My Winter on the Nile

Our guide leads us at a lively pace through these holes and heaps of the dead, over sand hot to the feet, under a sky blue and burning, for a mile and a half. He is the first Egyptian I have seen who can walk. He gets over the ground with a sort of skipping lope, barefooted, and looks not unlike a tough North American Indian. As he swings along, holding his thin cotton robe with one hand, we feel as if we were following a shade despatched to conduct us to some Unhappy Hunting-Grounds.

Near the temple are some sycamore-trees and a collection of hovels called Koorneh, inhabited by a swarm of ill-conditioned creatures, who are not too proud to beg and probably are not ashamed to steal. They beset us there and in the ruins to buy all manner of valuable antiquities, strings of beads from mummies, hands and legs of mummies, small green and blue images, and the like, and raise such a clamor of importunity that one can hold no communion, if he desires to, with the spirits of Sethi I., and his son Rameses II., who spent the people’s money in erecting these big columns and putting the vast stones on top of them.

We are impressed with the massiveness and sombreness of the Egyptian work, but this temple is too squat to be effective, and is scarcely worth visiting, in comparison with others, except for its sculptures. Inside and out it is covered with them; either the face of the stone cut away, leaving the figures in relief, or the figures are cut in at the sides and left in relief in the center. The rooms are small—from the necessary limitations of roof-stones that stretched from wall to wall, or from column to column; but all the walls, in darkness or in light, are covered with carving.

The sculptures are all a glorification of the Pharaohs. We should like to know the unpronounceable names of the artists, who, in the conventional limits set them by their religion, drew pictures of so much expression and figures so life-like, and chiseled these stones with such faultless execution; but there are no names here but of Pharaoh and of the gods.

The king is in battle, driving his chariot into the thick of the fight; the king crosses rivers, destroys walled cities, routs armies the king appears in a triumphal procession with chained captives, sacks of treasure, a menagerie of beasts, and a garden of exotic trees and plants borne from conquered countries; the king is making offerings to his predecessors, or to gods many, hawk-headed, cow-headed, ibis-headed, man-headed. The king’s scribe is taking count of the hands, piled in a heap, of the men the king has slain in battle. The king, a gigantic figure, the height of a pylon, grasps by the hair of the head a bunch of prisoners, whom he is about to slay with a raised club—as one would cut off the tops of a handful of radishes.

There is a vein of “Big Injun” running through them all. The same swagger and boastfulness, and cruelty to captives. I was glad to see one woman in the mythic crowd, doing the generous thing: Isis, slim and pretty, offers her breast to her son, and Horus stretches up to the stone opportunity and takes his supper like a little gentleman. And there is color yet in her cheek and robe that was put on when she was thirty-five hundred years younger than she is now.

Towards the south we saw the more extensive ruins of the Memnonium and, more impressive still, the twin Colossi, one of them the so-called vocal statue of Memnon, standing up in the air against the evening sky more than a mile distant. They rose out of a calm green plain of what seemed to be wheat, but which was a field of beans. The friendly green about them seemed to draw them nearer to us in sympathy. At this distance we could not see how battered they were. And the unspeakable calm of these giant figures, sitting with hands on knees, fronting the east, like the Sphinx, conveys the same impression of lapse of time and of endurance that the pyramids give.

The sunset, as we went back across the plain, was gorgeous in vermilion, crimson, and yellow. The Colossi dominated the great expanse, and loomed up in the fading light like shapes out of the mysterious past.

Our dahabeëh had crept up to the east side of the island, and could only be reached by passing through sand and water. A deep though not wide channel of the Nile ran between us and the island. We were taken over this in a deep tub of a ferryboat. Laboriously wading through the sand and plowed fields of the island, we found our boat anchored in the stream, and the shore so shallow that even the sandal could not land. The sailors took us off to the row-boat on their backs.

In the evening the dahabeëh is worked across and secured to the crumbling bank of the Luxor. And the accomplishment of a voyage of four hundred and fifty miles in sixteen days is, of course, announced by rockets.

