our party was not very game. It was our first day in Upper Egypt, and
the flies and the sun made a pretty deadly combination. We began to
complain, and to long for the cool corridors and fizzy drinks and
protecting screens of the hotel. We might have played golf or tennis in
that sun, but seeing ruins was different, and we began to pray for the
donkeys again. So Gaddis led us around by the Sacred Lake, where once
the splendid ceremonials were performed--it is only a shallow pool
now--and then once more we were on the donkeys, strung out in a crazy,
shrieking stampede for the hotel. Gaddis rode near me. His donkey was a
racer, too, but Gaddis did not laugh or cry out, or anything of the
sort. He only wore that gentle serene smile, the smile of Egypt,
observing trivial things.
* * * * *
[Illustration: THE TEMPLE OF LUXOR ... ONCE MORE REFLECTING ITS COLUMNS
IN THE NILE]
In the afternoon we visited the Temple of Luxor, that beautiful
structure which Amenophis III. built on the banks of the Nile. Luxor is
Karnak on a smaller scale, though big enough in all conscience, and it
is not all excavated yet. Debris had covered this temple to the very
top, and it is not so long ago that a village was built on a level with
the capitals of these columns. When M. Maspero, in 1883, began his work
of excavation, the natives naturally protested against the uncovering of
the "heathen" ruins at the expense of their mud huts. The work went on,
however, and to-day a large part of the magnificent architecture stands
revealed, once more reflecting its columns in the Nile.
There is still a quantity of debris to be removed. One end of the Temple
is full of it, and may remain so a good while. On top of this mass, some
five hundred years ago, a Mohammedan mosque was built by the descendants
of a saint named Abu Haggag, and sufficient of his family are left to
this day to hold that mosque intact against all would-be excavators.
However, the mosque itself begins to look pretty old. If the diggers
keep encroaching, it may slide off into the Temple some day, saints and
all.
Luxor, as a whole, is better preserved than Karnak. I suppose the
heaped-up debris kept the columns in position during the last ten or a
dozen centuries. I wish it had been there when the early Christian came
along. Cambyses of Persia, who burned everything that would burn in
Egypt, about 527 B.C., blackened the walls of this temple with fire, the
marks of which show to this day, but he was nothing to the followers of
Queen Helena. Even the guide-book, which is likely to be conservative in
any comment that may touch upon the faith of its readers, says
concerning the followers of Helena: "Not content with turning certain
sections of it into churches, the more fanatical among them smashed
statues, and disfigured bas-reliefs and wrecked shrines with
characteristic savage and ignorant zeal."[7]
There ought to be a painting or a marble group somewhere entitled "Early
Christian at Work"--a lean-faced, stringy-haired maniac with sledge,
murdering a symbolized figure of Defenceless Art in the Far East. The
early Christian is said to have destroyed forty-five thousand statues in
Thebes in one day.
Still, those statues may not matter so much--they were probably all of
Rameses the Great, and there are enough of him left. The Luxor Temple
had them in all sizes, and of all materials, from granite to alabaster.
Also some of "Mrs. Rameses," as Gaddis called her--no particular Mrs.
Rameses--there having been several of her; just a sort of generic type
of connubial happiness, I suppose. Mrs. Rameses, by the way, does not
cut much figure in the statuary. She usually comes only about to the
knee of the King, though she is life-size even then, for his own statues
are colossal, ranging anywhere from fifteen to fifty feet high. That was
to represent their difference in importance, of course, an idea which
the women members of our party seemed to disapprove.[8]
One of the statues of Rameses was found in a curious manner. A guide
only a little while ago was lecturing to a party of tourists, while a
young lady not far away was sketching a corner of the ruin. The sketcher
stopped to listen to the guide's talk, and when he had finished said to
the boy who was keeping the flies from her:
"Go up on that heap of rubbish and see what that stone is."
It was the rubbish that slopes down from the old mosque. The boy climbed
up, pulled away the trash, and uncovered the head of one of the most
perfect Rameseses yet discovered.
