THE PYRAMID PLAYGROUND
Ancient Egypt Speaks. By A. J. Howard Hulme and Frederick H. Wood (Mus. Doc.). (Rider. sos. 6d.) OirrHonox theology is quite definite on the subject of rappings and trances : you may be hoaxing yourselves, but in so far as you arc playing games with anyone else you are playing with the Devil. In the case recorded in this book Lady Nona, a wife of Akhnaton, as far as I could gather, though I had always understood that he was married to someone else, has made contact with a certain medium, Rosemary, through whom she speaks in ancient Egyptian. Rosemary is qualified for the job as this is not her first spell on the earth ; she was formerly a dancer in Thebes, a great pal of Nona, as is proved by the fact that they were both drowned together in the Nile. This disaster, I have the impression, owed quite a lot to the pushful priests of the older school who, of course, objected to Akhnaton's innovations of which Lady Nona was an immense supporter.
Well, Lady Nona's getting even now. She has renewed her friendship with Rosemary who in consequence is visited by strange fits of talking gibberish—gibberish that is to say to her and me and you, but not to Mr. Hulme who has identified the spate with the spoken word of ancient Egypt— and as the messages from Lady Nona are handed over by Rosemary they are reverently fondled and clarified by the authors of this work. There is a photograph of both of them and of Rosemary. None of them looks like a crook and, as I hope to make clear, their work bears the hallmark of sincerity. Never mind the sincerity, warn the Bishops, you are being led up some hellish garden path. But when the Devil dresses up as a lady, I heretically object, I expect a temptation, and the sincerity and harmlessness of this experiment seems to me to be evident from the extraordinary fatuousness of the results : no Cagliostro would be such a fool as to pretend that the dead spoke to him only in the dullest platitudes : no Lucifer so shortsighted as to permit a suggestion that Hell is dull.
Tell us of these revelations, prompt the Bishops.
The book has the grave fault which mars most ghost stories. All the energy of the experimenters goes in proving that their conjuration is indeed from the other world. If I were to pretend that I had had an interview with the German Ambassador I would not represent him as perpetually demon- strating to me that his passport was in order, our supposed conversation would be on mightier themes. But for the most part Lady Nona has- no other object in her talks than to assure us that she is indeed a genuine ghost from the ghostliest and most conjectured part of the world's history. Not till the last chapter does she give us a message, and it is just the kind of rubbish I have sometimes forced out of tables myself. But observe, again, the hallmark : I did not publish the results of my rappings—and this, in a volume too boring to sell very well, Messrs. Wood and Hulme and poor Rosemary have. A new glorious hypothesis arises, and I hurl it at the Bishops in a frenzy of optimism—what if the Devil is a fool ? His magic is as harmless as a Teddy Bear and (potentially) more exciting. I am off to play planchette in the pyramids.
And it is only now, as I sit exchanging squeaks with the dead, that I see the perilous success of this prank of the Prince of Darkness. For, after all, if this is the standard of mental activity I have to look forward to beyond the grave—away with prayer books and the moral life and the virtues—let me drink and be merry before I pass over into eternal dotage.
CHRISTOPHER SYKES.
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