The worship of Humanity with a capital H? My
Gods, or what I saw in them, contented me.'
'What did you see in your Gods as affecting belief and conduct?'
'You know the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx?'
'No,' I murmured. 'What is it?'
'"All sensible men are of the same religion, but no sensible man ever
tells,"' he replied. With that I had to be content, for the passage
ended in solid rock.
There were other tombs in the valley, but the owners were dumb, except
one Pharaoh, who from the highest motives had broken with the creeds and
instincts of his country, and so had all but wrecked it. One of his
discoveries was an artist, who saw men not on one plane but modelled
full or three-quarter face, with limbs suited to their loads and
postures. His vividly realised stuff leaped to the eye out of the
acreage of low-relief in the old convention, and I applauded as a
properly brought-up tourist should.
'Mine was a fatal mistake,' Pharaoh Ahkenaton sighed in my ear,' I
mistook the conventions of life for the realities.'
'Ah, those soul-crippling conventions!' I cried.
'You mistake me,' he answered more stiffly. 'I was so sure of their
reality that I thought that they were really lies, whereas they were
only invented to cover the raw facts of life.'
'Ah, those raw facts of life!' I cried, still louder; for it is not
often that one has a chance of impressing a Pharaoh.' We must face them
with open eyes and an open mind!
