The Lamp at Qurna

by H. Rider Haggard, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

On the river, below Luxor. 11th January, 1887.

We made fast at dusk under the temple, among a dozen dahabeahs and the other steamer of the company, and I stood at the rail for an hour while the columns went from gold to grey to nothing. Then the bell rang for dinner, and Mrs. Ruddock asked me across the soup whether I did not think it all very like the pictures. I said that it was. It is. That is my complaint against it.

I have come three thousand miles to see something nobody has drawn. My publishers have advanced me a hundred pounds on a romance of the Theban priesthood, which I have called, for the present, The Daughter of Amen. I have the plot, I have the heroine, and I have read everything: Wilkinson, Mariette, Belzoni twice over, and Murray's Handbook so often that I could conduct the party myself. But Belzoni crawled into the hills when nobody had been there since the Romans, and came out with the dust of kings in his lungs. What I want is one hour of what Belzoni had. I do not want the Colossi at ten and the Ramesseum at half-past eleven, with luncheon in a basket and the ship's dragoman calling "Ladies and gentlemen, this way."

So I shall leave the herd while the boat lies here, which is four days, and engage a man of my own.

Our company on board is not large. Besides Mrs. Ruddock, who is from Philadelphia and buys everything, there is a Scotch minister, the Rev. Mr. Kinnaird, who has wintered on the Nile nine times for his chest, reads a little of the hieroglyphs, and says very little at all. He was at the rail beside me this evening, and asked what I hoped to find at Thebes. I told him. He said, "Aye, well," and went below.

Luxor. 12th January.

I have my man. His name is Sayed Ibrahim Tolba, and the manager of the hotel recommended him, not warmly, as "a very good dragoman for a gentleman who knows his own mind." He is perhaps forty, a tall, heavy, slow-moving Upper Egyptian in a black coat over a striped robe, a red tarboosh, and very good boots; he speaks an English that he got, he says, from twenty years of Englishmen, and he has a little book in a leather case that he gave me to read before we had settled anything.

It was full of testimonials, in a dozen hands, going back to 1868. Honest, sober, attentive to ladies. Knows every stone on the west bank. Excellent with donkeys. One, from a colonel of the Bombay army, read in full: Tolba is the best dragoman on the river, and entirely honest in everything except antiquities. I laughed aloud at that, and Tolba, who had been watching me read, smiled very slightly and took the book back and put it away.

His terms are ten shillings a day, the donkeys extra, and bakhshish at the end "as the gentleman is pleased." I agreed, and we crossed at once in a felucca to the west bank.

He did his duty by the Colossi, and I bore it. Then I told him that I wished to see where the people lived, and he looked at me for a moment and turned the donkeys up the slope towards the village of Qurna.

I had read of Qurna, but nothing had prepared me. The whole face of the hill, for a mile, is honeycombed with the doors of tombs, and in the doors live the people. They have walled up the fronts with mud brick, and built little courts before them, and ovens of mud on the terraces, and the women were baking as we came up, with the smoke of the dung fires going straight up in the cold air, and dogs on every roof. The tombs of the scribes and the priests of the Pharaohs are their bedrooms and their byres. A buffalo looked out at me from the door of a man who had been, Tolba said, a great officer of Thothmes the Third.

The boys of the place came down on us like starlings, holding up scarabs, little blue figures, beads, bits of painted coffin, a mummied hand. "Antika! Antika, effendi! Very old!" Tolba drove them off without heat. When I asked him whether any of it was real, he pointed with his stick across the slope.

"The blue ones, they make in that house," he said. "The one with the white dog. The beads are real, but only beads. The hand is real." He considered. "The hand is somebody."

I liked him for that more than for anything in his book.

Luxor. 13th January. Night.

We spent the day among the tombs that are open, and lunched in the shade of the Ramesseum, and in the afternoon, sitting on the hill above Deir el-Bahari with the whole valley of the river below us, green and brown and silver, I told Tolba what I wanted.

He heard me without surprise. Then he said that it was not possible. The Government forbade it. The French gentlemen of the Antiquities paid men in every village to tell them where anybody was digging, and the guards were always about. Six years ago, he said, there were brothers in Qurna who found the kings, the very Pharaohs, all together in one hole in the mountain, and sold a little and a little for ten years, until one of them talked; and now the Pharaohs are in the museum at Bulaq and the brothers were taken to Keneh in chains and beaten on the feet.

