Leave for Egypt — Reincarnation — Boulak Museum — Excavations — Removal of mummies — Nofertari — Adventure in tomb — Mr. Brownrigg’s danger on Pyramid — Cyprus — Article on “Fiction” — “Jess” — Home by long sea — “Cleopatra” — “Colonel Quaritch, V.C.” — Press attacks — Publishing arrangements — Lang’s advice — “Cleopatra” dedicated to H. R. H.‘s mother — Her death — Savile Club — Thomas Hardy — H. R. H. weary of writing novels — Lang’s encouragement — Allan Quatermain and Umslopogaas — Winston Churchill’s approval — Letters from W. E. Henley — “Maiwa’s Revenge” — “Beatrice” — Collaboration with Lang in “The World’s Desire” — Letters from Lang — “The Song of the Bow.”
After “She” had been fairly launched, and the proofs of “Jess” passed for press, I started, in January 1887, on a journey to Egypt. From a boy ancient Egypt had fascinated me, and I had read everything concerning it on which I could lay hands. Now I was possessed by a great desire to see it for myself, and to write a romance on the subject of “Cleopatra,” a sufficiently ambitious project.
A friend of mine who is a mystic of the first water amused me very much not long ago by forwarding to me a list of my previous incarnations, or rather of three of them, which had been revealed to him in some mysterious way. Two of these were Egyptian, one as a noble in the time of Pepi II who lived somewhere about 4000 B.C., and the second as one of the minor Pharaohs. In the third, according to him, I was a Norseman of the seventh century, who was one of the first to sail to the Nile, whence he returned but to die in sight of his old home. After that, saith the prophet, I slumbered for twelve hundred years until my present life.
I cannot say that I have been converted to my friend’s perfectly sincere beliefs, since the reincarnation business seems to me to be quite insusceptible of proof. If it could be proved, how much more interesting it would make our lives. But that, I think, will never happen, even if it be true that we return again to these glimpses of the moon, which, like everything else, is possible.
Still it is a fact that some men have a strong affinity for certain lands and periods of history, which, of course, may be explained by the circumstance that their direct ancestors dwelt in those lands and at those periods. Thus I love the Norse people of the saga and presaga times. But then I have good reason to believe that my forefathers were Danes. I am, however, unable to trace any Egyptian ancestor — if such existed at all it is too long ago.
However these things may be, with the old Norse and the old Egyptians I am at home. I can enter into their thoughts and feelings; I can even understand their theologies. I have a respect for Thor and Odin, I venerate Isis, and always feel inclined to bow to the moon!
Whatever the reason, I seem to myself to understand the Norse folk of anywhere about 800 A.D. and the Egyptians from Menes down to the Ptolemaic period, much better than I understand the people of the age in which I live. They are more familiar to me. They interest me much more. For instance, I positively loathe the Georgian period, about which I can never even bring myself to read. On the other hand, I have the greatest sympathy with savages, Zulus for instance, with whom I always got on extremely well. Perhaps my mystical friend has left a savage incarnation out of his list.
For these reasons I know well that I could never be a success as a modern novelist. I can see the whole thing; it goes on under my eyes, and as a magistrate and in other ways I am continually in touch with it. I could write of it also if I could bring myself to the task. I would undertake to produce a naturalistic novel that would sell — why should I not do so with my experience? But the subject bores me too much. The naturalism I would not mind, but if it is to be truthful it is impossible and, to say the least, unedifying. The petty social conditions are what bore me. I know this is not right; but it is a failing in myself, since under all conditions human nature is the same and the true artist should be able to present it with equal power. But we are as we are made. Even the great Shakespeare, I observe, sought distant scenes and far-off events for his tragedies, seeking, I presume, to escape the trammels of his time.
