"This man, a shaven, peculiarly hollow-voiced and relatively clean fellow who looked like a Pharaoh and called himself 'Abdul Reis el Drogman', appeared to have much power over others of his kind; though subsequently the police professed not to know him, and to suggest that reis is merely a name for any person in authority, whilst 'Drogman' is obviously no more than a clumsy modification of the word for a leader of tourist parties - dragoman."
"...across the cryptic yellow Nile that is the mother of eons and dynasties - lurked the menacing sands of the Libyan desert, undulant and iridescent and evil with older arcana.
The red sun sank low, bringing the relentless chill of Egyptian dusk; and as it stood poised on the world's rim like that ancient god of Heliopolis - Re-Harakhte, the Horizon-Sun - we saw silhouetted against its vermeil holocaust the black outlines of the Pyramids of Gizeh - the palaeogean tombs there were hoary with a thousand years when Tut-Ankh-Amen mounted his golden throne in distant Thebes. Then we knew that we were done with Saracen Cairo, and that we must taste the deeper mysteries of primal Egypt - the black Kem of Re and Amen, Isis and Osiris."
"The pyramids stand on a high rock plateau, this group forming next to the northernmost of the series of regal and aristocratic cemeteries built in the neighbourhood of the extinct capital Memphis, which lay on the same side of the Nile, somewhat south of Gizeh, and which flourished between 3400 and 2000 BC. The greatest pyramid, which lies nearest the the modern road, was built by King Cheops or Khufu about 2800 BC., and stands more than 450 feet in perpendicular height. In a line southwest from this are successively the Second Pyramid, built a generation later by King Khephren, and though slightly smaller, looking even larger because set on higher ground, and the radically smaller Third Pyramid of King Mycerinus, built about 2700 BC. Near the edge of the plateau and due east of the Second Pyramid, with a face probably altered to form a colossal portrait of Khephren, its royal restorer, stands the monstrous Sphinx - mute, sardonic, and wise beyond mankind and memory."
"There are unpleasant tales of the Sphinx before Khephren - but whatever its elder features were, the monarch replaced them with his own that men might look at the colossus without fear."
"I would give much, in view of my experience and of certain Bedouin whisperings discredited or unknown in Cairo, to know what has developed in connection with a certain well in a transverse gallery where statues of the Pharaoh were found in curious juxtaposition to the statues of baboons."
"We saw the vast pyramids at the end of avenue, ghoulish with a dim atavistical menace which I had not seemed to notice in the daytime. Even the smallest of them had a hint of the ghastly - for was it not in this that they had buried Queen Nitocris alive in the Sixth Dynasty; a subtle Queen Nitocris, who once invited all her enemies to a feast in a temple below the Nile, and drowned them by opening the watergates? I recalled that the Arabs whisper things about Nitocris, and shun the Third Pyramid at certain phases of the moon. It must have been over her that Thomas Moore was brooding when he wrote a thing muttered about by Memphian boatmen:
The subterranean nymph that dwells
'Mid sunless gems and glories bid -
The lady of the Pyramid!"
"It gradually dawned on me that the elder magic of Egypt did not depart without leaving traces, and that fragments of a strange secret lore and priestly cult-practises have survived surreptitiously amongst the fellaheen to such an extent that the prowess of a strange hahwi or magician is resented and disputed. I thought of how much my hollow-voiced guide Abdul Reis looked like an old Egyptian priest or Pharaoh or smiling Sphinx... and wondered."
"It was very gradually that I regained my senses after that eldritch flight through stygian space. The process was infinitely painful, and coloured by fantastic dreams in which my bound and gagged condition found singular embodiment [...] I dreamed that I was in the grasp of a great and horrible paw; a yellow, hairy, five-clawed paw which had reached out of the earth to crush and engulf me. And when I stopped to reflect what the paw was it seemed to me that it was Egypt. In the dream I looked back at the events of the preceding weeks, and saw myself lured and enmeshed little by little , subtly and insidiously, by some hellish ghoul-spirit of the elder Nile sorcery; some spirit that was in Egypt before ever man was and that will be when man is no more.
