He broke off suddenly, as though he had been speaking to himself. We sat down. George Isley leaned out of the window with his back to us, watching the desert in the moonless night.
“You have tried its effect before upon—others?” I asked point-blank.
“Upon myself,” he answered shortly.
“Upon others?” I insisted.
He hesitated an instant.
“Upon one other—yes,” he admitted.
“Intentionally?” And something quivered in me as I asked it.
He shrugged his shoulders slightly. “I’m merely a speculative archaeologist,” he smiled, “and—and an imaginative Egyptologist. My bounden duty is to reconstruct the past so that it lives for others.”
An impulse rose in me to take him by the throat.
“You know perfectly well, of course, the magical effect it’s sure—likely at least—to have?”
He stared steadily at me through the cigarette smoke. To this day I cannot think exactly what it was in this man that made me shudder.
“I’m sure of nothing,” he replied smoothly, “but I consider it quite legitimate to try. Magical—the word you used—has no meaning for me. If such a thing exists, it is merely scientific—undiscovered or forgotten knowledge.” An insolent, aggressive light shone in his eyes as he spoke; his manner was almost truculent. “You refer, I take it, to—our friend—rather than to yourself?”
And with difficulty I met his singular stare. From his whole person something still emanated that was forbidding, yet overmasteringly persuasive. It brought back the notion of that invisible Web, that dim gauze curtain, that motionless Influence lying waiting at the center for its prey, those monstrous and mysterious Items standing, alert and watchful, through the centuries. “You mean,” he added lower, “his altered attitude to life—his going?”
To hear him use the words, the very phrase, struck me with sudden chill. Before I could answer, however, and certainly before I could master the touch of horror that rushed over me, I heard him continuing in a whisper. It seemed again that he spoke to himself as much as he spoke to me.
“The soul, I suppose, has the right to choose its own conditions and surroundings. To pass elsewhere involves translation, not extinction.” He smoked a moment in silence, then said another curious thing, looking up into my face with an expression of intense earnestness. Something genuine in him again replaced the pose of cynicism. “The soul is eternal and can take its place anywhere, regardless of mere duration. What is there in the vulgar and superficial Present that should hold it so exclusively; and where can it find today the belief, the faith, the beauty that are the very essence of its life—where in the rush and scatter of this tawdry age can it make its home? Shall it flutter for ever in a valley of dry bones, when a living Past lies ready and waiting with loveliness, strength, and glory?” He moved closer; he touched my arm; I felt his breath upon my face. “Come with us,” he whispered awfully; “come back with us! Withdraw your life from the rubbish of this futile ugliness! Come back and worship with us in the spirit of the Past. Take up the old, old splendor, the glory, the immense conceptions, the wondrous certainty, the ineffable knowledge of essentials. It all lies about you still; it’s calling, ever calling; it’s very close; it draws you day and night—calling, calling, calling.…”
His voice died off curiously into distance on the word; I can hear it to this day, and the soft, droning quality in the intense yet fading tone: “Calling, calling, calling.” But his eyes turned wicked. I felt the sinister power of the man. I was aware of madness in his thought and mind. the Past he sought to glorify I saw black, as with the forbidding Egyptian darkness of a plague. It was not beauty but Death that I heard calling, calling, calling.
“It’s real,” he went on, hardly aware that I shrank, “and not a dream. These ruined symbols still remain in touch with that which was. They are potent today as they were six thousand years ago. the amazing life of those days brims behind them. They are not mere masses of oppressive stone; they express in visible form great powers that still are—knowable.” He lowered his head, peered up into my face, and whispered. Something secret passed into his eyes.
“I saw you change,” came the words below his breath, “as you saw the change in us. But only worship can produce that change. the soul assumes the qualities of the deity it worships. the powers of its deity possess it and transform it into its own likeness. You also felt it. You also were possessed. I saw the stone-faced deity upon your own.”
