IX

And forthwith his voice began a series of long-drawn cadences that

seemed somehow the root-sounds of every tongue that ever was. A spell

came over me I could touch and feel. A web encompassed me; my arms and

feet became entangled; a veil of fine threads wove across my eyes. The

enthralling power of the rhythm produced some magical movement in the

soul. I was aware of life everywhere about me, far and near, in the

dwellings of the dead, as also in the corridors of the iron hills.

Thebes stood erect, and Memphis teemed upon the river banks. For the

modern world fell, swaying, at this sound that restored the past, and

in this past both men before me lived and had their being. The storm

of present life passed o’er their heads, while they dwelt underground,

obliterated, gone. Upon the wave of sound they went down into their

recovered kingdom.

I shivered, moved vigorously, half rose up, then instantly sank back

again, resigned and helpless. For I entered by their side, it seemed,

the conditions of their strange captivity. My thoughts, my feelings,

my point of view were transplanted to another centre. Consciousness

shifted in me. I saw things from another’s point of view--antiquity’s.

The present forgotten but the past supreme, I lost Reality. Our

room became a pin-point picture seen in a drop of water, while this

subterranean world, replacing it, turned immense. My heart took on the

gigantic, leisured stride of what had been. Proportions grew; size

captured me; and magnitude, turned monstrous, swept mere measurement

away. Some hand of golden sunshine picked me up and set me in the

quivering web beside those other two. I heard the rustle of the

settling threads; I heard the shuffling of the feet in sand; I heard

the whispers in the dwellings of the dead. Behind the monotony of

this sacerdotal music I heard them in their dim carved chambers. The

ancient galleries were awake. The Life of unremembered ages stirred in

multitudes about me.

The reality of so incredible an experience evaporates through the

stream of language. I can only affirm this singular proof--that the

deepest, most satisfying knowledge the Present could offer seemed

insignificant beside some stalwart majesty of the Past that utterly

usurped it. This modern room, holding a piano and two figures

of To-day, appeared as a paltry miniature pinned against a vast

transparent curtain, whose foreground was thick with symbols of temple,

sphinx and pyramid, but whose background of stupendous hanging grey

slid off towards a splendour where the cities of the Dead shook off

their sand and thronged space to its ultimate horizons.... The stars,

the entire universe, vibrating and alive, became involved in it. Long

periods of time slipped past me. I seemed living ages ago.... I was

living backwards....

The size and eternity of Egypt took me easily. There was an

overwhelming grandeur in it that elbowed out all present standards. The

whole place towered and stood up. The desert reared, the very horizons

lifted; majestic figures of granite rose above the hotel, great faces

hovered and drove past; huge arms reached up to pluck the stars and

set them in the ceilings of the labyrinthine tombs. The colossal

meaning of the ancient land emerged through all its ruined details ...

reconstructed--burningly alive....

It became at length unbearable. I longed for the droning sounds to

cease, for the rhythm to lessen its prodigious sweep. My heart cried

out for the gold of the sunlight on the desert, for the sweet air by

the river’s banks, for the violet lights upon the hills at dawn. And I

resisted, I made an effort to return.

‘Your chant is horrible. For God’s sake, let’s have an Arab song--or

the music of To-day!’

The effort was intense, the result was--nothing. I swear I used these

words. I heard the actual sound of my voice, if no one else did, for

I remember that it was pitiful in the way great space devoured it,

making of its appreciable volume the merest whisper as of some bird or

insect cry. But the figure that I took for Moleson, instead of answer

or acknowledgment, merely grew and grew as things grow in a fairy tale.

I hardly know; I certainly cannot say. That dwindling part of me which

offered comments on the entire occurrence noted this extraordinary

effect as though it happened naturally--that Moleson himself was

marvellously increasing.

The entire spell became operative all at once. I experienced both the

delight of complete abandonment and the terror of letting go what _had_

seemed real. I understood Moleson’s sham laughter, and the subtle

resignation of George Isley. And an amazing thought flashed birdlike

across my changing consciousness--that this resurrection into the

Past, this rebirth of the spirit which they sought, involved taking

upon themselves the guise of these ancient symbols each in turn. As

the embryo assumes each evolutionary stage below it before the human

semblance is attained, so the souls of those two adventurers took upon

themselves the various emblems of that intense belief. The devout

worshipper takes on the qualities of his deity. They wore the entire

series of the old-world gods so potently that I perceived them, and

even objectified them by my senses. The present was their pre-natal

stage; to enter the past they were being born again.

