We are told that at one time the British Isles were connected with the mainland of Europe; that Italy was at least within sight of the African coast; and that westward from Gibraltar, there was a continent which ultimately sank beneath the waves, leaving isolated mountain peaks, now islands and shoals, to mark its submerged position.
The Egyptian priesthood told Solon of the greatness of the civilization of this submerged land, Atlantis or Kami, even then, as of an ancient past; and Homer, Horace and Plato have whispered of its greatness.
The soul of one of its ancient inhabitants, yet wandering upon this earth, may through transmigration have become in part your own, and you, in reverie at odd hours and in company with it, live again a few scenes of those old days.
Near Winchester, Kentucky, driving out the Lexington turnpike you pass an old brick farmhouse of ante-bellum days; flanked on the one side by an old stone springhouse under two spreading elms and on the other by a large tobacco barn that looks extremely modern and out of place. Behind the house is an orchard of ancient apple and pear trees, all dead at the top, a negro cabin beside which are two black heart cherry trees, higher than the farmhouse and more than three feet through; and yet farther back, hemp and tobacco fields and awoodland pasture of oak and walnut trees. At least this was a description of my home thirty years ago.
I had just graduated from Center College, and having in mind to practice law in Lexington, had during the summer formed the habit of going down to the springhouse and under the shade of its eaves and the overhanging elms, sit and read Kent's Commentaries.
A negro family lived in the cabin, Mose Hunter, his wife and boy. Mose was as black as they grow them in Kentucky; but his wife was the color of my old volumes of Kent and had build and features which fixed the country of her ancestry in northern Africa and seemed to identify her as a desert Berber. Mose worked on the farm, his wife was cook at the farmhouse, and the boy, who was said to be half imbecile, was as harmless and shy as a ground robin. I do not know of his ever having gone off the place. He was probably fourteen, had never been to school, and wandered about like a lost turkey hen. We could depend upon him to pick up the apples, feed the cider mill, water the stock, gather the eggs and feed the pigs and chickens.
The boy had the habit of coming to the springhouse and taking a nap each day on the milk crock bench, which had been discarded since we had bought our new refrigerator. Every warm summer afternoon about three o'clock, he would run down the path, dodge behind a tree out of sight, if his mother happened to step out of the kitchen door, and slipping into the springhouse, lie down and sleep quietly in its cool moist shade for a quarter of an hour; then, still asleep, sit up and in a startled way, talk earnestly for some time, his features transformed by a look of tragic intelligence, which they did not possess at other times. Then he would lie down again and aftera few minutes quiet sleep, awake and return to the cabin.
His speech did not disturb me; his voice was low, though tense, and his words unintelligible. Gradually his murmurings became a familiar sound, as the call of the lark from the pasture gatepost.
Finally I noticed that he spoke in an apparently strange tongue and even mentioned time and again names given in my ancient atlas. Many times he used the words, pehu, Kami, Theni, horshesu, hik, nut, tash, hesoph, and un.
I wrote Professor Fales of Danville about this time, sending him a small box of crinoids, and casually mentioned the boy and his strange habit, writing out the above list of words, with others, that he habitually repeated.
He wrote back that the words were Egyptian or a kindred Hamite tongue. Consulting the college library, he had discovered that the ancient Egyptian name for Atlantis was Kami. That Theni was the name of a very ancient prehistoric city, its location unknown. That pehu meant an overflowed land; un, uncultivated land; and the word tash, tribe; the others he was unable to translate.
He suggested that I find out from the boy's mother where she or her people were from; get a stenographer at Winchester to come out and make careful notes of his murmurings; and when made send a copy to him and one to——, a lawyer at Covington, who was an antiquarian and an Egyptologist.
The next day after the receipt of the letter I went to Winchester and inquired at the court-house for the official stenographer. I learned, as all courts in the district were adjourned for the summer, he had gone toAtlantic City for the month. So I went to Judge Buckner's office and borrowed his stenographer.
The Judge said the season was dull and except on county court day he could spare the girl for an hour or two almost any afternoon. He also asked if my father still had on hand that half barrel of Old Mock. The next afternoon when I went for the girl I brought the Judge a gallon jug of Dad's Old Mock, telling the folks I was taking him some cider.
When we returned, we found the boy asleep in the springhouse, but within five minutes of our arrival he sat up and went through the regular program. After he had talked for some time, he laid down and resumed his quiet slumber.
This program was repeated the next day except the girl brought out a slate and succeeded in making the boy write or draw upon it characters which were strange to us, and which he wrote from right to left with great ease, though he could not write his name.
The writings on the slate the stenographer carefully copied and after transcribing her notes gave me the copies, one of which I sent to Professor Fales, who forwarded it to his learned friend at Covington. He not only wrote but telegraphed for more.
Twice again the boy's words were taken down and twice he wrote again upon the slate. We might with patience and quiet have gotten a complete history of a generation of prehistoric people, but my mother, who still looked upon me as a young boy incapable of caring for himself in the company of a designing female person, and having noted our regular visits to the springhouse, rushed down unannounced with the boy's mother.
