MENU. MARCH 31, 1874.White soup:—(Turkey).FISH.Fried Samak.[236]ENTRÉES.Stewed pigeons. Spinach and rice.ROAST.Dall.[237]ENTRÉES.Kebobs[238]of mutton.Tomatoes with rice.Kebobs of lambs’ kidneys.Kuftah.[239]ROAST.Turkey, with cucumber sauce.ENTRÉE.Pilaff[240]of rice.SECOND COURSE.Mish-mish.[241]Kunáfah.[242]Rus Blebban.[243]Totleh.[244]
MENU. MARCH 31, 1874.
White soup:—(Turkey).FISH.Fried Samak.[236]ENTRÉES.Stewed pigeons. Spinach and rice.ROAST.Dall.[237]ENTRÉES.Kebobs[238]of mutton.Tomatoes with rice.Kebobs of lambs’ kidneys.Kuftah.[239]ROAST.Turkey, with cucumber sauce.ENTRÉE.Pilaff[240]of rice.SECOND COURSE.Mish-mish.[241]Kunáfah.[242]Rus Blebban.[243]Totleh.[244]
These dishes were placed one at a time in the middle of the table and rapidly changed. Each dipped his own spoon into the soup, dived into the stew and pulled off pieces of fish or lamb with his fingers. Having no plates, we made plates of our bread. Meanwhile, Mustapha Aga, like an attentive host, tore off an especially choice morsel now and then and handed it to one or other of his guests.
To eat gracefully with one’s fingers is a fine art; to carve with them skillfully is a science. None of us, I think, will soon forget the wonderful way in which our host attacked and vanquished the turkey—a solid colossus weighing twenty pounds, and roasted to perfection. Half rising, he turned back his cuff, poised his wrist, and driving his forefinger and thumb deep into the breast, brought out a long, stringy smoking fragment, which he deposited on the plate of the writer. Thus begun, the turkey went round the table amid peals of laughter and was punished by each in turn. The pilaff which followed is always the last dish served at an Egyptian or Turkish dinner. After this our spoons were changed and the sweets were put upon the table. The drinks throughout were plain water, rice-water and lemonade. Some native musicians played in the ante-room during dinner; and when we rose from the table we washed our hands as before.
We now returned to the large hall, and, not being accomplished in the art and mystery of sitting crossed-legged, curled ourselves up on the divans as best we could. The writer was conducted by Mustapha Aga to the corner seat at the upper end of the room, where he said the Princess of Wales had sat when their royal highnesses dined with him the year before. We were then served with pipes and coffee. The gentlemen smoked chibouques and cigarettes, while for us there were gorgeous rose-water narghilehs with long flexible tubes and amber mouthpieces. L—— had the princess’ pipe and smoked it very cleverly all the evening.
By and by came the governor, the Kadî of Luxor, the Prussian consul and his son and some three or four grave-looking merchants in rich silk robes and ample turbans. Meanwhile the band—two fiddles, a tambourine and a darabukkeh—played at intervals at the lower end of the hall; pipes, coffee and lemonade went continually round; and the entertainment wound up, as native entertainmentsalways do wind up at Luxor, with a performance of Ghawâzi.
We had already seen these dancers at two previous fantasias and we admired them no more the third time than the first. They wore baggy Turkish trousers, loose gowns of gaudy pattern and a profusion of jewelry. Thepremière danseusewas a fine woman and rather handsome; but in the “belle” of the company, a thick-lipped Nubian, we could discover no charm whatever. The performances of the Ghawâzi—which are very ungraceful and almost wholly pantomimic—have been too often described to need description here. Only once, indeed, did we see them perform an actual dance; and then they swam lightly to and fro, clattering their castanets, crossing and re-crossing and bounding every now and then down the whole length of the room. This dance, we were told, was of unknown antiquity. They sang occasionally; but their voices were harsh and their melodies inharmonious.
There was present, however, one native performer whom we had already heard many times and of whose skill we never tired. This was the leader of the little band—an old man who played the kemengeh,[245]or cocoanut fiddle. A more unpromising instrument than the kemengeh it would be difficult to conceive; yet our old Arab contrived to make it discourse most eloquent music. His solos consisted of plaintive airs and extemporized variations, embroidered with difficult and sometimes extravagant cadenzas. He always began sedately, but warmed to his work as he went on; seeming at last to forget everything but his own delight in his own music. At such times one could see that he was weaving some romance in his thoughts and translating it into sounds. As the strings throbbed under his fingers, the whole man became inspired; and more than once when, in shower after shower of keen, despairing notes, he had described the wildest anguish of passion, I have observed his color change and his hand tremble.
Although we heard him repeatedly, and engaged him more than once when we had friends to dinner, I am sorryto say that I forget the name of this really great artist. He is, however, celebrated throughout the Thebaid, and is constantly summoned to Erment, Esneh, Keneh, Girgeh, and other large towns, to perform at private entertainments.
While at Luxor, we went one Sunday morning to the Coptic church—a large building at the northern extremity of the village. Church, schools, and bishop’s house, are here grouped under one roof and inclosed in a court-yard; for Luxor is the center of one of the twelve sees into which Coptic Egypt is divided.
