EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS
[Illustration: THE SPHINX]
EGYPT
AND ITS MONUMENTS
BY
ROBERT HICHENS
ILLUSTRATED BY
JULES GUÉRIN
AND WITH PHOTOGRAPHS
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1923
Copyright, 1908, by
THE CENTURY CO.
_Published October, 1908_
_Printed in U. S. A._
CONTENTS
I PAGE
THE PYRAMIDS 5
II
THE SPHINX 18
III
SAKKARA 28
IV
ABYDOS 37
V
THE NILE 46
VI
DENDERAH 52
VII
KARNAK 66
VIII
LUXOR 88
IX
COLOSSI OF MEMNON 107
X
MEDINET-ABU 120
XI
THE RAMESSEUM 132
XII
DEIR-EL-BAHARI 148
XIII
THE TOMBS OF THE KINGS 166
XIV
EDFU 174
XV
KOM OMBOS 196
XVI
PHILÆ 212
XVII
“PHARAOH’S BED” 228
XVIII
OLD CAIRO 252
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
The Sphinx _Frontispiece_
Painted by Jules Guérin.
The Pyramids of Ghizeh 4
From a Photograph.
From the summit of the Great Pyramid 7
From a Photograph.
Looking down the main passage of the Great Pyramid 11
From a Photograph.
The Pyramids of Ghizeh 16
Painted by Jules Guérin.
The Sphinx 20
From a Photograph.
The Sphinx and the Second Pyramid 25
From a Photograph.
The Step Pyramid of Sakkara 29
Painted by Jules Guérin.
Entrance to the Tomb of Thi 34
From a Photograph.
Temple of Seti I, Abydos 39
From a Photograph.
The Great Hall of Abydos 44
Painted by Jules Guérin.
Village on the site of Ancient Memphis 48
From a Photograph.
On the Roof of the Temple of Hathor, Denderah 53
From a Photograph.
The Temple of Hathor, Denderah 57
Painted by Jules Guérin.
Figures of Cleopatra and her son Cæsarion on the wall of the
Temple of Hathor 62
From a Photograph.
Interior, Temple of Khuns, Karnak 67
From a Photograph.
The Great Temple of Karnak 72
Painted by Jules Guérin.
The Sacred Lotus in the Temple at Karnak 76
From a Photograph.
Entrance to Temple of Rameses III, Karnak 81
From a Photograph.
The Sacred Lake, Karnak 85
Painted by Jules Guérin.
The Temple of Luxor from the easterly Pylon 90
From a Photograph.
The Court of Amenhotep III, Temple of Luxor 93
Painted by Jules Guérin.
In the Temple of Luxor 97
From a Photograph.
Obelisk and Pylon, Luxor 102
From a Photograph.
The Great Colonnade, Temple of Luxor 105
Painted by Jules Guérin.
Near view of the Colossi of Memnon 109
From a Photograph.
The Colossi of Memnon 114
Painted by Jules Guérin.
The Valley of the Tombs of the Kings 117
From a Photograph.
The Temple of Medinet-Abu 122
Painted by Jules Guérin.
Corner of Second Court, Temple of Rameses III, Medinet-Abu 125
From a Photograph.
The Ramesseum 129
Painted by Jules Guérin.
“The Thinking Place of Rameses the Great.” Hall of Lotus Columns,
Ramesseum 133
From a Photograph.
The Plain of Thebes from the roof of the Ramesseum 137
From a Photograph.
Hall of Lotus Columns, Ramesseum 141
From a Photograph.
Pilasters and broken colossal statue of Rameses II 146
From a Photograph.
The Temple of Queen Hatasu, Deir-el-Bahari 149
Painted by Jules Guérin.
Recent excavations at Deir-el-Bahari 153
From a Photograph.
“The half-naked workmen toiling and sweating in the sun” 157
From a Photograph.
The Vache Hathor of Denderah 162
From a Photograph.
Painted tomb chamber of Prince Sen-nofer, Thebes 167
From a Photograph.
Temple of Esneh 171
From a Photograph.
Prayer in the Desert 175
Painted by Jules Guérin.
The Temple of Edfu 180
Painted by Jules Guérin.
Pylon, Temple of Edfu 183
From a Photograph.
The Temple of Edfu from the top of the Pylon 190
From a Photograph.
The Court, Temple of Edfu 193
Painted by Jules Guérin.
Hypostyle Hall, Kôm Ombos 197
From a Photograph.
The Temple of Kôm Ombos 201
Painted by Jules Guérin.
Temple of Kôm Ombos. Screen wall of Hypostyle Hall 206
From a Photograph.
The Island of Elephantine, from Assuan 210
From a Photograph.
The Isle of Philæ before the construction of the dam 213
From a Photograph.
The Sacred Isle of Philæ 217
Painted by Jules Guérin.
The Temple of Isis, Philæ 222
From a Photograph.
Nearly submerged columns, Isle of Philæ 225
From a Photograph.
Pharaoh’s Bed, before the construction of the dam 229
From a Photograph.
“Pharaoh’s Bed,” Island of Philæ 233
Painted by Jules Guérin.
In “Pharaoh’s Bed,” Island of Philæ 238
From a Photograph.
Fore-court of the Temple of Isis and “Pharaoh’s Bed,” Philæ 241
From a Photograph.
Abu-Simbel 245
Painted by Jules Guérin.
Abu-Simbel, from the river 249
From a Photograph.
EGYPT
AND ITS MONUMENTS
[Illustration:
From a photograph by Bonfils of Beirut
THE PYRAMIDS OF GHIZEH]
EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS
I
THE PYRAMIDS
Why do you come to Egypt? Do you come to gain a dream, or to regain lost
dreams of old; to gild your life with the drowsy gold of romance, to
lose a creeping sorrow, to forget that too many of your hours are
sullen, gray, bereft? What do you wish of Egypt?
