Delicate yet august, the country that stretches westward from the
expiring waters of Lake Mariout is not easy to describe. Though it
contains accredited Oriental ingredients, such as camels, a mirage, and
Bedouins, and though it remounts to a high antiquity, yet I cannot
imagine our powerful professional novelists getting to work at it, and
extracting from its quiet recesses hot tales about mummies and sin. Its
basis is a soft limestone, which rises on the seaward side into two
well-defined and parallel ridges, and swells inland into gentle hills
whose outlines and colouring often suggest a Scotch moor: the whole
district has a marked tendency to go purple, especially in its
hollows—into that sombre brownish purple that may be caused by moorland
growths. Many of the bushes are like flowerless heather. In the lower
ground barley is cultivated, and depends for its success upon an
occasional violent thunderstorm which shall swill a sudden torrent off
the hills. The ancients cultivated vines and olives here too, as the
remains of their presses prove, and Cleopatra had a garden here, but
from such luxuries the soil has desisted. It has beat a general retreat
from civilization, and the spirit of the place, without being savage, is
singularly austere. Its chief episode is the great temple of Abousir,
which with its attendant beacon-tower stands so magnificently upon the
coastal ridge. And inland lie the marble basilicas of St. Menas and his
holy well. But these apart, there is nothing to catch the attention. The
tents of the Bedouins, so Mongolian in outline, seldom cut the lines of
the sky, but blend in colour with the stone, against which they crouch.
The quarries, vast and romantic, lie hidden in the flanks of the
limestone. They do not play the part that a chalk-pit does in the
landscape of the Sussex downs. The place is not a wilderness, it is a
working concern. But it is essentially solitary, and only once a year
does it, for a brief space, put its solitude away, and blossom.
There is nothing there of the ordered progress of the English spring,
with its slow extension from wood-anemones through primroses into the
buttercups of June. The flowers come all of a rush. One week there is
nothing but spikes and buds, then the temperature rises or the wind
drops, and whole tracts turn lilac or scarlet. They scarcely wait for
their leaves, they are in such a hurry, and many of them blossom like
little footstools, close to the ground. They do not keep their times.
They scarcely keep their places, and you may look in vain for them this
season where you found them last. There is a certain tract of yellow
marigolds that I suspect of migration. One year it was in a quarry, the
next by the railway line, now it has flown a distance of five and a half
miles and unfolded its carpet on the slopes beneath Abousir. All is
confusion and hurry. The white tassels of garlic that wave in the shadow
of the temple may be fallen to-morrow, the blue buds of the borage never
have time to unfold. The pageant passes like the waving of a
handkerchief, but in compensation without the lumber that attends the
passing of an English spring, no stalks and reluctant exits of half-dead
leaves. As it came, so it goes. It has been more like a ray of coloured
light playing on the earth than the work of the earth herself, and if
one had not picked a few of the flowers and entombed them in vases upon
an Alexandrian mantelpiece, they could seem afterwards like the growths
of a dream.
It would require a botanist to do justice to these flowers, but
fortunately there is no occasion to do justice to flowers. They are not
Government officials. Let their titles and duties remain for the most
part unknown. The most permanent of them are, oddly enough, the
asphodels, whose coarse stems and turbid venous blossoms have
disappointed many who dreamt of the Elysian Fields. How came the Greeks
to plant so buxom a bulb in the solitary place they imagined beyond the
grave—that place which though full of philosophers and charioteers
remains for ever empty? The asphodel is built to resist rough winds and
to stand on the slopes of an earthly hill. It is too heavy for the hands
of ghosts, too harsh for their feet, but perhaps ours were not the
asphodels the Greeks planted, and their ghosts may have walked upon what
we call Stars of Bethlehem. The marigolds are solid too, but for the
most part the flora are very delicate, and their colours aerial. There
is a tiny vetch that hesitates between terracotta and claret. There is a
scented yellow flower the size of flax which is only found in one part
of the district and which closes in the evening when the irises unfold.
Two of these irises are dwarf, and coloured purple and deep blue; at
third is larger and china blue. There are tracts of night-scented stock.
Down in the quarries grows a rock plant with a dull red spire and a
fleshy leaf that almost adheres to the stone. As for the shrubs, some
have transparent joints that look filled with wine; while from the
woolly fibre of others jut buttons like a blue scabious. Other blue
plants wave their heads in the barley. Mignonette, purple and white
anemones, scarlet and yellow ranunculus, scarlet poppies, coltsfoot and
dwarf orange marigolds, nettles genuine and false, henbane, mallows,
celandine, hen and chickens, lords and ladies, convolvulus. English
daisies I do not remember. And many of these flowers are not the
varieties we know in England. The lords and ladies, for instance, are
smaller and thrust up their pale green spoons in the open ground. While,
to compensate, there is a larger kind—an arum of great size with a
coal-black sheath and clapper—a positively Satanic plant, such as Des
Esseintes would have commanded for his conservatory. In this way, just
here and there, the tropic note is struck, and reminds us that these
familiar and semi-familiar flowers are after all growing in Africa, and
that those swelling hills stretch southwards towards the heart of the
dark continent.
But what impresses one most in the scene is the quiet persistence of the
earth. There is so little soil about and she does so much with it. Year
after year she has given this extraordinary show to a few Bedouins, has
covered the Mareotic civilization with dust and raised flowers from its
shards. Will she do the same to our own tins and barbed wire? Probably
not, for man has now got so far ahead of other forms of life that he
will scarcely permit the flowers to grow over his works again. His old
tins will be buried under new tins. This is the triumph of civilization,
I suppose, the final imprint of the human upon this devoted planet,
which should exhibit in its apotheosis a solid crust of machinery and
graves. In cities one sees this development coming, but in solitary
places, however austere, the primæval softness persists, the vegetation
still flowers and seeds unchecked, and the air still blows untainted hot
from the land or cold from the sea. I have tried to describe this
Mariout country as it is at the beginning of March, when the earth makes
her great effort. In a few days the wind may scratch and tear the
blossoms, in a few weeks the sun will scorch the leaves. The spongeous
red growth of the ice-plant endures longest and further empurples the
hills. This too will dry up and the bones of the limestone reappear.
Then all will be quiet till the first winter rain, when the camels will
be driven out to surface-plough. A rectangle is outlined on the soil and
scattered with seed barley. Then the camel will shuffle up and down
dragging after him a wooden plough that looks like a half-open penknife,
and the Bedouin, guiding it, will sing tunes to the camel that he can
only sing to the camel, because in his mind the tune and the camel are
the same thing.
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