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Solution Manual for Nature of Mathematics, 13th Edition Karl
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Table of Contents
Prologue: Why Math? A Historical Overview.
1. THE NATURE OF PROBLEM SOLVING.
The Nature of Problem Solving. Problem Solving. Inductive and Deductive
Reasoning. Scientific Notation and Estimation. Summary.
2. THE NATURE OF SETS.
Sets, Subsets, and Venn Diagrams. Operations with Sets. Applications of Sets.
Finite and Infinite Sets. Summary.
3. THE NATURE OF LOGIC.
Deductive Reasoning. Truth Tables and the Conditional. Operators and Laws of
Logic. The Nature of Proof. Problem Solving Using Logic. Logic Circuits (Optional).
Summary.
4. THE NATURE OF NUMERATION SYSTEMS.
Early Numeration Systems. Hindu-Arabic Numeration System. Different
Numeration Systems. Binary Numeration System. History of Calculating Devices
(Optional). Summary.
5. THE NATURE OF NUMBERS.
Natural Numbers. Prime Numbers. Integers. Rational Numbers. Irrational
Numbers. Groups, Fields, and Real Numbers. Discrete Mathematics. Cryptography
(Optional). Summary.
6. THE NATURE OF ALGEBRA.
Polynomials. Factoring. Evaluation, Applications, and Spreadsheets. Equations.
Inequalities. Algebra in Problem Solving. Ratios, Proportions, and Problem Solving.
Percents. Modeling Uncategorized Problems. Summary.
7. THE NATURE OF GEOMETRY.
Geometry. Polygons and Angles. Triangles. Similar Triangles. Right Triangle
Trigonometry (Optional). Mathematics, Art, and Non-Euclidean Geometries
(Optional Sections). Summary.
8. THE NATURE OF MEASUREMENT.
Perimeter. Area. Surface Area, Volume and Capacity. Miscellaneous
Measurements (Optional). U.S.-Metric Conversions. Summary.
9. THE NATURE OF NETWORKS AND GRAPH THEORY.
Euler Circuits and Hamiltonian Cycles. Trees and Minimum Spanning Trees.
Topology and Fractals. Guest Essay: “What Good Are Fractals?” . Summary.
10. THE NATURE OF GROWTH.
Exponential Equations. Logarithmic Equations. Applications of Growth and Decay.
Summary.
11. THE NATURE OF SEQUENCES, SERIES, AND FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT.
Interest. Installment Buying. Sequences. Series. Annuities. Amortization. Summary
of Financial Formulas. Summary.
12. THE NATURE OF COUNTING.
Permutations. Combinations. Counting without Counting. Rubik’s Cube and
Instant Insanity (Optional). Summary.
13. THE NATURE OF PROBABILITY.
Introduction to Probability. Mathematical Expectation. Probability Models.
Calculated Probabilities. GUEST ESSAY: “EXTRASENSORY PERCEPTION”. “Bayes’
Theorem”. The
Binomial Distribution (Optional). Summary.
14. THE NATURE OF STATISTICS.
Frequency Distributions and Graphs. Descriptive Statistics. The Normal Curve.
Correlation and Regression. Sampling (Optional). Summary.
15. THE NATURE OF GRAPHS AND FUNCTIONS.
Cartesian Coordinates and Graphing Lines. Graphing Half-Planes. Graphing
Curves. Conic Sections.Functions. Summary.
16. THE NATURE OF MATHEMATICAL SYSTEMS.
Systems of Linear Equations. Problem Solving with Systems. Matrix Solution of a
System of Equations. Inverse Matrices. Modeling with Linear Programming
(Optional). Summary.
17. THE NATURE OF VOTING AND APPORTIONMENT.
Voting. Voting Dilemmas. Apportionment. Apportionment Flaws. Summary.
18. THE NATURE OF CALCULUS (OPTIONAL).
What Is Calculus? Limits. Derivatives. Integrals. Summary.
Epilogue: Why Not Math? Mathematics in the Natural Sciences, Social Sciences,
and in the Humanities.
Appendices.
A. Glossary.
B. Selected Answers.
C. Index.
Other documents randomly have
different content
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Court of
the King, and Other Studies
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
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eBook.

