As I drew slowly nearer and nearer to the home of “the great
Enchantress,” or, as Isis was also called in bygone days, “the Lady of
Philae,” the land began to change in character, to be full of a new and
barbaric meaning. In recent years I have paid many visits to northern
Africa, but only to Tunisia and Algeria, countries that are wilder
looking, and much wilder seeming than Egypt. Now, as I approached
Assuan, I seemed at last to be also approaching the real, the intense
Africa that I had known in the Sahara, the enigmatic siren, savage and
strange and wonderful, whom the typical Ouled Nail, crowned with
gold, and tufted with ostrich plumes, painted with kohl, tattooed, and
perfumed, hung with golden coins and amulets, and framed in plaits
of coarse, false hair, represents indifferently to the eyes of the
travelling stranger. For at last I saw the sands that I love creeping
down to the banks of the Nile. And they brought with them that wonderful
air which belongs only to them--the air that dwells among the dunes in
the solitary places, that is like the cool touch of Liberty upon
the face of a man, that makes the brown child of the nomad as lithe,
tireless, and fierce-spirited as a young panther, and sets flame in the
eyes of the Arab horse, and gives speed of the wind to the Sloughi. The
true lover of the desert can never rid his soul of its passion for the
sands, and now my heart leaped as I stole into their pure embraces, as
I saw to right and left amber curves and sheeny recesses, shining ridges
and bloomy clefts. The clean delicacy of those sands that, in long
and glowing hills, stretched out from Nubia to meet me, who could ever
describe them? Who could ever describe their soft and enticing shapes,
their exquisite gradations of color, the little shadows in their
hollows, the fiery beauty of their crests, the patterns the cool winds
make upon them? It is an enchanted _royaume_ of the sands through which
one approaches Isis.
Isis and engineers! We English people have effected that curious
introduction, and we greatly pride ourselves upon it. We have presented
Sir William Garstin, and Mr. John Blue, and Mr. Fitz Maurice, and other
clever, hard-working men to the fabled Lady of Philae, and they have
given her a gift: a dam two thousand yards in length, upon which
tourists go smiling on trolleys. Isis has her expensive tribute--it
cost about a million and a half pounds--and no doubt she ought to be
gratified.
Yet I think Isis mourns on altered Philae, as she mourns with her
sister, Nepthys, at the heads of so many mummies of Osirians upon the
walls of Egyptian tombs. And though the fellaheen very rightly rejoice,
there are some unpractical sentimentalists who form a company about
her, and make their plaint with hers--their plaint for the peace that
is gone, for the lost calm, the departed poetry, that once hung, like a
delicious, like an inimitable, atmosphere, about the palms of the “Holy
Island.”
I confess that I dreaded to revisit Philae. I had sweet memories of the
island that had been with me for many years--memories of still mornings
under the palm-trees, watching the gliding waters of the river, or
gazing across them to the long sweep of the empty sands; memories of
drowsy, golden noons, when the bright world seemed softly sleeping, and
the almost daffodil-colored temple dreamed under the quivering canopy of
blue; memories of evenings when a benediction from the lifted hands
of Romance surely fell upon the temple and the island and the river;
memories of moonlit nights, when the spirits of the old gods to whom the
temples were reared surely held converse with the spirits of the desert,
with Mirage and her pale and evading sisters of the great spaces, under
the brilliant stars. I was afraid, because I could not believe the
asservations of certain practical persons, full of the hard and almost
angry desire of “Progress,” that no harm had been done by the creation
of the reservoir, but that, on the contrary, it had benefited the
temple. The action of the water upon the stone, they said with vehement
voices, instead of loosening it and causing it to crumble untimely away,
had tended to harden and consolidate it. Here I should like to lie, but
I resist the temptation. Monsieur Naville has stated that possibly the
English engineers have helped to prolong the lives of the buildings of
Philae, and Monsieur Maspero has declared that “the state of the temple
of Philae becomes continually more satisfactory.” So be it! Longevity
has been, by a happy chance, secured. But what of beauty? What of the
beauty of the past, and what of the schemes for the future? Is
Philae even to be left as it is, or are the waters of the Nile to be
artificially raised still higher, until Philae ceases to be? Soon, no
doubt, an answer will be given.
