newly-discovered sarcophagi, and was not a little astonished, upon
descending, to find myself in a regular snow-drift of locusts, which,
almost darkening the heavens, flew over our heads from the south-west
from the desert in hundreds of thousands to the valley. I took it for a
single flight, and called my companions from the tombs where they were
busy, that they might see this Egyptian wonder ere it was over. But the
flight continued; indeed the work-people said it had begun an hour
before. Then we first observed that the whole region near and far was
covered with locusts. I sent an attendant into the desert, to discover
the breadth of the flock. He ran for the distance of a quarter of an
hour, then returned and told us that, as far as he could see, there was
no end to them. I rode home in the midst of the locust shower. At the
edge of the fruitful plain they fell down in showers; and so it went on
the whole day till the evening, and so the next day from morning till
evening, and the third; in short, to the sixth day, indeed in weaker
flights much longer. Yesterday it did seem that a storm of rain in the
desert had knocked down and destroyed the last of them. The Arabs are
now lighting great fires of smoke in the fields, and clattering and
making loud noises all day long to preserve their crops from the
unexpected invasion. It will, however, do little good. Like a new
animated vegetation, these millions of winged spoilers cover even the
neighbouring sandhills, so that scarcely anything is to be seen of the
ground; and when they rise from one place, they immediately fall down
somewhere in the neighbourhood; they are tired with their long journey,
and seem to have lost all fear of their natural enemies, men, animals,
smoke, and noise, in their furious wish to fill their stomachs, and in
the feeling of their immense number. The most wonderful thing, in my
estimation, is their flight over the naked wilderness and the instinct
which has guided them from some oasis over the inhospitable desert to
the fat soil of the Nile vale. Fourteen years ago, it seems, this
Egyptian plague last visited Egypt with the same force. The popular idea
is, that they are sent by the comet which we have observed for twelve
days in the south-west, and which, as it is now no longer obscured by
the rays of the moon, stretches forth its stately tail across the
heavens in the hours of night. The zodiacal light, too, so seldom seen
in the north, has lately been visible for several nights in succession.
At this place have I first been able to settle my account with Gizeh,
and to put together the historical results of the investigation. I have
every reason to rejoice at the consequences; the fourth and fifth
dynasties are completed all except one king.
I have just received the rather illegible drawing of a stone in a wall
at the village of Abusir, which presents a row of kings of the fourth
and fifth dynasties, and, as it would seem, in chronological order. I am
on the point of riding over to see the original.
LETTER VIII.
SAQÂRA.
_April 13, 1843._
I hasten to inform you of an event which I should not like to be first
communicated to you from other quarters, and perhaps with distorted
exaggeration. Our camp was attacked and robbed a few nights since by an
armed band, but none of our party have been seriously hurt, and nothing
has been lost that is not to be replaced. The matter is past, and the
consequences can only be favourable to us; but I must first go back a
few days in my report.
On the 3rd of April, H.R.H. Prince Albrecht returned from Upper Egypt to
Cairo; next day I went to town and submitted a portion of our labours to
him, in which he took the more lively interest as he had already seen
more of the wonder-land than we, and had only omitted to visit the
pyramid fields. On his former arrival in Cairo I was absent with Abeken
and Bonomi on a journey of several days’ duration in the Faiûm. The
Prince came just in time for some Mohammedan festivals, which I should
have neglected but for his presence. On the sixth was the entrance of
the solemnly-welcomed caravan of pilgrims from Mecca, and a few days
later, the birthday festival of the prophet “Mulid e’Nebbi,” one of the
most original feasts throughout the Orient. The principal parts fall to
the share of the Derwishes, who arrange processions during the day, and
in the evening exhibit their terrible dance named Sikr in the
gaily-lighted tents erected among the trees of the Ezbekîeh; thirty to
forty of this religious sect place themselves in a circle, and begin to
move their bodies backward and forward, according to the time, first
slowly, and then more violently, at last with the most cruel strains
upon the nerves; at the same time they repeat their maxim rhythmically
with a loud howling voice, “_Lâ ilâha ill’ Allah_” (no God but Allah),
gradually lowering and softening the tone until it is resembles a faint
snore: at length, their powers wholly exhausted, some fall down, others
withdraw reelingly, and the broken circle, after a short pause, is
replaced by another.
