“I beg your pardon,” said Doctor Ponnonner at this point, laying his hand gently upon the arm of the Egyptian—“I beg your pardon, sir, but may I presume to interrupt you for one moment?”
“By all means,
sir
,” replied the Count, drawing up.
“I merely wished to ask you a question,” said the Doctor. “You mentioned the historian’s personal correction of
traditions
respecting his own epoch. Pray, sir, upon an average, what proportion of these Kabbala were usually found to be right?”
“The Kabbala, as you properly term them, sir, were generally discovered to be precisely on a par with the facts recorded in the un-re-written histories themselves;—that is to say, not one individual iota of either, was ever known, under any circumstances, to be not totally and radically wrong.”
“But since it is quite clear,” resumed the Doctor, “that at least five thousand years have elapsed since your entombment, I take it for granted that your histories at that period, if not your traditions, were sufficiently explicit on that one topic of universal interest, the Creation, which took place, as I presume you are aware, only about ten centuries before.”
“Sir!” said the Count Allamistakeo.
The Doctor repeated his remarks, but it was only after much additional explanation, that the foreigner could be made to comprehend them. The latter at length said, hesitatingly:
“The ideas you have suggested are to me, I confess, utterly novel. During my time I never knew any one to entertain so singular a fancy as that the universe (or this world if you will have it so) ever had a beginning at all. I remember, once, and once only, hearing something remotely hinted, by a man of many speculations, concerning the origin
of the human race
; and by this individual the very word
Adam
, (or Red Earth) which you make use of, was employed. He employed it, however, in a generical sense, with reference to the spontaneous germination from rank soil ( just as a thousand of the lower
genera
of creatures are germinated)—the spontaneous germination, I say, of five vast hordes of men, simultaneously upspringing in five distinct and nearly equal divisions of the globe.”
4
Here, in general, the company shrugged their shoulders, and one or two of us touched our foreheads with a very significant air. Mr. Silk Buckingham, first glancing slightly at the occiput and then at the sinciput of Allamistakeo, spoke as follows:—
“The long duration of human life in your time, together with the occasional practice of passing it, as you have explained, in instalments, must have had, indeed, a strong tendency to the general development and conglomeration of knowledge. I presume, therefore, that we are to attribute the marked inferiority of the old Egyptians in all particulars of science, when compared with the moderns, and more especially with the Yankees, altogether to the superior solidity of the Egyptian skull.”
5
“I confess again,” replied the Count with much suavity, “that I am somewhat at a loss to comprehend you; pray, to what particulars of science do you allude?”
Here our whole party, joining voices, detailed, at great length, the assumptions of phrenology and the marvels of animal magnetism.
Having heard us to an end, the Count proceeded to relate a few anecdotes, which rendered it evident that prototypes of Gall and Spurzheim
6
had flourished and faded in Egypt so long ago as to have been nearly forgotten, and that the manœuvres of Mesmer were really very contemptible tricks when put in collation with the positive miracles of the Theban
savans
, who created lice and a great many other similar things.
I here asked the Count if his people were able to calculate eclipses. He smiled rather contemptuously, and said they were.
This put me a little out, but I began to make other inquiries in regard to his astronomical knowledge, when a member of the company, who had never as yet opened his mouth, whispered in my ear, that for information on this head, I had better consult Ptolemy, (whoever Ptolemy is), as well as one Plutarch
de facie lunae
.
I then questioned the Mummy about burning-glasses and lenses, and, in general, about the manufacture of glass; but I had not made an end of my queries before the silent member again touched me quietly on the elbow, and begged me for God’s sake to take a peep at Diodorus Siculus. As for the Count, he merely asked me, in the way of reply, if we moderns possessed any such microscopes as would enable us to cut cameos in the style of the Egyptians. While I was thinking how I should answer this question, little Doctor Ponnonner committed himself in a very extraordinary way.
“Look at our architecture!” he exclaimed, greatly to the indignation of both the travellers, who pinched him black and blue to no purpose.
“Look,” he cried with enthusiasm, “at the Bowling-Green Fountain in New York!
7
or if this be too vast a contemplation, regard for a moment the Capitol at Washington, D.C.!”—and the good little medical man went on to detail very minutely, the proportions of the fabric to which he referred. He explained that the portico alone was adorned with no less than four and twenty columns, five feet in diameter, and ten feet apart.
