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_ After the prisoners had been removed Ayesha waved her hand, and the
spectators turned round, and began to crawl off down the cave like a
scattered 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 of whom 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 the night, as people never died of that sort of fever
except at nightfall or dawn. Also she said that it would be better to
let the sickness spend its course as much as possible before she cured
it. Accordingly, I was rising 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
her no, 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 four of the girls took lamps, and ranged themselves two in
front and two behind us, but the others went away, as also did the
guards.
"Now," she said, "wouldst thou see some of the wonders of this place,
oh Holly? 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 once lived here in the city on the plain. A great and wonderful
people must they have been, those men of Kôr, but, like the Egyptians,
they thought more 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 cave and all the galleries thereof?"
"Tens of thousands," I answered.
"So, oh Holly. This people was an old people before the Egyptians
were. A little can I read of their inscriptions, having found the key
thereto--and see, thou here, this was one of the last of the caves
that they hollowed," and, turning to the rock behind her, she motioned
the mutes to hold up the lamps. Carven over the daïs was the figure of
an old man seated in a chair, with an ivory rod in his hand. It struck
me at once that his features were exceedingly like those of the man
who was represented as being embalmed in the chamber where we took our
meals. Beneath the chair, which, by the way, was shaped exactly like
the one in which Ayesha had sat to give judgment, was a short
inscription in the extraordinary characters of which I have already
spoke, but which I do not remember sufficient of to illustrate. It
looked more like Chinese writing than any other that I am acquainted
with. This inscription Ayesha proceeded, with some difficulty and
hesitation, to read aloud and translate. It ran as follows:--
"In the year four thousand two hundred and fifty-nine from the
founding of the City of imperial Kôr was this cave (or burial
place) completed by Tisno, King of Kôr, the people thereof and
their slaves having laboured thereat for three generations, to be
a tomb for their citizens of rank who shall come after. May the
blessings of the heaven above the heaven rest upon their work, and
make the sleep of Tisno, the mighty monarch, the likeness of whose
features is graven above, a sound and happy sleep till the day of
awakening,[*] and also the sleep of his servants, and of those of
his race who, rising up after him, shall yet lay 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, of
which the ruins yet cumber the plain yonder, four thousand years
before this cave was finished. Yet, when first mine eyes beheld it two
thousand years ago, was it even as it is now. Judge, therefore, how
old must that city have been! And now, follow thou me, and I will show
thee after what fashion 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 spot where a round rock had been let into a kind of
large manhole in the flooring, accurately filling it just as the iron
plates fill the spaces in 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
side of the cave (looking towards the entrance) and signed to the
mutes to hold up the lamps. On the wall was something painted with a
red pigment in similar characters to those hewn beneath the sculpture
of Tisno, King of Kôr. This inscription she proceeded to translate to
me, the pigment still 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 the
rock of the burying-place in the year four thousand eight hundred
and three from the founding of Kôr. Kôr is fallen! No more shall
the mighty feast in her halls, no more shall she rule the world,
and her navies go out to commerce with the world. Kôr is fallen!
and her mighty works and all the cities of Kôr, and all the
harbours that she built and the canals that she made, are for the
wolf and the owl and the wild swan, and the barbarian who comes
after. Twenty and five moons ago did a cloud settle upon Kôr, and
the hundred cities of Kôr, and out of the cloud came a pestilence
that slew her people, old and young, one with another, and spared
not. One with another they turned black and died--the young and
the old, the rich and the poor, the man and the woman, the prince
and the slave. The pestilence slew and slew, and ceased not by day
or by night, and those who escaped from the pestilence were slain
of the famine. No longer could the bodies of the children of Kôr
be preserved according to the ancient rites, because of the number
of the dead, therefore were they hurled into the great pit beneath
the cave, through the hole in the floor of the cave. Then, at
last, a remnant of this the great people, the light of the whole
world, went down to the coast and took ship and sailed northwards;
and now am I, the Priest Junis, who write this, the last man left
alive of this great city of men, but whether there be any yet left
in the other cities I know not. This do I write in misery of heart
before I die, because Kôr the Imperial is no more, and because
there are none to worship in her temple, and all her palaces are
empty, and her princes and her captains and her traders and her
fair women have passed off the face of the earth."
I gave a sigh of astonishment--the utter desolation depicted in this
rude scrawl was so overpowering. It was terrible to think of this
solitary survivor of a mighty people recording its fate before he too
went down into darkness. What must the old man have felt as, in
ghastly terrifying solitude, by the light of one lamp feebly
illuminating a little space of gloom, he in a few brief lines daubed
the history of his nation's death upon the cavern wall? What a subject
for the moralist, or the painter, or indeed for any one who can think!
