FROM SKETCH-BOOK AND DIARY
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
LETTERS FROM THE HOLY LAND
CONTAINING 16 FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR
FROM PAINTINGS BY THE AUTHOR
“Charmingly natural and spontaneous travel impressions with sixteen
harmonious illustrations. The glow, spaciousness and atmosphere of these
Eastern scenes are preserved in a way that eloquently attests the
possibilities of the best colour process work.”--_Outlook_.
“The letters in themselves afford their own justification; the sketches
are by Lady Butler, and when we have said that we have said all.
Combined, they make a book that is at once a delight to the eye and a
pleasure to handle. The coloured illustrations, marvellously well
reproduced, provide in a panoramic display faithful representations of
the Holy Land as it is seen to-day. They make a singularly attractive
collection, worthy of the distinguished artist who painted them.”--_St.
James’s Gazette_.
A. & C. BLACK, SOHO SQUARE LONDON
AGENTS
America The Macmillan Company
64 & 66 Fifth Avenue, New York
Australasia The Oxford University Press
205 Flinders Lane, Melbourne
Canada The Macmillan Company of Canada, Ltd.
27 Richmond Street West, Toronto
India Macmillan & Company, Ltd.
Macmillan Building, Bombay
309 Bow Bazaar Street, Calcutta
[Illustration: THE HOUR OF PRAYER, A SOUVENIR OF WADY HALFA]
FROM SKETCH-BOOK
AND DIARY
BY
ELIZABETH BUTLER
WITH TWENTY-EIGHT ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR
AND TWENTY-ONE SMALL SKETCHES IN THE TEXT
BY THE AUTHOR
[Illustration: colophon]
LONDON
ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK, SOHO SQUARE, W.
BURNS AND OATES, 28 ORCHARD STREET, W.
1909
Dedication
TO MY SISTER, ALICE MEYNELL
I have an idea of writing to you, most sympathetic Reader, of certain
days and nights of my travels that have impressed themselves with
peculiar force upon my memory, and that have mostly rolled by since you
and I set out, at the Parting of the Ways, from the paternal roof-tree,
within three months of each other.
First, I want to take you to the Wild West Land of Ireland, to a glen in
Kerry, where, so far, the tourist does not come, and then on to remote
Clew Bay, in the County Mayo.
After that, come with me up the Nile in the time that saw the close of
the Gordon Relief Expedition, when the sailing “Dahabieh,” most
fascinating of house-boats, was still the vogue for those who were not
in a hurry, and when again the tourist (of that particular year) was
away seeking safer picnic grounds elsewhere.
Then to the Cape and the voyage thither, which may not sound alluring,
but where you may find something to smile at.
I claim your indulgence, wherever I ask you to accompany me, for my
painter’s literary crudities; but nowhere do I need it more than in
Italy, for you have trodden that field with me almost foot by foot. The
veil to which I trust for softening those asperities elsewhere must fall
asunder there.
I have made my Diary, and in the case of the Egyptian chapters, my
letters to our mother, the mainsprings from which to draw these
reminiscences.
Bansha CASTLE, _July_ 1909.
CONTENTS
I. IN THE WEST OF IRELAND
CHAPTER I
PAGE
GLANARAGH 3
CHAPTER II
COUNTY MAYO IN 1905 15
II. EGYPT
CHAPTER I
CAIRO 31
CHAPTER II
THE UPPER NILE 55
CHAPTER III
ALEXANDRIA 77
III. THE CAPE
CHAPTER I
TO THE CAPE 91
CHAPTER II
AT ROSEBANK, CAPE COLONY 105
IV. ITALY
CHAPTER I
VINTAGE-TIME IN TUSCANY 123
CHAPTER II
Sienna, Perugia, and Vesuvius 143
CHAPTER III
ROME 160
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
IN COLOUR
1. The Hour of Prayer, A Souvenir of Wady Halfa _Frontispiece_
IRELAND
FACING PAGE
2. Our Escort into Glenaragh 1
3. “A Chapel-of-Ease,” Co. Kerry 8
4. Croagh Patrick 17
5. Clew Bay, Co. Mayo 20
6. A Little Irish River 24
EGYPT
7. In a Cairo Bazaar 33
8. The Camel Corps 40
9. The English General’s Syces 49
10. Registering Fellaheen for the Conscription 56
11. “No Mooring To-night!” 59
12. The “Fostât” becalmed 62
13. At Philæ 67
14. A “Lament” in the Desert 70
15. Abu Simbel at Sunrise 76
16. Madame’s “At Home” Day; Servants at the Gate 81
17. Syndioor on the Lower Nile 88
THE CAPE
18. “In the Hollow of His Hand” 97
19. A Corner of our Garden at Rosebank 104
20. The Inverted Crescent 113
21. The Cape “Flats” 120
ITALY
22. Bringing in the Grapes 123
23. A Son of the Soil, Riviera di Levante 126
24. Ploughing in Tuscany 145
25. The Bersaglieri at the Fountain, Perugia 152
26. A Meeting on the Pincian: French and German
Seminarists 161
27. A Lenten Sermon in the Colosseum 164
28. The Start for the Horse Race, Rome 168
Also head and tail pieces in black and white on pp. 2, 3, 15, 27,
28, 30, 31, 54, 55, 76, 77, 88, 90, 91, 104, 105, 122, 123,
142, 143, and 160.
[Illustration: OUR ESCORT INTO GLENARAGH]
I
IN THE WEST OF IRELAND
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
CHAPTER I
GLENARAGH
My diary must introduce you to Glenaragh, where I saw a land whose
beauty was a revelation to me; a new delight unlike anything I had seen
in my experiences of the world’s loveliness. To one familiarized from
childhood with Italy’s peculiar charm, a sudden vision of the Wild West
of Ireland produces a sensation of freshness and surprise difficult
adequately to describe.
“--_June_ ‘77.--At Killarney we left the train and set off on one of the
most enchanting carriage journeys I have ever made, passing by the
lovely Lough Leane by a road hedged in on both sides with masses of the
richest May blossom. For some distance the scenery was wooded and soft,
almost too perfect in composition of wood, lake, river, and mountain;
but by degrees we left behind us those scenes of finished beauty, and
entered upon tracts of glorious bog-land which, in the advancing
evening, impressed me beyond even my heart’s desire by their breadth of
colour and solemn tones. I was beginning to taste the salt of the Wilds.
“The scenery grew more rugged still, and against ranges of distant
mountains jutted out the strong grey and brown rocks, the stone cairns
and cabins of the Wild West land.