The church, which has been rebuilt of late years, is constructed of sun-dried brick, having a small apse toward the east, and at the lower or western end a screened atrium for the women. The center aisle is perhaps thirty feet in width; the side-aisles, if aisles they can be called, being thickly planted with stone pillars supporting round arches. These pillars came from Karnak, and were the gift of the khedive. They have lotus-bud capitals, and measure about fifteen feet high in the shaft. At the upper end of the nave, some eighteen or twenty feet in advance of the apse, there stands a very beautiful screen inlaid in the old Coptic style with cedar, ebony, rosewood, ivory and mother-of-pearl. This screen is the pride of the church. Through the opening in the center one looks straight into the little wagon-roofed apse, which contains a small table and a suspended lamp, and is as dark as the sanctuary of an Egyptian temple. The reading-desk, like a rickety office stool, faces the congregation; and just inside the screen stands the bishop’s chair. Upon this plan, which closely resembles the plan of the first cathedral of St. Peter at Rome, most Coptic churches are built. They vary chiefly in the number of apses, some having as many as five. The atrium generally contains a large tank, called the Epiphany tank, into which, in memory of the baptism of our Lord, the men plunge at their festivals of El Ghitâs.
Young Todroos, the son of the Prussian consul, conducted us to the church. We went in at about eleven o’clock and witnessed the end of the service, which had then been going on since daybreak. The atrium was crowded with women and children, and the side-aisles with men of the poorer sort. A few groups of better dressed Copts were gathered near the screen listening to ablack-robed deacon, who stood reading at the reading desk with a lighted taper in his left hand. A priest in a white vestment embroidered on the breast and hood with a red Maltese cross, was squatting on his heels at the entrance to the adytum. The bishop, all in black, with a black turban, sat with his back to the congregation.
Every face was turned upon us when we came in. The reader paused. The white-robed priest got up. Even the bishop looked round. Presently a couple of acolytes, each carrying two cane-bottomed chairs, came bustling down the nave; and, unceremoniously driving away all who were standing near, placed us in a row across the middle of the church. This interruption over, the reading was resumed.
We now observed with some surprise that every word of the lessons as they were read in Coptic was translated,viva voce, into Arabic by a youth in a surplice, who stood against the screen facing the congregation. He had no book, but went on fluently enough, following close upon the voice of the reader. This, we were told, was done only during the reading of the lessons, the Gospel, and the Lord’s prayer. The rest of the service is performed without translation; and, the Coptic being a dead language, is consequently unintelligible to the people.
When the reading of the Gospel was over, the deacon retired. The priest then came forward and made a sign to the school-children, who ran up noisily from all parts of the church, and joined with the choristers in a wild kind of chant. It seemed to us that this chant concluded the first part of the service.
The second part closely resembled the celebration of mass. The priest came to the door of the screen; looked at the congregation; folded his hands palm to palm; went up to the threshold of the apse, and began reciting what sounded like a litany. He then uncovered the sacred vessels, which till now had been concealed under two blue cotton handkerchiefs, and, turning, shook the handkerchief toward the people. He then consecrated the wine and wafer; elevated the host; and himself partook of the Eucharist in both elements. A little bell was rung during the consecration and again at the elevation. The people, meanwhile, stood very reverently, with their heads bent; but no one knelt during any part of the service. After this, theofficiating priest washed his hands in a brass basin; and the deacon—who was also the schoolmaster—came round the church holding up his scarf, which was heaped full of little cakes of unleavened bread. These he distributed to all present. An acolyte followed with a plate, and collected the offerings of the congregation.
We now thought the service was over; but there remained four wee, crumpled, brown mites of babies to be christened. These small Copts were carried up the church by four acolytes, followed by four anxious fathers. The priest then muttered a short prayer; crossed the babies with water from the basin in which he had washed his hands; drank the water; wiped the basin out with a piece of bread; ate the bread; and dismissed the little newly made Christians with a hasty blessing.
Finally, the bishop—who had taken no part in the service, nor even partaken of the Eucharist—came down from his chair, and stood before the altar to bless the congregation. Hereupon all the men and boys ranged themselves in single file and trooped through between the screen and the apse, crowding in at one side and out at the other; each being touched by the bishop on his cheek, as he went by. If they lagged, the bishop clapped his hands impatiently, and the schoolmaster drove them through faster. When there were no more to come (the women and little girls, be it observed, coming in for no share of this benediction), the priest took off his vestments and laid them in a heap on the altar; the deacon distributed a basketful of blessed cakes among the poor of the congregation; and the bishop walked down the nave, eating a cake and giving a bit here and there to the best dressed Copts as he went along. So ended this interesting and curious service, which I have described thus minutely for the reason that it represents, with probably but little change, the earliest ceremonial of Christian worship in Egypt.[246]
Before leaving, we asked permission to look at the books from which the service had been read. They were all very old and dilapidated. The new testament, however, was in better condition than the rest, and was beautifully written upon vellum, in red and black ink. The Coptic, of course, looks like Greek to the eyes of the uninitiated; but some of the illuminated capitals struck us as bearing a marked resemblance to certain of the more familiar hieroglyphic characters.
While we were examining the books, the bishop sent his servant to invite us to pay him a visit. We accordingly followed the man up an outer flight of wooden steps at one corner of the court-yard, and were shown into a large room built partly over the church. Here we found the bishop—handsome, plump, dignified, with soft brown eyes, and a slightly grizzled beard—seated cross-legged on a divan, and smoking his chibouque. On a table in the middle of the room stood two or three blue and white bottles of oriental porcelain. The windows, which were sashless and very large, looked over to Karnak. The sparrows flew in and out as they listed.