Title: The Court of the King, and Other Studies

Author: Margaret Benson

Release date: February 22, 2020 [eBook #61478]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COURT OF

THE KING, AND OTHER STUDIES ***
THE COURT OF THE KING

BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

THE SOUL OF A CAT.
THE VENTURE OF RATIONAL
FAITH.
CAPITAL LABOUR AND TRADE AND
THE OUTLOOK.
SUBJECT TO VANITY.
THE TEMPLE OF MUT IN ASHER.
(With J. A. Gourlay.)
 THE COURT OF
THE KING

AND OTHER STUDIES

By MARGARET BENSON

T. FISHER UNWIN
LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE
LEIPSIC: INSELSTRASSE 20
First published, 1913

(All rights reserved)

 PREFACE
“We wake with wrists and ankles jewelled still.”
There are many ways of entering fairyland; sometimes there is a
door in the ground, and he who goes through finds himself in some
great hall or carved and painted chamber. Sometimes we find the
morning dew on a flower and touch the eyes with it; or, like John
Dietrich, catch the cap which the fairies are flinging and put it on our
own heads: and immediately the little people spring into sight, we
hear the sweetness of their music and see the glitter of their hidden
treasure and watch the merriness of their games.
The difficulty of the first method is to find the way, of the second to
find the will; and John Dietrich’s way is the venture of confidence.
Children are continually in fairyland; grubbing in mother earth they
find the door; as they tumble on the grass the morning dew touches
their eyes and makes them pure.
But sometimes the light of fairyland will shine suddenly about you;
and you know it is no common glow though it seems but the light of
day to many. So a child sauntering and playing at midday in the
fields may throw back its head and look into a deep blue summer
sky, and be seized on a sudden by a beauty which troubles the spirit,
a greatness which weighs upon the soul and wearies it, till the will
fails. Or the light may shine softer at evening through the nursery
window, when roofs of houses and branches of elder purple and
darken against a sky all purest primrose, and draw the young spirit
with a half-comprehended longing. Sometimes it comes with
raptures of sunlight in a green garden; sometimes cold and strange
in moonlight when existence holds its breath, and earth is lost in
shadow or refined to vapour in uncertain light; sometimes with a
fullness of peace in pale emerald of evening light jewelling the
latticed windows of an old house, till the enchantment thickens and
the spirit pants with the presage of the moment, waiting for a
revelation which still delays.
And sometimes it is filled with the very spirit of the little people:
curious, amused, fantastic—as when you walk on a sea-shore, and
suddenly, as with the touch of a charm, the pool at your feet
becomes a little inland sea: you see the rocky shores sloping down,
the sandy bottom, the submarine promontories through the blue:
forests of seaweed sway; a terrible creature with claws crawls out
through pale coralline; a lump of red jelly stretches out its arms and
becomes now a living, crimson flower, now a horrid polypus
ravaging, irresistible; a fairy being mailed in translucent armour
floats on with antennæ fiercely waving; and you are back in
fairyland.
Many times you may borrow the Red Cap to watch the boy
Stevenson titanically carve mountains and seas in a mere mess of
porridge; or to hear with Charles Kingsley when the grouse
prophesies doom on the moor or the empty gnat boasts himself
beside the stream. But sweetest of all it is to win for yourself the
charm which opens your eyes in wood or field, and to hear with
awakened ear the voices of created things.
These things should be at our command; but the things which
children know we must re-learn; and there is no truth more evident
to the child nor more surely proved to the philosopher than that all
which we see or hear depends for all its meaning on the soul of the
world that no man sees or hears. Let this book be taken as a short
and simple lesson-book in hidden meanings. Life gives us many
lessons hard to read, and problems painful to unriddle; but here in
kind and simple wise our lesson was made plain and the page was
pleasant to read: for to the eyes of everyday, in varying scenes,
among diverse races, and nations long since dead “the dear old
nurse” showed us the things which follow. She brought us through
the Gates of Gold and sent us to float on the serene water below a
pleasant pasture; she taught us daily, dwelling on the other side; led
us by moonlight to the Court of the King; showed us through sordid
circumstance the silent romance on the golden hill, as she had
showed us romantic incidents, even in the Desert City; then she
surrendered us to the guardianship of her child Imagination who,
through the voices of others, brought back for us the Oriental vision
of the royal boat in the mysterious midnight solemnity. And from this
our older guardian led us back, and blotting out for us sight and
sound of a populous city by a transparent veil, made us understand
how to trust the mightiness of the life of which we were part.
Then she bade us close the book with the touch of pain and healing
sent to quicken into life, and again Imagination sent us, among the
scenes of daily life to look for the beautiful kingdom which endures:
And we must say it in what form we may, so that we catch the
meaning of the simple word, so early and so often said, from which
our stubborn sense rebels, “the prison is the world of sight.”
Thus before memory should fade too much I wrote down some of
the things I had under guidance witnessed and experienced, and
those which the child Imagination had, as I say, taught in divers
ways.
For too often we let memory lie like a rabbit in a winter burrow; and
imagination buzzes on the surface of things like a fly on a pane: we
narrow our vision to our purpose and our hearing to intelligible
voices, till it needs a shock of strangeness or of beauty to bring us
back to realities—to rouse memory to throw open the door in the
hillside, to make imagination leave its sheet of glass for the world of
air and light, to let the beauties and the music of the infinite creation
reach the dull brain.
MARGARET BENSON.
 CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE 5