The Sphinx will not ask you, will not care. The Pyramids, lifting their
unnumbered stones to the clear and wonderful skies, have held, still
hold, their secrets; but they do not seek for yours. The terrific
temples, the hot, mysterious tombs, odorous of the dead desires of men,
crouching in and under the immeasurable sands, will mock you with their
brooding silence, with their dim and somber repose. The brown children
of the Nile, the toilers who sing their antique songs by the shadoof
and the sakieh, the dragomans, the smiling goblin merchants, the
Bedouins who lead your camel into the pale recesses of the dunes--these
will not trouble themselves about your deep desires, your perhaps
yearning hunger of the heart and the imagination.
Yet Egypt is not unresponsive.
I came back to her with dread, after fourteen years of absence--years
filled for me with the rumors of her changes. And on the very day of my
arrival she calmly reassured me. She told me in her supremely magical
way that all was well with her. She taught me once more a lesson I had
not quite forgotten, but that I was glad to learn again--the lesson that
Egypt owes her most subtle, most inner beauty to Kheper, although she
owes her marvels to men; that when he created the sun which shines upon
her, he gave her the luster of her life, and that those who come to her
must be sun-worshipers if they would truly and intimately understand the
treasure of romance that lies heaped within her bosom.
Thoth, says the old legend, traveled in the Boat of the Sun. If you
would love Egypt rightly, you, too, must be a traveler in that bark. You
must not fear to steep yourself in the mystery of gold, in the mystery
of heat, in the mystery of silence that seems softly showered out of the
sun. The sacred white lotus must be your emblem, and Horus, the
hawk-headed, merged in Ra, your special deity. Scarcely had I set foot
once
[Illustration:
From stereograph, copyright, 1902, by Underwood & Underwood, New York
FROM THE SUMMIT OF THE GREAT PYRAMID]
more in Egypt before Thoth lifted me into the Boat of the Sun and
soothed my fears to sleep.
I arrived in Cairo. I saw new and vast hotels; I saw crowded streets;
brilliant shops; English officials driving importantly in victorias,
surely to pay dreadful calls of ceremony; women in gigantic hats, with
Niagaras of veil, waving white gloves as they talked of--I guessed--the
latest Cairene scandal. I perceived on the right hand and on the left
waiters created in Switzerland, hall porters made in Germany, Levantine
touts, determined Jews holding false antiquities in their lean fingers,
an English Baptist minister, in a white helmet, drinking chocolate on a
terrace, with a guide-book in one fist, a ticket to visit monuments in
the other. I heard Scottish soldiers playing, “I’ll be in Scotland
before ye!” and something within me, a lurking hope, I suppose, seemed
to founder and collapse--but only for a moment. It was after four in the
afternoon. Soon day would be declining. And I seemed to remember that
the decline of day in Egypt had moved me long ago--moved me as few, rare
things have ever done. Within half an hour I was alone, far up the long
road--Ismail’s road--that leads from the suburbs of Cairo to the
Pyramids. And then Egypt took me like a child by the hand and reassured
me.
It was the first week of November, high Nile had not subsided, and all
the land here, between the river and the sand where the Sphinx keeps
watch, was hidden beneath the vast and tranquil waters of what seemed a
tideless sea--a sea fringed with dense masses of date-palms, girdled in
the far distance by palm-trees that looked almost black, broken by low
and tiny islands on which palm-trees kept the white and the brown houses
in their feathery embrace. Above these isolated houses pigeons circled.
In the distance the lateen sails of boats glided, sometimes behind the
palms, coming into view, vanishing, mysteriously reappearing among their
narrow trunks. Here and there a living thing moved slowly, wading
homeward through this sea: a camel from the sands of Ghizeh, a buffalo,
two donkeys, followed by boys who held with brown hands their dark blue
skirts near their faces, a Bedouin leaning forward upon the neck of his
quickly stepping horse. At one moment I seemed to look upon the lagoons
of Venice, a watery vision full of a glassy calm. Then the palm-trees in
the water, and growing to its edge, the pale sands that, far as the eyes
could see, from Ghizeh to Sakkara and beyond, fringed it toward the
west, made me think of the Pacific, of palmy islands of a paradise where
men grow drowsy in well-being, and dream away the years. And then I
looked still farther, beyond the pallid line of the sands, and I saw a
Pyramid of gold, the wonder Khufu had built. As a golden wonder it
saluted me after all my years of absence. Later I was to see it gray as
gray sands, sulphur color in the afternoon from very near at hand,
[Illustration:
From stereograph, copyright, 1908, by Underwood & Underwood, New York
LOOKING DOWN THE MAIN PASSAGE OF THE GREAT PYRAMID]
black as a monument draped in funereal velvet for a mourning under the
stars at night, white as a monstrous marble tomb soon after dawn from
the sand-dunes between it and Sakkara. But as a golden thing it greeted
me, as a golden miracle I shall remember it.
Slowly the sun went down. The second Pyramid seemed also made of gold.