The bishop received us very amiably, and the proceedings opened as usual with pipes and coffee. The conversation which followed consisted chiefly of questions on our part, and of answers on his. We asked the extent of his diocese, and learned that it reached from Assûan on the south to Keneh on the north. The revenue of the see, he said, was wholly derived from endowments in land. He estimated the number of Copts in Luxor at two thousand, being two-thirds of the entire population. The church was built and decorated in the time of his predecessor. He had himself been bishop here for rather more than four years. We then spoke of the service we had just witnessed, and of the books we had seen. I showed him my prayer-book, which he examined with much curiosity. I explained the differences indicated by the black and the rubricated matter, and pointed out the parts that were sung. He was, however, more interested in the outside than in the contents, and tapped the binding once ortwice, to see if it were leather or wood. As for the gilt corners and clasp, he undoubtedly took them for solid gold.
The conversation next turned upon Coptic; the idle man asking him if he believed it to be the tongue actually spoken by the ancient Egyptians.
To this he replied:
“Yes, undoubtedly. What else should it be?”
The idle man hereupon suggested that it seemed to him, from what he had just seen of the church books, as if it might be a corrupt form of Byzantine Greek.
The bishop shook his head.
“The Coptic is a distinct language,” he said. “Eight Greek letters were added to the Coptic alphabet upon the introduction of Christianity into Egypt; and since that time many Greek words have been imported into the Coptic vocabulary; but the main body of the tongue is Coptic, purely; and it has no radical affinity whatever with the Greek.”[247]
This was the longest speech we heard him make, and he delivered it with some emphasis.
I then asked him if the Coptic was in all respects a dead language; to which he replied that many Coptic words, such as the names of the months and of certain festivals, were still in daily use. This, however, was not quite what I meant; so I put the question in another form, and asked if he thought any fragments of the tongue yet survived among the peasantry.
He pondered a moment before replying.
“That,” he said, “is a question to which it is difficult to give a precise answer, but I think you might yet find in some of the remoter villages an old man, here and there, who would understand it a little.”
I thought this a very interesting reply to a very interesting question.
After sitting about half an hour we rose and took leave. The bishop shook hands with us all round, and, but that we protested against it, would have accompanied us to the head of the stairs.
This interview was altogether very pleasant. The Copts are said to be sullen in manner and so bigoted that even a Moslem is less an object of dislike to them than a Christian of any other denomination. However this may be, we saw nothing of it. We experienced, on the contrary, many acts of civility from the Copts with whom we were brought into communication. No traveler in Egypt should, I think, omit being present at a service in a Coptic church. For a Coptic church is now the only place in which one may hear the last utterances of that far-off race with whose pursuits and pleasures the tomb paintings make us so familiar. We know that great changes have come over the language since it was spoken by Rameses the Great and written by Pentaur. We know that the Coptic of to-day bears to the Egyptian of the Pharaohs some such resemblance, perhaps, as the English of Macaulay bears to the English of Chaucer. Yet it is at bottom the tongue of old Egypt, and it is something to hear the last lingering echoes of that ancient speech read by the undoubted descendants of the Egyptian people. In anotherfifty years or so, the Coptic will, in all probability, be superseded by the Arabic in the services of this church; and then the very tradition of its pronunciation will be lost. The Copts themselves, it is said, are fast going over to the dominant faith. Perhaps by the time our own descendants are counting the two thousandth anniversary of the Christian era, both Copts and Coptic will be extinct in Egypt.
A day or two after this we dropped down to Karnak, where we remained till the end of the week, and on the following Sunday we resumed our downward voyage.
If the universe of literature was unconditioned and the present book was independent of time and space, I would write another chapter here about Karnak. But Karnak, to be fairly dealt by, would ask, not a chapter, but a volume. So, having already told something of the impression first made upon us by that wilderness of wonders, I will say no more.
Ourlast weeks on the Nile went by like one long, lazy, summer’s day. Events now were few. We had out-stayed all our fellow-travelers. Even the faithful Bagstones had long since vanished northward; and the Philæ was the last dahabeeyah of the year. Of the great sights of the river, we had only Abydus and Beni Hassan left to see; while for minor excursions, daily walks and explorations by the way, we had little energy left. For the thermometer was rising higher and the Nile was falling lower every day; and we should have been more than mortal if we had not felt the languid influences of the glowing Egyptian spring.
The natives call it spring; but to our northern fancy it is spring, summer and autumn in one. Of the splendor of the skies, of the lavish bounty of the soil at this season, only those who have lingered late in the land can form any conception. There is a breadth of repose now about the landscape which it has never worn before. The winter green of the palms is fading fast. The harvests are ripening; the pigeons are pairing; the time of the singing of birds is come. There is just enough south wind most days to keep the boat straight and the sail from flapping. The heat is great; yet it is a heat which, up to a certain point, one can enjoy. The men ply their oars by night and sleep under their benches or croon old songs and tell stories among themselves by day. But for the thin canopy of smoke that hangs over the villages one would fancy now that those clusters of mud huts were all deserted. Not a human being is to be seen on the banks when the sun is high. The buffaloes stand up to their necks in the shallows. The donkeys huddle together wherever there is shade. The very dogs have given up barking and lie asleep under the walls.
The whole face of the country, and even of the Nile, iswonderfully changed since we first passed this way. The land, then newly squared off like a gigantic chess-board and intersected by thousands of little channels, is now one sea of yellowing grain. The river is become a labyrinth of sand-banks, some large, some small; some just beginning to thrust their heads above water; others so long that they divide the river for a mile or more at a stretch. Reïs Hassan spends half his life at the prow, poling for shallows; and when we thread our way down one of these sandy straits, it is for all the world like a bit of the Suez canal. The banks, too, are twice as steep as they were when we went up. The lentil patches, which then blossomed on the slope next the water’s edge, now lie far back on the top of a steep brown ridge, at the foot of which stretches a moist flat planted with watermelons. Each melon-plant is protected from the sun by a tiny gable-roof of palm-thatch.
