11 “Cruelty was the word I took with me on my first walk into the Desert, but at the end of ten hours spent in its silent spaces I rejected it as utterly unjustified. The glow of the majestic Desert sunset was on the Mokattam Hills behind Helouan, making them burn inwardly with strange fiery torches of their own and the limestone ridges, so curiously eroded by the wind-borne sand of centuries, nodded fantastic heads towards the old Pyramids far off across the Nile.” “The Egyptian Desert from Helouan—I,” Country Life no. 793 (March 16, 1912): 381.
12 “I found myself continually thinking . . . of the wee white flowers I found in the savage bed of the Wadi Hof, tiny, little spotless faces that shone, unawed, amid the waste of ruin and loneliness. . . .” “The Egyptian Desert from Helouan—I,” p. 381.
13 “And this world of colour changes incessantly from dawn to sunset. The sunset colourings, indeed, force one to turn from the sky, where the brilliant effects are themselves amazing enough, and watch the great dead Desert turn alive with coloured fire no man could possibly invent or dream of. And all through the short dusk, as well as when the stars shine through the later hours of darkness, there are patches of yellow sand and gleaming limestone, almost white, that continue to glow as with internal furnaces just behind their sculptured surface. They light your journey home, these strange faint torches.” “The Egyptian Desert from Helouan—I,” p. 384.
14 There were eleven kings named Rameses during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties (1307-1070 B.C.E.), but AB probably refers to Rameses II (r. 1290-1223 B.C.E.), who is by tradition the pharaoh from whose control Moses is said to have secured the release of the Israelites. Two magnificent temples at Abu Simbel were built under his command.
15 AB refers (slightly erroneously) to two eccentric works by Walter Mar-sham Adams, The Book of the Master; or, The Egyptian Doctrine of the Light Born of the Virgin (New York: Putnam, 1898) and The House of the Hidden Places: A Clue to the Creed of Early Egypt from Egyptian Sources (London: John Murray, 1895).
16 AB here reflects the theory of theosophist Helena P. Blavatsky, who maintained in The Secret Doctrine (1888-97) that Poseidonis was the last portion of the continent of Atlantis to sink into the Atlantic.
17 Plato’s discussion of Atlantis (probably to be identified with an island in the eastern Mediterranean) can be found in two late dialogues, the Timaeus (25a) and the Critias (108e, 113c-121c), both dating to c. 350 B.C.E. They are the first extant mentions of Atlantis in literary history. Ignatius Donnelly (1831-1901) was an American politician and mystic whose treatise, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882), was one of the most celebrated discussions of Atlantis.
18 Donnelly also wrote an immense treatise on the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, The Great Cryptogram (1888).
19 Karnak is a large complex of temples (chief among them an immense temple of Amun) in Luxor, on the east bank of the Nile, about 300 miles southeast of Cairo. See “Egypt: An Impression”: “There is a sense of deathlessness about the ancient Nile, about the grim Sphinx and Pyramids, in the very collonnades of Karnak, whose pylons now once more stand upright after a sleep of forty centuries on their backs” (p. 626).
20 Nut was a sky goddess, usually in human form but sometimes in the form of a cow. Shu was the god of the air and sunlight, usually depicted as a man wearing a plumelike headdress. Thoth was the god of writing and knowledge, depicted either as a baboon or as an ibis. Hathor was a goddess of varied significance, usually depicted as a woman with the ears of a cow and regarded as the divine mother of each reigning pharaoh. Khonsu was the moon god, usually depicted as a mummified human figure holding a scepter and a flail. Ra (or Re’) was the sun god, usually depicted as a hawk-headed human figure.
21 Memphis, on the west bank of the Nile, about 15 miles south of Cairo, was founded as early as 3100 B.C.E. and was the capital of Egypt during most of the Pharaonic period. Heliopolis (“the city of the sun”), now in the northeast part of the Cairo metropolitan area, is one of the most ancient Egyptian cities, founded no later than the Fifth Dynasty (c. 2500 B.C.E.) and being the seat of worship for the sun-god Re’. It became the center of a Roman colony around 16 B.C.E. and is the site of several large Graeco-Roman temples built in the first and second centuries C.E.