Drowsily splendid it and its greater brother looked set on the golden
sands beneath the golden sky. And now the gold came traveling down from
the desert to the water, turning it surely to a wine like the wine of
gold that flowed down Midas’s throat; then, as the magic grew, to a
Pactolus, and at last to a great surface that resembled golden ice,
hard, glittering, unbroken by any ruffling wave. The islands rising from
this golden ice were jet black, the houses black, the palms and their
shadows that fell upon the marvel black. Black were the birds that flew
low from roof to roof, black the wading camels, black the meeting leaves
of the tall lebbek-trees that formed a tunnel from where I stood to Mena
House. And presently a huge black Pyramid lay supine on the gold, and
near it a shadowy brother seemed more humble than it, but scarcely less
mysterious. The gold deepened, glowed more fiercely. In the sky above
the Pyramids hung tiny cloud wreaths of rose red, delicate and airy as
the gossamers of Tunis. As I turned, far off in Cairo I saw the first
lights glittering across the fields of doura, silvery white, like
diamonds. But the silver did not call me. My imagination was held
captive by the gold. I was summoned by the gold, and I went on, under
the black lebbek-trees, on Ismail’s road, toward it. And I dwelt in it
many days.
The wonders of Egypt man has made seem to increase in stature before the
spirits’ eyes as man learns to know them better, to tower up ever higher
till the imagination is almost stricken by their looming greatness.
Climb the great Pyramid, spend a day with Abou on its summit, come down,
penetrate into its recesses, stand in the king’s chamber, listen to the
silence there, feel it with your hands,--is it not tangible in this hot
fastness of incorruptible death?--creep, like the surreptitious midget
you feel yourself to be, up those long and steep inclines of polished
stone, watching the bloomy darkness of the narrow walls, the far-off
pinpoint of light borne by the Bedouin who guides you, hear the twitter
of the bats that have their dwelling in this monstrous gloom that man
has made to shelter the thing whose ambition could never be embalmed,
though that, of all its qualities, should have been given here, in the
land it dowered, a life perpetual. Now you know the great Pyramid. You
know that you can climb it, that you can enter it. You have seen it from
all sides, under all aspects. It is familiar to you.
No, it can never be that. With its more wonderful comrade, the Sphinx,
it has the power peculiar, so it seems to me, to certain of the rock and
stone monuments
[Illustration: THE PYRAMIDS OF GHIZEH]
of Egypt, of holding itself ever aloof, almost like the soul of man
which can retreat at will, like the Bedouin retreating from you into the
blackness of the Pyramid, far up, or far down, where the pursuing
stranger, unaided, cannot follow.
II
THE SPHINX
One day at sunset I saw a bird trying to play with the Sphinx--a bird
like a swallow, but with a ruddy brown on its breast, a gleam of blue
somewhere on its wings. When I came to the edge of the sand basin where
perhaps Khufu saw it lying nearly four thousand years before the birth
of Christ, the Sphinx and the bird were quite alone. The bird flew near
the Sphinx, whimsically turning this way and that, flying now low, now
high, but ever returning to the magnet which drew it, which held it,
from which it surely longed to extract some sign of recognition. It
twittered, it poised itself in the golden air, with its bright eyes
fixed upon those eyes of stone which gazed beyond it, beyond the land of
Egypt, beyond the world of men, beyond the center of the sun to the last
verges of eternity. And presently it alighted on the head of the Sphinx,
then on its ear, then on its breast; and over the breast it tripped
jerkily, with tiny, elastic steps, looking upward, its whole body
quivering apparently with a desire for comprehension--a desire for some
manifestation of friendship. Then suddenly it spread its wings
[Illustration: THE SPHINX]
and, straight as an arrow, it flew away over the sands and the waters
toward the doura-fields and Cairo.
And the sunset waned, and the afterglow flamed and faded, and the clear,
soft African night fell. The pilgrims who day by day visit the Sphinx,
like the bird, had gone back to Cairo. They had come, as the bird had
come; as those who have conquered Egypt came; as the Greeks came,
Alexander of Macedon, and the Ptolemies; as the Romans came; as the
Mamelukes, the Turks, the French, the English came.
They had come--and gone.
And that enormous face, with the stains of stormy red still adhering to
its cheeks, grew dark as the darkness closed in, turned brown as a
fellah’s face, as the face of that fellah who whispered his secret in
the Sphinx’s ear, but learnt no secret in return; turned black almost as
a Nubian’s face. The night accentuated its appearance of terrible
repose, of superhuman indifference to whatever might befall. In the
night I seemed to hear the footsteps of the dead--of all the dead
warriors and the steeds they rode, defiling over the sand before the
unconquerable thing they perhaps thought that they had conquered. At
last the footsteps died away. There was a silence. Then, coming down
from the Great Pyramid, surely I heard the light patter of a donkey’s
feet. They went to the Sphinx and ceased. The silence was profound. And
I remembered the legend that Mary, Joseph, and the Holy Child once
halted here on their long journey, and that Mary laid the tired Christ
between the paws of the Sphinx to sleep. Yet even of the Christ the soul
within that body could take no heed at all.
It is, I think, one of the most astounding facts in the history of man
that a man was able to contain within his mind, to conceive, the
conception of the Sphinx. That he could carry it out in the stone is
amazing. But how much more amazing it is that before there was the
Sphinx he was able to see it with his imagination! One may criticize the
Sphinx. One may say impertinent things that are true about it: that seen
from behind at a distance its head looks like an enormous mushroom
growing in the sand, that its cheeks are swelled inordinately, that its
thick-lipped mouth is legal, that from certain places it bears a
resemblance to a prize bulldog. All this does not matter at all. What
does matter is that into the conception and execution of the Sphinx has
been poured a supreme imaginative power. He who created it looked beyond
Egypt, beyond the life of man. He grasped the conception of Eternity,
and realized the nothingness of Time, and he rendered it in stone.