To return from this dissertation. I went to Egypt seeking knowledge and a holiday. The knowledge I acquired, or some of it, for when the mind is open and desirous, it absorbs things as a dry sponge does water. I had an introduction to Brugsch Bey, who was then, I think, the head of the Boulak Museum. He took me round that heavenly place. He showed me the mummies of Seti, Rameses, and the rest, and oh! with what veneration did I look upon them. He told me, trembling with emotion, of the discovery, then recent, of the great Deir-el-Behari cache of Pharaohs and their treasures. He said when he got to the bottom of that well and entered the long passage where for tens of centuries had slept the mighty dead, huddled together there to save them from the wicked hands of robbers or enemies, and by the light of torches had read a few of the names upon the coffins, that he nearly fainted with joy, as well he might. Also he described to me how, when the royal bodies were borne from this resting-place and shipped for conveyance to Cairo, there to find a new tomb in the glass cases of a museum, the fellaheen women ran along the banks wailing because their ancient kings were being taken from among them. They cast dust upon their hair, still dressed in a hundred plaits, as was that of those far-off mothers of theirs who had wailed when these Pharaohs were borne with solemn pomp to the homes they called eternal. Poor kings! who dreamed not of the glass cases of the Cairo Museum, and the gibes of tourists who find the awful majesty of their whithered brows a matter for jest and smiles. Often I wonder how we dare to meddle with these hallowed relics, especially now in my age. Then I did not think so much of it; indeed I have taken a hand at the business myself.
On that same visit I saw the excavation of some very early burials in the shadow of the pyramids of Ghizeh, so early that the process of mummification was not then practised. The skeletons lay upon their sides in the prenatal position. The learned gentleman in charge of the excavation read to me the inscription in the little ante-chamber of one of these tombs.
If I remember right, it ran as follows: “Here A. B. [I forget the name of the deceased], priest of the Pyramid of Khufu, sleeps in Osiris awaiting the resurrection. He passed all his long life in righteousness and peace.”
That, at any rate, was the sense of it, and I bethought me that such an epitaph would have been equally fitting to, let us say, the dean of a cathedral in the present century. Well, perhaps a day will come when Westminster Abbey and our other sacred burying-places will be ransacked in like manner, and the relics of our kings and great ones exposed in the museum of some race unknown of a different faith to ours. I may add that in Egypt even an identity of faith does not protect the dead, since the Christian bishops, down to those of the eighth or ninth century, have been disinterred, for I have seen many of their broidered vestments in public and private collections. The idea seems to be that if only you have been dead long enough your bones are fair prey. All of which is to me a great argument in favour of cremation.
Still it must be remembered that it is from Egyptian tombs that we have dug the history of Egypt, which now is better and more certainly known than that of the Middle Ages. Were it not for the burial customs of the old inhabitants of Khem, and their system of the preservation of mortal remains that these might await the resurrection of the body in which they were such firm believers, we should be almost ignorant of the lives of that great people. Only ought not the thing to stop somewhere? For my part I should like to see the bodies of the Pharaohs, after they had been reproduced in wax, reverently laid in the chambers and passages of the Great Pyramids and there sealed up for ever, in such a fashion that no future thief could break in and steal.
Dr. Budge told me of a certain tomb which he and his guide were the first to enter since it had been closed, I think about 4000 years before. He said that it was absolutely perfect. There lay the coffin of the lady, there stood the funeral jars of offering, there on the breast was a fan of which the ostrich plumes were turned to feathers of dust. There, too, in the sand of the floor were the footprints of those who had borne the corpse to burial. Those footprints always impressed me very much.
In considering such matters the reader should remember that nothing in the world was so sacred to the old Egyptian as were his corpse and his tomb. In the tomb slept the body, but according to his immemorial faith it did not sleep alone, for with it, watching it eternally, was the Ka or Double, and to it from time to time came the Spirit. This Ka or Double had, so he believed, great powers, and could even wreak vengeance on the disturber of the grave or the thief of the corpse.
From Cairo I proceeded up the Nile, inspecting all the temples and the tombs of the kings at Thebes, to my mind, and so far as my experience goes, the most wondrous tombs of all the world. So, too, thought the tourists of twenty centuries or more ago, for there are the writings on the walls recording their admiration and salutations to the ghosts of the dead; and so, too, in all probability will think the tourists of two thousand years hence, for the world can never reproduce such vast and mysterious burying-places, any more than it can reproduce the pyramids.
About eighteen years later I revisited these tombs and found them much easier of access and illuminated with electric light. Somehow in these new conditions they did not produce quite the same effect upon me. When first I was there I remember struggling down one of them — I think it was that of the great Seti — lit by dim torches, and I remember also the millions of bats that must be beaten away. I can see them now, those bats, weaving endless figures in the torchlight, dancers in a ghostly dance. Indeed, afterwards I incarnated them all in the great bat that was a spirit which haunted the pyramid where Cleopatra and her lover, Harmachis, sought the treasure of the Pharaoh, Men-kau-ra. When next I stood in that place I do not recall any bats; I suppose that the electric light had scared them away.
