deliberate attempt to convert Cairo into a second Paris, by cutting
great avenues through the narrow, squalid streets of the old city, but
Ismail simply transformed a certain quarter of the place and spoiled its
native character. What he could not do, fortunately, was to rob the
Egyptian of his picturesqueness or make the chief city of Egypt other
than a great collection of Oriental bazars and outdoor coffee shops, as
full of the spirit of the East as the camel or the Bedouin of the
desert.
The ride from Port Said to Cairo on the train, which consumes four
hours, is interesting mainly as a revelation of what the Nile means to
these people, who without its life-giving water would be unable to grow
enough to live on. With abundant irrigation this Nile delta is one of
the garden spots of the earth.
The villages that we pass remind one somewhat of old Indian villages on
the fringe of the desert in California and Arizona--the same walls of
sun-baked adobe; the roofs of any refuse from tree pruning; the goats
and chickens on terms of intimacy with the single living-room. But the
people are not of the Western world. Dressed in voluminous black or blue
cotton robes, which are pulled up over their heads to protect them from
the keen wind of winter, they belong to the land as absolutely as the
tawny, dust-colored camel. The dress of the women appears to differ very
little from that of the men, but always the women gather a loose fold of
their dress and bring it over the head, thus partially concealing the
face. Men, women and children, all in bare feet, squat in the sand or
sit hunched up against the sunny side of their houses. Beyond any other
Orientals I have seen, these Egyptians have the capacity for unlimited
loafing under circumstances that would drive an American insane in a few
hours. Flies swarm over them; passing donkeys or camels powder them with
dust; the fierce sun beats down on their heads; but all these things
they accept philosophically as an inevitable part of life, as something
decreed by fate which it would be useless and senseless to change.
The first walk down the Street of the Camel in Cairo is one not soon
forgotten. Before you are clear of the hotel steps an Arab in a sweater
and loose skirt, something like the Malay sarong, rushes up and shouts:
"The latest New York Herald; just came this morning!" Although you tell
him "no" and shake your head, he follows you for half a block. Meanwhile
you are badgered by dealers in scarabs, beads, stamps, postal cards,
silver shawls and various curios, who dog your heels, and, when you
finally lose your temper, retaliate by shouting: "Yankee!" through their
noses. These street peddlers are wonderfully keen judges of nationality
and they manage to make life a burden to the American tourist by their
unwearied and smiling persistence. This is due in great part to the
foolish liberality of American travelers, who are inclined to accept the
first price offered, although with an Egyptian or an Arab this is
usually twice or three times what he finally agrees to take.
Custom and habit probably blunt one's sensibilities in time, but this
constant annoyance by peddlers detracts much from the pleasure of any
stroll through Cairo streets. To the new arrival everything is novel and
attractive. The main avenues are wide, well paved and lined with
spacious sidewalks, but here the European touch ends. After passing some
fine shops, their windows filled with costly goods from all parts of
Egypt and the Soudan, one comes upon one of the great cafes that form a
distinctive feature of Cairo street life. Here the sidewalk is half
filled with small tables, about which are grouped Egyptians and
foreigners drinking the sweet Turkish coffee that is served here at all
hours of the day.
Many of these Egyptians are in European dress, their swarthy faces and
the red fez alone showing their nationality. The young men are
remarkably handsome, with fine, regular features, large, brilliant black
eyes and straight, heavy eyebrows that frequently meet over the nose.
Their faces beam with good nature and they evidently regard the frequent
enjoyment of coffee and cigarettes as among the real pleasures of life.
But the older men all show traces of this life of ease and
self-indulgence. It is seldom that one sees a man beyond fifty with a
strong face. The Egyptian over forty loses his fine figure, he lays on
abundant flesh, his jowl is heavy and his whole face suggests satiety
and the loss of that pleasure in mere existence that makes the youth so
attractive.