I can imagine the most determined atheist looking at the Sphinx and, in
a flash, not merely believing, but feeling that he had before him proof
of the life of the soul beyond the grave, of the life of the soul of
Khufu beyond the tomb of his Pyramid. Always as you return to the
Sphinx you wonder at it more, you adore more strangely its repose, you
steep yourself more intimately in the aloof peace that seems to emanate
from it as light emanates from the sun. And as you look on it at last
perhaps you understand the infinite; you understand where is the bourne
to which the finite flows with all its greatness, as the great Nile
flows from beyond Victoria Nyanza to the sea.
And as the wonder of the Sphinx takes possession of you gradually, so
gradually do you learn to feel the majesty of the Pyramids of Ghizeh.
Unlike the Step Pyramid of Sakkara, which, even when one is near it,
looks like a small mountain, part of the land on which it rests; the
Pyramids of Ghizeh look what they are--artificial excrescences, invented
and carried out by man, expressions of man’s greatness. Exquisite as
they are as features of the drowsy golden landscape at the setting of
the sun, I think they look most wonderful at night, when they are black
beneath the stars. On many nights I have sat in the sand at a distance
and looked at them, and always, and increasingly, they have stirred my
imagination. Their profound calm, their classical simplicity, are
greatly emphasized when no detail can be seen, when they are but black
shapes towering to the stars. They seem to aspire then like prayers
prayed by one who has said, “God does not need my prayers, but I need
them.” In their simplicity they suggest a crowd of thoughts, and of
desires. Guy de Maupassant has said that of all the arts architecture
is perhaps the most esthetic, the most mysterious, and the most
nourished by ideas. How true this is you feel as you look at the Great
Pyramid by night. It seems to breathe out mystery. The immense base
recalls to you the labyrinth within; the long descent from the tiny slit
that gives you entrance, your uncertain steps in its hot, eternal night,
your falls on the ice-like surfaces of its polished blocks of stone, the
crushing weight that seemed to lie on your heart as you stole
uncertainly on, summoned almost as by the desert; your sensation of
being forever imprisoned, taken and hidden by a monster from Egypt’s
wonderful light, as you stood in the central chamber, and realized the
stone ocean into whose depths, like some intrepid diver, you had dared
deliberately to come. And then your eyes travel up the slowly shrinking
walls till they reach the dark point which is the top. There you stood
with Abou, who spends half his life on the highest stone, hostages of
the sun, bathed in light and air that perhaps came to you from the Gold
Coast. And you saw men and camels like flies, and Cairo like a gray
blur, and the Mokattam hills almost as a higher ridge of the sands. The
mosque of Mohammed Ali was like a cup turned over. Far below slept the
dead in that graveyard of the Sphinx, with its pale stones, its sand,
its palm, its “Sycamores of the South,” once worshiped and regarded as
Hathor’s living body. And beyond them on one side
[Illustration:
From stereograph, copyright, 1908, by Underwood & Underwood, New York
THE SPHINX AND THE SECOND PYRAMID]
were the sleeping waters, with islands small, surely, as delicate
Egyptian hands, and on the other the great desert that stretches, so the
Bedouins say, on and on “for a march of a thousand days.”
That base and that summit--what suggestion and what mystery in their
contrast! What sober, eternal beauty in the dark line which unites them,
now sharply, yet softly, defined against the night, which is purple as
the one garment of the fellah! That line leads the soul irresistibly
from earth to the stars.
III
SAKKARA
It was the “Little Christmas” of the Egyptians as I rode to Sakkara,
after seeing a wonderful feat, the ascent and descent of the second
Pyramid in nineteen minutes by a young Bedouin called Mohammed Ali, who
very seriously informed me that the only Roumi who had ever reached the
top was an “American gentlemens” called Mark Twain, on his first visit
to Egypt. On his second visit, Ali said, Mr. Twain had a bad foot, and
declared he could not be bothered with the second Pyramid. He had been
up and down it once without a guide; he had disturbed the jackal which
lives near its summit, and which I saw running in the sunshine as Ali
drew near its lair, and he was satisfied to rest on his immortal
laurels. To the Bedouins of the Pyramids Mark Twain’s world-wide
celebrity is owing to one fact alone: he is the only Roumi who has
climbed the second Pyramid. That is why his name is known to every one.
It was the “Little Christmas,” and from the villages in the plain the
Egyptians came pouring out to visit
[Illustration: THE STEP PYRAMID OF SAKKARA]
their dead in the desert cemeteries as I passed by to visit the dead in
the tombs far off on the horizon. Women, swathed in black, gathered in
groups and jumped monotonously up and down, to the accompaniment of
stained hands clapping, and strange and weary songs. Tiny children blew
furiously into tin trumpets, emitting sounds that were terribly
European. Men strode seriously by, or stood in knots among the graves,
talking vivaciously of the things of this life. As the sun rose higher
in the heavens, this visit to the dead became a carnival of the living.
Laughter and shrill cries of merriment betokened the resignation of the
mourners. The sand-dunes were black with running figures, racing,
leaping, chasing one another, rolling over and over in the warm and
golden grains. Some sat among the graves and ate. Some sang. Some
danced. I saw no one praying, after the sun was up. The Great Pyramid of
Ghizeh was transformed in this morning hour, and gleamed like a marble
mountain, or like the hill covered with salt at El-Outaya, in Algeria.
As we went on it sank down into the sands, until at last I could see
only a small section with its top, which looked almost as pointed as a
gigantic needle. Abou was there on the hot stones in the golden eye of
the sun--Abou who lives to respect his Pyramid, and to serve Turkish
coffee to those who are determined enough to climb it. Before me the
Step Pyramid rose, brown almost as bronze, out of the sands here
desolate and pallid. Soon I was in the house of Marriette, between the
little sphinxes.