"Everybody in Qurna is very honest now," he said.

I asked him whether he thought me a man who would be found out. He said that he did not think anything. And then, because the afternoon was very fine, and he seemed to wish to know, I told him the story of my book.

I told him of Nefert, the priestess of Amen, who loved where she should not, and was sealed alive by her own order in a chamber in the western mountain, with her ornaments, and her name cut over the door, and a lamp of oil beside her. And of the young Englishman who, three thousand years later, follows a clue in an old papyrus to that hill, and breaks the seal, and comes into the chamber with his candle, and sees, before anything else, before the coffin and the gold, that the lamp is still alight: a small yellow flame, standing straight up in the dark. And it burns so for the space of one breath, and then the outer air reaches it, and it goes out.

I had not told anyone the scene before. I had not meant to tell it now.

Tolba asked what kind of lamp. I said clay, I supposed; a little dish with a lip for the wick. He asked if the lady lay in gold. I said in painted wood, for I was not writing for the penny papers. He asked about the seal on the door, and I told him, mud plaster, with the impress of the priests' seals in it, and the marks of the fingers that had smoothed it down. He asked whether the young Englishman took anything away. I said a single scarab, from the dust at the coffin's foot, as a token; and that he wore it on his watch-chain all his life, and never told anyone where it came from.

Tolba nodded, as a man nods who has heard a fair price. Then he got up and said that the donkeys were cold.

As we came down the hill he said, without turning round, "God is generous. Perhaps."

Luxor. 15th January. Two in the morning.

I write this by the cabin lamp, with my hands not yet steady, and the boat asleep.

Tolba came yesterday at noon and said, low, on the bank, that a man of his wife's family had been opening the floor of his house to make a store for grain, and had broken into a shaft, and below the shaft was a door that nobody had passed. The man was frightened and would tell nobody; but he would show it to one gentleman, by night, for five pounds, which was to go to him and not to Tolba, and was the price of a man going to Keneh. I paid it, in gold, before I could think of reasons for not paying it.

We crossed after ten in a small boat with no lantern. There were donkeys waiting on the far side, and a boy, and we went up through the fields and the edge of the desert in the starlight, very cold, the boy running ahead, the jackals crying up in the hills. In the village the dogs began on every roof at once, and then all stopped, as though someone had spoken to them.

The house was at the top of the slope, a court with a mud wall, an oven, a tethered goat, and behind it the black door of a tomb. Inside, by the light of two candles, I saw the man: thin, very young, with grey dust on his hands and arms to the elbow, who would not look at me. A mat had been rolled back from the floor, and there was the shaft, square-cut in the living rock, about the width of a man's shoulders.

I went down on a rope, with a candle in my teeth for the first part, and then in my hand. It was perhaps twenty feet. At the bottom a passage ran into the hill, so low that I had to stoop, and the walls were black with the smoke of torches, the very smoke, I thought, of the funeral. At the end of it was the door.

It was exactly as I had told it. The doorway had been filled with stones and the stones plastered over with mud, and the mud smoothed by hands; I could see the furrows of the fingers in it, going up and down. Near the top were three round marks pressed in, where seals had been. I put my palm flat on it and it was cold, and damp, as if the mountain itself sweated in the dark. I remember thinking of the three thousand years that had gone into that coldness.

The young man came down after me, and Tolba after him, and the young man had a short iron bar. He would not strike. Tolba said something sharp to him in Arabic and he struck, and the plaster fell in lumps, and the stones behind it moved quite easily, and there was a black hole, and I put my candle into it.

The air did not rush out. I had read that it would be foul, and I held my breath, but when I breathed it was only dust, and something warm, and a little sour, like a baker's shop in the morning.

The chamber was small, perhaps ten feet by eight. Against the far wall lay a coffin of painted wood in the shape of a woman, with a broad collar of blue and red painted on the breast, and a face of yellow, with long black eyes that looked up. There were a few brown stalks lying across it, which went to powder when I breathed near them. On the floor about it, in the dust, stood little figures of blue-green faience, a dozen or more, some fallen on their faces. And in a niche cut into the rock at the coffin's head, small and plain and dark, there was a lamp.