CHAPTER XVI.—HISTORY IN STONE

IT NEVER rains at Thebes; you begin with that fact. But everybody is anxious to have it rain, so that he can say, “It rained when I was at Thebes, for the first time in four thousand years.”

It has not rained for four thousand years, and the evidence of this is that no representation of rain is found in any of the sculptures on temples or monuments; and all Egyptologists know that what is not found thus represented has had no existence.

To-day, it rained for the first time in four thousand years The circumstances were these. We were crossing at sunset from the west side to the island, in a nasty little ferry, built like a canal-barge, its depths being full of all uncleanliness and smell—donkeys, peasants, and camels using it for crossing. (The getting of a camel in and out of such a deep trough is a work of time and considerable pounding and roaring of beast and men.) The boat was propelled by two half-clad, handsome, laughing Egyptian boys, who rowed with some crooked limbs of trees, and sang “Hà! Yâlesah,” and “Yah! Mohammed” as they stood and pulled the unwieldy oars.

We were standing, above the reek, on a loose platform of sticks at the stern, when my comrade said, “It rains, I think I felt a drop on my hand.”

“It can’t be,” I said, “it has not rained here in four thousand years;” and I extended my hand. I felt nothing. And yet I could not swear that a drop or two did not fall into the river.

It had that appearance, nearly. And we have seen no flies skipping on the Nile at this season.

In the sculpture we remember that the king is often represented extending his hand. He would not put it out for nothing, for everything done anciently in Egypt, every scratch on a rock, has a deep and profound meaning. Pharaoh is in the attitude of fearing that it is going to rain. Perhaps it did rain last night. At any rate, there were light clouds over the sky.

The morning opens with a cool west wind, which increases and whirls the sand in great clouds over the Libyan side of the river, and envelopes Luxor in its dry storm. Luxor is for the most part a collection of miserable mud-hovels on a low ridge, with the half-buried temple for a nucleus, and a few houses of a better sort along the bank, from which float the consular flags.

The inhabitants of Luxor live upon the winter travelers. Sometimes a dozen or twenty gay dahabeëhs and several steamboats are moored here, and the town assumes the appearance of a fashionable watering-place. It is the best place on the river on the whole, considering its attractions for scholars and sightseers, to spend the winter, and I have no doubt it would be a great resort if it had any accommodations for visitors. But it has not; the stranger must live in his boat. There is not indeed in the whole land of Egypt above Cairo such a thing as an inn; scarcely a refuge where a clean Christian, who wishes to keep clean, can pass a night, unless it be in the house of some governor or a palace of the Khedive. The perfection of the world’s climate in winter is, to be sure, higher up, in Nubia; but that of Thebes is good enough for people accustomed to Europe and New England. With steamboats making regular trips and a railroad crawling up the river, there is certain to be the Rameses Hotel at Thebes before long, and its rival a Thothmes House; together with the Mummy Restaurant, and the Scarabæus Saloon.

You need two or three weeks to see properly the ruins of Thebes, though Cook’s “personally conducted tourists” do it in four days, and have a soiree of the dancing-girls besides. The region to be traveled over is not only vast (Strabo says the city was nine miles long) but it is exceedingly difficult getting about, and fatiguing, if haste is necessary. Crossing the swift Nile in a sandal takes time; you must wade or be carried over shallows to the island beach; there is a weary walk or ride over this; another stream is to be crossed, and then begins the work of the day. You set out with a cavalcade of mules, servants, water-carriers, and a retinue of hungry, begging Arabs, over the fields and through the desert to the temples and tombs. The distances are long, the sand is glaring, the incandescent sun is reflected in hot waves from the burning Libyan chain. It requires hours to master the plan of a vast temple in its ruins, and days to follow out the story of the wonderful people who built it, in its marvelous sculptures—acres of inside and outside walls of picture cut in stone.

Perhaps the easiest way of passing the time in an ancient ruin was that of two Americans, who used to spread their rugs in some shady court, and sit there, drinking brandy and champagne all day, letting the ancient civilization gradually reconstruct itself in their brains.

