Pharaoh's Wife

by Félicien Champsaur

  She thought, secretly, that love alone was a sovereign temple—which might crumble, but to be replaced, sooner or later, by another.

  And the poor, melancholy Pharaoh’s wife watched a shower of shooting stars in the African night, trying to catch sight of an invisible god winnowing those stars.

  VII. A Little Life in Death

  The Pharaoh’s wife, with her horror of crowds and modernity, wanted to contemplate the pyramids and their forty centuries, and the desert, which had even more centuries, when there was no one else anyone around. Other women have different tastes, however, which do not incite them to flee their contemporaries.

  At the same time as Diana, Adsum and Ormus, there was a joyful band of young Englishwomen in Cairo, with their boy-friends, all very young avid for pleasure, movement and gaiety. A sumptuous Hispano carried them along the white and duty road, silvered by the moonlight and the headlights, and they quickly found themselves in open country, where a few rare villas were asleep in the midst of centenarian gardens.

  Already shining are the lights of the Mena, a palace constructed in the middle of the sands near the pyramids, which, realizing all the refinements of light and electricity, aliments a swimming-pool in its immense and marvelous garden, and lights it by means of artificial stars by night.

  The brown vanished façade of the wooden hotel, in the Moorish style, is a genuine lacework, brightened at every window by little boxes of colorful geraniums. In front of the perron, bell-boys huddle, clad in broad bouffant trousers with red waistcoats embroidered with gold, a tarboosh or a turban coiffing their dark heads, hiding the unique tufts of hair remaining there, by means of which Mohammed pulls his faithful followers to him.

  The joyous band gets out of the automobile. They go in search, in the vicinity of the Mena, of camels with purple and green saddles, camels that have necklaces of trinkets, and fetishes in quantity.

  The large docile animals allow themselves to be mounted and led away by a bronzed guide, and the troupe sets off for the pyramids. They are visible, squat and mauve in the sapphire sky, gigantic, impressive in their grandeur and the majesty of straight and mysterious lines.

  Ten minutes later, the bare-headed gallants and their female companions, with page-boy haircuts and short skirts, are able to contemplate the three colossal objects, constructed out of immense blocks of tone, at close range. By means of a few projections, the agile Bedouins, to whom a few piastres have been given, climb up to the summit; and people aggravated by travel literature yawn with admiration for the stone giants, a trifle stupid.

  That evening, the moonlight inundated the desert as far as the eye can see. A warm breeze, perfumed by acacias, caressed the face. The tall silhouettes of the camels were outlined in darkness on the sand, the sky and the granite walls. A slender form, crouching in a corner, intrigued the genteel misses. It was a fortune-teller, and the merry group, in order to amuse themselves, interrogated her in turn.

  Gravely, the young sorceress traced fantastic signs in the dust of the sand and the moon, in order to unveil the future, with her fingers of bronze with silver rigs. Then, delectable with local color, she developed her predictions, with English words picked up here and there, to the great joy of all that youth intoxicated by all kinds of hope and the heady scent of the flowers in the gardens of the Mena—which, beneath the twinkling of innumerable stars, sent forth their seductive magic.

  Then all the adolescents go back to the Mena. In the background, in the vast palm-plantation, nimble American women are trotting on horseback, accompanied by their current boy-friends, and in the swimming-pool, other young women are bathing. Their slender bodies, clad in short pink swimming costumes that strip them bare in the bewitching shadows—without any blonde or brunette secret animality—are reminiscent of naiads or fairies. Their harmonious gestures, under the moon on that beautiful night, have something eternal about them.

  Are they the returned shades of the marvelous princesses of an Egypt of long ago? No, just pretty girls frolicking under the gaze of the same nocturnal divinity—and beside those princesses in flower, the pyramids are stupid.

  VIII. The Smile of the Sphinx

  While chatting, the Duchess and her companions had gone around the great pyramid of Cheops, and before them stood the enigmatic and colossal Sphinx.

  “Master,” Ormus asked Adsum, “have you nothing particular to tell us about the Pharaoh Khufu, the fourth-dynasty king of Egypt who had the largest of the pyramids built?”

