I
Mystery
attracts mystery. Ever since the wide appearance of my name as a performer of
unexplained feats, I have encountered strange narratives and events which my
calling has led people to link with my interests and activities. Some of these
have been trivial and irrelevant, some deeply dramatic and absorbing, some
productive of weird and perilous experiences and some involving me in extensive
scientific and historical research. Many of these matters I have told and shall
continue to tell very freely; but there is one of which I speak with great
reluctance, and which I am now relating only after a session of grilling
persuasion from the publishers of this magazine, who had heard vague rumors of
it from other members of my family.
The
hitherto guarded subject pertains to my non-professional visit to Egypt
fourteen years ago, and has been avoided by me for several reasons. For one
thing, I am averse to exploiting certain unmistakably actual facts and
conditions obviously unknown to the myriad tourists who throng about the
pyramids and apparently secreted with much diligence by the authorities at
Cairo, who cannot be wholly ignorant of them. For another thing, I dislike to
recount an incident in which my own fantastic imagination must have played so
great a part. What I saw - or thought I saw - certainly did not take place; but
is rather to be viewed as a result of my then recent readings in Egyptology,
and of the speculations anent this theme which my environment naturally
prompted. These imaginative stimuli, magnified by the excitement of an actual
event terrible enough in itself, undoubtedly gave rise to the culminating
horror of that grotesque night so long past.
In
January, 1910, I had finished a professional engagement in England and signed a
contract for a tour of Australian theatres. A liberal time being allowed for
the trip, I determined to make the most of it in the sort of travel which
chiefly interests me; so accompanied by my wife I drifted pleasantly down the
Continent and embarked at Marseilles on the P & O Steamer Malwa, bound for
Port Said. From that point I proposed to visit the principal historical
localities of lower Egypt before leaving finally for Australia.
The
voyage was an agreeable one, and enlivened by many of the amusing incidents
which befall a magical performer apart from his work. I had intended, for the
sake of quiet travel, to keep my name a secret; but was goaded into betraying
myself by a fellow-magician whose anxiety to astound the passengers with
ordinary tricks tempted me to duplicate and exceed his feats in a manner quite
destructive of my incognito. I mention this because of its ultimate effect - an
effect I should have foreseen before unmasking to a shipload of tourists about
to scatter throughout the Nile valley. What it did was to herald my identity
wherever I subsequently went, and deprive my wife and me of all the placid
inconspicuousness we had sought. Traveling to seek curiosities, I was often
forced to stand inspection as a sort of curiosity myself!
We
had come to Egypt in search of the picturesque and the mystically impressive,
but found little enough when the ship edged up to Port Said and discharged its
passengers in small boats. Low dunes of sand, bobbing buoys in shallow water,
and a drearily European small town with nothing of interest save the great De
Lesseps statue, made us anxious to get to something more worth our while. After
some discussion we decided to proceed at once to Cairo and the Pyramids, later
going to Alexandria for the Australian boat and for whatever Greco-Roman sights
that ancient metropolis might present.
The
railway journey was tolerable enough, and consumed only four hours and a half.
We saw much of the Suez Canal, whose route we followed as far as Ismailiya and
later had a taste of Old Egypt in our glimpse of the restored fresh-water canal
of the Middle Empire. Then at last we saw Cairo glimmering through the growing
dusk; a winkling constellation which became a blaze as we halted at the great
Gare Centrale.
But
once more disappointment awaited us, for all that we beheld was European save
the costumes and the crowds. A prosaic subway led to a square teeming with
carriages, taxicabs, and trolley-cars and gorgeous with electric lights shining
on tall buildings; whilst the very theatre where I was vainly requested to play
and which I later attended as a spectator, had recently been renamed the
'American Cosmograph'. We stopped at Shepheard's Hotel, reached in a taxi that
sped along broad, smartly built-up streets; and amidst the perfect service of
its restaurant, elevators and generally Anglo-American luxuries the mysterious
East and immemorial past seemed very far away.
The
next day, however, precipitated us delightfully into the heart of the Arabian
Nights atmosphere; and in the winding ways and exotic skyline of Cairo, the
Bagdad of Harun-al-Rashid seemed to live again. Guided by our Baedeker, we had
struck east past the Ezbekiyeh Gardens along the Mouski in quest of the native
quarter, and were soon in the hands of a clamorous cicerone who - notwithstanding
later developments - was assuredly a master at his trade.
Not
until afterward did I see that I should have applied at the hotel for a
licensed guide. This man, a shaven, peculiarly hollow-voiced and relatively
cleanly fellow who looked like a Pharaoh and called himself 'Abdul Reis el
Drogman' appeared to have much power over others of his kind; though
subsequently the police professed not to know him, and to suggest that reis is
merely a name for any person in authority, whilst 'Drogman' is obviously no
more than a clumsy modification of the word for a leader of tourist parties - dragoman.
Abdul
led us among such wonders as we had before only read and dreamed of. Old Cairo
is itself a story-book and a dream - labyrinths of narrow alleys redolent of
aromatic secrets; Arabesque balconies and oriels nearly meeting above the
cobbled streets; maelstroms of Oriental traffic with strange cries, cracking
whips, rattling carts, jingling money, and braying donkeys; kaleidoscopes of
polychrome robes, veils, turbans, and tarbushes; water-carriers and dervishes,
dogs and cats, soothsayers and barbers; and over all the whining of blind
beggars crouched in alcoves, and the sonorous chanting of muezzins from
minarets limned delicately against a sky of deep, unchanging blue.
The
roofed, quieter bazaars were hardly less alluring. Spice, perfume, incense
beads, rugs, silks, and brass - old Mahmoud Suleiman squats cross-legged amidst
his gummy bottles while chattering youths pulverize mustard in the hollowed-out
capital of an ancient classic column - a Roman Corinthian, perhaps from
neighboring Heliopolis, where Augustus stationed one of his three Egyptian
legions. Antiquity begins to mingle with exoticism. And then the mosques and
the museum - we saw them all, and tried not to let our Arabian revel succumb to
the darker charm of Pharaonic Egypt which the museum's priceless treasures
offered. That was to be our climax, and for the present we concentrated on the
mediaeval Saracenic glories of the Califs whose magnificent tomb-mosques form a
glittering faery necropolis on the edge of the Arabian Desert.
At
length Abdul took us along the Sharia Mohammed Ali to the ancient mosque of
Sultan Hassan, and the tower-flanked Babel-Azab, beyond which climbs the
steep-walled pass to the mighty citadel that Saladin himself built with the
stones of forgotten pyramids. It was sunset when we scaled that cliff, circled
the modern mosque of Mohammed Ali, and looked down from the dizzy parapet over
mystic Cairo - mystic Cairo all golden with its carven domes, its ethereal
minarets and its flaming gardens.
