KOROSKO TO ABOU SIMBEL.
It so happened that we arrived at Korosko on the eve of El-Id el-Kebîr,
or the anniversary of the sacrifice of Abraham; when, according to the
Moslem version, Ishmael was the intended victim and a ram the
substituted offering. Now El-Id el-Kebîr, being one of the great feasts
of the Mohammedan calendar, is a day of gifts and good wishes. The rich
visit their friends and distribute meat to the poor; and every true
believer goes to the mosque to say his prayers in the morning. So,
instead of starting as usual at sunrise, we treated our sailors to a
sheep and waited till past noon, that they might have a holiday.
They began the day by trooping off to the village mosque in all the
glory of new blue blouses, spotless turbans and scarlet leather
slippers; then loitered about till dinner-time, when the said sheep,
stewed with lentils and garlic, brought the festivities to an end. It
was a thin and ancient beast and must have been horribly tough; but an
epicure might have envied the childlike enjoyment with which our honest
fellows squatted, cross-legged and happy, round the smoking cauldron;
chattering, laughing, feasting; dipping their fingers in the common
mess; washing the whole down with long draughts of Nile water; and
finishing off with a hubble-bubble passed from lip to lip and a mouthful
of muddy coffee. By a little after midday they had put off their finery,
harnessed themselves to the tow-rope and set to work to haul us through
the rocky shoals which here impede the current.
From Korosko to Derr, the actual distance is about eleven miles and a
half; but what with obstructions in the bed of the river, and what with
a wind that would have been favorable but for another great bend which
the Nile takes toward the east, those eleven miles and a half cost us
the best part of two days’ hard tracking.
Landing from time to time when the boat was close in shore, we found the
order of planting everywhere the same, lupins and lentils on the slope
against the water-line; an uninterrupted grove of palms on the edge of
the bank; in the space beyond, fields of cotton and young corn; and then
the desert. The arable soil was divided off, as usual, by hundreds of
water channels, and seemed to be excellently farmed as well as
abundantly irrigated. Not a weed was to be seen; not an inch of soil
appeared to be wasted. In odd corners where there was room for nothing
else, cucumbers and vegetable-marrows flourished and bore fruit. Nowhere
had we seen castor-berries so large, cotton-pods so full, or palms so
lofty.
Here also, for the first time out of Egypt, we observed among the bushes
a few hoopoes and other small birds; and on a sand-slope down by the
river a group of wild ducks. We--that is to say, one of the M. B.’s and
the writer--had wandered off that way in search of crocodiles. The two
dahabeeyahs, each with its file of trackers, were slowly laboring up
against the current about a mile away. All was intensely hot and
intensely silent. We had walked far and had seen no crocodile. What we
should have done if we had met one I am not prepared to say. Perhaps we
should have run away. At all events, we were just about to turn back
when we caught sight of the ducks sunning themselves, half asleep, on
the brink of a tiny pool about an eighth of a mile away.
Creeping cautiously under the bank, we contrived to get within a few
yards of them. They were four--a drake, a duck, and two young
ones--exquisitely feathered and as small as teal. The parent-birds could
scarcely have measured more than eight inches from head to tail. All
alike had chestnut-colored heads with a narrow buff stripe down the
middle, like a parting; maroon backs; wing-feathers maroon and gray; and
tails tipped with buff. They were so pretty, and the little family party
was so complete, that the writer could not help secretly rejoicing that
Alfred and his gun were safe on board the Bagstones.
High above the Libyan bank on the sloping verge of the desert, stands,
half-drowned in sand, the little temple of Amada. Seeing it from the
opposite side while duck-hunting in the morning, I had taken it for one
of the many stone shelters erected by Mohammed Ali for the
accommodation of cattle levied annually in the Soudan. It proved,
however, to be a temple, small but massive; built with squared blocks of
sandstone; and dating back to the very old times of the Usurtesens and
Thothmes. It consists of a portico, a transverse atrium, and three small
chambers. The pillars of the portico are mere square piers. The rooms
are small and low. The roof, constructed of oblong blocks, is flat from
end to end. As an architectural structure it is in fact but a few
degrees removed from Stonehenge.