I
THE GATES OF GOLD 17

II
THE LAKE WITHIN THE WORLD 27

III
A DESERT CITY 37

IV
THE OTHER SIDE 53

V
THE SILENT ROMANCE 73

VI
THE COURT OF THE KING 85

VII
THE GOLDEN DAHABEAH 101

VIII
THE UNSEEN WORLD 125
 IX
FROM THE BANK OF THE RIVER 135
 THE GATES OF GOLD

I
THE GATES OF GOLD
The favourite game with Noah’s Ark was to make the nursery table
an Island of Delight. The Delight must have centred in the looking-
glasses, which, with frames discreetly hidden in moss, mirrored in
their unruffled surfaces forms of numerous ducks and geese and
other less decided species of birds. Certainly the other furnishings of
the Island were not particularly delightful, for it was thickly
populated with wild beasts of horrid aspect and defective limbs, and
specimens of that strange pinkish animal of which Noah is so fond,
and which may be classified with equal probability as a Dingo or a
Wild Boar.
My earliest ideas of an Oasis were combined of this Island of Delight
and of the description of Elim. The Oasis would be round as the
nursery table; it would be covered with lush green grass like a
water-meadow. It would have about seventy palm-trees standing at
fairly regular intervals, and between the palm-trees there would be
(instead of the looking-glasses) bubbling springs of water crystal-
clear.
When at last I saw an Oasis it was unlike my vision—my Vision of
Delight. There was no grass, but there were more palm-trees; there
were no crystal fountains, but trickles of brown water in sandy
channels. It came up to my ideal in one point only—there was none
of that indefiniteness of outline which is so repulsive to the simple
mind. Even as you can stand on the bridge above Mentone, and see
a milestone with France on one side and a milestone with Italy on
the other, so here you could take your stand and say “That on my
right hand is Desert, and that on my left is Oasis.”
We had been travelling all day over the sandy, dusty plains of North
Africa; we had found little to eat at the shed-like stations except blue
cheese and musty bread; and towards evening we entered a rocky
defile. At the end of this defile they said were the Gates of Gold.
There was not much to see and the train loitered on.
Suddenly we saw at the end of the valley two great escarpments of
reddish rock; at their foot leaned one palm-tree, behind was a
glimpse of blue hills. The evening sunlight fell golden on the Golden
Gates as we passed through and suddenly cried out, for everywhere
below us spread a sea of waving palm-trees. This was the Oasis.
The Oasis lay on a plain so flat that the horizon to the south curved
like the horizon of the sea; and like little clouds resting on the ocean
here and there an oasis showed greyish green in the distance. To
the north lay a range of hills, which guarded the enchanted place
from the world of men. The flatness drew the soul with a strange
attraction, until one longed to go out over it farther than eye could
reach, anywhere or nowhere. The desert was in sandy ridges like a
badly ploughed field; isolated tufts of a heath-like plant grew here
and there; often there lay on the ground, as if spilled from a cart,
yellow apples, reddening invitingly. Evil fruits these are, full of dust
and bitterness, and even the camel will not eat them.
But within the Oasis were golden oranges, juicy, like no oranges you
eat here, for they ripen on the dark, glossy trees; there were
gardens of purple fig and yellow citrons large as the head of an Arab
child; and the dates were sweet and large, and half transparent in
their candied clusters.
But the enchanted time was when the moon was high, its silver light
was faintly tinged with rose; then one walked under the palm-trees,
and light and shadow lay like silver and ebony across the path,
interlacing and waving if some faint breeze stirred them, and the
strange, sweet odours of the East lay warm and thick, and the tinkle
of Arab sounds were in our ears, and the slim brown figures moved
across the path; and we went back to dream of silver lights and
waving, ebon shadows.
And one morning we went away from the Oasis, and passed through
the Gates of Gold, and back into the world of men, to find we had
been but two days away.
 THE LAKE WITHIN THE WORLD

