Idylls and Lyrics of The Nile :: :: University of Virginia Library

There is no need, great Hormachu, for thee
To open lips and speak to kings in dream,
For now thy limbs from desert-sand are free,
And to thy temple, down the steps can stream
The men who come to wonder or to pray.

But here in ‘Roset,’ at the ancient gate
Of the dim under-world, where dead men are,
I, lying at the noon, was dreaming late
Of those past days when Thothmes drove his car
Keen in his lion-quest on hunting-day.

And since upon his tablet plain is graved
The old-world tale of how the hunter-king
Heard the Sphinx speak, when of his hand it craved
Deliverance from the sand's long covering,
To tell it to the new world I essay.

Hormachu—the Harmachis of the Greeks—was one of the names of the Sphinx, = ‘Horus in the Horizon,’ probably the Sun at Midday.

In Thothmes' time the burial-ground round the Pyramids, already abandoned, was spoken of as Roset = ‘Door to the under-world.’

Here of old Prince Thothmes came, so the granite tablet tells,
The Prince whom the Sphinx made a king,
On his lordly pastime bent,
Cast the spear at the ring,
Bolts at brazen target sent,
And to hunt the lion went
With his chariot and two horses in the ‘valley of gazelles.’

At the hour of high noon, when he gave his servants rest,
Unto Hormachu he brought,
In the city of the dead,
Offering fair of mountain flowers,
And with prayer the goddess sought
Who of Memphis-town is head,
She whose bosom Horus fed,
And with vows he came to call
On Her who guards the towers
Of the north and southern wall,
And on Sekhet feared at Zois,
And on Set and Rannu blest.

Now of all the places none is so weird as the abode
Of great Khepra, where the road

Of the gods, so full of fear,
From of old doth eastward run,
From the setting of the sun
O'er the plain, and goeth straight
Unto On, from very near
The Sphinx, whose monument
Doth Khepra represent—
Of spirits the most great:—
The Sphinx, whose ruddy face
Shines forth with Khepra's grace,
Khepra, he who in this place
Doth remain a mighty god.

Thothmes came unto the place, left his car, and wandered on.
He was weary, wanted rest,
And himself adown he laid
In the great god's mighty shade,
And sleep sank into his breast,
And a wondrous dream he dreamed.
It was noontide, and it seemed
That the god's own mouth spake words as a father to a son.

‘Behold me, my son Thothmes, I am Hormachu thy sire,
I am Khepra, Ra, and Tum,

Unto thee this land shall come
And the kingship; thou shalt wear
The white crown, and the red
Shall be placed upon thy head,
Thou, young Seb, the earth-god's heir;
And the earth it shall be thine
Far as his great eyes do shine
Who is lord of all the lands.
Plenty, riches thine shall be,
Borne by furthest people's hands,
From the north and southern nation
Shall full tribute come to thee,
And of years a long duration
Shall be granted, for my face
Smiles upon thee with its grace,
And my heart to thee it clings.
With the best of all earth's things,
Thothmes' son, on one condition, to enrich thee I desire.

Think of me as thy peculiar flesh, of bone thy very bone.
Lo, the sand how it doth cover,
Blown by centuries of storm,
How encroaching it wraps over
All my moveless, godlike form!
Do the wish within my heart,

Yea, unwrap these wreaths of sand,
So shall all men understand
That to me a son thou art;
Come thou near me, let me be
As a Father unto thee,
Lo! I take thee by the hand, Thothmes, thou and I are one.'

Then Thothmes he awoke at the ending of these words,
And he recognised the sign,
Felt the message was divine,
And made silence very deep
In his heart these words to keep.
‘Let us go,’ said he, ‘and bring
To the Sphinx uncovering,
For the honour of the king
Khafra good, and for the sake
Of the image he dared make
Unto Harmachis and Tum,
That again the folk may come
Here with prayer and offering.'

So they dug away the sands,
Bared the Temple where it stands
In the Sphinx's mighty hands;
Egypt's priests and people all,

When young Thothmes wore the red
And white crown upon his head,
Came again to festival;
Geese in thousands, beer and bread,
Wine and oil and incense brought
To the God whom Khafra wrought,
Great guardian, Lord of Lords,
Where to-day a granite tablet the royal dream records.

Isis.

See note, p. 25.

The Sun of the Midnight, the Sun in the East, the Sun in the West, under which forms Hormachu the Sphinx was worshipped.

Note.—The translation of the dream of Thothmes IV., upon which this poem is based, was made by S. Birch—Records of the Past, vol. xii. p. 143. But I have availed myself also of the fuller translation given by M. Brugsch, in his Egypt under the Pharaohs, vol. i. p. 415. The inscription from which these translations are made is found upon a granite tablet, about 14 feet high, placed before the breast of the great Sphinx at Gîzeh. Travellers to Egypt should not leave the Pyramids without a careful examination of this remarkable dream-tablet, set up in the month Athyr, and on the nineteenth day, in the year I of Thothmes IV., B.C. 1533.