not by them. A heap of their black mummies is shown to you reposing in a
sort of tomb or shrine open at one end to the air. By these mummies the
new note is loudly struck. The crocodiles have carried you in an instant
from that which is pervadingly general to that which is narrowly
particular; from the purely noble, which seems to belong to all time, to
the entirely barbaric, which belongs only to times outworn. It is
difficult to feel as if one had anything in common with men who
seriously worshiped crocodiles, had priests to feed them, and decorated
their scaly necks with jewels.
Yet the crocodile god had a noble temple at Kom Ombos, a temple which
dates from the times of the Ptolemies, though there was a temple in
earlier days which has now disappeared. Its situation is splendid. It
stands high above the Nile, and close to the river, on a terrace which
has recently been constructed to save it from the encroachments of the
water. And it looks down upon a view which is exquisite in the clear
light of early morning. On the right, and far off, is a delicious pink
bareness of distant flats and hills. Opposite there is a flood of
verdure and of trees going to mountains, a spit of sand where is an
inlet of the river,
[Illustration: THE TEMPLE OF KÔM OMBOS]
with a crowd of native boats, perhaps waiting for a wind. On the left is
the big bend of the Nile, singularly beautiful, almost voluptuous in
form, and girdled with a radiant green of crops, with palm-trees, and
again the distant hills. Sebek was well advised to have his temples here
and in the glorious Fayum, that land flowing with milk and honey, where
the air is full of the voices of the flocks and herds, and alive with
the wild pigeons; where the sweet sugar-cane towers up in fairy forests,
the beloved home of the jackal; where the green corn waves to the
horizon, and the runlets of water make a maze of silver threads carrying
life and its happy murmur through all the vast oasis.
At the guardian’s gate by which you go in there sits not a watch dog,
nor yet a crocodile, but a watch cat, small, but very determined, and
very attentive to its duties, and neatly carved in stone. You try to
look like a crocodile-worshiper. It is deceived, and lets you pass. And
you are alone with the growing morning and Kom Ombos.
I was never taken, caught up into an atmosphere, in Kom Ombos. I
examined it with interest, but I did not feel a spell. Its grandeur is
great, but it did not affect me as did the grandeur of Karnak. Its
nobility cannot be questioned, but I did not stilly rejoice in it, as in
the nobility of Luxor, or the free splendor of the Ramesseum.
The oldest thing at Kom Ombos is a gateway of sandstone placed there by
Thothmes III as a tribute to Sebek. The great temple is of a warm-brown
color, a very rich and particularly beautiful brown, that soothes and
almost comforts the eyes that have been for many days boldly assaulted
by the sun. Upon the terrace platform above the river you face a low and
ruined wall, on which there are some lively reliefs, beyond which is a
large, open court containing a quantity of stunted, once big columns
standing on big bases. Immediately before you the temple towers up, very
gigantic, very majestic, with a stone pavement, walls on which still
remain some traces of paintings, and really grand columns, enormous in
size and in good formation. There are fine architraves, and some bits of
roofing, but the greater part is open to the air. Through a doorway is a
second hall containing columns much less noble, and beyond this one
walks in ruin, among crumbled or partly destroyed chambers, broken
statues, become mere slabs of granite and fallen blocks of stone. At the
end is a wall, with a pavement bordering it, and a row of chambers that
look like monkish cells, closed by small doors. At Kom Ombos there are
two sanctuaries, one dedicated to Sebek, the other to Heru-ur, or
Haroëris, a form of Horus in Egyptian called “the Elder,” which was
worshiped with Sebek here by the admirers of crocodiles. Each of them
contains a pedestal of granite upon which once rested a sacred bark
bearing an image of the deity.