Far
over the city towered the great Roman dome of the new museum; and beyond it - across
the cryptic yellow Nile that is the mother of eons and dynasties - lurked the
menacing sands of the Libyan Desert, undulant and iridescent and evil with
older arcana.
The
red sun sank low, bringing the relentless chill of Egyptian dusk; and as it
stood poised on the world's rim like that ancient god of Heliopolis - Re-Harakhte,
the Horizon-Sun - we saw silhouetted against its vermeil holocaust the black
outlines of the Pyramids of Gizeh - the palaeogean tombs there were hoary with
a thousand years when Tut-Ankh-Amen mounted his golden throne in distant
Thebes. Then we knew that we were done with Saracen Cairo, and that we must
taste the deeper mysteries of primal Egypt - the black Kem of Re and Amen, Isis
and Osiris.
The
next morning we visited the Pyramids, riding out in a Victoria across the
island of Chizereh with its massive lebbakh trees, and the smaller English
bridge to the western shore. Down the shore road we drove, between great rows
of lebbakhs and past the vast Zoological Gardens to the suburb of Gizeh, where
a new bridge to Cairo proper has since been built. Then, turning inland along
the Sharia-el-Haram, we crossed a region of glassy canals and shabby native
villages till before us loomed the objects of our quest, cleaving the mists of
dawn and forming inverted replicas in the roadside pools. Forty centuries, as
Napoleon had told his campaigners there, indeed looked down upon us.
The
road now rose abruptly, till we finally reached our place of transfer between
the trolley station and the Mena House Hotel. Abdul Reis, who capably purchased
our Pyramid tickets, seemed to have an understanding with the crowding, yelling
and offensive Bedouins who inhabited a squalid mud village some distance away
and pestiferously assailed every traveler; for he kept them very decently at
bay and secured an excellent pair of camels for us, himself mounting a donkey
and assigning the leadership of our animals to a group of men and boys more
expensive than useful. The area to be traversed was so small that camels were
hardly needed, but we did not regret adding to our experience this troublesome
form of desert navigation.
The
pyramids stand on a high rock plateau, this group forming next to the
northernmost of the series of regal and aristocratic cemeteries built in the
neighborhood of the extinct capital Memphis, which lay on the same side of the
Nile, somewhat south of Gizeh, and which flourished between 3400 and 2000 B.C.
The greatest pyramid, which lies nearest the modern road, was built by King
Cheops or Khufu about 2800 B.C., and stands more than 450 feet in perpendicular
height. In a line southwest from this are successively the Second Pyramid,
built a generation later by King Khephren, and though slightly smaller, looking
even larger because set on higher ground, and the radically smaller Third
Pyramid of King Mycerinus, built about 2700 B.C. Near the edge of the plateau
and due east of the Second Pyramid, with a face probably altered to form a
colossal portrait of Khephren, its royal restorer, stands the monstrous Sphinx
- mute, sardonic, and wise beyond mankind and memory.
Minor
pyramids and the traces of ruined minor pyramids are found in several places,
and the whole plateau is pitted with the tombs of dignitaries of less than
royal rank. These latter were originally marked by mastabas, or stone
bench-like structures about the deep burial shafts, as found in other Memphian
cemeteries and exemplified by Perneb's Tomb in the Metropolitan Museum of New
York. At Gizeh, however, all such visible things have been swept away by time
and pillage; and only the rock-hewn shafts, either sand-filled or cleared out
by archaeologists, remain to attest their former existence. Connected with each
tomb was a chapel in which priests and relatives offered food and prayer to the
hovering ka or vital principle of the deceased. The small tombs have their
chapels contained in their stone mastabas or superstructures, but the mortuary
chapels of the pyramids, where regal Pharaohs lay, were separate temples, each
to the east of its corresponding pyramid, and connected by a causeway to a
massive gate-chapel or propylon at the edge of the rock plateau.
The
gate-chapel leading to the Second Pyramid, nearly buried in the drifting sands,
yawns subterraneously south-east of the Sphinx. Persistent tradition dubs it
the 'Temple of the Sphinx'; and it may perhaps be rightly called such if the
Sphinx indeed represents the Second Pyramid's builder Khephren. There are
unpleasant tales of the Sphinx before Khephren - but whatever its elder
features were, the monarch replaced them with his own that men might look at
the colossus without fear.
It
was in the great gateway-temple that the life-size diorite statue of Khephren
now in the Cairo museum was found; a statue before which I stood in awe when I
beheld it. Whether the whole edifice is now excavated I am not certain, but in
1910 most of it was below ground, with the entrance heavily barred at night.
Germans were in charge of the work, and the war or other things may have
stopped them. I would give much, in view of my experience and of certain
Bedouin whisperings discredited or unknown in Cairo, to know what has developed
in connection with a certain well in a transverse gallery where statues of the
Pharaoh were found in curious juxtaposition to the statues of baboons.
The
road, as we traversed it on our camels that morning, curved sharply past the
wooden police quarters, post office, drug store and shops on the left, and
plunged south and east in a complete bend that scaled the rock plateau and
brought us face to face with the desert under the lee of the Great Pyramid.
Past Cyclopean masonry we rode, rounding the eastern face and looking down
ahead into a valley of minor pyramids beyond which the eternal Nile glistened
to the east, and the eternal desert shimmered to the west. Very close loomed
the three major pyramids, the greatest devoid of outer casing and showing its
bulk of great stones, but the others retaining here and there the neatly fitted
covering which had made them smooth and finished in their day.
Presently
we descended toward the Sphinx, and sat silent beneath the spell of those
terrible unseeing eyes. On the vast stone breast we faintly discerned the
emblem of Re-Harakhte, for whose image the Sphinx was mistaken in a late
dynasty; and though sand covered the tablet between the great paws, we recalled
what Thutmosis IV inscribed thereon, and the dream he had when a prince. It was
then that the smile of the Sphinx vaguely displeased us, and made us wonder
about the legends of subterranean passages beneath the monstrous creature,
leading down, down, to depths none might dare hint at - depths connected with
mysteries older than the dynastic Egypt we excavate, and having a sinister
relation to the persistence of abnormal, animal-headed gods in the ancient
Nilotic pantheon. Then, too, it was I asked myself in idle question whose
hideous significance was not to appear for many an hour.
Other
tourists now began to overtake us, and we moved on to the sand-choked Temple of
the Sphinx, fifty yards to the southeast, which I have previously mentioned as
the great gate of the causeway to the Second Pyramid's mortuary chapel on the
plateau. Most of it was still underground, and although we dismounted and
descended through a modern passageway to its alabaster corridor and pillared
hall, I felt that Abdul and the local German attendant had not shown us all
there was to see.
