A little over a hundred years ago the learned world of fashionable London was profoundly moved by the arrival of eventful news. After having been sealed to Europeans for some four thousand years, one of the great pyramids of Egypt had at length been opened, and torch in hand, a modern man had walked the untrodden dust of the oven-hot and silent galleries.
Now that all three pyramids stand open to the world, and tourists with green sun-goggles and parasols hesitate and giggle at the forbidding entrances, it is difficult to believe that the interiors should have been so recently a mystery. Save for a few measurements, however, the first years of the nineteenth century knew no more about the great Pyramids than the Renaissance had known; all was tradition, legend and conjecture. Of the familiar giants at Gizeh, only one, the Great Pyramid of Cheops, was open, and this but very partially so, for the famous well and the lower galleries were clogged with rubbish and débris. The second pyramid, that of Chephren, and the third, that of Mycerinus, were apparently solid mountains of limestone blocks with no sign whatsoever of an opening or a door.
It is scarce possible to exaggerate the hold which these locked giants had maintained on the imagination of mankind. The pilgrim of the middle ages thought them the granaries of Joseph, and stared at them with reverence; the conquering Arab called them the palaces of kings, sleeping enchanted in moated halls whose lamps were hollow emeralds.
All tales, however, agreed upon one point,—that the pyramids concealed a treasure. The Arabic conquerors of Egypt had already sought it, and one of them, the tenth century caliph, Al Mamun, baffled by the masonry of the third pyramid, had actually made a vain and lunatic attempt to destroy the entire edifice. So kings passed, and emperors and sultans and great ages of historic time, but the sunrise still rolled up the veiling mist from the great plain of Egypt, revealing the vast, solemn geometry of the masters of the Nile. What treasure, what strange secret lay within these stones? Who would be the first to enter them? What would he find?
In the year 1778, Jacopo Belzoni, a worthy barber of Padua, and Teresa his wife, were rejoicing at the arrival of a son. They had christened him Giovanni Battista, or “Gianbattista” for short. Had a soothsayer of ancient Egypt appeared by the cradle, and revealed the infant’s destiny, the good tonsore would have surely opened his mouth and dropped his shears. For the soothsayer would have said something like this:
“This child will be a juggler at theatres and village fairs, a scholar, an author, and a traveller. For thirty-seven years, life will toss him about as a juggler tosses a ball in the air, but then his opportunity will come, he will win fame in a strange land, and solve the most romantic of all mysteries.”
The adventurous tale begins, strangely enough, in a monastery. The worthy Jacopo had fathered a brood of fourteen,—something had to be found for each and every one of them, and in the distribution young Giovanni Battista was handed over to the church. He was to find a place in the world for himself as a monk. From the parental dwelling on a by-street in Padua, the boy, still in his teens, walked the ancient highways of Umbria to the house of a monastic order in Rome. Somewhere in the old papal city, behind an encircling wall, his days of boyhood and youth began before the dawn with the clangour of a monastery bell, and ended with the echoing cave of a darkened church, the golden, pin-point flames of altar lamps, and the solemn chanting of the offices.
Years pass, years of quiet and withdrawal from the world. Of a sudden comes alarming news, the pot of the Revolution has boiled over, the French are crossing the frontiers and invading Italy. Presently there are disorders in Rome and a descent of French troops upon the city; the bells are silenced, the monasteries closed or seized for barracks, and the monks harried out into the street.
Among the monks thus compelled to abandon the religious life was Gianbattista Belzoni. The Paduan novice had grown up into a giant, a colossus even, for he now stood six feet seven inches in height, and was broadly and solidly built in the same proportion. And not only did Gianbattista have a giant’s strength, he had also the pride and the sense of decorum which accompany a giant stature. Those who are born of average height little know how huge is the influence of great stature on its possessor’s conduct and character! He who is born a Titan must act the Titan; a frolicsome colossus is an outrage to Nature. Gianbattista, moreover, though of Paduan birth, was of Roman stock, and Romans have to this day an eye for dignity. Brown eyed, and black-brown of hair, with a giant’s mildness, a giant’s decorum, and an Italian’s grace of address, young Gianbattista was a figure for Michelangelo.
Walking with a giant’s disdain through the rabble of soldiers and revolutionists jeering by the monastery gate, the young monk passed forth into the world.
