Редьярд Джозеф Киплинг
Letters of Travel (1892-1913)
IV
UP THE RIVER
Once upon a time there was a murderer who got off with a life-sentence. What impressed him most, when he had time to think, was the frank boredom of all who took part in the ritual.
'It was just like going to a doctor or a dentist,' he explained. 'You come to 'em very full of your affairs, and then you discover that it's only part of their daily work to them. I expect,' he added, 'I should have found it the same if – er – I'd gone on to the finish.'
He would have. Break into any new Hell or Heaven and you will be met at its well-worn threshold by the bored experts in attendance.
For three weeks we sat on copiously chaired and carpeted decks, carefully isolated from everything that had anything to do with Egypt, under chaperonage of a properly orientalised dragoman. Twice or thrice daily, our steamer drew up at a mud-bank covered with donkeys. Saddles were hauled out of a hatch in our bows; the donkeys were dressed, dealt round like cards: we rode off through crops or desert, as the case might be, were introduced in ringing tones to a temple, and were then duly returned to our bridge and our Baedekers. For sheer comfort, not to say padded sloth, the life was unequalled, and since the bulk of our passengers were citizens of the United States – Egypt in winter ought to be admitted into the Union as a temporary territory – there was no lack of interest. They were overwhelmingly women, with here and there a placid nose-led husband or father, visibly suffering from congestion of information about his native city. I had the joy of seeing two such men meet. They turned their backs resolutely on the River, bit and lit cigars, and for one hour and a quarter ceased not to emit statistics of the industries, commerce, manufacture, transport, and journalism of their towns; – Los Angeles, let us say, and Rochester, N.Y. It sounded like a duel between two cash-registers.
One forgot, of course, that all the dreary figures were alive to them, and as Los Angeles spoke Rochester visualised. Next day I met an Englishman from the Soudan end of things, very full of a little-known railway which had been laid down in what had looked like raw desert, and therefore had turned out to be full of paying freight. He was in the full-tide of it when Los Angeles ranged alongside and cast anchor, fascinated by the mere roll of numbers.
'Haow's that?' he cut in sharply at a pause.
He was told how, and went on to drain my friend dry concerning that railroad, out of sheer fraternal interest, as he explained, in 'any darn' thing that's being made anywheres,'
'So you see,' my friend went on, 'we shall be bringing Abyssinian cattle into Cairo.'
'On the hoof?' One quick glance at the Desert ranges.
'No, no! By rail and River. And after that we're going to grow cotton between the Blue and the White Nile and knock spots out of the States.'
'Ha-ow's that?'
'This way.' The speaker spread his first and second fingers fanwise under the big, interested beak. 'That's the Blue Nile. And that's the White. There's a difference of so many feet between 'em, an' in that fork here, 'tween my fingers, we shall – '
'I see. Irrigate on the strength of the little difference in the levels. How many acres?'
Again Los Angeles was told. He expanded like a frog in a shower. 'An' I thought,' he murmured, 'Egypt was all mummies and the Bible! I used to know something about cotton. Now we'll talk.'
All that day the two paced the deck with the absorbed insolente of lovers; and, lover-like, each would steal away and tell me what a splendid soul was his companion.
That was one type; but there were others – professional men who did not make or sell things – and these the hand of an all-exacting Democracy seemed to have run into one mould. They 'were not reticent, but no matter whence they hailed, their talk was as standardised as the fittings of a Pullman.
I hinted something of this to a woman aboard who was learned in their sermons of either language.
'I think,' she began, 'that the staleness you complain of – '
'I never said "staleness,"' I protested.
'But you thought it. The staleness you noticed is due to our men being so largely educated by old women – old maids. Practically till he goes to College, and not always then, a boy can't get away from them.'
'Then what happens?'
'The natural result. A man's instinct is to teach a boy to think for himself. If a woman can't make a boy think as she thinks, she sits down and cries. A man hasn't any standards. He makes 'em. A woman's the most standardised being in the world. She has to be. Now d'you see?'
'Not yet.'
'Well, our trouble in America is that we're being school-marmed to death. You can see it in any paper you pick up. What were those men talking about just now?'
'Food adulteration, police-reform, and beautifying waste-lots in towns,' I replied promptly.