A shed without, this little temple is, however, a cameo within. Nowhere,
save in the tomb of Ti, had we seen bas-reliefs so delicately modeled,
so rich in color. Here, as elsewhere, the walls are covered with groups
of kings and gods and hieroglyphic texts. The figures are slender and
animated. The head-dresses, jewelry, and patterned robes are elaborately
drawn and painted. Every head looks like a portrait; every hieroglyphic
form is a study in miniature.
Apart from its exquisite finish, the wall-sculpture of Amada has,
however, nothing in common with the wall-sculpture of the ancient
empire. It belongs to the period of Egyptian renaissance; and, though
inferior in power and naturalness to the work of the elder school, it
marks just that moment of special development when the art of modeling
in low relief had touched the highest level to which it ever again
attained. That highest level belongs to the reigns of Thothmes II and
Thothmes III; just as the perfect era in architecture belongs to the
reigns of Seti I and Rameses II. It is for this reason that Amada is so
precious. It registers an epoch in the history of the art, and gives us
the best of that epoch in the hour of its zenith. The sculptor is here
seen to be working within bounds already prescribed; yet within those
bounds he still enjoys a certain liberty. His art, though largely
conventionalized, is not yet stereotyped. His sense of beauty still
finds expression. There is, in short, a grace and sweetness about the
bas-relief designs of Amada for which one looks in vain to the storied
walls of Karnak.
The chambers are half-choked with sand and we had to crawl into the
sanctuary upon our hands and knees. A long inscription at the upper end
records how Amenhotep II, returning from his first campaign against the
Ruten, slew seven kings with his own hand; six of whom were gibbeted
upon the ramparts of Thebes, while the body of the seventh was sent to
Ethiopia by water and suspended on the outer wall of the city of
Napata,[70] “in order that the negroes might behold the victories of the
Pharaoh in all the lands of the world.”
In the darkest corner of the atrium we observed a curious tableau
representing the king embraced by a goddess. He holds a short, straight
sword in his right hand and the crux ansata in his left. On his head he
wears the khepersh, or war-helmet; a kind of a blue miter studded with
gold stars and ornamented with the royal asp. The goddess clasps him
lovingly about the neck and bends her lips to his. The artist has given
her the yellow complexion conventionally ascribed to women; but her
saucy mouth and nez retroussé are distinctly European. Dressed in the
fashion of the nineteenth century, she might have served Leech as a
model for his girl of the period.
The sand has drifted so high at the back of the temple that one steps
upon the roof as upon a terrace only just raised above the level of the
desert. Soon that level will be equal; and if nothing is done to rescue
it within the next generation or two, the whole building will become
engulfed and its very site be forgotten.
The view from the roof, looking back toward Korosko and forward toward
Derr, is one of the finest--perhaps quite the finest--in Nubia. The Nile
curves grandly through the foreground. The palm-woods of Derr are green
in the distance. The mountain region which we have just traversed ranges
a vast crescent of multitudinous peaks, round two-thirds of the horizon.
Ridge beyond ridge, chain beyond chain, flushing crimson in light and
deepening through every tint of amethyst and purple in shadow, those
innumerable summits fade into tenderest blue upon the horizon. As the
sun sets they seem to glow; to become incandescent; to be touched with
flame--as in the old time when every crater was a font of fire.
Struggling next morning through a maze of sand-banks, we reached Derr
soon after breakfast. This town--the Nubian capital--lies a little lower
than the level of the bank, so that only a few mud walls are visible
from the river. Having learned by this time that a capital town is but a
bigger village, containing perhaps a mosque and a market-place, we were
not disappointed by the unimposing aspect of the Nubian metropolis.
Great, however, was our surprise when, instead of the usual clamorous
crowd screaming, pushing, scrambling and bothering for backshîsh, we
found the landing-place deserted. Two or three native boats lay up under
the bank, empty. There was literally not a soul in sight. L---- and the
little lady, eager to buy some of the basket-work for which the place is
famous, looked blank. Talhamy, anxious to lay in a store of fresh eggs
and vegetables, looked blanker.