Life on the dahabeëh is much as usual; in fact, we are only waiting a favorable wind to pursue our voyage, expecting to see Thebes satisfactorily on our return. Of the inhabitants and social life of Luxor, we shall have more to say by and by. We have daily a levee of idlers on the bank, who spend twilight hours in watching the boat; we are visited by sharp-eyed dealers in antiquities, who pull out strings of scarabæi from their bosoms, or cautiously produce from under their gowns a sculptured tablet, or a stone image, or some articles from a mummy-case—antiques really as good as new. Abd-el-Atti sits on the forward-deck cheapening the poor chickens with old women, and surrounded by an admiring group of Arab friends, who sit all day smoking and sipping coffee, and kept in a lively enjoyment by his interminable facetiae and badinage.

Our most illustrious visitors are the American consul, Ali Effendi Noorad, and the English consul, Mustapha Aga. Ali is a well-featured, bronze-complexioned Arab of good family (I think of the Ababdehs), whose brother is Sheykh of a tribe at Karnak.

He cannot speak English, but he has a pleasanter smile than any other American consul I know. Mustapha, now very old and well known to all Nile travelers, is a venerable wise man of the East, a most suave, courtly Arab, plausible, and soft of speech; under his bushy eyebrows one sees eyes that are keen and yet glazed with a film of secrecy; the sort of eye that you cannot look into, but which you have no doubt looks into you.

Mustapha, as I said, built his house between two columns of the temple of Luxor. These magnificent columns, with flaring lotus capitals, are half-buried in sand, and the whole area is so built in and over by Arab habitations that little of the once extensive and splendid structure can be seen. Indeed, the visitor will do well to be content with the well-known poetic view of the columns from the river. The elegant obelisk, whose mate is in Paris, must however be seen, as well as the statues of Rameses II. sitting behind it up to their necks in sand—as if a sitz-bath had been prescribed. I went one day into the interior of the huts, in order to look at some of the sculptures, especially that of a king’s chariot which is shaded by a parasol—an article which we invented three or four thousand years after the Egyptians, who first used it, had gone to the shades where parasols are useless. I was sorry that I went. The private house I entered was a mud enclosure with a creaky wooden door. Opening this I found myself in what appeared to be a private hen-yard, where babies, chickens, old women, straw, flies, and dust, mingled with the odors of antiquity; about this were the rooms in which the family sleep—mere dog-kennels. Two of the women had nose-rings put through the right nostril, hoops of gold two or three inches across. I cannot say that a nose-ring adds to a woman’s beauty, but if I had to manage a harem of these sharp-tongued creatures I should want rings in their noses—it would need only a slight pull of the cord in the ring to cause the woman to cry, in Oriental language, “where thou goest, I will go.” The parasol sculpture was half-covered by the mud-wall and the oven; but there was Pharaoh visible, riding on in glory through all this squalor. The Pharaohs and priests never let one of the common people set foot inside these superb temples; and there is a sort of base satisfaction now! in seeing the ignorant and oppressed living in their palaces, and letting the hens roost on Pharaoh’s sun-shade. But it was difficult to make picturesque the inside of this temple-palace, even with all the flowing rags of its occupants.

We spend a day in a preliminary visit to the Memnonium and the vast ruins known as those of Medeenet Hâboo. Among our attendants over the plain are half a dozen little girls, bright, smiling lasses, who salute us with a cheery “Good morning,” and devote themselves to us the whole day. Each one carries on her head a light, thin water-koolleh, that would hold about a quart, balancing it perfectly as she runs along. I have seen mere infants carrying very small koollehs, beginning thus young to learn the art of walking with the large ones, which is to be the chief business of their lives.

One of the girls, who says her name is Fatimeh (the name of the Prophet’s favorite daughter is in great request), is very pretty, and may be ten or eleven years old, not far from the marriageable age. She has black hair, large, soft, black eyes, the lids stained with kohl, dazzling white teeth and a sweet smile. She wears cheap earrings, a necklace of beads and metal, and a slight ring on one hand; her finger-nails and the palms of her little hands are stained with henna. For dress she has a sort of shawl used as a head-veil, and an ample outer-garment, a mantle of dark-blue cotton, ornamented down the front seams with colored beads—a coquettish touch that connects her with her sisters of the ancient régime who seem to have used the cylindrical blue bead even more profusely than ladies now-a-day the jet “bugles,” in dress trimming. I fear the pretty heathen is beginning to be aware of her attractions.

