MINIEH TO SIUT.
It is Christmas day. The M. B.’s are coming to dinner; the cooks are up
to their eyes in entrées; the crew are treated to a sheep in honor of
the occasion; the new-comers are unpacking; and we are all gradually
settling down into our respective places. Now the new-comers consist of
four persons: a painter, a happy couple and a maid. The painter has
already been up the Nile three times and brings a fund of experience
into the council. He knows all about sand-banks and winds and
mooring-places; is acquainted with most of the native governors and
consuls along the river; and is great on the subject of what to eat,
drink and avoid. The stern-cabin is given to him for a studio and
contains frames, canvases, drawing-paper and easels enough to start a
provincial school of art. He is going to paint a big picture at
Aboo-Simbel. The happy couple it is unnecessary to say are on their
wedding tour. In point of fact, they have not yet been married a month.
The bridegroom is what the world chooses to call an idle man; that is to
say, he has scholarship, delicate health and leisure. The bride, for
convenience, shall be called the little lady. Of people who are
struggling through that helpless phase of human life called the
honeymoon, it is not fair to say more than that they are both young
enough to make the situation interesting.
Meanwhile the deck must be cleared of the new luggage that has come on
board and the day passes in a confusion of unpacking, arranging and
putting away. Such running to and fro as there is down below; such
turning-out of boxes and knocking-up of temporary shelves; such talking,
and laughing, and hammering! Nor is the bustle confined to down-stairs.
Talhamy and the waiters are just as busy above, adorning the upper deck
with palm branches and hanging the boat all round with rows of colored
lanterns. One can hardly believe, however, that it is Christmas
day--that there are fires blazing at home in every room; that the church
field, perhaps, is white with snow; and that familiar bells are ringing
merrily across the frosty air. Here at midday it is already too hot on
deck without the awning, and when we moor toward sunset near a riverside
village in a grove of palms, the cooler air of evening is delicious.
There is novelty in even such a commonplace matter as dining out, on the
Nile. You go and return in your felucca, as if it were a carriage; and
your entertainers summon you by firing a dinner gun, instead of sounding
a gong. Wise people who respect the feelings of their cooks fire a
dressing gun as well; for watches soon differ in a hopeless way for want
of the church clock to set them by, and it is always possible that host
and guest may be an hour or two apart in their reckoning.
The customary guns having therefore been fired and the party assembled,
we sat down to one of cook Bedawee’s prodigious banquets. Not, however,
till the plum-pudding, blazing demoniacally, appeared upon the scene,
did any of us succeed in believing that it was really Christmas day.
Nothing could be prettier or gayer than the spectacle that awaited us
when we rose from table. A hundred and fifty colored lanterns outlined
the boat from end to end, sparkled up the masts, and cast broken
reflections in the moving current. The upper-deck, hung with flags and
partly closed in with awnings, looked like a bower of palms. The stars
and the crescent moon shone overhead. Dim outlines of trees and
headlands, and a vague perspective of gleaming river, were visible in
the distance; while a light gleamed now and then in the direction of the
village, or a dusky figure flitted along the bank.
Meanwhile, there was a sound of revelry by night; for our sailors had
invited the Bagstones’ crew to unlimited coffee and tobacco, and had
quite a large party on the lower deck. They drummed, they sang, they
danced, they dressed up, improvised a comic scene, and kept their
audience in a roar. Reïs Hassan did the honors. George, Talhamy and the
maids sat apart at the second table and sipped their coffee genteelly.
We looked on and applauded. At ten o’clock a pan of magnesium powder was
burned, and our fantasia ended with a blaze of light, like a pantomime.
In Egypt, by the way, any entertainment which is enlivened by music,
dancing, or fire-works is called a fantasia.