After
this we made the conventional circuit of the pyramid plateau, examining the
Second Pyramid and the peculiar ruins of its mortuary chapel to the east, the
Third Pyramid and its miniature southern satellites and ruined eastern chapel,
the rock tombs and the honeycombings of the Fourth and Fifth dynasties, and the
famous Campbell's Tomb whose shadowy shaft sinks precipitously for fifty-three
feet to a sinister sarcophagus which one of our camel drivers divested of the
cumbering sand after a vertiginous descent by rope.
Cries
now assailed us from the Great Pyramid, where Bedouins were besieging a party
of tourists with offers of speed in the performance of solitary trips up and
down. Seven minutes is said to be the record for such an ascent and descent,
but many lusty sheiks and sons of sheiks assured us they could cut it to five
if given the requisite impetus of liberal baksheesh. They did not get this
impetus, though we did let Abdul take us up, thus obtaining a view of
unprecedented magnificence which included not only remote and glittering Cairo
with its crowned citadel back ground of gold-violet hills, but all the pyramids
of the Memphian district as well, from Abu Roash on the north to the Dashur on
the south. The Sakkara step-pyramid, which marks the evolution of the low
mastaba into the true pyramid, showed clearly and alluringly in the sandy
distance. It is close to this transition-monument that the famed tomb of Perneb
was found - more than four hundred miles north of the Theban rock valley where
Tut-Ankh-Amen sleeps. Again I was forced to silence through sheer awe. The
prospect of such antiquity, and the secrets each hoary monument seemed to hold
and brood over, filled me with a reverence and sense of immensity nothing else
ever gave me.
Fatigued
by our climb, and disgusted with the importunate Bedouins whose actions seemed
to defy every rule of taste, we omitted the arduous detail of entering the
cramped interior passages of any of the pyramids, though we saw several of the
hardiest tourists preparing for the suffocating crawl through Cheops' mightiest
memorial. As we dismissed and overpaid our local bodyguard and drove back to
Cairo with Abdul Reis under the afternoon sun, we half regretted the omission
we had made. Such fascinating things were whispered about lower pyramid
passages not in the guide books; passages whose entrances had been hastily
blocked up and concealed by certain uncommunicative archaeologists who had
found and begun to explore them.
Of
course, this whispering was largely baseless on the face of it; but it was
curious to reflect how persistently visitors were forbidden to enter the
Pyramids at night, or to visit the lowest burrows and crypt of the Great
Pyramid. Perhaps in the latter case it was the psychological effect which was
feared - the effect on the visitor of feeling himself huddled down beneath a
gigantic world of solid masonry; joined to the life he has known by the merest
tube, in which he may only crawl, and which any accident or evil design might
block. The whole subject seemed so weird and alluring that we resolved to pay
the pyramid plateau another visit at the earliest possible opportunity. For me
this opportunity came much earlier than I expected.
That
evening, the members of our party feeling some what tired after the strenuous
program of the day, I went alone with Abdul Reis for a walk through the
picturesque Arab quarter. Though I had seen it by day, I wished to study the
alleys and bazaars in the dusk, when rich shadows and mellow gleams of light
would add to their glamor and fantastic illusion. The native crowds were
thinning, but were still very noisy and numerous when we came upon a knot of
reveling Bedouins in the Suken-Nahhasin, or bazaar of the coppersmiths. Their
apparent leader, an insolent youth with heavy features and saucily cocked
tarbush, took some notice of us, and evidently recognized with no great
friendliness my competent but admittedly supercilious and sneeringly disposed
guide.
Perhaps,
I thought, he resented that odd reproduction of the Sphinx's half-smile which I
had often remarked with amused irritation; or perhaps he did not like the
hollow and sepulchral resonance of Abdul's voice. At any rate, the exchange of
ancestrally opprobrious language became very brisk; and before long Ali Ziz, as
I heard the stranger called when called by no worse name, began to pull
violently at Abdul's robe, an action quickly reciprocated and leading to a
spirited scuffle in which both combatants lost their sacredly cherished
headgear and would have reached an even direr condition had I not intervened
and separated them by main force.
My
interference, at first seemingly unwelcome on both sides, succeeded at last in
effecting a truce. Sullenly each belligerent composed his wrath and his attire,
and with an assumption of dignity as profound as it was sudden, the two formed
a curious pact of honor which I soon learned is a custom of great antiquity in
Cairo—a pact for the settlement of their difference by means of a nocturnal
fist fight atop the Great Pyramid, long after the departure of the last
moonlight sightseer. Each duelist was to assemble a party of seconds, and the
affair was to begin at midnight, proceeding by rounds in the most civilized
possible fashion.
In
all this planning there was much which excited my interest. The fight itself
promised to be unique and spectacular, while the thought of the scene on that
hoary pile overlooking the antediluvian plateau of Gizeh under the wan moon of
the pallid small hours appealed to every fiber of imagination in me. A request
found Abdul exceedingly willing to admit me to his party of seconds; so that
all the rest of the early evening I accompanied him to various dens in the most
lawless regions of the town - mostly northeast of the Ezbekiyeh - where he
gathered one by one a select and formidable band of congenial cutthroats as his
pugilistic background.
Shortly
after nine our party, mounted on donkeys bearing such royal or
tourist-reminiscent names as 'Rameses,' 'Mark Twain,' 'J. P. Morgan,' and
'Minnehaha', edged through street labyrinths both Oriental and Occidental,
crossed the muddy and mast-forested Nile by the bridge of the bronze lions, and
cantered philosophically between the lebbakhs on the road to Gizeh. Slightly
over two hours were consumed by the trip, toward the end of which we passed the
last of the returning tourists, saluted the last inbound trolley-car, and were
alone with the night and the past and the spectral moon.
Then
we saw the vast pyramids at the end of the avenue, ghoulish with a dim atavistical
menace which I had not seemed to notice in the daytime. Even the smallest of
them held a hint of the ghastly - for was it not in this that they had buried
Queen Nitocris alive in the Sixth Dynasty; subtle Queen Nitocris, who once
invited all her enemies to a feast in a temple below the Nile, and drowned them
by opening the water-gates? I recalled that the Arabs whisper things about
Nitocris, and shun the Third Pyramid at certain phases of the moon. It must
have been over her that Thomas Moore was brooding when he wrote a thing
muttered about by Memphian boatmen: 'The subterranean nymph that dwells 'Mid
sunless gems and glories hid - The lady of the Pyramid!'