What a fearful, barbarous worship, which the astounded multitude, great
and small, gentle and simple, gaze upon seriously and with stupid
respect, and in which it not unfrequently takes a part! The invoked
deity is manifestly much less an object of reverence than the
fanatic saints who invoke him; for mad, idiotic, or other
psychologically-diseased persons, are very generally looked upon as holy
by the Mohammedans, and treated with great respect. It is the
demoniacal, incomprehensibly-acting, and therefore fearfully-observed
power of nature, that the natural man always reveres when he perceives
it, because he is sensible of some connection between it and his
intellectual power, without being able to command it; first in the
mighty elements, then in the wondrous but obscure law-governed
instincts of animals, and, at last, in the yet more overpowering
exstatical, or generally abnormal mental condition of his own race. We
must decidedly look upon the Egyptian animal-worship, as far as it was
not the covering for deeper and more refined doctrines, as resting upon
the same idea of a worship of nature;[22] and the reverence occasionally
manifesting itself among some nations of mentally-diseased men may be
regarded as a curious branch of the same feeling. Whether such
conditions really exist, or whether, as with the _derwishes_, they are
artificially produced and purposely fostered, is not criticised by the
masses, and it is much the same in individual cases. In such a presence
one would feel oneself overcome by a mysterious feeling of dread, and
would not care to express repugnance, or even to manifest it by signs,
or by a token of having even observed anything, for fear of diverting to
oneself the storm of brute passion.
The nine days’ festival closes with a peculiar ceremony called _doseh_,
the treading, but which I was myself prevented from witnessing. The
sheîkh of the Saadîeh-_derwishes_ rides to the chief sheîkh of all the
_derwishes_ of Egypt, El Bekri. On the way thither, a great number of
these holy folk, and others too, who fancy themselves not a whit
behindhand in piety, throw themselves flat on the ground, with their
faces downward, and so that the feet of one lie close to the head of the
next; over this living carpet, the sheikh rides on his horse, which is
led on each side by an attendant, in order to compel the animal to the
unnatural march. Each man’s body receives two treads of the horse; most
of them jump up again without hurt, but whoever suffers serious, or, as
it occasionally happens, mortal injury, has the additional ignominy to
bear, for not having pronounced, or for not being able to pronounce, the
proper prayers and magical charms that alone could save him.[23]
On the 7th of April, I and Erbkam accompanied the prince to the
pyramids, and first to those of Gizeh. The pyramid of Cheops was
ascended, and the inside visited; the beautiful tomb of Prince Merhet I
had had laid open for the purpose of showing it. Then we left for our
camp at Saqâra.
Here we heard that a barefaced robbery had been committed in Abeken’s
tent the night before. While he was asleep, with a light burning, after
his return from Cairo, his knapsack, pistols, and a few other matters
lying about, were stolen; as the thief was departing, a noise was
perceived by the guard, but the darkness precluded all pursuit.
After the prince had inspected the most beautiful tomb of Saqâra, we
rode across the plain to Mitrahinneh to visit the mound of Memphis, and
the half-buried colossus of Ramses Miamun (Sesostris), the face of which
is almost perfectly preserved.[24] Late at night, we arrived again in
Cairo, after sixteen hours of motion, scarcely interrupted by short
pauses of rest; the unusual fatigue, however, rather raised the lively
taste for travelling in the prince’s mind than otherwise.
The next day the mosques of the city were visited, which are partly
worthy of notice for their magnificence, and are partly of interest in
the history of mediæval art on account of the earliest specimen of the
general application of the pointed arch. The questions touching this
characteristic architectural branch of the so-called Gothic style had
employed me so much some years ago, that I could not avoid pursuing the
old traces; the pointed arch is found in the oldest mosques up to the
ninth century. With the conquest of Sicily by the Arabs, this form of
the arch was carried over to the island, where the next conquerors, the
Normans, found it in the eleventh century, and were led to employ it
much. To deny some historical connection between the Norman pointed arch
of Palermo and our northern style appears to me to be impossible; the
admission of such a connection would certainly render it more difficult
to explain of the sporadically but not lawlessly used rows of pointed
arches which occur in the cathedral of Naumburg in the eleventh century,
and at Memleben already in the tenth. The theorists will not yet admit
this; but I must await the confutation of these reasons.[25]
The Nilometer on the island of Roda, which we visited after the mosques,
also contains a row of pointed arches, which belong to the original
building, going back to the ninth century, as the carefully-examined
Kufic inscriptions testify.
