CHAPTER I.

THE STELE.

Perhaps one’s happiest manner to begin the history of the remarkable boy whose moral we have to point is to give, as we can, that part of Professor S. S. Reid’s diary which has to do with the matter. The professor writes:

* * * * *

I have this morning the tidings that a son is born to Dr. Lepsius, and as the fact may possibly come to prove momentous in the history of experiment, I am about now to jot down just what I was in the way to know of the story.

In the dog-days of ’68, close on two years gone now, our bout-at-arms with Theodore III. of Abyssinia came to a close with the capture of Magdala by Napier: and the victory was still in everyone’s mouth, when Lepsius one afternoon strolls into my study to notify me that the British Government was about to send out a mission to that country, and that he, Lepsius, was to accompany it in some rôle or other. I was quite surprised, in spite of my familiarity with the manifold activities of this man.

“_You_ going to Abyssinia?” I exclaimed.

“I am,” says he.

“But what for?” I asked.

“There are the Jurassic limestones for one thing,” he answered, “and you surely know that some more or less valuable MSS., especially Bible MSS., already derive from Abyssinia.”

He then proceeded to tell me that in the rage of the Mohammedan invasion of that region in the sixteenth century, the Abyssinians heaped most of their Ethiopian and other manuscripts into a certain museum on Debra-Seena (an island of Lake Sana), where they remain guarded by clerics, who regard them as idol relics. “Abyssinia, then,” said he, “might not be a bad four-months’ abode for a bloke like me; at all events, I am off.”

And off, in some weeks, Lepsius was.... Never let it be said that the doctor was any shade of a scatter-brains! for in my lifetime never did I meet so essential a sage; all the same, I do admit that to some of the heats of Lepsius the word “flighty” has been applied with some meaning, he was ever so fevered, seeming always to keep vastly too many irons in the fire—“Jack of all trades!” I don’t say master of none. The man was tinged with both physics and biology like a Janus-head, was an educationist and an Egyptologist, all in the ardour of the same day. Modern learning—he made that his domain. Of course, his thumping fortune had much to do with such a mental posture and manner of life, for, like the free-lance that he ever was, his relation with the mill of science was mainly honorary. I never met him steaming along the streets, mopping his pink brow, but he was eager to drag me to the meeting-of-council of some society, or to drop at my ear some spanking scientific tidings. Old Lepsius! I fancy that I behold him anew, not a beauty assuredly, with his shortish form, bold nose, and thin lips, his burning straight hair brushed back flat from the forehead, and curled up a bit at the nape! At the time when he started for Abyssinia he was a man of perhaps forty-five, of established fame in the western world, and a hardened old bachelor—I almost said old maid!

What surprises me is that a man like Lepsius, a tender wight at bottom surely, should have let himself become the excuse for bloodshed during this exuberance of his, and should have been led into committing an act which the common man might well consider wonderfully like pilfering—at the spur of a whim! Learning, may be, has a claim to make its own code of morals, but I am convinced that in, say, Madrid, Lepsius would have shrunk with dismay from doing what in that savage country he did with the coolest self-assurance.

The mission reached the town of Gondar at the end of August—a world of mountains now, after a camel-journey of some weeks across the lowlands from Somaliland. By September, Dr. Lepsius had won sufficient favour for his purposes with the viceroy, or _ras_, and, with his usual rashness, ventured out with only one Choan servant on an ass for Lake Sana, twenty miles south, to examine the MSS., etc.

It appears that in these regions the rainy season is from June to the tail-end of September, so that now it was pouring without pity. However, one forenoon Lepsius comes to the lake, and is rowed, as he related it to me, in a buffalo-hide boat to one of the islets.

On this island was a kind of double monastery, half occupied by sisters, and half by brothers, to which latter Lepsius had a letter of introduction given him by the _abuna_ (or father) of Gondar, the head of the Christian-Coptic Church of Abyssinia; but the scientist’s welcome at the monastery was hardly hearty, since, having landed on the island, he had to hang about a whole hour without beholding his hosts. This, however, as it turned out, was owing to no cursedness of the monks, since it appears that, the prior of the monastery having recently died, the monks were even then intent upon the rite of electing his successor. This once over, Lepsius was fairly well received, and soon thereupon was rowed through the rain to the library by two of the monks: those monks, he told me, being dark-skinned carles with crinkled hair all in plaits, and the library being a kind of mosque on another island half a mile from the monastery-island.