The girls run patiently beside us or wait for us at the temples all day, bruising their feet on the stony ways, getting nothing to eat unless we give them something, chatting cheerfully, smiling at us and using their little stock of English to gain our good will, constantly ready with their koollehs, and say nothing of backsheesh until they are about to leave us at night and go to their homes. But when they begin to ask, and get a copper or two, they beg with a mixture of pathos and anxiety and a use of the pronouns that is irresistible.

“You tired. Plenty backsheesh for little girl. Yes.”

“Why don’t you give us backsheesh? We are tired too,” we reply.

“Yes. Me give you backsheesh you tired all day.”

Fatimeh only uses her eyes, conscious already of her power. They are satisfied with a piastre; which the dragoman says is too much, and enough to spoil them. But, after all, five cents is not a magnificent gift, from a stranger who has come five thousand miles, to a little girl in the heart of Africa, who has lighted up the desert a whole day with her charming smiles!

The donkey-boy pulls the strings of pathos for his backsheesh, having no beauty to use; he says, “Father and mother all dead.” Seems to have belonged to a harem.

Before we can gain space or quiet either to examine or enjoy a temple, we have to free ourselves of a crowd of adhesive men, boys, and girls, who press upon us their curiosities, relics of the dead, whose only value is their antiquity. The price of these relics is of course wholly “fancy,” and I presume that Thebes, where the influence of the antique is most strong, is the best market in the world for these trifles; and that however cheaply they may be bought here, they fetch a better price than they would elsewhere.

I suppose if I were to stand in Broadway and offer passers-by such a mummy’s hand as this which is now pressed upon my notice, I could scarcely give it away. This hand has been “doctored” to sell; the present owner has re-wrapped its bitumen-soaked flesh in mummy-cloth, and partially concealed three rings on the fingers. Of course the hand is old and the cheap rings are new. It is pleasant to think of these merchants in dried flesh prowling about among the dead, selecting a limb here and there that they think will decorate well, and tricking out with cheap jewelry these mortal fragments. This hand, which the rascal has chosen, is small, and may have been a source of pride to its owner long ago; somebody else may have been fond of it, though even he—the lover—would not care to hold it long now. A pretty little hand; I suppose it has in its better days given many a caress and love-pat, and many a slap in the face; belonged to one of the people, or it would not have been found in a common mummy-pit; perhaps the hand of a sweet water-bearer like Fatimeh, perhaps of some slave-girl whose fatal beauty threw her into the drag-net that the Pharaohs occasionally cast along the Upper Nile—slave-hunting raids that appear on the monuments as great military achievements. This hand, naked, supple, dimpled, henna-tipped, may have been offered for nothing once; there are wanted for it four piastres now, rings and all. A dear little hand!

Great quantities of antique beads are offered us in strings, to one end of which is usually tied a small image of Osiris, or the winged sun, or the scarabæus with wings. The inexhaustible supply of these beads and images leads many to think that they are manufactured to suit the demand. But it is not so. Their blue is of a shade that is not produced now-a-days. And, besides, there is no need to manufacture what exists in the mummy-pits in such abundance. The beads and bugles are of glass; they were much used for necklaces and are found covering the breasts of mummies, woven in a network of various patterns, like old bead purses. The vivid blue color was given by copper.

The little blue images of Osiris which are so abundant are also genuine. They are of porcelain, a sort of porcelain-glass, a sand-paste, glazed, colored blue, and baked. They are found in great quantities in all tombs; and it was the Egyptian practice to thickly strew with them the ground upon which the foundations and floors of temples were laid. These images found in tombs are more properly figures of the dead under the form of Osiris, and the hieroglyphics on them sometimes give the name and quality of the departed. They are in fact a sort of “p.p. c.” visiting-card, which the mummy has left for future ages. The Egyptians succeeded in handing themselves down to posterity; but the manner in which posterity has received them is not encouraging to us to salt ourselves down for another age.

