The Ship Dwellers Part 26

I think this is as far as general acknowledgment goes. The Scriptures declare more, the sceptic allows less; but the majority of mankind unite on the foregoing admissions. At all events, a great religion was founded on this man's life and death--a doctrine of gentleness when creeds are stripped away--and it is proper that such truth as can be established concerning the ground He trod, especially on that last dark day, should be recognized and made known. Of our little party of four there was not one who--standing there as the stars came out, and looking up at that hill outlined against the sky--did not feel a full and immediate conviction that this was indeed the spot where that last, supreme expiation was made, and that this sweet garden, guarded by these two gentle people, was the truer site for the Sepulchre which was "nigh at hand."

x.x.xVI

AT THE MOUTH OF THE NILE

I am not a gifted person; I cannot write about existing places and things without seeing them, and I am afraid to steal from the guide-book--unintelligently, I mean. I have sometimes found the guide-book mistaken--not often, I admit, but too often to take chances.

I should be struck with remorse if I should steal from the guide-book and then find that I had stolen a mistake. So I shall have to skip Galilee, Tiberias, Nazareth, and Hebron, for the reason that I could not visit those and include Egypt, too, by our schedule.

One _must_ go to Egypt. If the "grand object of all travel is to visit the sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean," then the grand climax of that tour is Egypt. One _must_ take all the time there is for that amazing land, and any time will be too short, even though it be a lifetime.

The guide-book says that the arrival at Alexandria is not very impressive. I suppose a good deal depends on the day and the time of day and one's mental att.i.tude. As usual with our arrivals, it was early morning, and everything was hazy and yellow-misty with sunrise. We were moving slowly, and the water was gla.s.sy still. Here and there across the yellow haze drifted a barge-like craft with a lateen-sail, or a slow moving boat, pulled by men in native dress. Then out of the mist across the port bow came the outline of a low-lying sh.o.r.e, and a shaft that rose, a vague pencil against the morning glow. The Diplomat was leaning on the rail at my side.

"Egypt," he said, quietly. "That is a lighthouse--they call it a pharos, after the one that Ptolemy built; it must have stood about in the same direction."

Certainly that was not very dramatic, not actively so at least, but to me it was impressive; and stealing into that dream-like harbor, through the mellow quiet of the morning, I had the feeling that we were creeping up on the past--catching it asleep, as it were; that this was indeed the pharos of the Ptolemies--the harbor they had known.

I shall always remember Alexandria, Egypt. I shall always remember the railway station with its wild hallabaloo of Arab porters, who grab one's hand-baggage, make off with it, and sit on it in a secluded place until you race around and hunt it up and produce baksheesh for its return. You do not check baggage in Egypt, by the way; you register it, which means that you tell somebody about it, then try to convince yourself that it is all right and that some day you will see it again.

But I shall remember that station for another reason. When we had finally fought our way through to the train, and Laura and I had placed our things here and there in our compartment--in the racks and about--we realized that we were hot and thirsty, and I said I would slip back and get some oranges, seeing we had plenty of time.

It was easy to do that--easy enough, I mean, for I no longer had anything for the Bedouins to grab. I got the oranges and paid a piastre apiece for them--about ten times what they were worth in Jaffa, and I had the usual difficulty making change--a detachment of interested Arabs looking on meanwhile. Then I started back, and was stopped by a guard who wanted to see my ticket. I felt for the flat leather case which I generally carry in my hip-pocket. It was gone!

If there had been anything resembling a chair there I should have sat down. As it was I took hold of the little railing, for my knees had a watery feeling which I felt was not to be trusted. That pocket-book contained my letter of credit; all my money, except a little change; my tickets, my character--everything that an unprotected stranger is likely to need in a strange land! When I got my breath I dived into all my pockets at once, then went through them categorically, as much as three times apiece. I had never realized I owned so many pockets or that they could be so empty, so useless.

Those Bedouins had done it, of course. I rushed back to the orange-man, and in a mixture of three languages which n.o.body, not even myself, could understand, explained my loss. He shrugged his shoulders in French, elevated his hands in Egyptian, and said "No can tell" in English. I glared around at the contiguous Bedouins, but they all looked disinterestedly guilty. In a mixed daze I went back to the guard, and crept through when he was attending to another pa.s.senger. I still held the bag of oranges, and handed them to Laura, who was quietly waiting, looking out the window at the pa.s.sing show. Little did she guess my condition, and how could I tell her?

