The Pyramid Chapter 4

NIGHT OF THE NEW MOON

Dances, dinners, almost daily letters from Alice up the Nile—which he answered with some fervor, as well as with perfect promptness—and all the other ordinary features of the Egyptian season; yet Carlton could not get away from the feeling of mystery that clung close about him. For that matter, he didn’t try to. It was in keeping with his mood.

Only in a roundabout way had he questioned Osman about the apparition he had seen on the steps of the mosque of Ibn-Tulun. It must have been an apparition. Like every other member of his race and class, Osman was not the person to let any woman pass unnoticed.

He had flouted the mere possibility of such a thing almost tearfully. No, there had been no woman on the steps of the mosque while they were there—nor anywhere near, unless, perhaps, behind those inscrutable gray walls.

The walls of Old Cairo—of New Cairo—always look as though they might conceal languishing slaves with painted lips and eyes.

Carlton took note of himself—investigated himself as though he were at once specialist and patient; as, indeed, to some extent, he was. For, on that previous visit of his to Egypt—it had not been made “during the season”—he had traveled far into the desert with some friends of his on a mission from Harvard, and had managed to be touched by the sun.

Carlton’s own valuable monograph on sunstroke can be consulted in most of the scientific libraries of the world to-day.

But, what interested him now was the fact that many of the subsequent effects of the sunstroke seemed to be returning to him now—the same occasional lapses of memory, the same prevalence of reverie or daydream, the same brooding sense of mystery, the same premonitions of forthcoming events. Whether these events concerned the actual, visible world, or merely the world of his imagination, was of no great concern. That an adventure was impending he felt certain—increasingly certain.

He had always nourished the belief that atmosphere and locality had much to do with the phenomena of the world; had always believed that things which were possible in one country, for example, were impossible elsewhere.

With him from America he had brought a bunch of keys—each key, doubtless, of perfectly good steel. Now they were rusty, every one of them. Yet native steel, as there was abundant evidence all about him, did not rust at all.

Wasn’t the same thing possible, in a different degree, with the infinitely more delicate and responsive substance of the human mind? He had known Indian jugglers who had been utterly incapable of performing their commonest tricks—or miracles—outside of their own country.

Wasn’t it just possible that their minds had rusted in the new environment, just as these American keys of his had rusted in the air of Egypt?

More than that. Wasn’t it possible that his own mind was reacting to the million mysterious currents of this ancient land, where other minds, stronger than his, only different, responded not at all?

One of the resident physicians at Shepheard’s, Dr. Blake—an old friend of his—met him in the hall one day.

“A trifle liverish,” Dr. Blake diagnosed. “Come into my office and have a pill.”

Carlton laughed.

“I’m treating my own case.”

The incident ended there, so far as Dr. Blake was concerned. Some idle, friendly talk and they had gone their several ways. But the physician’s remark lingered in Carlton’s thought. He was feeling queer, and no mistake. What was this thing that was hanging over him?

Since his interview with Hamid Yusef, he had prodded deeper into that myth of the Woman of the Pyramid. He had talked long with another half-crazed beggar he had found near the old Coptic church—had heard practically the same story. He had found others, and still others. Cairo seemed to be filled with crazy men who attributed their downfall—or their good fortune, seeing that all such are under the special protection of the Prophet—to that same haunting spirit of the Pyramid of Menkaura.

He had discovered the same tradition in the only translation he could find of the Arab historian, al-Murtadi.

It was all right for the other strangers within the gates of this ancient land—tourists, Turkish, English, and French officialdom, greedy Levantines of every stripe—it was all right for such to laugh at the old tradition. But he had facts of his own. Real facts they were, too, however odd, however unscientific.

In the first place there was not only the appearance of Alice’s Aunt Rhodopis. There was the name Rhodopis itself—a name constantly recurring in everything that he could find concerning the Red Pyramid—the third and smallest of the eternal Three, and yet the most fascinating.

They called it the Pyramid of Menkaura, but a woman had built it—had built it away back in the dawn of time—Queen Nitocris or the fabulous courtesan Rhodopis—who could tell?

And Carlton had seen her again—had once more looked upon that private, haunting, beautiful, yet terrible specter of his. This time, as on that day in the Bois de Boulogne, looked upon her in the full flood of daylight with plenty of other people there also to see, had they cared or been able.

It was the hour of afternoon tea—the great rooms of Shepheard’s crowded by the rich and the fashionable and the otherwise celebrated from the six continents. A blaze of color—anything lacking in that respect being supplied by the servants in red and white.

Carlton, seated by himself, only dimly conscious of the music and the frothy surge of laughter and conversation, of tinkling silver, glass, and porcelain.

Then, there she stood again.

This time he looked his fill.

She stood at the far end of the room, slender, graceful, exquisitely dressed—though this latter fact was a mere impression, Carlton, like many men, being quite incapable of ever noting the detail of feminine costume. She looked back at him quite as steadily.

She had an olive complexion: red lips, painted, perhaps, but not too much; blue-black hair: and then, those singular disquieting eyes, dark-fringed, yet light, under fine, straight black brows that did not curve at all except where they drooped a little at the temples.

He looked and looked. So did she. There was no feeling of embarrassment on his part this time. There was romance in it, unquestionably; but, so far as he was concerned, there was something more than romance. There was the passion for truth which fires every scientist, especially if he be something of an idealist, if he have a touch of the poet in him.

The bright unearthly nymph who dwells
’Mid sunless gold and jewels hid.

Was it possible that he was to be permitted to solve the old, old riddle that al-Murtadi had spoken about? Was this the Woman of the Pyramid?

He smiled at her, and she smiled back. Steadily, as steadily as though he had a full glass of water in his hand which he didn’t want to spill, Carlton got up from his chair and started forward, his eyes still on the enchantress, real or imaginary—whatever she was.

While this had been in progress an extremely fat and bald-headed gentleman, accompanied by two extraordinarily slim and hirsute young women, had been making his way down the center of the crowded room. With a polite nod he moved toward the table which Carlton had just vacated, blocking Carlton’s view for a moment.

When Carlton could look again the woman was gone.

That same evening, obedient to some instinct which led him as surely as the homing instinct directs a pigeon to its destination, Carlton found himself on the long road that leads from the suburbs of Cairo to the pyramids.

They reared their mountainous silhouettes—the imperishable Three, as mighty and mysterious as Egypt is in the history of mankind—shimmering gold and purple against the western sky.

The pyramids!

The sun went down. Night crept in upon him like an ancient spell. Still the pyramids hung nebulous in front of him—as real and as unreal as a figment of his imagination. What was reality and unreality, anyway?

Were these mysterious mountains of hewn stone any more real or any less real than the other legacies handed down to man from the remote past—the legacy of memories and experiences which every man, however poor, carries round in the back of his head?

The lebbek-trees were black—blacker than they had ever appeared before. The entire landscape had taken on a magical aspect, holy, solemn, brooding.

There was no sound. Carlton had a peculiar sensation of being all alone in the world—of having passed into a sort of cosmic anteroom—the ordinary world behind him, the palace of the unknown just ahead, yet unexplored.

Then it was as though a servant had appeared from the palace and bade him enter. Every nerve in his body was crisping.

He stood there looking into the young night-sky, hypnotized by the dim and slender crescent that he saw there.

It was the night of the new moon.