that. I know we sat there in the sun and looked at all the curious
things in all the assortments about us, over and over, and discussed
them and wondered if Menelek would ever return. It became necessary at
last that he should do so. No vehicle could pass us in that narrow
thoroughfare, and in a string behind there was collecting as motley an
assortment of curiosities as ever were gathered in a menagerie. There
was a curious two-wheeled cart or dray, drawn by water-buffaloes, upon
which a man had his collection of wives out for an airing; there was a
camel loaded with huge water-jars until they projected out over the
heads of the selling people; there was a load of hay drawn by a cow;
there was a donkey train that reached back to the end of the street, and
what lay beyond only Allah knew.
The East is patient, but even the East has its limits. Presently we
began to be interviewed by dark men--camel-drivers and the like--who had
a way of flinging up their hands, while from behind came a rising tide
of what I assumed to be imprecation.
We were calm--that is, we assured each other that we were calm--and we
told them quite pleasantly how matters stood. The result was not
encouraging. One Bedouin grabbed the bridle, and I was at the point of
slaying him with my water-jar when at the same moment appeared a member
of the Cairo police--one of those with a tall red fez--also Menelek, our
long-lost Menelek, with the change, out of which there was baksheesh for
the discontented drivers. Everything was all right then. We headed the
procession. Behind us came the buffalo-cart--the wives, sandwiched fore
and aft and smiling--the camel with his distended load of jars; the
heaped-up little hay-wagon; the string of donkeys all in blue beads,
with heaven knows what else trailing down the distance. All the curses
were removed; all the drivers singing; traffic congestion in the East
was over.
One of the first things we had noticed in Egypt was the curious brass
spool affair which Arab women wear, suspended perpendicularly across the
forehead, from the head-gear to the top of their veil. It extends from
the nose upward, and has sharp, saw-like ridges on it, which look as if
they would cut in. When we asked about these things, we were told that
they were worn to avert the evil eye, also as a handy means by which the
husband may correct any little indiscretion on the part of one of his
wives. He merely has to tap that brass spool with his cane or
broomstick, or whatever is handy, and it cuts in and neatly reminds the
wearer that she is a woman and had better behave. Family discipline has
matured in this ancient land.
I explained to Menelek now, in some fashion, that I wanted one of those
brass things; whereupon we entered the narrow and thronging thoroughfare
of commerce--a gay place, with all sorts of showy wares lavishly
displayed--and went weaving in and out among the crowd to find it. Every
other moment Menelek would shout something that sounded exactly like,
"Oh, I _mean_ it! Oh, I _mean_ it!" which made us wonder _what_ he meant
in that emphatic way.
Then all at once he changed to, "Oh, I _schmell_ it! Oh, I _schmell_
it!"
"That's all right," we said; "so do we," for, though Cairo is cleaner
than Constantinople, it was not over-sweet just there. But presently,
when he changed again to, "Oh, I eat it! Oh, I eat it!" we drew the
line. We said, "No, we do not go as far as that."
We have learned now that those calls are really "O-i-menuk,
o-i-schmeluk," etc., and indicate that some one is to turn to the right
or left, or simply get out of the way, as the case may be. We used them
ourselves after that, which gave Menelek great joy.
XXXIX
WHERE HISTORY BEGAN
When I glanced casually over the little heap of hand-bags that would
accompany our party up the Nile--we were then waiting on the terrace of
Shepheard's for the carriages--I noticed that my own did not appear to
be of the number. I mentioned this to the guides, to the head-porter, to
the clerk, to casual Bedouins in the hotel uniform, without arousing any
active interest. Finally, I went on a still hunt on my own account. I
found the missing bag out in the back area-way, with a Bedouin whom I
had not seen before sitting on it, smoking dreamily and murmuring a song
about lotus and moonlight and the spell of his lady's charms. Growing
familiar with the habits of the country, I dispossessed him with my foot
and marched back through the vast corridors carrying my bag myself.
Still, I am sorry now I didn't contribute the baksheesh he expected. He
was probably the cousin or brother or brother-in-law of one of my room
servitors. They all have a line of those relatives, and they must live,
I suppose, though it is difficult to imagine why.
