LETTING our dahabeëh drift on in the morning, we spend the day at
Assiout, intending to overtake it by a short cut across the oxbow which
the river makes here. We saw in the city two examples, very unlike, of
the new activity in Egypt. One related to education, the other to the
physical development of the country and to conquest.
After paying out respects to the consul, we were conducted by his two
sons to the Presbyterian Mission-School. These young men were educated
at the American College in Beyrout. Nearly everywhere we have been in
the East, we have found a graduate of this school, that is as much as
to say, a person intelligent and anxious and able to aid in the
regeneration of his country. It would not be easy to overestimate the
services that this one liberal institution of learning is doing in the
Orient.
The mission-school was under the charge of the Rev. Dr. John Hogg and
his wife (both Scotch), with two women-teachers, and several native
assistants. We were surprised to find an establishment of about one
hundred and twenty scholars, of whom over twenty were girls. Of course
the majority of the students were in the primary studies, and some were
very young; but there were classes in advanced mathematics, in logic,
history, English, etc. The Arab young men have a fondness for logic and
metaphysics, and develop easily an inherited subtlety in such studies.
The text-books in use are Arabic, and that is the medium of teaching.
The students come from all parts of Upper Egypt, and are almost all
the children of Protestant parents, and they are, with an occasional
exception, supported by their parents, who pay at least their board
while they are at school. There were few Moslems among them, I think
only one Moslem girl. I am bound to say that the boys and young men
in their close rooms did not present an attractive appearance; an
ill-assorted assembly, with the stamp of physical inferiority and
dullness—an effect partially due to their scant and shabby apparel, for
some of them had bright, intelligent faces.
The school for girls, small as it is, impressed us as one of the most
hopeful things in Egypt. I have no confidence in any scheme for the
regeneration of the country, in any development if agriculture, or
extension of territory, or even in education, that does not reach woman
and radically change her and her position. It is not enough to say that
the harem system is a curse to the East: woman herself is everywhere
degraded. Until she becomes totally different from what she now is, I am
not sure but the Arab is right in saying that the harem is a necessity:
the woman is secluded in it (and in the vast majority of harems there
is only one wife) and has a watch set over her, because she cannot be
trusted. One hears that Cairo is full of intrigue, in spite of locked
doors and eunuchs. The large towns are worse than the country; but I
have heard it said that woman is the evil and plague of Egypt—though
I don't know how the country could go on without her. Sweeping
generalizations are dangerous, but it is said that the sole education of
most Egyptian women is in arts to stimulate the passion of men. In the
idleness of the most luxurious harem, in the grim poverty of the lowest
cabin, woman is simply an animal.
What can you expect of her? She is literally uneducated, untrained in
every respect. She knows no more of domestic economy than she does of
books, and she is no more fitted to make a house attractive or a room
tidy than she is to hold an intelligent conversation. Married when she
is yet a child, to person she may have never seen, and a mother at an
age when she should be in school, there is no opportunity for her to
become anything better than she is.
A primary intention in this school is to fit the girls to become good
wives, who can set an example of tidy homes economically managed,
in which there shall be something of social life and intelligent
companionship between husband and wife. The girls are taught the common
branches, sewing, cooking, and housekeeping—as there is opportunity for
learning it in the family of the missionaries. This house of Dr. Hogg's,
with its books, music, civilized menage, is a school in itself, and the
girl who has access to it for three or four years will not be content
with the inconvenience, the barren squalor of her parental hovel; for
it is quite as much ignorance as poverty that produces miserable homes.
Some of the girls now here expect to become teachers; some will marry
young men who are also at this school. Such an institution would be of
incalculable service if it did nothing else than postpone the marriage
of women a few years. This school is a small seed in Egypt, but it is,
I believe, the germ of a social revolution. It is, I think, the only one
in Upper Egypt. There is a mission school of similar character in Cairo,
and the Khedive also has undertaken schools for the education of girls.
In the last room we came to the highest class, a dozen girls, some of
them mere children in appearence, but all of marriageable age. I asked
the age of one pretty child, who showed uncommon brightness in her
exercises.
“She is twelve,” said the superintendent, “and no doubt would be
married, if she were not here. The girls become marriageable from eleven
years, and occasionally they marry younger; if one is not married at
fifteen she is in danger of remaining single.”
“Do the Moslems oppose your school?”