[Illustration: TEMPLE OF KOM OMBOS. SCREEN WALL OF HYPOSTYLE HALL]
There are some fine reliefs scattered through these mighty ruins,
showing Sebek with the head of a crocodile, Heru-ur with the head of a
hawk so characteristic of Horus, and one strange animal which has no
fewer than four heads, apparently meant for the heads of lions. One
relief which I specially noticed for its life, its charming vivacity,
and its almost amusing fidelity to details unchanged to-day, depicts a
number of ducks in full flight near a mass of lotus flowers. I
remembered it one day in the Fayum, so intimately associated with Sebek,
when I rode twenty miles out from camp on a dromedary to the end of the
great lake of Kurun, where the sand wastes of the Libyan desert stretch
to the pale and waveless waters which, that day, looked curiously
desolate and even sinister under a low, gray sky. Beyond the wiry
tamarisk bushes, which grow far out from the shore, thousands upon
thousands of wild duck were floating as far as the eyes could see. We
took a strange native boat, manned by two half-naked fishermen, and were
rowed with big, broadbladed oars out upon the silent flood that the
silent desert surrounded. But the duck were too wary ever to let us get
within range of them. As we drew gently near, they rose in black
throngs, and skimmed low into the distance of the wintry landscape,
trailing their legs behind them, like the duck on the wall of Kom Ombos.
There was no duck for dinner in camp that night, and the cook was
inconsolable. But I had seen a relief come to life, and surmounted my
disappointment.
Kom Ombos and Edfu, the two houses of the lovers and haters of
crocodiles, or at least of the lovers and the haters of their worship, I
shall always think of them together, because I drifted on the _Loulia_
from one to the other, and saw no interesting temple between them, and
because their personalities are as opposed as were, centuries ago, the
tenets of those who adored within them. The Egyptians of old were
devoted to the hunting of crocodiles, which once abounded in the reaches
of the Nile between Assuan and Luxor, and also much lower down. But I
believe that no reliefs, or paintings, of this sport are to be found
upon the walls of the temples and the tombs. The fear of Sebek, perhaps,
prevailed even over the dwellers about the temple of Edfu. Yet how could
fear of any crocodile god infect the souls of those who were privileged
to worship in such a temple, or even reverently to stand under the
colonnade within the court? As well, perhaps, one might ask how men
could be inspired to raise such a perfect building to a deity with the
face of a hawk? But Horus was not the god of crocodiles, but a god of
the sun. And his power to inspire men must have been vast; for the
greatest conception in stone in Egypt, and, I suppose, in the whole
world, the Sphinx, as De Rougé proved by an inscription at Edfu, was a
representation of Horus transformed to
[Illustration: THE ISLAND OF ELEPHANTINE, FROM ASSOUAN]
conquer Typhon. The Sphinx and Edfu! For such marvels we ought to bless
the hawk-headed god. And if we forget the hawk, which one meets so
perpetually upon the walls of tombs and temples, and identify Horus
rather with the Greek Apollo, the yellow-haired god of the sun, driving
“westerly all day in his flaming chariot,” and shooting his golden
arrows at the happy world beneath, we can be at peace with those dead
Egyptians. For every pilgrim who goes to Edfu to-day is surely a
worshiper of the solar aspect of Horus. As long as the world lasts there
will be sun-worshipers. Every brown man upon the Nile is one, and every
good American who crosses the ocean and comes at last into the somber
wonder of Edfu, and I was one upon the deck of the _Loulia_.
And we all worship as yet in the dark, as in the exquisite dark, like
faith, of the Holy of Holies of Horus.
XVI
PHILÆ
As I drew slowly nearer and nearer to the home of “the great
Enchantress,” or, as Isis was also called in bygone days, “the Lady of
Philæ,” the land began to change in character, to be full of a new and
barbaric meaning. In recent years I have paid many visits to northern
Africa, but only to Tunisia and Algeria, countries that are
wilder-looking, and much wilder-seeming, than Egypt. Now, as I
approached Assuan, I seemed at last to be also approaching the real, the
intense Africa that I had known in the Sahara, the enigmatic siren,
savage and strange and wonderful, whom the typical Ouled Näil, crowned
with gold, and tufted with ostrich plumes, painted with kohl, tattooed,
and perfumed, hung with golden coins and amulets, and framed in plaits
of coarse, false hair, represents indifferently to the eyes of the
traveling stranger. For at last I saw the sands that I love creeping
down to the banks of the Nile. And they brought with them that wonderful
air which belongs only to them--the air that dwells among the dunes in
the solitary places, that is like the cool touch of Liberty upon the
face of a
[Illustration: THE ISLE OF PHILÆ BEFORE THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE DAM]
man, that makes the brown child of the nomad as lithe, tireless, and
fierce-spirited as a young panther, and sets flames in the eyes of the
Arab horse, and gives speed of the wind to the Sloughi. The true lover
of the desert can never rid his soul of its passion for the sands, and
now my heart leaped as I stole into their pure embraces, as I saw to
right and left amber curves and sheeny recesses, shining ridges and
bloomy clefts. The clean delicacy of those sands that, in long and
glowing hills, stretched out from Nubia to meet me, who could ever
describe them? Who could ever describe their soft and enticing shapes,
their exquisite gradations of color, the little shadows in their
hollows, the fiery beauty of their crests, the patterns the cool winds
make upon them? It is an enchanted _royaume_ of the sands through which
one approaches Isis.
