A TWENTIETH-CENTURY EVENING AT THEBES
An impalpable dust floats in a sky which scarcely ever knows a cloud; a
dust so impalpable that, even while it powders the heavens with gold, it
leaves them their infinite transparency. It is a dust of remote ages, of
things destroyed; a dust that is here continually--of which the gold at
this moment fades to green at the zenith, but flames and glistens in
the west, for it is now that magnificent hour which marks the end of the
day's decline, and the still burning globe of the sun, quite low down
in the heaven, begins to light up on all sides the conflagration of the
evening.
This setting sun illumines with splendour a silent chaos of granite,
which is not that of the slipping of mountains, but that of ruins. And
of such ruins as, to our eyes unaccustomed hereditarily to proportions
so gigantic, seem superhuman. In places, huge masses of carven
stone--pylons--still stand upright, rising like hills. Others are
crumbling in all directions in bewildering cataracts of stone. It is
difficult to conceive how these things, so massive that they might have
seemed eternal, could come to suffer such an utter ruin. Fragments of
columns, fragments of obelisks, broken by downfalls of which the mere
imagination is awful, heads and head-dresses of giant divinities, all
lie higgledy-piggledy in a disorder beyond possible redress. Nowhere
surely on our earth does the sun in his daily revolution cast his light
on such debris as this, on such a litter of vanished palaces and dead
colossi.
It was even here, seven or eight thousand years ago, under this pure
crystal sky, that the first awakening of human thought began. Our Europe
then was still sleeping, wrapped in the mantle of its damp forests;
sleeping that sleep which still had thousands of years to run. Here, a
precocious humanity, only recently emerged from the Age of Stone, that
earliest form of all, an infant humanity, which saw massively on its
issue from the massiveness of the original matter, conceived and built
terrible sanctuaries for gods, at first dreadful and vague, such as its
nascent reason allowed it to conceive them. Then the first megalithic
blocks were erected; then began that mad heaping up and up, which was
to last nearly fifty centuries; and temples were built above temples,
palaces over palaces, each generation striving to outdo its predecessor
by a more titanic grandeur.
Afterwards, four thousand years ago, Thebes was in the height of her
glory, encumbered with gods and with magnificence, the focus of the
light of the world in the most ancient historic periods; while our
Occident was still asleep and Greece and Assyria were scarcely awakened.
Only in the extreme East, a humanity of a different race, the yellow
people, called to follow in totally different ways, was fixing, so that
they remain even to our day, the oblique lines of its angular roofs and
the rictus of its monsters.
The men of Thebes, if they still saw too massively and too vastly,
at least saw straight; they saw calmly, at the same time as they saw
forever. Their conceptions, which had begun to inspire those of Greece,
were afterwards in some measure to inspire our own. In religion, in art,
in beauty under all its aspects, they were as much our ancestors as were
the Aryans.
Later again, sixteen hundred years before the birth of Christ, in one
of the apogees of the town which, in the course of its interminable
duration, experienced so many fluctuations, some ostentatious kings
thought fit to build on this ground, already covered with temples,
that which still remains the most arresting marvel of the ruins: the
hypostyle hall, dedicated to the God Amen, with its forest of columns,
as monstrous as the trunk of the baobab and as high as towers, compared
with which the pillars of our cathedrals are utterly insignificant.
In those days the same gods reigned at Thebes as three thousand years
before, but in the interval they had been transformed little by little
in accordance with the progressive development of human thought, and
Amen, the host of this prodigious hall, asserted himself more and more
as the sovereign master of life and eternity. Pharaonic Egypt was really
tending, in spite of some revolts, towards the notion of a divine unity;
even, one might say, to the notion of a supreme pity, for she already
had her Apis, emanating from the All-Powerful, born of a virgin
mother, and come humbly to the earth in order to make acquaintance with
suffering.
