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Title: The Court of the King, and Other Studies

Author: Margaret Benson

Release date: February 22, 2020 [eBook #61478]

Language: English

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THE COURT OF THE KING




_BY THE SAME AUTHOR._


  THE SOUL OF A CAT.
  THE VENTURE OF RATIONAL FAITH.
  CAPITAL LABOUR AND TRADE AND THE OUTLOOK.
  SUBJECT TO VANITY.
  THE TEMPLE OF MUT IN ASHER. (With J. A. GOURLAY.)




  THE COURT OF
  THE KING

  AND OTHER STUDIES


  _By_ MARGARET BENSON


  T. FISHER UNWIN
  LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE
  LEIPSIC: INSELSTRASSE 20




  _First published, 1913_


  (_All rights reserved_)




PREFACE

  “We wake with wrists and ankles jewelled still.”


There are many ways of entering fairyland; sometimes there is a door in
the ground, and he who goes through finds himself in some great hall
or carved and painted chamber. Sometimes we find the morning dew on a
flower and touch the eyes with it; or, like John Dietrich, catch the
cap which the fairies are flinging and put it on our own heads: and
immediately the little people spring into sight, we hear the sweetness
of their music and see the glitter of their hidden treasure and watch
the merriness of their games.

The difficulty of the first method is to find the way, of the second to
find the will; and John Dietrich’s way is the venture of confidence.

Children are continually in fairyland; grubbing in mother earth they
find the door; as they tumble on the grass the morning dew touches
their eyes and makes them pure.

But sometimes the light of fairyland will shine suddenly about you;
and you know it is no common glow though it seems but the light of day
to many. So a child sauntering and playing at midday in the fields
may throw back its head and look into a deep blue summer sky, and be
seized on a sudden by a beauty which troubles the spirit, a greatness
which weighs upon the soul and wearies it, till the will fails. Or the
light may shine softer at evening through the nursery window, when
roofs of houses and branches of elder purple and darken against a sky
all purest primrose, and draw the young spirit with a half-comprehended
longing. Sometimes it comes with raptures of sunlight in a green
garden; sometimes cold and strange in moonlight when existence holds
its breath, and earth is lost in shadow or refined to vapour in
uncertain light; sometimes with a fullness of peace in pale emerald of
evening light jewelling the latticed windows of an old house, till
the enchantment thickens and the spirit pants with the presage of the
moment, waiting for a revelation which still delays.

And sometimes it is filled with the very spirit of the little people:
curious, amused, fantastic--as when you walk on a sea-shore, and
suddenly, as with the touch of a charm, the pool at your feet becomes
a little inland sea: you see the rocky shores sloping down, the sandy
bottom, the submarine promontories through the blue: forests of seaweed
sway; a terrible creature with claws crawls out through pale coralline;
a lump of red jelly stretches out its arms and becomes now a living,
crimson flower, now a horrid polypus ravaging, irresistible; a fairy
being mailed in translucent armour floats on with antennæ fiercely
waving; and you are back in fairyland.

Many times you may borrow the Red Cap to watch the boy Stevenson
titanically carve mountains and seas in a mere mess of porridge; or to
hear with Charles Kingsley when the grouse prophesies doom on the moor
or the empty gnat boasts himself beside the stream. But sweetest of all
it is to win for yourself the charm which opens your eyes in wood or
field, and to hear with awakened ear the voices of created things.

These things should be at our command; but the things which children
know we must re-learn; and there is no truth more evident to the child
nor more surely proved to the philosopher than that all which we see
or hear depends for all its meaning on the soul of the world that
no man sees or hears. Let this book be taken as a short and simple
lesson-book in hidden meanings. Life gives us many lessons hard to
read, and problems painful to unriddle; but here in kind and simple
wise our lesson was made plain and the page was pleasant to read: for
to the eyes of everyday, in varying scenes, among diverse races, and
nations long since dead “the dear old nurse” showed us the things which
follow. She brought us through the Gates of Gold and sent us to float
on the serene water below a pleasant pasture; she taught us daily,
dwelling on the other side; led us by moonlight to the Court of the
King; showed us through sordid circumstance the silent romance on the
golden hill, as she had showed us romantic incidents, even in the
Desert City; then she surrendered us to the guardianship of her child
Imagination who, through the voices of others, brought back for us the
Oriental vision of the royal boat in the mysterious midnight solemnity.
And from this our older guardian led us back, and blotting out for
us sight and sound of a populous city by a transparent veil, made us
understand how to trust the mightiness of the life of which we were
part.

Then she bade us close the book with the touch of pain and healing sent
to quicken into life, and again Imagination sent us, among the scenes
of daily life to look for the beautiful kingdom which endures: And we
must say it in what form we may, so that we catch the meaning of the
simple word, so early and so often said, from which our stubborn sense
rebels, “the prison is the world of sight.”

Thus before memory should fade too much I wrote down some of the things
I had under guidance witnessed and experienced, and those which the
child Imagination had, as I say, taught in divers ways.

For too often we let memory lie like a rabbit in a winter burrow; and
imagination buzzes on the surface of things like a fly on a pane: we
narrow our vision to our purpose and our hearing to intelligible
voices, till it needs a shock of strangeness or of beauty to bring
us back to realities--to rouse memory to throw open the door in the
hillside, to make imagination leave its sheet of glass for the world
of air and light, to let the beauties and the music of the infinite
creation reach the dull brain.

                                                        MARGARET BENSON.




CONTENTS


                                 PAGE

  PREFACE                           5


  I

  THE GATES OF GOLD                17


  II

  THE LAKE WITHIN THE WORLD        27


  III

  A DESERT CITY                    37


  IV

  THE OTHER SIDE                   53


  V

  THE SILENT ROMANCE               73

  VI

  THE COURT OF THE KING            85


  VII

  THE GOLDEN DAHABEAH             101


  VIII

  THE UNSEEN WORLD                125


  IX

  FROM THE BANK OF THE RIVER      135




THE GATES OF GOLD




I

THE GATES OF GOLD


The favourite game with Noah’s Ark was to make the nursery table
an Island of Delight. The Delight must have centred in the
looking-glasses, which, with frames discreetly hidden in moss, mirrored
in their unruffled surfaces forms of numerous ducks and geese and other
less decided species of birds. Certainly the other furnishings of the
Island were not particularly delightful, for it was thickly populated
with wild beasts of horrid aspect and defective limbs, and specimens of
that strange pinkish animal of which Noah is so fond, and which may be
classified with equal probability as a Dingo or a Wild Boar.

My earliest ideas of an Oasis were combined of this Island of Delight
and of the description of Elim. The Oasis would be round as the nursery
table; it would be covered with lush green grass like a water-meadow.
It would have about seventy palm-trees standing at fairly regular
intervals, and between the palm-trees there would be (instead of the
looking-glasses) bubbling springs of water crystal-clear.

When at last I saw an Oasis it was unlike my vision--my Vision of
Delight. There was no grass, but there were more palm-trees; there were
no crystal fountains, but trickles of brown water in sandy channels.
It came up to my ideal in one point only--there was none of that
indefiniteness of outline which is so repulsive to the simple mind.
Even as you can stand on the bridge above Mentone, and see a milestone
with France on one side and a milestone with Italy on the other, so
here you could take your stand and say “That on my right hand is
Desert, and that on my left is Oasis.”

We had been travelling all day over the sandy, dusty plains of North
Africa; we had found little to eat at the shed-like stations except
blue cheese and musty bread; and towards evening we entered a rocky
defile. At the end of this defile they said were the Gates of Gold.
There was not much to see and the train loitered on.

Suddenly we saw at the end of the valley two great escarpments of
reddish rock; at their foot leaned one palm-tree, behind was a glimpse
of blue hills. The evening sunlight fell golden on the Golden Gates
as we passed through and suddenly cried out, for everywhere below us
spread a sea of waving palm-trees. This was the Oasis.

The Oasis lay on a plain so flat that the horizon to the south curved
like the horizon of the sea; and like little clouds resting on the
ocean here and there an oasis showed greyish green in the distance.
To the north lay a range of hills, which guarded the enchanted place
from the world of men. The flatness drew the soul with a strange
attraction, until one longed to go out over it farther than eye could
reach, anywhere or nowhere. The desert was in sandy ridges like a badly
ploughed field; isolated tufts of a heath-like plant grew here and
there; often there lay on the ground, as if spilled from a cart, yellow
apples, reddening invitingly. Evil fruits these are, full of dust and
bitterness, and even the camel will not eat them.

But within the Oasis were golden oranges, juicy, like no oranges you
eat here, for they ripen on the dark, glossy trees; there were gardens
of purple fig and yellow citrons large as the head of an Arab child;
and the dates were sweet and large, and half transparent in their
candied clusters.

But the enchanted time was when the moon was high, its silver light was
faintly tinged with rose; then one walked under the palm-trees, and
light and shadow lay like silver and ebony across the path, interlacing
and waving if some faint breeze stirred them, and the strange, sweet
odours of the East lay warm and thick, and the tinkle of Arab sounds
were in our ears, and the slim brown figures moved across the path;
and we went back to dream of silver lights and waving, ebon shadows.

And one morning we went away from the Oasis, and passed through the
Gates of Gold, and back into the world of men, to find we had been but
two days away.




THE LAKE WITHIN THE WORLD




II

THE LAKE WITHIN THE WORLD


There were other such enchanted places in this land, and one could
step aside from the high-road of life into a place of fantasy and
sweet illusion. The dawdling, leisured train set us down one day at a
wayside station. No houses were in sight, but behind a clump of trees
a cloud of steam rose into the air, as if all the world was a-washing.
The train dawdled away across the plain and we went towards the
trees to find ourselves in face of a shining, misty waterfall. The
white stone was streaked with grey and pink; the water boiled up in
little cauldrons and fell down in a cloud of steam; at the bottom of
the dazzling rocks oleanders bent over the warm streams, maiden-hair
fringed the banks; hoary olives with twisted trunks rose above the
oleanders.