The homeless young Titan, he was only 22, may well have wondered what was now to become of him. At the monastery school he had chanced to make a special study of the science of hydraulics, but that was hardly a knowledge to be peddled about in those uncertain times. Having no choice, therefore, he fell back on his physical strength, and set about earning his living as a juggler and a Hercules of village fairs. From Italy the showman monk made his way through Germany, and then through Holland to the various kingdoms of the British Isles. Finding life pleasant in England, he settled down there, and spent the Napoleonic years amusing his hosts and becoming something of an Englishman.
For the next ten years, his life is that of an Italian mountebank in England. The English knew the huge, serious, well-mannered foreigner as “Signor” Belzoni; they saw him in their pantomimes and at Bartholomew Fair. He had a booth at the fair, and amid the smell of black puddings sizzling on the fire, and the shouts and cries of barrow vendors and showmen, our Signor delighted the London rabble with feats of strength and dexterity. His favorite show was a spectacle called “Samson,” an edifying Biblical affair in whose course Belzoni pulled down the pillars of a stage temple with the most blood-curdling roars, crash, dust and general uproar. At Sadlers Wells Theatre, to quote an old play bill, his performance consisted “in carrying from seven to ten men in a manner never attempted by any but himself. He clasps round him a belt to which are affixed ledges to support the men who cling about him.... When thus encumbered, he moves as easy and as graceful as if about to walk a minuet, and displays a flag in as flippant a manner as a dancer on the rope.” Another visitor became poetic. “Signor Belzoni,” he wrote, “moved about the stage under this enormous pressure with as much steadiness and stateliness as the elephant does when his howdah is full of Indian warriors.”
Ellar the comedian knew him well, and saw him perform; the giant was getting two pounds a week, and Edmund Kean was watching delighted in the stalls.
In England came Romance: there Gianbattista found his Sarah. This resolute spouse was an Englishwoman of a stature almost as magnificent as her lord’s, and with a character and a mind as British as the dome of St. Paul’s. Indomitable Sarah Belzoni! Writing of the Turks, she set down in her journal, “though I may be condemned for my opinion, there is no religion would suit them so well as the Protestant church of England.” She called her husband “Mr. B.,” and accompanied him on his expeditions, never once losing her nerve or her practical grasp of life. The gigantic pair now set about the serious business of earning a living.
After exhibiting “Samson” through Portugal and Spain, the Belzonis drifted to Malta, then a dependency of Egypt, and there Belzoni attracted the friendly attention of the Mohammedan governor. The adventurer’s old interest in hydraulics was becoming practical; he had devised certain irrigating machines intended for agricultural use, and the governor advised him to go to Cairo, and bring these contrivances to the attention of Mehmet Ali, the quasi-independent governor of Egypt.
It is the month of August in the year 1815; the heat in Egypt is the heat of a dry oven; a little wind blows, but merely serves to pour the heat upon the flesh. There is no sun in the cloudless sky, only an inundation of tremendous light whose source is no more to be looked at than a god. Circling higher and higher, vultures ride the furnace of the air, eyeing the broad, low-lying plain, the winding Nile, the shrunken marshes, the cornelian sands, and the broken tops of the Memphian pyramids. At a landing in Cairo, three Europeans are disembarking from a Nile boat,—they are Gianbattista and Sarah Belzoni and James Curtain, their little Irish serving lad.
The monk whom Destiny had turned into a bohemian was now thirty-seven years old, and the many influences he had undergone had moulded an exceptional mind and character. On the one hand, he was a strolling mountebank; on the other, an educated man with churchly learning and a genuine respect for scholarship. He was an Italian with an Italian’s suppleness, ingenuity, and Latin sense of making the best of what life affords; he was an Englishman as well, with the English language on his lips, and ten years’ experience of life in the English way. He wrote English extraordinarily well; he could draw passably, and from his years as a stroller he had gained a knack of getting along with men of all conditions and kinds. A stroller, a scholar, a Roman, an Englishman—was there ever such another Hercules? Through the streets of Cairo he rides, with a giant’s aloof peaceableness and a giant’s propriety.
He was weary now, it would seem, of Samson’s roars and tuggings. He had accepted the cards which life had dealt him and done his best to play them well,—what else was there to do? Here in this new land, the game should begin again, and the showman vanish into the vagrant engineer.
