Second Horseman

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Second Horseman

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.
the first, wetting it with muddy water, and working into it sand, clay,
and tufts of dead hair. What a way to spend Sunday!
This is, on the whole, a model village. The people appear to have
nothing, and perhaps they want nothing. They do nothing, and I
suppose they would thank no one for coming to increase their wants
and set them to work. Nature is their friend.
I wonder what the staple of conversation of these people is, since
the weather offers nothing, being always the same, and always fine.
A day and a night and a day we fight adverse winds, and make no
headway. One day we lie at Farras, a place of no consequence, but
having, almost as a matter of course, ruins of the time of the
Romans and the name Rameses II. cut on a rock. In a Roman wall
we find a drain-tile exactly like those we use now. In the evening,
after moon-rise, we drop down to Aboo Simbel.
CHAPTER XXIV.—GIANTS IN STONE.

W
HEN daylight came the Colossi of Aboo Simbel (or
Ipsambool) were looking into our windows; greeting the
sunrise as they have done every morning for three
thousand five hundred years; and keeping guard still over the
approach to the temple, whose gods are no longer anywhere
recognized, whose religion disappeared from the earth two thousand
years ago:—vast images, making an eternity of time in their silent
waiting.
The river here runs through an unmitigated desert. On the east
the sand is brown, on the west the sand is yellow; that is the only
variety. There is no vegetation, there are no habitations, there is no
path on the shore, there are no footsteps on the sand, no one
comes to break the spell of silence. To find such a monument of
ancient power and art as this temple in such a solitude enhances the
visitor's wonder and surprise. The Pyramids, Thebes, and Aboo
Simbel are the three wonders of Egypt. But the great temple of Aboo
Simbel is unique. It satisfies the mind. It is complete in itself, it is the
projection of one creative impulse of genius. Other temples are
growths, they have additions, afterthoughts, we can see in them the
workings of many minds and many periods. This is a complete
thought, struck out, you would say, at a heat.
In order to justify this opinion, I may be permitted a little detail
concerning this temple, which impressed us all as much as anything
in Egypt. There are two temples here, both close to the shore, both
cut in the mountain of rock which here almost overhangs the
stream. We need not delay to speak of the smaller one, although it
would be wonderful, if it were not for the presence of the larger.
Between the two was a rocky gorge. This is now nearly filled up, to
the depth of a hundred feet, by the yellow sand that has drifted and
still drifts over from the level of the desert hills above.
 This sand, which drifts exactly like snow, lies in ridges like snow,
and lies loose and sliding under the feet or packs hard like snow,
once covered the façade of the big temple altogether, and now hides
a portion of it. The entrance to the temple was first cleared away in
1817 by Belzoni and his party, whose gang of laborers worked eight
hours a day for two weeks with the thermometer at 1120 to 1160
Fahrenheit in the shade—an almost incredible endurance when you
consider what the heat must have been in the sun beating upon this
dazzling wall of sand in front of them.
The rock in which the temple is excavated was cut back a
considerable distance, but in this cutting the great masses were left
which were to be fashioned into the four figures. The façade thus
made, to which these statues are attached, is about one hundred
feet high. The statues are seated on thrones with no intervening
screens, and, when first seen, have the appearance of images in
front of and detached from the rock of which they form a part. The
statues are all tolerably perfect, except one, the head of which is
broken and lies in masses at its feet; and at the time of our visit the
sand covered the two northernmost to the knees. The door of
entrance, over which is a hawk-headed figure of Re, the titular
divinity, is twenty feet high. Above the colossi, and as a frieze over
the curve of the cornice, is a row of monkeys, (there were twenty-
one originally, but some are split away), like a company of negro
minstrels, sitting and holding up their hands in the most comical
manner. Perhaps the Egyptians, like the mediaeval cathedral
builders, had a liking for grotesque effects in architecture; but they
may have intended nothing comic here, for the monkey had sacred
functions; he was an emblem of Thoth, the scribe of the under-
world, who recorded the judgments of Osiris.
These colossi are the largest in the world *; they are at least
fifteen feet higher than the wonders of Thebes, but it is not their
size principally that makes their attraction. As works of art they are
worthy of study. Seated, with hands on knees, in that eternal,
traditional rigidity of Egyptian sculpture, nevertheless the grandeur
of the head and the noble beauty of the face take them out of the
category of mechanical works. The figures represent Rameses II.
and the features are of the type which has come down to us as the
perfection of Egyptian beauty.

* The following are some of the measurements of one of these

giants:—height of figure sixty-six feet; pedestal on which
it sits, ten; leg from knee to heel, twenty; great toe, one
and a half feet thick; ear, three feet, five inches long;
fore-finger, three feet; from inner side of elbow-joint to
end of middle finger, fifteen feet.

I climbed up into the lap of one of the statues; it is there only that
you can get an adequate idea of the size of the body. What a roomy
lap! Nearly ten feet between the wrists that rest upon the legs! I sat
comfortably in the navel of the statue, as in a niche, and mused on
the passing of the nations. To these massive figures the years go by
like the stream. With impassive, serious features, unchanged in
expression in thousands of years, they sit listening always to the
flowing of the unending Nile, that fills all the air and takes away
from that awful silence which would else be painfully felt in this
solitude.
The interior of this temple is in keeping with its introduction. You
enter a grand hall supported by eight massive Osiride columns,
about twenty-two feet high as we estimated them. They are figures
of Rameses become Osiris—to be absorbed into Osiris is the end of
all the transmigrations of the blessed soul. The expression of the
faces of such of these statues as are uninjured, is that of immortal
youth—a beauty that has in it the promise of immortality. The sides
of this hall are covered with fine sculptures, mainly devoted to the
exploits of Rameses II.; and here is found again, cut in the stone the
long Poem of the poet Pentaour, celebrating the single-handed
exploit of Rameses against the Khitas on the river Orontes. It relates
that the king, whom his troops dared not follow, charged with his
chariot alone into the ranks of the enemy and rode through them
again and again, and slew them by hundreds. Rameses at that time
was only twenty-three; it was his first great campaign. Pursuing the
enemy, he overtook them in advance of his troops, and, rejecting the
councils of his officers, began the fight at once. “The footmen and
the horsemen then,” says the poet (the translator is M. de Rouge),
“recoiled before the enemy who were masters of Kadesh, on the left
bank of the Orontes.... Then his majesty, in the pride of his strength,
rising up like the god Mauth, put on his fighting dress. Completely
armed, he looked like Baal in the hour of his might. Urging on his
chariot, he pushed into the army of the vile Khitas; he was alone, no
one was with him. He was surrounded by 2,500 chariots, and the
swiftest of the warriors of the vile Khitas, and of the numerous
nations who accompanied them, threw themselves in his way....
