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Title:  Egypt (La Mort De Philae)

Author:  Pierre Loti

Release Date: January, 2003  [Etext #3685]
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[The actual date this file first posted = 07/17/01]

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Etext prepared by Dagny, dagnyj@hotmail.com
and John Bickers, jbickers@ihug.co.nz


Egypt (La Mort De Philae)

by Pierre Loti




Translated from the French by

W. P. BAINES




CHAPTER I

A WINTER MIDNIGHT BEFORE THE GREAT SPHINX

A night wondrously clear and of a colour unknown to our climate; a
place of dreamlike aspect, fraught with mystery. The moon of a bright
silver, which dazzles by its shining, illumines a world which surely
is no longer ours; for it resembles in nothing what may be seen in
other lands. A world in which everything is suffused with rosy color
beneath the stars of midnight, and where granite symbols rise up,
ghostlike and motionless.

Is that a hill of sand that rises yonder? One can scarcely tell, for
it has as it were no shape, no outline; rather it seems like a great
rosy cloud, or some huge, trembling billow, which once perhaps raised
itself there, forthwith to become motionless for ever. . . . And from
out this kind of mummified wave a colossal human effigy emerges, rose-
coloured too, a nameless, elusive rose; emerges, and stares with fixed
eyes and smiles. It is so huge it seems unreal, as if it were a
reflection cast by some mirror hidden in the moon. . . . And behind
this monster face, far away in the rear, on the top of those undefined
and gently undulating sandhills, three apocalyptic signs rise up
against the sky, those rose-coloured triangles, regular as the figures
of geometry, but so vast in the distance that they inspire you with
fear. They seem to be luminous of themselves, so vividly do they stand
out in their clear rose against the deep blue of the star-spangled
vault. And this apparent radiation from within, by its lack of
likelihood, makes them seem more awful.

And all around is the desert; a corner of the mournful kingdom of
sand. Nothing else is to be seen anywhere save those three awful
things that stand there upright and still--the human likeness
magnified beyond all measurement, and the three geometric mountains;
things at first sight like exhalations, visionary things, with
nevertheless here and there, and most of all in the features of the
vast mute face, subtleties of shadow which show that /it/ at least
exists, rigid and immovable, fashioned out of imperishable stone.

Even had we not known, we must soon have guessed, for these things are
unique in the world, and pictures of every age have made the knowledge
of them commonplace: the Sphinx and the Pyramids! But what is strange
is that they should be so disquieting. . . . And this pervading colour
of rose, whence comes it, seeing that usually the moon tints with blue
the things it illumines? One would not expect this colour either,
which, nevertheless, is that of all the sands and all the granites of
Egypt and Arabia. And then too, the eyes of the statue, how often have
we not seen them? And did we not know that they were capable only of
their one fixed stare? Why is it then that their motionless regard
surprises and chills us, even while we are obsessed by the smile of
the sealed lips that seem to hold back the answer to the supreme
enigma? . . .

It is cold, but cold as in our country are the fine nights of January,
and a wintry mist rises low down in the little valleys of the sand.
And that again we were not expecting; beyond question the latest
invaders of this country, by changing the course of the old Nile, so
as to water the earth and make it more productive, have brought hither
the humidity of their own misty isle. And this strange cold, this
mist, light as it still is, seem to presage the end of ages, give an
added remoteness and finality to all this dead past, which lies here
beneath us in subterranean labyrinths haunted by a thousand mummies.

And the mist, which, as the night advances, thickens in the valleys,
hesitates to mount to the great daunting face of the Sphinx; and
covers it with the merest and most transparent gauze; and, like
everything else here to-night, this gauze, too, is rose-colored. And
meanwhile the Sphinx, which has seen the unrolling of all the history
of the world, attends impassively the change in Egypt's climate,
plunged in profound and mystic contemplation of the moon, its friend
for the last 5000 years.

Here and there on the soft pathway of the sandhills are pigmy figures
of men that move about or sit squatting as if on the watch; and small
as they are, low down in the hollows and far away, this wonderful
silver moon reveals even their slightest gestures; for their white
robes and black cloaks stand sharply out against the monotonous rose
of the desert. At times they call to one another in a harsh, aspirate
tongue, and then go off at a run, noiselessly, barefooted, with
burnous flying, like moths in the night. They lie in wait for the
parties of tourists who arrive from time to time. For the great
symbols, during the hundreds and thousands of years that have elapsed
since men ceased to venerate them, have nevertheless scarcely ever
been alone, especially on nights with a full moon. Men of all races,
of all times, have come to wander round them, vaguely attracted by
their immensity and mystery. In the days of the Romans they had
already become symbols of a lost significance, legacies of a fabulous
antiquity, but people came curiously to contemplate them, and tourists
in toga and in peplus carved their names on the granite of their bases
for the sake of remembrance.

The tourists who have come to-night, and upon whom have pounced the
black-cloaked Bedouin guides, wear cap and ulster or furred greatcoat;
their intrusion here seems almost an offence; but, alas, such visitors
become more numerous in each succeeding year. The great town hard by--
which sweats gold now that men have started to buy from it its dignity
and its soul--is become a place of rendezvous and holiday for the
idlers and upstarts of the whole world. The modern spirit encompasses
the old desert of the Sphinx on every side. It is true that up to the
present no one has dared to profane it by building in the immediate
neighbourhood of the great statue. Its fixity and calm disdain still
hold some sway, perhaps. But little more than a mile away there ends a
road travelled by hackney carriages and tramway cars, and noisy with
the delectable hootings of smart motor cars; and behind the pyramid of
Cheops squats a vast hotel to which swarm men and women of fashion,
the latter absurdly feathered, like Redskins at a scalp dance; and
sick people, in search of purer air; and consumptive English maidens;
and ancient English dames, a little the worse for wear, who bring
their rheumatisms for the treatment of the dry winds.

Passing on our way hither, we had seen this road and this hotel and
these people in the glare of the electric lights, and from an
orchestra that was playing there we caught the trivial air of a
popular refrain of the music halls; but when in a dip of the ground
all this had disappeared, what a sense of deliverance possessed us,
how far off this turmoil seemed! As soon as we commenced to tread upon
the sand of centuries, where all at once our footsteps made no sound,
nothing seemed to have existence, save only the great calm and the
religious awe of this world into which we were come, of this world
with its so crushing commentary upon our own, where all seemed silent,
undefined, gigantic and suffused with rose-colour.

And first there is the pyramid of Cheops, whose immutable base we had
to skirt on our way hither. In the moonlight we could see the separate
blocks, so enormous, so regular, so even in their layers, which lie
one above the other to infinity, getting ever smaller and smaller, and
mounting, mounting in diminishing perspective, until at last high up
they form the apex of this giddy triangle. And the pyramid seemed to
be illumined by some sad dawn of the end of the world, a dawn which
made ruddy only the sands and the granites of earth, and left the
heavens, pricked with their myriad stars, more awful in their
darkness. How impossible it is for us to conceive the mental attitude
of that king who, during some half-century, spent the lives of
thousands and thousands of his slaves in the construction of this
tomb, in the fond and foolish hope of prolonging to infinity the
existence of his mummy.

The pyramid once passed there was still a short way to go before we
confronted the Sphinx, in the middle of what our contemporaries have
left him of his desert. We had to descend the slope of that sandhill
which looked like a cloud, and seemed as if covered with felt, in
order to preserve in such a place a more complete silence. And here
and there we passed a gaping black hole--an airhole, as it seemed, of
the profound and inextricable kingdom of mummies, very populous still,
in spite of the zeal of the exhumers.

As we descended the sandy pathway we were not slow to perceive the
Sphinx itself, half hill, half couchant beast, turning its back upon
us in the attitude of a gigantic dog, that thought to bay the moon;
its head stood out in dark silhouette, like a screen before the light
it seemed to be regarding, and the lappets of its headgear showed like
downhanging ears. And then gradually, as we walked on, we saw it in
profile, shorn of its nose--flat-nosed like a death's head--but having
already an expression even when seen afar off and from the side;
already disdainful with thrust-out chin and baffling, mysterious
smile. And when at length we arrived before the colossal visage, face
to face with it--without however encountering its gaze, which passed
high above our heads--there came over us at once the sentiment of all
the secret thought which these men of old contrived to incorporate and
make eternal behind this mutilated mask.

But in full daylight their great Sphinx is no more. It has ceased as
it were to exist. It is so scarred by time, and by the hands of
iconoclasts; so dilapidated, broken and diminished, that it is as
inexpressive as the crumbling mummies found in the sarcophagi, which
no longer even ape humanity. But after the manner of all phantoms it
comes to life again at night, beneath the enchantments of the moon.

For the men of its time whom did it represent? King Amenemhat? The Sun
God? Who can rightly tell? Of all hieroglyphic images it remains the
one least understood. The unfathomable thinkers of Egypt symbolised
everything for the benefit of the uninitiated under the form of awe-
inspiring figures of the gods; and it may be, perhaps, that, after
having meditated so deeply in the shadow of their temples, and sought
so long the everlasting wherefore of life and death, they wished
simply to sum up in the smile of these closed lips the vanity of the
most profound of our human speculations. . . . It is said that the
Sphinx was once of striking beauty, when harmonious contour and
colouring animated the face, and it was enthroned at its full height
on a kind of esplanade paved with long slabs of stone. But was it then
more sovereign than it is to-night in its last decrepitude? Almost
buried beneath the sand of the Libyan desert, which now quite hides
its base, it rises at this hour like a phantom which nothing solid
sustains in the air.

*****

It has gone midnight. In little groups the tourists of the evening
have disappeared; to regain perhaps the neighbouring hotel, where the
orchestra doubtless has not ceased to rage; or may be, remounting
their cars, to join, in some club of Cairo, one of those bridge
parties, in which the really superior intellects of our time delight;
some--the stouthearted ones--departed talking loudly and with cigar in
mouth; others, however, daunted in spite of themselves, lowered their
voices as people instinctively do in church. And the Bedouin guides,
who a moment ago seemed to flutter about the giant monument like so
many black moths--they too have gone, made restless by the cold air,
which erstwhile they had not known. The show for to-night is over, and
everywhere silence reigns.

The rosy tint fades on the Sphinx and the pyramids; all things in the
ghostly scene grow visibly paler; for the moon as it rises becomes
more silvery in the increasing chilliness of midnight. The winter
mist, exhaled from the artificially watered fields below, continues to
rise, takes heart and envelops the great mute face itself. And the
latter persists in its regard of the dead moon, preserving still the
old disconcerting smile. It becomes more and more difficult to believe
that here before us is a real colossus, so surely does it seem nothing
other than a dilated reflection of a thing which exists /elsewhere/,
in some other world. And behind in the distance are the three
triangular mountains. Them, too, the fog envelops, till they also
cease to exist, and become pure visions of the Apocalypse.

Now it is that little by little an intolerable sadness is expressed in
those large eyes with their empty sockets--for, at this moment, the
ultimate secret, that which the Sphinx seems to have known for so many
centuries, but to have withheld in melancholy irony, is this: that all
these dead men and women who sleep in the vast necropolis below have
been fooled, and the awakening signal has not sounded for a single one
of them; and that the creation of mankind--mankind that thinks and
suffers--has had no rational explanation, and that our poor
aspirations are vain, but so vain as to awaken pity.



CHAPTER II

THE PASSING OF CAIRO

Ragged, threatening clouds, like those that bring the showers of our
early spring, hurry across a pale evening sky, whose mere aspect makes
you cold. A wintry wind, raw and bitter, blows without ceasing, and
brings with it every now and then some furtive spots of rain.

