SIUT TO DENDERAH.
We started from Siût with a couple of tons of new brown bread on board,
which, being cut into slices and laid to dry in the sun, was speedily
converted into rusks and stored away in two huge lockers on the upper
deck. The sparrows and water-wagtails had a good time while the drying
went on; but no one seemed to grudge the toll they levied.
“We often had a “big wind” now; though it seldom began to blow before
ten or eleven A.M., and generally fell at sunset. Now and then, when it
chanced to keep up, and the river was known to be free from shallows, we
went on sailing through the night; but this seldom happened, and, when
it did happen, it made sleep impossible--so that nothing but the
certainty of doing a great many miles between bedtime and breakfast
could induce us to put up with it.
We had now been long enough afloat to find out that we had almost always
one man on the sick list, and were therefore habitually short of a hand
for the navigation of the boat. There never were such fellows for
knocking themselves to pieces as our sailors. They were always bruising
their feet, wounding their hands, getting sunstrokes, and whitlows, and
sprains, and disabling themselves in some way. L----, with her little
medicine chest and her roll of lint and bandages, soon had a small but
steady practice, and might have been seen about the lower deck most
mornings after breakfast, repairing these damaged Alis and Hassans. It
was well for them that we carried “an experienced surgeon,” for they
were entirely helpless and despondent when hurt, and ignorant of the
commonest remedies. Nor is this helplessness confined to natives of the
sailor and fellâh class. The provincial proprietors and officials are to
the full as ignorant, not only of the uses of such simple things as
poultices or wet compresses, but of the most elementary laws of health.
Doctors there are none south of Cairo; and such is the general mistrust
of state medicine, that when, as in the case of any widely spread
epidemic, a medical officer is sent up the river by order of the
government, half the people are said to conceal their sick, while the
other half reject the remedies prescribed for them. Their trust in the
skill of the passing European is, on the other hand, unbounded. Appeals
for advice and medicine were constantly being made to us by both rich
and poor; and there was something very pathetic in the simple faith with
which they accepted any little help we were able to give them. Meanwhile
L----’s medical reputation, being confirmed by a few simple cures, rose
high among the crew. They called her the hakîm sitt (the doctor-lady);
obeyed her directions and swallowed her medicines as reverently as if
she were the college of surgeons personified; and showed their gratitude
in all kinds of pretty, child-like ways--singing her favorite Arab song
as they ran beside her donkey--searching for sculptured fragments
whenever there were ruins to be visited--and constantly bringing her
little gifts of pebbles and wild flowers.
Above Siût, the picturesqueness of the river is confined for the most
part to the eastern bank. We have almost always a near range of
mountains on the Arabian side, and a more distant chain on the Libyan
horizon. Gebel Sheik el Raáineh succeeds to Gebel Abufayda, and is
followed in close succession by the cliffs of Gow, of Gebel Sheik el
Hereedee, of Gebel Ayserat and Gebel Tûkh--all alike rigid in strongly
marked beds of level limestone strata; flat-topped and even, like lines
of giant ramparts; and more or less pierced with orifices which we know
to be tombs, but which look like loop-holes from a distance.
Flying before the wind with both sails set, we see the rapid panorama
unfold itself day after day, mile after mile, hour after hour. Villages,
palm groves, rock-cut sepulchers, flit past and are left behind. To-day
we enter the region of the dôm palm. To-morrow we pass the map-drawn
limit of the crocodile. The cliffs advance, recede, open away into
desolate-looking valleys, and show faint traces of paths leading to
excavated tombs on distant heights. The headland that looked shadowy in
the distance a couple of hours ago is reached and passed. The
cargo-boat on which we have been gaining all the morning is outstripped
and dwindling in the rear. Now we pass a bold bluff sheltering a sheik’s
tomb and a solitary dôm palm--now an ancient quarry from which the stone
has been cut out in smooth masses, leaving great halls, and corridors,
and stages in the mountain side. At Gow,[31] the scene of an
insurrection headed by a crazy dervish some ten years ago, we see, in
place of a large and populous village, only a tract of fertile corn
ground, a few ruined huts, and a group of decapitated palms. We are now
skirting Gebel Sheik el Hereedee; here bordered by a rich margin of
cultivated flat; yonder leaving space for scarce a strip of roadway
between the precipice and the river. Then comes Raáineh, a large village
of square mud towers, lofty and battlemented, with string-courses of
pots for the pigeons--and later on, Girgeh, once the capital town of
Middle Egypt, where we put in for half an hour to post and inquire for
letters. Here the Nile is fast eating away the bank and carrying the
town by storm. A ruined mosque with pointed arches, roofless cloisters,
and a leaning column that must surely have come to the ground by this
time, stands just above the landing-place. A hundred years ago it lay a
quarter of a mile from the river; ten years ago it was yet perfect;
after a few more inundations it will be swept away. Till that time
comes, however, it helps to make Girgeh one of the most picturesque
towns in Egypt.
