And Of Voices And Warnings And Outcries
Behind Rocks There Is No End.
These last arise from the fact that men
very rarely live in a spot so utterly still that they can hear the
murmuring race of the blood over their own ear-drums.
Neither ship,
prairie, nor forest gives that silence. I went out to find it once, when
our steamer tied up and the rest of them had gone to see a sight, but I
never dared venture more than a mile from our funnel-smoke. At that
point I came upon a hill honey-combed with graves that held a multitude
of paper-white skulls, all grinning cheerfully like ambassadors of the
Desert. But I did not accept their invitation. They had told me that all
the little devils learn to draw in the Desert, which explains the
elaborate and purposeless detail that fills it. None but devils could
think of etching every rock outcrop with wind-lines, or skinning it down
to its glistening nerves with sand-blasts; of arranging hills in the
likeness of pyramids and sphinxes and wrecked town-suburbs; of covering
the space of half an English county with sepia studies of interlacing
and recrossing ravines, dongas, and nullahs, each an exposition of much
too clever perspective; and of wiping out the half-finished work with a
wash of sand in three tints, only to pick it up again in silver-point on
the horizon's edge. This they do in order to make lost travellers think
they can recognise landmarks and run about identifying them till the
madness comes. The Desert is all devil-device - as you might say 'blasted
cleverness' - crammed with futile works, always promising something fresh
round the next corner, always leading out through heaped decoration and
over-insistent design into equal barrenness.
There was a morning of mornings when we lay opposite the rock-hewn
Temple of Abu Simbel, where four great figures, each sixty feet high,
sit with their hands on their knees waiting for Judgment Day. At their
feet is a little breadth of blue-green crop; they seem to hold back all
the weight of the Desert behind them, which, none the less, lips over at
one side in a cataract of vividest orange sand. The tourist is
recommended to see the sunrise here, either from within the temple where
it falls on a certain altar erected by Rameses in his own honour, or
from without where another Power takes charge.
The stars had paled when we began our watch; the river birds were just
whispering over their toilettes in the uncertain purplish light. Then
the river dimmered up like pewter; the line of the ridge behind the
Temple showed itself against a milkiness in the sky; one felt rather
than saw that there were four figures in the pit of gloom below it.
These blocked themselves out, huge enough, but without any special
terror, while the glorious ritual of the Eastern dawn went forward. Some
reed of the bank revealed itself by reflection, black on silver; arched
wings flapped and jarred the still water to splintered glass; the desert
ridge turned to topaz, and the four figures stood clear, yet without
shadowing, from their background. The stronger light flooded them red
from head to foot, and they became alive - as horridly and tensely yet
blindly alive as pinioned men in the death-chair before the current is
switched on. One felt that if by any miracle the dawn could be delayed a
second longer, they would tear themselves free, and leap forth to
heaven knows what sort of vengeance. But that instant the full sun
pinned them in their places - nothing more than statues slashed with
light and shadow - and another day got to work.
A few yards to the left of the great images, close to the statue of an
Egyptian princess, whose face was the very face of 'She,' there was a
marble slab over the grave of an English officer killed in a fight
against dervishes nearly a generation ago.
From Abu Simbel to Wady Halfa the river, escaped from the domination of
the Pharaohs, begins to talk about dead white men. Thirty years ago,
young English officers in India lied and intrigued furiously that they
might be attached to expeditions whose bases were sometimes at Suakim,
sometimes quite in the desert air, but all of whose deeds are now quite
forgotten. Occasionally the dragoman, waving a smooth hand east or
south-easterly, will speak of some fight. Then every one murmurs: 'Oh
yes. That was Gordon, of course,' or 'Was that before or after
Omdurman?' But the river is much more precise. As the boat quarters
the falling stream like a puzzled hound, all the old names spurt
up again under the paddle-wheels - 'Hicks' army - Val Baker - El
Teb - Tokar - Tamai - Tamanieb and Osman Digna!' Her head swings round
for another slant: 'We cannot land English or Indian troops: if
consulted, recommend abandonment of the Soudan within certain limits.'
That was my Lord Granville chirruping to the advisers of His Highness
the Khedive, and the sentence comes back as crisp as when it first
shocked one in '84. Next - here is a long reach between flooded palm
trees - next, of course, comes Gordon - and a delightfully mad Irish
war correspondent who was locked up with him in Khartoum.
Gordon - Eighty-four - Eighty-five - the Suakim-Berber Railway really begun
and quite as really abandoned. Korti - Abu Klea - the Desert Column - a
steamer called the Safieh not the Condor, which rescued two other
steamers wrecked on their way back from a Khartoum in the red hands of
the Mahdi of those days. Then - the smooth glide over deep water
continues - another Suakim expedition with a great deal of Osman Digna
and renewed attempts to build the Suakim-Berber Railway. 'Hashin,' say
the paddle-wheels, slowing all of a sudden - 'MacNeill's Zareba - the 15th
Sikhs and another native regiment - Osman Digna in great pride and power,
and Wady Halfa a frontier town.
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