There was a red glow in the sky when our train slipped out of the Cairo
station toward Luxor. The Nile was red, too, and against this tide of
evening were those curious sail-boats of Egypt that are like great
pointed-winged butterflies, and the tall palms of the farther shore.
By-and-by we began to run through mud villages that rose from the river
among the palms, wonderfully picturesque in the gathering dusk. This was
the Egypt of the pictures, the Egypt we have always known. No need to
strain one's imagination to accept this reality. You are possessed,
enveloped by it, and I cannot think that I enjoyed it any the less from
seeing it through the window of a comfortable diner, with the knowledge
that an equally comfortable, even if tiny, state-room was reserved in
the car ahead. The back of a camel or deck of a dahabiyah would be more
picturesque, certainly--more poetic--but those things require time, and
there are drawbacks, too. Railway travel in Egypt is both swift and
satisfactory. The accommodations differ somewhat from those of America,
but not unpleasantly.
We were a small party now. There were fewer than twenty of us--all
English-speaking, except a young man who shared my apartment and was
polite enough to pretend to understand my German.
It was a little after 5 A.M. when I heard him getting up. I inquired if
there was "_Etwas los?_" which is the ship idiom for asking if anything
had gone wrong. He said no, but that the sun would be upstanding
directly, which brought me into similar action. One does not miss
sunrises on the Nile, if one cares for sunrises anywhere. We hurried
through our dressing and were out on the platform when the train drew up
for water at Nag Hamadeh--a station like many others, surrounded by the
green luxury of the Nile's fertile strip, with yellow desert and
mountains pressing close on either hand. It was just before sunrise. The
eastward sky was all resonant with ruddy tones--a stately overture of
its coming. Uplifting palms, moveless in the morning air, broke the
horizon line, while nearer lay the low village--compact and flat of
roof--a vast, irregular hive built of that old material of Egypt, bricks
without straw. Below it the Nile repeated the palms, the village, the
swelling symphony of dawn. Only here and there was any sign of life. An
Arab woman with a water-jar drowsed toward the river-bank; a camp of
Bedouins with their camels and their tents were beginning to stir and
kindle their morning fires. The railroad crosses the river here, and
just as we were creeping out over the slow-moving flood the sun rose,
and the orchestra of the sky broke into a majestic crescendo, as rare
and radiant and splendid as it was when Memnon answered to its waking
thrill and sang welcome to the day.
The young man and I had forgotten each other, I think, for neither of us
had spoken for some moments. Then we both spoke at once--"_Wunderbar!_"
we said, "_Wunderschon!_" for I have trained myself to speak German even
when strongly moved. Then with one impulse we looked at our watches. It
was precisely six, and we remembered that it was the 22d of March--the
equinox.
We stayed out there and saw the land awake--that old land which has
awakened so many times and in so much the same fashion. Outside of its
cities and its temples it cannot have changed greatly since the days of
Rameses. It is still just a green, fertile thread of life, watered and
tilled in the manner of fifty centuries ago. They had to drag us in to
breakfast at last, for we would be at Luxor before long, four hundred
and fifty miles from Cairo; that is, at ancient Thebes, where--though
the place has lingered for our coming a good four thousand years--"ze
train he have not time to wait."
We are in Thebes now, the "city of a hundred gateways and twenty
thousand chariots of war." Homer called it that, though it was falling
to ruin even then. Homer was a poet, but his statistics are believed to
be correct enough in this instance, for Diodorus, who saw the ruins a
little before the Christian era, states that there were a hundred war
stables, each capable of holding two hundred horses, "the marks and
signs of which," he says, "are visible to this day." Of its glory in
general he adds: "There was no city under the sun so adorned with so
many and stately monuments of gold and silver and ivory, and multitudes
of colossi and obelisks cut out of entire stone." Still further along
Diodorus adds, "There, they say, are the wonderful sepulchres of the
ancient kings, which for state and grandeur far exceed all that
posterity can attain unto at this day."
Coming from a historian familiar with Athens and Rome in the height of
their splendor, this statement is worth considering. We have journeyed
to Thebes to see the ruin of the mighty temples which Diodorus saw, and
the colossi and the obelisks, and to visit the royal tombs of which he
heard--now open to the light of day.