At Farshût we see the sugar-works in active operation--smoke pouring
from the tall chimneys; steam issuing from the traps in the basement;
cargo-boats unlading fresh sugar-cane against the bank; heavily burdened
Arabs transporting it to the factory; bullock trucks laden with
cane-leaf for firing. A little higher up, at Sahîl Bajûra on the
opposite side of the river, we find the bank strewn for full a quarter
of a mile with sugar-cane _en masse_. Hundreds of camels are either
arriving laden with it, or going back for more--dozens of cargo-boats
are drawn up to receive it--swarms of brown fellâheen are stacking it on
board for unshipment again at Farshût. The camels snort and growl; the
men shout; the overseers, in blue-fringed robes and white turbans, stalk
to and fro, and keep the work going. The mountains here recede so far as
to be almost out of sight, and a plain rich in sugar-cane and date-palms
widens out between them and the river.
And now the banks are lovely with an unwonted wealth of verdure. The
young corn clothes the plain like a carpet, while the yellow-tasseled
mimosa, the feathery tamarisk, the dôm and date palm, and spreading
sycamore-fig, border the towing-path like garden trees beside a garden
walk.
Farther on still, when all this greenery is left behind and the banks
have again become flat and bare, we see to our exceeding surprise what
seems to be a very large grizzled ape perched on the top of a dust-heap
on the western bank. The creature is evidently quite tame, and sits on
its haunches in just that chilly, melancholy posture that the chimpanzee
is wont to assume in his cage at the Zoological Gardens. Some six or
eight Arabs, one of whom has dismounted from his camel for the purpose,
are standing round and staring at him, much as the British public stand
and stare at the specimen in the Regent’s Park. Meanwhile a strange
excitement breaks out among our crew. They crowd to the side; they
shout; they gesticulate; the captain salaams; the steersman waves his
hand; all eyes are turned toward the shore.
“Do you see Sheik Selîm?” cries Talhamy, breathlessly, rushing up from
below. “There he is! Look at him! That is Sheik Selîm!”
And so we find out that it is not a monkey but a man--and not only a
man, but a saint. Holiest of the holy, dirtiest of the dirty,
white-pated, white-bearded, withered, bent, and knotted up, is the
renowned Sheik Selîm--he who, naked and unwashed, has sat on that same
spot every day through summer heat and winter cold for the last fifty
years; never providing himself with food or water; never even lifting
his hand to his mouth; depending on charity not only for his food but
for his feeding! He is not nice to look at, even by this dim light, and
at this distance; but the sailors think him quite beautiful, and call
aloud to him for his blessing as we go by.
“It is not by our own will that we sail past, O father!” they cry. “Fain
would we kiss thy hand; but the wind blows and the mérkeb (boat) goes,
and we have no power to stay!”
But Sheik Selîm neither lifts his head nor shows any sign of hearing,
and in a few minutes the mound on which he sits is left behind in the
gloaming.
At How, where the new town is partly built on the mounds of the old
(Diospolis Parva), we next morning saw the natives transporting small
boat-loads of ancient brick rubbish to the opposite side of the river,
for the purpose of manuring those fields from which the early durra crop
had just been gathered in. Thus, curiously enough, the mud left by some
inundation of two or three thousand years ago comes at last to the use
from which it was then diverted, and is found to be more fertilizing
than the new deposit. At Kasr es Sayd, a little farther on, we came to
one of the well-known “bad bits”--a place where the bed of the river is
full of sunken rocks, and sailing is impossible. Here the men were half
the day punting the dahabeeyah over the dangerous part, while we grubbed
among the mounds of what was once the ancient city of Chenoboscion.
These remains, which cover a large superficial area and consist entirely
of crude brick foundations, are very interesting and in good
preservation. We traced the ground-plans of several houses; followed the
passages by which they were separated; and observed many small arches
which seemed built on too small a scale for doors or windows, but for
which it was difficult to account in any other way. Brambles and weeds
were growing in these deserted inclosures; while rubbish-heaps,
excavated pits, and piles of broken pottery divided the ruins and made
the work of exploration difficult. We looked in vain for the dilapidated
quay and sculptured blocks mentioned in Wilkinson’s “General View of
Egypt”; but if the foundation-stones of the new sugar factory close
against the mooring-place could speak, they would no doubt explain the
mystery. We saw nothing, indeed, to show that Chenoboscion had contained
any stone structures whatever, save the broken shaft of one small
granite column.
The village of Kasr es Sayd consists of a cluster of mud huts and a
sugar factory; but the factory was idle that day and the village seemed
half deserted. The view here is particularly fine. About a couple of
miles to the southward, the mountains, in magnificent procession, come
down again at right angles to the river, and thence reach away in long
ranges of precipitous headlands. The plain, terminating abruptly against
the foot of this gigantic barrier, opens back eastward to the remotest
horizon--an undulating sea of glistening sand, bordered by a chaotic
middle distance of mounded ruins. Nearest of all, a narrow foreground of
cultivated soil, green with young crops and watered by frequent shâdûfs,
extends along the river side to the foot of the mountains. A sheik’s
tomb shaded by a single dôm palm is conspicuous on the bank, while far
away, planted amid the solitary sands, we see a large Coptic convent
with many cupolas; a cemetery full of Christian graves; and a little
oasis of date palms indicating the presence of a spring.
