Lovecraft, H P - Imprisoned With The Pharaos

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Imprisoned with the Pharoas

Imprisoned with the Pharaos

by H. P. Lovecraft

Written Feb-Mar 1924

Published May 1924 in Weird Tales

Mystery attracts mystery. Ever since the wide appearance of my name as a performer of

unexplained feats, I have encountered strange narratives and events which my calling has

led people to link with my interests and activities. Some of these have been trivial and

irrelevant, some deeply dramatic and absorbing, some productive of weird and perilous

experiences and some involving me in extensive scientific and historical research. Many

of these matters I have told and shall continue to tell very freely; but there is one of which

I speak with great reluctance, and which I am now relating only after a session of grilling

persuasion from the publishers of this magazine, who had heard vague rumors of it from

other members of my family.

The hitherto guarded subject pertains to my non-professional visit to Egypt fourteen years

ago, and has been avoided by me for several reasons. For one thing, I am averse to

exploiting certain unmistakably actual facts and conditions obviously unknown to the

myriad tourists who throng about the pyramids and apparently secreted with much

diligence by the authorities at Cairo, who cannot be wholly ignorant of them. For another

thing, I dislike to recount an incident in which my own fantastic imagination must have

played so great a part. What I saw - or thought I saw - certainly did not take place; but is

rather to be viewed as a result of my then recent readings in Egyptology, and of the

speculations anent this theme which my environment naturally prompted. These

imaginative stimuli, magnified by the excitement of an actual event terrible enough in

itself, undoubtedly gave rise to the culminating horror of that grotesque night so long

past.

In January, 1910, I had finished a professional engagement in England and signed a

contract for a tour of Australian theatres. A liberal time being allowed for the trip, I

determined to make the most of it in the sort of travel which chiefly interests me; so

accompanied by my wife I drifted pleasantly down the Continent and embarked at

Marseilles on the P & O Steamer Malwa, bound for Port Said. From that point I proposed

to visit the principal historical localities of lower Egypt before leaving finally for

Australia.

The voyage was an agreeable one, and enlivened by many of the amusing incidents

which befall a magical performer apart from his work. I had intended, for the sake of

quiet travel, to keep my name a secret; but was goaded into betraying myself by a fellow-

magician whose anxiety to astound the passengers with ordinary tricks tempted me to

duplicate and exceed his feats in a manner quite destructive of my incognito. I mention

Imprisoned with the Pharoas

this because of its ultimate effect - an effect I should have foreseen before unmasking to a

shipload of tourists about to scatter throughout the Nile valley. What it did was to herald

my identity wherever I subsequently went, and deprive my wife and me of all the placid

inconspicuousness we had sought. Traveling to seek curiosities, I was often forced to

stand inspection as a sort of curiosity myself!

We had come to Egypt in search of the picturesque and the mystically impressive, but

found little enough when the ship edged up to Port Said and discharged its passengers in

small boats. Low dunes of sand, bobbing buoys in shallow water, and a drearily European

small town with nothing of interest save the great De Lesseps statue, made us anxious to

get to something more worth our while. After some discussion we decided to proceed at

once to Cairo and the Pyramids, later going to Alexandria for the Australian boat and for

whatever Greco-Roman sights that ancient metropolis might present.

The railway journey was tolerable enough, and con sumed only four hours and a half. We

saw much of the Suez Canal, whose route we followed as far as Ismailiya and later had a

taste of Old Egypt in our glimpse of the restored fresh-water canal of the Middle Empire.

Then at last we saw Cairo glimmering through the growing dusk; a winkling constellation

which became a blaze as we halted at the great Gare Centrale.

But once more disappointment awaited us, for all that we beheld was European save the

costumes and the crowds. A prosaic subway led to a square teeming with carriages,

taxicabs, and trolley-cars and gorgeous with electric lights shining on tall buildings;

whilst the very theatre where I was vainly requested to play and which I later attended as

a spectator, had recently been renamed the 'American Cosmograph'. We stopped at

Shepheard's Hotel, reached in a taxi that sped along broad, smartly built-up streets; and

amidst the perfect service of its restaurant, elevators and generally Anglo-American

luxuries the mysterious East and immemorial past seemed very far away.

