There was a king in Egypt

Front matter

I t i

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I t

Preface

The monarch indicated in There was a Kmg m Egypt is Akhnaton, the heretic Pharaoh, first brought home to the English reader by the well known Egyptian archaeologist, Mr. Arthur Weigall. Akhnaton, or Amenhotep IV., has an interest for the whole world as the first Messiah. Like Our Lord, he was of Syrian parentage — on the mother’s side. Our interest in him is undying, because underlying his Sunsymbolism we have the first foreshadowings of the altruism of Christianity.

The book is not directly devoted to Akhnaton. It is about a young English Egyptologist, who is excavating the /tomb of Akhnaton’s mother, in which the Pharaoh’s exhumed body found its final repose ; his sister ; and an Irish mystic, who copies the tomb-paintings excavated before their freshness fades. Aton-worship and Mohammedanism have an almost equal fascination for this Irishman, and the romance is permeated with their mysticism. The prophecies of a Mohammedan saint who has attained the light by a life of abstinence and self-discipline, influence the current of the romance no less than the visions of the Pharaoh Messiah, whose pure religion threatened his country with disasters like the Russian revolution.

For the historical facts I am indebted to the brilliant Akhnatoriy Pharaoh of Egypt,^ of Mr. Weigall, late Chief Inspector of Monuments in Upper Egypt. The character of the Egyptian Messiah has fascinated me ever since I began to read Egyptian history, and Mr. Weigall writes with the grace and colour of a Pierre Loti. I have always used

VI

PREFACE hi« translations of Akhnaton’s words, and very often his own words in describing Akhnaton.

I take this opportunity of thanking Mr. Weigall for his ungrudging permission to quote from him, and I should like him to know that his book was the inspiration of There was a Kmg m Egypt.

I must also acknowledge my indebtedness to Mr. Walter TyndalPs fine volume, Below the Cataracts ^ — he is equally successful as author and artist — for my description of the tomb of Queen Thiy.

The teachings of the reformed Mohammedanism scattered through my book are derived from the propaganda works of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, especially his Teachings of Islam.

I trust that my readers will find the mysticism of the book not a clog upon the wheels of the romance of Excavation in Egypt, but Virgil’s ‘‘vital breeze.”

Norma Lorimer.

7, PiTcuLLEN Terrace, Perth, Scotland.

FART I

Chapter I

Dawn held the world in stillness. In the vast stretches of barren hills and soft sands there was nothing living or stirring but the figure of an Englishman, standing at the door of his tent.

At the hour of sunrise and sunset the East is its own. Every suggestion of Western influence and foreign invasion is wiped out. The going and the coming of the sun throws the land of the Pharaohs, the kingdom of Ra, the great Sun God, whose cradle was at Heliopolis, back to* the days when Egypt was the world ; to the days when the sun governed the religion of her people; to the days when civilization had barely touched the Mediterranean and the world knew not Rome; back again to the days when the Nile, the Mother of Life, bordered by bands of fertile, food-giving land, had not as yet sheltered the infant Moses in her reeds. Dawn in Egypt is the dawn of civilization.

Each dawn saw Michael Amory, wrapped in his thickest coat, standing outside his tent, watching and waiting for the glory of Egypt, for Ra, the Sun God, to appear above the horizon of the desert.

To stand alone, nerve-tense and oppressed by the soundless sands, and surrounded by the Theban Hills, in whose bosoms lie the eternal remains of the world’s first kings, drew him so strongly that, tired as he might be with his previous day’s work, he seldom slept later than the hour which links us with the day that is past and the morrow which holds the magic of the future.

For that half-hour only his higher self was conscious of existence, and it was infinitely nearer to God than he was aware of. The silence of the desert and its simplicity, which to the complex mind of Western man is so mysterious, banished all material thoughts and even the consciousness of his own body, and left him a naked soul, alone in the world, encompassed with Divinity, a world whose hills and rolling sands had known neither labour nor strife, nor the despotism of kings.