Originally the Temple of Luxor was five hundred feet long, one hundred
and eighty feet wide, and, as before mentioned, was connected with
Karnak by a double row of ram-headed sphinxes. Amenophis III. built it
about 1500 B.C., and it was regarded as the most beautiful of Egyptian
temples. Then came his son, Amenophis IV., who, being a sun-worshipper
after the manner of his Mesopotamian mother, cut away the name of the
Egyptian god Amen and set up a new worship here. It was a brief
innovation. The priests made it too hot for the Heretic King. He gave up
the struggle after a time, went into the desert farther down the Nile,
and built there a city and temples of his own. Then this temple was
sacred to the old religion again. It remained so until Alexander came,
cut his name here and there, and probably worshipped his own assortment
of gods. Later came the Roman and the early Christian; still later the
Mohammedan established ceremonies and reconstructed shrines.
We had all the old sacrifices and processions and gods and victories
over again in Luxor, including the picture story of the birth of
Amenophis III., which depicts an immaculate conception; an annunciation;
a visitation of wise men with gifts, executed about 1500 B.C.
After which we returned to the hotel; but when the sun was low in the
west beyond the Nile and the air was getting balmy, I slipped back and
sat in the old Temple in the quiet, and thought of a number of things.
Then as the sun slipped below the verge, a figure stepped out on the
minaret just over my head and began that weird thrilling chant which
once heard will remain forever unforgotten, the cry of the East--"Allah
il Allah," the Muezzin's call to prayer.
So it is still a place of worship. The voice of faith has reached down
thirty-four centuries, and whatever the form, or the prophet, or the
priest, it is all embodied there at evening and at morning in the cry,
"There is no God but God."
FOOTNOTES:
[7] _Cook's Egypt_, page 562.
[8] At Abou Simbel there are sitting statues of Rameses the Great which,
if standing erect, would be eighty-three feet tall.
XLI
THE STILL VALLEY OF THE KINGS
It was early next morning when we crossed the Nile to the rhythm of a
weird chorus which the boatmen sang to the beat of the oars. It is
probably older than these temples, and the boatmen themselves do not
know the meaning of the words, Gaddis said. One intones and the others
answer, and it is in minor keys with a dying fall at the end, except now
and then when a curious lifting note drops in, like a flash of light on
the oars. Bound for the Valley of the Kings, the House of Hatasu, and
the Colossi of Memnon, it seemed a fitting overture.
The donkeys were waiting on the other bank--the same we had used
yesterday, fat and fresh as ever, and the same boys were there calling
and gesticulating to their special charges of the day before. There are
always a few more donkey-boys than is necessary, it seems, all of them
wildly eager for the privilege of racing all day in the perishing sun,
urging the donkeys and yelling for baksheesh at every jump--not that
they expect to get it until the end of the day, but as a traditional
part of the performance. The donkey-boy gets nothing, we are told, but
what one is pleased to give him--the donkey hire going to the Sheik, who
owns the donkeys and lets the boys get what they can. I would write a
good deal about those half-naked, half-savage, tireless donkey-boys if
permitted. They and their brothers, and their cousins even to the fourth
remove, who come in like a charging army in the wild baksheesh skirmish
at the end, interest me.
Mounted, we led away in the usual stampede along canals and by lush
green fields, across the fertile strip that borders the Nile. The green
is rather wide here--as much as a mile, I should think, and it was
pleasant going through the still morning if one kept well forward in the
procession--in front of the dust that rose mightily behind us. Every
little way where we slackened speed, detachments of sellers would charge
from the roadside with trinkets, imitation scarabs, and images, but more
notably with fragments (and these were genuine enough) of what long
ago--as much as three or four thousand years, perhaps--had been human
beings like ourselves. Remnants of mummies they were, quarried out of
the barren hills where lie not only the kings but the millions who in
the glory of Egypt lived and died in Thebes. The hills are full of them,
Gaddis said, and unearthing them has become an industry.
It was rather grewsome at first to be offered such things--to have a
head, or a hand, or a foot thrust up under your eyes, and with it an
outstretched palm for payment. The prices demanded were not very high,
and the owners, the present owners, would take less--a good deal less
than the first quotation. A physician in our party bought a head--hard
and black as old mahogany, with some bits of gold-leaf still sticking to
it--for five francs, and I was offered a baby's hand (it had been soft
and dimpled once--it was dark and withered now) for a shilling.
We crossed the line which "divides the desert from the sown"--a sharp,
perfectly distinguishable line in Egypt--and were in the sand, the sun
getting high and blazing down, fairly drenching us with its flame. We
thought it would be better when we entered the hills, but that was a
mistake. It was worse, for there was not a particle of growing shade,
not a blade of any green thing, and there seemed no breath of life in
that stirless air.