However on that second visit, with Mr. Carter, at that time a superintendent of antiquities for this part of Egypt, my companions and I were the first white men, except the discoverer, a Greek gentleman, to enter the burying-place of Nofertari, the favourite or, at least, the head wife of Rameses II. There on the walls were her pictures fresh as the day they were painted. There she sat playing chess with her royal husband or communing with the gods. But it is too long to describe. The tomb had been plundered in ancient days, probably a couple of thousand years ago. Just before the plunderers entered a flood of water had rushed down it, for when they came the washed paint was still wet, and I could see the prints of their fingers as they supported themselves on the slope of the incline.
One of my tomb explorations in 1887 nearly proved my last adventure. Opposite Assouan some great caverns had just been discovered. Into one of these I crept through a little hole, for the sand was almost up to the top of the doorway. I found it full of hundreds of dead, or at least there seemed to be hundreds, most of which had evidently been buried without coffins, for they were but skeletons, although mixed up with them was the mummy of a lady and the fragments of her painted mummy case. As I contemplated these gruesome remains in the dim light I began to wonder how it came about that there were so many of them. Then I recollected that about the time of Christ the town, which is now Assouan, had been almost depopulated by a fearful plague, and it occurred to me that doubtless at this time these old burying-places had been reopened and filled up with the victims of the scourge — also that the germ of plague is said to be very long-lived! Incautiously I shouted to my companions who were outside that I was coming out, and set to work to crawl along the hole which led to the doorway. But the echoes of my voice reverberating in that place had caused the sand to begin to pour down between the cracks of the masonry from above, so that the weight of it, falling upon my back, pinned me fast. In a flash I realised that in another few seconds I too should be buried. Gathering all my strength I made a desperate effort and succeeded in reaching the mouth of the hole just before it was too late, for my friends had wandered off to some distance and were quite unaware of my plight.
One of these, a young fellow named Brownrigg, had a worse because a more prolonged experience. He, I and a lady were contemplating the second Pyramid, when suddenly he announced that he was going to climb up it as far as the granite cap which still remains for something over a hundred feet at the top.
As he was a splendid athlete, with a very good head, this did not surprise us. Up he went while we sat and watched him, till he came to the cap, which at that time only eight or nine white people had ever ascended, of course with the help of guides. To our astonishment here we suddenly saw him take off his boots. The next thing we saw was Brownrigg climbing up the polished granite of the cap. Up he went from crack to crack till at last he reached the top in safety, and there proceeded to execute a war dance of triumph. Then after a rest he began to descend.
I noticed from the desert, some hundreds of feet below, that although he commenced his descent with face outwards, which is the right method, presently he turned so that it was against the sloping pyramid. Then I began to grow frightened. When he had done about thirty or forty feet of the descent I saw him stretch down his stockinged foot seeking some cranny, and draw it up again — because he could not reach the cranny without falling backwards. Twice or thrice he did this, and then remained quite still upon the cap with outstretched arms like one crucified. Evidently he could move neither up nor down.
While I stared, horrified — we three were quite alone in the place — a white-robed Arab rushed past me. He was the Sheik of the Pyramids, which without a word he began to climb with the furious activity of a frightened cat. Up he went over the lower and easy part onto the cap, which seemed to present no difficulties to him, for he knew exactly where to set his toes and had the head of an eagle or a mountain goat. Now he was just underneath Brownrigg and saying something to him. And now from that great height came a still small voice.
“If you touch me I’ll knock you down!” said the voice.
Yes, crucified there upon this awful cap he declared in true British fashion that he would knock his saviour down.
