Why do you come to Egypt? Do you come to gain a dream, or to regain lost
dreams of old; to gild your life with the drowsy gold of romance,
to lose a creeping sorrow, to forget that too many of your hours are
sullen, grey, bereft? What do you wish of Egypt?
The Sphinx will not ask you, will not care. The Pyramids, lifting their
unnumbered stones to the clear and wonderful skies, have held, still
hold, their secrets; but they do not seek for yours. The terrific
temples, the hot, mysterious tombs, odorous of the dead desires of men,
crouching in and under the immeasurable sands, will muck you with their
brooding silence, with their dim and sombre repose. The brown children
of the Nile, the toilers who sing their antique songs by the shadoof and
the sakieh, the dragomans, the smiling goblin merchants, the Bedouins
who lead your camel into the pale recesses of the dunes--these will not
trouble themselves about your deep desires, your perhaps yearning hunger
of the heart and the imagination.
Yet Egypt is not unresponsive.
I came back to her with dread, after fourteen years of absence--years
filled for me with the rumors of her changes. And on the very day of my
arrival she calmly reassured me. She told me in her supremely magical
way that all was well with her. She taught me once more a lesson I had
not quite forgotten, but that I was glad to learn again--the lesson that
Egypt owes her most subtle, most inner beauty to Kheper, although she
owes her marvels to men; that when he created the sun which shines upon
her, he gave her the lustre of her life, and that those who come to her
must be sun-worshippers if they would truly and intimately understand
the treasure or romance that lies heaped within her bosom.
Thoth, says the old legend, travelled in the Boat of the Sun. If you
would love Egypt rightly, you, too, must be a traveller in that bark.
You must not fear to steep yourself in the mystery of gold, in the
mystery of heat, in the mystery of silence that seems softly showered
out of the sun. The sacred white lotus must be your emblem, and Horus,
the hawk-headed, merged in Ra, your special deity. Scarcely had I set
foot once more in Egypt before Thoth lifted me into the Boat of the sun
and soothed my fears to sleep.
I arrived in Cairo. I saw new and vast hotels; I saw crowded streets;
brilliant shops; English officials driving importantly in victorias,
surely to pay dreadful calls of ceremony; women in gigantic hats, with
Niagaras of veil, waving white gloves as they talked of--I guess--the
latest Cairene scandal. I perceived on the right hand and on the left
waiters created in Switzerland, hall porters made in Germany, Levantine
touts, determined Jews holding false antiquities in their lean fingers,
an English Baptist minister, in a white helmet, drinking chocolate on a
terrace, with a guide-book in one fist, a ticket to visit monuments
in the other. I heard Scottish soldiers playing, “I’ll be in Scotland
before ye!” and something within me, a lurking hope, I suppose, seemed
to founder and collapse--but only for a moment. It was after four in the
afternoon. Soon day would be declining. And I seemed to remember that
the decline of day in Egypt had moved me long ago--moved me as few, rare
things have ever done. Within half an hour I was alone, far up the
long road--Ismail’s road--that leads from the suburbs of Cairo to the
Pyramids. And then Egypt took me like a child by the hand and reassured
me.
It was the first week of November, high Nile had not subsided, and all
the land here, between the river and the sand where the Sphinx keeps
watch, was hidden beneath the vast and tranquil waters of what seemed a
tideless sea--a sea fringed with dense masses of date-palms, girdled in
the far distance by palm-trees that kept the white and the brown houses
in their feathery embrace. Above these isolated houses pigeons circled.
In the distance the lateen sails of boats glided, sometimes behind the
palms, coming into view, vanishing and mysteriously reappearing among
their narrow trunks. Here and there a living thing moved slowly, wading
homeward through this sea: a camel from the sands of Ghizeh, a buffalo,
two donkeys, followed by boys who held with brown hands their dark blue
skirts near their faces, a Bedouin leaning forward upon the neck of his
quickly stepping horse. At one moment I seemed to look upon the lagoons
of Venice, a watery vision full of a glassy calm. Then the palm-trees in
the water, and growing to its edge, the pale sands that, far as the
eyes could see, from Ghizeh to Sakkara and beyond, fringed it toward
the west, made me think of the Pacific, of palmy islands, of a paradise
where men grow drowsy in well-being, and dream away the years. And
then I looked farther, beyond the pallid line of the sands, and I saw
a Pyramid of gold, the wonder Khufu had built. As a golden wonder it
saluted me after all my years of absence. Later I was to see it grey as
grey sands, sulphur color in the afternoon from very near at hand, black
as a monument draped in funereal velvet for a mourning under the stars
at night, white as a monstrous marble tomb soon after dawn from the
sand-dunes between it and Sakkara. But as a golden thing it greeted me,
as a golden miracle I shall remember it.
Slowly the sun went down. The second Pyramid seemed also made of gold.
Drowsily splendid it and its greater brother looked set on the golden
sands beneath the golden sky. And now the gold came traveling down from
the desert to the water, turning it surely to a wine like the wine of
gold that flowed down Midas’s throat; then, as the magic grew, to a
Pactolus, and at last to a great surface that resembled golden ice,
hard, glittering, unbroken by any ruffling wave. The islands rising from
this golden ice were jet black, the houses black, the palms and their
shadows that fell upon the marvel black. Black were the birds that flew
low from roof to roof, black the wading camels, black the meeting leaves
of the tall lebbek-trees that formed a tunnel from where I stood to Mena
House. And presently a huge black Pyramid lay supine on the gold, and
near it a shadowy brother seemed more humble than it, but scarcely less
mysterious. The gold deepened, glowed more fiercely. In the sky above
the Pyramids hung tiny cloud wreaths of rose red, delicate and airy as
the gossamers of Tunis. As I turned, far off in Cairo I saw the first
lights glittering across the fields of doura, silvery white, like
diamonds. But the silver did not call me. My imagination was held
captive by the gold. I was summoned by the gold, and I went on, under
the black lebbek-trees, on Ismail’s road, toward it. And I dwelt in it
many days.
The wonders of Egypt man has made seem to increase in stature before the
spirits’ eyes as man learns to know them better, to tower up ever higher
till the imagination is almost stricken by their looming greatness.
Climb the great Pyramid, spend a day with Abou on its summit, come down,
penetrate into its recesses, stand in the king’s chamber, listen to the
silence there, feel it with your hands--is it not tangible in this hot
fastness of incorruptible death?--creep, like the surreptitious midget
you feel yourself to be, up those long and steep inclines of polished
stone, watching the gloomy darkness of the narrow walls, the far-off
pinpoint of light borne by the Bedouin who guides you, hear the twitter
of the bats that have their dwelling in this monstrous gloom that man
has made to shelter the thing whose ambition could never be embalmed,
though that, of all qualities, should have been given here, in the land
it dowered, a life perpetual. Now you know the Great Pyramid. You know
that you can climb it, that you can enter it. You have seen it from all
sides, under all aspects. It is familiar to you.
No, it can never be that. With its more wonderful comrade, the Sphinx,
it has the power peculiar, so it seems to me, to certain of the rock and
stone monuments of Egypt, of holding itself ever aloof, almost like the
soul of man which can retreat at will, like the Bedouin retreating from
you into the blackness of the Pyramid, far up, or far down, where the
pursuing stranger, unaided, cannot follow.