22 Cf. AB’s account of his initial reading of Yogi Aphorisms: “In that silent bedroom, dawn not far away, I can hear myself saying aloud: ‘But I’ve known all this before—I’ve only forgotten it.’ Even the Sanskrit words, given phonetically in brackets, had a familiar look” (EBT 32).
23 Cf. O’Malley in The Centaur: “We know to-day . . . that the human personality can extend itself under certain conditions called abnormal. It can project portions of itself, show itself even at a distance, operate away from the central covering body. In exactly similar fashion may the Being of the Earth have projected portions of herself in the past. Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival . . . a survival of a hugely remote period when her Consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity . . . forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds” (C 59). H. P. Lovecraft quoted a portion of this statement as the epigraph to “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926).
24 Osiris was the god of death, resurrection, and fertility, usually depicted as a mummy holding the royal crook and flail. Horus was a sky god and protector of the reigning pharaoh, usually depicted as a hawk or as a man with the head of a hawk. Nephthys, sometimes depicted as a kite, was the protector of the dead. She was the wife of the god Seth, sister of Isis, and mother (by Osiris) of Anubis.
25 The Egyptian Book of the Dead contains spells and instructions for the deceased soul after death. It was in use from the New Kingdom (1567-1085 B.C.E.) to the Ptolemaic period (332-30 B.C.E.). It was first translated into English by E. A. Wallis Budge in 1895.
26 Saqqara is a large necropolis just west of Memphis, featuring several complexes of pyramids, including those of Zoser (whose Step Pyramid [c. 2650 B.C.E.] is one of the oldest of the pyramids), Unas, Sekhemkhet, Teti, and others.
27 Aswan, on the east bank of the Nile in Upper Egypt, about 450 miles south of Cairo, gained importance for its location along trade routes between Egypt and the southern territories. A dam was built there by the British from 1898 to 1902 and modified between 1907 and 1912 and from 1929 to 1932; it was still further modified from 1960 to 1971 and renamed the Aswan High Dam. Edfu, a site in Upper Egypt, about 100 miles north of Aswan, is best known for an immense temple to Horus, dating to early dynastic times and rebuilt during the Ptolamaic period from 246 to 51 B.C.E.
28 “The listening silence in the grim Valley of the Tombs of the Kings, the intolerable glare of sunshine on the stones, the naked absence of any sign of animal or vegetable life, the slow approach to the secret hiding-place where the mummy of a once powerful monarch lies ghastly now beneath the glitter of an electric light, the implacable desert, deadly with heat and distance on every side—this picture, once seen, rather colours one’s memory of the rest of Egypt with its sombre and funereal character.” “Egypt: An Impression,” p. 628.
29 Al-Badrashayn is a small town on the west bank of the Nile just east of Memphis.
30 Bandar-log is the Hindu word for the rhesus monkey. Popularized by Rudyard Kipling in The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book, the term came to refer figuratively to irresponsibly chattering human beings.
31 “From Helouan one may study with never-ceasing interest, even though not geologically expert, the curious phenomenon of the Desert film. . . . The surface of the plateaux is a darkly shining crust, often nearly black, and sometimes a deep purply hue that makes one think at once of volcanic rocks. Beneath it, where the face of the worn cliffs becomes visible, one sees the bright colouring of the softer red and yellow sandstone or the whitish limestone. But the top is sombre to a strange degree. This film is a ‘genuine desert phenomenon, and no
part of the colour is in any way due to dust or dirt on the surface.’ . . . This curious film . . . is, however, of a ferruginous nature, and its origin is due, apparently, to the dissolving action of rain or dew, which drives out certain salts and acids and leaves the manganese and iron compounds on the surface.” “The Egyptian Desert from Helouan—II,” Country Life no. 797 (April 13, 1912): 549.
32 Auguste Mariette (1821-81) was a French Egyptologist who excavated at Saqqara, Giza, Thebes, and numerous other sites. He founded the Egyptian Antiquities Service and the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
33 The Al-Hayat was a luxurious hotel at Halwan owned by AB’s friends, the Baron and Baroness de Knoop.
34 The Halwan Observatory, northeast of the town, was built in 1903.
Ancient Sorceries And Other Weird Stories Page 49