# The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary/Part 3/Chapter 4

From the Desert back to the town, to "the world," to the hurly-burly of Cairo and the flesh-pots of Egypt! It is war-time, the summer of 1915, the Turks are being fought on the Peninsula of Gallipoli. The city is full of soldiers, sunburned Australians and New Zealanders who have not yet been in action but are being kept lest the Arabs should come out of the Desert and strive to efface the English and French civilisation of the banks of the lower Nile and so add more ruins to the ruins of Egypt. The city is majestical with its broad streets, white stone palaces and stately mansions, its wondrous river and its mighty bridges. The dryness, cleanness, and whiteness of a city that knows no rain; the city gleams in a vast supply of sunshine. The wind blows all the time from the Desert, and wafts heat in the face as from a furnace. A city of life and gay energy. The fountain of life plays rapidly and brilliantly all the time, throwing up all colours, forms, faces. There is a sense of resplendent and tremendous gaiety. No ​one comes to Cairo to be an ascetic and mortify the flesh. But every building, every sight and sound, says, "Life, life, life." All around is death—the Desert which is death itself, the Pyramids which are tombs, the old cities and ruins which are the bodies of ancient civilisations passed away. But every sight and sound in the oasis of the great city says—Live, be gay, let the pulse beat fast, let the heart go and be glad, let the eyes sparkle and burn, let the lips form words of passion and pleasure.
There is a sense of an immense antiquity which in contrast with the little second of the present moment makes the latter less important, less holy. There is a subtle smell in the air, an odour that makes the head a little dizzy and the hands a little feverish as you walk; it is the actual odour of antiquity, a finest dust in suspension in the wind, the dust of decay from past ages. All that dies in Egypt becomes dry, and only after centuries turns to dust and loses form. That which rots away in a year in our northern clime keeps its semblance for a thousand years in Egypt. The stones of the houses of native Cairo were many of them quarried by the ancients; the wooden beams and joists have lasted from the days of the Pharaohs, and only now are gently crumbling. Here the very stones can be used to manure the fields. Subtly, secretly, the seventh foundation is always crumbling away and passing in dust into the Desert air. The smell in the air is partly the fine dust of mummies, of the bodies that ​were once erect and nervous and vivid, gay and felicitous and moving, the mysterious flocking humans of thousands of years ago.
The streets roll forward with flocking crowds—dark faces, brown faces, sallow faces; red caps and straw hats and little turbans and smocks and burnous; negroes, Copts, Arabs, women in white veils, women with dark veils; Europeans, soldiers, hawkers, mendicants, post-card sellers, newspaper vendors. Along the centre of the broad sun-swept roadways crash the electric trams; the rubber-tyred cabs and wide-hooded victorias follow pleasantly; the motor-cars proceed; the military auto-cycles pant; and the heavy ox and buffalo carts of the natives blunder along at the sides. There is doing everywhere, happening, being. Voluminous and promiscuous action floods and surges through the city with the traffic. It is life everywhere. And yet mingled with life there is death. There is plague in Cairo, and every now and then the eyes rest on a native funeral procession, one procession, two processions, five processions, ten processions all following one another. They are in every street, and they go past with their strange pomp of death, with the body and the mourners and the keeners and professional howlers. The brightly living crowd on the footways each side of the road pause a moment and think, "Some one has died," and pass on, oblivious, intent on life.
In luxurious hotels gentle and beautiful Nubians ​are handing out delicate fare, rich dishes cooked and served in that sought-out and magnificent style that Egypt has inherited from ages of epicurism. And a wonderful assembly of officers and ladies, rich pleasure-seekers and tourists from the Mediterranean shores, invalids, receives—sitting at flower-decked tables in great halls. Many restless souls fall into the rhythm of Egypt and feel themselves part of a great and satisfying grandeur. It is borne in upon the mind that the rich have always lived in a certain way in Egypt, and that the grandeur of Pharaoh and of Antony and Cleopatra are one and the same with the grandeur of to-day. A living thread of crimson and gold runs through the centuries of Egypt and is caught to-day, unbroken. Cairo is the capital of the Desert, and yet I do not know. It seems to me even at midday, when the sun glares over the stones, that somehow the Desert does not exist, or that it is in profound darkness, and that Cairo is a city all lamps, an island of effulgent light encompassed on all sides with darkness. It is barely credible that the sun of Cairo is the terrible sun of the Sahara, the sun whose monstrous arms clasp thousands of miles of scorched sand and wasted world, that the sun may not even notice Cairo as it looks on the Desert. But those who live in the cities of Egypt are enough unto themselves.
A strange impression, in the afternoon, to go down side streets and observe the throngs of young ​men, unsteady on their feet but bright-eyed and thirsty-lipped, greedy, eager; the strong-limbed sun-burnt Colonial soldiers dancing with Arab girls, the café-chantants, shooting-saloons, bars, bad houses, the barrel-organs, the smell of the air.
One can spare a questioning thought as to the homes of the soldiers. They come to Egypt from a fresh Colonial country, from good homes, pure women who are their mothers, gentle and innocent girls who are their brides. They nobly offer themselves to fight for their race against a false idea and a predatory nation. Tears fall at their departure. Prayers accompany them. But though bound for France and England they suddenly find their destination changed to Turkey, and they are put down, for convenience, in Egypt. They are dumped upon this mysterious and astonishing country as if one bit of dry land were just the same as any other, and without any notion of the spiritual significance of being stranded here. No blame to any one. Providence directs the destinies of men and women.