Remember it never rains here; these hills have never known water since
the Flood, but have been baking in this vast kiln for a million years.
You will realize that it must be hot, then, but you will never know how
hot until you go there. Here and there a rock leaned over a little and
made a skimpy blue shadow, which we sidled into as we passed for a
blessed instant of relief. We understood now the fuller meaning of that
Bible phrase, "As the shadow of a great rock in a weary land." This was
a weary land with shadows far between. Now and then those astonishing
donkeys broke into a gallop and stirred up a little scorching wind, the
unflagging boys capering and shouting behind.
It seemed an endless way, up into these calcined hills to the
Burial-place of Kings, but by-and-by there were traces of ruins and
excavation, and we heard the throb of a dynamo on the quivering air. We
dismounted then, and Gaddis led us up a burning little steep to what at
first seemed a great tunnel into the mountain-side. How deep and cool
and inviting it looked up there; we would go in, certainly. Was it
really a tomb? No wonder those old kings looked forward to such a place.
It was merely an entrance to a tomb--a tunnel, truly, and of such size
that I believe two railway trains could enter it side by side and two
more on top of them! I think most of us had the idea--I know I did--that
we would go down ladders into these tombs, and that they would be
earthy, cheerless places, more interesting than attractive.
They are the most beautiful places I ever saw. The entrances--vast, as I
have stated--go directly in from the hillside; the rock floors are dry
and clean, while the side-walls and the ceilings are simply a mass of
such carving and color as the world nowhere else contains. An electric
dynamo set up in a tomb that was never finished (that of Rameses XII., I
believe) supplies illumination for these homes of the kingly dead, and
as you follow deeper and deeper into the heart of the mountain your
wonder grows at the inconceivable artistic effort and constructive labor
that have been expended on those walls. Deeper, and still deeper, along
a gradual decline that seems a veritable passage to the underworld. Here
and there, at the side, are antechambers or avenues that lead away--we
wonder whither.
Now and again Gaddis paused to explain the marvellous story of the
walls--the progress of the King to the underworld--his reception there,
his triumphs, his life in general in that long valley of spirits which
ran parallel with Egypt and was neither above nor below the level of the
earth. It was this form and idea of the underworld that the shape of
these tombs was intended to express, while their walls illustrate the
happy future life of the King. Chapters from the "Book of the
Underworld" (a sort of descriptive geography of the country) and from
the "Book of the Dead" (a manual of general instruction as to customs
and deportment in the new life) cover vast spaces. Here and there a
design was not entirely worked out, but the sketch was traced in
outline, which would indicate that perhaps the King died before his tomb
(always a life-work) was complete.
Now, realize: This gorgeous passage was nearly five hundred feet long,
cut into the living rock, and opened into a vast pillared and vaulted
chamber fully sixty feet long by forty wide and thirty high--the whole
covered with splendid decorations that the dry air and protection have
preserved as fresh and beautiful as the day they were finished so many
centuries ago. This was the royal chamber, empty now, where in silent
state King Seti I. once lay. We are a frivolous crowd, but we were awed
into low-voiced wonder at the magnitude of this work, the mightiness of
a people who could provide so overwhelmingly for their dead.
I do not remember how many such tombs we visited, but they were a good
many, including those of Rameses I. and II., the father and the mighty
son of Seti I., all three of whom now sleep in the Cairo Museum. Also
the tomb of Rameses IX., one of the finest of the lot.
In some of the tombs the sarcophagi were still in place, but all are
empty of occupants except one. This was the splendid tomb of Amenophis
II., of the Eighteenth Dynasty, who lived in the glory of Egypt, 1600
B.C., a warrior who slew seven Syrian chiefs with his own hand. Gaddis
had not told us what to expect in that tomb, and when we had followed
through the long declining way to the royal chamber and beheld there,
not an empty sarcophagus but a king asleep, we were struck to silence
with that three thousand five hundred years of visible rest.
The top of the sarcophagus is removed, and is replaced by heavy plate
glass. Just over the sleeper's face there is a tiny electric globe, and
I believe one could never tire of standing there and looking at that
quiet visage, darkened by age, but beautiful in its dignity; unmoved,
undisturbed by the storm and stress of the fretful years.