But it was not Moleson’s semblance alone that took on this awful

change. Both faces, scaled to the measure of Egypt’s outstanding

quality of size, became in this little modern room distressingly

immense. Distorting mirrors can suggest no simile, for the symmetry of

proportion was not injured. I lost their human physiognomies. I saw

their thoughts, their feelings, their augmented, altered hearts, the

thing that Egypt put there while she stole their love from modern life.

There grew an awful stateliness upon them that was huge, mysterious,

and motionless as stone.

For Moleson’s narrow face at first turned hawk-like in the semblance

of the sinister deity, Horus, only stretched to tower above the

toy-scaled piano; it was keen and sly and monstrous after prey, while

a swiftness of the sunrise leaped from both the brilliant eyes. George

Isley, equally immense of outline, was in general presentment more

magnificent, a breadth of the Sphinx about his spreading shoulders,

and in his countenance an inscrutable power of calm temple images.

These were the first signs of obsession; but others followed. In rapid

series, like lantern-slides upon a screen, the ancient symbols flashed

one after another across these two extended human faces and were gone.

Disentanglement became impossible. The successive signatures seemed

almost superimposed as in a composite photograph, each appearing and

vanished before recognition was even possible, while I interpreted the

inner alchemy by means of outer tokens familiar to my senses. Egypt,

possessing them, expressed herself thus marvellously in their physical

aspect, using the symbols of her intense, regenerative power....

The changes merged with such swiftness into one another that I did not

seize the half of them--till, finally, the procession culminated in

a single one that remained fixed awfully upon them both. The entire

series merged. I was aware of this single masterful image which summed

up all the others in sublime repose. The gigantic thing rose up in

this incredible statue form. The spirit of Egypt synthesised in this

monstrous symbol, obliterated them both. I saw the seated figures of

the grim Colossi, dipped in sand, night over them, waiting for the

dawn....

X

I made a violent effort, then, at self-assertion--an effort to focus my

mind upon the present. And, searching for Moleson and George Isley, its

nearest details, I was aware that I could not find them. The familiar

figures of my two companions were not discoverable.

I saw it as plainly as I also saw that ludicrous, wee piano--for a

moment. But the moment remained; the Eternity of Egypt stayed. For

that lonely and terrific pair had stooped their shoulders and bowed

their awful heads. They were in the room. They imaged forth the power

of the everlasting Past through the little structures of two human

worshippers. Room, walls, and ceiling fled away. Sand and the open sky

replaced them.

The two of them rose side by side before my bursting eyes. I knew

not where to look. Like some child who confronts its giants upon the

nursery floor, I turned to stone, unable to think or move. I stared.

Sight wrenched itself to find the men familiar to it, but found

instead this symbolising vision. I could not see them properly. Their

faces were spread with hugeness, their features lost in some uncommon

magnitude, their shoulders, necks, and arms grown vast upon the air. As

with the desert, there was physiognomy yet no personal expression, the

human thing all drowned within the mass of battered stone. I discovered

neither cheeks nor mouth nor jaw, but ruined eyes and lips of broken

granite. Huge, motionless, mysterious, Egypt informed them and took

them to herself. And between us, curiously presented in some false

perspective, I saw the little symbol of To-day--the Blüthner piano. It

was appalling. I knew a second of majestic horror. I blenched. Hot and

cold gushed through me. Strength left me, power of speech and movement

too, as in a moment of complete paralysis.

The spell, moreover, was not within the room alone; it was outside and

everywhere. The Past stood massed about the very walls of the hotel.

Distance, as well as time, stepped nearer. That chanting summoned the

gigantic items in all their ancient splendour. The shadowy concourse

grouped itself upon the sand about us, and I was aware that the great

army shifted noiselessly into place; that pyramids soared and towered;

that deities of stone stood by; that temples ranged themselves in

reconstructed beauty, grave as the night of time whence they emerged;

and that the outline of the Sphinx, motionless but aggressive, piled

its dim bulk upon the atmosphere. Immensity answered to immensity....

