IV

And this word ‘soul’ remained with me to the end. Egypt was taking his

soul away into the Past. What was of value in him went willingly; the

rest, some lesser aspect of his mind and character, resisted, holding

to the present. A struggle, therefore, was involved. But this was being

gradually obliterated too.

How I arrived gaily at this monstrous conclusion seems to me now a

mystery; but the truth is that from a conversation one brings away a

general idea that is larger than the words actually heard and spoken.

I have reported, naturally, but a fragment of what passed between

us in language, and of what was suggested--by gesture, expression,

silence--merely perhaps a hint. I can only assert that this troubling

verdict remained a conviction in my mind. It came upstairs with me;

it watched and listened by my side. That mysterious Third evoked in

our conversation was bigger than either of us separately; it might

be called the spirit of ancient Egypt, or it might be called with

equal generalisation, the Past. This Third, at any rate, stood by me,

whispering this astounding thing. I went out on to my little balcony

to smoke a pipe and enjoy the comforting presence of the stars before

turning in. It came out with me. It was everywhere. I heard the barking

of dogs, the monotonous beating of a distant drum towards Bedraschien,

the sing-song voices of the natives in their booths and down the

dim-lit streets. I was aware of this invisible Third behind all these

familiar sounds. The enormous night-sky, drowned in stars, conveyed

it too. It was in the breath of chilly wind that whispered round the

walls, and it brooded everywhere above the sleepless desert. I was

alone as little as though George Isley stood beside me in person--and

at that moment a moving figure caught my eye below. My window was on

the sixth story, but there was no mistaking the tall and soldierly

bearing of the man who was strolling past the hotel. George Isley was

going slowly out into the desert.

There was actually nothing unusual in the sight. It was only ten

o’clock; but for doctor’s orders I might have been doing the same

myself. Yet, as I leaned over the dizzy ledge and watched him, a chill

struck through me, and a feeling nothing could justify, nor pages of

writing describe, rose up and mastered me. His words at dinner came

back with curious force. Egypt lay round him, motionless, a vast grey

web. His feet were caught in it. It quivered. The silvery meshes in

the moonlight announced the fact from Memphis up to Thebes, across the

Nile, from underground Sakkhâra to the Valley of the Kings. A tremor

ran over the entire desert, and again, as in the dining-room, the

leagues of sand went rustling. It seemed to me that I caught him in the

act of disappearing.

I realised in that moment the haunting power of this mysterious still

atmosphere which is Egypt, and some magical emanation of its mighty

past broke over me suddenly like a wave. Perhaps in that moment I felt

what he himself felt; the withdrawing suction of the huge spent wave

swept something out of me into the past with it. An indescribable

yearning drew something living from my heart, something that longed

with a kind of burning, searching sweetness for a glory of spiritual

passion that was gone. The pain and happiness of it were more poignant

than may be told, and my present personality--some vital portion of it,

at any rate--wilted before the power of its enticement.

I stood there, motionless as stone, and stared. Erect and steady,

knowing resistance vain, eager to go yet striving to remain, and half

with an air of floating off the ground, he went towards the pale grey

thread which was the track to Suez and the far Red Sea. There came

upon me this strange, deep sense of pity, pathos, sympathy that was

beyond all explanation, and mysterious as a pain in dreams. For a

sense of his awful loneliness stole into me, a loneliness nothing on

this earth could possibly relieve. Robbed of the Present, he sought

this chimera of his soul, an unreal Past. Not even the calm majesty

of this exquisite Egyptian night could soothe the dream away; the

peace and silence were marvellous, the sweet perfume of the desert air

intoxicating; but all these intensified it only.

And though at a loss to explain my own emotion, its poignancy was so

real that a sigh escaped me and I felt that tears lay not too far away.

I watched him, yet felt I had no right to watch. Softly I drew back

from the window with the sensation of eavesdropping upon his privacy;

but before I did so I had seen his outline melt away into the dim world

of sand that began at the very walls of the hotel. He wore a cloak of

green that reached down almost to his heels, and its colour blended

with the silvery surface of the desert’s dark sea-tint. This sheen

first draped and then concealed him. It covered him with a fold of its

mysterious garment that, without seam or binding, veiled Egypt for a

thousand leagues. The desert took him. Egypt caught him in her web. He

was gone.