Isis and engineers! We English people have effected that curious
introduction, and we greatly pride ourselves upon it. We have presented
Sir William Garstin, and Mr. John Blue, and Mr. Fitz Maurice, and other
clever, hard-working men to the fabled Lady of Philæ, and they have
given her a gift: a dam two thousand yards in length, upon which
tourists go smiling on trolleys. Isis has her expensive tribute,--it
cost about a million and a half pounds,--and no doubt she ought to be
gratified.
Yet I think Isis mourns on altered Philæ, as she mourns with her sister,
Nepthys, at the heads of so many mummies of Osirians upon the walls of
Egyptian tombs. And though the fellaheen very rightly rejoice, there are
some unpractical sentimentalists who form a company about her, and make
their plaint with hers--their plaint for the peace that is gone, for the
lost calm, the departed poetry, that once hung, like a delicious, like
an inimitable, atmosphere, about the palms of the “Holy Island.”
I confess that I dreaded to revisit Philæ. I had sweet memories of the
island that had been with me for many years--memories of still mornings
under the palm-trees, watching the gliding waters of the river, or
gazing across them to the long sweep of the empty sands; memories of
drowsy, golden noons, when the bright world seemed softly sleeping, and
the almost daffodil-colored temple dreamed under the quivering canopy of
blue; memories of evenings when a benediction from the lifted hands of
Romance surely fell upon the temple and the island and the river;
memories of moonlit nights, when the spirits of the old gods to whom the
temples were reared surely held converse with the spirits of the desert,
with Mirage and her pale and evading sisters of the great spaces, under
the brilliant stars. I was afraid, because I could not believe the
asseverations of certain practical persons, full of the hard and almost
angry desire of “Progress,” that no harm had been done by the creation
of the reservoir, but that, on the contrary, it had benefited the
temple.
[Illustration: THE SACRED ISLE OF PHILÆ]
The action of the water upon the stone, they said with vehement voices,
instead of loosening it and causing it to crumble untimely away, had
tended to harden and consolidate it. Here I should like to lie, but I
resist the temptation. Monsieur Naville has stated that possibly the
English engineers have helped to prolong the lives of the buildings of
Philæ, and Monsieur Maspero has declared that “the state of the temple
of Philæ becomes continually more satisfactory.” So be it! Longevity has
been, by a happy chance, secured. But what of beauty? What of the beauty
of the past, and what of the schemes for the future? Is Philæ even to be
left as it is, or are the waters of the Nile to be artificially raised
still higher, until Philæ ceases to be? Soon, no doubt, an answer will
be given.
Meanwhile, instead of the little island that I knew, and thought a
little paradise breathing out enchantment in the midst of titanic
sterility, I found a something diseased. Philæ now, when out of the
water, as it was all the time when I was last in Egypt, looks like a
thing stricken with some creeping malady--one of those maladies which
begin in the lower members of a body, and work their way gradually but
inexorably upward to the trunk, until they attain the heart.
I came to it by the desert, and descended to Shellal--Shellal with its
railway-station, its workmen’s buildings, its tents, its dozens of
screens to protect the hewers of stone from the burning rays of the sun,
its bustle of people, of overseers, engineers, and workmen, Egyptian,
Nubian, Italian, and Greek. The silence I had known was gone, though the
desert lay all around--the great sands, the great masses of granite that
look as if patiently waiting to be fashioned into obelisks, and
sarcophagi, and statues. But away there across the bend of the river,
dominating the ugly rummage of this intrusive beehive of human bees,
sheer grace overcoming strength both of nature and human nature, rose
the fabled “Pharaoh’s Bed”; gracious, tender, from Shellal most
delicately perfect, and glowing with pale gold against the grim
background of the hills on the western shore. It seemed to plead for
mercy, like something feminine threatened with outrage, to protest
through its mere beauty, as a woman might protest by an attitude,
against further desecration.
