With eldest daughter to Egypt — Return by Italy and Spain — Abu Simbel with Carter — Bee’s nest 2000 years old — “The Way of the Spirit” — Dedicated to Kipling — Death of H. R. H.‘s retriever Bob — Appears to him in dream — Report published in Journal of Society for Psychical Research — Lasting effect on H. R. H.‘s mind — More dream-pictures — Sir Oliver Lodge.
Early in 1904 I took my daughter Angela on a trip to Egypt, returning by way of Italy and Spain. We went out on one of the new P. & O. boats which was making her maiden voyage, and experienced the most awful weather. We began by grounding in the Thames and, after a short stop to bury a Lascar overboard — who, poor fellow, had died of the cold — ran into a terrific gale in the Channel. The wind-gauges registered its pace at about eighty miles the hour, after which their bottoms were blown out or something happened to them. Then the fore-hatch was stove in and filled with water, as did the passages along which we had to walk from the cabins. Time after time did we stop to try and make that hatch good with four-inch teak planks, but always these were broken by the force of the sea.
Our subsequent misfortunes were many. We were taken in closer to Ushant than I thought pleasant; the new engines heated; the chief engineer went mad with the strain and, when at length we did reach Port Said, had to be carried ashore raving. I believe that he died not long afterwards. One night this poor fellow, dressed in full uniform, rushed from cabin to cabin, telling the passengers to get up as the ship was sinking!
We took the turn into the Mediterranean about twenty-four hours late, and in the dense darkness caused by a fearful squall nearly went ashore on the coast of Africa, as the Delhi did in after years — I saw her wreck only the other day. When the light came I had a nearer view of that shore than I ever wish to see again — from the deck of an ocean liner. In Gibraltar harbour we fouled our anchor in a man-of-war’s mooring chains and had to slip it. In the Gulf of Lyons we encountered a very bad mistral while we were trying to sling another anchor into its place. There it hung over the bow, bumping against the side of the ship. By this time the Lascars seemed to be practically useless, and the first officer was obliged to slide down the chain and sit on the fluke of the anchor, shouting directions. It was a strange sight to see this plucky young gentleman swinging about there over the deep. He was — and I trust still is — a man of whom the country might be proud, but I have long forgotten his name. In the end we crawled into Marseilles at three knots the hour, where some of the passengers left the ship, one of them explaining, for the comfort of the rest of us, that he had the strongest presentiments that she was going to sink.
Our next adventure was a sandstorm blowing from the coast of Africa which turned the day to darkness and covered the decks with a kind of mud. Then suddenly the vessel was put about, and it was discovered that the soundings showed that we were uncomfortably near the coast of Crete. As the dear old captain, who had been much cut about by a sea that knocked him down on the bridge, remarked, “he knew what was behind him and did not know what was before”; also that “where he had once been he could go again.” Subsequently our fore well-deck filled three times to the bulwarks, shipping seas in the most unaccountable manner.
However, we came to Port Said at length, and got ashore at about midnight as best we could. Never was I more glad to find myself on land again.
I enjoyed that trip in Egypt very much. The place has a strange fascination for me, and if I could afford it I would go there every year. On this my second visit we went as far as the wonderful rock-temple of Abu Simbel, near the Second Cataract of the Nile. Also I had the good fortune to be with Mr. Carter, then the local custodian of antiquities at Luxor; when we visited the tomb of Queen Nefer-tari, which, with the exception of the discover, who, I think, was Professor Scaparelli, we were, I believe, the first white men to enter.
It was wonderful to see those paintings of her late Majesty as fresh as the day that the artist left them. In one of them, I remember, she is represented playing chess. The tomb had been robbed a couple of thousand years or so ago. When the ancient thief broke in it had recently been flooded by a rain-storm, and there on the walls were the marks of his hand printed on the paint which then was wet. Also a hermit bee had built its nest upon the roof — two thousand or so of years ago! The sarcophagus had been broken up for its costly granite, which doubtless was worked into statues by some old-world sculptor, and the body of the beautiful favourite queen of Rameses destroyed. Some bones lay about in the tomb-chamber, probably those of the funeral offerings, and among them ushapti figures, laid there to serve her Majesty in the other world.
