ABOU SIMBEL.
We came to Abou Simbel on the night of the 31st of January and we left
at sunset on the 18th of February. Of these eighteen clear days we spent
fourteen at the foot of the rock of the great temple, called in the old
Egyptian tongue the Rock of Abshek. The remaining four (taken at the end
of the first week and the beginning of the second) were passed in the
excursion to Wady-Halfeh and back. By thus dividing the time our long
sojourn was made less monotonous for those who had no especial work to
do.
Meanwhile it was wonderful to wake every morning close under the steep
bank, and, without lifting one’s head from the pillow, to see that row
of giant faces so close against the sky. They showed unearthly enough by
moonlight, but not half so unearthly as in the gray of dawn. At that
hour, the most solemn of the twenty-four, they wore a fixed and fatal
look that was little less than appalling. As the sky warmed this awful
look was succeeded by a flush that mounted and deepened like the rising
flush of life. For a moment they seemed to glow--to smile--to be
transfigured. Then came a flash, as of thought itself. It was the first
instantaneous flash of the risen sun. It lasted less than a second. It
was gone almost before one could say it was there. The next moment
mountain, river and sky were distinct in the steady light of day; and
the colossi--mere colossi now--sat serene and stony in the open
sunshine.
Every morning I waked in time to witness that daily miracle. Every
morning I saw those awful brethren pass from death to life, from life to
sculptured stone. I brought myself almost to believe at last that there
must sooner or later come some one sunrise when the ancient charm would
snap asunder and the giants must arise and speak.
Stupendous as they are, nothing is more difficult than to see the
colossi properly. Standing between the rock and the river one is too
near; stationed on the island opposite one is too far off; while from
the sand-slope only a side view is obtainable. Hence, for want of a
fitting standpoint, many travelers have seen nothing but deformity in
the most perfect face handed down to us by Egyptian art. One recognizes
in it the negro and one the Mongolian type;[108] while another admires
the fidelity with which “the Nubian characteristics” have been seized.
Yet, in truth, the head of the young Augustus is not cast in a loftier
mold. These statues are portraits--portraits of the same man four times
repeated; and that man is Rameses the Great.
Now, Rameses, the Great if he was as much like his portraits as his
portraits are like each other, must have been one of the handsomest men,
not only of his own day, but of all history. Wheresoever we meet with
him, whether in the fallen colossus at Memphis or in the syenite torso
of the British Museum, or among the innumerable bas-reliefs of Thebes,
Abydos, Gournah, and Bayt-el-Welly, his features (though bearing in some
instances the impress of youth and in others of maturity) are always the
same. The face is oval; the eyes are long, prominent, and heavy-lidded;
the nose is slightly aquiline and characteristically depressed at the
tip; the nostrils are open and sensitive; the under lip projects; the
chin is short and square.
Here, for instance, is an outline from a bas-relief at Bayt-el-Welly.
The subject is commemorative of the king’s first campaign. A beardless
youth, fired with the rage of battle, he clutches a captive by the hair
and lifts his mace to slay. In this delicate and Dantesque face, which
lacks as yet the fullness and repose of the later portraits, we
recognize all the distinctive traits of the older Rameses.
[Illustration]
Here, again, is a sketch from Abydos in which the king, although he has
not yet ceased to wear the side-lock of youth, is seen with a boyish
beard, and looks four years older than in the previous portrait.
[Illustration]
It is interesting to compare these heads with the accompanying profile
of one of the caryatid colossi inside the great temple of Abou Simbel;
and all three with one of the giant portraits of the façade. This last,
whether regarded as a marvel of size or of portraiture, is the
chef-d’œuvre of Egyptian sculpture. We here see the great king in his
prime. His features are identical with those of the head at
Bayt-el-Welly; but the contours are more amply filled in and the
expression is altogether changed. The man is full fifteen or twenty
years older. He has outlived that rage of early youth. He is no longer
impulsive, but implacable. A godlike serenity, an almost superhuman
pride, an immutable will, breathe from the sculptured stone. He has
learned to believe his prowess irresistible and himself almost divine.
If he now raised his arm to slay it would be with the stern placidity of
a destroying angel.
[Illustration]
The annexed wood-cut gives the profile of the southern-most colossus,
which is the only perfect--or very nearly perfect--one of the four. The
original can be correctly seen from but one point of view; and that
point is
[Illustration: PROFILE OF RAMESES II.
(From the southernmost colossus, Abou Simbel.)]
where the sand-slope meets the northern buttress of the façade, at a
level just parallel with the beards of the statues. It was thence that
the present outline was taken. The sand-slope is steep and loose and hot
to the feet. More disagreeable climbing it would be hard to find, even
in Nubia; but no traveler who refuses to encounter this small hardship
need believe that he has seen the faces of the colossi.
Viewed from below, this beautiful portrait is foreshortened out of all
proportion. It looks unduly wide from ear to ear, while the lips and the
lower part of the nose show relatively larger than the rest of the
features. The same may be said of the great cast in the British Museum.