“To be a figure-painter and full of interest in mankind does not mean
that one cannot enjoy, from the depths of one’s heart, such scenes as
these, where what human habitations there are, are so like the stone
heaps that lie over the face of the land that they are scarcely
distinguishable from them. When observed they only convey to the mind
the sense of the feebleness of man, overpowered as he is here by the
might of the primeval landscape. This human atom stands timidly at his
black cabin door to see the stranger pass, often half-witted through
privation; or he silently tills the little patch of land he has borrowed
from the strong and barbarous earth that yields him so little.
“The mighty ‘Carran Thual,’ one of the mountain group which rises out of
Glenaragh and dominates the whole land of Kerry, was ablaze with burning
heather, its peak sending up a glorious column of smoke which spread out
at the top for miles and miles and changed its exquisite smoke tints
every minute as the sun sank lower. As we reached the rocky pass that
took us by the wild and remote Lough Acoose that sun had gone down
behind an opposite mountain, and the blazing heather glowed brighter as
the twilight deepened, and circles of fire played fiercely and weirdly
on the mountain-side. Our Glen gave the ‘Saxon lady’ its grandest
illumination on her arrival.
“Wild strange birds rose from the bracken as we passed, and flew
strongly away over lake and mountain torrent, and the little black Kerry
cows all watched us go by with ears pricked and heads inquiringly
raised. The last stage of the journey had a brilliant _finale_. A herd
of young horses was in our way in the narrow road, and the creatures
careered before us, unable or too stupid to turn aside into the ditches
by the roadside to let us through. We could not head them, and for fully
a mile did those shaggy wild things caper and jump ahead, their manes
flying out wildly with the glow from the west shining through them. Some
imbecile cows soon joined them in the stampede, for no imaginable
reason, unless they enjoyed the fright of being pursued, and the
ungainly progress of those recruits was a sight to behold,--tails in the
air and horns in the dust. The troop led the way right into the eye of
the sunset. With this escort we entered Glenaragh.
* * * * *
“--_June_ 1877.--We rode in to-night after a long excursion amidst the
mountains of this wild land of Kerry, rode down into the glen where our
little inn stands in a clump of birch and arbutus trees. That northern
light which in these high latitudes and at this season carries the
after-light of the sunset on into the dawn, lighted our path for the
last hour with surprising power. Were we sufficiently far north, of
course, the sun itself would not dip below the horizon at all, but here
we have only the upper portion of his aureole from his setting to his
rising. Oh! the wild freedom of these mountain paths, the scent of the
cabin turf fires, the round west wind rolling through the heather; what
cool wells of memories they fill up for the thirsty traveller in desert
places far away. That west wind! This is the first land it has swept
with its wings since it left the coasts of Labrador. For purity, for
freshness, for generosity, give me the Wild West wind of Ireland.
“‘Carran Thual’ is still on fire; it signals each night back to the
northern light across the glen in a red glare of burning heather. The
moon, now in her first quarter, looks green-gold by contrast with all
this red of sky and flame, and altogether our glen gives us, these
nights, such a display of earthly and heavenly splendour that it seems
one should be a spectator all night of so much beauty. And to this
concert of colour runs the subtle accompaniment of rushing water, for
all these mountains are laced with silvery torrents leaping down to the
lakes and rivers that reflect the glory of the sky. Glenaragh! loveliest
of wild valleys, where is the poet that should make thee the theme of
his songs?
“Coming through ‘Windy Gap’ in this illuminated gloaming we met a lonely
horseman riding fast, a rope for his bridle, his pony very shaggy. He
passed us over the rocks and rolling stones, and, looking back, we saw
his bent figure jet black against the west for a moment, ere he dipped
down through the ‘Gap’ out of sight. We knew who he was. Some peasant
was dying on the mountain-side beyond, and the priest was anxious to be
in time with the Viaticum.
“A strange little creature came out of the kitchen of the inn to see us
after supper, and I made the acquaintance of a Leprechaun. Tiny, grey,
bald little manikin; a ‘fairy,’ the people call him. I do not want to
know why they are like that. I would rather leave them mysterious and
unexplained.
* * * * *
“The people speak Gaelic here, amongst themselves, and the priest
preaches in it in the little chapel with the mud floor up on the hill
over the torrent. The language and the torrent seem to speak alike,
hurrying headlong.
[Illustration: “A CHAPEL-OF-EASE,” CO. KERRY]
“But the chapel! Shall I ever forget the tub of holy water, on my first
Sunday, placed before the rickety little altar on the mud floor, where
the people, on coming in, splashed the water up into their faces? The
old women had all brought big bottles from their homes in far-away glens
to fill at the tub, and nothing could surpass the comicality of
their attitudes as they stooped over their pious business, all wearing
the hooded cloak that made them look as broad as they were long. One old
lady, in her nice white cap, monopolized the tub an unconscionably long
time, for, catching sight of her wind-tossed tresses in that
looking-glass, she finished her devout ablutions by smoothing her few
grey hairs with her moistened fingers into tidy bands, with alternate
signs of the cross. The windows were all broken, and the men and boys
stuffed the holes with their hats and caps to keep out the mountain
blast.
“Last Sunday, a very hot day, the tub happened to be placed outside the
door, and it was well my horse was not tied up within reach, or a former
catastrophe might have been repeated, and a ‘blessed baist’ have carried
me home. The heat in the rickety little gallery, where the ‘quality’
have their seats, was such that I went out into the open air and
followed the rest of the service with a rock for my hassock, and two
rosy pigs toddling about me in that friendly way I notice as
characteristic of all the animals in these parts. They seem to feel they
are members of the family, and you see calves, goats, pigs, and donkeys
sauntering in and out of the cabin doors in a free-and-easy harmony
with the human beings which takes my fancy greatly. But the beasts are
by far the happiest; their lives seem passed in perfect contentment and
satisfaction, whereas the poor human animals have a hard struggle for
existence in this stony and difficult land of Kerry.
“The other day when W. and I dismounted at a cabin door on a wild
mountain that holds, still higher up, a little dark lake which the
people declare has no bottom to it, and on the shores of which ‘worms as
big as a horse’ come out and bellow in the evenings, the gaunt pig that
seemed to act watch-dog charged at me like a wild boar and sent me home
in ‘looped and windowed raggedness.’ I never thought to find excess of
zeal in a pig! The inmates of the cabin could not do enough for us to
make up for such want of reticence.
“On one occasion at church in Tipperary, I noticed a rather satanic goat
come pattering up the church and occupy an empty pew, where he lay down
with perfect self-complacency and remained quiescent, chewing the cud,
while we knelt; but each time the congregation stood up, up jumped the
goat, his pale eyes and enormous horns just appearing over the high
front of the pew. Then as we knelt again he would subside also, till he
was startled to his feet once more by the rustle of the people rising,
and then his wild head was again visible over the top of the pew,
staring about him. Not a single person took any notice of the weird
creature or seemed to think him out of place or at all funny. And so he
continued to rise and fall with the rest to the end.
