Pharaoh's Wife Read online

  “Let’s go,” said Diana. “These necropolises, which are the great attraction of pilgrimages, weigh upon me like a leaden mantle. Let’s allow our spirits to relax. For my part, I feel the need to see a little greenery, and I’d like an excursion to the great oasis or Lake Birket-el-Keroun. Since the episode of the Sphinx I find all these monuments repulsive. It seems to me that these masses of granite conceal a multitude of crimes.”

  “Even if they don’t all hide political crimes,” said Adsum, “their construction nevertheless cost the lives of thousands of people.”

  “How?” asked Diana.

  “The great projects were carried out during the flooding of the Nile, imposed on the inhabitants in the form of forced labor. The laborers were fed, but not paid—the construction workers, that is; the quarrymen and miners were recruited by civil and military condemnations. All punishment consisted of years in the galleys, as oarsmen, or in the quarries. When a Pharaoh had need of strong arms, severity was increased and the slightest misdemeanor led to forced labor. They were all treated very harshly, poorly-nourished—and as the work of laying foundations in the mud led to fevers and epidemics, I can certify that every temple, or even the erection of an obelisk, cost the lives of thousands of men. The pyramid of Cheops, which put millions of arms to work for ten years, caused so much depopulation that a famine decimated the third that remained.”

  “Then let’s go, quickly!” said Diana. “I’m positively in haste to get far away from all these tombs. How far is it to the Lake of Horns?”

  “About forty kilometers—two or three hours’ travel through the desert. We can have lunch on one of the islands.”

  X. Arab Hospitality

  The excursion to the Lake of Horns—the popular name of Birket-el-Keroun—was not without incident. Scarcely had the travelers covered a few kilometers than the kamsin rose, not as a tempest but sufficiently to hinder the progress of the automobiles and force them to stop. In spite of the hermetic closure of the hoods, further protected by damp cloths, the sand penetrated nevertheless and choked the engines.

  It was the same inside the vehicles, and Diana interrogated the Father anxiously.

  “There’s no absolute peril,” Adsum replied. “It’s only a sandstorm, frequent in the region. In a couple of hours, at the most, we can proceed with a careful cleaning of the machines, and set off again thereafter. In the meantime, let’s wrap up our faces as best we can, and summon up all our philosophy.”

  Indeed, after an hour, the wind dropped. When Diana’s vehicle had been cleaned, she got into it with the two mages, and the servants stayed behind to restore the other two vehicles to working order.

  After a fairly long journey, they arrived at Taniyeh, the nearest village—not very large, but in sufficient communication with Europeans for the travelers to find what they needed there. The Sheikh, Able El Massaoud, had one of the principal fishing concessions with regard to the lake. Very rich and well-educated, he hastened to make the three travelers welcome, especially once he discovered, from the Reïs, the status of the American woman. He offered them the honors of his house and introduced them to his harem.

  While the Duchess was entertained by the Sheikh’s wife, the great Arab lord and the two mages installed themselves in what Able El Massaoud called “the drawing room” and ate a few local foodstuffs, which were exquisite, not without first having done honor to the “mézé.”

  Mézé consists of a quantity of small hors-d’oeuvre: stuffed vine-leaves; lamb sausages scented with herbs, grilled and crushed into little balls; and aubergine salad, strongly spiced. The whole is served on a large tray shaped like a flower or featuring some design. The tray constitutes a kind of puzzle that can be separated into a host of small plates of various forms, from which everyone can take the preferred foodstuff according to his taste.

  The beverage accompanying the mézé is strongly alcoholic, with a taste of aniseed, known as raki. It is consumed in silence, almost religiously, in delicate little glasses, elegant in form. After the mézé comes an enormous fish served whole, about two meters long. The indigenes call it fa’ach, and the sheikh’s guests appreciated it greatly. It was presented on a long wooden latter, cooked on the grill, seasoned with a very pungent sauce and sprinkled with lemon juice.

