Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “You think so?”

  “Oh, yes. All he cares for is mathematics. He wants to talk in terms of calculus again with somebody who understands him. He’ll be perfectly quiet if he’s allowed to do that.”

  “This is very inconvenient,” said Zegloush Pasha. “Why this unusual hour? Would not another time do as well?”

  “As far as I’m concerned,” I said. “If I take the Sikh away now, without his having seen his friend, I’m afraid there’ll be trouble, that’s all.”

  “Then you yourself do not want to see this Chinaman ?”

  “Oh, no.”

  He looked relieved. Egyptians despise Indians as thoroughly, almost, as Indians despise Egyptians. Zegloush would have refused me point-blank; but a Sikh was a different matter.

  “Are you a resident of Cairo?” he asked me suddenly.

  “No. Here only for a month or two. I’m hoping to send my Sikh back to India, if I can find somebody to look after him on board ship.”

  “Oh, in that case-one does not like, you know, to have residents of Cairo too inquisitive into one’s household; but if this Sikh is out of his wits, and is returning to India, there is really no objection. My servant shall take him to see his friend.”

  “Better not leave him alone with the servant,” I suggested. “Let my Arab friend go, too, and keep an eye on him. I don’t want to cause trouble in your house.”

  “Let me see them both.”

  I followed him out into the hall, where Grim greeted him with profound solemnity, and for a minute or two he and Grim conversed in Arabic; Grim quoting that Arab text about “whom Allah hath touched and made mad let none offend.” In fact, Grim acted his part of learned hajji so well that Zegloush turned and swore at his servant for his bad manners in leaving such a worthy waiting in the hall. And all that while Narayan Singh kept making imaginary figures on the carpet with one finger, mumbling to himself.

  “What does he say his friend’s name is?” asked Zegloush — not unexpectedly.

  That was the one question we had dreaded, but Grim was ready with the only solution of the difficulty that we had been able to think of, and it got by.

  “He thinks his friend is in trouble and that he might not want his real name known,” he answered. “The uleema saith: ‘It is wisdom not to inquire too closely into what does not concern us.’”

  “Taib!” said Zegloush; then, turning to the servant: “Show both of them the way.”

  I followed Zegloush back into the library, and there we sat and talked interminably, he glancing at his watch from time to time with ever increasing restlessness. He was a well-informed and well-read man on the surface, but, in common with most of his kind, preferred his learning done up in nice little parcels to be swallowed whole. He had smatterings of everything by heart, from Aeschylus to Beaudelaire, and could trot out a quotation to cap any argument. But no philosophy, nor any politics, meant a thing to him beyond that Zegloush Pasha must ride the rising wave at all costs.

  At last, when we had talked for nearly an hour, he rang for the servant and told him to go and cut short the interview.

  “For I have an engagement,” he explained, “and I can really not go away and leave strangers in my house.”

  The servant came back presently in a great state of excitement. Sikh, Arab, and Chinaman, he said, had all vanished; moreover, two Nubians, supposed to be on guard in the passage outside the Chinaman’s door, were bound and gagged.

  “What does this mean? What have you done?” Zegloush demanded angrily. “Who are you? What—”

  He jumped from his chair, shook his fist at me, and rushed by, but paused in the doorway to give orders to the Nubian servant.

  “Watch him!” he ordered. “Don’t let him move out of here!”

  Then he was gone, on the run, through a swinging door at the end of a passage that led into the hall; and the Nubian proceeded to obey orders. I liked that Nubian, for he was a faithful fellow. The disproportion between his size and mine was something not to be ignored, so he stepped to the wall where a shield and scimitar hung between two bookcases and took down the scimitar. But he forgot the shield, so I took that, and it was two full feet from rim to rim, as heavy as so much solid metal. I thrust it out toward him and he slashed at it, breaking about six inches off the scimitar’s blade, so then I thrust the shield into his face and strode past, after which I had nothing to do but guard my retreat to the front door-a comparatively simple matter. I was outside in a jiffy, and in the street the next.

