She

XVI

THE TOMBS OF KÔR

After the prisoners had been removed Ayesha waved her hand, and thespectators turned round, and began to crawl off down the cave like ascattered flock of sheep. When they were a fair distance from the daïs,however, they rose and walked away, leaving the Queen and myself alone,with the exception of the mutes and the few remaining guards, most ofwhom had departed with the doomed men. Thinking this a good opportunity,I asked _She_ to come and see Leo, telling her of his serious condition;but she would not, saying that he certainly would not die before thenight, as people never died of that sort of fever except at nightfallor dawn. Also she said that it would be better to let the sickness spendits course as much as possible before she cured it. Accordingly, I wasrising to leave, when she bade me follow her, as she would talk with me,and show me the wonders of the caves.

I was too much involved in the web of her fatal fascinations to say herno, even if I had wished, which I did not. She rose from her chair, and,making some signs to the mutes, descended from the daïs. Thereon fourof the girls took lamps, and ranged themselves two in front and twobehind us, but the others went away, as also did the guards.

”Now,” she said, ”wouldst thou see some of the wonders of this place, ohHolly? Look upon this great cave. Sawest thou ever the like? Yet was it,and many more like it, hollowed by the hands of the dead race that oncelived here in the city on the plain. A great and wonderful people mustthey have been, those men of Kôr, but, like the Egyptians, they thoughtmore of the dead than of the living. How many men, thinkest thou,working for how many years, did it need to the hollowing out this caveand all the galleries thereof?”

”Tens of thousands,” I answered.

”So, oh Holly. This people was an old people before the Egyptianswere. A little can I read of their inscriptions, having found the keythereto--and see thou here, this was one of the last of the caves thatthey hollowed,” and, turning to the rock behind her, she motioned themutes to hold up the lamps. Carven over the daïs was the figure of anold man seated in a chair, with an ivory rod in his hand. It struck meat once that his features were exceedingly like those of the man who wasrepresented as being embalmed in the chamber where we took our meals.Beneath the chair, which, by the way, was shaped exactly like the onein which Ayesha had sat to give judgment, was a short inscription in theextraordinary characters of which I have already spoke, but which I donot remember sufficient of to illustrate. It looked more like Chinesewriting than any other that I am acquainted with. This inscriptionAyesha proceeded, with some difficulty and hesitation, to read aloud andtranslate. It ran as follows:--

”In the year four thousand two hundred and fifty-nine from the foundingof the City of imperial Kôr was this cave (or burial place) completedby Tisno, King of Kôr, the people thereof and their slaves havinglaboured thereat for three generations, to be a tomb for their citizensof rank who shall come after. May the blessings of the heaven above theheaven rest upon their work, and make the sleep of Tisno, the mightymonarch, the likeness of whose features is graven above, a sound andhappy sleep till the day of awakening,[*] and also the sleep of hisservants, and of those of his race who, rising up after him, shall yetlay their heads as low.”

[*] This phrase is remarkable, as seeming to indicate a belief in a future state.--Editor.

”Thou seest, oh Holly,” she said, ”this people founded the city, ofwhich the ruins yet cumber the plain yonder, four thousand years beforethis cave was finished. Yet, when first mine eyes beheld it two thousandyears ago, was it even as it is now. Judge, therefore, how old must thatcity have been! And now, follow thou me, and I will show thee after whatfashion this great people fell when the time was come for it to fall,”and she led the way down to the centre of the cave, stopping at a spotwhere a round rock had been let into a kind of large manhole in theflooring, accurately filling it just as the iron plates fill the spacesin the London pavements down which the coals are thrown. ”Thou seest,”she said. ”Tell me, what is it?”

”Nay, I know not,” I answered; whereon she crossed to the left-hand sideof the cave (looking towards the entrance) and signed to the mutes tohold up the lamps. On the wall was something painted with a red pigmentin similar characters to those hewn beneath the sculpture of Tisno, Kingof Kôr. This inscription she proceeded to translate to me, the pigmentstill being fresh enough to show the form of the letters. It ran thus:

”I, Junis, a priest of the Great Temple of Kôr, write this upon therock of the burying-place in the year four thousand eight hundred andthree from the founding of Kôr. Kôr is fallen! No more shall themighty feast in her halls, no more shall she rule the world, and hernavies go out to commerce with the world. Kôr is fallen! and her mightyworks and all the cities of Kôr, and all the harbours that she builtand the canals that she made, are for the wolf and the owl and the wildswan, and the barbarian who comes after. Twenty and five moons ago dida cloud settle upon Kôr, and the hundred cities of Kôr, and out of thecloud came a pestilence that slew her people, old and young, onewith another, and spared not. One with another they turned black anddied--the young and the old, the rich and the poor, the man and thewoman, the prince and the slave. The pestilence slew and slew, andceased not by day or by night, and those who escaped from the pestilencewere slain of the famine. No longer could the bodies of the children ofKôr be preserved according to the ancient rites, because of the numberof the dead, therefore were they hurled into the great pit beneaththe cave, through the hole in the floor of the cave. Then, at last, aremnant of this the great people, the light of the whole world, wentdown to the coast and took ship and sailed northwards; and now am I, thePriest Junis, who write this, the last man left alive of this great cityof men, but whether there be any yet left in the other cities I knownot. This do I write in misery of heart before I die, because Kôrthe Imperial is no more, and because there are none to worship in hertemple, and all her palaces are empty, and her princes and her captainsand her traders and her fair women have passed off the face of theearth.”

I gave a sigh of astonishment--the utter desolation depicted in thisrude scrawl was so overpowering. It was terrible to think of thissolitary survivor of a mighty people recording its fate before he toowent down into darkness. What must the old man have felt as, in ghastlyterrifying solitude, by the light of one lamp feebly illuminating alittle space of gloom, he in a few brief lines daubed the history of hisnation's death upon the cavern wall? What a subject for the moralist, orthe painter, or indeed for any one who can think!

”Doth it not occur to thee, oh Holly,” said Ayesha, laying her hand uponmy shoulder, ”that those men who sailed North may have been the fathersof the first Egyptians?”

”Nay, I know not,” I said; ”it seems that the world is very old.”

”Old? Yes, it is old indeed. Time after time have nations, ay, and richand strong nations, learned in the arts, been and passed away andbeen forgotten, so that no memory of them remains. This is but one ofseveral; for Time eats up the works of man, unless, indeed, he digs incaves like the people of Kôr, and then mayhap the sea swallows them, orthe earthquake shakes them in. Who knows what hath been on the earth, orwhat shall be? There is no new thing under the sun, as the wise Hebrewwrote long ago. Yet were not these people utterly destroyed, as I think.Some few remained in the other cities, for their cities were many. Butthe barbarians from the south, or perchance my people, the Arabs,came down upon them, and took their women to wife, and the race of theAmahagger that is now is a bastard brood of the mighty sons of Kôr, andbehold it dwelleth in the tombs with its fathers' bones.[*] But I knownot: who can know? My arts cannot pierce so far into the blackness ofTime's night. A great people were they. They conquered till none wereleft to conquer, and then they dwelt at ease within their rocky mountainwalls, with their man servants and their maid servants, their minstrels,their sculptors, and their concubines, and traded and quarrelled, andate and hunted and slept and made merry till their time came. But come,I will show thee the great pit beneath the cave whereof the writingspeaks. Never shall thine eyes witness such another sight.”

[*] The name of the race Ama-hagger would seem to indicate a curious mingling of races such as might easily have occurred in the neighbourhood of the Zambesi. The prefix ”Ama” is common to the Zulu and kindred races, and signifies ”people,” while ”hagger” is an Arabic word meaning a stone. --Editor.

Accordingly I followed her to a side passage opening out of the maincave, then down a great number of steps, and along an underground shaftwhich cannot have been less than sixty feet beneath the surface of therock, and was ventilated by curious borings that ran upward, I know notwhere. Suddenly the passage ended, and she halted and bade the muteshold up the lamps, and, as she had prophesied, I saw a scene such asI was not likely to see again. We were standing in an enormous pit, orrather on the brink of it, for it went down deeper--I do not know howmuch--than the level on which we stood, and was edged in with a low wallof rock. So far as I could judge, this pit was about the size of thespace beneath the dome of St. Paul's in London, and when the lamps wereheld up I saw that it was nothing but one vast charnel-house, beingliterally full of thousands of human skeletons, which lay piled up in anenormous gleaming pyramid, formed by the slipping down of the bodiesat the apex as fresh ones were dropped in from above. Anything moreappalling than this jumbled mass of the remains of a departed race Icannot imagine, and what made it even more dreadful was that in thisdry air a considerable number of the bodies had simply become desiccatedwith the skin still on them, and now, fixed in every conceivableposition, stared at us out of the mountain of white bones, grotesquelyhorrible caricatures of humanity. In my astonishment I uttered anejaculation, and the echoes of my voice, ringing in the vaulted space,disturbed a skull that had been accurately balanced for many thousandsof years near the apex of the pile. Down it came with a run, boundingalong merrily towards us, and of course bringing an avalanche of otherbones after it, till at last the whole pit rattled with their movement,even as though the skeletons were getting up to greet us.

