A CHARMING LUNCHEON
We are making our way through the fields of Abydos in the dazzling
splendour of the forenoon, having come, like so many pilgrims of old,
from the banks of the Nile to visit the sanctuaries of Osiris, which lie
beyond the green plains, on the edge of the desert.
It is a journey of some ten miles or so, under a clear sky and a burning
sun. We pass through fields of corn and lucerne, whose wonderful green
is piqued with little flowers, such as may be seen in our climate.
Hundreds of little birds sing to us distractedly of the joy of life; the
sun shines radiantly, magnificently; the impetuous corn is already in
the ear; it might be some gay pageant of our days of May. One forgets
that it is February, that we are still in the winter--the luminous
winter of Egypt.
Here and there amongst the outspread fields are villages buried under
the thick foliage of trees--under acacias which, in the distance,
resemble ours at home; beyond indeed the mountain chain of Libya, like
a wall confining the fertile fields, looks strange perhaps in its
rose-colour, and too desolate; but, nevertheless amidst this glad music
of the fields, these songs of larks and twitterings of sparrows, you
scarcely realise that you are in a foreign land.
Abydos! What magic there is in the name! “Abydos is at hand, and in
another moment we shall be there.” The mere words seem somehow to
transform the aspect of the homely green fields, and make this pastoral
region almost imposing. The buzzing of the flies increases in the
overheated air and the song of the birds subsides until at last it dies
away in the approach of noon.
We have been journeying a little more than an hour amongst the verdure
of the growing corn that lies upon the fields like a carpet, when
suddenly, beyond the little houses and tress of a village, quite a
different world is disclosed--the familiar world of glare and death
which presses so closely upon inhabited Egypt: the desert! The desert of
Libya, and now as ever when we come upon it suddenly from the banks
of the old river it rises up before us; beginning at once, without
transition, absolute and terrible, as soon as we leave the thick velvet
of the last field, the cool shade of the last acacia. Its sands seem to
slope towards us, in a prodigious incline, from the strange mountains
that we saw from the happy plain, and which now appear, enthroned
beyond, like the monarchs of all this nothingness.
The town of Abydos, which has vanished and left no wrack behind, rose
once in this spot where we now stand, on the very threshold of the
solitudes; but its necropoles, more venerated even than those of
Memphis, and its thrice-holy temples, are a little farther on, in the
marvellously conserving sand, which has buried them under its tireless
waves and preserved them almost intact up till the present day.
The desert! As soon as we put foot upon its shifting soil, which
smothers the sound of our steps, the atmosphere too seems suddenly to
change; it burns with a strange new heat, as if great fires had been
lighted in the neighbourhood.
And this whole domain of light and drought, right away into the
distance, is shaded and streaked with the familiar brown, red and yellow
colours. The mournful reflection of adjacent things augments to excess
the heat and light. The horizon trembles under the little vapours of
mirage like water ruffled by the wind. The background, which mounts
gradually to the foot of the Libyan mountains, is strewn with the debris
of bricks and stones--shapeless ruins which, though they scarcely rise
above the sand, abound nevertheless in great numbers, and serve to
remind us that here indeed is a very ancient soil, where men laboured in
centuries that have drifted out of knowledge. One divines instinctively
and at once the catacombs, the hypogea and the mummies that lie beneath!
These necropoles of Abydos once--and for thousands of years--exercised
an extraordinary fascination over this people--the precursor of
peoples--who dwelt in the valley of the Nile. According to one of the
most ancient of human traditions, the head of Osiris, the lord of the
_other world_, reposed in the depths of one of the temples which to-day
are buried in the sands. And men, as soon as their thought commenced to
issue from the primeval night, were haunted by the idea that there were
localities helpful, as if were, to the poor corpses that lay beneath the
earth, that there were certain holy places where it behoved them to
be buried if they wished to be ready when the signal of awakening was
given. And in old Egypt, therefore, each one, at the hour of death,
turned his thoughts to these stones and sands, in the ardent hope that
he might be able to sleep near the remains of his god. And when the
place was becoming crowded with sleepers, those who could obtain no
place there conceived the idea of having humble obelisks planted on the
holy ground, which at least should tell their names; or even recommended
that their mummies might be there for some weeks, even if they were
afterwards removed. And thus, funeral processions passed to and fro
without ceasing through the cornfields that separate the Nile from
the desert. Abydos! In the sad human dream dominated by the thought of
dissolution, Abydos preceded by many centuries the Valley of Jehosophat
of the Hebrews, the cemeteries around Mecca of the Moslems, and the holy
tombs beneath our oldest cathedrals! . . . Abydos! It behoves us to walk
here pensively and silently out of respect for all those thousands of
souls who formerly turned towards this place, with outstretched hands,
in the hour of death.