Early
as we were, Ali Ziz and his party were ahead of us; for we saw their donkeys
outlined against the desert plateau at Kafrel-Haram; toward which squalid Arab
settlement, close to the Sphinx, we had diverged instead of following the
regular road to the Mena House, where some of the sleepy, inefficient police
might have observed and halted us. Here, where filthy Bedouins stabled camels
and donkeys in the rock tombs of Khephren's courtiers, we were led up the rocks
and over the sand to the Great Pyramid, up whose time-worn sides the Arabs
swarmed eagerly, Abdul Reis offering me the assistance I did not need.
As
most travelers know, the actual apex of this structure has long been worn away,
leaving a reasonably flat platform twelve yards square. On this eery pinnacle a
squared circle was formed, and in a few moments the sardonic desert moon leered
down upon a battle which, but for the quality of the ringside cries, might well
have occurred at some minor athletic club in America. As I watched it, I felt
that some of our less-desirable institutions were not lacking; for every blow,
feint, and defense bespoke 'stalling' to my not inexperienced eye. It was
quickly over, and despite my misgivings as to methods I felt a sort of
proprietary pride when Abdul Reis was adjudged the winner.
Reconciliation
was phenomenally rapid, and amidst the singing, fraternizing and drinking that
followed, I found it difficult to realize that a quarrel had ever occurred.
Oddly enough, I myself seemed to be more a center of notice than the
antagonists; and from my smattering of Arabic I judged that they were
discussing my professional performances and escapes from every sort of manacle
and confinement, in a manner which indicated not only a surprising knowledge of
me, but a distinct hostility and skepticism concerning my feats of escape. It
gradually dawned on me that the elder magic of Egypt did not depart without
leaving traces, and that fragments of a strange secret lore and priestly
cult-practices have survived surreptitiously amongst the fellaheen to such an
extent that the prowess of a strange hahwi or magician is resented and
disputed. I thought of how much my hollow-voiced guide Abdul Reis looked like
an old Egyptian priest or Pharaoh or smiling Sphinx... and wondered.
Suddenly
something happened which in a flash proved the correctness of my reflections
and made me curse the denseness whereby I had accepted this night's events as
other than the empty and malicious 'frame-up' they now showed themselves to be.
Without warning, and doubtless in answer to some subtle sign from Abdul, the
entire band of Bedouins precipitated itself upon me; and having produced heavy
ropes, soon had me bound as securely as I was ever bound in the course of my
life, either on the stage or off.
I
struggled at first, but soon saw that one man could make no headway against a
band of over twenty sinewy barbarians. My hands were tied behind my back, my
knees bent to their fullest extent, and my wrists and ankles stoutly linked
together with unyielding cords. A stifling gag was forced into my mouth, and a
blindfold fastened tightly over my eyes. Then, as Arabs bore me aloft on their
shoulders and began a jouncing descent of the pyramid, I heard the taunts of my
late guide Abdul, who mocked and jeered delightedly in his hollow voice, and
assured me that I was soon to have my 'magic-powers' put to a supreme test - which
would quickly remove any egotism I might have gained through triumphing over
all the tests offered by America and Europe. Egypt, he reminded me, is very
old, and full of inner mysteries and antique powers not even conceivable to the
experts of today, whose devices had so uniformly failed to entrap me.
How
far or in what direction I was carried, I cannot tell; for the circumstances
were all against the formation of any accurate judgment. I know, however, that
it could not have been a great distance; since my bearers at no point hastened
beyond a walk, yet kept me aloft a surprisingly short time. It is this
perplexing brevity which makes me feel almost like shuddering whenever I think
of Gizeh and its plateau - for one is oppressed by hints of the closeness to
everyday tourist routes of what existed then and must exist still.
The
evil abnormality I speak of did not become manifest at first. Setting me down
on a surface which I recognized as sand rather than rock, my captors passed a
rope around my chest and dragged me a few feet to a ragged opening in the
ground, into which they presently lowered me with much rough handling. For
apparent eons I bumped against the stony irregular sides of a narrow hewn well
which I took to be one of the numerous burial-shafts of the plateau until the
prodigious, almost incredible depth of it robbed me of all bases of conjecture.
The
horror of the experience deepened with every dragging second. That any descent
through the sheer solid rock could be so vast without reaching the core of the
planet itself, or that any rope made by man could be so long as to dangle me in
these unholy and seemingly fathomless profundities of nether earth, were
beliefs of such grotesqueness that it was easier to doubt my agitated senses
than to accept them. Even now I am uncertain, for I know how deceitful the
sense of time becomes when one is removed or distorted. But I am quite sure
that I preserved a logical consciousness that far; that at least I did not add
any fullgrown phantoms of imagination to a picture hideous enough in its
reality, and explicable by a type of cerebral illusion vastly short of actual
hallucination.
All
this was not the cause of my first bit of fainting. The shocking ordeal was
cumulative, and the beginning of the later terrors was a very perceptible
increase in my rate of descent. They were paying out that infinitely long rope
very swiftly now, and I scraped cruelly against the rough and constricted sides
of the shaft as I shot madly downward. My clothing was in tatters, and I felt
the trickle of blood all over, even above the mounting and excruciating pain.
My nostrils, too, were assailed by a scarcely definable menace: a creeping odor
of damp and staleness curiously unlike anything I had ever smelled before, and
having faint overtones of spice and incense that lent an element of mockery.
Then
the mental cataclysm came. It was horrible - hideous beyond all articulate
description because it was all of the soul, with nothing of detail to describe.
It was the ecstasy of nightmare and the summation of the fiendish. The
suddenness of it was apocalyptic and demoniac - one moment I was plunging
agonizingly down that narrow well of million-toothed torture, yet the next
moment I was soaring on bat-wings in the gulfs of hell; swinging free and
swooping through illimitable miles of boundless, musty space; rising dizzily to
measureless pinnacles of chilling ether, then diving gaspingly to sucking
nadirs of ravenous, nauseous lower vacua...
Thank God for the mercy that shut out in oblivion those clawing Furies
of consciousness which half unhinged my faculties, and tore harpy-like at my
spirit! That one respite, short as it was, gave me the strength and sanity to
endure those still greater sublimations of cosmic panic that lurked and
gibbered on the road ahead.
II
It
was very gradually that I regained my senses after that eldritch flight through
stygian space. The process was infinitely painful, and colored by fantastic
dreams in which my bound and gagged condition found singular embodiment. The
precise nature of these dreams was very clear while I was experiencing them,
but became blurred in my recollection almost immediately afterward, and was
soon reduced to the merest outline by the terrible events—real or
imaginary—which followed. I dreamed that I was in the grasp of a great and
horrible paw; a yellow, hairy, five-clawed paw which had reached out of the
earth to crush and engulf me. And when I stopped to reflect what the paw was,
it seemed to me that it was Egypt. In the dream I looked back at the events of
the preceding weeks, and saw myself lured and enmeshed little by little, subtly
and insidiously, by some hellish ghoul-spirit of the elder Nile sorcery; some
spirit that was in Egypt before ever man was, and that will be when man is no
more.