How long he has been asleep! The Israelites were still in bondage when
he fell into that quiet doze, and for their exodus, a century or two
later, he did not care. Hector and Achilles and Paris and the rest had
not battled on the Plains of Troy; the gods still assembled on Mt.
Olympus; Rome was not yet dreamed. He had been asleep nigh a thousand
years when Romulus quit nursing the she-wolf to build the walls of a
city which would one day rule the world. The rise, the conquest, the
decline of that vast empire he never knew. When her armies swept the
nations of the East and landed upon his own shores he did not stir in
his sleep. The glory of Egypt ebbed away, but he did not care. Old
religions perished; new gods and new prophets replaced the gods and
prophets he had known--it mattered not to him, here in this quiet
underworld. Through every change he lay here in peace, just as he lies
to-day, so still, so fine in his kingly majesty--upon his face that soft
electric glow which seems in no wise out of place, because it has come
as all things come at last to him who waits.
In a sort of anteroom near the royal chamber lie the mummies of three
adherents of the King, each with a large hole in the skull and a large
gash in the breast--royal slaves, no doubt, sent to bear their liege
company. I remember one of them as having very long thick curly hair--a
handsome fellow, I suppose; a favorite who could not, or would not, be
left behind.
A number of other royal mummies were found in the Tomb of Amenophis II.,
so that at some period of upheaval it must have been used as a
hiding-place for the regal dead, as was a cave across the mountains at
Der al-Bahari. Perhaps those who secreted them here thought that a king
who in life had slain seven chiefs with his own hand would make a potent
guard. They were not mistaken. Through all the centuries the guests of
that still house lay undisturbed.
We paused, though briefly--for it was fairly roasting outside--at the
excavations of our countryman, Mr. Theodore M. Davis, who has brought to
light so many priceless relics in this place; after which we bought an
entire stock of oranges from an Arab who suddenly appeared from nowhere,
sucked them ravenously, and set out, leading our donkeys up a broiling
precipitous path over the mountains, for the house of Queen Hatasu,
which lies at the base of the cliffs on the other side.
It was not very far, I suppose, but it was strenuous and seemed miles.
We were rewarded, however, when we reached the plateau of the mountain
top. From the brink of the great cliff we could look out over the whole
plain of Thebes, its villages and its ruins, its green cultivation and
its blazing sands. Once it was a vast city--"the city of a hundred gates
and twenty thousand chariots of war." Through its centre flowed the
Nile, a very fountain of life, its one outlet to the world. To the east
and the west lay Nature's surest fortifications, the dead hills and the
encompassing sands. It is estimated that the city of Paris could stand
on this level sweep and that Thebes overspread it all. As at Ephesus, we
tried to re-create that vanished city, but we did not try long, for the
mid-day sun was too frying hot.
So we descended to the rest-house of Der al-Bahari, where we created a
famine in everything resembling refreshments, liquid or otherwise, in
that wayside shelter. Then out on the piazza we swung our fly-brushes,
beat off the sellers of things, and tried to assimilate our half-baked
knowledge.
We were in a mixed state of temples and tombs and dynasties and
localities--of sacrificial processions, and gods of the "Underworld."
The sun had got into our heads, too, and some of the refreshments had
been of strange color and curious brands. It is no wonder that we
drifted into deliriums of verse. I have forgotten who had the first
seizure, but from internal evidence it was probably Fosdick--Fosdick of
Ohio. This is it:
Queen Hatasu, of Timbuctoo,
She lived a busy life;
She fell in love with King Khufu,
And she became his wife.
She put him in a pyramid--
He put her in another,
And now four thousand years have gone
You can't tell one from tother.
I do remember how we tried to reason with the author; how we explained
to him carefully that Hatasu, who was also called Hatshepset and certain
other names, did not hail from Timbuctoo; also that King Khufu, alias
Cheops, had been in his pyramid at least two thousand years, with
fourteen dynasties on top of him, when that lady of the Nile was born.
It was no use; he turned a glazed eye on us and said all periods looked
alike to him, that art was long and life fleeting, that a trifle of two
thousand years was as a few grains on the Egyptian sands of time. We
saw, then, he was hopeless, but later he improved and seemed sorry. It
did not matter; another member of the party had been taken with the
poetic madness, and we gave room for his attack. It was of milder form,
and mercifully short:
King Rameses, he strove to please,
And put his foes to flight;
To celebrate his victories
He toiled both day and night.