For the dead Pharaohs, lying in their tombs under the hills, in the grandest monuments ever wrought by the vanity of man, were forgotten. His long days of labour in their depths might never have been. Man and his place in the universe were wiped out.

The cold was intense. Michael shivered and turned up the collar of his coat. A faint light had appeared on the horizon, a pale streak like a silver thread, which widened and widened until it spread into the higher heavens; with its spreading the indefinite forms of moving figures appeared — ghostly figures of dawn.

Michael knew that they would appear; he knew that, just as soon as the streak of light grew in width from a faint thread to a wider band, he would see them, dignified, stately figures, like white-robed priests, walking desertwards from the horizon to his tent.

Although he had seen the same figures every morning for some months, he was not tired of watching them. It always gave him pleasure to recall how vividly they had at first reminded him of the pictures, familiar to him as a boy, of the Wise Men following the star in the east. But these were not wise men coming to pay homage or bring pres^ents to the Galilean Babe who came to be called the Prince of Peace ; they were the Mohammedan workmen who were employed by the Exploration School to which Michael Amory had attached himself ; their labour was confined to the rougher preliminary digging and the clearing away of the accumulation of sand and debris on sites which had been selected for excavation.

O

As the dawn slipped back and counted itself with the years that are spent and the first yellow gleam appeared in the sky, Michael saw the tall figures go down on their knees land press their foreheads to the sand. It was their third prayer of the day: devout Mohammedans begin their new day at sunset ; their second prayer is at nightfall, when it is quite dark ; their third is at daybreak.

Michael knew that the moment el isfirary or the first yellow glow, appeared in the heavens, the white figures would turn to the east and perform their subh^ or daybreak devotion. He knew that it would be finished before the golden globe appeared above the rim of the desert, for did not the Prophet counsel his people not to pray exactly at sunrise or sunset or at noon, because they might be confounded with the infidels who worshipped the sun.? Yet it gave him a fresh thrill each morning to watch these desert worshippers prostrate themselves in undoubting faith before their omnipotent God. In the untrodden desert, with its mingling of sky and sand, their perfect trust and faith in Allah seemed a convincing and evident belief. At such times he forgot that these same men were the children of Superstition and that one and all of them were held in the bondage of genii. He also forgot that their performance of five prayers a day, which is the number prescribed for the devout, did not necessarily make them men of honour. A perfect trust in Allah gives a bad man a long rope.

As the figures drew nearer and the golden globe rested for one moment on the sands of the desert, for that one brief moment before its rays broke into the amazing splendour which is Egypt’s, the world became less mysterious,* more familiar. Things relating to the day’s work forced themselves upon Michael’s mind. His bath and breakfast and many other practical things began to usurp his thoughts, while the barking of dogs, the movement in the hut of the ^^boys,” brought him back to the common, everyday li^e of the excavating camp.

While he was dressing he remembered that Freddy

Lampton’s sister was to arrive that day. For a moment or two his mind was completely usurped with a vision of what the girl would be like. Subconsciously his manhood quickened.

Yet the very idea of a woman intruding herself upon their strange and exquisitely intellectual life — a life made healthy by the long hours of physical labour in the various portions of the excavation — slightly annoyed him.

Fleeting pictures of Lampton as a girl rose and faded before his eyes as he hurriedly shaved himself, slipped into his flannels and adjusted his necktie as punctiliously as though he were going to a tennis-party at Mena House Hotel. It is typical of Englishmen in the East that the young men in the excavating camps, and especially in the one to which Michael belonged, showed as much regard for their personal appearance and nicety of dress, even when their day’s work was to be done in the bowels of the earth, down a shaft as deep as a mine, as they did in the golden days of their life at Oxford or Cambridge. Michael Amory was perhaps as a rule the least careful of the digging party, because he was by temperament a dreamer ; and his friend, Freddy Lampton, knew that if he was not careful and on his guard he would become ‘^a slacker.” Freddy, in spite of his acknowledged ability as a scholar and Egyptologist, was practical and conventional in his methods and mode of living. Michael Amory had fits of exactness and fits of what he considered conventionality; he had also his fits of slackness, days in which Freddy Lampton would let his blue eyes rest on his carelessly-tied ‘necktie, or on his shoelaces, which were an offence to his eyes. Freddy’s exquisite delicacy of touch and his eyes, which were trained to a fine pitch of exactitude for minute detail, two characteristics essential for his work as an excavator, made it painful for him to be in the company of anyone who offended his sense of personal nicety.

