I was aware of rushing, but it was the soul in me that rushed. It
experienced dizzy, unutterable alterations. Thousands of emotions,
intense and varied, poured through me at lightning speed, each
satisfyingly known, yet gone before its name appeared. The life of many
centuries tore headlong back with me, and, as in drowning, this epitome
of existence shot in a few seconds the steep slopes the Past had so
laboriously built up. The changes flashed and passed. I wept and prayed
and worshipped; I loved and suffered; I battled, lost and won. Down the
gigantic scale of ages that telescoped thus into a few brief moments,
the soul in me went sliding backwards towards a motionless, reposeful
Past.
I remember foolish details that interrupted the immense descent--I put
on coat and hat; I remember some one’s words, strangely sounding as
when some bird wakes up and sings at midnight--‘We’ll take the little
door; the front one’s locked by now’; and I have a vague recollection
of the outline of the great hotel, with its colonnades and terraces,
fading behind me through the air. But these details merely flickered
and disappeared, as though I fell earthwards from a star and passed
feathers or blown leaves upon the way. There was no friction as my
soul dropped backwards into time; the flight was easy and silent as a
dream. I felt myself sucked down into gulfs whose emptiness offered
no resistance ... until at last the appalling speed decreased of its
own accord, and the dizzy flight became a kind of gentle floating.
It changed imperceptibly into a gliding motion, as though the angle
altered. My feet, quite naturally, were on the ground, moving through
something soft that clung to them and rustled while it clung.
I looked up and saw the bright armies of the stars. In front of me I
recognised the flat-topped, shadowy ridges; on both sides lay the open
expanses of familiar wilderness; and beside me, one on either hand,
moved two figures who were my companions. We were in the desert, but
it was the desert of thousands of years ago. My companions, moreover,
though familiar to some part of me, seemed strangers or half known.
Their names I strove in vain to capture; Mosely, Ilson, sounded in my
head, mingled together falsely. And when I stole a glance at them, I
saw dark lines of mannikins unfilled with substance, and was aware
of the grotesque gestures of living hieroglyphics. It seemed for an
instant that their arms were bound behind their backs impossibly, and
that their heads turned sharply across their lineal shoulders.
But for a moment only; for at a second glance I saw them solid and
compact; their names came back to me; our arms were linked together as
we walked. We had already covered a great distance, for my limbs were
aching and my breath was short. The air was cold, the silence absolute.
It seemed, in this faint light, that the desert flowed beneath our
feet, rather than that we advanced by taking steps. Cliffs with hooded
tops moved past us, boulders glided, mounds of sand slid by. And then I
heard a voice upon my left that was surely Moleson speaking:
‘Towards Enet our feet are set,’ he half sang, half murmured, ‘towards
Enet-te-ntōrē. There, in the House of Birth, we shall dedicate
our hearts and lives anew.’
And the language, no less than the musical intonation of his voice,
enraptured me. For I understood he spoke of Denderah, in whose majestic
temple recent hands had painted with deathless colours the symbols of
our cosmic relationships with the zodiacal signs. And Denderah was our
great seat of worship of the goddess Hathor, the Egyptian Aphrodite,
bringer of love and joy. The falcon-headed Horus was her husband, from
whom, in his home at Edfu, we imbibed swift kinds of power. And--it was
the time of the New Year, the great feast when the forces of the living
earth turn upwards into happy growth.
We were on foot across the desert towards Denderah, and this sand we
trod was the sand of thousands of years ago.
The paralysis of time and distance involved some amazing lightness of
the spirit that, I suppose, touched ecstasy. There was intoxication
in the soul. I was not divided from the stars, nor separate from this
desert that rushed with us. The unhampered wind blew freshly from my
nerves and skin, and the Nile, glimmering faintly on our right, lay
with its lapping waves in both my hands. I knew the life of Egypt, for
it was in me, over me, round me. I was a part of it. We went happily,
like birds to meet the sunrise. There were no pits of measured time and
interval that could detain us. We flowed, yet were at rest; we were
endlessly alive; present and future alike were inconceivable; we were
in the Kingdom of the Past.