We landed. Before us lay an open space, at the farther end of which,
facing the river, stood the governor’s palace; the said palace being a
magnified mud hut, with a frieze of baked bricks round the top and an
imposing stone doorway. In this doorway, according to immemorial usage,
the great man gives audience. We saw him--a mere youth,
apparently--purring away at a long chibouque, in the midst of a little
group of graybeard elders. They looked at us gravely, immovably; like
smoking automata. One longed to go up and ask them if they were all
transformed to black granite from the waists to the feet and if the
inhabitants of Derr had been changed into blue stones.
Still bent on buying baskets, if baskets were to be bought--bent also on
finding out the whereabouts of a certain rock-cut temple which our books
told us to look for at the back of the town, we turned aside into a
straggling street leading toward the desert. The houses looked better
built than usual; some pains having evidently been bestowed in smoothing
the surface of the mud and ornamenting the doorways with fragments of
colored pottery. A cracked willow-pattern dinner-plate set, like a
fanlight, over one, and a white soup-plate over another, came doubtless
from the canteen of some English dahabeeyah, and were the pride of their
possessors. Looking from end to end of this street--and it was a
tolerably long one, with the Nile at one end and the desert at the
other--we saw no sign or shadow of moving creature. Only one young
woman, hearing strange voices talking a strange tongue, peeped out
suddenly from a half-opened door as we went by; then, seeing me look at
the baby in her arms (which was hideous and had sore eyes), drew her
veil across its face and darted back again. She thought I coveted her
treasure and she dreaded the Evil Eye.
All at once we heard a sound like the far-off quivering cry of many
owls. It shrilled--swelled--wavered--dropped--then died away, like the
moaning of the wind at sea. We held our breath and listened. We had
never heard anything so wild and plaintive. Then suddenly, through an
opening between the houses, we saw a great crowd on a space of rising
ground about a quarter of a mile away. This crowd consisted of men
only--a close, turbaned mass some three or four hundred in number; all
standing quite still and silent; all looking in the same direction.
Hurrying on to the desert we saw the strange sight at which they were
looking.
The scene was a barren sand-slope hemmed in between the town and the
cliffs and dotted over with graves. The actors were all women. Huddled
together under a long wall some few hundred yards away, bareheaded and
exposed to the blaze of the morning sun, they outnumbered the men by a
full third. Some were sitting, some standing; while in their midst,
pressing round a young woman who seemed to act as leader, there swayed
and circled and shuffled a compact phalanx of dancers. Upon this young
woman the eyes of all were turned. A black Cassandra, she rocked her
body from side to side, clapped her hands above her head and poured
forth a wild declamatory chant which the rest echoed. This chant seemed
to be divided into strophes, at the end of each of which she paused,
beat her breast, and broke into that terrible wail that we had heard
just now from a distance.
Her brother, it seemed, had died last night; and we were witnessing his
funeral.
The actual interment was over by the time we reached the spot; but four
men were still busy filling the grave with sand, which they scraped up,
a bowlful at a time, and stamped down with their naked feet.
The deceased being unmarried, his sister led the choir of mourners. She
was a tall, gaunt young woman of the plainest Nubian type, with high
cheek-bones, eyes slanting upward at the corners, and an enormous mouth
full of glittering teeth. On her head she wore a white cloth smeared
with dust. Her companions were distinguished by a narrow white fillet,
bound about the brow and tied with two long ends behind. They had hidden
their necklaces and bracelets and wore trailing robes and shawls and
loose trousers of black or blue calico.
We stood for a long time watching their uncouth dance. None of the women
seemed to notice us; but the men made way civilly and gravely, letting
us pass to the front, that we might get a better view of the ceremony.
By and by an old woman rose slowly from the midst of those who were
sitting and moved with tottering, uncertain steps toward a higher point
of ground, a little apart from the crowd. There was a movement of
compassion among the men; one of whom turned to the writer and said,
gently: “His mother.”
She was a small, feeble old woman, very poorly clad. Her hands and arms
were like the hands and arms of a mummy, and her withered black face
looked ghastly under its mask of dust. For a few moments, swaying her
body slowly to and fro, she watched the grave-diggers stamping down the
sand; then stretched out her arms and broke into a torrent of
lamentations. The dialect of Derr[71] is strange and barbarous; but we
felt as if we understood every word she uttered. Presently the tears
began to make channels down her cheeks--her voice became choked with
sobs--and, falling down in a sort of helpless heap, like a
broken-hearted dog, she lay with her face to the ground, and there
stayed.
