The weird of the wanderer Being the papyrus records of some incidents in one of the previous lives of Mr. Nicholas Crabbe
the very place which I was intending to pass in the morning, that is
to say Ptolemais Hermii. And, having mentioned that the rebel-leader
Pyrrhos was the mightiest warrior ever seen in Egypt, the strangers
scurried fearfully toward Thebes, adjuring us to turn and follow them:
for, said they, to go downstream was to court an evil and somewhat
protracted death.
Having heard this, and having ordered my slaves to sleep by turns and
not to come within sight of Ptolemais Hermii before dawn, I rested
tranquilly in dreamless sleep. And, waking while it was yet dark, we
three bathed one by one, not disturbing the sons of slime, and also
refreshed our bodies with food and wine. Which having been done, I
instructed Nesamun and Yokkho for the fray, saying that they were not
to concern themselves with anything, excepting the swift manœuvring of
the barge, instantly and implicitly obeying my commands. And my first
stratagem was to lower the sail, lest it should be injured in the
battle which I expected. But Yokkho was to stand by with the cordage,
ready to hoist the yard immediately when we should have pierced our
foes. And Nesamun was to govern our course with the steering-oar
under my directions. But I buckled on my cartridge-belt and loaded my
revolver. And, when Helios Hyperion had driven the chariot of the sun
about an hour above the horizon, we drifted on the current in sight of
Ptolemais Hermii.
But, between us and that city, I espied a long and lofty galley,
propelled by forty oars, hissing toward us.
A glance at the alert eager faces of my slaves shewed me that all was
as I would have it; and, stepping into the waist, I inspected the
advancing enemy. The galley was crowded with mercenaries from stem
to stern. Red horse-hair streamed from their helmets. The shields
of some, who were Rhodians, bore the rose of Rhodes. The others, as
I learned later, were Karians. All wore white and blue kirtles girt
with well-made sword-belts: but owing to the heat of the land and the
feebleness of those who hitherto had encountered them, they neglected
their greaves and body-armour. The rebel Pyrrhos (most righteous of
men) stood on the prow, wearing a scarlet kirtle and a short purple
military cloak. His helmet gleamed with well-forged brass; and a plume
of red horse-hair sprouted therefrom. But the oars of the galley were
pulled by enormous portly Nubians, rolling-eyed, blubber-lipped; and
fiercely they snorted coming on.
“Stop, stranger!” shouted the blameless Pyrrhos.
“In whose name?” I inquired, dallying with my victim.
“In my name:” he answered.
“On what penalty?”
“Death.”
“For whom?”
“For thee. Spear me this confounded babbler, O Orkhos:” he cried.
A spear hurtled toward me: but, at my quick command, Nesamun zigzagged
the barge to let it pass, and held on a straight course as before.
The galley swung athwart the stream twenty long paces distant. But
I, raising my revolver and taking aim at the rebel-leader, bellowed:
“Pyrrhos, I give thy carcase to the sons of slime.”
And dark doom leaped from my finger and pressing palm, and sank into
the socket of his eye. And his life withered in the seat of wisdom,
so that his soul fled gibbering to the netherworld. But the carcase,
heavily lurching, fell, purple and bejewelled, dully splashing into
sacred Sihor; and crocodiles dragged down the shreds and tatters of its
fatness with bubbling swirlings.
But the blameless mercenaries sucked in their breath during a full
minute, being appalled at the sight of their leader turned topsy-turvy
by a noise like the yap of a small dog. But Nesamun held my barge
still, stem on to the galley’s side and twenty long paces from it,
ready to leap forward or backward at my word. But I said, very sternly:
“Thus, O ye rebels, do I treat prepotence and audacity. And thus, also,
will I deal with all, arrogant, who bar my passage.”
And, so saying, I paused, while I reloaded my revolver, that they
might evacuate their sites if they were wise. But, recovering from
their amazement, they took to hurling javelins; and the rowers bent
to their sweeps, turning the galley upstream and driving the dreadful
ram against me. Then, indeed, did Nesamun give proof of his quality,
nimbly leaping to and fro on his narrow station to avoid the hissing
darts and (at the same time) wielding the steering-oar so dexterously
that we circled round the cumbrous galley, always maintaining our
relative position. But I, partly sheltered by the bulwarks, fired into
selected eyes or ear-holes of the rebels, as their destinies presented
the same to me. For the pure lust of fighting, which never before
had really inflamed me, had come upon me; and I laughed hideously in
bloodthirsty glee as my enemies fell to my hand. And those, in whose
wet eyes my bullets quenched their blunt-nosed heat in fizzling,
tossed their useless limbs when Death entered to drive out Life; and
their knees slackened as they flopped into the river, where crocodiles
anxiously scrambled for morsels of them. But my last shot slew two
Karians, passing through their ear-holes, and also a Nubian in whose
it remained. And the current threw the sweep, slipping from his dead
hands on to the oars of his fellows, causing a shocking confusion, in
the midst of which I recharged my revolver a third time.
But the rebel-helmsman was already a refection for the sons of slime.
And, the galley having swung right round so that it now lay between
me and Thebes, I saw that the mercenaries desired to escape upstream,
being no longer inclined to have dealings with me. Wherefore, having
sent fourteen in all of them to Osiris, I gave a word to Nesamun and
Yokkho. And, instantly, the sail ascended to the top of the mast, while
the boatman brought us about into a favouring breeze; and, as an eagle
spreads his pinions having satiated his hunger with a prey, so we sped
on toward Ptolemais Hermii.