After Seti I. and the Ramses had built, in honour of Amen, this temple,
which, beyond all doubt, is the grandest and most durable in the world,
men still continued for another fifteen centuries to heap up in its
neighbourhood those blocks of granite and marble and sandstone, whose
enormity now amazes us. Even for the invaders of Egypt, the Greeks and
Romans, this old ancestral town of towns remained imposing and unique.
They repaired its ruins, and built here temple after temple, in a style
which hardly ever changes. Even in the ages of decadence everything
that raised itself from the old, sacred soil, seemed to be impregnated a
little with the ancient grandeur.
And it was only when the early Christians ruled here, and after them
the Moslem iconoclasts, that the destruction became final. To these new
believers, who, in their simplicity, imagined themselves to be possessed
of the ultimate religious formula and to know by His right name
the great Unknowable, Thebes became the haunt of “false gods,” the
abomination of abominations, which it behoved them to destroy.
And so they set to work, penetrating with an ever-present fear into the
profound depths of the gloomy sanctuaries, mutilating first of all the
thousands of visages whose disconcerting smile frightened them, and then
exhausting themselves in the effort to uproot the colossi, which even
with the help of levers, they could not move. It was no easy task
indeed, for everything was as solid as geological masses, as rocks or
promontories. But for five or six hundred years the town was given over
to the caprice of desecrators.
And then came the centuries of silence and oblivion under the shroud of
the desert sands, which, thickening each year, proceeded to bury, and,
in the event, to preserve for us, this peerless relic.
And now, at last, Thebes is being exhumed and restored to a semblance
of life--now, after a cycle of seven or eight thousand years, when our
Western humanity, having left the primitive gods that we see here, to
embrace the Christian conception, which, even yesterday, made it live,
is in way of denying everything, and struggles before the enigma
of death in an obscurity more dismal and more fearful than in the
commencement of the ages. (More dismal and more fearful still in this,
that plea of youth is gone.) From all parts of Europe curious and
unquiet spirits, as well as mere idlers, turn their steps towards
Thebes, the ancient mother. Men clear the rubbish from its remains,
devise ways of retarding the enormous fallings of its ruins, and dig in
its old soil, stored with hidden treasure.
And this evening on one of the portals to which I have just
mounted--that which opens at the north-west and terminates the colossal
artery of temples and palaces, many very diverse groups have already
taken their places, after the pilgrimage of the day amongst the ruins.
And others are hastening towards the staircase by which we have just
climbed, so as not to miss the grand spectacle of the sun setting,
always with the same serenity, the same unchanging magnificence, behind
the town which once was consecrated to it.
French, German, English; I see them below, a lot of pygmy figures,
issuing from the hypostyle hall, and making their way towards us. Mean
and pitiful they look in their twentieth-century travellers' costumes,
hurrying along that avenue where once defiled so many processions of
gods and goddesses. And yet this, perhaps, is the only occasion on
which one of these bands of tourists does not seem to me altogether
ridiculous. Amongst these groups of unknown people, there is none who is
not collected and thoughtful, or who does not at least pretend to be
so; and there is some saving quality of grace, even some grandeur of
humility, in the sentiment which has brought them to this town of Amen,
and in the homage of their silence.
We are so high on this portal that we might fancy ourselves upon a
tower, and the defaced stones of which it is built are immeasurably
large. Instinctively each one sits with his face to the glowing sun, and
consequently to the outspread distances of the fields and the desert.
Before us, under our feet, an avenue stretches away, prolonging towards
the fields the pomp of the dead city--an avenue bordered by monstrous
rams, larger than buffaloes, all crouched on their pedestals in two
parallel rows in the traditional hieratic pose. The avenue terminates
beyond at a kind of wharf or landing-stage which formerly gave on to
the Nile. It was there that the God Amen, carried and followed by long
trains of priests, came every year to take his golden barge for a solemn
procession. But it leads to-day only to the cornfields, for, in the
course of successive centuries, the river has receded little by little
and now winds its course a thousand yards away in the direction of
Libya.