But visions of Lampton’s sister were to be dismissed. She would be good-looking, of course, because Freddy’s sister could scarcely be anything else; his blue eyes, clear colouring and sunlit hair would be beautiful in a girl. But Michael Amory had no desire to encourage any thoughts which gave woman a place in his mind. The very visualizing of Lampton as a girl, comical as it had been, had forced before his eyes another face and another form which he had been striving to forget. Whenever he was idle, and too often when he was busy over some piece of work which ought to have engrossed his entire thoughts, her haunting charm and beauty would suddenly become more real and vivid than the bright blues and greens and reds of the pigments on the white walls of the tomb upon which he was at work. With well-practised mind-control he had learned to pull down a blind on her vision, to blot it out from his thoughts. On this morning, when he was hurrying through his dressing so as to be in time for breakfast, always a matter of difficulty with him, even though he had many hours in which to put on his few clothes, he shrank from thinking about the arrival of the girl who was coming to live with her brother in this strange valley, which had been the underground cemetery for countless centuries of the tomb-builders of Egypt.

When he was almost dressed and the sun was high in the heavens and its power was beginning to warm the nightchilled valley, a stone was flung into his tent. ^‘Come out, you lazy beggar! The coffee’s getting cold.”

It was Lampton’s voice and Lampton’s nicety of aim. He had not been up since dawn ; his boy had only brought him his cup of early tea half an hour ago, yet he was bathed and shaved and as neatly dressed as the most fastidious woman could desire.

^^Right-ho!” Michael shouted back. ‘‘Don’t wait for me.”

“I should jolly well think I won’t! Who’d be such an ass.?^” There was the best of human fellowship in Freddy’s voice, but he knew his friend too well to risk the chance of spoiling his coffee by waiting for him.

After stretching out his arms and opening his lungs to the fresh dry air of the newborn day, Freddy turned into the dining-room. The mess-room and common sitting-room of the camp was in a wooden hut. Lampton’s bedroom !was at the back of it, as was also the one which had been set apart for his sister; it by right belonged to the Overseer-General and Controller of the Excavations and Monuments of Upper Egypt. Margaret Lampton was to use it and her brother was to evacuate his room when the overseer announced that he was coming to pay one of his visits of inspection to the camp.

Michael Amory lived in a tent, as did one or two other Englishmen who in busy and prosperous years helped in the work of excavating. At the present moment they were slack, which meant that funds were low and there was no fine work to be done which necessitated the individual spade and pick work of European Egyptologists. A new site was being cleared, so that the work had consisted for some time of the first clearing away of sand and stones and the debris which had collected during the thousands of years that had passed since the tomb which Freddy hoped to discover had been carved in the bowels of the earth, and the Pharaoh had been laid to rest in it. At such times there was little work for experts to do, so the camp shrank and left Lampton, who was the head of it, and one of England’s finest Egyptologists, alone with his native workmen.

He had allowed his old Oxford chum, Michael Amory, to join him on condition that he put in so many hours’ work every day in connection with the excavations. Michael’s stipulated work, the work which he had undertaken to do, was the making of exact copies of the mural paintings and decorations, such as Lampton required, and to help in the evenings to clean and sort and arrange the small objects which the workmen found each day. In the debris they often found amulets and small earthenware vases and minute pieces of broken pottery, the very smallest of which suggested theories as regards the period and history of the monument. The texture of the glaze used, or the nature of the pottery itself, the small remnant of decoration on them, or the trademark on the broken base of a vase, all were valuable links in the chain of history, which is unfolding itself to the eager eyes of Egyptian exploration schools.