Here, then, on this second island, Lepsius abode most of the day, ferreting and feasting his curiosity. Onwards from the sixth century of our era Abyssinia, he has told me, was a bold and expansive power, having dealings with India, with Ceylon, with the Greek Empire, and overflowing by far the greater part of Arabia: so that this mosque place was crammed with all the gimcrackery and dust of the ages—scriptures, urns, relics, cartouches, taliput-books, mostly modern and of small importance, but still of interest; and the only thing which badgered Lepsius’ peace of mind at being turned loose into these pastures was the continual presence of the two monks who had rowed him over, seeing that they did not leave his side a moment. One of them, he says, was a particularly swagger chap who carried over his cotton garment two falchions in scarlet-morocco scabbards, and his aspect appears to have smacked nastily of the fact that in Abyssinia the Church is burningly militant. Ever and anon he would grumble something to his mate in Amharic—a kind of Arabic lingo with which Lepsius was pretty well acquainted, though his ear lacked ease in striking quite what was said.

Toward sunset he went down some steps to an underground corridor into which a series of grilles and doors opened, having in his brisk fashion already made a survey of the treasures above, and wishing to run over those below while there was still some twilight. Midway in the corridor, at a moment when, as it happened, the two monks were whispering together, he noticed a half-open grille, and passed in, whereat the grimmer of the two fellows stepped sharply up and tapped him on the shoulder, saying, “Not in there!” But Lepsius was already in, and making out that he didn’t understand, took another step, and looked about him.

Three sides of this apartment were piled with papyri and many book-like objects dark with dust, together with pictures of saints all painted full-face, whatever the posture of the body, and with idols, weapons, beads, and other suchlike gems and curios. One wall of it, however, was almost bare, and there, in the centre of that wall, hung a little basalt stele, about as thick as one’s wrist, and about six inches long; it had a copper cap with an old hole in it, through which passed the banyan string with which it was hung up. Lepsius could see that it was covered with a singular enough mixture of hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic figures; and his curiosity seems to have been at once fired to a high degree by this sight, especially when he saw marked on the wall over the stele in the Geez jargon the curious runes, “Riches of Jerusalem.”

Meantime, while peering at the little stele, Lepsius with half an eye had observed on the floor, immediately under the stele, a coffin only half covered by its lid, so that he could spy the body of a very old man who looked lost within it—the coffin was so large, and the corpse so small—and at the coffin’s foot sat on the floor a gigantic Galla, armed to the teeth, his shield garnished with human hair, these Gallas being, in fact, the blackest and most malignant of the Abyssinian clans.

“Well,” Lepsius said, “may I look about?” addressing himself to the milder of the two monks. The answer was, “No, it is the prior’s room.”

“And who is the dead man?” Lepsius asked.

“The prior,” was the answer.

“Who died yesterday?”

“Yes.”

“He died here, then?”

“Yes, in this chamber, where he mainly passed his time.”

“Why did he pass his time here?” Lepsius wished to know.

“Because,” was the answer, “he wanted to contemplate the sacred stele. For fifty years he was poring upon it, and dropped dead before it.”

“Oho,” says Lepsius, “and what is the history of the stele, my friend?”

“It fell from heaven,” replied the monk; “the prior found it here when he was a very young monk, and hung it there under that picture of the Virgin, who was looking when he found it.”

“Oho,” says Lepsius, “but can’t I approach a little and examine it?” The answer was, “No, the irreligious could not approach it.”

But the irreligious _had_ approached it. Lepsius could already make out two or three of the phrases, could tell that it was mainly an imitation of the hieratic of the nineteenth dynasty, mixed with some intentionally secret writing; and, as he stared at it, he mumbled on absently, saying, “Oho, one can see, one can see, its date; and what is the meaning of those marks on it, then?”

“No one knows,” was the answer.

“And yet you write over it, ‘Riches of Jerusalem’?”

“Yes, for the prior discovered this much, that it tells of the riches of the City of God.”

“He was a learned man, I see.”

“We shall not have another like him! a learned and a saintly man. He made the stele the study of his life, and mined out much of its meaning, for which reason it is to be buried with him.”

“Buried with him?” cries Lepsius.

“Yes, by his own instructions.”

“And when?”

“To-night.”

“Ah! At what hour?”

“At eleven.”

“And where?”

“In the monastery.”