  The motor-car was gone, but Grim was waiting for me at the corner of the street, chafing his wrist and his face alternately.

  “We had quite a job with two Nubians,” he explained. “There’s a cab, let’s take it.”

  “Did the Chink come willingly?” I asked as we drove toward home.

  “He was crazy to come. Talks English. Said they’d kept him in that room so many weeks he’d forgotten how long, and that although they’d bring him almost anything he asked for, they wouldn’t let him out for fresh air. Soon as we’d gagged that pair of Nubies we just ran downstairs with him, unbolted the front door and out into the street. I’ve been waiting half an hour for you.”

  “What is the prospect of pursuit?” I wondered.

  “None. Zegloush won’t draw attention to his having kept a prisoner in his house for weeks. But you may bet your bottom dollar they’ll do something, and do it quick! They may try using influence to get us jumped on by the Government. They may try murder-poison is likeliest. But my guess is that the first attempt will be corruption...

  “They don’t know who we are yet,” I answered.

  “They’ll not take long to find that out. They own more spies, and better ones, than the Government does.”

  At any rate, we were in for whatever was going to happen, or, as a Moslem would prefer to state it, “that which is written shall come to pass,” and the next step obviously was to interview the Chinaman. We found him seated in Grim’s corner in the big sitting-room, being waited on by Narayan Singh-a dwarf served by a giant. He was ancient, and astonishingly frail to look at, dressed in black alpaca clothes and a black cloth Chinese cap, with big horn spectacles and thick-soled Chinese felt shoes. Somehow, although a prisoner, he had managed to keep himself shaved and clean, and the fingernails of his left hand were all unbroken, although he had no shields for them. The criss-cross crows-feet at the corners of his eyes, and the cheeklines that paralleled his drooping, dyed moustache made him look good-humoured, and he was certainly not in the least afraid, but smiled on the Sikh’s ministrations with the air of an ancient guest accepting what was due to him.

  “Since Your Excellency has consented to occupy my most unworthy house,” said Grim, “is it permissible to know the honoured name of the great one?”

  “Chu Chi Ying,” he answered, smiling.

  I knew who he was then. Not only Cappy Rainer, but at least a dozen other sailors had told me of the old Chinaman who used to teach mathematics to sea-captains waiting for a cargo and ambitious for their extra-master’s ticket. They always spoke of him with wonder as a man who could carry in his head any combination of figures whatever, and who seemed to know such things as tide-tables and the astronomical calendar by heart.

  “From Singapore?” I asked, and he nodded again.

  “How did Your Excellency come to visit Cairo and to be imprisoned in that house?” Grim asked him.

  “Came look-see pylarnid:”

  “Wanted to find out who was buried in it, I dare say?”

  Chu Chi Ying shook his head violently.

  “No man bellied in him. Pylamid is astlonomical monument, and has told one stlory four-thousand year long, but velly learned plofessors all look other way, and teach foolishness. Same as usual,” he added, with neither sarcasm nor rancour. “Mathlcmatics saying one thing, plofessors saying something else. I come look-see. I know.”

  “How did Zegloush get hold of you?” asked Grim.

  “He see me one time near p
ylamid. Must have money. Not much. Must have some. He see me teaching mathlematics to one velly sick man who stop at Meena House Hotel and come sit in sun near pylamid daily. Velly sick man much more sick; go back and lie down in hotel. Zegloush stay by me and talk many questions, not understanding what I say, but his fliend stand by and listen. By and by they talk. By and by Zegloush come back and say, ‘You teach my son mathlematics.’ So happened.”

  “You told him what you know about the pyramid ?”

  He nodded.

  “Big fool likee fat flirst mate, wantee master’s ticket. By an’ by he understand something,”

  Well, we fed the old gentleman and did our best to make him feel at home. He scorned Grim’s marvellous curry and would take nothing more than rice with a little garlic in it, washed down with copious drafts of tea, but he seemed to enjoy our hospitality immensely and beamed grateful acknowledgment whenever anything was done for him. So, after our own meal was finished, seeing the good humour he was in, Grim pushed a table up against the corner seat, set Chinese drawing materials on it, and we three gathered round to try and get him to expound his secret.