Walking down this main artery of Cairo life one sees on the left a large
park surrounded by a high iron fence. This is the Esbekiyeh Gardens,
which cover twenty acres, and are planted to many choice trees and
shrubs. They contain cafes, a restaurant and a theater, and on several
evenings in the week military and Egyptian bands alternate in playing
foreign music. Beyond the gardens is an imposing opera house, with a
small square in front, ornamented with an impressive equestrian statue
of old Ibrahim Pasha, one of the few good fighters that Egypt has
produced. From the opera house radiate many streets, some leading to the
new Europeanized quarters, with noble residences and great apartment
houses; others taking one directly to the bazars and narrow streets that
give a good idea of Cairo as it existed before the foreigner came to
change its life.
Although the modern tram car clangs its way through these native
streets, it is about the only foreign touch that can be seen. Everything
else is distinctively Oriental. It is difficult to give any adequate
idea of the narrowness of these streets or of the amount of life that is
crowded into them. As in many cities of India, all the work of the shops
goes on in plain view from the street. The shops themselves are mere
cubicles, from eight to ten feet wide and seldom more than from six to
eight feet deep. In certain streets the makers of shoes and slippers are
massed in solid rows; then come the workers in brass and metals; then
the jewelers, and following these may be dealers in shawls and in curios
of various kinds. The native shopkeeper sits cross-legged amid his
stock and, although he shows great keenness in getting you to examine
his wares, he never reveals any haste in closing a bargain.
Shopping in this native quarter and in the great Muski bazar that
adjoins it is a constant source of amusement to the foreign woman who
has a fondness for bargaining. These Arabs and Egyptians never expect
one to give more than half what is demanded, except in the case of a few
large shops in which the price is marked. If one of the silver shawls
made at Assiut attracts a lady's attention and the polite shopkeeper
demands five pounds sterling, she may safely offer him two pounds, and
then, after haggling for a half hour, she will probably become the
possessor of the shawl for two pounds ten shillings. Of one thing the
traveler may be sure: he will never get any article from an Egyptian on
which the shopkeeper cannot make a small profit.
The Muski bazar is about a mile long and, although many European shops
line it, the street still retains its Oriental attractiveness. Branching
off from it are many narrow streets crowded with shops on both sides.
Here may be seen the real life of Old Cairo, unhampered by any foreign
innovations. The street is not more than twelve feet wide and above the
first floor of the houses projecting latticed windows and open balconies
reduce this width to three or four feet. Looking up one sees only a
narrow slit of blue sky, against which are outlined several tiers of
latticed windows. From these the harem women look down upon the street
life in which they can have no real part. Peeping over the balconies may
be seen black eyes that gleam above the yashmak or Oriental veil worn by
the poorer classes. This veil covers the face almost to the eyes and it
is held in place by a curious bit of bamboo that comes down over the
forehead to the nose. The women of the better class do not wear this
ugly yashmak, but content themselves with a white silk veil that is
stretched across the lower part of the face, leaving the eyes and a part
of the nose uncovered.
No visit to Cairo is complete without a sight of Old Cairo, with its
bazars. This is a quarter of the city that remains as it was in the days
of the Caliphs. It is inhabited mainly by Copts and among the mean
houses, built of sun-dried bricks, may be traced part of the old Roman
wall that encircled this suburb, then known as Babylon. The houses are
mainly of two or three stories, but the streets are so narrow that two
people on opposite sides may easily join hands by leaning out of their
windows. Many or the antique doors of oak, studded with great
wrought-iron nails, still remain. Here is the old church of St. Sergius,
which is said to antedate the Moslem conquest. In the ancient crypt the
Virgin Mary and the Child are said to have sought shelter after their
flight into Egypt.
Near by is the island of Roda, which is noteworthy for the legend that
here the infant Moses was found by Pharaoh's daughter. The visitor
crosses a narrow arm of the Nile by a crude ferry and then walks through
a quaint old garden to a wall that overlooks the Nile and the Pyramids.
This wall marks the spot, according to local tradition, where Moses was
taken from the bulrushes. The bulrushes are no more because they have
been dredged out, but the place has the look of extreme age and the
garden contains many curious trees.