“Our chapel here is too small for the congregation that streams in from
places as far as fifteen miles away among the mountains, and on one
pouring wet Sunday I saw the strangest rendering of what is called ‘a
chapel-of-ease.’ Not much ‘ease’ there, for some dozen men and youths
who could find no place inside were kneeling about the door in running
water, with a stone placed under each knee. Every day I see some
incident or episode which has for me a surprise and all the charm of a
new and striking experience. I feel more ‘abroad’ in this country than I
do on the Continent.
“See, again, this little scene. A friend journeying to our inn and
missing the road got belated in the defiles of the ‘Reeks.’ Dismounting
at one of those mud cabins, which, at a little distance, are
indistinguishable from their rocky surroundings, to ask the way, he was
invited inside and offered a meal. The light was waning, so two little
girls stood on either side of the stranger, each holding a bit of
lighted candle as he sat at table. These wild-eyed and ragged little
creatures made a pretty pair of dining-table candlesticks! I wish I
could have seen them in the dim twilight of the black, smoke-dimmed
cabin interior, their faces lighted by the candle flame.
“The beauty of the children here is a constant pleasure to me. We are
here in the land of blue eyes and black lashes, or golden ones, when the
hair, as it so frequently is, is ruddy. The young women are quite
beautiful. I wish a painter of female beauty could have seen the girl we
passed to-day who was minding some calves in a bit of bog-land bordered
with birch-trees. It was a symphony of green; her head shawl was green
plaid, her petticoat another tone of green, the background and all her
surroundings gave every cool and delicious variation of green, and her
ruddy limbs and red-gold hair, tossed by the breeze and shone through by
the sun, looked richer in colour by the contrast. Her great blue eyes
looked shyly at us and the shawl soon covered her laughing face. What a
sweet picture, ‘In the Green Isle’!
“Every day I am more and more struck with the light-heartedness and
gaiety of the animals. Whether it is emphasized by the poverty-stricken
and quiet, saddened, demeanour of the human beings in these parts I
cannot tell, but certainly the beasts seem to have the best of it. As to
the dogs that belong to the mud cabins, never have I seen such jolly
dogs, full of comic ways, especially when in puppy-hood, and all so
valiant in confronting us as we near their strongholds. But on our near
approach that puppy who looks mighty fierce afar off usually bolts under
some door and sticks there. Then the pigs, who generally are less
valiant than our wild boar of Lough Cluen, seized with apparent panic,
rush round and round in the yard, and the flurried ducks that scuttle
from under our horses’ hoofs end by falling on their sides in the
ditches--surely all in fun? And invariably the cows and calves by the
way-side prefer to be pursued along the roads, and keep up a splendid
burst of galloping with tails in the air for miles before a tumble
happening to one of them suggests a movement to the rear. All the lower
creatures are ‘jolly dogs’ here, and only man is care-worn.”
In the autumn we came back to our well-loved glen, and I gathered
materials there for my first _married_ Academy picture--the ‘Recruits
for the Connaught Rangers.’ W. found me two splendid ‘bog-trotters’ for
models. The elder of the two had the finer physique, and it was
explained to me that this was owing to his having been reared on
herrings as well as potatoes, whereas the other, who lived up in the
mountains, away from the sea, had not known the luxury of the herring. I
wish we could get more of these men into our army. W. at that time was
developing suggestions for forming a Regiment of Irish Guards, and I was
enthusiastic in my adhesion to such a project and filling the imaginary
ranks with big men like my two models. However, he was some twenty-three
years too soon, and the honour had to be won for Ireland through yet
another big war.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER II
COUNTY MAYO IN 1905
I wish you would make a summer tour to Mayo. It is simple; yet what a
change of scene, of sensations, of thoughts one secures by this simple
and direct journey--Euston, Holyhead, Dublin, Mulranny. You travel right
across Ireland, getting a very informing vista of the poverty and
stagnation of those Midland counties till your eyes greet the glorious
development of natural beauty on the confines of the sea-girt Western
land. I went there tired from London and came on a scene of the most
perfect repose imaginable, with the sound of the motor buses still
buzzing in my ears.
Mulranny is supremely healthy--a place of rosy cheeks and sunburn,
bracing yet genial, clear-aired, majestic in its scenery, unspoilt. As
you near your journey’s end and enter Mayo the change in the scenery
from the emptiness of Roscommon develops rapidly. Magnificent mountains
rise on the horizon, and the grandeur of the landscape grows into
extraordinary beauty as the train rounds into Clew Bay. The great cone
of Croagh Patrick rises in striking isolation at first, and then the
surrounding mountains, one by one, join it in lovely outlines against
the fresh _clean_ sky. It was a beautiful afternoon when I was
introduced to this memorable landscape, and the waters of the Bay were
quite calm. After sunset the crescent moon gave the culminating charm to
the lovely scene in the west, while to the south the red planet Mars
flamed above Croagh Patrick, and all this beauty was mirrored in the
Bay. What an emancipation from the fret and fuss of little Piccadilly in
a hot July to find oneself before these mountain forms and colours that
have not changed since the cooling of the earth. You might travel
farther a great way and not find such a virgin land.
[Illustration: CROAGH PATRICK]
And there is Achill Island, a one-day’s excursion from Mulranny,
poignantly melancholy in its beauty and remoteness beyond anything I
have seen in the west. Achill has often been described; it holds the
traveller’s attention with a wild appeal to his heart; but I don’t know
that one little detail of that land “beyond the beyond” has ever been
described. It is Achill’s mournful little Pompeii, a village of the
dead, on a bare hillside, which we passed one day on our way to an
unfrequented part of the island. This village was deserted in the awful
famine year of ‘47, some of the inhabitants creeping away in fruitless
search of work and food to die farther afield, others simply sinking
down on the home sod that could give them nothing but the grave. In the
bright sunshine its roofless cabins and grass-grown streets looked more
heart-breaking than they might have done in dismal rain. I wish I could
have made a sketch of it as I saw it that day--a subject strongly
attracting the attention of the mind rather than the eye. Pictorial
beauty there was none.
Everywhere in this country there is that heart-piercing contrast between
natural beauty and human adversity--that companionship of sun and
sorrow. But the light and the darkness seem blended by the unquestioning
faith of these rugged Christians into a solemn unity and harmony before
which any words of mine sound only like so much dilettantism.