Meanwhile, the sand being now filled in and mounded up, the men betook
themselves to a place where the rock had given way and selected a couple
of big stones from the débris. These they placed at the head and foot of
the grave and all was done.
Instantly--perhaps at an appointed signal, though we saw none given--the
wailing ceased; the women rose; every tongue was loosened; and the whole
became a moving, animated, noisy throng dispersing in a dozen different
directions.
We turned away with the rest, the writer and the painter rambling off in
search of the temple, while the other three devoted themselves to the
pursuit of baskets and native jewelry. When we looked back presently the
crowd was gone; but the desolate mother still lay motionless in the
dust.
It chanced that we witnessed many funerals in Nubia; so many that one
sometimes felt inclined to doubt whether the governor of Assûan had not
reported over-favorably of the health of the province. The ceremonial,
with its dancing and chanting, was always much the same; always
barbaric, and in the highest degree artificial. One would like to know
how much of it is derived from purely African sources, and how much from
ancient Egyptian tradition. The dance is most probably Ethiopian.
Lepsius, traveling through the Soudan in A.D. 1844,[72] saw something of
the kind at a funeral in Wed Medineh, about half-way between Sennaar and
Khartûm. The white fillet worn by the choir of mourners is, on the other
hand, distinctly Egyptian. We afterward saw it represented in paintings
of funeral processions on the walls of several tombs at Thebes,[73]
where the wailing women are seen to be gathering up the dust in their
hands and casting it upon their heads, just as they do now. As for the
wail--beginning high and descending through a scale divided not by
semi-tones but thirds of tones to a final note about an octave and a
half lower than that from which it started--it probably echoes to this
day the very pitch and rhythm of the wail that followed the Pharaohs to
their sepulchers in the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings. Like the
zaghareet, or joy-cry, which every mother teaches to her little girls
and which, it is said, can only be acquired in very early youth, it has
been handed down from generation to generation through an untold
succession of ages. The song to which the fellâh works his shâdûf and
the monotonous chant of the sakkieh-driver have, perhaps, as remote an
origin. But of all old, mournful, human sounds, the death-wail that we
heard at Derr is perhaps one of the very oldest--certainly the most
mournful.
The temple here, dating from the reign of Rameses II, is of rude design
and indifferent execution. Partly constructed, partly excavated, it is
approached by a forecourt, the roof of which was supported by eight
square columns. Of these columns only the bases remain. Four massive
piers, against which once stood four colossi, upheld the roof of the
portico and gave admission by three entrances to the rock-cut chambers
beyond. The portico is now roofless. Nothing is left of the colossi but
their feet. All is ruin; and ruin without beauty.
Seen from within, however, the place is not without a kind of gloomy
grandeur. Two rows of square columns, three at each side, divide the
large hall into a nave and two aisles. This hall is about forty feet
square, and the pillars have been left standing in the living rock, like
those in the early tombs at Siût. The daylight, half-blocked out by the
fallen portico, is pleasantly subdued, and finds its way dimly to the
sanctuary at the farther end. The sculptures of the interior, though
much damaged, are less defaced than those of the outer court. Walls,
pillars, doorways, are covered with bas-reliefs. The king and Ptah, the
king and Ra, the king and Amen, stand face to face, hand in hand, on
each of the four sides of every column. Scenes of worship, of slaughter,
of anointing, cover the walls; and the blank spaces are filled in as
usual with hieroglyphic inscriptions. Among these Champollion discovered
an imperfect list of the sons and daughters of Rameses II. Four gods
once sat enthroned at the upper end of the sanctuary; but they have
shared the fate of the colossi outside and only their feet remain. The
wall sculptures of this dark little chamber are, however, better
preserved, and better worth preservation, than those of the hall. A
procession of priests, bearing on their shoulders the bari, or sacred
boat, is quite unharmed; and even the color is yet fresh upon a
full-length figure of Hathor close by.