The chief interest of this scene, however, centers in the ruins; and
these--looked upon from a little distance, blackened, desolate,
half-buried, obscured every now and then, when the wind swept over them,
by swirling clouds of dust--reminded us of the villages we had seen not
two years before, half-overwhelmed and yet smoking, in the midst of a
lava-torrent below Vesuvius.
We now had the full moon again, making night more beautiful than day.
Sitting on deck for hours after the sun had gone down, when the boat
glided gently on with half-filled sail and the force of the wind was
spent, we used to wonder if in all the world there was another climate
in which the effect of moonlight was so magical. To say that every
object far or near was visible as distinctly as by day, yet more
tenderly, is to say nothing. It was not only form that was defined; it
was not only light and shadow that were vivid--it was color that was
present. Color neither deadened nor changed; but softened, glowing,
spiritualized. The amber sheen of the sand-island in the middle of the
river, the sober green of the palm-grove, the little lady’s
turquoise-colored hood, were clear to the sight and relatively true in
tone. The oranges showed through the bars of the crate like nuggets of
pure gold. L----’s crimson shawl glowed with a warmer dye than it ever
wore by day. The mountains were flushed as if in the light of sunset. Of
all the natural phenomena that we beheld in the course of the journey, I
remember none that surprised us more than this. We could scarcely
believe at first that it was not some effect of after-glow, or some
miraculous aurora of the east. But the sun had nothing to do with that
flush upon the mountains. The glow was in the stone, and the moonlight
but revealed the local color.
For some days before they came in sight we had been eagerly looking for
the Theban hills; and now, after a night of rapid sailing, we woke one
morning to find the sun rising on the wrong side of the boat, the
favorable wind dead against us, and a picturesque chain of broken peaks
upon our starboard bow. By these signs we knew that we must have come to
the great bend in the river between How and Keneh, and that these new
mountains, so much more varied in form than those of Middle Egypt, must
be the mountains behind Denderah. They seemed to lie upon the eastern
bank, but that was an illusion which the map disproved, and which lasted
only till the great corner was fairly turned. To turn that corner,
however, in the teeth of wind and current, was no easy task, and cost us
two long days of hard tracking.
At a point about ten miles below Denderah we saw some thousands of
fellâheen at work amid clouds of sand upon the embankments of a new
canal. They swarmed over the mounds like ants, and the continuous murmur
of their voices came to us across the river like the humming of
innumerable bees. Others, following the path along the bank, were
pouring toward the spot in an unbroken stream. The Nile must here be
nearly half a mile in breadth; but the engineers in European dress and
the overseers with long sticks in their hands were plainly
distinguishable by the help of a glass. The tents in which these
officials were camping out during the progress of the work gleamed white
among the palms by the river side. Such scenes must have been common
enough in the old days when a conquering Pharaoh, returning from Libya
or the land of Kush, set his captives to raise a dyke, or excavate a
lake, or quarry a mountain. The Israelites, building the massive walls
of Pithom and Rameses with bricks of their own making, must have
presented exactly such a spectacle.
That we were witnessing a case of forced labor could not be doubted.
Those thousands yonder had most certainly been drafted off in gangs from
hundreds of distant villages, and were but little better off, for the
time being, than the captives of the ancient empire. In all cases of
forced labor under the present _régime_, however, it seems that the
laborer is paid, though very insufficiently, for his unwilling toil; and
that his captivity only lasts so long as the work for which he has been
pressed remains in progress. In some cases the term of service is
limited to three or four months, at the end of which time the men are
supposed to be returned in barges towed by government steam-tugs. It too
often happens, nevertheless, that the poor souls are left to get back
how they can; and thus many a husband and father either perishes by the
way or is driven to take service in some village far from home.
Meanwhile his wife and children, being scantily supported by the Sheik
el Beled, fall into a condition of semi-serfdom; and his little patch of
ground, left untilled through seed-time and harvest, passes after the
next inundation into the hands of a stranger.