We can see, beyond, the old sacred Nile between the clusters of
palm-trees on its banks; meandering there like a rosy pathway, which
remains, nevertheless, in this hour of universal incandescence,
astonishingly pale, and gleams occasionally with a bluish light. And
on the farther bank, from one end to the other of the western horizon,
stretches the chain of the Libyan mountains behind which the sun is
about to plunge; a chain of red sandstone, parched since the beginning
of the world--without a rival in the preservation to perpetuity of dead
bodies--which the Thebans perforated to its extreme depths to fill it
with sarcophagi.
We watch the sun descend. But we turn also to see, behind us, the ruins
in this the traditional moment of their apotheosis. Thebes, the immense
town-mummy, seems all at once to be ablaze--as if its old stones were
able still to burn; all its blocks, fallen or upright, appear to have
been suddenly made ruddy by the glow of fire.
On this side, too, the view embraces great peaceful distances. Past the
last pylons, and beyond the crumbling ramparts the country, down there
behind the town, presents the same appearance as that we were facing a
moment before. The same cornfields, the same woods of date-trees,
that make a girdle of green palms around the ruins. And, right in the
background, a chain of mountains is lit up and glows with a vivid coral
colour. It is the chain of the Arabian desert, lying parallel to that of
Libya, along the whole length of the Nile Valley--which is thus
guarded on right and left by stones and sand stretched out in profound
solitudes.
In all the surrounding country which we command from this spot there
is no indication of the present day; only here and there, amongst the
palm-trees, the villages of the field labourers, whose houses of dried
earth can scarcely have changed since the days of the Pharaohs. Our
contemporary desecrators have up till now respected the infinite
desuetude of the place, and, for the tourists who begin to haunt it, no
one yet has dared to build a hotel.
Slowly the sun descends; and behind us the granites of the town-mummy
seem to burn more and more. It is true that a slight shadow of a warmer
tint, an amaranth violet, begins to encroach upon the lower parts,
spreading along the avenues and over the open spaces. But everything
that rises into the sky--the friezes of the temples, the capitals of
the columns, the sharp points of the obelisks--are still red as glowing
embers. These all become imbued with light and continue to glow and shed
a rosy illumination until the end of the twilight.
It is a glorious hour, even for the old dust of Egypt, which fills the
air eternally, without detracting at all from its wonderful clearness.
It savours of spices, of the Bedouin, of the bitumen of the sarcophagus.
And here now it is playing the role of those powders of different shades
of gold which the Japanese use for the backgrounds of their lacquered
landscapes. It reveals itself everywhere, close to and on the horizon,
modifying at its pleasure the colour of things, and giving them a kind
of metallic lustre. The phantasy of its changes is unimaginable. Even
in the distances of the countryside, it is busy indicating by little
trailing clouds of gold the smallest pathways traversed by the herds.
And now the disc of the God of Thebes has disappeared behind the Libyan
mountains, after changing its light from red to yellow and from yellow
to green.
And thereupon the tourists, judging that the display is over for
the night, commence to descend and make ready for departure. Some in
carriages, others on donkeys, they go to recruit themselves with the
electricity and elegance of Luxor, the neighbouring town (wines and
spirits are paid for as extras, and we dress for dinner). And the dust
condescends to mark their exodus also by a last cloud of gold beneath
the palm-trees of the road.
An immediate solemnity succeeds to their departure. Above the mud houses
of the fellah villages rise slender columns of smoke, which are of a
periwinkle-blue in the midst of the still yellow atmosphere. They tell
of the humble life of these little homesteads, subsisting here, where in
the backward of the ages were so many palaces and splendours.
And the first bayings of the watchdogs announce already the vague
uneasiness of the evenings around the ruins. There is no one now within
the mummy-town, which seems all at once to have grown larger in the
silence. Very quickly the violet shadow covers it, all save the extreme
points of its obelisks, which keep still a little of their rose-colour.
The feeling comes over you that a sovereign mystery has taken possession
of the town, as if some vague phantom things had just passed into it.