But more interesting than all these--more interesting because more
rare--is a sculptured palm-tree against which the king leans while
making an offering to Amen Ra. The trunk is given with elaborate
truthfulness; and the branches, though formalized, are correct and
graceful in curvature. The tree is but an accessory. It may have been
introduced with reference to the date-harvests which are the wealth of
the district; but it has no kind of sacred significance, and is
noticeable only for the naturalness of the treatment. Such naturalness
is unusual in the art of this period, when the conventional persea and
the equally conventional lotus are almost the only vegetable forms which
appear on the walls of the temples. I can recall, indeed, but one
similar instance in the bas-relief sculpture of the new empire--namely,
the bent, broken and waving bulrushes in the great lion-hunting scene at
Medinet Habu, which are admirably free and studied, apparently, from
nature.
Coming out, we looked in vain along the court-yard walls for the
battle-scene in which Champollion was yet able to trace the famous
fighting lion of Rameses II with the legend describing him as “the
servant of his majesty rending his foes in pieces.” But that was
forty-five years ago. Now it is with difficulty that one detects a few
vague outlines of chariot-wheels and horses.
There are some rock-cut tombs in the face of the cliffs close by. The
painter explored them while the writer sketched the interior of the
temple; but he reported of them as mere sepulchers, unpainted and
unsculptured.
The rocks, the sands, the sky, were at a white heat when we again turned
our faces toward the river. Where there had so lately been a great
multitude there was now not a soul. The palms nodded; the pigeons dozed;
the mud town slept in the sun. Even the mother had gone from her place
of weeping and left her dead to the silence of the desert.
We went and looked at his grave. The fresh-turned sand was only a little
darker than the rest, and, but for the trampled foot-marks round about,
we should scarcely have been able to distinguish the new mound from the
old ones. All were alike nameless. Some, more cared for than the rest,
were bordered with large stones and filled with variegated pebbles. One
or two were fenced about with a mud wall. All had a bowl of baked clay
at the head. Wherever we saw a burial-ground in Nubia we saw these bowls
upon the graves. The mourners, they told us, mourn here for forty days;
during which time they come every Friday with fresh water, that the
birds may drink from it. The bowls on the other graves were dry and full
of sand; but the new bowl was brimming full and the water in it was hot
to the touch.
We found L---- and the happy couple standing at bay with their backs
against a big lebbich tree, surrounded by an immense crowd and far from
comfortable. Bent on “bazaaring,” they had probably shown themselves too
ready to buy; so bringing the whole population, with all the mats,
baskets, nose-rings, finger-rings, necklaces and bracelets in the place
about their ears. Seeing the straits they were in, we ran to the
dahabeeyah and dispatched three or four sailors to the rescue, who
brought them off in triumph.
Even in Egypt it does not answer, as a rule, to go about on shore
without an escort. The people are apt to be importunate and can with
difficulty be kept at a pleasant distance. But in Nubia, where the
traveler’s life was scarcely safe fifty years ago, unprotected Ingleezeh
are pretty certain to be disagreeably mobbed. The natives, in truth, are
still mere savages _au fond_--the old war-paint being but half-disguised
under a thin veneer of Mohammedanism.
Some of the women who followed our friends to the boat, though in
complexion as black as the rest, had light-blue eyes and frizzy red
hair, the effect of which was indescribably frightful. Both here and at
Ibrim there are many of these “fair” families, who claim to be descended
from Bosnian fathers stationed in Nubia at the time of the conquest of
Sultan Selim in A.D. 1517. They are immensely proud of their alien blood
and think themselves quite beautiful.
All hands being safe on board, we pushed off at once, leaving about a
couple of hundred disconsolate dealers on the bank. A long-drawn howl of
disappointment followed in our wake. Those who had sold, and those who
had not sold, were alike wronged, ruined, and betrayed. One woman tore
wildly along the bank, shrieking and beating her breast. Foremost among
the sellers, she had parted from her gold brow-pendant for a good price;
but was inconsolable now for the loss of it.
It often happened that those who had been most eager to trade were
readiest to repent of their bargains. Even so, however, their cupidity
outweighed their love of finery. Moved once or twice by the lamentations
of some dark damsel who had sold her necklace at a handsome profit, we
offered to annul the purchase. But it invariably proved that, despite
her tears, she preferred to keep the money.