We had glimpses of these things at the very moment of our arrival. The
Temple of Luxor (so called) is but a step from the hotel, and, waiting
on the terrace for our donkeys, we looked across the Nile to the Colossi
of Memnon, still rising from the wide plain where once a thronging city
stood--still warming to the sunrise that has never failed in their
thirty-five hundred years.
We were in no hurry to leave that prospect, but our donkeys were ready
presently, and a gallant lot indeed. The Luxor donkeys are the best in
Egypt, we are told, and we believe it. They are a mad, racing
breed--fat, unwearied, and strenuous--the pick of their species. They
can gallop all day in the blazing sun, and the naked rascal that races
behind, waving a stick and shouting, can keep up with them hour after
hour when an American would drop dead in five minutes.
They are appropriately named, those donkeys. Mine was "Whiskey
Straight," and he arrived accordingly. He was a gray, wild-headed
animal, made of spring steel. We headed the procession that led away for
the Temple of Karnak in a riotous stampede. Laura's donkey was "Whiskey
and Soda"--a slightly milder proposition, but sufficient unto the day. I
have never seen our ship-dwellers so unreserved in their general
behavior, so "let loose," as it were, from anything that resembled
convention, as when we went cavorting through that Arab settlement of
"El-Uksur," where had been ancient Thebes. Beset with a mad, enjoying
fear, our ladies--some of whom were no longer young and perhaps had
never ridden before--broke into frantic and screaming prophecies of
destruction, struggling to check their locomotion, their feet set
straight ahead, skirts, scarfs, hats, hair streaming down the wind. It
was no time for scenery--Egyptian scenery; we knew nothing, could attend
to nothing, till at the towering entrance of the great Temple of Karnak
we came to a sudden and confused halt.
We dismounted there, shook ourselves together, and stared wonderingly up
at those amazing walls whose relief carving and fresco tints the dry air
of this rainless land has so miraculously preserved. And then presently
we noticed that Gaddis, our guide for the Nile, had stepped quietly out
before us, and with that placid smile he always wears had lifted his
hand to the records of his ancestors.
[Illustration: SANCTUARY IN KARNAK]
[Illustration: GADDIS
YOUNG IN YEARS. GADDIS IS AS OLD AS THESE MONUMENTS IN REFLECTION AND
MENTAL HERITAGE--A PART WITH THEM OF A VANISHED DAY]
I want to speak a word just here of Gaddis. He is pure Copt, and the
name "Copt" is from "Gypt"--that is, "Egypt"--the Copts being the direct
descendants of the race that built ancient Thebes. His color is a clear,
rich brown; his profile might be a part of these wall decorations. Then
there are his eyes--mere dreamy slits, behind which he dwells in an age
far removed from ours, while his lips wear always that ineffable smile
which belongs only to Egypt, its sculpture and its people, the smile
that regards with gentle contemplation--and compassion--all trivial
things. Young in years, Gaddis is as old as these monuments in
reflection and mental heritage--a part with them of a vanished day. And
but for his fez and little European coat, which with the sash and
figured skirt complete the dress of the Egyptian guide, Gaddis might
truly have been plucked from these pictured walls. I should add that he
reads the hieroglyphics and has all languages on his tongue--English,
French, German--the Egyptian is born with these, I think; his voice is a
drowsy hum that is pure music; his temper is as sweet and changeless as
his smile.
So much for Gaddis. He stood now with his lifted hand directed to the
panoramic story of the past; then, in slow, measured voice:
"Zis is ze great temple of Karnak--ze work of many king. Here you will
see ze King Ram-e-ses II. wiz ze crown an' symbol of Upper an' Lower
Egypt, making sacrifice of fruit and fowl an' all good sings to ze gawd
Amm-Ra, in ze presence of Horus, ze hawk-headed sun-gawd, an' Anubis an'
Osiris, ze gawd of ze under-worlid."
Thus it was our sight-seeing in Upper Egypt began.
