THE TREASURY OF TIME

Hokitika Guardian, 17 May 1924, Page 4

THE TREASURY OF TIME

ROMANCE OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM. (By F. S. Burnell). On the banks of the Nile, in a tiny hut of reeds and Mastered mud, a man lay dying. A youth with curly black hair and reddish-yellow complexion squatted silently at his father’s feet, and a woman, wailing shrilly, crouched tit his head. When the end came, the young man scooped out a grave in the sand at the edge of the desert, and there laid the body together with the dead man’s Hint weapons and some coarse clay pots containing food. Before the building of the first pyramid nearly ffOOO years were yet to pass: not for over 2000 more would the first Hebrew unmads ride out of the desert darkness into history, or the Pharaoh, Tutankhamen be borne to his gorgeous tomb. The Egyptian Empire went the way of Babylonia. Assyria, Chaldea; Rome rose and ruled the world and fell ; the Papacy was born ; Constantinople was sacked—for the last time —a new world grew to maturity. And then at last, when seventy centuries had gone by unheeded, strangers from a distant land scraped away the soil and the light of the suit shone once again upon the dead man’s lace, today, shrunken and vitrified by the hot desert sand, but perfectly preserved even to bis eyelashes and hair, ho lies in a glass ease in the British .Muse-

in a small tipper room in a shabby street of Ephesus it little group of Christians clustered, heads together, about a table on which stood a smoky oil lamp of baked clay. Ihe great Pan-lonic festival was in full progress, and tho rich and splendid city was crowded with the devotees ot the goddess Diana, as well as with thousands of other visitors attracted less by picti.stic motives than by tlit' desire ol beholding The famous temple. whose wealth and beauty were renowned ihroug.ut the ancient world. Through the narrow windows there Honied on t!ie warm night air rounds of women’s laughter, the music of flutes and castanets, and occasionally of a popular liallatl t rolled in a voice somewhat impaired, apparently, by nine. The oceanauts ol the rot A, however, laid little disposition to share in the prevailing joyotisness. I lie animosity of a powerful long-vested interest had been aroused : the Guild ol Silversmiths. a large pint ol whose revenues was derived from the making ol silver shrines for the endless throngs ol Dia-nu-worshippers, had discerned a budding menace ill tln* new faith; and within the past, few days two at least til the little hand of missionaries had ruin.' near to losing their lives at the luimis of an enraged mob. instigated equally by greed and I’auaiicisin. it, was sorrowfully recognisable tlial, for the present, further missionary effort in Ephesus was impracticable. ():i the following day the leader himself was to take shin for Tinas; and now, wearied with the di-enssion, no leit the room, and ascended the stairs to the open nail. lie was a short man, prematurely hald", whose somou hat fierce expression, due to his prominent nose and eye-brows that met almost in a straight line, was tempered bv tiie wonder. u!L- gracious lines ol the mi in t !i. Leaning with folded arms i a tbe low parapet, lie giv.ed out across tlie expanse of roofs to where toweled up I lie great Temple, gleaming mlikily in the dear .Mediterranean moonlight. Of wlr.il was lie thinking? Did lie, Christian though lie was. yet fed the wonder of its pagan beauty? Did he ponder upon the danger., and hardships which the future had in store for him? Did his memory linger round the figure of her. .Mary ol Nazareth, who not long leioro had also dwelt in Epliesit', and who, though lie ho did mu know it was destined to .lie i here? One thought at least, one mat sure tu v< r i ios-- 'I hi- mindthat before two centuries bad passed llio splendid shrine would be reduced to a black .mod ruin : that for IS*)0 vear- i; s very site would b'P lorgoilen beneath a grassy mound ; and tlml its fragments, mutilated but still beautiful, would to-day thrill the imagination fl men. whose very races were 1 hei: unknown, in one ol the rooms n! Ihe British .Museum. . . . About the year Still A.D., l.othairlT King of the Franks, and one of the immediate siiir.—'its of the Emperor ( harlemague, ordered a lapidary to eiigrave lor him a certain large crystal, of lout ieiilar form, with a series’of scones Irom tin Bible-aI siory of Susaiina. For a hundred years afterwards the fate of the Crystal of l.nthair is unknown, lml b.v the first half of the pith century it had become the property of the wile of a certain Conor Filbert of I'Toren'tes, in the present province of Namur: and lieneefnrward' its adventures are of the most mutantie deseiiplio.il.