The palms of Derr and of the rich district beyond were the finest we saw
throughout the journey. Straight and strong and magnificently plumed,
they rose to an average height of seventy or eighty feet. These superb
plantations supply all Egypt with saplings and contribute a heavy tax to
the revenue. The fruit, sun-dried and shriveled, is also sent northward
in large quantities.
The trees are cultivated with strenuous industry by the natives and owe
as much of their perfection to laborious irrigation as to climate. The
foot of each separate palm is surrounded by a circular trench, into
which the water is conducted by a small channel about fourteen inches in
width. Every palm-grove stands in a network of these artificial runlets.
The reservoir from which they are supplied is filled by means of a
sakkieh, or water-wheel--a primitive and picturesque machine consisting
of two wheels, the one set vertically to the river and slung with a
chain of pots; the other a horizontal cog turned sometimes by a camel,
but more frequently in Nubia by a buffalo. The pots (which go down
empty, dip under the water, and come up full) feed a sloping trough
which in some places supplies a reservoir, and in others communicates at
once with the irrigating channels. These sakkiehs are kept perpetually
going, and are set so close just above Derr, that the writer counted a
line of fifteen within the space of a single mile. There were probably
quite as many on the opposite bank.
The sakkiehs creak atrociously; and their creaking ranges over an
unlimited gamut. From morn till dewy eve, from dewy eve till morn, they
squeak, they squeal, they grind, they groan, they croak. Heard after
dark, sakkieh answering to sakkieh, their melancholy chorus makes night
hideous. To sleep through it is impossible. Being obliged to moor a few
miles beyond Derr and having lain awake half the night, we offered a
sakkieh-driver a couple of dollars if he would let his wheel rest till
morning. But time and water are more precious than even dollars at this
season; and the man refused. All we could do, therefore, was to punt
into the middle of the river and lie off at a point as nearly as
possible equidistant from our two nearest enemies.
The native dearly loves the tree which costs him so much labor, and
thinks it the chef-d’œuvre of creation. When Allah made the first man,
says an Arab legend, he found he had a little clay to spare; so with
that he made the palm. And to the poor Nubian, at all events, the gifts
of the palm are almost divine; supplying food for his children, thatch
for his hovel, timber for his water-wheel, ropes, matting, cups, bowls
and even the strong drink forbidden by the prophet. The date-wine is
yellowish-white, like whisky. It is not a wine, however, but a spirit;
coarse, fiery, and unpalatable.
Certain trees--as for instance the perky little pine of the German
wald--are apt to become monotonous; but one never wearies of the palm.
Whether taken singly or in masses, it is always graceful, always
suggestive. To the sketcher on the Nile it is simply invaluable. It
breaks the long parallels of river and bank and composes with the stern
lines of Egyptian architecture as no other tree in the world could do.
“Subjects, indeed!” said once upon a time an eminent artist to the
present writer; “fiddlesticks about subjects! Your true painter can make
a picture out of a post and a puddle.”
Substitute a palm, however, for a post; combine it with anything that
comes first--a camel, a shâdûf, a woman with a water-jar upon her
head--and your picture stands before you ready made.
Nothing more surprised me at first than the color of the palm-frond,
which painters of eastern landscape are wont to depict of a hard bluish
tint, like the color of a yucca leaf. Its true shade is a tender,
bloomy, sea-green gray; difficult enough to match, but in most exquisite
harmony with the glow of the sky and the gold of the desert.
The palm-groves kept us company for many a mile, backed on the Arabian
side by long level ranges of sandstone cliffs, horizontally stratified,
like those of the Thebaid. We now scarcely ever saw a village--only
palms and sakkiehs and sand-banks in the river. The villages were there,
but invisible, being built on the verge of the desert. Arable land is
too valuable in Nubia for either the living to dwell upon it or the dead
to be buried in it.
At Ibrim--a sort of ruined Ehrenbreitstein on the top of a grand
precipice overhanging the river--we touched for only a few minutes, in
order to buy a very small shaggy sheep which had been brought down to
the landing-place for sale. But for the breeze that happened just then
to be blowing we should have liked to climb the rock and see the view
and the ruins--which are part modern, part Turkish, part Roman, and
little, if at all, Egyptian.