“The heads of the religion endeavor to prevent Moslem children coming
to it; we have had considerable trouble; but generally the mothers would
like to have their girls taught here, they become better daughters and
more useful at home.”
“Can you see that you gain here?”
“Little by little. The mission has been a wonderful success. I have
been in Egypt eighteen years; since the ten years that we have been
at Assiout, we have planted, in various towns in Upper Egypt, ten
churches.”
“What do do you think is your greatest difficulty?”
“Well, perhaps the Arabic language.”
“The labor of mastering it?”
“Not that exactly, although it is an unending study. Arabic is an
exceedingly rich language, as you know—a tongue that has often a
hundred words for one simple object has almost infinite capabilities for
expressing shades of meaning. To know Arabic grammatically is the work
of a lifetime. A man says, when he has given a long life to it, that
he knows a little Arabic. My Moslem teacher here, who was as learned an
Arab as I ever knew, never would hear me in a grammatical lesson upon
any passage he had not carefully studied beforehand. He begged me to
excuse him, one morning, from hearing me (I think we were reading from
the Koran) because he had not had time to go over the portion to be
read. Still, the difficulty of which I speak, is that Arabic and
the Moslem religion are one and the same thing, in the minds of the
faithful. To know Arabic is to learn the Koran, and that is the learning
of a learned Arab. He never gets to the end of the deep religious
meaning hidden in the grammatical intricacies. Religion and grammar thus
become one.”
“I suppose that is what our dragoman means, when he is reading me
something out of the Koran, and comes to a passage that he calls too
deep.”
“Yes. There is room for endless differences of opinion in the rendering
of almost any passage, and the disagreement is important, because it
becomes a religious difference. I had an example of the unity of the
language and the religion in the Moslem mind. When I came here the
learned thought I must be a Moslem because I knew the grammatical
Arabic; they could not conceive how else I should know it.”
When we called upon his excellency, Shakeer Pasha, the square in front
of his office and the streets leading to it were so covered with sitting
figures that it was difficulty to make a way amidst them. There was an
unusual assembly of some sort, but its purport we could not guess. It
was hardly in the nature of a popular convention, although its members
sat at their ease, smoking, and a babel of talk arose. Nowhere else
in Egypt have I seen so many fine and even white-looking men gathered
together. The center of every group was a clerk, with inkhorn and reed,
going over columns of figures.
The governor's quarters were a good specimen of Oriental style and
shabbiness; spacious whitewashed apartments, with dirty faded curtains.
But we were received with a politeness that would have befitted
a palace, and with the cordial ease of old friends. The Pasha was
heartbroken that we had not notified him of our coming, and that now our
time would not permit us to stay and accept a dinner—had we not promised
to do so on our return? He would send couriers and recall our boat, he
would detain us by force. Allowing for all the exaggeration of Oriental
phraseology, it appeared only too probable that the Pasha would die if
we did not stay to dinner and spend the night. But we did not.
This great concourse? Oh, they were sheykhs and head men of all the
villages in the country round, whom he had summoned to arrange for
the purchase of dromedaries. The government has issued orders for the
purchase of a large number, which it wants to send to Darfour.
The Khedive is making a great effort to open the route to Darfour
(twenty-eight days by camel) to regular and safe travel, and to
establish stations on the road. That immense and almost unknown
territory will thus be brought within the commercial world.
During our call we were served with a new beverage in place of coffee;
it was a hot and sweetened tea of cinnamon, and very delicious.
On our return to the river, we passed the new railway station building
which is to be a handsome edifice of white limestone. Men women, and
children are impressed to labor on it, and, an intelligent Copt told
us, without pay. Very young girls were the mortar-carriers, and as
they walked to and fro, with small boxes on their heads, they sang, the
precocious children, an Arab love-song;—
“He passed by my door, he did not speak to me.”
We have seen little girls, quite as small as these, forced to load coal
upon the steamers, and beaten and cuffed by the overseers. It is a
hard country for women. They have only a year or two of time, in which
all-powerful nature and the wooing sun sing within them the songs of
love, then a few years of married slavery, and then ugliness, old age,
and hard work.
I do not know a more melancholy subject of reflection than the
condition, the lives of these women we have been seeing for three
months. They have neither any social nor any religious life. If there
were nothing else to condemn the system of Mohammed, this is sufficient.
I know what splendors of art it has produced, what achievements in war,
what benefits to literature and science in the dark ages of Europe.