But at this the more truculent of the two monks stepped offensively before Lepsius, blocking his view. The Galla warrior, too, who kept guard over the corpse was eyeing him disagreeably, so Lepsius moved off, and after sauntering through another room or two, started off for the monastery-island, to be at once afresh drenched through by the rain. Darkness had suddenly come.

As he now passed up the steps towards the monastery, he made minute note of everything: a number of boats lay close about the landing-place, with some monks baling them out; from a chapel some way off he was aware of the chaunted vesper-psalm of the nuns.

After a repast with the new prior, a portly man of middle age, he was conducted for the night to his chamber, where for a while he waited, sitting on a bed made of rushes mixed with raw cotton; but at ten o’clock he got up and stole through his door. Lepsius by this time had fully informed himself of the minutiæ of the dead prior’s funeral, and had resolved to pilfer the little stele.

I think that I never knew quite so insolently plucky a nut as this of Lepsius. His impetuosity is extreme, and his tenacity is extreme; so that whatever happens at any time to fascinate his mind fascinates it in a quite unbalanced manner, to the banning of every other concern in the world. When this blessed stele had once seized upon his fancy as a thing likely to prove a scientific find, his subsequent action was so very in character, that I shouldn’t wonder if he went stealing the thing, about to be buried and lost as it was, with an overweening sense of propriety, and perhaps, in setting about it, whispered to himself the word “Science,” or perhaps only the word “Lepsius”: I don’t know.

But no man surely ever rushed into a job bristling with dangers more horrid, for he was alone among all those martial fanatics, and, save for a razor and a penknife, if I am right, quite unarmed.

He crept out of his room into a corridor and down some steps, there being no light apparently in that part of the building, though the place was full of the sounds of busy footfalls and people passing about with lime-torches; and when one of these approached him at a rapid walk, Lepsius had to snatch himself into a kind of carrel, only to find a monk praying in it in the dark, who, at the sound of his entrance, looked round and addressed him: Lepsius droned some mutter in Amharic, and slipped out into an alcove opposite.

He knew very well that he had only to be noticed prowling about in this way to set the whole place in a hullabaloo, and no doubt bring on his instant death; but the floors, covered with cocoanut-fibre, facilitated his flights and escapes, and he contrived to run the blockade to the landing-place. There his ears were aware of a priest baling rain-water from the boat meant to bring over the body of the prior, but so deep was the darkness of the night, that nothing could be seen a yard beyond one’s eyes. With elaborate stealths Lepsius stepped down into a boat almost swamped with rain-water, put out the oar, and paddled off for the library-island.

His hope, derived from certain answers already given to his inquiries, was that the corpse might by this time be less closely guarded, that he might thus perchance be able to stretch a clandestine arm to the stele, and then, hastening back with it, steal into his chamber. But when with bare feet he had got down into the underground corridor of the stele and corpse, and had peeped into the prior’s room, there still lingered, brooding, the armed Galla. Lepsius was the last man alive to be baffled! He simply said to himself, “Well, the other way, then,” went up afresh, towed his boat away from the landing-stage, sat down on a rock, and waited, his ear cocked to hear a sound through the showering of the rain.

Presently over the surface of the lake appeared three throngs of lights approaching—torches made of lime-wood saturated in spirits, borne by the priests; and amid the splash of their oars there floated forth the burden of a Coptic dirge. One by one, however, these torches were seen to cower out, quenched by the shower, and by the time the boats had reached the library-island where Lepsius lurked, not one remained burning. Upon this Lepsius had counted.

The monks landed and entered the mosque.

After some twenty minutes they returned to the quay with rekindled torches, carrying the coffin: and though the largest of the boats was a craft as big as a Red Sea lugger, so overgrown was the size of the coffin, that they were obliged to lay it crosswise over the gunwales aft. Lepsius, himself unseen, could, by means of the flickering torch-lights, see all. He stole along the shore closer to the landing-stage. The placing of the coffin was a longish task; and out into darkness, one by one, cowered the lights, so that no more than two remained burning when the first of the boats pushed off, and the dirge was afresh lifted; and when at last all the boats were abroad on the water, the priests intoned in a complete darkness. Lepsius was then hanging to the transom of the boat which bore the coffin, she towing his length in her track.