  Diana ate in the harem. It consisted of only one wife, a very pretty Armenian, whom the Sheikh had saved during one of the massacres frequent between Turks and Armenians. He had snatches her from a burning house where she was lying unconscious among her dead relatives. She was then thirteen years of age. Her savior had married her, and she was happy with him, even though he was twenty years older than her.

  “There’s to be a big fishing-trip the day after tomorrow,” she told Diana. “If you want to see it, I’ll ask my husband to bring it forward a day. It’s very curious.”

  “Gladly—we’re in no hurry. We’re in Egypt to study that which, in the lives of the people, survives over time through political changes.”

  “In that case, I can assure you that our method of fishing has scarcely changed since the remotest times.”

  XI. An Egyptian Spiritualist

  While the two new friends exchanged confidences, Able El Messaoud had, once the meal as over, taken the two mages into what he called, in the European manner, his “studio.” Not without astonishment, the mages found a library principally composed of books on occultism and philosophy. The Sheikh—who, like all bibliophiles, seemed proud of his books—drew their attention to a collection of periodicals and pamphlets relating to magnetism and spiritualism.

  “This proves that I’m a true Oriental,” he said. “Although I’m cheerful by nature, the great mystery of life and death has always fascinated me, and I take a great interest in studies intended to prove the immortality of the spirit and its manifestations beyond the grave. Perhaps you’re indifferent to that, though.”

  “Entirely to the contrary,” replied Antal Fodor, enthusiastically, “since the objective of our voyage to Egypt is research of a psychic order. We are not laymen, and might be able to help you.”

  “God! From all this mess of papers I can only extract hypothesis, not certainties. I’ve studied all these occult authors, French and otherwise, with all the more determination because I’m searching for conviction. There’s no doubt that a fluidic force exists, emanating from ourselves, and a fluidic force emanating from the unknown—but where does the latter come from? That’s the question that no one, thus far, has been able to resolve.”

  “We’ll offer you a hypothesis,” Adsum said, “that has the advantage over the others of a greater probability. Present-day spiritualism rests on two recognized and proven facts: the levitation of tables and various other objects, and the existence of mediums. The first of those causes is in contradiction to the law of gravity, and in order to explain it, it’s necessary to contravene that law—which seems, however, to rule the worlds.

  “That force of levitation, escaping a law that we’re accustomed to recognize, has to be explained as an action of the fluidic force emanating from ourselves. It is concentrated in a will-power that dominates matter and its laws. We have a false idea of matter in considering it as inert mass; matter is alive. The pebbles on the road and the sand of the desert are alive, since they are transformed; they have been part of an organic body, and they will be again.

  “In nature, time does not exist. Humans imagine that they are creating immortality, by building pyramids and carving a granite Sphinx in the rock: a question of time; although it might taken then thousand years, a day will come when the sphinx and the pyramids will disappear under the action of the ages and those mountains of stone will become once again what they were before: sand. And that sand will return to the oceans in order to agglomerate again, to become animal or mineral, whatever; but inactive mater does not exist.

  “As for fluidic forces, they are innumerable; every body emits waves, and suggestion proves that a human being, the greatest psychic concentralizer, is, in cons
equence, the most powerful emitter of these psychic fluids. What are called mediums are humans who, by means of a natural gift and by severe study of the concentration of thought, are able to impose their will on other people by means of mental suggestion. They can also concentrate the fluidic forces of others, and create in that fashion a force that is manifest externally: the displacement of objects, apports, collective illusions. Is there, in all that, a connection to the beyond? No, for it would be ridiculous for a spirit of the astral purity to lend itself to such puerile manifestations.

  “However, a few facts seem to prove the contrary, and it would be absurd to reject them without scientific investigation, when they can be explained by one simple fact: at the moment of death, the spirit—which is to say, the psychic ‘self,’ the thinking self, leaves the body that it has borrowed during an existence, and which will return to the universal for further transformation. The fluid spirit, dispossessed of its senses—which are for the living nothing but means of manifestation for the brain, the motor of sensation—still exists. It remains in the universe at the exact location from which it emerged from its terrestrial envelope, for the Earth, in its dual movement of axial and orbital rotation had left it behind.

