Egypt was the country, of all others, from that mixture of the melancholy
and the voluptuous, which marked the character of her people, her
religion, and her scenery, to affect deeply a temperament and fancy like
mine, and keep tremblingly alive the sensibilities of both. Wherever I
turned, I saw the desert and the garden, mingling their bloom and
desolation together. I saw the love‐bower and the tomb standing side by
side, and pleasure and death keeping hourly watch upon each other. In the
very luxury of the climate there was the same saddening influence. The
monotonous splendour of the days, the solemn radiance of the nights—all
tended to cherish that ardent melancholy, the offspring of passion and of
thought, which had so long been the inmate of my soul.
When I sailed from Alexandria, the inundation of the Nile was at its full.
The whole valley of Egypt lay covered by its flood; and, as I saw around
me, in the light of the setting sun, shrines, palaces, and monuments,
encircled by the waters, I could almost fancy that I beheld the sinking
island of Atalantis, on the last evening its temples were visible above
the wave. Such varieties, too, of animation as presented themselves on
every side!—
While, far as sight can reach, beneath as clear
And blue a heaven as ever bless’d this sphere,
Gardens, and pillar’d streets, and porphyry domes,
And high‐built temples, fit to be the homes
Of mighty gods, and pyramids, whose hour
Outlasts all time, above the waters tower!
Then, too, the scenes of pomp and joy, that make
One theatre of this vast, peopled lake,
Where all that Love, Religion, Commerce gives
Of life and motion, ever moves and lives.
Here, up the steps of temples, from the wave
Ascending, in procession slow and grave,
Priests, in white garments, go, with sacred wands
And silver cymbals gleaming in their hands:
While, there, rich barks—fresh from those sunny tracts
Far off, beyond the sounding cataracts—
Glide with their precious lading to the sea,
Plumes of bright birds, rhinoceros’ ivory,
Gems from the isle of Meröe, and those grains
Of gold, wash’d down by Abyssinian rains.
Here, where the waters wind into a bay
Shadowy and cool, some pilgrims, on their way
To Saïs or Bubastus, among beds
Of lotus‐flowers, that close above their heads,
Push their light barks, and hid, as in a bower,
Sing, talk, or sleep away the sultry hour;
While haply, not far off, beneath a bank
Of blossoming acacias, many a prank
Is play’d in the cool current by a train
Of laughing nymphs, lovely as she, whose chain
Around two conquerors of the world was cast,
But, for a third too feeble, broke at last!
Enchanted with the whole scene, I lingered on my voyage, visiting all
those luxurious and venerable places, whose names have been consecrated by
the wonder of ages. At Saïs I was present during her Festival of Lamps,
and read, by the blaze of innumerable lights, those sublime words on the
temple of Neitha: “I am all that has been, that is, and that will be, and
no man hath ever lifted my veil.” I wandered among the prostrate obelisks
of Heliopolis, and saw, not without a sigh, the sun smiling over her
ruins, as if in mockery of the mass of perishable grandeur, that had once
called itself, in its pride, “The City of the Sun.” But to the Isle of the
Golden Venus was my fondest pilgrimage;—and as I explored its shades,
where bowers are the only temples, I felt how far more fit to form the
shrine of a Deity are the ever‐living stems of the garden and the grove,
than the most precious columns that the inanimate quarry can supply.
Every where new pleasures, new interests awaited me; and though
Melancholy, as usual, stood always near, her shadow fell but half‐way over
my vagrant path, and left the rest more welcomely brilliant from the
contrast. To relate my various adventures, during this short voyage, would
only detain me from events, far, far more worthy of record. Amidst such
endless variety of attractions, the great object of my journey was
forgotten;—the mysteries of this land of the sun were, to me, as much
mysteries as ever, and I had as yet been initiated in nothing but its
pleasures.
It was not till that evening, when I first stood before the Pyramids of
Memphis, and saw them towering aloft, like the watch‐towers of Time, from
whose summit, when he expires, he will look his last,—it was not till this
moment that the great secret, of which I had dreamed, again rose, in all
its inscrutable darkness, upon my thoughts. There was a solemnity in the
sunshine that rested upon those monuments—a stillness, as of reverence, in
the air around them, that stole, like the music of past times, into my
heart. I thought what myriads of the wise, the beautiful, and the brave,
had sunk into dust since earth first beheld those wonders; and, in the
sadness of my soul, I exclaimed,—“Must man alone, then, perish? must minds
and hearts be annihilated, while pyramids endure? Death, Death, even on
these everlasting tablets,—the only approach to immortality that kings
themselves could purchase,—thou hast written our doom, saying, awfully and
intelligibly, ‘There is, for man, no eternal mansion, but the tomb!’”
My heart sunk at the thought; and, for the moment, I yielded to that
desolate feeling, which overspreads the soul that hath no light from the
future. But again the buoyancy of my nature prevailed, and again, the
willing dupe of vain dreams, I deluded myself into the belief of all that
I most wished, with that happy facility which makes imagination stand in
place of happiness. “Yes,” I cried, “immortality _must_ be within man’s
reach; and, as wisdom alone is worthy of such a blessing, to the wise
alone must the secret have been revealed. Deep, it is said, under yonder
pyramid, has for ages lain concealed the Table of Emerald, on which the
Thrice‐Great Hermes engraved, before the flood, the secret of Alchemy,
that gives gold at will. Why may not the mightier, the more god‐like
secret, that gives life at will, be recorded there also? It was by the
power of gold, of endless gold, that the kings, who repose in those massy
structures, scooped earth to the centre, and raised quarries into the air,
to provide themselves with tombs that might outstand the world. Who can
tell but that the gift of immortality was also theirs? who knows but that
they themselves, triumphant over decay, still live—those mansions, which
we call tombs, being rich and everlasting palaces, within whose depths,
concealed from this withering world, they still wander, with the few who
are sharers of their gift, through a sunless, but illuminated, elysium of
their own? Else, wherefore those structures? wherefore that subterraneous
realm, by which the whole valley of Egypt is undermined? Why, else, those
labyrinths, which none of earth hath ever beheld—which none of heaven,
except that God, with the finger on his hushed lip, hath trodden!”
While I indulged in these dreams, the sun, half sunk beneath the horizon,
was taking, calmly and gloriously, his leave of the Pyramids,—as he had
done, evening after evening, for ages, till they had become familiar to
him as the earth itself. On the side turned to his ray they now presented
a front of dazzling whiteness, while, on the other, their great shadows,
lengthening to the eastward, looked like the first steps of Night,
hastening to envelope the hills of Araby in her shade.
No sooner had the last gleam of the sun disappeared, than, on every house‐
top in Memphis, gay, gilded banners were seen waving aloft, to proclaim
his setting,—while a full burst of harmony pealed from all the temples
along the shores.
Startled from my musing by these sounds, I at once recollected, that, on
that very evening, the great festival of the Moon was to be celebrated. On
a little island, half‐way over between the gardens of Memphis and the
eastern shore, stood the temple of that goddess,
Whose beams
Bring the sweet time of night‐flowers and dreams.
_Not_ the cold Dian of the North, who chains
In vestal ice the current of young veins;
But she, who haunts the gay, Bubastian grove,
And owns she sees, from her bright heav’n above,
Nothing on earth, to match that heav’n, but love!
Thus did I exclaim, in the words of one of their own Egyptian poets, as,
anticipating the various delights of the festival, I cast away from my
mind all gloomy thoughts, and, hastening to my little bark, in which I now
lived, like a Nile‐bird, on the waters, steered my course to the island‐
temple of the Moon.