Egypt does not only lay claim to the oldest employment, and therefore
probable invention, of the pointed arches, but also upon that of the
circular arch.[26] Near the pyramids a group of tombs may be seen, the
single blocks of which manifest the proper concentric way of cutting.
They belong to the twenty-sixth Manethonic dynasty of the Psammetici,
_i. e._ in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., are therefore of about
the same antiquity as the _Cloaca maxima_ and the _Carcer Mamertinus_ at
Rome. We have also found tombs with vaults of Nile bricks, that go back
as far as the era of the pyramids. Now I deny, in contradistinction to
the opinion of others, that the brick arch, the single flat bricks of
which are only placed concentrically by the aid of the trowel, admits of
a previous knowledge of the actual principle of the arch, and
particularly with respect to its sustaining power, of which denial there
is already proof in the fact that before the Psammetici there is no
instance of a concentrically laid arch, but many pseudo-arches, cut, as
it were, in horizontal layers. But where the brick arch was ancient, we
may also most naturally place the origin of the later concentric stone
arch, or at least admit of its appearing contemporaneously in other
lands.
I was about to accompany the prince the next morning to the interesting
institution of Herr Lieder, when Erbkam unexpectedly arrived from our
camp. He reported that on the previous night, between three and four
o’clock A.M., a number of shots were suddenly fired in the neighbourhood
of our tents, and at the same time a crowd of more than twenty people
rushed into the encampment. Our tents stand on a small surface before
the rock tombs, which are excavated half-way up the steep wall of the
Libyan Vale, and have a considerable terrace in front, formed by the
rubbish. Almost the only way in which it was to be approached was on one
side by a gorge that passes down from above by our tents. Thence the
attack was made. It was first directed against the tent which served as
a _salōn_ for our whole society. This soon fell down in a mass. Then
followed the other great tent in which slept Erbkam, Frey, Ernst
Weidenbach, and Franke. This was also torn down, and covered up its
inhabitants, who had great difficulty in creeping out from among the
ropes and tent-cloths. Besides this, all the guns had been placed in one
tent together on the previous day, at the visit of the prince, and
fastened to the centre pole, so that they were not at hand. The guards,
cowardly in the extreme, and knowing that they had made themselves
liable to punishment, even if such a thing had happened without their
being in fault, immediately fled with loud cries in every direction, and
have not yet returned. The thieves now stuck to what was nearest at
hand, rolled everything they could lay hold of down the hill, and were
soon lost in the plains below. Their shots had evidently been blank, for
no one had been hurt by them; but they had gained their object of
rendering the confusion greater. Only Ernst Weidenbach and a few of our
attendants were wounded in the head or shoulders by blows from
gunstocks, bludgeons, or stones, but they were none of them dangerous.
The things stolen will have bitterly disappointed the expectation of the
thieves. The great trunks scarcely contained anything but European
clothes and other things that no Arab can use. A number of coloured
sketches is most to be regretted, the artistical Sunday amusement of the
talented Frey.
We are perfectly aware of the quarter whence this attack originated. We
live on the frontier of the territory of Abusir, an Arab village long
bearing but a doubtful reputation, between Kafr-el-Batran, at the foot
of the pyramids of Gizeh and Saqâra. By Arabs (_’Arab_, pl. _’Urbân_) I
mean, according to custom, those inhabitants of the land who have
settled in the valley of the Nile, at a late period, and have built
villages with some show of right. They distinguish themselves very
markedly, by their free origin and manlier character, from the Fellahs
(_Fellah‘_, pl. _Fellah‘in_), those original tillers of the soil, who,
by centuries of slavery, have been pressed down and enervated, and who
could not withstand the invading Islam. A Bedouin (_Bedaui_, pl.