I seemed to shake myself as a dog shakes water from its body. I stood up. I remember that I stretched my hands out as though to push him from me and expel some creeping influence from my mind. I remember another thing as well. But for the reality of the sequel, and but for the matter-of-fact result still facing me today in the disappearance of George Isley—the loss to the present time of all George Isley was—I might have found subject for laughter in what I saw. Comedy was in it certainly. Yet it was both ghastly and terrific. Deep horror crept below the aspect of the ludicrous, for the apparent mimicry cloaked truth. It was appalling because it was real.
In the large mirror that reflected the room behind me I saw myself and Moleson; I saw Isley too in the background by the open window. And the attitude of all three was the attitude of hieroglyphics come to life. My arms indeed were stretched, but not stretched, as I had thought, in mere self-defence. They were stretched—unnaturally. the forearms made those strange obtuse angles that the old carved granite wears, the palms of the hands held upwards, the heads thrown back, the legs advanced, the bodies stiffened into postures that expressed forgotten, ancient minds. the physical conformation of all three was monstrous; and yet reverence and truth dictated even the uncouthness of the gestures. Something in all three of us inspired the forms our bodies had assumed. Our attitudes expressed buried yearnings, emotions, tendencies—whatever they may be termed—that the spirit of the Past evoked.
I saw the reflected picture but for a moment. I dropped my arms, aware of foolishness in my way of standing. Moleson moved forward with his long, significant stride, and at the same instant Isley came up quickly and joined us from his place by the open window. We looked into each other’s faces without a word. There was this little pause that lasted perhaps ten seconds. But in that pause I felt the entire world slide past me. I heard the centuries rush by at headlong speed. the present dipped away. Existence was no longer in a line that stretched two ways; it was a circle in which ourselves, together with Past and Future, stood motionless at the center, all details equally accessible at once. the three of us were falling, falling backwards.…
“Come!” said the voice of Moleson solemnly, but with the sweetness as of a child anticipating joy. “Come! Let us go together, for the boat of Ra has crossed the Underworld. the darkness has been conquered. Let us go out together and find the dawn. Listen! It is calling, calling, calling.…”
XIII
I was aware of rushing, but it was the soul in me that rushed. It experienced dizzy, unutterable alterations. Thousands of emotions, intense and varied, poured through me at lightning speed, each satisfyingly known, yet gone before its name appeared. the life of many centuries tore headlong back with me, and, as in drowning, this epitome of existence shot in a few seconds the steep slopes the Past had so laboriously built up. the changes flashed and passed. I wept and prayed and worshipped; I loved and suffered; I battled, lost and won. Down the gigantic scale of ages that telescoped thus into a few brief moments, the soul in me went sliding backwards towards a motionless, reposeful Past.
I remember foolish details that interrupted the immense descent—I put on coat and hat; I remember someone’s words, strangely sounding as when some bird wakes up and sings at midnight—“We’ll take the little door; the front one’s locked by now”; and I have a vague recollection of the outline of the great hotel, with its colonnades and terraces, fading behind me through the air. But these details merely flickered and disappeared, as though I fell earthward
s from a star and passed feathers or blown leaves upon the way. There was no friction as my soul dropped backwards into time; the flight was easy and silent as a dream. I felt myself sucked down into gulfs whose emptiness offered no resistance…until at last the appalling speed decreased of its own accord, and the dizzy flight became a kind of gentle floating. It changed imperceptibly into a gliding motion, as though the angle altered. My feet, quite naturally, were on the ground, moving through something soft that clung to them and rustled while it clung.
I looked up and saw the bright armies of the stars. In front of me I recognised the flat-topped, shadowy ridges; on both sides lay the open expanses of familiar wilderness; and beside me, one on either hand, moved two figures who were my companions. We were in the desert, but it was the desert of thousands of years ago. My companions, moreover, though familiar to some part of me, seemed strangers or half known. Their names I strove in vain to capture; Mosely, Ilson, sounded in my head, mingled together falsely. And when I stole a glance at them, I saw dark lines of mannikins unfilled with substance, and was aware of the grotesque gestures of living hieroglyphics. It seemed for an instant that their arms were bound behind their backs impossibly, and that their heads turned sharply across their lineal shoulders.