But all the culture of a race that in its men has borne accomplished
scholars, warriors, and artists, has never touched the women. The
condition of woman in the Orient is the conclusive verdict against the
religion of the Prophet.
I will not contrast that condition with the highest; I will not compare
a collection of Egyptian women, assembled for any purpose, a funeral or
a wedding, with a society of American ladies in consultation upon some
work of charity, nor with an English drawing-room. I chanced once to be
present at a representation of Verdi's Grand Mass, in Venice, when all
the world of fashion, of beauty, of intelligence, assisted. The
coup d'oil was brilliant. Upon the stage, half a hundred of the
chorus-singers were ladies. The leading solo-singers were ladies. I
remember the freshness, the beauty even, the vivacity, the gay decency
of the toilet, of that group of women who contributed their full share
in a most intelligent and at times profoundly pathetic rendering of the
Mass. I recall the sympathetic audience, largely composed of women, the
quick response to a noble strain nobly sung, the cheers, the tears even
which were not wanting in answer to the solemn appeal, in fine, the
highly civilized sensitiveness to the best product of religious art.
Think of some such scene as that, and of the women of an European
civilization; and then behold the women who are the product of this,—the
sad, dark fringe of water-drawers and baby-carriers, for eight hundred
miles along the Nile.
We have a row in the sandal of nine miles before we overtake our
dahabeëh, which the wind still baffles. However, we slip along under the
cover of darkness, for, at dawn, I hear the muezzin calling to prayer at
Manfaloot, trying in vain to impress a believing but drowsy world, that
prayer is better than sleep. This is said to be the place where Lot
passed the period of his exile. Near here, also, the Holy Family
sojourned when it spent a winter in Egypt. (The Moslems have
appropriated and localized everything in our Scriptures which is
picturesque, and they plant our Biblical characters where it is
convenient). It is a very pretty town, with minarets and gardens.
It surprises us to experience such cool weather towards the middle of
March; at nine in the morning the thermometer marks 550; the north wind
is cold, but otherwise the day is royal. Having nothing better to do we
climb the cliffs of Gebel Aboofeyda, at least a thousand feet above the
river; for ten miles it presents a bold precipice, unscalable except at
intervals. We find our way up a ravine. The rocks' surface in the river
and the ravine are worn exactly as the sea wears rock, honeycombed by
the action of water, and excavated into veritable sea-caves near the
summit. The limestone is rich in fossil shells.
The plain on top presented a singular appearance. It was strewn with
small boulders, many of them round and as shapely as cannon-balls, all
formed no doubt before the invention of the conical missiles. While we
were amusing ourselves with the thousand fantastic freaks of nature in
hardened clay, two sinister Arabs approached us from behind and cut
off our retreat. One was armed with a long gun and the other with a
portentous spear. We saluted them in the most friendly manner, and hoped
that they would pass on: but, no, they attached themselves to us. I
tried to think of cases of travelers followed into the desert on the
Nile and murdered, but none occurred to me. There seemed to be no danger
from the gun so long as we kept near its owner, for the length of it
would prevent his bringing it into action close at hand. The spear
appeared to be the more effective weapon of the two; it was so, for I
soon ascertained that the gun was not loaded and that its bearer had
neither powder nor balls. It turned out that this was a detachment of
the local guard, sent out to protect us; it would have been a formidable
party in case of an attack.
Continuing our walk over the stone-clad and desolate swells, it
suddenly occurred to us that we had become so accustomed to this sort
of desert-walking, with no green or growing thing in sight, that it
had ceased to seem strange to us. It gave us something like a start,
therefore, shortly after, to see, away to the right, blue water forming
islands out of the hill-tops along the horizon; there was an appearance
of verdure about the edge of the water, and dark clouds sailed over it.
There was, however, when we looked steadily, about the whole landscape a
shimmer and a shadowy look that taught us to know that it was a mirage,
the rich Nile valley below us, with the blue water, the green fields,
the black lines of palms, was dimly mirrored in the sky and thrown upon
the desert hills in the distance. We stood where we could compare the
original picture with the blurred copy.