XL
KARNAK AND LUXOR
The temple of Karnak cannot be described. The guide-books attempt it,
but the result is only a maze of figures and detail for which the mind
cares little. All the Greek temples on the Acropolis combined would make
but a miniature showing by the side of Karnak. Most of the Egyptian
kings, beginning as far back as 3000 B.C., had a hand in its building,
and for above two thousand years it was in a state of construction,
restoration, or repair. The result is an amazing succession of halls and
columns, monoliths, and mighty walls--many of them tumbled and tumbling
now, but enough standing to show what a race once flourished here. Long
ago the road over which we came from Luxor was an avenue eighty feet
wide and a mile and a half long, connecting the two great temples. It
was faced on each side with ram-headed sphinxes only a few feet apart.
Most of them are gone now, but the few mutilated specimens left prompt
one's imagination of that mighty boulevard. The Karnak of that day, with
its various enclosures, is said to have covered a thousand acres. The
mind does not grasp that, any more than it comprehends the ages of its
construction, the history it has seen. It is like trying to grasp the
distance to the stars.
No one may say who began Karnak, but the Usertsens of the earliest
Theban Dynasty had a hand in its building, and after them the other
dynasties down to the Ptolemaic days. Thothmes III. and his aunt, the
wonderful Queen Hatasu--the ablest woman of her time--were among its
builders, and these two set up obelisks, erected pylons and vast
columned halls. This was about 1600 B.C., when the glory of Egypt was at
flood-tide. Two centuries later the mighty Seti I., whose mummied form
sleeps to-day in the Museum at Cairo, began what is known as the great
Hypostile Hall, finished by his still mightier son, Rameses II., whose
mummy likewise reposes in Cairo, father and son together. Rameses built
other additions to Karnak, and crowded most of them with pictures and
statues of himself and the sculptured glorification of his deeds. He
was, in fact, not only the greatest king, but the greatest egotist the
world has ever known, and in the end believed himself a god. It is said
that he built more than seventy temples altogether, chiefly to hold his
statues, and that he put his name on a number that had been built by his
predecessors. It has been hinted that to his title of "The Great" the
word "Advertiser" should have been added, and the fact that he is now on
exhibition in a glass case must be a crowning gratification to him, if
he knows it. It should be mentioned that Rameses II. is thought to be
one of the oppressors of the Israelites, which may tend to arrange his
period and personality in the Biblical mind.
I am wandering away from the subject in hand. I want to talk about
Karnak, and I find myself talking of kings. But, then, one _cannot_
talk about Karnak--not intelligently. One must _see_ Karnak, and he will
believe himself dreaming all the time, and he will come away silent. The
Romans came to Karnak when the Egyptians had finished with their
building, and by-and-by the early Christians, who could always be
depended upon to pull down and mutilate and destroy anything that was
particularly magnificent. Our old friend, the good Queen Helena,
arrived, and the temples of Egypt crumbled before the blight of her
fanaticism. But I must change cars again. I get a little rabid when I
take up Queen Helena and her tribe.
We followed Gaddis from arch to pylon, from enclosure to sanctuary--we
passed down colonnades that one must see to believe. There are two kinds
of columns in Egypt, by-the-way, the Lotus and the Papyrus--the former
with a capital that opens out like a flaring bowl, the cup of the
lotus-flower; the other with a capital that is more like an opening bud.
The lotus symbolizes the Delta country, Lower Egypt; the papyrus stands
for Upper Egypt, the country of the Nile, where we now are. Both are
used in these temples, and here in Karnak there is a hall of Lotus
columns--one hundred and thirty-four in number--twelve of them sixty
feet high and twelve feet through!
That is the great Hypostile Hall of Seti I., and I wish the English
language were big enough, and I on sufficiently good terms with it to
convey the overwhelming impression of that place. Try to conceive an
architectural forest of the size of a city block, planted with
sculptured and painted columns and filled with sunlight--the columns
towering till they seem to touch the sky, and of such thickness that six
men with extended arms, finger-tip to finger-tip, can barely span them
round. The twelve mightier columns form a central avenue that simply
dwarfs into insignificance any living thing that enters it. You suddenly
become an insect when you stand between those columns and look up, and
you have the feeling that you are likely to be stepped on. The rest of
that colossal assembly stretch away on either side and are only a degree
smaller. All are painted with the four colors of the Nile--mellow tones
of blue, red, green and yellow, signifying high and low Nile, green
fields and harvest--imperishable pigments as fresh and luminous under
this sunlit sky as when they were laid there by artists who finished and
put their brushes away more than three thousand years ago. How poor are
mere words in the presence of this mighty reality which has outlived so
many languages--will outlive all the puny languages that try to convey
it now!