But there is another side to this question of forced labor. Water must
be had in Egypt, no matter at what cost. If the land is not sufficiently
irrigated the crops fail and the nation starves. Now, the frequent
construction of canals has from immemorial time been reckoned among the
first duties of an Egyptian ruler; but it is a duty which cannot be
performed without the willing or unwilling co-operation of several
thousand workmen. Those who are best acquainted with the character and
temper of the fellâh maintain the hopelessness of looking to him for
voluntary labor of this description. Frugal, patient, easily contented
as he is, no promise of wages, however high, would tempt him from his
native village. What to him are the needs of a district six or seven
hundred miles away? His own shâdûf is enough for his own patch, and so
long as he can raise his three little crops a year neither he nor his
family will starve. How, then, are these necessary public works to be
carried out, unless by means of the _corvée_? M. About has put an
ingenious summary of this “other-side” argument into the mouth of his
ideal fellâh. “It is not the emperor,” says Ahmed to the Frenchman, “who
causes the rain to descend upon your land; it is the west wind--and the
benefit thus conferred upon you exacts no penalty of manual labor. But
in Egypt, where the rain from heaven falls scarcely three times in the
year, it is the prince who supplies its place to us by distributing the
waters of the Nile. This can only be done by the work of men’s hands;
and it is therefore to the interest of all that the hands of all should
be at his disposal.”
We regarded it, I think, as an especial piece of good fortune when we
found ourselves becalmed next day within three or four miles of
Denderah. Abydos comes first in order, according to the map; but then
the temples lie seven or eight miles from the river, and, as we happened
just thereabouts to be making some ten miles an hour, we put off the
excursion till our return. Here, however, the ruins lay comparatively
near at hand, and in such a position that we could approach them from
below and rejoin our dahabeeyah a few miles higher up the river. So,
leaving Reïs Hassan to track against the current, we landed at the first
convenient point, and, finding neither donkeys nor guides at hand, took
an escort of three or four sailors and set off on foot.
The way was long, the day was hot, and we had only the map to go by.
Having climbed the steep bank and skirted an extensive palm-grove, we
found ourselves in a country without paths or roads of any kind. The
soil, squared off as usual like a gigantic chess-board, was traversed by
hundreds of tiny water-channels, between which we had to steer our
course as best we could. Presently the last belt of palms was
passed--the plain, green with young corn and level as a lake, widened
out at the foot of the mountains--and the temple, islanded in that sea
of rippling emerald, rose up before us upon its platform of blackened
mounds.
It was still full two miles away; but it looked enormous--showing from
this distance as a massive, low-browed, sharply defined mass of
dead-white masonry. The walls sloped in slightly toward the top; and the
façade appeared to be supported on eight square biers, with a large
doorway in the center. If sculptured ornament, or cornice, or pictured
legend enriched those walls, we were too far off to distinguish them.
All looked strangely naked and solemn--more like a tomb than a temple.
Nor was the surrounding scene less deathlike in its solitude. Not a
tree, not a hut, not a living form broke the green monotony of the
plain. Behind the temple, but divided from it by a farther space of
mounded ruins, rose the mountains--pinky, aerial, with sheeny
sand-drifts heaped in the hollows of their bare buttresses and spaces of
soft blue shadow in their misty chasms. Where the range receded, a long
vista of glittering desert opened to the Libyan horizon.
Then as we drew nearer, coming by and by to a raised causeway which
apparently connected the mounds with some point down by the river, the
details of the temple gradually emerged into distinctness. We could now
see the curve and under shadow of the cornice; and a small object in
front of the façade, which looked at first sight like a monolithic
altar, resolved itself into a massive gateway, of the kind known as a
single pylon. Nearer still, among some low outlying mounds, we came upon
fragments of sculptured capitals and mutilated statues half-buried in
rank grass--upon a series of stagnant niter-tanks and deserted
workshops--upon the telegraph poles and wires which here come striding
along the edge of the desert and vanish southward with messages for
Nubia and the Soudan.
Egypt is the land of niter. It is found wherever a crude brick mound is
disturbed or an antique stone structure demolished. The Nile mud is
strongly impregnated with it; and in Nubia we used to find it lying in
thick talc-like flakes upon the surface of rocks far above the present
level of the inundation. These tanks at Denderah had been sunk, we are
told, when the great temple was excavated by Abbas Pasha more than
twenty years ago. The niter then found was utilized out of hand; washed
and crystallized in the tanks; and converted into gunpowder in the
adjacent workshops. The telegraph wires are more recent intruders, and
the work of the khedive; but one longed to put them out of sight, to
pull down the gunpowder sheds, and to fill up the tanks with débris. For
what had the arts of modern warfare or the wonders of modern science to
do with Hathor, the Lady of Beauty and the Western Shades, the Nurse of
Horus, the Egyptian Aphrodite, to whom yonder mountain of wrought stone
and all these wastes were sacred?
We were by this time near enough to see that the square piers of the
façade were neither square nor piers, but huge round columns with
human-headed capitals; and that the walls, instead of being plain and
tomb-like, were covered with an infinite multitude of sculptured
figures. The pylon--rich with inscriptions and bas-reliefs, but
disfigured by myriads of tiny wasps nests, like clustered
mud-bubbles--now towered high above our heads and led to a walled avenue
cut direct through the mounds and sloping downward to the main entrance
of the temple.