AMONG THE RUINS OF LUXOR AND KARNAK
Luxor, the ancient city of Upper Egypt, which may be reached by a night
train ride from Cairo, is the center of the most interesting ruins on
the Nile. The city itself has been built around the splendid temple of
Luxor, founded by Amenophis III, but altered and extensively rebuilt by
Rameses II. From the Nile the colonnade of this temple is a beautiful
spectacle, as the huge columns are in perfect preservation. Big tourist
hotels make up most of the other buildings. The town boasts a good water
front, which is generally lined in the winter season with tourist
steamers. The view across the Nile is fine, as it includes the lofty
Libyan range of mountains, in whose flanks were cut the tombs of the
Pharaohs. Here, in two or three days, one may study the ruins of Luxor,
Karnak and Thebes--names that the historian still conjures with.
All the Egyptian temples were built on one general plan, like the
mosques of North India, and Luxor does not differ from the others,
except that it surpasses them all in the beauty of its colonnaded
pillars. Seven double columns, about fifty-two feet high, with lotus
capitals, support a massive architrave, while beyond them are double
columns on three sides of a great court. This temple of Luxor was
originally built by Amenophis III of the eighteenth dynasty in honor of
Ammon, the greatest of Egyptian gods, his wife and their son, the
moon-god Khons. The successor of this monarch erased the name of Ammon
and made other changes, but Seti I restored Ammon's name, and then came
Rameses II, the builder who never wearied in rearing huge temples and in
carving colossal figures of himself.
Rameses added a colonnaded court in front of the temple, built an
enormous pylon, with obelisks and colossal statues that celebrate his
own greatness, and erased the cartouches of the original builder,
substituting his own and thus claiming credit for the erection of the
whole temple. Were the spirit of the great Rameses allowed to return to
earth and reanimate the mummy that now forms the most interesting
exhibit in the Cairo Museum, how great would be his humiliation to know
that his ingenious devices to appropriate the credit of other men's work
have been exposed? In nearly all the remains of Upper Egypt, Rameses
figures as the sole builder, but the cunning of modern archaeologists
has stripped him of this credit and has revealed him as the greatest of
royal charlatans.
The general plan of the Luxor temple is repeated at Karnak and all other
places in Egypt. The pylon, two towers of massive masonry, formed the
entrance to the temple, the door being in the middle. The towers of the
pylon resemble truncated pyramids and, as they were formed of large
stones, they frequently survived when all other parts of the temple fell
into ruins. The surfaces of the pylon afforded space for reliefs and
inscriptions, telling of the glories of the king who reared the temple.
In most cases obelisks and colossal statues of the royal builder were
placed in front of the pylon. From the pylon one enters the great open
court, with covered colonnades at right and left. This court was the
gathering place of the people on all big festivals, and in the center
stood the great altar. Back of this court, on a terrace a few feet
higher, was the vestibule of the temple upheld by columns, the front row
of which was balustraded. Behind this was the great hypostyle hall,
extending the whole width of the building, with five aisles, the two
outer ones being lower than the others. The roof of the central aisle is
upheld by papyrus columns with calyx capitals, while that of the other
aisles is supported by papyrus columns with bud capitals. Behind this
hall is the inner sanctuary, containing the image of the god in a sacred
boat. Around the sanctuary were grouped various chambers for the storage
of the priests' vestments and for the use of watchmen and other
attendants.
In the Luxor temple the surface of the pylon is devoted to a record of
the achievements in war of Rameses II, the monarch who finally revised
the temple and put his seal on it. Behind the pylon is the great court
of Rameses, entirely surrounded by two rows of seventy-four columns,
with papyrus bud capitals and smooth shafts. Then comes a colonnade of
seven double columns, fifty-two feet high, with calyx capitals; a second
court, that of Amenophis III, with double rows of columns on three
sides; the vestibule of the temple, two chapels, the birth-room of
Amenophis and several other chambers.
[Illustration:
The Great Hypostyle Hall at Karnak.