She threw up her hands. 'I knew it!' she cried. 'Our great National Policy of co-educational housekeeping! Ham-frills and pillow-shams. Did you ever know a man get a woman's respect by parading around creation with a dish-clout pinned to his coat-tails?'
'But if his woman ord – told him to do it?' I suggested.
'Then she'd despise him the more for doing it. You needn't laugh. 'You're coming to the same sort of thing in England.'
I returned to the little gathering. A woman was talking to them as one accustomed to talk from birth. They listened with the rigid attention of men early trained to listen to, but not to talk with, women. She was, to put it mildly, the mother of all she-bores, but when she moved on, no man ventured to say as much.
'That's what I mean by being school-manned to death,' said my acquaintance wickedly. 'Why, she bored 'em stiff; but they are so well brought up, they didn't even know they were bored. Some day the American Man is going to revolt.'
'And what'll the American Woman do?'
'She'll sit and cry – and it'll do her good.'
Later on, I met a woman from a certain Western State seeing God's great, happy, inattentive world for the first time, and rather distressed that it was not like hers. She had always understood that the English were brutal to their wives – the papers of her State said so. (If you only knew the papers of her State I) But she had not noticed any scandalous treatment so far, and Englishwomen, whom she admitted she would never understand, seemed to enjoy a certain specious liberty and equality; while Englishmen were distinctly kind to girls in difficulties over their baggage and tickets on strange railways. Quite a nice people, she concluded, but without much sense of humour. One day, she showed me what looked like a fashion-paper print of a dress-stuff – a pretty oval medallion of stars on a striped grenadine background that somehow seemed familiar.
'How nice! What is it?' I asked.
'Our National Flag,' she replied.
'Indeed. But it doesn't look quite – '
'No. This is a new design for arranging the stars so that they shall be easier to count and more decorative in effect. We're going to take a vote on it in our State, where we have the franchise. I shall cast my vote when I get home.'
'Really! And how will you vote?'
'I'm just thinking that out.' She spread the picture on her knee and considered it, head to one side, as though it were indeed dress material.
All this while the land of Egypt marched solemnly beside us on either hand. The river being low, we saw it from the boat as one long plinth, twelve to twenty feet high of brownish, purplish mud, visibly upheld every hundred yards or so by glistening copper caryatides in the shape of naked men baling water up to the crops above. Behind that bright emerald line ran the fawn-or tiger-coloured background of desert, and a pale blue sky closed all. There was Egypt even as the Pharaohs, their engineers and architects, had seen it – land to cultivate, folk and cattle for the work, and outside that work no distraction nor allurement of any kind whatever, save when the dead were taken to their place beyond the limits of cultivation. When the banks grew lower, one looked across as much as two miles of green-stuff packed like a toy Noah's-ark with people, camels, sheep, goats, oxen, buffaloes, and an occasional horse. The beasts stood as still, too, as the toys, because they were tethered or hobbled each to his own half-circle of clover, and moved forward when that was eaten. Only the very little kids were loose, and these played on the flat mud roofs like kittens.
No wonder 'every shepherd is an abomination to the Egyptians.' The dusty, naked-footed field-tracks are cut down to the last centimetre of grudged width; the main roads are lifted high on the flanks of the canals, unless the permanent-way of some light railroad can be pressed to do duty for them. The wheat, the pale ripened tufted sugar-cane, the millet, the barley, the onions, the fringed castor-oil bushes jostle each other for foothold, since the Desert will not give them room; and men chase the falling Nile inch by inch, each dawn, with new furrowed melon-beds on the still dripping mud-banks.
Administratively, such a land ought to be a joy. The people do not emigrate; all their resources are in plain sight; they are as accustomed as their cattle to being led about. All they desire, and it has been given them, is freedom from murder and mutilation, rape and robbery. The rest they can attend to in their silent palm-shaded villages where the pigeons coo and the little children play in the dust.
But Western civilisation is a devastating and a selfish game. Like the young woman from 'our State,' it says in effect: 'I am rich. I've nothing to do. I must do something. I shall take up social reform.'
