ABOU TALEB, WITH HIS lantern and coat hanger, had disappeared with the pack camels. The heat was terrible. The bottle of Evian water in the saddle bag under my left foot had taken on the temperature of the stomach of the camel against which it had been resting. To stop was to burn. And then—we had to stop.
In an unguarded moment we had agreed to have a photographer from the Pyramids take our pictures, caravan and all. And half way to Sakkara in the mid-day heat we topped a rise and found him waiting for us! All set up in the desert sand, black cloth over camera, his camel kneeling and tied, he brought us back from ancient Egypt with a jerk. There we sat, waiting for the pack camels and the men to come up. And it took considerable self-control to keep me from hissing like a teakettle.
Maybe he earned his seven English pounds; I daresay he did. But my vision of our being taken in silhouette along the top of a dune, moving picture fashion, died in the first few minutes. My other and earlier vision of being a veiled and mysterious figure had died long ago. But it was now that I learned why Assour and Smeda carried always their small rattan sticks.
One of the camel men moving at a critical moment, Smeda soundly beat him! He bore no ill-will, either then or later on, but it was a strange and painful experience. Later on we were to recognize that this beating was not so much a punishment as an assertion of authority, but it required considerable readjustment of ideas on our part.
On and on. A Bedouin encampment, in from the desert to sell camels; low black tents, open in front and untidy beyond words, for the desert Bedouin has no sense of order; he unpacks his camels and lets the stuff fall where it may. Dirty, slatternly, delicately featured women with beautiful slender bodies, barefooted, tattooed with blue on the chin and wearing many bracelets, and a ring in the right nostril. Tall and bearded men.
They were very friendly; they came to my camel and offered me to shake hands that had not been washed in months. They brought up their children to show, beautiful children, so dirty that I did not dare to touch them. And when we divided among them the equivalent of a dollar and a half in our money, their gratitude was amazing.
They were intensely interested in my clothing, examining it carefully. And as the “expression” of my skirt was by that time about as bad as it could be, owing to being hooked up over a ten-inch saddle horn, I do not yet know whether their interest was admiration or the reverse.
One wonders about these desert dwellers. How do they thrive as they do, on a diet almost exclusively of camel’s milk and cheese? So short of water that the women, at least in the Arabian desert, frequently wash their hair in camel’s urine; their clothing mostly ragged cotton against the winter winds; their fuel dried camel dung, when they use fuel at all; their bed an ancient blanket or rug, their tents open to the air, and their entire wealth in camels, sheep and goats which they must move constantly, in search of desert grass and water.
It is liberty, rather than the call of the desert, perhaps, which holds them there. They love the desert, but it is its freedom, not its privations, that holds them. They look down with a lofty contempt on those Arabs who have degenerated into town dwellers, and suffer their own constant hardships with pride.
They are brave, handsome, dishonest, and dirty. Yet the tradition of the Sheik as a passionate and romantic figure somehow persists. The Head, who in his lyric moments has been apt to warble: “From the desert I come to thee,” took one good look at this Bedouin encampment and has not since offered to arrive on his Arab shod with fire!
To those impressionable women on the terrace of Shepheard’s hotel, gazing with romantic eyes from their matter-of-fact husbands to the picturesque dragomen on the pavement below, I strongly suggest that they visit the Sheik in his native habitat.
Mohammed or Ali or Abdul may be of Bedouin blood—almost always is, in fact—but he is a town dweller. His beautiful garments are a part of his stock in trade. From his soft, tight-wrapped turban to his long under-slip of striped silk or satin, and the loose cloak of gold or blue or mulberry broadcloth over it, he is a product of the city bazaars. He is as deliberately got up for the part as the corral outfit on a dude ranch. And on holidays you may happen on him in a ready-made sack suit, a tarbush and a pair of American tan shoes!
We left our Bedouins and went on. Incredibly slow going. A camel walks about two and a half miles an hour, and to look back was discouraging, The Great Pyramid continued to look about as close as ever, and Sakkara as far away.
But as Sakkara gradually drew nearer Assour became happier. Here were to be more tombs, and tombs were his food and drink.
“Fellow must belong to the ground-hog family,” the Head grumbled. “He isn’t happy unless he’s scrambling into the earth or crawling out again.”