The first great temple--that which King Seti raised to the mysterious
Prince of the Other World, who in those days was called Osiris--is quite
close--a distance of little more than 200 yards in the glare of the
desert. We come upon it suddenly, so that it almost startles us, for
nothing warns us of its proximity. The sand from which it has been
exhumed, and which buried it for 2000 years, still rises almost to its
roof. Through an iron gate, guarded by two tall Bedouin guards in black
robes, we plunge at once into the shadow of enormous stones. We are in
the house of the god, in a forest of heavy Osiridean columns, surrounded
by a world of people in high coiffures, carved in bas-relief on the
pillars and walls--people who seem to be signalling one to another and
exchanging amongst themselves mysterious signs, silently and for ever.
But what is this noise in the sanctuary? It seems to be full of people.
There, sure enough, beyond a second row of columns, is quite a little
crowd talking loudly in English. I fancy that I can hear the clinking of
glasses and the tapping of knives and forks.
Oh! poor, poor temple, to what strange uses are you come. . . . This
excess of grotesqueness in profanation is more insulting surely than to
be sacked by barbarians! Behold a table set for some thirty guests, and
the guests themselves--of both sexes--merry and lighthearted, belong to
that special type of humanity which patronises Thomas Cook & Son (Egypt
Ltd.). They wear cork helmets, and the classic green spectacles; drink
whisky and soda, and eat voraciously sandwiches and other viands out of
greasy paper, which now litters the floor. And the women! Heavens! what
scarecrows they are! And this kind of thing, so the black-robed Bedouin
guards inform us, is repeated every day so long as the season lasts. A
luncheon in the temple of Osiris is part of the programme of pleasure
trips. Each day at noon a new band arrives, on heedless and unfortunate
donkeys. The tables and the crockery remain, of course, in the old
temple!
Let us escape quickly, if possible before the sight shall have become
graven on our memory.
But alas! even when we are outside, alone again on the expanse of
dazzling sands, we can no longer take things seriously. Abydos and the
desert have ceased to exist. The faces of those women remain to haunt
us, their faces and their hats, and those looks which they vouchsafed us
from over their solar spectacles. . . . The ugliness associated with the
name of Cook was once explained to me in this wise, and the explanation
at first sight seemed satisfactory: “The United Kingdom, justifiably
jealous of the beauty of its daughters, submits them to a jury when
they reach the age of puberty; and those who are classed as too ugly to
reproduce their kind are accorded an unlimited account at Thomas Cook &
Sons, and thus vowed to a course of perpetual travel, which leaves
them no time to think of certain trifles incidental to life.” The
explanation, as I say, seduced me for the time being. But a more
attentive examination of the bands who infest the valley of the Nile
enables me to aver that all these good English ladies are of an age
notoriously canonical; and the catastrophe of procreation therefore,
supposing that such an accident could ever have happened to them, must
date back to a time long anterior to their enrolment. And I remain
perplexed!
Without conviction now, we make our way towards another temple,
guaranteed solitary. Indeed the sun blazes there a lonely sovereign in
the midst of a profound silence, and Egypt and the past take us again
into their folds.