He knew that in the monastery a rite had yet to be performed over the prior; he had been told that the corpse would then be exposed for the last time to the looks of the assembled fathers; he was certain, then, that the lid was not so far fastened to the coffin. All he had to do was to lift his weight up on the transom, raise the lid, whip the little stele from the dead bosom, where he had been told that it would be, and bolt with it into the building, to his bed. They couldn’t see him; the chaunting should drown any chance sound which he might make: and he felt secure, save for one vital fact—he could not swim; he would have to hang on to the boat till it came to the monastery landing-place before he could attempt to make his escape.

Midway across, judging the moment come, he raised himself cautiously up; one stiff arm held up his weight on the transom, while with the other hand he groped, grasped the lid, tried to lift it. Lid wouldn’t stir: it was fastened.

Another man might now, perhaps, have renounced the attempt, not knowing what string next to pull; it was in just such a plight that Lepsius was likely to show fight.

The man’s a born theorist: would never dream of abandoning a conclusion based upon reasoning, because, perhaps, appearances should happen to combat it; and he had already reasoned that the lid was unnailed. He raised himself still further, felt with his hand over the surface of the lid, and was soon reassured, seeing that the priests, in order to keep the two pieces together during the passage, had tied two cords of banyan-twine bodily about lid and coffin; finding which, Lepsius dived into his pocket, took out a penknife, and cut the cords, deeming that the monks, when they saw the cords cut, the stele gone, would set it all down to a miracle of God. By this time the boats had floated the funeral-hymn pretty close up to the monks’ home.

Lepsius could now easily insert his fingers between lid and coffin, and, on doing so, found what he had opined, that the stele had been slung round the dead neck by its string; so, manœuvring with the fingers of his left hand, he managed to urge and win this string upward from under the dead head: and he had begun to draw forth string and stele, his fingers being still within the coffin, when the poor man’s stiff right arm, weary of his weight, gave way under him with a shock, whereat he, in an involuntary movement to check his fall, caught the coffin-rim. It was a disastrous business: the blessed coffin tilted, and slid with a sideward dive into the water, while Lepsius, having clean lost his hold, found himself adrown in the deep, as an outcry arose among the crowd of monks.

Lepsius splashed about, catching at the vacant air; but even in the very plight and fix of his death his reasoning mind was not drowned. He judged that he must now be very near the monastery, so that if he could find even a minute’s support in the water, he might by such means manage some way to come at safety; but the boats had forged on well away beyond him, and there was no making out anything in that thickness of blackness. There was, however, one hope—the coffin: for, though he could not see, he knew perfectly the course of its sideward dive, and it was assuredly only the coffin, or the coffin-lid, which, if he was to find salvation, could save him. He quite well knew the science of swimming, though no master of the art: so, taking care to keep his lips closed, he made a few strokes, sinking and rising indeed, but moving, and his strokes proved in the duly right course, for very soon now he found himself on the coffin-lid, the little basalt stele hanging still to his forefinger by its string.

Still awash and struggling, he began to urge the board toward the shore. The hubbub of monkish tongues had now come to land, while a number of them had rushed out of the monastery, all carrying torches, with outcries, so that the landing-stage was now in a nice state of commotion. Lepsius, in the gloomy deep, steered his struggles in a changed direction, making for another spot of the shore, though he does not seem to have known what he was to do when he got there; but his feet touched bottom in a minute, and at the same time he entered the region of the off-shine of the lights, which showed up his white visage, whereat at once a perfect hullabaloo of howls broke out from the priests, and they all dashed forward to catch him, foremost among them being the fierce monk of the day-time, with his sword flashing, and the new prior, and the huge black fellow.

Lepsius scrambled up some rocks, and started slantways away from the throng of lights toward a wing of the building; and as the priests appear to have had no firearms, it became an affair of darting, Lepsius being a fairly nimble fellow, though, I fancy, without any wind to speak of, and already very weary. However, he reached the monastery-wall, and hastening along it, happened upon a small doorway, into which he darted, slammed the door, and was away anew through darkness; whereat the monks ran round to the front, and scattering there, rushed with rekindled torches in all directions through the monastery, scouring it for the fugitive.