Each chariot bore three men, and the king had with him neither
princes nor generals, nor his captains of archers nor of chariots.”
Then Rameses calls upon Amun; he reminds him of the obelisk he
has raised to him, the bulls he has slain for him:—“Thee, I invoke, O
my Father! I am in the midst of a host of strangers, and no man is
with me. My archers and horsemen have abandoned me; when I
cried to them, none of them has heard, when I called for help. But I
prefer Amun to thousands of millions of archers, to millions of
horsemen, to millions of young heroes all assembled together. The
designs of men are nothing, Amun overrules them.”
Needless to say the prayer was heard, the king rode slashing
through the ranks of opposing chariots, slaying, and putting to rout
the host. Whatever basis of fact the poem may have had in an
incident of battle or in the result of one engagement, it was like one
of Napoleon's bulletins from Egypt. The Khitas were not subdued
and, not many years after, they drove the Egyptians out of their land
and from nearly all Palestine, forcing them, out of all their
conquests, into the valley of the Nile itself. During the long reign of
this Rameses, the power of Egypt steadily declined, while luxury
increased and the nation was exhausted in building the enormous
monuments which the king projected. The close of his pretentious
reign has been aptly compared to that of Louis XIV.—a time of
decadence; in both cases the great fabric was ripe for disaster.
But Rameses liked the poem of Pentaour. It is about as long as a
book of the Iliad, but the stone-cutters of his reign must have known
it by heart. He kept them carving it and illustrating it all his life, on
every wall he built where there was room for the story. He never, it
would seem, could get enough of it. He killed those vile Khitas a
hundred times; he pursued them over all the stone walls in his
kingdom. The story is told here at Ipsambool; it is carved in the
Rameseum; the poem is graved on Luxor and Karnak.
Out of this great hall open eight other chambers, all more or less
sculptured, some of them covered with well-drawn figures on which
the color is still vivid. Two of these rooms are long and very narrow,
with a bench running round the walls, the front of which is cut out
so as to imitate seats with short pillars. In one are square niches, a
foot deep, cut in the wall. The sculptures in one are unfinished, the
hieroglyphics and figures drawn in black but not cut—some event
having called off the artists and left their work incomplete We seem
to be present at the execution of these designs, and so fresh are the
colors ot those finished, that it seems it must have been only
yesterday that the workman laid down the brush. (A small chamber
in the rock outside the temple, which was only opened in 1874, is
wonderful in the vividness of its colors; we see there better than
anywhere else the colors of vestments.)
These chambers are not the least mysterious portion of this
temple. They are in absolute darkness, and have no chance of
ventilation. By what light was this elaborate carving executed? If
people ever assembled in them, and sat on these benches, when
lights were burning, how could they breathe? If they were not used,
why should they have been so decorated? They would serve very
well for the awful mysteries of the Odd Fellows. Perhaps they were
used by the Free Masons in Solomon's time.
Beyond the great hall is a transverse hall (having two small
chambers off from it) with four square pillars, and from this a
corridor leads to the adytum. Here, behind an altar of stone, sit four
marred gods, facing the outer door, two hundred feet from it. They
sit in a twilight that is only-brightened by rays that find their way in
at the distant door; but at morning they can see, from the depth of
their mountain cavern, the rising sun.
 We climbed, up the yielding sand-drifts, to the top of the precipice
in which the temple is excavated, and walked back to a higher ridge.
The view from there is perhaps the best desert view on the Nile,
more extensive and varied than that of Aboosir. It is a wide sweep of
desolation. Up and down the river we see vast plains of sand and
groups of black hills; to the west and north the Libyan desert
extends with no limit to a horizon fringed with sharp peaks, like
aiguilles of the Alps, that have an exact resemblance to a forest.
At night, we give the ancient deities a sort of Fourth of July, and
illuminate the temple with colored lights. A blue-light burns upon the
altar in the adytum before the four gods, who may seem in their
penetralia to receive again the worship to which they were
accustomed three thousand years ago. A green flame in the great
hall brings out mysteriously the features of the gigantic Osiride, and
revives the midnight glow of the ancient ceremonies. In the glare of
torches and colored lights on the outside, the colossi loom in their
gigantic proportions and cast grotesque shadows.
Imagine this temple as it appeared to a stranger initiated into the
mysteries of the religion of the Pharaohs—a cultus in which the
mathematical secrets of the Pyramid and the Sphinx, art and
architecture, were wrapped in the same concealment with the
problem of the destiny of the soul; when the colors on these
processions of gods and heroes, upon these wars and pilgrimages
sculptured in large on the walls, were all brilliant; when these
chambers were gorgeously furnished, when the heavy doors that
then hung in every passage, separating the different halls and
apartments, only swung open to admit the neophyte to new and
deeper mysteries, to halls blazing with light, where he stood in the
presence of these appalling figures, and of hosts of priests and
acolytes.
The temple of Aboo Simbel was built early in the reign of Rameses
II., when art, under the impulse of his vigorous predecessors was in
its flower, and before the visible decadence which befel it later under
a royal patronage and “protection,” and in the demand for a
wholesale production, which always reduces any art to mechanical
conditions. It seemed to us about the finest single conception in
Egypt. It must have been a genius of rare order and daring who
evoked in this solid mountain a work of such grandeur and harmony
of proportion, and then executed it without a mistake. The first blow
on the exterior, that began to reveal the Colossi, was struck with the
same certainty and precision as that which brought into being the
gods who are seated before the altar in the depth of the mountain.
A bolder idea was never more successfully wrought out.
Our last view of this wonder was by moonlight and by sunrise. We
arose and went forth over the sand-bank at five o'clock. Venus
blazed as never before. The Southern Cross was paling in the
moonlight. The moon, in its last half, hung over the south-west
corner of the temple rock, and threw a heavy shadow across a
portion of the sitting figures. In this dimness of the half-light their
proportions were supernatural. Details were lost.
These might be giants of pre-historic times, or the old fabled gods
of antediluvian eras, outlined largely and majestically, groping their
way out of the hills.
Above them was the illimitable, purplish blue of the sky. The
Moon, one of the goddesses of the temple, withdrew more and more
before the coming of Re, the sun-god to whom the temple is
dedicated, until she cast no shadow on the façade. The temple, even
the interior, caught the first glow of the reddening east. The light
came, as it always comes at dawn, in visible waves, and these
passed over the features of the Colossi, wave after wave, slowly
brightening them into life.
In the interior the first flush was better than the light of many
torches, and the Osiride figures were revealed in their hiding-places.
