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