See here another bit of chapel interior. A rough, plain little building,
too formless to be picturesque, packed with peasant men, women, and
children. Where but in Ireland could such a scene take place as I
witnessed there? The priest, before the beginning of the service, gave a
tremendous swish of holy water to the congregation with a mop out of a
zinc pail, from the altar. He had previously heard nearly half the
congregation’s confessions, men, women, boys, and girls kneeling in turn
beside his chair at one side of the altar, without any sort of screen. I
wondered, as they pressed round him, that they did not overhear each
other, but indeed I reflected that would be “no matther whativer,” as
these people must have but little to tell!
The server ran a match along the earthen floor to light the two
guttering, unequal candles on the altar, and at the end of Mass he
produced the mop and zinc pail again. _Swish_ went the holy water once
more from the mop, wielded by the athletic sword-arm of the gigantic
young priest. For fear the nearer people should have been but poorly
sprinkled under that far-reaching arc of water, which went to the very
end wall of the chapel, he soused the mop again with a good twist and
gave everybody in the front benches a sharp whack full in their faces,
tactfully leaving us out. They received it with beaming and grateful
smiles.
There are wonderful studies of old men’s and women’s heads here full of
that character which in the more “educated” parts of Ireland the School
Board seems to be rubbing out, and I was delighted to see the women and
girls wearing the head-shawls and white caps and the red petticoats that
charmed me in Kerry in ‘77. The railway is sure to bring the dreadful
“Frenchy” hat here in time, and then good-bye to the comely appearance
of these women. Their wild beauty undergoes an extraordinary change
under the absurd hat and feathers--these winsome colleens then lose all
their charm.
Yet I must thank this same railway for having brought us to this haven
of rest, right up to the doors of a charming, very modern hotel, on
quite different lines from the dear little inn that fascinated me in
the old Glenaragh days. In its way it is fascinating too, for here you
have all the up-to-date amenities in the very heart of the wildest
country you could wish for. The electric light is generated by the
mountain streams and the baths filled from the glorious bay that lies
below the hotel terraces, a never-failing delight in all its moods of
sun and shadow, wind and calm.
Sad it is to see so many cabins deserted. The strength of the country is
ebbing away. The few people that are left are nice and wholesome in mind
and manner; they have the quiet urbanity of the true peasant all the
world over. They remind me of the Tuscan in this particular, but, of
course, they have not his light-heartedness. More seriousness, I should
think, these Irish have. I was sketching sheep, for a contemplated
picture, in the evenings on the lovely marshes by the sea, and one
evening a widow, left completely lonely in her little cabin on the
heights above by the departure for America of her last child, came down
to fetch home her solitary sheep from amongst the others, and I told her
I thought these creatures were leading a very happy life. “Yes,” she
answered, pausing for a moment and looking down on the flock, “and they
are without sin.”
[Illustration: CLEW BAY, CO. MAYO]
At the ringing of the Angelus the work in the fields, the bogs, the
potato patches stops till the words of St. Luke’s Gospel have been
repeated, just as we remember them said in Italy. It was a surprise--and
one of great interest to me--when I first saw peasants saying the
Angelus under a northern sky.
My studies of the wild mountain sheep on the marshes came to an abrupt
close. I was reposing under a rock (it was well on in July) with palette
and panels ready, waiting for the sunset and its after-glow, to get
final precious notes of colour upon the fleeces. One particular sheep
had been a very useful model. It ambled in a graceful way on three legs
and we called it “Pacer.” I became aware of an opaque body rising
between my closed eyes and the sun, and looking up I beheld the head of
“Pacer” peering at me over the edge of the rock over my head. But what
had happened to “Pacer’s” neck? Good gracious! I jumped up and beheld a
shorn “Pacer” and all the flock in the same lamentable condition. It had
all happened in twenty-four hours.
I want to bring before your mind two little rocky islands with green
summits off the coast of Clare, not far from here. Of all the
wind-swept little islands none could be more wind-swept. On one, the
smallest, I heard that a ferocious and unmanageable billy-goat was
deposited as a useless member of the community, and one night he was
blown out to sea--a good riddance. On the other you perceive, through
the spray, little nodules on the turf--the graves of unbaptized infants.
And the sea-gulls along the cliffs are for ever crying like legions of
children.
* * * * *
By returning from Mulranny by way of Tipperary and the Rosslare route to
England you can voyage down the Shannon and have an experience not
lightly to be foregone. This is the “lordly Shannon,” a great wide,
slowly-flowing and majestic river of dark, clear, bluish water--blue
shot with slate. You sit at the bows of the little steamboat which takes
you from Athlone to Killaloe, so that neither smoke nor screw interferes
with your enjoyment of the lovely scenes you are to pass through. If the
time is July (_the_ time to choose) you are at once greeted on clearing
the little grey town of Athlone with the most exquisite scent from the
level banks which form two wide belts of creamy meadow-sweet all the way
to the end, at Lough Derg. These belts are interrupted, once only, by
the lock at Shannon Bridge, that little gathering of houses and gaunt
dismantled barracks and breastworks built in the days of the threatened
French invasion. Near here lived Charlotte Brontë’s husband till his
death only the other day.
You will see in the Shannon a mighty waterway for commerce, left to the
wild things that haunt it; and it has haunted me ever since that July
day on which I saw it with a sense of regret that the condition of
Ireland makes such a river out of scale with the requirements of the
country. It flows for the wild birds, the cattle, the fishes, and for
its own pleasure; and it flowed for mine that day, for I let no phase of
it escape me and gladly added its sonorous name to the long list of
those of the great rivers of the world I have already seen.
We hardly saw a soul along the banks, but many kinds of aquatic birds,
flying, diving, and swimming, enlivened the voyage with their funny
ways, scurrying out of the track of the puffing little steamer. Along
the whole course of the great stream there stood at regular intervals,
planted in more hopeful days, navigation posts, marking the channel for
the ships that never come, and on these scarlet signs perched black
cormorants eyeing us like vultures. The herons rose slowly from the
meadow-sweet and the sedges, with their long flapping wings; the cattle
standing in the water followed us with their mild eyes. It was all
beautiful, mournful, eloquent, and when the ruins of Clonmacnoise hove
in sight I heard the spirit of Ireland speaking to me from the grave.
Clonmacnoise! A mere curious name to us in England. Perhaps nowhere,
even in depopulated Ireland, can a more desolate, abandoned plot of land
than this be seen. And yet this great monastery and university, founded
in A.D. 544, and at the height of her renown in the eighth century while
our country was in a very immature state, was a European centre to which
scholars on the Continent came to study; which was quoted and referred
to by them as a conspicuous authority, and which for long was in what I
might call brisk communication with the centres of learning abroad, if
“brisk” was not too bizarre a word in such a place to-day. A more
mournful oblivion never fell on any once flourishing centre of active
thought and teaching.