At the spring equinox the sun strikes squarely in, two hundred feet,
upon the faces of the sitting figures in the adytum. That is their
annual salute! Now it only sent its light to them; but it made rosy
the Osiride faces on one side of the great hall.
The morning was chilly, and we sat on a sand-drift, wrapped up
against the cutting wind, watching the marvellous revelation. The
dawn seemed to ripple down the gigantic faces of the figures
outside, and to touch their stony calm with something like a smile of
gladness; it almost gave them motion, and we would hardly have
felt surprised to see them arise and stretch their weary limbs,
cramped by ages of inaction, and sing and shout at the coming of
the sun-god. But they moved not, the strengthening light only
revealed their stony impassiveness; and when the sun, rapidly
clearing the eastern hills of the desert, gilded first the row of
grinning monkeys, and then the light crept slowly down over faces
and forms to the very feet, the old heathen helplessness stood
confessed.
And when the sun swung free in the sky, we silently drew away
and left the temple and the guardians alone and unmoved. We
called the reis and the crew; the boat was turned to the current, the
great sweeps dipped into the water, and we continued our voyage
down the eternal river, which still sings and flows in this lonely
desert place, where sit the most gigantic figures man ever made.
 CHAPTER XXV.—FLITTING
THROUGH NUBIA.

W
E HAVE been learning the language. The language consists
merely of tyeb. With tyeb in its various accents and
inflections, you can carry on an extended conversation. I
have heard two Arabs talking for a half hour, in which one of them
used no word for reply or response except tyeb “good.”
Tyeb is used for assent, agreement, approval, admiration, both
interrogatively and affectionately. It does the duty of the Yankee “all
right” and the vulgarism “that's so” combined; it has as many
meanings as the Italian va bene, or the German So! or the English
girl's yes! yes? ye-e-s, ye-e-as? yes (short), 'n ye-e-es in doubt and
really a negative—ex.:—“How lovely Blanche looks to-night!” “'n ye-
e-es.” You may hear two untutored Americans talking, and one of
them, through a long interchange of views will utter nothing except,
“that's so,” “that's so?” “that's so,” “that's so.” I think two Arabs
meeting could come to a perfect understanding with:
“Tyeb?'
“Tyeb.”
“Tyeb!” (both together).
“Tyeb?” (showing something).
“Tyeb” (emphatically, in admiration).
“Tyeb” (in approval of the other's admiration).
“Tyeb Ketér” (“good, much”).
“Tyeb Keter?”
“Tyeb.”
“Tyeb.” (together, in ratification of all that has been said).
 I say tyeb in my satisfaction with you; you say tyeb in pleasure at
my satisfaction; I say tyeb in my pleasure at your pleasure. The
servant says tyeb when you give him an order; you say tyeb upon
his comprehending it. The Arabic is the richest of languages. I
believe there are three hundred names for earth, a hundred for lion,
and so on. But the vocabulary of the common people is exceedingly
limited. Our sailors talk all day with the aid of a very few words.
But we have got beyond tyeb. We can say eiwa (“yes”)—or nam,
when we wish to be elegant—and la (“no”). The universal negative
in Nubia, however, is simpler than this—it is a cluck of the tongue in
the left check and a slight upward jerk of the head. This cluck and
jerk makes “no,” from which there is no appeal. If you ask a Nubian
the price of anything—be-kam dee?—and he should answer khamsa
(“five”), and you should offer thelata (“three”), and he should kch
and jerk up his head, you might know the trade was hopeless;
because the kch expresses indifference as well as a negative. The
best thing you could do would be to say bookra (“to-morrow”), and
go away—meaning in fact to put off the purchase forever, as the
Nubian very well knows when he politely adds, tyeb.
But there are two other words necessary to be mastered before
the traveller can say he knows Arabic. To the constant call for
“backsheesh” and the obstructing rabble of beggars and children,
you must be able to say mafeesh (“nothing”), and im'shee
(“getaway,” “clear out,” “scat.”) It is my experience that this im'shee
is the most necessary word in Egypt.
We do nothing all day but drift, or try to drift, against the north
wind, not making a mile an hour, constantly turning about, floating
from one side of the river to the other. It is impossible to row, for
the steersman cannot keep the boat's bow to the current.
There is something exceedingly tedious, even to a lazy and
resigned man, in this perpetual drifting hither and thither. To float,
however slowly, straight down the current, would be quite another
thing. To go sideways, to go stern first, to waltz around so that you
never can tell which bank of the river you are looking at, or which
way you are going, or what the points of the compass are, is
confusing and unpleasant. It is the one serious annoyance of a
dahabeëh voyage. If it is calm, we go on delightfully with oars and
current; if there is a southerly breeze we travel rapidly, and in the
most charming way in the world. But our high-cabined boats are
helpless monsters in this wind, which continually blows; we are
worse than becalmed, we are badgered.
However, we might be in a worse winter country, and one less
entertaining. We have just drifted in sight of a dahabeëh, with the
English flag, tied up to the bank. On the shore is a picturesque
crowd; an awning is stretched over high poles; men are busy at
something under it—on the rock near sits a group of white people
under umbrellas. What can it be? Are they repairing a broken yard?
Are they holding a court over some thief? Are they performing some
mystic ceremony? We take the sandal and go to investigate.
An English gentleman has shot two crocodiles, and his people are
skinning them, stuffing the skin, and scraping the flesh from the
bones, preparing the skeletons for a museum. Horrible creatures
they are, even in this butchered condition. The largest is twelve feet
long; that is called a big crocodile here; but last winter the
gentleman killed one that was seventeen feet long; that was a
monster.
In the stomach of one of these he found two pairs of bracelets,
such as are worn by Nubian children, two “cunning” little leathern
bracelets ornamented with shells—a most useless ornament for a
crocodile. The animal is becoming more and more shy every year,
and it is very difficult to get a shot at one. They come out in the
night, looking for bracelets. One night we nearly lost Ahmed, one of
our black boys; he had gone down upon the rudder, when an
enquiring crocodile came along and made a snap at him—when the
boy climbed on deck he looked white even by starlight.
The invulnerability of the crocodile hide is exaggerated. One of
these had two bullet-holes in his back. His slayer says he has
repeatedly put bullets through the hide on the back.
 When we came away we declined steaks, but the owner gave us
some eggs, so that we might raise our own crocodiles.