Near Cairo, although the desert is real desert, it does not give, to me,
at any rate, the immense impression of naked sterility, of almost
brassy, sunbaked fierceness, which often strikes one in the Sahara to
the south of Algeria, where at midday one sometimes has a feeling of
being lost upon a waste of metal, gleaming, angry, tigerish in color.
Here, in Egypt, both the people and the desert seem gentler, safer, more
amiable. Yet these tombs of Sakkara are hidden in a desolation of the
sands, peculiarly blanched and mournful; and as you wander from tomb to
tomb, descending and ascending, stealing through great galleries beneath
the sands, creeping through tubes of stone, crouching almost on hands
and knees in the sultry chambers of the dead, the awfulness of the
passing away of dynasties and of races comes, like a cloud, upon your
spirit. But this cloud lifts and floats from you in the cheerful tomb of
Thi, that royal councilor, that scribe and confidant, whose life must
have been passed in a round of serene activities, amid a sneering,
though doubtless admiring, population.
Into this tomb of white, vivacious figures, gay almost, though never
wholly frivolous, for these men were full of purpose, full of an ardor
that seduces even where it seems grotesque, I took with me a child of
ten called Ali, from the village of Kafiah; and as I looked
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO THE TOMB OF THI]
from him to the walls around us, rather than the passing away of the
races, I realized the persistence of type. For everywhere I saw the face
of little Ali, with every feature exactly reproduced. Here he was
bending over a sacrifice, leading a sacred bull, feeding geese from a
cup, roasting a chicken, pulling a boat, carpentering, polishing,
conducting a monkey for a walk, or merely sitting bolt upright and
sneering. There were lines of little Alis with their hands held to their
breasts, their faces in profile, their knees rigid, in the happy tomb of
Thi; but he glanced at them unheeding, did not recognize his ancestors.
And he did not care to penetrate into the tombs of Mera and
Meri-Ra-ankh, into the Serapeum and the Mestaba of Ptah-hotep. Perhaps
he was right. The Serapeum is grand in its vastness, with its long and
high galleries and its mighty vaults containing the huge granite
sarcophagi of the sacred bulls of Apis; Mera, red and white, welcomes
you from an elevated niche benignly; Ptah-hotep, priest of the fifth
dynasty, receives you, seated at a table that resembles a rake with
long, yellow teeth standing on its handle, and drinking stiffly a cup of
wine. You see upon the wall near by, with sympathy, a patient being
plied by a naked and evidently an unyielding physician with medicine
from a jar that might have been visited by Morgiana, a musician playing
upon an instrument like a huge and stringless harp. But it is the happy
tomb of Thi that lingers in your memory. In that tomb one sees
proclaimed with a marvelous ingenuity and expressiveness the joy and the
activity of life. Thi must have loved life; loved prayer and sacrifice,
loved sport and war, loved feasting and gaiety, labor of the hands and
of the head, loved the arts, the music of flute and harp, singing by the
lingering and plaintive voices which seem to express the essence of the
East, loved sweet odors, loved sweet women,--do we not see him sitting
to receive offerings with his wife beside him?--loved the clear nights
and the radiant days that in Egypt make glad the heart of man. He must
have loved the splendid gift of life, and used it completely. And so
little Ali did very right to make his sole obeisance at Thi’s delicious
tomb, from which death itself seems banished by the soft and embracing
radiance of the almost living walls.
This delicate cheerfulness, a quite airy gaiety of life, is often
combined in Egypt, and most beautifully and happily combined, with
tremendous solidity, heavy impressiveness, a hugeness that is well-nigh
tragic; and it supplies a relief to eye, to mind, to soul, that is sweet
and refreshing as the trickle of a tarantella from a reed flute heard
under the shadows of a temple of Hercules. Life showers us with
contrasts. Art, which gives to us a second and a more withdrawn life,
opening to us a door through which we pass to our dreams, may well
imitate life in this.
IV
ABYDOS
Through a long and golden noontide, and on into an afternoon whose
opulence of warmth and light it seemed could never wane, I sat alone, or
wandered gently quite alone, in the Temple of Seti I at Abydos. Here
again I was in a place of the dead. In Egypt one ever seeks the dead in
the sunshine, black vaults in the land of the gold. But here in Abydos I
was companioned by whiteness. The general effect of Seti’s mighty temple
is that it is a white temple when seen in full sunshine and beneath a
sky of blinding blue. In an arid place it stands, just beyond an
Egyptian village that is a maze of dust, of children, of animals, and
flies. The last blind houses of the village, brown as brown paper,
confront it on a mound, and as I came toward it a girl-child swathed in
purple, with ear-rings, and a twist of orange handkerchief above her
eyes, full of cloud and fire, leaned from a roof, sinuously as a young
snake, to watch me. On each side, descending, were white, ruined walls,
stretched out like defaced white arms of the temple to receive me. I
stood still for a moment and looked at the narrow, severely simple
doorway, at the twelve broken columns advanced on either side, white and
grayish white with their right angles, their once painted figures now
almost wholly colorless.
Here lay the Osirians, those blessed dead of the land of Egypt, who
worshiped the Judge of the Dead, the Lord of the Underworld, and who
hoped for immortality through him--Osiris, husband of Isis, Osiris,
receiver of prayers, Osiris the sun who will not be conquered by night,
but eternally rises again, and so is the symbol of the resurrection of
the soul. It is said that Set, the power of Evil, tore the body of
Osiris into fourteen fragments and scattered them over the land. But
multitudes of worshipers of Osiris believed him buried near Abydos and,
like those who loved the sweet songs of Hafiz, they desired to be buried
near him whom they adored; and so this place became a place of the dead,
a place of many prayers, a white place of many longings.