  “Spirits that have not evolved in the course of their terrestrial passage—and for how many is that the case?—no longer know where they are, or what they are. Wandering, lost in the astral immensity, an indescribable terror brings them back to the Earth where they lived, where they will live again in order to reach the degree of evolution that it is necessary for them to acquire. Most of the time—not to say always—it is those spirits that manifest themselves through the intermediary of mediums, and their manifestations of ignorance can only be uninteresting or stupid.

  “In addition to these inferior spirits there are others: pure ones, having rejected the material envelope forever, who live the fluidic life of angels—not those represented to us by religious paintings, but immaterial, invisible beings, perhaps nourishing themselves on light.

  “How far does the strangeness of conceptions in the creations of the terrestrial soul extend? Think about the multiplicity of forms, of modes of existence, of reproduction. All that the fantasy of a pen can imagine will find its counterpart in the scale of beings; everything is kneaded from the same clay, everything nourishes itself on the same matter, and yet, everything differs in its aspect and character.

  “Since there are fluidic forces on Earth, then, why should there not be entirely fluid beings? Magnetism, electricity, light and sound all propagate by means of waves. And what is a wave? An unconscious are active force? To act is to be, to have a will. So?”

  “So, humans seek...”

  “Around us, within us, millions of beings that we cannot see, but which exist, are acting, living, dying. There are colors that our eyes do not see; and rays, invisible to us, that have an influence upon us. The entire universe is nothing but a formidable vibration, in which the enormous in juxtaposed with the infinitesimal, which it needs in order to be. Can we deny the marvelous and the supernatural, since the marvelous surrounds us and the supernatural of today might be the natural of tomorrow?”

  “What do you conclude?” asked the Sheikh. Is spiritualism—by which I mean the communication of the living with the dead—possible?”

  “Possible, but, as I’ve told you, uninteresting, since the dead are as ignorant as you, and must instruct themselves on the astral plane, or undergo numerous reincarnations on Earth.”

  “But can a superior intelligence not communicate with the living?”

  “It is a very considerable suffering for it. Moreover, it is necessary for it to make use of the intermediary of a medium, who is almost always insincere, even unknowingly—hence, uncertainty as to the truth for the interrogator. Everything about this matter is complex.

  “Is not the human spirit inherently complicated? Is it not completely different during sleep, when one can accomplish actions that one could not think of doing in a waking state? When I recall my memories of youth, I remember a dream that pursued me obstinately: I was walking perpendicularly, and it only required a slight pressure of the foot or he hand to make me progress. Was that a reminiscence of another world?

  “In any case, our diurnal spirit is often subject to a duplication; when you are reading, while your mind consciously scans the lines, your mind is thinking about something else. Are there no examples of thoughts doubling themselves under the influence of certain urgencies? Bonaparte dictated several letters simultaneously; a chess player can play several games at the same time. The mystery that reigns over all nature reigns within ourselves.

  “To return to our subject, I believe in the possibility of fluidic beings on our globe, created by the Earth, like the rest of terrestrial humankinds.”

  “What do you think about metempsychosis?”

  “It seems to indicate an animal progression. Progression, says the moral mentality, if there is reward, regression if there is punishment. But who is the judge? Let us admit that I have been an animal; what noble action has that animal been able to accomplish in order to become a man?

  “The mentality of beasts is imagined to be inferior. That is false, since the animal makes provision for its shelter, its nourishment and its reproduction; it performs the same duties as a human, with a few additional qualities. Humans, endowed with intelligence, generally do things that can harm them; animals do not. Humans kill for pleasure; animals kill in order to live or defend themselves. Humans have invented laws to shackle their liberty; animals life freely, and if they submit to humans it is often by necessity, and their masters are then obliged to lodge and nourish them.