He filled full threescore temples with
His statues vast and grim,
And some of Mrs. Rameses
Who wa'n't knee-high to him.
I don't know why a malady of this sort should fall upon our party. Such
things never happened on the ship, but then Egypt is different, as I
have said. There was one more outbreak before we got the germ destroyed:
Behold the halls of Seti I.,
And also Seti II.;
Likewise of old Amenhetep
And haughty Hatasu.
They lived in state, their days were great
And glided gayly by;
Sometimes they used to rail at fate,
The same as you and I.
Oh, Seti I., your race is run,
And also Seti II.,
And lizards sleep where ages creep
In the house of Hatasu.
It was time to check the tendency; it was getting serious.
We went up to the "House of Hatasu"--all that is left of it--a beautiful
fragment of what was built by the great Queen as her Holy of Holies. It
is unlike other temples we have seen, with its square columns; its
beautiful open portico; its fine ceiling, still perfect in workmanship
and coloring. Queen Hatasu had ideas of her own about building; also,
her own architect. His name was Senmut, and his tomb, a mile from the
temple, commands a view of it to this day.
Hatasu once made a notable expedition to the lower east coast of
Africa--to Punt, as it was called then, and she has recorded it on these
walls. It shows the natives bringing valuable presents--woods, spices,
gold, and the like--in exchange for glass beads and tin whistles, after
the customary manner of such barter. A part of the relief shows the
Prince of Punt and "Mrs. Punt," whose figure was certainly remarkable,
followed by their family, all with hands raised in deference to the
Egyptian Queen.
It was near here, in 1881, that the cave or pit was found containing the
mummies of many kings, including Seti I., Rameses II., and others who
had been stored here for safety. Arabs had been selling royal scarabs
for some time, and the archaeologists finally discovered the secret of
their supply. It was a priceless find, and with the treasures of the
tomb of Amenophis II., made the museum of Cairo the richest
archaeological depository in the world.
We put in the afternoon visiting temples, mostly of Rameses the Great,
and looking at statues which he had caused to be erected of himself
wherever there was room. I remember one colossal granite figure of that
self-sufficient king, lying prostrate on the sand now, estimated to
weigh a thousand tons--which is to say two million pounds. That statue
was sixty feet high when it stood upright, and it is cut like a gem. It
was brought down from Assuan in one piece, by barge, as was the enormous
granite base, which is thirty feet long, sixteen feet wide, and eight
feet thick.
I remember, too, some sun-dried brick--brick made by the Israelites,
maybe--with the imprint of Rameses still on them, uneffaced after
thirty-three centuries. The sun bakes hard in Egypt; no other kiln is
needed. I remember a temple of Rameses III. and a pictorial record of
one of his victories. His soldiers had reported a killing of twelve
thousand of the enemy; he said:
"Go bring the evidence. If you have those dead men anywhere you can
bring something to prove it."
So the army returned and got the right hands of their victims. The story
is all cut there on the walls, and the hands are there too.
Rameses III. knew the custom inaugurated by his ancestor "The Great," of
eliminating old names with new ones, and he took measures accordingly by
cutting his own inscriptions deep. Some of them sink ten inches into the
walls and will stay there a good while.
I had noticed one curious thing along the outer walls of all these old
temples, to wit: row after row of smooth egg-shaped holes, ranging
irregularly, one above the other, from the base upward--sometimes to the
very top. It was as if they had been dug out by some animal or insect. I
asked Gaddis, at last, what they were, and he told me this curious
thing.
The childless Arab woman, he said, for ages had believed that some magic
in these walls could make them fruitful, so had come and rubbed
patiently with their fingers until they worked a few grains of the
sandstone into a cup of water, which they drank with a prayer of hope.
They had begun, he said, in that far-off time when the temples stood as
clear of rubbish as they do to-day; and, as the years heaped up the
debris, these anxious women had rubbed higher and higher up the walls
until, with the drift of the ages, they had reached the very top. So
there the record stands to-day, and when one realizes how little of that
stone can be rubbed away with the finger-end; how comparatively few must
have been the childless mothers, and then sees how innumerable and deep
those holes are, he gets a sudden and comprehensive grasp of the vast
stretch of time these walls stood tenantless, vanishing, and unregarded,
save by those generations of barren women.