In the dark underworld of vanished deities, the animal-headed gods of Egypt, the cow Hathor, the cat Pasht, and the jackal Anubis stir in their ancient dreams, for the first of the awakeners of their civilization is setting foot beside the Nile.
Negotiations with Mehmet Ali and the building and the test of Belzoni’s water-lifting wheel consumed the greater part of a year; it was wasted time, for the Pasha decided against the use of the device.
From the uncertainty which followed, the adventurer was rescued by his old friend, John Lewis Burckhardt, the traveller, who now persuaded the British Consul General, Henry Salt, to send Belzoni on a special expedition up the Nile. A colossal head of “Memnon” (in reality a head of Ramses II) was lying in the sands at Thebes, and Salt wished to have it carried down the river, and shipped off to the British Museum. Belzoni accepted the charge gladly, and going to Thebes, surmounted a thousand difficulties, and carried off the prize. It was anything but an easy task, for the giant head, or more properly the bust, measured some six by eight feet and weighed over seven tons. Belzoni handled it with home-made machinery. The engineer side of him was real; it is a quality often found just below the surface in Italians.
Mrs. Belzoni was with him, and shared with her “Mr. B.” a hut built of stones in the portico of the Memnonium. All the long hot summer, the giant lady cooked her Titan’s rice and mutton, and kept a practical eye on everything. The British matron was the terror of rival French explorers,—“Madame Belzoni, Amazone formidable,” they wrote in their accounts.
Other voyages followed which can not here be set down in detail. The first voyage saw the removal of the head and an exploring trip up the river to Abu Simbel and the cataracts. At Abu Simbel, it was “Ypsambul” to Belzoni, that greatest of rock temples was clogged with a vast fanslope of fallen stones and sand in which the colossi sat up to their necks. A second journey carried the explorer back to Thebes. The labyrinth of mountain tombs was still full of the ancient dead, some lying on the floors of their cave sepulchres, some standing, some on their heads,—all surfaced with a very fine and choking dust.
Mrs. Belzoni having lingered in Cairo, the explorer now and then accepted the hospitality of natives dwelling in the outer tombs. “I was sure of a supper of milk served in a wooden bowl,” he wrote, “but whenever they supposed I should stay all night they killed a couple of fowls for me which were baked in a small oven heated with pieces of mummy cases, and sometimes with the bones and rags of the mummies themselves.” It is a far cry from the sun-helmeted professors, the great officials, and the electric lights of Tutankhamen’s tomb.
On this second journey, the explorer began the clearing of Abu Simbel, and discovered the tomb of Seti I in the Valley of the Kings, still the most beautifully decorated sepulchre in Egypt. Old usage called it Belzoni’s tomb; new days have forgotten the explorer. Then followed expeditions to Philæ, to the site of the Roman city of Berenike on the Red Sea, and a journey to the oasis of Elwah which Belzoni mistook for the historic oasis of Jupiter Ammon. The fever of exploration now descended on Mrs. B., and the intrepid lady, disguised as a man, went off by herself on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem,—a feat of extraordinary fortitude and daring.
At the close of his second journey, Belzoni had cleared and opened Abu Simbel, discovered the tomb of Seti I, and explored Philæ, the Theban necropolis and the Valley of the Kings. He had shown himself venturesome, courageous, and resolute. He had a way of getting things done, not by shouts and the whip, but by a certain steadiness of pressure, as if he were putting his giant shoulders to a door and slowly forcing it inward from its frame. There are passages in his account of his work which seem to reveal a quality of suspicion in the giant’s mind; he could see the hand of rival gatherers of antiquities in every check and delay. Twenty-five years ago the trait would have required a moral explanation; the wiser and more travelled present simply points to the thermometer.
By an ironic turn of the wheel of fate, it chanced that the rival collector to whom Belzoni attributed his vexations was himself an Italian. Bernardino Drouetti, agent of France and gatherer of antiquities for the Louvre, had been born in Leghorn. The competition between this Frenchman from Leghorn and this Briton from Padua had thus a certain raciness and emotional quality. Keen as it was, the amenities were outwardly preserved, and Drouetti even went so far as to present Belzoni with the “rights” to a sarcophagus it was impossible to extricate. At Philæ, however, the duel became a battle, for Drouetti’s henchmen rushed Belzoni and his party as the giant was making off with an obelisk. If Drouetti’s indignant lament is to be believed, Belzoni snatched a shrieking, jabbering “Arab” out of the mob swarming about him, swung him up by the ankles, and used him à la Samson on the heads and shoulders of his fellow country men. The novel weapon, it is said, won a headlong victory, and the giant carried off his obelisk in peace.