* * * * *

Sleep for me just then seemed out of the question. The change in _him_

made me feel less sure of myself. To see him thus invertebrate shocked

me. I was aware that I had nerves.

For a long time I sat smoking by the window, my body weary, but my

imagination irritatingly stimulated. The big sign-lights of the hotel

went out; window after window closed below me; the electric standards

in the streets were already extinguished; and Helouan looked like a

child’s white blocks scattered in ruin upon the nursery carpet. It

seemed so wee upon the vast expanse. It lay in a twinkling pattern,

like a cluster of glow-worms dropped into a negligible crease of the

tremendous desert. It peeped up at the stars, a little frightened.

The night was very still. There hung an enormous brooding beauty

everywhere, a hint of the sinister in it that only the brilliance of

the blazing stars relieved. Nothing really slept. Grouped here and

there at intervals about this dun-coloured world stood the everlasting

watchers in solemn, tireless guardianship--the soaring Pyramids, the

Sphinx, the grim Colossi, the empty temples, the long-deserted tombs.

The mind was aware of them, stationed like sentries through the night.

‘This is Egypt; you are actually in Egypt,’ whispered the silence.

‘Eight thousand years of history lie fluttering outside your window.

_She_ lies there underground, sleepless, mighty, deathless, not to be

trifled with. Beware! Or she will change you too!’

My imagination offered this hint: Egypt _is_ difficult to realise. It

remains outside the mind, a fabulous, half-legendary idea. So many

enormous elements together refuse to be assimilated; the heart pauses,

asking for time and breath; the senses reel a little; and in the end

a mental torpor akin to stupefaction creeps upon the brain. With a

sigh the struggle is abandoned and the mind surrenders to Egypt on her

own terms. Alone the diggers and archaeologists, confined to definite

facts, offer successful resistance. My friend’s use of the words

‘resistance’ and ‘protection’ became clearer to me. While logic halted,

intuition fluttered round this clue to the solution of the influences

at work. George Isley realised Egypt more than most--but as she had

been.

And I recalled its first effect upon myself, and how my mind had been

unable to cope with the memory of it afterwards. There had come to

its summons a colossal medley, a gigantic, coloured blur that merely

bewildered. Only lesser points lodged comfortably in the heart. I saw a

chaotic vision: sands drenched in dazzling light, vast granite aisles,

stupendous figures that stared unblinking at the sun, a shining river

and a shadowy desert, both endless as the sky, mountainous pyramids

and gigantic monoliths, armies of heads, of paws, of faces--all set to

a scale of size that was prodigious. The items stunned; the composite

effect was too unwieldy to be grasped. Something that blazed with

splendour rolled before the eyes, too close to be seen distinctly--at

the same time very distant--unrealised.

Then, with the passing of the weeks, it slowly stirred to life. It had

attacked unseen; its grip was quite tremendous; yet it could be neither

told, nor painted, nor described. It flamed up unexpectedly--in the

foggy London streets, at the Club, in the theatre. A sound recalled the

street-cries of the Arabs, a breath of scented air brought back the

heated sand beyond the palm groves. Up rose the huge Egyptian glamour,

transforming common things; it had lain buried all this time in deep

recesses of the heart that are inaccessible to ordinary daily life. And

there hid in it something of uneasiness that was inexplicable; awe, a

hint of cold eternity, a touch of something unchanging and terrific,

something sublime made lovely yet unearthly with shadowy time and

distance. The melancholy of the Nile and the grandeur of a hundred

battered temples dropped some unutterable beauty upon the heart. Up

swept the desert air, the luminous pale shadows, the naked desolation

that yet brims with sharp vitality. An Arab on his donkey tripped in

colour across the mind, melting off into tiny perspective, strangely

vivid. A string of camels stood in silhouette against the crimson

sky. Great winds, great blazing spaces, great solemn nights, great

days of golden splendour rose from the pavement or the theatre-stall,

and London, dim-lit England, the whole of modern life, indeed, seemed

suddenly reduced to a paltry insignificance that produced an aching

longing for the pageantry of those millions of vanished souls. Egypt

rolled through the heart for a moment--and was gone.