The first army that came were the wildest, boldest, and they plunged right away into the sin and gaiety and dangerous pleasures of the city, conducted by the money-grubbing but ingenious and smiling Arabs to the gambling dens, dancing-houses, and strange parlours of the back streets. They were cheated, swindled, robbed whilst drunk, robbed whilst asleep, but they saw strange sights and tasted unusual pleasures, sating the new eyes ​and lips which Egypt had given them. At last, the time drawing nigh for their departure for the Dardanelles, they resolved to get back part of what they had lost in the back streets of the city—certain things they could never get back—and they went down in force and sacked the houses and rushed the Arabs and Arab women to the streets and took back what they could find. There was a great riot. The native police were called out, and they fired at the screaming mob. Such scenes were enacted in the city that brought to mind the continuous street-rioting in Alexandria in the old early-Christian days. But what is most significant in the sight of these fine young men in the city is the realisation of the impure strain they take back with them from Egypt to the women and the children of Australia and New Zealand.
Night comes over the stately city, and the Europeans in their white clothes come in greater numbers into the streets. The great remote staring moon stands over the broad highway and arched bridges. Heat seems to be generated through the haze in the sky, but a light dry breeze is ever blowing, and the pungent sweetish odour of the city is in the nostrils. In the contrast of darkness and night silence the clangour of Eastern music is more stirring. It stirs the body, not the soul, and is like the sensuous music of Nebuchadnezzar, the ​music of cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, and dulcimer. Dark women with gold ornaments hang out from curtainless windows or lurk just inside doorways and dark passages, ready to coil snake-like upon a prey. In the roadways a shouting, calling crowd. In the taverns they are singing "Tipperary" and "We won't go home till morning"; some men are standing on the tables, others are trying to put gawky Arab girls through the steps of a tango. The music jangles. The whole street has a collective voice, a strange tinkling and murmuring uproar.
A tall, lank, loose-jawed, genial Copt would show you the haunts of evil, and offers his services to procure you pleasure. You have said "No" to him; he stands there where you left him on the pavement in his long cotton rags, smiling gently and cogitatively—the same type as stood in the city of the Pharaohs in the old days of the Israelitish bondage. It is strange to reflect that they find in the mummies of those who lived so many thousands of years ago the marks of "the city's disease," and the sign of the impure strain. There is a community of sin. What was in ancient Egypt is in the world to-day and was not invented in any recent time but has been carried on from one human being to another, to many others, and from them to others still.
I look at the mummies of Egypt, at the bright pictures of the people, fresh as if painted yesterday. ​These paintings on the coffin-lids live, they are the real people. You know that the brown, dry bodies wrapped in thick folds of linen did once walk, and were the beautiful society of some era five or six thousand years ago. There is in Cairo the unwrapped mummy of the majestical Pharaoh who would not let the children of Israel go. As you look at his face time is bridged over, and you see how brief a space is our vaunted history of man and what parochial dwellers in time we are, rolling our eyes and hushing our accents when we speak of a hundred or a thousand years, as if those seconds of being were of vast extent, tiring the angels to get over them. There lies old Pharaoh, brown, but still in the flesh. He has a Roman nose, distinguished features, the face of a man of learning; there is a look of Dante about him. His neck has shrunk to the size of a bird's neck and his head rather dangles on it, but it is an actual head and an actual face.
Pharaoh is unwrapped, but beside him stands an unopened pupa case; the linen is fresh as when new, and daintily folded and tied as on the day of burial five thousand years ago. A lotus flower lies in the coffin; it looks as if it had been picked last month and had wilted a little, and yet it may have been picked by the princess herself, and she was a daughter of one of the Pharaohs—perchance even of her who found and cherished the baby Moses.
​When you read of Jacob in the Old Testament, that—
. . . the physicians embalmed him. And forty days were fulfilled for him; for so are fulfilled the days of those which are embalmed: and the Egyptians mourned for him threescore and ten days. And when the days of his mourning were past . . . Joseph went up to bury his father: and with him went up all the servants of Pharaoh, the elders of his house, and all the elders of the land of Egypt . . .
you realise that there is perhaps somewhere a mummy of Jacob, and a modern might see him face to face.
Time flies. But the distance is near. I would like to imagine one night in ancient Egypt. The faces on the coffins, as I look at them, lid after lid, are quite realisable, those broad cheeks and bright eyes. . . . I suppose one could find five thousand mummies who in their lifetime were contemporaries, and one night they are all thinking about much the same thing. Something is toward at the Court; their chairs or carriages or chariots come for them; they are decked out, they have their jewels in their hair, their fine garb, their vanities, spites, triumphs, vexations, loves, ambitions. They dwell in their present moment, eyes burn, hearts beat faster, lips frame vain words. The same moon is on high, the same odour in the air. They bend their gaze towards the throne, they flock towards the throne as if the touch of it were miraculous. Vanity of vanities! The Israelites had to go out to the ​Desert to find the ten commandments and the Mosaic laws. Vanity of vanities—and is it not all vanity? Is not the life of the ascetics in the Desert vanity also? No, for they have denied the world. They have said No to Egypt and gone into the wilderness to seek a promised land. In their shrunken pearly faces is written a different allegiance from that of Pharaoh. They deny that this world is our world, that our life is our true life, that death is really death.
But we do not condemn the gay crowd that imagination has summoned from the linen wrappings of the tombs, nor the glimmering of khaki and burnous in the purlieus of Cairo in that moment we call 1915. Mankind is one and indivisible.
Outside the city stand the three triangles and the woman's head, signs written in the sand which might cause all people to know that there was some mystery about Cairo.
The dead are sleeping and you cannot wake them. There are crowns on their heads, and they sleep that fixed, unearthly, steady sleep, undisturbed, untouched, uncorrupted. Egypt that was is dreaming Egypt that is. Out in the Desert sits the Sphinx with an I-am-that-I-am expression on its face.