Returning to Cairo during the inundation, Belzoni paused by night at the pyramids. So vividly were the stars of the Egyptian sky mirrored in the flood, that there seemed to be two heavens, one above and below. Awesome, even a little terrible, the vast and ancient shapes of the pyramids rose seemingly from the starry water to the splendour overhead.
The Pyramids. Mystery of ancient mystery! Belzoni resolved to match his knowledge and skill with this riddle of the years.
He went first to Gizeh, and wandered about the three pyramids, studying and observing.
From the sands of the Egyptian desert, which are cornelian in hue and strewn with colored pebbles much like fragments of ancient pottery, the pyramids rise as masses of old ivory stone suffused with a certain golden rust; the description is laboured, but the effect is not to be given in a word. Belzoni, trudging the sand, watched the late afternoon light bring out the grey. The second great pyramid, the pyramid of Chephren, had taken his eye, and round it and about he went, now gazing up to the cap of reddish surfacing still in place about the peak, now pausing to study the huge confusion of sand and wreckage washed up about the base like a wave of shattered stone. Was there an opening, and if so, where? Or was the pyramid a solid hill of stone as the Egyptians had told Herodotus twenty-five hundred years before? The French scholars attached to Napoleon’s expedition had sought an entrance in vain, and the Europeans resident in Cairo were meditating a scheme of collecting 20,000 pounds “at various European courts,” and “forcing their way into the centre of this pyramid by explosions.”
“It seems little short of madness,” wrote Belzoni, “to renew the enterprise.” The giant had now grown a fine black beard, and taken to wearing Eastern dress, huge white turban and all. It was the proper thing to do then when travelling in the East.
The entrance to the Great Pyramid being on the north, Belzoni studied with particular care the northern face of the second pyramid, and presently discovered there “three marks” which seemed to offer a clue. Just under the centre of the north face of the pyramid, the bordering wave of débris was high, as if it might possibly lie piled atop some entrance way; the accumulation of stone at the mound seemed less compact than the mass to either side, and the débris had apparently gathered since the removal of the surfacing. There was the place, there would he begin.
Somewhat to his surprise, he got his permission to dig quite easily, the authorities merely insisting that he must not disturb “ploughed ground.” The capital on which he hoped to accomplish his undertaking consisted of a scant two hundred pounds, some of it a gift from Burckhardt, some of it a profit from the sale of “antiquities.”
Early in February, 1818, the adventurer left Cairo quietly, and took up his quarters in a tent by the second pyramid. Alone in his tent he sits, this huge bearded man who has lived so fantastic a life; it is night, and he smokes his long Turkish pipe, and watches the giant Egyptian moon cast the pointed shadow of his pyramid upon sands traced with the paths of naked feet. That monastery in Rome, the bells of other convents heard over the wall as one walked the garden in the cool of the afternoon, the rumble and galopade of a cardinal’s coach over the stones,—how far away and old it all is in that still splendour of the Egyptian night!
At the pyramid all begins well, eighty natives have been secured, and Belzoni has put forty to clearing the ground between the temple and the pyramid, and forty more to clearing the débris at the rise by the northern rim. The plates which accompany his text show the workmen to have worn the short, rolled white drawers and turbans of this earlier day, a costume far more picturesque than the long-skirted nightgown affair and red felt “fez” of modern Egypt. A nimble folk these brown Egyptians; they scramble about the pyramids today with the agility of boys in an easy tree; even so they must have scrambled and chattered for Belzoni. He paid them sixpence English a day, and hired boys and girls to carry away the earth.
The giant sagely explained to his corps that it would be to their advantage to find the entrance to the pyramid, for they would then have another marvel to show to visitors, and thus get more bakshish[3] than ever. The natives began with a will, but for several days their labors promised no indication of success. It was particularly difficult work. The fringe of wreckage had become solidly jammed, and the only tools to be had were spades meant for the cutting of soft ground. There were times when it seemed as if the workmen could scarcely proceed. At the end of a fortnight’s digging, the party working on the ground between the temple and the pyramid had cut through some forty feet of rubbish to a broad pavement which seemed to encircle the pyramid; but the workmen at the north side had uncovered only deeper and deeper layers of débris.