Visiiing a fair one day, the Count sol'* there a horse which be decided to buy. but not having the neces-ary money with him, 110 pledged the crystal frr the amonul with a ration of Rheims whose probity should, one would have thought, have been above suspicion. Unhappily, bis faith in human—and especially occh-iastieal —nature was destined to lie severely shaken, for on bis p'eseiitiug himself to reclaim the crystal, the canon blandly denied ever having seen or even heard of such an object. I'Ttll of strange oaths, the enraged Count collected a large body of hi- retainers and returned to Rheims without delay, to resume the argument mi more advantageous terms. The wily cleric, however, wa- not to he found ; he had hidden himself in some secret crainy of the cathedral. Without hesitation the Count gave orders to ;,"t the church on lire and smoke the rascal out. This was done; the canon, half suffocated and with streaming eyes, hurst out into the very arms

of the Count’s men; and the crystal was 01 cour-e found hidden under his his gown. One may well imagine the story lost nothing in the Count’s telling for many a long year to come. But in spite ol

his exultation the daring sacrilege ivliich he had committed in burning achurch gave his conscience a sore twinge from time, to time, with the re-, suit that before he died he presentedthe precious crystal to the Abbey of Wanlsort, near Dinaut, on the Meuse, which he had recently founded close to his castle of I'lorrennes. There it lay undisturbed for SOO years among the treasures of the monastery, till the advent of the French Revolution. As a proof of the newlv-won liberties of mankind, the monks were forthwith expelled from their ancient homes, and one of them, reluctant to let the Crystal of Lothnir fall into the hands of the despoilers, surreptitiously dropped the jewel into the Mouse. He hoped no doubt to recover it on some more /Auspicious occasion, which, however, never came; and it was not till nearly a generation later that it was accidentally fished up, and sold by a Relgian dealer in antiquities to a French collector—for the stupendous sum of 12 francs! *ln 1 SOo it was finally acquired hy the Eritish Museum. Quo, Musa, tendis? Whither, Memory, are you dragging 1110? -Such are but a few of the innumerable stories which, for me at least, render the Rrltisli .Museum one of the most romantic buildings in the world. It is not for nothing that its soaring pediment and huge lonic colonnade give it the appearance (if some vast grey temple. For a tempi? it surely is—a temple of Time, in which have been deposited, for safe keeping the greatest treasures of every age. It is a pantheon too; and one cannot, without a smile, think of how motley a company of banished deities have 'found asylum beneath its roof—hawk-headed gods from Egypt, monstrous man-bulls from the hands of the Two Rivers, squat pot-bellied i mailings from the dark forests of the • Congo, bland impassive gods of China - and .lapan, plumed and bloodthirsty ■ gods of Yucatan or Polynesia, even the ■ Olympians themselves, remote and Tii- ‘ eliable, telling of that vision of su- ■ premest beauty to which the world has | never since attained. Retween the 1 great columns if the facade a grim, colossal figure from Faster Island, I ‘‘rough-hewn, grey, rain-bleared,” gazes out immovably at the heedless stream of eplTomei'ida that drift, daylong and every day, in and out of the .Museum doors. 01 what is he thiiik- ' ing, one wonders? On strange memories yet creep sluggishly within his 1 stonv brain, of midnight hymns and ■ savage sacrifices? Does lm ponder ; upon the romance of destiny that has ' brought him. a nameless evile. across • so many thousands of miles and so many centuries to his ultimate island • folded in lhe northern mists? Or does he. behind that rigid mask, only i revolve si ml exult mum the ineluctable ' (loom of Loudon? Who can toll?