The Count said that he regretted not being able to remember, just at that moment, the precise dimensions of any one of the principal buildings of the city of Aznac, whose foundations were laid in the night of Time, but the ruins of which were still standing, at the epoch of his entombment, in a vast plain of sand to the westward of Thebes. He recollected, however, (talking of the porticoes) that one affixed to an inferior palace in a kind of suburb called Carnac, consisted of a hundred and forty-four columns, thirty-seven feet in circumference, and twenty-five feet apart. The approach to this portico, from the Nile, was through an avenue two miles long, composed of sphynxes, statues and obelisks, twenty, sixty, and a hundred feet in height. The palace itself (as well as he could remember) was, in one direction, two miles long, and might have been altogether, about seven in circuit. Its walls were richly painted all over, within and without, with hieroglyphics. He would not pretend to
assert
that even fifty or sixty of the Doctor’s Capitols might have been built within these walls, but he was by no means sure that two or three hundred of them might not have been squeezed in with some trouble. That palace at Carnac was an insignificant little building after all. He, (the Count) however, could not conscientiously refuse to admit the ingenuity, magnificence, and superiority of the Fountain at the Bowling-Green, as described by the Doctor. Nothing like it, he was forced to allow, had ever been seen in Egypt or elsewhere.
I here asked the Count what he had to say to our railroads.
“Nothing,” he replied, “in particular.” They were rather slight, rather ill-conceived, and clumsily put together. They could not be compared, of course, with the vast, level, direct, iron-grooved causeways, upon which the Egyptians conveyed entire temples and solid obelisks of a hundred and fifty feet in altitude.
I spoke of our gigantic mechanical forces.
He agreed that we knew something in that way, but inquired how I should have gone to work in getting up the imposts on the lintels of even the little palace at Carnac.
This question I concluded not to hear, and demanded if he had any idea of Artesian wells; but he simply raised his eye-brows; while Mr. Gliddon winked at me very hard, and said, in a low tone, that one had been recently discovered by the engineers employed to bore for water in the Great Oasis.
I then mentioned our steel; but the foreigner elevated his nose, and asked me if our steel could have executed the sharp carved work seen on the obelisks, and which was wrought altogether by edge-tools of copper.
This disconcerted us so greatly that we thought it advisable to vary the attack to Metaphysics. We sent for a copy of a book called the “Dial,” and read out of it a chapter or two about something that is not very clear, but which the Bostonians call the Great Movement or Progress.
8
The Count merely said that Great Movements were awfully common things in his day, and as for Progress, it was at one time quite a nuisance, but it never progressed.
We then spoke of the great beauty and importance of Democracy, and were at much trouble in impressing the Count with a due sense of the advantages we enjoyed in living where there was suffrage
ad libitum
, and no king.
He listened with marked interest, and in fact seemed not a little amused. When we had done, he said that, a great while ago, there had occurred something of a very similar sort. Thirteen Egyptian provinces determined all at once to be free, and so set a magnificent example to the rest of mankind.
9
They assembled their wise men, and concocted the most ingenious constitution it is possible to conceive. For a while they managed remarkably well; only their habit of bragging was prodigious. The thing ended, however, in the consolidation of the thirteen states, with some fifteen or twenty others, into the most odious and insupportable despotism that was ever heard of upon the face of the Earth.
I asked what was the name of the usurping tyrant.
As well as the Count could recollect, it was
Mob
.
Not knowing what to say to this, I raised my voice, and deplored the Egyptian ignorance of steam.
The Count looked at me with much astonishment, but made no answer. The silent gentleman, however, gave me a violent nudge in the ribs with his elbows—told me I had sufficiently exposed myself for once—and demanded if I was really such a fool as not to know that the modern steam-engine is derived from the invention of Hero, through Solomon de Caus.
We were now in imminent danger of being discomfited; but, as good luck would have it, Doctor Ponnonner, having rallied, returned to our rescue, and inquired if the people of Egypt would seriously pretend to rival the moderns in the all-important particular of dress.
