Pillars of Creation

Mine is yesterday, and to-morrow is known to me. What, then, is this? Yesterday is the name of Osiris; to-morrow is the name of Rā.

The Book of the Dead, Chapter the Seventeenth

Abydos, March 1893

Hamid ibn Daud had not slept for three nights, and the blame for it, as for all else that had gone amiss upon his land since the days of the Pharaohs, lay with the English.

In twenty years of service among the diggings Hamid had come to know this breed of men better than many an imam knows the Book, and had long since drawn for himself one plain truth: every Inglīz who sets foot in Egypt is ill. Their illness yielded neither to quinine nor to prayer, and showed itself in divers ways.

Some counted potsherds, and trembled over every bone as though it were their own departed mother; others sought gold, and so dug fast and filthy and merry, like hyenas; and others still — and these Hamid feared above the rest — sought a thing for which they had no name, and, not finding it, would oftentimes fall to raving and drink themselves senseless like the basest of sikkīrs,[1] or stupefy themselves with the sweet fog of afyūn,[2] until, having squandered all they had brought and harried by letters from home, they gave over the search altogether and went home with the wind whistling alike through their heads and their pockets.

Yet there were among them such as would sit for long spells in the underground passages and the cuttings, not coming up into God's light for weeks together, and would afterward come back quiet and hollow, as though they had left beneath the ancient stones not their money but their very souls.

Sahib Reginald Mortlock arrived at Abydos a man of the second breed, stepping down from the train with his escort and his manservant, the latter of whom he dispatched at once to see to lodging and food.

Hamid had been at the station that day upon the business that fed him through all the months his spade lay idle. For some years now, between seasons — and at times in their stead, for the Service[3] granted a firman[4] to dig neither every winter nor to every man — he had kept up, about the Balliana station, a trade unobtrusive and bearing no official title whatever, yet trusty, and one that promised Hamid himself an old age free of want; for whosoever stepped down from the Cairo train onto that dusty platform meaning to reach the Temple of Seti fell, soon or late, into Hamid's hands.

Hamid bargained for the donkeys and the donkey-men; Hamid knew in whose house the lodging was cleaner, and the fleas would not gnaw a guest to the bare bone in a single night; Hamid set guides and porters and water-carriers upon the Franks — and from every bargain he took his bakshish twice over: from the traveller for his trouble, and from the driver for having steered a moneyed infidel to him and not to his neighbour. The Almighty, Hamid would tell himself, had not made the Inglīz rich and helpless for nothing, but that between him and the fellahin a sensible man might stand.

Hamid had marked Mortlock even before the man set foot upon the platform: an imposing figure, a shade bloated, in a pith helmet and a suit of good English wool wholly unfit for the sun of this land. The sahib's face was large, clean-shaven and pink, and his eyes — something in them put Hamid in mind of his own: watchful, and setting a price upon all things, from the bone beads on the bazaar-traders' stalls to the life of another man. Such men Hamid loved for their businesslike way with the world, and yet feared also; for to drive too hard a bargain with them was to risk finding oneself among those very dead whose sleep the English were forever so doggedly bent on disturbing.

The sahib's retinue was the usual sort; Hamid had seen a dozen such, and for each he devised a by-name in advance, holding it as idle to keep an Englishman's name in one's head as to count the crows above carrion. First after the sahib there stepped down a lanky clerk, a stooped and inky man, who clutched a travelling writing-desk and a leather satchel of papers to his side and fretted over them as others do not clutch their own child to the breast, and would not let go of it on the platform or after; and Hamid understood at once that, should he take it into his head to learn aught untoward of the sahib, it was the papers he must ask, and not the men.

Behind the clerk there trailed the doctor, and the doctor Hamid read first of all by his nose, which was purple, porous and soft, like an overripe fig. The doctor's bag chimed loud and tunefully at every step, and the sound was not of instruments but of glass — and that glass, Hamid would have pledged his father's beard, held neither quinine nor mixtures.

