prolific in the abrupt creation of peers as if he were a democratic
government.
I looked about me. We stood in a ruined hall with columns, architraves
covered with inscriptions, segments of flat roof. Here and there traces
of painting, dull-red, pale, ethereal blue,--the “love-color” of Egypt,
as the Egyptians often call it,--still adhered to the stone. This hall,
dignified, grand, but happy, was open on all sides to the sun and air.
From it I could see tamarisk and acacia-trees, and far-off shadowy
mountains beyond the eastern verge of the Nile. And the trees were still
as carven things in an atmosphere that was a miracle of clearness and of
purity. Behind me, and near, the hard Libyan mountains gleamed in the
sun. Somewhere a boy was singing; and suddenly his singing died away.
And I thought of the “Lay of the Harper” which is inscribed upon the
[Illustration: “THE THINKING PLACE OF RAMESES THE GREAT,” HALL OF LOTUS
COLUMNS, RAMESSEUM]
tombs of Thebes--those tombs under those gleaming mountains:
For no one carries away his goods with him;
Yea, no one returns again who has gone thither.
It took the place of the song that had died as I thought of the great
king’s glory; that he had been here, and had long since passed away.
“The thinking place of Rameses the Great!”
“Suttinly.”
“You must leave me alone here, Ibrahim.”
I watched his gold-colored robe vanish into the gold of the sun through
the copper color of the columns. And I was quite alone in the “thinking
place” of Rameses. It was a brilliant day, the sky dark sapphire blue,
without even the specter of a cloud, or any airy, vaporous veil; the
heat already intense in the full sunshine, but delicious, if one slid
into a shadow. I slid into a shadow, and sat down on a warm block of
stone. And the silence flowed upon me--the silence of the Ramesseum.
Was _Horbehutet_, the winged disk, with crowned _uraei_, ever set up
above this temple’s principal door to keep it from destruction? I do not
know. But, if he was, he failed perfectly to fulfil his mission. And I
am glad he failed. I am glad of the ruin that is here, glad that walls
have crumbled or been overthrown, that columns have been cast down, and
ceilings torn off from the pillars that supported them, letting in the
sky. I would have nothing different in the thinking place of Rameses.
Like a cloud, a great golden cloud, a glory impending that will not,
cannot, be dissolved into the ether, he loomed over the Egypt that is
dead, he looms over the Egypt of to-day. Everywhere you meet his traces,
everywhere you hear his name. You say to a tall young Egyptian: “How big
you are growing, Hassan!”
He answers, “Come back next year, my gentleman, and I shall be like
Rameses the Great.”
Or you ask of the boatman who rows you, “How can you pull all day
against the current of the Nile?” And he smiles, and lifting his brown
arm, he says to you: “Look! I am as strong as Rameses the Great.”
This familiar fame comes down through some three thousand, two hundred,
and twenty years. Carved upon limestone and granite, now it seems
engraven also on every Egyptian heart that beats not only with the
movement of shadoof, or is not buried in the black soil fertilized by
Hapi. Thus can inordinate vanity prolong the true triumph of genius, and
impress its own view of itself upon the minds of millions. This Rameses
is believed to be the Pharaoh who oppressed the children of Israel.
As I sat in the Ramesseum that morning, I recalled his face--the face of
an artist and a dreamer rather
[Illustration:
From stereograph, copyright, 1908, by Underwood & Underwood, New York
THE PLAIN OF THEBES FROM THE ROOF OF THE RAMESSEUM]
than that of a warrior and oppressor; Asiatic, handsome, not
insensitive, not cruel, but subtle, aristocratic, and refined. I could
imagine it bending above the little serpents of the sistrum as they
lifted their melodious voices to bid Typhon depart, or watching the
dancing women’s rhythmic movements, or smiling half kindly, half with
irony, upon the lovelorn maiden who made her plaint:
“What is sweet to the mouth, to me is as the gall of birds;
Thy breath alone can comfort my heart.”
And I could imagine it looking profoundly grave, not sad, among the
columns with their opening lotus flowers. For it is the hall of the
lotus columns that Ibrahim calls the thinking place of the king.
There is something both lovely and touching to me in the lotus columns
of Egypt, in the tall masses of stone opening out into flowers near the
sun. Near the sun! Yes; only that obvious falsehood will convey to those
who have not seen them the effect of some of the hypostyle halls, the
columns of which seem literally soaring to the sky. And flowers of
stone, you will say, rudely carved and rugged! That does not matter.