It was quite by chance that I glanced up at the overhead rack where I had stowed our smaller packages. Ah me! The gates of bliss open wide will never be a more inspiring sight than what I saw there. There it lay--that precious pocket-book! In the disordered mental state of our arrival I had for some unguessed reason taken out my pocket-case and laid it there with the other items. It was safe--safe in every detail.

The world suddenly became glorified. Those Bedouins were my brothers. I would have gone back and embraced them if the train had not begun to move.

Yes, I shall always remember Alexandria.

There is a continuous panorama between Alexandria and Cairo, absolutely fascinating to one who has not seen it before, and I wonder how it can ever grow old to any one. Almost immediately there was water--the Nile, or one of its ca.n.a.ls--and stretching away, a dead level of green--lavish, luxurious, blossoming green--the delta-land of Lower Egypt, the richest garden in all the world. A network of irrigation; mud villages that might have been made by wasps; a low-dropping sky that met the level green--these made a background, and against it, along the raised road that follows the Nile, an endless procession pa.s.sed.

A man riding a camel, leading another; a boy watering two buffaloes; an Arab walking, followed by his wife and a string of loaded donkeys; ditto camels; a cow grinding an old Egyptian water-mill that has been in use since Pharaoh's time; two men turning an Archimedes screw to lift the water to their fields--so the pictures whirl by. The Orient has become familiar to us, yet for some reason the atmosphere, the impression, is wholly different here, because--I cannot tell why--because this is Egypt, I suppose, and there is only one Egypt, a fact easier to realize than to explain.

The day was well along when we reached Cairo and, after the usual battle with the Ishmaelites, drove to Shepheard's Hotel. As there is only one Egypt, so there is only one Shepheard's Hotel. There are other hotels as large and as lavish, with as fair gardens, perhaps, but I believe there is no other hotel on the planet where you can sit on a vast balmy terrace and look down on such a panorama of the nations--American, European, Asiatic, African--such a universal congress of pleasure as each winter a.s.sembles here. It would take a more riotous pen than mine to achieve a description of that mixture. If the reader can imagine a World's Fair Midway of every nationality and every costume and every language and mode of locomotion under the sun, and can see mingled with it all the dark-faced sellers of shawls and scarabs, and beads and relics, the picture will serve, and we will let it go at that.

And perhaps I may as well say here that Cairo is the wildest, freest place in Christendom. The confluence of Upper and Lower Egypt--the Delta and the Nile--here on the edge of the desert, it is the veritable jumping-off place where all conventions melt away. It is the neutral ground where East and West meet--each to adopt the special privilege and license of the other--madly to compete in lavishness of dress and the reckless joy of living. In the language of the Reprobates, "One gets his money's worth in Cairo, if he makes his headquarters at Shepheard's and sits in the game." But he will require a certain capital to make good his ante. If I hadn't found that pocket-book at Alexandria I should have taken my meals with the Arabs in the back bas.e.m.e.nt.

The Arab, by-the-way, is the general servitor in the Egyptian hotel. You ring three times when you want him, and he is as picturesque and gentle a Bedouin as ever held up a camel train or slew a Christian to glorify his faith. He is nave and noiseless, and whatever you ask him for he says "Yes," and if you ask him if he understands he says "Yes," and you will never know whether he does or not until you see what he brings. It does not help matters to talk loudly to the Arab. Volume of sound does not increase his lingual gifts, and spelling the article is likewise wasted effort. Ladies sometimes try that method. The trunk of one of our party had not reached her room--and she needed it.

"My trunk," she said to the Arab. "_You_ know, trunk--t-r-u-n-k, trunk--yes, trunk, with my name on it--_you_ know--n-a-m-e--my initials, I mean, _you_ know--T. D.--T. D. on both ends."