Cooped up at the end of a narrow corridor and lifted not more than
fifteen feet above the ground, it is carefully placed so as to be wrong
from every point of view and shown to the greatest possible
disadvantage.
The artists who wrought the original statues were, however, embarrassed
by no difficulties of focus, daunted by no difficulties of scale. Giants
themselves, they summoned these giants from out the solid rock and
endowed them with superhuman strength and beauty. They sought no
quarried blocks of syenite or granite for their work. They fashioned no
models of clay. They took a mountain and fell upon it like Titans and
hollowed and carved it as though it were a cherry stone; and left it for
the feebler men of after ages to marvel at forever. One great hall and
fifteen spacious chambers they hewed out from the heart of it, then
smoothed the rugged precipice toward the river, and cut four huge
statues with their faces to the sunrise, two to the right and two to the
left of the doorway, there to keep watch to the end of time.
These tremendous warders sit sixty-six feet high, without the platform
under their feet. They measure across the chest twenty-five feet and
four inches; from the shoulder to the elbow fifteen feet and six inches;
from the inner side of the elbow joint to the tip of the middle finger,
fifteen feet; and so on, in relative proportion. If they stood up, they
would tower to a height of at least eighty-three feet, from the soles of
their feet to the tops of their enormous double-crowns.
Nothing in Egyptian sculpture is perhaps quite so wonderful as the way
in which these Abou Simbel artists dealt with the thousands of tons of
material to which they here gave human form. Consummate masters of
effect, they knew precisely what to do and what to leave undone. These
were portrait statues; therefore they finished the heads up to the
highest point consistent with their size. But the trunk and the lower
limbs they regarded from a decorative rather than a statuesque point of
view. As decoration, it was necessary that they should give size and
dignity to the façade. Everything, consequently, was here subordinated
to the general effect of breadth, of massiveness, of repose. Considered
thus, the colossi are a triumph of treatment. Side by side they sit,
placid and majestic, their feet a little apart, their hands resting on
their knees. Shapely though they are, those huge legs look scarcely
inferior in girth to the great columns of Karnak. The articulations of
the knee-joint, the swell of the calf, the outline of the _peroneus
longus_ are indicated rather than developed. The toe-nails and
toe-joints are given in the same bold and general way; but the fingers,
because only the tips of them could be seen from below, are treated _en
bloc_.
The faces show the same largeness of style. The little dimple which
gives such sweetness to the corners of the mouth, and the tiny
depression in the lobe of the ear, are, in fact, circular cavities as
large as saucers.
How far this treatment is consistent with the most perfect delicacy and
even finesse of execution may be gathered from the sketch. The nose
there shown in profile is three feet and a half in length; the mouth, so
delicately curved, is about the same in width; even the sensitive
nostril, which looks ready to expand with the breath of life, exceeds
eight inches in length. The ear (which is placed high and is well
detached from the head) measures three feet and five inches from top to
tip.
A recent writer,[109] who brings sound practical knowledge to bear upon
the subject, is of opinion that the Egyptian sculptors did not even
“point” their work beforehand. If so, then the marvel is only so much
the greater. The men who, working in so coarse and friable a material,
could not only give beauty and finish to heads of this size, but could,
with barbaric tools, hew them out _ab initio_, from the natural rock,
were the Michael Angelos of their age.
It has already been said that the last Rameses to the southward is the
best preserved. His left arm and hand are injured, and the head of the
uræus sculptured on the front of the pschent is gone; but with these
exceptions the figure is as whole, as fresh in surface, as sharp in
detail, as on the day it was completed. The next is shattered to the
waist. His head lies at his feet, half-buried in sand. The third is
nearly as perfect as the first; while the fourth has lost not only the
whole beard and the greater part of the uræus, but has both arms broken
away and a big, cavernous hole in the front of the body. From the
double-crowns of the two last the top ornament is also missing. It looks
a mere knob; but it measures eight feet in height.
Such an effect does the size of these four figures produce on the mind
of the spectator that he scarcely observes the fractures they have
sustained. I do not remember to have even missed the head and body of
the shattered one, although nothing is left of it above the knees. Those
huge legs and feet, covered with ancient inscriptions,[110] some of
Greek, some of Phœnician origin, tower so high above the heads of those
who look at them from below that one scarcely thinks of looking higher
still.
The figures are naked to the waist and clothed in the usual striped
tunic. On their heads they wear the double-crown, and on their necks
rich collars of cabochon drops cut in very low relief. The feet are bare
of sandals and the arms of bracelets; but in the front of the body, just
where the customary belt and buckle would come, are deep holes in the
stone, such as might have been made to receive rivets, supposing the
belts to have been made of bronze or gold. On the breast, just below the
necklace, and on the upper part of each arm, are cut in magnificent
ovals, between four and five feet in length, the ordinary cartouches of
the king. These were probably tattooed upon his person in the flesh.