Just now there is a little social reform in Egypt which is rather amusing. The Egyptian cultivator borrows money; as all farmers must. This land without hedge or wild-flower is his passion by age-long inheritance and suffering, by, in and for which he lives. He borrows to develop it and to buy more at from £30 to £200 per acre, the profit on which, when all is paid, works out at between £5 to £10 per acre. Formerly, he borrowed from the local money-lenders, mostly Greeks, at 30 per cent per annum and over. This rate is not excessive, so long as public opinion allows the borrower from time to time to slay the lender; but modern administration calls that riot and murder. Some years ago, therefore, there was established a State-guaranteed Bank which lent to the cultivators at eight per cent, and the cultivator zealously availed himself of that privilege. He did not default more than in reason, but being a farmer, he naturally did not pay up till threatened with being sold up. So he prospered and bought more land, which was his heart's desire. This year – 1913 – the administration issued sudden orders that no man owning less than five acres could borrow on security of his land. The matter interested me directly, because I held five hundred pounds worth of shares in that State-guaranteed Bank, and more than half our clients were small men of less than five acres. So I made inquiries in quarters that seemed to possess information, and was told that the new law was precisely on all-fours with the Homestead Act or the United States and France, and the intentions of Divine Providence – or words to that effect.
'But,' I asked, 'won't this limitation of credit prevent the men with less than five acres from borrowing more to buy more land and getting on in the world?'
'Yes,' was the answer, 'of course it will. That's just what we want to prevent. Half these fellows ruin themselves trying to buy more land. We've got to protect them against themselves.'
That, alas! is the one enemy against which no law can protect any son of Adam; since the real reasons that make or break a man are too absurd or too obscene to be reached from outside. Then I cast about in other quarters to discover what the cultivator was going to do about it.
'Oh, him?' said one of my many informants. 'He's all right. There are about six ways of evading the Act that, I know of. The fellah probably knows another six. He has been trained to look after himself since the days of Rameses. He can forge land-transfers for one thing; borrow land enough to make his holding more than five acres for as long as it takes to register a loan; get money from his own women (yes, that's one result of modern progress in this land!) or go back to his old friend the Greek at 30 per cent.'
'Then the Greek will sell him up, and that will be against the law, won't it?' I said.
'Don't you worry about the Greek. He can get through any law ever made if there's five piastres on the other side of it.'
'Maybe; but was the Agricultural Bank selling the cultivators up too much?'
'Not in the least. The number of small holdings is on the increase, if anything. Most cultivators won't pay a loan until you point a judgment-summons at their head. They think that shows they're men of consequence. This swells the number of judgment-summonses issued, but it doesn't mean a land-sale for each summons. Another fact is that in real life some men don't get on as well as others. Either they don't farm well enough, or they take to hashish, or go crazy about a girl and borrow money for her, or – er – something of that kind, and they are sold up. You may have noticed that.'
'I have. And meantime, what is the fellah doing?'
'Meantime, the fellah has misread the Act – as usual. He thinks it's retrospective, and that he needn't pay past debts. They may make trouble, but I fancy your Bank will keep quiet.'
'Keep quiet! With the bottom knocked out of two-thirds of its business and – and my five hundred pounds involved!'
'Is that your trouble? I don't think your shares will rise in a hurry; but if you want some fun, go and talk to the French about it,'
This seemed as good a way as any of getting a little interest. The Frenchman that I went to spoke with a certain knowledge of finance and politics and the natural malice of a logical race against an illogical horde.
'Yes,' he said. 'The idea of limiting credit under these circumstances is absurd. But that is not all. People are not frightened, business is not upset by one absurd idea, but by the possibilities of more,'
'Are there any more ideas, then, that are going to be tried on this country?'
'Two or three,' he replied placidly. 'They are all generous; but they are all ridiculous. Egypt is not a place where one should promulgate ridiculous ideas.'
'But my shares – my shares!' I cried. 'They have already dropped several points.'
'It is possible. They will drop more. Then they will rise.'
'Thank you. But why?'
'Because the idea is fundamentally absurd. That will never be admitted by your people, but there will be arrangements, accommodations, adjustments, till it is all the same as it used to be. It will be the concern of the Permanent Official – poor devil! – to pull it straight. It is always his concern. Meantime, prices will rise for all things.'
'Why?'
'Because the land is the chief security in Egypt. If a man cannot borrow on that security, the rates of interest will increase on whatever other security he offers. That will affect all work and wages and Government contracts.'