The Arab did know "trunk"; the rest was mere embroidery.

x.x.xVII

THE SMILE OF THE SPHINX

There was not much left of the afternoon when we reached Cairo, but some of us wandered off here and there to get the habit of the place, as it were. Laura and I came to a trolley-line presently, and found that it ran out to the Pyramids and Sphinx. We were rather shocked at the thought, but recovered and decided to steal a march on the others by slipping out there and having those old wonders all to ourselves, at sunset.

It is a long way. You pa.s.s through streets of many kinds and by houses of many sorts, and you cross the Nile and glide down an avenue of palms where there are glimpses of water--the infinite desert stretching away into the evening. Long before we reached them we saw the outlines of the three pyramids against the sky, and then we made out the Sphinx--that old group which is perhaps the most familiar picture that children know.

Yet, somehow, it could not be true that this was the reality of the pictures we had seen. The likeness was very great, certainly, but those pictures had represented something in a realm of books and romance--the unattainable land--while these were here; we were actually going to them, and in a trolley-car! It required all the spell of Egypt then--the palms, the desert, and the evening sky--to fit the reality into its old place in the hall of dreams.

We had thought to have a quiet view, but this was a miscalculation.

There is no such thing as a quiet view of the Pyramids. At any hour of the day or night you are immediately beset by beggars and fortune-tellers and would-be guides, and you are pulled and dragged and distracted by their importunities until you have lost all interest in your original purpose in a general desire to start a plague or a ma.s.sacre that will wipe out the whole pestiferous crew. There is no hope, except in the employment of one or two of the guides--the strongest-looking ones, who will in a certain measure keep off the others--and you will have to engage donkeys, and perhaps have your fortune told. Otherwise these creatures will follow you and surround you, insisting that they want no money; that they only love you; that it makes them happy even to be near you; that they love all Americans; that, in short, for a s.h.i.+lling, just a s.h.i.+lling, and a baksheesh (a piastre), one little baksheesh, they will become your guide, your slave, the dirt under your feet--"Ah, mister--ze Sphinkis, ze Pyramid, aevry-zing!" It is a disgrace to Egypt, and to England who is in charge here now, that such persecution is permitted in the shadow of one of the world's most revered and imposing ruins.

We engaged donkeys, at last, after there had been several fights over us, and set out up the road to the Great Pyramid, a.s.sailed every little way by bandits lying in wait. The Great Pyramid does not improve with close acquaintance. It has been too much damaged by time and criminal a.s.sault. It loses its clean-cut outlines as you come near and becomes little more than a stupendous heap of stones. I think we were a trifle disappointed with a close inspection, to tell the truth, for even the largest pictures do not give one quite the impression of the reality. It was as if we had been gazing at some marvellous painting, and then had walked up very near to see how the work was done.

The charm came back as we rode off a little and turned to view it now and again in the evening light. The irregularities disappeared; the outlines became clean against the sky; I was no longer disappointed in that giant of architecture whose shadow (it lay now just at our feet) began marking time at a period when the world had no recorded history.

Yet in one or two respects the reality differed from the dream. Usually stone grows gray with age and takes on moss and lichen--the mould of time. The Pyramids are entirely bare, and they are not gray. The stones might have been laid up yesterday so far as any vegetable increment is concerned, and their color is a tawny gold--luminous gold in the sunset, like the barren hills beyond. The daily sandblast of the desert will level these monuments in time, no doubt, but the last fragment in that remote age will still be bare and in color unchanged.

As with the Pyramids, our first impression of the Sphinx was one of disappointment. It seemed small to us. It is small compared with a pyramid, while the photographs give one another idea. The photographs are made with the Sphinkis (Sphinx, I mean--one falls so easily into the native speech) in the foreground, looking fully as big as the second-size pyramid and quite able to have the third-size pyramid for breakfast. Figures mean nothing in the face of a picture like that; you comprehend them, but you do not realize them--visualize them, perhaps I ought to say.