_Bedauîn_) is ever the free son of the desert, hovering upon the coasts
of the inhabited lands. Along the pyramids, therefore, there are
situated a number of Arab villages. To them belong the three places
named above. The sheikh of Abusir, a young, handsome, and enterprising
man, had a kind of claim, by the reason of our camp lying on his border,
to post a number of excellently-paid guards around us. I preferred,
however, to withdraw ourselves to the protection of the sheîkh of
Saqâra, a mightier man and more to be relied on, whom I had previously
known, and to whose district the larger portion of the scene of our
labours belonged. This determination cost the people of Abusir a
service, and us their friendship, as I had already observed for some
time without troubling myself further about it. Evidently, they had now
taken advantage of my absence in Cairo, with several attendants, to
carry out this design. To Abusir the traces led through the plain; a
little active boy, the grandson of an old Turk of the Mameluke time, the
only stranger dwelling in Abusir, with whom we occasionally changed
visits, seems to have served as a spy. This boy, who was often in our
camp, must have carried out the first robbery, in Abukir’s tent, with
which he was well acquainted.
The attack was a serious matter, and a precedent for the future, if it
were left unpunished. I immediately went with Herr von Wagner to Sherif
Pasha, the minister, in order to discover the thieves.
In a few days the plain beneath our camp wore an animated appearance.
The Mudhir (governor) of the province came, with a magnificent train,
and a great flock of under-officers and servants, and pitched his varied
camp at the foot of the mountain. We interchanged visits of politeness,
and conversed upon the event. The Mudhir told me at once that the actual
thieves would never be discovered, at least never brought to
confession, as each one knew that it would cost him his neck. But the
second day the sheikhs of Saqâra and Abusir, with a number of suspected
persons, were brought up to be judged. Neither confrontation nor
examination succeeded in obtaining any decision, as it was expected. The
punishment was therefore summarily executed; one after the other they
were shut in the stocks, with their faces down and their soles up, and
pitifully beaten, often to fainting, with long whips, called kurwatch,
the thongs of which are strips of hippopotamus skin. It was in vain that
I represented that I really saw no reason for punishing these persons
precisely, and I was still more astonished when our reverend old friend
the sheîkh of Saqâra, for whose innocence I had pledged my strongest
belief, was led down and laid in the dust like all the others. I
expressed my surprise to the Mudhir, and protested seriously against it,
but received for answer that the punishment could not be spared him, for
though we had not been exactly upon his soil, yet we had received our
guides from him, who had run away, and until now had not returned. With
much difficulty I obtained a shortening of the proceeding, but he was
already scarcely sensible, and he had to be carried to the tent, where
his feet were bound up. The whole matter ended with an indemnification
in money for the worth of the stolen things, which I purposely estimated
at a large sum, as every loss in money remains for years in the memory
of the Arab, while he forgets his thrashing, or, indeed, exults in it,
when he no longer feels it. “_Nezel min e’ semmâ e’ nebût, bárakah min
Allah_,” say the Arabs, _i.e._ “Down came the stick from heaven, a
blessing of Allah.” Even at the proportioning of the fine, the sum we
had asked was so divided that the rich sheikh of Saqâra had to pay a
much larger share than he of Abusir, a partiality in which the request
of the respected old Turk of Abusir, from the Turkish mudhir, no doubt
had its due weight.
As soon as the money was counted out, I went to our sheîkh of Saqâra,
whose unmerited ill-fortune seriously discomforted me, and returned him
publicly the half of his money, with the confidential assurance that the
rest should be restored on the departure of the Mudhir. This was so
unexpected on the part of the reverend sheikh, that he long stared at me
incredulously, then kissed my hands and feet, and called me his best
friend on earth,--I, who had just been at least the indirect cause of
his stately beard having been mingled with the dust, and of his feet
being beaten into week-enduring pain. His surprised pleasure did not,
however, so much have me for its object as the unexpected sight of the
money, that never fails in its magical effects on the Arab.