Meanwhile, the river being low and the banks high, we unfortunates benefit scarcely at all by the faint breezes that now and then ruffle the barley. Day by day, the thermometer (which hangs in the coolest corner of the saloon) creeps up higher and higher, working its way by degrees to above 99°; but never succeeding in getting up quite to 100°. We, however, living in semi-darkness, with closed jalousies, and wet sails hung round the sides of the dahabeeyah, and wet towels hung up in our cabins, find 99° quite warm enough to be pleasant. The upper deck is, of course, well deluged several times a day; but even so, it is difficult to keep the timbers from starting. Meanwhile L—— and the idle man devote their leisure to killing flies, keeping the towels wet, and sprinkling the floors.
Our progress all this time is of the slowest. The men cannot row by day; and at night the sand-banks so hedge us in with dangers that the only possible way by which we can make a few miles between sunset and sunrise is by sheer hard punting. Now and then we come to a clear channel, and sometimes we get an hour or two of sweet south breeze; but these flashes of good luck are few and far between.
In such wise, and in such a temperature, we found ourselves becalmed one morning within six miles of Denderah. Not even L—— could be induced to take a six-mile donkey-ride that day in the sun. The writer, however,ordered out her sketching-tent and paid a last visit to the temple; which, seen amid the ripening splendor of miles of barley, looked gloomier and grander and more solitary than ever.
Two or three days later we came within reach of Abydus. Our proper course would have been to push on to Bellianeh, which is one of the recognized starting-points for Abydus. But an unlucky sand-bank barred the way; so we moored instead at Samata, a village about two miles nearer to the southward. Here our dragoman requisitioned the inhabitants for donkeys. As it happened, the harvest had begun in the neighborhood and all the beasts of burden were at work, so that it was near midday before we succeeded in getting together the three or four wretched little brutes with which we finally started. Not one of these steeds had ever before carried a rider. We had a frightful time with them. My donkey bolted about every five minutes. L——’s snarled like a camel and showed its teeth like a dog. The idle man’s, bent on flattening its rider, lay down and rolled at short intervals. In this exciting fashion we somehow or other accomplished the seven miles that separate Samata from Abydus. Skirting some palm-groves and crossing the dry bed of a canal, we came out upon a vast plain, level as a lake, islanded here and there with villages, and presenting one undulating surface of bearded corn. This plain—the plain of ancient Thinis—runs parallel with the Nile, like the plain of Thebes, and is bounded to the westward by a range of flat-topped mountains. The distance between the river and the mountains, however, is here much greater than at Thebes, being full six miles; while to north and south the view ends only with the horizon.
Our way lies at first by a bridle-track through the thick of the barley; then falls into the Bellianeh road—a raised causeway, embanked some twenty feet above the plain. Along this road the country folk are coming and going. In the cleared spaces where the maize has been cut, little encampments of straw huts have sprung up. Yonder, steering their way by unseen paths, go strings of camels; their gawky necks and humped backs undulating above the surface of the corn, like galleys with fantastic prows upon a sea of rippling green. The pigeons fly in great clouds from village to village. The larks are singingand circling madly in the clear depths overhead. The bee-eaters flash like live emeralds across our path. The hoopoes strut by the wayside. At rather more than half-way across the plain we come into the midst of the harvest. Here the brown reapers, barelegged and naked to the waist, are at work with their sickles, just as they are pictured in the tomb of Tih. The women and children follow, gleaning, at the heels of those who bind the sheaves. The sheik in his black robe and scarlet slippers rides to and fro upon his ass, like Boaz among his people. As the sheaves are bound up the camels carry them homeward. A camel-load is fourteen sheaves; seven to each side of the hump. A little farther and the oxen, yoked two and two, are plowing up the stubble. In a day or two the land will be sown with millet, indigo, or cotton, to be gathered in once more before the coming of the inundation.
Meanwhile, as the plain lengthens behind us and the distance grows less between ourselves and the mountains, we see a line of huge irregular mounds reaching for apparently a couple of miles or more along the foot of the cliffs. From afar off the mounds look as if crowned by majestic ruins, but as we draw nearer these outlines resolve themselves into the village of Arabát-el-Madfûneh, which stands upon part of the mounds of Abydus. And now we come to the end of the cultivated plain—that strange line of demarcation where the inundation stops and the desert begins. Of actual desert, however, there is here but a narrow strip, forming a first step, as it were, above the alluvial plain. Next comes the artificial platform, about a quarter of a mile in depth, on which stands the modern village; and next again, towering up sheer and steep, the great wall of limestone precipice. The village is extensive and the houses, built in a rustic arabesque, tell of a well-to-do population. Arched gateways ornamented with black, white and red bricks, windows of turned lattice-work and pigeon-towers in courses of pots and bricks, give a singular picturesqueness to the place; while the slope down to the desert is covered with shrubberies and palms. Below these hanging gardens, on the edge of the desert, lies the cut corn in piles of sheaves. Here the camels are lying down to be unladen. Yonder the oxen are already treading out the grain, or chopping the straw by means of a curious sledge-like machine set with rows of revolving circularknives.[248]Meanwhile, fluttering from heap to heap, settling on the sheaves, feeding unmolested in the very midst of the threshing-floors, strutting all over the margin of the desert, trailing their wings, ruffling their plumes, cooing, courtesying, kissing, courting, filling the air with sweet sounds and setting the whole lovely idyl to a pastoral symphony of their own composing, are thousands and tens of thousands of pigeons.[249]
Now our path turns aside and we thread our way among the houses, noticing here a sculptured block built into a mud wall—yonder, beside a dried-up well, a broken alabaster sarcophagus—farther on, a granite column, still erect, in the midst of a palm-garden. And now, the village being left behind, we find ourselves at the foot of a great hill of newly excavated rubbish, from the top of which we presently look down into a kind of crater, and see the great Temple of Abydus at our feet.
