MODERN LUXOR
The waters of the Nile being already low my dahabiya--delayed by
strandings--had not been able to reach Luxor, and we had moored
ourselves, as the darkness began to fall, at a casual spot on the bank.
“We are quite near,” the pilot had told me before departing to make his
evening prayer; “in an hour, to-morrow, we shall be there.”
And the gentle night descended upon us in this spot which did not seem
to differ at all from so any others where, for a month past now, we had
moored our boat at hazard to await the daybreak. On the banks were dark
confused masses of foliage, above which here and there a high date-palm
outlined its black plumes. The air was filled with the multitudinous
chirpings of the crickets of Upper Egypt, which make their music here
almost throughout the year in the odorous warmth of the grass. And,
presently, in the midst of the silence, rose the cries of the night
birds, like the mournful mewings of cats. And that was all--save for
the infinite calm of the desert that is always present, dominating
everything, although scarcely noticed and, as it were, latent.
*****
And this morning, at the rising of the sun, is pure and splendid as
all other mornings. A tint of rosy coral comes gradually to life on the
summit of the Libyan mountains, standing out from the gridelin shadows
which, in the heavens, were the rearguard of the night.
But my eyes, grown accustomed during the last few weeks to this
glorious spectacle of the dawn, turn themselves, as if by force of some
attraction, towards a strange and quite unusual thing, which, less than
a mile away along the river, on the Arabian bank, rises upright in the
midst of the mournful plains. At first it looks like a mass of towering
rocks, which in this hour of twilight magic have taken on a pale violet
colour, and seem almost transparent. And the sun, scarcely emerged
from the desert, lights them in a curious gradation, and orders their
contours with a fringe of fresh rose-colour. And they are not rocks, in
fact, for as we look more closely, they show us lines symmetrical
and straight. Not rocks, but architectural masses, tremendous and
superhuman, placed there in attitudes of quasi-eternal stability. And
out of them rise the points of two obelisks, sharp as the blade of a
lance. And then, at once, I understand--Thebes!
Thebes! Last evening it was hidden in the shadow and I did not know it
was so near. But Thebes assuredly it is, for nothing else in the world
could produce such an apparition. And I salute with a kind of shudder
of respect this unique and sovereign ruin, which had haunted me for many
years, but which until now life had not left me time to visit.
And now for Luxor, which in the epoch of the Pharaohs was a suburb of
the royal town, and is still its port. It is there, it seems, where we
must stop our dahabiya in order to proceed to the fabulous palace which
the rising sun has just disclosed to us.
And while my equipage of bronze--intoning that song, as old as Egypt
and everlastingly the same, which seems to help the men in their arduous
work--is busy unfastening the chain which binds us to the bank, I
continue to watch the distant apparition. It emerges gradually from the
light morning mists which, perhaps, made it seem even larger than it is.
The clear light of the ascending sun shows it now in detail; and reveals
it as all battered, broken and ruinous in the midst of a silent plain,
on the yellow carpet of the desert. And how this sun, rising in its
clear splendour, seems to crush it with its youth and stupendous
duration. This same sun had attained to its present round form, had
acquired the clear precision of its disc, and begun its daily promenade
over the country of the sands, countless centuries of centuries, before
it saw, as it might be yesterday, this town of Thebes arise; an
attempt at magnificence which seemed to promise for the human pygmies
a sufficiently interesting future, but which, in the event, we have
not been able even to equal. And it proved, too, a thing quite puny and
derisory, since here it is laid low, after having subsisted barely four
negligible thousands of years.
*****
An hour later we arrive at Luxor, and what a surprise awaits us there!
The thing which dominates the whole town, and may be seen five or six
miles away, is the Winter Palace, a hasty modern production which has
grown on the border of the Nile during the past year: a colossal hotel,
obviously sham, made of plaster and mud, on a framework of iron. Twice
or three times as high as the admirable Pharaonic Temple, its impudent
facade rises there, painted a dirty yellow. One such thing, it will
readily be understood, is sufficient to disfigure pitiably the whole of
the surroundings. The old Arab town, with its little white houses, its
minarets and its palm-trees, might as well not exist. The famous temple
and the forest of heavy Osiridean columns admire themselves in vain in
the waters of the river. It is the end of Luxor.
And what a crowd of people is here! While, on the contrary, the opposite
bank seems so absolutely desertlike, with its stretches of golden sand
and, on the horizon, its mountains of the colour of glowing embers,
which, as we know, are full of mummies.
Poor Luxor! Along the banks is a row of tourist boats, a sort of two or
three storeyed barracks, which nowadays infest the Nile from Cairo to
the Cataracts. Their whistlings and the vibration of their dynamos make
an intolerable noise. How shall I find a quiet place for my dahabiya,
where the functionaries of Messrs. Cook will not come to disturb me?
We can now see nothing of the palaces of Thebes, whither I am to repair
in the evening. We are farther from them than we were last night. The
apparition during our morning's journey had slowly receded in the plains
flooded by sunlight. And then the Winter Palace and the new boats shut
out the view.