While we still waited there came up from the side of the steaming river
a splendid figure--a woman all in scarlet hung about with silvery
chains. “That,” said the guide, “is the washer-woman.” We climbed up
behind the waterfall, where it sprang in its strange excitement out of
the earth, and found a stone courtyard, built round with little empty
houses, one of these prepared for us.

While we paused at the door a moment, I saw between the stones a tiny
plant--a plant to conjure with. It is like clover, splashed with
crimson. A poet who wore the Red Cap has said that this crimson is the
blood of Spring, and, to him, a drop of his own heart’s blood.

A French family were living here in a clean, empty house with airy
guest-rooms; and while they regaled us with wild-boar’s flesh they
talked of the topics of their day: how the jackals howled about the
courtyard in winter; how the rugged way to the Roman City was not yet
open; how the locusts came down ten years ago, swarm upon swarm, till
you could hear the sound of the eating of their hosts by night; how
they devoured fruit and leaf and bark like the “army” in Joel, and then
melted like snow under the sun.

In this strange, quiet land we slept well, and went out next day over
the pleasant undulating plain, watered by warm streams with their
bordering of oleander and fern, and sheltered by olive and carob.

At last we came to a place where a grassy bank swept round us in a half
circle. “Fourteen years ago,” said the guide “the shepherds feeding
their flocks close by heard a great noise, and running hither saw the
earth had fallen in,” and he pointed as he spoke to a crack in the side
of the bank, just such a rent as a great tree makes when it falls,
tearing its roots out of the ground. “Into that,” he said, “you must
go.”

So we went towards it in faith, and found when we got there a man could
easily pass in. As we descended into the hot twilight inside the ground
a bat flew out. We went down-hill until the guide stopped us, where
there seemed to lie at our feet a little blue dust over the stones,
for this was the still blue water of a lake that stretched away into
deep and deeper darkness. As we stood we heard out of the darkness the
splash of oars, a light shone on the water, and round the sheer wall
of rock on the right came a boat with a lantern at its prow.

Into this we stepped, and it moved on into the deep shadows. Out of the
dark water rose great stalagmites like columns, and stalactites dropped
to meet them like heavy pendants from some vaulted roof. We moved round
rocky chambers where the lantern shone on the walls, and through halls
whose boundaries were unrevealed; all sense of direction and of time
was lost till a flash of lightning seemed to fall on the water. It
was only the reflected light of a grey day, filtered through the rent
in the earth down which we had come, but after that great darkness it
seemed dazzling.

So we went up again to the light of day, and back through that
pleasant land. But when we came away, I brought with me a leaf of the
crimson-splashed clover “to witness if I lie.”




A DESERT CITY




III

A DESERT CITY

  “He seems as one whose footsteps halt
  Toiling in immeasurable sand
  And o’er a weary sultry land
  Sown in a wrinkle of the monstrous hill
  The city sparkles like a grain of salt.”


In the desert not twenty miles from Cairo there has sprung up the
mushroom growth of a wonder-working Health Resort. It possesses several
hotels, an “Establishment,” a golf links, and everything which a
really desirable Health Resort must possess.[1] But at the time when
I first knew that tract of sand on which it stands the case was far
otherwise. If one must have summarized the attractions of the place
they would have run:--

  Fifteen pyramids                Distant
  One palm-tree                   Distant
  Several ill-smelling streams    Quite close
  Flat sandy desert               Near and distant

  A perfectly bare range of low hills beginning half a mile away and
    reaching to Arabia.

An English advertisement of foreign appearance bore witness to these
charms and ended with a striking appeal to leave for desert air “the
filthy, stinking city,” as it characterized Grand Cairo.

We responded to the appeal, and went to stay in a hotel of large
corridors and wide balconies which looked out upon the fifteen
pyramids. Opposite was a small, bare house called Villa Mon Bijou. The
town was planted on a desert so flat that it seemed a German toy town
set upon a table; only there were no trees with curly green foliage
to be seen, because no one might plant a living thing unless by order
from Government.[2] Neat little pavements with new little gas lamps
traversed it rectangularly, and came every way to an abrupt stop in
heavy desert sand. There was a tiny English church, in which the few
English Christians staying in the place assembled. Little flat-roofed
villas like coloured cardboard boxes stood back from the pavement with
strange ornaments above the gate; here a stone eagle with knees turned
outwards, there a stuffed fox. Backwards and forwards we went under
noontide sun to the baths, and were told to rest in the Khedive’s
sitting-room, upholstered with yellow satin.

One would have thought that nothing so brand-new could have been found
in sight of the pyramid of Unas and the cemetery of Sakkara. Even death
seemed glaringly recent. One day we drove in the desert and searched
the horizon for objects of interest. “What is that?” we said, pointing
to a small building on the outskirts of the town. “That,” replied Saïd
with pride, “is the new slaughter-house.” “And this enclosure?” “The
English cemetery.” “And that yonder?” “The Italian mortuary.” “What is
that which looks like a village on the hill?” “That is the Mahommedan
burying-place.” “And that beyond?” “Another graveyard.” Then he drove
us through a valley of Hinnom, where we marked, among other things, a
dead camel and a dead calf; and as we passed between the windmill and
the ill-smelling stream we saw three coffins lie, brand-new, unguarded
and alone.

But towards evening a certain magic fell upon the place. We had gone
one day towards the single palm-tree in the desert. Miles and miles of
sand and air, unstirred by any slightest sound, seemed to lie between
us and that solitary tree, and when we reached it nothing could be seen
but the slot of beasts around it.

Then as we turned the light began to change. Behind the fifteen
pyramids the sky glowed scarlet till it tinged the water of the
Nile with blood. Far up in the blue hung an ethereal arc of crimson
light; the heaven deepened to indigo where it met night; kindled
into indescribable sapphire where it touched the dying day; the
conflagration grew till at last earth glowed its answer to the sky with
a purple flood rising and deluging sand-hills and valley.

As we neared the toy town with its twinkling lights the glow had died
away, and there gloomed before us dimly a knoll round which knelt the
camels of the Bedawîn; the figures which moved beside them with dark,
fine profile and the white cloths round their heads seemed like Magi
come to greet the Royal Child.

Again we went up the hills which, like a low rampart, bordered the
plain to the east. At the foot they were carved into quarries of a
stone so white that it seemed like wedges cut in a great cream cheese.
The hills were barren, but for a few straggling plants and grasses
about; like a raised map or the skeleton of the world. Yet as we went
on we still found always in front, like the marks on the carriage
drive, a curving, trodden road, winding up vanishing out of sight.

While we stood looking at the loneliness there came daintily stepping,
with embroidered shoes and black silk mantles round them, a party of
women to meet us; in front a man carried a child. I cannot but think
that they vanished into thin air when they had passed us.

Or again one might descend towards the river, on the road between the
fields. There as the sky lights its fires towards evening the men would
leave their work and stand with dripping feet on their coarse outer
garment by the water’s edge to say the evening prayer. Near the town
stood a sycamore, under which, on a raised platform, some men prayed
loud and lustily five times a day. “God likit them very much,” said the
donkey-boy; but with cynical estimation of the importance of this fact
he added, “If I bray, where is my business?”

A brougham on the road as we returned: Europe is at one side. But
within sat a woman golden haired, with her veil pushed back and a
cigarette between her teeth. That one passing, demure and dignified,
with an attendant wrinkled and stately, is a Princess walking for
her health. Here two in a victoria, with transparent veils and Paris
bonnets, show Turkish emancipation; and the shut and blinded brougham
with a Sudanese on the box gives sign of Arab propriety.

And now as the town is reached we begin to see the meaning of this
modern city; those high walls are not merely meant to hide a garden
of flowers, nor does the lattice serve only to keep the sunlight from
fading Eastern fabrics. But behind the pierced work of that window
peers some Scheherazade at her story-weaving, wondering what life
means, “half sick of shadows.” There is the Pasha’s house, and the
whisper goes that these are slaves.

A strange, pathetic figure trod this road daily, a man of aquiline
face, brown skin, and pointed beard, dressed in a fine embroidered
garment of scarlet with white cloth falling on his shoulders.

Evening by evening he left the town, and squatting by one of the
sulphur streams looked out with level eyes towards the farthest horizon
of the south, his beads held idly in his hands. That man, we learned,
was the Pasha’s gatekeeper and came from the Sudan.

One day a crowd ran and digged by the side of this stream. “What are
they doing?” we asked, and the answer was that they were making a
garden. It will surely blossom like the rose--but not on those flowers
will the gatekeeper gaze.

In the evening when the moon has risen, and a great star close to
her tip hangs the banner of the Moslems in heaven, the magic is most
potent. Then the flat-roofed houses become palaces of marble, and among
the dark figures stealing through the street you look for Mesrour on
his secret errands, that he may show you the mysteries of life and
death behind veil and wall and lattice. Then one may well believe that
over at Sakkara under the sand-hills the dead are sitting in their
carven chambers, to play their games and cast their spells and eat and
drink.

And yet in Europe they talk of freeing Egypt, and speak of the
“patriot” dervish; and at Gordon’s death-place, where the gatekeeper
was born and from which he was stolen, they entertain the Pasha with
the honours of a burgess.

Who wakes? who dreams? Surely the Western eye sees clear, which looks
on the place in the searching noonday light; for it is the hand of the
Western that planted Villa Mon Bijou and raised the gas lamps.