It was now nearly three o’clock; so, having seen what we could in the time and having before us a long ride through a strange country, we left again at six. I will not presume to describe the temples of Abydus—one of which is so ruined as to be almost unintelligible, and the other so singularly planned and so obscure in its general purport as to be a standing puzzle to archæologists—after a short visit of three hours. Enough if I sketch briefly what I saw but cursorily.
Buried as it, Abydus,[250]even under its mounds, is a place of profound historical interest. At a time so remote that it precedes all written record of Egyptian story, there existed a little way to the northward of this site a citycalled Teni.[251]We know not to what aboriginal community of prehistoric Egypt this city belonged; but here, presumedly, the men of Kem[252]built their first temple, evolved their first notions of art and groped their way to an alphabet which, in its origin, was probably a mere picture-writing, like the picture-writing of Mexico. Hence, too, came a man named Mena, whose cartouche from immemorial time has stood first in the long list of Egyptian Pharaohs. Of Mena,[253]a shadowy figure hovering on the border-land of history and tradition, we know only that he was the first primitive chieftain who took the title of king of Upper and Lower Egypt and that he went northward and founded Memphis. Not, however, till after some centuries was the seat of government removed to the new city. Teni—the supposed burial-place of Osiris—then lost its political importance; but continued to be for long ages the holy city of Egypt.
In the meanwhile, Abydus had sprung up close to Teni. Abydus, however, though an important city, was never thecapital of Egypt. The seat of power shifted strangely with different dynasties, being established now in the delta, now at Thebes, now at Elephantine; but having once departed from the site which, by reason of its central position and the unbounded fertility of its neighborhood, was above all others best fitted to play this great part in the history of the country, it never again returned to the point from which it had started. That point, however, was unquestionably the center from which the great Egyptian people departed upon its wonderful career. Here was the nursery of its strength. Hence it derived its proud title to an unmixed autochthonous descent. For no greater proof of the native origin of the race can be adduced than the position which their first city occupies upon the map of Egypt. That any tribe of colonists should have made straight for the heart of the country and there have established themselves in the midst of barbarous and probably hostile aborigines is evidently out of the question. It is, on the other hand, equally clear that if Egypt had been colonized from Asia or Ethiopia, the strangers would, on the one hand, have founded their earliest settlement in the neighborhood of the isthmus; or, on the other, have halted first among the then well-watered plains of Nubia.[254]But the Egyptians started from the fertile heart of their own mother country and began by being great at home.
Abydus and Teni, planted on the same platform of desert, were probably united at one time by a straggling suburb inhabited by the embalmers and other tradesfolk concerned in the business of death and burial. A chain of mounds, excavated only where the temples were situated, now stand to us for the famous city of Abydus. An ancient crude-brick inclosure and an artificial tumulus mark the site of Teni. The temples and the tumulus, divided by the now exhausted necropolis, and about as distant from one another as Medinet Habu and the Ramesseum.
There must have been many older temples at Abydus than these which we now see, one of which was built by Seti I, and the other by Rameses II. Or possibly, as inso many instances, the more ancient buildings were pulled down and rebuilt. Be this as it may, the temple of Seti, as regards its sculptured decorations, is one of the most beautiful of Egyptian ruins; and as regards its plan, is one of the most singular. A row of square limestone piers, which must once have supported an architrave, are now all that remains of the façade. Immediately behind these comes a portico of twenty-four columns leading by seven entrances to a hall of thirty-six columns. This hall again opens into seven parallel sanctuaries, behind which lie another hall of columns and a number of small chambers. So much of the building seems to be homogeneous. Adjoining this block, however, and leading from it by doorways at the southern end of the great hall, come several more halls and chambers connected by corridors, and conducting apparently to more chambers not yet excavated. All these piers, columns, halls, and passages, and all the seven sanctuaries,[255]are most delicately sculptured and brilliantly colored.
There is so far a family resemblance between temples of the same style and period that, after a little experience, one can generally guess before crossing the threshold of a fresh building what one is likely to see in the way of sculptures within. But almost every subject in the temple of Seti at Abydus is new and strange. All the gods of the Egyptian pantheon seem to have been worshiped here and to have had each his separate shrine. The walls are covered with paintings of these shrines and their occupants; while before each the king is represented performing some act of adoration. A huge blue frog, a greyhound, a double-headed goose, a human-bodied creature with a Nilometer for its head,[256]and many more than I can now remember, are thus depicted. The royal offerings, too, though incense and necklaces and pectoral ornaments abound, are for the most part of a kind that we have not seen before. In one place the king presents to Isis a column with four capitals, having on the top capital a globe and two asps surmounted by a pair of ostrich feathers.