[Illustration: A LITTLE IRISH RIVER]
The slow havoc of time amongst these seven remaining little churches and
blunt round towers was one day accelerated by Cromwell’s gunpowder,
which has left the “Guest House” of the monastery a heap of ruins split
into ugly shapes quite out of keeping with the rest.
As the grey group passed away from sight I thought I had never known
more eloquent silence than that which enfolds the ruins bearing the
sounding name of Clonmacnoise.
Will the electric chain ever be linked up again that carried Ireland’s
intellect and mental energy to the Continent in those remote times, and
round again from the great sources of learning there, with fresh
material to enrich her own store?
You will have the wish to “Come back to Erin, Mavourneen,” after making
this little tour. To me Ireland is very appealing, though I owe her a
grudge for being so tantalizing and evasive for the painter. The low
clouds of her skies cause such rapid changes of sun and shadow over her
landscapes that it requires feats of technical agility to catch them on
the wing beyond my landscape powers. My only chance is to have unlimited
time and thus be able to wait a week, if necessary, for the particular
effect to come round again. An artist I heard of thought he had “bested”
the Irish weather and its wiles when he set up this clever system: six
canvasses he spread out before him on the ground in a row, each with a
given arrangement of light and shade sketched out ready. But when the
psychological moment arrived he was so flurried, that while he was
wildly running his hand up and down the row of canvasses for the right
one he could never find it in time.
A nice dance you are led, sketching in Ireland, altogether! You are, for
instance, intent on dashing down the plum-like tones of a distant
mountain, when lo! that mountain which in its purple mystery seemed some
fifteen miles away, in a moment flashes out into such vivid green that,
as the saying is here, “you might shake hands with it,” so close has it
come. Even its shape is changed, for peaks and buttresses start forth in
the sunburst where you imagined unbroken slopes a few minutes before.
Shadowed woods spring into dark prominence by the sudden illumination of
the fields behind them and as suddenly are engulfed in the golden haze
of a shaft of light that pierces the very clouds whose shadows had a
minute before given them such a startling prominence on the light
background. Unsuspected lovelinesses leap forth while those we saw
before are snatched away, and the sunlight for ever wanders up and
along the mountain sides, as some one has finely said, “like the light
from a heavenly lantern.”
What those changes from beauty to beauty do towards sunset I leave you
to imagine. I have never seen Ireland at all worthily painted. I think
we ought to leave her to her poets and to the composers of her matchless
music.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
II
EGYPT
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
CHAPTER I
CAIRO
To the East! What a thrill of pleasure those words caused me when they
meant that I was really off for Egypt. The East has always had for me an
intense fascination, and it is one of the happiest circumstances of my
life that I should have had so much enjoyment of it.
My childish sketch-books, as you remember, are full of it, and so are my
earliest scribblings. To see the reality of my fervid imaginings,
therefore, was to satisfy in an exquisite way the longing of all my
life.
The Gordon expedition was my opportunity, and it was a bold and happy
conception of W.’s that of my going out with the two eldest little ones
to join him on the Nile when the war should be over. I may say I--and
the British Army--had the Nile pretty well to ourselves, for few
tourists went up the year I was there. But I had to wait some time at
Cairo and at Luxor before all trouble had been put an end to by the
battle of Ginniss, which closed the recrudescence of rebellion that
burst out after the great Khartoum campaign.
The emotion on seeing the East for the first time can never be felt
again. The surprise can never be repeated, and holds a type of pleasure
different from that which one feels on revisiting it, as I have so often
done since.
One knows the “gorgeous East” at first only in pictures; one takes it on
trust from Delacroix, Decamps, Gérôme, Müller, Lewis, and a host of
others. You arrive, and their pictures suddenly become breathing
realities, and in time you learn, with exquisite pleasure, that their
most brilliant effects and groups are no flights of fancy but faithful
transcripts of every-day reality.
[Illustration: IN A CAIRO BAZAAR]
But at first you ask, “Can those figures in robes and turbans be really
going about on ordinary business? Are they bringing on that string of
enormous camels to carry real hay down that crowded alley; are those
bundles in black and in white wrappers, astride of white asses
caparisoned in blue and silver, merely matter-of-fact ladies of the
harem taking their usual exercise? That Pasha’s curvetting white Arab
horse’s tail is dyed a tawny red, and what is this cinder-coloured,
bare-headed, jibbering apparition, running along, clothed in rattling
strings of sea-shells and foaming at the mouth? A _real_ fanatic? That
water-seller by Gérôme has moved; he is selling a cup of water to that
gigantic negro in the white robe and yellow slippers, and is pocketing
the money quite in an ordinary way. And there is a praying man by
Müller, not arrested in mid-prayer, but going through all the periods
with the prescribed gestures, his face to the East, and the declining
sun adding an ever-deepening flush to the back of his amber-coloured
robe.”
It takes two or three days to rid oneself of the idea that the streets
are parading their colours and movement and their endless variety of
Oriental types and costumes for your diversion only, on an open-air
stage.
Cairo in ‘85, ‘86, was only at the beginning of its mutilations by
occidentalism, and the Oriental _cachet_ was dominant still. To sit on
the low shady terrace of the old Shepheard’s hotel under the acacias and
watch the pageant of the street below was to me an endless delight.
The very incongruity of the drama unrolling itself before one’s eyes had
a charm of its own. Look at that Khedivial officer in sky-blue, jerkily
riding his pretty circus Arab. There follows him a majestic and most
genuine Bedouin in camel’s hair burnoos, deigning not the turn of an
eyelash as he passes our frivolous throng on the terrace; two Greek
priests, their long hair gathered up in knots under the tall black cap
and flowing veil, equal him in quiet dignity, and a mendicant friar
rattles his little money-box, like an echo of the water-seller’s cups
over the way, as a hint to our charity. An Anglo-Indian officer of high
degree is driven up to our steps in a ‘bus under a pile of baggage. He
has just arrived from India and is impressively escorted by various
Sikhs, whose immense _puggarees_ are conceived in a totally different
spirit from that of the native turbans. A British hussar, smart as only
a British soldier can be, trots by on a wiry Syrian horse; a cab full of
Highlanders out for a spree bumps along the unpaved roadway. I confess
I was disappointed with the effect of our honoured British red. What did
it look like where the red worn by the natives was always of the most
harmonious tones!
See that string of little donkeys cheerily toddling along, all but
extinguished under their loads of sugar-canes that sweep the ground with
their long leaves; humble peasant donkeys, meeting a flashing brougham
with windows rigidly closed, through which the almond eyes of veiled
ladies of some high Pasha’s harem glance up at us and take us all in in
that devouring sweep of vision. Double syces run before such equipages.