Meanwhile, instead of the little island that I knew, and thought a
little paradise breathing out enchantment in the midst of titanic
sterility, I found a something diseased. Philae now, when out of the
water, as it was all the time when I was last in Egypt, looks like a
thing stricken with some creeping malady--one of those maladies which
begin in the lower members of a body, and work their way gradually but
inexorably upward to the trunk, until they attain the heart.
I came to it by the desert, and descended to Shellal--Shellal with
its railway-station, its workmen’s buildings, its tents, its dozens of
screens to protect the hewers of stone from the burning rays of the sun,
its bustle of people, of overseers, engineers, and workmen, Egyptian,
Nubian, Italian, and Greek. The silence I had known was gone, though the
desert lay all around--the great sands, the great masses of granite
that look as if patiently waiting to be fashioned into obelisks, and
sarcophagi, and statues. But away there across the bend of the river,
dominating the ugly rummage of this intrusive beehive of human bees,
sheer grace overcoming strength both of nature and human nature,
rose the fabled “Pharaoh’s Bed”; gracious, tender, from Shellal
most delicately perfect, and glowing with pale gold against the grim
background of the hills on the western shore. It seemed to plead for
mercy, like something feminine threatened with outrage, to protest
through its mere beauty, as a woman might protest by an attitude,
against further desecration.
And in the distance the Nile roared through the many gates of the dam,
making answer to the protest.
What irony was in this scene! In the old days of Egypt Philae was sacred
ground, was the Nile-protected home of sacerdotal mysteries, was a
veritable Mecca to the believers in Osiris, to which it was forbidden
even to draw near without permission. The ancient Egyptians swore
solemnly “By him who sleeps in Philae.” Now they sometimes swear angrily
at him who wakes in, or at least by, Philae, and keeps them steadily
going at their appointed tasks. And instead of it being forbidden to
draw near to a sacred spot, needy men from foreign countries flock
thither in eager crowds, not to worship in beauty, but to earn a living
wage.
And “Pharaoh’s Bed” looks out over the water and seems to wonder what
will be the end.
I was glad to escape from Shellal, pursued by the shriek of an engine
announcing its departure from the station, glad to be on the quiet
water, to put it between me and that crowd of busy workers. Before me I
saw a vast lake, not unlovely, where once the Nile flowed swiftly, far
off a grey smudge--the very damnable dam. All around me was a grim
and cruel world of rocks, and of hills that look almost like heaps of
rubbish, some of them grey, some of them in color so dark that they
resemble the lava torrents petrified near Catania, or the “Black
Country” in England through which one rushes on one’s way to the north.
Just here and there, sweetly almost as the pink blossoms of the wild
oleander, which I have seen from Sicilian seas lifting their heads from
the crevices of sea rocks, the amber and rosy sands of Nubia smiled down
over grit, stone, and granite.
The setting of Philae is severe. Even in bright sunshine it has an iron
look. On a grey or stormy day it would be forbidding or even terrible.
In the old winters and springs one loved Philae the more because of
the contrast of its setting with its own lyrical beauty, its curious
tenderness of charm--a charm in which the isle itself was mingled with
its buildings. But now, and before my boat had touched the quay, I saw
that the island must be ignored--if possible.
The water with which it is entirely covered during a great part of the
year seems to have cast a blight upon it. The very few palms have a
drooping and tragic air. The ground has a gangrened appearance, and much
of it shows a crawling mass of unwholesome-looking plants, which seem
crouching down as if ashamed of their brutal exposure by the receded
river, and of harsh and yellow-green grass, unattractive to the eyes. As
I stepped on shore I felt as if I were stepping on disease. But at least
there were the buildings undisturbed by any outrage. Again I turned
toward “Pharaoh’s Bed,” toward the temple standing apart from it, which
already I had seen from the desert, near Shellal, gleaming with its
gracious sand-yellow, lifting its series of straight lines of masonry
above the river and the rocks, looking, from a distance, very simple,
with a simplicity like that of clear water, but as enticing as the light
on the first real day of spring.