this country of shadows,
called also the west, to which it had to render itself, was that where
the moon sinks and where each evening the sun goes down; a country to
which the living were never able to attain, because it fled before them,
however fast they might travel across the sands or over the waters. On
its arrival there, the scared soul had to parley successively with the
fearsome demons who lay in wait for it along its route. If at last
it was judged worthy to approach Osiris, the great Dead Sun, it was
subsumed in him and reappeared, shining over the world the next morning
and on all succeeding mornings until the consummation of time--a vague
survival in the solar splendour, a continuation without personality, of
which one is scarcely able to say whether or not it was more desirable
than eternal non-existence.
[*] The Khou, which never returned to our world.
[+] The Bai, which might, at its will, revisit the tomb.
And, moreover, it was necessary to preserve the body at whatever cost,
for a certain _double_ of the dead man continued to dwell in the dry
flesh, and retained a kind of half life, barely conscious. Lying at the
bottom of the sarcophagus it was able to see, by virtue of those two
eyes, which were painted on the lid, always in the same axis as the
empty eyes of the mummy. Sometimes, too, this _double_, escaping from
the mummy and its box, used to wander like a phantom about the hypogeum.
And, in order that at such times it might be able to obtain nourishment,
a mass of mummified viands wrapped in bandages were amongst the thousand
and one things buried at its side. Even natron and oils were left,
so that it might re-embalm itself, if the worms came to life in its
members.
Oh! the persistence of this _double_, sealed there in the tomb, a prey
to anxiety, lest corruption should take hold of it; which had to serve
its long duration in suffocating darkness, in absolute silence, without
anything to mark the days and nights, or the seasons or the centuries,
or the tens of centuries without end! It was with such a terrible
conception of death as this that each one in those days was absorbed in
the preparation of his eternal chamber.
And for Amenophis II. this more or less is what happened to his
_double_. Unaccustomed to any kind of noise, after three or four hundred
years passed in the company of certain familiars, lulled in the same
heavy slumber as himself, he heard the sound of muffled blows in the
distance, by the side of the hidden well. The secret entrance was
discovered: men were breaking through its walls! Living beings were
about to appear, pillagers of tombs, no doubt, come to unswathe them
all! But no! Only some priests of Osiris, advancing with fear in a
funeral procession. They brought nine great coffins containing the
mummies of nine kings, his sons, grandsons and other unknown successors,
down to that King Setnakht, who governed Egypt two and a half centuries
after him. It was simply to hide them better that they brought them
hither, and placed them all together in a chamber that was immediately
walled up. Then they departed. The stones of the door were sealed
afresh, and everything fell again into the old mournful and burning
darkness.
Slowly the centuries rolled on--perhaps ten, perhaps twenty--in a
silence no longer even disturbed by the scratchings of the worms, long
since dead. And a day came when, at the side of the entrance, the same
blows were heard again. . . . And this time it was the robbers. Carrying
torches in their hands, they rushed headlong in, with shouts and cries
and, except in the safe hiding-place of the nine coffins, everything was
plundered, the bandages torn off, the golden trinkets snatched from
the necks of the mummies. Then, when they had sorted their booty,
they walled up the entrance as before, and went their way, leaving an
inextricable confusion of shrouds, of human bodies, of entrails issuing
from shattered vases, of broken gods and emblems.
Afterwards, for long centuries, there was silence again, and finally,
in our days, the _double_, then in its last weakness and almost
non-existent, perceived the same noise of stones being unsealed by blows
of pickaxes. The third time, the living men who entered were of a race
never seen before. At first they seemed respectful and pious, only
touching things gently. But they came to plunder everything, even the
nine coffins in their still inviolate hiding-place. They gathered the
smallest fragments with a solicitude almost religious. That they might
lose nothing they even sifted the rubbish and the dust. But, as for
Amenophis, who was already nothing more than a lamentable mummy, without
jewels or bandages, they left him at the bottom of his sarcophagus of
sandstone. And since that day, doomed to receive each morning numerous
people of a strange aspect, he dwells alone in his hypogeum, where there
is now neither a being nor a thing belonging to his time.
But yes, there is! We had not looked all round. There in one of the
lateral chambers some bodies are lying, dead bodies--three corpses
(unswathed at the time of the pillage), side by side on their rags.
