The Heart to Artemis

by Bryher;

  I could not accept Islam after I was fifteen. After my mind developed I was horrified by its attitude to woman and its fanaticism. It advances literally by the sword (as now in certain parts of Africa) and a religion imposed by force can have no roots in faith. In 1903, however, it spoke to me as simply as to most of the Sufis; in trust, in compassion and as a defense against danger.

  Religion in Egypt was not only Islam, it was also The Book of the Dead. This was the original adventure story, a voyage through danger into heaven. I took to this ancient faith like a duck to water. It never preached; it always explained. There were no terrifying pictures as in the Italian churches of wailing figures tumbling into hell. It was true that the Osiris story was grim but it was also remote. I did not think of Isis (years were to pass before I read of “the woman who was made a man by her father, Osiris”) but Horus, the child, the hawk-headed, was both a warrior and a perfect Henty book hero. It was so simple; a boat sailed along the river just as our steamer puffed its way up the Nile. The would-be initiates faced tests; we had to find water, we might lose the path or, through pure weariness, drop our spears. If so, vultures and hyenas were waiting to pounce on us while we lay helplessly on the sand. To endure was the first triumph, then Thoth himself, his friendly ape beside him, would welcome us and lead us to the judgment hall. If we had murdered, looted or robbed the unfortunate, the crocodiles were waiting in their pool but if our hearts balanced (I loved the feather that to me was truthfulness and not a symbol of it) we should remember the passwords and run out to the lotus fields to play for ever and ever. Yes, the journey was the twin of life, free from snares and the incomprehensible subtleties surrounding me in the West. The only bit of it that I could not understand was the sacred beetle. I looked at scarabs and the live ones clinging to ledges in the mud walls and wondered. Life and age, death and renewal are shadowy to a child and I clung the more closely to Thoth, the ibis-headed scribe, and his wonderfully gentle ape.

  When there are so many memories it is wise to concentrate upon a few. Many children have a good uncle in their lives, with me it was Dr. Boyce. He was no real relative, we met him riding near the pyramids, but he talked to me seriously without mention of any babyish topics and our friendship survived even his prescription of some odious potash lozenges when I got a sore throat from the dust. He came from Kent but was partly Irish and, with the dash of eccentricity common in the British Isles, he had worked almost without holidays for years as a specialist in children’s diseases so that aged about fifty he could retire “and see the world.” We often had no news of him for months and then he would call upon us suddenly, bringing me a Tibetan necklace that was subsequently stolen, to my sorrow because of its associations, and speaking of places with authority that I could not find on my schoolroom atlas. Eventually he took a post as private physician to a Russian nobleman to learn the language and prepare himself for a supreme trip. He wanted to go to Bokhara (“You must pronounce it Bo’hara,” he corrected me when he told us), a city more rigidly behind an Iron Curtain then than it is today. He would have got there, I think, but he was due to start in the summer of 1914 and hurried back to England instead because of rumors of a possible war. The conditions that he had seen in Russia had shocked him profoundly and conservative as he was, he was sympathetic towards the revolution. In the autumn of 1914 he went out to a hospital in France and died from overwork a year or two after the Armistice. Almost the last time that I saw him was during the influenza epidemic of 1918. “Why didn’t you get inoculated?” he said reproachfully, looking at my pile of handkerchiefs, and took me straight round to Dr. John Matthews who not only inoculated me for many years but became a lifelong friend and stimulated my interest in vaccines. In the desert, however, when we first met, Dr. Boyce flattered me by asking my opinion about Egypt; my parents liked him as much as I did and all that winter he joined us on most of our excursions.

  Our first long trip was to ride across the desert to Sakkara. We left the pyramids behind us but as we trotted close to the Sphinx, Ali explained that it had once almost disappeared under the sand. We ambled forward over a wide plain and the light was so clear that everything seemed fluid. I resented being accompanied by a donkey boy whose indigo robe was belted up almost to his waist but Ali was firm, “It is the custom of the country and there must be somebody to water and feed your animal while you are having lunch or seeing the tombs.” That first day we did not notice any gazelles but on a subsequent occasion some passed us in the distance; they were shy, as if somebody had drawn a few dark lines with a palm leaf against the horizon, and incredibly swift.