French bugles tell us an Egyptian regiment is coming, and, meeting it,
will go by with a dull rumble a string of English baggage-waggons drawn
by mules and driven by Nubians, escorted by British soldiers in dusty
khaki uniforms; stout fellows going to the front, a good many of them to
stay there--under the sand.
About 5.30 P.M. weird music and flaring torches brings us out again on
the terrace, and we see a tumultuous crowd of pilgrims just arrived from
Mecca by the five o’clock Suez train. They gather the crowd by their
unearthly din and sweep it along with them. Beggars, flower-sellers,
snake-charmers, tourists, and touts are all rolling along in a
continuous buzz of various noises. Perhaps the full escort of cavalry
jingles past our point of observation and the native crowd salutes the
Khedive. Not so the British officers on the terrace, who keep their
seats.
But what was all this to diving into the old city, and in a ten minutes’
donkey ride to find oneself in the Middle Ages; in the real, breathing,
moving, sounding life of the Arabian Nights? Then when inclined to come
back to our time and its comforts, which I am far from despising, ten
minutes’ return ride and the glimpse into the old life of the East
became as a vision. For what I call the pageant of the street in front
of Shepheard’s was much too much mixed with modernity to allow of so
complete a transformation of ideas.
The bazaars of Cairo have been painted and written about more than those
of any other Oriental city. The idea of my having “a try” at them seems
to come a little late! But _if_ it is true that, as some croakers say,
Old Cairo is gradually dying, I feel impelled to lay one flower of
appreciation beside the grave which is ere long to close.
What a treat, to put it in that way, it was to rove about in the reality
of the true East, to meet beauty of form and colour and light and shade
and movement wherever one’s eyes turned, without being brought up with a
nasty jar by some modern hideosity or other. This was contentment. You
know what a bit of colour in sun or luminous shade does for me. Think of
my feelings when I walked through the narrow streets where the rays of
the sun slanted down through gaps in the masonry, or, as in some,
through chinks in the overhead matting--now on a white turban, now on a
rose-coloured robe relieved against the rich dark background of some
cavernous open doorway, now on a bit of brass-work. The soft tones of
the famous Carpet Bazaar in noon-day twilight, with that richness of
colour that tells you the invisible sunshine is somewhere,
fulfilled--yea, over-filled--my expectations, and close by in real
working trim were the brass-workers tinkering and tapping musically, the
while smoking their hubble-bubbles in very truth. The goldsmiths, in
their own particular alley, were sitting in the rich chiaroscuro of
their little shops waiting for me.
Added to those feasts for the eyes were the sounds which pictures could
not give me--the warning shouts of the donkey-and camel-drivers, the
“by your leave” in Arabic, followed by the shuffling sound of hoof and
foot in the soft tan; the tinkling of the water-sellers’ brass saucers;
the cries, like wild songs in the minor, of hawkers of all kinds of
things. Then the scents, also unpaintable. Incense, gums, tan, ripe
fruit, wood-smoke. And the smells? Ah, yes, well--the smells, goaty and
otherwise. They were all bound up together in that entirety which I
would not have deleted.
There was one particular angle of street in front of I forget what ripe
old mosque, before which I would have liked to establish myself all day.
The two streams of passers-by, human and animal, ceaselessly jostling
each other, came at one particular hour into a shaft of sunlight just at
the turn where I could see them in perspective. Now a splendid figure in
yellow robe and white turban, accentuating the streak of gold to
perfection, occupied the centre of the composition and I would make a
mental note: “daffodil yellow and white in intense sunlight; dull
crimson curtain in shade behind; man in half-shade in dark brown, boy in
indigo in reflected light”--when in the shaft of light now appeared a
snow-white robe and rosy turban, putting out the preceding scheme, till
a _hadji_ in a turban of soft bluey-green and pale-blue drapery came to
suggest a very delicate emphasis to the rich and subdued surroundings.
In the first fresh days how mysterious these covered streets appear,
these indoor thoroughfares, muffled with tan, where towering camels and
shuffling donkeys and curvetting horses seem so astonishingly out of
place.
Anglo-Egyptians who have to live in Cairo smile at my enthusiasm, and
tell me they get tired of all this in time, and they are certainly
helping to attenuate the charm. A late high official, on leaving Egypt,
in his farewell speech told his audience that that day had been the
happiest in his life, for he had seen the first “sandwich man” in the
streets of Cairo. Since then another charming form of advertisement from
the go-ahead West has appeared over the minarets of the
alcohol-abhorring Moslems--a “sky sign” flashing out against the stars
the excellence of somebody’s whisky. Can they now say “the changeless
East”? And what a whirlpool of intensely Western amusements you may be
sucked into if you are not wary. You may hide in the bazaars but you
cannot live there, and teas, gymkanas, dances, and dinners will claim
you for their own as though you were at Monte Carlo or still nearer
home. In fact I have found New Cairo a little London and Monte Carlo
rolled into one.
[Illustration: THE CAMEL CORPS]
One glimpse of the vanishing Past which I got on a certain Friday at
Cairo has left a queer impression on my mind, not at all a happy one. I
am told the howling and dancing Dervishes have been lately suppressed,
and I am dubious as to the fitness of us Christians being witnesses of
those performances. However, I went, and saw what one can no longer see
in Cairo. I found it difficult to believe those men were in real
earnest, otherwise I should have felt more painfully impressed, but even
as it was it was a disagreeable sight to witness the frenzied creatures
flinging themselves backwards and forwards in time with the
ever-increasing rapidity of the tom-toms till their long hair swept the
floor at one moment and flew up straight on end towards the great
vaulted interior of the mosque the next. Gasping shouts as of dying men
escaped them rhythmically, and when the bewildering music had reached
its climax it stopped, and so did they, and the priest, with gestures of
loving commiseration and encouragement, very gracefully fell on their
necks and gave them a drink of water each in turn. All this went on
in a faint light from the hanging lamps, and the heat became
suffocating. Mrs. C. put her hand on my shoulder, and pointing upwards
asked me, “What is that?” A little white figure had appeared on a ledge
high up under the drum of the dome. Whether man, woman, monkey, or
goblin, I never saw a more impish figure, and it squatted there looking
down from under its hood. I saw many very queer beings in Egypt as time
went on, and decidedly the British occupation has not exorcised all the
old magic of the Egyptians. But I have never played with it as some do.
Not from fear, but from dislike. I am told in sober truth, people who
came to scoff have begged to be let go when spell-bound with horror at
what they have seen in a drop of enchanted ink spilled on a table.