A carriage takes me towards what was once the residence of the great
Mehemet Ali: by a steep incline it ascends into the midst of rocks and
sand--and already, and almost in a moment, we seem to be in the
desert; though we have scarcely left behind the last houses of an Arab
quarter, where long-robed folk, who looked half frozen, were muffled
up to the eyes to-day. . . . Was there formerly such weather as this
in this country noted for its unchanging mildness?

This residence of the great sovereign of Egypt, the citadel and the
mosque which he had made for his last repose, are perched like eagles'
nests on a spur of the mountain chain of Arabia, the Mokattam, which
stretches out like a promontory towards the basin of the Nile, and
brings quite close to Cairo, so as almost to overhang it, a little of
the desert solitude. And so the eye can see from far off and from all
sides the mosque of Mehemet Ali, with the flattened domes of its
cupolas, its pointed minarets, the general aspect so entirely Turkish,
perched high up, with a certain unexpectedness, above the Arab town
which it dominates. The prince who sleeps there wished that it should
resemble the mosques of his fatherland, and it looks as if it had been
transported bodily from Stamboul.

A short trot brings us up to the lower gate of the old fortress; and,
by a natural effect, as we ascend, all Cairo which is near there,
seems to rise with us: not yet indeed the endless multitude of its
houses; but at first only the thousands of its minarets, which in a
few seconds point their high towers into the mournful sky, and suggest
at once that an immense town is about to unfold itself under our eyes.

Continuing to ascend--past the double rampart, the double or triple
gates, which all these old fortresses possess, we penetrate at length
into a large fortified courtyard, the crenellated walls of which shut
out our further view. Soldiers are on guard there--and how unexpected
are such soldiers in this holy place of Egypt! The red uniforms and
the white faces of the north: Englishmen, billeted in the palace of
Mehemet Ali!

The mosque first meets the eye, preceding the palace. And as we
approach, it is Stamboul indeed--for me dear old Stamboul--which is
called to mind; there is nothing, whether in the lines of its
architecture or in the details of its ornamentation, to suggest the
art of the Arabs--a purer art it may be than this and of which many
excellent examples may be seen in Cairo. No; it is a corner of Turkey
into which we are suddenly come.

Beyond a courtyard paved with marble, silent and enclosed, which
serves as a vast parvis, the sanctuary recalls those of Mehemet Fatih
or the Chah Zade: the same sanctified gloom, into which the stained
glass of the narrow windows casts a splendour as of precious stones;
the same extreme distance between the enormous pillars, leaving more
clear space than in our churches, and giving to the domes the
appearance of being held up by enchantment.

The walls are of a strange white marble streaked with yellow. The
ground is completely covered with carpets of a sombre red. In the
vaults, very elaborately wrought, nothing but blacks and gold: a
background of black bestrewn with golden roses, and bordered with
arabesques like gold lace. And from above hang thousands of gold
chains supporting the vigil lamps for the evening prayers. Here and
there are people on their knees, little groups in robe and turban,
scattered fortuitously upon the red of the carpets, and almost lost in
the midst of the sumptuous solitude.

In an obscure corner lies Mehemet Ali, the prince adventurous and
chivalrous as some legendary hero, and withal one of the greatest
sovereigns of modern history. There he lies behind a grating of gold,
of complicated design, in that Turkish style, already decadent, but
still so beautiful, which was that of his epoch.

Through the golden bars may be seen in the shadow the catafalque of
state, in three tiers, covered with blue brocades, exquisitely faded,
and profusely embroidered with dull gold. Two long green palms freshly
cut from some date-tree in the neighbourhood are crossed before the
door of this sort of funeral enclosure. And it seems that around us is
an inviolable religious peace. . . .

But all at once there comes a noisy chattering in a Teutonic tongue--
and shouts and laughs! . . . How is it possible, so near to the great
dead? . . . And there enters a group of tourists, dressed more or less
in the approved "smart" style. A guide, with a droll countenance,
recites to them the beauties of the place, bellowing at the top of his
voice like a showman at a fair. And one of the travellers, stumbling
in the sandals which are too large for her small feet, laughs a
prolonged, silly little laugh like the clucking of a turkey. . . .

Is there then no keeper, no guardian of this holy mosque? And amongst
the faithful prostrate here in prayer, none who will rise and make
indignant protest? Who after this will speak to us of the fanaticism
of the Egyptians? . . . Too meek, rather, they seem to me everywhere.
Take any church you please in Europe where men go down on their knees
in prayer, and I should like to see what kind of a welcome would be
accorded to a party of Moslem tourists who--to suppose the impossible
--behaved so badly as these savages here.

Behind the mosque is an esplanade, and beyond that the palace. The
palace, as such, can scarcely be said to exist any longer, for it has
been turned into a barrack for the army of occupation. English
soldiers, indeed, meet us at every turn, smoking their pipes in the
idleness of the evening. One of them who does not smoke is trying to
carve his name with a knife on one of the layers of marble at the base
of the sanctuary.

At the end of this esplanade there is a kind of balcony from which one
may see the whole of the town, and an unlimited extent of verdant
plains and yellow desert. It is a favourite view of the tourists of
the agencies, and we meet again our friends of the mosque, who have
preceded us hither--the gentlemen with the loud voices, the bellowing
guide and the cackling lady. Some soldiers are standing there too,
smoking their pipes contemplatively. But spite of all these people, in
spite, too, of the wintry sky, the scene which presents itself on
arrival there is ravishing.

A very fairyland--but a fairyland quite different from that of
Stamboul. For whereas the latter is ranged like a great amphitheatre
above the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmora, here the vast town is
spread out simply, in a plain surrounded by the solitude of the desert
and dominated by chaotic rocks. Thousands of minarets rise up on every
side like ears of corn in a field; far away in the distance one can
see their innumerable slender points--but instead of being simply, as
at Stamboul, so many white spires, they are here complicated by
arabesques, by galleries, clock-towers and little columns, and seem to
have borrowed the reddish colour of the desert.

The flat rocks tell of a region which formerly was without rain. The
innumerable palm-trees of the gardens, above this ocean of mosques and
houses, sway their plumes in the wind, bewildered as it were by these
clouds laden with cold showers. In the south and in the west, at the
extreme limits of the view, as if upon the misty horizon of the
plains, appear two gigantic triangles. They are Gizeh and Memphis--the
eternal pyramids.

At the north of the town there is a corner of the desert quite
singular in its character--of the colour of bistre and of mummy--where
a whole colony of high cupolas, scattered at random, still stand
upright in the midst of sand and desolate rocks. It is the proud
cemetery of the Mameluke Sultans, whose day was done in the Middle
Ages.

But if one looks closely, what disorder, what a mass of ruins there
are in this town--still a little fairylike--beaten this evening by the
squalls of winter. The domes, the holy tombs, the minarets and
terraces, all are crumbling: the hand of death is upon them all. But
down there, in the far distance, near to that silver streak which
meanders through the plains, and which is the old Nile, the advent of
new times is proclaimed by the chimneys of factories, impudently high,
that disfigure everything, and spout forth into the twilight thick
clouds of black smoke.

The night is falling as we descend from the esplanade to return to our
lodgings.

We have first to traverse the old town of Cairo, a maze of streets
still full of charm, wherein the thousand little lamps of the Arab
shops already shed their quiet light. Passing through streets which
twist at their caprice, beneath overhanging balconies covered with
wooden trellis of exquisite workmanship, we have to slacken speed in
the midst of a dense crowd of men and beasts. Close to us pass women,
veiled in black, gently mysterious as in the olden times, and men of
unmoved gravity, in long robes and white draperies; and little donkeys
pompously bedecked in collars of blue beads; and rows of leisurely
camels, with their loads of lucerne, which exhale the pleasant
fragrance of the fields. And when in the gathering gloom, which hides
the signs of decay, there appear suddenly, above the little houses, so
lavishly ornamented with mushrabiyas and arabesques, the tall aerial
minarets, rising to a prodigious height into the twilight sky, it is
still the adorable East.

But nevertheless, what ruins, what filth, what rubbish! How present is
the sense of impending dissolution! And what is this: large pools of
water in the middle of the road! Granted that there is more rain here
than formerly, since the valley of the Nile has been artificially
irrigated, it still seems almost impossible that there should be all
this black water, into which our carriage sinks to the very axles; for
it is a clear week since any serious quantity of rain fell. It would
seem that the new masters of this land, albeit the cost of annual
upkeep has risen in their hands to the sum of fifteen million pounds,
have given no thought to drainage. But the good Arabs, patiently and
without murmuring, gather up their long robes, and with legs bare to
the knee make their way through this already pestilential water, which
must be hatching for them fever and death.

Further on, as the carriage proceeds on its course, the scene changes
little by little. The streets become vulgar: the houses of "The
Arabian Nights" give place to tasteless Levantine buildings; electric
lamps begin to pierce the darkness with their wan, fatiguing glare,
and at a sharp turning the new Cairo is before us.

What is this? Where are we fallen? Save that it is more vulgar, it
might be Nice, or the Riviera, or Interkalken, or any other of those
towns of carnival whither the bad taste of the whole world comes to
disport itself in the so-called fashionable seasons. But in these
quarters, on the other hand, which belong to the foreigners and to the
Egyptians rallied to the civilisation of the West, all is clean and
dry, well cared for and well kept. There are no ruts, no refuse. The
fifteen million pounds have done their work conscientiously.

Everywhere is the blinding glare of the electric light; monstrous
hotels parade the sham splendour of their painted facades; the whole
length of the streets is one long triumph of imitation, of mud walls
plastered so as to look like stone; a medley of all styles, rockwork,
Roman, Gothic, New Art, Pharaonic, and, above all, the pretentious and
the absurd. Innumerable public-houses overflow with bottles; every
alcoholic drink, all the poisons of the West, are here turned into
Egypt with a take-what-you-please.

And taverns, gambling dens and houses of ill-fame. And parading the
side-walks, numerous Levantine damsels, who seek by their finery to
imitate their fellows of the Paris boulevards, but who by mistake, as
we must suppose, have placed their orders with some costumier for
performing dogs.

This then is the Cairo of the future, this cosmopolitan fair! Good
heavens! When will the Egyptians recollect themselves, when will they
realise that their forebears have left to them an inalienable
patrimony of art, of architecture and exquisite refinement; and that,
by their negligence, one of those towns which used to be the most
beautiful in the world is falling into ruin and about to perish?

And nevertheless amongst the young Moslems and Copts now leaving the
schools there are so many of distinguished mind and superior
intelligence! When I see the things that are here, see them with the
fresh eyes of a stranger, landed but yesterday upon this soil,
impregnated with the glory of antiquity, I want to cry out to them,
with a frankness that is brutal perhaps, but with a profound sympathy:

"Bestir yourselves before it is too late. Defend yourselves against
this disintegrating invasion--not by force, be it understood, not by
inhospitality or ill-humour--but by disdaining this Occidental
rubbish, this last year's frippery by which you are inundated. Try to
preserve not only your traditions and your admirable Arab language,
but also the grace and mystery that used to characterise your town,
the refined luxury of your dwelling-houses. It is not a question now
of a poet's fancy; your national dignity is at stake. You are
/Orientals/--I pronounce respectfully that word, which implies a whole
past of early civilisation, of unmingled greatness--but in a few
years, unless you are on your guard, you will have become mere
Levantine brokers, exclusively preoccupied with the price of land and
the rise in cotton."