I
saw the horror and unwholesome antiquity of Egypt, and the grisly alliance it
has always had with the tombs and temples of the dead. I saw phantom
processions of priests with the heads of bulls, falcons, cats, and ibises;
phantom processions marching interminably through subterraneous labyrinths and
avenues of titanic propylaea beside which a man is as a fly, and offering
unnamable sacrifice to indescribable gods. Stone colossi marched in endless
night and drove herds of grinning androsphinxes down to the shores of
illimitable stagnant rivers of pitch. And behind it all I saw the ineffable
malignity of primordial necromancy, black and amorphous, and fumbling greedily
after me in the darkness to choke out the spirit that had dared to mock it by
emulation.
In
my sleeping brain there took shape a melodrama of sinister hatred and pursuit,
and I saw the black soul of Egypt singling me out and calling me in inaudible
whispers; calling and luring me, leading me on with the glitter and glamor of a
Saracenic surface, but ever pulling me down to the age-mad catacombs and horrors
of its dead and abysmal pharaonic heart.
Then
the dream faces took on human resemblances, and I saw my guide Abdul Reis in
the robes of a king, with the sneer of the Sphinx on his features. And I knew
that those features were the features of Khephren the Great, who raised the
Second Pyramid, carved over the Sphinx's face in the likeness of his own and
built that titanic gateway temple whose myriad corridors the archaeologists
think they have dug out of the cryptical sand and the uninformative rock. And I
looked at the long, lean rigid hand of Khephren; the long, lean, rigid hand as
I had seen it on the diorite statue in the Cairo Museum - the statue they had
found in the terrible gateway temple - and wondered that I had not shrieked
when I saw it on Abdul Reis... That
hand! It was hideously cold, and it was crushing me; it was the cold and
cramping of the sarcophagus... the chill
and constriction of unrememberable Egypt...
It was nighted, necropolitan Egypt itself… that yellow paw… and they
whisper such things of Khephren...
But
at this juncture I began to wake - or at least, to assume a condition less
completely that of sleep than the one just preceding. I recalled the fight atop
the pyramid, the treacherous Bedouins and their attack, my frightful descent by
rope through endless rock depths, and my mad swinging and plunging in a chill
void redolent of aromatic putrescence. I perceived that I now lay on a damp
rock floor, and that my bonds were still biting into me with unloosened force.
It was very cold, and I seemed to detect a faint current of noisome air
sweeping across me. The cuts and bruises I had received from the jagged sides
of the rock shaft were paining me woefully, their soreness enhanced to a
stinging or burning acuteness by some pungent quality in the faint draft, and
the mere act of rolling over was enough to set my whole frame throbbing with
untold agony.
As
I turned I felt a tug from above, and concluded that the rope whereby I was
lowered still reached to the surface. Whether or not the Arabs still held it, I
had no idea; nor had I any idea how far within the earth I was. I knew that the
darkness around me was wholly or nearly total, since no ray of moonlight
penetrated my blindfold; but I did not trust my senses enough to accept as evidence
of extreme depth the sensation of vast duration which had characterized my
descent.
Knowing
at least that I was in a space of considerable extent reached from the above
surface directly by an opening in the rock, I doubtfully conjectured that my
prison was perhaps the buried gateway chapel of old Khephren - the Temple of
the Sphinx - perhaps some inner corridors which the guides had not shown me
during my morning visit, and from which I might easily escape if I could find
my way to the barred entrance. It would be a labyrinthine wandering, but no
worse than others out of which I had in the past found my way.
The
first step was to get free of my bonds, gag, and blindfold; and this I knew
would be no great task, since subtler experts than these Arabs had tried every
known species of fetter upon me during my long and varied career as an exponent
of escape, yet had never succeeded in defeating my methods.
Then
it occurred to me that the Arabs might be ready to meet and attack me at the
entrance upon any evidence of my probable escape from the binding cords, as
would be furnished by any decided agitation of the rope which they probably
held. This, of course, was taking for granted that my place of confinement was
indeed Khephren's Temple of the Sphinx. The direct opening in the roof,
wherever it might lurk, could not be beyond easy reach of the ordinary modern
entrance near the Sphinx; if in truth it were any great distance at all on the
surface, since the total area known to visitors is not at all enormous. I had
not noticed any such opening during my daytime pilgrimage, but knew that these
things are easily overlooked amidst the drifting sands.
Thinking
these matters over as I lay bent and bound on the rock floor, I nearly forgot
the horrors of abysmal descent and cavernous swinging which had so lately
reduced me to a coma. My present thought was only to outwit the Arabs, and I
accordingly determined to work myself free as quickly as possible, avoiding any
tug on the descending line which might betray an effective or even
problematical attempt at freedom.
This,
however, was more easily determined than effected. A few preliminary trials
made it clear that little could be accomplished without considerable motion;
and it did not surprise me when, after one especially energetic struggle, I
began to feel the coils of falling rope as they piled up about me and upon me.
Obviously, I thought, the Bedouins had felt my movements and released their end
of the rope; hastening no doubt to the temple's true entrance to lie
murderously in wait for me.
The
prospect was not pleasing - but I had faced worse in my time without flinching,
and would not flinch now. At present I must first of all free myself of bonds,
then trust to ingenuity to escape from the temple unharmed. It is curious how
implicitly I had come to believe myself in the old temple of Khephren beside
the Sphinx, only a short distance below the ground.
That
belief was shattered, and every pristine apprehension of preternatural depth
and demoniac mystery revived, by a circumstance which grew in horror and
significance even as I formulated my philosophical plan. I have said that the
falling rope was piling up about and upon me. Now I saw that it was continuing
to pile, as no rope of normal length could possibly do. It gained in momentum
and became an avalanche of hemp, accumulating mountainously on the floor and
half burying me beneath its swiftly multiplying coils. Soon I was completely
engulfed and gasping for breath as the increasing convolutions submerged and
stifled me.
My
senses tottered again, and I vaguely tried to fight off a menace desperate and
ineluctable. It was not merely that I was tortured beyond human endurance - not
merely that life and breath seemed to be crushed slowly out of me - it was the
knowledge of what those unnatural lengths of rope implied, and the
consciousness of what unknown and incalculable gulfs of inner earth must at
this moment be surrounding me. My endless descent and swinging flight through
goblin space, then, must have been real, and even now I must be lying helpless
in some nameless cavern world toward the core of the planet. Such a sudden
confirmation of ultimate horror was insupportable, and a second time I lapsed
into merciful oblivion.