  I wonder if my introduction to ancient Egyptian life on the walls of the tomb of Ti was not similar to the experience of another generation of children at the cinema? The pictures were in panels and full of action. An official walked across a field, men were reaping or feeding cranes, a boat shaped like a throwing stick was crowded with rowers. It was different from reading. I could see the movements, notice how a robe fell or the shape of a loaf of bread. Yet if I had not studied my two authorities, Baedeker and Henty, I reflected, I might have thought that the scribe was holding a stick instead of a reed pen or that the awning on the ship was a house. There were broken steps leading to an underground passage half choked with sand. The guide flashed his candle along it and my mother swore that she could see the track of snakes.

  We ate our lunch under a green umbrella at the Rest House near the ancient Step Pyramid that rose mysteriously out of the sand. I did not want to go back to the hotel but if I ran away without a guide I might die of thirst before I came to the wells. We were alone, visitors usually found the ride too exhausting but we were used to exercise and went over in the early afternoon to the tombs of the sacred bulls. We walked through a stifling passage into a hall full of slabs of granite but I found it hard to understand why the animals had been worshiped. The guidebook wrote of mysteries but in its traditional manner did not explain what these were. I always seemed to be waiting angrily at the threshold of a door. It was too heavy for me to open but if I could have got the other side, surely there would have been a book or something to translate what seemed so obscure?

  I shall never forget the end of that day. We rode to Bedrashen where we could take a train back to Cairo. An immense statue was stretched out under the palms. It was all that was left of Memphis, a lesson in the transience of empires and inexpressibly sad.

  Cairo fifty years ago was the myth of a child’s imagination. We went to Rhoda, a legendary island where Moses was said to have drifted ashore among the bulrushes that were still a part of the Nile and to the underground crypt where the Holy Family was supposed to have rested. Travellers’ tales, yes, but as my mother said in front of the patient donkey tugging at a water wheel and the hut of sun-baked bricks, it was “exactly like the Bible.” I visited an ostrich farm and remembered the Robinsons on their island as I watched a round orange descend a bird’s long throat. They tried to sell us eggs decorated with signs and waved white feathers that made a noise like palm leaves when a boy swished them through the air. Hieropolis, the priests’ city, had already become the summer quarters of Egyptian officials but at sunset nothing could take away the gold of its name.

  Time was not unlimited and one night we took the train to Luxor to see Karnak and the Tombs of the Kings. My favorite excursion was to the Rest House, a square, whitewashed building where Cook’s fed and soothed their tourists after a slippery descent down a barely existent path from the steep and crumbling hills. The groups from the steamers had to see “the sights” within so many hours but individual parties could explore the valley quietly, a tomb or two in a morning. After lunch I had to wait, trying hard not to scuff the sand against the metal legs of the chairs because that would disturb the ladies round me, dozing under their green-lined sunshades. The dragomans were asleep in another court, their hands folded above cinnamon robes while the minutes stretched like the worn elastic on my old hat until my parents took pity on me. A nod, and I was
off with a donkey boy to the terraces of Deir el-Bahri that I had decided were the color of myrrh. In imagination I was already in Punt, in that land that had been found, forgotten and eventually rediscovered. Was it deep in Africa as some authorities said? Or was it the coast of Somaliland along the Red Sea? I wanted to stand alone and unhindered in front of the pictures, the Egyptians running down the gangplank like the sailors that I had seen in Naples, the beehive huts described in Baedeker, and the servitors carrying treasures up to the King. Nobody understood how important it was for me to remember every detail because they had not seen my exercise book; I was writing a story a whole nine pages long about a stowaway aged ten who went to Punt and came back with a pet monkey and a spice tree in a pot.

