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Page 87
Inside it was lined with a copy of the queen's funeral canopy of
softest leather; stretched square; to the touch as soft, supple and
fine as velvet.[1]
True, this copy had not taken year upon year to make, nor had scores
and scores of nimble fingers stitched and stitched for days and months
to finish it, as in the days of the XIXth dynasty. The panels in the
copy were of one piece of hide stitched finely by machinery, with the
emblems painted upon them after the stitching; in the original they are
made by the stitching together by hand of thousands and thousands of
pieces of gazelle-hide, each of which had been painted either pink or
blue or green or in various shades of yellow before the stitching.
Look up with Hugh Carden Ali as he lifts his head to gaze at something
far beyond the tent-roof.
You will see a copy of the central square which, divided into two,
rested upon the top of the shrine which covered the dead queen who died
about one hundred years after the siege of Troy. One side of the panel
is sprinkled with yellow and pink rosettes on a pale-blue ground; the
other side shows the vulture, the emblem of maternity, holding in its
claws the feather of justice; six there are in all.
That is the ceiling.
The tent walls are lined with a copy of the flaps which hung down on
each side of the shrine of the funeral-boat of the Egyptian queen who,
some thousand years before Christ, crossed the blue-green Nile,
followed by other boats filled with her priests and princes, her
officers, her mourning women. North and south, the flaps are of
chess-board pattern in squares of pink and green; behind one of which
was hidden the small room which held naught but a crystal pitcher and
crystal basin, filled to the brim with water for the ablutions at the
Hour of Nazam, which is the Hour of Prayer.
Near the top the sides show bands of colour, red, yellow, green and
blue, almost as bright in the original as on the day the paints were
mixed, one thousand years ago. Beneath the bands upon one side you
will see the signet-ring of the priest-King Pinotem--whose son Queen
Isi em Kheb espoused--; also the royal asps and the scarab, the emblem
of life out of death.
Upon the other wall you will see the lotus-flower, which opens at the
rising of the sun and closes at its setting; the enigmatic
double-headed ducklings and the picture of a gazelle, which is
doubtless the representation of the pet which, bound in mummy
trappings, was found beside its royal mistress in the tomb. Across the
lotus-flowers, like a silver shaft, there hung a light throwing-spear.
A very technical description, taken down in rough notes at the museum,
of a specimen of patchwork--even like the patchwork counterpanes of our
great-grandmothers--stitched together by dusky slender fingers in the
days of the great King Solomon.
And to Hugh Carden Ali as he lay in this tent, looking towards Mecca,
there came the sound, from a great distance, as of a horse running at
full speed.
[1]This is a description of the funeral-tent of Queen Isi em Kheb,
contemporary of the wise Solomon, mother-in-law of the Shishak who
besieged Jerusalem and "carried away also the shields of gold which
Solomon had made." (II Chron. 12.)
It served as a pall to cover the royal lady upon her last terrestrial
journey, when she crossed the Nile in the funeral boat from her palace
in Karnak (?) to her burial-chamber in Deir el-Bahari.
CHAPTER XXIX
"_La vie est br�ve:
Un peu d'espoir,
Un peu de r�ve
Et puis--Bon soir_!"
MONTENAEKEN.
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