Leave it then with its neat realities and its fancied magic; draw away
over the sand towards the Great River and the dwellings of the dead;
and as one might see across the great ocean a line of reef built up by
tiny busy insects, so look back once to see over “immeasurable sand,”
“the city sparkle like a grain of salt.”




THE OTHER SIDE




IV

THE OTHER SIDE


When Alice went through the Looking-glass, she sprang down into a world
where a change had passed on all familiar things; so that she must walk
away from the things she wanted to arrive at, and time ran backwards
and stopped. When a merman brought a girl through the translucent
mirror of the water to be his wife in the great caves below the sea,
she heard but dimly the church bell and the sounds of the world above,
and saw but seldom its sights when she rose through the bay. And when
Tom slipped into the stream he found himself in a great empty world
below the water; and it was not for some time that he was able even to
see the crowds of merry water-babies with which it was peopled.

We had often looked into the looking-glass from a little village on
the bank of a great river. Sometimes this river was only a river of
muddy water; sometimes towards evening, when no wind ruffled its
surface, it was a mirror of burnished metal, reflecting the fires of
the west; sometimes a river of molten gold. Sometimes, when the sky was
bright above, it was a stretch of sapphire, edged with gold and set
in emerald, for beyond the sandy shore of the river lay a great sea
of green corn--few trees were there, but the waving corn, and animals
pasturing in luxuriant vetch; and beyond this again began the sandy
desert, which stretched away to the bases of the hills.

So the River ran, dividing the country, and the two sides of it have
been called since the beginning of history _the two lands_. The River
was broad, and so deep that the reptiles of the one side have never
been able to cross to the other, and the lizards of the two lands are
of quite different kinds.

But just at the edge of the desert you begin to see traces of quite
a different kind of life, the giant images of people long dead, and
their temples; behind in the cliff you may see, even from across the
river, the doors of rock-hewn chambers which are called the Eternal
Habitations. That side of the river is called the City of the Dead.

Now the people of the village opposite used to speak of going over to
the “Other Side.” They crossed the river, and rode through the fields
of waving corn, and the men and women who moved among the fields, who
tethered the beasts to pasture, the little children who drove oxen
in the creaking _sakhieh_ seemed like figures of a picture to them;
and when they reached the City of the Dead, the desert places of the
Eternal Habitations, the Silent Citizens were unperceived by them,
their voices were unheard; or they seemed to see but rude stone
figures of an earlier age, dead bodies, unskilful paintings on the
wall. Before they could recognize the living men they had turned back
and recrossed the river, and never knew that they had been so near the
mysteries of the “Other Side.”

But when you came to live in the country on the Other Side the aspect
of it was altogether different. At the back, the country was walled in
by precipices of rock, a great golden wall from which spurs ran down
on to the desert. If you climbed up the first ridge to get a farther
view you saw ridge on ridge of the same barren hills, with golden rocky
defiles, reflecting back and back again the eastern sunlight. At
certain hours of the day a stream of people, like small ants, poured
up one valley, over a hill and back again across the river; otherwise
there was never a sign of human life, except that, from peak to peak,
at far distances, you might see a little rock-built shelter, and the
solitary figure of a watchman who guarded the chambers of the dead.

Between the hills and the cultivated lands are lower hills, half rock,
half sand, with sandy slopes. In the sand there gaped holes about the
paths as you rode or walked, and looking down you might peer into a
chamber, sculptured with images of men and women sitting at feasts; or
higher up in the hill you would see a squared doorway of stone facing
sometimes a great courtyard, and entering, you might find a pillared
chamber, gold vessels and jewelled boats painted on the wall; here a
picture of a man propelling his bark through marshy groves populous
with birds, there one driving the plough, and a woman sowing corn; here
a kingly child on his nurse’s knee; there the antelope caught by the
dogs and dripping blood from the hunter’s arrow. The longer one lived
here the more one began to see of these doors in the hillside and holes
in the ground, until it seemed that the whole mountain was honeycombed
with the rock-hewn chambers. Sometimes you might cross a courtyard
where the eastern slope of a hill lay in cool shadow; pass through one
painted room after another, chapel and shrine, shrine and chapel, and
so come out on the other side of the hill still golden in the light of
the setting sun.[3]

Down below these rocks, clustering round the doorways of the lowest
slopes, are brown houses that a day’s rain can bring to ruin, villages
like a child’s building in sand; open yards, sheds thatched with straw,
erections in mud like gigantic mushrooms with upturned brim; and for
the more permanent part of the habitation these childish builders have
borrowed the rocky chambers.

For the truth is that two races of people inhabit this country. The
one race are like merry, selfish children, though a mystery of
simplicity hangs about them like the mystery of the hidden life of a
child. In their villages ring sounds of men and animals all day and
all night; voices are hoarse with talking and singing; it seems like
a great orchestra of the inhabitants. Up to the middle of the night
donkeys chant their canon, cocks blow their clarion; all day you
hear the groaning of camels, the agitated voices of kids and lambs,
the lamentable cries of their mothers; towards evening the lowing of
kine as they return from the _sakhieh_, the fury of the dogs, the
provocative cry of the jackal, and sometimes as night falls the long,
weird howling of the wolf. Then when the moon is full the children
sing in chorus, apeing the elder boys at their work; the workers of
the day are the feasters of the night, and drum and song help on the
fantasia. Here is merriment and noise, complaint, vociferous demand,
swift anger, cheerfulness again; the ragged children and young animals
race and play from simple excess of vitality.

Yet all this noise is like the chattering of a brook in a quiet place,
though it beats loud upon the ear it is as powerless against the great
quiet of the desert as lapping waves against a rocky shore.

For the other race that lives here is silent, yet their words have
gone out into the ends of the world. You leave the villages and mount
the hill, and the noise comes fainter from below. You pass through
the chambers and see these greater people live their lives and learn
from the writing on the wall what “he saith.” You go towards evening
up some valley of golden rocks, where the sunlight reflected from the
sand shines on the shadowed cliff like the shining of a hidden lake,
and find in a fold of the hill a little empty temple of old time; or
descending rocky steps pass into a chamber where the walls present
great deeds of state, ambassadors clad in fine embroidered dresses
bring foreign tribute of nations long perished, precious things of gold
and gem, strange beasts from far countries. Or when clouds are chasing
through a moonlit sky you pass up a road between sand-hills towards
a temple of these silent races; its white pillars and colonnades now
flash out silver in a sudden gleam of light; and now the shadow of a
cloud passing with purple bloom over the hill above annihilates courts
and terraces, until it seems a magician’s wand is at work, destroying
and re-creating this ghostly building.

Or at evening you ride through the place of tombs; the sun has sunk,
and a glow, orange and red, gives a sharp outline to the hills. Out of
the holes in the ground come an army of little shadows, sweeping faster
than the eye can follow them over the unlevel ground; and from the
rocks on the left peers out a sharp nose and ears, and the jackal runs
with heavy drooping tail across the path, and dodges behind a big stone
to peer out with insatiable curiosity as you pass; or in the night one
hears the cry of a wild cat caught and torn by the dogs.

There are no merry flocks of birds here as in the cultivated land
below, and but little sound of their voices. The sparrow indeed, who
holds nothing sacred, chatters his minute affairs in the great silence;
the discreet wagtail runs about the ledges of the rocks, the black and
white chat bows on a stone. But the most part are seen on the wing; the
soft grey martin, with its atmosphere of domestic peace, hovers about
the Eternal Habitations, thinking to rear its young in the chambers of
the dead; the swallows made wild by their long flight, and loosed from
the restraints of the North, build their nests on the cliff, and sweep
at sunset, with musical screams, up and down the face of the rock;
great kites circle above in the hot noonday, let fall sometimes their
weird whistling cry, circling on and on till the vast blue engulfs
them; and once, high in the sky towards evening, there came a flight of
cranes, who wheeled, split, and recrossed, then gathered decision and
moved stately in black and white northwards.

All luxuriance of life had vanished. Even as time seemed to have stood
still, and the people learnt their arts and crafts from those who
died six thousand years ago, so growth seemed to have vanished from
the visible world. Now and then as you wandered up a valley a single
blade of barley shone like a gem half hidden by a stone; or some plant,
desert-coloured, spread, dry greyish tufts, where the ground retained
invisible moisture. But life hung suspended, and the longer you dwelt
in the country the more you perceived that you were living in the City
of the Dead. Sometimes one forgot how days and weeks were passing, and
again a thousand years were but as yesterday, a watch in the night. The
noises of the outside world came but faintly: once, we heard the sound
of a nation weeping and the nations of the earth sorrowing with it,
and again the sober welcome to one who came to take upon him the burden
of the State.

So they sorrowed four thousand years ago--not without hope. “A hawk
has soared--the follower of the god met his maker.” So the officers of
State welcomed the son who should take its cares upon him. And on that
very night when with grief and praise the nation laid to rest a Queen
and mother in the fullness of her age, our eyes looked on, resting
untouched, deep in the recesses of the rock, among the mystic symbols
of his faith, the body of a king swathed still and garlanded who died
three thousand years before that Queen was born.

The sounds of war came dimly, for the pictures of far earlier wars
might meet the eyes day by day; and when we came on the bodies of those
men who warred and taught and lived and enjoyed, alert in the chase,
quiescent in the cool breath of their gardens, they lay quiet with
their ornaments perhaps upon them, a garland round their neck, a book
between their feet.