There was poetry in the minds that conceived them, in the thought that
directed the hands which shaped them and placed them where they are. In
Egypt perpetually one feels how the ancient Egyptians loved the _Nymphæa
Lotus_, which is the white lotus, and the _Nymphæa cærulæa_, the lotus
that is blue. Did they not place Horus in its cup, and upon the head of
Nefer-Tum, the nature god, who represented in their mythology the heat
of the rising sun, and who seems to have been credited with power to
grant life in the world to come, set it as a sort of regal ornament? To
Seti I, when he returned in glory from his triumphs over the Syrians,
were given bouquets of lotus blossoms by the great officers of his
household. The tiny column of green feldspar ending in the lotus
typified eternal youth, even as the carnelian buckle typified the blood
of Isis, which washed away all sin. Kohl pots were fashioned in the form
of the lotus, cartouches sprang from it, wine flowed from cups shaped
like it. The lotus was part of the very life of Egypt, as the rose, the
American beauty rose, is part of our social life of to-day. And here, in
the Ramesseum, I found campaniform, or lotus-flower capitals on the
columns--here where Rameses once perhaps dreamed of his Syrian
campaigns, or of that famous combat when, “like Baal in his fury,” he
fought single-handed against the host of the Hittites massed in two
thousand, five hundred chariots to overthrow him.
The Ramesseum is a temple not of winds, but of soft and kindly airs.
There comes Zephyrus, whispering love to Flora incarnate in the Lotus.
To every sunbeam, to every little breeze, the ruins stretch out arms.
They adore the deep-blue sky, the shining,
[Illustration: HALL OF LOTUS COLUMNS, RAMESSEUM]
sifted sand, untrammeled nature, all that whispers, “Freedom.”
So I felt that day when Ibrahim left me, so I feel always when I sit in
the Ramesseum, that exultant victim of Time’s here not sacrilegious
hand.
All strong souls cry out secretly for liberty as for a sacred necessity
of life. Liberty seems to drench the Ramesseum. And all strong souls
must exult there. The sun has taken it as a beloved possession. No massy
walls keep him out. No shield-shaped battlements rear themselves up
against the outer world as at Medinet-Abu. No huge pylons cast down upon
the ground their forms in darkness. The stone glows with the sun, seems
almost to have a soul glowing with the sense, the sun-ray sense, of
freedom. The heart leaps up in the Ramesseum not frivolously, but with a
strange, sudden knowledge of the depths of passionate joy there are in
life and in bountiful, glorious nature. Instead of the strength of a
prison, one feels the ecstasy of space; instead of the safety of
inclosure, the rapture of naked publicity. But the public to whom this
place of the great king is consigned is a public of Theban hills; of the
sunbeams striking from them over the wide world toward the east; of
light airs, of drifting sand grains, of singing birds, and of
butterflies with pure white wings. If you have ever ridden an Arab
horse, mounted in the heart of an oasis, to the verge of the great
desert, you will remember the bound, thrilling with fiery animation,
which he gives when he sets his feet on the sand beyond the last tall
date-palms. A bound like that the soul gives when you sit in the
Ramesseum, and see the crowding sunbeams, the far-off groves of
palm-trees, and the drowsy mountains, like shadows, that sleep beyond
the Nile. And you look up, perhaps, as I looked that morning, and upon a
lotus column near you, relieved, you perceive the figure of a young man
singing.
A young man singing! Let him be the tutelary god of this place, whoever
he be, whether only some humble, happy slave, or the “superintendent of
song and of the recreation of the king.” Rather even than Amun-Ra let
him be the god. For there is something nobly joyous in this
architecture, a dignity that sings.
It has been said, but not established, that Rameses the Great was buried
in the Ramesseum, and when first I entered it the “Lay of the Harper”
came to my mind, with the sadness that attends the passing away of glory
into the shades of death. But an optimism almost as determined as
Emerson’s was quickly bred in me there. I could not be sad, though I
could be happily thoughtful, in the light of the Ramesseum. And even
when I left the thinking place, and, coming down the central aisle, saw
in the immersing sunshine of the Osiride Court the fallen colossus of
the king, I was not struck to sadness.