I shut my eyes, and when I looked again the sheik had got Brownrigg’s foot down into the crack below, how I never discovered. Well, the rest of the sickening descent was accomplished in safety, thanks to that splendid sheik. In a few more minutes a very pale and shaking Brownrigg was gasping on the sand beside us, while the Arab, streaming with perspiration, danced round and objurgated him and us in his native tongue until he was appeased with large baksheesh. Brownrigg, who will never be nearer to a dreadful death than he was that day, told me afterwards that, strong as his head was, he found it impossible to attempt the descent face outwards, since the thickness of the cap hid the sides of the pyramid from his sight, so that all he saw beneath him was some three hundred feet of empty space. Therefore he turned and soon found himself quite helpless, since he could neither find any foothold beneath him, nor could he reascend. Had not the watchful Arab seen him and his case, in another few minutes he must have fallen and been dashed to pieces at our feet. The memory of that scene still makes my back feel cold and my flesh creep. I have tried to reproduce it in “Ayesha,” where Holly falls from the rock to the ice-covered river far beneath.
From Egypt I sailed to Cyprus in a tub of a ship, where a rat had its nest behind my bunk. It was my first visit to that delightful and romantic isle, over which all the civilisations have poured in turn, wave by wave, till at length came the Turk, beneath whose foot “the grass does not grow,” and, by the special mercy of Providence, after the Turk the English.
Here I was the guest of my old chief, Sir Henry Bulwer, who at that time was High Commissioner for the island.
From Government House at Nicosia I made various delightful expeditions in the company of Mrs. Caldwell, Sir Henry Bulwer’s sister, and her daughters. For instance we visited Famagusta, that marvellous mediaeval, walled town, built and fortified by the Venetians, that the Turks took after a terrible siege, for the details of which I will refer the reader to my book, “A Winter Pilgrimage,” written many years later after a second visit to Cyprus.
In 1887, strange as it may seem, the debris of this siege were still very much in evidence. Thus after about three centuries the balls fired by the Turkish cannon lay all over the place. I hold one of them in my hand as I write, slightly pit-marked by the passage of time, or more probably by flaws in the casting.
Here in this beautiful island of Venus I trusted, before turning to my tasks again, to have a little real holiday after a good many years of very hard work. But, as it happened, holidays have never been for me. At the age of nineteen, to say nothing of the preliminary toils of education, I began to labour, and at the age of fifty-six I still find myself labouring with the firm and, so far as I can judge, well-grounded prospect that I shall continue to labour on public and private business till health and intelligence fail me, or, as I hope, death overtakes me while these still remain.
Here I must go back a little. In the winter of 1886, as I remember very much against my own will, I was worried into writing an article about “Fiction” for the Contemporary Review.
It is almost needless for me to say that for a young writer who had suddenly come into some kind of fame to spring a dissertation of this kind upon the literary world over his own name was very little short of madness. Such views must necessarily make him enemies, secret or declared, by the hundred. There are two bits of advice which I will offer to the youthful author of the future. Never preach about your trade, and, above all, never criticise other practitioners of that trade, however profoundly you may disagree with them. Heaven knows there are critics enough without your taking a hand in the business. Do your work as well as you can and leave other people to do theirs, and the public to judge between them. Secondly, unless you are absolutely driven to it, as of course may happen sometimes, never enter into a controversy with a newspaper.
To return: this unfortunate article about “Fiction” made me plenty of enemies, and the mere fact of my remarkable success made me plenty more. Through no fault of mine, also, these foes found a very able leader in the person of Mr. Stead, who at that time was the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette. I should say, however, that of late years Mr. Stead has quite changed his attitude towards me and has indeed become very complimentary, both with reference to my literary and to my public work. For my part, too, I have long ago forgiven his onslaughts, as I can honestly say I have forgiven everybody else for every harm that they have done, or tried to do me.
To go back to “Jess.” Being somewhat piqued by the frequent descriptions of myself as “a mere writer of romances and boys’ books,” I determined to try my hand at another novel (if one comes to think of it “Dawn” and “The Witch’s Head” were novels, but these had been obliterated by “King Solomon’s Mines”). So after I had finished “Allan Quatermain” I set to as I have already described, and wrote “Jess.”
It is a gloomy story and painful to an Englishman, so gloomy and painful that Lang could scarcely read it, having a nature susceptible as a sensitive plant. I feel this myself, for except when I went through it some fifteen years ago to correct it for a new illustrated edition, I too have never reread it, and I think that I never mean to do so. The thing is a living record of our shame in South Africa, written by one by whom it was endured. And therefore it lives, for it is a bit of history put into tangible and human shape. At any rate, the other day the publishers kindly sent me a copy of the twenty-seventh edition of the work, which of course has been circulated in countless numbers in a cheap form. I believe that in South Africa they think highly of “Jess”; even the Boers of the new generation read it. I remember that when some of their trenches were stormed in the last war, the special correspondents reported that the only book found in them was “Jess.”