But when at last returning we came down to the fields, we saw that
time indeed had passed. The corn which was but sprouting when we came,
was full in the ear, and the barley was yellowing to harvest; the
bean-flower had opened, spread its fragrance and passed; the purple
vetch still lingered; the poppy raised an imperial head. Clouds of
gay, thieving sparrows rose as we passed; the crested lark ran before
us, sprang and hovered with a few notes of liquid song; tiny birds
hung on the barley blades; the whistle of the quail came from the deep
green where it hid. The river spread before us like a highway paved
with sapphire; so we passed along it to the north and the voices of the
world we belonged to rung out clearer as we moved; and behind us there
faded like a dream that world whose present is four thousand years of
time with the insistence of its silent voices, the permanence of the
dead, the fleeting brightness of the living.




THE SILENT ROMANCE




V

THE SILENT ROMANCE


The cock has been defying Achmet Bukdadi again to-day.

It is a very little cock, hardly larger than a bantam; its plumage
betokens a fine disregard of race; if you were pressed you might
suggest a remote relationship to a game-cock. The cries of Achmet
Bukdadi drew me to the window to see the cock, feathers raised,
parading angrily and scornfully in front of him. Achmet’s cries
attracted two or three other children, and they ran about on our
terrace trying to hustle the cock off the edge of it. Finally one
courageous boy lifted him by the wings, and put him on the back of
another, whence he descended with feathers and dignity ruffled to the
ground, while the children dispersed shrieking and laughing.

Achmet had a more prompt ally two days ago, when the cock was doing
sentry-go before their front yard gate and would not let Achmet go
home. His cries called his mother to his aid, and she came evidently
prepared for the crisis, for she straightway threw the wand which was
in her hand with unerring aim, and the cock fled vanquished down the
village rubbish-heap.

Achmet’s mother is the most silent and most graceful woman in the
village. She is the youngest of Bukdadi’s two wives; the other must be
the mother of the sullen looking boy who lounges after our water-donkey
up and down the hill, for she is grey haired, while Achmet’s mother has
thick black plaits under her blue head veil. She is not indifferent to
matters of dress, for her outer wrapping is edged with crimson. She
seems far more active than the other woman, and all her movements, in
the most menial occupation, show an unconscious grace which tempts one
to the full use of unusual advantages of observation. Her grace is not
the tender quality often so-called, but a robust deftness and certainty
of action. She had to drive a lame donkey to the water the other day,
and in the strokes of her staff there was no more pity for the little
beast, halting and hurrying between two diverse pains, than for her
own burdened womanhood. The donkey must drink; she herself would bring
water for the household in the great earthenware pot balanced on her
head. Hesitation for the animal was as much out of the question as
help for her from the stepson who lounged past her with his stick held
behind his shoulders.

So she urged the animal to the pool beneath the tamarisks, and I doubt
not mounted the hill again with all the speed that nature would allow.

It is well, perhaps, that she is taciturn in a yard so populous--the
other wife, the two sons, Bukdadi himself, seldom seen, a girl,
daughter or slave, and the little Achmet, not to speak of the
animals--the white camel in the corner nearest the gate, the neat black
water-donkey next him, for the invalid one occupies the innermost
corner, the bullocks who move with deference at her bidding, besides
Achmet’s enemy the cock with his harîm, and the pigeons. I cannot be
sure that the brown sheep belong to this yard; they are always being
driven out, it is true, but whenever they are not being driven out
they are going in; and it appeared that the black goat with two kids
was preparing to spend the night in the hollow stem of the mud fungus,
on the family platform. What makes conclusions less certain, however,
is that the grey kid now dances up and down hill with the boy in the
yellow-striped dress, and that the sheep have more than once called on
us in our dining-room.

Among all these Achmet’s mother moves, sober, taciturn, efficient. One
wonders when the transition comes from the laughing children to the
serious, burdened woman. Marriage is not the turning-point, for little
Saïda, with her round face and dark eyes and blue-patterned little
chin, is married, though she still prefers to live with her father
and be an occasional visitor at her husband’s house. And what there
is of demureness in Saïda compared to the ragged Ahm Ibrahim in wild
neglected gaiety is produced evidently not by her marriage but by her
blue dress and her red dress, her necklace and her earrings.

The burden of the household, but above all the care of the children,
must work the change, and the trace of tenderness that there is about
Achmet’s mother seems all for Achmet. She exercises no repressive
influence on him, for Achmet, with his grubby black dress, his thin,
merry, ugly little face with even rows of little white teeth as he
lisps his greeting--Achmet, whether cantering about on a dhurra stalk,
or pretending to be a man carrying stones with his grandfather, or
climbing over his neighbours’ walls, is always gay.

He takes the unexpected gift without that deliberate anticipation of
favours to come which is the first acquirement of the Arab baby; and in
his pleasures and his woes alike Achmet flies to his mother, conveys to
her his bakshîsh of sugar-cane; wails to her when the cock is warlike
and threatening.

She had him with her one evening in the great mud chalice which forms
larder, barn, and summer chamber of the Arab house.

The sun had gone down, but a certain unreal glow lay on the hill behind
the village; night was purpling the sky; her figure rose out of the
shadowy cup powerful and graceful, with the child crouched at her feet;
the work of the day was over, her heart’s desire was with her.

To-day she could not come to the child when he called, for but two
nights ago there was a movement and whispering at midnight in the yard
of Bukdadi, and the wail arose of a voice smaller and younger than that
of little Achmet. So the mother rests.




THE COURT OF THE KING




VI

THE COURT OF THE KING

  “Sealed within the iron hills.”


THE APPROACH

The moon had risen as we rode down the steep, sandy road and threaded
our way through the little mud enclosures, where dogs, alive for the
excitement of the night, were prowling on the walls, listening with
ears pricked up for warnings of enemies, looking with vigilant eyes
for some alien to draw near. As we crossed into that part of the
village where they did not know us, a hoarse storm of barking filled
the air, but in a minute or two we had passed beyond this, and were
out among the sand-hills between the tombs, where the whole plain was
flooded with a misty, uncertain light.

Song and merry-making had begun in the villages, for the full moon is
festival for those who have no artificial light; but the thud of the
drums, the sound of children’s voices, and the barking of dogs faded
and died away, and we came out into a great emptiness, threading a
narrow path between the tumbled heaps; on each side the tombs gaped
dimly at our feet. On the right hand we looked far away over desert
and field to the great dark pylons of a temple across the river: on the
left rose sharply the sandy spur of the hill we were rounding. No one
was in sight and on no side could we see any human habitation.

We turned round the spur of the hill into a boulder-strewn valley,
arid and silent. Even at midday there is little sign of life here,
except on certain days when a stream of people traverse it and return;
otherwise you find but a chance sown seed, dropped in a favourable
spot; a withering leaf let fall by some traveller, a stray pigeon,
an “evil bird” the Arabs think, who has left the abode of men and
foresworn its final service for their use, to live its hermit life
in the wilderness. Otherwise you see but the golden limestone rocks,
radiating back the golden Egyptian sunshine. Then all is bare and keeps
no secret, for the very shadows are broken by reflected light.

But now the colour of the limestone showed but faintly in the white
light, and the shadows fell dark from boulder and rocks. The valley was
empty of life, penetrated with mystery.

There, as we turned, at an angle of the path was a figure, solitary in
the moonlight, a man in a long, dark garment, holding by him his donkey
with a sheepskin over its saddle. He stood waiting here to give us a
message, and having delivered it went back by the way we had come.
And now looking back we could see nothing of mud village or vast old
temple, no living man of the present, no stone memorial of the past; we
were alone in a world half lit, wholly empty, stone and sand as far as
eye could see, with an empty sky above where the moon had quenched all
lesser lights.

The valley, which we began to see more clearly, was narrow and rose
steeply on each side; the ground beneath our feet looked like a
river-bed, on each side of which were large boulders casting deep
black shadows. From time to time the rocks which walled the valley so
crossed one another that it seemed the way was barred in front of us,
until, as we neared it, we found the road swept round a corner of rock.
Turning such a corner, again we found three people silently awaiting
us, two of them the companions who had preceded us; the third a slim
figure all in white, on foot with a staff in his hand. He was a man of
some authority over the guard, who, as we learned later, had lain seven
years in jail for a murder. He ran with noiseless steps in front of us,
and so heralded we went on to where the valley broadened out a little,
branching to the right; and at the entrance a great rock jutting out of
the cliff seemed in the moonlight to take a fantastic likeness to some
colossal statue of a king, carved, you would have said, by an Egyptian
of old.

Our path led us to the left, and here the cliffs began to close in on
us, until they rose like a wall on each side of a narrow way, at once
so steep and so rugged that we could not tell whether the defile was
natural or the work of man. It led at last to where a wall of rock,
barring the way, had been rudely cut through. In this rough gateway
we halted--behind us the rocky passage through which we had come;
before us, as far as we could see, the hills ran down, like a great
amphitheatre, to a floor of tumbled sand-heaps.

Here, as we halted, one of our companions blew a whistle, and the next
moment the hills re-echoed to the sound of a gun. After a moment’s
pause he blew again, and now dark-draped figures suddenly appeared
among the desolate rocks, running noiselessly towards us. After a
moment all but two or three dispersed again, and we rode forward with
the white, slim figure still in front and two men in flowing dark
garments following us behind.

The great emptiness, the silence, the white, uncertain light by which
the rocks showed faintly tinged with the rose and golden colour of the
limestone, the dark figures suddenly appearing, noiselessly moving,
dispersing into the night; the strange, desolate valley winding through
all apparent barriers into the heart of the hills seemed like a dream.
Surprise vanished; even observation was dulled.

So we went forward to the head of the valley, ringed about with sheer
mountain walls, and perceived that here the mounds which lay about the
way gaped with open mouths, and we could see the moonlight shining
through grated doors on the painted walls of galleries that ran down
deep into the hill.

These we passed, and dismounting from our beasts, climbed a little
mound, turned behind a projecting buttress of rock, and found ourselves
opposite to a door cut in the cliff. One of the men who had followed
us went in and left us for a while sitting without in the moonlight.