When Michael at last appeared, Freddy looked up from his bacon and eggs. say, Margaret comes to-night.’’

«Yes, I know.”

Freddy raised his blue eyes and gave Michael one of his quick glances. ‘^Remembered, did you.^^”

“Yes — ^the fact suddenly came into my head when I was shaving. I say, what are you going to do with her.? Won’t she be awfully bored.?”

“Margaret doesn’t know what the word bored means. Give her enough freedom and lots of sunshine — ^that’s all she wants.”

“Sounds the right sort.”

“One of the best — old Margaret’s all right!”

“Is she like you in appearance?”

“Good Lord, no!”

Michael’s enthusiasm was damped. He wanted her to be like Freddy, to have his short, straight nose and his strong, rounded chin and beautiful mouth. For his looks were wasted on a man ; Michael wanted to see them repeated and softened in a girl. As his eyes rested contemplatingly on his companion’s bent head and youthfully-lean figure, he began to visualize a very plain, dowdy sister. The “Good Lord, no!” probably meant that although Freddy was not the least vain of his own extraordinary good looks, he could not help exclaiming at the idea of his dowdy sister being considered like him.

Michael had never seen her, because Freddy and Margaret had been left orphans when they were little children. They had been adopted by different relatives, so that Michael had never had the opportunity of meeting his friend’s sister while they were together at Oxford or when he visited Freddy in his uncle’s home.

“Pass the marmalade!” said Freddy. “And I say, old chap, I wish you’d go and meet Margaret!”

Their eyes met as Michael handed him the marmalade, which was the one thing in the world which Lampton said he could not live without.

“Meet your sister?” Michael said. “I will, if you can’t, but where ? — and won’t she expect you ?”

“She ought to be on the ferry at five o’clock — I’ve made all the other arrangements, but I do wish you would meet her there and bring her up the valley. I simply can’t, and Margaret knows that she is only allowed to come here on condition that her visit makes no earthly difference to my work. I daren’t leave the men alone to-day — ^there’s too much lying about. We are getting pretty ‘hot’ and they know it.”

Michael looked up eagerly. “By Jove, is that so?”

“Getting hot” was expressive of getting close to a “find.” It was the old saying which they had used as children when they played hide-and-seek.

“Yes, I think we are on the right track and I want to get ahead, so if you will go down to the ferry and fetch her up here I’ll be awfully obliged to you.”

“Right you are, old chap. I’ll be there at five o’clock, and if she’s not punctual I’ll do a bit of sketching. You’re sure everything else will be all right ?”

“I don’t think she’ll be late, because she is to be in Luxor by eleven o’clock. She is to rest there until it gets cooler and Abdul is to bring her over the river from the hotel. The donkeys will be at the ferry to meet her. Mohammed is very anxious for her to ride his camel” (Mohammed was the sheikh of the district) ; “he thinks it more proper and fitting for my sister to make her entry into his district on a camel, but I don’t feel certain that Margaret would appreciate the honour. He is keen to ‘do her proud.’ ”

^^Good old Mohammed !” Michael said. has a great

sense of dignity and convention.”

“And of hospitality,” Lampton said. “He never forgets that as the sheikh of the district he is its host as well.”

That was all that was said about Margaret’s arrival. The two men lapsed into silence until breakfast was over. If they had been two women discussing the coming of a man in their midst, there might have been more to say on the subject. In silence Freddy lit his cigarette and wandered into Margaret’s room. It was as bare and plainly furnished as a convent cell or a room in a small log-hut in a frontier-camp in Canada — just the necessary bed and table, a washstand and one chair. It was scrupulously clean, and the white mosquito-curtain, which was suspended from the roof and dropped over the little iron bed like a bride’s veil, gave the room a pleasant virginal atmosphere.

Freddy came back to the sitting-room, evidently satisfied. His quick eye had noticed that the “boy” had carried out his orders.

“Meg’s an awful girl for books,” He said, as He carried off a bundle of yellow-paper-bound French novels and one or two volumes of the Temple Classics to her room.