Gradually we drift out of this almost utterly sterile country, and
come to long strips of palm-groves, and to sakiyas innumerable,
shrieking on the shore every few hundred feet. We have time to visit
a considerable village, and see the women at their other occupation
(besides lamentation) braiding each other's hair; sitting on the
ground, sometimes two at a head, patiently twisting odds and ends
of loose hair into the snaky braids, and muddling the whole with
sand, water, and clay, preparatory to the oil. A few women are
spinning with a hand-spindle and producing very good cotton-
thread. All appear to have time on their hands. And what a busy
place this must be in summer, when the heat is like that of an oven!
The men loaf about like the women, and probably do even less.
Those at work are mostly slaves, boys and girls in the slightest
clothing; and even these do a great deal of “standing round.”
Wooden hoes are used.
The desert over which we walked beyond the town was very
different from the Libyan with its drifts and drifts of yellow sand. We
went over swelling undulations (like our rolling prairies), cut by
considerable depressions, of sandstone with a light sand cover but
all strewn with shale or shingle. This black shale is sometimes seen
adhering like a layer of glazing to the coarse rock; and, though a
part of the rock, it has the queer appearance of having been a
deposit solidified upon it and subsequently broken off. On the tops of
these hills we found everywhere holes scooped out by the natives in
search of nitre; the holes showed evidence, in dried mud, of the
recent presence of water.
We descended into a deep gorge, in which the rocks were broken
squarely down the face, exhibiting strata of red, white, and
variegated sandstone; the gorge was a Wady that ran far back into
the country among the mountains; we followed it down to a belt of
sunt acacias and palms on the river. This wady was full of rocks, like
a mountain stream at home; a great torrent running long in it, had
worn the rocks into fantastic shapes, cutting punch-bowls and the
like, and water had recently dried in the hollows. But it had not
rained on the river.
This morning we are awakened by loud talking and wrangling on
deck, that sounds like a Paris revolution. We have only stopped for
milk! The forenoon we spend among the fashionable ladies of Derr,
the capital of Nubia, studying the modes, in order that we may carry
home the latest. This is an aristocratic place. One of the eight-
hundred-years-old sycamore trees, of which we made mention, is
still vigorous and was bearing the sycamore fig. The other is in front
of a grand mud-house with latticed windows, the residence of the
Kashefs of Sultan Selim whose descendants still occupy it, and,
though shorn of authority, are said to be proud of their Turkish
origin. One of them, Hassan Kashef, an old man in the memory of
our dragoman, so old that he had to lift up his eyelids with his finger
when he wanted to see, died only a few years ago. This patriarch
had seventy-two wives as his modest portion in this world; and as
the Koran allows only four, there was some difficulty in settling the
good man's estate. The matter was referred to the Khedive, but he
wisely refused to interfere. When the executor came to divide the
property among the surviving children, he found one hundred and
five to share the inheritance.
The old fellow had many other patriarchal ways. On his death-bed
he left a legacy of both good and evil wishes, requests to reward this
friend, and to “serve out” that enemy, quite in the ancient style, and
in the Oriental style, recalling the last recorded words of King David,
whose expiring breath was an expression of a wish for vengeance
upon one of his enemies, whom he had sworn not to kill. It reads
now as if it might have been spoken by a Bedawee sheykh to his
family only yesterday:—“And, behold, thou hast with thee Shimei the
son of Gera, a Benjamite of Bahurim, which cursed me with a
grievous curse in the day when I went to Mahanaim; but he came
down to meet me at Jordan, and I sware to him by the Lord, saying,
I will not put thee to death with the sword. Now therefore hold him
not guiltless: for thou art a wise man, and knowest what thou
oughtest to do unto him; but his hoar head bring thou down to the
grave with blood. So David slept with his fathers, and was buried in
the city of David.”
We call at the sand-covered temple at A'mada, and crawl into it; a
very neat little affair, with fresh color and fine sculptures, and as old
as the time of Osirtasen III. (the date of the obelisk of Heliopolis, of
the Tombs of Beni Hassan, say about fifteen hundred years before
Rameses II.); and then sail quickly down to Korosko, passing over in
an hour or so a distance that required a day and a half on the
ascent.
At Korosko there are caravans in from Kartoom; the camel-drivers
wear monstrous silver rings, made in the interior, the crown an inch
high and set with blood-stone. I bought from the neck of a pretty
little boy a silver “charm,” a flat plate with the name of Allah
engraved on it. Neither the boy nor the charm had been washed
since they came into being.
The caravan had brought one interesting piece of freight, which
had just been sent down the river. It was the head of the Sultan of
Darfoor, preserved in spirits, and forwarded to the Khedive as a
present. This was to certify that the Sultan was really killed, when
Darfoor was captured by the army of the Viceroy; though I do not
know that there is any bounty on the heads of African Sultans. It is
an odd gift to send to a ruler who wears the European dress and
speaks French, and whose chief military officers are Americans.
The desolate hills behind Korosko rise a thousand feet, and we
climbed one of the peaks to have a glimpse of the desert route and
the country towards Kartoom. I suppose a more savage landscape
does not exist. The peak of black disintegrated rocks on which we
stood was the first of an assemblage of such as far as we could see
south; the whole horizon was cut by these sharp peaks; and through
these thickly clustering hills the caravan trail made its way in sand
and powdered dust. Shut in from the breeze, it must be a hard road
to travel, even with a winter sun multiplying its rays from all these
hot rocks; in the summer it would be frightful. But on these
summits, or on any desert swell, the air is an absolute elixir of life; it
has a quality of lightness but not the rarity that makes respiration
difficult.
At a village below Korosko we had an exhibition of the manner of
fighting with the long Nubian war-spear and the big round shield
made of hippopotamus-hide. The men jumped about and uttered
frightening cries, and displayed more agility than fight, the object
being evidently to terrify by a threatening aspect; but the scene was
as barbarous as any we see in African pictures. Here also was a
pretty woman (pretty for her) with beautiful eyes, who wore a heavy
nose-ring of gold, which she said she put on to make her face
beautiful; nevertheless she would sell the ring for nine dollars and a
half. The people along here will sell anything they have, ornaments,
charms to protect them from the evil-eye,—they will part with
anything for money. At this village we took on a crocodile ten feet
long, which had been recently killed, and lashed it to the horizontal
yard. It was Abd-el-Atti's desire to present it to a friend in Cairo, and
perhaps he was not reluctant, when we should be below the
cataract, to have it take the appearance, in the eyes of spectators,
of having been killed by some one on this boat.
We obtained above Korosko one of the most beautiful animals in
the world—a young gazelle—to add to our growing menagerie;
which consists of a tame duck, who never gets away when his leg is
tied; a timid desert hare, who has lived for a long time in a tin box in
the cabin, trembling like an aspen leaf night and day; and a
chameleon.