And now, sometimes sailing, sometimes tracking, sometimes punting, we go
on day by day, making what speed we can. Things do not, of course,
always fall out exactly as one would have them. The wind too often fails
when we most need it, and gets up when there is something to be seen on
shore. Thus, after a whole morning of tracking, we reach Beni Hassan at
the moment when a good breeze has suddenly filled our sails for the
first time in forty-eight hours; and so, yielding to counsels which we
afterward deplored, we pass on with many a longing look at the terraced
doorways pierced along the cliffs. At Rhoda, in the same way, we touch
for only a few minutes to post and inquire for letters, and put off till
our return the inland excursion to Dayr el Nakhl, where is to be seen
the famous painting of the Colossus on the Sledge. But sights deferred
are fated sometimes to remain unseen, as we found by and by to our
exceeding loss and regret.
Meanwhile, the skies are always cloudless, the days warm, the evenings
exquisite. We of course live very much in the open air. When there is no
wind, we land and take long walks by the river side. When on board, we
sketch, write letters, read Champollion, Bunsen, and Sir Gardner
Wilkinson: and work hard at Egyptian dynasties. The sparrows and
water-wagtails perch familiarly on the awnings and hop about the deck;
the cocks and hens chatter, the geese cackle, the turkeys gobble in
their coops close by; and our sacrificial sheep, leading a solitary life
in the felucca, comes baaing in the rear. Sometimes we have as many as a
hundred chickens on board (to say nothing of pigeons and rabbits) and
two or even three sheep in the felucca. The poultry-yard is railed off,
however, at the extreme end of the stern, so that the creatures are well
away from the drawing-room; and when we moor at a suitable place, they
are let out for a few hours to peck about the banks and enjoy their
liberty. L---- and the little lady feed these hapless prisoners with
breakfast-scraps every morning, to the profound amusement of the
steersman, who, unable to conceive any other motive, imagines they are
fatting them for the table.
Such is our Noah’s ark life--pleasant, peaceful and patriarchal. Even on
days when there is little to see and nothing to do it is never dull.
Trifling incidents which have for us the excitement of novelty are
continually occurring. Other dahabeeyahs, their flags and occupants, are
a constant source of interest. Meeting at mooring-places for the night,
we now and then exchange visits. Passing each other by day we dip
ensigns, fire salutes, and punctiliously observe the laws of maritime
etiquette. Sometimes a Cook’s excursion steamer hurries by crowded with
tourists; or a government tug towing three or four great barges closely
packed with wretched-looking, half-naked fellâheen bound for forced
labor on some new railway or canal. Occasionally we pass a dahabeeyah
sticking fast upon a sand-bank; and sometimes we stick on one ourselves.
Then the men fly to their punting poles or jump into the river like
water-dogs, and, grunting in melancholy cadence, shove the boat off with
their shoulders.
The birds, too, are new, and we are always looking out for them. Perhaps
we see a top-heavy pelican balancing his huge yellow bill over the edge
of the stream and fishing for his dinner--or a flight of wild geese
trailing across the sky toward sunset--or a select society of vultures
perched all in a row upon a ledge of rock and solemn as the bench of
bishops. Then there are the herons who stand on one leg and doze in the
sun; the strutting hoopoes with their legendary top-knots; the blue and
green bee-eaters hovering over the uncut dura. The pied kingfisher,
black and white like a magpie, sits fearlessly under the bank and never
stirs, though the tow-rope swings close above his head and the
dahabeeyah glides within a few feet of the shore. The paddy-birds whiten
the sand-banks by hundreds and rise in a cloud at our approach. The
sacred hawk, circling overhead, utters the same sweet, piercing,
melancholy note that the Pharaohs listened to of old.
