There was a King in Egypt Part 27

"The whole thing is very bewildering. The tomb obviously hasn't been plundered, for nothing of any value is missing, and yet, as you can see, some of the gold wrappings have been torn from the mummy, certain things have been defaced on the walls--the tomb is not as it was when the body was first laid here."

"No," Mike said. "Obviously not. The entrance has been tampered with and those outer walls built; and look at all that debris in the shaft.

Yet, as you say, the obvious things of intrinsic value have not been removed."

Meg pointed to a recess in the wall; it still held the canopic jars.

Their lids were splendidly formed out of head-portraits of the queen.

Meg knew their meaning, their use; they held the intestines of the dead. The Biblical expression, "bowels of compa.s.sion," always came to her mind when she looked at canopic jars. These jars had their significance.

A very good significance, too, she thought, for certainly our bowels are highly sensitive organs, responding and acting in complete sympathy with our mental condition. And who can say for certain where our compa.s.sions are seated, our sensibilities and sympathies? Why not, as the Egyptians thought, in our bowels rather than in our brains?

"Joseph's bowels did yearn upon his brother Benjamin."

"Then you have no idea who the queen was?" Meg said.

"Not yet," Freddy said. "But we shall know. No Egyptian could enter into his future abode without his name. It was always plainly and repeatedly written on the embalmed mummy. His identification was absolutely essential."

"What a help to Egyptologists!" Meg said.

"Probably her name will be written on these golden wrappings and on the scarabs, if we find any. Nothing has been done yet. This precaution of the ancients, in the matter of names, has, as you say, saved us endless work. If plunderers haven't obliterated the name and stolen the scarabs and other marks of identification, we generally discover who it is."

Meg sighed. "Is it just ordinary desert and daylight still up above, Freddy? I can't believe it. We seem to be back in the Egypt of the Pharaohs down here."

They all looked silently again at the wonderful sight, far more wonderful than words can suggest--the power of Egypt, the mystery of death.

"The soothsayer was quite true," Meg said. "His words were more than true."

"Yes," Freddy said, "more than true. And the odd thing is that he said what I thought was a lot of rot about a 'bridal figure,' its splendour, its brilliance. He visualized it almost correctly. He said, too, that there would be great trouble for us in the work; he saw difficulties and errors and wrong judgments. Nothing was clear, beyond the brilliance of the figure and the objects. I wonder if he will be right in that as well?"

Michael and Margaret looked at each other. Obviously Freddy had been influenced by the accuracy of the visionary's predictions. His voice was free from scoffing. He owned that it was extraordinary--the manner in which the man's words had come true. Neither Meg nor Michael made any remark; they held their tongues in patience.

"There is certainly plenty of gold," Freddy said, "and jewels and much fine apparel. I hope we shan't encounter the great difficulty he expects, as regards the historical problems and arguments it may open up. He predicts that the opinions of the learned Egyptologists will be cast out; their judgments will be at fault. What at first will appear obvious and clear will not be the lasting truth."

"How odd!" Mike said. "Was he very pleased to hear of the correctness of his predictions so far?"

"I haven't told him."

"Not told him?"

"No, it's wiser not. I've done my best to keep the astonis.h.i.+ng richness of the tomb from the ears of the natives. No one has been inside it but the Chief Inspector and the photographer and you two. No words have been spoken--you must not talk."

Meg's heart bounded. It was delightful to be one of the privileged few, to be trusted and accepted as one of the school. She felt like a great explorer who had set foot in untravelled country.

"If we stand here, without moving," she said; "quite, quite still, mayn't we stay for a little bit longer? I'm so full of wonder and amazement, Freddy. I can't begin to think intelligently or see things separately--everything is a blurred ma.s.s of white and gold and blue and priceless objects."

"No, Meg, I'm sorry--I can't let you stay. You see, I must take this light with me and get on with picking up those small objects. You'll see all of them to-night. And with out the light you would be in total darkness--real Egyptian darkness."

"That's the thing that beats me. Freddy, how do you solve the problem?--had they electric torches, or were these tombs only built for supernatural eyes to enjoy?"

"They certainly didn't use flares or torches in tombs, as the early Christians did in the Roman catacombs, for there's no trace on the walls of dirt or smoke as there is on the low walls of the catacombs.

