From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier/Chapter 8
CHAPTER VIII
A COLOSSAL COLLOQUY
On the edge of the Libyan wilderness, about a bowshot to the east of the line "that just divides the desert from the sown," their backs turned to the mountain and their faces to the river, sit and have sat for more than thirty centuries the two Colossi of Amenophis. Of the temple that they once guarded scarce a vestige remains—only the stele recording the pompous titles of the royal templebuilder, and commending him and his work to an immortality which the great fane whose very ground-plan is now lost has done nothing to preserve. Nature herself has undergone a change in the course of these three thousand years, and Tama and Shama, as the Arabs call them, once high and dry at all seasons of the year, now sit through the months of overflow with their huge feet in the flooding Nile waters, and throughout the winter and springtime plant them in its rich alluvium, green with the sprouting wheat, or blue-flecked with blossoms of the lentil.
More than sixteen hundred years had passed since either of them had uttered a sound, and the silence was becoming monotonous. Shama, the Southern Colossus, was the first to break it.
"Are you still there, Tama?" he asked, in a low and carefully modulated voice, which, however, awoke thunderous echoes from the Libyan range behind him, and slightly shook the windows of the Luxor Hotel.
"Why, certainly," replied his companion in the same subdued tone.
"It seems an age since I heard you sing at sunrise," muttered the Southern Colossus.
"Does it?" said Tama, with a slightly ironical inflection of the voice. "Only an age? Time seems to pass quicker with you than it does with me, or else your reckoning of it is different from mine. Considering, at least, that one World Empire has passed away, that the Power that wrested from it the dominion of the East has itself been waning for five centuries, and that Egypt has passed under a dozen dynasties, and more than a hundred rulers since I sang my last morning hymn, 'an age' seems rather an inadequate measure of the period, don't you think?"
"How long do you make it, then?" inquired Shama, somewhat nettled.
"Can't you calculate it yourself? You must know very well that I haven't sung since I was repaired."
"Which was in the year—what?"
"About 200 a.d., wasn't it?" said the Northern Colossus, after a short pause of reflection.
"Well, if you can't remember the exact date," observed Shama, shaking down a little avalanche of débris from a mound behind him with a rumble of suppressed laughter, "I can hardly be expected to."
"What does it matter within a year or two. It was the fool's trick of Septimius Severus whenever it was, and I know that it was about the end of the second century that he brought a party here for an Egyptian tour. They came with the special object of hearing me sing, and because I didn't happen to be in the humour to perform just then, he must needs restore me from the waist upwards, by way, as he imagined, of propitiating the god. The consequence is that I have never sung a note since."
"The consequence, you call it," echoed the Southern Colossus. "Well, I have never been musical myself, so of course I don't know what sort of provocation it requires to make an offended singer keep silence for sixteen hundred years; but I confess I don't quite see where the connection comes in, or why you should have left off singing because Severus had some much-needed repairs executed in your upper story."
"What? Not as an everlasting lesson to all rash restorers?"
"Rash restorers!" echoed Shama, contemptuously. "You talk as if your song had been as old as yourself, and a natural or supernatural birth-gift of your own."
The Southern Colossus spoke with some tartness of tone. He was a little irritated at his brother's airs of superiority. The Northern Figure maintained a dignified silence.
"Look here," resumed Shama at last, "I think that after all these years we might as well be candid with each other. It won't do to talk about your singing as though it were an accomplishment of immense antiquarian value. As a matter of fact, we both of us know very well that you hadn't a note in you before the earthquake of B.C. 27. A musical career of only a little over a couple of centuries isn't much to make a fuss about."
"It might have occurred to a more logical mind than yours," observed Tama coldly, "that if my power of singing was created by an injury, nothing would be more likely to reduce me to silence than its repair. But who says I never had a note of music in me before B.C. 27?"
"Well, there is no mention of it whatever in any very early record, and no one, at any rate, seems to have paid much attention to it before the Roman period."
"Have you forgotten the beautiful legend of the Greeks?"
"By no means. But the Greeks were in the habit of inventing beautiful legends with very slight provocation from the facts."