CHAPTER III

THE MOSQUES OF CAIRO

They are almost innumerable, more than 3000, and this great town,
which covers some twelve miles of plain, might well be called a city
of mosques. (I speak, of course, of the ancient Cairo, of the Cairo of
the Arabs. The new Cairo, the Cairo of sham elegance and of "Semiramis
Hotels," does not deserve to be mentioned except with a smile.)

A city of mosques, then, as I was saying. They follow one another
along the streets, sometimes two, three, four in a row; leaning one
against the other, so that their confines become merged. On all sides
their minarets shoot up into the air, those minarets embellished with
arabesques, carved and complicated with the most changing fancy. They
have their little balconies, their rows of little columns; they are so
fashioned that the daylight shows through them. Some are far away in
the distance; others quite close, pointing straight into the sky above
our heads. No matter where one looks--as far as the eye can see--still
there are others; all of the same familiar colour, a brown turning
into rose. The most ancient of them, those of the old easy-tempered
times, bristle with shafts of wood, placed there as resting-places for
the great free birds of the air, and vultures and ravens may always be
seen perched there, contemplating the horizon of the sands, the line
of the yellow solitudes.

Three thousand mosques! Their great straight walls, a little severe
perhaps, and scarcely pierced by their tiny ogive windows, rise above
the height of the neighbouring houses. These walls are of the same
brown colour as the minarets, except that they are painted with
horizontal stripes of an old red, which has been faded by the sun; and
they are crowned invariably with a series of trefoils, after the
fashion of battlements, but trefoils which in every case are different
and surprising.

Before the mosques, which are raised like altars, there is always a
flight of steps with a balustrade of white marble. From the door one
gets a glimpse of the calm interior in deep shadow. Once inside there
are corridors, astonishingly lofty, sonorous and enveloped in a kind
of half gloom; immediately on entering one experiences a sense of
coolness and pervading peace; they prepare you as it were, and you
begin to be filled with a spirit of devotion, and instinctively to
speak low. In the narrow street outside there was the clamorous uproar
of an Oriental crowd, cries of sellers, and the noise of humble old-
world trading; men and beasts jostled you; there seemed a scarcity of
air beneath those so numerous overhanging mushrabiyas. But here
suddenly there is silence, broken only by the vague murmur of prayers
and the sweet songs of birds; there is silence too, and the sense of
open space, in the holy garden enclosed within high walls; and again
in the sanctuary, resplendent in its quiet and restful magnificence.
Few people as a rule frequent the mosques, except of course at the
hours of the five services of the day. In a few chosen corners,
particularly cool and shady, some greybeards isolate themselves to
read from morning till night the holy books and to ponder the thought
of approaching death: they may be seen there in their white turbans,
with their white beards and grave faces. And there may be, too, some
few poor homeless outcasts, who are come to seek the hospitality of
Allah, and sleep, careless of the morrow, stretched to their full
length on mats.

The peculiar charm of the gardens of the mosques, which are often very
extensive, is that they are so jealously enclosed within their high
walls--crowned always with stone trefoils--which completely shut out
the hubbub of the outer world. Palm-trees, which have grown there for
some hundred years perhaps, rise from the ground, either separately or
in superb clusters, and temper the light of the always hot sun on the
rose-trees and the flowering hibiscus. There is no noise in the
gardens, any more than in the cloisters, for people walk there in
sandals and with measured tread. And there are Edens, too, for the
birds, who live and sing therein in complete security, even during the
services, attracted by the little troughs which the imams fill for
their benefit each morning with water from the Nile.

As for the mosque itself it is rarely closed on all sides as are those
in the countries of the more sombre Islam of the north. Here in Egypt
--since there is no real winter and scarcely ever any rain--one of the
sides of the mosque is left completely open to the garden; and the
sanctuary is separated from the verdure and the roses only by a simple
colonnade. Thus the faithful grouped beneath the palm-trees can pray
there equally as well as in the interior of the mosque, since they can
see, between the arches, the holy Mihrab.[*]

[*] The Mihrab is a kind of portico indicating the direction of Mecca.
    It is placed at the end of each mosque, as the altar is in our
    churches, and the faithful are supposed to face it when they pray.

Oh! this sanctuary seen from the silent garden, this sanctuary in
which the pale gold gleams on the old ceiling of cedarwood, and
mosaics of mother-of-pearl shine on the walls as if they were
embroideries of silver that had been hung there.

There is no faience as in the mosques of Turkey or of Iran. Here it is
the triumph of patient mosaic. Mother-of-pearl of all colours, all
kinds of marble and of porphyry, cut into myriads of little pieces,
precise and equal, and put together again to form the Arab designs,
which, never borrowing from the human form, nor indeed from the form
of any animal, recall rather those infinitely varied crystals that may
be seen under the microscope in a flake of snow. It is always the
Mihrab which is decorated with the most elaborate richness; generally
little columns of lapis lazuli, intensely blue, rise in relief from
it, framing mosaics so delicate that they look like brocades of fine
lace. In the old ceilings of cedarwood, where the singing birds of the
neighbourhood have their nests, the golds mingle with some most
exquisite colourings, which time has taken care to soften and to blend
together. And here and there very fine and long consoles of sculptured
wood seem to fall, as it were, from the beams and hang upon the walls
like stalactites; and these consoles, too, in past times, have been
carefully coloured and gilded. As for the columns, always dissimilar,
some of amaranth-coloured marble, others of dark green, others again
of red porphyry, with capitals of every conceivable style, they are
come from far, from the night of the ages, from the religious
struggles of an earlier time and testify to the prodigious past which
this valley of the Nile, narrow as it is, and encompassed by the
desert, has known. They were formerly perhaps in the temples of the
pagans, or have known the strange faces of the gods of Egypt and of
ancient Greece and Rome; they have been in the churches of the early
Christians, or have seen the statues of tortured martyrs, and the
images of the transfigured Christ, crowned with the Byzantine aureole.
They have been present at battles, at the downfall of kingdoms, at
hecatombs, at sacrileges; and now brought together promiscuously in
these mosques, they behold on the walls of the sanctuary simply the
thousand little designs, ideally pure, of that Islam which wishes that
men when they pray should conceive Allah as immaterial, a Spirit
without form and without feature.

Each one of these mosques has its sainted dead, whose name it bears,
and who sleeps by its side, in an adjoining mortuary kiosk; some
priest rendered admirable by his virtues, or perhaps a khedive of
earlier times, or a soldier, or a martyr. And the mausoleum, which
communicates with the sanctuary by means of a long passage, sometimes
open, sometimes covered with gratings, is surmounted always by a
special kind of cupola, a very high and curious cupola, which raises
itself into the sky like some gigantic dervish hat. Above the Arab
town, and even in the sand of the neighbouring desert, these funeral
domes may be seen on every side adjoining the old mosques to which
they belong. And in the evening, when the light is failing, they
suggest the odd idea that it is the dead man himself, immensely
magnified, who stands there beneath a hat that is become immense. One
can pray, if one wishes, in this resting-place of the dead saint as
well as in the mosque. Here indeed it is always more secluded and more
in shadow. It is more simple, too, at least up to the height of a man:
on a platform of white marble, more or less worn and yellowed by the
touch of pious hands, nothing more than an austere catafalque of
similar marble, ornamented merely with a Cufic inscription. But if you
raise your eyes to look at the interior of the dome--the inside, as it
were, of the strange dervish hat--you will see shining between the
clusters of painted and gilded stalactites a number of windows of
exquisite colouring, little windows that seem to be constellations of
emeralds and rubies and sapphires. And the birds, you may be sure,
have their nests also in the house of the holy one. They are wont
indeed to soil the carpets and the mats on which the worshippers
kneel, and their nests are so many blots up there amid the gildings of
the carved cedarwood; but then their song, the symphony that issues
from that aviary, is so sweet to the living who pray and to the dead
who dream. . . .

*****

But yet, when all is said, these mosques seem somehow to be wanting.
They do not wholly satisfy you. The access to them perhaps is too
easy, and one feels too near to the modern quarters of the town, where
the hotels are full of visitors--so that at any moment, it seems, the
spell may be broken by the entry of a batch of Cook's tourists, armed
with the inevitable /Baedeker/. Alas! they are the mosques of Cairo,
of poor Cairo, that is invaded and profaned. The memory turns to those
of Morocco, so jealously guarded, to those of Persia, even to those of
Old Stamboul, where the shroud of Islam envelops you in silence and
gently bows your shoulders as soon as you cross their thresholds.

And yet what pains are being taken to-day to preserve these mosques,
which in olden times were such delightful retreats. Neglected for
whole centuries, never repaired, notwithstanding the veneration of
their heedless worshippers, the greater part of them were fallen into
ruin; the fine woodwork of their interiors had become worm-eaten,
their cupolas were cracked and their mosaics covered the floor as with
a hail of mother-of-pearl, of porphyry and marble. It seemed that to
repair all this was a task incapable of fulfilment; it was sheer
folly, people said, to conceive the idea of it.

Nevertheless, for nearly twenty years now an army of workers has been
at the task, sculptors, marble-cutters, mosaicists. Already certain of
the sanctuaries, the most venerable of them indeed, have been entirely
renovated. After having re-echoed for some years to the sounds of
hammers and chisels, during the course of these vast renovations, they
are restored now to peace and to prayer, and the birds have
recommenced to build their nests in them.

It will be the glory of the present reign that it has preserved,
before it was too late, all this magnificent legacy of Moslem art.
When the city of "The Arabian Nights," which was formerly there, shall
have entirely disappeared, to give place to a vulgar /entrepot/ of
commerce and of pleasure, to which the plutocracy of the whole world
comes every winter to disport itself, so much at least will remain to
bear testimony to the lofty and magnificent thought that inspired the
earlier Arab life. These mosques will continue to remain into the
distant future, even when men shall have ceased to pray in them, and
the winged guests shall have departed, for the want of those troughs
of water from the Nile, filled for them by the good imams, whose
hospitality they repay by making heard in the courts, beneath the
arched roofs, beneath the ceilings of cedarwood, the sweet, piping
music of birds.



CHAPTER IV

THE HALL OF THE MUMMIES

There are two of us, and as we light our way by the aid of a lantern
through these vast halls we might be taken for a night watch on its
round. We have just shut behind us and doubly locked the door by which
we entered, and we know that we are alone, rigorously alone, although
this place is so vast, with its endless, communicating halls, its high
vestibules and great flights of stairs; mathematically alone, one
might say, for this palace that we are in is one quite out of the
ordinary, and all its outlets were closed and sealed at nightfall.
Every night indeed the doors are sealed, on account of the priceless
relics that are collected here. So we shall not meet with any living
being in these halls to-night, in spite of their vast extent and
endless turnings, and in spite too of all these mysterious things that
are ranged on every side and fill the place with shadows and hiding-
places.

Our round takes us first along the ground floor over flagstones that
resound to our footsteps. It is about ten of the clock. Here and there
through some stray windows gleams a small patch of luminous blue sky,
lit by the stars which for the good folk outside lend transparency to
the night; but there, none the less, the place is filled with a solemn
gloom, and we lower our voices, remembering perhaps the dead that fill
the glass cases in the halls above.

And these things which line the walls on either side of us as we pass
also seem to be in the nature of receptacles for the dead. For the
most part they are sarcophagi of granite, proud and indestructible:
some of them, in the shape of gigantic boxes, are laid out in line on
pedestals; others, in the form of mummies, stand upright against the
walls and display enormous faces, surmounted by equally enormous head-
dresses. Assembled there they look like a lot of malformed giants,
with oversized heads sunk curiously in their shoulders. There are,
besides, some that are merely statues, colossal figures that have
never held a corpse in their interiors; these all wear a strange,
scarcely perceptible smile; in their huge sphinxlike headgear they
reach nearly to the ceiling and their set stare passes high above our
heads. And there are others that are not larger than ourselves, some
even quite little, with the stature of gnomes. And, every now and
then, at some sudden turning, we encounter a pair of eyes of enamel,
wide-open eyes, that pierce straight into the depths of ours, that
seem to follow us as we pass and make us shiver as if by the contact
of a thought that comes from the abysm of the ages.