Some have supposed that these statues were originally colored, and that
the color may have been effaced by the ceaseless shifting and blowing of
the sand. Yet the drift was probably at its highest when Burckhardt
discovered the place in 1813; and on the two heads that were still above
the surface he seems to have observed no traces of color. Neither can
the keenest eye detect any vestige of that delicate film of stucco with
which the Egyptians invariably prepared their surfaces for painting.
Perhaps the architects were for once content with the natural color of
the sandstone, which is here very rich and varied. It happens, also,
that the colossi come in a light-colored vein of the rock, and so sit
relieved against a darker background. Toward noon, when the level of the
façade has just passed into shade and the sunlight still strikes upon
the statues, the effect is quite startling. The whole thing, which is
then best seen from the island, looks like a huge onyx-cameo cut in high
relief.
A statue of Ra,[111] to whom the temple is dedicated, stands some twenty
feet high in a niche over the doorway, and is supported on either side
by a bas-relief portrait of the king in an attitude of worship. Next
above these comes a superb hieroglyphic inscription reaching across the
whole front; above the inscription, a band of royal cartouches; above
the cartouches, a frieze of sitting apes; above the apes, last and
highest, some fragments of a cornice. The height of the whole may have
been somewhat over a hundred feet. Wherever it has been possible to
introduce them as decoration, we see the ovals of the king. Under those
sculptured on the platform and over the door I observed the hieroglypic
character [Illustration] which, in conjunction with the sign known as
the determinative of metals, signifies gold (nub); but when represented,
as here, without the determinative, stands for Nubia, the Land of Gold.
This addition, which I do not remember to have seen elsewhere in
connection with the cartouches of Rameses II,[112] is here used in an
heraldic sense, as signifying the sovereignty of Nubia.
The relative positions of the two temples of Abou Simbel have been
already described--how they are excavated in two adjacent mountains and
divided by a cataract of sand. The front of the small temple lies
parallel to the course of the Nile, here flowing in a northeasterly
direction. The façade of the great temple is cut in the flank of the
mountain and faces due east. Thus the colossi, towering above the
shoulder of the sand-drift, catch, as it were, a side view of the small
temple and confront vessels coming up the river. As for the sand-drift,
it curiously resembles the glacier of the Rhone. In size, in shape, in
position, in all but color and substance, it is the same. Pent in
between the rocks at top, it opens out like a fan at bottom. In this,
its inevitable course, it slants downward across the façade of the
great temple. Forever descending, drifting, accumulating, it wages the
old stealthy war; and, unhasting, unresting, labors, grain by grain, to
fill the hollowed chambers and bury the great statues and wrap the whole
temple in a winding-sheet of golden sand, so that the place thereof
shall know it no more.
It had very nearly come to this when Burckhardt went up (A.D. 1813). The
top of the doorway was then thirty feet below the surface. Whether the
sand will ever reach that height again must depend on the energy with
which it is combated. It can only be cleared as it accumulates. To avert
it is impossible. Backed by the illimitable wastes of the Libyan desert,
the supply from above is inexhaustible. Come it must; and come it will,
to the end of time.
The drift rose to the lap of the northernmost colossus and half-way up
the legs of the next when the Philæ lay at Abou Simbel. The doorway was
clear, however, almost to the threshold, and the sand inside was not
more than two feet deep in the first hall. The whole façade, we were
told, had been laid bare, and the interior swept and garnished, when the
Empress of the French, after opening the Suez Canal in 1869, went up the
Nile as far as the second cataract. By this time, most likely, that
yellow carpet lies thick and soft in every chamber, and is fast silting
up the doorway again.
How well I remember the restless excitement of our first day at Abou
Simbel! While the morning was yet cool, the painter and writer wandered
to and fro, comparing and selecting points of view and superintending
the pitching of their tents. The painter planted his on the very brink
of the bank, face to face with the colossi and the open doorway. The
writer perched some forty feet higher on the pitch of the sandslope; so
getting a side view of the façade and a peep of distance looking up the
river. To fix the tent up there was no easy matter. It was only by
sinking the tent-pole in a hole filled with stones that it could be
trusted to stand against the steady push of the north wind, which at
this season is almost always blowing.
Meanwhile the travelers from the other dahabeeyahs were tramping
backward and forward between the two temples; filling the air with
laughter and waking strange echoes in the hollow mountains. As the day
wore on, however, they returned to their boats, which one by one spread
their sails and bore away for Wady Halfeh.
When they were fairly gone and we had the marvelous place all to
ourselves we went to see the temples.
The smaller one, though it comes first in order of sailing, is generally
seen last; and seen therefore to disadvantage. To eyes fresh from the
“Abode of Ra,” the “Abode of Hathor” looks less than its actual size;
which is, in fact, but little inferior to that of the temple at Derr. A
first hall, measuring some forty feet in length by twenty-one in width,
leads to a transverse corridor, two side-chambers, and a sanctuary seven
feet square, at the upper end of which are the shattered remains of a
cow-headed statue of Hathor. Six square pillars, as at Derr, support
what, for want of a better word, one must call the ceiling of the hall;
though the ceiling is, in truth, the superincumbent mountain.