THE PRESENCE

The great square doorway of the tomb showed inky black on the face of
the cliff, golden in the moonlight; the shaft plunged steeply downwards
into the rock, with short, high steps roughly cut against one wall.
Down these we slowly made our way, the utter darkness pricked here and
there by the flame of a candle in some one’s hand. A flame shone for
a moment on the little shelf cut back into the rock, where the string
bed and wooden pillow of the guard still wait his return, just where he
went out and left them so many thousand years ago. The steps stopped
suddenly on the edge of a pit deep and broad; by the light of a candle
held high we could dimly see the red and blue patterns painted on its
plastered walls. A hole had been broken through them on the opposite
side of the chasm, and crossing by a little plank bridge we crept
through, still deeper into the heart of the cliff. On the other side of
the wall the tunnel still went downwards, but the faint light showed
a deep alcove to the right. On the rocky floor lay a man, bound upon
a crumbling wooden boat; the painful bonds still held the brown and
shrivelled limbs, his knees drawn up, his head pressed back.

Again down the steep stairway we climbed, feeling along the rough-cut
wall, and again at the bottom a chamber opened to the right. A man, a
woman, and a girl lie here, side by side in the middle of the floor.
They have suffered the indignity of stripping; wounds are in their
breasts; the thick black hair upon their heads makes the small faces
and limbs seem the more withered and unhuman. It is a pitiful sight.

For the third time the rock-hewn ladder led us down to the square-cut
doorway which opened to the presence-chamber of a king of Egypt.
The great hall stretched back into the darkness, dimly lighted by
hidden candles, heavy with the silence of three thousand years. The
faint gleam fell upon the painted walls and pillars of the eternal
dwelling-place, the work of such far-off hands clear and fresh with
the freshness of yesterday. On the great square pillars Amenhetep
still feels the fullness of his earthly life and draws strength from
mysterious communing with the life-giving god. On the walls a huge
papyrus seems unrolled where the spirit of the King, in the depth
of the nether world, may learn to wrestle with and overthrow the
serpent-monsters brought by each gloomy Hour. At the back of the hall
two steps lead down to the high vaulted space where stands the great
rose-granite sarcophagus. In the darkness and the silence the lid or
the inner coffin was raised and we were in the presence of the King.

The dim-veiled figure lay before us, wrapt in an inexpressible mystery,
the impress of his kingship still upon him, crowned with the greater
dignity of death. Far from the loved Egyptian sunshine, from the sweet
breath of the north wind, from the fleeting ways of men, the inhabitant
of the rock holds his solemn court through the centuries which have no
power upon him, with the records of his life and warfare around him and
the mimosa wreaths upon his breast.

  [Since the above was written plunderers penetrated into the tomb in
  the absence of the guard, and the body of Amenhetep II. no longer
  rests in his Eternal Habitation.]




THE GOLDEN DAHABEAH




VII

THE GOLDEN DAHABEAH


I

Mahmoud was crouched on the hot sand, in the shade of a great granite
figure of an old Egyptian king. On the temple wall at his right hand
was incised the figure of a large hawk, which had a certain life-like
stare and stride. Below lay the thick green lake; a little pied
kingfisher fluttered and poised over it. Mahmoud’s donkey had strayed
a little from his owner, and was pulling at some few blades of thin,
straggling weed. The Father of the Box, who had ridden him out to
Karnak, had some foolish prejudice against tying up donkeys’ heads.
Mahmoud explained that it prevented the donkey from having a headache;
but Englishmen always want things done in their own way.

Yet as Mahmoud sat dreaming, his eyes fixed on the water, he was
thinking of none of these things. Rather he was dreaming of little
Fatma, Fatma whom he had run and played with as a little girl--but now
she was old enough to be married. He had seen Fatma as they came out;
she was carrying a waterpot on her head, and the slender fingers were
tipped with henna; her hair was plaited over her brow, and the large
blue-studded rings in her ears swayed as she ran. She held her veil
firmly in her small, white teeth, and only gave him one look, half shy,
half merry, as she passed.

Mahmoud’s father and mother said he must be married this year. He
wished to marry no one but little Fatma; but ah! the marriage-gift.

He stared at the smooth, thick water, and droned a little song--“Oh,
great holy gardener, let me into the garden.”

The sun was just going down, and as Mahmoud turned idly, half lost
in his dreaming, the rays struck the wall where was the image of the
hawk, and the boy stood breathless, for the hawk was all of gold, and
as he looked the fierce head turned a little.

Through his maze came the voice of the Father of the Box, crying to him
to get the donkey.

A moment he started and turned, but when he looked again there was
nothing but the stone hawk carved on the wall; and again came the call,
as the Englishman and the “box” came round the corner.

Mahmoud gasped and panted: “The chicken is all gold.”

“Oh, the Golden Horus,” said the Father of the Box, giving the precious
camera into Mahmoud’s hand. “Hurry up and fetch the donkey, it is
getting dark and damp.”

But he did not ask how a donkey-boy should know the Golden Horus.


II

The donkey-boys were sitting outside the garden gate of the hotel.
Mahmoud was against the wall, and taking little part in the flow of
conversation.

“Achmet Effendi will make a big feast to-morrow,” said one. “He has
killed two sheep for his feast.”

“Achmet Effendi is a very rich man,” said Maouad. “Twenty years ago he
sent his servant Gameel Gameel to dig up stones to burn and lay on his
field, there where the English ‘_sidi matre_’ (cemetery) is. But Gameel
Gameel found a big pot of golden coins and he brought them all back
to Achmet Effendi. For ten years they kept them hidden, then Achmet
Effendi sold them for much money and became a rich man. That is why he
loves Gameel Gameel better than his son.”

“Gameel Gameel was a great fool,” said Hassan flippantly. “Why should
he not become a rich man himself?”

Kuku was speaking aside to Gorgius.

“I tell my lady that I am going to be married to Fatma. I say to her:
‘I see Fatma in the market; I like her very much and she likes me very
much. My mother has arranged it for me. If you give me an English
handkerchief,’ I say to my lady, ‘you shall come to my wedding.’”

“Liar-boy!” said Gorgius scornfully; but Mahmoud feared and sighed in
himself.

A small figure passed, and the light from the gas lamp showed a
withered old man with a white beard and smiling face. He wore a red
tarbûsh turbaned about with white, and trailed a green Mecca robe.

“Mohammed Mohassib will have a big feast,” said one. “He has killed a
camel and made soup with it. The Father of the Beard said to Mohammed,
‘You will feed three hundred men to-morrow.’ Mohammed said, ‘I hope
more than that.’”

“Mohammed Mohassib slept in the temple of Mut,” said Maouad; “that was
fifty years ago, when he was a boy. When the sun rose Mohammed saw the
golden hawk. He ran to catch it, but it flew away into the sky. One
feather fell from it, and Mohammed Mohassib picked it up. Then he was
a lucky man and became rich, and went to Mecca, and to-morrow he will
feed more than three hundred men.”

Mahmoud’s ear was caught for the second time. “If a man sees the golden
bird will he be a lucky man?” he asked.

“Oh, it is Mahmoud who will be the lucky man,” said Hassan, with a
laugh. “To-morrow when Abu el Haggag has done with his boat we shall
set it to float on the Lake of Karnak, and Mahmoud shall see it all
golden at night and shall swim out to it. But Mahmoud, he never speaks,
so when the sun strikes it the boat of Abu el Haggag will be for
Mahmoud.”

A short silence followed this profane speech, for Abu el Haggag is the
great Saint of Luxor, and next day they held the procession of his
sacred boat.

But Hassan rattled on. “I make no feast to-morrow. Everybody else
makes a feast. Nasr says every time he sees his lady he says, ‘I have
bought some sheep and some rice, and my wife has mixed them together
like so; my wife has made balls of them, and she will put them in the
oven to bake them. And I will bring you some.’ Every time he says that.
I would not eat Nasr’s balls. I will go to Rameses Bar and spend money
and drink whisky.”

His audacity succeeded in making itself heard, which was chiefly what
he wanted. And he went on: “Mahmoud gets little money from the Father
of the Box. I say to the Father of the Box when he rides my donkey,
‘Give me more money, this is too little.’ He says, ‘Then I will beat
you.’ But I say to the Mother of the Nose, ‘I am a very poor boy; I am
only ten years old. My father send away my mother. Who shall give my
mother money?’ Then she says, ‘Oh, poor boy! here is some money.’ I
like these ladies. They are very foolish.”

“Did you say to the Mother of the Nose ‘My mother is married again to a
rich man,’ oh liar?” asked Mahmoud.

But at this moment the garden gate opened and a babel of voices
arose:--“Take my donkey; take my donkey; de best donkey in Luxor.”
“Here is Whisky and Soda; no donkey like so.” “Never you believe
nobody. Liar boy. Here is Rameses. Every day he win a race....”


III

Abu el Haggag’s boat had come and passed, poor starveling
representative of the longest pedigree in the world. Here passed of old
the Sacred Bark of the gods, carrying the precious images and emblems,
the king burning incense before it, the oxen lotus-garlanded for the
sacrifice.

And later this sacred bark lent its outward form to the Ark of the Most
High God, bearing the simple symbols of justice and mercy, in the long
desert wanderings and in the Holy Land.

And now the poor, sordid boat on its little truck passed round;
charcoal burned instead of incense. With the feeble tradition the
Arabs tell that it was the boat in which Abu the Saint went to see his
friends. This is all that is left in their minds of that most ancient
idea--this and the golden vision of the boat at midnight on Karnak Lake.