After some sixteen days of this, the workmen began to weary of the task. “The Arabs,” said Belzoni, “continued, but with less zeal. Still I observed that the stones on that spot were not so consolidated as those on the sides of them, and I determined to proceed till I should be persuaded that I was wrong in my conjecture.”
On the morning of February 18th, an overseer of the workmen came across the sand dunes with promising news. A workman of the northern party had perceived “a small chink” between two stones of the newly uncovered lower side of the pyramid. Belzoni returned with the messenger, and found the workers gathered in a talkative group awaiting his coming. Yes, there was a small open slit between two of the great stones, into which the giant was able “to thrust a palm stick to the length of two yards.” The workmen took heart; their night of foolish labour for this incomprehensible European infidel was seemingly ending in a dawn.
The loose stone, torn from its place, revealed a mystery,—a passage some three feet wide choked with smaller stones and sand. Belzoni, in his turban and loose white eastern dress, peered within, while his half naked, dusky workers pushed and peeped and whispered behind that Titan back. Was the mystery of the ages about to be unveiled? Would they presently behold the legendary spirit of the pyramid—an old man with a censer? This attendant guardian was still to be seen at sundown, making the tour of his pyramid at about half way up the sides,—a solemn, priestly figure who swung his censer as he walked. Trickles of sand fell noiselessly from the roof of the opening; they heard the drop of little stones; about them the quiet of the desert seemed to have become intensified.
On being excavated, this passage proved to be wider within, and after five days of clearing, the excavators arrived at an open tunnel leading inward.
“Having made it wide enough,” said Belzoni, “I took a candle in my hand, and looking in, perceived a spacious cavity ... bending its course to the centre. It is evidently a forced passage executed by a powerful hand, and appears intended to find a way to the centre of the pyramid.”
It was less a passage he had discovered than a wound. In ancient times some ruler of the land had attempted to force the pyramid, but the deed and the man had perished from the memory of the world, and the pyramid itself had hidden the deep wound within its side. To make the entrance, huge stones of the outer casing had been cut and sawed; then a ragged tunnel had been pierced directly into the heart of the masonry. The task had certainly taken toll of many lives. It was an awesome place, and exceedingly dangerous. Huge stones, which the piercing of the tunnel had left hanging by a thread, fell down, and every time that Belzoni crawled down its length of a hundred feet, he never knew but what a cry and a muffled crash might announce his living entombment in the dark of the edifice.
Europeans from Cairo now got wind of the giant’s enterprise, and came riding over the sands to see Belzoni at his task. The discovery of the forced passage seems to have impressed them as an interesting failure, an attitude which struck at the giant’s dignity and pride. He paused to mull things over in his mind, and gave the workmen a special holiday.
The false passage ended in a pocket of fallen stone. He would abandon his exploration of it, and continue his search for the real entrance.
Staff in hand, the huge figure, now resumes its trudge about the pyramid. The workmen have gone, the wind over the desert lifts the dust out of the hollows of the dunes, and brings no human sound; sand and ruin prevail. The adventurer wanders over the waste to the great pyramid.
It was then open, and somewhere in the hot, repellent heart of it, rank with the sour-foul odour of multitudes upon multitudes of bats, a typical European adventurer was working simply because the pyramids were his hobby. The name of this enthusiast was Caviglia, and he was the Italian master of a Mediterranean trading vessel flying the British flag. The good sailor had little education, and needed little, for his work was primarily a matter of removing rubbish, and discovering what lay beneath. In later years Colonel Howard Vyse had dealings with him, and found him temperamental. Captain Caviglia, dear excitable Latin, rushed out of his pyramid one morning and hurled on the Colonel’s breakfast table a subsidy of forty pounds done up in an old sock. It appears that he considered the sum quite unworthy of his efforts. The Colonel, however, was equal to the occasion, and after taking out the money, returned the sock with his “best compliments.” Such was the dawn of archæology!
