第62章

No longer could the bodies of the children of Ko^r be preserved according to the ancient rites, because of the number of the dead, therefore were they hurled into the great pit beneath the cave through the hole in the floor of the cave.Then at last, a remnant of this the great people, the light of the whole world, went down to the coast and took ship and sailed northwards; and now am I, the Priest Junis, who write this, the last man left alive of this great city of men, but whether there be any yet left in the other cities I know not.This do I write in misery of heart before I die, because Ko^r the Imperial is no more, and because there are none to worship in her temple, and all her palaces are empty, and her princes and her captains and her traders and her fair women have passed off the face of the earth."I gave a sigh of astonishmentthe utter desolation depicted in this rude scrawl was so overpowering.It was terrible to think of this solitary survivor of a mighty people recording its fate before he too went down into darkness.What must the old man have felt as, in ghastly, terrifying solitude, by the light of one lamp feebly illumining a little space of gloom, he in a few brief lines daubed the history of his nation's death upon the cavern wall? What a subject for the moralist, or the painter, or indeed for any one who can think!

"Doth it not occur to thee, O Holly," said Ayesha, laying her hand upon my shoulder, "that those men who sailed north may have been the fathers of the first Egyptians?""Nay, I know not," I said; "it seems that the world is very old.""Old? Yes, it is old.indeed.Time after time have nations, ay, and rich and strong nations, learned in the arts, been and passed away and been forgotten, so that no memory of them remains.This is but one of several; for Time eats up the works of man, unless, indeed, he digs in caves like the people of Ko^r, and then mayhap the sea swallows them, or the earthquake shakes them in.Who knows what hath been on the earth, or what shall be? There is no new thing under the sun, as the wise Hebrew wrote long ago.Yet were not these people utterly destroyed, as I think.Some few remained in the other cities, for their cities were many.But the barbarians from the south, or perchance my people, the Arabs, came down upon them, and took their women to wife, and the race of the Amahagger that is now is a bastard brood of the mighty sons of Ko^r, and behold it dwelleth in the tombs with its fathers' bones.But I know not: who can know? My arts cannot pierce so far into the blackness of Time's night.A great people were they.They conquered till none were left to conquer, and then they dwelt at ease within their rocky mountain walls, with their manservants and their maid-servants, their minstrels, their sculptors, and their concubines, and traded and quarrelled, and ate and hunted and slept and made merry till their time came.But come, I will show thee the great pit beneath the cave whereof the writing speaks.Never shall thine eyes witness such another sight."Accordingly I followed her to a side passage opening out of the main cave, then down a great number of steps, and along an underground shaft which cannot have been less than sixty feet beneath the surface of the rock, and was ventilated by curious borings that ran upward, I do not know where.Suddenly the passage ended, and she halted and bade the mutes hold up the lamps, and, as she had prophesied, I saw a scene such as I was not likely to see again.We were standing in an enormous pit, or rather on the edge of it, for it went down deeperI do not know how muchthan the level on which we stood, and was edged in with a low wall of rock.So far as I could judge, this pit was about the size of the space beneath the dome of St.

Paul's in London, and when the lamps were held up Isaw that it was nothing but one vast charnelhouse, being literally full of thousands of human skeletons, which lay piled up in an enormous gleaming pyramid, formed by the slipping down of the bodies at the apex as fresh ones were dropped in from above.Anything more appalling than this jumbled mass of the remains of a departed race I cannot imagine, and what made it even more dreadful was that in this dry air a considerable number of the bodies had simply become desiccated with the skin on them, and now, fixed in every conceivable position, stared at us out of the mountain of white bones, grotesquely horrible caricatures of humanity.In my astonishment I uttered an ejaculation, and the echoes of my voice ringing in the vaulted space disturbed a skull that had been accurately balanced for many thousands of years near the apex of the pile.Down it came with a run, hounding along merrily towards us, and of course bringing an avalanche of other bones after it, till at last the whole pit rattled with their movement, even as though the skeletons were getting up to greet us.

"Come," I said, "I have seen enough.These are the bodies of those who died of the great sickness, is it not so?" I added, as we turned away.

"Yes.The people of Ko^r ever embalmed their dead, as did the Egyptians, but their art was greater than the art of the Egyptians, for whereas the Egyptians disembowelled and drew the brain, the people of Ko^r injected fluid into the veins, and thus reached every part.But stay, thou shalt see," and she halted at haphazard at one of the little doorways opening out of the passage along which we were walking, and motioned to the mutes to light us in.We entered into a small chamber similar to the one in which I had slept at our first stopping-place, only instead of one there were two stone benches or beds in it.On the benches lay figures covered with yellow linen, on which a fine and impalpable dust had gathered in the course of ages, but nothing like to the extent that one would have anticipated, for in these deep-hewn caves there is no material to turn to dust.About the bodies on the stone shelves and floor of the tomb were many painted vases, but I saw very few ornaments or weapons in any of the vaults.