The two made such a racket when they came in theyawoke the boy, who dropped the slate. He never again came to the springhouse to sleep; and though afterwards I sat many hours by his bedside in the cabin, he never again uttered a strange or unusual sound until just before his death, which occurred in the fall.
In the early fall his father and mother visited a negro family who had a child ill with scarlet fever. Within two weeks their own boy was taken with the same illness and a few days thereafter died. Shortly before his death I went into the cabin and found him raving in the strange tongue. He had been born on the place. I felt too sad to be curious or to go for the stenographer, but I remember very distinctly the sounds of the last few words he uttered, which were twice repeated. These I wrote down and sent away. I found the translation of the words was; "After a brief bird life I shall find Nirvana."
In a talk with his mother, which occurred some time before his death, she stated that it was a rare thing he ever talked in his sleep and then only used the most common expressions.
She told me her mother was born west of Timbuctu, belonged to a Berber tribe, and had been taken prisoner and sold to slave dealers of the west African coast.
Several weeks after the boy's death I received from Professor Fales a liberal translation of the boy's talk and writings, which at the suggestion of the professor and his friend I have kept a secret, as neither of us believed in transmigration, or desired to figure as in any sense encouraging such an outrageously absurd belief.
The translator and professor are both dead and I suppose their copies have been destroyed. I give mine to the public as a spooky flight of fancy unworthy ofbelief, aware that this declaration will cause a few half-crazy people to believe the tale is true.
THE TRANSLATION.
The city of Theni is the capital of Kami. The western and southern coast of Kami and the interior country to the central range is a pleasant land, where palm trees of many kinds grow and there is much tropical verdure because on these coasts there is a constant current of warm water, which comes through an untraveled sea lying west and south of us, and in which float endless paths of sargassum.
To the north and east beyond the central range, as also the land northeast of us across the sea, are barren wastes of ice and snow. It has not always been so. Our records show that centuries ago the whole land was as the south and west coast country, but each year the fields of ice swallow more and more of our sweet and fertile land, until now we have but little space for our teeming population and each year less and less to eat.
On the top of a mountain south of our city dwell a few strange people with a strange faith and who keep to themselves. For years they have been building a great ship well up the mountain side. They are directed and encouraged in this useless labor by a prophet who tells of the early destruction of our land by ice and water.
I visited the place recently; the great ship is nearly completed and they are beginning to sheet the hull with copper to protect it from ice floes.
For three nights past my sleep has been disturbed by strange, wild dreams. I see the warm ocean currents which wash our shores, shifted westward by some strangefreak of nature, and a land far north of us, now ice and snow, turned into greenland; while our whole land is enshrouded in death dealing cold and ice and snow and preceding this, the waters creep up and engulf our city. The mountain on which the great ship rests sinks down to meet the rising waters and the ship sails off to the southeast, leaving us helpless victims to be engulfed by the rising waters or frozen by the creeping, numbing cold, or smothered under mountains of ice and snow. How long before this shall be I do not know.
I have told my dream to Nefert, the best beloved of my wives, and we have agreed to prepare against the portent of such catastrophes.
We have too many idle, too many to feed; it were better were our population reduced one-half.
We will gather all the provisions of the land into great warehouses, and only those shall eat who labor to build our great pyramid, within which the chosen shall find refuge from the rising waters and the destructive cold.
When the pyramid is completed, we shall store it with great quantities of grain and fuel and textiles to last for years; and as the waters rise, if they shall cover the eminence on which we shall built it, which seems impossible, we shall ascend from the lower to the upper chambers.
On the morrow we will begin our preparations, which will not be wasted, though the flood and cold come not, as it will make for us a most pretentious tomb.
I shall send a great force to gather grain and other foodstuffs, another to collect fuel, others still shall be put to work to weave heavy woolen textiles. Five thousand shall quarry stone for the pyramid of Theni, whichshall be built upon the highest mountain near our city. Thirty thousand shall drag and carry great stones from the quarries to the site and fifteen thousand more shall shape and place the stones. Twelve thousand shall act as guards and task masters, to see that the work is done and speedily.
I shall tell the pyramid is for my tomb and until my death to be used as a great storage warehouse; else the people may grow frightened and desperate. They have not yet learned to fear storage plants. Those of the people who are too old or too young to labor shall die.
Dimly discernible from the city is the central high mountain range, extending from the eastern coast far to the northwest and there ending in a rugged promontory, jutting out into a frozen sea.
The country across these mountains, and even to their snow-capped, fog-bannered peaks, is a land of ice and snow, destitute of all life, except a few wild and hardy white-clothed birds and beasts. Even from the mountain peaks you may see the spires and walls of an ice-encased, long dead city.
Near the city is a lesser range, upon which to their very tops grow dense groves of palm and other fern-like trees. In the shelter of these groves are many villas of the rich.
Upon the highest of this range and near our granite quarries I have decided to build the pyramid. The task of building, beginning today, will be pushed with the utmost speed.
The road leading from the city to the top and from the quarries we broadened and regraded. The site was cleared and leveled and the basal walls, six hundred and eighty feet square, started. The height is to be threehundred and fifty feet and the wall angle is approximately forty-seven degrees.