There is absolutely nothing to tell us how they lighted these vast buildings up, how they even introduced sufficient light to paint them by or to build them. Look at the minuteness of these figures."

"Surely they never built all these wonderful tombs and took the trouble to paint them with the brightest colours if they were never again to be seen with mortal eyes? I can't believe it."

"So far we don't know. Perhaps the _Ka_, the part of a man who lived for ever in his eternal home, had supernatural powers of sight. The joys were for him. But how did they paint them in the darkness?"

"Is that fact ever alluded to?"

"No, the _Ka_ is treated in a perfectly human and natural manner. All his pleasures were material ones. It's very odd--but we'll discover the secret yet."

"If they had some secret form of wireless telegraphy, they may just as well have had some secret means of producing light, don't you think?

You've not discovered their wireless code, yet, have you?"

"No, that's still a secret. And they certainly used no apparatus for electric light, if they knew of it. There are no wires in the tombs."

He laughed. "You know, there is a lift in the Forum at Rome; it was used for bringing the beasts up to the arena from underground cages.

It is in use to-day, I believe."

"We've not discovered one hundredth part of what they had or hadn't,"

Meg said. "They probably used radium to cure diseases."

"The Etruscans had dentists who knew the use of gold for stopping teeth--we know that."

"Yes, I've seen a skull with gold-stopped teeth in the Etruscan Museum at Rome."

They had reached the beginning of the steep climb which was to take them up to the open desert. Freddy left them with the a.s.surance that he would come back to lunch. The two policemen were to be responsible for the guarding of the tomb. If anything was disturbed, they would be held to account.

When Margaret and Michael at last reached the open desert, Meg flung herself down and gazed up into the sky. It had never seemed so blue and beautiful before. The clear air rushed into her lungs. Oh, the sweetness and the dearness of the daylight and the real world! The joy it was to press her body close, close to the desert! She put her face down to it. Nothing in all her life had ever been so rea.s.suring and comforting.

Michael was seated beside her. The world was so wide and open and bewildering; he felt giddy, stupefied. Surrounding them was the ever-wonderful light of the desert, the yellow sands and, in the distance, the ma.s.ses of moving figures, working like busy insects at the clearing away of the tomb-rubbish. Native chants and the noise of picks and spades shovelling up the debris broke the stillness. Life was just as it had been for the last two months. The desert was as it had been before the tribes of Israel followed Moses. Down below them, under the golden sand, in the dark bowels of the earth, Freddy was still picking up precious jewels and packing them into the cigarette-boxes, the effigy of the royal bride still lay in all her Pharaonic splendour. She was there, underneath them, waiting and waiting as she had waited for three thousand years for her heavenly bridegroom. And still by her side lay that shrivelled, withered corpse, the real queen, for whose pride and honour the vast underground temple had been built. The brown mummy was the thing which mattered, the real owner of the costly home.

Freddy, in his white flannels, with his modern mind, was alone with these two forms, alone and shut off from the embracing, loving light of the desert. It was not a quarter of an hour since Meg and he had been there; now they were as far away from the withered mummy and the resplendent bride as though they had travelled across the breadth of the world.

His mind went back to the time before the excavating of the tomb was begun, when it had seemed absurd to suppose that all this splendour lay under their feet. It seemed to him now as though the whole of Egypt might be honeycombed in this subterranean manner.

Meg still lay embracing the sun-warmed sand, rejoicing in the dazzling suns.h.i.+ne.

"It makes one feel very humble," she said at last. "So utterly, utterly unimportant. It doesn't seem as if it much matters what happens, not even to our love, Mike."

Mike raised his face from his hands. "I know," he said. "It is absolute devastation, nothing more or less. I'm shattered, Meg."

"It seems hardly worth while trying to do anything. Tomorrow we'll be like that. It's so difficult to explain, except that it's just wiped out my eagerness, it's made our own precious happiness seem absurd and hollow, human beings ridiculous."

"Dearest, I understand, I feel the same," Mike said. "All that down there"--he stuck his stick into the sand--"ill.u.s.trates a bit too plainly the things we want to forget."

"It shows us the absurdity of what we think are the things that matter.

It's really destructive to anything like worldly fame and ambition.

Those poor shrunken cheeks, those poor leathery lips, those poor, poor diadems and jewels!"

Mike let her ramble on. It was good for her to give utterance to her incoherent thoughts.

"They are so different when you see them in a museum," she said.