Making our way down the face of the cliff, along some ledges, we
came upon many grottoes and mummy-pits cut in the rock, all without
sculptures, except one; this had on one side an arched niche and
pilasters from which the arch sprung. The vault of the niche had been
plastered and painted, and a Greek cross was chiseled in each pilaster;
but underneath the plaster the rock was in ornamental squares, lozenges
and curves in Saracenic style, although it may have been ancient
Egyptian. How one religion has whitewashed, and lived on the remains of
another here; the tombs of one age become the temples of another and the
dwellings of a third. On these ledges, and on the desert above, we found
bits of pottery. Wherever we have wandered, however far into the desert
from the river, we never get beyond the limit of broken pottery; and
this evidence of man's presence everywhere, on the most barren of
these high or low plains of stone and sand, speak of age and of human
occupation as clearly as the temples and monuments. There is no virgin
foot of desert even; all is worn and used. Human feet have trodden it in
every direction for ages. Even on high peaks where the eagles sit, men
have piled stones and made shelters, perhaps lookouts for enemies,
it may be five hundred, it may be three thousand years ago. There is
nowhere in Egypt a virgin spot.
By moonlight we are creeping under the frowning cliffs of Aboofeyda,
and voyage on all night in a buccaneerish fashion; and next day sail by
Hadji Kandeel, where travelers disembark for Tel el Amarna. The remains
of a once vast city strew the plain, but we only survey it through a
field-glass. What, we sometimes say in our more modern moments, is
one spot more than another? The whole valley is a sepulchre of dead
civilizations; its inhabitants were stowed away, tier on tier, shelf on
shelf, in these ledges.
However, respect for age sent us in the afternoon to the grottoes on the
north side of the cliff of Sheykh Said. This whole curved range, away
round to the remains of Antinoë, is full of tombs. Some that we visited
are large and would be very comfortable dwellings; they had been used
for Christian churches, having been plastered and painted. Traces of one
painting remain—trees and a comical donkey, probably part of the story
of the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt. We found in one the ovals
of Cheops, the builder of the great pyramid, and much good sculpture in
the best old manner—agricultural scenes, musicians, dancers, beautifully
cut, with careful details and also with spirit. This is very old work,
and, even abused as it has been, it is as good as any the traveler will
find in Egypt. This tomb no doubt goes back to the fourth dynasty, and
its drawing of animals, cows, birds, and fish is better than we usually
see later. In a net in which fish are taken, many kinds are represented,
and so faithfully that the species are recognizable; in a marsh is
seen a hippopotamus, full of life and viciousness, drawn with his mouth
stretched asunder wide enough to serve for a menagerie show-bill. There
are some curious false doors and architectural ornaments, like those of
the same epoch in the tombs at the pyramids.
At night we were at Rhoda, where is one of the largest of the Khedive's
sugar-factories; and the next morning at Beni Hassan, famed, next to
Thebes, for its grottoes, which have preserved to us, in painted scenes,
so much of the old Egyptian life. Whoever has seen pictures of these
old paintings and read the vast amount of description and inferences
concerning the old Egyptian life, based upon them, must be disappointed
when he sees them to-day. In the first place they are only painted, not
cut, and in this respect are inferior to those in the grottoes of Sheykh
Saïd; in the second place, they are so defaced, as to be with difficulty
deciphered, especially those depicting the trades.
Some of the grottoes are large—sixty feet by forty feet; fine apartments
in the rock, high and well lighted by the portal. Architecturally, no
tombs are more interesting; some of the ceilings are vaulted, in three
sections; they are supported by fluted pillars some like the Doric, and
some in the beautiful lotus style; the pillars have architraves; and
there are some elaborately wrought false doorways. And all this goes
to show that, however ancient these tombs are, they imitated stone
buildings already existing in a highly developed architecture.
Essentially the same subjects are represented in all the tombs; these
are the trades, occupations, amusements of the people. Men are blowing
glass, working in gold, breaking flax, tending herds (even doctoring
animals that are ill), chiseling statues, painting, turning the potter's
wheel; the barber shaves his customer; two men play at draughts; the
games most in favor are wrestling and throwing balls, and in the
latter women play. But what one specially admires is the honesty of the
decorators, which conceals nothing from posterity; the punishment of the
bastinado is again and again represented, and even women are subject
to it; but respect was shown for sex; the women was not cast upon the
ground, she kneels and takes the flagellation on her shoulders.
We saw in these tombs no horses among the many animals; we have never
seen the horse in any sculptures except harnessed in a war-chariot; “the
horse and his rider” do not appear.
There is a scene here which was the subject of a singular mistake, that
illustrates the needless zeal of early explorers to find in everything
in Egypt confirmation of the Old Testament narrative. A procession,
painted on the wall, now known to represent the advent of an Asiatic
tribe into Egypt, perhaps the Shepherds, in a remote period, was
declared to represent the arrival of Joseph's brethren. The tomb,
however, was made several centuries before the advent of Joseph himself.