He put it so convincingly and with so many historical illustrations that I saw whole perspectives of the old energetic Pharaohs, masters of life and death along the River, checked in mid-career by cold-blooded accountants chanting that not even the Gods themselves can make two plus two more than four. And the vision ran down through the ages to one little earnest head on a Cook's steamer, bent sideways over the vital problem of rearranging 'our National Flag' so that it should be 'easier to count the stars.'
For the thousandth time: Praised be Allah for the diversity of His creatures!
V
DEAD KINGS
The Swiss are the only people who have taken the trouble to master the art of hotel-keeping. Consequently, in the things that really matter – beds, baths, and victuals – they control Egypt; and since every land always throws back to its aboriginal life (which is why the United States delight in telling aged stories), any ancient Egyptian would at once understand and join in with the life that roars through the nickel-plumbed tourist-barracks on the river, where all the world frolics in the sunshine. At first sight, the show lends itself to cheap moralising, till one recalls that one only sees busy folk when they are idle, and rich folk when they have made their money. A citizen of the United States – his first trip abroad – pointed out a middle-aged Anglo-Saxon who was relaxing after the manner of several school-boys.
'There's a sample!' said the Son of Hustle scornfully. 'Tell me, he ever did anything in his life?' Unluckily he had pitched upon one who, when he is in collar, reckons thirteen and a half hours a fairish day's work.
Among this assembly were men and women burned to an even blue-black tint – civilised people with bleached hair and sparkling eyes. They explained themselves as 'diggers' – just diggers – and opened me a new world. Granted that all Egypt is one big undertaker's emporium, what could be more fascinating than to get Government leave to rummage in a corner of it, to form a little company and spend the cold weather trying to pay dividends in the shape of amethyst necklaces, lapis-lazuli scarabs, pots of pure gold, and priceless bits of statuary? Or, if one is rich, what better fun than to grub-stake an expedition on the supposed site of a dead city and see what turns up? There was a big-game hunter who had used most of the Continent, quite carried away by this sport.
'I'm going to take shares in a city next year, and watch the digging myself,' he said. 'It beats elephants to pieces. In this game you're digging up dead things and making them alive. Aren't you going to have a flutter?'
He showed me a seductive little prospectus. Myself, I would sooner not lay hands on a dead man's kit or equipment, especially when he has gone to his grave in the belief that the trinkets guarantee salvation. Of course, there is the other argument, put forward by sceptics, that the Egyptian was a blatant self-advertiser, and that nothing would please him more than the thought that he was being looked at and admired after all these years. Still, one might rob some shrinking soul who didn't see it in that light.
At the end of spring the diggers flock back out of the Desert and exchange chaff and flews in the gorgeous verandahs. For example, A's company has made a find of priceless stuff, Heaven knows how old, and is – not too meek about it. Company B, less fortunate, hints that if only A knew to what extent their native diggers had been stealing and disposing of the thefts, under their very archaeological noses, they would not be so happy.
'Nonsense,' says Company A. 'Our diggers are above suspicion. Besides, we watched 'em.'
'Are they?' is the reply. 'Well, next time you are in Berlin, go to the Museum and you'll see what the Germans have got hold of. It must have come out of your ground. The Dynasty proves it.' So A's cup is poisoned – till next year.
No collector or curator of a museum should have any moral scruples whatever; and I have never met one who had; though I have been informed by deeply-shocked informants of four nationalities that the Germans are the most flagrant pirates of all.
The business of exploration is about as romantic as earth-work on Indian railways. There are the same narrow-gauge trams and donkeys, the same shining gangs in the borrow-pits and the same skirling dark-blue crowds of women and children with the little earth-baskets. But the hoes are not driven in, nor the clods jerked aside at random, and when the work fringes along the base of some mighty wall, men use their hands carefully. A white man – or he was white at breakfast-time – patrols through the continually renewed dust-haze. Weeks may pass without a single bead, but anything may turn up at any moment, and it is his to answer the shout of discovery.
