CHAPTER I

       Which is a kind of preface

       Table of Contents

      We Americans are ostriches. We stick well meaning heads into the political sands of these United States, swear—probably correctly—they are better than all other sands, and accordingly declare ourselves free for ever from entangling alliances. “Struthio camelus,” whose plumes are plucked for market while his head, stowed snugly in a stocking, “sees no evil, hears no evil, speaks no evil,” and who then struts about asserting that a plucked and smarting rump is fashionable, ought to be our national bird, not the all-seeing eagle.

      But this isn’t an effort to reform the United States. We’re the finest there is or ever was, only rather more entangled with the old world than we think.

      The Great Pyramid of Gizeh is older than the Declaration of Independence, and its claims continue to have precedence, our elected statesmen notwithstanding. Statesmen understand not much beyond the drift of popular opinion; but conspirators have always understood that the safest place to conspire in is the centre of the establishment they aim at.

      The men whose lives are spent mainly in the open are the widest awake. To assert the contrary is only another phase of the ostrich habit. If a man wipes his knife on the seat of his trousers and knows where the cinnamon bear will be rooting at six a.m., he’s not necessarily less enlightened than the fellow who thinks he knows what the editorials in the morning paper really mean. That partly explains why the best policemen come from the plough-tail and the woods, and cities don’t often produce Abe Lincolns.

      All this sounds rather far from Egypt and the Pyramid of Gizeh, but is not. Few people know or knew why the Great Pyramid was built. Hundreds of thousands toiled at the making of it, most of whom thought they knew, just as most of the people who take the subway in the morning think they know why, and are deluded. They believed what they were told. They were told what was considered good for them to think. The men who told them knew hardly any more but were getting a profit, and hard cash always did look like Euclid’s Q.E.D. But the men who really did know why the Pyramid was building held their tongues and toiled elsewhere, also for cash, except Khufu himself, who was the arch-type of perfect profiteers.

      Khufu was king of Upper and Lower Egypt in those days. Cash dividends did not trouble him much, for he had the taxes to draw on and auditors passed his vouchers without comment. Consequently the man in the street of to-day might be paying higher taxes on account of old Khufu, if Joan Angela Leich hadn’t just contrived to miss me with her Ford one dark night on the Geiger Trail; which sounds incredible.

      But so is Joan Angela incredible; I’m coming to her presently. Everybody knows her who isn’t fenced in by apartment-house blocks. If she had pushed me over the edge of the Geiger that night, you, who read this, would be paying for more armaments.

      But it was Khufu who started the trouble. He is better known to fame as Cheops, and we know pretty well what he looked like.

      He was a calm, proud, confident-appearing man, with an obvious sense of his own importance and a smile that seemed to say: “Carry on, boys. What’s good for me is good for you,” Being city folk, he had them all in one place where they had got to listen. Spell-binders laid the argument on thick in one direction; in the other the overseers laid on the lash; and the minstrels, who were the equivalent of the daily Press in those days, praised all concerned.

      But right here I’m going to be called in question by the Egyptologists unless I hasten to explain. It will be said with a certain amount of surface truth that the Egyptians who laboured at building the Pyramid were peasants on vacation. Work ceased in the fields when the Nile had overflowed, and they were kept out of mischief by thoughtful superiors, who provided wholesome amusement with educational value that incidentally promoted trade. When the Nile receded at the end of three months, those who had survived the education were permitted to return home and go to work in the fields again, in order to raise crops, with which to pay the taxes, that should keep the ball a-rolling and Jack Pharaoh’s pyramid a-building again next season. That is what the text-book writers will assert.

      But those peasants were city folk. Egypt was always one great straggling city, with one wide avenue—the Nile—running straight down the middle of it. Everybody lived on Main Street, and they all do still; there was, and is, nowhere else to live, and if the Nile were to dry up Egypt would disappear.

      Living