She
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.[2]
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.”
[2] 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,[3] 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.
[3] 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 time 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,[4] instead of
its being injected into the substance of the flesh.
[4] 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.