"Doth it not occur to thee, oh Holly," said Ayesha, laying her hand
upon my shoulder, "that those men who sailed North may have been the
fathers of 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
rich and strong nations, learned in the arts, been and passed away and
been forgotten, so that no memory of them remains. This is but one of
several; for Time eats up the works of man, unless, indeed, he digs in
caves like the people of Kôr, and then mayhap the sea swallows them,
or the earthquake shakes them in. Who knows what hath been on the
earth, or what shall be? There is no new thing under the sun, as the
wise Hebrew wrote long ago. Yet were not these people utterly
destroyed, as I think. Some few remained in the other cities, for
their cities were many. But the barbarians from the south, or
perchance my people, the Arabs, came down upon them, and took their
women to wife, and the race of the Amahagger that is now is a bastard
brood of the mighty sons of Kôr, and behold it dwelleth in the tombs
with its fathers' bones.[*] But I know not: who can know? My arts
cannot pierce so far into the blackness of Time's night. A great
people were they. They conquered till none were left to conquer, and
then they dwelt at ease within their rocky mountain walls, with their
man servants and their maid servants, their minstrels, their
sculptors, and their concubines, and traded and quarrelled, and ate
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 writing
speaks. 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 main
cave, then down a great number of steps, and along an underground
shaft which cannot have been less than sixty feet beneath the surface
of the rock, and was ventilated by curious borings that ran upward, I
know not where. Suddenly the passage ended, and she halted and bade
the mutes hold up the lamps, and, as she had prophesied, I saw a scene
such as I was not likely to see again. We were standing in an enormous
pit, or rather on the brink of it, for it went down deeper--I do not
know how much--than the level on which we stood, and was edged in with
a low wall of rock. So far as I could judge, this pit was about the
size of the space beneath the dome of St. Paul's in London, and when
the lamps were held up I saw that it was nothing but one vast charnel-
house, being literally full of thousands of human skeletons, which lay
piled up in an enormous gleaming pyramid, formed by the slipping down
of the bodies at the apex as fresh ones were dropped in from above.
Anything more appalling than this jumbled mass of the remains of a
departed race I cannot imagine, and what made it even more dreadful
was that in this dry air a considerable number of the bodies had
simply become desiccated with the skin still on them, and now, fixed
in every conceivable position, stared at us out of the mountain of
white bones, grotesquely horrible caricatures of humanity. In my
astonishment I uttered an ejaculation, and the echoes of my voice,
ringing in the vaulted space, disturbed a skull that had been
accurately balanced for many thousands of years near the apex of the
pile. Down it came with a run, bounding along merrily towards us, and
of course bringing an avalanche of other bones 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 who
died 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, whereas the Egyptians disembowelled and drew the brain, the
people of Kôr injected fluid into the veins, and thus reached every
part. But stay, thou shalt see," and she halted at haphazard at one of
the little doorways opening out of the passage along which we were
walking, and motioned to the mutes to light us in. We entered into a
small chamber similar 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 the benches lay figures covered with yellow linen,[*]
on which a fine and impalpable dust had gathered in the course of
ages, but nothing like to the extent that one would have anticipated,
for in these deep-hewn caves there is no material to turn to dust.
About the bodies on the stone shelves and floor of the tomb were many
painted vases, but I saw very few 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 hand
to do so I drew it back again. It seemed like sacrilege, and, to speak
the truth, I was awed by the dread solemnity of the place, and of the
presences before us. Then, with a little laugh at my fears, she drew
them herself, only to discover other and yet finer cloths lying over
the forms upon the stone bench. These also she withdrew, and then for
the first for thousands upon thousands of years did living eyes look
upon the face of that chilly dead. It was a woman; she might have been
thirty-five years of age, or perhaps a little less, and had certainly
been beautiful. Even now her calm clear-cut features, marked out with
delicate eyebrows and long eyelashes which threw little lines of the
shadow of the lamplight upon the ivory face, were wonderfully
beautiful. There, robed in white, down which her blue-black hair was
streaming, she slept her last long sleep, and on her arm, its face
pressed against her breast, there lay a little babe. So sweet was the
sight, although so awful, that--I confess it without shame--I could
scarcely withhold my tears. It took me back across the dim gulf of
ages to some happy home in dead Imperial Kôr, where this winsome lady
girt about with beauty had lived 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 a forgotten human history speaking more
eloquently to the heart than could any written record of their lives.
Reverently I replaced the grave-cloths, and, with a sigh that flowers
so fair should, in the purpose of the Everlasting, have only bloomed
to be gathered to the grave, I turned to the body on the opposite
shelf, and gently unveiled it. 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, after surviving her many years, came at the
last to sleep once more for good and all beside her.