I saw the horror and unwholesome antiquity of Egypt, and the grisly alliance it has always had with the tombs and temples of the dead. I saw phantom processions of priests with the heads of bulls, falcons, cats and ibises; phantom processions marching interminably through subterraneous labyrinths and avenues of titanic propylaea beside which a man is as a fly, and offering unnamable sacrifices to indescribable gods. Stone colossi marched in endless night and drove herds of grinning androsphinxes down to the shores of illimitable stagnant rivers of pitch. And behind it all I saw the ineffable malignity of primordial necromancy, black and amorphous, and fumbling greedily after me in the darkness to choke out the spirit that had dared to mock it by emulation.
In my sleeping brain there took shape a melodrama of sinister hatred and pursuit, and I saw the black soul of Egypt singling me out and calling me in inaudible whispers; calling and luring me, leading me on with the glitter and glamour of a Saracenic surface, but ever pulling me down to the age-mad catacombs and horrors of its dead and abysmal pharaonic heart.
Then the dream faces took on human resemblances, and I saw my guide Abdul Reis in the robes of a king, with the sneer oh the Sphinx on his features. And I knew that those features were the features of Khephren the Great, who raised the Second Pyramid, carved over the Sphinx's face in the likeness of his own and built that titanic gateway temple whose myriad corridors the archeologists think they have dug out of the cryptical sand and the uninformative rock. And I looked at the long, lean, rigid hand of Khephren; the long, lean, rigid hand as I had seen it on the diorite statue in the Cairo museum - the statue they had found in the terrible gateway temple - and wondered that I had no shrieked when I saw it on Abdul Reis.... That hand! It was hideously cold, and it was crushing me; it was the cold and cramping of the sarcophagus.... the chill and constriction of unrememberable Egypt.... It was nighted, necropolitan Egypt itself... that yellow paw.... and they whisper such things of Khephren... "
"All these people thought of was death and the dead. They concieved of a literal resurrection of the body which made them mummify it with desperate care, and preserve all the vital organs in canopic jars near the corpse; whilst besides the body they believed in two other elements, the soul, which after its weighing and approval by Osiris dwelt in the land of the blest, and the obscure and portentous ka or life-principle which wandered about the upper and lower worlds in a horrible way, demanding occasional access to the preserved body, consuming the food offerings brought by priests and pious relatives to the mortuary chapel, and sometimes - as men whispered - taking its body or the wooden double always buried beside it and stalking noxiously abroad on errands peculiarly repellent.
For thousands of years those bodies rested gorgeously encased and staring glassily upward when not visited by the ka, awaiting the day when Osiris should restore both ka and soul, and lead forth the stiff legions of the dead from the sunken houses of sleep. It was to have been a glorious rebirth - but not all souls were approved, nor were all tombs inviolate, so that certain grotesque mistakes and fiendish abnormalities were to be looked for. Even today the Arabs murmur of unsanctified convocations and unwholesome worship in forgotten nether abysses which only winged invisible kas and soulless mummies may visit and return unscathed.
Perhaps the most leeringly blood-congealing legends are those which relate to certain perverse products of decadent priestcraft - composite mummies made by the artificial union of human trunks and limbs with the heads of animals in imitation of the elder gods. At all stages of history the sacred animals were in mummified, so that consecrated bulls, cats, ibises, crocodiles and the like might return some day to greater glory. But only in the decadence did they mix the human and animal in the same mummy - only in the decadence, when they did not understand the rights and prerogatives of the ka and the soul."
"They even hint that old Khephren - he of the Sphinx, the Second Pyramid and the yawning gateway temple - lives far underground wedded to the ghoul-queen Nitocris and ruling over the mummies that are neither of man nor of beast."
"From some still lower chasm in earth's bowels were proceeding certain sounds, measured and definite, and like nothing I had ever head before. That they were very ancient and distinctly ceremonial I felt almost intuitively; and much reading in Egyptology led me to associate them with the flute, the sambuke, the sistrum, and the tympanum. In their rhythmic piping, droning, rattling and beating I felt an element of terror beyond all the known terrors of earth - a terror peculiarly dissociated from personal fear, and taking the form of a sort of objective pity for out planet, that is should hold within its depths such horrors as must lie beyond these aegipanic cacophanies. The sounds increased in volume, and I felt that they were approaching. Then - and may all the gods of all the pantheons unite to keep the like from my ears again - I began to hear, faintly and afar off, the morbid and millennial tramping of the marching things."