The next day, however, precipitated us delightfully into the heart of the Arabian Nights

atmosphere; and in the winding ways and exotic skyline of Cairo, the Bagdad of Harun-

al-Rashid seemed to live again. Guided by our Baedeker, we had struck east past the

Ezbekiyeh Gardens along the Mouski in quest of the native quarter, and were soon in the

hands of a clamorous cicerone who - notwith standing later developments - was assuredly

a master at his trade.

Not until afterward did I see that I should have applied at the hotel for a licensed guide.

This man, a shaven, peculiarly hollow-voiced and relatively cleanly fellow who looked

like a Pharaoh and called himself 'Abdul Reis el Drogman' appeared to have much power

over others of his kind; though subsequently the police professed not to know him, and to

suggest that reis is merely a name for any person in authority, whilst 'Drogman' is

obviously no more than a clumsy modification of the word for a leader of tourist parties -

dragoman.

Abdul led us among such wonders as we had before only read and dreamed of. Old Cairo

is itself a story-book and a dream - labyrinths of narrow alleys redolent of aromatic

Imprisoned with the Pharoas

secrets; Arabesque balconies and oriels nearly meeting above the cobbled streets;

maelstroms of Oriental traffic with strange cries, cracking whips, rattling carts, jingling

money, and braying donkeys; kaleidoscopes of polychrome robes, veils, turbans, and

tarbushes; water-carriers and dervishes, dogs and cats, soothsayers and barbers; and over

all the whining of blind beggars crouched in alcoves, and the sonorous chanting of

muezzins from minarets limned delicately against a sky of deep, unchanging blue.

The roofed, quieter bazaars were hardly less alluring. Spice, perfume, incense beads,

rugs, silks, and brass - old Mahmoud Suleiman squats cross-legged amidst his gummy

bottles while chattering youths pulverize mustard in the hollowed-out capital of an

ancient classic column - a Roman Corinthian, perhaps from neighboring Heliopolis,

where Augustus stationed one of his three Egyptian legions. Antiquity begins to mingle

with exoticism. And then the mosques and the museum - we saw them all, and tried not

to let our Arabian revel succumb to the darker charm of Pharaonic Egypt which the

museum's priceless treasures offered. That was to be our climax, and for the present we

concentrated on the mediaeval Saracenic glories of the Califs whose magnificent tomb-

mosques form a glittering faery necropolis on the edge of the Arabian Desert.

At length Abdul took us along the Sharia Mohammed Ali to the ancient mosque of Sultan

Hassan, and the tower-flanked Babel-Azab, beyond which climbs the steep-walled pass

to the mighty citadel that Saladin himself built with the stones of forgotten pyramids. It

was sunset when we scaled that cliff, circled the modern mosque of Mohammed Ali, and

looked down from the dizzy parapet over mystic Cairo - mystic Cairo all golden with its

carven domes, its ethereal minarets and its flaming gardens.

Far over the city towered the great Roman dome of the new museum; and beyond it -

across the cryptic yellow Nile that is the mother of eons and dynasties - lurked the

menacing sands of the Libyan Desert, undulant and iridesc ent and evil with older arcana.

The red sun sank low, bringing the relentless chill of Egyptian dusk; and as it stood

poised on the world's rim like that ancient god of Heliopolis - Re-Harakhte, the Horizon-

Sun - we saw silhouetted against its vermeil holocaust the black outlines of the Pyramids

of Gizeh - the palaeogean tombs there were hoary with a thousand years when Tut-Ankh-

Amen mounted his golden throne in distant Thebes. Then we knew that we were done

with Saracen Cairo, and that we must taste the deeper mysteries of primal Egypt - the

black Kem of Re and Amen, Isis and Osiris.