We left the place and entered others. It would be too long to describe
the many things I saw in them. Each one had its occupants, for the
five hundred and odd years that had elapsed between the completion of
the cave and the destruction of the race had evidently sufficed to
fill these catacombs, numberless as they were, and all appeared to
have been undisturbed since the day when they were placed there. I
could fill a book with the description of them, but to do so would
only be to repeat what I have said, with variations.
Nearly all the bodies, so masterfully was the art with which they had
been treated, were as perfect as on the day of death thousands of
years before. Nothing came to injure them in the deep silence of the
living rock: they were beyond the reach of heat and cold and damp, and
the aromatic drugs with which they had been saturated were evidently
practically everlasting in their effect. Here and there, however, we
saw an exception, and in these cases, although the flesh looked sound
enough externally, if one touched it it fell in, and revealed the fact
that the figure was but a pile of dust. This arose, Ayesha told me,
from these particular bodies having, either owing to haste in the
burial or other causes, been soaked in the preservative,[*] instead of
its being injected 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 its
contents spoke even more eloquently to the human sympathies than those
of the first. It had but two occupants, and they lay together on a
single shelf. I withdrew the grave-cloths and there, clasped heart to
heart, 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
linen robe, and there over his heart was a dagger-wound, and beneath
the woman's fair breast was a like cruel stab, through which her life
had ebbed away. On the rock above was an inscription in three words.
Ayesha translated it. It was "/Wedded in Death/."
What was the life-story of these two, who, of a truth, were beautiful
in their 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
their blackness so real and vivid in its details that I could almost
for a moment think that I had triumphed o'er the Past, and that my
spirit's eyes had pierced the mystery of Time.
I seemed to see this fair girl form--the yellow hair streaming down
her, glittering against her garments snowy white, and the bosom that
was whiter than the robes, even dimming with its lustre her ornaments
of burnished gold. I seemed to see the great cave filled with
warriors, bearded and clad in mail, and, on the lighted daïs where
Ayesha had given judgment, a man standing, robed, and surrounded by
the symbols of his priestly office. And up the cave there came one
clad in purple, and before him and behind him came minstrels and fair
maidens, chanting a wedding song. White stood the maid against the
altar, fairer than the fairest there--purer than a lily, and more cold
than the dew that glistens in its heart. But as the man drew near she
shuddered. Then out of the press and throng there sprang a dark-haired
youth, and put his arms about this long-forgotten maid, and kissed her
pale face in which the blood shot up like lights of the red dawn
across the silent sky. And next there was turmoil and uproar, and a
flashing of swords, and they tore the youth from her arms, and stabbed
him, but with a cry she snatched 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 arena of my vision, and once more the
past shut to its book.
Let him who reads forgive the intrusion of a dream into a history of
fact. 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 the
soul's thought.
In an instant the whole thing had passed through my brain, and /She/
was addressing me.
"Behold the lot of man," said the veiled Ayesha, as she drew the
winding sheets back over the dead lovers, speaking in a solemn,
thrilling voice, which accorded well with the dream that I had
dreamed: "to the tomb, and to 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 thousands of years hence; thousands of years
after you hast gone through the gate and been lost in the mists, a day
will dawn whereon I shall die, and be even as thou art and these are.
And then what will it avail that I have lived a little longer, holding
off death by the knowledge that I have wrung from Nature, since at
last I too must die? What is a span of ten thousand 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; it fleeth 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 shall sleep. Certainly,
too, we shall awake and live again, and again shall sleep, and so on
and on, through periods, spaces, and times, from æon unto æon, till
the world is dead, and the worlds beyond the world are dead, and
naught liveth but the Spirit that is Life. But for us twain and for
these dead ones shall the end of ends be Life, or shall it be Death?
As yet Death is but Life's Night, but out of the night is the Morrow
born again, and doth again beget the Night. Only when Day and Night,
and Life and Death, are ended and swallowed up in that from which they
came, what shall be our fate, oh Holly? Who can see so far? Not even
I!"
And then, with a sudden change of tone and manner--
"Hast thou seen enough, my stranger guest, or shall I show thee more
of the wonders of these tombs that are my palace halls? If thou wilt,
I can lead 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 mock at nothingness, and bid the empty shadows of the past do
homage to his sculptured vanity!"
"I have seen enough, oh Queen," I answered. "My heart is overwhelmed
by the power of the present Death. Mortality is weak, and easily
broken down by a sense of the companionship that waits upon its end.
Take me hence, oh Ayesha!" _
Read next: CHAPTER XVII - THE BALANCE TURNS
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