Not, however, till we stood immediately under those ponderous columns,
looking down upon the paved floor below and up to the huge cornice that
projected overhead like the crest of an impending wave, did we realize
the immense proportions of the building. Lofty as it looked from a
distance, we now found that it was only the interior that had been
excavated, and that not more than two-thirds of its actual height was
visible above the mounds. The level of the avenue was, indeed, at its
lowest part full twenty feet above that of the first great hall; and we
had still a steep temporary staircase to go down before reaching the
original pavement.
The effect of the portico as one stands at the top of this staircase is
one of overwhelming majesty. Its breadth, its height, the massiveness of
its parts, exceed in grandeur all that one has been anticipating
throughout the long two miles of approach. The immense girth of the
columns, the huge screens which connect them, the ponderous cornice
jutting overhead, confuse the imagination, and in the absence of given
measurements[32] appear, perhaps, even more enormous than they are.
Looking up to the architrave, we see a kind of Egyptian Panathenaic
procession of carven priests and warriors, some with standards and some
with musical instruments. The winged globe, depicted upon a gigantic
scale in the curve of the cornice, seems to hover above the central
doorway. Hieroglyphs, emblems, strange forms of kings and gods, cover
every foot of wall-space, frieze and pillar. Nor does this wealth of
surface-sculpture tend in any way to diminish the general effect of
size. It would seem, on the contrary, as if complex decoration were in
this instance the natural complement to simplicity of form. Every group,
every inscription, appears to be necessary and in its place; an
essential part of the building it helps to adorn. Most of these details
are as perfect as on the day when the last workman went his way and the
architect saw his design completed. Time has neither marred the surface
of the stone nor blunted the work of the chisel. Such injury as they
have sustained is from the hand of man; and in no country has the hand
of man achieved more and destroyed more than in Egypt. The Persians
overthrew the masterpieces of the Pharaohs; the Copts mutilated the
temples of the Ptolemies and Cæsars; the Arabs stripped the pyramids and
carried Memphis away piece-meal. Here at Denderah we have an example of
Græco-Egyptian work and early Christian fanaticism. Begun by Ptolemy
XI.,[33] and bearing upon its
[Illustration: CLEOPATRA.]
latest ovals the name and style of Nero, the present building was still
comparatively new when, in A.D. 379, the ancient religion was abolished
by the edict of Theodosius. It was then the most gorgeous as well as the
most recent of all those larger temples built during the prosperous
foreign rule of the last seven hundred years. It stood, surrounded by
groves of palm and acacia, within the precincts of a vast inclosure, the
walls of which, one thousand feet in length, thirty-five feet in height
and fifteen feet thick, are still traceable. A dromos, now buried under
twenty feet of débris, led from the pylon to the portico. The pylon is
there still, a partial ruin; but the temple, with its roof, its
staircases and its secret treasure-crypts, is in all essential respects
as perfect as on the day when its splendor was given over to the
spoilers. One can easily imagine how these spoilers sacked and ravaged
all before them; how they desecrated the sacred places and cast down the
statues of the goddess and divided the treasures of the sanctuary. They
did not, it is true, commit such wholesale destruction as the Persian
invaders of nine hundred years before; but they were merciless
iconoclasts and hacked away the face of every figure within easy reach,
both inside and outside the building.
Among those which escaped, however, is the famous external bas-relief of
Cleopatra on the back of the temple. This curious sculpture is now
banked up with rubbish for its better preservation and can no longer be
seen by travelers. It was, however, admirably photographed some years
ago by Signor Beati; which photograph is faithfully reproduced in the
annexed engraving. Cleopatra is here represented with a head-dress
combining the attributes of three goddesses; namely, the vulture of Maut
(the head of which is modeled in a masterly way), the horned disk of
Hathor and the throne of Isis. The falling mass below the head-dress is
intended to represent hair dressed according to the Egyptian fashion, in
an infinite number of small plaits, each finished off with an ornamental
tag. The women of Egypt and Nubia wear their hair so to this day and
unplait it, I am sorry to say, not oftener than once in every eight or
ten weeks. The Nubian girls fasten each separate tail with a lump of
Nile mud daubed over with yellow ocher; but Queen Cleopatra’s silken
tresses were probably tipped with gilded wax or gum.
It is difficult to know where decorative sculpture ends and portraiture
begins in a work of this epoch. We cannot even be certain that a
portrait was intended; though the introduction of the royal oval in
which the name of Cleopatra (Klaupatra) is spelled with its vowel sounds
in full, would seem to point that way. If it is a portrait, then large
allowance must be made for conventional treatment. The fleshiness of the
features and the intolerable simper are common to every head of the
Ptolemaic period. The ear, too, is pattern work, and the drawing of the
figure is ludicrous. Mannerism apart, however, the face wants for
neither individuality nor beauty. Cover the mouth, and you have an
almost faultless profile. The chin and throat are also quite lovely;
while the whole face, suggestive of cruelty, subtlety, and
voluptuousness, carries with it an indefinable impression not only of
portraiture, but of likeness.