But for a moment only; for at a second glance I saw them solid and compact; their names came back to me; our arms were linked together as we walked. We had already covered a great distance, for my limbs were aching and my breath was short. the air was cold, the silence absolute. It seemed, in this faint light, that the desert flowed beneath our feet, rather than that we advanced by taking steps. Cliffs with hooded tops moved past us, boulders glided, mounds of sand slid by. And then I heard a voice upon my left that was surely Moleson speaking:
“Towards Enet our feet are set,” he half sang, half murmured, “towards Enet-te-ntōrē. There, in the House of Birth, we shall dedicate our hearts and lives anew.”
And the language, no less than the musical intonation of his voice, enraptured me. For I understood he spoke of Denderah, in whose majestic temple recent hands had painted with deathless colors the symbols of our cosmic relationships with the zodiacal signs. And Denderah was our great seat of worship of the goddess Hathor, the Egyptian Aphrodite, bringer of love and joy. the falcon-headed Horus was her husband, from whom, in his home at Edfu, we imbibed swift kinds of power. And—it was the time of the New Year, the great feast when the forces of the living earth turn upwards into happy growth.
We were on foot across the desert towards Denderah, and this sand we trod was the sand of thousands of years ago.
The paralysis of time and distance involved some amazing lightness of the spirit that, I suppose, touched ecstasy. There was intoxication in the soul. I was not divided from the stars, nor separate from this desert that rushed with us. the unhampered wind blew freshly from my nerves and skin, and the Nile, glimmering faintly on our right, lay with its lapping waves in both my hands. I knew the life of Egypt, for it was in me, over me, round me. I was a part of it. We went happily, like birds to meet the sunrise. There were no pits of measured time and interval that could detain us. We flowed, yet were at rest; we were endlessly alive; present and future alike were inconceivable; we were in the Kingdom of the Past.
The Pyramids were just a-building, and the army of Obelisks looked about them, proud of their first balance; Thebes swung her hundred gates upon the world. New, shining Memphis glittered with myriad reflections into waters that the tears of Isis sweetened, and the cliffs of Abou Simbel were still innocent of their gigantic progeny. Alone, the Sphinx, linking timelessness with time, brooded unguessed and underived upon an alien world. We marched within antiquity towards Denderah.…
How long we marched, how fast, how far we went, I can remember as little as the marvellous speech that passed across me while my two companions spoke together. I only remember that suddenly a wave of pain disturbed my wondrous happiness and caused my calm, which had seemed beyond all reach of break, to fall away. I heard their voices abruptly with a kind of terror. A sensation of fear, of loss, of nightmare bewilderment came over me like cold wind. What they lived naturally, true to their inmost hearts, I lived merely by means of a temperamental sympathy. And the stage had come at which my powers failed. Exhaustion overtook me. I wilted. the strain—the abnormal backwards stretch of consciousness that was put upon me by another—gave way and broke. I heard their voices faint and horrible. My joy was extinguished. A glare of horror fell upon the desert and the stars seemed evil. An anguishing desire for the safe and wholesome Present usurped all this mad yearning to obtain the Past. My feet fell out of step. the rushing of the desert paused. I unlinked my arms. We stopped all three.
The actual spot is to this day well known to me. I found it afterwards, I even photographed it. It lies actually not far from Helouan—a few miles at most beyond the Solitary Palm, where slopes of undulating sand mark the opening of a strange, enticing valley called the Wadi Gerraui. And it is enticing because it beckons and leads on. Here, amid torn gorges of a limestone wilderness, there is suddenly soft yellow sand that flows and draws the feet onward. It slips away with one too easily; always the next ridge and basin must be seen, each time a little farther. It has the quality of decoying. the cliffs say, No; but this streaming sand invites. In its flowing curves of gold there is enchantment.