Looking down the great central avenue of Seti's hall, we beheld at the
end--standing as true to-day as when she placed it there--the graceful
granite obelisk of Queen Hatasu.
"Set up in honor of father Amen," she relates in her inscription on the
base. She adds that she covered the tip with copper that it might be
seen at a great distance, and tells how the monolith and its mate (now
lying broken near it) were hewn from the Assuan quarries and brought
down the Nile to Thebes. I may say here that we did not read these
inscriptions ourselves. We could do it, of course, if we had time, but
Gaddis, who is at least five thousand years old, inside, is better at it
than we could be in a brief period like that, so we depend on him a good
deal. Gaddis can read anything. A bird without a head, followed by a
pair of legs walking, a row of sawteeth, a picked chicken, a gum-drop
and a comb, all done in careful outline, mean "Homage to the Horus of
the two horizons" to Gaddis, though I have been unable as yet to see
why.
We went into the Hall, or Temple, of Khonsu, the moon-god, and here was
a breath-taking collection of papyrus columns, short, thick, built to
stand through the ages on the uncertain foundation of this alluvial
plain. We passed into a sanctuary where the priests of Amen prepared the
sacrifice, and Gaddis read the story on the walls, and pointed out for
the twentieth time, perhaps, Horus, the hawk-headed god, and Hapi, his
son, who has a dog head and can hardly be called handsome; also Anubis,
the jackal-headed god of the Under World. We came to a temple with a
wall upon which Seti recorded his victories over the forces of Syria,
and pictured himself in the act of destroying an army single handed by
gathering their long hair into a single twist preparatory to smiting off
this combined multitude of heads at a blow. We follow Gaddis through
long tumbling avenues and corridors of decorated walls; we climbed over
fallen columns that prostrate were twice as high as our heads; we
studied the records which those old kings, in ages when all the rest of
the world was myth and fable set up to preserve the story of their
deeds. And remember, all these columns and walls were not only
completely covered with figures carved in relief, but tinted in those
unfading colors, subdued, harmonious, and more beautiful than I can
tell.
[Illustration: I MADE A PICTURE OF THE FLY-BRUSH BRIGADE]
How little and how feebly I seem to be writing about this stupendous
ruin, yet I must conclude presently for lack of room. We went into the
Ramesseum, a temple literally lined with heroic statues of Rameses,
where I made a picture of the fly-brush brigade, as we call ourselves
now, because in Upper Egypt a fly-brush is absolutely necessary not
alone to comfort, but to very existence. The fly here is not the
ordinary house variety, fairly coy and flirtatious if one has a
newspaper or other impromptu weapon, retiring now and again to a safe
place for contemplation; no, the Egyptian fly is different. He never
retires and he is not in the least coy. He makes for you in a cloud, and
it is only by continuous industry that you can beat him off at all.
Furthermore, he begins business the instant he touches, and he has
continuously the gift which our fly sometimes has on a sultry, muggy
day--the art of sticking with his feet, which drives you frantic. So you
buy a fly-brush the instant you land in Upper Egypt, and you keep it
going constantly from dawn to dark. The flies retire then, for needed
rest.
[Illustration: ITS MAGNIFICENT PYLONS OR ENTRANCE WALLS ... AND THEN
ONCE MORE WE WERE ON THE DONKEYS]
We passed through another avenue of ram-headed sphinxes (some of the
heads were gone) which Rameses built, and stood outside of the great
temple of Amen, once called the "Throne of the World." Its magnificent
pylons, or entrance walls, are one hundred and fifty feet high and
three hundred broad. We ascended one of these for a general view of the
vast field of ruin.
Piled and tumbled and flung about lay the mighty efforts of a mighty
race. At one place excavating was still going on, and a regiment of
little boys were running back and forth with baskets of dirt on their
heads, singing and sweating in the blazing sun, earning as much as two
piastres (ten cents) a day. Men were working, too; they receive quite
fancy sums--twenty cents a day, some of them.