But this modern quay of Luxor, where I disembark at ten o'clock in the
morning in clear and radiant sunshine, is not without its amusing side.
In a line with the Winter Palace a number of stalls follow one another.
All those things with which our tourists are wont to array themselves
are on sale there: fans, fly flaps, helmets and blue spectacles. And,
in thousands, photographs of the ruins. And there too are the toys, the
souvenirs of the Soudan: old negro knives, panther-skins and gazelle
horns. Numbers of Indians even are come to this improvised fair,
bringing their stuffs from Rajputana and Cashmere. And, above all, there
are dealers in mummies, offering for sale mysteriously shaped coffins,
mummy-cloths, dead hands, gods, scarabaei--and the thousand and
one things that this old soil has yielded for centuries like an
inexhaustible mine.
Along the stalls, keeping in the shade of the houses and the scattered
palms, pass representatives of the plutocracy of the world. Dressed
by the same costumiers, bedecked in the same plumes, and with faces
reddened by the same sun, the millionaire daughters of Chicago merchants
elbow their sisters of the old nobility. Pressing amongst them impudent
young Bedouins pester the fair travellers to mount their saddled
donkeys. And as if they were charged to add to this babel a note of
beauty, the battalions of Mr. Cook, of both sexes, and always in a
hurry, pass by with long strides.
Beyond the shops, following the line of the quay, there are other
hotels. Less aggressive, all of them, than the Winter Palace, they have
had the discretion not to raise themselves too high, and to cover their
fronts with white chalk in the Arab fashion, even to conceal themselves
in clusters of palm-trees.
And finally there is the colossal temple of Luxor, looking as out of
place now as the poor obelisk which Egypt gave us as a present, and
which stands to-day in the Place de la Concorde.
Bordering the Nile, it is a colossal grove of stone, about three hundred
yards in length. In epochs of a magnificence that is now scarcely
conceivable this forest of columns grew high and thick, rising
impetuously at the bidding of Amenophis and the great Ramses. And how
beautiful it must have been even yesterday, dominating in its superb
disarray this surrounding country, vowed for centuries to neglect and
silence!
But to-day, with all these things that men have built around it, you
might say that it no longer exists.
We reach an iron-barred gate and, to enter, have to show our permit to
the guards. Once inside the immense sanctuary, perhaps we shall find
solitude again. But, alas, under the profaned columns a crowd of people
passes, with _Baedekers_ in their hands, the same people that one sees
here everywhere, the same world as frequents Nice and the Riviera. And,
to crown the mockery, the noise of the dynamos pursues us even here, for
the boats of Messrs. Cook are moored to the bank close by.
Hundreds of columns, columns which are anterior by many centuries to
those of Greece, and represent, in their naïve enormity, the first
conceptions of the human brain. Some are fluted and give the impression
of sheaves of monstrous weeds; others, quite plain and simple, imitate
the stem of the papyrus, and bear by way of capital its strange flower.
The tourists, like the flies, enter at certain times of the day, which
it suffices to know. Soon the little bells of the hotels will call
them away and the hour of midday will find me here alone. But what in
heaven's name will deliver me from the noise of the dynamos? But look!
beyond there, at the bottom of the sanctuaries, in the part which should
be the holy of holies, that great fresco, now half effaced, but still
clearly visible on the wall--how unexpected and arresting it is! An
image of Christ! Christ crowned with the Byzantine aureole. It has
been painted on a coarse plaster, which seems to have been added by an
unskilful hand, and is wearing off and exposing the hieroglyphs beneath.
. . . This temple, in fact, almost indestructible by reason of its
massiveness, has passed through the hands of diverse masters. Its
antiquity was already legendary in the time of Alexander the Great, on
whose behalf a chapel was added to it; and later on, in the first ages
of Christianity, a corner of the ruins was turned into a cathedral.
The tourists begin to depart, for the lunch bell calls them to the
neighbouring _tables d'hote_; and while I wait till they shall be gone,
I occupy myself in following the bas-reliefs which are displayed for a
length of more than a hundred yards along the base of the walls. It
is one long row of people moving in their thousands all in the same
direction--the ritual procession of the God Amen. With the care which
characterised the Egyptians to draw everything from life so as to render
it eternal, there are represented here the smallest details of a day
of festival three or four thousand years ago. And how like it is to a
holiday of the people of to-day! Along the route of the procession are
ranged jugglers and sellers of drinks and fruits, and negro acrobats who
walk on their hands and twist themselves into all kinds of contortions.
But the procession itself was evidently of a magnificence such as we no
longer know. The number of musicians and priests, of corporations, of
emblems and banners, is quite bewildering. The God Amen himself came by
water, on the river, in his golden barge with its raised prow, followed
by the barques of all the other gods and goddesses of his heaven. The
reddish stone, carved with minute care, tells me all this, as it has
already told it to so many dead generations, so that I seem almost to
see it.