I returned to England by long sea, avoiding the train journey across Europe. This I undertook when I went out in order to study the Egyptian collections at the Louvre and Turin. As it happened I never saw that at Turin. When I arrived there, purposing to spend an afternoon at the museum, my cabman drove me to a distant circus, and when at length I did reach the said museum, it was to find that on this particular day it was closed.
On my arrival in England what between success and attacks I found myself quite a celebrity, one whose name was in everybody’s mouth. I made money; for instance I sold “Cleopatra” for a large sum in cash, and also “Colonel Quaritch, V.C.,” a tale of English country life which Longman liked — it was dedicated to him — and Lang hated it so much that I think he called it the worst book that ever was written. Or perhaps it was someone else who favoured it with that description. Some of this money I lost, for really I had not time to look after it, and the investments suggested by kind friends connected with the City were apt to prove disappointing. Some of it I spent in paying off back debts and mortgages on our property, and in doing up this house which it sadly needed, as well as countless farm buildings, and a proportion was absorbed by our personal expenditure. For instance we moved into a larger house in Radcliffe Square and there entertained a little, though not to any great extent, for we never were extravagant. Also I became what is called famous, which in practice means that people are glad to ask you out to dinner, and when you enter a room everyone turns to look at you. Also it means that bores of the most appalling description write to you from all over the earth, and expect answers.
Therefore, although I had the affection of my old friends and made one or two new ones, such as Charles Longman, with whom, to my great good fortune, I began to grow intimate about this time, it came about that I was much envied and not a little hated by many who made my life bitter with constant attacks in the Press, which, being somewhat sensitive by nature, I was foolish enough to feel. Indeed there came a time when for a good many years I would read no reviews of my books, unless chance thrust them under my eyes. Therefore of those years there are few literary records.
In addition to much worry, my work at this time was truly overwhelming. The unfortunate agreement to which I have already alluded, entered into with the firm in which I believe Mr. Maxwell, the late husband of Miss Braddon, was a partner, had been abrogated without a lawsuit, through the admirable efforts of my friend and agent, Mr. A. P. Watt. But this was done at a price, and that price was that I should write them two stories, which in addition to my other and more serious work of course cost me time and labour. The tales that I wrote for them were called respectively “Mr. Meeson’s Will” and “Allan’s Wife.” Ultimately, after various “business complications,” in the course of which I lost some money that was due for royalties, together with “Dawn” and “The Witch’s Head,” they passed into the hands of Messrs. Longmans.
Then I began “Cleopatra” on May 27, 1887, and, as the MS. records, finished it on August 2nd of the same year. In order to do this I fled from London to Ditchingham, because in town there were so many distractions and calls upon my time that I could not get on with my work. I remember my disgust when on arrival there an invitation to be present in Westminster Abbey on the occasion of the Jubilee of Queen Victoria was forwarded too late for me to be able to avail myself of it. Although I do not greatly care for such pomp and circumstance, that was a ceremony which I should have liked to see.
Charles Longman thought very highly indeed of “Cleopatra.” Also, he backed his opinion by buying the copyright of the book for a large sum of money.
By the way, unluckily for myself, I also sold “Jess” outright and not for a large sum. Messrs. Smith, Elder, however, behaved extremely well to me, for when the novel proved such a great success they sent me a second cheque of a like amount as that they had given for the copyright, a thing which perhaps few publishers would have done. Moreover, a dozen years or so later, they offered to give me back a half interest in the book if I would write them another work. This I was very anxious to do, as both for sentimental and business reasons I should much have liked to regain a part proprietorship in “Jess.” But when I wrote to Charles Longman on the subject he begged me to abandon the idea, and as I could not hurt the feelings of such an old and valued friend, I did so, with many sighs.
I should explain that at the time I published only with the Longmans. Afterwards to my great sorrow I was obliged to abandon this arrangement, for the reason that I found it impossible to place works serially unless I could give the book rights as well. For a while I got over this difficulty, or rather Messrs. Watt, my agents, did, by selling serial rights to the two great illustrated papers. But in course of time, I suppose as they began to feel the pressure of the competition of the new sixpenny magazines, they gave up publishin............