First, a woman, the queen probably, with loosened hair. Her profile has
preserved its exquisite lines. How beautiful she still is! And then a
young boy with the little greyish face of a doll. His head is shaved,
except for that long curl at the right side, which denotes a prince of
the royal blood. And the third a man. Ugh! How terrible he is--looking
as if he found death a thing irresistibly comical. He even writhes with
laughter, and eats a corner of his shroud as if to prevent himself from
bursting into a too unseemly mirth.
And then, suddenly, black night! And we stand as if congealed in our
place. The electric light has gone out--everywhere at once. Above, on
the earth, midday must have sounded--for those who still have cognisance
of the sun and the hours.
The guard who has brought us hither shouts in his Bedouin falsetto, in
order to get the light switched on again, but the infinite thickness of
the walls, instead of prolonging the vibrations, seems to deaden them;
and besides, who could hear us, in the depths where we now are? Then,
groping in the absolute darkness, he makes his way up the sloping
passage. The hurried patter of his sandals and the flapping of his
burnous grow faint in the distance, and the cries that he continues to
utter sound so smothered to us soon that we might ourselves be buried.
And meanwhile we do not move. But how comes it that it is so hot amongst
these mummies? It seems as if there were fires burning in some oven
close by. And above all there is a want of air. Perhaps the corridors,
after our passage, have contracted, as happens sometimes in the anguish
of dreams. Perhaps the long fissure by which we have crawled hither,
perhaps it has closed in upon us.
But at length the cries of alarm are heard and the light is turned on
again. The three corpses have not profited by the unguarded moments to
attempt any aggressive movement. Their positions, their expressions have
not changed: the queen calm and beautiful as ever; the man eating
still the corner of his rags to stifle the mad laughter of thirty-three
centuries.
The Bedouin is now returned, breathless from his journey. He urges us
to come to see the king before the electric light is again extinguished,
and this time for good and all. Behold us now at the end of the hall, on
the edge of a dark crypt, leaning over and peering within. It is a place
oval in form, with a vault of a funereal black, relieved by frescoes,
either white or of the colour of ashes. They represent, these frescoes,
a whole new register of gods and demons, some slim and sheathed narrowly
like mummies, others with big heads and big bellies like hippopotami.
Placed on the ground and watched from above by all these figures is an
enormous sarcophagus of stone, wide open; and in it we can distinguish
vaguely the outline of a human body: the Pharaoh!
At least we should have liked to see him better. The necessary light is
forthcoming at once: the Bedouin Grand Master of Ceremonies touches an
electric button and a powerful lamp illumines the face of Amenophis,
detailing with a clearness that almost frightens you the closed
eyes, the grimacing countenance, and the whole of the sad mummy. This
theatrical effect took us by surprise; we were not prepared for it.
He was buried in magnificence, but the pillagers have stripped him of
everything, even of his beautiful breastplate of tortoiseshell, which
came to him from a far-off Oriental country, and for many centuries
now he has slept half naked on his rags. But his poor bouquet is there
still--of mimosa, recognisable even now, and who will ever tell what
pious or perhaps amorous hand it was that gathered these flowers for him
more than three thousand years ago.
The heat is suffocating. The whole crushing mass of this mountain, of
this block of limestone, into which we have crawled through relatively
imperceptible holes, like white ants or larvae, seems to weigh upon our
chest. And these figures too, inscribed on every side, and this mystery
of the hieroglyphs and the symbols, cause a growing uneasiness. You are
too near them, they seem too much the masters of the exits, these gods
with their heads of falcon, ibis and jackal, who, on the walls, converse
in a continual exalted pantomime. And then the feeling comes over
you, that you are guilty of sacrilege standing there, before this open
coffin, in this unwonted insolent light. The dolorous, blackish face,
half eaten away, seems to ask for mercy: “Yes, yes, my sepulchre has
been violated and I am returning to dust. But now that you have seen me,
leave me, turn out that light, have pity on my nothingness.”
In sooth, what a mockery! To have taken so many pains, to have adopted
so many stratagems to hide his corpse; to have exhausted thousands of
men in the hewing of this underground labyrinth, and to end thus, with
his head in the glare of an electric lamp, to amuse whoever passes.
And out of pity--I think it was the poor bouquet of mimosa that awakened
it--I say to the Bedouin: “Yes, put out the light, put it out--that is
enough.”
And then the darkness returns above the royal countenance, which is
suddenly effaced in the sarcophagus. The phantom of the Pharaoh is
vanished, as if replunged into the unfathomable past. The audience is
over.
And we, who are able to escape from the horror of the hypogeum, reascend
rapidly towards the sunshine of the living, we go to breathe the air
again, the air to which we have still a right--for some few days longer.