II
THE LAKE WITHIN THE WORLD
There were other such enchanted places in this land, and one could
step aside from the high-road of life into a place of fantasy and
sweet illusion. The dawdling, leisured train set us down one day at a
wayside station. No houses were in sight, but behind a clump of
trees a cloud of steam rose into the air, as if all the world was a-
washing. The train dawdled away across the plain and we went
towards the trees to find ourselves in face of a shining, misty
waterfall. The white stone was streaked with grey and pink; the
water boiled up in little cauldrons and fell down in a cloud of steam;
at the bottom of the dazzling rocks oleanders bent over the warm
streams, maiden-hair fringed the banks; hoary olives with twisted
trunks rose above the oleanders.
While we still waited there came up from the side of the steaming
river a splendid figure—a woman all in scarlet hung about with
silvery chains. “That,” said the guide, “is the washer-woman.” We
climbed up behind the waterfall, where it sprang in its strange
excitement out of the earth, and found a stone courtyard, built
round with little empty houses, one of these prepared for us.
While we paused at the door a moment, I saw between the stones a
tiny plant—a plant to conjure with. It is like clover, splashed with
crimson. A poet who wore the Red Cap has said that this crimson is
the blood of Spring, and, to him, a drop of his own heart’s blood.
A French family were living here in a clean, empty house with airy
guest-rooms; and while they regaled us with wild-boar’s flesh they
talked of the topics of their day: how the jackals howled about the
courtyard in winter; how the rugged way to the Roman City was not
yet open; how the locusts came down ten years ago, swarm upon
swarm, till you could hear the sound of the eating of their hosts by
night; how they devoured fruit and leaf and bark like the “army” in
Joel, and then melted like snow under the sun.
In this strange, quiet land we slept well, and went out next day over
the pleasant undulating plain, watered by warm streams with their
bordering of oleander and fern, and sheltered by olive and carob.
At last we came to a place where a grassy bank swept round us in a
half circle. “Fourteen years ago,” said the guide “the shepherds
feeding their flocks close by heard a great noise, and running hither
saw the earth had fallen in,” and he pointed as he spoke to a crack
in the side of the bank, just such a rent as a great tree makes when
it falls, tearing its roots out of the ground. “Into that,” he said, “you
must go.”
So we went towards it in faith, and found when we got there a man
could easily pass in. As we descended into the hot twilight inside the
ground a bat flew out. We went down-hill until the guide stopped us,
where there seemed to lie at our feet a little blue dust over the
stones, for this was the still blue water of a lake that stretched away
into deep and deeper darkness. As we stood we heard out of the
darkness the splash of oars, a light shone on the water, and round
the sheer wall of rock on the right came a boat with a lantern at its
prow.
Into this we stepped, and it moved on into the deep shadows. Out
of the dark water rose great stalagmites like columns, and stalactites
dropped to meet them like heavy pendants from some vaulted roof.
We moved round rocky chambers where the lantern shone on the
walls, and through halls whose boundaries were unrevealed; all
sense of direction and of time was lost till a flash of lightning
seemed to fall on the water. It was only the reflected light of a grey
day, filtered through the rent in the earth down which we had come,
but after that great darkness it seemed dazzling.
So we went up again to the light of day, and back through that
pleasant land. But when we came away, I brought with me a leaf of
the crimson-splashed clover “to witness if I lie.”
 A DESERT CITY