The chameleon ought to have a chapter to himself. We have
reason to think that he has the soul of some transmigrating
Egyptian. He is the most uncanny beast. We have made him a study,
and find very little good in him. His changeableness of color is not
his worst quality. He has the nature of a spy, and he is sullen and
snappish besides. We discovered that his color is not a purely
physical manifestation, but that it depends upon his state of mind,
upon his temper. When everything is serene, he is green as a May
morning, but anger changes him instantly for the worse. It is
however true that he takes his color mainly from the substance upon
which he dwells, not from what he eats; for he eats flies and allows
them to make no impression on his exterior. When he was taken off
an acacia-tree, this chameleon was of the bright-green color of the
leaves. Brought into our cabin, his usual resting-place was on the
reddish maroon window curtains, and his green changed muddily
into the color of the woollen. When angry, he would become mottled
with dark spots, and have a thick cloudy color. This was the range of
his changes of complexion; it is not enough (is it?) to give him his
exaggerated reputation.
I confess that I almost hated him, and perhaps cannot do him
justice. He is a crawling creature at best, and his mode of getting
about is disagreeable; his feet have the power of clinging to the
slightest roughness, and he can climb anywhere; his feet are like
hands; besides, his long tail is like another hand; it is prehensile like
the monkey's. He feels his way along very carefully, taking a turn
with his tail about some support, when he is passing a chasm, and
not letting go until his feet are firmly fixed on something else. And,
then, the way he uses his eye is odious. His eye-balls are stuck upon
the end of protuberances on his head, which protuberances work
like ball-and-socket joints—as if you had your eye on the end of your
finger. When he wants to examine anything, he never turns his
head; he simply swivels his eye round and brings it to bear on the
object. Pretending to live in cold isolation on the top of a window
curtain, he is always making clammy excursions round the cabin,
and is sometimes found in our bed-chambers. You wouldn't like to
feel his cold tail dragging over you in the night.
The first question every morning, when we come to breakfast, is,
“Where is that chameleon?”
He might be under the table, you know, or on the cushions, and
you might sit on him. Commonly he conceals his body behind the
curtain, and just lifts his head above the roller. There he sits, spying
us, gyrating his evil eye upon us, and never stirring his head; he
takes the color of the curtain so nearly that we could not see him if
it was not for that swivel eye. It is then that he appears malign, and
has the aspect of a wise but ill-disposed Egyptian whose soul has
had ill luck in getting into any respectable bodies for three or four
thousand years. He lives upon nothing,—you would think he had
been raised in a French pension. Few flies happen his way; and,
perhaps he is torpid out of the sun so much of the time, he is not
active to catch those that come. I carried him a big one the other
day, and he repaid my kindness by snapping my finger. And I am his
only friend.
Alas, the desert hare, whom we have fed with corn, and greens,
and tried to breed courage in for a long time, died this morning at
an early hour; either he was chilled out of the world by the cold air
on deck, or he died of palpitation of the heart; for he was always in
a flutter of fear, his heart going like a trip-hammer, when anyone
approached him. He only rarely elevated his long silky ears in a
serene enjoyment of society. His tail was too short, but he was,
nevertheless, an animal to become attached to.
Speaking of Hassan Kashef's violation of the Moslem law, in taking
more than four wives, is it generally known that the women in
Mohammed's time endeavored also to have the privileges of men?
Forty women who had cooked for the soldiers who were fighting the
infidels and had done great service in the campaign, were asked by
the Prophet to name their reward. The chief lady, who was put
forward to prefer the request of the others, asked that as men were
permitted four wives women might be allowed to have four
husbands. The Prophet gave them a plain reason for refusing their
petition, and it has never been renewed. The legend shows that long
ago women protested against their disabilities.
The strong north wind, with coolish weather, continues. On
Sunday we are nowhere in particular, and climb a high sandstone
peak, and sit in the shelter of a rock, where wandering men have
often come to rest. It is a wild, desert place, and there is that in the
atmosphere of the day which leads to talk of the end of the world.
Like many other Moslems, Abd-el-Atti thinks that these are the last
days, bad enough days, and that the end draws near. We have
misunderstood what Mr. Lane says about Christ coming to “judge”
the world. The Moslems believe that Christ, who never died, but was
taken up into heaven away from the Jews,—a person in his likeness
being crucified in his stead,—will come to rule, to establish the
Moslem religion and a reign of justice (the Millenium); and that after
this period Christ will die, and be buried in Medineh, not far from
Mohammed. Then the world will end, and Azrael, the angel of death,
will be left alone on the earth for forty days. He will go to and fro,
and find no one; all will be in their graves. Then Christ and
Mohammed and all the dead will rise. But the Lord God will be the
final judge of all.
“Yes, there have been many false prophets. A man came before
Haroun e' Rasheed pretending to be a prophet.
“'What proof have you that you are one? What miracle can you
do?'.rdquo;
“'Anything you like.'.rdquo;
“'Christ, on whom be peace, raised men from the dead.'.rdquo;
“'So will I.' This took place before the king and the chief-justice.
'Let the head of the chief-justice be cut off,' said the pretended
prophet, 'and I will restore him to life.'.rdquo;
“'Oh,' cried the chief-justice, 'I believe that the man is a real
prophet. Anyone who does not believe can have his head cut off,
and try it.'.rdquo;
“A woman also claimed to be a prophetess. 'But,' said the Khalif
Haroun e' Rasheed, 'Mohammed declared that he was the last man
who should be a prophet.'.rdquo;
“'He didn't say that a woman shouldn't be,' the woman she
answer.”
The people vary in manners and habits here from village to
village, much more than we supposed they would. Walking this
morning for a couple of miles through the two villages of Maharraka
—rude huts scattered under palm-trees—we find the inhabitants,
partly Arab, partly Barabra, and many negro slaves, more barbaric
than any we have seen; boys and girls, till the marriageable age, in
a state of nature, women neither so shy nor so careful about
covering themselves with clothing as in other places, and the slaves
wretchedly provided for. The heads of the young children are shaved
in streaks, with long tufts of hair left; the women are loaded with
tawdry necklaces, and many of them, poor as they are, sport heavy
hoops of gold in the nose, and wear massive silver bracelets.
The slaves, blacks and mulattoes, were in appearance like those
seen formerly in our southern cotton-fields. I recall a picture, in
abolition times, representing a colored man standing alone, and
holding up his arms, in a manner beseeching the white man, passing
by, to free him. To-day I saw the picture realized. A very black man,
standing nearly naked in the midst of a bean-field, raised up both his
arms, and cried aloud to us as we went by. The attitude had all the
old pathos in it. As the poor fellow threw up his arms in a wild
despair, he cried “Backsheesh, backsheesh, O! howadji!”
