第51章

And now the cornfields have ceased; there is no longer any herbage--nothing. We have crossed the desolate threshold, we are in the desert, and tread suddenly upon a disquieting funereal soil, half sand, half ashes, that is pitted on all sides with gaping holes. It looks like some region that had long been undermined by burrowing beasts. But it is men who, for more than fifty centuries, have vexed this ground, first to hide the mummies in it, and afterwards, and until our day, to exhume them. Each of these holes has enclosed its corpse, and if you peer within you may see yellow-coloured rags still trailing there; and bandages, or legs and vertebrae of thousands of years ago. Some lean Bedouins, who exercise the office of excavators, and sleep hard by in holes like jackals, advance to sell us scarabaei, blue-glass trinkets that are half fossilised, and feet or hands of the dead.

And now farewell to the fresh morning. Every minute the heat becomes more oppressive. The pathway that is marked only by a row of stones turns at last and leads into the depths of the mountain by a tragical passage. We enter now into that "Valley of the Kings" which was the place of the last rendezvous of the most august mummies. The breaths of air that reach us between these rocks are become suddenly burning, and the site seems to belong no longer to earth but to some calcined planet which had for ever lost its clouds and atmosphere. This Libyan chain, in the distance so delicately rose, is positively frightful now that it overhangs us. It looks what it is--an enormous and fantastic tomb, a natural necropolis, whose vastness and horror nothing human could equal, an ideal stove for corpses that wanted to endure for ever. The limestone, on which for that matter no rain ever falls from the changeless sky, looks to be in one single piece from summit to base, and betrays no crack or crevice by which anything might penetrate into the sepulchres within. The dead could sleep, therefore, in the heart of these monstrous blocks as sheltered as under vaults of lead. And of what there is of magnificence the centuries have taken care. The continual passage of winds laden with dust has scaled and worn away the face of the rocks, so as to leave only the denser veins of stone, and thus have reappeared strange architectural fantasies such as Matter, in the beginning, might have dimly conceived.

Subsequently the sun of Egypt has lavished on the whole its ardent reddish patines. And now the mountains imitate in places great organ-pipes, badigeoned with yellow and carmine, and elsewhere huge bloodstained skeletons and masses of dead flesh.

Outlined upon the excessive blue of the sky, the summits, illumined to the point of dazzling, rise up in the light--like red cinders of a glowing fire, splendours of living coal, against the pure indigo that turns almost to darkness. We seem to be walking in some valley of the Apocalypse with flaming walls. Silence and death, beneath a transcendent clearness, in the constant radiance of a kind of mournful apotheosis--it was such surroundings as these that the Egyptians chose for their necropoles.

The pathway plunges deeper and deeper in the stifling defiles, and at the end of this "Valley of the Kings," under the sun now nearly meridian, which grows each minute more mournful and terrible, we expected to come upon a dread silence. But what is this?

At a turning, beyond there, at the bottom of a sinister-looking recess, what does this crowd of people, what does this uproar mean? Is it a meeting, a fair? Under awnings to protect them from the sun stand some fifty donkeys, saddled in the English fashion. In a corner an electrical workshop, built of new bricks, shoots forth the black smoke, and all about, between the high blood-coloured walls, coming and going, making a great stir and gabbling to their hearts' content, are a number of Cook's tourists of both sexes, and some even who verily seem to have no sex at all. They are come for the royal audience; some on asses, some in jaunting cars, and some, the stout ladies who are grown short of wind, in chairs carried by the Bedouins.

From the four points of Europe they have assembled in this desert ravine to see an old dried-up corpse at the bottom of a hole.

Here and there the hidden palaces reveal their dark, square-shaped entrances, hewn in the massive rock, and over each a board indicates the name of a kingly mummy--Ramses IV., Seti I., Thothmes III., Ramses IX., etc. Although all these kings, except Amenophis II., have recently been removed and carried away to Lower Egypt, to people the glass cases of the museum of Cairo, their last dwellings have not ceased to attract crowds. From each underground habitation are emerging now a number of perspiring Cooks and Cookesses. And from that of Amenophis, especially, they issue rapidly. Suppose that we have come too late and that the audience is over!

And to think that these entrances had been walled up, had been masked with so much care, and lost for centuries! And of all the perseverance that was needed to discover them, the observation, the gropings, the soundings and random discoveries!

But now they are being closed. We loitered too long around the colossi of Memnon and the palaces of the plain. It is nearly noon, a noon consuming and mournful, which falls perpendicularly upon the red summits, and is burning to its deepest recesses the valley of stone.

At the door of Amenophis we have to cajole, beseech. By the help of a gratuity the Bedouin Grand Master of Ceremonies allows himself to be persuaded. We are to descend with him, but quickly, quickly, for the electric light will soon be extinguished. It will be a short audience, but at least it will be a private one. We shall be alone with the king.

In the darkness, where at first, after so much sunlight, the little electric lamps seem to us scarcely more than glow-worms, we expected a certain amount of chilliness as in the undergrounds of our climate.