  He was perfectly willing. With a few strokes of the brush he drew for us a picture of the Great Pyramid in sections, showing the interior galleries and chambers. He drew it with the swift precision of a man who has studied his subject for years and knows the details all by heart; and then, with the persuasive charm of the philosopher who loves to tcach, he began at the beginning and told us the story of the pyramid and what it meant. Illustrating each step mathematically.

  His English improved as he warmed to his task, and he did not seem to mind how often he was asked to repeat a statement or its explanation. But at the end of it — which was long after midnight — although we all three understood what he claimed to have proved, the maze of calculations through which he had led us was still a maze to me and I couldn’t have repeated the hundreth part of it. Even Grim-to whom mathematics is, like music, a delight-laughed when I asked him how much he had understood.

  “He’s over my head. I can’t follow his proofs. Yet — aren’t you convinced?”

  I was, and we all were. As far as I could make it out, Chu Chi Ying’s theory was this: There were men in the days when the pyramid was built who knew Knowledge. Abstract knowledge. And abstract knowledge was their notion of the after-life and what we call heaven. Therefore, the attainment of abstract knowledge meant eternal life. But — and here was the rub, as I understood it — abstract knowledge could not be understood unless first concretely expressed in some way. In other words, he who believed he had attained to abstract knowledge had to prove it, and to leave his proof for others to follow if they could. So the pyramid was an effort on the part of old King Khufu to express concretely the sum total of the abstract knowledge that had been taught to him by the sages of his day-who came from abroad, by the way; they were not Egyptians. But that was not all.

  Now, mind you, I’m hazy about all this, being one of the concrete fraternity from shoe-sole to occiput. I’m simply trying to set down all that I could gather from the learned lecture of a nice old Chinaman, who was sufficiently abstract to be satisfied with rice and tea, whereas I eat porterhouse steak as often as I can get it.

  According to Chu Chi Ying, then, as I understood him, abstract knowledge is infinite, and therefore has no end. One thing leads to another, as it were, and so on for ever and ever. There’s no stopping-place; nowhere where you can say: “Here is the end of knowledge, or of this particular branch, of it.”

  Therefore, he who seeks to express in concrete terms-as in a pyramid, for instance-the abstract knowledge that he has made his own must take care to express its infinity in some way. It must not be complete in itself, but must lead on to something else; and it must in some way provide a connecting link, however obscure and difficult to trace, which other men may follow if they will.

  According, then, to that ancient system of metaphysics, however much Khufu might wish to use his pyramid — his concrete expression of abstract knowledge, that is to say-for a blind to prevent thieves from finding his real tomb, nevertheless, if the knowledge he had gained was to be of any use to him in the next world, he was obliged to incorporate in the pyramid some means whereby men might follow him step by step, if they could puzzle It out.

  And at that point came in Khufu’s limitations, his heathenism, materialism, or whatever you care to call it. He believed, in common with most of the educated folk of that day, that the door of the tomb in which his body was to be interred was the actual door of the next world, and that whatever he should take with him into his tomb, provided he could keep it in there, would be his in the next world also. So unless he chose to turn his back on his beliefs, he was compelled to incorporate in the pyramid some intelligible clue to the whereabouts of his next step forward, which he believed his private burying-place to be.

  Does it sound like lunacy? Maybe it was and is. Maybe every speculation on the next world and the means of getting front scats there is lunacy. And undoubtedly our old Chinese friend had got himself accepted as a lunatic by the Egyptians to whom, in the innocence of a craving to instruct, he had confided his discovery. But those Egyptians had been just as much convinced as Grim, Narayan Singh and I were that there were facts and real pots of gold at the foot of Chu Chi Ying’s theoretic rainbow.

  Moreover, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and always was. It was possible that Chu Chi Ying was wrong, and that Khufu did not mix his pudding in that way at all. We, who have not spent fifty or sixty years in analysing all the evidence, have a perfect right, of course, to criticize Chu Chi Ying’s deductions and to label him a lunatic. But was there any pudding? If what Chu Chi Ying described to us was true, were there any such clues contained in the pyramid as he maintained there ought to be, and if so what were they, and where did they lead?