In this arrangement, as in the general character of the bas-relief
sculptures which cover the walls and pillars, there is much simplicity,
much grace, but nothing particularly new. The façade, on the contrary,
is a daring innovation. Here the whole front is but a frame for six
recesses, from each of which a colossal statue, erect and lifelike,
seems to be walking straight out from the heart of the mountain. These
statues, three to the right and three to the left of the doorway, stand
thirty feet high, and represent Rameses II and Nefertari, his queen.
Mutilated as they are, the male figures are full of spirit and the
female figures full of grace. The queen wears on her head the plumes and
disk of Hathor. The king is crowned with the pschent and with a
fantastic helmet adorned with plumes and horns. They have their children
with them; the queen her daughters, the king his sons--infants of ten
feet high, whose heads just reach to the parental knee.
The walls of these six recesses, as they follow the slope of the
mountain, form massive buttresses, the effect of which is wonderfully
bold in light and shadow. The doorway gives the only instance of a porch
that we saw in either Egypt or Nubia. The superb hieroglyphs which cover
the faces of these buttresses and the front of this porch are cut half a
foot deep into the rock and are so large that they can be read from the
island in the middle of the river. The tale they tell--a tale retold in
many varied turns of old Egyptian style upon the architraves within--is
singular and interesting.
“Rameses, the Strong in Truth, the Beloved of Amen,” says the outer
legend, “made this divine abode[113] for his royal wife, Nefertari, whom
he loves.”
The legend within, after enumerating the titles of the king, records
that “his royal wife who loves him, Nefertari the beloved of Maut,
constructed for him this abode in the mountain of the pure waters.”
On every pillar, in every act of worship pictured on the walls, even in
the sanctuary, we find the names of Rameses and Nefertari “coupled and
inseparable.” In this double dedication and in the unwonted tenderness
of the style one seems to detect traces of some event, perhaps of some
anniversary, the particulars of which are lost forever. It may have been
a meeting; it may have been a parting; it may have been a prayer
answered or a vow fulfilled. We see, at all events, that Rameses and
Nefertari desired to leave behind them an imperishable record of the
affection which united them on earth and which they hoped would reunite
them in Amemti. What more do we need to know? We see that the queen was
fair;[114] that the king was in his prime. We divine the rest; and the
poetry of the place, at all events, is ours. Even in these barren
solitudes there is wafted to us a breath from the shores of old romance.
We feel that Love once passed this way and that the ground is still
hallowed where he trod.
We hurried on to the great temple, without waiting to examine the lesser
one in detail. A solemn twilight reigned in the first hall, beyond which
all was dark. Eight colossi, four to the right and four to the left,
stand ranged down the center, bearing the mountain on their heads. Their
height is twenty-five feet. With hands crossed on their breasts, they
clasp the flail and crook--emblems of majesty and dominion. It is the
attitude of Osiris, but the face is the face of Rameses II. Seen by this
dim light, shadowy, mournful, majestic, they look as if they remembered
the past.
Beyond the first hall lies a second hall supported on four square
pillars; beyond this, again, a transverse chamber, the walls of which
are covered with colored bas-reliefs of various gods; last of all, the
sanctuary. Here, side by side, sit four figures larger than life--Ptah,
Amen-Ra, Ra and Rameses deified. Before them stands an altar, in shape a
truncated pyramid, cut from the solid rock. Traces of color yet linger
on the garments of the statues; while in the walls on either side are
holes and grooves such as might have been made to receive a screen of
metal-work.
The air in the sanctuary was heavy with an acrid smoke, as if the
priests had been burning some strange incense and were only just gone.
For this illusion we were indebted to the visitors who had been there
before us. They had lit the place with magnesian wire; the vapor of
which lingers long in these unventilated vaults.
To settle down then and there to a steady investigation of the
wall-sculptures was impossible. We did not attempt it. Wandering from
hall to hall, from chamber to chamber; now trusting to the faint gleams
that straggled in from without, now stumbling along by the light of a
bunch of candles tied to the end of a stick, we preferred to receive
those first impressions of vastness, of mystery, of gloomy magnificence,
which are the more profound for being somewhat vague and general.
Scenes of war, of triumph, of worship, passed before our eyes like the
incidents of a panorama. Here the king, borne along at full gallop by
plumed steeds gorgeously caparisoned, draws his mighty bow and attacks a
battlemented fortress. The besieged, some of whom are transfixed by his
tremendous arrows, supplicate for mercy. They are a Syrian people and
are by some identified with the northern Hittites. Their skin is yellow;
and they wear the long hair and beard, the fillet, the rich robe,
fringed cape and embroidered baldric with which we are familiar in the
Nineveh sculptures. A man driving off cattle in the foreground looks as
if he had stepped out of one of the tablets in the British Museum.