And in the distance the Nile roared through the many gates of the dam,
making answer to the protest.
What irony was in this scene! In the old days of Egypt Philæ was sacred
ground, was the Nile-protected home of sacerdotal mysteries, was a
veritable Mecca to the believers in Osiris, to which it was forbidden
even to draw near without permission. The ancient Egyptians swore
solemnly “By him who sleeps in Philæ.” Now they sometimes swear angrily
at him who wakes in, or at least by, Philæ, and keeps them steadily
going at their appointed tasks. And instead of it being forbidden to
draw near to a sacred spot, needy men from
[Illustration:
From a photograph by James S. Lee
THE TEMPLE OF ISIS, PHILÆ]
foreign countries flock thither in eager crowds, not to worship in
beauty, but to earn a living wage.
And “Pharaoh’s Bed” looks out over the water and seems to wonder what
will be the end.
I was glad to escape from Shellal, pursued by the shriek of an engine
announcing its departure from the station, glad to be on the quiet
water, to put it between me and that crowd of busy workers. Before me I
saw a vast lake, not unlovely, where once the Nile flowed swiftly, far
off a gray smudge--the very damnable dam. All around me was a grim and
cruel world of rocks, and of hills that look almost like heaps of
rubbish, some of them gray, some of them in color so dark that they
resemble the lava torrents petrified near Catania, or the “black
country” in England through which one rushes on one’s way to the North.
Just here and there, sweetly almost as the pink blossoms of the wild
oleander, which I have seen from Sicilian seas lifting their heads from
the crevices of sea rocks, the amber and rosy sands of Nubia smiled down
over grit stone and granite.
The setting of Philæ is severe. Even in bright sunshine it has an iron
look. On a gray or stormy day it would be forbidding or even terrible.
In the old winters and springs one loved Philæ the more because of the
contrast of its setting with its own lyrical beauty, its curious
tenderness of charm--a charm in which the isle itself was mingled with
its buildings. But now, and before my boat had touched the quay, I saw
that the island must be ignored--if possible.
The water with which it is entirely covered during a great part of the
year seems to have cast a blight upon it. The very few palms have a
drooping and tragic air. The ground has a gangrened appearance, and much
of it shows a crawling mass of unwholesome-looking plants, which seem
crouching down as if ashamed of their brutal exposure by the receded
river, and of harsh and yellow-green grass, unattractive to the eyes. As
I stepped on shore I felt as if I were stepping on disease. But at least
there were the buildings undisturbed by any outrage. Again I turned
toward “Pharaoh’s Bed,” toward the temple standing apart from it, which
already I had seen from the desert, near Shellal, gleaming with its
gracious sand-yellow, lifting its series of straight lines of masonry
above the river and the rocks, looking, from a distance, very simple,
with a simplicity like that of clear water, but as enticing as the light
on the first real day of spring.
I went first to “Pharaoh’s Bed.”
Imagine a woman with a perfectly lovely face, with features as
exquisitely proportioned as those, say, of Praxiteles’s statue of the
Cnidian Aphrodite, for which King Nicomedes was willing to remit the
entire national debt of Cnidus, and with a warmly white rose-leaf
complexion--one of those complexions one sometimes sees in Italian
women, colorless, yet suggestive almost of glow,
[Illustration: NEARLY SUBMERGED COLUMNS, ISLE OF PHILÆ]
of purity, with the flame of passion behind it. Imagine that woman
attacked by a malady which leaves her features exactly as they were, but
which changes the color of her face--from the throat upward to just
beneath the nose--from the warm white to a mottled, grayish hue. Imagine
the line that would seem to be traced between the two complexions--the
mottled gray below the warm white still glowing above. Imagine this, and
you have “Pharaoh’s Bed” and the temple of Philæ as they are to-day.