  He laid aside that large sketch of the pyramid that he had made, and drew a map of the Fayoum, showing the Nile, the pyramid, the desert and the distant hills. Then, using the stem of the brushpencil to measure with, he placed with great care a drawing of the Sphinx.

  “You know liddle of Sphinx?” he asked, and grinned. “Plenty men know Sphinx made liddle. None guess, beclause not know what liddle is. Liddle of Sphinx, liddle of tomb of Khufu. Samee thing!”

  “Then is the tomb of Khufu underneath the Sphinx, or inside it?” I asked him.

  “Is point of departure inside ship?” he retorted with a dry little cackle of amusement. “Fat fool first mate wanting ticket askee same question.”

  He tapped his forehead meaningly with one lean finger.

  “Business of think, not guess! You know tligonometly? You know tliangulation? You know what base is? So. Look, see.”

  He went into a maze of calculations then that would baffle an astronomer who hadn’t tables to fall back on. Chu Chi Ying used never a note, set down no figures, hesitated not one second, but reeled off — in English, mind you — numbers running into billions, pointing with the long nail of his left forefinger to the various details of the pyramid’s construction as he dealt with them mathematically, one by one. He calculated for an hour. He dragged in the precession of the equinoxes and law of gravity, the speed of light, and the mean distance between the earth and sun, and related all that-in some inscrutable fashion that seemed plausible while he was doing it — to the inside measurements of the empty granite sarcophagus — so called — that was all they ever found in the pyramid when Al Mahmoun’s men broke in, A.D. 800. And the long and short of all that was, as he announced triumphantly at the conclusion, that the base of the pyramid on the side opposed to the Sphinx is the base of a theoretical triangle, whose apex falls exactly on the opening into Khufu’s real tomb!

  “And I go look-see!” he added. “Answer collect. Plerfectly collect! Tomb there!”

  Grim asked him to figure out the result on paper, giving the site of the supposed real tomb, but omit ting details of the calculations, and he promised to do that the
following morning, saying it would take time to draft it out with the aid of instrurnents.

  “Have you any idea what is inside the tomb?” I asked him.

  “Mummy of dam-fool Khufu!” he answered.

  “Anything else, d’you suppose?”

  “Heap much plenty money!”

  “Any way of guessing how much?”

  “No can guess. Can reckon.”

  “Reckon away then, Your Excellency, unless you want to go to bed.”

  Now he began unravelling the mysteries of another law that he said was one of the things men understood in those days. It included the law of summation. He said that the arrangement of the stars in the sky was governed by it-of the branches and twigs and leaves on a tree — of the seeds in a flower — of the proportions of dry land and water that go to make the world. He said it governed the proportions of the vases that the Chinese artists made so wonderfully in the reign of the Emperor Ming, and went on to add that it was the secret of all wealth, and of all true architecture, and of all true growth and accumulation.

  To him, the pyramid expressed — by means of some abstruse relation between the number of courses of stone and the height and weight of the finished building — not only the number of ingots of gold and silver that Khufu caused to be buried with him in his tomb, but their exact dimensions, purity or fineness, and the order of their arrangement underground. Then, for our special edification, he jotted down on paper the totals in silver and gold in English ounces, and translated that into pounds sterling at approximately current market rates.

  I simply refuse to repeat the total. It was staggering. The famous Comstock Lode, with its total output of seven hundred million dollars, was a dwarf beside it, and if there was a word of truth in what Chu Chi Ying undoubtedly believed, then Grim’s description of Joan Angela’s lot as a Golconda was a ridiculous understatement. You couldn’t believe it, for your mind refused to take it in. We three sat back, and two of us whistled; the third, Narayan Singh, grinned foolishly, and Chu Chi Ying sat and nodded at us, much more delighted with his mathematical solution and with our bewilderment than with any thought about the value of the gold.