There were vast intervals of time and there were reaches of enormous

distance, yet all happened in a moment, and all happened within a

little space. It was now and here. Eternity whispered in every second

as in every grain of sand. Yet, while aware of so many stupendous

details all at once, I was really aware of one thing only--that the

spirit of ancient Egypt faced me in these two terrific figures, and

that my consciousness, stretched painfully yet gloriously, included

all, as She also unquestionably included them--and me.

For it seemed I shared the likeness of my two companions. Some lesser

symbol, though of similar kind, obsessed me too. I tried to move, but

my feet were set in stone; my arms lay fixed; my body was embedded in

the rock. Sand beat sharply upon my outer surface, urged upwards in

little flurries by a chilly wind. There was nothing felt: I _heard_ the

rattle of the scattering grains against my hardened body....

And we waited for the dawn; for the resurrection of that unchanging

deity who was the source and inspiration of all our glorious life....

The air grew keen and fresh. In the distance a line of sky turned from

pink to violet and gold; a delicate rose next flushed the desert; a

few pale stars hung fainting overhead; and the wind that brought the

sunrise was already stirring. The whole land paused upon the coming of

its mighty God....

Into the pause there rose a curious sound for which we had been

waiting. For it came familiarly, as though expected. I could have sworn

at first that it was George Isley who sang, answering his companion.

There beat behind its great volume the same note and rhythm, only so

prodigiously increased that, while Moleson’s chant had waked it, it

now was independent and apart. The resonant vibrations of what he

sang had reached down into the places where it slept. _They_ uttered

synchronously. Egypt spoke. There was in it the deep muttering as of a

thousand drums, as though the desert uttered in prodigious syllables. I

listened while my heart of stone stood still. There were two voices in

the sky. _They_ spoke tremendously with each other in the dawn:

‘So easily we still remain possessors of the land.... While the

centuries roar past us and are gone.’

Soft with power the syllables rolled forth, yet with a booming depth as

though caverns underground produced them.

‘Our silence is disturbed. Pass on with the multitude towards the

East.... Still in the dawn we sing the old-world wisdom.... They shall

hear our speech, yet shall not hear it with their ears of flesh. At

dawn our words go forth, searching the distances of sand and time

across the sunlight.... At dusk they return, as upon eagles’ wings,

entering again our lips of stone.... Each century one syllable, yet no

sentence yet complete. While our lips are broken with the utterance....’

It seemed that hours and months and years went past me while I

listened in my sandy bed. The fragments died far away, then sounded

very close again. It was as though mountain peaks sang to one another

above clouds. Wind caught the muffled roar away. Wind brought it

back.... Then, in a hollow pause that lasted years, conveying

marvellously the passage of long periods, I heard the utterance more

clearly. The leisured roll of the great voice swept through me like a

flood:

‘We wait and watch and listen in our loneliness. We do not close our

eyes. The moon and stars sail past us, and our river finds the sea. We

bring Eternity upon your broken lives.... We see you build your little

lines of steel across our territory behind the thin white smoke. We

hear the whistle of your messengers of iron through the air.... The

nations rise and pass. The empires flutter westwards and are gone....

The sun grows older and the stars turn pale.... Winds shift the line

of the horizons, and our River moves its bed. But we, everlasting and

unchangeable, remain. Of water, sand and fire is our essential being,

yet built within the universal air.... There is no pause in life, there

is no break in death. The changes bring no end. The sun returns....

There is eternal resurrection.... But our kingdom is underground in

shadow, unrealised of your little day.... Come, come! The temples still

are crowded, and our Desert blesses you. Our River takes your feet. Our

sand shall purify, and the fire of our God shall burn you sweetly into

wisdom.... Come, then, and worship, for the time draws near. It is the

dawn....’

The voices died down into depths that the sand of ages muffled, while

the flaming dawn of the East rushed up the sky. Sunrise, the great

symbol of life’s endless resurrection, was at hand. About me, in

immense but shadowy array, stood the whole of ancient Egypt, hanging

breathlessly upon the moment of adoration. No longer stern and terrible

in the splendour of their long neglect, the effigies rose erect with

passionate glory, a forest of stately stone. Their granite lips were

parted and their ancient eyes were wide. All faced the east. And the

sun drew nearer to the rim of the attentive Desert.