"...the mummies without souls, the meeting-place of the wandering kas.... the hordes of the devil cursed pharaonic dead of forty centuries... the composite mummies led through the uttermost onyx voids by King Khephren and his ghoul-queen Nitocris..."
"A fiendish and ululant corpse-gurgle or death-rattle now split the very atmosphere - the charnel atmosphere poisonous with naftha and bitumen blasts - in one concerted chorus from the ghoulish legion of hybrid blasphemies. My eyes, perversely shaken open, gazed for an instant upon a sight which no human creature could even imagine without panic, fear and physical exhaustion. The things had filed ceremonially in one direction, the direction of the noisome wind, where the light of their torches showed their bended heads of such as had heads. They were worshipping before a great black fetor-belching aperture which reached up almost out of sight, and which I could see was flanked at right angles by two giant staircases whose ends were far away in shadow.
The dimesions of the hole were fully in proportion with those of the columns - an ordinary house would have been lost in it, and any average public building could easily have been moved in and out. It was so vast a surface that only by moving the eye could one trace its boundaries.... so vast, so hideously black, and so aromatically stinking.... Directly in front of this yawning Polyphemus-door the things were throwing objects - evidently sacrifices or religious offerings, to judge by their gestures. Khephren was their leader; sneering King Khephren or the guide Abdul Reis, crowned with a golden pshent and intoning endless formulae with the hollow voice of the dead. By his side knelt beautiful Queen Nitocris, whom I saw in profile for a moment, nothing that the right half of her face was eaten away by rats or other ghouls. And I shut my eyes again when I saw what objects were being thrown as offerings to the fetid aperture or its possible local deity.
It occured to me that, judging from the elaborateness of this worship, the concealed deity must be one of considerable importance. Was it Osiris, or Isis, Horus or Anubis, or some vast unknown God of the Dead still more central and supreme? There is a legend that terrible altars and colossi were reared to an Unknown One before ever the known gods were worshipped..."
"The monstrosities were hailing something which had poked itself out of the nauseous aperture to seize the hellish fare proffered it. It was something quite ponderous, even as seen from my height; something yellowish and hairy, and endowed with a sort of nervous motion. It was as large, perhaps, as a good-sized hippopotamus, but very curiously shaped. It seemed to have no neck, but five seperate shaggy heads springing in a row, from a roughly cylindrical trunk; the first very small, the second good-sized, the third and fourth equal and the fifth rather small, though not so small as the first.
Out of these heads darted curious rigid tentacles which seized ravenously on the excessively great quantities of unmentionable good placed before the aperture. Once in a while the thing would leap up, and occasionally it would retreat into its den in a very odd manner. Its locomotion was so inexplicable that I stared in fascination, wish it would emerge farther from the cavernous lair beneath me.
Then it did emerge.... it did emerge, and at the sight I turned and fled into the darkness up the higher staircase that rose behind me; fled unknowingly up incredible steps and ladders and inclined planes to which no human sight or logic guided me, and which I must ever relegate to the world of dreams for want to any confirmation. It must have been a dream, or the dawn would never have found me breathing on the sands of Gizeh before the sardonic dawn-flushed face of the Great Sphinx.
The Great Sphinx! God! - that idle question I asked myself on that sunblest morning before... what huge and loathsome abnormality was the Sphinx originally carved to represent? Accursed is the sight, be it in dream or not, that revealed to me the supreme horror - the unknown God of the Dead, which licks its colossal chops in the unsuspected abyss, fed hideous morsels by soulless absurdities that should not exist. The five-headed monster that emerged... that five-headed monster as large as a hippopotamus... the five-headed monster - and that of which it is the merest forepaw....
But I survived, and I know it was only a dream."
Retour en haut
Well, that actually works really well with my analogy. If I'm looking at things through a sniper's scope, my vision is tunneled and I can miss the big picture. Which is why snipers don't run around staring into their lense.
I like to think of it as me being sure of my stances.