The Pyramids were just a-building, and the army of Obelisks looked
about them, proud of their first balance; Thebes swung her hundred
gates upon the world. New, shining Memphis glittered with myriad
reflections into waters that the tears of Isis sweetened, and the
cliffs of Abou Simbel were still innocent of their gigantic progeny.
Alone, the Sphinx, linking timelessness with time, brooded unguessed
and underived upon an alien world. We marched within antiquity towards
Denderah....
How long we marched, how fast, how far we went, I can remember as
little as the marvellous speech that passed across me while my two
companions spoke together. I only remember that suddenly a wave
of pain disturbed my wondrous happiness and caused my calm, which
had seemed beyond all reach of break, to fall away. I heard their
voices abruptly with a kind of terror. A sensation of fear, of loss,
of nightmare bewilderment came over me like cold wind. What _they_
lived naturally, true to their inmost hearts, _I_ lived merely by
means of a temperamental sympathy. And the stage had come at which
my powers failed. Exhaustion overtook me. I wilted. The strain--the
abnormal backwards stretch of consciousness that was put upon me by
another--gave way and broke. I heard their voices faint and horrible.
My joy was extinguished. A glare of horror fell upon the desert and
the stars seemed evil. An anguishing desire for the safe and wholesome
Present usurped all this mad yearning to obtain the Past. My feet fell
out of step. The rushing of the desert paused. I unlinked my arms. We
stopped all three.
The actual spot is to this day well known to me. I found it afterwards,
I even photographed it. It lies actually not far from Helouan--a few
miles at most beyond the Solitary Palm, where slopes of undulating
sand mark the opening of a strange, enticing valley called the Wadi
Gerraui. And it is enticing because it beckons and leads on. Here, amid
torn gorges of a limestone wilderness, there is suddenly soft yellow
sand that flows and draws the feet onward. It slips away with one too
easily; always the next ridge and basin must be seen, each time a
little farther. It has the quality of decoying. The cliffs say, No; but
this streaming sand invites. In its flowing curves of gold there is
enchantment.
And it was here upon its very lips we stopped, the rhythm of our steps
broken, our hearts no longer one. My temporary rapture vanished. I
was aware of fear. For the Present rushed upon me with attack in it,
and I felt that my mind was arrested close upon the edge of madness.
Something cleared and lifted in my brain.
The soul, indeed, could ‘choose its dwelling-place’; but to live
elsewhere completely was the choice of madness, and to live divorced
from all the sweet wholesome business of To-day involved an exile
that was worse than madness. It was death. My heart burned for George
Isley. I remembered the tear upon his cheek. The agony of his struggle
I shared suddenly with him. Yet with him was the reality, with me
a sympathetic reflection merely. _He_ was already too far gone to
fight....
I shall never forget the desolation of that strange scene beneath the
morning stars. The desert lay down and watched us. We stood upon the
brink of a little broken ridge, looking into the valley of golden sand.
This sand gleamed soft and wonderful in the starlight some twenty feet
below. The descent was easy--but I would not move. I refused to advance
another step. I saw my companions in the mysterious half-light beside
me peering over the edge, Moleson in front a little.
And I turned to him, sure of the part I meant to play, yet conscious
painfully of my helplessness. My personality seemed a straw in
mid-stream that spun in a futile effort to arrest the flood that bore
it. There was vivid human conflict in the moment’s silence. It was an
eddy that paused in the great body of the tide. And then I spoke. Oh,
I was ashamed of the insignificance of my voice and the weakness of my
little personality.
‘Moleson, we go no farther with you. We have already come too far. We
now turn back.’
Behind my words were a paltry thirty years. His answer drove sixty
centuries against me. For his voice was like the wind that passed
whispering down the stream of yellow sand below us. He smiled.
‘Our feet are set towards Enet-te-ntōrē. There is no turning
back. Listen! It is calling, calling, calling!’
‘We will go home,’ I cried, in a tone I vainly strove to make
imperative.
‘Our home is there,’ he sang, pointing with one long thin arm towards
the brightening east, ‘for the Temple calls us and the River takes our
feet. We shall be in the House of Birth to meet the sunrise----’
‘You lie,’ I cried again, ‘you speak the lies of madness, and this Past
you seek is the House of Death. It is the kingdom of the underworld.’
The words tore wildly, impotently out of me. I seized George Isley’s
arm.