And it was here upon its very lips we stopped, the rhythm of our steps broken, our hearts no longer one. My temporary rapture vanished. I was aware of fear. For the Present rushed upon me with attack in it, and I felt that my mind was arrested close upon the edge of madness. Something cleared and lifted in my brain.
The soul, indeed, could “choose its dwelling-place”; but to live elsewhere completely was the choice of madness, and to live divorced from all the sweet wholesome business of Today involved an exile that was worse than madness. It was death. My heart burned for George Isley. I remembered the tear upon his cheek. the agony of his struggle I shared suddenly with him. Yet with him was the reality, with me a sympathetic reflection merely. He was already too far gone to fight.…
I shall never forget the desolation of that strange scene beneath the morning stars. the desert lay down and watched us. We stood upon the brink of a little broken ridge, looking into the valley of golden sand. This sand gleamed soft and wonderful in the starlight some twenty feet below. the descent was easy—but I would not move. I refused to advance another step. I saw my companions in the mysterious half-light beside me peering over the edge, Moleson in front a little.
And I turned to him, sure of the part I meant to play, yet conscious painfully of my helplessness. My personality seemed a straw in mid-stream that spun in a futile effort to arrest the flood that bore it. There was vivid human conflict in the moment’s silence. It was an eddy that paused in the great body of the tide. And then I spoke. Oh, I was ashamed of the insignificance of my voice and the weakness of my little personality.
“Moleson, we go no farther with you. We have already come too far. We now turn back.”
Behind my words were a paltry thirty years. His answer drove sixty centuries against me. For his voice was like the wind that passed whispering down the stream of yellow sand below us. He smiled.
“Our feet are set towards Enet-te-ntōrē. There is no turning back. Listen! It is calling, calling, calling!”
“We will go home,” I cried, in a tone I vainly strove to make imperative.
“Our home is there,” he sang, pointing with one long thin arm towards the brightening east, “for the Temple calls us and the River takes our feet. We shall be in the House of Birth to meet the sunrise—”
“You lie,” I cried again, “you speak the lies of madness, and this Past you seek is the House of Death. It is the kingdom of the underworld.”
The words tore wildly, impotently out of me. I seized George Isley’s arm.
“Come back with me,” I pleaded vehemently, my heart aching with a nameless pain for him. “We’ll retrace our steps.
Come home with me! Come back! Listen! the Present calls you sweetly!”
His arm slipped horribly out of my grasp that had seemed to hold it so tightly. Moleson, already below us in the yellow sand, looked small with distance. He was gliding rapidly farther with uncanny swiftness. the diminution of his form was ghastly. It was like a doll’s. And his voice rose up, faint as with the distance of great gulfs of space.
“Calling…calling.… You hear it for ever calling…”
It died away with the wind along that sandy valley, and the Past swept in a flood across the brightening sky. I swayed as though a storm was at my back. I reeled. Almost I went too—over the crumbling edge into the sand.
“Come back with me! Come home!” I cried more faintly. “The Present alone is real. There is work, ambition, duty. There is beauty too—the beauty of good living! And there is love! There is—a woman…calling, calling…!”
That other voice took up the word below me. I heard the faint refrain sing down the sandy walls. the wild, sweet pang in it was marvellous.
“Our feet are set for Enet-te-ntōrē. It is calling, calling…!”
My voice fell into nothingness. George Isley was below me now, his outline tiny against the sheet of yellow sand. And the sand was moving. the desert rushed again. the human figures receded swiftly into the Past they had reconstructed with the creative yearning of their souls.
I stood alone upon the edge of crumbling limestone, helplessly watching them. It was amazing what I witnessed, while the shafts of crimson dawn rose up the sky. the enormous desert turned alive to the horizon with gold and blue and silver. the purple shadows melted into grey. the flat-topped ridges shone. Huge messengers of light flashed everywhere at once. the radiance of sunrise dazzled my outer sight.