We have sometimes played tricks on those people with imitation magic,
but never more successfully than did our friend Sir James Dormer out in
the Great Desert, when he struck the Bedouins dumb by taking out his
glass eye, which they, of course, believed to be his own, tossing it in
the air, and replacing it. He had great power over them, I should say,
for ever after. Brave man, he was killed shortly after in India by the
wild animal he had wounded and who sprang on him on his blind side. I
think a man with a single eye is doubly brave who goes out
tiger-shooting in the jungle.
A much wholesomer diversion than the Dervishes was provided by the then
General in command at Cairo a few days later, when some three hundred of
the Native Camel Corps were put through a series of splendid
manœuvres out in the great open spaces of Abassieh, beyond the Tombs
of the Mameluks. I got out of the carriage when warned that the final
charge was about to be delivered, and stood so as to see them coming
nearly “stem on.” It was a sight worth seeing, and surprising to me,
who, before I landed, had never seen a camel worthy of the name. When
the “halt!” was sounded, down fell the three hundred bellowing creatures
on their knees in mid-career, close up to us, and the panting riders
leapt off, their accoutrements in most admired disorder, and their
puttees for the most part streaming along the ground. I was in a hurry
to get back to Shepheard’s to take the impression down, for I was
greatly struck by so novel a sight. The red morocco-leather saddle
covers were most effective, and very sorry I was on my next visit to
Egypt to find they had gone the way of all “effective” bits of military
equipment, and were replaced by dull brown substitutes. Henceforth I was
an enthusiastic admirer of that most picturesque of animals, and though
I approached the camel at first with diffidence and apprehension, I soon
found him much easier to draw than the horse. What you would _like_ to
do with a horse to give him movement and action, but _mustn’t_, you
_may_ do with a camel. You can twist his neck almost indefinitely and
brandish his great coarse head as you like, and his long legs give you
_carte-blanche_ for producing speed. I found out a curious fact as time
went on and I had dogged dozens of camels about the desert and made
orderlies walk them up and down for me--namely, that the camel moves his
legs _in the walk_ precisely like the horse, but when he falls into a
trot he moves the legs of the same side forward together. He walks like
a horse and trots like a camel! As to the gallop, a more dislocating
performance I never saw. Lady ---- once told me she had, by an unlucky
chance, got on a baggage camel with a hard mouth, or rather _nose_, and
it ran away with her in the wide, wide desert. She hauled in the nose
rope with the strength of despair, till the detestable animal’s face
was twisted back taut into her lap and was _looking at her_, and still
the body galloped forward without the remotest check. She artistically
left the end of the adventure untold.
As to the camel’s noises, I don’t think I ever got to the end of them.
The snarl and the grunt I was prepared for--the horrible querulous and
sickening sound that some one has likened to the roar of a lion and the
grunt of a pig combined; but one day, as I was making a study of one of
these ungracious creatures for a big picture, I thought I heard a sweet
lark warbling somewhere, and I marvelled at its presence over the
Egyptian desert. The warblings came from the camel’s throat, and there
was a look in his eye that seemed to warn me that he considered the
sitting had lasted long enough. The length of his neck suggested that I
was within measurable distance of a bite, and I dismissed my sitter and
his lanky rider with promptitude.
Of all the figures that delighted me in Cairo those of the syces soon
became first favourites. The dress, the springing run, the beauty of the
movements--I don’t think the human figure could be more charmingly shown
off. The English General’s syces alone wear the scarlet jacket, and
deep indigo blue or maroon are the usual colours for the liveries of
those mercuries. Our fast-trotting horses now try them too much, and we
don’t let them run very far, but take them up after a little while. They
were intended to trot before the ambling horses or donkeys of Pashas, to
clear the way with shouts and sticks through the crowded bazaars. I saw
a lady (alas!) driving a very fast English horse past Shepheard’s in a
rakish T-cart, and the unfortunate syce was constantly on the point of
being knocked down by the high-stepper. It did _not_ add to the
smartness of this turn-out to see this panting creature looking over his
shoulder every minute in terror of the horse, and sometimes, when
flagging in his run, being overtaken and having to run alongside. I
levelled mental epithets at the thoughtless driver, and wondered how
such a thing could be. Some of us are curiously inconsiderate. I am
afraid she was but a type of many. Witness the suffering horses bitted
up with tight bearing-reins standing for hours outside shops and smart
houses where “at homes” are going on, when a word from the fair owners
to their ignorant coachmen might procure ease for their miserable
beasts. I am not enthusiastic about motors, but I am thankful for the
fact that they are greatly reducing the sufferings of our poor “gees.” I
hope by and by the motor will be made noiseless and odourless, for at
present I cannot enjoy its country driving. The scents of the country
are replaced by smell and the sounds by noise.
You are better friends with the motor than I am, and have gathered much
advantage from its audacity in taking you up, for instance, such rugged
heights as those about Tivoli, well within a morning’s outing from Rome,
which I have looked at as inaccessible, and only to be admired from a
lowly distance; those remote cones crowned with mediæval towns that
figure in the backgrounds of many an “Adoration of the Magi” and “Flight
into Egypt.”
I am, like you, of two minds about very rapid travel. There is something
to say for and against it. “For” it, the freshness with which the mind,
untrammelled with the bodily weariness of “diligence” or “vetturino”
jogging, receives impressions of points of interest; “against” it, the
hustling of venerable monuments and reverenced natural features which
should be approached with more ceremony. There is too much hustling
nowadays. I don’t know that I enjoyed my last visit to Venice quite as
much as usual, feeling apologetic and guilty in participating in the
“bumping” of the gondolas by the electric boats, whose back-wash sends
them hopping and lurching in such an undignified manner. The sedate,
gracious gondola, too well-bred ever to be in a hurry, “knocked out of
time” by a fussing little electric launch, which is always in a hurry,
with or without reason! What with the hurry, and the whistlings, and
puffings, and syren-bellowings, the powers that be are actually
succeeding in making Venice noisy. But I have got off the Egyptian track
a long way.
After a visit to Sakkara and to the Pyramids and the Sphinx I shall
launch out upon Old Nile at once. Our Sakkara day was typical of many I
was to experience in this strangest of lands--full of the delights, then
new to me, of donkey-riding through the fresh winter air of the desert,
but donkey-riding over tombs. Sakkara is the necropolis of Memphis,
itself long buried, that capital of the Pyramid Period that looms dark
far behind the nearer glories of Thebes and the Temples.
My hilarity induced by the sun, the breeze, the absurd goings-on of the
donkeys of our party was constantly damped by the weird reminders we
constantly came upon. Those Sakkara pyramids lack the majesty of _the_
Pyramids, and one looks at the amorphous heaps in an oppressed silence.