The center sanctuary of the seven appears to be dedicated to Khem, who seems to be here, as in the great temple of Seti at Karnak, the presiding divinity. In this principal sanctuary, which is resplendent with color and in marvelous preservation, we especially observed a portrait of Rameses II[257]in the act of opening the door of a shrine bymeans of a golden key formed like a human hand and arm. The lock seems to consist of a number of bolts of unequal length, each of which is pushed back in turn by means of the forefinger of the little hand. This, doubtless, gives a correct representation of the kind of locks in use at that time.
It was in a corridor opening out from the great hall in this temple that Mariette discovered that precious sculpture known as the new tablet of Abydus. In this tableau, Seti I and Rameses II are seen, the one offering incense, the other reciting a hymn of praise, to the manes of seventy-six Pharaohs,[258]beginning with Mena, and ending with Seti himself. To our great disappointment—though one cannot but acquiesce in the necessity for precaution—we found the entrance to this corridor closed and mounded up. A ragged old Arab who haunts the temple in the character of custode, told us that the tablet could now only be seen by special permission.
We seemed to have been here about half an hour when the guide came to warn us of approaching evening. We had yet the site of the great Tumulus of Teni to see; the tumulus being distant about twenty minutes’ ride. The guide shook his head; but we insisted on going. The afternoon had darkened over; and for the first time in many months a gathering canopy of cloud shut out the glory of sunset. We, however, mounted our donkeys and rode northward. With better beasts we might perhaps have gained our end; as it was, seeing that it grew darkerevery moment, we presently gave in, and instead of trying to push on farther, contented ourselves with climbing a high mound which commanded the view toward Teni.
The clouds by this time were fast closing round, and waves of shadows were creeping over the plain. To our left rose the near mountain-barrier, dusk and lowering; to our right stretched the misty corn-flats; at our feet, all hillocks and open graves, lay the desolate necropolis. Beyond the palms that fringed the edge of the desert—beyond a dark streak that marked the site of Teni—rose, purple in shadow against the twilight, a steep and solitary hill. This hill, called by the natives Kom-es-Sultan, or the Mound of the King, was the tumulus we so desired to see. Viewed from a distance and by so uncertain a light, it looked exactly like a volcanic cone of perhaps a couple of hundred feet in height. It is, however, wholly artificial, and consists of a mass of graves heaped one above another in historic strata; each layer, as it were, the record of an era; the whole, a kind of human coral reef built up from age to age with the ashes of generations.
For some years past, the Egyptian government had been gradually excavating this extraordinary mound. The lower it was opened the more ancient were its contents. So steadily retrogressive, indeed, were the interments, that it seemed as if the spade of the digger might possibly strike tombs of the first dynasty, and so restore to light relics of men who lived in the age of Mena. “According to Plutarch,” wrote Mariette,[259]“wealthy Egyptians came from all parts of Egypt to be buried at Abydus, in order that their bones might rest near Osiris. Very probably the tombs of Kom-es-Sultan belong to those personages mentioned by Plutarch. Nor is this the only interest attaching to the mound of Kom-es-Sultan. The famous tomb of Osiris cannot be far distant; and certain indications lead us to think that it is excavated in precisely that foundation of rock which serves as the nucleus of this mound. Thus the persons buried in Kom-es-Sultan lay as near as possible to the divine tomb. The works now in progress at this point have, therefore, a twofold interest. They may yield tombs yet more and more ancient—tombseven of the first dynasty; and some day or another they may discover to us the hitherto unknown and hidden entrance to the tomb of the god.”[260]
I bitterly regretted at the time that I could not at least ride to the foot of Kom-es-Sultan; but I think now that I prefer to remember it as I saw it from afar off, clothed in mystery, in the gloom of that dusky evening.
There was a heavy silence in the air, and a melancholy as of the burden of ages. The tumbled hillocks looked like a ghastly sea, and beyond the verge of the desert it was already night. Presently, from among the grave-pits, there crept toward us a slowly moving cloud. As it drew nearer—soft, filmy, shifting, unreal—it proved to be the dust raised by an immense flock of sheep. On they came, a brown compact mass, their shepherd showing dimly now and then through openings in the cloud. The last pale gleam from above caught them for a moment ere they melted, ghostlike, into the murky plain. Then we went down ourselves, and threaded the track between the mounds and the valley. Palms and houses loomed vaguely out of the dusk; and a caravan of camels, stalking by with swift and noiseless footfall, looked like shadows projected on a background of mist. As the night deepened the air became stifling. There were no stars and we could scarcely see a yard before us. Crawling slowly along the steep causeway, we felt, but could distinguish nothing of the plain stretching away on either side. Meanwhile the frogs croaked furiously, and our donkeys stumbled at every step. When at length we drew near Samata, it was close upon ten o’clock, and Reïs Hassan had just started with men and torches to meet us.