The other two were of greater interest. One was an ungainly man buried beneath his own baggage: a tripod, a black cloth, a dozen crates packed in straw, which he would not trust to the porters but guarded himself, screeching shrill and womanish at any who raised dust above them — and Hamid, making inquiry, learned that this was the photographer, and that the crates held the brittle glass for the making of light-pictures. The other was a youth, and this youth, against all his custom, Hamid came near to loving: he had stepped from the train already burnt by the sun to a peeling nose, carried nothing but a flat box of paints and a folio of bleached paper, and gazed upon the grey, age-worn walls they had not yet so much as drawn near to as other men gaze upon a dancing ghāziya[5] — without covetousness, with only the hunger of the beholder.

There was a dragoman[6] with the sahib too, hired, as is the way of it, in Cairo — a plump Alexandrian in a tarboosh,[7] who let every word fall through his lip and looked upon the Saidi fellahin of those parts as a pedigree cat looks upon the strays of the yard. Him Hamid marked down for a rival, and within the first days, quietly and without quarrel, edged him from his master's ear, forestalling every Cairene trick and setting in its place his own men and his own price.

His men a sahib must, like every gentleman who sets about an expedition into the sepulchres of the ancient kings, not bring along with him but take on the spot, through Hamid and his like. By the evening of that same day Hamid had engaged for the camp the donkey-men, a cook, two ghafirs[8] with muskets older than their great-grandsires, and some thirty diggers from the nearer villages, with a promise to make the number up to a hundred as need arose; and over and above this, as is the way of a sensible man, he found a place in the work for his own kin, setting down as water-carrier and odd-hand his nephew Yusuf, his sister's son, a long and witless lad, as are all nephews under these heavens, who could lose a camel in an empty room.

Had Hamid known then what it would all come to, he would have sent the luckless kinsman packing — back to his sister's house, or to Jahannam[9] itself, it was all one — but Hamid, by the will of Allah, neither could nor knew how to read the future, and busied himself instead with the reckoning of his bakshish, and did so with the greatest diligence and delight.

***

They dug that winter as men do not dig who keep a living conscience — broad and greedy, without plans or numbered baskets. Sahib Mortlock did not record his finds; he weighed them. And all went on in the usual way, sinful and profitable, until, late in that winter's work, Yusuf's spade drove into the sand to the very haft and met no bottom.

Beneath the sand was a void. Beneath the void, a stair. And beneath the stair, at a depth where nothing should lie but stone and darkness, was water.

Hamid went down there but once, the first time and the last, when they had broken through the opening and Mortlock had not yet gathered his wits to forbid it. He contrived to see little, and that little has sufficed him to this day and will suffice him, insha'Allah, to the grave: black and motionless water, in which the fire of the torches threw no reflection; granite pillars as thick as four oxen; and in the depth of the hall, upon an island amid the black water, two columns crossed with bars, like the spines of some unknown beast, set one beside the other. Between those columns, as it seemed to Hamid, the darkness lay thicker and denser. Many a time had he seen darkness — in tombs, in wells, in blind alleyways, and in his own house when the lamp was put out. But never yet had the darkness looked back at him.

The fellahin gave the place a name that very first day — Beit el-Mithal, the House of the Dream — and flatly refused to go down, and the sahib, to Hamid's great astonishment, did not haggle. From that day he went down alone.

It was then, too, that the true change came over the sahib. Gold grew tedious to him: the crates of finds, a month since told over every evening, now stood untouched, and the greater part of the workmen, having no orders and having been paid the wage honestly owing them, dispersed to their homes.

By night the sahib burned his lamp over papers he hid even from his secretary, and by day he walked the length of the diggings with the look of a man reading a letter that will not end. Letters, as it happened, were the cause of it all — those that came from England with every post, in envelopes edged with black, which Hamid had learned to know from afar. After them the sahib did not sleep, and so neither did Hamid, for a good foreman sleeps with one eye open when the master of the dig roams by night God knows where, to the delight of Iblis.[10]

That night — the third night of Hamid's sleeplessness and the last night of the dig, though as yet no one knew it — the sahib came out of his tent before the moon had risen. He was dressed for travelling, as though bound not for the underworld but for the railway station, and bore in his hand an oil lamp.

"Let no one come down after me," said the sahib in Arabic, though in two seasons he had not learned ten words of the tongue. "Whatever you may hear. Is that clear to you, reis?"[11]

Hamid nodded, signifying that, aye, it was clear. To Hamid nothing was clear at all; but to argue with Englishmen who had bartered gold for madness he held a wholly hopeless business.

