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 and porphyry, 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 princ.i.p.al 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 G.o.ds, 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 may be 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 G.o.ds, look after the 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 n.o.bility; and it is not uncommon for a prince to surrender his claim of succession to a.s.sume 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d of good, in contradistinction to Set, the G.o.d of evil.

He is the G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 their priestly positions at his demise, the succession pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d, 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 pa.s.sed 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 G.o.ds 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 G.o.ds, 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 a.s.sume 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 many transmigrations shall find and reanimate its rejected tenement. Yet I know no other G.o.d or even if I have a soul. Can I by searching find out truth or the true G.o.d? 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 G.o.d."

(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 h.e.l.l 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 lacks enthusiasm, 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 pa.s.s 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.