This Hall is in the Temple of Ammon, and is One
of the Most Impressive in All Egypt. Originally
There Were One Hundred and Thirty-four
Columns, Arranged in Sixteen Rows]
Each monarch who reared a temple to his chosen deity devoted much space
to statues of himself, with grandiloquent accounts in hieroglyphs of his
exploits in war and peace and of the many peoples who paid him tribute.
Rameses appears to have had most of the evil traits of the arbitrary
despot. With unlimited men and material he was engaged during the
greater part of his long reign in erecting colossal structures which
were designed to perpetuate in enduring stone the record of his
achievements. But Time has dealt Rameses some staggering blows. His tomb
at Thebes, which was planned to preserve his mummy throughout the ages,
fell in and is the only one of the tombs of the kings that cannot be
shown. The mummy of this ablest and proudest of the Pharaohs is now on
exhibition at the Cairo Museum with a score of others and excites the
ribald comment of the Cook's tourist, who drops his "h's" and knows
nothing of Egyptology. Yet the mummy of Rameses is by far the most
interesting of those shown at the museum because the head and face are
so essentially modern. The other rulers of Egypt were plainly Orientals,
but this man, with the high-bridged, sensitive nose, the long upper lip,
the strong chin and the powerful forehead, might have stepped out of the
political life of any of the great European nations during the last
century.
The impressiveness of the temple of Luxor depends mainly upon the rows
of columns, nearly sixty feet in height, which give one a vivid idea of
the majesty of Egyptian architecture in its best estate. These columns
show few traces of the destroying hand of time, although they were
carved from soft limestone. Probably the escape of this temple from the
ruin that befell Karnak and Thebes was due mainly to its sheltered
position and also to the fact that a Coptic church and the houses of
peasants were built among the columns. The refuse that aided to preserve
these remains of Ancient Egyptian architecture was fully twenty feet
deep when the work of excavation was begun. Hence Luxor satisfies the
eye in the perfect arrangement of the columns and in the massiveness of
the work. Here also on the pylon and the walls of the court may be seen
some beautiful reliefs and inscriptions which depict scenes in the
campaigns of Rameses II against the Hittites, sacrificial processions
and hymns to the gods.
From ancient Luxor to Karnak, a distance of a mile and one-half, the way
was marked in the time of the Pharaohs by a double row of small
sphinxes, many of which still remain in a half-ruined condition. This
avenue leads to the small temple of Khons, the moon-god, made noteworthy
by a beautiful pylon. This pylon is one hundred and four feet long,
thirty-three feet wide and sixty feet high and is covered with
inscriptions and reliefs. This small temple serves as an introduction to
the great temple of Ammon, the chief glory of Karnak, to which most of
the Pharaohs contributed. This temple is difficult to describe, as it
covers several acres and is a mass of gigantic masonry, full of majesty
even in its ruin. What it was in the days of its builders, with its vast
courts lined with beautiful designs in brilliant colors, the imagination
fails to conceive. Its greatest features are the main pylon (three
hundred and seventy feet wide and one hundred and forty-two and one-half
feet high), the great hypostyle hall of Seti I and Rameses II, the
festival temple of Thotmes III and the obelisk of Queen Hatasu. From the
pylon a superb view may be gained of the ruins of Karnak.
The hypostyle hall is justly ranked among the wonders of the world, as
it is no less than three hundred and thirty-eight feet in breadth by one
hundred and seventy feet in depth and it is estimated that the great
church of Notre Dame in Paris could be set down in this hall. Sixteen
rows of columns--one hundred and thirty-four in all--support the roof.
Looking down the two central rows of columns toward the sanctuary, one
gets some idea of the effect of this colossal architecture when the
pillars were all perfect and the fierce sunshine of ancient Egypt
brought out their barbaric wealth of gold and brilliant colors.