”Come,” I said, ”I have seen enough. These are the bodies of those whodied of the great sickness, is it not so?” I added, as we turned away.

”Yea. The people of Kôr ever embalmed their dead, as did the Egyptians,but their art was greater than the art of the Egyptians, for, whereasthe Egyptians disembowelled and drew the brain, the people of Kôrinjected fluid into the veins, and thus reached every part. But stay,thou shalt see,” and she halted at haphazard at one of the littledoorways opening out of the passage along which we were walking, andmotioned to the mutes to light us in. We entered into a small chambersimilar to the one in which I had slept at our first stopping-place,only instead of one there were two stone benches or beds in it. On thebenches lay figures covered with yellow linen,[*] on which a fine andimpalpable dust had gathered in the course of ages, but nothing like tothe extent that one would have anticipated, for in these deep-hewn cavesthere is no material to turn to dust. About the bodies on the stoneshelves and floor of the tomb were many painted vases, but I saw veryfew ornaments or weapons in any of the vaults.

[*] All the linen that the Amahagger wore was taken from the tombs, which accounted for its yellow hue. It was well washed, however, and properly rebleached, it acquired its former snowy whiteness, and was the softest and best linen I ever saw.--L. H. H.

”Uplift the cloths, oh Holly,” said Ayesha, but when I put out my handto do so I drew it back again. It seemed like sacrilege, and, to speakthe truth, I was awed by the dread solemnity of the place, and of thepresences before us. Then, with a little laugh at my fears, she drewthem herself, only to discover other and yet finer cloths lying over theforms upon the stone bench. These also she withdrew, and then for thefirst time for thousands upon thousands of years did living eyes look uponthe face of that chilly dead. It was a woman; she might have beenthirty-five years of age, or perhaps a little less, and had certainlybeen beautiful. Even now her calm clear-cut features, marked out withdelicate eyebrows and long eyelashes which threw little lines of theshadow of the lamplight upon the ivory face, were wonderfully beautiful.There, robed in white, down which her blue-black hair was streaming, sheslept her last long sleep, and on her arm, its face pressed against herbreast, there lay a little babe. So sweet was the sight, although soawful, that--I confess it without shame--I could scarcely withhold mytears. It took me back across the dim gulf of ages to some happy home indead Imperial Kôr, where this winsome lady girt about with beauty hadlived and died, and dying taken her last-born with her to the tomb.There they were before us, mother and babe, the white memories of aforgotten human history speaking more eloquently to the heart thancould any written record of their lives. Reverently I replaced thegrave-cloths, and, with a sigh that flowers so fair should, in thepurpose of the Everlasting, have only bloomed to be gathered to thegrave, I turned to the body on the opposite shelf, and gently unveiledit. It was that of a man in advanced life, with a long grizzled beard,and also robed in white, probably the husband of the lady, who, aftersurviving her many years, came at the last to sleep once more for goodand all beside her.

We left the place and entered others. It would be too long to describethe many things I saw in them. Each one had its occupants, for the fivehundred and odd years that had elapsed between the completion of thecave and the destruction of the race had evidently sufficed to fillthese catacombs, numberless as they were, and all appeared to have beenundisturbed since the day when they were placed there. I could fill abook with the description of them, but to do so would only be to repeatwhat I have said, with variations.

Nearly all the bodies, so masterfully was the art with which they hadbeen treated, were as perfect as on the day of death thousands of yearsbefore. Nothing came to injure them in the deep silence of the livingrock: they were beyond the reach of heat and cold and damp, and thearomatic drugs with which they had been saturated were evidentlypractically everlasting in their effect. Here and there, however, we sawan exception, and in these cases, although the flesh looked sound enoughexternally, if one touched it it fell in, and revealed the fact that thefigure was but a pile of dust. This arose, Ayesha told me, from theseparticular bodies having, either owing to haste in the burial orother causes, been soaked in the preservative,[*] instead of its beinginjected into the substance of the flesh.

[*] Ayesha afterwards showed me the tree from the leaves of which this ancient preservative was manufactured. It is a low bush-like tree, that to this day grows in wonderful plenty upon the sides of the mountains, or rather upon the slopes leading up to the rocky walls. The leaves are long and narrow, a vivid green in colour, but turning a bright red in the autumn, and not unlike those of a laurel in general appearance. They have little smell when green, but if boiled the aromatic odour from them is so strong that one can hardly bear it. The best mixture, however, was made from the roots, and among the people of Kôr there was a law, which Ayesha showed me alluded to on some of the inscriptions, to the effect that on pain of heavy penalties no one under a certain rank was to be embalmed with the drugs prepared from the roots. The object and effect of this was, of course, to preserve the trees from extermination. The sale of the leaves and roots was a Government monopoly, and from it the Kings of Kôr derived a large proportion of their private revenue.--L. H. H.