The Memnonium, or more properly Rameseum, since it was built by Rameses II., and covered with his deeds, writ in stone, gives you even in its ruins a very good idea of one of the most symmetrical of Egyptian temples; the vast columns of its great hall attest its magnificence, while the elaboration of its sculpture, wanting the classic purity of the earlier work found in the tombs of Geezeh and Sakkara, speaks of a time when art was greatly stimulated by royal patronage.

It was the practice of the Pharaohs when they came to the throne to make one or more military expeditions of conquest and plunder, slay as many enemies as possible (all people being considered “enemies” who did not pay tribute), cut as wide a swarth of desolation over the earth as they were able, loot the cities, drag into captivity the pleasing women, and return laden with treasure and slaves and the evidences of enlarged dominion. Then they spent the remainder of their virtuous days in erecting huge temples and chiseling their exploits on them. This is, in a word, the history of the Pharaohs.

But I think that Rameses II., who was the handsomest and most conceited swell of them all, was not so particular about doing the deeds as he was about recording them. He could not have done much else in his long reign than erect the temples, carve the hieroglyphics, and set up the statues of himself, which proclaim his fame. He literally spread himself all over Egypt, and must have kept the whole country busy, quarrying, and building, and carving for his glorification. That he did a tenth of the deeds he is represented performing, no one believes now; and I take a vindictive pleasure in abusing him. By some historic fatality he got the name of the Great Sesostris, and was by tradition credited with the exploits of Thothmes III., the greatest of the Pharaohs, a real hero and statesman, during whose reign it was no boast to say that Egypt “placed her frontier where it pleased herself,” and with those of his father Sethi I., a usurper in the line, but a great soldier.

However, this Rameses did not have good luck with his gigantic statues; I do not know one that is not shattered, defaced, or thrown down. This one at the Rameseum is only a wreck of gigantic fragments. It was a monolith of syenite, and if it was the largest statue in Egypt, as it is said, it must have been over sixty feet high. The arithmeticians say that it weighed about eight hundred and eighty-seven tons, having a solid content of three times the largest obelisk in the world, that at Karnak. These figures convey no idea to my mind. When a stone man is as big as a four-story house, I cease to grasp him. I climbed upon the arm of this Rameses, and found his name cut deeply in the hard granite, the cutting polished to the very bottom like the finest intaglio. The polishing alone of this great mass must have been an incredible labor. How was it moved from its quarry in Assouan, a hundred and thirty miles distant? And how was it broken into the thousand fragments in which it lies? An earthquake would not do it. There are no marks of drilling or the use of an explosive material. But if Cambyses broke it—and Cambyses must have been remembered in Egypt as Napoleon I. is in Italy, the one for smashing, the other for stealing—he had something as destructive as nitro-glycerine.

Rameses II. impressed into his service not only art but literature. One of his achievements depicted here is his victory over the Khitas (Hittites), an Asiatic tribe; the king is in the single-handed act of driving the enemy over the river Orontes,—a bluish streak meandering down the wall. This scene is the subject of a famous poem, known as the Poem of Pentaour, which is carved in hieroglyphics at Karnak and at Luxor. The battle is very spiritedly depicted here. On the walls are many side-scenes and acts characteristic of the age and the people. The booty from the enemy is collected in a heap; and the quantity of gold is indicated by the size of a bag of it which is breaking the back of an ass; a soldier is pulling the beard of his prisoner, and another is beating his captives, after the brutal manner of the Egyptians.

The temples at Medeenet Haboo are to me as interesting as those at Karnak. There are two; the smaller one is of various ages; but its oldest portions were built by Amun-noo-het, the sister of Thothmes, the woman who has left more monuments of her vigor than any other in history, and, woman-like, the monuments are filial offerings, and not erections to her own greatness; the larger temple is the work of Rameses III. The more you visit it, the more you will be impressed with the splendor of its courts, halls and columns, and you may spend days in the study of its sculptures without exhausting them.