Well, a scene of sufficient wildness seems to have ensued. Lepsius, divining that the monks would leave the door which he had slammed in their faces to fly to the front, ran back to the door; but his slam had locked, he could not open, it. So back afresh he turned, ran to the bottom of the corridor in which he found himself, and now heard the sound of the onrush of many runners. Happily, it was no longer a question of legs and lungs alone, but of eager, quick wit as well, and here Lepsius was in his element. He saw that he could only rescue himself by hiding, and that he could only hide by continual wise movement. On hieing thievishly up some steps he heard more pelting feet behind him, but he had the advantage of being in shadow, while his hunters were well lit up, and away he went again, choosing his way with good instinct; only, the priests had split up into such an intricacy of pickets, that he should have possessed six sets of wits to elude them. Still, he did for no little while elude them, guided not only by their lights, but by the sounds of the groups, their faint footsteps and outcries: till on a sudden one of those aids was cut off—that of sound—when out roared the abbey-bells, drowning everything else. Just afterwards, he was running down a corridor when behind him he saw coming a bunch of torches; there was no harking back this time; so, hoping to hit upon some door or side-passage somewhere ahead, forward he sped, his wind about done for now, and his wits all bewildered and badgered by the loud bedlam and brabblement of the bells throughout the building. At the corridor’s end his course was stopped by a wall with what he took to be a door in it, and a cocoanut tapestry hung before it; there was no side-passage anywhere; the door was fixed, and his hand, feeling behind the tapestry, could find no handle; the throng of torches, too, were now trooping down the corridor towards him, and he thought himself dished and taken. However, he found by touch that the door, too, as well as the tapestry, was of cocoanut-fibre, not a door at all, but a mass of matting fastened over an opening; and inasmuch as the corridor was long, he had time to snatch his shaving-razor and slash a rent in the tough stuff, so that when the monks arrived at the spot they must have been astonished (if they had spied him) to find their man vanished. Lepsius says that he next hastened over a species of bridge or hanging gallery, at the end of which he hacked a hole in another door, got himself through that as well, and was away ardently again, no more caring whither, through darkness, when all at once he was in the very midst of a lot of people, of a flood of light, for he had pitched through the doorway of a chamber before ever he could check his flight. This chamber was full of beds, for which the people in it must have been making ready when the pealing of the bells had flurried them; they were all women, as Lepsius saw at once, all half-undressed, with their hair floating loose; the two door-mattings through which he had slashed his way were manifestly the doors which separated the monastery from the nunnery; and at the apparition of this white man among them, that multitude of women whooped out one unanimous yowl, which Lepsius tells me he is not going to forget. Out they rushed pell-mell, clutching their garments about them, he after them—with the grave consciousness meantime in his eye-corner of a big floor-bed on fire, for one of the calabash-lamps had been dashed to the floor in the out-rush, and how the whole show, built mostly of touch-wood, was not burnt to the deuce was, he asserts, a wonder. After a little Lepsius pulled up and listened: all was still—for the simple reason that the priests would not at once enter upon the part of the place sacred to the nuns, and presently coming to a staircase, he sped down, and soon found himself out in the open, unpursued. Running now round the rim of the islet in search of a boat, he heard all round about the shores a buzzing sound on the lake, the cause of which he was unable to imagine, and when, having found a boat, he paddled away, this sound swelled upon him, until he was all in the thick of it—a host of tongues hubbubooing, not in Amharic, but in Ethiopic; not monks, then, but chiefs, or _dejamatshs_, with their troops, who, at the call of the bells, had come to beset the islet with a cordon of boats; and Lepsius declares that he passed through the thick of them, thanks to the darkness and the rain, by something of a miracle. After this the banks of the lake were not far off; and there, having made rapid paces for the deeps of a forest, and presently feeling himself safer, he dropped to the ground, giving out.

Toward morning, it being still pitch dark, the Englishmen at Gondar who composed the mission were startled by the bombardment of the place set apart for their abode: for the priests and natives, failing to find Lepsius, had posted northward to seek vengeance upon the mission; whereat the British, in danger of their lives, were obliged to barricade their doors and defend themselves; and before the intervention of the _ras_ was able to reach the residence, three Abyssinians were shot, so that this matter of the basalt stele had something of a grim beginning.

Not till six days later did Lepsius succeed in coming up secretly with his comrades, after seeing the lion and the hyrax, and a score of escapades; and on the sixteenth morning they all started eastward and coastward under an escort of the _ras_. The terror of the anger of England was, of course, extreme at the moment in the mind of the Negus and his Court, or it might have gone ill with Lepsius and his companions. However, all’s well that ends well; nothing graver than threats came about, and Lepsius, having his basalt stele, could afford, I suppose, to grin his grin.