During the building there was much sickness and many deaths from starvation and hardship, for all of which I was held responsible, and until the laboring-people swore at and called me Santa, The Terrible.
Each day the pyramid grew in size; and each night seemed slightly colder than the one preceding it. It was reported that the snow on the distant mountain peaks was deeper than ever before.
We now used the lower stories of the pyramid as a storeroom for fuel and grain and were forced constantly to maintain a heavy guard to keep the half-starved populace from stealing our supplies. I had executed more than a dozen who were caught attempting to steal food stored for their betters.
The warm ocean current shifted to the west. The sun was overcast by clouds. The earth trembled. The snow line crept down the mountain range. The land seemed slowly sinking into the sea. The people shook from fear and cold.
It was necessary to push the work, and, in their terror and to satisfy their hunger, the whole population labored on the pyramid.
One night, when the pyramid was three hundred feet high, a light snow, the first, covered pyramid mountain. A few weeks later there was another and the next morning there was thin ice.
A swift-running mountain river separated pyramid mountain and the city of Theni from the foothills of the distant range. Gradually the current disappeared. The river became a salt lake, then a bay of the great western sea.
One night there was an earthquake, in which we feared for the destruction of the pyramid, and in which a number of the houses of the city toppled over on their occupants.
In the morning it was observed that the mountain on which the prophet's people lived had settled until the place where the ship rested was but a few feet above the level of our new sea. The mountain on which our pyramid had been constructed and the adjacent plain on which the city was built had risen materially in altitude; at least such seemed to be the case.
Within ten days the ship rode at anchor. Then I knew that my gods had been good to me and had truly warned so I might make preparation. I determined on the morrow to seize the ship and retain it for my own use. All owners of boats had long since fled the land. The next morning when I awoke the ship was a distant speck upon the growing ocean. It seemed the gods of some few others were caring for them also.
The pyramid now was about completed and not having provisions for all, though we of the palace stinted not ourselves, having plenty for years, I directed the guards to issue only half rations to the people. They died by hundreds and were cast from the cliffs into the cold waters of the sea.
Noticing that great crowds gathered in the city and that they wept and swore and encouraged one another to assault the palace and tear their ruler to pieces, I thought it best to desert the palace and take possession of the pyramid, which was full of provisions, and had a guard of several thousand soldiers.
So we of the palace, some hundred persons, with a guard of more than three hundred, moved into the pyramid; and, with the stones prepared for that purpose,closed the entrance hall with fifty feet of solid masonry, telling the soldiers outside that we would feed them from our supplies, which we had no intention of doing, except as they might be of use. How easy it is to fool the common people.
That night it stormed and sleet and snow made the outer pyramid a thing of milky glass.
The half-naked, half-starved people came by thousands, and holding out their hands in supplication, begged for bread. But we, sheltered and fed and clothed and sitting by our fires, had no thought for and took no risk for others.
The pyramid in the winter sunlight, with its coating of milk-white ice, seemed an immense half-buried diamond; and we within its heart were not more considerate of the starving, surging mass at its base.
Through the narrow slit-like ventilators, we heard in the afternoon the sound of strife; and, climbing to the flat top, where there was a walled-in area about twenty feet square, looked down upon the soldiers struggling with and slaughtering the half-armed, starving, shivering populace.
For sport, not caring whether they killed soldiers or subjects, I had some of our guard bring a quantity of unused granite blocks about two feet square and slide them down the ice-smooth surface into the seething mass below.
After watching for some time, though clothed in a heavy woolen gown, I grew cold and tired of the sport and went below to the feast, the music and the dance. There I sat with Nefert and two other queens, not less beautiful.
One of the guards from the pinnacle came down and reported that the soldiers had ceased fighting thepopulace and, joining cause with them, were attempting to scale the pyramid by cutting steps in the icy surface. So again I went above and Nefert went with me.
Our guards collected small stone blocks and with them bowled off our desperate, slowly-climbing assailants. The boulders slid over the glazed surface with the speed of a swift-winged water fowl and when they found a victim precipitated him, a death-dealing catapultic charge upon the heads of his comrades. The effort to reach us was utterly futile.
For several days we found it great sport to shoot loaves of bread and a few tempting morsels of food down to the starving mass and watch them fight and struggle for possession.
At my suggestion, to make the game of greater interest, we took the bread from the crusts and stuffed the loaves with stones. Occasionally, one snatching for the bread lost his life from the stone loaf. So the days passed, not wholly without amusement.
The whole land was now white with snow and ice. Great white bears came out of the mountains of the north and feasted on the dead at the base of the pyramid. Nowhere in the land could we see a living man.
In our company was a beautiful young maid; and, thinking she might furnish amusement for a dull afternoon, I gave orders that she be brought to my quarters.
She was carried thence, struggling and in tears. With her came one of our captains, who said she was to be his wife, and asked me to spare her discourtesy for his sake. He had many times been of service, but no more so than a subject should be. I directed that he be thrown from the top platform, and took the girl with me, so she might see the spectacle.