It is not without something like a shock that one first sees the
unsightly havoc wrought upon the Hathor-headed columns of the façade at
Denderah. The massive folds of the head-gear are there; the ears, erect
and pointed like those of a heifer, are there; but of the benignant face
of the goddess not a feature remains. Ampère, describing these columns
in one of his earliest letters from Egypt, speaks of them as being still
“brilliant with colors that time had had no power to efface.” Time,
however, must have been unusually busy during the thirty years that have
gone by since then; for though we presently found several instances of
painted bas-reliefs in the small inner chambers, I do not remember to
have observed any remains of color (save here and there a faint trace of
yellow ocher) on the external decorations.
Without, all was sunshine and splendor; within, all was silence and
mystery. A heavy, death-like smell, as of long-imprisoned gases, met us
on the threshold. By the half-light that strayed in through the portico
we could see vague outlines of a forest of giant columns rising out of
the gloom below and vanishing into the gloom above. Beyond these again
appeared shadowy vistas of successive halls leading away into depths of
impenetrable darkness. It required no great courage to go down those
stairs and explore those depths with a party of fellow-travelers; but it
would have been a gruesome place to venture into alone.
Seen from within, the portico shows as a vast hall, fifty feet in height
and supported on twenty-four Hathor-headed columns. Six of these, being
engaged in the screen, form part of the façade, and are the same upon
which we have been looking from without. By degrees, as our eyes become
used to the twilight, we see here and there a capital which still
preserves the vague likeness of a gigantic female face; while, dimly
visible on every wall, pillar, and doorway, a multitude of fantastic
forms--hawk-headed, ibis-headed, cow-headed, mitered, plumed, holding
aloft strange emblems, seated on thrones, performing mysterious
rites--seem to emerge from their places, like things of life. Looking up
to the ceiling, now smoke-blackened and defaced, we discover elaborate
paintings of scarabæi, winged globes, and zodiacal emblems divided by
borders of intricate Greek patterns, the prevailing colors of which are
verditer and chocolate. Bands of hieroglyphic inscriptions of royal
ovals, of Hathor-heads of mitered hawks, of lion-headed chimeras, of
divinities and kings in bas-relief, cover the shafts of the great
columns from top to bottom; and even here, every accessible human face,
however small, has been laboriously mutilated.
Bewildered at first sight of these profuse and mysterious decorations,
we wander round and round; going on from the first hall to the second,
from the second to the third; and plunging into deeper darkness at every
step. We have been reading about these gods and emblems for weeks
past--we have studied the plan of the temple beforehand; yet now that we
are actually here, our book knowledge goes for nothing, and we feel as
hopelessly ignorant as if we had been suddenly landed in a new world.
Not till we have got over this first feeling of confusion--not till,
resting awhile on the base of one of the columns, we again open out the
plan of the building--do we begin to realize the purport of the
sculptures by which we are surrounded.
The ceremonial of Egyptian worship was essentially processional. Herein
we have the central idea of every temple and the key to its
construction. It was bound to contain store-chambers in which were kept
vestments, instruments, divine emblems, and the like; laboratories for
the preparation of perfumes and unguents; treasuries for the safe
custody of holy vessels and precious offerings; chambers for the
reception and purification of tribute in kind; halls for the assembling
and marshaling of priests and functionaries; and, for processional
purposes, corridors, staircases, court-yards, cloisters, and vast
inclosures planted with avenues of trees and surrounded by walls which
hedged in with inviolable secrecy the solemn rites of the priesthood.
In this plan, it will be seen, there is no provision made for anything
in the form of public worship; but then an Egyptian temple was not a
place for public worship. It was a treasure-house, a sacristy, a royal
oratory, a place of preparation, of consecration, of sacerdotal privacy.
There, in costly shrines, dwelt the divine images. There they were robed
and unrobed; perfumed with incense; visited and worshiped by the king.
On certain great days of the calendar, as on the occasion of the
festival of the new year, or the panegyries of the local gods, these
images were brought out, paraded along the corridors of the temple,
carried round the roof, and borne with waving of banners, and chanting
of hymns, and burning of incense, through the sacred groves of the
inclosure. Probably none were admitted to these ceremonies save persons
of royal or priestly birth. To the rest of the community, all that took
place within those massy walls was enveloped in mystery. It may be
questioned, indeed, whether the great mass of the people had any kind of
personal religion. They may not have been rigidly excluded from the
temple precincts, but they seem to have been allowed no participation in
the worship of the gods. If now and then, on high festival days, they
beheld the sacred bark of the deity carried in procession round the
temenos, or caught a glimpse of moving figures and glittering ensigns in
the pillared dusk of the Hypostyle Hall, it was all they ever beheld of
the solemn services of their church.