And even if it were of later date than the event named, we should
not expect to find in it a record of an occurrence of such little
significance at that time. We ought not to be surprised at the absence
in Egypt of traces of the Israelitish sojourn, and we should not be,
if we looked at the event from the Egyptian point of view and not from
ours. In a view of the great drama of the ancient world in the awful
Egyptian perspective, the Jewish episode is relegated to its proper
proportion in secular history. The whole Jewish history, as a worldly
phenomenon, occupies its narrow limits. The incalculable effect upon
desert tribes of a long sojourn in a highly civilized state, the
subsequent development of law and of a literature unsurpassed in after
times, and the final flower into Christianity,—it is in the light of all
this that we read the smallest incident of Jewish history, and are
in the habit of magnifying its contemporary relations. It was the
slenderest thread in the days of Egyptian puissance. In the ancient
atmosphere of Egypt, events purely historical fall into their proper
proportions. Many people have an idea that the ancient world revolved
round the Jews, and even hold it as a sort of religious faith.
It is difficult to believe that the race we see here are descendants of
the active, inventive, joyous people who painted their life upon these
tombs. As we lie all the afternoon before a little village opposite
Beni Hassan I wonder for the hundredth time what it is that saves such
miserable places from seeming to us as vile as the most wretched abodes
of poverty in our own land. Is it because, with an ever-cheerful sun and
a porous soil, this village is not so filthy as a like abode of misery
would be with us? Is it that the imagination invests the foreign and the
Orient with its own hues; or is it that our reading, prepossessing our
minds, gives the lie to all our senses? I cannot understand why we are
not more disgusted with such a scene as this. Not to weary you with a
repetition of scenes sufficiently familiar, let us put the life of the
Egyptian fellah, as it appears at the moment, into a paragraph.
Here is a jumble of small mud-hovels, many of them only roofed with
cornstalks, thrown together without so much order as a beaver would use
in building a village, distinguishable only from dog-kennels in that
they have wooden doors—not distinguishable from them when the door
is open and a figure is seen in the aperture. Nowhere any comfort or
cleanliness, except that sometimes the inner kennel, of which the woman
guards the key, will have its floor swept and clean matting in one
corner. The court about which there are two or three of these kennels,
serves the family for all purposes; there the fire for cooking is built,
there are the water-jars, and the stone for grinding corn; there the
chickens and the dogs are; there crouch in the dirt women and men, the
women spinning, making bread, or nursing children, the men in vacant
idleness. While the women stir about and go for water, the men will
sit still all day long. The amount of sitting down here in Egypt is
inconceivable; you might almost call it the feature of the country. No
one in the village knows anything, either of religion or of the world;
no one has any plans; no one exhibits any interest in anything; can any
of them have any hopes? From this life nearly everything but the animal
is eliminated. Children, and pretty children, swarm, tumbling about
everywhere; besides, nearly every woman has one in her arms.
We ought not to be vexed at this constant north wind which baffles us,
for they say it is necessary to the proper filling out of the wheat
heads. The boat drifts about all day in a mile square, having passed
the morning on a sand-spit where the stupidity and laziness of the crew
placed it; and we have leisure to explore the large town of Minieh,
which lies prettily along the river. Here is a costly palace, which I
believe has never been occupied by the Khedive, and a garden attached,
less slovenly in condition than those of country palaces usually are.
The sugar-factory is furnished with much costly machinery, which could
not have been bought for less than half a million of dollars. Many of
the private houses give evidences of wealth in their highly ornamented
doorways and Moorish arches, but the mass of the town is of the usual
sort here—tortuous lanes in which weary hundreds of people sit in dirt,
poverty, and resignation. We met in the street and in the shops many
coal-black Nubians and negroes, smartly dressed in the recent European
style, having an impudent air, who seemed to be persons of wealth and
consideration here. In the course of our wanderings I came to a large
public building, built in galleries about an open court, and unwittingly
in my examination of it, stumbled into the apartment of the Governor,
Osman Bey, who was giving audience to all comers. Justice is still
administered in patriarchal style; the door is open to all; rich and
poor were crowding in, presenting petitions and papers of all sorts, and
among them a woman preferred a request. Whether justice was really done
did not appear, but Oriental hospitality is at least unfailing. Before
I could withdraw, having discovered my blunder, the governor welcomed
me with all politeness and gave me a seat beside him. We smiled at each
other in Arabic and American, and came to a perfect understanding on
coffee and cigarettes.