  “No, in that epoch I was not in Egypt—but I can tell you about the Sphinx, for I assisted in its construction.”

  There as a pause. Ormus and Ahmed were already sitting on the sand. Pharaoh’s wife perched like a goat on a block of stone, and Adsum, still standing up, began.

  “I was then a servant in the temple of Horus, one of the Father’s names. As you can see, through the ages, I find myself again what I was thousands of years ago: a worshiper of the Sun.

  “When, exiled by the defeat of his kingdom of Arafista, the great Mehnes20 penetrated into Egypt and stopped on the banks of the Nile, this region was only inhabited by a few African tribes who had come down from the high plateaux, and populations originating, like him, from India. The only weapons those tribes had were slings and clubs. Mehnes, although defeated, was at the head of an army of twenty thousand men, with weapons of iron and bronze, knowing the use of the bow and the lance. He defeated the resistant tribes easily, submitted them to slavery, and founded the first Egyptian city; Mehnes-Phi.

  “The son of a civilization that was already old, Mehnes soon understood that he had arrived in a land with a great future. The Nile, although it was far, in that epoch, from being what it is today, carried masses of humus extracted from the high plateaux of Central Africa. He created an autocratic absolute monarchy, and, in order to achieve that result, declared himself the son of the Sun. He built a great temple to his Father, and instituted a clergy, appointed by him, which he initially recruited from among his military leaders. The high priest, Osthi-Amon, a man avid for honors and wealth, myself, Amaheh, and three other Levites, formed the whole of the clergy.

  “Osthi-Amon immediately seized the immense authority that he was able to acquire over an ignorant and superstitious people, all the more easily because Mehnes thought of nothing but increasing the size of his empire and submitting the surrounding ribs to its yoke. Leaving the internal government to Osthi-Amon, who had his full confidence, he extended his conquests, in one direction beyond the Nile—which then had only a fifth of its present width, while the sea bathed the foothills of the Libyan and Arabian mountains. It was, therefore, toward the south, most of all, that the monarch extended his domination. Building cities and instituting governments. The interbreeding of Hindu and African races formed a new race, which, after two thousand years, acquired a definitive type.

  “Between conquests, Mehnes returned triumphantly to Mehnes-Phi. That name was the badge of its founder, and meant “city of Menes.” Every time, the clergy, which, under the impulsion of its leader, had increased prodigiously in size—without causing Mehnes any anxiety—exalted the glory and the so-called divinity of the Master. That adroit means, pushing the Pharaoh’s pride to the point of dementia, permitted the high priest to increase his fortune and his power.

  “It was then that, in order to flatter the Pharaoh’s vanity, Osthi-Amon suggested to him that he leave an imperishable monument to is glory: to sculpt outside the city, on the first buttresses of the mountain, an enormous rock overlooking the sea. Mehnes accepted his divinity. The Nile forced the river-dwellers to rest for three months, permitting the employment of the entire population, during that lapse of time, to undertake gigantic labors. The surrounding mountains furnished inexhaustible quarries of granite and limestone. A few temples and the Royal Palace were sketches out in the capital, and under the direction of the great sculptor Am-Ahoury, the monument to Mehnes was carved.

  “In that epoch, the sea came all the way to the foot of th
e Libyan mountains, and Memphis—to use its present name—was a seaport; not a very deep port, in truth, but sufficient for the flat-bottomed boats then in use, and of which the dahabieh of today is merely a enlarged and improved replica.

  “For eleven years, the stone-carvers worked on the statue of the man-god; for eleven years, more than ten thousand men toiled over that formidable, truly splendid task, but the stone block was not yet tall enough to crown the head of the colossus with the royal and divine emblems—which is to say, with a sort of tiara forming a solar disk coupled with lotus flowers and the double serpent. That part of the monument was carved separately, and in order to put it in place, an inclined plane was established, rising all the way to the summit of the statue’s head.

  “The work had reached that point when, one evening, Osthi-Amon, whose secretary and friend I was, summoned me to him. Then he made me party to a grandiose project intended to free the church of Horus from all authority and give him supremacy over the Pharaoh. This is what it involved.