‘^She’d better begin on this,” he said, as he returned in search of still more. “She can’t do better” — he lifted up the weighty tome of Maspero’s Dawn of Civilization.

“A bit dry, isn’t it, for a beginner

“Not for Meg,” Freddy said. “She can tackle pretty stiff stuff. At college she used to suck the guts out of a book like a weasel sucking blood from a rabbit.”

“Blue stocking !” Michael said to himself. He abhorred the type of ardent, eager, studious woman with whom he had come in contact during his university life. “Able and abominable,” he called them.

In less than ten minutes the two companions had separated; the one, with his paint-box and camp-stool in his hand, made his way to the tomb where he was copying with delicate and extraordinary exactitude the exquisite figures and heads painted on the walls and pillars of the vast building ; the other directed his steps to the site where the band of native excavators was already at work.

What a strange sight it presented in the brilliant morning sunshine ! To the untutored eye nothing more or less than a vast rubbish-heap of sand and stones and broken rocks, with here and there patches of sparsely-clad natives working away with pickaxes and the tall figure of a white-robed gaphir, standing on a hillock of sand, watching them with unremitting care. On the sides of the vast ashpits long lines of ^^boys,” toiling like ants up steep inclines, were carrying rush-baskets full of rubbish on their shoulders.

Yet these ignorant fellahin were playing their part, and an indispensable one, in laying bare to modern eyes the history of the world’s first civilization. This vast rubbish-heap, where men with pickaxes and boys with baskets, full of the dust and sand of ages, toiled from dawn until sunset, would in the course of time yield perhaps to the Egyptologist one of the long-looked-for links in the lost centuries of Egypt’s story, or be transformed into a wonderful picture-gallery of Egyptian art.

Nothing could look less inviting, less interesting, as Freddy approached it, for as yet there was little or nothing for the untutored eye to see but the debris of familiar desert rubbish. But Freddy Lampton knew otherwise. Only yesterday the most experienced of the workmen had struck something hard, something which told him that they had finished with loose sand and broken rocks and had struck the ancient handiwork of man.

The site chosen had been a mere conjecture on Freddy Lampton’s part, a conjecture guided by scientific knowledge and careful research. He felt convinced that the tomb which they were looking for was close to the spot where they were working. Indications such as the excavator looks for had decided him to begin work on the site. The discovery yesterday had been nothing more or less than the first indication of a narrow flight of steps, cut in the virgin desert rock, a stairway probably built by the tomb-builders for the use of the workmen, in order to carry away baskets of sand and rubbish without slipping.

The moment that the expert workman had come across this staircase, they had suspended work until “EfFendi” had been sent for and found. Under his eye and partly by his own pickaxe, the little flight of embryo steps, with a very steep gradient, had been laid bare. In the vast expanse which the work covered, it seemed a very small thing, but the greatest underground temples — for the tombs are veritable temples — of Egypt, and some of the most wonderful of her monuments, have been discovered by far fainter clues. The little staircase, about twenty feet below the surface of the sand, was enough to fill the young Englishman’s heart with hope. He had come upon man’s handiwork — no doubt they would soon come upon more important masonry.

When all the workmen had saluted the Effendi with respectful salaams and returned to their common toil, Freddy Lampton addressed the native overseer. He was enveloped in a white woollen hooded cloak, for the heat of the day had not yet begun ; he also wore a fine turban ; while the fellahin who did the roughest work wore only white skull-caps and cotton drawers to their knees and full shirts of blue or white cotton, open from the neck to the waist. A few of the better-paid older men wore turbans of cheap white muslin, wrapped round brown felt skull caps, or fezes. The carriers of rubbish, who received the smallest pay of any, dispensed with the drawers as well as with the turban. In the sunlight their one garment, a blue or white shirt, stood out against the yellow sand as they wound their way in Indian file from the low level of the excavation to the place in the desert where they threw down their burdens.