We pass on rapidly, however, and somewhat inattentively, for our
business here to-night is not with these simulacra on the ground
floor, but with the more redoubtable hosts above. Besides our lantern
sheds so little light in these great halls that all these people of
granite and sandstone and marble appear only at the precise moment of
our passage, appear only to disappear, and, spreading their fantastic
shadows on the walls, mingle the next moment with the great mute
crowd, that grows ever more numerous behind us.

Placed at intervals are apparatus for use in case of fire, coils of
hose and standpipes that shine with the warm glow of burnished copper,
and I ask my companion of the watch: "What is there that could burn
here? Are not these good people all of stone?" And he answers: "Not
here indeed; but consider how the things that are above would blaze."
Ah! yes. The "things that are above"--which are indeed the object of
my visit to-night. I had no thought of fire catching hold in an
assembly of mummies; of the old withered flesh, the dead, dry hair,
the venerable carcasses of kings and queens, soaked as they are in
natron and oils, crackling like so many boxes of matches. It is
chiefly on account of this danger indeed that the seals are put upon
the doors at nightfall, and that it needs a special favour to be
allowed to penetrate into this place at night with a lantern.

In the daytime this "Museum of Egyptian Antiquities" is as vulgar a
thing as you can conceive, filled though it is with priceless
treasures. It is the most pompous, the most outrageous of those
buildings, of no style at all, by which each year the New Cairo is
enriched; open to all who care to gaze at close quarters, in a light
that is almost brutal, upon these august dead, who fondly thought that
they had hidden themselves for ever.

But at night! . . . Ah! at night when all the doors are closed, it is
the palace of nightmare and of fear. At night, so say the Arab
guardians, who would not enter it at the price of gold--no, not even
after offering up a prayer--at night, horrible "forms" escape, not
only from the embalmed bodies that sleep in the glass cases above, but
also from the great statues, from the papyri, and the thousand and one
things that, at the bottom of the tombs, have long been impregnated
with human essence. And these "forms" are like unto dead bodies, and
sometimes to strange beasts, even to beasts that crawl. And, after
having wandered about the halls, they end by assembling for their
nocturnal conferences on the roofs.

We next ascend a staircase of monumental proportions, empty in the
whole extent, where we are delivered for a little while from the
obsession of those rigid figures, from the stares and smiles of the
good people in white stone and black granite who throng the galleries
and vestibules on the ground floor. None of them, to be sure, will
follow us; but all the same they guard in force and perplex with their
shadows the only way by which we can retreat, if the formidable hosts
above have in store for us too sinister a welcome.

He to whose courtesy I owe the relaxation of the orders of the night
is the illustrious savant to whose care has been entrusted the
direction of the excavations in Egyptian soil; he is also the
comptroller of this vast museum, and it is he himself who has kindly
consented to act as my guide to-night through its mazy labyrinth.

Across the silent halls above we now proceed straight towards those of
whom I have demanded this nocturnal audience.

To-night the succession of these rooms, filled with glass cases, which
cover more than four hundred yards along the four sides of the
building, seems to be without end. After passing, in turn, the papyri,
the enamels, the vases that contain human entrails, we reach the
mummies of the sacred beasts: cats, ibises, dogs, hawks, all with
their mummy cloths and sarcophagi; and monkeys, too, that remain
grotesque even in death. Then commence the human masks, and, upright
in glass-fronted cupboards, the mummy cases in which the body, swathed
in its mummy cloths, was moulded, and which reproduced, more or less
enlarged, the figure of the deceased. Quite a lot of courtesans of the
Greco-Roman epoch, moulded in paste in this wise after death and
crowned with roses, smile at us provokingly from behind their windows.
Masks of the colour of dead flesh alternate with others of gold which
gleam as the light of our lantern plays upon them momentarily in our
rapid passage. Their eyes are always too large, the eyelids too wide
open and the dilated pupils seem to stare at us with alarm. Amongst
these mummy cases and these coffin lids fashioned in the shape of the
human figure, there are some that seem to have been made for giants;
the head especially, beneath its cumbrous head-dress, the head stuffed
as it were between the hunchback shoulders, looks enormous, out of all
proportion to the body which, towards the feet, narrows like a
scabbard.

Although our little lantern maintains its light we seem to see here
less and less: the darkness around us in these vast rooms becomes
almost overpowering--and these are the rooms, too, that, leading one
into the other, facilitate the midnight promenade of those dread
"forms" which, every evening, are released and roam about. . . .

On a table in the middle of one of these rooms a thing to make you
shudder gleams in a glass box, a fragile thing that failed of life
some two thousand years ago. It is the mummy of a human embryo, and
someone, to appease the malice of this born-dead thing, had covered
its face with a coating of gold--for, according to the belief of the
Egyptians, these little abortions became the evil genii of their
families if proper honour was not paid to them. At the end of its
negligible body, the gilded head, with its great foetus eyes, is
unforgettable for its suffering ugliness, for its frustrated and
ferocious expression.

In the halls into which we next penetrate there are veritable dead
bodies ranged on either side of us as we pass; their coffins are
displayed in tiers one above the other; the air is heavy with the
sickly odour of mummies; and on the ground, curled always like some
huge serpent, the leather hoses are in readiness, for here indeed is
the danger spot for fire.

And the master of this strange house whispers to me: "This is the
place. Look! There they are."

In truth I recognise the place, having often come here in the daytime,
like other people. In spite of the darkness, which commences at some
ten paces from us--so small is the circle of light cast by our lantern
--I can distinguish the double row of the great royal coffins, open
without shame in their glass cases. And standing against the walls,
upright, like so many sentinels, are the coffin lids, fashioned in the
shape of the human figure.

We are there at last, admitted at this unseasonable hour into the
guest-chamber of kings and queens, for an audience that is private
indeed.

And there, first of all, is the woman with the baby, upon whom,
without stopping, we throw the light of our lantern. A woman who died
in giving to the world a little dead prince. Since the old embalmers
no one has seen the face of this Queen Makeri. In her coffin there she
is simply a tall female figure, outlined beneath the close-bound
swathings of brown-coloured bandages. At her feet lies the fatal baby,
grotesquely shrivelled, and veiled and mysterious as the mother
herself; a sort of doll, it seems, put there to keep her eternal
company in the slow passing of endless years.

More fearsome to approach is the row of unswathed mummies that follow.
Here, in each coffin over which we bend, there is a face which stares
at us--or else closes its eyes in order that it may not see us; and
meagre shoulders and lean arms, and hands with overgrown nails that
protrude from miserable rags. And each royal mummy that our lantern
lights reserves for us a fresh surprise and the shudder of a different
fear--they resemble one another so little. Some of them seem to laugh,
showing their yellow teeth; others have an expression of infinite
sadness and suffering. Sometimes the faces are small, refined and
still beautiful despite the pinching of the nostrils; sometimes they
are excessively enlarged by putrid swelling, with the tip of the nose
eaten away. The embalmers, we know, were not sure of their means, and
the mummies were not always a success. In some cases putrefaction
ensued, and corruption and even sudden hatchings of larvae, those
"companions without ears and without eyes," which died indeed in time
but only after they had perforated all the flesh.

Hard by are ranked according to dynasty, and in chronological order,
the proud Pharaohs in a piteous row: father, son, grandson, great-
grandson. And common paper tickets tell their tremendous names, Seti
I., Ramses II., Seti II., Ramses III., Ramses IV. . . . Soon the
muster will be complete, with such energy have men dug in the heart of
the rocks to find them all; and these glass cases will no doubt be
their final resting-place. In olden days, however, they made many
pilgrimages after their death, for in the troubled times of the
history of Egypt it was one of the harassing preoccupations of the
reigning sovereign to hide, to hide at all costs, the mummies of his
ancestors, which filled the earth increasingly, and which the
violators of tombs were so swift to track. Then they were carried
clandestinely from one grave to another, raised each from his own
pompous sepulchre, to be buried at last together in some humble and
less conspicuous vault. But it is here, in this museum of Egyptian
antiquities, that they are about to accomplish their return to dust,
which has been deferred, as if by miracle, for so many centuries. Now,
stripped of their bandages, their days are numbered, and it behoves us
to hasten to draw these physiognomies of three or four thousand years
ago, which are about to perish.

In that coffin--the last but one of the row on the left--it is the
great Sesostris himself who awaits us. We know of old that face of
ninety years, with its nose hooked like the beak of a falcon; and the
gaps between those old man's teeth; the meagre, birdlike neck, and the
hand raised in a gesture of menace. Twenty years have elapsed since he
was brought back to the light, this master of the world. He was
wrapped /thousands of times/ in a marvellous winding-sheet, woven of
aloe fibres, finer than the muslin of India, which must have taken
years in the making and measured more than 400 yards in length. The
unswathing, done in the presence of the Khedive Tewfik and the great
personages of Egypt, lasted two hours, and after the last turn, when
the illustrious figure appeared, the emotion amongst the assistants
was such that they stampeded like a herd of cattle, and the Pharaoh
was overturned. He has, moreover, given much cause for conversation,
this great Sesostris, since his installation in the museum. Suddenly
one day with a brusque gesture, in the presence of the attendants, who
fled howling with fear, he raised that hand which is still in the air,
and which he has not deigned since to lower.[*] And subsequently there
supervened, beginning in the old yellowish-white hair, and then
swarming over the whole body, a hatching of cadaveric fauna, which
necessitated a complete bath in mercury. He also has his paper ticket,
pasted on the end of his box, and one may read there, written in a
careless hand, that name which once caused the whole world to tremble
--"Ramses II. (Sesostris)"! It need not be said that he has greatly
fallen away and blackened even in the fifteen yeas that I have known
him. He is a phantom that is about to disappear; in spite of all the
care lavished upon him, a poor phantom about to fall to pieces, to
sink into nothingness. We move our lantern about his hooked nose, the
better to decipher, in the play of shadow, his expression, that still
remains authoritative. . . . To think that once the destinies of the
world were ruled, without appeal, by the nod of this head, which looks
now somewhat narrow, under the dry skin and the horrible whitish hair.
What force of will, of passion and colossal pride must once have dwelt
therein! Not to mention the anxiety, which to us now is scarcely
conceivable, but which in his time overmastered all others--the
anxiety, that is to say, of assuring the magnificence and
inviolability of sepulture! . . . And this horrible scarecrow,
toothless and senile, lying here in its filthy rags, with the hand
raised in an impotent menace, was once the brilliant Sesostris, the
master of kings, and by virtue of his strength and beauty the demigod
also, whose muscular limbs and deep athletic chest many colossal
statues at Memphis, at Thebes, at Luxor, reproduce and try to make
eternal. . . .

[*] This movement is explained by the action of the sun, which,
    falling on the unclothed arm, is supposed to have expanded the
    bone of the elbow.

In the next coffin lies his father, Seti I., who reigned for a much
shorter period, and died much younger than he. This youthfulness is
apparent still in the features of the mummy, which are impressed
besides with a persistent beauty. Indeed this good King Seti looks the
picture of calm and serene reverie. There is nothing shocking in his
dead face, with its long closed eyes, its delicate lips, its noble
chin and unblemished profile. It is soothing and pleasant even to see
him sleeping there with his hands crossed upon his breast. And it
seems strange, that he, who looks so young, should have for son the
old man, almost a centenarian, who lies beside him.