There is in the Arab a remarkable mixture of noble pride and low
avarice, which is at first quite incomprehensible to the European. His
free, noble carriage and imperturbable rest seem to express nothing but
a proud feeling of honour. But against the least prospect of profit
this melts like wax in the sun, and the most debasing usage is of no
consideration when money is at stake, but is creepingly borne. One of
these two natures appears at first to be but apparent or delusive; but
the contradiction comes back in every shape, in little things and great,
too often not to cause the conviction that it is characteristic of the
Arab, if not of the whole cast. The Egyptians had so degenerated already
in the Roman æra, that Ammianus Marcellinus could say of them,
“_Erubescit apud eos, si quis non infitiando tributa plurimas in corpore
vibices ostendat_;” just in the same way the Fellah to-day points to his
red weals with a contented smile as soon as the tax-gatherer had
departed, _minus_ a few of his desired piastres, notwithstanding his
instruments of torture.[27]
LETTER IX.
CAIRO.
_April 22, 1843._
A severe cold, which has for some time stopped my usual activity, has
brought me hither from our camp near Saqâra. The worst of it is, that we
are obliged to postpone our journey, although we should all have liked
to quit Saqâra. Certainly everything that such a place offers is of the
highest importance; but its wealth almost brings us into a dilemma here.
To the most important, but most difficult and time-occupying pursuit,
belongs that of Erbkam, our architect. He has the great task allotted
him of making the detailed plans of the desert coasts, in about the
centre of which we lie. This extent of country embraces the almost
unbroken chain of tomb-fields, from the pyramid of Rigah to those of
Dahshûr. The single plans of the northern fields of Abu Roash, Gizeh,
Zauiet el Arrian, are already completed. The sketches of Perring, useful
as they are, cannot be compared with ours. Whole Necropolis, with the
pyramids belonging to them, have been discovered, partly by myself,
partly by Erbkam. Some of the hitherto unknown pyramids are even now
from eighty to a hundred feet in height, others are almost worn away,
but were originally of considerable size, as is shown by the extent of
their ground plans. My return to Saqâra will, it is to be hoped, be the
signal of our departure.
We shall proceed by land to the Faiûm, that province branching into the
wilderness. The season of the year is still most beautiful, and the
desert journey will no doubt be more conducive to our health than the
Nile passage, which we formerly intended.
My health will, it is to be hoped, not long detain me here, for with
every day my impatience increases to leave the living city of the
Mamelukes, for the solemn Necropolis of the ancient Pharaohs. And yet it
might give you more pleasure, perhaps, could I picture to you, in
colours or words, how it looks from this my window.
I live on the great place of the Ezbekîeh, in the most handsome and
populous part of the city. Formerly there was a large lake in the
middle, but it is now transformed into gardens. All around run broad
streets, parted off for riders and walkers, and shaded by high trees.
There the whole East flits by me with its gay, manifold, and always
picturesque forms; the poor with blue or white tucked-up dresses, the
rich with long garments of the most various stuffs, with silken kaftans,
or fine clothes in delicate broken colours, with white, red, green, or
black turbans, or with the noble but little-becoming Turkish _tarbush_;
then Greeks with their dandified _fustanellas_, or Arabian sheîkhs in
their wide, antiquely-draped mantle: the children quite, or half, naked,
with shaven heads, from which a single lock stands up on their bare
polls like a handle; the women with veiled faces, whose black-rimmed
eyes glance ghostly from out the holes cut in the covering. All these
and a hundred other indescribable forms go, creep, dash by on foot, on
asses, mules, dromedaries, camels, horses, only not in carriages; for
they were employed much more in the Pharoahic times than now. If I look
upward from the street, I see on one side a prospect of magnificent
mosques with their cupolas and slender minarets shooting into the air,
with long rows of generally carelessly-built, but now and then
richly-ornamented houses, distinguished by artistically-carved lattices,
and elegant balconies; on the other side my view is bounded by green
palmtrees, or leaf-wealthy sycamores and acacias. In the far back-ground
at last, beyond the level roofs and their green interruptions, there
come forth on the Libyan horizon the far-lighting sister-pair of the two
great pyramids, sunny amidst the fine æther in sharply-broken lines.
What a difference to the mongrel Alexandria, where the oriental nature
of the country and the mightily progressed culture of Europe still
strive for the mastery. It seems to me as if I had already penetrated to
the inmost heart of the East of the present.
LETTER X.
AT THE RUINS OF THE LABYRINTH.
_May 31, 1843._