When I was seven, I wanted to write a play about Ancient Egypt — not the Egypt of the Badarian predynasts, or of Ptolemy and Julius Caesar, or of General Gordon; but the Egypt of mystery, of the pyramids and the valley of the Kings. Half way through the first page of my scrawl, I was struck by the thought that these characters ought to speak in Ancient Egyptian, a language with which I was unacquainted at the time. I abandoned my play therefore and started to learn hieroglyphics; so that I cannot now remember when those sideways-standing figures, those neat and pregnant symbols were not obscurely familiar to me. My inward connection with Egypt has been deep for more than a generation. When my mother took me to London, I nagged and bullied her to the British Museum; and if I think of London now, that museum, with the rich Egyptian collections is at the heart of it.

I do not wish to claim that my interest has been one of exact scholarship or painstaking science. The work of scholars and scientists has brought up massive information which denies the mystery. They are all children of Herodotus, the first Egyptologist. It is entertaining to meditate on Herodotus in Egypt. He was the first, for example, to point out the peculiarly dense quality of the Egyptian cranium, and he brought forward statistical evidence for it. He inspected an ancient battlefield and tried Egyptian skulls against those of their opponents as a child might strike one pebble on another. He found that in every case, the Egyptian skulls were the more durable; a fact he attributed to their habit of shaving the head and exposing it to a nearly vertical sun. Later, the guides showed him some statues of women with their hands lying on the ground before them. They told him these were women who failed to preserve the virtue of a princess, and had their hands cut off as punishment. There the matter might have ended had Herodotus been a decent, credulous tourist. But he insisted on examining the statues for himself. He found that the statues were wooden, that their hands had been pegged on, and in course of time had dropped off. The legend died with a whimper. It was a meeting between two opposite psychic worlds — perhaps even a meeting between two ages. It was commonsense and experiment at odds with vivid imagination and intellectual sloth.

I salute the Herodotean method grudgingly and am wary of it. It is a lever which controls limitless power, but a power in which I am not much interested. The method has begotten that lame giant we call civilization as Frankenstein created his monster. It has forgotten that there is a difference between a puzzle and a mystery. It is pedestrian, terrible and comic. Because it both bores and frightens me, I laugh at it, and find my image of it in a half-witted countryman and the way he made a discovery. He stood there with his beer, describing his first day-trip to London. He dropped statement after statement into the ruminative silence. He told how a nice young lady spoke to him in the street. Very friendly she was. She took him to her flat, where she gave him a meal and such a strong drink that he missed his last train. Then — would you believe it? — she gave him half her bed; and such was her social perception and delicacy that she didn’t wear a nightie, because he had no pyjamas. In the morning, this kind young lady gave him his breakfast, and a warm hug at the door — .

At which point in his story, he stopped suddenly, took the mug of beer from his lips and cried, with a mixture of astonishment and conviction: ‘Eh! If oi’d played moi cards roightly, I could ’ave ’ad that wench!’

In dialectical terms, this is an example of the change of quantity into quality, the laborious collection of information which may eventuate in a new theory of the whole. Those to whom the method is their only tool are as dull as they are laborious. They will decide, for example, that a statistical survey of the desiccated bodies of predynastic savages in desert sand, leads them to believe they have discovered the source of the Egyptian conviction that the body would be resurrected and therefore must be embalmed. This is an interesting theory, and relevant, I suppose, to the lurching progress of human society. It gives to desiccated flesh a kind of material dejection, as if it were the body of a dog. What it is not relevant to, is the child, looking down on dry skin and bone, and hearing for the first time a brassy yet silent voice inwardly proclaiming: That is a dead body; and in course of time that is what you will become.