The walls of this immense hall are covered with pictures in relief
depicting the victories of Seti and Rameses over the Libyans and the
people of Palestine. These designs represent the two monarchs as
performing prodigies of valor on the field of battle and then bringing
the trophies of war as an offering to the gods. The festal hall of
Thotmes III is made noteworthy by twenty unique columns arranged in two
rows. The Temple of Karnak was made beautiful by two fine obelisks of
pink granite from Assuan, erected by Queen Hatasu. One is in fragments,
but the other rises one hundred and one-half feet from amid a ruined
colonnade. It is the loftiest obelisk known with the single exception of
that in front of the Lateran in Rome, which is taller by only three and
one-half feet. The inscription records that it was made in seven months.
The impression left by the ruins of Karnak is bewildering. The modern
mind has great difficulty in conceiving how any monarch, no matter how
great his resources, could spend years in erecting these huge structures
in honor of his gods. Here are scores of colossal statues of Rameses,
Seti and Amenophis, each of which required six months to carve from a
single slab of red or black granite. Here are hundreds of columns of
from forty to sixty feet high, covered from capital to base with richly
carved hieroglyphs. Here are splendid halls, larger than anything known
in our day, which were picture galleries in stone, blazing with gold,
red, purple and other colors. And here are obelisks that have preserved
through all these centuries the story of their dedication.
The mind is staggered by so great a mass of work, representing untold
misery of thousands of wretched slaves brought from all parts of the
then known world. These slaves were made to work under the terrible
Egyptian sun; if they were overcome by the heat and stopped for a
moment's rest their bare backs felt the cruel lash of the overseer; if
they fell under the heat and the burden they were dragged out and their
bodies thrown to the vultures and the jackals. So, while we stand in
amazement before these relics of the enormous activity of a people who
have passed away, we cannot fail to note that these huge stones were
cemented with the blood and tears of the bond slave, and that if they
could find a voice they would tell of unthinkable atrocities which they
witnessed in those old days, before brotherly love came into the world.
TOMBS OF THE KINGS AT ANCIENT THEBES
The Greeks and Romans who went up the Nile as far as the "hundred-gated"
city of Thebes declared that the Tombs of the Kings, cut in the
limestone sides of the Libyan range of mountains, were among the wonders
of the world. The tourist of to-day will confirm this early impression,
for in Egypt nothing gives one a more vivid idea of the enormous pains
taken by the Pharaohs to preserve their dead from desecration than do
these tombs. Here for several miles in the flanks of these
mountains--sterile, desolate beyond any region that I have ever
seen--are scattered the rock-hewn tombs of the monarchs who carried the
arms of Egypt to all parts of the known world of their day. Like their
temples, the Egyptians built their tombs after a uniform plan--the only
variation was in the arrangement of the minor chambers and in the
inscriptions which told of the history of the king whose mummy reposed
in the vault.
Seven miles across the river the Pharaohs chose the site of their tombs.
Imagination could not conceive a greater abomination of desolation than
the rocky mountainside in which these tombs are carved; but fortunes
were lavished on the construction of these resting places of the dead.
Historians and travelers have told of the great city which grew up about
the tombs of the Egyptian kings--the temples, the homes of priests and
the huge settlements of thousands of workmen who spent years in the
laborious carving and decoration of these burial places. But to-day
nothing remains of these cities, and of the temples only a few columns,
pillars and broken statues bear witness to their former grandeur. Yet
the tombs have resisted the destroying hand of the centuries, and the
walls of several of them actually retain the brilliant colors laid on by
the painters over four thousand years ago. When you go down the
roughly-hewn steps into the mortuary chambers, carved out of the solid
rock, it is borne in upon you that here time has stood still; that
during all the ages that have seen the rise of Christianity and the
growth of empires greater than Thebes ever dreamed of, the mummies of
these Pharaohs reposed here undisturbed. Now by the aid of skilfully
arranged electric lights you may descend into most of these tombs,
marvel at the beauty of the decorative inscriptions on the walls, gaze
upon the massive granite sarcophagi in which the mummies were placed,
and get a genuine taste of the antiquity that you have read about but
never fully realized before. This is the service of the tombs of the
kings--the actual turning back of the centuries so that one feels the
touch of the ancient days as vividly as he feels the hot, dust-laden,
oppressive air of the mausoleum.