Next morning early we once again passed Girgeh, with its ruined mosque and still unfallen column; and about noonday moored at a place called Ayserat, where we paid a visit to a native gentleman, one Ahmed Abû Ratab Aga, to whom we carried letters of introduction. Ratab Aga owns large estates in this province; is great in horseflesh; and lives in patriarchal fashion surrounded by a numerous clan of kinsfolk and dependents. His residence as Ayserat consists of a cluster of three or four large houses, a scoreor so of pigeon-towers, an extensive garden, stabling, exercising ground, and a large court-yard; the whole inclosed by a wall of circuit and entered by a fine arabesque gateway. He received us in a loggia of lattice-work overlooking the court-yard, and had three of his finest horses—a gray, a bay, and a chestnut—brought out for us to admire. They were just such horses as Velasquez loved to paint—thick in the neck, small in the head, solid in the barrel, with wavy manes, and long silky tails set high and standing off straight in true Arab fashion. We doubted, however, that they were altogetherpur sang. They looked wonderfully picturesque with their gold embroidered saddle-cloths, peaked saddles covered with crimson, green, and blue velvet, long shovel stirrups and tasseled head-gear. The Aga’s brother and nephews put them through their paces. They knelt to be mounted; lay down and died at the word of command; dashed from perfect immobility into a furious gallop; and when at fullest speed, stopped short, flung themselves back upon their haunches, and stood like horses of stone. We were told that our host had a hundred such standing in his stables. Pipes, coffee, and an endless succession of different kinds of sherbets went round all the time our visit lasted; and in the course of conversation, we learned that not only the wages of agricultural laborers, but even part of the taxes to the khedive, are here paid in corn.
Before leaving, L——, the little lady and the writer were conducted to the hareem and introduced to the ladies of the establishment. We found them in a separate building, with a separate court-yard, living after the usual dreary way of eastern women, with apparently no kind of occupation and not even a garden to walk in. The Aga’s principal wife (I believe he had but two), was a beautiful woman, with auburn hair, soft brown eyes, and a lovely complexion. She received us on the threshold, led us into a saloon surrounded by a divan and with some pride showed us her five children. The eldest was a graceful girl of thirteen; the youngest a little fellow of four. Mother and daughter were dressed alike in black robes embroidered with silver, pink velvet slippers on bare feet, silver bracelets and anklets and full pink Turkish trousers. They wore their hair cut straight across the brow, plaited in long tails behind and dressed with coins and pendants;while from the back of the head there hung a veil of thin black gauze, also embroidered with silver. Another lady, whom we took for the second wife and who was extremely plain, had still richer and more massive ornaments, but seemed to hold an inferior position in the hareem. There were perhaps a dozen women and girls in all, two of whom were black.
One of the little boys had been ill all his short life and looked as if he could not last many more months. The poor mother implored us to prescribe for him. It was in vain to tell her that we knew nothing of the nature of his disease and had no skill to cure it. She still entreated and would take no refusal; so in pity we sent her some harmless medicines.
We had little opportunity of observing domestic life in Egypt. L—— visited some of the vice-regal hareems at Cairo and brought away on each occasion the same impression of dreariness. A little embroidery, a few musical toys of Geneva manufacture, a daily drive on the Shubra road, pipes, cigarettes, sweetmeats, jewelry and gossip, fill up the aimless days of most Egyptian ladies of rank. There are, however, some who take an active interest in politics; and in Cairo and Alexandria the opera-boxes of the khedive and the great pashas are nightly occupied by ladies. But it is not by the daily life of the wives of princes and nobles, but by the life of the lesser gentry and upper middle-class, that a domestic system should be judged. These ladies of Ayserat had no London-built brougham, no Shuba road, no opera. They were absolutely without mental resources; and they were even without the means of taking air and exercise. One could see that time hung heavy on their hands, and that they took but a feeble interest in the things around them. The hareem stairs were dirty; the rooms were untidy; the general aspect of the place was slatternly and neglected. As for the inmates, though all good-nature and gentleness, their faces bore the expression of people who are habitually bored. At Luxor, L—— and the writer paid a visit to the wife of an intelligent and gentlemanly Arab, son of the late governor of that place. This was a middle-class hareem. The couple were young and not rich. They occupied a small house which commanded no view and had no garden. Their little court-yard was given up to the poultry; their tinyterrace above was less than twelve feet square; and they were surrounded on all sides by houses. Yet in this stifling prison the young wife lived, apparently contented, from year’s end to year’s end. She literally never went out. As a child, she had no doubt enjoyed some kind of liberty; but as a marriageable girl, and as a bride, she was as much a prisoner as a bird in a cage. Born and bred in Luxor, she had never seen Karnak; yet Karnak is only two miles distant. We asked her if she would like to go there with us; but she laughed and shook her head. She was incapable even of curiosity.
It seemed to us that the wives of the fellahîn were in truth the happiest women in Egypt. They work hard and are bitterly poor; but they have the free use of their limbs and they at least know the fresh air, the sunshine and the open fields.
When we left Ayserat, there still lay three hundred and thirty-five miles between us and Cairo. From this time the navigation of the Nile became every day more difficult. The dahabeeyah, too, got heated through and through, so that not even sluicing and swabbing availed to keep down the temperature. At night when we went to our sleeping-cabins, the timbers alongside of our berths were as hot to the hand as a screen in front of a great fire. Our crew, though to the manner born, suffered even more than ourselves; and L—— at this time had generally a case of sunstroke on her hands. One by one, we passed the places we had seen on our way up—Siût, Manfalût, Gebel Abufayda, Roda, Minieh. After all, we did not see Beni Hassan. The day we reached that part of the river, a furious sandstorm was raging; such a storm that even the writer was daunted. Three days later, we took the rail at Bibbeh and went on to Cairo, leaving the Philæ to follow as fast as wind and weather might permit.