Rameses meanwhile towers, swift and godlike, above the crowd. His
coursers are of such immortal strain as were the coursers of Achilles.
His sons, his whole army, chariot and horse, follow headlong at his
heels. All is movement and the splendor of battle.
Farther on we see the king returning in state, preceded by his prisoners
of war. Tied together in gangs they stagger as they go, with heads
thrown back and hands uplifted. These, however, are not Assyrians, but
Abyssinians and Nubians, so true to the type, so thick-lipped,
flat-nosed and woolly-headed, that only the pathos of the expression
saves them from being ludicrous. It is naturalness pushed to the verge
of caricature.
A little farther still and we find Rameses leading a string of these
captives into the presence of Amen-Ra, Maut and Khons--Amen-Ra weird and
unearthly, with his blue complexion and towering plumes; Maut wearing
the crown of Upper Egypt; Khons, by a subtle touch of flattery, depicted
with the features of the king. Again, to right and left of the entrance,
Rameses, thrice the size of life, slays a group of captives of various
nations. To the left Amen-Ra, to the right Ra Harmachis,[115] approve
and accept the sacrifice. In the second hall we see, as usual, the
procession of the sacred bark. Ptah, Khem and Bast, gorgeous in
many-colored garments, gleam dimly, like figures in faded tapestry, from
the walls of the transverse corridor.
But the wonder of Abou Simbel is the huge subject on the north side of
the great hall. This is a monster battle-piece which covers an area of
fifty-seven feet seven inches in length, by twenty-five feet four inches
in height, and contains over eleven hundred figures. Even the heraldic
cornice of cartouches and asps which runs round the rest of the ceiling
is omitted on this side, so that the wall is literally filled with the
picture from top to bottom.
Fully to describe this huge design would take many pages. It is a
picture-gallery in itself. It represents not a single action, but a
whole campaign. It sets before us, with Homeric simplicity, the pomp and
circumstance of war, the incidents of camp life and the accidents of the
open field. We see the enemy’s city, with its battlemented towers and
triple moat; the besigers’ camp and the pavilion of the king; the march
of infantry; the shock of chariots; the hand-to-hand melée; the flight
of the vanquished; the triumph of the Pharaoh; the bringing in of the
prisoners; the counting of the hands of the slain. A great river winds
through the picture from end to end and almost surrounds the invested
city. The king in his chariot pursues a crowd of fugitives along the
bank. Some are crushed under his wheels; some plunge into the water and
are drowned.[116] Behind him, a moving wall of shields and spears,
advances with rhythmic step the serried phalanx; while yonder, where the
fight is thickest, we see chariots overturned, men dead and dying, and
riderless horses making for the open. Meanwhile, the besieged send out
mounted scouts and the country folk drive their cattle to the hills.
A grand frieze of chariots charging at full gallop divides the subject
lengthwise and separates the Egyptian camp from the field of battle. The
camp is square and inclosed, apparently, in a palisade of shields. It
occupies less than one-sixth part of the picture and contains about a
hundred figures. Within this narrow space the artist has brought
together an astonishing variety of incidents. The horses feed in rows
from a common manger, or wait their turn and impatiently paw the ground.
Some are lying down. One, just unharnessed, scampers round the
inclosure. Another, making off with the empty chariot at his heels, is
intercepted by a couple of grooms. Other grooms bring buckets of water
slung from the shoulders on wooden yokes. A wounded officer sits apart,
his head resting on his hand; and an orderly comes in haste to bring him
news of the battle. Another, hurt apparently in the foot, is having the
wound dressed by a surgeon. Two detachments of infantry, marching out to
re-enforce their comrades in action, are met at the entrance to the camp
by the royal chariot returning from the field. Rameses drives before him
some fugitives who are trampled down, seized and dispatched upon the
spot. In one corner stands a row of objects that look like joints of
meat; and near them are a small altar and a tripod brazier. Elsewhere, a
couple of soldiers, with a big bowl between them, sit on their heels and
dip their fingers in the mess, precisely as every fellâh does to this
day. Meanwhile, it is clear that Egyptian discipline was strict and that
the soldier who transgressed was as abjectly subject to the rule of
stick as his modern descendant. In no less than three places do we see
this time-honored institution in full operation, the superior officer
energetically flourishing his staff; the private taking his punishment
with characteristic disrelish. In the middle of the camp, watched over
by his keeper, lies Rameses’ tame lion; while close against the royal
pavilion a hostile spy is surprised and stabbed by the officer on guard.
The pavilion itself is very curious. It is evidently not a tent but a
building, and was probably an extemporaneous construction of crude
brick. It has four arched doorways, and contains in one corner an object
like a cabinet, with two sacred hawks for supporters. This object, which
is in fact almost identical with the hieroglyphic emblem used to express
a royal panegyry or festival, stands, no doubt, for the private oratory
of the king. Five figures kneeling before it in adoration.
