THE PASSING OF PHILAE
Leaving Assouan--as soon as we have passed the last house--we come at
once upon the desert. And now the night is falling, a cold February
night, under a strange, copper-coloured sky.
Incontestably it is the desert, with its chaos of granite and sand, its
warm tones and reddish colour. But there are telegraph poles and the
lines of a railroad, which traverse it in company, and disappear in the
empty horizon. And then too how paradoxical and ridiculous it seems
to be travelling here on full security and in a carriage! (The most
commonplace of hackney-carriages, which I hired by the hour on the
quay of Assouan.) A desert indeed which preserves still its aspects
of reality, but has become domesticated and tamed for the use of the
tourists and the ladies.
First, immense cemeteries surrounded by sand at the beginning of these
quasi-solitudes. Such old cemeteries of every epoch of history. The
thousand little cupolas of saints of Islam are crumbling side by side
with the Christian obelisks of the first centuries; and, underneath, the
Pharaonic hypogea. In the twilight, all these ruins of the dead, all the
scattered blocks of granite are mingled in mournful groupings, outlined
in fantastic silhouette against the pale copper of the sky; broken
arches, tilted domes, and rocks that rise up like tall phantoms.
Farther on, when we have left behind this region of tombs, the granites
alone litter the expanse of sand, granites to which the usury of
centuries has given the form of huge round beasts. In places they
have been thrown one upon the other and make great heaps of monsters.
Elsewhere they lie alone among the sands, as if lost in the midst of
the infinitude of some dead sea-shore. The rails and the telegraph poles
have disappeared; by the magic of twilight everything is become grand
again, beneath one of those evening skies of Egypt which, in winter,
resemble cold cupolas of metal. And now it is that you feel yourself
verily on the threshold of the profound desolations of Arabia, from
which no barrier, after all separates you. Were it not for the lack of
verisimilitude in the carriage that has brought us hither, we should
be able now to take this desert quite seriously--for in fact it has no
limits.
After travelling for about three-quarters of an hour, we see in the
distance a number of lights, which have already been kindled in
the growing darkness. They seem too bright to be those of an Arab
encampment. And our driver turning round and pointing to them says:
“Chelal!”
Chelal--that is the name of the Arab village, on the riverside, where
you take the boat for Philae. To our disgust the place is lighted by
electricity. It consists of a station, a factory with a long smoking
chimney, and a dozen or so suspicious-looking taverns, reeking of
alcohol, without which, it would seem, our European civilisation could
not implant itself in a new country.
And here we embark for Philae. A number of boats are ready: for the
tourists allured by many advertisements flock hither every winter in
docile herds. All the boats, without a single exception, are profusely
decorated with little English flags, as if for some regatta on the
Thames. There is no escape therefore from this beflagging of a foreign
holiday--and we set out with a homesick song of Nubia, which the boatmen
sing to the cadence of the oars.
The copper-coloured heaven remains so impregnated with cold light that
we still see clearly. We are amid magnificent tragic scenery on a lake
surrounded by a kind of fearful amphitheatre outlined on all sides by
the mountains of the desert. It was at the bottom of this granite circus
that the Nile used to flow, forming fresh islets, on which the eternal
verdure of the palm-trees contrasted with the high desolate mountains
that surrounded it like a wall. To-day, on account of the barrage
established by the English, the water has steadily risen, like a tide
that will never recede; and this lake, almost a little sea, replaces
the meanderings of the river and has succeeded in submerging the sacred
islets. The sanctuary of Isis--which was enthroned for thousands of
years on the summit of a hill, crowded with temples and colonnades and
statues--still half emerges; but it is alone and will soon go the way
of the others, There it is, beyond, like a great rock, at this hour in
which the night begins to obscure everything.
Nowhere but in Upper Egypt have the winter nights these transparencies
of absolute emptiness nor these sinister colourings. As the light
gradually fails, the sky passes from copper to bronze, but remains
always metallic. The zenith becomes brownish like a brazen shield, while
the setting sun alone retains its yellow colour, growing slowly paler
till it is almost of the whiteness of latten; and, above, the mountains
of the desert edge their sharp outlines with a tint of burnt sienna.
To-night a freezing wind blows fiercely in our faces. To the continual
chant of the rowers we pass slowly over the artificial lake, which is
upheld as it were in the air by the English masonry, invisible now in
the distance, but divined nevertheless and revolting. A sacrilegious
lake one might call it, since it hides beneath its troubled waters ruins
beyond all price; temples of the gods of Egypt, churches of the first
centuries of Christianity, obelisks, inscriptions and emblems. It is
over these things that we now pass, while the spray splashes in our
faces, and the foam of a thousand angry little billows.