The guards lifted him over the wall and gave a shove. He started slowly, bracing and resisting with hands and feet, but was soon speeding meteor-like down the icy incline. He disappeared, in the snow and debris at the base, but in a few minutes reappeared, with right arm swinging useless at his side.
The girl, giving a cry, leaped over the wall and skimming along the incline as a swallow might the face of a white slanting cliff, sped towards her lover. The man leaped to the edge to break her fall and she struck him with destructive force. They were thrown some distance and lay still in the snow, which was crimsoned by their bleeding wounds.
Two great white bears, smelling the blood, came forth from behind the cliffs and feasted upon the pair.
In a few more days the icy waters of a polar sea covered the city of Theni; and in tears we witnessed the great dome of the temple of our gods sink beneath its surface. The next week great icebergs were floating across the plain and above the site of Theni. It grew intensely cold and the inner walls of our great upper hall were coated with frost crystals.
The wind shrieked; great waves striking the mountain side shook our pyramid. The sight was blotted out by a blizzard of snow and ice.
The guards are kept busy with spears and spades trying to keep the ventilators and the pinnacle area free of snow and ice so we can have air. Several have been blown from the top.
We made a mistake in the construction of our refuge. We should have shielded our ventilators to keep off the snow. It is a hard struggle for air. Tomorrow we muststart work opening the passageway for light and air. Nefert says I should have built a ship and sailed away, as did the prophet and his people.
Nefert awake. It is dark and cold. The air is foul. I hear rushing waters. It comes in the ventilators above our heads. It is salty. We are being swallowed by the icy sea. I have found you! O! How cold! How cold!
I know not how long it has been, nor how many different habitations my soul has tenanted since our pyramid sank beneath the icy sea and, holding Nefert in my arms, I lost consciousness.
I am now in India, near the city of Bombay. A city presenting a magnificent front, but reeking with filth and disease, where, through the year, cholera daily claims its victims. It is the year 1790.
On the top of a high hill in a beautiful garden are three Dakhmas or Parsee towers of silence. These towers, built like a windowless colosseum, are massive cylinders of hard black granite, open to the heavens.
The parapet supports a coping of motionless living vultures, waiting in patience to be fed. Here the death rate is high and there are many to die, so they do not suffer from hunger.
The vultures grow restless; they see a funeral cortege of black men in spotless white robes; they bear a black corpse in a white shroud. The body is hastily deposited within the area on its bed of stone and mattress of charcoal. The vultures swoop down to the feast. In a short while, satiated, they rise on heavy wing and lazily resettle upon the parapet.
All day long, my soul struggling for freedom or forgetfulness, is caged within the body of one of these vultures. I do not see the sun except through vulture eyes. I do not feed except upon the dead. My companions are vultures. I am never beyond the smell of the dead. I have no friendships, no hopes.
There are times at night when my vulture body sleeps. Then the soul seems to break forth; but it does not go out in freedom as of old. I may go into the hovels of Bombay in the form of an old black beggar.
Then it is my overwhelming desire to do some act of kindness, but my clothes are in rags; my face is a horrid mask, and I smell of the dead and am driven away.
I found a man dying by the wayside, too weak to move, too blind to see. When he asked for water, I thought now is my chance. I shuffled to the fountain and when I would dip up a cupful, it became as solid glass.
At a time of famine I found a child crying for bread without the city walls. At great strain upon my feeble limbs, I climbed a wall and stole from the kitchen of the enclosed villa a roasted fowl and carried it to the child. The child took it, but when he raised it to eat, it was the hand of a putrid corpse.
When I lift the head of the sick, they shudder and gasp and grow cold.
So I return to my vulture body, to my perch on the parapet, to breakfast on the dead and to my vulture consort.
(End of translation.)
I spent the next winter at law school, returning to the old farmhouse the middle of May.
The first time I went down to the springhouse, I saw a vividly-colored golden robin or hangnest restlessly flitting about the old elm trees and occasionally bursting into loud-noted song.
A few days later I heard and saw him again. He was not so restless, and his song was low-toned and had a rich and more pleasant refrain. His notes were of endless and individual variety.
When he ceased singing I heard an incessant warble of sweet, though feeble, notes and, looking above my head, saw the composer, his bride, dressed in olive and gold, weaving on the pendulous nest of moss and horse hair, near the tips of the overhanging limb. I then knew why his song had changed and understood the happy warble of the busy weaver.
They were so gaily colored, so happily situated, their home so far from harm, they were so exclusive, that I called the pair the little king and queen.
Bright pair of boundless wing and sweet song, did you first meet here? You did not come together. How did the king mark the way for his queen? Have you searched all the way from Panama, your winter home, for this old elm, to celebrate your bird marriage, pass your honeymoon and find much joy in nest-building and rearing a family? Do you know tears and night and nothingness? Or have you found and eaten of the fruit of the trees of life and eternal love?
In about three weeks all song ceased. They made incessant trips to the old orchard and returned with caterpillars to feed five cavernous yellow-throated mouths.
One warm sultry afternoon in June I sat in my old place by the springhouse, reading Story's EquityJurisprudence and, closing the book, enjoyed the ease and peace of the lazy, if not the righteous.