The sahib went down, and the shaft swallowed the light of his lamp in three gulps.

Hamid waited at the edge until daybreak. He would swear by his father's beard that all night long not a sound came up from below — not a footstep, not a voice, not the lapping of water. The sahib came up when the rim of the sky above the eastern hills had turned the colour of camel-hide. His lamp was not lit, and the oil in it, as Hamid afterward remarked, stood at exactly what it had been the evening before, as though Mortlock had sat the whole while in darkness. The sahib himself, though —

Hamid had seen many faces come up out of the earth. He had seen the faces of robbers who had found gold, and the faces of robbers who had found a cobra. He had seen the face of a mullah who had gone down into a tomb on a wager and sprung out of it ahead of his own scream. The sahib's face was like none of these. Thus — calm, weary, and final — does a man look in the bazaar who has haggled long, desperately, till his voice cracked, over the dearest thing in his life, and in the end has paid the full price without beating it down by a single piastre. He went in a man who bargains, Hamid thought then. And he came out a man who has paid.

"Fill it in," the sahib said then.

Hamid took it for a mishearing, and the sahib said it again, in English now, slow and distinct, as one speaks to dull-witted children:

"Fill it all in. The stair, the shaft, the pit. As it was. Better than it was."

They filled it in over three days, with sixty spades, and Hamid could not recall in all his years a labour the fellahin set to more gladly: they flung the earth into the shaft as though burying a blood-enemy, and sang the while as at a wedding. The sahib paid every man triple — without haggling, a thing that of itself ought to be set down among the wonders — and from each, from Hamid to the lowliest water-carrier, took a word to keep silence. The word cost him little: of Beit el-Mithal not a soul would have prattled even unpaid.

Within the week the expedition struck camp. The crates went down the river on barges; the papers the sahib burned himself, upon a brazier, one leaf at a time, and afterward, having made sure that none was looking, trod the ashes long into the sand with his shoes. All this Hamid saw with his own eyes.

On the day of departure, when the carts had already started for Balliana, Hamid walked one last time about the place where the dig had been and where now lay smooth, wind-packed sand, in no way to be told from all the other sand of this land, which under every handsbreadth holds something it is better not to know. That night, in Balliana now, Hamid ibn Daud, a man devout and level-headed, performed the evening prayer with especial care, and after it — may he be forgiven, for it is written that the Almighty is merciful and knows what is in men's hearts — went out into the yard, turned his face to the north, where the buried House of the Dream lay, and bowed to it as well, against all chance.

That the old gods of this land are dead, any fool in the bazaar would tell you, and he would be right. That the old gods never die altogether was known only to a rare few wise men — and of that they preferred to hold their peace.

_____

[1] Sikkīr (Arabic سِكِّير) — a hopeless drunkard; a sot.

[2] Afyūn — opium.

[3] The Service des Antiquités (Egyptian Antiquities Service) — founded in 1859 by the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette, who strove to save the monuments from plunderers and to halt the export of artefacts from Egypt. From 1892 to 1897 it was directed by the French engineer and geologist Jacques de Morgan.

[4] Firman — an official decree or licence issued by the rulers of the Ottoman Empire or the khedives of Egypt.

[5] Ghawazi (Arabic غوازي, ghawāzī; sing. ghāziya) — a distinct caste of Egyptian street dancing-girls, of the eastern Romani lineage, who performed erotic dances.

[6] Dragoman — an interpreter and clerk attached to the embassies of the Ottoman Empire.

[7] Tarboosh (Arabic طربوش) — a traditional man's cap in the shape of a truncated cone, usually red, with a dark tassel; a fez.

[8] Ghafir (Arabic غفير) — a hired watchman. In Egypt, a village night-guard in semi-official service; on excavations, ghafirs were engaged to guard the pit and the store of finds against thieves.

[9] Jahannam — in Islam, hell.

[10] Iblis — in Islam, the chief adversary, the devil and leader of the evil spirits (shaitans), who lures men from the righteous path.

[11] Reis (Arabic رئيس) — "head," "chief," "foreman."