III
A DESERT CITY
“He seems as one whose footsteps halt
Toiling in immeasurable sand
And o’er a weary sultry land
Sown in a wrinkle of the monstrous hill
The city sparkles like a grain of salt.”
In the desert not twenty miles from Cairo there has sprung up the
mushroom growth of a wonder-working Health Resort. It possesses
several hotels, an “Establishment,” a golf links, and everything which
a really desirable Health Resort must possess.[1] But at the time
when I first knew that tract of sand on which it stands the case was
far otherwise. If one must have summarized the attractions of the
place they would have run:—
Fifteen pyramids Distant
One palm-tree Distant
Several ill-smelling streams Quite close
Flat sandy desert Near and distant
A perfectly bare range of low hills beginning half
a mile away and reaching to Arabia.
An English advertisement of foreign appearance bore witness to
these charms and ended with a striking appeal to leave for desert air
“the filthy, stinking city,” as it characterized Grand Cairo.
We responded to the appeal, and went to stay in a hotel of large
corridors and wide balconies which looked out upon the fifteen
pyramids. Opposite was a small, bare house called Villa Mon Bijou.
The town was planted on a desert so flat that it seemed a German
toy town set upon a table; only there were no trees with curly green
foliage to be seen, because no one might plant a living thing unless
by order from Government.[2] Neat little pavements with new little
gas lamps traversed it rectangularly, and came every way to an
abrupt stop in heavy desert sand. There was a tiny English church,
in which the few English Christians staying in the place assembled.
Little flat-roofed villas like coloured cardboard boxes stood back from
the pavement with strange ornaments above the gate; here a stone
eagle with knees turned outwards, there a stuffed fox. Backwards
and forwards we went under noontide sun to the baths, and were
told to rest in the Khedive’s sitting-room, upholstered with yellow
satin.
One would have thought that nothing so brand-new could have been
found in sight of the pyramid of Unas and the cemetery of Sakkara.
Even death seemed glaringly recent. One day we drove in the desert
and searched the horizon for objects of interest. “What is that?” we
said, pointing to a small building on the outskirts of the town. “That,”
replied Saïd with pride, “is the new slaughter-house.” “And this
enclosure?” “The English cemetery.” “And that yonder?” “The Italian
mortuary.” “What is that which looks like a village on the hill?” “That
is the Mahommedan burying-place.” “And that beyond?” “Another
graveyard.” Then he drove us through a valley of Hinnom, where we
marked, among other things, a dead camel and a dead calf; and as
we passed between the windmill and the ill-smelling stream we saw
three coffins lie, brand-new, unguarded and alone.
But towards evening a certain magic fell upon the place. We had
gone one day towards the single palm-tree in the desert. Miles and
miles of sand and air, unstirred by any slightest sound, seemed to lie
between us and that solitary tree, and when we reached it nothing
could be seen but the slot of beasts around it.
Then as we turned the light began to change. Behind the fifteen
pyramids the sky glowed scarlet till it tinged the water of the Nile
with blood. Far up in the blue hung an ethereal arc of crimson light;
the heaven deepened to indigo where it met night; kindled into
indescribable sapphire where it touched the dying day; the
conflagration grew till at last earth glowed its answer to the sky with
a purple flood rising and deluging sand-hills and valley.
As we neared the toy town with its twinkling lights the glow had died
away, and there gloomed before us dimly a knoll round which knelt
the camels of the Bedawîn; the figures which moved beside them
with dark, fine profile and the white cloths round their heads
seemed like Magi come to greet the Royal Child.
Again we went up the hills which, like a low rampart, bordered the
plain to the east. At the foot they were carved into quarries of a
stone so white that it seemed like wedges cut in a great cream