  “Mehnes had five wives. His favorite was the daughter of an Arab chief, conquer by force. Her name was Mekri; she was very beautiful, but stupid and exceedingly superstitious. The high priest had obtained an absolute empire over her, and it was on that domination that he had established his plan. Mekri had given her husband two sons and a daughter; the older son, Atahot, was only seven years old. In case of the Pharaoh’s death, therefore, Mekri was assured a long guardianship, and, in consequence, a regency of which Osthi-Amon would be the absolute master

  “This was the high priest’s thinking: the Pharaoh’s boundless vanity made him believe in his own divine essence, not only in spirit but in body. Osthi-Amon created, in his own interest, the hypothesis of the Double, with the indefinite conservation of the envelope in which the spirit could persist until the day of its absorption into the ancestral divinity: Horus, the Sun.

  “For that imperishable sheath, that Double, an indestructible habitation was required in which the defunct individual was placed in an upright position, surrounded by everything that he needed to await the great deliverance. A Pharaoh, however, merited something better. Within the very head of the statue, therefore, a funerary chamber had been hollowed out, which a gigantic miter would cover and seal hermetically.

  “The statue and the mortuary chamber were complete. The head-dress, an immense block of granite twenty cubits high, enormously heavy, had been carved in place on rollers and a inclined plane. The genius of Am-Ahoury had established the ensemble so well that a few blows of a sledgehammer would suffice, on the day of the Pharaoh’s burial, to expel the wedges retaining the miter, in order that it would slide and fit into the notch designed to receive it.

  “A few days later, Mehnes was to make a triumphal entry into Memphis. The inauguration of the statue, cleared of the scaffolding and a part of the inclined plane, was included in the program of celebrations. ‘This is what your role will be,’ the high priest said to me. ‘Pay close attention, and don’t omit a single detail.’

  “Minutely, he explained his plan, which was admirably conceived, but had one basic flaw. Osthi-Amon believed himself to be the absolute master of the Pharaoh’s wife; he was only half-right, for I had been her lover for three years, and she only seemed to be devoted to the high priest in order to elevate me.

  “The great day arrived. A veil had been extended before the statue in such a fashion as to mask it on the side of the city. At sunrise, all the trumpets sounded; the zithers and drums made a solemn noise, while the Pharaoh, the prestigious Mehnes, on a magnificent chariot, surrounded by a multitude of chiefs and warriors, advanced. When he was close, the veil fell, and the Sphinx appeared to the eyes of the monarch and his court.

  “How beautiful it was, that monster twenty-eight meters high, with its impassive and sublime mask of the omnipotent autocrat, more divine than human, in that monstrous animal form. And I, who was due to play a terrible role that day, felt a glacial chill run through me at the sight of it; for me most of all, that mask, as impassive as Destiny, had an expression of formidable irony. However, the entire clergy, after a genuflection before the living, eternal god, was to file before the Pharaoh, dazzled by his own grandeur.

  “The sculptor-architect advanced toward the Pharaoh, prostrated himself, and said: ‘O Son of the Sun, your portrait is greater than you in its dimensions, but smaller than you beside your glory!’

  “The high priest had approached the Pharaoh and spoken to him in a low voice. Mehnes nodded his approval; then Osthi-Amon raised the artist to his feet and embraced him. ‘Am-Ahoury,’ he said, ‘you are henceforth the foremost in Memphis, and you will have lodgings and a table in the temple of the gods that you have so marvelously reproduced. Look, Am-Ahoury, look closely at your masterpiece, for you will never see it again!’

  “In response to a signal, the temple guards took possession of the artist, seated him in a chariot, and bore him away in triumph. The architect never saw his work again; his eyes were closed forever in order that, being blind, he could never make another similar masterpiece. Thus, heaped with gratitude and honors, Am-Ahoury ended his days deprived of light in the temple of the Sun!

  “Now, the high priest and the Pharaoh mounted the framework in order to visit the funerary chamber, while I and two of the most vigorous of the temple guards surrounded the granite miter. Mehnes and Osthi-Amon descended into the chamber.