The Tomb of Ti raised one’s spirits by its vivid frescoes showing the
every-day life of that Prime Minister’s _ménage_: it was cheery to see
the poulterer in brilliant colours bringing in the goose to the cook,
but the final extinguisher fell when we were conducted along an
avenue--a sandy causeway--lined on either side with I forget how many
sarcophagi of sacred bulls. Each granite sarcophagus was, as far as my
memory could say, of exactly the same dimensions and of almost the same
shape as that of the great Napoleon at the “Invalides”! And all for
bulls.
It was crushing; but well for me was the scamper back to the Cairo
train. You cannot afford to be pensive riding a donkey at that pace with
an Arab saddle to which you are not yet accustomed.
[Illustration: THE ENGLISH GENERAL’S SYCES]
I am not going to dare to try to say anything new about the Pyramids of
Gizeh or the Sphinx; nothing new in any shape can come in contact with
these monuments. One feels overcome with hoariness oneself by their mere
proximity and silenced by the weight of ages. I am not going to ask you
to follow me into any interiors, for I did not go in myself; and
indeed, in my progress through this land of tombs, I protested more or
less successfully against burrowing into sepulchres, shuffling in thick
gloom through pungent and uncanny mummy dust, in bat-scented atmosphere,
while above-ground the blessed light of that matchless sky and the
uplifting air of the desert were being wasted. Polite compulsion on
certain social and festive (!) excursions alone forced me to forego for
a while the joy of that “to-day” above-ground for the mould of the dead
Aeons below.
I refer to a letter for my first visit to the Pyramids. That first sight
of anything one has read of and pictured in one’s child’s mind in the
course of education is a most precious occurrence, to be chronicled and
set down at the moment.
_30th November ‘85._--“A sweet gentle morning; limpid air, lovely fresh
clouds in a soft blue sky. We started at 11 in a carriage, with our
dragoman, and were soon taken at the usual hand gallop over the big iron
bridge with the colossal green lions at each end which spans the wide
Nile, into the acacia-shaded road which runs for a long distance in an
imposing straight line to almost the very base of the great Pyramid. As
we sped towards the illustrious group which we saw rising grey and
stern at the very edge of the desert where it meets the bright green of
the cultivated land we alternately looked ahead at what was awaiting us
and at the ever-interesting groups of men, women, children, and animals
which we passed, and at the mud villages with their palms and rude domes
and minarets which lay in the well-watered, low-lying land on either
side of the road. From the first moment I saw the Pyramids afar off I
knew I was not destined to be disappointed, and my apprehensions caused
by some travellers’ descriptions vanished at the outset. It is difficult
to put my feelings into words as I came nearer and nearer to these
wonders of man’s work, so pathetic in their antiquity and in the
evidence they give of their builders’ colossal failure to ensure for
their poor bodies absolute safety during the long waiting for the
Resurrection. The seals are broken, the secret places found out, the
contents gone to the winds!
“My beloved father was constantly in my mind to-day, for he it was who
with such patience taught us the value and fascinating interest of old
Egyptian history, and here were some of the scenes he used to read to us
of so often, but which he himself was not allowed to see.
“Mrs. C---- and I, on getting out of the carriage, first made the
circuit of the Great Pyramid--a space of ‘thirteen statute acres,’ I
remember Menzies telling us. I found that the most striking point from
which to feel the immensity of the Pyramids is in the centre of the
base, not the angles.
“We hear of ‘weeping stone.’ Here is stone that has wept blood and
tears! Each succeeding year of the king’s reign forced an additional
coating to his tomb, and prolonged the slave-toil under the lash--all to
safeguard a little dust that has now vanished. This age of ours is about
the time the old Egyptians looked to for the Great Awakening, for which
all their poor mummies were embalmed.
“How intolerable these three Pyramids must have looked when new and
entirely coated with white marble. Their glitter under the blinding
sunlight and the hardness of their repellent shapes make me shudder as I
realise the effect. Seen in the rough, as they now are, they do not jar,
but only oppress the mind by their ponderous immensity, and the eye
takes great pleasure in their tawny colouring.
“We next went down to the Sphinx and rested a long while in its broad
shadow. The gaze of the eyes is exceedingly impressive, and though the
face is so mutilated one would not have it restored. Strange that one
should prefer the broken nose and the hare-lip! It would not be _the_
Sphinx if it had the universal Sphinx face as originally carved.
Originally! When? It was there long before the Pyramids, and it now
appears that more than the ‘forty centuries’ looked down upon Napoleon’s
army from their summits. Sixty centuries, some say now. Time is
annihilated as one stands confronted with the Sphinx, and a feeling of
annihilation swirls around one’s own microscopic personality.
“This annihilation of Time is one of the sensations of Egypt. Look at
Rameses the Great in his glass coffin in the Cairo Museum. There, more
than ever, the intervening cycles are as though they had never been as
one stands face to face with Sesostris. More appalling than the
Sphinx--a chimera in stone--here is the Man. Not his effigy, not his
mask taken after death, but the _Man_! There is his hair, rusted by the
Ages, his teeth still in their sockets, the gash across his forehead
cleft in battle. His father lies in the next glass case, his grandfather
on the other side, and many other Pharaohs similarly enclosed in glass
and docketed lie around, all torn out of their hiding-places, stripped
of their multitudinous envelopes, and exposed to the stare of the
passers-by. Their mortuary jewels are ticketed in other glass cases, and
only a few shreds of winding-sheet adhere to their bodies. They were
religiously preserved, at infinite pains, for this.
“From the entrance to the Great Pyramid in the north face I had an
enchanting view of Cairo on the right, in sun and shadow with a sky of
most beautiful cloud-forms, and on the left the lovely pearly and rosy
desert stretching away into the golden West. How cheerily, how
consolingly the wholesome, refreshing Present receives us back after
those wanderings down the corridors of the dead Ages! Let us wash our
faces and smile again and feel young. The drive back was exhilarating
and full of living interest. We overtook shepherds guiding their flocks
along the road and carrying tired lambs on their shoulders. There were
buffaloes and oxen and ploughmen going home from work in the tender
after-glow, and then as soon as we were over the big iron bridge and in
the suburbs again it was dark, and the gas lamps were being lighted, and
‘Tommy Atkins’ was about, and British officers were riding in from
polo, and the _cafés_ of this Parisianized quarter were full and noisy,
and I felt I had leapt back into To-day by crossing an iron bridge that
spanned six thousand years. My thoughts lingered long amongst the most
ancient, most pathetic, most solemn monuments of the pre-Christian
world.”
[Illustration]
[Illustration]