We had the good fortune to stay a while at the Headquarters of the Metropolitan Museum (New York) in a valley riddled like a rabbit-warren with tombs. Their stables, store-houses, and servants' quarters are old tombs; their talk is of tombs, and their dream (the diggers' dream always) is to discover a virgin tomb where the untouched dead lie with their jewels upon them. Four miles away are the wide-winged, rampant hotels. Here is nothing whatever but the rubbish of death that died thousands of years ago, on whose grave no green thing has ever grown. Villages, expert in two hundred generations of grave-robbing, cower among the mounds of wastage, and whoop at the daily tourist. Paths made by bare feet run from one half-tomb, half-mud-heap to the next, not much more distinct than snail smears, but they have been used since…
Time is a dangerous thing to play with. That morning the concierge had toiled for us among steamer-sailings to see if we could save three days. That evening we sat with folk for whom Time had stood still since the Ptolemies. I wondered, at first, how it concerned them or any man if such and such a Pharaoh had used to his own glory the plinths and columns of such another Pharaoh before or after Melchizedek. Their whole background was too inconceivably remote for the mind to work on. But the next morning we were taken to the painted tomb of a noble – a Minister of Agriculture – who died four or five thousand years ago. He said to me, in so many words: 'Observe I was very like your friend, the late Mr. Samuel Pepys, of your Admiralty. I took an enormous interest in life, which I most thoroughly enjoyed, on its human and on its spiritual side. I do not think you will find many departments of State better managed than mine, or a better-kept house, or a nicer set of young people … My daughters! The eldest, as you can see, takes after her mother. The youngest, my favourite, is supposed to favour me. Now I will show you all the things that I did, and delighted in, till it was time for me to present my accounts elsewhere.' And he showed me, detail by detail, in colour and in drawing, his cattle, his horses, his crops, his tours in the district, his accountants presenting the revenue returns, and he himself, busiest of the busy, in the good day.
But when we left that broad, gay ante-room and came to the narrower passage where once his body had lain and where all his doom was portrayed, I could not follow him so well. I did not see how he, so experienced in life, could be cowed by friezes of brute-headed apparitions or satisfied by files of repeated figures. He explained, something to this effect:
'We live on the River – a line without breadth or thickness. Behind us is the Desert, which nothing can affect; wither no man goes till he is dead, (One does not use good agricultural ground for cemeteries.) Practically, then, we only move in two dimensions – up stream or down. Take away the Desert, which we don't consider any more than a healthy man considers death, and you will see that we have no background whatever. Our world is all one straight bar of brown or green earth, and, for some months, mere sky-reflecting water that wipes out everything You have only to look at the Colossi to realise how enormously and extravagantly man and his works must scale in such a country. Remember too, that our crops are sure, and our life is very, very easy. Above all, we have no neighbours That is to say, we must give out, for we cannot take in. Now, I put it to you, what is left for a priest with imagination, except to develop ritual and multiply gods on friezes? Unlimited leisure, limited space of two dimensions, divided by the hypnotising line of the River, and bounded by visible, unalterable death – must, ipso facto – '
'Even so,' I interrupted. 'I do not comprehend your Gods – your direct worship of beasts, for instance?'
'You prefer the indirect? The worship of Humanity with a capital H? My Gods, or what I saw in them, contented me.'
'What did you see in your Gods as affecting belief and conduct?'
'You know the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx?'
'No,' I murmured. 'What is it?'
'"All sensible men are of the same religion, but no sensible man ever tells,"' he replied. With that I had to be content, for the passage ended in solid rock.
There were other tombs in the valley, but the owners were dumb, except one Pharaoh, who from the highest motives had broken with the creeds and instincts of his country, and so had all but wrecked it. One of his discoveries was an artist, who saw men not on one plane but modelled full or three-quarter face, with limbs suited to their loads and postures. His vividly realised stuff leaped to the eye out of the acreage of low-relief in the old convention, and I applauded as a properly brought-up tourist should.
'Mine was a fatal mistake,' Pharaoh Ahkenaton sighed in my ear,' I mistook the conventions of life for the realities.'
'Ah, those soul-crippling conventions!' I cried.
'You mistake me ,' he answered more stiffly. 'I was so sure of their reality that I thought that they were really lies, whereas they were only invented to cover the raw facts of life.'
'Ah, those raw facts of life!' I cried, still louder; for it is not often that one has a chance of impressing a Pharaoh.' We must face them with open eyes and an open mind! Did you ?'
'I had no opportunity of avoiding them,' he replied. 'I broke every convention in my land.'
'Oh, noble! And what happened?'