It was not alight. I am ashamed to write that for an instant I had thought it would be, and was disappointed. It was a little dish of red clay, pinched at one side into a lip, and the lip was black. I put out my finger and touched it, and the soot came off on my skin, black and soft, as if the flame had gone out an hour before I came.

I stood there, I do not know how long. Tolba did not speak. I think it was the finest moment of my life.

I was not allowed to touch the coffin; the man said that the woman in it would follow whoever moved her, and Tolba said that the Service would know at once if she were opened, which I thought the better reason. Nor might I take the lamp, nor the figures; they would be missed. But Tolba knelt and turned over the dust at the coffin's foot with his fingers, and found there a scarab, green, the size of the top of my thumb, and put it into my hand, and said that for this the man would want two pounds more. I paid it in the chamber.

When I came up the rope the young man's mother was sitting by the oven in the court with her face covered, and the sky over the eastern hills was already turning grey. They were rolling the mat back over the shaft as I went out of the door.

Luxor. 16th January.

I have written all day, and have eleven pages of the chapter of the tomb, and they are the best eleven pages I have ever written or ever shall. Everything is in them: the cold of the rope, the furrows of the fingers in the plaster, the warm sour breath of the dark, the soot on the lip of the lamp. I have changed nothing in the story. I find I had nothing to change.

At dinner I was foolish, and showed the scarab, though I said nothing of where it came from. Mrs. Ruddock admired it and went and fetched her own, three of them, bought from the boys at the Colossi for a piastre apiece. Hers are blue and mine is green. Mine is heavier. Mr. Kinnaird asked to look at mine, and took it to the lamp, and turned it over and over under his glass for a long time.

He said the name on the base was that of Thothmes the Third, Men-kheper-ra, which was the commonest name on the river. The Egyptians had gone on making scarabs in that king's honour for a thousand years after he was dead. And at Qurna, he said, they went on making them still: they cut them out of soft stone and glaze them, and he had been told, though he could not vouch for it, that they bake them in the ovens along with the bread.

"Then which is it?" I said.

"I couldna tell ye," said Mr. Kinnaird. "No more could any man in Cairo." He gave it back to me, and then, wiping his glass, he asked, as if it were nothing, "Was the plaster wet?"

I did not answer him. I said good night and came to my cabin, and here I am.

Luxor. 17th January. Morning.

We sail at nine. Tolba was on the bank at half-past seven, in his black coat, as he had promised, to have his money and his book signed.

I paid him what was owing, and then I asked him, and I was careful to ask him quietly, with nobody by, whether it was a true tomb.

He did not look offended, or look away. "Effendi, the tomb is true," he said. "Very old. My wife's grandfather was born in it. Since we were small children, they keep the goat in there in the summer, because of the heat."

"And the coffin?"

"The coffin is true. They found her in the hill a long time ago, when my father was a boy. Nobody buys a coffin. It is too big for the steamers."

"And the little figures?"

"Some true. Some from the house with the white dog."

"And the door," I said. "The plaster."

"The plaster is from the river, effendi. We put it on the night before. The seal I made with the bottom of a bottle." He spread his hands. "It is the door you told me."

I was silent a little while. Then I said, "And the lamp?"

Tolba smiled very slightly, as he had smiled on the first morning, watching me read his book.

"You told me there was a lamp," he said.

The bell went for the second time. I took out my pocket-book and gave him a pound more for himself, which I had not meant to do, and wrote in his little leather book, under the colonel of the Bombay army, Sayed Ibrahim Tolba gave me exactly what I asked for. L. Gedge. He read it slowly, moving his lips, and put the book away in his coat.

Then he asked me whether, when my book was printed, I would send him a copy, because many English came to Luxor, and many of them had read books. I said I would, and he spelled out his direction for me, letter by letter, care of the hotel; and I wrote it down on the last page of this journal, and the steamer cast off, and he stood on the bank with his hand raised until he was too small to tell from the columns behind him.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ab Henrīcō Rider Haggard per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

H. Rider Haggard, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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