I wrote a series of articles for the Daily Mail about these Egyptian experiences, which have never been republished, for such newspaper matter must needs be very scrappy. In one of these, however, I dwelt upon the wholesale robbery of the ancient Egyptian tombs and the consequent desecration of the dead who lie therein. It does indeed seem wrong that people with whom it was the first article of religion that their mortal remains should lie undisturbed until the Day of Resurrection should be haled forth, stripped and broken up, or sold to museums and tourists. How should we like our own bodies to be treated in such a fashion, or to be left lying, as I have often see those of the Egyptians, naked and unsightly on the sand at the mouths of the holy sepulchres which with toil and cost they had prepared for themselves in their life-days? If one puts the question to those engaged in excavation, the answer is a shrug of the shoulders and a remark to the effect that they died a long while ago. But what is time to the dead? To them, waking or sleeping, ten thousand years and a nap after dinner must be one and the same thing. I have tried to emphasise this point in a little story that I have recently written under the title of “Smith and the Pharaohs.”
Now I must dwell no more on Egypt with all its history and problems, which, whenever I can find time, it is my greatest recreation to study. Truly its old inhabitants were a mysterious and fascinating folk and, across the gulf of ages — largely, it must be admitted, through these very excavations — they have come very near to us again. I confess I know more of her kings, her queens, and her social conditions than I do of those of early England.
From Egypt we went to Naples and from Naples to the south of Spain, which I now visited for the first time in preparation for a tale which I wrote afterwards and named “Fair Margaret.”
At Granada we saw that wondrous building, the Alhambra, and in the cathedral the tomb of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic. I descended into a vault and was shown the coffins of these great people; also those of Philip le Bel and his wife Joanna. Readers of Prescott will remember that the man Joanna insisted upon opening the coffin of her husband after he had been some while dead. I procured a candle and examined it, and there I could see the line where the lead had been cut through and soldered together again.
Of all the buildings that I saw upon this journey I think the mosque at Cordova, with its marvellous shrine and its forest of pillars of many-coloured marbles, struck me as the most impressive. The great cathedral at Seville, however, with its vast cold spaces runs it hard in majesty.
On my return to England I wrote “The Way of the Spirit,” an Anglo–Egyptian book which is dedicated to Kipling, and one that interested him very much. Indeed he and I hunted out the title together in the Bible, as that of “Renunciation,” by which it was first called, did not please him. Or perhaps this had been used before. I was glad to receive many letters from strangers thanking me for it.
In July 1904 there happened to me a very extraordinary incident. The story is contained in a letter from me which appeared in The Times for July 21, 1904, together with letters from various other persons testifying to the facts of the case. These letters and other matter were included in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research for October 1904, from which I make short extracts relating the facts. Should any one wish to study it in detail, with the corroborating letters, they are referred to the number of the Society’s Journal.
On the night of Saturday, July 9, I went to bed about 12.30, and suffered from what I took to be a nightmare. I was awakened by my wife’s voice calling to me from her own bed upon the other side of the room. I dreamed that a black retriever dog, a most amiable and intelligent beast named Bob, which was the property of my eldest daughter, was lying on its side among brushwood, or rough growth of some sort, by water. In my vision the dog was trying to speak to me in words, and, failing, transmitted to my mind in an undefined fashion the knowledge that it was dying. Then everything vanished, and I woke to hear my wife asking me why on earth I was making those horrible and weird noises. I replied that I had had a nightmare about a fearful struggle, and that I had dreamed that old Bob was in a dreadful way, and was trying to talk to me and to tell me about it.
On the Sunday morning Mrs. Rider Haggard told the tale at breakfast, and I repeated my story in a few words.
Thinking that the whole thing was nothing more than a disagreeable dream, I made no inquiries about the dog and never learned even that it was missing until that Sunday night, when my little girl, who was in the habit of feeding it, told me so. At breakfast-time, I may add, nobody knew that it was gone, as it had been seen late on the previous evening. Then I remembered my dream, and the following day inquiries were set on foot.
To be brief, on the morning of Thursday, the 14th, my servant, Charles Bedingfield, and I discovered the body of the dog floating in the Waveney against a weir about a mile and a quarter away.