The droning noises of Arab music had died down as Mahmoud ran through
Luxor; a few beggars cleared the remnants of the feast of Mohammed
Mohassib; while the old man stood smiling in his doorway over the
memory of his lordly hospitality. He nodded kindly to Mahmoud running
by.

After he passed the house Mahmoud paused; he did not dare to go on this
way--highway though it was--for he feared above all the afreet-haunted
bridge that he would have to pass. So he turned, and running down a
narrow way crossed the empty market-place and came out on the field
road.

The light was dying down and the sky was cloudy; there was little mist,
but the scent of beanfields hung heavy on the air; the corn-blades
rustled as his dress swept them, running. The barking of the village
dogs died down behind him into silence, so that he started and nearly
fell when a little cue-owl mewed suddenly from a carob-tree.

Down into the cutting, and as he mounted again his heart leaped into
his mouth, for a dark figure rose up above the corn. Then he remembered
that it was only the great lion-headed statue that sat lonely in the
fields, and he took courage again.

When he came to the road he paused, debating. Which of the two ways to
the Lake? By the one he would have to pass the spot where that fierce
golden bird had turned to look at him yesterday. By the other way he
must go up the dark sphinx avenue, a very haunt of afreets. To go on
either way was dreadful; to stay here not less so; to go back, he was
persuaded now, would be to lose Fatma.

He turned to the left and entered the sphinx avenue. A half-grown moon
struggling with the clouds now and again threw straggling and sharp
shadows of the palm leaves across his path, but more dreadful was the
dry rustling of the leaves on high when a cloud passed; before him
loomed the great arch. On each side the sphinxes--crouched like strange
creatures with narrow, beak-like noses--seemed in the darkness ready
to spring. And that great black nodding palm-tree, surely that was an
afreet too, and might catch him. But up the path bordered with horror
he still ran.

Now he must turn to the right, before the arch is reached; and but a
short way farther pass those four images of great old kings mutilated,
but not the less uncanny and fearful in this dim light. They seemed
to look down on the little figure still running; but he had passed in
safety, and there lay the lake, black and still like the pool of ink in
which men saw strange visions.

Mahmoud said his prayer and praise and lay down to sleep by the
lake....


IV

The first time Mahmoud woke the moon had won the battle, and was
shining on the temple, turning all to unreal, ethereal building,
faintly roseate, a temple seen in a dream. Mahmoud looked towards the
lake and all was still; the moon made a white sheet of water.

The second time Mahmoud woke the moon was down, but from the lake came
a light--soft, lambent, golden. He looked towards it, and oh the glory,
the wonder! a golden boat was riding on the water.

Mahmoud had often seen under the hot sun, in some ripple of desert
sand, a sudden sheet of water. In the middle it was clear water,
bright, reflecting the edge of cultivated land. At the margin it was
uncertain; no eye could tell where it melted into the shaking haze of
heat. So here, the middle of the boat was clear and distinct, and on
the deck was standing one single figure; but at the stern and prow,
though he saw figures he saw them dimly, the outlines of them melted
into the gold reflection of the water.

The central figure on the deck he marked from head to foot. He says
he has seen the face outlined on some temple wall, but he can never
find it. He says, too, it was not unlike the father of Gorgius the
Copt donkey-boy. But the father of Gorgius, he added, was only a
fellah-man; this was a great man, greater than the Khedive of Egypt, as
great as a King of England.

But of one thing he is certain: not only had the figure a strange
erection on his head, but he wore a lion’s tail behind. Mahmoud’s eyes
were so riveted to the figure that he could not tell how the boat
moved. He said something about a sail and something about oars; but
this he knew, that though it moved on with its golden reflection over
the lake, it stirred no water in front and no widening ripple ran out
behind.

It was drawing to the shore, and suddenly, as if it had come within
focus, the prow was clear to him, with a man leaping down to the land,
a coil of golden rope upon his arm.

What passed next was but the work of an instant. Without rising to his
feet Mahmoud shot down like a snake among the stones, and as the man
coiled the rope round a rock he seized it.

As the lightning flash strikes across the sky, so the man with this
golden light upon him leaped back; and into the waters of the lake,
into the golden reflection, sank the boat, without sound or ripple.

Mahmoud was standing alone by the black pool in the light of the stars
under the lonely night. But by the light of the stars he saw in his
scarred and bleeding hand the strands of the golden rope.

       *       *       *       *       *

Now Mahmoud trails the Mecca robe through the streets of Luxor, but
they say that Fatma wears the golden rope.




THE UNSEEN WORLD




VIII

THE UNSEEN WORLD


The whole world had faded and darkened to a uniform tint, black and
dingy. The woman who stood there could hardly say whether this tint
were brown or grey, for there was no colour to contrast it with,
nothing but her own black dress seen through the same sordid medium.
In front of her, rather lighter in tint, she could see a few inches of
parapet, on which her hands were lying, and dimly could discern the
ground at her feet. If she leant over the parapet she could not see the
water, but where she believed it to be, something like the shadow of a
ripple moved across the dusk.

And as for want of contrast she could determine no colour, so for want
of distance she could determine no size. All she saw could be enclosed
by four small walls; all she could not see might reveal miles of
river-bank, streets of stately houses. It was not the Infinite but the
Indetermined that she looked upon. Noises had sunk into a hoarse murmur
and swell, dulled as by this thick, heavy medium. No such monotony of
existence could be conceived; a world of shadows, an Isle of Voices,
would be life itself to this. And yet she believed herself to be
standing in the heart of the greatest city in the world, but a few
paces removed from streets where men and women were moving up and down;
where her face was turned across the water stood (she believed) a great
house, a town garden where wood-pigeons built, and where she had seen
lilies of the valley flower, saying softly to herself:--

  “Here in dust and dirt, oh here,
  The lilies of His love appear.”

How was it possible that in so short a time such a change should fall,
such a swallowing up of life as the centuries cannot bring to the
cities of the south? Truly she was living by faith in a blank world of
existence. A foot or two of parapet each side of her hands; a foot or
two of gravel each side of her feet--beyond that limit nothingness. Yet
by faith she would move in this void.

She turned to the left and walked along the path which appeared step
by step as she paced, until in front of her the shadow of a building
fell upon the fog: cornerwise it rose, fading into mist, and likewise
vanished a few feet above her head.

Yet she believed that this was a great tower; she believed that the
building stretched away from her, and that at that moment, gathered
inside its halls, was the Council of the Nation. It is strange if you
think of it, how firmly she believed in that invisible building, in
those inaudible deliberations, in the reality of its connection with
the isolated fragments of parapet and path--fragments without visible
support, the only things she could see and the least of all she
believed in.

For as she believed in a present invisible, so she believed in a future
uncreated; that she should presently return from where she stood to
her own house, the fragment of visible world opening before her and
above her, closing behind her as she went. If she could not find the
way, other figures dawning on her, fog-enwrapped, would direct her.
Strange--how she believed in their existence, though she could neither
see nor hear them, how she trusted in their good faith, though she
knew neither who they were nor whence they would come, in their greater
knowledge, though all men were more or less astray in the same fog.

So resting peaceably in this belief she looked again over the parapet.

A shadow on blank colourlessness in front; a splash as of water to the
ear. The shadow deepened, defined itself, and out of nothingness grew a
great black barge; it seemed to float on water that she could not see.
Two men, one with body bent forward, one with body swayed back, swung
a great oar at the stern. They were steering in this indistinguishable
world; in this chaos of a world, threading their way between dangers
undiscerned till ruin was impending. Now the black outline was
opposite to her and now the barge was shortened, and still the two
figures swayed and bent, swayed and bent, at their steering. The dark
vision faded into darkness again. Out of nothing grew that barge, into
nothing it went.

The third thing she saw was this: just below the parapet where the fog
was least thick, out of nothingness came a bird, like a little white
spirit. It was smaller than a seagull; its wings, delicately shaded
with brown, showed a sharper outline, and round them ran a dark line;
the head too was dark.

A moment it hung below her lightly poised, white wings uplifted, head
down-bent, feet down-dropped towards the flood below. Then this too
vanished in the mist.

And having seen that she went away content.




FROM THE BANK OF THE RIVER




IX

FROM THE BANK OF THE RIVER


I

In a room in an hotel of the south some one was lying ill. It was
March, and an airless, parching heat lay outside, the palms drooped
yellow leaves, the bee-eaters chattering on a carob-bush dived
luxuriantly into corn so green that they were in no wise distinguished
from it; they turned and fluttered like butterflies, and from the
bronze wing feathers a sheen of gold rippled over their emerald in the
sun.

Inside the room was as cool as it might be; when, from time to time,
the shutters were opened the glory of gold and green outside flashed
into sight. Outside life was heavy with heat, luxuriant, substantial;
bounded, limited and weighed down by its very fullness.

Inside life had dwindled to a thin thread of consciousness, or rather
it seemed like two strands worn nearly to breaking lying side by side.
The one, the actual physical consciousness of a corporal life ebbing,
of breath drawn with difficulty; of physical sensation not perhaps
actually painful, but almost altogether wearying--a consciousness
close to that mysterious land of delusions, where the physical symptoms
are set apart from the personal consciousness and become external
antagonistic forces. It was not intolerable because it was becoming a
thing more and more external, more separate from that other spiritual
consciousness with which it was still lightly entwined.

And that other thread of being, how shall one describe it? It was not
quite continuous, for now and again the physical sensation numbed it;
now and then, when times of refreshment came, the other like a stream
rose and engulfed it.

Compare that old image of the Rhone and the Saone. The one flows on,
blue, clear, transparent; the other side by side, turbulent, muddy and
swift. The man lying here seemed to himself to be both, but most of all
the clearer thinner stream. The turbulence, the force of the other is
daily less and less himself, more and more an alien power to which he
yet jealously clings in the body of this death, and will not, cannot
part from it.