The next morning we are slowly passing the Copt convent of Gebel e'
Tayr, and expecting the appearance of the swimming Christians. There is
a good opportunity to board us, but no one appears. Perhaps because it
is Sunday and these Christians do not swim on Sunday. No. We learn from
a thinly clad and melancholy person who is regarding us from the rocks
that the Khedive has forbidden this disagreeable exhibition of muscular
Christianity. It was quite time. But thus, one by one, the attractions
of the Nile vanish.
What a Sunday! But not an exceptional day. “Oh dear,” says madame, in
a tone of injury, “here's another fine day!” Although the north wind is
strong, the air is soft, caressing, elastic.
More and more is forced upon us the contrast of the scenery of Upper
and Lower Egypt. Here it is not simply that the river is wider and the
mountains more removed and the arable land broader; the lines are all
straight and horizontal, the mountain-ranges are level-topped, parallel
to the flat prairies—at sunset a low level of white limestone hills in
the east looked exactly like a long line of fence whitewashed. In Upper
Egypt, as we have said, the plains roll, the hills are broken, there are
pyramidal mountains, and evidences of upheaval and disorder. But these
wide sweeping and majestic lines have their charm; the sunsets and
sunrises are in some respects finer than in Nubia; the tints are not so
delicate, the colors not so pure, but the moister atmosphere and clouds
make them more brilliant and various. The dawn, like the after-glow, is
long; the sky burns half round with rose and pink, the color mounts high
up. The sunsets are beyond praise, and always surprise. Last night the
reflection in the east was of a color unseen before—almost a purple
below and a rose above; and the west glowed for an hour in changing
tints. The night was not less beautiful—we have a certain comfort in
contrasting both with March in New England. It was summer; the Nile
slept, the moon half-full, let the stars show; and as we glided swiftly
down, the oars rising and falling to the murmured chorus of the
rowers, there were deep shadows under the banks, and the stately palms,
sentinelling the vast plain of moonlight over which we passed,—the great
silence of an Egyptian night—seemed to remove us all into dreamland. The
land was still, except for the creak of an occasional shadoof worked by
some wise man who thinks it easier to draw water in the night than
in the heat of the day, or an aroused wolfish dog, or a solitary bird
piping on the shore.
Thus we go, thus we stay, in the delicious weather, encouraged now and
again by a puff of southern wind, but held back from our destination by
some mysterious angel of delay. But one day the wind comes, the sail is
distended, the bow points downstream, and we move at the dizzy rate of
five miles an hour.
It is a day of incomparable beauty. We see very little labor along the
Nile; the crops are maturing. But the whole population comes to the
river, to bathe, to sit in the shallows, to sit on the bank. All the
afternoon we pass groups, men, women, children, motionless, the picture
of idleness. There they are, hour after hour, in the sun. Women, coming
for water, put down their jars, and bathe and frolic in the grateful
stream. In some distant reaches of the river there are rows of women
along the shore, exactly like the birds which stand in the shallow
places or sun themselves on the sand. There are more than twenty miles
of bathers, of all sexes and ages.
When at last we come to a long sand-reef, dotted with storks, cranes and
pelicans, the critic says he is glad to see something with feathers on
it.
We are in full tide of success and puffed up with confidence: it is
perfectly easy to descend the Nile. All the latter part of the afternoon
we are studying the False Pyramid of Maydoom, that structure, older
than Cheops, built, like all the primitive monuments, in degrees, as
the Tower of Babel was, as the Chaldean temples were. It lifts up, miles
away from the river, only a broken mass from the debris at its base.
We leave it behind. We shall be at Bedreshayn, for Memphis, before
daylight. As we turn in, the critic says, “We've got the thing in our
own hands now.”
Alas! the Lord reached down and took it out. The wind chopped suddenly,
and blew a gale from the north. At breakfast time we were waltzing round
opposite the pyramids of Dashoor, liable to go aground on islands and
sandbars, and unable to make the land. Determined not to lose the day,
we anchored, took the sandal, had a long pull, against the gale, to
Bedreshayn, and mounted donkeys for the ruins of ancient Memphis.