I slept; and my mind jumbling the springhouse, the orioles, the dead boy and his strange tale, whispered that my little king and queen of the hanging nest were Santa and Nefert. Thereafter I called them as the dream had said.
The little nestlings grew apace and the nest made tight quarters. One, seeking room and adventure, climbed out and perched upon a twig. Growing careless or sleepy, or caught by a squall, he half flew, half fell from his perch.
The big black cat, who every week ate his weight in young birds, pounced upon the unfortunate one, who let out a squawk of terror.
Santa darted into the face of the cat with such fierce force as to rescue the baby bird, but lost his own life by his brave rashness.
Before the plumage of white, black and old gold had been marred I drove the cat away and picked up the little dead king.
In the corner of the old orchard, hedged about by a stone fence overhung with myrtle and honeysuckle, under three ancient cedar trees, were four graves; three of slaves long dead and the other of the half-witted boy.
Under the fresh green sod of the newer grave I buried the dead bird, and marked the spot with little cedar grave boards, on which I carved the name, "Santa." What a place to bury a king who had built a great pyramid for his sepulchre!
I sat under the old elm trees reading a work on Early Egyptian Civilization, which declared that the recorded history of that ancient people began when Menes was king, about 4300 B. C.
Placing the book, back up on the ground, I thought of their strange faith; the reverent care with which they embalmed the body to be again occupied by the soul, when, after many transmigrations from one animal to another, having expiated all sins done in the body, it should return purified to the old body. Assuming their belief true, where now might be those ancient believers in Osiris, Ra, Horus, Isis, Set and other nature gods, having ages before bowed in submission to Bes, the god of death?
How limited is sense; how weak intellect; how short bodily life. Yet the very frailty and uncertainty of life establishes the immortality of the soul and the soul, in turn, gives spontaneous testimony to God and of a life within which the body does not own.
Nature was enjoying her afternoon siesta. Over the hills so far away as to make it a picture, a threshing machine was eating wheat shocks and blowing forth a golden dust-like breath of straw. The incessant sawing of harvest flies, a heavy country dinner and the afternoon glow and heat conspired to drive me into the springhouse, where the coolness and peace of the place brought a bodily laziness, and, lying down on the old stone shelf, I slept.
Three walls of the springhouse grew as the palace walls of Aladdin; the front rolled up as the curtain for a drama; and between great columns of red granite andporphyry, chiseled with hieroglyphics and decorated with the symbols of Amun and Osiris, I looked out upon a grove of date palms, the pyramid of Sneferru, an island sea of yellow flood water, and yet beyond, the low hills of Arabia. A view seemingly as familiar as the one from my bedroom window.
It was the Nile valley at Meidoom; Aur-Aa was at flood stage, then nearly fifty feet above the normal level, Now, after centuries, the valley has been filled by river silt and the tide is much shallower.
The beauty and changefulness of that narrow valley by comparison with the monotonous lands which flank it gave promise of a happy people. Hemmed in on the west by the sand hills of Libya and on the east by the equally bare, dry, never-changing hills of Arabia; teeming with people as the channels of an ant hill with ants; intensively cultivated, some of the crops like the dhourra or millet, the principal food of the poor, returning to the sower two hundred and fifty times its seed; shaded by date palms which yield abundant and delicious fruit; a land with a delightful climate seasonably watered, fertilized by yearly tides and protected from invasion by wide deserts of soft sand; why should we not have been a happy people?
Because no one is free. We are enslaved by caste, a most merciless master, by the priesthood, by our king. We work continually, but for others. Happy he, who when life is done, after contributing to the priesthood and the king, after sacrificing to a hundred gods, leaves sufficient estate to pay for the embalming of and a safe resting place for his body.
This is the best of a short life, with the sad hope that after you have been many times a lower form of life, you may return to your old body if, perchance, it maybe found. Far better off the unclean fish, which, when the flood recedes, gasp themselves to death in shallow pools, choked by the sand.
I rose from my couch and walked out where a better view might be had of the river and the valley.
Near a small eminence more than sixty feet above the flood tide was a great fleet of barges and rafts of logs, which had borne heavy blocks of cut stone from far to the southward down on the tide to construct our tombs and temples.
Upon the rafts and barges low caste humanity, driven by the lash to tortured effort, swarmed and sweated and groaned that some high priest or royal personage might in mummied grandeur await his soul's return to its foul, flinty, wrinkled and desolate home. Near, floating northward with the tide, was a great obelisk of granite weighing more than forty tons, held upon the surface by parallel rafts of buoyant logs and inflated skins.
I was head embalmer, one of the priesthood and, therefore, considered one of the fortunate ones.
The city of Meidoom was called the City of the Dead, because at that time, 3750 B. C., it was the place of burial of the royalty and priesthood of Men-nefu, which name means secure and beautiful, and which centuries later was changed to Memphis.
Meidoom's population, near forty thousand, consisted of more than two thousand priests with their families and retainers and twenty thousand laborers and overseers. The majority are engaged in the construction of temples and sarcophagi.
The people are firm believers in a future state and therefore very religious. The priests act as intercessors between the people and their many gods, look afterthe sacred animals of the temples, are professional embalmers, architects and custodians of the tombs.