I was glad to be alone there. The guardian left me in perfect peace. I
happily forgot him. I sat down in the shadow of a column upon its mighty
projecting base. The sky was blinding blue. Great bees hummed, like
bourdons, through the silence, deepening the almost heavy calm. These
columns, architraves, doorways, how mighty, how grandly strong they
were! And yet soon I began to be aware that even here, where surely one
should read only the Book of the Dead,
[Illustration:
From stereograph, copyright, 1904, by Underwood & Underwood, New York.
TEMPLE OF SETI I, ABYDOS]
or bend down to the hot ground to listen if perchance one might hear the
dead themselves murmuring over the chapters of Beatification far down in
their hidden tombs, there was a lightness, a gentle gaiety of life, as
in the tomb of Thi. The effect of solidity was immense. These columns
bulged, almost like great fruits swollen out by their heady strength of
blood. They towered up in crowds. The heavy roof, broken in places most
mercifully to show squares and oblongs of that perfect, calling blue,
was like a frowning brow. And yet I was with grace, with gentleness,
with lightness, because in the place of the dead I was again with the
happy, living walls. Above me, on the roof, there was a gleam of palest
blue, like the blue I have sometimes seen at morning on the Ionian sea
just where it meets the shore. The double rows of gigantic columns
stretched away, tall almost as forest trees, to right of me and to left,
and were shut in by massive walls, strong as the walls of a fortress.
And on these columns, and on these walls, dead painters and gravers had
breathed the sweet breath of life. Here in the sun, for me alone, as it
seemed, a population followed their occupations. Men walked, and
kneeled, and stood, some white and clothed, some nude, some red as the
red man’s child that leaped beyond the sea. And here was the
lotus-flower held in reverent hands, not the rose-lotus, but the blossom
that typified the rising again of the sun, and that, worn as an amulet,
signified the gift of eternal youth. And here was hawk-faced Horus, and
here a priest offering sacrifice to a god, belief in whom has long since
passed away. A king revealed himself to me, adoring Ptah, “Father of the
beginnings,” who established upon earth, my figures thought, the
everlasting justice, and again at the knees of Amen burning incense in
his honor. Isis and Osiris stood together, and sacrifice was made before
their sacred bark. And Seti worshiped them, and Seshta, goddess of
learning, wrote in the book of eternity the name of the king.
The great bees hummed, moving slowly in the golden air among the mighty
columns, passing slowly among these records of lives long over, but
which seemed still to be. And I looked at the lotus-flowers which the
little grotesque hands were holding, had been holding for how many
years--the flowers that typified the rising again of the sun and the
divine gift of eternal youth. And I thought of the bird and the Sphinx,
the thing that was whimsical wooing, the thing that was mighty. And I
gazed at the immense columns and at the light and little figures all
about me. Bird and Sphinx, delicate whimsicality, calm and terrific
power! In Egypt the dead men have combined them, and the combination has
an irresistible fascination, weaves a spell that entrances you in the
sunshine and beneath the blinding blue. At Abydos I knew it. And I loved
the columns that seemed blown out with
[Illustration: THE GREAT HALL OF ABYDOS]
exuberant strength, and I loved the delicate white walls that, like the
lotus-flower, give to the world a youth that seems eternal--a youth that
is never frivolous, but that is full of the divine, and yet pathetic,
animation of happy life.
The great bees hummed more drowsily. I sat quite still in the sun. And
then presently, moved by some prompting instinct, I turned my head, and,
far off, through the narrow portal of the temple, I saw the girl-child
swathed in purple still lying, sinuously as a young snake, upon the
palm-wood roof above the brown earth wall to watch me with her eyes of
cloud and fire.
And upon me, like cloud and fire--cloud of the tombs and the great
temple columns, fire of the brilliant life painted and engraved upon
them, there stole the spell of Egypt.
V
THE NILE
I do not find in Egypt any more the strangeness that once amazed, and at
first almost bewildered me. Stranger far is Morocco, stranger the
country beyond Biskra, near Mogar, round Touggourt, even about El
Kantara. There I feel very far away, as a child feels distance from
dear, familiar things. I look to the horizon expectant of I know not
what magical occurrences, what mysteries. I am aware of the summons to
advance to marvelous lands, where marvelous things must happen. I am
taken by that sensation of almost trembling magic which came to me when
first I saw a mirage far out in the Sahara. But Egypt, though it
contains so many marvels, has no longer for me the marvelous atmosphere.
Its keynote is seductiveness.
In Egypt one feels very safe. Smiling policemen in clothes of spotless
white--emblematic, surely, of their innocence!--seem to be everywhere,
standing calmly in the sun. Very gentle, very tender, although perhaps
not very true, are the Bedouin at the Pyramids. Up the Nile the
fellaheen smile as kindly as the policemen,
[Illustration:
From a photograph by Bonfils of Beirut
VILLAGE ON THE SITE OF ANCIENT MEMPHIS]
smile protectingly upon you, as if they would say, “Allah has placed us
here to take care of the confiding stranger.” No ferocious demands for
money fall upon my ears; only an occasional suggestion is subtly
conveyed to me that even the poor must live and that I am immensely
rich. An amiable, an almost enticing seductiveness seems emanating from
the fertile soil, shining in the golden air, gleaming softly in the
amber sands, dimpling in the brown, the mauve, the silver eddies of the
Nile. It steals upon one. It ripples over one. It laps one as if with
warm and scented waves. A sort of lustrous languor overtakes one. In
physical well-being one sinks down, and with wide eyes one gazes and
listens and enjoys, and thinks not of the morrow.
The dahabiyeh--her very name, the _Loulia_, has a gentle, seductive,
cooing sound--drifts broadside to the current with furled sails, or
glides smoothly on before an amiable north wind with sails unfurled.