The gaphir led his master a few steps from where the staircase had been excavated the day before and then bade him look down. Freddy’s quick eye detected a horizontal line of masonry, the beginning of a strongly-built wall. The men had unearthed it that morning. It was only a narrow strip, but it would have been against the strictest rules to have excavated more without Informing the ^^Effendi.”

The gaphir, a splendid man and very reliable, adored his enthusiastic English master, whose good looks and well-bred, unfailing courtesy of speech alone would have made his personality irresistible to the Arab. Added to his good looks and to his manner of ‘^one who is born to be obeyed,” Freddy had courage and great ability and — best of all in the gaphir^s eyes — a silent respect for the teachings of the Prophet. -^1

After an inspection of the various points of excavation and a word of greeting here and there had been passed with upper workmen, those who had showed an intelligent interest in their work, Freddy returned to the exciting spot and with two or three men who had ^‘fingers” and a ‘‘sense” of things, began his morning’s picking.

While he worked away with youthful energy and an almost inspired intelligence, he could hear the toilers with the rubbish-baskets singing their monotonous chants. The word “Allah, Allah” came repeatedly to his ears. He had grown so accustomed to the words of their chants that he followed them subconsciously; the words “Allah, Lord of Kindness, Giver of Ease,” rang out with monotonous persistence. Allah was to ease their burdens; Allah was to moisten their dry lips ; the “Lord of the Worlds” was to hasten the time when the poor man might sit in the shade and smell the sweet scents of paradise and listen to the sound of running waters.

They chanted verses from the Koran as Jack Tars sing sea songs. In Mohammedan lands the song of Allah never dies.

Only occasionally Freddy heard the quaint words of some popular love-song, coming from the lips of one of the higher-class Arab workmen, a song as old as their tales of The Thousand and One Nights. One was drifting to his halfconscious ears at the moment; he was familiar with ever}^ word of it.

‘^A lover says to his dove, ^Send me your wings for a day.’ The dove replied, ^The affair is vain.’ I said, ‘Some other day, that I may soar through the sky and see the face of the beloved ; I shall obtain love enough for a year and will return, O dove, in a day.’ The night ! The night ! O those sweet hands ! Gather of the dewy peach ! Whence were ye, and whence were we, when ye ensnared us

The Arab who was singing it was considered quite a musician amongst his fellow-workmen. He had earned his living for some years by singing love-songs on the small boats which drift up and down the Nile and in the cafes in Luxor. To English ears his talents as a singer would not have been recognized; the particular qualities which ensured the approval of his native audience would have caused much laughter in an English music-hall. Freddy Lampton, who knew something of Arab music, was able to recognize the singer’s talents, but he was not near enough to hear the grunts of intense satisfaction and longing which the song was calling forth from the blue-shirted fellahin.

And so the hours of the morning wore on, until the sun was too powerful to allow even the natives to work, and Freddy Lampton wandered off to the tomb in which his friend was painting. The fellahin instantly untied the bundles which held their simple food and began their midday meal. Many of them prayed before eating ; many of them did not.

When the meal was eaten, each man sought some vestige of shade, behind a mound of rock or an ash-heap of debris, or in the excavated channels of the site ; there with full stomach and contented mind he would lay himself down to sleep, amid the heap of ruins which thousands of years ago had been the field of vast numbers of toilers, such as were he and his fellow-toilers, slaving for the glorification of an absolute monarch, whose kingdom was the civilized world. He cared not one jot nor tittle for what he had uncovered or what secrets the valley or hills had hidden from men for countless centuries. Filling baskets full of rubbish was his work.

his method of earning a living, and it mattered nothing to him whether the rubbish was culled from the golden sand of the most wonderful valley in the world, or thrown out of the filthy ashbins in the native city of Cairo. Toil was all one thing to him; it had no interest, it suggested no varieties. Allah had willed it. The clear blue sky and the sunlit hills, with their tombs and tombs and endless tombs stretching further and further into the western valley, they, too, were Allah’s will, as were the dark, evil-smelling streets of the city, with their noise and the crowding of human and animal beasts of burden.