The scenery is for the most part of the ordinary Nile pattern; and for
many a mile we see the same things over and over again--the level bank
shelving down steeply to the river; the strip of cultivated soil, green
with maize or tawny with dura; the frequent mud-village and palm-grove;
the deserted sugar factory with its ungainly chimney and shattered
windows; the water-wheel slowly revolving with its necklace of pots; the
shâdûf worked by two brown athletes; the file of laden camels; the
desert, all sand-hills and sand-plains, with its background of
mountains; the long reach and the gleaming sail ahead. Sometimes,
however, as at Kom Ahmar, we skirt the ancient brick mounds of some
forgotten city, with fragments of arched foundations, and even of walls
and doorways, reaching down to the water’s edge; or, sailing close under
ranges of huge perpendicular cliffs, as at Gebel Abufayda, startle the
cormorants from their haunts, and peer as we pass into the dim recesses
of many a rock-cut tomb excavated just above the level of the
inundation.
This Gebel Abufayda has a bad name for sudden winds; especially at the
beginning and end of the range, where the Nile bends abruptly and the
valley opens out at right angles to the river. It is fine to see Reïs
Hassan, as we approach one of the worst of these bad bits--a point where
two steep ravines divided by a bold headland command the passage like a
pair of grim cannon, and rake it with blasts from the northeastern
desert. Here the current, flowing deep and strong, is met by the wind
and runs high in crested waves. Our little captain, kicking off his
shoes, himself springs up the rigging and there stands silent and
watchful. The sailors, ready to shift our mainsail at the word of
command, cling some to the shoghool[25] and some to the end of the yard;
the boat tears on before the wind; the great bluff looms up darker and
nearer. Then comes a breathless moment. Then a sharp, sudden word from
the little man in the main rigging; a yell and a whoop from the sailors;
a slow, heavy lurch of the flapping sail; and the corner is turned in
safety.
The cliffs are very fine; much loftier and less uniform than at Gebel et
Tayr; rent into strange forms, as of sphinxes, cheesewrings, towers, and
bastions; honeycombed with long ranges of rock-cut tombs; and undermined
by water-washed caverns in which lurk a few lingering crocodiles. If at
Gebel et Tayr the rock is worn into semblances of arabesque
ornamentation, here it looks as if inscribed all over with mysterious
records in characters not unlike the Hebrew. Records they are, too, of
prehistoric days--chronicles of his own deeds carved by the great god
Nile himself, the Hapimu of ancient time--but the language in which
they are written has never been spoken by man.
As for the rock-cut tombs of Gebel Abufayda, they must number many
hundreds. For nearly twelve miles the range runs parallel to the river,
and throughout that distance the face of the cliffs is pierced with
innumerable doorways. Some are small and square, twenty or thirty
together, like rows of port-holes. Others are isolated. Some are cut so
high up that they must have been approached from above; others again
come close upon the level of the river. Some of the doorways are faced
to represent jambs and architraves; some, excavated laterally, appear to
consist of a series of chambers, and are lit from without by small
windows cut in the rock. One is approached by a flight of rough steps
leading up from the water’s edge; and another, hewn high in the face of
the cliff, just within the mouth of a little ravine, shows a simple but
imposing façade supported by four detached pillars. No modern travelers
seem to visit these tombs; while those of the old school, as Wilkinson,
Champollion, etc., dismiss them with a few observations. Yet, with the
single exception of the mountains behind Thebes, there is not, I
believe, any one spot in Egypt which contains such a multitude of
sepulchral excavations. Many look, indeed, as if they might belong to
the same interesting and early epoch as those of Beni Hassan.
I may here mention that about half-way, or rather less than half-way,
along the whole length of the range I observed two large hieroglyphed
stelæ incised upon the face of a projecting mass of boldly rounded cliff
at a height of perhaps a hundred and fifty feet above the river. These
stelæ, apparently royal ovals, and sculptured as usual side by side, may
have measured from twelve to fifteen feet in height; but in the absence
of any near object by which to scale them, I could form but a rough
guess as to their actual dimensions. The boat was just then going so
fast that to sketch or take notes of the hieroglyphs was impossible.
Before I could adjust my glass they were already in the rear; and by the
time I had called the rest of the party together they were no longer
distinguishable.