In our passage we have gazed on many other royal mummies, some
tranquil and some grimacing. But, to finish, there is one of them (the
third coffin there, in the row in front of us), a certain Queen
Nsitanebashru, whom I approach with fear, albeit it is mainly on her
account that I have ventured to make this fantastical round. Even in
the daytime she attains to the maximum of horror that a spectral
figure can evoke. What will she be like to-night in the uncertain
light of our little lantern?

There she is indeed, the dishevelled vampire in her place right
enough, stretched at full length, but looking always as if she were
about to leap up; and straightway I meet the sidelong glance of her
enamelled pupils, shining out of half-closed eyelids, with lashes that
are still almost perfect. Oh! the terrifying person! Not that she is
ugly, on the contrary we can see that she was rather pretty and was
mummied young. What distinguishes her from the others is her air of
thwarted anger, of fury, as it were, at being dead. The embalmers have
coloured her very religiously, but the pink, under the action of the
salts of the skin, has become decomposed here and there and given
place to a number of green spots. Her naked shoulders, the height of
the arms above the rags which were once her splendid shroud, have
still a certain sleek roundness, but they, too, are stained with
greenish and black splotches, such as may be seen on the skins of
snakes. Assuredly no corpse, either here or elsewhere, has ever
preserved such an expression of intense life, of ironical, implacable
ferocity. Her mouth is twisted in a little smile of defiance; her
nostrils pinched like those of a ghoul on the scent of blood, and her
eyes seem to say to each one who approaches: "Yes, I am laid in my
coffin; but you will very soon see I can get out of it." There is
something confusing in the thought that the menace of this terrible
expression, and this appearance of ill-restrained ferocity had endured
for some hundreds of years before the commencement of our era, and
endured to no purpose in the secret darkness of a closed coffin at the
bottom of some doorless vault.

Now that we are about to retire, what will happen here, with the
complicity of silence, in the darkest hours of the night? Will they
remain inert and rigid, all these embalmed bodies, once left to
themselves, who pretended to be so quiet because we were there? What
exchanges of old human fluid will recommence, as who can doubt they do
each night between one coffin and another. Formerly these kings and
queens, in their anxiety as to the future of their mummy, had foreseen
violation, pillage and scattering amongst the sands of the desert, but
never this: that they would be reunited one day, almost all unveiled,
so near to one another under panes of glass. Those who governed Egypt
in the lost centuries and were never known except by history, by the
papyri inscribed with hieroglyphics, brought thus together, how many
things will they have to say to one another, how many ardent questions
to ask about their loves, about their crimes! As soon as we shall have
departed, nay, as soon as our lantern, at the end of the long
galleries, shall seem no more than a foolish, vanishing spot of fire,
will not the "forms" of whom the attendants are so afraid, will they
not start their nightly rumblings and in their hollow mummy voices,
whisper, with difficulty, words? . . .

Heavens! How dark it is! Yet our lantern has not gone out. But it
seems to grow darker and darker. And at night, when all is shut up,
how one smells the odour of the oils in which the shrouds are
saturated, and, more intolerable still, the sickly stealthy stench,
almost, of all these dead bodies! . . .

As I traverse the obscurity of these endless halls, a vague instinct
of self-preservation induces me to turn back again, and look behind.
And it seems to me that already the woman with the baby is slowly
raising herself, with a thousand precautions and stratagems, her head
still completely covered. While farther down, that dishevelled
hair. . . . Oh! I can see her well, sitting up with a sudden jerk, the
ghoul with the enamel eyes, the lady Nsitanebashru!



CHAPTER V

A CENTRE OF ISLAM

  "To learn is the duty of every Moslem."
        Verse from the Hadith or Words of the Prophet.

In a narrow street, hidden in the midst of the most ancient Arab
quarters of Cairo, in the very heat of a close labyrinth mysteriously
shady, an exquisite doorway opens into a wide space bathed in
sunshine; a doorway formed of two elaborate arches, and surmounted by
a high frontal on which intertwined arabesques form wonderful
rosework, and holy writings are enscrolled with the most ingenious
complications.

It is the entrance to El-Azhar, a venerable place in Islam, whence
have issued for nearly a thousand years the generations of priests and
doctors charged with the propagation of the word of the Prophet
amongst the nations, from the Mohreb to the Arabian Sea, passing
through the great deserts. About the end of our tenth century the
glorious Fatimee Caliphs built this immense assemblage of arches and
columns, which became the seat of the most renowned Moslem university
in the world. And since then successive sovereigns of Egypt have vied
with one another in perfecting and enlarging it, adding new halls, new
galleries, new minarets, till they have made of El-Azhar almost a town
within a town.

*****

 "He who seeks instruction is more loved of God than he who fights
  in a holy war."
        A verse from the Hadith.

Eleven o'clock on a day of burning sunshine and dazzling light. El-
Azhar still vibrates with the murmur of many voices, although the
lessons of the morning are nearly finished.

Once past the threshold of the double ornamented door we enter the
courtyard, at this moment empty as the desert and dazzling with
sunshine. Beyond, quite open, the mosque spreads out its endless
arcades, which are continued and repeated till they are lost in the
gloom of the far interior, and in this dim place, with its perplexing
depths, innumerable people in turbans, sitting in a close crowd, are
singing, or rather chanting, in a low voice, and marking time as it
were to their declamation by a slight rhythmic swaying from the hips.
They are the ten thousand students come from all parts of the world to
absorb the changeless doctrine of El-Azhar.

At the first view it is difficult to distinguish them, for they are
far down in the shadow, and out here we are almost blinded by the sun.
In little attentive groups of from ten to twenty, seated on mats
around a grave professor, they docilely repeat their lessons, which in
the course of centuries have grown old without changing like Islam
itself. And we wonder how those in the circles down there, in the
aisles at the bottom where the daylight scarcely penetrates, can see
to read the old difficult writings in the pages of their books.

In any case, let us not trouble them--as so many tourists nowadays do
not hesitate to do; we will enter a little later, when the studies of
the morning are over.

This court, upon which the sun of the forenoon now pours its white
fire, is an enclosure severely and magnificently Arab; it has isolated
us suddenly from time and things; it must lend to the Moslem prayer
what formerly our Gothic churches lent to the Christian. It is vast as
a tournament list; confined on one side by the mosque itself, and on
the others by a high wall which effectively separates it from the
outer world. The walls are of a reddish hue, burnt by centuries of sun
into the colour of raw sienna or of bloodstone. At the bottom they are
straight, simple, a little forbidding in their austerity, but their
summits are elaborately ornamented and crowned with battlements, which
show in profile against the sky a long series of denticulated
stonework. And over this sort of reddish fretwork of the top, which
seems as if it were there as a frame to the deep blue vault above us,
we see rising up distractedly all the minarets of the neighbourhood;
and these minarets are red-coloured too, redder even than the jealous
walls, and are decorated with arabesques, pierced by the daylight and
complicated with aerial galleries. Some of them are a little distance
away; others, startlingly close, seem to scale the zenith; and all are
ravishing and strange, with their shining crescents and outstretched
shafts of wood that call to the great birds of space. Spite of
ourselves we raise our heads, fascinated by all the beauty that is in
the air; but there is only this square of marvellous sky, a sort of
limpid sapphire, set in the battlements of El-Azhar and fringed by
those audacious slender towers. We are in the religious East of olden
days and we feel how the mystery of this magnificent court--whose
architectural ornament consists merely in geometrical designs repeated
to infinity, and does not commence till quite high up on the
battlements, where the minarets point into the eternal blue--must cast
its spell upon the imagination of the young priests who are being
trained here.

*****

 "He who instructs the ignorant is like a living man amongst the
  dead."

 "If a day passes without my having learnt something which brings me
  nearer to God, let not the dawn of that day be blessed."

        Verses from the Hadith.

He who has brought me to this place to-day is my friend, Mustapha
Kamel Pacha, the tribune of Egypt, and I owe to his presence the fact
that I am not treated like a casual visitor. Our names are taken at
once to the great master of El-Azhar, a high personage in Islam, whose
pupil Mustapha formerly was, and who no doubt will receive us in
person.

It is in a hall very Arab in its character, furnished only with
divans, that the great master welcomes us, with the simplicity of an
ascetic and the elegant manners of a prelate. His look, and indeed his
whole face, tell how onerous is the sacred office which he exercises:
to preside, namely, at the instruction of these thousands of young
priests, who afterwards are to carry faith and peace and immobility to
more than three hundred millions of men.

And in a few moments Mustapha and he are busy discussing--as if it
were a matter of actual interest--a controversial question concerning
the events which followed the death of the Prophet, and the part
played by Ali. . . . In that moment how my good friend Mustapha, whom
I had seen so French in France, appeared all at once a Moslem to the
bottom of his soul! The same thing is true indeed of the greater
number of these Orientals, who, if we meet them in our own country,
seem to be quite parisianised; their modernity is only on the surface:
in their inmost souls Islam remains intact. And it is not difficult to
understand, perhaps, how the spectacle of our troubles, our despairs,
our miseries, in these new ways in which our lot is cast, should make
them reflect and turn again to the tranquil dream of their
ancestors. . . .

While waiting for the conclusion of the morning studies, we are
conducted through some of the dependencies of El-Azhar. Halls of every
epoch, added one to another, go to form a little labyrinth; many
contain /Mihrabs/, which, as we know already, are a kind of portico,
festooned and denticulated till they look as if covered with rime. And
library after library, with ceilings of cedarwood, carved in times
when men had more leisure and more patience. Thousands of precious
manuscripts, dating back some hundreds of years, but which here in El-
Azhar are no whit out of date. Open, in glass cases, are numerous
inestimable Korans, which in olden times had been written fair and
illuminated on parchment by pious khedives. And, in a place of honour,
a large astronomical glass, through which men watch the rising of the
moon of Ramadan. . . . All this savours of the past. And what is being
taught to-day to the ten thousand students of El-Azhar scarcely
differs from what was taught to their predecessors in the glorious
reign of the Fatimites--and which was then transcendent and even new:
the Koran and all its commentaries; the subtleties of syntax and of
pronunciation; jurisprudence; calligraphy, which still is dear to the
heart of Orientals; versification; and, last of all, mathematics, of
which the Arabs were the inventors.

Yes, all this savours of the past, of the dust of remote ages. And
though, assuredly, the priests trained in this thousand-year-old
university may grow to men of rarest soul, they will remain, these
calm and noble dreamers, merely laggards, safe in their shelter from
the whirlwind which carries us along.

*****

 "It is a sacrilege to prohibit knowledge. To seek knowledge is to
  perform an act of adoration towards God; to instruct is to do an
  act of charity."

 "Knowledge is the life of Islam, the column of faith."

        Verses from the Hadith.

The lesson of the morning is now finished and we are able, without
disturbing anybody, to visit the mosque.

When we return to the great courtyard, with its battlemented walls, it
is the hour of recreation for this crowd of young men in robes and
turbans, who now emerge from the shadow of the sanctuary.

