“LAND OF EGYPT”

Wairarapa Times-Age, 1 August 1939, Page 4

“LAND OF EGYPT”

IDEA BEHIND THE PYRAMIDS. In Egypt there has always been so slight a chance for a man to pull out of the ruck, to differentiate himself from his fellows, to add that decoration to his life, those windings and deviations, which can lor a time obscure its real direction; and the goal of his activity. He lived on the soil and from the soil, and into the soil he would go. The facts were inescapable, writes Mr Robbin Fedden in his book, “The Land of Egypt.” That is why the Egyptians, perhaps more than any other people, found it necessary to gild the bitter pill and turned to the palliative of resurrection with an unparalleled thoroughness and application. Their avid insistence on life after death was the result of their familiarity with death in life, and of the undifferentiated nonetity in which so many of them (one might recall the nameless multitudes who built the pyramids) passed their earthly existence. Having been nonetities in this world, they did not intend to become obliterated in the next. Thus arose the whole process of mummification and the cult of the resurrection. In their death they fled from the all-absorbent soil of the Delta to preserve ves in the dry deserts. It is the endless rock tombs and pyramids, those showcases for bones from which the traveller emerges blinking into a steady sun, that are inevitably the most impressive instances of Egyptian consciousness of death. Bat hunted, impervious to time, growing neither cooler in winter nor hotter in summer, they affirm and reaffirm, not that resurrection which their builders meant they should ensure, but the domination of death.