When
I say oblivion, I do not imply that I was free from dreams. On the contrary, my
absence from the conscious world was marked by visions of the most unutterable
hideousness. God!... If only I had not
read so much Egyptology before coming to this land which is the fountain of all
darkness and terror! This second spell of fainting filled my sleeping mind anew
with shivering realization of the country and its archaic secrets, and through
some damnable chance my dreams turned to the ancient notions of the dead and
their sojournings in soul and body beyond those mysterious tombs which were
more houses than graves. I recalled, in dream-shapes which it is well that I do
not remember, the peculiar and elaborate construction of Egyptian sepulchers;
and the exceedingly singular and terrific doctrines which determined this
construction.
All
these people thought of was death and the dead. They conceived of a literal
resurrection of the body which made them mummify it with desperate care, and
preserve all the vital organs in canopic jars near the corpse; whilst besides
the body they believed in two other elements, the soul, which after its
weighing and approval by Osiris dwelt in the land of the blest, and the obscure
and portentous ka or life-principle which wandered about the upper and lower
worlds in a horrible way, demanding occasional access to the preserved body,
consuming the food offerings brought by priests and pious relatives to the mortuary
chapel, and sometimes - as men whispered - taking its body or the wooden double
always buried beside it and stalking noxiously abroad on errands peculiarly
repellent.
For
thousands of years those bodies rested gorgeously encased and staring glassily
upward when not visited by the ka, awaiting the day when Osiris should restore
both ka and soul, and lead forth the stiff legions of the dead from the sunken
houses of sleep. It was to have been a glorious rebirth - but not all souls
were approved, nor were all tombs inviolate, so that certain grotesque mistakes
and fiendish abnormalities were to be looked for. Even today the Arabs murmur
of unsanctified convocations and unwholesome worship in forgotten nether
abysses, which only winged invisible kas and soulless mummies may visit and
return unscathed.
Perhaps
the most leeringly blood-congealing legends are those which relate to certain
perverse products of decadent priestcraft - composite mummies made by the
artificial union of human trunks and limbs with the heads of animals in
imitation of the elder gods. At all stages of history the sacred animals were
mummified, so that consecrated bulls, cats, ibises, crocodiles and the like
might return some day to greater glory. But only in the decadence did they mix
the human and the animal in the same mummy - only in the decadence, when they
did not understand the rights and prerogatives of the ka and the soul.
What
happened to those composite mummies is not told of - at least publicly - and it
is certain that no Egyptologist ever found one. The whispers of Arabs are very
wild, and cannot be relied upon. They even hint that old Khephren - he of the
Sphinx, the Second Pyramid and the yawning gateway temple - lives far
underground wedded to the ghoul-queen Nitocris and ruling over the mummies that
are neither of man nor of beast.
It
was of these - of Khephren and his consort and his strange armies of the hybrid
dead - that I dreamed, and that is why I am glad the exact dream-shapes have
faded from my memory. My most horrible vision was connected with an idle
question I had asked myself the day before when looking at the great carven
riddle of the desert and wondering with what unknown depth the temple close to
it might be secretly connected. That question, so innocent and whimsical then,
assumed in my dream a meaning of frenetic and hysterical madness... what huge and loathsome abnormality was the
Sphinx originally carven to represent?
My
second awakening - if awakening it was - is a memory of stark hideousness which
nothing else in my life - save one thing which came after - can parallel; and
that life has been full and adventurous beyond most men's. Remember that I had
lost consciousness whilst buried beneath a cascade of falling rope whose
immensity revealed the cataclysmic depth of my present position. Now, as
perception returned, I felt the entire weight gone; and realized upon rolling
over that although I was still tied, gagged and blindfolded, some agency had
removed completely the suffocating hempen landslide which had overwhelmed me.
The significance of this condition, of course, came to me only gradually; but
even so I think it would have brought unconsciousness again had I not by this
time reached such a state of emotional exhaustion that no new horror could make
much difference. I was alone... with
what?
Before
I could torture myself with any new reflection, or make any fresh effort to
escape from my bonds, an additional circumstance became manifest. Pains not
formerly felt were racking my arms and legs, and I seemed coated with a profusion
of dried blood beyond anything my former cuts and abrasions could furnish. My
chest, too, seemed pierced by a hundred wounds, as though some malign, titanic
ibis had been pecking at it. Assuredly the agency which had removed the rope
was a hostile one, and had begun to wreak terrible injuries upon me when
somehow impelled to desist. Yet at the same time my sensations were distinctly
the reverse of what one might expect. Instead of sinking into a bottomless pit
of despair, I was stirred to a new courage and action; for now I felt that the
evil forces were physical things which a fearless man might encounter on an
even basis.
On
the strength of this thought I tugged again at my bonds, and used all the art
of a lifetime to free myself as I had so often done amidst the glare of lights
and the applause of vast crowds. The familiar details of my escaping process
commenced to engross me, and now that the long rope was gone I half regained my
belief that the supreme horrors were hallucinations after all, and that there
had never been any terrible shaft, measureless abyss or interminable rope. Was
I after all in the gateway temple of Khephren beside the Sphinx, and had the
sneaking Arabs stolen in to torture me as I lay helpless there? At any rate, I
must be free. Let me stand up unbound, ungagged, and with eyes open to catch
any glimmer of light which might come trickling from any source, and I could
actually delight in the combat against evil and treacherous foes!
How
long I took in shaking off my encumbrances I cannot tell. It must have been
longer than in my exhibition performances, because I was wounded, exhausted,
and enervated by the experiences I had passed through. When I was finally free,
and taking deep breaths of a chill, damp, evilly spiced air all the more
horrible when encountered without the screen of gag and blindfold edges, I
found that I was too cramped and fatigued to move at once. There I lay, trying
to stretch a frame bent and mangled, for an indefinite period, and straining my
eyes to catch a glimpse of some ray of light which would give a hint as to my
position.
By
degrees my strength and flexibility returned, but my eyes beheld nothing. As I
staggered to my feet I peered diligently in every direction, yet met only an
ebony blackness as great as that I had known when blindfolded. I tried my legs,
blood-encrusted beneath my shredded trousers, and found that I could walk; yet
could not decide in what direction to go. Obviously I ought not to walk at
random, and perhaps retreat directly from the entrance I sought; so I paused to
note the difference of the cold, fetid, natron-scented air-current which I had
never ceased to feel. Accepting the point of its source as the possible
entrance to the abyss, I strove to keep track of this landmark and to walk
consistently toward it.
I
had a match-box with me, and even a small electric flashlight; but of course
the pockets of my tossed and tattered clothing were long since emptied of all
heavy articles. As I walked cautiously in the blackness, the draft grew
stronger and more offensive, till at length I could regard it as nothing less
than a tangible stream of detestable vapor pouring out of some aperture like
the smoke of the genie from the fisherman's jar in the Eastern tale. The East... Egypt...
truly, this dark cradle of civilization was ever the wellspring of
horrors and marvels unspeakable!
