But As A Golden Thing It Greeted Me, As A
Golden Miracle I Shall Remember It.
Slowly the sun went down.
The second Pyramid seemed also made of gold.
Drowsily splendid it and its greater brother looked set on the golden
sands beneath the golden sky. And now the gold came traveling down
from the desert to the water, turning it surely to a wine like the
wine of gold that flowed down Midas's throat; then, as the magic grew,
to a Pactolus, and at last to a great surface that resembled golden
ice, hard, glittering, unbroken by any ruffling wave. The islands
rising from this golden ice were jet black, the houses black, the
palms and their shadows that fell upon the marvel black. Black were
the birds that flew low from roof to roof, black the wading camels,
black the meeting leaves of the tall lebbek-trees that formed a tunnel
from where I stood to Mena House. And presently a huge black Pyramid
lay supine on the gold, and near it a shadowy brother seemed more
humble than it, but scarcely less mysterious. The gold deepened,
glowed more fiercely. In the sky above the Pyramids hung tiny cloud
wreaths of rose red, delicate and airy as the gossamers of Tunis. As I
turned, far off in Cairo I saw the first lights glittering across the
fields of doura, silvery white, like diamonds. But the silver did not
call me. My imagination was held captive by the gold. I was summoned
by the gold, and I went on, under the black lebbek-trees, on Ismail's
road, toward it. And I dwelt in it many days.
The wonders of Egypt man has made seem to increase in stature before
the spirits' eyes as man learns to know them better, to tower up ever
higher till the imagination is almost stricken by their looming
greatness. Climb the great Pyramid, spend a day with Abou on its
summit, come down, penetrate into its recesses, stand in the king's
chamber, listen to the silence there, feel it with your hands - is it
not tangible in this hot fastness of incorruptible death? - creep, like
the surreptitious midget you feel yourself to be, up those long and
steep inclines of polished stone, watching the gloomy darkness of the
narrow walls, the far-off pinpoint of light borne by the Bedouin who
guides you, hear the twitter of the bats that have their dwelling in
this monstrous gloom that man has made to shelter the thing whose
ambition could never be embalmed, though that, of all qualities,
should have been given here, in the land it dowered, a life perpetual.
Now you know the Great Pyramid. You know that you can climb it, that
you can enter it. You have seen it from all sides, under all aspects.
It is familiar to you.
No, it can never be that. With its more wonderful comrade, the Sphinx,
it has the power peculiar, so it seems to me, to certain of the rock
and stone monuments of Egypt, of holding itself ever aloof, almost
like the soul of man which can retreat at will, like the Bedouin
retreating from you into the blackness of the Pyramid, far up, or far
down, where the pursuing stranger, unaided, cannot follow.
II
THE SPHINX
One day at sunset I saw a bird trying to play with the Sphinx - a bird
like a swallow, but with a ruddy brown on its breast, a gleam of blue
somewhere on its wings. When I came to the edge of the sand basin
where perhaps Khufu saw it lying nearly four thousand years before the
birth of Christ, the Sphinx and the bird were quite alone. The bird
flew near the Sphinx, whimsically turning this way and that, flying
now low, now high, but ever returning to the magnet which drew it,
which held it, from which it surely longed to extract some sign of
recognition. It twittered, it posed itself in the golden air, with its
bright eyes fixed upon those eyes of stone which gazed beyond it,
beyond the land of Egypt, beyond the world of men, beyond the centre
of the sun to the last verges of eternity. And presently it alighted
on the head of the Sphinx, then on its ear, then on its breast; and
over the breast it tripped jerkily, with tiny, elastic steps, looking
upward, its whole body quivering apparently with a desire for
comprehension - a desire for some manifestation of friendship. Then
suddenly it spread its wings, and, straight as an arrow, it flew away
over the sands and the waters toward the doura-fields and Cairo.
And the sunset waned, and the afterglow flamed and faded, and the
clear, soft African night fell. The pilgrims who day by day visit the
Sphinx, like the bird, had gone back to Cairo. They had come, as the
bird had come; as those who have conquered Egypt came; as the Greeks
came, Alexander of Macedon, and the Ptolemies; as the Romans came; as
the Mamelukes, the Turks, the French, the English came.
They had come - and gone.
And that enormous face, with the stains of stormy red still adhering
to its cheeks, grew dark as the darkness closed in, turned brown as a
fellah's face, as the face of that fellah who whispered his secret in
the sphinx's ear, but learnt no secret in return; turned black almost
as a Nubian's face. The night accentuated its appearance of terrible
repose, of super-human indifference to whatever might befall. In the
night I seemed to hear the footsteps of the dead - of all the dead
warriors and the steeds they rode, defiling over the sand before the
unconquerable thing they perhaps thought that they had conquered. At
last the footsteps died away. There was a silence. Then, coming down
from the Great Pyramid, surely I heard the light patter of a donkey's
feet. They went to the Sphinx and ceased.
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