Belzoni returned from his visit to his neighbour and countryman with a new notion in his head. Prompted by certain indications, he had been digging away the rubbish gathered before the centre of the northern face of the second pyramid, whilst the entrance into the Great Pyramid was not in line with the centre of that edifice, but some thirty feet to the east of centre, for the tomb chamber lay in the centre, and the passage entered at the chamber’s eastern end. He would abandon his excavation at the forced passage, and begin again thirty feet to the east.
He went to the spot, and saw, or thought he saw, that the coating of rubbish was there not so thickly piled. Moreover, it appeared sunken as if an entrance below it might have fallen in. “This gave me no little delight,” wrote the giant later, “and hope returned to cherish my pyramidical brains.”
Again work began merrily, for the natives had grown to appreciate the giant’s sixpence a day. But they thought their employer quite mad, and Belzoni heard them whispering it to each other. “Magnoon,” they said as he passed, and again “magnoon,”—the madman! More days of sunlight and scurrying and digging of a tribe of black-brown fellahin. On February 28th, a world of excitement and heart-quickening anticipation; something which looks like an entrance has been reached, for now appears a large granite stone set into the pyramid at the same angle as the passage into the Great Pyramid. The shovels flew that day. On the day following, they have uncovered three great blocks of granite, one on each side and one on top, all “lying in an inclined direction towards the centre.”
It was the entrance at last. By the second of March, the débris in front of the three stones having been cleared away, the long-sought opening was seen. It proved to be a passage, four feet high and three feet six inches wide, which descended at a steep incline into the pyramid. Its granite walls were undisturbed, but the passage itself was full of wreckage which had slid down the incline and piled up to form a barrier.
Provided with torches and candles, Belzoni and a few workmen now followed the passage for a hundred and four feet down into the dark. Whither was it leading them? The giant bulk of Belzoni nearly filled up the passage, as he came crouching almost double and holding a dripping candle light. Suddenly, to their great dismay, the passage came to a blind end at three solid granite walls.
Discouragement fell upon them as heavy as a pyramid. “At first sight,” said Belzoni, “it seemed a fixed block of stone which stared me in the face and said ne plus ultra, putting an end to all my projects as I thought.” Suddenly, a discovery, a catch of the breath; the stone at the end of the passage is not fixed solidly in place; it is a portcullis which can be raised; the barrier stone is already eight inches above the true floor, and rests on surface rubbish. There followed a hurrying back and forth through the passage, a coming of workmen with levers, and a time of hard work in the tiny cubicle of the passageway. The portcullis stone was one foot three inches thick, and rose slowly because the low ceiling permitted only a little play of the levers. At the outer entrance, the workmen had gathered in a chattering and excited crowd; they questioned those who came and went—what of wonders within, and how vast was the treasure?
When the aperture had grown wide enough for a man to pass through, a native squirmed under carrying a candle, and “returned saying that the place within was very fine.” Belzoni, poor Titan, had to wait.
It had chanced that on the day before a fellow countryman of Belzoni’s, the Chevalier Frediani, had come to visit Gizeh; he had proved a pleasant guest, and the giant had invited him to remain for the opening of the pyramid. This second Italian now joined the little group lifting the portcullis. It was now high enough for Belzoni to crawl under, and he did so, followed by the Chevalier.
Over a thousand years, perhaps more, had passed since the tunnels into which they crawled had echoed to the sound of human voices. Belzoni led the way, carrying a light; Frediani, too, had a torch. The huge shadow of Belzoni followed along the walls; the granite twinkled in the first light of ten long centuries. At the end of the passage was an open pit which they descended along a rope, and at the depth of the pit were passages thick with dark and silence. Ghostlike arborisations of nitre hung on these lower walls, some projecting in fantastic ropes. Belzoni went off on one trail, Frediani on another. Presently the giant arrived at the door of the chamber of the tomb.
“I walked slowly two or three paces, and then stood still to contemplate the place where I was. Whatever it might be, I certainly considered myself in the centre of that pyramid which from time immemorial had been the subject of the obscure conjecture of many hundred travellers, ancient and modern. My Torch, formed of a few wax candles, gave but a faint light.”
He heard a sound of footsteps, and Frediani entered with his candles.
But the treasure of the pyramid? The sarcophagus of Khaf-ra, King of Egypt, was cut in the floor, the lid was awry, and the stone coffin “full of a great quantity of earth and stones.” Who had violated it in the long course of history’s four thousand years? No one knows. There is evidence that the Caliph Al Mamun had forced