XVII
“PHARAOH’S BED”
“Pharaoh’s Bed,” which stands alone close to the Nile on the eastern
side of the island, is not one of those rugged, majestic buildings, full
of grandeur and splendor, which can bear, can “carry off,” as it were, a
cruelly imposed ugliness without being affected as a whole. It is, on
the contrary, a small, almost an airy, and a femininely perfect thing,
in which a singular loveliness of form was combined with a singular
loveliness of color. The spell it threw over you was not so much a spell
woven of details as a spell woven of divine uniformity. To put it in
very practical language, “Pharaoh’s Bed” was “all of a piece.” The form
was married to the color. The color seemed to melt into the form. It was
indeed a bed in which the soul that worships beauty could rest happily
entranced. Nothing jarred. Antiquaries say that apparently this building
was left unfinished. That may be so. But for all that it was one of the
most finished things in Egypt, essentially a thing to inspire within one
the “perfect calm that is Greek.” The blighting touch of the Nile, which
has changed the beautiful pale yellow of the stone of
[Illustration: PHARAOH’S BED, BEFORE THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE DAM]
the lower part of the building to a hideous and dreary gray,--which made
me think of a steel knife on which liquid has been spilt and allowed to
run,--has destroyed the uniformity, the balance, the faultless melody
lifted up by form and color. And so it is with the temple. It is as it
were cut in two by the intrusion into it of this hideous, mottled
complexion left by the receded water. Everywhere one sees disease on
walls and columns, almost blotting out bas-reliefs, giving to their
active figures a morbid, a sickly look. The effect is specially
distressing in the open court that precedes the temple dedicated to the
Lady of Philæ. In this court, which is at the southern end of the
island, the Nile at certain seasons is now forced to rise very nearly as
high as the capitals of many of the columns. The consequence of this is
that here the disease seems making rapid strides. One feels it is
drawing near to the heart, and that the poor, doomed invalid may
collapse at any moment.
Yes, there is much to make one sad at Philæ. But how much of pure beauty
there is left--of beauty that mutely protests against any further
outrage!
As there is something epic in the grandeur of the Lotus Hall at Karnak,
so there is something lyrical in the soft charm of the Philæ temple.
Certain things or places, certain things in certain places, always
suggest to my mind certain people in whose genius I take delight--who
have won me, and moved me by their art. Whenever I go to Philæ, the name
of Shelley comes to me. I scarcely could tell why. I have no special
reason to connect Shelley with Philæ. But when I see that almost airy
loveliness of stone, so simply elegant, so, somehow, spring-like in its
pale-colored beauty, its happy, daffodil charm, with its touch of the
Greek,--the sensitive hand from Attica stretched out over Nubia,--I
always think of Shelley. I think of Shelley the youth who dived down
into the pool so deep that it seemed he was lost forever to the sun. I
think of Shelley the poet, full of a lyric ecstasy, who was himself like
an embodied
Longing for something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow.
Lyrical Philæ is like a temple of dreams, and of all poets Shelley might
have dreamed the dream, and have told it to the world in a song.
For all its solidity, there are a strange lightness and grace in the
temple of Philæ; there is an elegance you will not find in the other
temples of Egypt. But it is an elegance quite undefiled by weakness, by
any sentimentality. (Even a building, like a love-lorn maid, can be
sentimental.) Edward Fitzgerald once defined taste as the feminine of
genius. Taste prevails in Philæ, a certain delicious femininity that
seduces the eyes and the heart of man. Shall we call it the spirit of
Isis?
I have heard a clever critic and antiquarian declare that he is not very
fond of Philæ; that he feels a
[Illustration: “PHARAOH’S BED,” ISLAND OF PHILÆ]
certain “spuriousness” in the temple due to the mingling of Greek with
Egyptian influences. He may be right. I am no antiquarian, and, as a
mere lover of beauty, I do not feel this “spuriousness.” I can see
neither two quarreling strengths nor any weakness caused by division. I
suppose I see only the beauty, as I might see only the beauty of a woman
bred of a handsome father and mother of different races, and who, not
typical of either, combined in her features and figure distinguishing
merits of both. It is true that there is a particular pleasure which is
roused in us only by the absolutely typical--the completely thoroughbred
person or thing. It may be a pleasure not caused by beauty, and it may
be very keen, nevertheless. When it is combined with the joy roused in
us by all beauty, it is a very pure emotion of exceptional delight.
Philæ does not, perhaps, give this emotion. But it certainly has a
lovableness that attaches the heart in a quite singular degree. The
Philæ-lover is the most faithful of lovers. The hold of his mistress
upon him, once it has been felt, is never relaxed. And in his affection
for Philæ there is, I think, nearly always a rainbow strain of romance.