Imagine the greatest figure in the world,--such a figure
[Illustration:
From stereograph, copyright by Underwood & Underwood, New York
PILASTERS AND BROKEN COLOSSAL STATUE OF RAMESES II]
as this Rameses was in his day,--with all might, all glory, all climbing
power, all vigor, tenacity of purpose, and granite strength of will
concentrated within it, struck suddenly down, and falling backward in a
collapse of which the thunder might shake the vitals of the earth, and
you have this prostrate colossus. Even now one seems to hear it fall, to
feel the warm soil trembling beneath one’s feet as one approaches it. A
row of statues of enormous size, with arms crossed as if in resignation,
glowing in the sun, in color not gold or amber, but a delicate, desert
yellow, watch near it like servants of the dead. On a slightly lower
level than theirs it lies, and a little nearer the Nile. Only the upper
half of the figure is left, but its size is really terrific. This
colossus was fifty-seven feet high. It weighed eight hundred tons. Eight
hundred tons of syenite went to its making, and across the shoulders its
breadth is, or was, over twenty-two feet. But one does not think of
measurements as one looks upon it. It is stupendous. That is obvious and
that is enough. Nor does one think of its finish, of its beautiful, rich
color, of any of its details. One thinks of it as a tremendous personage
laid low, as the mightiest of the mighty fallen. One thinks of it as the
dead Rameses whose glory still looms over Egypt like a golden cloud that
will not disperse. One thinks of it as the soul that commanded, and, lo!
there rose up above the sands, at the foot of the hills of Thebes, the
exultant Ramesseum.
XII
DEIR-EL-BAHARI
Place for Queen Hatshepsu! Surely she comes to a sound of flutes, a
merry noise of thin, bright music, backed by a clashing of barbaric
cymbals, along the corridors of the past; this queen who is shown upon
Egyptian walls dressed as a man, who is said to have worn a beard, and
who sent to the land of Punt the famous expedition which covered her
with glory and brought gold to the god Amun. To me most feminine she
seemed when I saw her temple at Deir-el-Bahari, with its brightness and
its suavity; its pretty shallowness and sunshine; its white, and blue,
and yellow, and red, and green and orange; all very trim and fanciful,
all very smart and delicate; full of finesse and laughter, and breathing
out to me of the twentieth century the coquetry of a woman in 1500 B.C.
After the terrific masculinity of Medinet-Abu, after the great freedom
of the Ramesseum, and the grandeur of its colossus, the manhood of all
the ages concentrated in granite, the temple at Deir-el-Bahari came upon
me like a delicate woman, perfumed and arranged, clothed in a
[Illustration: THE TEMPLE OF QUEEN HATASU DEIR-EL-BAHARI]
creation of white and blue and orange, standing--ever so
knowingly--against a background of orange and pink, of red and of
brown-red, a smiling coquette of the mountain, a gay and sweet
enchantress who knew her pretty powers and meant to exercise them.
Hatshepsu with a beard! Never will I believe it. Or if she ever seemed
to wear one, I will swear it was only the tattooed ornament with which
all the lovely women of the Fayum decorate their chins to-day, throwing
into relief the smiling, soft lips, the delicate noses, the liquid eyes,
and leading one from it step by step to the beauties it precedes.
Mr. Wallis Budge says in his book on the antiquities of Egypt: “It would
be unjust to the memory of a great man and a loyal servant of Hatshepsu,
if we omitted to mention the name of Senmut, the architect and overseer
of works at Deir-el-Bahari.” By all means let Senmut be mentioned, and
then let him be utterly forgotten. A radiant queen reigns here--a queen
of fantasy and splendor, and of that divine shallowness--refined
frivolity literally cut into the mountain--which is the note of
Deir-el-Bahari. And what a clever background! Oh, Hatshepsu knew what
she was doing when she built her temple here. It was not the solemn
Senmut (he wore a beard, I’m sure) who chose that background, if I know
anything of women.
Long before I visited Deir-el-Bahari I had looked at it from afar. My
eyes had been drawn to it merely from its situation right underneath the
mountains. I had asked: “What do those little pillars mean? And are
those little doors?” I had promised myself to go there, as one promises
oneself a _bonne bouche_ to finish a happy banquet. And I had realized
the subtlety, essentially feminine, that had placed a temple there. And
Mentu-Hotep’s temple, perhaps you say, was it not there before the
queen’s? Then he must have possessed a subtlety purely feminine, or have
been advised by one of his wives in his building operations, or by some
favorite female slave. Blundering, unsubtle man would probably think
that the best way to attract and to fix attention on any object was to
make it much bigger than things near and around it, to set up a giant
among dwarfs.