Since the early morning they have remained seated on their mats,
immersed in study and prayer, amid the confused buzzing of their
thousands of voices; and now they scatter themselves about the
contiguous Arab quarters until such time as the evening lessons
commence. They walk along in little groups, sometimes holding one
another's hands like children; most of them carry their heads high and
raise their eyes to the heavens, although the sun which greets them
outside dazzles them a little with its rays. They seem innumerable,
and as they pass show us faces of the most diverse types. They come
from all quarters of the world; some from Baghdad, others from
Bassorah, from Mossul and even from the interior of Hedjaz. Those from
the north have eyes that are bright and clear; and amongst those from
Moghreb, from Morocco and the Sahara, are many whose skins are almost
black. But the expression of all the faces is alike: something of
ecstasy and of aloofness marks them all; the same detachment, a
preoccupation with the self-same dream. And in the sky, to which they
raise their eyes, the heavens--framed always by the battlements of El-
Azhar--are almost white from the excess of light, with a border of
tall, red minarets, which seem to be aglow with the refection of some
great fire. And, watching them pass, all these young priests or
jurists, at once so different and so alike, we understand better than
before how Islam, the old, old Islam, keeps still its cohesion and its
power.

The mosque in which they pursue their studies is now almost empty. In
its restful twilight there is silence, and the unexpected music of
little birds; it is the brooding season and the ceilings of carved
wood are full of nests, which nobody disturbs.

A world, this mosque, in which thousands of people could easily find
room. Some hundred and fifty marble columns, brought from ancient
temples, support the arches of the seven parallel aisles. There is no
light save that which comes through the arcade opening into the
courtyard, and it is so dark in the aisles at the far end that we
wonder again how the faithful can see to read when the sun of Egypt
happens to be veiled.

Some score of students, who seem almost lost in the vast solitude,
still remain during the hour of rest, and are busy sweeping the floor
with long palms made into a kind of broom. These are the poor
students, whose only meal is of dry bread, and who at night stretch
themselves to sleep on the same mat on which they have sat studying
during the day.

The residence at the university is free to all the scholars, the cost
of their education and maintenance being provided by pious donations.
But, inasmuch as the bequests are restricted according to nationality,
there is necessarily inequality in the treatment doled out to the
different students: thus the young men of a given country may be
almost rich, possessing a room and a good bed; while those of a
neighbouring country must sleep on the ground and have barely enough
to keep body and soul together. But none of them complain, and they
know how to help one another.[*]

[*] The duration of the studies at El-Azhar varies from three to six
    years.

Near to us, one of these needy students is eating, without any false
shame, his midday meal of dry bread; and he welcomes with a smile the
sparrows and the other little winged thieves who come to dispute with
him the crumbs of his repast. And farther down, in the dimly lighted
vaults at the end, is one who disdains to eat, or who, maybe, has no
bread; who, when his sweeping is done, reseats himself on his mat,
and, opening his Koran, commences to read aloud with the customary
intonation. His voice, rich and facile, and moderated with discretion,
has a charm that is irresistible in the sonorous old mosque, where at
this hour the only other sound is the scarcely perceptible twittering
of the little broods above, among the dull gold beams of the ceiling.
Those who have been familiar with the sanctuaries of Islam know, as
well as I, that there is no book so exquisitely rhythmical as that of
the Prophet. Even if the sense of the verses escape you, the chanted
reading, which forms part of certain of the offices, acts upon you by
the simple magic of its sounds, in the same way as the oratorios which
draw tears in the churches of Christ. Rising and falling like some sad
lullaby, the declamation of this young priest, with his face of
visionary, and garb of decent poverty, swells involuntarily, till
gradually it seems to fill the seven deserted aisles of El-Azhar.

We stop in spite of ourselves, and listen, in the midst of the silence
of midday. And in this so venerable place, where dilapidation and the
usury of centuries are revealed on every side--even on the marble
columns worn by the constant friction of hands--this voice of gold
that rises alone seems as if it were intoning the last lament over the
death-pang of Old Islam and the end of time, the elegy, as it were, of
the universal death of faith in the heart of man.

*****

 "Science is one religion; prayer is another. Study is better than
  worship. Go; seek knowledge everywhere, if needs be, even into
  China."

        Verses from the Hadith.

Amongst us Europeans it is commonly accepted as a proven fact that
Islam is merely a religion of obscurantism, bringing in its train the
stagnation of nations, and hampering them in that march to the unknown
which we call "progress." But such an attitude shows not only an
absolute ignorance of the teaching of the Prophet, but a blind
forgetfulness of the evidence of history. The Islam of the earlier
centuries evolved and progressed with the nations, and the stimulus it
gave to men in the reign of the ancient caliphs is beyond all
question. To impute to it the present decadence of the Moslem world is
altogether too puerile. The truth is that nations have their day; and
to a period of glorious splendour succeeds a time of lassitude and
slumber. It is a law of nature. And then one day some danger threatens
them, stirs them from their torpor and they awake.

This immobility of the countries of the Crescent was once dear to me.
If the end is to pass through life with the minimum of suffering,
disdaining all vain striving, and to die entranced by radiant hopes,
the Orientals are the only wise men. But now that greedy nations beset
them on all sides their dreaming is no longer possible. They must
awake, alas.

They must awake; and already the awakening is at hand. Here, in Egypt,
where the need is felt to change so many things, it is proposed, too,
to reform the old university of El-Azhar, one of the chief centres of
Islam. One thinks of it with a kind of fear, knowing what danger there
is in laying hands upon institutions which have lasted for a thousand
years. Reform, however, has, in principle, been decided upon. New
knowledge, brought from the West, is penetrating into the tabernacle
of the Fatimites. Has not the Prophet said: "Go; seek knowledge far
and wide, if needs be even into China"? What will come of it? Who can
tell? But this, at least, is certain: that in the dazzling hours of
noon, or in the golden hours of evening, when the crowd of these
modernised students spreads itself over the vast courtyard, overlooked
by its countless minarets, there will no longer be seen in their eyes
the mystic light of to-day; and it will no longer be the old
unshakable faith, nor the lofty and serene indifference, nor the
profound peace, that these messengers will carry to the ends of the
Mussulman earth. . . .



CHAPTER VI

IN THE TOMBS OF THE APIS

The dwelling-places of the Apis, in the grim darkness beneath the
Memphite desert, are, as all the world knows, monster coffins of black
granite ranged in catacombs, hot and stifling as eternal stoves.

To reach them from the banks of the Nile we have first to traverse the
low region which the inundations of the ancient river, regularly
repeated since the beginning of time, have rendered propitious to the
growth of plants and to the development of men; an hour or two's
journey, this evening through forests of date-trees whose beautiful
palms temper the light of the March sun, which is now half veiled in
clouds and already declining. In the distance herds are grazing in the
cool shade. And we meet fellahs leading back from the field towards
the village on the river-bank their little donkeys, laden with sheaves
of corn. The air is mild and wholesome under the high tufts of these
endless green plumes, which move in the warm wind almost without
noise. We seem to be in some happy land, where the pastoral life
should be easy, and even a little paradisiacal.

But beyond, in front of us, quite a different world is gradually
revealed. Its aspect assumes the importance of a menace from the
unknown; it awes us like an apparition of chaos, of universal death.
. . . It is the desert, the conquering desert, in the midst of which
inhabited Egypt, the green valleys of the Nile, trace merely a narrow
ribbon. And here, more than elsewhere, the sight of this sovereign
desert rising up before us is startling and thrilling, so high up it
seems, and we so low in the Edenlike valley shaded by the palms. With
its yellow hues, its livid marblings, and its sands which make it look
somehow as if it lacked consistency, it rises on the whole horizon
like a kind of soft wall or a great fearsome cloud--or rather, like a
long cataclysmic wave, which does not move indeed, but which, if it
did, would overwhelm and swallow everything. It is the /Memphite
desert/--a place, that is to say, such as does not exist elsewhere on
earth; a fabulous necropolis, in which men of earlier times, heaped up
for some three thousand years the embalmed bodies of their dead,
exaggerating, as time went on, the foolish grandeur of their tombs.
Now, above the sand which looks like the front of some great tidal
wave arrested in its progress, we see on all sides, and far into the
distance, triangles of superhuman proportions which were once the
tombs of mummies; pyramids, still upright, all of them, on their
sinister pedestal of sand. Some are comparatively near; others almost
lost in the background of the solitudes--and perhaps more awesome in
that they are merely outlined in grey, high up among the clouds.

*****

The little carriages that have brought us to the necropolis of
Memphis, through the interminable forest of palm-trees, had their
wheels fitted with large pattens for their journey over the sand.

Now, arrived at the foot of the fearsome region, we commence to climb
a hill where all at once the trot of our horses ceases to be heard;
the moving felting of the soil establishes a sudden silence around us,
as indeed is always the case when we reach these sands. It seems as if
it were a silence of respect which the desert itself imposes.

The valley of life sinks and fades behind us, until at last it
disappears, hidden by a line of sandhills--the first wave, as one
might say, of this waterless sea--and we are now mounted into the
kingdom of the dead, swept at this moment by a withering and almost
icy wind, which from below one would not have expected.

This desert of Memphis has not yet been profaned by hotels or motor
roads, such as we have seen in the "little desert" of the Sphinx--
whose three pyramids indeed we can discern at the extreme limit of the
view, prolonging almost to infinity for our eyes this domain of
mummies. There is nobody to be seen, nor any indication of the present
day, amongst these mournful undulations of yellow or pale grey sand,
in which we seem lost as in the swell of an ocean. The sky is cloudy--
such as you can scarcely imagine the sky of Egypt. And in this immense
nothingness of sand and stones, which stands out now more clearly
against the clouds on the horizon, there is nothing anywhere save the
silhouettes of those eternal triangles; the pyramids, gigantic things
which rise here and there at hazard, some half in ruin, others almost
intact and preserving still their sharp point. To-day they are the
only landmarks of this necropolis, which is nearly six miles in
length, and was formerly covered by temples of a magnificence and a
vastness unimaginable to the minds of our day. Except for one which is
quite near us (the fantastic grandfather of the others, that of King
Zoser, who died nearly 5000 years ago), except for this one, which is
made of six colossal superposed terraces, they are all built after
that same conception of the /Triangle/, which is at once the most
mysteriously simple figure of geometry, and the strongest and most
permanently stable form of architecture. And now that there remains no
trace of the frescoed portraits which used to adorn them, nor of their
multicoloured coatings, now that they have taken on the same dead
colour as the desert, they look like the huge bones of giant fossils,
that have long outlasted their other contemporaries on earth. Beneath
the ground, however, the case is different; there, still remain the
bodies of men, and even of cats and birds, who with their own eyes saw
these vast structures building, and who sleep intact, swathed in
bandages, in the darkness of their tunnels. /We know/, for we have
penetrated there before, what things are hidden in the womb of this
old desert, on which the yellow shroud of the sand grows thicker and
thicker as the centuries pass. The whole deep rock had been perforated
patiently to make hypogea and sepulchral chambers, great and small,
and veritable palaces for the dead, adorned with innumerable painted
figures. And though now, for some two thousand years, men have set
themselves furiously to exhume the sarcophagi and the treasures that
are buried here, the subterranean reserves are not yet exhausted.
There still remain, no doubt, pleiads of undisturbed sleepers, who
will never be discovered.

As we advance the wind grows stronger and colder beneath a sky that
becomes increasingly cloudy, and the sand is flying on all sides. The
sand is the undisputed sovereign of the necropolis; if it does not
surge and roll like some enormous tidal wave, as it appears to do when
seen from the green valley below, it nevertheless covers everything
with an obstinate persistence which has continued since the beginning
of time. Already at Memphis it has buried innumerable statues and
colossi and temples of the Sphinx. It comes without a pause, from
Libya, from the great Sahara, which contain enough to powder the
universe. It harmonises well with the tall skeletons of the pyramids,
which form immutable rocks on its always shifting extent; and if one
thinks of it, it gives a more thrilling sense of anterior eternities
even than all these Egyptian ruins, which, in comparison with it, are
things of yesterday. The sand--the sand of the primitive seas--which
represents a labour of erosion of a duration impossible to conceive,
and bears witness to a continuity of destruction which, one might say,
had no beginning.