So the Sphinx seemed small to us as we approached, and even when we were on the immediate brink of sand, gazing down upon it, its sixty-five feet of stature seemed reduced from the image in our minds.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A VAST INDIFFERENCE TO ALL PUNY THINGS]

But the Sphinx grows on one. As the light faded and the shadows softened its scarred features there came also a dignity and with it a feeling of immensity, of grandeur, a vast indifference to all puny things. And then--perhaps it was the light, perhaps it was because I stood at a particular angle, but certainly--standing just there, at that moment, I saw, or fancied I saw, about its serene lips the suggestion or beginning of a smile. The more I looked, the more certain of it I became, and when I spoke of it to Laura, she saw it, too. Yes, undoubtedly we had caught the Sphinx smiling--not outwardly, at least not openly, but quietly, quizzically--smiling inside as one might say. I could not understand it then, but later it came to me.

Back at the hotel, to-night, I thought it out. I remembered that the Sphinx had been there a long time; n.o.body knows how long, but _a very long time indeed_. I remembered that it had seen a number of things--_a very great number of things_. I remembered that it had seen one very curious thing, to wit:

A long time ago, when a certain Pharaoh--we can only guess which Pharaoh--ruled over Egypt, it saw a young man who had been sold into bondage from Syria rise in the king's favor through certain dreams and become his chief counsellor, even "ruler over all the land of Egypt." It saw him in the height of his power and glory bring his family, who were Syrian shepherds, down from their barren hills and establish them in the favor of the Egyptian king. The Sphinx was old--a thousand years old, at least, even then--and, being wise, heard with certain curiosity their claim that they were a "chosen people," and thoughtfully watched them multiply through a few brief centuries into a band of servitors who, because of this tradition, held themselves a race apart, repeating tales of a land of promise which they would some day inherit. Then at last, during a period of visitation, the Sphinx saw them escape, taking what they could lay their hands on, straggling away, with their families and their flocks, toward the Red Sea. The Sphinx heard nothing more of that tribe for about three thousand years.

Then an amazing thing happened. Among those who came to wonder at the Sphinx's age and mystery were some who repeated tales of that runaway band--tales magnified and embroidered almost beyond recognition--and, what was more curious, accepted them--not as such tales are usually accepted, with a heavy basis of discount--but as gospel; inspired truth; the foundation of a mighty religion; the word of G.o.d.

Nor was that all. The Sphinx realized presently that not only were those old stories accepted as gospel by the descendants of the race themselves, but by a considerable number of the human race at large--accepted and debated in a most serious manner, even to the point of bloodshed.

Some details of this inspired chronology were wholly new to the Sphinx.

It was interesting, for example, to hear that there had been three million of those people, and that before they started there had been a time when the Nile had been turned to blood--twice, in fact: once by the grace of G.o.d and once by magicians. The Sphinx did not remember a time when the Nile had turned to blood. In the five thousand years and more of its existence it had never heard of a magician who could produce that result. It was interesting, too, to learn that the Red Sea had opened a way for those people to cross, and that the hosts of Egypt, trying to follow them, had been swallowed up and drowned. This was wholly new. The Sphinx had been there and seen all that had happened, but she had somehow missed those things.

Not that the Sphinx was surprised at these embroideries. She had seen several mythologies created, and knew the general scale of enlargement and glorification. It was only when she saw strong, cultured, and enlightened nations still accepting the old Hebrew poem--with all its stately figures and exaggerations--as gospel; heard them actually trying to prove that a mult.i.tude as big as the census of Australia had marched out with its chattels and its flocks; heard them vow that the Red Sea had parted long enough to let this population pa.s.s through; heard them maintain that this vast a.s.sembly had found shade and refreshment on the other side by twelve wells of water and under seventy palm-trees: heard them tell how the sea behind them had suddenly rushed together and swallowed up all the Egyptian army (including the king himself, some said)--it was only when the Sphinx heard learned men argue these things as facts that a smile--scarcely perceptible, yet still a smile--began to grow behind the stone lips.

That is the smile we saw to-night--a quiet smile, a gracious smile, a compa.s.sionate smile--and as it has grown so slowly, so it will not soon depart. For by-and-by, when these ages have pa.s.sed, and with them their story and their gospels--when those old chronicles of the Jews have been relegated to the realm of mythology for a thousand years--there may come another band who will establish their traditions as G.o.d's holy word, and the Sphinx--still remaining, still observing, still looking across the encompa.s.sing sands to the sunrise--will smile, and dream old dreams.