We draw near to what was once the holy isle. In places dying palm-trees,
whose long trunks are to-day under water, still show their moistened
plumes and give an appearance of inundation, almost of cataclysm.
Before coming to the sanctuary of Isis, we touch at the kiosk of Philae,
which has been reproduced in the pictures of every age, and is as
celebrated even as the Sphinx and the pyramids. It used to stand on
a pedestal of high rocks, and around it the date-trees swayed their
bouquets of aerial palms. To-day it has no longer a base; its columns
rise separately from this kind of suspended lake. It looks as if it had
been constructed in the water for the purpose of some royal naumachy. We
enter with our boat--a strange port indeed, in its ancient grandeur; a
port of a nameless melancholy, particularly at this yellow hour of the
closing twilight, and under these icy winds that come to us mercilessly
from the neighbouring deserts. And yet how adorable it is, this kiosk of
Philae, in this the abandonment that precedes its downfall! Its columns
placed, as it were, upon something unstable, become thereby more
slender, seem to raise higher still the stone foliage of their capitals.
A veritable kiosk of dreamland now, which one feels is about to
disappear for ever under these waters which will subside no more!
And now, for another few moments, it grows quite light again, and tints
of a warmer copper reappear in the sky. Often in Egypt when the sun has
set and you think the light is gone, this furtive recoloration of the
air comes thus to surprise you, before the darkness finally descends.
The reddish tints seem to return to the slender shafts that surround us,
and also, beyond, to the temple of the goddess, standing there like a
sheer rock in the middle of this little sea, which the wind covers with
foam.
On leaving the kiosk our boat--on this deep usurping water, among the
submerged palm-trees--makes a detour in order to lead us to the temple
by the road which the pilgrims of olden times used to travel on foot--by
that way which, a little while ago, was still magnificent, bordered with
colonnades and statues. But now the road is entirely submerged, and will
never be seen again. Between its double row of columns the water lifts
us to the height of the capitals, which alone emerge and which we could
touch with our hands. It seems like some journey of the end of time, in
a kind of deserted Venice, which is about to topple over, to sink and be
forgotten.
We arrive at the temple. Above our heads rise the enormous pylons,
ornamented with figures in bas-relief: an Isis who stretches out her
arms as if she were making signs to us, and numerous other divinities
gesticulating mysteriously. The door which opens in the thickness of
these walls is low, besides being half flooded, and gives on to depths
already in darkness. We row on and enter the sanctuary, and as soon as
one boat has crossed the sacred threshold the boatmen stop their song
and suddenly give voice to the new cry that has been taught them for the
benefit of the tourists: “Hip! Hip! Hip! Hurrah!” Coming at this
moment, when, with heart oppressed by all the utilitarian vandalism that
surrounds us, we were entering the sanctuary, what an effect of gross
and imbecile profanation this bellowing of English joy produces! The
boatmen know, moreover, that they have been displaced, that their day
has gone for ever; perhaps even, in the depths of their Nubian souls,
they understand us, for all that we have imposed silence on them. The
darkness increases within, although the place is open to the sky, and
the icy wind blows more mournfully than it did outside. A penetrating
humidity--a humidity altogether unknown in this country before the
inundation--chills us to the bone. We are now in that part of the temple
which was left uncovered, the part where the faithful used to kneel. The
sonority of the granites round about exaggerates the noise of the oars
on the enclosed water, and there is something confusing in the thought
that we are rowing and floating between the walls where formerly,
and for centuries, men were used to prostrate themselves with their
foreheads on the stones.
And now it is quite dark; the hour grows late. We have to bring the boat
close to the walls to distinguish the hieroglyphs and rigid gods which
are engraved there as finely as by the burin. These walls, washed for
nearly four years by the inundation, have already taken on at the base
that sad blackish colour which may be seen on the old Venetian palaces.
Halt and silence. It is dark and cold. The oars no longer move, and we
hear only the sighing of the wind and the lapping of the water against
the columns and the bas-reliefs--and then suddenly there comes the noise
of a heavy body falling, followed by endless eddies. A great carved
stone has plunged, at its due hour, to rejoin in the black chaos below
its fellows that have already disappeared, to rejoin the submerged
temples and old Coptic churches, and the town of the first Christian
centuries--all that was once the Isle of Philae, the “pearl of Egypt,”
one of the marvels of the world.