Not so Queen Hatshepsu. More artful in her generation, she set her long
but little temple against the precipices of Libya. And what is the
result? Simply that whenever one looks toward them one says, “What are
those little pillars?” Or if one is more instructed, one thinks about
Queen Hatshepsu. The precipices are as nothing. A woman’s wile has
blotted them out.
And yet how grand they are! I have called them tiger-colored precipices.
And they suggest tawny wild beasts, fierce, bred in a land that is the
prey of the sun. Every shade of orange and yellow glows and grows pale
on their bosses, in their clefts. They shoot out
[Illustration:
From stereograph, copyright, 1908, by Underwood & Underwood, New York
RECENT EXCAVATIONS AT DEIR-EL-BAHARI]
turrets of rock that blaze like flames in the day. They show great
teeth, like the tiger when any one draws near. And, like the tiger, they
seem perpetually informed by a spirit that is angry. Blake wrote of the
tiger:
Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night.
These tiger-precipices of Libya are burning things, avid like beasts of
prey. But the restored apricot-colored pillars are not afraid of their
impending fury--fury of a beast baffled by a tricky little woman, almost
it seems to me; and still less afraid are the white pillars, and the
brilliant paintings that decorate the walls within.
As many people in the sad but lovely islands off the coast of Scotland
believe in “doubles,” as the old classic writers believed in man’s
“genius,” so the ancient Egyptians believed in his “Ka,” or separate
entity, a sort of spiritual other self, to be propitiated and ministered
to, presented with gifts, and served with energy and ardor. On this
temple of Deir-el-Bahari is the scene of the birth of Hatshepsu, and
there are two babies, the princess and her Ka. For this imagined Ka,
when a great queen, long after, she built this temple, or chapel, that
offerings might be made there on certain appointed days. Fortunate Ka of
Hatshepsu to have had so cheerful a dwelling! Liveliness pervades
Deir-el-Bahari. I remember, when I was on my first visit to Egypt,
lunching at Thebes with Monsieur Naville and Mr. Hogarth, and afterward
going with them to watch the digging away of the masses of sand and
rubbish which concealed this gracious building. I remember the songs of
the half-naked workmen toiling and sweating in the sun. And I remember
seeing a white temple wall come up into the light with all the painted
figures surely dancing with joy upon it. And they are surely dancing
still.
Here you may see, brilliant as yesterday’s picture anywhere,
fascinatingly decorative trees growing bravely in little pots, red
people offering incense which is piled up in mounds like mountains;
Ptah-Seket, Osiris receiving a royal gift of wine, the queen in the
company of various divinities, and the terrible ordeal of the cows. The
cows are being weighed in scales. There are three of them. One is a
philosopher, and reposes with an air that says, “Even this last
indignity of being weighed against my will cannot perturb my soaring
spirit.” But the other two, sitting up, look as apprehensive as old
ladies in a rocking express, expectant of an accident. The vividness of
the colors in this temple is quite wonderful. And much of its great
attraction comes rather from its position, and from them, than
essentially from itself. At Deir-el-Bahari, what the long shell
contains--its happy murmur of life--is more fascinating than the shell.
There, instead of being uplifted or overawed by form, we are rejoiced
by
[Illustration: “THE HALF-NAKED WORKMEN TOILING AND SWEATING IN THE
SUN”]
color, by the high vivacity of arrested movement, by the story that
color and movement tell. And over all there is the bright, blue, painted
sky, studded, almost distractedly studded, with a plethora of the yellow
stars the Egyptians made like starfish.
The restored apricot-colored columns outside look unhappily suburban
when you are near them. The white columns with their architraves are
more pleasant to the eyes. The niches full of bright hues, the arched
chapels, the small, white steps leading upward to shallow sanctuaries,
the small black foxes facing each other on little yellow
pedestals--attract one like the details and amusing ornaments of a
clever woman’s boudoir. Through this most characteristic temple one
roves in a gaily attentive mood, feeling all the time Hatshepsu’s
fascination.
You may see her, if you will, a little lady on the wall, with a face
decidedly sensual--a long, straight nose, thick lips, an expression
rather determined than agreeable. Her mother looks as Semitic as a Jew
moneylender in Brick Lane, London. Her husband, Thothmes II, has a weak
and poor-spirited countenance. Decidedly an accomplished performer on
the second violin. The mother wears on her head a snake, no doubt a
cobra-di-capello, the symbol of her sovereignty. Thothmes is clad in a
loin-cloth. And a god, with a sleepy expression and a very fishlike
head, appears in this group of personages to offer the key of life.