I remembered that some such fantastic experience had been mine. Put it

as one may, the fact remains that for certain temperaments Egypt can

rob the Present of some thread of interest that was formerly there.

The memory became for me an integral part of personality; something in

me yearned for its curious and awful beauty. He who has drunk of the

Nile shall return to drink of it again.... And if for myself this was

possible, what might not happen to a character of George Isley’s type?

Some glimmer of comprehension came to me. The ancient, buried, hidden

Egypt had cast her net about his soul. Grown shadowy in the Present,

his life was being transferred into some golden, reconstructed Past,

where it was real. Some countries give, while others take away. And

George Isley was worth robbing....

Disturbed by these singular reflections, I moved away from the open

window, closing it. But the closing did not exclude the presence of

the Third. The biting night air followed me in. I drew the mosquito

curtains round the bed, but the light I left still burning; and, lying

there, I jotted down upon a scrap of paper this curious impression

as best I could, only to find that it escaped easily between the

words. Such visionary and spiritual perceptions are too elusive to

be trapped in language. Reading it over after an interval of years,

it is difficult to recall with what intense meaning, what uncanny

emotion, I wrote those faded lines in pencil. Their rhetoric seems

cheap, their content much exaggerated; yet at the time truth burned

in every syllable. Egypt, which since time began has suffered robbery

with violence at the hands of all the world, now takes her vengeance,

choosing her individual prey. Her time has come. Behind a modern

mask she lies in wait, intensely active, sure of her hidden power.

Prostitute of dead empires, she lies now at peace beneath the same

old stars, her loveliness unimpaired, bejewelled with the beaten gold

of ages, her breasts uncovered, and her grand limbs flashing in the

sun. Her shoulders of alabaster are lifted above the sand-drifts; she

surveys the little figures of to-day. She takes her choice....

That night I did not dream, but neither did the whole of me lie down in

sleep. During the long dark hours I was aware of that picture endlessly

repeating itself, the picture of George Isley stealing out into the

moonlight desert. The night so swiftly dropped her hood about him;

so mysteriously he merged into the unchanging thing which cloaks the

past. It lifted. Some huge shadowy hand, gloved softly yet of granite,

stretched over the leagues to take him. He disappeared.

They say the desert is motionless and has no gestures! That night I

saw it moving, hurrying. It went tearing after him. You understand my

meaning? No! Well, when excited it produces this strange impression,

and the terrible moment is--when you surrender helplessly--you desire

it shall swallow you. You let it come. George Isley spoke of a web. It

is, at any rate, some central power that conceals itself behind the

surface glamour folk call the spell of Egypt. Its home is not apparent.

It dwells with ancient Egypt--underground. Behind the stillness of hot

windless days, behind the peace of calm, gigantic nights, it lurks

unrealised, monstrous and irresistible. My mind grasped it as little as

the fact that our solar system with all its retinue of satellites and

planets rushes annually many million miles towards a star in Hercules,

while yet that constellation appears no closer than it did six thousand

years ago. But the clue dropped into me. George Isley, with his entire

retinue of thought and life and feeling, was being similarly drawn. And

I, a minor satellite, had become aware of the horrifying pull. It was

magnificent.... And I fell asleep on the crest of this enormous wave.

V

The next few days passed idly; weeks passed too, I think; hidden

away in this cosmopolitan hotel we lived apart, unnoticed. There

was the feeling that time went what pace it pleased, now fast, now

slow, now standing still. The similarity of the brilliant days, set

between wondrous dawns and sunsets, left the impression that it was

really one long, endless day without divisions. The mind’s machinery

of measurement suffered dislocation. Time went backwards; dates were

forgotten; the month, the time of year, the century itself went down

into undifferentiated life.

The Present certainly slipped away curiously. Newspapers and politics

became unimportant, news uninteresting, English life so remote as

to be unreal, European affairs shadowy. The stream of life ran in

another direction altogether--backwards. The names and faces of

friends appeared through mist. People arrived as though dropped from

the skies. They suddenly were there; one saw them in the dining-room,

as though they had just slipped in from an outer world that once was

real--somewhere. Of course, a steamer sailed four times a week, and

the journey took five days, but these things were merely known, not

realised. The fact that here it was summer, whereas over there winter

reigned, helped to make the distance not quite thinkable. We looked at

the desert and made plans. ‘We will do this, we will do that; we must

go there, we’ll visit such and such a place ...’ yet nothing happened.