Coming back several months later, I looked for them again, but without
success; for the intense midday sun was then pouring full upon the
rocks, to the absolute obliteration of everything like shallow detail.
While watching vainly, however, for the stelæ, I was compensated by the
unexpected sight of a colossal bas-relief high up on the northward face
of a cliff standing, so to say, at the corner of one of those little
recesses or _culs-de-sac_ which here and there break the uniformity of
the range. The sculptural relief of this large subject was apparently
very low; but, owing to the angle at which it met the light, one figure,
which could not have measured less than eighteen or twenty feet in
height, was distinctly visible. I immediately drew L----’s attention to
the spot; and she not only discerned the figure without the help of a
glass, but believed like myself that she could see traces of a second.
As neither the stelæ nor the bas-relief would seem to have been observed
by previous travelers, I may add for the guidance of others that the
round and tower-like rock upon which the former are sculptured lies
about a mile to the southward of the sheik’s tomb and palm-tree (a
strikingly picturesque bit which no one can fail to notice), and a
little beyond some very large excavations near the water’s edge; while
the bas-relief is to be found at a short distance below the Coptic
convent and cemetery.
Having for nearly twelve miles skirted the base of Gebel Abufayda--by
far the finest panoramic stretch of rock scenery on this side of the
second cataract--the Nile takes an abrupt bend to the eastward, and
thence flows through many miles of cultivated flat. One coming to this
sudden elbow the wind, which had hitherto been carrying us along at a
pace but little inferior to that of a steamer, now struck us full on the
beam and drove the boat to shore with such violence that all the
steersman could do was just to run the Philæ’s nose into the bank and
steer clear of some ten or twelve native cangias that had been driven in
before us. The Bagstones rushed in next; and presently a large
iron-built dahabeeyah, having come gallantly along under the cliffs with
all sail set, was seen to make a vain struggle at the fatal corner, and
then plunge headlong at the bank, like King Agib’s ship upon the
Loadstone Mountain.
Imprisoned here all the afternoon, we exchanged visits of condolence
with our neighbors in misfortune; had our ears nearly cut to pieces by
the driving sand; and failed signally in the endeavor to take a walk on
shore. Still the fury of the storm went on increasing. The wind howled;
the river raced in turbid waves; the sand drove in clouds; and the face
of the sky was darkened as if by a London fog. Meanwhile, one boat after
another was hurled to shore, and before nightfall we numbered a fleet of
some twenty odd craft, native and foreign.
It took the united strength of both crews all next day to warp the Philæ
and Bagstones across the river by means of a rope and an anchor; an
expedient that deserves special mention not for its amazing novelty or
ingenuity, but because our men declared it to be impracticable. Their
fathers, they said, had never done it. Their fathers’ fathers had never
done it. Therefore it was impossible. Being impossible, why should they
attempt it?
They did attempt it, however, and, much to their astonishment, they
succeeded.
It was, I think, toward the afternoon of this second day, when,
strolling by the margin of the river, that we first made the
acquaintance of that renowned insect, the Egyptian beetle. He was a very
fine specimen of his race, nearly half an inch long in the back, as
black and shiny as a scarab cut in jet, and busily engaged in the
preparation of a large rissole of mud, which he presently began
laboriously propelling up the bank. We stood and watched him for some
time, half in admiration, half in pity. His rissole was at least four
times bigger than himself, and to roll it up that steep incline to a
point beyond the level of next summer’s inundation was a labor of
Hercules for so small a creature. One longed to play the part of the
_Deus ex machina_ and carry it up the bank for him; but that would have
been a dénouement beyond his power of appreciation.
