There was a King in Egypt. Norma Lorimer
French novels and one or two volumes of the Temple Classics to her room.
"She'd better begin on this," he said, as he returned in search of still more. "She can't do better"—he lifted up the weighty tome of Maspero's Dawn of Civilization.
"A bit dry, isn't it, for a beginner?"
"Not for Meg," Freddy said. "She can tackle pretty stiff stuff. At college she used to suck the guts out of a book like a weasel sucking blood from a rabbit."
"Blue stocking!" Michael said to himself. He abhorred the type of ardent, eager, studious woman with whom he had come in contact during his university life. "Able and abominable" he called them.
In less than ten minutes the two companions had separated; the one, with his paint-box and camp-stool in his hand, made his way to the tomb where he was copying with delicate and extraordinary exactitude the exquisite figures and heads painted on the walls and pillars of the vast building; the other directed his steps to the site where the band of native excavators was already at work.
What a strange sight it presented in the brilliant morning sunshine! To the untutored eye nothing more or less than a vast rubbish-heap of sand and stones and broken rocks, with here and there patches of sparsely-clad natives working away with pickaxes and the tall figure of a white-robed gaphir, standing on a hillock of sand, watching them with unremitting care. On the sides of the vast ashpits long lines of "boys," toiling like ants up steep inclines, were carrying rush-baskets full of rubbish on their shoulders.
Yet these ignorant fellahin were playing their part, and an indispensable one, in laying bare to modern eyes the history of the world's first civilization. This vast rubbish-heap, where men with pickaxes and boys with baskets, full of the dust and sand of ages, toiled from dawn until sunset, would in the course of time yield perhaps to the Egyptologist one of the long-looked-for links in the lost centuries of Egypt's story, or be transformed into a wonderful picture-gallery of Egyptian art.
Nothing could look less inviting, less interesting, as Freddy approached it, for as yet there was little or nothing for the untutored eye to see but the debris of familiar desert rubbish. But Freddy Lampton knew otherwise. Only yesterday the most experienced of the workmen had struck something hard, something which told him that they had finished with loose sand and broken rocks and had struck the ancient handiwork of man.
The site chosen had been a mere conjecture on Freddy Lampton's part, a conjecture guided by scientific knowledge and careful research. He felt convinced that the tomb which they were looking for was close to the spot where they were working. Indications such as the excavator looks for had decided him to begin work on the site. The discovery yesterday had been nothing more or less than the first indication of a narrow flight of steps, cut in the virgin desert rock, a stairway probably built by the tomb-builders for the use of the workmen, in order to carry away baskets of sand and rubbish without slipping.
The moment that the expert workman had come across this staircase, they had suspended work until "Effendi" had been sent for and found. Under his eye and partly by his own pickaxe, the little flight of embryo steps, with a very steep gradient, had been laid bare. In the vast expanse which the work covered, it seemed a very small thing, but the greatest underground temples—for the tombs are veritable temples—of Egypt, and some of the most wonderful of her monuments, have been discovered by far fainter clues. The little staircase, about twenty feet below the surface of the sand, was enough to fill the young Englishman's heart with hope. He had come upon man's handiwork—no doubt they would soon come upon more important masonry.
When all the workmen had saluted the Effendi with respectful salaams and returned to their common toil, Freddy Lampton addressed the native overseer. He was enveloped in a white woollen hooded cloak, for the heat of the day had not yet begun; he also wore a fine turban; while the fellahin who did the roughest work wore only white skull-caps and cotton drawers to their knees and full shirts of blue or white cotton, open from the neck to the waist. A few of the better-paid older men wore turbans of cheap white muslin, wrapped round brown felt skull-caps, or fezes. The carriers of rubbish, who received the smallest pay of any, dispensed with the drawers as well as with the turban. In the sunlight their one garment, a blue or white shirt, stood out against the yellow sand as they wound their way in Indian file from the low level of the excavation to the place in the desert where they threw down their burdens.
The gaphir led his master a few steps from where the staircase had been excavated the day before and then bade him look own. Freddy's quick eye detected a horizontal line of masonry, the beginning of a strongly-built wall. The men had earthed it that morning, it was only a narrow strip, but it would have been against the strictest rules to have excavated more without informing the "Effendi."
The gaphir, a splendid man and very reliable, adored his enthusiastic English master, whose good looks and well-bred, unfailing courtesy of speech alone would have made his personality irresistible to the Arab. Added to his good looks and to his manner of "one who is born to be obeyed," Freddy had courage and great ability and—best of all in the gaphir's eyes—a silent respect for the teachings of the Prophet.
After an inspection of the various points of excavation and a word of greeting here and there had been passed with upper workmen, those who had showed an intelligent interest in their work, Freddy returned to the exciting spot and with two or three men who had "fingers" and a "sense" of things, began his morning's picking.
While he worked away with youthful energy and an almost inspired intelligence, he could hear the toilers with the rubbish-baskets singing their monotonous chants. The word "Allah, Allah" came repeatedly to his ears. He had grown so accustomed to the words of their chants that he followed them subconsciously; the words "Allah, Lord of Kindness, Giver of Ease," rang out with monotonous persistence. Allah was to ease their burdens; Allah was to moisten their dry lips; the "Lord of the Worlds" was to hasten the time when the poor man might sit in the shade and smell the sweet scents of paradise and listen to the sound of running waters.
They chanted verses from the Koran as Jack Tars sing sea songs. In
Mohammedan lands the song of Allah never dies.
Only occasionally Freddy heard the quaint words of some popular love-song, coming from the lips of one of the higher-class Arab workmen, a song as old as their tales of The Thousand and One Nights. One was drifting to his half-conscious ears at the moment; he was familiar with every word of it.
"A lover says to his dove, 'Send me your wings for a day.' The dove replied, 'The affair is vain.' I said, 'Some other day, that I may soar through the sky and see the face of the beloved; I shall obtain love enough for a year and will return, O dove, in a day.' The night! The night! O those sweet hands! Gather of the dewy peach! Whence were ye, and whence were we, when ye ensnared us?"
The Arab who was singing it was considered quite a musician amongst his fellow-workmen. He had earned his living for some years by singing love-songs on the small boats which drift up and down the Nile and in the cafés in Luxor. To English ears his talents as a singer would not have been recognized; the particular qualities which ensured the approval of his native audience would have caused much laughter in an English music-hall. Freddy Lampton, who knew something of Arab music, was able to recognize the singer's talents, but he was not near enough to hear the grunts of intense satisfaction and longing which the song was calling forth from the blue-shirted fellahin.
And so the hours of the morning wore on, until the sun was too powerful to allow even the natives to work, and Freddy Lampton wandered off to the tomb in which his friend was painting. The fellahin instantly untied the bundles which held their simple food and began their midday meal. Many of them prayed before eating; many of them did not.
When the meal was eaten, each man sought some vestige of shade, behind a mound of rock or an ash-heap of debris, or in the excavated channels of the site; there with full stomach and contented mind he would lay himself down to sleep, amid the heap of ruins which thousands of years ago had been the field of vast numbers of toilers, such as were he and his fellow-toilers, slaving for the glorification of an absolute monarch, whose kingdom was the civilized world. He cared not one jot nor tittle