When Herodotus visited Memphis, probably about four hundred and fifty
years before Christ, it was a great city. He makes special mention of
its temple of Vulcan, whose priests gave him a circumstantial account of
the building of the city by Menes, the first Pharaoh. Four hundred
years later, Diodorus found it magnificent; about the beginning of the
Christian era, Strabo says it was next in size to Alexandria. Although
at the end of the twelfth century it had been systematically despoiled
to build Cairo, an Arab traveler says that, “its ruins occupy a space
half a day's journey every way,” and that its wonders could not
be described. Temples, palaces, gardens, villas, acres of common
dwellings—the city covered this vast plain with its splendor and its
squalor.
The traveler now needs a guide to discover a vestige, a stone here and
there, of this once most magnificent capital. Here came Moses and
Aaron, from the Israelitish settlement in the Delta, from Zoan (Tanis)
probably, to beg Menephtah to let the Jews depart; here were performed
the miracles of the Exodus. This is the Biblical Noph, against which
burned the wrath of the prophets. “No (Heliopolis, or On) shall be
rent asunder, and Noph shall have distresses daily.” The decree was
“published in Noph”:—“Noph shall be waste and desolate without an
inhabitant;” “I will cause their images to cease out of Noph.”
The images have ceased, the temples have either been removed or have
disappeared under the deposits of inundations; you would ride over old
Memphis without knowing it, but the inhabitants have returned to this
fertile and exuberant plain. It is only in the long range of pyramids
and the great necropolis in the desert that you can find old Memphis.
The superabundant life of the region encountered us at once. At
Bedreshayn is a ferry, and its boats were thronged, chiefly by women,
coming and going, and always with a load of grain or other produce on
the head. We rode round the town on an elevated dyke, lined with palms,
and wound onward over a flat, rich with wheat and barley, to Mitrahenny,
a little village in a splendid palm-grove. This marks the central
spot of the ruins of old Memphis. Here are some mounds, here are found
fragments of statues and cut stones, which are preserved in a temporary
shelter. And here, lying on its side, in a hollow from which the water
was just subsiding, is a polished colossal statue of Rameses II.—the
Pharaoh who left more monuments of less achievements than any other
“swell” of antiquity. The face is handsome, as all his statues are, and
is probably conventionalized like our pictures of George Washington,
or Napoleon's busts of himself. I confess to a feeling of perfect
satisfaction at seeing his finely chiseled nose rooting in the mud.
This—some mounds, some fragments of stone, and the statue,—was all we
saw of Memphis. But I should like to have spent a day in this lovely
grove, which was carpeted with the only turf I saw in Egypt; reclining
upon the old mounds in the shade, and pretending to think of Menes and
Moses and Menephtah; and of Rhampsinitus, the king who “descended alive
into the place which the Greeks call Hades, and there played at dice
with Ceres, and sometimes won, and other times lost,” and of the
treasure-house he built here; and whether, as Herodotus believed, Helen,
the beautiful cause of the Iliad, really once dwelt in a palace here,
and whether Homer ever recited his epic in these streets.
We go on over the still rich plain to the village of Sakkarah—chiefly
babies and small children. The cheerful life of this prairie fills us
with delight—flocks of sheep, herds of buffaloes, trains of dromedaries,
hundreds of laborers of both sexes in the fields, children skylarking
about; on every path are women, always with a basket on the head, their
blue cotton gown (the only article of dress except a head-shawl,) open
in front, blowing back so as to show their figures as they walk.
When we reach the desert we are in the presence of death—perhaps the
most mournful sight on this earth is a necropolis in the desert, savage,
sand-drifted, plundered, all its mounds dug over and over. We ride along
at the bases of the pyramids. I stop at one, climb over the débris at
its base, and break off a fragment of stone. The pyramid is of crumbling
limestone, and, built in stages or degrees, like that of Maydoom; it is
slowly becoming an unsightly heap. And it is time. This is believed
to be the oldest structure in the world, except the Tower of Babel. It
seems to have been the sepulchre of Keken, a king of the second dynasty.
At this period hieroglyphic writing was developed, but the construction
and ornamentation of the doorway of the pyramid exhibit art in its
infancy. This would seem to show that the Egyptians did not emigrate
from Asia with the developed and highly perfected art found in the
sculptures of the tombs of the fourth, fifth, and sixth dynasties, as
some have supposed, but that there was a growth, which was arrested
later.
But no inference in regard to old Egypt is safe; a discovery tomorrow
may upset it. Statues recently found, representing persons living in
the third dynasty, present a different type of race from that shown in
statues of the fourth and fifth dynasties. So that, in that period in
which one might infer a growth of art, there may have been a change of
the dominating race.