‘Come back with me,’ I pleaded vehemently, my heart aching with a
nameless pain for him. ‘We’ll retrace our steps. Come home with me!
Come back! Listen! The Present calls you sweetly!’
His arm slipped horribly out of my grasp that had seemed to hold it so
tightly. Moleson, already below us in the yellow sand, looked small
with distance. He was gliding rapidly farther with uncanny swiftness.
The diminution of his form was ghastly. It was like a doll’s. And his
voice rose up, faint as with the distance of great gulfs of space.
‘Calling ... calling.... You hear it for ever calling ...’
It died away with the wind along that sandy valley, and the Past swept
in a flood across the brightening sky. I swayed as though a storm was
at my back. I reeled. Almost I went too--over the crumbling edge into
the sand.
‘Come back with me! Come home!’ I cried more faintly. ‘The Present
alone is real. There is work, ambition, duty. There is beauty too--the
beauty of good living! And there is love! There is--a woman ...
calling, calling...!’
That other voice took up the word below me. I heard the faint refrain
sing down the sandy walls. The wild, sweet pang in it was marvellous.
‘Our feet are set for Enet-te-ntōrē. It is calling, calling...!’
My voice fell into nothingness. George Isley was below me now, his
outline tiny against the sheet of yellow sand. And the sand was moving.
The desert rushed again. The human figures receded swiftly into the
Past they had reconstructed with the creative yearning of their souls.
I stood alone upon the edge of crumbling limestone, helplessly watching
them. It was amazing what I witnessed, while the shafts of crimson dawn
rose up the sky. The enormous desert turned alive to the horizon with
gold and blue and silver. The purple shadows melted into grey. The
flat-topped ridges shone. Huge messengers of light flashed everywhere
at once. The radiance of sunrise dazzled my outer sight.
But if my eyes were blinded, my inner sight was focused the more
clearly upon what followed. I witnessed the disappearance of George
Isley. There was a dreadful magic in the picture. The pair of them,
small and distant below me in that little sandy hollow, stood out
sharply defined as in a miniature. I saw their outlines neat and
terrible like some ghastly inset against the enormous scenery. Though
so close to me in actual space, they were centuries away in time. And a
dim, vast shadow was about them that was not mere shadow of the ridges.
It encompassed them; it moved, crawling over the sand, obliterating
them. Within it, like insects lost in amber, they became visibly
imprisoned, dwindled in size, borne deep away, absorbed.
And then I recognised the outline. Once more, but this time recumbent
and spread flat upon the desert’s face, I knew the monstrous shapes of
the twin obsessing symbols. The spirit of ancient Egypt lay over all
the land, tremendous in the dawn. The sunrise summoned her. She lay
prostrate before the deity. The shadows of the towering Colossi lay
prostrate too. The little humans, with their worshipping and conquered
hearts, lay deep within them.
George Isley I saw clearest. The distinctness, the reality were
appalling. He was naked, robbed, undressed. I saw him a skeleton,
picked clean to the very bones as by an acid. His life lay hid in the
being of that mighty Past. Egypt had absorbed him. He was gone....
* * * * *
I closed my eyes, but I could not keep them closed. They opened of
their own accord. The three of us were nearing the great hotel that
rose yellow, with shuttered windows, in the early sunshine. A wind
blew briskly from the north across the Mokattam Hills. There were soft
cannon-ball clouds dotted about the sky, and across the Nile, where the
mist lay in a line of white, I saw the tops of the Pyramids gleaming
like mountain peaks of gold. A string of camels, laden with white
stone, went past us. I heard the crying of the natives in the streets
of Helouan, and as we went up the steps the donkeys arrived and camped
in the sandy road beside their _bersim_ till the tourists claimed them.
‘Good morning,’ cried Abdullah, the man who owned them. ‘You all
go Sakkhâra to-day, or Memphis? Beat’ful day to-day, and vair good
donkeys!’
Moleson went up to his room without a word, and Isley did the same.
I thought he staggered a moment as he turned the passage corner from
my sight. His face wore a look of vacancy that some call peace. There
was radiance in it. It made me shudder. Aching in mind and body, and
no word spoken, I followed their example. I went upstairs to bed, and
slept a dreamless sleep till after sunset....