We all know the old story of how this beetle lays its eggs by the
river’s brink; incloses them in a ball of moist clay; rolls the ball to
a safe place on the edge of the desert; buries it in the sand; and when
his time comes, dies content, having provided for the safety of his
successors. Hence his mythic fame; hence all the quaint symbolism that
by degrees attached itself to his little person, and ended by investing
him with a special sacredness which has often been mistaken for actual
worship. Standing by thus, watching the movements of the creature, its
untiring energy, its extraordinary muscular strength, its business-like
devotion to the matter in hand, one sees how subtle a lesson the old
Egyptian moralists had presented to them for contemplation, and with how
fine a combination of wisdom and poetry they regarded this little black
scarab not only as an emblem of the creative and preserving power, but
perhaps also of the immortality of the soul. As a type, no insect has
ever had so much greatness thrust upon him. He became a hieroglyph, and
stood for a word signifying both to be and to transform. His portrait
was multiplied a million-fold; sculptured over the portals of temples;
fitted to the shoulders of a god; engraved on gems; molded in pottery;
painted on sarcophagi and the walls of tombs; worn by the living and
buried with the dead.
Every traveler on the Nile brings away a handful of the smaller scarabs,
genuine or otherwise. Some may not particularly care to possess them;
yet none can help buying them, if only because other people do so, or to
get rid of a troublesome dealer, or to give to friends at home. I doubt,
however, if even the most enthusiastic scarab-fanciers really feel in
all its force the symbolism attaching to these little gems, or
appreciate the exquisite naturalness of their execution, till they have
seen the living beetle at its work.
In Nubia, where the strip of cultivable land is generally but a few feet
in breadth, the scarab’s task is comparatively light and the breed
multiplies freely. But in Egypt he has often a wide plain to traverse
with his burden, and is therefore scarce in proportion to the difficulty
with which he maintains the struggle for existence. The scarab race in
Egypt would seem indeed to have diminished very considerably since the
days of the Pharaohs, and the time is not perhaps far distant when the
naturalist will look in vain for specimens on this side of the first
cataract. As far as my own experience goes, I can only say that I saw
scores of these beetles during the Nubian part of the journey; but that
to the best of my recollection this was the only occasion upon which I
observed one in Egypt.
The Nile makes four or five more great bends between Gebel Abufayda and
Siût; passing Manafalût by the way, which town lies some distance back
from the shore. All things taken into consideration--the fitful wind
that came and went continually; the tremendous zigzags of the river; the
dead calm which befell us when only eight miles from Siût; and the long
day of tracking that followed, with the town in sight the whole way--we
thought ourselves fortunate to get in by the evening of the third day
after the storm. These last eight miles are, however, for open, placid
beauty, as lovely in their way as anything north of Thebes. The valley
is here very wide and fertile; the town, with its multitudinous
minarets, appears first on one side and then on the other, according to
the windings of the river; the distant pinky mountains look almost as
transparent as the air or the sunshine; while the banks unfold an
endless succession of charming little subjects, every one of which looks
as if it asked to be sketched as we pass. A shâdûf and a clump of
palms--a triad of shaggy black buffaloes, up to their shoulders in the
river, and dozing as they stand--a wide-spreading sycamore fig, in the
shade of which lie a man and camel asleep--a fallen palm uprooted by the
last inundation, with its fibrous roots yet clinging to the bank and its
crest in the water--a group of sheiks’ tombs with glistening white
cupolas relieved against a background of dark foliage--an old disused
water-wheel lying up sidewise against the bank like a huge teetotom, and
garlanded with wild tendrils of a gourd--such are a few out of many bits
by the way, which, if they offer nothing very new, at all events present
the old material under fresh aspects, and in combination with a distance
of such ethereal light and shade, and such opalescent tenderness of
tone, that it looks more like an air-drawn mirage than a piece of the
world we live in.
Like a mirage, too, that fairy town of Siût seemed always to hover at
the same unattainable distance and after hours of tracking to be no
nearer than at first. Sometimes, indeed, following the long reaches of
the river, we appeared to be leaving it behind; and although, as I have
said, we had eight miles of hard work to get to it, I doubt whether it
was ever more than three miles distant as the bird flies. It was late in
the afternoon, however, when we turned the last corner; and the sun was
already setting when the boat reached the village of Hamra, which is the
mooring-place for Siût--Siût itself, with clustered cupolas and arrowy
minarets, lying back in the plain at the foot of a great mountain
pierced with tombs.