It always was to-morrow or yesterday, and we shared the discovery of

Alice that there was no real ‘to-day.’ For our thinking made everything

happen. That was enough. It _had_ happened. It was the reality of

dreams. Egypt was a dream-world that made the heart live backwards.

It came about, thus, that for the next few weeks I watched a fading

life, myself alert and sympathetic, yet unable somehow to intrude and

help. Noticing various little things by which George Isley betrayed

the progress of the unequal struggle, I found my assistance negatived

by the fact that I was in similar case myself. What he experienced in

large and finally, I, too, experienced in little and for the moment.

For I seemed also caught upon the fringe of the invisible web. My

feelings were entangled sufficiently for me to understand.... And the

decline of his being was terrible to watch. His character went with it;

I saw his talents fade, his personality dwindle, his very soul dissolve

before the insidious and invading influence. He hardly struggled. I

thought of those abominable insects that paralyse the motor systems

of their victims and then devour them at their leisure--alive. The

incredible adventure was literally true, but, being spiritual, may not

be told in the terms of a detective story. This version must remain

an individual rendering--an aspect of _one_ possible version. All who

know the real Egypt, that Egypt which has nothing to do with dams and

Nationalists and the external welfare of the falaheen, will understand.

The pilfering of her ancient dead she suffers still; she, in revenge,

preys at her leisure on the living.

The occasions when he betrayed himself were ordinary enough; it was

the glimpse they afforded of what was in progress beneath his calm

exterior that made them interesting. Once, I remember, we had lunched

together at Mena, and, after visiting certain excavations beyond

the Gizeh pyramids, we made our way homewards by way of the Sphinx.

It was dusk, and the main army of tourists had retired, though some

few dozen sight-seers still moved about to the cries of donkey-boys

and baksheesh. The vast head and shoulders suddenly emerged, riding

undrowned above the sea of sand. Dark and monstrous in the fading

light, it loomed, as ever, a being of non-human lineage; no amount of

familiarity could depreciate its grandeur, its impressive setting,

the lost expression of the countenance that is too huge to focus as a

face. A thousand visits leave its power undiminished. It has intruded

upon our earth from some uncommon world. George Isley and myself both

turned aside to acknowledge the presence of this alien, uncomfortable

thing. We did not linger, but we slackened pace. It was the obvious,

inevitable thing to do. He pointed then, with a suddenness that made me

start. He indicated the tourists standing round.

‘See,’ he said, in a lowered tone, ‘day and night you’ll always find a

crowd obedient to that thing. But notice their behaviour. People don’t

do that before any other ruin in the world I’ve ever seen.’ He referred

to the attempts of individuals to creep away alone and stare into the

stupendous visage by themselves. At different points in the deep sandy

basin were men and women, standing solitary, lying, crouching, apart

from the main company where the dragomen mouthed their exposition with

impertinent glibness.

‘The desire to be alone,’ he went on, half to himself, as we paused a

moment, ‘the sense of worship which insists on privacy.’

It _was_ significant, for no amount of advertising could dwarf the

impressiveness of the inscrutable visage into whose eyes of stone

the silent humans gazed. Not even the red-coat, standing inside one

gigantic ear, could introduce the commonplace. But my companion’s words

let another thing into the spectacle, a less exalted thing, dropping a

hint of horror about that sandy cup: It became easy, for a moment, to

imagine these tourists worshipping--against their will; to picture the

monster noticing that they were there; that it might slowly turn its

awful head; that the sand might visibly trickle from a stirring paw;

that, in a word, they might be taken--changed.

‘Come,’ he whispered in a dropping tone, interrupting my fancies as

though he half divined them, ‘it is getting late, and to be alone with

the thing is intolerable to me just now. But you notice, don’t you,’

he added, as he took my arm to hurry me away, ‘how little the tourists

matter? Instead of injuring the effect, they increase it. It uses

_them_.’