The first great work of Mariette Bey in Egypt—and it is a monument of
his sagacity, enthusiasm, and determination, was the unearthing, in this
waste of Memphis, the lost Serapeum and the Apis Mausoleum, the tombs of
the sacred bulls. The remains of the temple are again covered with sand;
but the visitor can explore the Mausoluem. He can walk, taper in hand,
through endless galleries, hewn in the rock, passing between rows of
gigantic granite sarcophagi, in which once rested the mummies of
the sacred bulls. Living, the bull was daintily fed—the Nile water
unfiltered was thought to be too fattening for him—and devotedly
worshipped; and dying, he was entombed in a sepulchre as magnificent as
that of kings, and his adorers lined the walls of his tomb with votive
offerings. It is partly from these stelæ, or slabs with inscriptions,
that Mariette Bey has added so much to our knowledge of Egyptian
history.
Near the Serapeum is perhaps the most elegant tomb in Egypt, the tomb
of Tih, who lived in the fifth dynasty, some time later than Cheops, but
when hippopotami abounded in the river in front of his farm,
Although Tih was a priest, he was a gentleman of elegant tastes, an
agriculturist, a sportsman. He had a model farm, as you may see by the
buildings and by the thousand details of good management here carved.
His tomb does him great credit. In all the work of later times there is
nothing so good as this sculpture, so free, so varied, so beautiful; it
promises everything. Tih even had, what we do not expect in people of
that early time, humor; you are sure of it from some of the pictures
here. He must have taken delight in decorating his tomb, and have spent,
altogether, some pleasant years in it before he occupied it finally; so
that he had become accustomed to staying here.
But his rule was despotic, it was that of the “stick.” Egyptians have
never changed in this respect, as we have remarked before. They are
now, as then, under the despotism of some notion of governance—divine
or human—despotic and fateful. The “stick” is as old as the monarchy;
it appears in these tombs; as to day, nobody then worked or paid taxes
without its application.
The sudden arrest of Egyptian art was also forced upon us next day, in a
second visit to the pyramids of Geezeh. We spent most of the day in the
tombs there. In some of them we saw the ovals of all the kings of the
fourth dynasty, many of them perfect and fresh in color. As to drawing,
cutting, variety, liveliness of attitude and color, there is nothing
better, little so good, in tombs of recent date. We find almost every
secular subject in the early tombs that is seen in the latest. In
thousands of years, the Egyptians scarcely changed or made any progress.
The figures of men and animals are better executed in these old
tombs than in the later. Again, these tombs are free from the endless
repetitions of gods and of offerings to them. The life of the people
represented is more natural, less superstitious; common events are
naively portrayed, with the humorous unconsciousness of a simple age;
art has thought it not unworthy its skill to represent the fact in one
tomb, that men acted as midwives to cows, in the dawn of history.
While we lay at Geezeh we visited one of the chicken-hatching
establishments for which the Egyptians have been famous from a remote
period. It was a very unpretending affair, in a dirty suburb of the
town. We were admitted into a low mud-building, and into a passage with
ovens on each side. In these ovens the eggs are spread upon mats, and
the necessary fire is made underneath. The temperature is at 100° to
108° Fahrenheit. Each oven has a hole in the center, through which the
naked attendant crawls to turn the eggs from time to time. The process
requires usually twenty-one days, but some eggs hatch on the twentieth.
The eggs are supplied by the peasants who usually receive, without
charge, half as many chickens as they bring eggs. About one third of the
eggs do not hatch. The hatching is only performed about three months in
the year, during the spring.
In the passage, before one of the ovens, was a heap of soft chickens,
perhaps half a bushel, which the attendant scraped together whenever
they attempted to toddle off. We had the pleasure of taking up some
handfuls of them. We also looked into the ovens, where there was a stir
of life, and were permitted to hold some eggs while the occupants kicked
off the shell.
I don't know that a plan will ever be invented by which eggs, as well as
chickens, will be produced without the intervention of the hen. If one
could be, it would leave the hen so much more time to scratch—it would
relieve her from domestic cares so that she could take part in public
affairs. The hen in Egypt is only partially emancipated, But since she
is relieved from setting, I do not know that she is any better hen. She
lays very small eggs.
This ends what I have to say about the hen. We have come to Cairo, and
the world is again before us.
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