There are also some sculptured and painted grottoes to be seen in the
southern face of the mountain. They are, however, too difficult of
access to be attempted by ladies. Alfred, who went ashore after quail,
was drawn up to them by ropes, but found them too much defaced as to be
scarcely worth the trouble of a visit.
We were now only thirty-four miles from Abou Simbel; but making slow
progress and impatiently counting every foot of the way. The heat at
times was great, frequent and fitful spells of Khamsîn wind alternating
with a hot calm that tried the trackers sorely. Still we pushed forward,
a few miles at a time, till by and by the flat-topped cliffs dropped out
of sight and were again succeeded by volcanic peaks, some of which
looked loftier than any of those about Dakkeh or Korosko.
Then the palms ceased and the belt of cultivated land narrowed to a
thread of green between the rocks and the water’s edge; and at last
there came an evening when we only wanted breeze enough to double two or
three more bends in the river.
“Is it to be Abou Simbel to-night?” we asked for the twentieth time
before going down to dinner.
To which Reïs Hassan replied: “Aiwah” (“certainly”).
But the pilot shook his head and added: “Bûkra” (“to-morrow”).
When we came up again the moon had risen but the breeze had dropped.
Still we moved, impelled by a breath so faint that one could scarcely
feel it. Presently even this failed. The sail collapsed; the pilot
steered for the bank; the captain gave word to go aloft--when a sudden
puff from the north changed our fortunes and sent us out again with a
well-filled sail into the middle of the river.
None of us, I think, will be likely to forget the sustained excitement
of the next three hours. As the moon climbed higher a light more
mysterious and unreal than the light of day filled and overflowed the
wide expanse of river and desert. We could see the mountains of Abou
Simbel standing, as it seemed, across our path, in the far distance--a
lower one first; then a larger; then a series of receding heights, all
close together, yet all distinctly separate.
That large one--the mountain of the great temple--held us like a spell.
For a long time it looked a mere mountain like the rest. By and by,
however, we fancied we detected a something--a shadow--such a shadow as
might be cast by a gigantic buttress. Next appeared a black speck, no
bigger than a port-hole. We knew that this black speck must be the
doorway. We knew that the great statues were there, though not yet
visible, and that we must soon see them.
For our sailors, meanwhile, there was the excitement of a chase. The
Bagstones and three other dahabeeyahs were coming up behind us in the
path of the moonlight. Their galley fires glowed like beacons on the
water; the nearest about a mile away, the last a spark in the distance.
We were not in the mood to care much for racing to-night, but we were
anxious to keep our lead and be first at the mooring place.
To run upon a sand-bank at such a moment was like being plunged suddenly
into cold water. Our sail flapped furiously. The men rushed to the
punting-poles. Four jumped overboard and shoved with all the might of
their shoulders. By the time we got off, however, the other boats had
crept up half a mile nearer, and we had hard work to keep them from
pressing closer on our heels.
At length the last corner was rounded and the great temple stood
straight before us. The façade, sunk in the mountain side like a huge
picture in a mighty frame, was now quite plain to see. The black speck
was no longer a port-hole, but a lofty doorway.
Last of all, though it was night, and they were still not much less than
a mile away, the four colossi came out, ghostlike, vague and shadowy, in
the enchanted moonlight. Even as we watched them they seemed to grow, to
dilate, to be moving toward us out of the silvery distance.
It was drawing on toward midnight when the Philæ at length ran in close
under the great temple. Content with what they had seen from the river
the rest of the party then went soberly to bed; but the painter and the
writer had no patience to wait till morning. Almost before the
mooring-rope could be made fast they had jumped ashore and began
climbing the bank.
They went and stood at the feet of the colossi, and on the threshold of
that vast portal beyond which was darkness. The great statues towered
above their heads. The river glittered like steel in the far distance.
There was a keen silence in the air; and toward the east the Southern
Cross was rising. To the strangers who stood talking there with bated
breath, the time, the place, even the sound of their own voices, seemed
unreal. They felt as if the whole scene must fade with the moonlight,
and vanish before morning.