And again a slight sensation of chill, communicated possibly by his

nervous touch, or possibly by his earnest way of saying these curious

words, passed through me. Some part of me remained behind in that

hollow trough of sand, prostrate before an immensity that symbolised

the past. A curious, wild yearning caught me momentarily, an intense

desire to understand exactly why that terror stood there, its actual

meaning long ago to the hearts that set it waiting for the sun, what

definite rôle it played, what souls it stirred and why, in that

system of towering belief and faith whose indestructible emblem it

still remained. The past stood grouped so solemnly about its menacing

presentment. I was distinctly aware of this spiritual suction backwards

that my companion yielded to so gladly, yet against his normal, modern

self. For it made the past appear magnificently desirable, and loosened

all the rivets of the present. It bodied forth three main ingredients

of this deep Egyptian spell--size, mystery, and immobility.

Yet, to my relief, the cheaper aspect of this Egyptian glamour left him

cold. He remained unmoved by the commonplace mysterious; he told no

mummy stories, nor ever hinted at the supernatural quality that leaps

to the mind of the majority. There was no play in him. The influence

was grave and vital. And, although I knew he held strong views with

regard to the impiety of disturbing the dead, he never in my hearing

attached any possible revengeful character to the energy of an outraged

past. The current tales of this description he ignored; they were for

superstitious minds or children; the deities that claimed his soul were

of a grander order altogether. He lived, if it may be so expressed,

already in a world his heart had reconstructed or remembered; it drew

him in another direction altogether; with the modern, sensational view

of life his spirit held no traffic any longer; he was living backwards.

I saw his figure receding mournfully, yet never sentimentally, into

the spacious, golden atmosphere of recaptured days. The enormous

soul of buried Egypt drew him down. The dwindling of his physical

appearance was, of course, a mental interpretation of my own; but

another, stranger interpretation of a spiritual kind moved parallel

with it--marvellous and horrible. For, as he diminished outwardly

and in his modern, present aspect, he grew within--gigantic. The size

of Egypt entered into him. Huge proportions now began to accompany

any presentment of his personality to my inner vision. He towered.

These two qualities of the land already obsessed him--magnitude and

immobility.

And that awe which modern life ignores contemptuously woke in my heart.

I almost feared his presence at certain times. For one aspect of the

Egyptian spell is explained by sheer size and bulk. Disdainful of

mere speed to-day, the heart is still uncomfortable with magnitude;

and in Egypt there is size that may easily appal, for every detail

shunts it laboriously upon the mind. It elbows out the present. The

desert’s vastness is not made comprehensible by mileage, and the

sources of the Nile are so distant that they exist less on the map

than in the imagination. The effort to realise suffers paralysis; they

might equally be in the moon or Saturn. The undecorated magnificence

of the desert remains unknown, just as the proportions of pyramid and

temple, of pylons and Colossi approach the edge of the mind yet never

enter in. All stand outside, clothed in this prodigious measurement

of the past. And the old beliefs not only share this titanic effect

upon the consciousness, but carry it stages further. The entire scale

haunts with uncomfortable immensity, so that the majority run back with

relief to the measurable details of a more manageable scale. Express

trains, flying machines, Atlantic liners--these produce no unpleasant

stretching of the faculties compared to the influence of the Karnak

pylons, the pyramids, or the interior of the Serapeum.

Close behind this magnitude, moreover, steps the monstrous. It is

revealed not in sand and stone alone, in queer effects of light and

shadow, of glittering sunsets and of magical dusks, but in the very

aspect of the bird and animal life. The heavy-headed buffaloes betray

it equally with the vultures, the myriad kites, the grotesqueness of

the mouthing camels. The rude, enormous scenery has it everywhere.

There is nothing lyrical in this land of passionate mirages. Uncouth

immensity notes the little human flittings. The days roll by in a tide

of golden splendour; one goes helplessly with the flood; but it is an

irresistible flood that sweeps backwards and below. The silent-footed

natives in their coloured robes move before a curtain, and behind

that curtain dwells the soul of ancient Egypt--the Reality, as George

Isley called it--watching, with sleepless eyes of grey infinity. Then,

sometimes the curtain stirs and lifts an edge; an invisible hand creeps

forth; the soul is touched. And some one disappears.