  Was it destiny or merely a chance meeting? We were riding down the valley one hot morning when we stopped to talk to an Austrian archaeologist in a white sun helmet. He was examining a wall and I suppose that I must have questioned him because he took my hand and began to teach me hieroglyphics. M was an owl, I traced it after him on the rock with my fingers, here was a pigeon, this sign represented both a syllable and a house. I had the delicious sensation of entering a secret world. How powerful I should be once I had learned the names, even the dragoman did not know that a chicken was not carved into the rock for fun but because it was a letter and part of the alphabet. I was gloriously proud when the archaeologist (whose own name I never knew) told my father that if I stayed for the winter I should be able to read the easier texts. I pored for hours over the notes in Baedeker afterwards! I was lucky to have met this Austrian first. Some English archaeologists to whom I spoke upon a subsequent visit elbowed all laymen out of their way and sneered at me for asking whether they had found any scraps of poetry on their ostraca.

  Sometimes the smell of bats drove us out of subterranean chambers where the ground was littered with chips of alabaster. Whatever we saw represented in the temples was duplicated in the life around us, the men stooped over their crops in the same way or, with the stiff, slow movements of a frieze, drove their donkeys to water. Once an Egyptian came nervously up to us with two evil-looking dragons, they were scorpions, fighting on a pottery sherd. I was lifted up to see a polished basin into which they put the babies in the summer so that they did not crawl on the ground among the vipers. There were many deaths from snakebite, much malaria and plenty of smallpox; these things were kept hidden from that gold mine, the tourists, but we heard about them from Dr. Boyce. (For some reason, they did not seem to alarm my family as much as measles.) Ali gave me a piece of freshly cut sugar cane to eat; to my disappointment because I felt disloyal to the Swiss Robinsons, it had a sickly, unpleasant taste. Neither did I care for fresh dates.

  We rode home slowly in the evenings past the Colossi of Memnon while I wished that they could find an inscription that would set the stones singing again. The Romans had heard them, then the sounds had suddenly ceased. How exciting it would be to know the real pronunciation of Egyptian words! My head was full of such thoughts as we trotted across the plain that stretched about us like a fisherman’s shallow hamper, sand, grass and stalk overlapping each other in a pattern of ochre and green with an occasional kingfisher rising above the rushes.

  The day came when we took a Cook’s steamer from Luxor to Assuan. We stopped at Esna to see the temple and the small boys ran up to us with tall black and white baskets or faked scarabs just as they had pestered Roman legionaries on their way to the Cataract or Arab travelers in the Middle Ages. The next place, Edfu, was a hawk. It was the temple of my hero, Horus. His bird faced us, black, polished and still on guard after two thousand years in front of columns whose shadows were the color of water. I scrambled up to the tower and down to the colonnade. I was angry when some of the tourists laughed. It was as holy to me as it had been to the Egyptians.

  Most of all, however, I liked standing beside the rail of the steamer while we moved gently along the Nile. A drove of asses repeated the familiar oval of an Egyptian text. A pole creaked, men stopped, the buckets of precious water for the maize and onions passed to and fro. Tiny camels followed their heavily laden mothers and where the villages ended, black and white hoopoes with amazing crests waited as if in audience upon narrow, gritty sandbanks.

  I read of course but was mainly dependent upon Tauchnitz. I had translations of novels about ancient Egypt by Ebers, Uarda, The Sisters and An Egyptian Princess. There was our invaluable guidebook, A Thousand Miles Up the Nile by Amelia B. Edwards. It had been published in the early seventies but the scenes that she described had scarcely changed during the intervening thirty years. “This experience will give her more than two years at school,” an American lady said to my mother. Two years! What an understatement! The background was there for life.

  Kom Ombo was a frontier post where the river civilization and the sand met in uneasy alliance. It had a temple dedicated to two gods, Darkness and Light, the crocodile and the falcon-headed, a wonderful frieze of ducks rising out of a clump of rushes into the sky and a pool where they had once kept live crocodiles.