"To them," said the Northern Colossus dreamily, "I was the statue of Memnon, the son of Tithonus and Aurora, the ill-fated young Ethiopian prince who was the first to be slain before the walls of Troy; and my song at sunrise was the voice of my lament to my mother, the Morning, even as the dews which she sprinkled upon me were her tears shed for her hapless son. Ah, me! It was indeed a lovely myth."
"Oh, lovely!" said Shama, with a sneer. "But you must forgive me for reminding you that my own surface is just as dewy as yours at daybreak, and, further, that since we are as like as two beans in one of those pods down below in the field yonder, my claim to be a statue of Memnon would appear to be every bit as good as yours. Besides, why keep up the pretence of believing this silly old fable between ourselves? You must know as well as I do that the whole of the Memnon legend arose out of a ridiculous Greek misunderstanding of an Egyptian word, and that we are neither of us anything more romantic or mysterious than a sandstone portrait model of His Majesty King Amenhotep III."
In the stony recesses of his inmost heart—say, at a depth of about five feet from the surface—the Northern Colossus was as well aware of this fact as his brother, and he relapsed into a melancholy silence of some two years and a half. But, on one exquisite spring morning at the close of this period, just as the first shaft of sunrise darted across the Nile from the broken sky-line of the Arabian desert and smote his songless lips he spoke again.
"I suppose you accept the scientific explanation, then?" he said, in a somewhat embarrassed tone.
"Of course I do," replied Shama, quoting briskly from Baedeker. "The sounds which used formerly to proceed from you are on no account to be attributed to any mere priestly trick, for, in the opinion of eminent physicists it is perfectly possible that a hard resonant stone, heated by the warm sunshine suddenly following upon the cold nights in Egypt, might emit a sound in the early morning. Perhaps you are not aware that a similar phenomenon has been observed under the porphyry cliffs in the Sinai Mountains, though you might be expected to know that it has been also met with as near home as in the granite sanctuary just over the river at Karnak. It is possible that when your extensive broken and sloping surface—I speak, of course, of your condition previous to your injudicious restoration by Severus—was 'exposed to the direct rays of the rising sun while wet with the dews of early morning, a current of air might have been set up by this sudden change of temperature, and, passing over your rough and pebbly surface, might have produced the famous music. In that case the phenomenon would naturally cease when the upper part of the figure was replaced.'"
Shama recited this instructive passage with considerable fluency. Fragments of it had, in fact, been wafted up to him on many different occasions from the groups of sightseers round his base, and he had once heard it read out in extenso—and a loud voice—by a tourist who had mistaken him for the vocal Colossus, and under that delusion had clambered up into his lap.
"Yes; that is all there is to it," he continued. "Just for about two hundred and twenty-seven years you, owing solely to an injury, were a musical prodigy, while I, simply because I hadn't so much the matter with me, have never been able to sing a note."
"All art is morbid," murmured Tama, sadly, yet with a touch of complacency. "Genius is a kind of disease."
"And you," said his brother contemptuously, "could be proud of such a gift as that! Why, I would as soon plume myself on the performance of the Arab who swarms up your leg for a piastre and hides himself between your thighs to beat a tom-tom."
"Fool!" cried the Northern Colossus angrily; "Don't you see that I owe that very indignity to the fact that I can no longer make music of my own?"
"Well, and suppose you could do so once more, what, in these days, would be the consequence? Why, simply this: That there would be personally conducted parties every morning at daybreak, to hear the performances. And what would that mean? More tourists, more donkeys, more shouting Arabs, more spouting dragomen, more scarab-sellers, more mummy-hunters, more carved Smiths from Birmingham, and sculptured Browns from Chicago on your pedestal. But perhaps you enjoy that sort of thing?"
To this unworthy taunt the silently-indignant Tama vouchsafed no reply.
"You don't answer? I suppose you really do enjoy it. You positively like being vulgarised."
The offensive word was too much for the mighty figure to endure.