  “Then, in response to a signal, before the high priest had emerged, as we had agreed, leaving the Omnipotent to meditate briefly on his eternal Double, my co-conspirators withdrew the masses of iron and simultaneously removed the wedges retaining the enormous stone miter. It shook, slid with a thunderous noise, and sealed the Pharaoh’s tomb. Then, with great cries of triumph, I proclaimed the glory of Mehnes and the high-priest Osthi-Amon, who had entered voluntarily into celestial apotheosis together, into immortality.

  “The Pharaoh and the high priest having been swallowed up in the bosom of Horus, within sight of all the people, by virtue of their own final order, power came into the hands of the regent—and, in consequence, into mine, thanks to the subjugated mind of Queen Mekri.

  “We married Athotis to his sister as soon as he was twelve years old, and I took care to stupefy him by means of anticipated enjoyments. I was, therefore, the true master of Egypt.

  “The centuries have passed over the ironic monster; the miter has crumbled away, strewing its debris around the statue. The desert wind has carried away the ashes of the Pharaoh and his high priest. Only the granite sphinx remains.

  “Its human face speaks of intelligence, its breasts of love, its claws of combat; its wings are faith, the dream and the hope of human flight into the heavens; its bovine flanks counsel labor down here.21 But you now know why that animal god, nibbled by the Sun and the wind, has always had its enigmatic smile. It has devoured the man who was perhaps the greatest of the Pharaohs. Does it hope to survive humankind on the dead globe, alone?”

  IX. Symptoms of Saturation

  From Laouat El Aryan onwards, the ultimate buttresses of the Libyan mountain chain come to melt into the sands, and the banks of the Nile are already encased. There is a cultivable strip between the Nile and the mountain.

  The travelers paused in Saqqara, wanting to explore on foot the enormous quantity of pyramids and mastabas garnishing that region, entirely populated by the dead. The pyramids, of several of which only the location can be perceived, number eighteen. Only one is veritably interesting—the most ancient and best-conserved. It is the so-called step-pyramid, the tomb of King Djoser of the third dynasty. As for the mastabas, they are innumerable.

  Although pyramids were consecrated to kings and Pharaohs—which is to say, emperors—mastabas were the sepulchers of aristocrats or important functionaries. Steles relate their names and ranks, giving information about the civic life of the times, and completing the mural inscriptions of temples and royal tombs.

  But what is a mastaba?

  A mastaba has stro
ng analogies with the little chapels of modern Christian churches. It consisted of a vestibule giving access to a chapel where the stele was placed, and on the walls, the most important events of the life of the deceased individual were recorded in paintings. Externally, the mastaba had the appearance of a sharply-inclined pyramid truncated four or five meters from its base; the terrace surmounting it was tiled on the sides inclined toward the north, east or south, but never to the west. The door-frame and granite portico were sometimes ornamented by pillars supporting an entablature on which “the sign of the tomb” was engraved. In the center of the terrace was a shaft, its depth depending on the location—for it needed to attain a depth within the rock of twenty or thirty meters. There, a sloping vestibule contained the sarcophagus, which, by that means, was placed beneath the chapel. The whole was cleverly hidden, in order to escape tomb-robbers.

  A pathway through these tombs and pyramids formed a veritable labyrinth.

  “People in Europe seem to be astonished by this strange religion, which made Egyptian life into a constant preoccupation with death,” said Antal Fodor. “It was justified by belief in the Double, which forced the living to take care of an envelope that they had to recover intact for a further incarnation. We moderns, who do not have the same belief, nevertheless employ similar practices, limited solely by fortune. Does one not see, in the cemeteries of Europe or America, poor people surrounding with pious care the earth that covers their dead? Centuries have passed, but something of their beliefs still remains.”

  “Certainly,” Adsum replied, “and I find therein a vague memory of preceding incarnations. Do we not see, in our day, trees, rocks and springs edified under the labels of saints or madonnas? The ignorant soul evolves, is renewed, but maintains the same errors and the same superstitions.”