means satisfied. "This is all very well," they said, "but you have killed one of our finest women, and you offer us a miserable little boy as the murderer. That will not do at all." They therefore accused the headman of the offending family, and concocted their story so well that he was found guilty and sent to penal servitude. In conclusion I must relate one more story in order to illustrate the peculiar manner in which tragedy and comedy go hand in hand amongst the children of Egypt. A well-known robber was arrested at a small station in the Sudân during the time when martial law was still in force; and he was promptly sentenced to death. The solitary English officer in charge of the post refrained from attending the execution, the arrangements for which were left to the discretion of his Egyptian colleagues. A gibbet was erected, and about nine o'clock on the next morning the condemned man was driven up to it in a mule-cart. The rope was passed round his neck, the mule was whipped up, and the cart passed from under the feet of the victim, who was left swinging in mid-air. The officer, however, had forgotten to tie the man's hands; and he promptly swarmed up the rope to the crossbeam, there seating himself comfortably in the piping hot sunshine, while the troops stood gaping around him, the officer mopping his forehead in an ecstasy of heat and vexation. Nobody knew what to do. They could not shoot the man, for their orders were to hang him; and, on the barren sandy ground, no stones could be found to throw at him in order to dislodge him. The Egyptian officer therefore entered into friendly conversation with him, begging him to come down and be hanged like a man, instead of sitting up there swinging his legs like a monkey. This the robber totally refused to do, and he declared that nothing short of a free pardon would induce him to descend. The officer therefore endeavoured to appeal to the man's better feelings. "Look here," he said, "it is all very nice for you, sitting up there in the breeze, but down here it is dreadfully hot; and, you know, none of us have yet had our breakfasts, and we are feeling extraordinarily faint and uncomfortable. Please do come down and be hanged properly, or I, for my part, will most certainly be sick." The robber, however, refused to move; and at last the English officer was sent for, who, acting in accordance with an unwritten law, pardoned him there and then, thereby enlisting the faithful services of a scout who has since done very valuable work. CHAPTER XV AN ANCIENT EGYPTIAN POEM A CENTURY ago, when the hieroglyphical script of the Ancient Egyptians first began to be deciphered, it would hardly have been believed possible that scholars would one day find themselves possessed of such a vast literature as is now at the disposal of Egyptologists; nor would it have been dreamed that the subtilties of the language, the idioms, or even the grammatical structure, would ever be so fully understood as they are at the present day. Thanks mainly to the diligent work of a group of painstaking German Jews, and to the brilliant labours of a handful of European and American scholars, we can now translate the many hieroglyphic or hieratic texts which have come down to us, with a degree of accuracy almost equal to that obtained in our renderings of Greek and Latin. Poems, prayers, tales serious and comic, historical narratives, satires, and letters, are now able to be put into modern language with the full certainty that the meaning has been grasped; and the wealth and variety of the material thus presented to us is astonishing. One of the most remarkable documents of all those which have come down from Pharaonic times is that which records the dialogue between a man about to commit suicide and his own soul, composed some where about the year B.C. 2000. The papyrus upon which it is written is now preserved in Berlin; and the text has been translated by Professor Erman and Professor Breasted, whose renderings I have, in the main, here followed. The man is supposed to be weary of his mortal life, owing, it would seem, to the fact that his body has been disfigured by some dreadful mutilation, perhaps inflicted by his enemies; and the burden of the flesh has become intolerable to him. His soul, however, enjoys its sojourn upon earth, and has no desire to be launched into another sphere. The distinction between soul and body is somewhat difficult for us to understand, but actually it may be supposed that the dialogue represents the battle in the unfortunate man's mind between the desire for freedom from bodily pain on the one hand, and the dread of death on the other. "Recollect," says the life-loving soul, "that burial is lamentation and a bringer of tears, causing a man to be full of sorrow. It is taking a man from his home and casting him out upon the heights (of the desert). But you will not be going up there that you may see the sun. There are those who build (their tombs) in red granite, who construct their sepulchres within a pyramid; there are those who (lie) splendidly in splendid structures . . . But their memorial altars are as forsaken as are (the bodies of) those weary-ones who, without a surviving relative, die on the pathway across the inundation, the flood taking hold of them on the one side, the heat (of the sun) on the other, and to whom (alone) the fish along the brink of the water speak. Hearken to me!-pursue the gladness of the day and forget sorrow." But the man does not fear death so greatly as he dreads life now that his body has become hideous and an object to be shunned by others. "My name," he cries in the bitterness of his distress, "is more horrible than the stench of a (dead) bird on a summer day when the sun is hot. Yea, my name is more abhorrent than a woman against whom gossip is told to her husband." He then burst into a tirade against humanity in general. "The quiet man perishes," he declares; "the bold-faced walk abroad. Hearts are full of thieving; the (only) man in whom one can trust is he of no understanding . . . I am burdened with misery, and have no faithful friend. Then, in the anguish of his mind, he utters a welcome to Death which will stand for all time amongst the greatest poems in existence. The brevity of his metaphors, which are yet amply descriptive, are reminiscent of the best Japanese poetry, and show the same masterly handling of the structure of imagination, the same ability in the selection of the essential materials for the formation of a mindpicture. "Death is before me to-day Like the recovery of a sick man; Like going out into the garden after an illness. Death is before me to-day Like the fragrance of myrrh; Like sitting under a (ship's) sail on a windy day. Death is before me to-day Like the scent of lotus flowers; Like resting on the roadside to drink deep. Death is before me to-day Like the course of the overflowing water-channel, Like the return of a man from a ship of war to his house. |