Every One Of The
European Practising Doctors, Of Whom There Had Been Many, Had
Either Died Or Fled.
It was said, however, that there was an
Englishman in the medical service of the Pasha who quietly remained
at his post, but that he never engaged in private practice.
I
determined to try if I could obtain assistance in this quarter. I
did not venture at first, and at such a time as this, to ask him to
visit a servant who was prostrate on the bed of sickness, but
thinking that I might thus gain an opportunity of persuading him to
attend Mysseri, I wrote a note mentioning my own affair of the sore
throat, and asking for the benefit of his medical advice. He
instantly followed back my messenger, and was at once shown up into
my room. I entreated him to stand off, telling him fairly how
deeply I was "compromised," and especially by my contact with a
person actually ill and since dead of plague. The generous fellow,
with a good-humoured laugh at the terrors of the contagionists,
marched straight up to me, and forcibly seized my hand, and shook
it with manly violence. I felt grateful indeed, and swelled with
fresh pride of race because that my countryman could carry himself
so nobly. He soon cured Mysseri as well as me, and all this he did
from no other motives than the pleasure of doing a kindness and the
delight of braving a danger.
At length the great difficulty {36} which I had had in procuring
beasts for my departure was overcome, and now, too, I was to have
the new excitement of travelling on dromedaries. With two of these
beasts and three camels I gladly wound my way from out of the pest-
stricken city. As I passed through the streets I observed a
fanatical-looking elder, who stretched forth his arms, and lifted
up his voice in a speech which seemed to have some reference to me.
Requiring an interpretation, I found that the man had said, "The
Pasha seeks camels, and he finds them not; the Englishman says,
'Let camels be brought,' and behold, there they are!"
I no sooner breathed the free, wholesome air of the Desert than I
felt that a great burden which I had been scarcely conscious of
bearing was lifted away from my mind. For nearly three weeks I had
lived under peril of death; the peril ceased, and not till then did
I know how much alarm and anxiety I had really been suffering.
CHAPTER XIX - THE PYRAMIDS
I went to see and to explore the Pyramids.
Familiar to one from the days of early childhood are the forms of
the Egyptian Pyramids, and now, as I approached them from the banks
of the Nile, I had no print, no picture before me, and yet the old
shapes were there; there was no change; they were just as I had
always known them. I straightened myself in my stirrups, and
strived to persuade my understanding that this was real Egypt, and
that those angles which stood up between me and the West were of
harder stuff, and more ancient than the paper pyramids of the green
portfolio. Yet it was not till I came to the base of the great
Pyramid that reality began to weigh upon my mind. Strange to say,
the bigness of the distinct blocks of stones was the first sign by
which I attained to feel the immensity of the whole pile. When I
came, and trod, and touched with my hands, and climbed, in order
that by climbing I might come to the top of one single stone, then,
and almost suddenly, a cold sense and understanding of the
Pyramid's enormity came down, overcasting my brain.
Now try to endure this homely, sick-nursish illustration of the
effect produced upon one's mind by the mere vastness of the great
Pyramid. When I was very young (between the ages, I believe, of
three and five years old), being then of delicate health, I was
often in time of night the victim of a strange kind of mental
oppression. I lay in my bed perfectly conscious, and with open
eyes, but without power to speak or to move, and all the while my
brain was oppressed to distraction by the presence of a single and
abstract idea, the idea of solid immensity. It seemed to me in my
agonies that the horror of this visitation arose from its coming
upon me without form or shape, that the close presence of the
direst monster ever bred in hell would have been a thousand times
more tolerable than that simple idea of solid size. My aching mind
was fixed and riveted down upon the mere quality of vastness,
vastness, vastness, and was not permitted to invest with it any
particular object. If I could have done so, the torment would have
ceased. When at last I was roused from this state of suffering, I
could not of course in those days (knowing no verbal metaphysics,
and no metaphysics at all, except by the dreadful experience of an
abstract idea) - I could not of course find words to describe the
nature of my sensations, and even now I cannot explain why it is
that the forced contemplation of a mere quality, distinct from
matter, should be so terrible. Well, now my eyes saw and knew, and
my hands and my feet informed my understanding that there was
nothing at all abstract about the great Pyramid - it was a big
triangle, sufficiently concrete, easy to see, and rough to the
touch; it could not, of course, affect me with the peculiar
sensation which I have been talking of, but yet there was something
akin to that old nightmare agony in the terrible completeness with
which a mere mass of masonry could fill and load my mind.
And Time too; the remoteness of its origin, no less than the
enormity of its proportions, screens an Egyptian Pyramid from the
easy and familiar contact of our modern minds; at its base the
common earth ends, and all above is a world - one not created of
God, not seeming to be made by men's hands, but rather the sheer
giant-work of some old dismal age weighing down this younger
planet.
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