I must admit that the Egyptians themselves were partly to blame. They did not always deal with mystery. They declined whenever possible from high art and preoccupation with first and last things into a daylight banality. The ponderous self-advertisement of their pharaohs, the greed of their tomb robbers, the cruelty of their punishments, the dullness of their apothegms, are understandable and recognizable in modern terms. How at home we feel with the foetid Victorianism of some of the trinkets that littered the tomb of Tutankhamen! We recognize as almost contemporary, the dull portraits of stupid burgers with their stupid wives. It is the sort of thing we might very well do ourselves. It is not much worse than the average advertisement or the average television programme. It means no more either. Even on a higher level than this, the level of supreme craftsmanship, the Egyptians are likely to present us with an art we can see round, accept as a notable statement of the transience of life and no more. Look at the gold face mask of Tutankhamen. It is beautiful, but there is weakness in the beauty. It is the face of a poor boy, sensitive perhaps and idealized, but vulnerable. It looks at us, and for all the marvellous trappings of royalty, we see that death is a final defeat. The gold shapes no more than the sad lyricism of Herrick:

 

It was not by this I was caught as a child. Indeed, in those days the boy still lay undiscovered in his tomb. Certainly I was attracted — as who is not? — by the time-stopping quality of the place and the climate. I delighted in the copper chisel, left in a quarry five thousand years ago but still untarnished and shiny in that dry air. I found poignant immediacy in a schoolmaster’s correction of a copybook text. That classic story, the prints of the last feet to leave the tomb still visible on the floor in a scattering of sand, shut time up like a concertina. Yet though I learned as much as I could of the language and the script, memorized king lists and all the enneads of the gods, these things remained peripheral. I must go back down the years, remember what it was like, and find out what I was after.

There is a museum dusk and hush. It is a winter night and visitors are few or none. I have had my nose to a showcase for two hours. I have listed and drawn every object there, every bead, vase, fragment, every amulet, every figure. I have pored over the blue faience Eye of Osiris until that impersonal stare has made me feel as still and remote as a star. The Ded, that tree trunk for which the method will one day find a Freudian explanation, seems to me a veritable Tree of Life. I know about symbols without knowing what I know. I understand that neither their meaning nor their effect can be described, since a symbol is that which has an indescribable effect and meaning. I have never heard of levels of meaning, but I experience them. In my notebook, the scarab, the ankh, the steps, the ladder, the thet, are drawn with a care that goes near to love.

It seems to me, as I lean over the case, that I might get somewhere — as if I, or someone, at least, might break through a crust, an obscuration into a kind of knowledge. That feeling makes me hold my breath — turns my fascination into a kind of desperate struggle, an attempt to achieve a one-pointedness of the will. Yet what am I after? What am I trying to discover? For it is not merely a question of symbols. As I back away, I know there is something else beyond the glass of another showcase which is vital to me — something, a language perhaps, a script of which these beads, figures, amulets, are no more than the alphabet. Man himself is present here, timelessly frozen and intimidating, an eternal question mark. Let no one say there is nothing to a mummy but bones and skin. Reason tells us one thing; but a mummy speaks to a child with a directness that reason cannot qualify. The mummy lies behind glass, and not a visitor passes without stopping to look sideways with an awed and almost furtive glance. He commands attention without movement or speech. He is a brown thing, bound in brown bandages, some of which have flaked away, to show parchment, a knot of bone, and dust. He is at the point where time devours its own tail and no longer means anything. If he has information for the passerby, it is not to be defined and not to be escaped. His stiff fingers, each showing a single nailed joint — except for the right index which has dropped a joint among the bandages — are laid on a quivering nerve of the human animal, which no education, no reason, no faith, can entirely still. If children are not hurried past by their parents, they look, and ask urgent questions. Then comes the crunch, and parents fight a rear-guard action with the example of cut hair and nails and a reminder of heaven. But he is more immediate than heaven; and after a child has studied the gaunt effigy and the silent wooden box with its staring eyes, there is nothing more to be said — no defence against the new half-knowledge that will lend to a grandfather clock or a tall cupboard a subsidiary suggestion their makers never intended.

The mummy lies there, then; and we cannot feel in our bones that it is just a thing, nor that it is indifferent. The hollow eye-sockets with their horn-like lids drawn a little apart, the stick-thin neck, the broken cheek that allows us a glimpse of the roots of teeth, have a kind of still terror about them. It is eternally urgent, as inevitably to be inspected as air is to be breathed. So as I leave my showcase — and the only sound is a door shutting where an attendant prepares to turn the hush into a vigil — I keep the showcase between me and him, then circle, facing him always, till I stand where I can see the naked bones of his head. He excites, moves, disgusts, absorbs. He is a dead body but on permissive show behind glass. So I stand, watching him; and I do not credit him with my humanity. I do something far more mysterious and perhaps dangerous. I credit myself with his. He is part of the whole man, of what we are. There is awe and terror about us, ugliness, pathos, and this finality which we cannot believe is indifference, but more like a preoccupation.