"Vulgarised!" he cried in a voice of wrath that rumbled up the Valley of the Nile to the First Cataract like thunder among the hills. "Vulgarised! O, Father Time! As if anything on earth could vulgarise us! Are we the meaner or the newer or the less awful for the bees that hum around our heads and hide in the crevices of our limbs? And what more power over us have the wingless, two-legged insects that crawl on the earth beneath us, creatures of a but little longer day? Do you forget how many generations of them we have seen—how many swarms of these human locusts have passed over the land and disappeared—how many conquerors, as they call themselves, have swept with their hosts along the valley towards the prize of Thebes, and trampled these fair, green fields into a mire of blood to grasp it? Do you remember them I say? Ethiopian and Assyrian, Babylonian and Mede, Cambyses and his Immortals, Alexander and his phalanx, Cæsar and his legions, Omar and his savage horsemen, Bonaparte and his eager levies—all, all have passed before us, in storm of battle or in pageant of victory, and all have vanished into the night! But we—we remain."
"Yes," said the Southern Colossus, who had not been unaffected by his companions outburst, but thought fit to hide his emotion under a mask of cynicism. "Yes, we remain, if that is a matter on which to congratulate ourselves. And I have no doubt we shall see out the present occupants of the country; which, by the way, may be all the worse for the fellah who seems as eternal as ourselves."
"Fear not but we shall outlive this tribe of red coats and black hats as we have outlived the turbaned warriors they have displaced and the mail-clad legionaries of the dynasty before. And then, like enough, that cry of the fellaheen, which has moaned along this valley from the age of the pyramid builders till it was hushed but yesterday, may ascend once more. But we—we shall remain when these things of yesterday have passed away. To the human insects of an hour we shall stand, as we have always stood, for the emblems of an antiquity to which he must bow the head in awe."
The Northern Colossus had hardly ceased speaking when, under the fast-broadening sunlight, two early visitors from Luxor trotted up on their donkeys to the base of Shama's pedestal. They dismounted and proceeded leisurely to examine him.
"Observe the cartouche of Amenhotep III.," said the first visitor, "and the inscription, 'Son of the Sun. Beloved of———.'"
"Oh, yes," said the second, though in no very profoundly interested tone. "Quartzose sandstone, you see. This came from the quarries between Keneh and Koser, no doubt. You notice, I daresay, that it does not belong to the formation of the district, which consists, I need hardly tell you, of nummulite limestone. You don't find the sandstone-conglomerate until you get as high as———"
"The waist. Yes, that is where the restoration began. But it is rather singular, considering how fond the Roman Emperors were of airing their Egyptian titles, that one doesn't find any record of the fact. I wish, old chap, you would just take a turn round the base of the Colossus and see if you can happen upon a cartouche beginning with a hieroglyphic resembling a dicky-bird looking into a stable-bucket. Because that will be the signature of Septimius Severus Autocrator, the Johnny who———"
"By Jove! Here's a find!"
"What is it? A scarab? Eh? Of the eighteenth dynasty? A relic of that infinitely dim and distant past which———"
"Pooh!" exclaimed his companion, in a tone of withering contempt. "Infinitely dim and distant fiddlestick! Why, the whole show is an affair of yesterday. Late tertiary, every foot of it. You and your scarabs! No, no, my boy! Nothing so beastly modern as that. Look at it," he continued, holding out his treasure-trove. "Do you know what it is? No! Well, then, let me tell you that, from the geologist's point of view, it is the only thing of any decent age in the place. It's Xanthopsis Paulino-Würtembergicus, one of those fossil-crabs which the Arabs offer you for a few piastres on the Mokattam, and which have been deposited here or there by the sea that swept over this desert a few million years before these two sandstone gentlemen took the seat that, no doubt, in the modern spirit of unrest, they are beginning to get tired of already."
And, lightly humming to himself an adaptation of the irreverent French refrain,
Car ils sont en pierre, en pierre,
Pour eux ce n'est pas amusant,
the geologist wandered away in quest of new "indications."
Tama, fortunately, had not heard the conversation, and Shama, who had, had never heard geology talked before, and did not understand it. Hence there was nothing to mar the stony complacency with which, unconscious of their comparative juvenility, they continued staring over the Nile.