Now, it was in the bond that our crew were to be allowed twenty-four
hours for making and baking bread at Siût, Esneh and Assuân. No sooner,
therefore, was the dahabeeyah moored than Reïs Hassan and the steersman
started away at full speed on two little donkeys to buy flour; while
Mehemet Ali, one of our most active and intelligent sailors, rushed off
to hire the oven. For here, as at Esneh and Assuân, there are large
flour stores and public bakehouses for the use of sailors on the river,
who make and bake their bread in large lots; cut it into slices; dry it
in the sun; and preserve it in the form of rusks for months together.
Thus prepared, it takes the place of ship-biscuit; and it is so far
superior to ship-biscuit that it neither molds nor breeds the maggot,
but remains good and wholesome to the last crumb.
Siût, frequently written Asyoot, is the capital of Middle Egypt and has
the best bazaars of any town up the Nile. Its red and black pottery is
famous throughout the country; and its pipe-bowls (supposed to be the
best in the east), being largely exported to Cairo, find their way not
only to all parts of the Levant, but to every Algerine and Japanese shop
in London and Paris. No lover of peasant pottery will yet have forgotten
the Egyptian stalls in the ceramic gallery of the international
exhibition of 1871. All those quaint red vases and lustrous black
tazzas, all those exquisite little coffee services, those crocodile
paperweights, those barrel-shaped and bird-shaped bottles came from
Siût. There is a whole street of such pottery here in the town. Your
dahabeeyah is scarcely made fast before a dealer comes on board and
ranges his brittle wares along the deck. Others display their goods upon
the bank. But the best things are only to be had in the bazaars; and not
even in Cairo is it possible to find Siût ware so choice in color, form
and design as that which the two or three best dealers bring out,
wrapped in soft paper, when a European customer appears in the market.
Besides the street of pottery there is a street of red shoes; another of
native and foreign stuffs; and the usual run of saddlers’ shops, kebab
stalls and Greek stores for the sale of everything in heaven or earth,
from third-rate cognac to patent wax vestas. The houses are of plastered
mud or sun-dried bricks, as at Minieh. The thoroughfares are dusty,
narrow, unpaved and crowded, as at Minieh. The people are one-eyed,
dirty and unfragrant, as at Minieh. The children’s eyes are full of
flies and their heads are covered with sores, as at Minieh. In short, it
is Minieh over again on a larger scale; differing only in respect of
its inhabitants, who, instead of being sullen, thievish and unfriendly,
are too familiar to be pleasant, and the most unappeasable beggars out
of Ireland. So our mirage turns to sordid reality, and Siût, which from
afar off looked like the capital of Dreamland, resolves itself into a
big mud town, as ugly and ordinary as its fellows. Even the minarets, so
elegant from a distance, betray for the most part but rough masonry and
clumsy ornamentation when closely looked into.
A lofty embanked road planted with fine sycamore figs leads from Hamra
to Siût; and another embanked road leads from Siût to the mountain of
tombs. Of the ancient Egyptian city no vestige remains, the modern town
being built upon the mounds of the earlier settlement; but the City of
the Dead--so much of it, at least, as was excavated in the living
rock--survives, as at Memphis, to commemorate the departed splendor of
the place.
We took donkeys next day to the edge of the desert and went up to the
sepulchers on foot. The mountain, which looked a delicate salmon-pink
when seen from afar, now showed bleached and arid and streaked with
ocherous yellow. Layer above layer, in beds of strongly marked
stratification, it towered overhead; tier above tier, the tombs yawned,
open-mouthed, along the face of the precipice. I picked up a fragment of
the rock, and found it light, porous and full of little cells, like
pumice. The slopes were strewn with stones, as well as with fragments of
mummy, shreds of mummy-cloth and human bones, all whitening and
withering in the sun.