And now everybody has gone: the colonnades are empty and the noise of
the dynamos has ceased. Midday approaches with its torpor. The whole
temple seems to be ablaze with rays, and I watch the clear-cut shadows
cast by this forest of stone gradually shortening on the ground. The
sun, which just now shone, all smiles and gaiety, upon the quay of the
new town amid the uproar of the stall-keepers, the donkey drivers
and the cosmopolitan passengers, casts here a sullen, impassive and
consuming fire. And meanwhile the shadows shorten--and just as they do
every day, beneath this sky which is never overcast, just as they have
done for five and thirty centuries, these columns, these friezes
and this temple itself, like a mysterious and solemn sundial, record
patiently on the ground the slow passing of the hours. Verily for us,
the ephemerae of thought, this unbroken continuity of the sun of Egypt
has more of melancholy even than the changing, overcast skies of our
climate.
And now, at last, the temple is restored to solitude and all noise in
the neighbourhood has ceased.
An avenue bordered by very high columns, of which the capitals are in
the form of the full-blown flowers of the papyrus, leads me to a place
shut in and almost terrible, where is massed an assembly of colossi.
Two, who, if they were standing, would be quite ten yards in height, are
seated on thrones on either side of the entrance. The others, ranged on
the three sides of the courtyard, stand upright behind colonnades, but
look as if they were about to issue thence and to stride rapidly towards
me. Some broken and battered, have lost their faces and preserve only
their intimidating attitude. Those that remain intact--white faces
beneath their Sphinx's headgear--open their eyes wide and smile.
This was formerly the principal entrance, and the office of these
colossi was to welcome the multitudes. But now the gates of honour
flanked by obelisks of red granite, are obstructed by a litter of
enormous ruins. And the courtyard has become a place voluntarily closed,
where nothing of the outside world is any longer to be seen. In moments
of silence, one can abstract oneself from all the neighbouring modern
things, and forget the hour, the day, the century even, in the midst
of these gigantic figures, whose smile disdains the flight of ages. The
granites within which we are immured--and in such terrible company--shut
out everything save the point of an old neighbouring minaret which shows
now against the blue of the sky: a humble graft of Islam which grew
here amongst the ruins some centuries ago, when the ruins themselves had
already subsisted for three thousand years--a little mosque built on a
mass of debris, which it new protects with its inviolability. How many
treasures and relics and documents are hidden and guarded by this mosque
of the peristyle! For none would dare to dig in the ground within its
sacred walls.
Gradually the silence of the temple becomes profound. And if the
shortened shadows betray the hour of noon, there is nothing to tell
to what millennium that hour belongs. The silences and middays like
to this, which have passed before the eyes of these giants ambushed in
their colonnades--who could count them?
High above us, lost in the incandescent blue, soar the birds of
prey--and they were there in the times of the Pharaohs, displaying in
the air identical plumages, uttering the same cries. The beasts and
plants, in the course of time, have varied less than men, and remain
unchanged in the smallest details.
Each of the colossi around me--standing there proudly with one leg
advanced as if for a march, heavy and sure, which nothing should
withstand--grasps passionately in his clenched fist, at the end of the
muscular arm, a kind of buckled cross, which in Egypt was the symbol
of eternal life. And this is what the decision of their movement
symbolises: confident all of them in this poor bauble which they hold in
their hand, they cross with a triumphant step the threshold of death.
. . . “Eternal Life”--the thought of immortality--how the human soul has
been obsessed by it, particularly in the periods marked by its greatest
strivings! The tame submission to the belief that the rottenness of
the grave is the end of all is characteristic of ages of decadence and
mediocrity.
The three similar giants, little damaged in the course of their long
existence, who align the eastern side of this courtyard strewn with
blocks, represent, as indeed do all the others, that same Ramses II.,
whose effigy was multiplied so extravagantly at Thebes and Memphis. But
these three have preserved a powerful and impetuous life. They might
have been carved and polished yesterday. Between the monstrous reddish
pillars, they look like white apparitions issuing from their embrasure
of columns and advancing together like soldiers at manoeuvres. The
sun at this moment falls perpendicularly on their heads and strange
headgear, details their everlasting smile, and then sheds itself on
their shoulders and their naked torso, exaggerating their athletic
muscles. Each holding in his hand the symbolical cross, the three giants
rush forward with a formidable stride, heads raised, smiling, in a
radiant march into eternity.
Oh! this midday sun, that now pours down upon the white faces of these
giants, and displaces ever so slowly the shadows cast upon their breasts
by their chins and Osiridean beards. To think how often in the midst of
this same silence, this same ray has fallen thus, fallen from the same
changeless sky, to occupy itself in this same tranquil play! Yes, I
think that the fogs and rains of our winters, upon these stupendous
ruins, would be less sad and less terrible than the calm of this eternal
sunshine.
*****
Suddenly a ridiculous noise begins to make the air tremble; the dynamos
of the Agencies have been put in motion, and ladies in green spectacles
arrive, a charming throng, with guidebooks and cameras. The tourists,
in short, are come out of their hotels, at the same hour as the flies
awake. And the midday peace of Luxor has come to an end.