WHEN daylight came the Colossi of Aboo Simbel (or Ipsambool) were
looking into our windows; greeting the sunrise as they have done every
morning for three thousand five hundred years; and keeping guard still
over the approach to the temple, whose gods are no longer anywhere
recognized, whose religion disappeared from the earth two thousand years
ago:—vast images, making an eternity of time in their silent waiting.
The river here runs through an unmitigated desert. On the east the sand
is brown, on the west the sand is yellow; that is the only variety.
There is no vegetation, there are no habitations, there is no path on
the shore, there are no footsteps on the sand, no one comes to break the
spell of silence. To find such a monument of ancient power and art
as this temple in such a solitude enhances the visitor's wonder and
surprise. The Pyramids, Thebes, and Aboo Simbel are the three wonders of
Egypt. But the great temple of Aboo Simbel is unique. It satisfies the
mind. It is complete in itself, it is the projection of one creative
impulse of genius. Other temples are growths, they have additions,
afterthoughts, we can see in them the workings of many minds and many
periods. This is a complete thought, struck out, you would say, at a
heat.
In order to justify this opinion, I may be permitted a little detail
concerning this temple, which impressed us all as much as anything in
Egypt. There are two temples here, both close to the shore, both cut in
the mountain of rock which here almost overhangs the stream. We need not
delay to speak of the smaller one, although it would be wonderful, if
it were not for the presence of the larger. Between the two was a rocky
gorge. This is now nearly filled up, to the depth of a hundred feet, by
the yellow sand that has drifted and still drifts over from the level of
the desert hills above.
This sand, which drifts exactly like snow, lies in ridges like snow,
and lies loose and sliding under the feet or packs hard like snow, once
covered the façade of the big temple altogether, and now hides a portion
of it. The entrance to the temple was first cleared away in 1817 by
Belzoni and his party, whose gang of laborers worked eight hours a day
for two weeks with the thermometer at 1120 to 1160 Fahrenheit in the
shade—an almost incredible endurance when you consider what the heat
must have been in the sun beating upon this dazzling wall of sand in
front of them.
The rock in which the temple is excavated was cut back a considerable
distance, but in this cutting the great masses were left which were to
be fashioned into the four figures. The façade thus made, to which these
statues are attached, is about one hundred feet high. The statues are
seated on thrones with no intervening screens, and, when first seen,
have the appearance of images in front of and detached from the rock of
which they form a part. The statues are all tolerably perfect, except
one, the head of which is broken and lies in masses at its feet; and
at the time of our visit the sand covered the two northernmost to the
knees. The door of entrance, over which is a hawk-headed figure of Re,
the titular divinity, is twenty feet high. Above the colossi, and as a
frieze over the curve of the cornice, is a row of monkeys, (there were
twenty-one originally, but some are split away), like a company of
negro minstrels, sitting and holding up their hands in the most comical
manner. Perhaps the Egyptians, like the mediaeval cathedral builders,
had a liking for grotesque effects in architecture; but they may have
intended nothing comic here, for the monkey had sacred functions; he
was an emblem of Thoth, the scribe of the under-world, who recorded the
judgments of Osiris.
These colossi are the largest in the world *; they are at least fifteen
feet higher than the wonders of Thebes, but it is not their size
principally that makes their attraction. As works of art they are worthy
of study. Seated, with hands on knees, in that eternal, traditional
rigidity of Egyptian sculpture, nevertheless the grandeur of the head
and the noble beauty of the face take them out of the category of
mechanical works. The figures represent Rameses II. and the features
are of the type which has come down to us as the perfection of Egyptian
beauty.
* The following are some of the measurements of one of these
giants:—height of figure sixty-six feet; pedestal on which it sits, ten;
leg from knee to heel, twenty; great toe, one and a half feet thick;
ear, three feet, five inches long; fore-finger, three feet; from inner
side of elbow-joint to end of middle finger, fifteen feet.
I climbed up into the lap of one of the statues; it is there only that
you can get an adequate idea of the size of the body. What a roomy
lap! Nearly ten feet between the wrists that rest upon the legs! I sat
comfortably in the navel of the statue, as in a niche, and mused on the
passing of the nations. To these massive figures the years go by like
the stream. With impassive, serious features, unchanged in expression
in thousands of years, they sit listening always to the flowing of the
unending Nile, that fills all the air and takes away from that awful
silence which would else be painfully felt in this solitude.
