when alice went through the looking-glass, she sprang down into a world where a change had passed on all familiar things; so that she must walk away from the things she wanted to arrive at, and time ran backwards and stopped. when a merman brought a girl through the translucent mirror of the water to be his wife in the great caves below the sea, she heard but dimly the church bell and the sounds of the world above, and saw but seldom its sights when she rose through the bay. and when tom slipped into the stream he found himself in a great empty world below the water; and it was not for some time that he was able even to see the crowds of merry water-babies with which it was peopled.
we had often looked into the looking-glass from a little village on the bank of a great river. sometimes this river was only a river of muddy water; sometimes towards evening, when no wind ruffled its surface, it was a mirror of burnished metal, reflecting the fires of the west; sometimes a river of molten gold. sometimes, when the sky was bright above, it was a stretch of sapphire, edged with gold and set in emerald, for beyond the sandy shore of the river lay a great sea of green corn—few trees were there, but the waving corn, and animals pasturing in luxuriant vetch; and beyond this again began the sandy desert, which stretched away to the bases of the hills.
so the river ran, dividing the country, and the two sides of it have been called since the beginning of history the two lands. the river was broad, and so deep that the reptiles of the one side have never been able to cross to the other, and the lizards of the two lands are of quite different kinds.
but just at the edge of the desert you begin to see traces of quite a different kind of life, the giant images of people long dead, and their temples; behind in the cliff you may see, even from across the river, the doors of rock-hewn chambers which are called the eternal habitations. that side of the river is called the city of the dead.
now the people of the village opposite used to speak of going over to the “other side.” they crossed the river, and rode through the fields of waving corn, and the men and women who moved among the fields, who tethered the beasts to pasture, the little children who drove oxen in the creaking sakhieh seemed like figures of a picture to them; and when they reached the city of the dead, the desert places of the eternal habitations, the silent citizens were unperceived by them, their voices were unheard; or they seemed to see but rude stone figures of an earlier age, dead bodies, unskilful paintings on the wall. before they could recognize the living men they had turned back and recrossed the river, and never knew that they had been so near the mysteries of the “other side.”
but when you came to live in the country on the other side the aspect of it was altogether different. at the back, the country was walled in by precipices of rock, a great golden wall from which spurs ran down on to the desert. if you climbed up the first ridge to get a farther view you saw ridge on ridge of the same barren hills, with golden rocky defiles, reflecting back and back again the eastern sunlight. at certain hours of the day a stream of people, like small ants, poured up one valley, over a hill and back again across the river; otherwise there was never a sign of human life, except that, from peak to peak, at far distances, you might see a little rock-built shelter, and the solitary figure of a watchman who guarded the chambers of the dead.
between the hills and the cultivated lands are lower hills, half rock, half sand, with sandy slopes. in the sand there gaped holes about the paths as you rode or walked, and looking down you might peer into a chamber, sculptured with images of men and women sitting at feasts; or higher up in the hill you would see a squared doorway of stone facing sometimes a great courtyard, and entering, you might find a pillared chamber, gold vessels and jewelled boats painted on the wall; here a picture of a man propelling his bark through marshy groves populous with birds, there one driving the plough, and a woman sowing corn; here a kingly child on his nurse’s knee; there the antelope caught by the dogs and dripping blood from the hunter’s arrow. the longer one lived here the more one began to see of these doors in the hillside and holes in the ground, until it seemed that the whole mountain was honeycombed with the rock-hewn chambers. sometimes you might cross a courtyard where the eastern slope of a hill lay in cool shadow; pass through one painted room after another, chapel and shrine, shrine and chapel, and so come out on the other side of the hill still golden in the light of the setting sun.[3]
down below these rocks, clustering round the doorways of the lowest slopes, are brown houses that a day’s rain can bring to ruin, villages like a child’s building in sand; open yards, sheds thatched with straw, erections in mud like gigantic mushrooms with upturned brim; and for the more permanent part of the habitation these childish builders have borrowed the rocky chambers.
for the truth is that two races of people inhabit this country. the one race are like merry, selfish children, though a mystery of simplicity hangs about them like the mystery of the hidden life of a child. in their villages ring sounds of men and animals all day and all night; voices are hoarse with talking and singing; it seems like a great orchestra of the inhabitants. up to the middle of the night donkeys chant their canon, cocks blow their clarion; all day you hear the groaning of camels, the agitated voices of kids and lambs, the lamentable cries of their mothers; towards evening the lowing of kine as they return from the sakhieh, the fury of the dogs, the provocative cry of the jackal, and sometimes as night falls the long, weird howling of the wolf. then when the moon is full the children sing in chorus, apeing the elder boys at their work; the workers of the day are the feasters of the night, and drum and song help on the fantasia. here is merriment and noise, complaint, vociferous demand, swift anger, cheerfulness again; the ragged children and young animals race and play from simple excess of vitality.