In this manner I disposed of an impediment on sacred Sihor.
FOOTNOTES:
[25] English. A. H.
THE EIGHTH PAPYRUS
But, as soon as the barge was going swiftly with wind and stream,
Nesamun fixed the steering-oar, and came forward with Yokkho to adore
me. And, having laid their two bodies (gleaming with wholesome sweat)
at length at my feet, then they praised me in the Egyptian mode. But,
when they rose up, we refreshed ourselves with cups of wine; and the
boatman collected spears and javelins which were sticking in various
parts of the barge, and stacked them in tidy bundles near the prow. But
the slave brought sweet water for bathing a wound in my left forearm,
which had appeared to be a deep one: but, when the drying blood was
washed away, it was seen to be merely a scratch. And he bound it up,
using the nimble tender fingers which had waited so patiently, during
the fight, to hoist the sail at the very moment when I commanded
afterward. But, when I had rewarded them each with a handful of
Egyptian silver, I retired to my cabin, the radiant sun being near its
height; and, anon, dark sleep embraced me.
And, once again I was disturbed by conceptions not of a restful
nature. For, while my body slept, the mind in my dear breast concerned
itself about innumerable ideas, asking unanswerable questions. It
was quite clear to me that I indeed was living a new life: but I was
not certain as to whether I was still a man, or really (as people
opined) a god. And I laughed at the latter notion: because I never
before had heard of a Yacht Club member (as I am, having compounded my
subscription and never having been expelled), who also was a god of
sorts. But, god or man, I supposed that I still had the right to put
the address of the club on my visiting-card. And once more I laughed
at the notion of leaving visiting-cards on Gajus Julius Cæsar, and
Marcus Tullius Cicero, and the whole blameless gang of venal (but
Roman) old-fogeydom, whom I actually might see in the flesh within a
month, simply by crossing the unvintaged sea. But the scratch on my
arm smarted, in what I took to be an ungodly manner: for I knew not
then that the blessed gods are ever so much more sensible to pain than
your mere man, having made men in a godlike image, but having given
them only the sorriest fraction of a godlike nature. And the Whole is
naturally greater than a Part of a Whole. But I persuaded myself that
I was a man, at least so far. And, yet again, I laughed at the notions
that I, a subject of Victory, queen of the stalwart stately Anglicans,
was also an Egyptian master of magic, and, that I, a catholic of the
Apostolic Latin Obedience, on whose agonies of cold and hunger and
thirst and mind-maddening loneliness the foundations of Westminster
Cathedral were laid, was also a priest of Isis. And a doubt came to
me from I know not where, as to whether there were in fact any gods
at all, beside those which men are wont to make in their own idiotic
image,[26] and (if, perchance, there ever had been gods), whether they
had not all retired from business, to die at their ease, having grown
so feeble that mortals could handle them rudely even before windy
Ilion far back in the morning of time. Or, perhaps, the gods of the
Argives had gone into partnership with the gods of the barbarians.
For there certainly were gods in barbaric places, and my eyes had
seen them; and I began to contrive new wiles for seeing them again
one after the other, asking them to send me back to my own time, if I
had a time. But I became displeased with the frivolous manner of the
thought of visiting immortal gods who inhabit olympian palaces. And
yet, I asked myself, why should I not visit gods, who had been visited
by a strange god, even Belmarduk the god of Assyria with his attendant
heroes. And that notion, that a god should have taken the trouble to
come from distant Assyria to visit me in the land of Khem, convinced
me that (if indeed I was not in truth a god) I was extremely important
as a man, being certainly the sole representative of The Great Queen
Victory, queen of the stalwart stately Anglicans, in the Egypt over
which the Pharoah Ptolemaios Ayletes ruled. And that idea reminded me
of my Foreign Office Passport, and of the risk (which I was running)
of being arrested as the possessor of an undecypherable document. But
I scorned that; and began to contrive yet newer plans for going to
see the Kolossos of Rhodes when I should have finished my business
with Amenemhat at Tanis. And the last notion made me think of South
Africa,[27] and the colossal man Umgugondlhovu (as the Zulus name the
rumble of an elephant) whom I had left overshadowing that country,
with the hybrid horde of I.D.Bs. and polemic georgics,[28] all the
most righteous of men, who infested his vicinity. And the notion of
an elephant reminded of a circus. And the notion of a circus gave me
a foresight of the green and blue factions of Purity and Holy Wisdom
striving in the circus at Constantinople. And, from Constantinople
onward, notions came to me in crowds, notions of Turks, Bulgarian and
Albanian atrocities, the traitors Gladstone and Asquith, the treaties
of The Hague and Berlin, the German Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, Karl
the Great, Rome, Pontifex Maximus, Saint Peter, strange gods, with
whom I had no time to deal separately owing to a pressing engagement,
but merely checked off their names as the procession hurried by. And,
then, having come back to the notion of strange gods with which I had
started, I bounded out of my dream.
And, instantly, to me there came the last words of my dream, namely
“strange gods,” said in a fat phlegmatic voice near by.
To which the strong tones of Nesamun firmly answered, saying: “I have
said that my lord is indeed a god. I myself am loyal to the Pharoah;