Upon the bloomy banks, rich brown in color, the brown men stoop, and
straighten themselves, and stoop again, and sing. The sun gleams on
their copper skins, which look polished and metallic. Crouched in his
net behind the drowsy oxen, the little boy circles the live-long day
with the sakieh. And the sakieh raises its wailing, wayward voice and
sings to the shadoof; and the shadoof sings to the sakieh; and the
lifted water falls and flows away into the green wilderness of doura
that, like a miniature forest, spreads on every hand to the low
mountains, which do not perturb the spirit, as do the iron mountains of
Algeria. And always the sun is shining, and the body is drinking in its
warmth, and the soul is drinking in its gold. And always the ears are
full of warm and drowsy and monotonous music. And always the eyes see
the lines of brown bodies, on the brown river-banks above the brown
waters, bending, straightening, bending, straightening, with an
exquisitely precise monotony. And always the _Loulia_ seems to be
drifting, so quietly she slips up, or down, the level waterway.
And one drifts, too; one can but drift, happily, sleepily, forgetting
every care. From Abydos to Denderah one drifts, and from Denderah to
Karnak, to Luxor, to all the marvels on the western shore; and on to
Edfu, to Kom Ombos, to Assuan, and perhaps even into Nubia, to
Abu-Simbel and to Wadi-Halfa. Life on the Nile is a long dream, golden
and sweet as honey of Hymettus. For I let the “divine serpent,” who at
Philæ may be seen issuing from her charmed cavern, take me very quietly
to see the abodes of the dead, the halls of the vanished, upon her green
and sterile shores. I know nothing of the bustling, shrieking steamer
that defies her, churning into angry waves her waters for the
edification of those who would “do” Egypt and be gone before they know
her.
If you are in a hurry, do not come to Egypt. To hurry in Egypt is as
wrong as to fall asleep in Wall Street, or to sit in the Greek Theater
at Taormina, reading “How to Make a Fortune with a Capital of Fifty
Pounds.”
VI
DENDERAH
From Abydos, home of the cult of Osiris, judge of the dead, I came to
Denderah, the great temple of the “Lady of the Underworld,” as the
goddess Hathor was sometimes called, though she was usually worshiped as
the Egyptian Aphrodite, goddess of joy, goddess of love and loveliness.
It was early morning when I went ashore. The sun was above the eastern
hills, and a boy, clad in a rope of plaited grass, sent me half shyly
the greeting, “May your day be happy!”
Youth is, perhaps, the most divine of all the gifts of the gods, as
those who wore the lotus-blossom amulet believed thousands of years ago,
and Denderah, appropriately, is a very young Egyptian temple, probably,
indeed, the youngest of all the temples on the Nile. Its
youthfulness--it is only about two thousand years of age--identifies it
happily with the happiness and beauty of its presiding deity, and as I
rode toward it on the canal-bank in the young freshness of the morning,
I thought of the goddess Safekh and of the sacred Persea-tree. When
Safekh inscribed upon a leaf of
[Illustration:
From stereograph, copyright, 1908, by Underwood & Underwood, New York
ON THE ROOF OF THE TEMPLE OF HATHOR, DENDERAH]
the Persea-tree the name of king or conqueror, he gained everlasting
life. Was it the life of youth? An everlasting life of middle age might
be a doubtful benefit. And then mentally I added, “unless one lived in
Egypt.” For here the years drop from one, and every golden hour brings
to one surely another drop of the wondrous essence that sets time at
defiance and charms sad thoughts away.
Unlike White Abydos, White Denderah stands apart from habitations, in a
still solitude upon a blackened mound. From far off I saw the façade,
large, bare, and sober, rising, in a nakedness as complete as that of
Aphrodite rising from the wave, out of the plain of brown, alluvial soil
that was broken here and there by a sharp green of growing things. There
was something of sadness in the scene, and again I thought of Hathor as
the “Lady of the Underworld,” some deep-eyed being, with a pale brow,
hair like the night, and yearning, wistful hands stretched out in
supplication. There was a hush upon this place. The loud and vehement
cry of the shadoof-man died away. The sakieh droned in my ears no more
like distant Sicilian pipes playing at Natale. I felt a breath from the
desert. And, indeed, the desert was near--that realistic desert which
suggests to the traveler approaches to the sea, so that beyond each
pallid dune, as he draws near it, he half expects to hear the lapping of
the waves. Presently, when, having ascended that marvelous staircase of
the New Year, walking in procession with the priests upon its walls
toward the rays of Ra, I came out upon the temple roof, and looked upon
the desert--upon sheeny sands, almost like slopes of satin shining in
the sun, upon paler sands in the distance, holding an Arab _campo
santo_, in which rose the little creamy cupolas of a sheik’s tomb,
surrounded by a creamy wall, those little cupolas gave to me a feeling
of the real, the irresistible Africa such as I had not known since I had
been in Egypt; and I thought I heard in the distance the ceaseless hum
of praying and praising voices.
“God hath rewarded the faithful with gardens through which flow
rivulets. They shall be forever therein, and that is the reward of the
virtuous.”
The sensation of solemnity which overtook me as I approached the temple
deepened when I drew close to it, when I stood within it. In the first
hall, mighty, magnificent, full of enormous columns from which faces of
Hathor once looked to the four points of the compass, I found only one
face almost complete, saved from the fury of fanatics by the protection
of the goddess of chance, in whom the modern Egyptian so implicitly
believes. In shape it was a delicate oval. In the long eyes, about the
brow, the cheeks, there was a strained expression that suggested to me
more than a gravity--almost an anguish--of spirit. As I looked at it, I
thought of Eleanora Duse. Was this the ideal of joy
[Illustration: THE TEMPLE OF HATHOR. DENDERAH]
in the time of the Ptolemies? Joy may be rapturous, or it may be serene;
but could it ever be like this? The pale, delicious blue that here and
there, in tiny sections, broke the almost haggard, grayish whiteness of
this first hall with the roof of black, like bits of an evening sky seen
through tiny window-slits in a somber room, suggested joy, was joy
summed up in color. But Hathor’s face was weariful and sad.