We are mysterious ourselves. Else, why was I so desperate, so frightened and so determined? Why did my will produce the next step and reveal to me my own complexity? For one day, when I was about ten, and leaning over a showcase as usual, I found a man at my side. He said ‘Excuse me, sonny.’ He moved me away from the case and opened it with a key. I watched him with respect for he was a curator. He was one with my heroes, Schliemann, Pitt-Rivers, and Flinders-Petrie, men I believed in touch with levels and explanations that would have surprised them had they known. In some sense, this curator had the hot sand, the molten sun of Egypt lying in his turnups. I felt his tweedy jacket had been windblown on a dozen sites. He was big. Was he not what I wanted to become? His face was a little fat, and reddened. There was a ring of sandy curls round the baldness of his head. He was a cheerful man, as I soon discovered, whistling in the hush as if it were not sacred, but so habitual as to be unnoticed. He hummed sometimes to himself, as he arranged the amulets in a pattern which pleased him better. He took notice of me, questioned me, and soon found out that I was as learned an Egyptologist as I could well be, considering my age. At last he asked me — who desired nothing better — if I would like to give him a hand with some work he had to do. We went together through a museum I already felt to be more personally mine, I in the shorts, jersey, socks and shoes of an English schoolboy, he in his tweedy jacket and baggy flannels. We passed out of the Egyptian department, through the hall devoted to relics of the Industrial Revolution, through another hall full of stuffed animals, and up wide, marble stairs to the geological department. One corner of the room had been partitioned off from the rest. There was no ceiling to this part, as I discovered when the curator opened the door with another key and I followed him in. It was a makeshift division in what had once been a room of a splendid and princely house.

But it was a division full of significance. There were rows of green filing cabinets, with papers sticking out of the drawers. There were shelves of books, proceedings of learned societies, and other expensive volumes that I had heard of but could not afford. Lying open on a desk was the British Museum facsimile of the Book of the Dead in all its rich colour. Wherever I looked, things added up into an image of the life I guessed at but had not known, the world of the wise men, the archaeologists. There was a diorite vase, surely from the depths of the Step Pyramid; there was a Greek dish, from Alexandria, perhaps, but most scandalously misused, since I saw a fat roll of cigarette ash in it, and a curl of half-burnt paper. There were predynastic flint knives, and in one corner of the room a broken, sandstone altar, its scooped out channels waiting patiently for blood.

But all these, which I took in at a glance, were nothing to the main exhibits. A sarcophagus, tilted like a packing case, leaned against the left-hand wall. The lid leaned against the wall alongside it, inner surface revealing a white painting of Nut the Sky Goddess. I could see how the lid had been anthropomorphized, indicating by its curves the swelling of hips and chest, the neat hair, the feet. But the painted face was hidden in shadow, and stared away from us at the wall. Nor did I try long to see the face, because the lid and the box were no more than a preliminary. Before me, only a foot or two away on a trestle table, head back, arms crossed, lay a wrapped and bandaged mummy.

There was a new kind of atmosphere, some different quality in the space between me and it, because no glass kept me away. Glass multiplies space, and things in glass cases have an illogical quality of remoteness. I was not prepared for this difference; and I was not prepared for the curator’s casual habitual approach. He stood on the other side of the mummy, hands resting on the table and looked at me cheerfully.

‘You can give me a hand with this, if you like.’

I could have shaken my head, but I nodded, for my fate was on me. I guess that my eyes were big, and my mouth pinched a little. Yet at the same time there was an excitement in me that was either a part of, or at war with — I am not certain which — my awe and natural distaste for the object. If I have to define my state of mind I should say it consisted in a rapid oscillation between unusual extremes; and this oscillation made me a little unsteady on my feet, a little unsure of the length of my legs; and like a ground bass to all this turmoil was the knowledge that by my approach, by my complicity, by the touch which must surely take place of my hand on the dead, dry skin, I was storing up a terrible succession of endless dark nights for myself.