Here, in the midst of these solitudes, is a humble habitation, old and
half buried in sand, at which we have to stop. It was once the house
of the Egyptologist Mariette, and still shelters the director of the
excavations, from whom we have to obtain permission to descend amongst
the Apis. The whitewashed room in which he receives us is encumbered
with the age-old debris which he is continually bringing to light. The
parting rays of the sun, which shines low down from between two
clouds, enter through a window opening on to the surrounding
desolation; and the light comes mournfully, yellowed by the sand and
the evening.

The master of the house, while his Bedouin servants are gone to open
and light up for us the underground habitations of the Apis, shows us
his latest astonishing find, made this morning in a hypogeum of one of
the most ancient dynasties. It is there on a table, a group of little
people of wood, of the size of the marionettes of our theatres. And
since it was the custom to put in a tomb only those figures or objects
which were most pleasing to him who dwelt in it, the man-mummy to whom
this toy was offered in times anterior to all precise chronology must
have been extremely partial to dancing-girls. In the middle of the
group the man himself is represented, sitting in an armchair, and on
his knee he holds his favourite dancing-girl. Other girls posture
before him in a dance of the period; and on the ground sit musicians
touching tambourines and strangely fashioned harps. All wear their
hair in a long plait, which falls below their shoulders like the
pigtail of the Chinese. It was the distinguishing mark of these kinds
of courtesans. And these little people had kept their pose in the
darkness for some three thousand years before the commencement of the
Christian era. . . . In order to show it to us better the group is
brought to the window, and the mournful light which enters from across
the infinite solitudes of the desert colours them yellow and shows us
in detail their little doll-like attitudes and their comical and
frightened appearance--frightened perhaps to find themselves so old
and issuing from so deep a night. They had not seen a setting of the
sun, such as they now regard with their queer eyes, too long and too
wide oepn, they had not seen such a thing for some five thousand
years. . . .

The habitation of the Apis, the lords of the necropolis, is little
more than two hundred yards away. We are told that the place is now
lighted up and that we may betake ourselves thither.

The descent is by a narrow, rapidly sloping passage, dug in the soil,
between banks of sand and broken stones. We are now completely
sheltered from the bitter wind which blows across the desert, and from
the dark doorway that opens before us comes a breath of air as from an
oven. It is always dry and hot in the underground funeral places of
Egypt, which make indeed admirable stoves for mummies. The threshold
once crossed we are plunged first of all in darkness and, preceded by
a lantern, make our way, by devious turnings, over large flagstones,
passing obelisks, fallen blocks of stone and other gigantic debris, in
a heat that continually increases.

At last the principal artery of the hypogeum appears, a thoroughfare
more than five hundred yards long, cut in the rock, where the Bedouins
have prepared for us the customary feeble light.

It is a place of fearful aspect. As soon as one enters one is seized
by the sense of a mournfulness beyond words, by an oppression as of
something too heavy, too crushing, almost superhuman. The impotent
little flames of the candles, placed in a row, in groups of fifty, on
tripods of wood from one end of the route to the other, show on the
right and left of the immense avenue rectangular sepulchral caverns,
containing each a black coffin, but a coffin as if for a mastodon. And
all these coffins, so sombre and so alike, are square shaped too,
severely simple like so many boxes; but made out of a single block of
rare granite that gleams like marble. They are entirely without
ornament. It is necessary to look closely to distinguish on the smooth
walls the hieroglyphic inscriptions, the rows of little figures,
little owls, little jackals, that tell in a lost language the history
of ancient peoples. Here is the signature of King Amasis; beyond, that
of King Cambyses. . . . Who were the Titans who, century after
century, were able to hew these coffins (they are at least twelve feet
long by ten feet high), and, having hewn them, to carry them
underground (they weigh on an average between sixty and seventy tons),
and finally to range them in rows here in these strange chambers,
where they stand as if in ambuscade on either side of us as we pass?
Each in its turn has contained quite comfortably the mummy of a bull
Apis, armoured in plates of gold. But in spite of their weight, in
spite of their solidity which effectively defies destruction, they
have been despoiled[*]--when is not precisely known, probably by the
soldiers of the King of Persia. And this notwithstanding that merely
to open them represents a labour of astonishing strength and patience.
In some cases the thieves have succeeded, by the aid of levers, in
moving a few inches the formidable lid; in others, by persevering with
blows of pickaxes, they have pierced, in the thickness of the granite,
a hole through which a man has been enabled to crawl like a rat, or a
worm, and then, groping his way, to plunder the sacred mummy.

[*] One, however, remains intact in the walled cavern, and thus
    preserves for us the only Apis which has come down to our days.
    And one recalls the emotion of Mariette, when, on entering it, he
    saw on the sandy ground the imprint of the naked feet of the last
    Egyptian who left it thirty-seven centuries before.

What strikes us most of all in the colossal hypogeum is the meeting
there, in the middle of the stairway by which we leave, with yet
another black coffin, which lies across our path as if to bar it. It
is as monstrous and as simple as the others, its seniors, which many
centuries before, as the deified bulls died, had commenced to line the
great straight thoroughfare. But this one has never reached its place
and never held its mummy. It was the last. Even while men were slowly
rolling it, with tense muscles and panting cries, towards what might
well have seemed its eternal chamber, others gods were born, and the
cult of the Apis had come to an end--suddenly, then and there! Such a
fate may happen indeed to each and all of the religions and
institutions of men, even to those most deeply rooted in their hearts
and their ancestral past. . . . That perhaps is the most disturbing of
all our positive notions: to know that there will be a /last/ of all
things, not only a last temple, and a last priest, but a last birth of
a human child, a last sunrise, a last day. . . .

*****

In these hot catacombs we had forgotten the cold wind that blew
outside, and the physiognomy of the Memphite desert, the aspects of
horror that were awaiting us above had vanished from our mind.
Sinister as it is under a blue sky, this desert becomes absolutely
intolerable to look upon if by chance the sky is cloudy when the
daylight fails.

On our return to it, from the subterranean darkness, everything in its
dead immensity has begun to take on the blue tint of the night. On the
top of the sandhills, of which the yellow colour has greatly paled
since we went below, the wind amuses itself by raising little vortices
of sand that imitate the spray of an angry sea. On all sides dark
clouds stretch themselves as at the moment of our descent. The horizon
detaches itself more and more clearly from them, and, farther towards
the east, it actually seems to be tilted up; one of the highest of the
waves of this waterless sea, a mountain of sand whose soft contours
are deceptive in the distance, makes it look as if it sloped towards
us, so as almost to produce a sensation of vertigo. The sun itself has
deigned to remain on the scene a few seconds longer, held beyond its
time by the effect of mirage; but it is so changed behind its thick
veils that we would prefer that it should not be there. Of the colour
of dying embers, it seems too near and too large; it has ceased to
give any light, and is become a mere rose-coloured globe, that is
losing its shape and becoming oval. No longer in the free heavens, but
stranded there on the extreme edge of the desert, it watches the scene
like a large dull eye, about to close itself in death. And the
mysterious superhuman triangles, they too, of course, are there,
waiting for us on our return from underground, some near, some far,
posted in their eternal places; but surely they have grown gradually
more blue. . . .

Such a night, in such a place, it seems the /last/ night.



CHAPTER VII

THE OUTSKIRTS OF CAIRO

Night. A long straight road, the artery of some capital, through which
our carriage drives at a fast trot, making a deafening clatter on the
pavement. Electric light everywhere. The shops are closing; it must
needs be late.

The road is Levantine in its general character; and we should have no
clear notion of the place did we not see in our rapid, noisy passage
signs that recall us to the land of the Arabs. People pass dressed in
the long robe and tarboosh of the East; and some of the houses, above
the European shops, are ornamented with mushrabiyas. But this blinding
electricity strikes a false note. In our hearts are we quite sure we
are in the East?

The road ends, opening on to darkness. Suddenly, without any warning,
it abuts upon a void in which the eyes see nothing, and we roll over a
yielding, felted soil, where all noise abruptly ceases--it is the
/desert/! . . . Not a vague, nondescript stretch of country such as in
the outskirts of our towns, not one of the solitudes of Europe, but
the threshold of the vast desolations of Arabia. /The desert/; and,
even if we had not known that it was awaiting us, we should have
recognised it by the indescribable quality of harshness and uniqueness
which, in spite of the darkness, cannot be mistaken.

But the night after all is not so black. It only seemed so, at the
first moment, by contrast with the glaring illumination of the street.
In reality it is transparent and blue. A half-moon, high up in the
heavens, and veiled by a diaphanous mist, shines gently, and as it is
an Egyptian moon, more subtle than ours, it leaves to things a little
of their colour. We can see now, as well as feel, this desert, which
has opened and imposed its silence upon us. Before us is the paleness
of its sands and the reddish-brown of its dead rocks. Verily, in no
country but Egypt are there such rapid surprises: to issue from a
street flanked by shops and stalls and, without transition, to find
this! . . .

Our horses have, inevitably, to slacken speed as the wheels of our
carriage sink into the sand. Around us still are some stray ramblers,
who presently assume the air of ghosts, with their long black or white
draperies, and noiseless tread. And then, not a soul; nothing but the
sand and the moon.

But now almost at once, after the short intervening nothingness, we
find ourselves in a new town; streets with little low houses, little
cross-roads, little squares, all of them white, on whitened sands,
beneath a white moon. . . . But there is no electricity in this town,
no lights, and nobody is stirring; doors and windows are shut: no
movement of any kind, and the silence, at first, is like that of the
surrounding desert. It is a town in which the half-light of the moon,
amongst so much vague whiteness, is diffused in such a way that it
seems to come from all sides at once and things cast no shadows which
might give them definiteness; a town where the soil is so yielding
that our progress is weakened and retarded, as in dreams. It seems
unreal; and, in penetrating farther into it, a sense of fear comes
over you that can neither be dismissed nor defined.

For assuredly this is no ordinary town. . . . And yet the houses, with
their windows barred like those of a harem, are in no way singular--
except that they are shut and silent. It is all this whiteness,
perhaps, which freezes us. And then, too, the silence is not, in fact,
like that of the desert, which did at least seem natural, inasmuch as
there was nothing there; here, on the contrary, there is a sense of
innumerable presences, which shrink away as you pass but nevertheless
continue to watch attentively. . . . We pass mosques in total darkness
and they too are silent and white, with a slight bluish tint cast on
them by the moon. And sometimes, between the houses, there are little
enclosed spaces, like narrow gardens, but which can have no possible
verdure. And in these gardens numbers of little obelisks rise from the
sand--white obelisks, it is needless to say, for to-night we are in
the kingdom of absolute whiteness. What can they be, these strange
little gardens? . . . And the sand, meanwhile, which covers the
streets with its thick coatings, continues to deaden the sound of our
progress, out of compliment no doubt to all these watchful things that
are so silent around us.

At the crossings and in the little squares the obelisks become more
numerous, erected always at either end of a slab of stone that is
about the length of a man. Their little motionless groups, posted as
if on the watch, seem so little real in their vague whiteness that we
feel tempted to verify them by touching, and, verily, we should not be
astonished if our hand passed through them as through a ghost. Farther
on there is a wide expanse without any houses at all, where these
ubiquitous little obelisks abound in the sand like ears of corn in a
field. There is now no further room for illusion. We are in a
cemetery, and have been passing in the midst of houses of the dead,
and mosques of the dead, in a town of the dead.