Along these high-columned halls stalk vast processions, armies going to battle, conquerors in triumphal entry, priests and soldiers bearing sacrifices, and rows of stone deities of the Egyptian pantheon receiving them in a divine indifference. Again the battle rages, the chariots drive furiously, arrows fill the air, the foot-troops press forward with their big spears and long shields, and the king is slaying the chief, who tumbles from his car. The alarm has spread to the country beyond; the terrified inhabitants are in flight; a woman, such is the detail, is seen to snatch her baby and run into the woods, leaving her pot of broth cooking on the fire.

The carving in this temple is often very deep, cut in four or five inches in the syenite, and beautifully polished to the bottom, as if done with emery. The colors that once gave each figure its character, are still fresh, red, green, blue, and black. The ceilings of some of the chambers yet represent the blue and star-sprinkled sky. How surpassingly brilliant these must have been once! We see how much the figure owed to color, when the color designated the different nationalities, the enemies or the captives, the shade of their skin, hair, beard and garments. We recognize, even, textures of cloth, and the spotted leopard-skins worn by the priests. How gay are the birds of varied plumage.

There is considerable variety in sculpture here, but, after all an endless repetition on wall after wall, in chamber after chamber of the same royal persons, gods, goddesses, and priests. There is nothing on earth so tiresome as a row of stone gods, in whom I doubt if anybody ever sincerely believed, standing to receive the offerings of a Turveydrop of a king. Occasionally the gods take turn about, and pour oil on the head of a king, at his coronation, and with this is usually the very pretty device of four birds flying to the four quarters of the globe to announce the event. But whatever the scene, warlike or religious, it is for the glorification of Pharaoh, all the same. He is commonly represented of gigantic size, and all the other human figures about him are small in comparison. It must have kept the Pharaoh in a constantly inflated condition, to walk these halls and behold, on all sides, his extraordinary apotheosis. But the Pharaoh was not only king but high priest, and the divine representative on earth, and about to become, in a peculiar sense, Osiris himself, at his death.

The Egyptians would have saved us much trouble if they had introduced perspective into these pictures. It is difficult to feel that a pond of water, a tree and a house, one above the other on a wall, are intended to be on the same level. We have to accustom ourselves to figures always in profile, with the eye cut in full as if seen in front, and both shoulders showing. The hands of prisoners are tied behind them, but this is shown by bringing both elbows, with no sort of respect for the man’s anatomy, round to the side, toward us, yet it is wonderful what character and vivacity they gave to their figures, and how by simple profile they represent nationalities and races, Ethiops, Nubians, Jews, Assyrians, Europeans.

These temples are inlaid and overlaid and surrounded with heaps of rubbish, and the débris of ancient and modern mud and unbaked-brick dwellings; part of the great pillars are entirely covered. The Christians once occupied the temples, and there are remains of a church, and a large church, in one of the vast courts, built of materials at hand, but gone to ruin more complete than the structure around it. The early Christians hewed away the beautiful images of Osiris from the pillars (an Osiride pillar is one upon one side of which, and the length of it, is cut in full relief, only attached at the back, a figure of Osiris), and covered the hieroglyphics and sculptures with plaster. They defaced these temples as the Reformers hacked and whitewashed the cathedrals of Germany. And sometimes the plaster which was meant to cover forever from sight the images of a mysterious religion, has defeated the intentions of the plasterers, by preserving, to an age that has no fear of stone gods, the ancient pictures, sharp in outline and fresh in color.

It is indeed marvelous that so much has been preserved, considering what a destructive creature man is, and how it pleases his ignoble soul to destroy the works of his forerunners on the earth. The earthquake has shaken up Egypt time and again, but Cambyses was worse; he was an earthquake with malice and purpose, and left little standing that he had leisure to overturn. The ancient Christians spent a great deal of time in rubbing out the deep-cut hieroglyphics, chiseling away the heads of strange gods, covering the pictures of ancient ceremonies and sacrifices, and painting on the walls their own rude conceptions of holy persons and miraculous occurrences. And then the Moslems came, hating all images and pictorial representations alike, and scraped away or battered with bullets the work of pagans and Christians.