The
more I reflected on the nature of this cavern wind, the greater my sense of
disquiet became; for although despite its odor I had sought its source as at
least an indirect clue to the outer world, I now saw plainly that this foul
emanation could have no admixture or connection whatsoever with the clean air
of the Libyan Desert, but must be essentially a thing vomited from sinister
gulfs still lower down. I had, then, been walking in the wrong direction!
After
a moment's reflection I decided not to retrace my steps. Away from the draft I
would have no landmarks, for the roughly level rock floor was devoid of
distinctive configurations. If, however, I followed up the strange current, I
would undoubtedly arrive at an aperture of some sort, from whose gate I could
perhaps work round the walls to the opposite side of this Cyclopean and
otherwise unnavigable hall. That I might fail, I well realized. I saw that this
was no part of Khephren's gateway temple which tourists know, and it struck me
that this particular hall might be unknown even to archaeologists, and merely
stumbled upon by the inquisitive and malignant Arabs who had imprisoned me. If
so, was there any present gate of escape to the known parts or to the outer
air?
What
evidence, indeed, did I now possess that this was the gateway temple at all?
For a moment all my wildest speculations rushed back upon me, 'and I thought of
that vivid melange of impressions - descent, suspension in space, the rope, my
wounds, and the dreams that were frankly dreams. Was this the end of life for
me? Or indeed, would it be merciful if this moment were the end? I could answer
none of my own questions, but merely kept on, till Fate for a third time
reduced me to oblivion.
This
time there were no dreams, for the suddenness of the incident shocked me out of
all thought either conscious or subconscious. Tripping on an unexpected
descending step at a point where the offensive draft became strong enough to
offer an actual physical resistance, I was precipitated headlong down a black
flight of huge stone stairs into a gulf of hideousness unrelieved.
That
I ever breathed again is a tribute to the inherent vitality of the healthy
human organism. Often I look back to that night and feel a touch of actual humor
in those repeated lapses of consciousness; lapses whose succession reminded me
at the time of nothing more than the crude cinema melodramas of that period. Of
course, it is possible that the repeated lapses never occurred; and that all
the features of that underground nightmare were merely the dreams of one long
coma which began with the shock of my descent into that abyss and ended with
the healing balm of the outer air and of the rising sun which found me
stretched on the sands of Gizeh before the sardonic and dawn-flushed face of
the Great Sphinx.
I
prefer to believe this latter explanation as much as I can, hence was glad when
the police told me that the barrier to Krephren's gateway temple had been found
unfastened, and that a sizeable rift to the surface did actually exist in one
corner of the still buried part. I was glad, too, when the doctors pronounced
my wounds only those to be expected from my seizure, blindfolding, lowering,
struggling with bonds, falling some distance - perhaps into a depression in the
temple's inner gallery - dragging myself to the outer barrier and escaping from
it, and experiences like that… a very soothing diagnosis. And yet I know that
there must be more than appears on the surface. That extreme descent is too
vivid a memory to be dismissed - and it is odd that no one has ever been able
to find a man answering the description of my guide, Abdul Reis el Drogman - the
tomb-throated guide who looked and smiled like King Khephren.
I
have digressed from my connected narrative - perhaps in the vain hope of
evading the telling of that final incident; that incident which of all is most
certainly an hallucination. But I promised to relate it, and I do not break
promises. When I recovered - or seemed to recover - my senses after that fall
down the black stone stairs, I was quite as alone and in darkness as before.
The windy stench, bad enough before, was now fiendish; yet I had acquired
enough familiarity by this time to bear it stoically. Dazedly I began to crawl
away from the place whence the putrid wind came, and with my bleeding hands
felt the colossal blocks of a mighty pavement. Once my head struck against a
hard object, and when I felt of it I learned that it was the base of a column -
a column of unbelievable immensity - whose surface was covered with gigantic
chiseled hieroglyphics very perceptible to my touch.
Crawling
on, I encountered other titan columns at incomprehensible distances apart; when
suddenly my attention was captured by the realization of something which must
have been impinging on my subconscious hearing long before the conscious sense
was aware of it.
From
some still lower chasm in earth's bowels were proceeding certain sounds,
measured and definite, and like nothing I had ever heard before. That they were
very ancient and distinctly ceremonial I felt almost intuitively; and much
reading in Egyptology led me to associate them with the flute, the sambuke, the
sistrum, and the tympanum. In their rhythmic piping, droning, rattling and
beating I felt an element of terror beyond all the known terrors of earth - a
terror peculiarly dissociated from personal fear, and taking the form of a sort
of objective pity for our planet, that it should hold within its depths such
horrors as must lie beyond these aegipanic cacophonies. The sounds increased in
volume, and I felt that they were approaching. Then - and may all the gods of
all pantheons unite to keep the like from my ears again - I began to hear,
faintly and afar off, the morbid and millennial tramping of the marching
things.
It
was hideous that footfalls so dissimilar should move in such perfect rhythm.
The training of unhallowed thousands of years must lie behind that march of
earth's inmost monstrosities… padding, clicking, walking, stalking, rumbling,
lumbering, crawling... and all to the
abhorrent discords of those mocking instruments. And then - God keep the memory
of those Arab legends out of my head! - the mummies without souls… the
meeting-place of the wandering kas...
the hordes of the devil-cursed pharaonic dead of forty centuries... the composite mummies led through the
uttermost onyx voids by King Khephren and his ghoul-queen Nitocris...
The
tramping drew nearer - Heaven save me from the sound of those feet and paws and
hooves and pads and talons as it commenced to acquire detail! Down limitless
reaches of sunless pavement a spark of light flickered in the malodorous wind
and I drew behind the enormous circumference of a Cyclopic column that I might
escape for a while the horror that was stalking million-footed toward me through
gigantic hypostyles of inhuman dread and phobic antiquity. The flickers
increased, and the tramping and dissonant rhythm grew sickeningly loud. In the
quivering orange light there stood faintly forth a scene of such stony awe that
I gasped from sheer wonder that conquered even fear and repulsion. Bases of
columns whose middles were higher than human sight… mere bases of things that
must each dwarf the Eiffel Tower to insignificance... hieroglyphics carved by unthinkable hands in
caverns where daylight can be only a remote legend…
I
would not look at the marching things. That I desperately resolved as I heard
their creaking joints and nitrous wheezing above the dead music and the dead
tramping. It was merciful that they did not speak... but God! their crazy torches began to cast
shadows on the surface of those stupendous columns. Hippopotami should not have
human hands and carry torches... men
should not have the heads of crocodiles...