Once more to Osiris, the god of heavenly awakening in the necropolis
of Abydos, this sanctuary was built by Ramses II. But the sands have
covered it with their winding sheet in vain, and have been able to
preserve for us only the lower and more deeply buried parts. Men in
their blind greed have destroyed the upper portions,[*] and its ruins,
protected and cleared as they are to-day, rise only some ten or twelve
feet from the ground. In the bas-reliefs the majority of the figures
have only legs and a portion of the body; their heads and shoulders have
disappeared with the upper parts of the walls. But they seem to have
preserved their vitality: the gesticulations, the exaggerated pantomime
of the attitudes of these headless things, are more strange, more
striking, perhaps, than if their faces still remained. And they have
preserved too, in an extraordinary degree, the brightness of their
antique paintings, the fresh tints of their costumes, of their robes of
turquoise blue, or lapis, or emerald-green, or golden-yellow. It is an
artless kind of fresco-work, which nevertheless amazes us by remaining
perfect after thirty-five centuries. All that these people did seems
as if made for immortality. It is true, however, that such brilliant
colours are not found in any of the other Pharaonic monuments, and that
here they are heightened by the white background. For, notwithstanding
the bluish, black and red granite of the porticoes, the walls are all of
a fine limestone, of exceeding whiteness, and, in the holy of holies, of
a pure alabaster.
[*] Not long ago a manufacturer, established in the
neighbourhood, discovering that the limestone of its walls
was friable, used this temple as a quarry, and for some
years bas-reliefs beyond price served as aliment to the
mills of the factory.
Above the truncated walls, with their bright clear colours, the desert
appears, and shows quite brown by contrast; one sees the great yellow
swell of sand and stones above the pictures of these decapitated people.
It rises like a colossal wave and stretches out to bathe the foot of the
Libyan mountains beyond. Towards the north and west of the solitudes,
shapeless ruins of tawny-coloured blocks follow one another in the sands
until the dazzling distance ends in a clear-cut line against the sky.
Apart from this temple of Ramses, where we now stand, and that of Seti
in the vicinity, where the enterprise of Thomas Cook & Son flourishes,
there is nothing around us but ruins, crumbled and pulverised beyond all
possible redemption. But they give us pause, these disappearing ruins,
for they are the debris of that ageless temple, where sleeps the head of
the god, the debris of the tombs of the Middle and Ancient Empires, and
they indicate still the wide extent and development of the necropoles
of Abydos, so old that it almost makes one giddy to think of their
beginning.
Here, as at Thebes and Memphis, the tombs of the Egyptians are met
with only amongst the sands and the parched rocks. The great ancestral
people, who would have shuddered at our black trees, and the corruption
of the damp graves, liked to place its embalmed dead in the midst of
this luminous, changeless splendour of death, which men call the desert.
*****
And what is this now that is happening in the holy neighbourhood of
unhappy Osiris? A troupe of donkeys, belaboured by Bedouin drivers, is
being driven in the direction of the adjacent temple, dedicated to the
god by Seti! The luncheon no doubt is over and the band about to depart,
sharp to the appointed hour of the programme. Let us watch them from a
prudent distance.
To be brief, they all mount into their saddles, these Cooks and
Cookesses, and opening, not without a conscious air of majesty, their
white cotton parasols, take themselves off in the direction of the Nile.
They disappear and the place belongs to us.
When we venture at last to return to the first sanctuary, where they had
lunched their fill in the shade, the guardians are busy clearing away
the leavings and the dirty paper. And they pack the dubious crockery,
which will be required for to-morrow's luncheon, into large chests on
which may be read in large letters of glory the names of the veritable
sovereigns of modern Egypt: “Thomas Cook & Son (Egypt Ltd.).”
All this happily ends with the first hypostyle. Nothing dishonours
the halls of the interior, where silence has again descended, the vast
silence of the noon of the desert.
In the reign of the Emperor Tiberius, men already marvelled at this
temple, as at a relic of the most distant and nebulous past. The
geographer Strabo wrote in those days: “It is an admirable palace built
in the fashion of the Labyrinth save that it has fewer galleries.” There
are galleries enough however, and one can readily lose oneself in its
mazy turnings. Seven chapels, consecrated to Osiris and to different
gods and goddesses of his suite; seven vaulted chambers; seven doors for
the processions of kings and multitudes; and, at the sides, numberless
halls, corridors, secondary chapels, dark chambers and hidden doorways.
