Sir H Rider Haggard

The Way of the Spirit Sir H Rider Haggard

More than eleven years have gone by, and the scene upon which our curtain rises again is different indeed to that upon which it fell. In place of that little London house where Rupert had lain sick, behold the mouth of a cliff-hewn temple, and on the face of it, cut from the solid rock, four colossal statues of an Egyptian king, nearly seventeen feet high each of them, that gaze for ever across the waters of the Nile and the desert beyond-that unchanging desert whence for three thousand five hundred years, dawn by dawn, they have greeted the newly-risen sun. For this place is the temple of Abu-Simbel below the Second Cataract of the Nile in the Soudan. It is afternoon in the month of September, of the year 1889, and beneath one of the colossi near to the entrance of the temple is seated a British officer in uniform-a big, bearded observer as remarkable for intensity and power. Indeed, in this respect it was not unlike that stamped upon the stone countenances of the mighty statues above him. There was in it something of the same calm, patient strength-something of that air of contemptuous expectancy with which the old Egyptian sculptors had the art of clothing those effigies of their gods and kings. It would have been hard to recognise in this man the lad whom we left recovering from a sore sickness, for some twelve years of work, thought, struggle, and self-control-chisels, all of them, that cut deeply-had made their marks upon him. Yet it was Rupert Ullershaw and no other.