And from time to time comes a new impulse of the stronger torrent--its
yellowing waters tinge the blue--it is fuller, and there is a sense of
well-being; and yet that transparent river of spiritual being, clear as
crystal, has been sullied, it has disappeared.

Such little trivial things too will give him back the life which is
his power and his bondage;--the cup of iced coffee, that he looks for
and can drink when other food nauseates, this makes him feel that he
lives again and yet kills that clearer, sweeter, finer, life;--as much,
in a sense, as overpowering bodily discomfort kills it--more, perhaps,
for the more it overpowers the more external it is, the less it is
himself.

If only he can keep from fear, for that kills all. And yet this thread
of consciousness, which I have called spiritual, is not thinking any
thought, it is seeing visions, and these visions are not of another
world but of the sweeter, purer things of this world, transfigured
and serene. He is a child again in a Cornish lane, and the grass is
deep and dewy, the banks are high, crowned with little bushes nearly
bare of leaf, for it is spring; deep in the grass are primroses, long
stalked and growing by the handful, you can thrust your hand into the
damp grass, rich in little ferns and unnamed leaves, and pluck them so;
between the primroses there are violets--are they purple or grey or
blue?--and here and there a celandine, golden yellow. Or he is a boy
sitting on a rock; his feet are bare, the sea is shallow round him, the
ripples run out, and the sun shining through them laces the fine sand
below with gold. He tells the nurses that as soon as he is well he will
go to the sea and dip his feet in it.

Then he thinks of music that he knows, and it comes with unutterable
sweetness of cadence like music heard in dreams.

And this radiance lies not only on things imagined but on things seen.
The roses brought into the room are the roses of Dorothea; the scent
of the palm, in blossom outside, fills the room with an ethereal
fragrance; and oh, those clusters of waxen palm flowers that his
friends bring in and place in the green jug, surely it must come from
that tree whose very leaves are for the healing of the nations!

It is only at night that the horror comes--no nameless horror, but the
horror of fighting with the darkness; it is hot, and it stifles. The
doctors have been, and he knows their report is not good though no one
has told him so. The medicine bottles begin to change; there is one
like a knight’s head near the candle, he knows it is only a cork in it,
but it is very like the armoured head of a knight; and the darkness
comes near, it oppresses all, laying a heavy hand on the world: it is
too near, too heavy, all round us and weighing on us above.

He sleeps, to shout at the people in the room--he asks the nurse to
expel the Arab who is beside the bed. He knows they are not there at
all, but he does not want to sleep, for he will wake in that horrible
strangle of breath. It is so long, if only there were any light at
all! Weary, interminable length, and some lines of a poem run in his
mind:

  “An hour or two more and God is so kind
  The day will be blue in the window blind.”

         *       *       *       *       *

  “Thank the kind God the carts come in.”

They come in so early in London.--Only an hour or two is quiet in the
night, and you would know that the world is alive again, one would not
have to keep the darkness long at bay; but here the night is day-long.
Brandy--what is the good? The smell is nauseating; but it is at his
lips, and he drinks. Has he slept? but it is black and still and dark,
the dogs howl and scuffle past the window. Hours more to come, hours
of the blackness. One of these people who is about the room sits down
by the bed. She is not terrifying. She is only an old lady with grey
hair, but she expects something. She must be told to go away; they will
not tell her, and he is angry with urging. But of course she was not
really there, it was only a dream; so he must have slept again, and the
minutes must have passed.

There is a hint of grey in the sky, the whisper of a breeze in the palm
leaves--dawn is coming. Now there is one hour of horror to go through,
for the windows must be shut; he cannot breathe--he cannot live like
this for an hour. The door into the passage may be opened, and the
nurse’s step falls cold and echoing on the stone outside; no one else
is moving, it is all grey and cold; he knows how that empty passage
must look. This is better, for the blackness is going.

He sees the palm-trees outside above the muslin blinds; all the world
is still and dead, its light gone out, but it can be rekindled. From
the other window nothing can be seen but colourless sky, but the sky
itself begins to kindle into life.

Suddenly something falls across the muslin blind; a bar, and a dot of
sunlight, of that molten gold of Egyptian sunshine before the day has
dried it into dust of gold. Oh the extraordinary beauty of that gold!
Has sunshine been always in the world before, and yet we never knew it
was like that? The darkness has passed, the light shines, the rapture
and the beauty of the light spreads and broadens; the sky is awake,
the garden is alive, the night is gone--and now the window towards
the south is thrown open, and very faint and fair, a delicate violet
light lies on the hills beyond the river. The air is blown in sweet,
fragrant, unspeakably pure; and that carob-tree on which the birds sat
yesterday is green and fresh, and below is the blue-green of the corn
into which they dropped.

An Arab is riding on his camel along the dyke, they are outlined
against that purple hill. So people still live and move outside; they
can move then, they can go where they wish. But he sees the sun, and
the breath of heaven comes in, and the night is passed. He is tired
with this warring against the night, but the light has come and the
clearer, brighter river is flowing again. This is day.

What is this land where the spirit has been living? Is it the land of
Beulah or the Valley of the Shadow? Which is most real? He knows which
is most substantial, but why is it most real? The instrument is more
substantial than the melody and infinitely less real. Yet when the veil
grows thin which hides the glory of the vision, agonizing we entreat
that it may not be removed and show the glory of the face.


II

            “The luminous
  Star-inwrought, beautiful
        Folds of the Veil.”

Many have written of the journey down to the dark river; few have told
of the road backward from the river’s brink; a road of sudden ecstasies
and sordid pitfalls.

For the radiance lay over the earth when he turned his face to it
again. Nothing was ever sweeter than the sight of palm leaves against
the blue upon the banks of the Nile. As the shores streamed past,
with the rosy hills and yellow lights above them, winged feluccas
furling sail, or sweeping like birds across the blue, with the roaring
of the swiftness of their motion, he could lie and look--weary with
rapture--watching the figures sprung from the old Palestinian story--a
rugged Peter wrapping his fisher’s cloak about him, or urging his
fellows “I go a-fishing.” But slowly, imperceptibly, the walls of the
world closed in again; the sun beat pitilessly down; the heavens were
brass, the earth iron. Now and again they would open out at the sight
of the sapphire sparkle of the Mediterranean, or the deep, green growth
under blossoming orchards of France. The wind became the life-giving
breath of the spirit, and the soul would “beat” against “mortal bars,”
seeing infinite power, infinite possibility, lying but just beyond the
frail partition; a touch, and he might glide from the mountain side
down over the trees that slept in the noonday of the valley; a hand on
the eyes, and they would see to the truth that lies beneath form and
colour of earthly things; a finger on the ear, and he would hear the
very meaning of the wind and of the trickle of the stream--the gift of
tongues would be an imaginably natural incident.

Yet next day, at some trifling ailment, death and its terrors compass
him about, and the man shakes as with ague under the fear of it and
shame of cowardice. Or he wakes every morning seemingly refreshed,
only to fall by midday into a gulf of blackness and mistrust, sordid,
not tragic, not dignified; and he sits tongue-tied, seeing a sneer
in every smile, marvelling that men do not see the loathsomeness and
terror that lie around them, but walk unconcerned among the dangers
that encompass. Then again life returns in full flood, and the fears
and the terrors are as the fabric of a dream.

A long, strange way, full of inexplicable joys and sorrows, hopes and
fears--a far longer path to travel in the spirit than that by which he
came “out of the iron furnace, even out of Egypt,” to the cool airs and
sweet quiet of an old English country house in wooded downs touched
by the freshness of the sea. There in the south, after the first
bound towards health, life had stood still; the parched, sapless land
could yield dry, clear air, sharp bright sunlight, but no refreshment
of health and of spirit, nothing that could be compared to the misty
mornings, and soft dewy evenings of a mild English spring. There the
spring brings no refreshment; March reaps her harvest and the palm
leaves hang dry and yellowish: here all life was stirring after the
winter sleep, and earth was striving in her own finite way to make all
things new. It was long since he had seen an English spring, and the
eye could not be satisfied with gazing.

He first noticed it when, looking on the wintry copses, he saw that a
thin ripple of life had run over the ground; among brown stalks and
withered leaves so slight a flush of green that you could hardly say,
“It is here” or “It is there,” nor surely know the change was worked to
the outer eye or noted by the reanimate perception. Then the fine veil
of skeleton branches against the sky, through, under, beyond which he
could see the blue downs of the coast, thickened, and they warmed in
colour; till the brown of the elm became purple, and the brown of the
beeches red, and the willow golden: then the elm burst into its little
purple rosettes but the others stayed. And now crept out those little
silvery creatures which the children call palms; like little downy
animals, so sweet, so comfortable that the child must half believe they
are alive. Early in April the clumps of crocus in the turf, purple and
yellow, were dying, but the daffodils were beginning to take their
place, strewing the rough grass with flowers of milky gold. A week
later the snake-heads were drawing themselves out of the turf, with
head curved downwards like a swan preening its breast; primroses were
waking in the lanes, the larch was hanging “rosy plumelets,” the silver
leaf buds of the apple were out, and the flower of the peach.

This was cuckoo day, and punctual to the moment they hooted in the
wood below; they had come in good time for the later nests, for the
wagtails had taken their last year’s tenement again in the ivied wall,
and the untidy sparrows were littering lawn and garden.

