The Ethics of the Dust | Page 9

when we had been looking at your old cave by Cumae, and wondering why you didn't live there still: and then we wondered how old you were; and Egypt said you wouldn't tell, and nobody else could tell but she; and you laughed--I thought very gayly for a Sibyl--and said you would harness a flock of cranes for us, and we might fly over to Egypt if we liked, and see.
SIBYL. Yes, and you went, and couldn't find out after all!
L. Why, you know, Egypt had been just doubling that third pyramid of hers; [Footnote: Note i.] and making a new entrance into it; and a fine entrance it was! First, we had to go through an ante- room, which had both its doors blocked up with stones; and then we had three granite portcullises to pull up, one after another; and the moment we had got under them, Egypt signed to somebody above; and down they came again behind us, with a roar like thunder, only louder; then we got into a passage fit for nobody but rats, and Egypt wouldn't go any further herself, but said we might go on if we liked; and so we came to a hole in the pavement, and then to a granite trap-door--and then we thought we had gone quite far enough, and came back, and Egypt laughed at us.
EGYPT. You would not have had me take my crown off, and stoop all the way down a passage fit only for rats?
L. It was not the crown, Egypt--you know that very well. It was the flounces that would not let you go any further. I suppose, however, you wear them as typical of the inundation of the Nile, so it is all right.
ISABEL. Why didn't you take me with you? Where rats can go, mice can. I wouldn't have come back.
L. No, mousie; you would have gone on by yourself, and you might have waked one of Pasht's cats,[Footnote: Note iii] and it would have eaten you. I was very glad you were not there. But after all this, I suppose the imagination of the heavy granite blocks and the underground ways had troubled me, and dreams are often shaped in a strange opposition to the impressions that have caused them; and from all that we had been reading in Bunsen about stones that couldn't be lifted with levers, I began to dream about stones that lifted themselves with wings.
SIBYL. Now you must just tell us all about it.
L. I dreamed that I was standing beside the lake, out of whose clay the bricks were made for the great pyramid of Asychis. [Footnote: Note ii] They had just been all finished, and were lying by the lake margin, in long ridges, like waves. It was near evening; and as I looked towards the sunset, I saw a thing like a dark pillar standing where the rock of the desert stoops to the Nile valley. I did not know there was a pillar there, and wondered at it; and it grew larger, and glided nearer, becoming like the form of a man, but vast, and it did not move its feet, but glided, like a pillar of sand. And as it drew nearer, I looked by chance past it, towards the sun; and saw a silver cloud, which was of all the clouds closest to the sun (and in one place crossed it), draw itself back from the sun, suddenly. And it turned, and shot towards the dark pillar; leaping in an arch, like an arrow out of a bow. And I thought it was lightning; but when it came near the shadowy pillar, it sank slowly down beside it, and changed into the shape of a woman, very beautiful, and with a strength of deep calm in her blue eyes. She was robed to the feet with a white robe; and above that, to her knees, by the cloud which I had seen across the sun; but all the golden ripples of it had become plumes, so that it had changed into two bright wings like those of a vulture, which wrapped round her to her knees. She had a weaver's shuttle hanging over her shoulder, by the thread of it, and in her left hand, arrows, tipped with fire.
ISABEL (clapping her hands). Oh! it was Neith, it was Neith! I know now.
L. Yes; it was Neith herself; and as the two great spirits came nearer to me, I saw they were the Brother and Sister--the pillared shadow was the Greater Pthah.[Footnote: Note iii] And I heard them speak, and the sound of their words was like a distant singing. I could not understand the words one by one; yet their sense came to me; and so I knew that Neith had