The darkness is now extreme and we can see no longer. Let us go
and shelter, no matter where, to await the moon. At the end of this
uncovered hall there opens a door which gives on to deep night. It is
the holy of holies, heavily roofed with granite, the highest part of the
temple, the only part which the waters have not yet reached, and there
we are able to put foot to earth. Our footsteps resound noisily on the
large resonant flags, and the owls take to flight. Profound darkness;
the wind and the dampness freeze us. Three hours to go before the rising
of the moon; to wait in this place would be our death. Rather let us
return to Chelal, and shelter ourselves in any lodging that offers,
however wretched it may be.
*****
A tavern of the horrible village in the light of an electric lamp. It
reeks of absinthe, this desert tavern, in which we warm ourselves at a
little smoking fire. It has been hastily built of old tin boxes, of the
debris of whisky cases, and by way of mural decoration the landlord, an
ignorant Maltese, has pasted everywhere pictures cut from our European
pornographic newspapers. During our hours of waiting, Nubians and
Arabians follow one another hither, asking for drink, and are supplied
with brimming glassfuls of our alcoholic beverages. They are the workers
in the new factories who were formerly healthy beings, living in the
open air. But now their faces are stained with coal dust, and their
haggard eyes look unhappy and ill.
*****
The rising of the moon is fortunately at hand. Once more in our boat
we make our way slowly towards the sad rock which to-day is Philae. The
wind has fallen with the night, as happens almost invariably in this
country in winter, and the lake is calm. To the mournful yellow sky has
succeeded one that is blue-black, infinitely distant, where the stars of
Egypt scintillate in myriads.
A great glimmering light shows now in the east and at length the full
moon rises, not blood-coloured as in our climates but straightway very
luminous, and surrounded by an aureole of a kind of mist, caused by
the eternal dust of the sands. And when we return to the baseless
kiosk--lulled always by the Nubian song of the boatmen--a great disc is
already illuminating everything with a gentle splendour. As our little
boat winds in and out, we see the great ruddy disc passing and repassing
between the high columns, so striking in their archaism, whose images
are repeated in the water, that is now grown calm--more than ever a
kiosk of dreamland, a kiosk of old-world magic.
In returning to the temple of the goddess, we follow for a second time
the submerged road between the capitals and friezes of the colonnade
which emerge like a row of little reefs.
In the uncovered hall which forms the entrance to the temple, it is
still dark between the sovereign granites. Let us moor our boat against
one of the walls and await the good pleasure of the moon. As soon as
she shall have risen high enough to cast her light here, we shall see
clearly.
It begins by a rosy glimmer on the summit of the pylons; and then takes
the form of a luminous triangle, very clearly defined, which grows
gradually larger on the immense wall. Little by little it descends
towards the base of the temple, revealing to us by degrees the
intimidating presence of the bas-reliefs, the gods, goddesses and
hieroglyphs, and the assemblies of people who make signs among
themselves. We are no longer alone--a whole world of phantoms has been
evoked around us by the moon, some little, some very large. They had
been hiding there in the shadow and now suddenly they recommence their
mute conversations, without breaking the profound silence, using only
their expressive hands and raised fingers. And now also the colossal
Isis begins to appear--the one carved on the left of the portico
by which you enter; first, her refined head with its bird's helmet,
surmounted by a solar disc; then, as the light continues to descend,
her neck and shoulders, and her arm, raised to make who knows what
mysterious, indicating sign; and finally the slim nudity of her torso,
and her hips close bound in a sheath. Behold her now, the goddess,
come completely out of the shadow. . . . But she seems surprised and
disturbed at seeing at her feet, instead of the stones she had known
for two thousand years, her own likeness, a reflection of herself, that
stretches away, reversed in the mirror of the water. . . .
And suddenly, in the mist of the deep nocturnal calm of this temple,
isolated here in the lake, comes again the sound of a kind of mournful
booming, of things that topple, precious stones that become detached
and fall--and then, on the surface of the lake, a thousand concentric
circles form, close one another and disappear, ruffling indefinitely
this mirror embanked between the terrible granites, in which Isis
regards herself sorrowfully.
_Postscript._--The submerging of Philae, as we know, has increased by
no less than seventy-five millions of pounds the annual yield of the
surrounding land. Encouraged by this success, the English propose
next year to raise the barrage of the Nile another twenty feet. As a
consequence this sanctuary of Isis will be completely submerged, the
greater part of the ancient temples of Nubia will be under water, and
fever will infect the country. But, on the other hand, the cultivation
of cotton will be enormously facilitated. . . .
End of Project Gutenberg's Egypt (La Mort De Philae), by Pierre Loti