And true to type, we had no more than had our luncheon on the porch of Marriette’s house than Assour appeared with a coil of magnesium wire, and indicated that it was time to go underground. It was too bad to have to leave. The tombs of the bulls and the great Step Pyramid were bringing a long line of excursionists from a river boat on the Nile. They came in their dozens; elderly gentlemen holding with long-forgotten knee grips to the ribs of fractious little donkeys; large overfed women in tight skirts, astride their animals and extremely conscious of a length of uncovered stocking and even something more; priests in queer flat hats, cassocks and long beards. Some merely curious, some pathetically seeking understanding and the culture travel is supposed to bring, and some frankly out for a lark and not particularly having it.
They sank in the deep sand; they ate their cold basket lunches on the porch. And finally, hot and perspiring, they slid down the inclined way into the great Serapeum, and were somehow coordinated and silenced by its majestic strangeness.
Originally sun worshippers, gradually the state religion of Egypt had become largely a mystic one. Thus, a sacred beetle carved from stone, the scarab of today, was laid upon the heart of the dead, under the mummy wrappings. This beetle was inscribed with a charm: “Oh my heart, rise not up against me as a witness.”
But with all the vast cost in taxes on the common people of an extravagant religion and priesthood, the poor man never had a place in their magnificence. Not for him the great temple festivals, nor even the mighty gods of the rich.
He might not even enter the temples, but remained outside the gates, worshipping the lower demi-gods. Humble gods, which he could understand, and who perhaps might understand him.
There had been, from the very earliest times however, a cult of the bull. At Memphis, during the height of his apotheosis, he was worshipped in a temple and housed in a palace. “He lay on a soft couch behind a costly curtain; was fed on a broth of wheat flour and pearl water, with milk and honey cakes. A harem of cows was kept for him in an adjoining building.”
So he lived, an oracle whose verdict was favorable if he ate the food offered him and adverse if he did not, and one fancies that an attack of indigestion on his part must have thrown the entire community into black despair.
It was under his temple with its great avenue of sphinxes, some of them now seventy feet beneath the desert sand, that his priests and devotees built the crypt which was to house the sacred and embalmed remains after death. Today the temple is gone, but the mausoleum remains.
And into this mausoleum, sliding and slipping, did Assour lead the way with his magnesium wire. My own personal conviction that the only good bull is a dead bull heightened my interest, and made me wonder why Marriette, who discovered the Serapeum, burst into tears when he saw it.
But gradually the tremendous majesty of the place overcame me. The enormous granite sarcophagi, each in its deep particular crypt; the one still standing in the passageway, its journey unfinished, its progress forever stilled. To what processions and rituals were these great coffins entombed!
The king, with his crown and mace, with guards and standard bearers and slaves with long-handled fans; acolytes with burning flares, slaves to carry the precious burden, funeral pipes and lyres a-playing, and then the priests, in gold and fine linen, haughty, powerful, rich beyond dreams of wealth, reciting some mumble-jumble of incantation and prayer.
The sweating slaves dragged the great sarcophagi on a wooden sledge, in front of which a man poured water to prevent fire from friction. It moved, inch by inch, until finally it was lowered into place. The noise of lamentation and the drums filled and beat about the rocky walls of the tomb. Ceremonial vessels with grain and water for the next world were carried in. And then the mourning procession turned and went out again, into a world minus one good beef animal and nothing more.
Sixty-five tons each those staunch old caskets weigh. When Marriette discovered the crypt, one tomb still remained sealed, after thirty-seven hundred years. And the sand still bore the imprints of the naked feet of the slaves who had lowered that granite mass into place.
We camped that night three miles back in the desert, with the Step Pyramid to look at for history and the tiny light of the keeper of the Pyramid of Annos for company.
Poor devil, his is a lonely job. He has a hut overlooking the Nile Valley, but he lives in it alone. All around him are tombs. A misstep after dark, and he can fall down those great shafts dug by the Persians for the burial of their own dead. Modern tombs, these, only twenty-five hundred years old. As modern as Babylon and Nineveh. Assour did not think them worth our attention. But important nevertheless, for the deepest pit is not so deep as that into which old Egypt had by that time fallen.
Her greatness was gone, never to be regained. The Persian had taken her, and if she lived on, it was only later to become the granary of Rome.