To The Bedouins Of The Pyramids Mark Twain's World-
Wide Celebrity Is Owing To One Fact Alone:
He is the only Roumi who
has climbed the second Pyramid.
That is why his name is known to every
one.
It was the "Little Christmas," and from the villages in the plain the
Egyptians came pouring out to visit their dead in the desert
cemeteries as I passed by to visit the dead in the tombs far off on
the horizon. Women, swathed in black, gathered in groups and jumped
monotonously up and down, to the accompaniment of stained hands
clapping, and strange and weary songs. Tiny children blew furiously
into tin trumpets, emitting sounds that were terribly European. Men
strode seriously by, or stood in knots among the graves, talking
vivaciously of the things of this life. As the sun rose higher in the
heavens, this visit to the dead became a carnival of the living.
Laughter and shrill cries of merriment betokened the resignation of
the mourners. The sand-dunes were black with running figures, racing,
leaping, chasing one another, rolling over and over in the warm and
golden grains. Some sat among the graves and ate. Some sang. Some
danced. I saw no one praying, after the sun was up. The Great Pyramid
of Ghizeh was transformed in this morning hour, and gleamed like a
marble mountain, or like the hill covered with salt at El-Outaya, in
Algeria. As we went on it sank down into the sands, until at last I
could see only a small section with its top, which looked almost as
pointed as a gigantic needle. Abou was there on the hot stones in the
golden eye of the sun - Abou who lives to respect his Pyramid, and to
serve Turkish coffee to those who are determined enough to climb it.
Before me the Step Pyramid rose, brown almost as bronze, out of the
sands here desolate and pallid. Soon I was in the house of Marriette,
between the little sphinxes.
Near Cairo, although the desert is real desert, it does not give, to
me, at any rate, the immense impression of naked sterility, of almost
brassy, sun-baked fierceness, which often strikes one in the Sahara to
the south of Algeria, where at midday one sometimes has a feeling of
being lost upon a waste of metal, gleaming, angry, tigerish in color.
Here, in Egypt, both the people and the desert seem gentler, safer,
more amiable. Yet these tombs of Sakkara are hidden in a desolation of
the sands, peculiarly blanched and mournful; and as you wander from
tomb to tomb, descending and ascending, stealing through great
galleries beneath the sands, creeping through tubes of stone,
crouching almost on hands and knees in the sultry chambers of the
dead, the awfulness of the passing away of dynasties and of race
comes, like a cloud, upon your spirit. But this cloud lifts and floats
from you in the cheerful tomb of Thi, that royal councillor, that
scribe and confidant, whose life must have been passed in a round of
serene activities, amid a sneering, though doubtless admiring,
population.
Into this tomb of white, vivacious figures, gay almost, though never
wholly frivolous - for these men were full of purpose, full of an ardor
that seduces even where it seems grotesque - I took with me a child of
ten called Ali, from the village of Kafiah; and as I looked from him
to the walls around us, rather than the passing away of the races, I
realized the persistence of type. For everywhere I saw the face of
little Ali, with every feature exactly reproduced. Here he was bending
over a sacrifice, leading a sacred bull, feeding geese from a cup,
roasting a chicken, pulling a boat, carpentering, polishing,
conducting a monkey for a walk, or merely sitting bolt upright and
sneering. There were lines of little Alis with their hands held to
their breasts, their faces in profile, their knees rigid, in the happy
tomb of Thi; but he glanced at them unheeding, did not recognize his
ancestors. And he did not care to penetrate into the tombs of Mera and
Meri-Ra-ankh, into the Serapeum and the Mestaba of Ptah-hotep. Perhaps
he was right. The Serapeum is grand in its vastness, with its long and
high galleries and its mighty vaults containing the huge granite
sarcophagi of the sacred bulls of Apis; Mera, red and white, welcomes
you from an elevated niche benignly; Ptah-hotep, priest of the fifth
dynasty, receives you, seated at a table that resembles a rake with
long, yellow teeth standing on its handle, and drinking stiffly a cup
of wine. You see upon the wall near by, with sympathy, a patient being
plied by a naked and evidently an unyielding physician with medicine
from a jar that might have been visited by Morgiana, a musician
playing upon an instrument like a huge and stringless harp. But it is
the happy tomb of Thi that lingers in your memory. In that tomb one
sees proclaimed with a marvellous ingenuity and expressiveness the joy
and the activity of life. Thi must have loved life; loved prayer and
sacrifice, loved sport and war, loved feasting and gaiety, labor of
the hands and of the head, loved the arts, the music of flute and
harp, singing by the lingering and plaintive voices which seem to
express the essence of the east, loved sweet odors, loved sweet women
- do we not see him sitting to receive offerings with his wife beside
him? - loved the clear nights and the radiant days that in Egypt make
glad the heart of man. He must have loved the splendid gift of life,
and used it completely. And so little Ali had very right to make his
sole obeisance at Thi's delicious tomb, from which death itself seems
banished by the soft and embracing radiance of the almost living
walls.
This delicate cheerfulness, a quite airy gaiety of life, is often
combined in Egypt, and most beautifully and happily combined, with
tremendous solidity, heavy impressiveness, a hugeness that is well-
nigh tragic; and it supplies a relief to eye, to mind, to soul, that
is sweet and refreshing as the trickle of a tarantella from a reed
flute heard under the shadows of a temple of Hercules.
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