The next morning we visited the Pyramids, riding out in a Victoria across the island of

Chizereh with its massive lebbakh trees, and the smaller English bridge to the western

shore. Down the shore road we drove, between great rows of lebbakhs and past the vast

Zoological Gardens to the suburb of Gizeh, where a new bridge to Cairo proper has since

been built. Then, turning inland along the Sharia-el-Haram, we crossed a region of glassy

canals and shabby native villages till before us loomed the objects of our quest, cleaving

the mists of dawn and forming inverted replicas in the roadside pools. Forty centuries, as

Napoleon had told his campaigners there, indeed looked down upon us.

Imprisoned with the Pharoas

The road now rose abruptly, till we finally reached our place of transfer between the

trolley station and the Mena House Hotel. Abdul Reis, who capably purchased our

Pyramid tickets, seemed to have an understanding with the crowding, yelling and

offensive Bedouins who inhabited a squalid mud village some distance away and

pestiferously assailed every traveler; for he kept them very decently at bay and secured an

excellent pair of camels for us, himself mounting a donkey and assigning the leadership

of our animals to a group of men and boys more expensive than useful. The area to be

traversed was so small that camels were hardly needed, but we did not regret adding to

our experience this troublesome form of desert navigation.

The pyramids stand on a high rock plateau, this group forming next to the northernmost

of the series of regal and aristocratic cemeteries built in the neighborhood of the extinct

capital Memphis, which lay on the same side of the Nile, somewhat south of Gizeh, and

which flourished between 3400 and 2000 B.C. The greatest pyramid, which lies nearest

the modern road, was built by King Cheops or Khufu about 2800 B.C., and stands more

than 450 feet in perpendicular height. In a line southwest from this are successively the

Second Pyramid, built a generation later by King Khephren, and though slightly smaller,

looking even larger because set on higher ground, and the radically smaller Third

Pyramid of King Mycerinus, built about 2700 B.C. Near the edge of the plateau and due

east of the Second Pyramid, with a face probably altered to form a colossal portrait of

Khephren, its royal restorer, stands the monstrous Sphinx - mute, sardonic, and wise

beyond mankind and memory.

Minor pyramids and the traces of ruined minor pyramids are found in several places, and

the whole plateau is pitted with the tombs of dignitaries of less than royal rank. These

latter were originally marked by mastabas, or stone bench- like structures about the deep

burial shafts, as found in other Memphian cemeteries and exemplified by Perneb's Tomb

in the Metropolitan Museum of New York. At Gizeb, however, all such visible things

have been swept away by time and pillage; and only the rock-hewn shafts, either sand-

filled or cleared out by archaeologists, remain to attest their former existence. Connected

with each tomb was a chapel in which priests and relatives offered food and prayer to the

hovering ka or vital principle of the deceased. The small tombs have their chapels

contained in their stone mastabas or superstructures, but the mortuary chapels of the

pyramids, where regal Pharaohs lay, were separate temples, each to the east of its

corresponding pyramid, and connec ted by a causeway to a massive gate-chapel or

propylon at the edge of the rock plateau.

The gate-chapel leading to the Second Pyramid, nearly buried in the drifting sands,

yawns subterraneously south-east of the Sphinx. Persistent tradition dubs it the 'Temple

of the Sphinx'; and it may perhaps be rightly called such if the Sphinx indeed represents

the Second Pyramid's builder Khephren. There are unpleasant tales of the Sphinx before

Khephren - but whatever its elder features were, the monarch replaced them with his own

that men might look at the colossus without fear.

It was in the great gateway-temple that the life-size diorite statue of Khephren now in the

Cairo museum was found; a statue before which I stood in awe when I beheld it. Whether

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ImprisonedwiththePharoasImprisonedwiththePharaosbyH.P.LovecraftWrittenFeb-Mar1924PublishedMay1924inWeirdTalesIMysteryattractsmystery.Eversincethewideappearanceofmynameasaperformerofunexplainedfeats,Ihaveencounteredstrangenarrativesandeventswhichmycallinghasledpeopletolinkwithmyinterestsandactivities...

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Lovecraft, H P - Imprisoned With The Pharaos

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