From the gloom of the inner halls came a sound, loud, angry, menacing,
as I walked on, a sound of menace and an odor, heavy and deathlike. Only
in the first hall had those builders and decorators of two thousand
years ago been moved by their conception of the goddess to hail her, to
worship her, with the purity of white, with the sweet gaiety of
turquoise. Or so it seems to-day, when the passion of Christianity
against Hathor has spent itself and died. Now Christians come to seek
what Christian Copts destroyed; wander through the deserted courts,
desirous of looking upon the faces that have long since been hacked to
pieces. A more benign spirit informs our world, but, alas! Hathor has
been sacrificed to the devilries of old. And it is well, perhaps, that
her temple should be sad, like a place of silent waiting for the glories
that are gone.
With every step my melancholy grew. Encompassed by gloomy odors,
assailed by the clamor of gigantic bats, which flew furiously among the
monstrous pillars near a roof ominous as a storm-cloud, my spirit was
haunted by the sad eyes of Hathor, which gaze forever from that column
in the first hall. Were they always like that? Once that face dwelt with
a crowd of other faces, looked upon a glory of worship. And all the
other faces have gone, and all the glory has passed. And, like so many
of the living, the goddess has paid for her splendors. The pendulum
swung, and where men adored, men hated her--her the goddess of love and
loveliness. And as the human face changes when terror and sorrow come, I
felt as if Hathor’s face of stone had changed upon its column, looking
toward the Nile, in obedience to the anguish in her heart; I felt as if
Denderah were a majestic house of grief. So I must always think of it,
dark, tragic, and superb. The Egyptians once believed that when death
came to a man, the soul of him, which they called the Ba, winged its way
to the gods, but that, moved by a sweet unselfishness, it returned
sometime to his tomb, to give comfort to the poor, deserted mummy. Upon
the lids of sarcophagi it is sometimes represented as a bird, flying
down to, or resting upon, the mummy. As I went onward in the darkness,
among the columns, over the blocks of stone that form the pavements,
seeing vaguely the sacred boats upon the walls, Horus and Thoth, the
king before Osiris; as I mounted and descended with the priests to roof
and floor, I longed, instead of the clamor of the bats, to hear the
light flutter of the soft wings of the Ba of Hathor, flying
[Illustration: FIGURES OF CLEOPATRA AND HER SON CÆSARION ON THE WALL OF
THE TEMPLE OF HATHOR]
from Paradise to this sad temple of the desert to bring her comfort in
the gloom. I thought of her as a poor woman, suffering as only women can
in loneliness.
In the museum at Cairo there is the mummy of “the lady Amanit, priestess
of Hathor.” She lies there upon her back, with her thin body slightly
turned toward the left side, as if in an effort to change her position.
Her head is completely turned to the same side. Her mouth is wide open,
showing all the teeth. The tongue is lolling out. Upon the head the
thin, brown hair makes a line above the little ear, and is mingled at
the back of the head with false tresses. Round the neck is a mass of
ornaments, of amulets and beads. The right arm and hand lie along the
body. The expression of “the lady Amanit” is very strange, and very
subtle; for it combines horror--which implies activity--with a profound,
an impenetrable repose, far beyond the reach of all disturbance. In the
temple of Denderah I fancied the lady Amanit ministering sadly, even
terribly, to a lonely goddess, moving in fear through an eternal gloom,
dying at last there, overwhelmed by tasks too heavy for that tiny body,
the ultra-sensitive spirit that inhabited it. And now she sleeps--one
feels that, as one gazes at the mummy--very profoundly, though not yet
very calmly, the lady Amanit. But her goddess--still she wakes upon her
column.
When I came out at last into the sunlight of the growing day, I circled
the temple, skirting its gigantic, corniced walls, from which at
intervals the heads and paws of resting lions protrude, to see another
woman whose fame for loveliness and seduction is almost as legendary as
Aphrodite’s. It is fitting enough that Cleopatra’s form should be graven
upon the temple of Hathor; fitting, also, that though I found her in the
presence of deities, and in the company of her son, Cæsarion, her face,
which is in profile, should have nothing of Hathor’s sad impressiveness.
This, no doubt, is not the real Cleopatra. Nevertheless, this face
suggests a certain self-complacent cruelty and sensuality essentially
human, and utterly detached from all divinity, whereas in the face of
the goddess there is a something remote, and even distantly
intellectual, which calls the imagination to “the fields beyond.”
As I rode back toward the river, I saw again the boy clad in the rope of
plaited grass, and again he said, less shyly, “May your day be happy!”
It was a kindly wish. In the dawn I had felt it to be almost a prophecy.
But now I was haunted by the face of the goddess of Denderah, and I
remembered the legend of the lovely Laïs, who, when she began to age,
covered herself from the eyes of men with a veil, and went every day at
evening to look upon her statue, in which the genius of Praxiteles had
rendered permanent the beauty the woman could not keep. One evening,
hanging to the statue’s pedestal by a garland of red roses, the
sculptor found a mirror, upon the polished disk of which were traced
these words:
“Laïs, O Goddess, consecrates to thee her mirror: no longer able to see
there what she was, she will not see there what she has become.”