To enumerate all or half the points of interest in this amazing picture
would ask altogether too much space. Even to see it, with time at
command and all the help that candles and magnesian torches can give,
is far from easy. The relief is unusually low, and the surface, having
originally been covered with stucco, is purposely roughened all over
with tiny chisel marks, which painfully confuse the details. Nor is this
all. Owing to some kind of saline ooze in that part of the rock, the
stucco has not only peeled off, but the actual surface is injured. It
seems to have been eaten away, just as iron is eaten by rust. A few
patches adhere, however, in places, and retain the original coloring.
The river is still covered with blue and white zigzags, to represent
water; some of the fighting groups are yet perfect; and two very
beautiful royal chariots, one of which is surmounted by a richly
ornamented parasol-canopy, are fresh and brilliant as ever.
The horses throughout are excellent. The chariot frieze is almost
Panathenaic in its effect of multitudinous movement; while the horses in
the camp of Rameses, for naturalness and variety of treatment, are
perhaps the best that Egyptian art has to show. It is worth noting,
also, that a horseman, that _rara avis_, occurs some four or five times
in different parts of the picture.
The scene of the campaign is laid in Syria. The river of blue and white
zigzags is the Orontes;[117] the city of the besieged Kadesh or
Kades;[118] the enemy are the Kheta. The whole is, in fact, a grand
picture-epic of the events immortalized in the poem of Pentaur--that
poem which M. de Rougé has described as “a sort of Egyptian Iliad.” The
comparison would, however, apply to the picture with greater force than
it applies to the poem. Pentaur, who was in the first place a courtier
and in the second place a poet, has sacrificed everything to the
prominence of his central figure. He is intent upon the glorification of
the king; and his poem, which is a mere pæan of praise, begins and ends
with the prowess of Rameses Mer-Amen. If, then, it is to be called an
Iliad, it is an Iliad from which everything that does not immediately
concern Achilles is left out. The picture, on the contrary, though it
shows the hero in combat and in triumph, and always of colossal
proportions, yet has space for a host of minor characters. The episodes
in which these characters appear are essentially Homeric. The spy is
surprised and slain, as Dolon was slain by Ulysses. The men feast, and
fight, and are wounded, just like the long-haired sons of Achaia; while
their horses, loosed from the yoke, eat white barley and oats:
“Hard by their chariots, waiting for the dawn.”
Like Homer, too, the artist of the battle-piece is careful to point out
the distinguishing traits of the various combatants. The Khetas go three
in a chariot; the Egyptians only two. The Khetas wear a mustache and
scalp-lock; the Egyptians pride themselves on “a clean shave,” and cover
their bare heads with ponderous wigs. The Sardinian contingent cultivate
their own thick hair, whiskers and mustachios; and their features are
distinctly European. They also wear the curious helmet surmounted by a
ball and two spikes, by which they may always be recognized in the
sculptures. These Sardinians appear only in the border-frieze, next the
floor. The sand had drifted up just at that spot and only the top of one
fantastic helmet was visible above the surface. Not knowing in the least
to what this might belong, we set the men to scrape away the sand; and
so, quite by accident, uncovered the most curious and interesting group
in the whole picture. The Sardinians[119] (in Egyptian Shardana), seem
to have been naturalized prisoners of war drafted into the ranks of the
Egyptian army; and are the first European people whose names appear on
the monuments.
There is but one hour in the twenty-four at which it is possible to form
any idea of the general effect of this vast subject; and that is at
sunrise. Then only does the pure day stream in through the doorway and
temper the gloom of the side-aisles with light reflected from the sunlit
floor. The broad divisions of the picture and the distribution of the
masses may then be dimly seen. The details, however, require
candle-light and can only be studied a few inches at a time. Even so, it
is difficult to make out the upper groups without the help of a ladder.
Salame, mounted on a chair and provided with two long sticks lashed
together, could barely hold his little torch high enough to enable the
writer to copy the inscription on the middle tower of the fortress of
Kadesh.
It is fine to see the sunrise on the front of the great temple; but
something still finer takes place on certain mornings of the year, in
the very heart of the mountain. As the sun comes up above the eastern
hill-tops, one long, level, beam strikes through the doorway, pierces
the inner darkness like an arrow, penetrates to the sanctuary and falls
like fire from heaven upon the altar at the feet of the gods.
No one who has watched for the coming of that shaft of sunlight can
doubt that it was a calculated effect and that the excavation was
directed at one especial angle in order to produce it. In this way Ra,
to whom the temple was dedicated, may be said to have entered in daily
and by a direct manifestation of his presence to have approved the
sacrifices of his worshipers.
I need scarcely say that we did not see half the wall-sculptures or even
half the chambers that first afternoon at Abou Simbel. We rambled to and
fro, lost in wonder and content to wonder, like rustics at a fair. We
had, however, ample time to come again and again, and learn it all by
heart. The writer went in constantly and at all hours; but most
frequently at the end of the day’s sketching, when the rest were walking
or boating in the cool of the late afternoon.
