‘Curious _you_ should feel that too--curious you should say it, I
mean,’ Moleson replied, not looking at me, yet with an air as if I had
said something he expected. ‘To me the Memnon figures express Egypt
better than all the other monuments put together. Like the desert, they
are featureless. They sum her up, as it were, yet leave the message
unuttered. For, you see, they cannot.’ He laughed a little in his
throat. ‘They have neither eyes nor lips nor nose; their features are
gone.’
‘Yet they tell the secret--to those who care to listen,’ put in Isley
in a scarcely noticeable voice. ‘Just because they have no words. They
still sing at dawn,’ he added in a louder, almost a challenging tone.
It startled me.
Moleson turned round at him, opened his lips to speak, hesitated,
stopped. He said nothing for a moment. I cannot describe what it was
in the lightning glance they exchanged that put me on the alert for
something other than was obvious. My nerves quivered suddenly, and
a breath of colder air stole in among us. Moleson swung round to me
again. ‘I almost think,’ he said, laughing when I complimented him
upon the music, ‘that I must have been a priest of Aton-Ra in an
earlier existence, for all this comes to my finger-tips as if it were
instinctive knowledge. Plotinus, remember, lived a few miles away at
Alexandria with his great idea that knowledge is recollection,’ he
said, with a kind of cynical amusement. ‘In those days, at any rate,’
he added more significantly, ‘worship was real and ceremonials actually
expressed great ideas and teaching. There was power in them.’ Two of
the Molesons spoke in that contradictory utterance.
I saw that Isley was fidgeting where he sat, betraying by certain
gestures that uneasiness was in him. He hid his face a moment in his
hands; he sighed; he made a movement--as though to prevent something
coming. But Moleson resisted his attempt to change the conversation,
though the key shifted a little of its own accord. There were numerous
occasions like this when I was aware that both men skirted something
that had happened, something that Moleson wished to resume, but that
Isley seemed anxious to postpone.
I found myself studying Moleson’s personality, yet never getting beyond
a certain point. Shrewd, subtle, with an acute rather than a large
intelligence, he was cynical as well as insincere, and yet I cannot
describe by what means I arrived at two other conclusions as well about
him: first, that this insincerity and want of heart had not been so
always; and, secondly, that he sought social diversion with deliberate
and un-ordinary purpose. I could well believe that the first was
Egypt’s mark upon him, and the second an effort at resistance and
self-protection.
‘If it wasn’t for the gaiety,’ he remarked once in a flippant way
that thinly hid significance, ‘a man out here would go under in a
year. Social life gets rather reckless--exaggerated--people do things
they would never dream of doing at home. Perhaps you’ve noticed it,’
he added, looking suddenly at me; ‘Cairo and the rest--they plunge
at it as though driven--a sort of excess about it somewhere.’ I
nodded agreement. The way he said it was unpleasant rather. ‘It’s
an antidote,’ he said, a sub-acid flavour in his tone. ‘I used to
loathe society myself. But now I find gaiety--a certain irresponsible
excitement--of importance. Egypt gets on the nerves after a bit. The
moral fibre fails. The will grows weak.’ And he glanced covertly at
Isley as with a desire to point his meaning. ‘It’s the clash between
the ugly present and the majestic past, perhaps.’ He smiled.
Isley shrugged his shoulders, making no reply; and the other went on
to tell stories of friends and acquaintances whom Egypt had adversely
affected: Barton, the Oxford man, school teacher, who had insisted
in living in a tent until the Government relieved him of his job. He
took to his tent, roamed the desert, drawn irresistibly, practical
considerations of the present of no avail. This yearning took him,
though he could never define the exact attraction. In the end his
mental balance was disturbed. ‘But now he’s all right again; I saw
him in London only this year; he can’t say what he felt or why he
did it. Only--he’s different.’ Of John Lattin, too, he spoke, whom
agarophobia caught so terribly in Upper Egypt; of Malahide, upon
whom some fascination of the Nile induced suicidal mania and attempts
at drowning; of Jim Moleson, a cousin (who had camped at Thebes with
himself and Isley), whom megalomania of a most singular type attacked
suddenly in a sandy waste--all radically cured as soon as they left
Egypt, yet, one and all, changed and made otherwise in their very souls.
He talked in a loose, disjointed way, and though much he said
was fantastic, as if meant to challenge opposition, there was
impressiveness about it somewhere, due, I think, to a kind of
cumulative emotion he produced.
‘The monuments do not impress merely by their bulk, but by their
majestic symmetry,’ I remember him saying. ‘Look at the choice of
form alone--the Pyramids, for instance. No other shape was possible:
dome, square, spires, all would have been hideously inadequate. The
wedge-shaped mass, immense foundations and pointed apex were the _mot
juste_ in outline. Do you think people without greatness in themselves
chose that form? There was no unbalance in the minds that conceived the
harmonious and magnificent structures of the temples. There was stately
grandeur in their consciousness that could only be born of truth and
knowledge. The power in their images is a direct expression of eternal
and essential things they knew.’
