The Pyramid Chapter 5

INTO THE DARK

It may be said with perfect confidence that everything depends on a man’s personality, on his temperament, anyway. The Society for Psychical Research, both in England and in America, has paid a good deal of attention to this phase of a man. The majority of people never see a ghost, never have even a ghostly feeling, except a sort of “creepiness,” perhaps, when something or other occurs that they do not immediately understand.

Yet, over against this truth is the other—that the annals of the world, both written and unwritten, in every language, from every country and every century, are filled with ghost stories.

Not only that, but the learned society mentioned above has investigated no end of such stories in a purely scientific spirit and has found them to be true.

It results that what are vulgarly called ghosts are real, and that, while the vast majority of the earth’s population can’t see them, there are others who can; and that there always have been such.

This, to some extent, is merely a reflection of what was passing through George Carlton’s mind as he stood there on the edge of the desert, the pyramids soaring into the mystic, shadowy air to one side of him, that other vast shadow of the sphinx—he could understand why the Arabs called it “the Father of Terrors”—beyond; that timorous, slender new moon, “like a frightened girl,” floating in the sky above him.

It had always been the same—for Hamid Yusef on the steps of the mosque, for the old beggar outside the Coptic church, and every other loose madman that Osman had ferreted out for him: it had always been the same—on the night of the new moon they had seen her and followed the Woman of the Pyramid.

Carlton laughed.

“Shall I risk madness, too?”

His only answer was to walk forward, to surrender himself completely to the spell of the hour and the place.

He was not much of an Egyptologist, but he was fairly familiar with the ordinary aspects of the pyramids, of the sphinx, and their surrounding geography.

Over there, in ancient times, lay Memphis, and this had been the City of the Dead. It still was, after the lapse of all these centuries. No wonder that the Arabs preferred to give the place a wide berth at night!

What spells of magic, black and white, had not been woven into the winding-sheets of the thousands of dead who had been buried here? He, for one, would never deny that the priests of this ancestor of nations were masters of magic of every kind.

The sphinx! Even in that dim light he could see on its scarred visage the awe of the man who looks upon eternity. Who else but a master-magician, a demigod, could have dreamed such a dream as this monument and then have had it executed! It was old, most likely, when even the pyramids were young.

Cheops, Chefren, Menkaura!

To think that there were men who, in the name of science, would have these considered as mere burial places!

For Carlton, as for so many others, they epitomized the human race—its knowledge, so much of which had been lost: its aspirations, the same now as they had always been; its dim, unknowable origin, its unknowable end.

He remembered the first time that he had ever entered one of these man-made mountains—the warm darkness as he followed the twinkling candle of his guide deeper and deeper under the million tons of stone.

He had felt then, as he felt now, like the initiate of the ancient Mysteries. For, until any man has followed some twinkling light to the very heart of material appearance, what can he possibly know of life or of death or of the Giver of these things?

But it was the Pyramid of Menkaura—the Red Pyramid, the least but most beautiful of the three great ones—that drew Carlton now. And he was ready to admit to himself that there was something more than mere moralizing in his heart as he drew near to it. He felt almost as though he knew it—as though it were expecting him.

The Pyramid of Queen Nitocris, of the “Ruddy-Faced” Rhodopis! The Pyramid of the Woman!

There is an entrance to this pyramid—well known to tourists—on the northern side. From this, a long, narrow tunnel slants down to the chamber, far below the pyramid-floor and almost under the apex.

This entrance became Carlton’s destination at first. He admitted it, half amusedly, half ashamed. He, George Carlton, man of science, almost thirty, prowling alone at night in the neighborhood of the pyramids in the quest for a ghost!

But no man’s mood, unless he was a good deal of a downright idiot, could be anything but solemn for any length of time in this august company. By the time that Carlton had come to the rough foot of the Third Pyramid, had paused once to glance up its sloping height—reaching, like Jacob’s ladder, to the very stars—he was again submerged in queer, half-formed broodlings.

The night fell deeper. It was almost as though he were a diver in a blue, ethereal sea—going deeper and deeper, ever deeper into hitherto fathomless depths.

Had the hands of the dial of eternity been turned back it would be like this. The pyramids knew no age. Neither did Harmachis, the great sphinx, who still guarded the cemetery of Memphis.

There is a quality of the desert night which writers and travelers have often mentioned. It is the quality which nature often possesses—of making a man feel himself but the smallest grain of dust, the merest microbe. Add to this the huge, mystical mass of the pyramids, and you will have the feeling that engulfed Carlton as he waited there—waited, he wouldn’t have said for what.

Blue night, blue shadows, each great star a golden lamp, that frightened girl of a new moon gone long ago! He, the only atom of human consciousness in time or space, seated on a stone of Menkaura’s pyramid—that one stone as old as the earth and as solid!

He had been seated there for he couldn’t say how long. He had passed on by when he came to the entrance on the north side of the pyramid: had passed on round to the west where he knew that, for half the distance round the world, there was, perhaps, no other human being—empty desert and empty sea and empty sky. Then he was conscious that another presence was drawing near.

He did not stir, did not move his eyes even from their contemplation of the sky. But there had come a slight creeping of his superficial nerves, a sensation of nameless expectancy.

While he sat there, as he always said afterward, he experienced a swift review of everything which had led up to this supreme moment—the first time that he had ever seen that particular ghost of his back in the Savoy while the orchestra was playing; again, in Munich, with the strains of Aida in the air; again, in the Bois de Boulogne, on the steps of the mosque, in the crowded room at Shepheard’s: the prescience that this was the Woman of the Pyramid: and, more than all else, that she was here now, just behind him, looking at him, waiting for him to turn!

He turned.

He saw her standing there, only a few paces away. Perhaps it was that wonderful blue light of the desert night which cast a spell over his senses. At any rate, she appeared more beautiful and alluring than whenever he had seen her before.

There was a gust of tepid air, and it brought to him such perfume as he had never even dreamed of before; then a tingling of witch-music—as though the spirits of all the musicians he had ever heard and loved had cast their very best into a few bars and a few chords.

She smiled at him. He found himself scrambling to his feet—and a feeling scrambling to its feet in his heart such as he had hardly known existed there, even on that first night when he had first kissed Alice.

His nerves were still crisping. It was a good deal like that time that he had smoked a hashish cigarette.

A little while before (wrote Carlton, in the second and last monograph he has ever published), I was fully aware that man, in the presence of infinity, is himself infinity—the infinitely small in the presence of the infinitely great.

Matter, of course, is never at rest. The molecules of the brick swing free in their eternal dance. Was I not but a sentient molecule swinging free in the material universe as I followed the Woman into the Pyramid?

Carlton felt a pair of vibrant arms under his head, felt a perfumed, tepid breath on his face, looked up into the glowing eyes of the woman who had been haunting him.