About the last tomb we visited I must, however, say one word, for itscontents spoke even more eloquently to the human sympathies than thoseof the first. It had but two occupants, and they lay together on asingle shelf. I withdrew the grave-cloths and there, clasped heart toheart, were a young man and a blooming girl. Her head rested on his arm,and his lips were pressed against her brow. I opened the man's linenrobe, and there over his heart was a dagger-wound, and beneath thewoman's fair breast was a like cruel stab, through which her life hadebbed away. On the rock above was an inscription in three words. Ayeshatranslated it. It was ”_Wedded in Death_.”

What was the life-story of these two, who, of a truth, were beautiful intheir lives, and in their death were not divided?

I closed my eyelids, and imagination, taking up the thread of thought,shot its swift shuttle back across the ages, weaving a picture on theirblackness so real and vivid in its details that I could almost for amoment think that I had triumphed o'er the Past, and that my spirit'seyes had pierced the mystery of Time.

I seemed to see this fair girl form--the yellow hair streaming downher, glittering against her garments snowy white, and the bosom thatwas whiter than the robes, even dimming with its lustre her ornamentsof burnished gold. I seemed to see the great cave filled with warriors,bearded and clad in mail, and, on the lighted daïs where Ayesha hadgiven judgment, a man standing, robed, and surrounded by the symbols ofhis priestly office. And up the cave there came one clad in purple, andbefore him and behind him came minstrels and fair maidens, chanting awedding song. White stood the maid against the altar, fairer thanthe fairest there--purer than a lily, and more cold than the dew thatglistens in its heart. But as the man drew near she shuddered. Then outof the press and throng there sprang a dark-haired youth, and put hisarms about this long-forgotten maid, and kissed her pale face in whichthe blood shot up like lights of the red dawn across the silent sky. Andnext there was turmoil and uproar, and a flashing of swords, and theytore the youth from her arms, and stabbed him, but with a cry shesnatched the dagger from his belt, and drove it into her snowy breast,home to the heart, and down she fell, and then, with cries and wailing,and every sound of lamentation, the pageant rolled away from the arenaof my vision, and once more the past shut to its book.

Let him who reads forgive the intrusion of a dream into a history offact. But it came so home to me--I saw it all so clear in a moment,as it were; and, besides, who shall say what proportion of fact, past,present, or to come, may lie in the imagination? What is imagination?Perhaps it is the shadow of the intangible truth, perhaps it is thesoul's thought.

In an instant the whole thing had passed through my brain, and _She_ wasaddressing me.

”Behold the lot of man,” said the veiled Ayesha, as she drew the windingsheets back over the dead lovers, speaking in a solemn, thrilling voice,which accorded well with the dream that I had dreamed: ”to the tomb, andto the forgetfulness that hides the tomb, must we all come at last! Ay,even I who live so long. Even for me, oh Holly, thousands upon thousandsof years hence; thousands of years after you hast gone through the gateand been lost in the mists, a day will dawn whereon I shall die, and beeven as thou art and these are. And then what will it avail that I havelived a little longer, holding off death by the knowledge that I havewrung from Nature, since at last I too must die? What is a span of tenthousand years, or ten times ten thousand years, in the history of time?It is as naught--it is as the mists that roll up in the sunlight; itfleeth away like an hour of sleep or a breath of the Eternal Spirit.Behold the lot of man! Certainly it shall overtake us, and we shallsleep. Certainly, too, we shall awake and live again, and again shallsleep, and so on and on, through periods, spaces, and times, from æonunto æon, till the world is dead, and the worlds beyond the world aredead, and naught liveth but the Spirit that is Life. But for us twainand for these dead ones shall the end of ends be Life, or shall it beDeath? As yet Death is but Life's Night, but out of the night is theMorrow born again, and doth again beget the Night. Only when Day andNight, and Life and Death, are ended and swallowed up in that from whichthey came, what shall be our fate, oh Holly? Who can see so far? Noteven I!”

And then, with a sudden change of tone and manner--

”Hast thou seen enough, my stranger guest, or shall I show thee more ofthe wonders of these tombs that are my palace halls? If thou wilt, I canlead thee to where Tisno, the mightiest and most valorous King of Kôr,in whose day these caves were ended, lies in a pomp that seems to mockat nothingness, and bid the empty shadows of the past do homage to hissculptured vanity!”

”I have seen enough, oh Queen,” I answered. ”My heart is overwhelmedby the power of the present Death. Mortality is weak, and easily brokendown by a sense of the companionship that waits upon its end. Take mehence, oh Ayesha!”