We were so wedded by this time to dahabeeyah life, that we felt lost at first in the big rooms at Shepheard’s hotel, and altogether bewildered in the crowded streets. Yet here was Cairo, more picturesque, more beautiful than ever. Here were the same merchants squatting on the same carpets and smoking the same pipes, in the Tunis bazaar; here was the same old cake seller still ensconced in the same doorway in the Muski; here were the same jewelers selling bracelets in the Khan-Khalîli; the same money-changers sitting behind their little tables at the corners of the streets; the same veiled ladies riding on donkeys and driving in carriages; the same hurrying funerals and noisy weddings; the same odd cries and motley costumes and unaccustomed trades. Nothing was changed. We soon dropped back into the old life of sight-seeing and shopping—buying rugs and silks and silver ornaments and old embroideries and Turkish slippers and all sorts of antique and pretty trifles; going from Mohammedan mosques to rare old Coptic churches; dropping in for an hour or two most afternoons at the Boulak museum; and generally ending the day’s work with a drive on the Shubra road, or a stroll round the Esbekiyeh gardens.
The Môlid-en-Nebi, or festival of the birth of the prophet, was being held at this time in a tract of waste ground on the road to old Cairo. Here, in some twenty or thirty large open tents ranged in a circle, there were readings of the Koran and meetings of dervishes going on by day and night, without intermission, for nearly a fortnight. After dark, when the tents were all ablaze with lighted chandeliers, and the dervishes were howling and leaping, and fire-works were being let off from an illuminated platform in the middle of the area, the scene was extraordinary. All Cairo used to be there, on foot or in carriages, between eight o’clock and midnight every evening; the veiled ladies of the khedive’s hareem in their miniature broughams being foremost among the spectators.
The Môlid-en-Nebi ends with the performance of the Dóseh, when the sheik of the Saädîyeh dervishes rides over a road of prostrate fanatics. L—— and the writer witnessed this sight from the tent of the Governor of Cairo. Drunk with opium, fasting and praying, rolling their heads and foaming at the mouth, some hundreds of wretched creatures lay down in the road packed as close as paving-stones, and were walked and ridden over before our eyes. The standard-bearers came first; then a priest reading the Koran aloud; then the sheik on his white Arab, supported on either side by barefooted priests. The beautiful horse trod with evident reluctance and as lightly and swiftly as possible on the human causeway under his hoofs. The Mohammedans aver that no one is injured or even bruised[261]on this holy occasion; but I saw some men carriedaway in convulsions, who looked as if they would never walk again.[262]
It is difficult to say but a few inadequate words of a place about which an instructive volume might be written; yet to pass the Boulak Museum in silence is impossible. This famous collection is due, in the first instance, to the liberality of the late khedive and the labors of Mariette. With the exception of Mehemet Ali, who excavated the Temple of Denderah, no previous viceroy of Egypt had ever interested himself in the archæology of the country. Those who cared for such rubbish as encumbered the soil or lay hidden beneath the sands of the desert, were free to take it; and no favor was more frequently asked or more readily granted than permission to dig for “anteekahs.” Hence the Egyptian wealth of our museums. Hence the numerous private collections dispersed throughout Europe. Ismail Pasha, however, put an end to that wholesale pillage; and for the first time since ever “mummy was sold for balsam,” or for bric-à-brac, it became illegal to transport antiquities. Thus, for the first time, Egypt began to possess a national collection.
Youngest of great museums, the Boulak collection is the wealthiest in the world in portrait-statues of private individuals, in funerary tablets, in amulets and in personal relics of the ancient inhabitants of the Nile valley. It is necessarily less rich in such colossal statues as fill the great galleries of the British Museum, the Turin Museum and the Louvre. These, being above ground and comparatively few in number, were for the most part seized upon long since and transported to Europe. The Boulak statues are the product of the tombs. The famous wooden “sheik,” about which so much has been written,[263]the magnificentdiorite statue of Khafra (Chephren), the builder of the second pyramid, the two marvelous sitting statues of Prince Ra-hotep and Princess Nefer-t, are all portraits; and, like their tombs, were executed during the lifetime of the persons represented. Crossing the threshold of the great vestibule,[264]one is surrounded by a host of these extraordinary figures, erect, colored, clothed, all but in motion. It is like entering the crowded ante-room of a royal palace in the time of the ancient empire.
The greater number of the Boulak portrait statues are sculptured in what is called the hieratic attitude; that is, with the left arm down and pressed close to the body, the left hand holding a roll of papyrus, the right leg advanced and the right hand raised, as grasping the walking-staff. It occurred to me that there might be a deeper significance than at first sight appears in this conventional attitude, and that it perhaps suggests the moment of resurrection, when the deceased, holding fast by his copy of the book of the dead, walks forth from his tomb into the light of life eternal.
Of all the statues here—one may say, indeed, of all known Egyptian statues—those of Prince Ra-hotep and Princess Nefer-t are the most wonderful. They are probably the oldest portrait-statues in the world.[265]They come from a tomb of the third dynasty, and are contemporary with Snefru, a king who reigned before the time of Khufu and Khafra. That is to say, these people who sit before us side by side, colored to the life, fresh and glowing as the day when they gave the artist his last sitting, lived at a time when the great pyramids of Ghîzeh were not yet built, and at a date which is variously calculated as from about six thousand three hundred to four thousand years before the present day. The princess wears her hair precisely as it is still worn in Nubia, and her necklace of cabochon drops is of a pattern much favored by the modernGhawâzi. The eyes of both statues are inserted. The eyeball, which is set in an eyelid of bronze, is made of opaque white quartz, with an iris of rock-crystal inclosing a pupil of some kind of brilliant metal. This treatment—of which there are one or two other instances extant—gives to the eyes a look of intelligence that is almost appalling. There is a play of light within the orb, and apparently a living moisture upon the surface, which has never been approached by the most skillfully made glass eyes of modern manufacture.[266]