The first tomb we came to was the so-called Stabl Antar--a magnificent
but cruelly mutilated excavation, consisting of a grand entrance, a
vaulted corridor, a great hall, two side chambers and a sanctuary. The
ceiling of the corridor, now smoke-blackened and defaced, has been
richly decorated with intricate patterns in light green, white and buff,
upon a ground of dark bluish-green stucco. The wall to the right on
entering is covered with a long hieroglyphic inscription. In the
sanctuary vague traces of seated figures, male and female, with lotus
blossoms in their hands, are dimly visible. Two colossal warriors
incised in outline upon the leveled rock--the one very perfect, the
other hacked almost out of recognition--stand on each side of the huge
portal. A circular hole in the threshold marks the spot where the great
door once worked upon its pivot; and a deep pit, now partially filled in
with rubbish, leads from the center of the hall to some long-rifled
vault deep down in the heart of the mountain. Wilful destruction has
been at work on every side. The wall-sculptures have been defaced--the
massive pillars that once supported the superincumbent rock have been
quarried away--the interior is heaped high with débris. Enough is left,
however, to attest the antique stateliness of the tomb; and the
hieroglyphic inscription remains almost intact to tell its age and
history.
This inscription (erroneously entered in Murray’s Guide as uncopied, but
interpreted by Brugsch, who published extracts from it as far back as
1862) shows the excavation to have been made for one Hepoukefa or
Haptefa, monarch of the Lycopolite nome and the chief priest of the
jackal god of Siût.[26] It is also famous among scientific students for
certain passages which contain important information regarding the
intercalary days of the Egyptian calendar.[27] We observed that the
full-length figures on the jambs of the doorway appeared to have been
incised, filled in with stucco and then colored. The stucco had for the
most part fallen out, though enough remained to show the style of the
work.[28]
From this tomb to the next we crept by way of a passage tunneled in the
mountain, and emerged into a spacious, quadrangular grotto, even more
dilapidated than the first. It had been originally supported by square
pillars left standing in the substance of the rock; but, like the
pillars in the tomb of Hepoukefa, they had been hewn away in the middle
and looked like stalactite columns in process of formation. For the
rest, two half-filled pits, a broken sarcophagus and a few painted
hieroglyphs upon a space of stuccoed wall were all that remained.
One would have liked to see the sepulcher in which Ampère, the brilliant
and eager disciple of Champollion, deciphered the ancient name of Siût;
but since he does not specify the cartouche by which it could be
identified, one might wander about the mountain for a week without being
able to find it. Having first described the Stabl Antar, he says: “In
another grotto I found twice over the name of the city written in
hieroglyphic characters, _Çi-ou-t_. This name forms part of an
inscription which also contains an ancient royal cartouche; so proving
that the present name of the city dates back to Pharaonic times.”[29]
Here, then, we trace a double process of preservation. This town, which
in the ancient Egyptian was written Ssout, became Lycopolis under the
Greeks; continued to be called Lycopolis throughout the period of Roman
rule in Egypt; reverted to its old historic name under the Copts of the
middle ages, who wrote it Siôout; and survives in the Asyoot of the Arab
fellâh. Nor is this by any means a solitary instance. Khemmis in the
same way became Panopolis, reverted to the Coptic Chmin, and to this day
as Ekhmîm perpetuates the legend of its first foundation. As with these
fragments of the old tongue, so with the race. Subdued again and again
by invading hordes; intermixed for centuries together with Phœnician,
Persian, Greek, Roman and Arab blood, it fuses these heterogeneous
elements in one common mold, reverts persistently to the early type and
remains Egyptian to the last. So strange is the tyranny of natural
forces. The sun and soil of Egypt demand one special breed of men, and
will tolerate no other. Foreign residents cannot rear children in the
country. In the Isthmus of Suez, which is considered the healthiest part
of Egypt, an alien population of twenty thousand persons failed in the
course of ten years to rear one infant born upon the soil. Children of
an alien father and an Egyptian mother will die off in the same way in
early infancy, unless brought up in the simple native fashion. And it is
affirmed of the descendants of mixed marriages, that after the third
generation the foreign blood seems to be eliminated, while the traits of
the race are restored to their original purity.