Another painting of the queen shows her on her knees drinking milk from
the sacred cow, with an intent and greedy figure, and an extraordinarily
sensual and expressive face. That she was well guarded is surely proved
by a brave display of her soldiers--red men on a white wall. Full of
life and gaiety, all in a row they come, holding weapons, and,
apparently, branches, and advancing with a gait of triumph that tells of
“spacious days.” And at their head is an officer, who looks back, much
like a modern drill sergeant, to see how his men are marching.
In the southern shrine of the temple, cut in the rock as is the northern
shrine, once more I found traces of the “Lady of the Under-world.” For
this shrine was dedicated to Hathor, though the whole temple was sacred
to the Theban god Amun. Upon a column were the remains of the goddess’s
face, with a broad brow and long, large eyes. Some fanatic had hacked
away the mouth.
The tomb of Hatshepsu was found by Mr. Theodore M. Davis, and the famous
_Vache_ of Deir-el-Bahari by Monsieur Naville as lately as 1905. It
stands in the museum at Cairo, but forever it will be connected in the
minds of men with the tiger-colored precipices and the Colonnades of
Thebes. Behind the ruins of the temple of Mentu-Hotep III, in a chapel
of painted rock, the Vache-Hathor was found.
It is not easy to convey by any description the
[Illustration: THE VACHE HATHOR OF DENDERAH]
impression this marvelous statue makes. Many of us love our dogs, our
horses, some of us adore our cats; but which of us can think, without a
smile, of worshiping a cow? Yet the cow was the Egyptian Aphrodite’s
sacred animal. Under the form of a cow she was often represented. And in
the statue she is presented to us as a limestone cow. And positively
this cow is to be worshiped.
She is shown in the act apparently of stepping gravely forward out of a
small arched shrine, the walls of which are decorated with brilliant
paintings. Her color is red and yellowish red, and is covered with
blotches of very dark green, which look almost black. Only one or two
are of a bluish color. Her height is moderate. I stand about five foot
nine, and I found that on her pedestal the line of her back was about
level with my chest. The lower part of the body, much of which is
concealed by the under block of limestone, is white, tinged with yellow.
The tail is red. Above the head, open and closed lotus flowers form a
head-dress, with the lunar disk and two feathers. And the long lotus
stalks flow down on each side of the neck toward the ground. At the back
of this head-dress are a scarab and a cartouche. The goddess is
advancing solemnly and gently. A wonderful calm, a matchless, serene
dignity enfold her.
In the body of this cow one is able, indeed one is almost obliged, to
feel the soul of a goddess. The incredible is accomplished. The dead
Egyptian makes the ironic, the skeptical modern world feel deity in a
limestone cow. How is it done? I know not; but it is done. Genius can do
nearly anything, it seems. Under the chin of the cow there is a standing
statue of the King Mentu-Hotep, and beneath her the king kneels as a
boy. Wonderfully expressive and solemnly refined is the cow’s face,
which is of a dark color, like the color of almost black earth--earth
fertilized by the Nile. Dignified, dominating, almost but just not
stern, strongly intelligent, and, through its beautiful intelligence,
entirely sympathetic (“to understand all, is to pardon all”), this face,
once thoroughly seen, completely noticed, can never be forgotten. This
is one of the most beautiful statues in the world.
When I was at Deir-el-Bahari I thought of it and wished that it still
stood there near the Colonnades of Thebes under the tiger-colored
precipices. And then I thought of Hatshepsu. Surely she could not brook
a rival to-day near the temple which she made--a rival long lost and
long forgotten. Is not her influence still there upon the terraced
platforms, among the apricot and the white columns, near the paintings
of the land of Punt? Did it not whisper to the antiquaries, even to the
soldiers from Cairo, who guarded the Vache-Hathor in the night, to make
haste to take her away far from the hills of Thebes, and from the Nile’s
long southern reaches, that the great queen might once more reign
alone? They obeyed. Hatshepsu was appeased. And, like a delicate woman,
perfumed and arranged, clothed in a creation of white and blue and
orange, standing ever so knowingly against a background of orange and
pink, of red and of brown-red, she rules at Deir-el-Bahari.
XIII
THE TOMBS OF THE KINGS