cheese. The hills were barren, but for a few straggling plants and
grasses about; like a raised map or the skeleton of the world. Yet as
we went on we still found always in front, like the marks on the
carriage drive, a curving, trodden road, winding up vanishing out of
sight.
While we stood looking at the loneliness there came daintily
stepping, with embroidered shoes and black silk mantles round
them, a party of women to meet us; in front a man carried a child. I
cannot but think that they vanished into thin air when they had
passed us.
Or again one might descend towards the river, on the road between
the fields. There as the sky lights its fires towards evening the men
would leave their work and stand with dripping feet on their coarse
outer garment by the water’s edge to say the evening prayer. Near
the town stood a sycamore, under which, on a raised platform, some
men prayed loud and lustily five times a day. “God likit them very
much,” said the donkey-boy; but with cynical estimation of the
importance of this fact he added, “If I bray, where is my business?”
A brougham on the road as we returned: Europe is at one side. But
within sat a woman golden haired, with her veil pushed back and a
cigarette between her teeth. That one passing, demure and
dignified, with an attendant wrinkled and stately, is a Princess
walking for her health. Here two in a victoria, with transparent veils
and Paris bonnets, show Turkish emancipation; and the shut and
blinded brougham with a Sudanese on the box gives sign of Arab
propriety.
And now as the town is reached we begin to see the meaning of this
modern city; those high walls are not merely meant to hide a garden
of flowers, nor does the lattice serve only to keep the sunlight from
fading Eastern fabrics. But behind the pierced work of that window
peers some Scheherazade at her story-weaving, wondering what life
means, “half sick of shadows.” There is the Pasha’s house, and the
whisper goes that these are slaves.
A strange, pathetic figure trod this road daily, a man of aquiline face,
brown skin, and pointed beard, dressed in a fine embroidered
garment of scarlet with white cloth falling on his shoulders.
Evening by evening he left the town, and squatting by one of the
sulphur streams looked out with level eyes towards the farthest
horizon of the south, his beads held idly in his hands. That man, we
learned, was the Pasha’s gatekeeper and came from the Sudan.
One day a crowd ran and digged by the side of this stream. “What
are they doing?” we asked, and the answer was that they were
making a garden. It will surely blossom like the rose—but not on
those flowers will the gatekeeper gaze.
In the evening when the moon has risen, and a great star close to
her tip hangs the banner of the Moslems in heaven, the magic is
most potent. Then the flat-roofed houses become palaces of marble,
and among the dark figures stealing through the street you look for
Mesrour on his secret errands, that he may show you the mysteries
of life and death behind veil and wall and lattice. Then one may well
believe that over at Sakkara under the sand-hills the dead are sitting
in their carven chambers, to play their games and cast their spells
and eat and drink.
And yet in Europe they talk of freeing Egypt, and speak of the
“patriot” dervish; and at Gordon’s death-place, where the
gatekeeper was born and from which he was stolen, they entertain
the Pasha with the honours of a burgess.
Who wakes? who dreams? Surely the Western eye sees clear, which
looks on the place in the searching noonday light; for it is the hand
of the Western that planted Villa Mon Bijou and raised the gas
lamps.
Leave it then with its neat realities and its fancied magic; draw away
over the sand towards the Great River and the dwellings of the
dead; and as one might see across the great ocean a line of reef
built up by tiny busy insects, so look back once to see over
“immeasurable sand,” “the city sparkle like a grain of salt.”
 THE OTHER SIDE

IV
THE OTHER SIDE
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.
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