The priesthood hold high social rank, are exempt from taxes, but do not practice celibacy or asceticism. Their ranks are recruited by heredity or from the nobility; and it is not uncommon for a prince to surrender his claim of succession to assume the office of high priest.
Had there been occasion for a test of power between the government and the priesthood, the priestly orders would have been found the real rulers.
Amun is the chief or spiritual god of the Egyptians. The name means The Hidden One; and he controls the conscience and the soul.
Rahotep is chief priest of Amun and the keeper of the Book of Death. He and all the priesthood of Amun wear a costume of white linen decorated with the blue figure of a man having the head of a ram and carrying in his hand a sharsh, the symbols of Amun. The chief priest in addition wears the royal symbol with two long feathers as a head dress.
Osiris is the god of good, in contradistinction to Set, the god of evil. He is the god of the Nile and the guardian and preserver of the human body after death. His symbol is a mummy wearing a royal crown and ostrich plumes. The god of the sun is the soul of Osiris. The white linen gowns of the priests of Osiris have a figured border of mummies in black, wearing crowns and ostrich plumes. Nefermat, chief priest, in addition wears the royal insignia.
At this time, besides many shrines, there are three temples at Meidoom, the temple of Amun, the temple of Osiris and the temple of The Dead. The two orders of the priesthood are presided over by Rahotep and Nefermat, the two sons of Sneferru, who, occupying theirpriestly positions at his demise, the succession passed to Khufa, a brother, who married Neferma, the widow of Sneferru.
As chief embalmer I had charge of the temple of the Dead, where both orders of the priesthood officiated, since the one god, Amun, having charge of the soul, and the other, Osiris, of the body, perforce met officially, though usually holding little communication with each other.
As I stood at the portal two processions of priests drew near, the one led by Rahotep, the other by Nefermat. These two, leaving their attendants, entered the temple.
As they passed I bowed low to earth and followed into the corridor, there they found seats, and I stood before them awaiting their commands.
Rahotep said, "Our mother, the queen, has just died; after her body is partly embalmed they will bring it here from Men-nefer, when you, because of your skill, are to prepare it to rest in the vault of the great pyramid beside our father Sneferru, in care of Osiris, until Amun shall see fit to surrender her soul again to her body."
(Nefermat) "You mean, until Osiris shall deem her soul sufficiently purified to re-enter her body."
"No, as Amun is the superior of Osiris, so is the soul master of its tenement, the body, though it is by the grace of Osiris that the body is preserved until Amun has purified the soul for another human existence."
"You are wrong; in all sacred animals human souls dwell; it is only when those souls are made pure that Osiris permits them to occupy a human form. * * * Tepti, priest of Osiris, embalmer of and dweller with the dead and custodian of the temple of the Dead, what say you as to the body and the soul?"
"Pardon, Most Exalted of Osiris, am I to look upon your question as a command?"
"Yes."
"My belief, of which I am not master, I have kept unto myself and if put into words is but spoken ignorance. To become an expert embalmer I experimented on the bodies of many animals not sacred to our gods and discovered that they were as easily preserved as the bodies of men. This forced the conclusion that if man was specially favored of the gods, it was not in bodily composition; therefore, it would seem, the body is not sacred and is unworthy of the great expenditure of time and wealth which we give it as priests of Osiris. The body after death is as the husk of a nut from which the kernel has been extracted and our people would be better off were it burned as the refuse of earth. We of Osiris, who say the body must not perish, know better than anyone else that it does perish. If there is a difference between the body of a man and an animal's, that distinction departs at death; therefore, the distinction is life or a part of life and the questions presented are: What is life? What is there in man besides matter? When an animate being dies, the body, the mortal, is left; life departs. I do not see it go; I know not where it goes. If it is a man who dies, we say the soul has left the body, because we are men; if it is an animal, we say life has left the body. What is the difference between life and the soul? All I know is that I have a body which perishes and that, distinct from the body, I have the power to think, which power troubles me more than my body, and which power I may lose when life leaves the body. My power to think is so limited that its indulgence is like pulling one's self up to the stars by one's toes. I know I cannot answer the following questions:
"'What is truth?' Though I once heard a child of five answer that truth is the right.
"'What is life?' Though I am told it is the principle of animate corporeal existence.
"'What is death?' This I do not know, since I cannot define life, as death is the cessation of life or the beginning of a higher life.
"Since animals think, some more than some men (the feeble-minded), do they have souls? If so, where do their souls go?
"Is the source of new life in the soul?
"It seems we believe souls have existed from the beginning, since they never die but are transmigrated. Is immortality a divine gift or an inherent property of the soul?
"And of you, Chief Priest of Osiris, head of our order, I would respectfully ask:
"'Does the soul assume a body akin to its own nature?
"'Should I live to be very old, dwarfed in limb and blind, when my soul returns to its preserved mummy, which you maintain it does, will I rise again, old and blind and weak? If not why preserve the body?
"'Will I know the friends of my former life if they return to their bodies in the same period?
"'Your still-born brother, whose body I embalmed, had he yet a soul, and when his soul returns to his body, will it have life?