'What happens when you strip the cover off a hornet's nest? The raw fact of life is that mankind is just a little lower than the angels, and the conventions are based on that fact in order that men may become angels. But if you begin, as I did, by the convention that men are angels they will assuredly become bigger beasts than ever.'
'That,' I said firmly, 'is altogether out-of-date. You should have brought a larger mentality, a more vital uplift, and – er – all that sort of thing, to bear on – all that sort of thing, you know.'
'I did,' said Ahkenaton gloomily. 'It broke me!' And he, too, went dumb among the ruins.
There is a valley of rocks and stones in every shade of red and brown, called the Valley of the Kings, where a little oil-engine coughs behind its hand all day long, grinding electricity to light the faces of dead Pharaohs a hundred feet underground. All down the valley, during the tourist season, stand char-a-bancs and donkeys and sand-carts, with here and there exhausted couples who have dropped out of the processions and glisten and fan themselves in some scrap of shade. Along the sides of the valley are the tombs of the kings neatly numbered, as it might be mining adits with concrete steps leading up to them, and iron grilles that lock of nights, and doorkeepers of the Department of Antiquities demanding the proper tickets. One enters, and from deeps below deeps hears the voices of dragomans booming through the names and titles of the illustrious and thrice-puissant dead. Rock-cut steps go down into hot, still darkness, passages-twist and are led over blind pits which, men say, the wise builders childishly hoped would be taken for the real tombs by thieves to come. Up and down these alley-ways clatter all the races of Europe with a solid backing of the United States. Their footsteps are suddenly blunted on the floor of a hall paved with immemorial dust that will never dance in any wind. They peer up at the blazoned ceilings, stoop down to the minutely decorated walls, crane and follow the sombre splendours of a cornice, draw in their breaths and climb up again to the fierce sunshine to re-dive into the next adit on their programme. What they think proper to say, they say aloud – and some of it is very interesting. What they feel you can guess from a certain haste in their movements – something between the shrinking modesty of a man under fire and the Hadn't-we-better-be-getting-on attitude of visitors to a mine. After all, it is not natural for man to go underground except for business or for the last time. He is conscious of the weight of mother-earth overhead, and when to her expectant bulk is added the whole beaked, horned, winged, and crowned hierarchy of a lost faith flaming at every turn of his eye, he naturally wishes to move away. Even the sight of a very great king indeed, sarcophagused under electric light in a hall full of most fortifying pictures, does not hold him too long.
Some men assert that the crypt of St. Peter's, with only nineteen centuries bearing down on the groining, and the tombs of early popes and kings all about, is more impressive than the Valley of the Kings because it explains how and out of what an existing creed grew. But the Valley of the Kings explains nothing except that most terrible line in Macbeth :
To the last syllable of recorded time.
Earth opens her dry lips and says it.
In one of the tombs there is a little chamber whose ceiling, probably because of a fault in the rock, could not be smoothed off like the others. So the decorator, very cunningly, covered it with a closely designed cloth-pattern – just such a chintz-like piece of stuff as, in real life, one would use to underhang a rough roof with. He did it perfectly, down there in the dark, and went his way. Thousands of years later, there was born a man of my acquaintance who, for good and sufficient reason, had an almost insane horror of anything in the nature of a ceiling-cloth. He used to make excuses for not going into the dry goods shops at Christmas, when hastily enlarged annexes are hidden, roof and sides, with embroideries. Perhaps a snake or a lizard had dropped on his mother from the roof before he was born; perhaps it was the memory of some hideous fever-bout in a tent. At any rate, that man's idea of The Torment was a hot, crowded underground room, underhung with patterned cloths. Once in his life at a city in the far north, where he had to make a speech, he met that perfect combination. They led him up and down narrow, crowded, steam-heated passages, till they planted him at last in a room without visible windows (by which he knew he was, underground), and directly beneath a warm-patterned ceiling-cloth – rather like a tent-lining. And there he had to say his say, while panic terror sat in his throat. The second time was in the Valley of the Kings, where very similar passages, crowded with people, led him into a room cut of rock, fathoms underground, with what looked like a sagging chintz cloth not three feet above his head. The man I'd like to catch,' he said when he came outside again, 'is that decorator-man. D'you suppose he meant to produce that effect?'