It is a wonderful place to be alone in--a place in which the very
darkness and silence are old and in which time himself seems to have
fallen asleep. Wandering to and fro among these sculptured halls, like a
shade among shadows, one seems to have left the world behind; to have
done with the teachings of the present: to belong one’s self to the
past. The very gods assert their ancient influence over those who
question them in solitude. Seen in the fast-deepening gloom of evening,
they look instinct with supernatural life. There were times when I
should scarcely have been surprised to hear them speak--to see them rise
from their painted thrones and come down from the walls. There were
times when I felt I believed in them.
There was something so weird and awful about the place, and it became so
much more weird and awful the farther one went in, that I rarely
ventured beyond the first hall when quite alone. One afternoon, however,
when it was a little earlier, and therefore a little lighter than usual,
I went to the very end and sat at the feet of the gods in the sanctuary.
All at once (I cannot tell why, for my thoughts just then were far away)
it flashed upon me that a whole mountain hung--ready, perhaps, to cave
in--above my head. Seized by a sudden panic such as one feels in dreams,
I tried to run; but my feet dragged and the floor seemed to sink under
them. I felt I could not have called for help, though it had been to
save my life. It is unnecessary, perhaps, to add that the mountain did
not cave in, and that I had my fright for nothing. It would have been a
grand way of dying, all the same; and a still grander way of being
buried. My visits to the great temple were not always so dramatic. I
sometimes took Salame, who smoked cigarettes when not on active duty, or
held a candle while I sketched patterns of cornices, head-dresses of
kings and gods, designs of necklaces and bracelets, heads of captives,
and the like. Sometimes we explored the side-chambers. Of these there
are eight; pitch-dark, and excavated at all kinds of angles. Two or
three are surrounded by stone benches cut in the rock; and in one the
hieroglyphic inscriptions are part cut, part sketched in black and left
unfinished. As this temple is entirely the work of Rameses II, and
betrays no sign of having been added to by any of his successors, these
evidences of incompleteness would seem to show that the king died before
the work was ended.
I was always under the impression that there were secret places yet
undiscovered in these dark chambers, and Salame and I were always
looking for them. At Denderah, at Edfû, at Medinet Habu, at Philæ,[120]
there have been found crypts in the thickness of the walls and recesses
under the pavements, for the safe-keeping of treasure in time of danger.
The rock-cut temples must also have had their hiding-places; and these
would doubtless take the form of concealed cells in the walls, or under
the floors of the side-chambers.
To come out from these black holes into the twilight of the great hall
and see the landscape set, as it were, in the ebon frame of the doorway,
was alone worth the journey to Abou Simbel. The sun being at such times
in the west, the river, the yellow sand-island, the palms and tamarisks
opposite, and the mountains of the eastern desert, were all flooded with
a glory of light and color to which no pen or pencil could possibly do
justice. Not even the mountains of Moab in Holman Hunt’s “Scapegoat”
were so warm with rose and gold.
Thus our days passed at Abou Simbel; the workers working; the idler
idling; strangers from the outer world now and then coming and going.
The heat on shore was great, especially in the sketching-tents; but the
north breeze blew steadily every day from about an hour after sunrise
till an hour before sunset, and on board the dahabeeyah it was always
cool.
The happy couple took advantage of this good wind to do a good deal of
boating, and by judiciously timing their excursions contrived to use the
tail of the day’s breeze for their trip out, and the strong arms of four
good rowers to bring them back again. In this way they managed to see
the little rock-cut temple of Ferayg, which the rest of us unfortunately
missed. On another occasion they paid a visit to a certain sheik who
lived at a village about two miles south of Abou Simbel. He was a great
man, as Nubian magnates go. His name was Hassan Ebn Rashwan el Kashef,
and he was a grandson of that same old Hassan Kashef who was vice-regent
of Nubia in the days of Burckhardt and Belzoni. He received our happy
couple with distinguished hospitality, killed a sheep in their honor,
and entertained them for more than three hours. The meal consisted of an
endless succession of dishes, all of which, like that bugbear of our
childhood, the hated air with variations, went on repeating the same
theme under a multitude of disguises; and, whether roasted, boiled,
stewed or minced, served on skewers, smothered in rice, or drowned in
sour milk, were always mutton _au fond_.
We now despaired of ever seeing a crocodile; and but for a trail that
our men discovered on the island opposite, we should almost have ceased
to believe that there were crocodiles in Egypt. The marks were quite
fresh when we went to look at them. The creature had been basking high
and dry in the sun, and this was the point at which he had gone down
again to the river. The damp sand at the water’s edge had taken the mold
of his huge fleshy paws, and even of the jointed armor of his tail,
though this last impression was somewhat blurred by the final rush with
which he had taken to the water. I doubt if Robinson Crusoe, when he saw
the famous footprint on the shore, was more excited than we of the Philæ
at sight of this genuine and undeniable trail.