These are but a few instances of the startling conservatism of Egypt--a
conservatism which interested me particularly, and to which I shall
frequently have occasion to return.
Each nome or province of ancient Egypt had its sacred animals; and Siût
was called Lycopolis by the Greeks[30] because the wolf (now almost
extinct in the land) was there held in the same kind of reverence as the
cat at Bubastis, the crocodile at Ombos, and the lion at Leontopolis.
Mummy-wolves are, or used to be, found in the smaller tombs about the
mountain, as well as mummy-jackals; Anubis, the jackal-headed god, being
the presiding deity of the district. A mummied jackal from this place,
curiously wrapped in striped bandages, is to be seen in the first
Egyptian room at the British Museum.
But the view from the mountain above Siût is finer than its tombs and
more ancient than its mummies. Seen from within the great doorway of the
second grotto, it looks like a framed picture. For the foreground, we
have a dazzling slope of limestone débris; in the middle distance, a
wide plain clothed with the delicious tender green of very young corn;
farther away yet, the cupolas and minarets of Siût rising from the midst
of a belt of palm-groves; beyond these again, the molten gold of the
great river glittering away, coil after coil, into the far distance; and
all along the horizon the everlasting boundary of the desert. Large
pools of placid water left by the last inundation lie here and there,
like lakes amid the green. A group of brown men are wading yonder with
their nets. A funeral comes along the embanked road--the bier carried at
a rapid pace on men’s shoulders and covered with a red shawl; the women
taking up handfuls of dust and scattering it upon their heads as they
walk. We can see the dust flying and hear their shrill wail borne upon
the breathless air. The cemetery toward which they are going lies round
to the left, at the foot of the mountain--a wilderness of little white
cupolas, with here and there a tree. Broad spaces of shade sleep under
the spreading sycamores by the road side; a hawk cries overhead; and
Siût, bathed in the splendor of the morning sun, looks as fairy-like as
ever.
Lepsius is reported to have said that the view from this hillside was
the finest in Egypt. But Egypt is a long country and questions of
precedence are delicate matters to deal with. It is, however, a very
beautiful view; though most travelers who know the scenery about Thebes
and the approach to Assûan would hesitate, I should fancy, to give the
preference to a landscape from which the nearer mountains are excluded
by the position of the spectator.
The tombs here, as in many other parts of Egypt, are said to have been
largely appropriated by early Christian anchorites during the reigns of
the later Roman emperors; and to these recluses may perhaps be ascribed
the legend that makes Lycopolis the abode of Joseph and Mary during the
years of their sojourn in Egypt. It is, of course, but a legend and
wholly improbable. If the holy family ever journeyed into Egypt at all,
which certain Biblical critics now hold to be doubtful, they probably
rested from their wanderings at some town not very far from the eastern
border--as Tanis, or Pithom, or Bubastis. Siût would, at all events, lie
at least two hundred and fifty miles to the southward of any point to
which they might reasonably be supposed to have penetrated.
Still, one would like to believe a story that laid the scene of our
Lord’s childhood in the midst of this beautiful and glowing Egyptian
pastoral. With what a profound and touching interest it would invest the
place! With what different eyes we should look down upon a landscape
which must have been dear and familiar to Him in all its details and
which, from the nature of the ground, must have remained almost
unchanged from His day to ours! The mountain with its tombs, the green
corn-flats, the Nile and the desert, looked then as they look now. It is
only the Moslem minarets that are new. It is only the pylons and
sanctuaries of the ancient worship that have passed away.