yet all this noise is like the chattering of a brook in a quiet place, though it beats loud upon the ear it is as powerless against the great quiet of the desert as lapping waves against a rocky shore.
for the other race that lives here is silent, yet their words have gone out into the ends of the world. you leave the villages and mount the hill, and the noise comes fainter from below. you pass through the chambers and see these greater people live their lives and learn from the writing on the wall what “he saith.” you go towards evening up some valley of golden rocks, where the sunlight reflected from the sand shines on the shadowed cliff like the shining of a hidden lake, and find in a fold of the hill a little empty temple of old time; or descending rocky steps pass into a chamber where the walls present great deeds of state, ambassadors clad in fine embroidered dresses bring foreign tribute of nations long perished, precious things of gold and gem, strange beasts from far countries. or when clouds are chasing through a moonlit sky you pass up a road between sand-hills towards a temple of these silent races; its white pillars and colonnades now flash out silver in a sudden gleam of light; and now the shadow of a cloud passing with purple bloom over the hill above annihilates courts and terraces, until it seems a magician’s wand is at work, destroying and re-creating this ghostly building.
or at evening you ride through the place of tombs; the sun has sunk, and a glow, orange and red, gives a sharp outline to the hills. out of the holes in the ground come an army of little shadows, sweeping faster than the eye can follow them over the unlevel ground; and from the rocks on the left peers out a sharp nose and ears, and the jackal runs with heavy drooping tail across the path, and dodges behind a big stone to peer out with insatiable curiosity as you pass; or in the night one hears the cry of a wild cat caught and torn by the dogs.
there are no merry flocks of birds here as in the cultivated land below, and but little sound of their voices. the sparrow indeed, who holds nothing sacred, chatters his minute affairs in the great silence; the discreet wagtail runs about the ledges of the rocks, the black and white chat bows on a stone. but the most part are seen on the wing; the soft grey martin, with its atmosphere of domestic peace, hovers about the eternal habitations, thinking to rear its young in the chambers of the dead; the swallows made wild by their long flight, and loosed from the restraints of the north, build their nests on the cliff, and sweep at sunset, with musical screams, up and down the face of the rock; great kites circle above in the hot noonday, let fall sometimes their weird whistling cry, circling on and on till the vast blue engulfs them; and once, high in the sky towards evening, there came a flight of cranes, who wheeled, split, and recrossed, then gathered decision and moved stately in black and white northwards.
all luxuriance of life had vanished. even as time seemed to have stood still, and the people learnt their arts and crafts from those who died six thousand years ago, so growth seemed to have vanished from the visible world. now and then as you wandered up a valley a single blade of barley shone like a gem half hidden by a stone; or some plant, desert-coloured, spread, dry greyish tufts, where the ground retained invisible moisture. but life hung suspended, and the longer you dwelt in the country the more you perceived that you were living in the city of the dead. sometimes one forgot how days and weeks were passing, and again a thousand years were but as yesterday, a watch in the night. the noises of the outside world came but faintly: once, we heard the sound of a nation weeping and the nations of the earth sorrowing with it, and again the sober welcome to one who came to take upon him the burden of the state.
so they sorrowed four thousand years ago—not without hope. “a hawk has soared—the follower of the god met his maker.” so the officers of state welcomed the son who should take its cares upon him. and on that very night when with grief and praise the nation laid to rest a queen and mother in the fullness of her age, our eyes looked on, resting untouched, deep in the recesses of the rock, among the mystic symbols of his faith, the body of a king swathed still and garlanded who died three thousand years before that queen was born.
the sounds of war came dimly, for the pictures of far earlier wars might meet the eyes day by day; and when we came on the bodies of those men who warred and taught and lived and enjoyed, alert in the chase, quiescent in the cool breath of their gardens, they lay quiet with their ornaments perhaps upon them, a garland round their neck, a book between their feet.
but when at last returning we came down to the fields, we saw that time indeed had passed. the corn which was but sprouting when we came, was full in the ear, and the barley was yellowing to harvest; the bean-flower had opened, spread its fragrance and passed; the purple vetch still lingered; the poppy raised an imperial head. clouds of gay, thieving sparrows rose as we passed; the crested lark ran before us, sprang and hovered with a few notes of liquid song; tiny birds hung on the barley blades; the whistle of the quail came from the deep green where it hid. the river spread before us like a highway paved with sapphire; so we passed along it to the north and the voices of the world we belonged to rung out clearer as we moved; and behind us there faded like a dream that world whose present is four thousand years of time with the insistence of its silent voices, the permanence of the dead, the fleeting brightness of the living.