On Friday, the 15th, I was going into Bungay when at the level crossing on the Bungay road I was hailed by two plate-layers, who are named respectively George Arterton and Harry Alger. These men informed me that the dog had been killed by a train, and took me on a trolly down to a certain open-work bridge which crosses the water between Ditchingham and Bungay, where they showed me evidence of its death. This is the sum of their evidence:
It appears that about 7 o’clock upon the Monday morning, very shortly after the first train had passed, in the course of his duties Harry Alger was on the bridge, where he found a dog’s collar torn off and broken by the engine (since produced and positively identified as that worn by Bob), coagulated blood, and bits of flesh, of which remnants he cleaned the rails. On search also I personally found portions of black hair from the coat of a dog. On the Monday afternoon and subsequently his mate saw the body of the dog floating in the water beneath the bridge, whence it drifted down to the weir, it having risen with the natural expansion of gases, such as, in this hot weather, might be expected to occur within about forty hours of death. It would seem that the animal must have been killed by an excursion train that left Ditchingham at 10.25 on Saturday night, returning empty from Harlestone a little after 11. This was the last train which ran that night. No trains run on Sunday, and it is practically certain that it cannot have been killed on the Monday morning, for then the blood would have been still fluid. Further, if it was living, the dog would almost certainly have come home during Sunday, and its body would not have risen so quickly from the bottom of the river, or presented the appearance it did on Thursday morning. From traces left upon the piers of the bridge it appeared that the animal was knocked or carried along some yards by the train and fell into the brink of the water where reeds grow. Here, if it were still living — and, although the veterinary thinks that death was practically instantaneous, its life may perhaps have lingered for a few minutes — it must have suffocated and sunk, undergoing, I imagine, much the same sensations as I did in my dream, and in very similar surroundings to those that I saw therein — namely, amongst a scrubby growth at the edge of water.
I am forced to conclude that the dog Bob, between whom and myself there existed a mutual attachment, either at the moment of his death, if his existence can conceivably have been prolonged till after one in the morning, or, as seems more probable, about three hours after that event, did succeed in calling my attention to its actual or recent plight by placing whatever portion of my being is capable of receiving such impulses when enchained by sleep, into its own terrible position.
On the remarkable issues opened up by this occurrence I cannot venture to speak further than to say that — although it is dangerous to generalise from a particular instance, however striking and well supported by evidence, which is so rarely obtainable in such obscure cases — it does seem to suggest that there is a more intimate ghostly connection between all members of the animal world, including man, than has hitherto been believed, at any rate by Western peoples; that they may be, in short, all of them different manifestations of some central, informing life, though inhabiting the universe in such various shapes. The matter, however, is one for the consideration of learned people who have made a study of these mysterious questions. I will only add that I ask you to publish the annexed documents with this letter, as they constitute the written testimony at present available to the accuracy of what I state. Further, I may say that I shall welcome any investigation by competent persons.
I am, your obedient servant,
H. Rider Haggard.
To the Editor of The Times.
The editor of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research says:
This case is one of very unusual interest from several points of view. It is, therefore, specially satisfactory to have it so well authenticated, and Mr. Rider Haggard deserves the gratitude of psychical researchers for having collected all the available evidence so promptly and completely and put it at the disposal of the scientific world.
This experience produced a great effect upon me, and at first frightened and upset me somewhat, for without doubt it has a very uncanny side. By degrees, however, I came to see that it also has its lessons, notably one lesson — that of the kinship, I might almost say the oneness, of all animal life. I have always been fond of every kind of creature, and especially of dogs, some of which have been and are as very dear friends to me. But up to this date I had also been a sportsman. Shooting was my principal recreation, and one of which I was, and indeed still am, extremely fond. Greatly did I love a high pheasant, at which sometimes I made good marksmanship. But now, alas! I only bring them down in imagination with an umbrella or a walking-stick. From that day forward, except noxious insects and so forth, I have killed nothing, and, although I should not hesitate to shoot again for food or for protection, I am by no means certain that the act would not make me feel unwell. Perhaps illogically, I make an exception in favour of fishing, and I daresay that if salmon came my way I might once more throw a fly for them. I do not think that fish feel much; also I always remember that, if He did not fish Himself, our Lord was frequently present while others did, e............