The interior of this temple is in keeping with its introduction. You
enter a grand hall supported by eight massive Osiride columns, about
twenty-two feet high as we estimated them. They are figures of
Rameses become Osiris—to be absorbed into Osiris is the end of all the
transmigrations of the blessed soul. The expression of the faces of such
of these statues as are uninjured, is that of immortal youth—a beauty
that has in it the promise of immortality. The sides of this hall are
covered with fine sculptures, mainly devoted to the exploits of Rameses
II.; and here is found again, cut in the stone the long Poem of the poet
Pentaour, celebrating the single-handed exploit of Rameses against the
Khitas on the river Orontes. It relates that the king, whom his troops
dared not follow, charged with his chariot alone into the ranks of the
enemy and rode through them again and again, and slew them by hundreds.
Rameses at that time was only twenty-three; it was his first great
campaign. Pursuing the enemy, he overtook them in advance of his troops,
and, rejecting the councils of his officers, began the fight at once.
“The footmen and the horsemen then,” says the poet (the translator is M.
de Rouge), “recoiled before the enemy who were masters of Kadesh, on
the left bank of the Orontes.... Then his majesty, in the pride of
his strength, rising up like the god Mauth, put on his fighting dress.
Completely armed, he looked like Baal in the hour of his might. Urging
on his chariot, he pushed into the army of the vile Khitas; he was
alone, no one was with him. He was surrounded by 2,500 chariots, and the
swiftest of the warriors of the vile Khitas, and of the numerous nations
who accompanied them, threw themselves in his way.... Each chariot bore
three men, and the king had with him neither princes nor generals, nor
his captains of archers nor of chariots.”
Then Rameses calls upon Amun; he reminds him of the obelisk he has
raised to him, the bulls he has slain for him:—“Thee, I invoke, O my
Father! I am in the midst of a host of strangers, and no man is with me.
My archers and horsemen have abandoned me; when I cried to them, none of
them has heard, when I called for help. But I prefer Amun to thousands
of millions of archers, to millions of horsemen, to millions of young
heroes all assembled together. The designs of men are nothing, Amun
overrules them.”
Needless to say the prayer was heard, the king rode slashing through
the ranks of opposing chariots, slaying, and putting to rout the host.
Whatever basis of fact the poem may have had in an incident of battle or
in the result of one engagement, it was like one of Napoleon's bulletins
from Egypt. The Khitas were not subdued and, not many years after, they
drove the Egyptians out of their land and from nearly all Palestine,
forcing them, out of all their conquests, into the valley of the Nile
itself. During the long reign of this Rameses, the power of Egypt
steadily declined, while luxury increased and the nation was exhausted
in building the enormous monuments which the king projected. The close
of his pretentious reign has been aptly compared to that of Louis XIV.—a
time of decadence; in both cases the great fabric was ripe for disaster.
But Rameses liked the poem of Pentaour. It is about as long as a book
of the Iliad, but the stone-cutters of his reign must have known it
by heart. He kept them carving it and illustrating it all his life, on
every wall he built where there was room for the story. He never,
it would seem, could get enough of it. He killed those vile Khitas a
hundred times; he pursued them over all the stone walls in his kingdom.
The story is told here at Ipsambool; it is carved in the Rameseum; the
poem is graved on Luxor and Karnak.
Out of this great hall open eight other chambers, all more or less
sculptured, some of them covered with well-drawn figures on which the
color is still vivid. Two of these rooms are long and very narrow, with
a bench running round the walls, the front of which is cut out so as to
imitate seats with short pillars. In one are square niches, a foot deep,
cut in the wall. The sculptures in one are unfinished, the hieroglyphics
and figures drawn in black but not cut—some event having called off
the artists and left their work incomplete We seem to be present at
the execution of these designs, and so fresh are the colors ot those
finished, that it seems it must have been only yesterday that the
workman laid down the brush. (A small chamber in the rock outside the
temple, which was only opened in 1874, is wonderful in the vividness
of its colors; we see there better than anywhere else the colors of
vestments.)
These chambers are not the least mysterious portion of this temple. They
are in absolute darkness, and have no chance of ventilation. By what
light was this elaborate carving executed? If people ever assembled in
them, and sat on these benches, when lights were burning, how could they
breathe? If they were not used, why should they have been so decorated?
They would serve very well for the awful mysteries of the Odd Fellows.
Perhaps they were used by the Free Masons in Solomon's time.
Beyond the great hall is a transverse hall (having two small chambers
off from it) with four square pillars, and from this a corridor leads to
the adytum. Here, behind an altar of stone, sit four marred gods, facing
the outer door, two hundred feet from it. They sit in a twilight that is
only-brightened by rays that find their way in at the distant door; but
at morning they can see, from the depth of their mountain cavern, the
rising sun.