For the first time we found the crops in danger. The country was
overrun with reddish-brown locusts, which settled in clouds upon
every green thing; and the people in vain attempted to frighten
them from their scant strip of grain. They are not, however, useless.
The attractive women caught some, and, pulling off the wings and
legs, offered them to us to eat. They said locusts were good; and I
suppose they are such as John the Baptist ate. We are not Baptists.
As we go down the river we take in two or three temples a day,
besides these ruins of humanity in the village,—-Dakkeh, Gerf
Hossâyn, Dendoor. It is easy to get enough of these second-class
temples. That at Gerf Hossâyn is hewn in the rock, and is in general
arrangement like Ipsambool—it was also made by Rameses II.—but
is in all respects inferior, and lacks the Colossi. I saw sitting in the
adytum four figures whom I took to be Athos, Parthos, Aramis, and
D'Artignan—though this edifice was built long before the day of the
“Three Guardsmen.”
The people in the village below have such a bad reputation that
the dragoman in great fright sent sailors after us, when he found we
were strolling through the country alone. We have seen no natives
so well off in cattle, sheep, and cooking-utensils, or in nose-rings,
beads, and knives; they are, however, a wild, noisy tribe, and the
whole village followed us for a mile, hooting for backsheesh. The
girls wear a nose-ring and a girdle; the boys have no rings or
girdles. The men are fierce and jealous of their wives, perhaps with
reason, stabbing and throwing them into the river on suspicion, if
they are caught talking with another man. So they say. At this village
we saw pits dug in the sand (like those described in the Old
Testament), in which cattle, sheep and goats were folded; it being
cheaper to dig a pit than to build a stone fence.
At Kalâbshee are two temples, ruins on a sufficiently large scale to
be imposing; sculptures varied in character and beautifully colored;
propylons with narrow staircases, and concealed rooms, and deep
windows bespeaking their use as fortifications and dungeons as well
as temples; and columns of interest to the architect; especially two,
fluted (time of Rameses II.) with square projecting abacus like the
Doric, but with broad bases. The inhabitants are the most pestilent
on the river, crowding their curiosities upon us, and clamoring for
money. They have for sale gazelle-horns, and the henna (which
grows here), in the form of a green powder.
However, Kalâbshee has educational facilities. I saw there a boys'
school in full operation. In the open air, but in the sheltering angle of
a house near the ruins, sat on the ground the schoolmaster. Behind
him leaned his gun against the wall; before him lay an open Koran;
and in his hand he held a thin palm rod with which he enforced
education. He was dictating sentences from the book to a scrap of a
scholar, a boy who sat on the ground, with an inkhorn beside him,
and wrote the sentences on a board slate, repeating the words in
aloud voice as he wrote. Nearby was another urchin, seated before a
slate leaning against the angle of of the wall, committing the writing
on it to memory, in a loud voice also. When he looked off the stick
reminded him to attend to his slate. I do not know whether he calls
this a private or a public school.
Quitting these inhospitable savages as speedily as we can, upon
the springing up of a south wind, we are going down stream at a
spanking rate, leaving a rival dahabeëh, belonging to an English lord,
behind, when the adversary puts it into the head of our pilot to steer
across the river, and our prosperous career is suddenly arrested on a
sandbar. We are fast, and the English boat, keeping in the channel,
shows us her rudder and disappears round the bend.
Extraordinary confusion follows; the crew are in the water, they
are on deck, the anchor is got out, there are as many opinions, as
people, and no one obeys. The long pilot is a spectacle, after he has
been wading about in the stream and comes on deck. His gown is
off and his turban also; his head is shaved; his drawers are in tatters
like lace-work. He strides up and down beating his breast, his bare
poll shining in the sun like a billiard ball. We are on the sand nearly
four hours, and the accident, causing us to lose this wind, loses us,
it so happens, three days. By dark we tie up near the most
excruciating Sakiya in the world. It is suggested to go on shore and
buy the property and close it out. But the boy who is driving will
neither sell nor stop his cattle.
At Gertassee we have more ruins and we pass a beautiful, single
column, conspicuous for a long distance over the desert, as fine as
the once “nameless column” in the Roman forum, These temples, or
places of worship, are on the whole depressing. There was no lack
of religious privileges if frequency of religious edifices gave them.
But the people evidently had no part in the ceremonies, and went
never into these dark chambers, which are now inhabited by bats.
The old religion does not commend itself to me. Of what use would
be one of these temples on Asylum Hill, in Hartford, and how would
the Rev. Mr. Twichell busy himself in its dark recesses, I wonder,
even with the help of the deacons and the committee? The Gothic is
quite enough for us.
This morning—we have now entered upon the month of February
—for the first time in Nubia, we have early a slight haze, a thin veil
of it; and passing between shores rocky and high and among granite
breakers, we are reminded of the Hudson river on a June morning. A
strong north wind, however, comes soon to puff away this illusion,
and it blows so hard that we are actually driven up-stream.
The people and villages under the crumbling granite ledges that
this delay enables us to see, are the least promising we have
encountered; women and children are more nearly barbarians in
dress and manners; for the women, a single strip of brown cotton,
worn à la Bedawee, leaving free the legs, the right arm and breast,
is a common dress. And yet, some of these women are not without
beauty. One pretty girl sitting on a rock, the sun glistening on the
castor-oil of her hair, asked for backsheesh in a sweet voice, her
eyes sparkling with merriment. A flower blooming in vain in this
desert!
Is it a question of “converting” these people? Certainly, nothing
but the religion of the New Testament, put in practice here, bringing
in its train, industry, self-respect, and a desire to know, can awaken
the higher nature, and lift these creatures into a respectable
womanhood. But the task is more difficult than it would be with
remote tribes in Central Africa. These people have been converted
over and over again. They have had all sorts of religions during the
last few thousand years, and they remain essentially the same. They
once had the old Egyptian faith, whatever it was; and subsequently
they varied that with the Greek and Roman shades of heathenism.
They then accepted the early Christianity, as the Abyssinians did,
and had, for hundreds of years, opportunity of Christian worship,
when there were Christian churches all along the Nile from
Alexander to Meroë, and holy hermits in every eligible cave and
tomb. And then came Mohammed's friends, giving them the choice
of belief or martyrdom, and they embraced the religion of Mecca as
cordially as any other.
They have remained essentially unchanged through all their
changes. This hopelessness of their condition is in the fact that in all
the shiftings of religions and of dynasties, the women have
continued to soak their hair in castor-oil. The fashion is as old as the
Nile world. Many people look upon castor-oil as an excellent remedy.