But he had commenced without waiting for more than a nod from me. He was untying the long bandages that harnessed in the first shroud. As they came free, he handed them to me and told me to roll them up and put them on the side table. He hefted the thing itself and it turned on the table like another piece of wood. It was much harder inside the bandages and shrouds than you might suppose, turning with a sort of dull knock. He took off the outer shroud a large oblong of linen, now dark brown, which we folded, the two of us, as you might fold a bedsheet — he, holding one end for a moment with his chin. I knew what we should look for next. Each limb, each digit, was wrapped separately, and the amulets to ensure eternal security and happiness were hidden among the bandages. Presently they appeared one by one as we took the bandages away — little shapes of blue faience. It seemed to me in my wider oscillation, my swifter transition from hot to cold, that they were still warm from the hands of the embalmer/priest who was the last to touch them three thousand years ago, and who was surely standing with us now, whenever now was. But our operations had their own inevitability; and at last I laid my compelled, my quivering and sacrilegious hand on the thing in itself, experienced beyond all Kantian question, the bone, and its binding of thick, leathery skin.

The curator glanced at his wristwatch and whistled, but with astonishment, this time.

‘I’ve kept you late, sonny. You’d better go straight away. Apologise to your parents for me. You can come back tomorrow, if you like.’

I left him standing alone or partly alone, where I knew I should never dare to stand myself. The face of the sarcophagus was still hidden against the wall, but the curator was smiling at me out of his round, red face, under a fringe of curly hair. He waved one hand, and there was a hank of browning bandage in it, above a brightly lit and eternally uncheerful grin. I hurried away through the deserted museum with my contaminated hands to the dark streets and the long trek home. There I told my parents and my brother in excited detail about what had happened, was cross questioned, and finally prepared for the terrors of bed.

Now it is important to realize that I remembered and still remember everything in vivid and luminous detail. It became the event of my life; and before I returned to the museum, I talked the thing over passionately, with my parents and myself. I suffered the terrors of bed. I wrote an essay describing the episode when I went to school, and got extravagant praise for it. I brooded constantly about the lid of the sarcophagus with its hidden face. Yet it is important to realize that none of the episode happened at all. From the moment when I stood by the showcase, brooding and desperate, wishing, as singlemindedly as the hero of a fairy tale, till the time when I ran helter-skelter down the museum steps, I was somewhere; and I still do not know where that was. There was no curator with a red, smiling face. There was no mummy, and no sarcophagus. There was a partitioned corner of the geological room, but it contained rolls of maps, not bandages. I looked at the place in daylight and knew myself to be a liar, though I do not think now that a liar is exactly what I was. It was the childish equivalent of the Lost Weekend, the indulgence behind which was my unchildish learning, and my overwhelming need to come to terms with the Egyptian thing. The whole self-supplying episode is a brilliant part of the Egypt from my inside; stands with all the other pictures, the black and gold figures at the final entrance to Tutankhamen’s tomb, the Hall of Pillars at Karnak, and all the vignettes, fantastic, obscure, meaningful, that illustrate the Book of the Dead.

But the episode resolved nothing, only made the need bleaker and more urgent. I took my desperation down from the daylight of the geological department and the rolls of maps, and stood once more by the showcase in the Egyptian room, where there was a mummy and no curator to open the lid and rearrange the amulets. All day I wandered, brooding and drawing. As night fell I know there was still one thing to do. For the face that did not exist on the lid of the sarcophagus that did not exist had been turned to the wall and I had never seen it. But there was a ‘real’ sarcophagus in the Egyptian collection. It stood on its feet behind glass by the wall. It looked across the room. It was nearly seven feet tall; and however I moved about the room among the showcases it gazed fixedly over my head.