I
tried to turn away, but the shadows and the sounds and the stench were
everywhere. Then I remembered something I used to do in half-conscious
nightmares as a boy, and began to repeat to myself, 'This is a dream! This is a
dream!' But it was of no use, and I could only shut my eyes and pray... at least, that is what I think I did, for one
is never sure in visions - and I know this can have been nothing more. I
wondered whether I should ever reach the world again, and at times would
furtively open my eyes to see if I could discern any feature of the place other
than the wind of spiced putrefaction, the topless columns, and the
thaumatropically grotesque shadows of abnormal horror. The sputtering glare of
multiplying torches now shone, and unless this hellish place were wholly
without walls, I could not fail to see some boundary or fixed landmark soon.
But I had to shut my eyes again when I realized how many of the things were
assembling - and when I glimpsed a certain object walking solemnly and steadily
without any body above the waist.
A
fiendish and ululant corpse-gurgle or death-rattle now split the very
atmosphere - the charnel atmosphere poisonous with naftha and bitumen blasts - in
one concerted chorus from the ghoulish legion of hybrid blasphemies. My eyes,
perversely shaken open, gazed for an instant upon a sight which no human
creature could even imagine without panic, fear and physical exhaustion. The
things had filed ceremonially in one direction, the direction of the noisome
wind, where the light of their torches showed their bended heads - or the
bended heads of such as had heads. They were worshipping before a great black
fetor-belching aperture which reached up almost out of sight, and which I could
see was flanked at right angles by two giant staircases whose ends were far
away in shadow. One of these was indubitably the staircase I had fallen down.
The
dimensions of the hole were fully in proportion with those of the columns - an
ordinary house would have been lost in it, and any average public building
could easily have been moved in and out. It was so vast a surface that only by
moving the eye could one trace its boundaries... so vast, so hideously black, and so
aromatically stinking... Directly in
front of this yawning Polyphemus-door the things were throwing objects - evidently
sacrifices or religious offerings, to judge by their gestures. Khephren was
their leader; sneering King Khephren or the guide Abdul Reis, crowned with a
golden pshent and intoning endless formulae with the hollow voice of the dead.
By his side knelt beautiful Queen Nitocris, whom I saw in profile for a moment,
noting that the right half of her face was eaten away by rats or other ghouls.
And I shut my eyes again when I saw what objects were being thrown as offerings
to the fetid aperture or its possible local deity.
It
occurred to me that, judging from the elaborateness of this worship, the
concealed deity must be one of considerable importance. Was it Osiris or Isis,
Horus or Anubis, or some vast unknown God of the Dead still more central and
supreme? There is a legend that terrible altars and colossi were reared to an
Unknown One before ever the known gods were worshipped...
And
now, as I steeled myself to watch the rapt and sepulchral adorations of those
nameless things, a thought of escape flashed upon me. The hall was dim, and the
columns heavy with shadow. With every creature of that nightmare throng
absorbed in shocking raptures, it might be barely possible for me to creep past
to the far-away end of one of the staircases and ascend unseen; trusting to
Fate and skill to deliver me from the upper reaches. Where I was, I neither
knew nor seriously reflected upon - and for a moment it struck me as amusing to
plan a serious escape from that which I knew to be a dream. Was I in some
hidden and unsuspected lower realm of Khephren's gateway temple - that temple
which generations have persistently called the Temple of the Sphinx? I could
not conjecture, but I resolved to ascend to life and consciousness if wit and
muscle could carry me.
Wriggling
flat on my stomach, I began the anxious journey toward the foot of the
left-hand staircase, which seemed the more accessible of the two. I cannot
describe the incidents and sensations of that crawl, but they may be guessed
when one reflects on what I had to watch steadily in that malign, wind-blown
torchlight in order to avoid detection. The bottom of the staircase was, as I
have said, far away in shadow, as it had to be to rise without a bend to the
dizzy parapeted landing above the titanic aperture. This placed the last stages
of my crawl at some distance from the noisome herd, though the spectacle
chilled me even when quite remote at my right.
At
length I succeeded in reaching the steps and began to climb; keeping close to
the wall, on which I observed decorations of the most hideous sort, and relying
for safety on the absorbed, ecstatic interest with which the monstrosities
watched the foul-breezed aperture and the impious objects of nourishment they
had flung on the pavement before it. Though the staircase was huge and steep,
fashioned of vast porphyry blocks as if for the feet of a giant, the ascent
seemed virtually interminable. Dread of discovery and the pain which renewed
exercise had brought to my wounds combined to make that upward crawl a thing of
agonizing memory. I had intended, on reaching the landing, to climb immediately
onward along whatever upper staircase might mount from there; stopping for no
last look at the carrion abominations that pawed and genuflected some seventy
or eighty feet below - yet a sudden repetition of that thunderous corpse-gurgle
and death-rattle chorus, coming as I had nearly gained the top of the flight
and showing by its ceremonial rhythm that it was not an alarm of my discovery,
caused me to pause and peer cautiously over the parapet.
The
monstrosities were hailing something which had poked itself out of the nauseous
aperture to seize the hellish fare proffered it. It was something quite
ponderous, even as seen from my height; something yellowish and hairy, and
endowed with a sort of nervous motion. It was as large, perhaps, as a
good-sized hippopotamus, but very curiously shaped. It seemed to have no neck,
but five separate shaggy heads springing in a row from a roughly cylindrical
trunk; the first very small, the second good-sized, the third and fourth equal
and largest of all, and the fifth rather small, though not so small as the
first.
Out
of these heads darted curious rigid tentacles which seized ravenously on the
excessively great quantities of unmentionable food placed before the aperture.
Once in a while the thing would leap up, and occasionally it would retreat into
its den in a very odd manner. Its locomotion was so inexplicable that I stared
in fascination, wishing it would emerge farther from the cavernous lair beneath
me.
Then
it did emerge... it did emerge, and at
the sight I turned and fled into the darkness up the higher staircase that rose
behind me; fled unknowingly up incredible steps and ladders and inclined planes
to which no human sight or logic guided me, and which I must ever relegate to
the world of dreams for want of any confirmation. It must have been a dream, or
the dawn would never have found me breathing on the sands of Gizeh before the
sardonic dawn-flushed face of the Great Sphinx.
The
Great Sphinx! God! - that idle question I asked myself on that sun-blest
morning before... what huge and
loathsome abnormality was the Sphinx originally carven to represent?
Accursed
is the sight, be it in dream or not, that revealed to me the supreme horror - the
unknown God of the Dead, which licks its colossal chops in the unsuspected
abyss, fed hideous morsels by soulless absurdities that should not exist. The
five-headed monster that emerged... that
five-headed monster as large as a hippopotamus... the five headed monster - and that of which
it is the merest forepaw...
But
I survived, and I know it was only a dream.