I should like to know what it has done for Africa.
At Dabod is an interesting ruin, and a man sits there in front of his
house, weaving, confident that no rain will come to spoil his yarn. He
sits and works the treadle of his loom in a hole in the ground, the
thread being stretched out twenty or thirty feet on the wall before
him. It is the only industry of the village, and a group of natives are
looking on. The poor weaver asks backsheesh, and when I tell him I
have nothing smaller than an English sovereign, he says he can
change it!
Here we find also a sort of Holly-Tree Inn, a house for charitable
entertainment, such as is often seen in Moslem villages. It is a
square mud-structure, entered by two doors, and contains two long
rooms with communicating openings. The dirt-floors are cleanly
swept and fresh mats are laid down at intervals. Any stranger or
weary traveler, passing by, is welcome to come in and rest or pass
the night, to have a cup of coffee and some bread. There are two
cleanly dressed attendants, and one of them is making coffee,
within, over a handful of fire, in a tiny coffee-pot. In front, in the
sun, on neat mats, sit half a dozen turbaned men, perhaps tired
wanderers and pilgrims in this world, who have turned aside to rest
for an hour, for a day, or for a week. They appear to have been
there forever. The establishment is maintained by a rich man of the
place; but signs of an abode of wealth we failed to discover in any of
the mud-enclosures.
When we are under way again, we express surprise at finding
here such an excellent charity.
“You no think the Lord he take care for his own?” says Abd-el-Atti.
“When the kin' [king] of Abyssinia go to 'stroy the Kaabeh in
Mecca”—
“Did you ever see the Kaabeh?”
“Many times. Plenty times I been in Mecca.”
“In what part of the Kaabeh is the Black Stone?”
“So. The Kaabeh is a building like a cube, about, I think him, thirty
feet high, built in the middle of the mosque at Mecca. It was built by
Abraham, of white marble. In the outside the east wall, near the
corner, 'bout so (four feet) high you find him, the Black Stone, put
there by Abraham, call him haggeh el ashad, the lucky, the fortunate
stone. It is opposite the sunrise. Where Abraham get him? God
knows. If any one sick, he touch this stone, be made so well as he
was. So I hunderstand. The Kaabeh is in the centre of the earth, and
has fronts to the four quarters of the globe, Asia, Hindia, Egypt, all
places, toward which the Moslem kneel in prayer. Near the Kaabeh is
the well, the sacred well Zem-Zem, has clear water, beautiful, so
lifely. One time a year, in the month before Ramadan, Zem-Zem
spouts up high in the air, and people come to drink of it. When
Hagar left Ishmael, to look for water, being very thirsty, the little
fellow scratched with his fingers in the sand, and a spring of water
rushed up; this is the well Zem-Zem. I told you the same water is in
the spring in Syria, El Gebel; I find him just the same; come under
the earth from Zem-Zem.”
“When the kin' of Abyssinia, who not believe, what you call infidel,
like that Englishman, yes, Mr. Buckle, I see him in Sinai and Petra—
very wise man, know a great deal, very nice gentleman, I like him
very much, but I think he not believe—when the kin' of Abyssinia
came with all his great army and his elephants to fight against
Mecca, and to 'stroy the Kaabeh as well the same time to carry off
all the cattle of the people, then the people they say, 'the cattle are
ours, but the Kaabeh is the Lord's, and he will have care over it; the
Kaabeh is not ours.' There was one of the elephants of the kin' of
Abyssinia, the name of Mahmoud, and he was very wise, more wise
than anybody else. When he came in sight of Mecca, he turned back
and went the other way, and not all the spears and darts of the
soldiers could stop him. The others went on. Then the Lord sent out
of the hell very small birds, with very little stones, taken out of hell,
in their claws, no larger than mustard seeds; and the birds dropped
these on the heads of the soldiers that rode on the elephants—
generally three or four on an elephant. The little seeds went right
down through the men and through the elephants, and killed them,
and by this the army was 'stroyed.”
“When the kin', after that, come into the mosque, some power
outside himself made him to bow down in respect to the Kaabeh. He
went away and did not touch it. And it stands there the same now.”
 CHAPTER XXVI.—MYSTERIOUS
PHILÆ.

W
E are on deck early to see the approach to Philæ, which is
through a gateway of high rocks. The scenery is like parts
of the Rhine; and as we come in sight of the old mosque
perched on the hillside, and the round tomb on the pinnacle above,
it is very like the Rhine, with castle ruins. The ragged and rock island
of Biggeh rises before us and seems to stop the way, but, at a turn
in the river, the little temple, with its conspicuous columns, then the
pylon of the great temple, and at length the mass of ruins, that
cover the little island of Philæ, open on the view.
In the narrows we meet the fleet of government boats conveying
the engineer expedition going up to begin the railway from Wady
Haifa to Berber. Abd-el-Atti does not like the prospect of Egypt
running deeper and deeper in debt, with no good to come of it, he
says; he believes that the Khedive is acting under the advice of
England, which is entirely selfish and only desires a short way to
India, in case the French should shut the Suez Canal against them
(his view is a very good example of a Moslem's comprehension of
affairs). Also thinking, with all Moslems, that it is best to leave the
world and its people as the Lord has created and placed them, he
replied to an enquiry about his opinion of the railroad, with this story
of Jonah:—
“When the prophet Jonah came out of the whale and sat down on
the bank to dry under a tree (I have seen the tree) in Syria, there
was a blind man sitting near by, who begged the prophet to give him
sight. Then Jonah asked the Lord for help and the blind man was let
to see. The man was eating dates at the same time, and the first
thing he did when he got his eyes open was to snap the hard seeds
at Jonah, who you know was very tender from being so long in the
whale. Jonah was stung on his skin, and bruised by the stones, and
he cry out, 'O! Lord, how is this?' And the Lord said, 'Jonah, you not
satisfied to leave things as I placed 'em; and now you must suffer
for it'.”
One muses and dreams at Philæ, and does not readily arouse
himself to the necessity of exploring and comprehending the marvels
and the beauties that insensibly lead him into sentimental reveries.
If ever the spirit of beauty haunted a spot, it is this. Whatever was
harsh in the granite ledges, or too sharp in the granite walls,
whatever is repellant in the memory concerning the uses of these
temples of a monstrous theogony, all is softened now by time, all
asperities are worn away; nature and art grow lovely together in a
gentle decay, sunk in a repose too beautiful to be sad. Nowhere else
in Egypt has the grim mystery of the Egyptians cultus softened into
so harmless a memory.