We listened in silence. He was off upon his hobby. But behind
the careless tone and laughing questions there was this lurking
passionateness that made me feel uncomfortable. He was edging up, I
felt, towards some climax that meant life and death to himself and
Isley. I could not fathom it. My sympathy let me in a little, yet not
enough to understand completely. Isley, I saw, was also uneasy, though
for reasons that equally evaded me.
‘One can almost believe,’ he continued, ‘that something still hangs
about in the atmosphere from those olden times.’ He half closed his
eyes, but I caught the gleam in them. ‘It affects the mind through the
imagination. With some it changes the point of view. It takes the soul
back with it to former, quite different, conditions, that must have
been almost another kind of consciousness.’
He paused an instant and looked up at us. ‘The _intensity_ of belief in
those days,’ he resumed, since neither of us accepted the challenge,
‘was amazing--something quite unknown anywhere in the world to-day. It
was so sure, so positive; no mere speculative theories, I mean;--as
though something in the climate, the exact position beneath the stars,
the “attitude” of this particular stretch of earth in relation to
the sun--thinned the veil between humanity--and other things. Their
hierarchies of gods, you know, were not mere idols; animals, birds,
monsters, and what-not, all typified spiritual forces and powers
that influenced their daily life. But the strong thing is--they
_knew_. People who were scientific as they were did not swallow
foolish superstitions. They made colours that could last six thousand
years, even in the open air; and without instruments they measured
accurately--an enormously difficult and involved calculation--the
precession of the equinoxes. You’ve been to Denderah?’--he suddenly
glanced again at me. ‘No! Well, the minds that realised the zodiacal
signs could hardly believe, you know, that Hathor was a cow!’
Isley coughed. He was about to interrupt, but before he could find
words, Moleson was off again, some new quality in his tone and manner
that was almost aggressive. The hints he offered seemed more than
hints. There was a strange conviction in his heart. I think he was
skirting a bigger thing that he and his companion knew, yet that
his real object was to see in how far I was open to attack--how far
my sympathy might be with them. I became aware that he and George
Isley shared this bigger thing. It was based, I felt, on some certain
knowledge that experiment had brought them.
‘Think of the grand teaching of Aknahton, that young Pharaoh who
regenerated the entire land and brought it to its immense prosperity.
He taught the worship of the sun, but not of the visible sun. The
deity had neither form nor shape. The great disk of glory was but
the manifestation, each beneficent ray ending in a hand that blessed
the world. It was a god of everlasting energy, love and power, yet
men could know it at first hand in their daily lives, worshipping it
at dawn and sunset with passionate devotion. No anthropomorphic idol
masqueraded in _that_!’
An extraordinary glow was about him as he said it. The same minute he
lowered his voice, shifting the key perceptibly. He kept looking up at
me through half-closed eyelids.
‘And another thing they wonderfully knew,’ he almost whispered, ‘was
that, with the precession of their deity across the equinoctial
changes, there came new powers down into the world of men. Each
cycle--each zodiacal sign--brought its special powers which they
quickly typified in the monstrous effigies we label to-day in our dull
museums. Each sign took some two thousand years to traverse. Each
sign, moreover, involved a change in human consciousness. There was
this relation between the heavens and the human heart. All that they
knew. While the sun crawled through the sign of Taurus, it was the Bull
they worshipped; with Aries, it was the ram that coifed their granite
symbols. Then came, as you remember, with Pisces the great New Arrival,
when already they sank from their grand zenith, and the Fish was taken
as the emblem of the changing powers which the Christ embodied. For
the human soul, they held, echoed the changes in the immense journey
of the original deity, who is its source, across the Zodiac, and the
truth of “As above, so Below” remains the key to all manifested life.
And to-day the sun, just entering Aquarius, new powers are close upon
the world. The old--that which has been for two thousand years--again
is crumbling, passing, dying. New powers and a new consciousness are
knocking at our doors. It is a time of change. It is also’--he leaned
forward so that his eyes came close before me--‘the time to make the
change. The soul can choose its own conditions. It can----’
A sudden crash smothered the rest of the sentence. A chair had fallen
with a clatter upon the wooden floor where the carpet left it bare.
Whether Isley in rising had stumbled against it, or whether he had
purposely knocked it over, I could not say. I only knew that he had
abruptly risen and as abruptly sat down again. A curious feeling came
to me that the sign was somehow prearranged. It was so sudden. His
voice, too, was forced, I thought.
‘Yes, but we can do without all that, Moleson,’ he interrupted with
acute abruptness. ‘Suppose we have a tune instead.’