The Count, at this, glanced downward to the straps of his pantaloons, and then taking hold of the end of one of his coat-tails, held it up close to his eyes for some minutes. Letting it fall, at last, his mouth extended itself very gradually from ear to ear; but I do not remember that he said any thing in the way of reply.
Hereupon we recovered our spirits, and the Doctor, approaching the Mummy with great dignity, desired it to say candidly, upon its honor as a gentleman, if the Egyptians had comprehended, at
any
period, the manufacture of either Ponnonner’s lozenges, or Brandreth’s pills.
We looked, with profound anxiety, for an answer;—but in vain. It was not forthcoming. The Egyptian blushed and hung down his head. Never was triumph more consummate; never was defeat borne with so ill a grace. Indeed, I could not endure the spectacle of the poor Mummy’s mortification. I reached my hat, bowed to him stiffly, and took leave.
Upon getting home I found it past four o’clock, and went immediately to bed. It is now ten, A.M. I have been up since seven, penning these memoranda for the benefit of my family and of mankind. The former I shall behold no more. My wife is a shrew. The truth is, I am heartily sick of this life and of the nineteenth century in general. I am convinced that every thing is going wrong. Besides, I am anxious to know who will be President in 2045.
10
As soon, therefore, as I shave and swallow a cup of coffee, I shall just step over to Ponnonner’s and get embalmed for a couple of hundred years.
POEMS
Poe conjured strange scenes and haunting images in a dozen truly memorable poems that established his reputation in verse. Yet he achieved originality through a study of the poetic tradition; his juvenilia included imitations of the classical satirists. As a schoolboy he read Shakespeare and Milton with appreciation and studied Alexander Pope with delight. He left home at eighteen with a sheaf of verses, desperate to become a famous poet and identifying closely with the exiled Byron. In “Tamerlane,” the title poem of his first volume, he envisioned a scorned Byronic hero, and in the longer “Al Aaraaf,” which occasioned his second book, he emulated the orientalism of Thomas Moore’s
Lalla Rookh
. His fondness for dream imagery also derived from his reading of Coleridge. Savoring of derision and self-pity, the early poems recur to themes of loneliness, rejection, and loss, and “The Lake” offers a suggestive hint of the delight in terror symptomatic of his curious fascination with death.
Although Poe published three volumes of poetry by the age of twenty-two, none met with commercial success. In his “Letter to Mr.————,” which introduced the
Poems
of 1831, he acknowledged “the great barrier in the path of an American writer”: the popularity of established European writers, whose works sold cheaply in the absence of an international copyright law. Abandoning the idea of a career as a poet, he turned to periodical fiction and became “essentially a magazinist” but continued to write occasional poems, incorporating a few in tales such as “The Fall of the House of Usher.” He returned to poetry more concertedly when “The Raven” brought literary celebrity in 1845; his last four years produced several poems that rank among his best.
Poe regarded beauty as the sole province of the poem and valued indefinite sensation. Through meter, rhyme, and sonority he created musical effects and believed the beauty of woman inspired the “elevating excitement of the soul” essential to poetry. By a logical extension, “the death of a beautiful woman” represented “the most poetical topic in the world” and many of his most memorable poems grapple with the loss of an idealized female presence. Poems about dying women abounded in the sentimental literature of the day; what sets Poe’s work apart (beyond verbal brilliance) is the obsessive intensity and occult strangeness of the poet’s attachment to the dead beloved.
Among the early poems included here, “Fairy-Land” epitomizes indefiniteness in its evocation of a nocturnal landscape where “huge moons wax and wane,” burying the “strange woods” in “a labyrinth of light.” “Alone” offers revealing self-reflection: the speaker acknowledges a strangeness or difference that from childhood has alienated him from the rest of humanity. “Introduction” extends this confessional mode, tracing the beginnings of the “dreaming-book” his poems comprise. Poe tellingly admits that he “fell in love with melancholy” and “could not love except where Death / Was mingling his with Beauty’s breath”—that he felt doomed to love only dying women. A similar note of fatality informs “The Sleeper,” where the poet broods on the strange “pallor” and “silentness” of his “sleeping” love. It suffuses “To Helen,” where his homage to Helen of Troy privately eulogizes the late Mrs. Stanard, the nurturing, cherished confidant of Poe’s early adolescence.