The oval island contains perhaps a hundred acres. It is a rock,
with only a patch or two of green, and a few scattered palms, just
enough to give it a lonely, poetic, and not a fruitful aspect, and, as
has been said, is walled all round from the water's edge. Covered
with ruins, the principal are those of the temple of Isis. Beginning at
the southern end of the island, where a flight of steps led up to it, it
stretches along, with a curved and broadening colonnade, giant
pylons, great courts and covered temples. It is impossible to imagine
a structure or series of structures, more irregular in the lines or
capricious in the forms. The architects gave free play to their fancy,
and we find here the fertility and variety, if not the grotesqueness of
imagination of the mediaeval cathedral builders. The capitals of the
columns of the colonnade are sculptured in rich variety; the walls of
the west cloister are covered with fine carvings, the color on them
still fresh and delicate; and the ornamental designs are as beautiful
and artistic as the finest Greek work, which some of it suggests: as
rich as the most lovely Moorish patterns, many of which seem to
have been copied from these living creations—-diamond-work, birds,
exquisite medallions of flowers, and sphinxes.
 Without seeing this mass of buildings, you can have no notion of
the labor expended in decorating them. All the surfaces of the
gigantic pylons, of the walls and courts, exterior and interior, are
covered with finely and carefully cut figures and hieroglyphics, and a
great deal of the work is minute and delicate chiselling. You are lost
in wonder if you attempt to estimate the time and the number of
workmen necessary to accomplish all this. It seems incredible that
men could ever have had patience or leisure for it. A great portion of
the figures, within and without, have been, with much painstaking,
defaced; probably it was done by the early Christians, and this is the
only impress they have left of their domination in this region.
The most interesting sculptures, however, at Philæ are those in a
small chamber, or mortuary chapel, on the roof of the main temple,
touching the most sacred mystery of the Egyptian religion, the death
and resurrection of Osiris. This myth, which took many fantastic
forms, was no doubt that forbidden topic upon which Herodotus was
not at liberty to speak. It was the growth of a period in the Egyptian
theology when the original revelation of one God grew weak and
began to disappear under a monstrous symbolism. It is possible that
the priests, who held their religious philosophy a profound secret
from the vulgar (whose religion was simply a gross worship of
symbols), never relinquished the belief expressed in their sacred
texts, which say of God “that He is the sole generator in heaven and
earth, and that He has not been begotten.... That He is the only
living and true God, who was begotten by Himself.... He who has
existed from the beginning.... who has made all things and was not
Himself made.” It is possible that they may have held to this and still
kept in the purity of its first conception the myth of the
manifestation of Osiris, however fantastic the myth subsequently
became in mythology and in the popular worship.
Osiris, the personification of the sun, the life-giving, came upon
the earth to benefit men, and one of his titles was the “manifester of
good and truth.” He was slain in a conflict with Set the spirit of evil
and darkness; he was buried; he was raised from the dead by the
prayers of his wife, Isis; he became the judge of the dead; he was
not only the life-giving but the saving deity; “himself the first raised
from the dead, he assisted to raise those who were justified, after
having aided them to overcome all their trials.”
But whatever the priests and the initiated believed, this myth is
here symbolized in the baldest forms. We have the mummy of Osiris
passing through its interment and the successive stages of the
under-world; then his body is dismembered and scattered, and
finally the limbs and organs are reassembled and joined together,
and the resurrection takes place before our eyes. It reminds one of a
pantomime of the Ravels, who used to chop up the body of a
comrade and then put him together again as good as new, with the
insouciance of beings who lived in a world where such transactions
were common. This whole temple indeed, would be a royal place for
the tricks of a conjurer or the delusions of a troop of stage wizards.
It is full of dark chambers and secret passages, some of them in the
walls and some subterranean, the entrances to which are only
disclosed by removing a close-fitting stone.
The great pylons, ascended by internal stairways, have habitable
chambers in each story, lighted by deep slits of windows, and are
like palace fortresses. The view from the summit of one of them is
fascinating, but almost grim; that is, your surroundings are huge
masses of granite mountains and islands, only relieved by some
patches of green and a few palms on the east shore. But time has so
worn and fashioned the stones of the overtopping crags, and the
color of the red granite is so warm, and the contours are so softened
that under the brilliant sky the view is mellowed and highly poetical,
and ought not to be called grim.
This little island, gay with its gorgeously colored walls, graceful
colonnades, garden-roofs and spreading terraces, set in its rim of
swift water, protected by these granite fortresses, bent over by this
sky, must have been a dear and sacred place to the worshippers of
Isis and Osiris, and we scarcely wonder that the celebration of their
rites was continued so long in our era. We do not need, in order to
feel the romance of the place, to know that it was a favorite spot
with Cleopatra, and that she moored her silken-sailed dahabeëh on
the sandbank where ours now lies. Perhaps she was not a person of
romantic nature. There is a portrait of her here (the authenticity of
which rests upon I know not what authority) stiffly cut in the stone,
in which she appears to be a resolute woman with full sensual lips
and a determined chin. Her hair is put up in decent simplicity. But I
half think that she herself was like her other Egyptian sisters and
made her silken locks to shine with the juice of the castor-oil plant.
But what were these mysteries in which she took part, and what was
this worship, conducted in these dark and secret chambers? It was
veiled from all vulgar eyes; probably the people were scarcely
allowed to set foot upon the sacred island.
Sunday morning was fresh and cool, with fleecy clouds, light and
summer-like. Instead of Sabbath bells, when I rose late, I heard the
wild chant of a crew rowing a dahabeëh down the echoing channel.
And I wondered how church bells, rung on the top of these pylons,
would sound reverberating among these granite rocks and boulders.
We climbed, during the afternoon, to the summit of the island of
Biggeh, which overshadows Philæ, and is a most fantastic pile of
crags. You can best understand this region by supposing that a
gigantic internal explosion lifted the granite strata into the air, and
that the fragments fell hap-hazard. This Biggeh might have been
piled up by the giants who attempted to scale heaven, when Zeus
blasted them and their work with his launched lightning.
From this summit, we have in view the broken, rock-strewn field
called the Cataract, and all the extraordinary islands of rock above,
that almost dam the river; there, over Philæ, on the north shore, is
the barrack-like Austrian Mission, and neat it the railway that runs
through the desert waste, round the hills of the Cataract, to
Assouan. These vast piled-up fragments and splintered ledges, here
and all about us, although of raw granite and syenite, are all
disintegrating and crumbling into fine atoms. It is this decay that
softens the hardness of the outlines, and harmonizes with the ruins
below. Wild as the convulsion was that caused this fantastic wreck,
the scene is not without a certain peace now, as we sit here this
Sunday afternoon, on a high crag, looking down upon the pagan