That very primitive column, suggestive of reeds, which is called in
architecture the “plant column” and resembles a monstrous stem of
papyrus, rises here in a thick forest, to support the stones of the blue
ceilings, which are strewn with stars, in the likeness of the sky of
this country. In many cases these stones are missing and leave large
openings on to the real sky above. Their massiveness, which one might
have thought would secure them an endless duration, has availed them
nothing; the sun of so many centuries has cracked them, and their own
weight, then, has brought them headlong to the ground. And floods of
light now enter through the gaps, into the very chapels where the men of
old had thought to ensure a holy gloom.
Despite the disaster which has overtaken the ceilings, this is
nevertheless one of the most perfect of the sanctuaries of ancient
Egypt. The sands, those gentle sextons, have here succeeded miraculously
in their work of preservation. They might have been carved yesterday,
these innumerable people, who, everywhere--on the walls, on this forest
of columns--gesticulate and, with their arms and long hands, continue
with animation their eternal mute conversation. The whole temple, with
the openings which give it light, is more beautiful perhaps than in the
time of the Pharaohs. In place of the old-time darkness, a transparent
gloom now alternates with shafts of sunlight. Here and there the
subjects of the bas-reliefs, so long buried in the darkness, are deluged
with burning rays which detail their attitudes, their muscles, their
scarcely altered colours, and endow them again with life and youth.
There is no part of the wall, in this immense place, but is covered with
divinities, with hieroglyphs and emblems. Osiris in high coiffure,
the beautiful Isis in the helmet of a bird, jackal-headed Anubis,
falcon-headed Horus, and ibis-headed Thoth are repeated a thousand
times, welcoming with strange gestures the kings and priests who are
rendering them homage.
The bodies, almost nude, with broad shoulders and slim waist, have a
slenderness, a grace, infinitely chaste, and the features of the faces
are of an exquisite purity. The artists who carved these charming heads,
with their long eyes, full of the ancient dream, were already skilled
in their art; but through a deficiency, which puzzles us, they were only
able to draw them in profile. All the legs, all the feet are in profile
too, although the bodies, on the other hand, face us fully. Men needed
yet some centuries of study before they understood perspective--which to
us now seems so simple--and the foreshortening of figures, and were able
to render the impression of them on a plane surface.
Many of the pictures represent King Seti, drawn without doubt from life,
for they show us almost the very features of his mummy, exhibited now
in the museum at Cairo. At his side he holds affectionately his son, the
prince-royal, Ramses (later on Ramses II., the great Sesostris of the
Greeks). They have given the latter quite a frank air, and he wears a
curl on the side of his head, as was the fashion then in childhood. He,
also, has his mummy in a glass case in the museum, and anyone who has
seen that toothless, sinister wreck, who had already attained the age
of nearly a hundred years before death delivered him to the embalmers of
Thebes, will find it difficult to believe that he could ever have been
young, and worn his hair curled so; that he could ever have played and
been a child.
*****
We thought we had finished with the Cooks and Cookesses of the luncheon.
But alas! our horses, faster than their donkeys, overtake them in the
return journey amongst the green cornfields of Abydos; and in a stoppage
in the narrow roadway, caused by a meeting with a number of camels laden
with lucerne, we are brought to a halt in their midst. Almost touching
me is a dear little white donkey, who looks at me pensively and in such
a way that we at once understand each other. A mutual sympathy unites
us. A Cookess in spectacles surmounts him--the most hideous of them
all, bony and severe. Over her travelling costume, already sufficiently
repulsive, she wears a tennis jersey, which accentuates the angularity
of her figure, and in her person she seems the very incarnation of the
respectability of the British Isles. It would be more equitable, too--so
long are those legs of hers, which, to be sure, have scant interest for
the tourist--if she carried the donkey.
The poor little white thing regards me with melancholy. His ears twitch
restlessly and his beautiful eyes, so fine, so observant of everything,
say to me as plain as words:
“She is a beauty, isn't she?”
“She is, indeed, my poor little donkey. But think of this: fixed on thy
back as she is, thou hast this advantage over me--thou seest her not!”
But my reflection, though judicious enough, does not console him, and
his look answers me that he would be much prouder if he carried, like so
many of his comrades, a simple pack of sugarcanes.