As for the idle man, he flew at once to arms and made ready for the
fray. He caused a shallow grave to be dug for himself a few yards from
the spot; then went and lay in it for hours together, morning after
morning, under the full blaze of the sun--flat, patient, alert--with his
gun ready cocked, and a Pall Mall Budget up his back. It was not his
fault if he narrowly escaped sunstroke and had his labor for his reward.
That crocodile was too clever for him and took care never to come back.
Our sailors, meanwhile, though well pleased with an occasional holiday,
began to find Abou Simbel monotonous. As long as the Bagstones stayed,
the two crews met every evening to smoke, and dance, and sing their
quaint roundelays together. But when rumors came of wonderful things
already done this winter above Wady Halfeh--rumors that represented the
second cataract as a populous solitude of crocodiles--then our faithful
consort slipped away one morning before sunrise and the Philæ was left
companionless.
At this juncture, seeing that the men’s time hung heavy on their hands,
our painter conceived the idea of setting them to clean the face of the
northernmost colossus, still disfigured by the plaster left on it when
the great cast[121] was taken by Mr. Hay more than half a century
before. This happy thought was promptly carried into effect. A
scaffolding of spars and oars was at once improvised, and the men,
delighted as children at play, were soon swarming all over the huge
head, just as the carvers may have swarmed over it in the days when
Rameses was king.
All they had to do was to remove any small lumps that might yet adhere
to the surface, and then tint the white patches with coffee. This they
did with bits of sponge tied to the ends of sticks; but Reïs Hassan, as
a mark of dignity, had one of the painter’s old brushes, of which he was
immensely proud.
It took them three afternoons to complete the job; and we were all sorry
when it came to an end. To see Reïs Hassan artistically touching up a
gigantic nose almost as long as himself; Riskalli and the cook-boy
staggering to and fro with relays of coffee, brewed “thick and slab” for
the purpose; Salame perched cross-legged, like some complacent imp, on
the towering rim of the great pschent overhead; the rest chattering and
skipping about the scaffolding like monkeys, was, I will venture to say,
a sight more comic than has ever been seen at Abou Simbel before or
since.
Rameses’ appetite for coffee was prodigious. He consumed I know not how
many gallons a day. Our cook stood aghast at the demand made upon his
stores. Never before had he been called upon to provide for a guest
whose mouth measured three feet and a half in width.
Still, the result justified the expenditure. The coffee proved a capital
match for the sandstone; and though it was not possible wholly to
restore the uniformity of the original surface, we at least succeeded in
obliterating those ghastly splotches, which for so many years have
marred this beautiful face as with the unsightliness of leprosy.
What with boating, fishing, lying in wait for crocodiles, cleaning the
colossus, and filling reams of thin letter paper to friends at home, we
got through the first week quickly enough--the painter and the writer
working hard, meanwhile, in their respective ways; the painter on his
big canvas in front of the temple; the writer shifting her little tent
as she listed.
Now, although the most delightful occupation in life is undoubtedly
sketching, it must be admitted that the sketcher at Abou Simbel works
under difficulties. Foremost among these comes the difficulty of
position. The great temple stands within about twenty-five yards of the
brink of the bank, and the lesser temple within as many feet; so that to
get far enough from one’s subject is simply impossible. The present
writer sketched the small temple from the deck of the dahabeeyah; there
being no point of view obtainable on shore.
Next comes the difficulty of color. Everything, except the sky and the
river, is yellow--yellow, that is to say, “with a difference”; yellow
ranging through every gradation of orange, maize, apricot, gold and
buff. The mountains are sandstone; the temples are sandstone; the
sandslope is powdered sandstone from the sandstone desert. In all these
objects, the scale of color is necessarily the same. Even the shadows,
glowing with reflected light, give back tempered repetitions of the
dominant hue. Hence it follows that he who strives, however humbly, to
reproduce the facts of the scene before him, is compelled, _bon gré, mal
gré_, to execute what some of our young painters would nowadays call a
symphony in yellow.
Lastly, there are the minor inconveniences of sun, sand, wind, and
flies. The whole place radiates heat, and seems almost to radiate light.
The glare from above and the glare from below are alike intolerable.
Dazzled, blinded, unable to even look at his subject without the aid of
smoke-colored glasses, the sketcher whose tent is pitched upon the
sandslope over against the great temple enjoys a foretaste of cremation.
When the wind blows from the north (which at this time of the year is
almost always) the heat is perhaps less distressing, but the sand is
maddening. It fills your hair, your eyes, your water-bottles; silts up
your color-box; dries into your skies; and reduces your Chinese white to
a gritty paste the color of salad-dressing. As for the flies, they have
a morbid appetite for water-colors. They follow your wet brush along the
paper, leave their legs in the yellow ocher, and plunge with avidity
into every little pool of cobalt as it is mixed ready for use. Nothing
disagrees with them; nothing poisons them--not even olive-green.
It was a delightful time, however--delightful alike for those who worked
and those who rested--and these small troubles counted for nothing in
the scale. Yet it was pleasant, all the same, to break away for a day or
two, and be off to Wady Halfeh.