Negotiations with Mehmet Ali and the building and the test of Belzoni’s
water-lifting wheel consumed the greater part of a year; it was wasted
time, for the Pasha decided against the use of the device.
From the uncertainty which followed, the adventurer was rescued by his
old friend, John Lewis Burckhardt, the traveller, who now persuaded
the British Consul General, Henry Salt, to send Belzoni on a special
expedition up the Nile. A colossal head of “Memnon” (in reality a head of
Ramses II) was lying in the sands at Thebes, and Salt wished to have it
carried down the river, and shipped off to the British Museum. Belzoni
accepted the charge gladly, and going to Thebes, surmounted a thousand
difficulties, and carried off the prize. It was anything but an easy
task, for the giant head, or more properly the bust, measured some six by
eight feet and weighed over seven tons. Belzoni handled it with home-made
machinery. The engineer side of him was real; it is a quality often found
just below the surface in Italians.
Mrs. Belzoni was with him, and shared with her “Mr. B.” a hut built of
stones in the portico of the Memnonium. All the long hot summer, the
giant lady cooked her Titan’s rice and mutton, and kept a practical
eye on everything. The British matron was the terror of rival French
explorers,—“Madame Belzoni, Amazone formidable,” they wrote in their
accounts.
Other voyages followed which can not here be set down in detail. The
first voyage saw the removal of the head and an exploring trip up the
river to Abu Simbel and the cataracts. At Abu Simbel, it was “Ypsambul”
to Belzoni, that greatest of rock temples was clogged with a vast
fanslope of fallen stones and sand in which the colossi sat up to
their necks. A second journey carried the explorer back to Thebes. The
labyrinth of mountain tombs was still full of the ancient dead, some
lying on the floors of their cave sepulchres, some standing, some on
their heads,—all surfaced with a very fine and choking dust.
Mrs. Belzoni having lingered in Cairo, the explorer now and then accepted
the hospitality of natives dwelling in the outer tombs. “I was sure of
a supper of milk served in a wooden bowl,” he wrote, “but whenever they
supposed I should stay all night they killed a couple of fowls for me
which were baked in a small oven heated with pieces of mummy cases, and
sometimes with the bones and rags of the mummies themselves.” It is a
far cry from the sun-helmeted professors, the great officials, and the
electric lights of Tutankhamen’s tomb.
On this second journey, the explorer began the clearing of Abu Simbel,
and discovered the tomb of Seti I in the Valley of the Kings, still
the most beautifully decorated sepulchre in Egypt. Old usage called it
Belzoni’s tomb; new days have forgotten the explorer. Then followed
expeditions to Philæ, to the site of the Roman city of Berenike on the
Red Sea, and a journey to the oasis of Elwah which Belzoni mistook
for the historic oasis of Jupiter Ammon. The fever of exploration now
descended on Mrs. B., and the intrepid lady, disguised as a man, went
off by herself on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem,—a feat of extraordinary
fortitude and daring.
At the close of his second journey, Belzoni had cleared and opened Abu
Simbel, discovered the tomb of Seti I, and explored Philæ, the Theban
necropolis and the Valley of the Kings. He had shown himself venturesome,
courageous, and resolute. He had a way of getting things done, not by
shouts and the whip, but by a certain steadiness of pressure, as if he
were putting his giant shoulders to a door and slowly forcing it inward
from its frame. There are passages in his account of his work which
seem to reveal a quality of suspicion in the giant’s mind; he could see
the hand of rival gatherers of antiquities in every check and delay.
Twenty-five years ago the trait would have required a moral explanation;
the wiser and more travelled present simply points to the thermometer.
By an ironic turn of the wheel of fate, it chanced that the rival
collector to whom Belzoni attributed his vexations was himself an
Italian. Bernardino Drouetti, agent of France and gatherer of antiquities
for the Louvre, had been born in Leghorn. The competition between this
Frenchman from Leghorn and this Briton from Padua had thus a certain
raciness and emotional quality. Keen as it was, the amenities were
outwardly preserved, and Drouetti even went so far as to present Belzoni
with the “rights” to a sarcophagus it was impossible to extricate. At
Philæ, however, the duel became a battle, for Drouetti’s henchmen rushed
Belzoni and his party as the giant was making off with an obelisk.
If Drouetti’s indignant lament is to be believed, Belzoni snatched a
shrieking, jabbering “Arab” out of the mob swarming about him, swung him
up by the ankles, and used him _à la Samson_ on the heads and shoulders
of his fellow country men. The novel weapon, it is said, won a headlong
victory, and the giant carried off his obelisk in peace.
Returning to Cairo during the inundation, Belzoni paused by night at the
pyramids. So vividly were the stars of the Egyptian sky mirrored in the
flood, that there seemed to be two heavens, one above and below. Awesome,
even a little terrible, the vast and ancient shapes of the pyramids rose
seemingly from the starry water to the splendour overhead.
The Pyramids. Mystery of ancient mystery! Belzoni resolved to match his
knowledge and skill with this riddle of the years.