We climbed, up the yielding sand-drifts, to the top of the precipice in
which the temple is excavated, and walked back to a higher ridge.
The view from there is perhaps the best desert view on the Nile,
more extensive and varied than that of Aboosir. It is a wide sweep of
desolation. Up and down the river we see vast plains of sand and groups
of black hills; to the west and north the Libyan desert extends with no
limit to a horizon fringed with sharp peaks, like aiguilles of the Alps,
that have an exact resemblance to a forest.
At night, we give the ancient deities a sort of Fourth of July, and
illuminate the temple with colored lights. A blue-light burns upon
the altar in the adytum before the four gods, who may seem in their
penetralia to receive again the worship to which they were accustomed
three thousand years ago. A green flame in the great hall brings out
mysteriously the features of the gigantic Osiride, and revives the
midnight glow of the ancient ceremonies. In the glare of torches and
colored lights on the outside, the colossi loom in their gigantic
proportions and cast grotesque shadows.
Imagine this temple as it appeared to a stranger initiated into
the mysteries of the religion of the Pharaohs—a cultus in which
the mathematical secrets of the Pyramid and the Sphinx, art and
architecture, were wrapped in the same concealment with the problem of
the destiny of the soul; when the colors on these processions of gods
and heroes, upon these wars and pilgrimages sculptured in large on
the walls, were all brilliant; when these chambers were gorgeously
furnished, when the heavy doors that then hung in every passage,
separating the different halls and apartments, only swung open to admit
the neophyte to new and deeper mysteries, to halls blazing with light,
where he stood in the presence of these appalling figures, and of hosts
of priests and acolytes.
The temple of Aboo Simbel was built early in the reign of Rameses II.,
when art, under the impulse of his vigorous predecessors was in its
flower, and before the visible decadence which befel it later under
a royal patronage and “protection,” and in the demand for a wholesale
production, which always reduces any art to mechanical conditions. It
seemed to us about the finest single conception in Egypt. It must have
been a genius of rare order and daring who evoked in this solid mountain
a work of such grandeur and harmony of proportion, and then executed it
without a mistake. The first blow on the exterior, that began to reveal
the Colossi, was struck with the same certainty and precision as that
which brought into being the gods who are seated before the altar in the
depth of the mountain. A bolder idea was never more successfully wrought
out.
Our last view of this wonder was by moonlight and by sunrise. We arose
and went forth over the sand-bank at five o'clock. Venus blazed as never
before. The Southern Cross was paling in the moonlight. The moon, in its
last half, hung over the south-west corner of the temple rock, and threw
a heavy shadow across a portion of the sitting figures. In this dimness
of the half-light their proportions were supernatural. Details were
lost.
These might be giants of pre-historic times, or the old fabled gods of
antediluvian eras, outlined largely and majestically, groping their way
out of the hills.
Above them was the illimitable, purplish blue of the sky. The Moon, one
of the goddesses of the temple, withdrew more and more before the coming
of Re, the sun-god to whom the temple is dedicated, until she cast no
shadow on the façade. The temple, even the interior, caught the first
glow of the reddening east. The light came, as it always comes at dawn,
in visible waves, and these passed over the features of the Colossi,
wave after wave, slowly brightening them into life.
In the interior the first flush was better than the light of many
torches, and the Osiride figures were revealed in their hiding-places.
At the spring equinox the sun strikes squarely in, two hundred feet,
upon the faces of the sitting figures in the adytum. That is their
annual salute! Now it only sent its light to them; but it made rosy the
Osiride faces on one side of the great hall.
The morning was chilly, and we sat on a sand-drift, wrapped up against
the cutting wind, watching the marvellous revelation. The dawn seemed
to ripple down the gigantic faces of the figures outside, and to touch
their stony calm with something like a smile of gladness; it almost gave
them motion, and we would hardly have felt surprised to see them arise
and stretch their weary limbs, cramped by ages of inaction, and sing
and shout at the coming of the sun-god. But they moved not, the
strengthening light only revealed their stony impassiveness; and when
the sun, rapidly clearing the eastern hills of the desert, gilded first
the row of grinning monkeys, and then the light crept slowly down over
faces and forms to the very feet, the old heathen helplessness stood
confessed.
And when the sun swung free in the sky, we silently drew away and left
the temple and the guardians alone and unmoved. We called the reis and
the crew; the boat was turned to the current, the great sweeps dipped
into the water, and we continued our voyage down the eternal river,
which still sings and flows in this lonely desert place, where sit the
most gigantic figures man ever made.
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