"'There is a mummy in one of the old tombs with two heads and on one body; has that body one or two souls? And if two souls, will they be purified and return together to the body, though one be good and the other bad?'
"I believe not in Osiris; nor that my soul after manytransmigrations shall find and reanimate its rejected tenement. Yet I know no other god or even if I have a soul. Can I by searching find out truth or the true God? Will there be a time when the truth shall be made clear? I know that error is spread over all things; that the race is not to the swift, neither the battle to the strong. That he who disdains ease and comfort, though poverty is a disgrace and misfortune a crime, recognizes that wealth consists not in great possessions but in few wants; looking upon ownership as a trusteeship and therefore a responsibility; content with what life gives; thinking himself and conceding to others the right to think; living and letting others live; believing there is nothing after death and death is nothing; is as well off as he who struggles to be a blind leader of the blind. Would I could believe that we shall live many lives and each a preparation for a higher one. Our religion, like our government, as it grows old grows complex and rotten. What we need is a simple government, a simple faith and one God."
(Nefermat) "What you say is the vilest sacrilege. Your belief, if general, would lead to chaos; to the destruction of our holy order. You shall find there is a hell for the unbeliever; your mortal life shall end and your immortal begin as soon as our mother's body is prepared for Osiris. You shall know the difference between soul and body and have your doubts as to a future state tested and dissolved."
(Rahotep) "I would not be too hasty with the death sentence. What matters it what Tepti may think! He is a good embalmer, reticent of speech and his belief in death and nothingness if expressed would neither find believers nor corrupt our faith. The thought of non-existence is not acceptable to the Egyptians; it lacksenthusiasm, it lacks certainty, it lacks hope; there is no appeal to pride or power."
(Nefermat) "I cannot overlook such utterances from a priest of Osiris; he must die."
(Rahotep) "He is one of your priesthood; you are sole arbiter of his life or death, but were he one of Amun's and I demanding his opinion had been so answered, and it was delivered as to stone ears, as his was to us, I would pass it by. However, if you are bent on his death, which I regret, I would ask his body, hoping by my intercession, Amun may convince him he has a soul."
(Nefermat) "As you like. I am through with the sacrilegious beast as soon as he is dead. I would not give his body tomb room in the temple of the dead."
Whereupon the two high priests departed, leaving me with very sober thoughts.
Within an hour, three priests of our order, the death watch, took up their abode in my chambers, which I was not permitted to leave, and this watch was continued to the end.
On the next day the body of the queen arrived from Men-nefer and I was directed to complete the embalming already begun. This occupied a fortnight.
The day the embalming was completed Rahotep came to my chamber and, sending the guards from the room, said:
"On the morrow at sunrise you will be strangled to death, after which your body will be delivered to me for disposition. When it is carefully embalmed I shall place it in a new tomb in the temple of Amun and it shall become sacred to him. The tomb is so constructed that light and air penetrates through slits in the portal and it may be entered from the temple by members of our order. Amun will permit your soul to occupy and grow in yourmummied body. You have said you are not afraid of death. Neither you nor any other man knows what lies beyond. It is not the end of things as you declare but the beginning of the thought life. Living through the ages in your old shell you shall learn that the infinite is the author of all things and from the order and harmony of nature you shall deduce the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. You shall learn that the soul is an immaterial being which can go where the body can not and can live where the body cannot live and is so sometimes punished. That its controlling force is not the body nor even the mind but a power which pervades all space, which has existed from the beginning, looking after the universe and each creature therein. This is the infinite, the beginning, the end of all things, which, lacking a better name and light to discern, I call Amun, The Great, The Only One. The wind has not a body, yet you know the wind blows; light has not substance, yet you feel and see it and know it comes from the worlds in the skies. Your soul has existed from the beginning as a part of the infinite. It came into existence as the angels of light and darkness. It is of the size of the faith that is in you and yours is quite small. Yours shall grow during the ages, as Amun is about to begin its experience, which each soul is to have, though the experience given each is different, being judged and punished or rewarded according to the light given, which in every case is dim. You are first to be turned over to Phtha, the great father of beginnings. Your little seed of a soul, assuming the form of a beetle, shall remain in your mummified body. Your embalming robes shall be decorated with his sign, the scarabeus. Your body will be carefully watched by our priesthood to observe the growth of your soul and know that you finally believe in its existence and theinfinite power of God. You shall pass through the valley of humiliation, living as the Chelas live upon your own soul. Your suffering shall bring improvement and growth until your soul shall prove sufficient unto itself, since it shall know God and itself. Finally it shall part company with your mummied body and become a part of the light of the world."
I arose at daylight the next morning and, after carefully bathing, rubbed my whole body with a preparation for closing the pores; then, retiring to a couch, drank a vial of most precious and potent embalming fluid, which, knowing death to be near, I had secreted when preparing the mummy of the queen.
I felt a contraction of my stomach, an icy chill, a gradual though rapid cessation of consciousness and being. For what period I know not I slept the sleep of death.
Sluggishly in my dead frame fluttered a something. For days or years, I know not, there was a mere sense of spiritual life or being and a fluttering of body as of a small numbed insect; was it a scarabeus? This was succeeded in time by an acuter consciousness, when I saw my puny soul in its bare weakness.