There is nothing quite so real as the eyes of a primitive carving. Everything else may be rough-hewn, approximate or formalized. Indeed, the eyes may be formalized too, but if so, all they exaggerate is the stare. I know that it is necessary to meet that stare, eye to eye. It is a portrait of the man himself as his friends thought he should be — purified, secure, wise. It is the face prepared to penetrate mysteries, to stand pure and unfrightened in the hall where the forty-two judges ask their questions of the dead man, and the god weighs his heart against a feather. It is the face prepared to go down and through, in darkness. I too can go down and through, I can revisit the man with his red face and fringe of hair. I can comprehend and control the silent mummy by meeting those eyes, and understanding them, outstaring them. I go to the opposite wall, though it means being near the wrecked, dead thing. I get one foot on the valve of a radiator and lift myself perhaps eight or nine inches into the air but it is not enough. The mummiform sarcophagus with its carved and painted face still stares over my head as if there were a picture above me on the blank wall. I get down from the radiator and carry a chair from the door, but carefully; for who knows what might move, at a sudden noise? I am trembling, and every now and then, this trembling is interrupted by a kind of convulsive shudder. My teeth are gripped and I am at my apex. I put the chair soundlessly by the wall and climb up, then turn to look across the nearer, bandaged thing to the massive, upright figure. I am at eye-level with the awful, the pure face before its judges; but it does not see me nor a picture on the wall. Those formalized black and white oblongs focus where parallel lines meet. They outstare infinity in eternity. The wood is rounded as in life, but not my life, insecure, vulnerable. It dwells with a darkness that is its light. It will not look at me, so frightened yet desperate, I try to force the eyes into mine; but know that if the eyes focused or I could understand the focus, I should know what it knows; and I should be dead. On my chair I search for the unattainable focus of its vision in growing fear, until there is nothing but shadows round and under the staring oblongs which have detached themselves and swim unsupported. I scramble down, go quickly and silently away through the halls where the Chinese idols and the eyeslitted suits of armour are friendly, normal things; and outside the revolving doors there are red buses, and wintry-breathing people, and cars.

It will be observed that I do not understand these transactions; which is as much as to say that though I can describe the quality of living I do not understand the nature of this being alive. We are near the heart of my Egypt. It is to be at once alive and dead; to suggest mysteries with no solution, to mix the strange, the gruesome and the beautiful; to use all the resources of life to ensure that this leftover from living and its container shall stand outside change and bring the wheel to a full stop.

‘The Egyptians’, we are assured, ‘were a laughter- and life-loving people. They were earthy. We meet them only in their coffins and get their lives out of proportion.’ It may be so; yet for all their life- and laughter-love, that is where we meet them. That is what they made of themselves and I cannot see how we are to escape it. Whatever the Egyptians intended, they brought life and death together in the most tangible way possible. Their funerary rituals, their tombs and grave goods, their portrait statues on which no human eye was supposed to rest, their gloomy corridors irradiated with paint, their bones, skin and preservatives — these are not just a memento mori. They are a memento vivere as well. I recognize in their relics, through the medium of archaeology and art, my own mournful staring into the darkness, my own savage grasp on life. I have said how familiar to me their bad art is. When a shoddy ship model confronts me, with the scale all wrong and the figures no more lifelike than a clothespeg, I am at home in daylight; for it is the sort of model I might make myself. But their great art, I cannot understand, only wonder at a wordless communication. It is not merely the size, the weight, the skill, the integrity. It is the ponderous movement forward on one line which is none the less a floating motionlessness. It is the vision. Beyond the reach of the dull method, of statistical investigation, it is the thumbprint of a mystery.

We are not, for all our knowledge, in a much different position from the Egyptian one. Our medicine is better, our art, probably not so good; and we suffer from a dangerous pride in our ant-like persistence in building a pyramid of information. It is entertaining information for the most part, but it does not answer any of the questions the Egyptians asked themselves before us. And we have a blinding pride that was foreign to them. We discount the possibility of the potentialities of the human spirit which may operate by other means in other modes to other ends. For if we or the Egyptians confine ourselves to the accepted potential, the limits are plain to see. For them perhaps, it was those four pillars, the arms and legs of Nut, the Sky Goddess, beyond which investigation was useless. For us, the limit is where the receding galaxies move with the speed of light beyond all possibility of physical investigation. Yet in their effect on us and in their relationship to those other guessed-at qualities of the human spirit, they are the same limits.

Well. Most of us today are children of Herodotus. But though I admire the Greeks I am not one of them, nor one of their intellectual children. I cannot believe as the sillier of my ancestors did, that the measurements of the great pyramid gives us the date of the next war, nor that pounded mummy flesh makes a medicine, yet my link with the Egyptians is deep and sure. I do not believe them either wise or foolish. I am, in fact, an Ancient Egyptian, with all their unreason, spiritual pragmatism and capacity for ambiguous belief. And if you protest on the evidence of statistical enquiry they were not like that, I can only answer in the jargon of my generation, that for me they have projected that image.