The temple of Denderah consists of a portico; a hall of entrance; a hall
of assembly; a third hall, which may be called the hall of the sacred
boats; one small ground-floor chapel; and upward of twenty side chambers
of various sizes, most of which are totally dark. Each one of these
halls and chambers bears the sculptured record of its use. Hundreds of
tableaux in bas-relief, thousands of elaborate hieroglyphic
inscriptions, cover every foot of available space on wall and ceiling
and soffit, on doorway and column, and on the lining-slabs of passages
and staircases. These precious texts contain, amid much that is mystical
and tedious, an extraordinary wealth of indirect history. Here we find
programmes of ceremonial observances; numberless legends of the gods;
chronologies of kings with their various titles; registers of weights
and measures; catalogues of offerings; recipes for the preparation of
oils and essences; records of repairs and restorations done to the
temple; geographical lists of cities and provinces; inventories of
treasure, and the like. The hall of assembly contains a calendar of
festivals, and sets forth with studied precision the rites to be
performed on each recurring anniversary. On the ceiling of the portico
we find an astronomical zodiac; on the walls of a small temple on the
roof, the whole history of the resurrection of Osiris, together with the
order of prayer for the twelve hours of the night, and a calendar of the
festivals of Osiris in all the principal cities of Upper and Lower
Egypt. Seventy years ago these inscriptions were the puzzle and despair
of the learned; but since modern science has plucked out the heart of
its mystery, the whole temple lies before us as an open volume filled to
overflowing with strange and quaint and heterogeneous matter--a Talmud
in sculptured stone.[34]
Given such help as Mariette’s hand-book affords, one can trace out most
of these curious things and identify the uses of every hall and chamber
throughout the building. The king, in his double character of Pharaoh
and high priest, is the hero of every sculptured scene. Wearing
sometimes the truncated crown of Lower Egypt, sometimes the helmet-crown
of Upper Egypt, and sometimes the pschent, which is a combination of
both, he figures in every tableau and heads every procession. Beginning
with the sculptures of the portico, we see him arrive, preceded by his
five royal standards. He wears his long robe; his sandals are on his
feet; he carries his staff in his hand. Two goddesses receive him at the
door and conduct him into the presence of Thoth, the ibis-headed, and
Horus, the hawk-headed, who pour upon him a double stream of the waters
of life. Thus purified, he is crowned by the goddesses of Upper and
Lower Egypt, and by them consigned to the local deities of Thebes and
Heliopolis, who usher him into the supreme presence of Hathor. He then
presents various offerings and recites certain prayers; whereupon the
goddess promises him length of days, everlasting renown, and other good
things. We next see him, always with the same smile and always in the
same attitude, doing homage to Osiris, to Horus and other divinities. He
presents them with flowers, wine, bread, incense; while they in return
promise him life, joy, abundant harvests, victory, and the love of his
people. These pretty speeches--chefs-d’œuvre of diplomatic style and
models of elegant flattery--are repeated over and over again in scores
of hieroglyphic groups. Mariette, however, sees in them something more
than the language of the court grafted upon the language of the
hierarchy; he detects the language of the schools, and discovers in the
utterances here ascribed to the king and the gods a reflection of that
contemporary worship of the beautiful, the good, and the true, which
characterized the teaching of the Alexandrian Museum.[35]
Passing on from the portico to the hall of assembly, we enter a region
of still dimmer twilight, beyond which all is dark. In the
side-chambers, where the heat is intense and the atmosphere stifling, we
can see only by the help of lighted candles. These rooms are about
twenty feet in length; separate, like prison cells; and perfectly dark.
The sculptures which cover their walls are, however, as numerous as
those in the outer halls, and indicate in each instance the purpose for
which the room was designed. Thus in the laboratories we find
bas-reliefs of flasks and vases and figures carrying perfume bottles of
the familiar aryballos form; in the tribute chambers, offerings of lotus
lilies, wheat sheaves, maize, grapes and pomegranates. In the oratories
of Isis, Amen, and Sekhet, representations of these divinities
enthroned, and receiving the homage of the king; while in the treasury,
both king and queen appear laden with precious gifts of caskets,
necklaces, pectoral ornaments, sistrums, and the like. It would seem
that the image-breakers had no time to spare for these dark cells; for
here the faces and figures are unmutilated, and in some places even the
original coloring remains in excellent preservation. The complexion of
the goddesses, for instance, is painted of a light buff; the king’s skin
is dark-red; that of Amen, blue. Isis wears a rich robe of the
well-known Indian pine-pattern; Sekhet figures in a many colored garment
curiously diapered; Amen is clad in red and green chain armor. The
skirts of the goddesses are inconceivably scant; but they are rich in
jewelry, and their head-dresses, necklaces, and bracelets are full of
minute and interesting detail. In one of the four oratories dedicated to
Sekhet, the king is depicted in the act of offering a pectoral ornament
of so rich and elegant a design that, had there been time and daylight
to spare, the writer would fain have copied it.