Then began the journey through the valley of humiliation and suffering, when soul lived upon and thought only of self and its escape. Through ages of suffering and loneliness and blackness, my only thought was a constant prayer for absolute non-existence. Within the heart of my tiny soul there began to grow a germ-like conception and reverence for God. With this thought the soul seemed to take unto itself strength to make feeble efforts to tear a way through its coffin of flinty skin and in feeble flight bounded and pounded incessantly on its case ofparchment, as a drummer on his drum, with a ceaseless, monotonous, drum, drum, drum.
Finally, through the mummy eyes, there seemed to come dim rays of light. Then the feeble soul stationed itself immediately behind them and prayed only for light. And, after a thousand years, enough light was given to see crevices in the tomb and shifting grains of sand drift through. Life before had been so bare that the mere seeing of the flight of a grain of sand into that place of utter calm and monotony was as an angel visit to the disconsolate of earth.
Now the all-absorbing desire was for more light; for freedom to break through the prison walls of flinty skin and have one peep at earth and sun. Then, remembering how I had stolen our most potent embalming fluid and used it on my own body, I attributed continued imprisonment to its preservative properties and looked upon myself as my own jailer.
As the soul grew, reason discarded this thought and fixed upon my imprisonment as punishment for disbelief. Seemingly, ages went by; the soul passed through a period of great remorse; remorse grew to repentance, and repentance to hope and faith.
Then my soul seemed to fill the whole mummied frame and gained strength until it acquired the power of motion. I could shift position and look out upon the valley of Aur-Aa, now called Nilus, where, as time passed, I saw the maturity and wane of Egyptian power and the iron hand of Rome reach out in conquest.
The vandal hand of a conquering Roman tore loose the stone portal of the tomb, and mummy and imprisoned soul were carried across the great sea and with other husks of former life exhibited in the triumph of Octavius;then placed in a museum to be gazed upon by the curious of Rome.
One night robbers broke into the room, thinking the dead carried their treasures with them, and unwound our grave cloths. My soul pounded and tore at its case, hoping pantingly that they might break the parchment shell; but all they did was to remove a string of turquoise and porphyry beetle-shaped beads. When morning came the mummies were rewrapped and returned to the exhibit slab.
As the crowds passed by, if one, perchance, looked into my sunken eyes, the soul, watching hungrily beneath, looked out with an intensity and read his very inmost mind and most secret thought; and some there were who seemed to know the meaning of my look.
When I read thoughts of doubt, such as I had known in life, I sought with utmost soul strength to convey to them some warning and some hope; and as I struggled thus, there came rifts of light into my prison as from a higher life.
One day a noble Roman youth came strolling by with a companion and, stooping, gazed upon my form.
"See, Marcus! How much better preserved this man of ancient Egypt is than the others. Look! In his sunken eyes you may discern a glimmer as of intense life; of consciousness; I feel his look, as though he read me through and through and would speak in advice or warning."
"Oh! Come on! You have eaten too heavily or else departed from your stoical way and conscience has made you uneasy; else you could not attribute life to this foul shell, dead these three thousand years."
"I shall return alone tomorrow when the light is better and have a good look."
At noon the next day, when the sunlight rested on my slab, the youth returned and, bending over my black parchment face, peered into the hollow eye holes; and in some weird way I held communion with him. When he left, my soul seemed to go along, a companion of his own.
Lost in thought, he walked a long way into the poorer quarter of the city, where there was much squalor and suffering. He was aroused by the cries of women and children driven from their squalid homes by a band of Nero's condottieri, who then set fire to their deserted hovels.
He rushed to their rescue, remonstrating with the soldiers. They refused to desist, telling him that the people were of the new sect, the Christians; and their orders were to burn them out. He was assaulted by them, resisted, killed two and was himself slain.
His soul as a great white bird, with a brilliancy as of the sun, left his body and flew heavenward. My own returned to its mummied chamber. But the chamber had been reformed; it was of many hued crystal, of expansive wall and gave forth a light all its own. I settled upon a couch and drifted into a restful peace.
My own soul became as the tabernacle of God. All tears were wiped away by the conqueror of sorrow and pain and death. I had found the Father; the Father a son; and I entered into the place where God is the Light.
In the meantime Rome burned. The fire, started by Nero's soldiers near the Palatine Hill, spread from house to house and quarter to quarter until it reached my couch. The old shell parted and burned as tinder. Then the mortal put on immortality and the shackled darkness of the old soul gave place to light and liberty.
I awoke. It was near twilight; the world seemed new and fresh, but it was the old home place.
I bent over and examined my couch; it was the old slab shelf of the springhouse. Looking along its raised edge, which I had used as a pillow, I noticed for the first time crude strange characters or letters cut in the stone.
That night I asked my father the history of the slab. He said he had brought it from the Stoner Creek farm near Wade's Mill, where it had been plowed up in cultivating over a small Indian mound.
I came to the conclusion the slab possessed weird properties, making it a restless and unsatisfactory couch, and thereafter I called it the dream bench.