Again a week, and the cherry buds showed fawn coloured; two days they
stayed so, then a little tree burst into flower. Two days more, and
the orchard looked as if a snow shower had lightly fallen. At last one
windy day white blossoms came drifting down among the scarlet tulips,
and after this a rose-tinge passed over the trees, like a faint sunset
on the snow, and then the glory was gone. But the expanding spirit
could not bewail the glory gone, for warmer weather came with sun
like summer, so that the plum-tree on the wall burst into flower one
morning while one sat under it; a purple iris appeared, the blackthorn
whitened, and in the garden beds the peonies and lilies shot up,
anemones dozed half their radiant life away in royal groups, purple and
scarlet. The remembrance of trembling and helplessness fell from the
man, and he laughed to see the peacock’s grave and measured dance and
the fierce cock chaffinch wooing in his bright spring coat.

So the spring returned, unfolding infinite new delights, sometimes
hurrying, sometimes delaying; the copses clothed themselves in foliage
as light as a birch grove, with all fine gradations of colour from
the grey palms grown old, to the golden oaks beginning, and all life
and all activity responded. Though storms and chill might check the
budding, the renewal of the spring moved in man and nature, as man and
nature shook off the memory of death and winter, warmed and revivified
in the waxing power of the sun.

And the world found voice for its joy, and it was joy to lie awake
in the hour before dawn, while the last fine song of the nightingale
still lingered in the memory, and hear the untutored song echo from
bush to bush; when the thrush and the blackbird waked, and the starling
chattered, and the cock chimed in with the lusty bar of music of his
bugle call, and all in chorus welcomed the day, and ceased.

And one morning, as the man leaned out of his window to drink the
sweet air of growing things, he saw suddenly, that the desire of
spring was satiate. The trees had burst their buds and made a glory of
golden leaves. Life no longer pulsed, stayed, hurried on, but flowed
in the full tide of summer. Summer would burst into glories of beauty
and odour on this side and on that, but the fresh impulse of spring
was over. And the man leaned out and revelled in it. The rough bank
had covered its scars with lush green grass; and leaves, stems, and
branches were hidden. He revelled in the odorous, sun-warmed air, in
the pleasant kindly earth with its beauties, in the sight and sound of
the happy living things, and he looked away towards the hills, but they
were hidden. Then all at once he saw the blindness of content, and he
cried out “Oh my soul, where are the heavenly horizons and the distant
misty hills?”

For while he gazed, the veil had fallen; at first translucent, radiant;
threads fine as gossamer shining with light, so that they seemed but
to illuminate the distance. Then the veil was inwrought with flowers
and as each new beauty came, he said “This is God’s work, and I can
see Him in this; all this symbolizes the light of His countenance, and
I see Him in His world.” And of each human interest and activity he
said, “This is God’s work, for it is the work of His children.” So it
fell fold on fold, thickening imperceptibly, full of sweet odours as it
fell, and the voices of birds; and he did not know that the focus of
his view was contracting, and that he was beginning to look not through
the veil but at it. And he did not see that there was another hand at
work and other threads in the web, grosser, more earthly, and darker
yet; and that as it was woven, warp and woof, other hands threw the
shuttle.

So it fell, closing out the heavenly vision, hiding too the clouds and
darkness round God’s seat; and he found himself gazing on the veil
which men call this world. Then with a great struggle he cried, “In
the time of our wealth, good Lord deliver us.”


III

The year came round again, and this man had found no contentment for
mind or heart. He was such a one as had always believed in the unity
of God and nature, had held the visible universe to be the robe of
His glory and the material to be like clothing which partly hides and
partly reveals the form.

He was a man whom God had chastened a little in the flesh, so that He
might know the Hand that touched him, yet had given him no loathsome
evil thing to be with him, so that he must hate even the body that
served him. God had given him amply of the good things of life and
sufficiently of its sorrows to make him know the first were good. He
had early looked into the empty tomb and seen that since even the body
can in time elude it, it would be beyond reason and belief to dream
that the soul can be prisoned by it. For the soul is not even prisoned
by the body, seeing that it can walk among the stars, thread the secret
places of the earth, or dive into the seas, while the eyes of the body
stare upon a book; or it can fight battles and go through many strange
adventures and visit distant lands while the eyes are closed and the
body is laid upon the bed. Therefore this man had long believed in his
soul, though he had not taught his life and his fancies that though the
material sometimes appears to be greater and stronger and older than
the spiritual, yet that this is merely as the flower seems to one who
looks not below the ground to be more vital than the root. So though he
believed this, the man could not understand what the truth of the world
might be. For he saw that although one may rejoice in its beauties
and delight even in wholly innocent things, believing truly that they
come from God, yet many men thus go astray. And when he listened to
the voices of the dearest of God’s servants he became all the more
perplexed. For one cried “All things are yours, things present as well
as things to come”; but another said “Love not the world.” Again he
heard one say “It is good to be here; let us build three tabernacles”;
and saw him that said it straightway led into the dust and turmoil of
the incredulous crowd. And the sweetest voice said now “Deny yourself,”
and now “Consider the lilies, consider the birds.”

This man was a man who always loved the water. It made a great calm in
his mind to see the sea spread calm before his feet; the storm of the
sea filled him with life, and to die in the sea would, he thought, be
like a child sinking to sleep in its mother’s arms. Clear, translucent
water drew him with a great longing, and he dreamt often that he
should bathe, but as his feet touched the water it ebbed away.

Now near his home there spread, embowered in trees, a great lake; on
one side ran a road neglected and seldom used, from this the lake
ran up curving out of sight. Half-way up towards the curve there
stood a great oak, and beneath this he often bathed. So being in this
perplexity he went out one summer morning, passed through the sleeping
village and by the church, and went down to the lake.

And in the turn of the year again the woods were lightly foliaged, and
the branches shone golden between the leaves; the ground beneath the
oak was carpeted with hyacinths and primroses, here and there a late
anemone starred it.

Here he undressed and plunged from a little height into a pool. His
hands parted the water, which rushed up him as he plunged; then he gave
himself up to the element and it lifted him to the surface. Again he
warred with it, yet moved by means of it, with steady stroke parting
it, and again he turned over and yielded himself up to it, and the
least movement was enough to keep him floating on the surface, and he
rejoiced in the coolness and the purity. So when he had finished he
returned and clothed himself, and moved on through the edge of the
wood, looking at the water, wondering at a transparency that was so
deep and the strength of the fleeting thing, till he came to where a
little wooden bridge spanned the overflow from the lake; and upon the
bridge a boy of about eight years old was sitting.

He was not dressed like a village child; his cap lay beside him with a
little spray of reddening oak stuck into it, and he was staring at the
water.

“Who are you, my son?” said the man as he passed.

“I’m a king,” the child replied; “but I’m an outlaw just now, you see,”
he went on, laying his hand on his cap. “I can’t get into my kingdom.”

“Where is your kingdom?” asked the man.

“Come down here and you’ll see,” he said.

The man sat down beside him on the plank.

“I can’t see much,” he said, “the water is dazzling.”

“Ah, those are the sun’s messengers,” said the boy; “the sun sends
messengers millions and millions of miles to the lake and they
telegraph back to him. But you must look in another place.”

The man slipped into the humour of the child.

“Now I see your kingdom,” he said; “it has greenish forests waving,
strange transparent creatures move silently about.”

“No, that’s not my kingdom,” the child answered, “why, I can get in
there; but it is not like what you think. Those are slippery fishes and
the bottom is all slimy. You must fix your eyes tight and not let them
slip to see my kingdom.”

“Now I see it,” said the other; “it has beautiful blue sky, trees
stretch twigs into it which glisten like gold--one spreads leaves like
jewelled glass with the sun shining through; one stretches budding
twigs made of ruby; it is far, far below the shine and the fishes; and
yet when I look it is quite close to us.”

“Yes, that’s my kingdom!” cried the child.

“But isn’t it just like that behind us?” said the man, to test him.

The boy looked round. “No, that’s out-of-doors,” he said. “My kingdom
is much more happy and safe, and the sky is more shining and the leaves
glitter.”

“But it’s the sun’s kingdom down there even where the shine is,” said
the man.

“Yes, I know it’s his,” said the boy; “if he didn’t send messengers
down there it would be all inky black and dreadful; but they won’t let
his messengers get through, only a few of them, a little yellowish,
greenish light.”

“Is out-of-doors his kingdom too?” then said the man.

“Of course it’s his,” said the child; “if he wasn’t there it would be
dark, and the wind would sob and the trees shake their branches.”

“And what about your kingdom?”

“Oh, he makes that for me,” said the child, “to be all my own.”

The man sat a moment looking at the water and was silent; a starling
chattered on the boughs above; far away came the cry of the cuckoo; at
the right hand of them there was a little rustle as a snake slipped
over dead leaves and through the new living shoots of spring, and
paused.

The man turned to the child.

“But is it real?” he said.

“It’s just as real as the sun and the water and out-of-doors,” said the
boy steadily.

“But you said some day you would get in,” answered the man, tempting
him.

The boy turned and looked at him, and his eyes were like a great stream
with the sun shining through. “And that’s just as real as me,” he said.

The man snapped the twig he held in his hand, the snake silently
slipped through the brake and was gone, and the man stood up, yet
paused a moment looking down at the shining world, then he got up.

“Goodbye,” he said, “I must go and look for my kingdom. I had one once
but I lost it.”

“Shall you be able to get in?” asked the boy.

“Not just yet, perhaps,” he said, “but I can look at it till I find
the way in.”

So he went back through the wood, remembering that it was written,
“Out of the mouth of babes thou hast perfected praise.”




  The Gresham Press,

  UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED,
  WOKING AND LONDON.




FOOTNOTES:


[1] Some of the descriptions which follow include things seen on our
later visits.

[2] In later years we found a garden open to the public, and even trees
in it.

[3] More than one such outer chapel of a tomb we made to serve as a
place for Christian worship.




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Archaic or alternate spelling which may have been in use at the time
    of publication has been retained.





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