In the center room at the extreme end of the temple, exactly opposite
the main entrance, lies the oratory of Hathor. This dark chamber, into
which no ray of daylight has ever penetrated, contains the sacred niche,
the holy of holies, in which was kept the great golden sistrum of the
goddess. The king alone was privileged to take out that mysterious
emblem. Having done so, he inclosed it in a costly shrine, covered it
with a thick veil, and placed it in one of the sacred boats of which we
find elaborate representations sculptured on the walls of the hall in
which they were kept. These boats, which were constructed of cedar wood,
gold, and silver, were intended to be hoisted on wrought poles, and so
carried in procession on the shoulders of the priests. The niche is
still there--a mere hole in the hall, some three feet square and about
eight feet from the ground.
Thus, candle in hand, we make the circuit of these outer chambers. In
each doorway, besides the place cut out for the bolt, we find a circular
hole drilled above and a quadrant-shaped hollow below, where once upon a
time the pivot of the door turned in its socket. The paved floors, torn
up by treasure-seekers, are full of treacherous holes and blocks of
broken stone. The ceilings are very lofty. In the corridors a dim
twilight reigns; but all is pitch-dark beyond these gloomy thresholds.
Hurrying along by the light of a few flaring candles, one cannot but
feel oppressed by the strangeness and awfulness of the place. We speak
with bated breath, and even our chattering Arabs for once are silent.
The very air tastes as if it had been imprisoned here for centuries.
Finally, we take the staircase on the northern side of the temple, in
order to go up to the roof. Nothing that we have yet seen surprises and
delights us so much, I think, as this staircase.
We have hitherto been tracing in their order all the preparations for a
great religious ceremony. We have seen the king enter the temple;
undergo the symbolical purification; receive the twofold crown; and say
his prayers to each divinity in turn. We have followed him into the
laboratories, the oratories, and the holy of holies. All that he has yet
done, however, is preliminary. The procession is yet to come, and here
we have it. Here, sculptured on the walls of this dark staircase, the
crowning ceremony of Egyptian worship is brought before our eyes in all
its details. Here, one by one, we have the standard-bearers, the
hierophants with the offerings, the priests, the whole long, wonderful
procession, with the king marching at its head. Fresh and uninjured, as
if they had but just left the hand of the sculptor, these figures--each
in his habit as he lived, each with his foot upon the step--mount with
us as we mount, and go beside us all the way. Their attitudes are so
natural, their forms so roundly cut, that one could almost fancy them in
motion as the lights flicker by. Surely there must be some one weird
night in the year when they step out from their places and take up the
next verse of their chanted hymn, and, to the sound of instruments long
mute and songs long silent, pace the moonlit roof in ghostly order!
The sun is already down and the crimson light has faded, when at length
we emerge upon that vast terrace. The roofing-stones are gigantic.
Striding to and fro over some of the biggest, our idle man finds several
that measure seven paces in length by four in breadth. In yonder distant
corner, like a little stone lodge in a vast court-yard, stands a small
temple supported on Hathor-headed columns; while at the eastern end,
forming a second and loftier stage, rises the roof of the portico.
Meanwhile, the after-glow is fading. The mountains are yet clothed in an
atmosphere of tender half-light; but mysterious shadows are fast
creeping over the plain, and the mounds of the ancient city lie at our
feet, confused and tumbled, like the waves of a dark sea. How high it is
here--how lonely--how silent! Hark that thin, plaintive cry! It is the
wail of a night-wandering jackal. See how dark it is yonder, in the
direction of the river! Quick, quick! We have lingered too long. We must
be gone at once; for we are already benighted.
We ought to have gone down by way of the opposite staircase (which is
lined with sculptures of the descending procession) and out through the
temple; but there is no time to do anything but scramble down by a
breach in the wall at a point where the mounds yet lie heaped against
the south side of the building. And now the dusk steals on so rapidly
that before we reach the bottom we can hardly see where to tread. The
huge side wall of the portico seems to tower above us to the very
heavens. We catch a glimpse of two colossal figures, one lion-headed and
the other headless, sitting outside with their backs to the temple.
Then, making with all speed for the open plain, we clamber over
scattered blocks and among shapeless mounds. Presently night overtakes
us. The mountains disappear; the temple is blotted out; and we have only
the faint starlight to guide us. We stumble on, however, keeping all
close together; firing a gun every now and then, in the hope of being
heard by those in the boats; and as thoroughly and undeniably lost as
the babes in the wood.
At last, just as some are beginning to knock up, and all to despair,
Talhamy fires his last cartridge. An answering shot replies from near
by; a wandering light appears in the distance; and presently a whole
bevy of dancing lanterns and friendly brown faces come gleaming out from
among a plantation of sugar-canes to welcome and guide us home. Dear,
sturdy, faithful little Reïs Hassan, honest Khalîfeh, laughing Salame,
gentle Mehemet Ali, and Mûsa, “black but comely”--they were all there.
What a shaking of hands there was--what a gleaming of white teeth--what
a shower of mutually unintelligible congratulations! For my own part, I
may say with truth that I never was much more rejoiced at a meeting in
my life.