  I did not like these creatures. To me, as to the ancient world, they were a symbol of some dark force able to alter destiny in a few seconds. The bravest hunter was powerless against them if his boat upset and although I knew that now they were never found so far north, I glanced prudently up and down the Nile as I came on deck.

  It was early morning, there was nobody by the gangway. I ran ashore alone and started to explore the country, being careful, however, to keep our steamer in sight. This was the frontier of “Bow Land,” the ancient name for Nubia and a camp for the caravans traveling to and from the Red Sea.

  Three small children came towards me, glistening with castor oil. The boy’s head was a mass of fuzzy hair, the tiny plaits, that were as many as the leather strings of the aprons that were their only dresses, dangled to and fro whenever the little girls laughed. They pointed at me. I smiled back and asked politely in my most carefully phrased Arabic if I might play with them? They howled and ran away.

  How strange I must have looked! I was still dressed in woolen combinations, a bodice, knickers, and white petticoat, a blue dress with white braid, coat, black ribbed stockings and high boots. As a special concession to the African climate I had been permitted to leave off my flannel petticoat and had escaped that morning without gloves. I may even have had a Baedeker in my hand. My Arabic was unintelligible because they would certainly have spoken a dialect but I knew at once that it was my color that had driven them away. To them, black and almost naked, rubbed gloriously with oil like the Greeks at the funeral games, my white face under an overlarge, green-lined sun helmet can only have seemed a mask created by some medicine man to ward off the plague.

  Color prejudice is inconceivable to me. (I doubt if my conviction springs from this incident because I am sure that I should never have had it.) Has either a black or a white face the monopoly of eternal values? Supposing that a creature arrived from another planet with a green hide and pink spots, are we to refuse his offer of friendship because his appearance differs from our own?

  Naturally I did not think of such problems at that time. I was merely disappointed that they would not play with me and that I could not smear my head with castor oil.

  “What do you expect me to do for you?” my analyst asked, almost angrily, many years later. “As a child you have been in Paradise!”

  This was true. We rode every day across a desert that was not the flat plain that Westerners, accustomed to a beach, associate with sand but lightly smoothed ridges rising into hills. At noon these were gray but they turned into a fawn at sunset that darkened into glowing red. All an Arab’s feeling for the “black tents” was flowing through my blood. How could it be otherwise? I had loved adventure from my cradle and the realm before me was the kingdom of the tribes. I led, always. This was understood for the peace of the caravan. It was less the hunger to be first, I knew little then about competition, than a headlong urge to throw myself immediately int
o everything unknown.

  Ali came abreast of me one morning as we trotted past the half-buried column in the alabaster quarries. I was wishing that I knew how to carve one of the many scattered chips into a foal or perhaps a bird when he stooped in his saddle to inspect my donkey’s straps. The animal bore the unfortunate name of Ginger Brandy but it had a beautiful necklace of blue beads strung round its white neck to keep off the evil eye. “We are going a long way,” he said, “but you will enjoy yourself. We are following the caravan track as far as the first halt.”

  It was particularly clear. The sand beneath my donkey’s hooves was a fine, transparent apricot. Further away, in a hollow of the valley it reminded me of the topazes that a Cairo merchant had shaken into his palm from a black and white box. I was scolded suddenly for not answering and losing myself in a daydream but who, on such a morning, wanted to talk? Oh, if we had only got tents with us so that we need not go back to the hotel but could ride on week after week until we came to my other love, the sea. A donkey boy shouted, we stopped. Ali stood up in his stirrups, exactly like a trader from the friezes in his billowing robes. “Look!” he pointed and there, motionless and taut, I saw a long, tawny-haired dog. “Jackal!” There were whispers in Arabic and English. “What is it doing? They seldom come out except at night.” Had it smelt us trotting too near it in that lonely valley or had some beast disturbed it in its lair? We watched, it turned its head swiftly towards me, then with a bound it disappeared among the cliffs.