  “Why refuse animal, or plants, a psychology, and even a language? Humans have judged it simpler to appropriate a fluidic part, the spirit.

  “In sum, let us never say, in an affirmative manner, ‘I believe.’ Let us say simply, ‘I suppose.’”

  The Sheikh listened respectfully to the old man, his guest.

  XII. Lake Birket-El-Keroun

  It was on the Birket-El-Keroun, or Lake of Horns, fifty kilometers long by ten wide, between four and five meters deep, alimented by a few small streams descending from the Gabel Gadala, whose name is derived from its shape, that the fishing expedition mentioned by Madame Messaoud was to take place. The Sheikh had given orders for the preparations to be advanced by a day, in order that his guests could take part in it.

  The flat-bottomed boats that served for fishing, being the only ones capable of navigating over the depths covered in reeds and papyrus, were widely scattered; all night long the Arabs had labored to gather them together and clear a path through the aquatic plants in order to allow them to reach the middle of the lake, where the fishing would be done.

  One of the vessels had been fitted out with a carpet and cushions; Diana, Adsum, Ormus and the Sheikh took their places in it, and they all set out. In the prow of the boat a large stove had been lit, on which odorant herbs were burning, in order to drive away the mosquitoes and combat the un-balsamic scent of the mud and rotting vegetation that circled the edges. In the middle of the lake the atmosphere was purer, for the desert commenced on the far side.

  When the sun emerged above the mountains, the boats were immediately immobilized, and a clear voice rose up, intoning the morning prayer: “La ilaha ill’Allah, oua Mohammed resul Allah!” All the sailors, standing up with their heads bowed, murmured the prayer.

  The homage rendered by those primitive men to the god who is god, the one who has no image, who has no name but is the Father of all—and, doubtless, to his representative, the Sun, fecundator of the globe—beneath the vast sky, profoundly blue, in the middle of that expanse of water, was simple but imposing.

  Adsum and Antal Fodor exchanged glances, which meant: “Of all religions, this is the one that will be most easily assimilated to ours.”

  The boatmen had picked up their short oars with broad blades. Seated in the oriental fashion in the bow of the command-boat, the
Sheikh gave orders. Each vessel carried six men, four oarsmen and two fishermen, the first armed with a long trident, the second with a dagger held in a bracelet attached to the left wrist. The man with the dagger was naked save for a loincloth.

  The captain steered to windward, in order that the smoke would be driven back over the boat; the mosquitoes, which were flying around the boats in millions, drew away slightly. The Arabs did not appear to be inconvenienced by that invasion, but everyone in the command-boat was tightly wrapped in muslin.

  On the Sheikh’s order the boats drew apart, tracing a semicircle, and at a prearranged signal, al the rowers began to beat the water with their oars, uttering shrill and prolonged cries.

  Suddenly, a long white furrow appeared in the surface, and then many others. The cries increased, and the fish, disturbed and bewildered, raced back and forth in all directions, colliding with one another. There was a flash and then an impact; the trident-bearer had hurled his weapon violently, like a javelin.

  Leaning over the edge, the man with the dagger followed the wounded fish with his eyes; the shallow depth of the lake did not permit the victim to hide. The long shaft of the trident agitated the surface, indicting the spot where the animal was struggling.

  The propitious moment having arrived, the diver leapt into the water and swam toward the wounded fish, turning it skillfully, seized the shaft of the trident with one hand, and sliced the belly of the fish from end to end with the other. It was an enormous “hout,” almost two meters in length.

  The dry clicking of tridents, launched with force, was audible on all sides, and such was the fishermen’s skill that they rarely missed. When that did happen, by virtue of bad luck, laughter and mocking gibes rained down on the unfortunate who then had to dive in to recover his weapon. That was not without danger for him, because a thrash of the tail of one of the enormous fish could stun a fisherman, and sometimes drown him.