Once emerged from this cemetery, which in the end at least disclosed
itself in its true character, we are involved again in the
continuation of the mysterious town, which takes us back into its
network. Little houses follow one another as before, only now the
little gardens are replaced by little burial enclosures. And
everything grows more and more indistinct, in the gentle light, which
gradually grows less. It is as if someone were putting frosted globes
over the moon, so that soon, but for the transparency of this air of
Egypt and the prevailing whiteness of things, there would be no light
at all. Once at a window the light of a lamp appears; it is the
lantern of gravediggers. Anon we hear the voices of men chanting a
prayer; and the prayer is a prayer for the dead.

These tenantless houses were never built for dwellings. They are
simply places where men assemble on certain anniversaries, to pray for
the dead. Every Moslem family of any note has its little temple of
this kind, near to the family graves. And there are so many of them
that now the place is become a town--and a town in the desert--that is
to say, in a place useless for any other purpose; a secure place
indeed, for we may be sure that the ground occupied by these poor
tombs runs no risk of being coveted--not even in the irreverent times
of the future. No, it is on the other side of Cairo--on the other bank
of the Nile, amongst the verdure of the palm-trees, that we must look
for the suburb in course of transformation, with its villas of the
invading foreigner, and the myriad electric lights along its motor
roads. On this side there is no such fear; the peace and desuetude are
eternal; and the winding sheet of the Arabian sands is ready always
for its burial office.

At the end of this town of the dead, the desert again opens before us
its mournful whitened expanse. On such a night as this, when the wind
blows cold and the misty moon shows like a sad opal, it looks like a
steppe under snow.

But it is a desert planted with ruins, with the ghosts of mosques; a
whole colony of high tumbling domes are scattered here at hazard on
the shifting extent of the sands. And what strange old-fashioned domes
they are! The archaism of their silhouettes strikes us from the first,
as much as their isolation in such a place. They look like bells, or
gigantic dervish hats placed on pedestals, and those farthest away
give the impression of squat, large-headed figures posted there as
sentinels, watching the vague horizon of Arabia beyond.

They are the proud tombs of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
where the Mameluke Sultans, who oppressed Egypt for nearly three
hundred years, sleep now in complete abandonment. Nowadays, it is
true, some visits are beginning to be paid to them--on winter nights
when the moon is full and they throw on the sands their great clear-
cut shadows. At such times the light is considered favourable, and
they rank among the curiosities exploited by the agencies. Numbers of
tourists (who persist in calling them the tombs of the caliphs) betake
themselves thither of an evening--a noisy caravan mounted on little
donkeys. But to-night the moon is too pale and uncertain, and we shall
no doubt be alone in troubling them in their ghostly communion.

To-night indeed the light is quite unusual. As just now in the town of
the dead, it is diffused on all sides and gives even to the most
massive objects the transparent semblance of unreality. But
nevertheless it shows their detail and leaves them something of their
daylight colouring, so that all these funeral domes, raised on the
ruins of the mosques, which serve them as pedestals, have preserved
their reddish or brown colours, although the sand which separates
them, and makes between the tombs of the different sultans little dead
solitudes, remains pale and wan.

And meanwhile our carriage, proceeding always without noise, traces on
this same sand little furrows which the wind will have effaced by
to-morrow. There are no roads of any kind; they would indeed be as
useless as they are impossible to make. You may pass here where you
like, and fancy yourself far away from any place inhabited by living
beings. The great town, which we know to be so close, appears from
time to time, thanks to the undulations of the ground, as a mere
phosphorescence, a reflection of its myriad electric lights. We are
indeed in the desert of the dead, in the sole company of the moon,
which, by the fantasy of this wonderful Egyptian sky, is to-night a
moon of grey pearl, one might almost say a moon of mother-of-pearl.

Each of these funeral mosques is a thing of splendour, if one examines
it closely in its solitude. These strange upraised domes, which from a
distance look like the head-dresses of dervishes or magi, are
embroidered with arabesques, and the walls are crowned with
denticulated trefoils of exquisite fashioning.

But nobody venerates these tombs of the Mameluke oppressors, or keeps
them in repair; and within them there are no more chants, no prayers
to Allah. Night after night they pass in an infinity of silence. Piety
contents itself with not destroying them; leaving them there at the
mercy of time and the sun and the wind which withers and crumbles
them. And all around are the signs of ruin. Tottering cupolas show us
irreparable cracks; the halves of broken arches are outlined to-night
in shadow against the mother-of-pearl light of the sky, and debris of
sculptured stones are strewn about. But nevertheless these tombs, that
are well-nigh accursed, still stir in us a vague sense of alarm--
particularly those in the distance, which rise up like silhouettes of
misshapen giants in enormous hats--dark on the white sheet of sand--
and stand there in groups, or scattered in confusion, at the entrance
to the vast empty regions beyond.

*****

We had chosen a time when the light was doubtful in order that we
might avoid the tourists, but as we approach the funeral dwelling of
Sultan Barkuk, the assassin, we see, issuing from it, a whole band,
some twenty in a line, who emerge from the darkness of the abandoned
walls, each trotting on his little donkey and each followed by the
inevitable Bedouin driver, who taps with his stick upon the rump of
the beast. They are returning to Cairo, their visit ended, and
exchange in a loud voice, from one ass to another, more or less inept
impressions in various European languages. . . . And look! There is
even amongst them the almost proverbial belated dame who, for private
reasons of her own, follows at a respectable distance behind. She is a
little mature perhaps, so far as can be judged in the moonlight, but
nevertheless still sympathetic to her driver, who, with both hands,
supports her from behind on her saddle, with a touching solicitude
that is peculiar to the country. Ah! these little donkeys of Egypt, so
observant, so philosophical and sly, why cannot they write their
memoirs! What a number of droll things they must have seen at night in
the outskirts of Cairo!

This good lady evidently belongs to that extensive category of hardy
explorers who, despite their high respectability at home, do not
hesitate, once they are landed on the banks of the Nile, to supplement
their treatment by the sun and the dry winds with a little of the
"Bedouin cure."



CHAPTER VIII

ARCHAIC CHRISTIANITY

Dimly lighted by the flames of a few poor slender tapers which flicker
against the walls in stone arches, a dense crowd of human figures
veiled in black, in a place overpowering and suffocating--underground,
no doubt--which is filled with the perfume of the incense of Arabia;
and a noise of almost wicked movement, which sirs us to alarm and even
horror: bleatings of new-born babies, cries of distress of tiny mites
whose voices are drowned, as if on purpose, by a clinking of cymbals.

What can it be? Why have they descended into this dark hole, these
little ones, who howl in the midst of the smoke, held by these
phantoms in mourning? Had we entered it unawares we might have thought
it a den of wicked sorcery, an underground cavern for the black mass.

But no. It is the crypt of the basilica of St. Sergius during the
Coptic mass of Easter morning. And when, after the first surprise, we
examine these phantoms, we find that, for the most part, they are
young mothers, with the refined and gentle faces of Madonnas, who hold
the plaintive little ones beneath their black veils and seek to
comfort them. And the sorcerer, who plays the cymbals, is a kind old
priest, or sacristan, who smiles paternally. If he makes all this
noise, in a rhythm which in itself is full of joy, it is to mark the
gladness of Easter morn, to celebrate the resurrection of Christ--and
a little, too, no doubt, to distract the little ones, some of whom are
woefully put out. But their mammas do not prolong the proof--a mere
momentary visit to this venerable place, which is to bring them
happiness, and they carry their babes away: and others are led in by
the dark, narrow staircase, so low that one cannot stand upright in
it. And thus the crypt is not emptied. And meanwhile mass is being
said in the church overhead.

But what a number of people, of black veils, are in this hovel, where
the air can scarcely be breathed, and where the barbarous music,
mingled with wailings and cries, deafens you! And what an air of
antiquity marks all things here! The defaced walls, the low roof that
one can easily touch, the granite pillars which sustain the shapeless
arches are all blackened by the smoke of the wax candles, and scarred
and worn by the friction of human hands.

At the end of the crypt there is a very sacred recess round which a
crowd presses: a coarse niche, a little larger than those cut in the
wall to receive the tapers, a niche which covers the ancient stone on
which, according to tradition, the Virgin Mary rested, with the child
Jesus, in the course of the flight into Egypt. This holy stone is
sadly worn to-day and polished smooth by the touch of many pious
hands, and the Byzantine cross which once was carved on it is almost
effaced.

But even if the Virgin had never rested there, the humble crypt of St.
Sergius would remain no less one of the oldest Christian sanctuaries
in the world. And the Copts who still assemble there with veneration
have preceded by many years the greater part of our Western nations in
the religion of the Bible.

Although the history of Egypt envelops itself in a sort of night at
the moment of the appearance of Christianity, we know that the growth
of the new faith there was as rapid and impetuous as the germination
of plants under the overflow of the Nile. The old Pharaonic cults,
amalgamated at that time with those of Greece, were so obscured under
a mass of rites and formulae, that they had ceased to have any
meaning. And nevertheless here, as in imperial Rome, there brooded the
ferment of a passionate mysticism. Moreover, this Egyptian people,
more than any other, was haunted by the terror of death, as is proved
by the folly of its embalmments. With what avidity therefore must it
have received the Word of fraternal love and immediate resurrection?

In any case Christianity was so firmly implanted in this Egypt that
centuries of persecution did not succeed in destroying it. As one goes
up the Nile, many little human settlements are to be seen, little
groups of houses of dried mud, where the whitened dome of the modest
house of prayer is surmounted by a cross and not a crescent. They are
the villages of those Copts, those Egyptians, who have preserved the
Christian faith from father to son since the nebulous times of the
first martyrs.

*****

The simple Church of St. Sergius is a relic hidden away and almost
buried in the midst of a labyrinth of ruins. Without a guide it is
almost impossible to find your way thither. The quarter in which it is
situated is enclosed within the walls of what was once a Roman
fortress, and this fortress in its turn is surrounded by the tranquil
ruins of "Old Cairo"--which is to the Cairo of the Mamelukes and the
Khedives, in a small degree, what Versailles is to Paris.

On this Easter morning, having set out from the Cairo of to-day to be
present at this mass, we have first to traverse a suburb in course of
transformation, upon whose ancient soil will shortly appear numbers of
these modern horrors, in mud and metal--factories or large hotels--
which multiply in this poor land with a stupefying rapidity. Then
comes a mile or so of uncultivated ground, mixed with stretches of
sand, and already a little desertlike. And then the walls of Old
Cairo; after which begins the peace of the deserted houses, of little
gardens and orchards among the ruins. The wind and the dust beset us
the whole way, the almost eternal wind and the eternal dust of this
land, by which, since the beginning of the ages, so many human eyes
have been burnt beyond recovery. They keep us now in blinding
whirlwinds, which swarm with flies. The "season" indeed is already
over, and the foreign invaders have fled until next autumn. Egypt is
now more Egyptian, beneath a more burning sky. The sun of this Easter
Sunday is as hot as ours of July, and the ground seems as if it would
perish of drought. But it is always thus in the springtime of this
rainless country; the trees, which have kept their leaves throughout
the winter, shed them in April as ours do in November. There is no
shade anywhere and everything suffers. Everything grows yellow on the
yellow sands. But there is no cause for uneasiness: the inundation is
at hand, which has never failed since the commencement of our
geological period. In another few weeks the prodigious river will
spread along its banks, just as in the times of the God Amen, a
precocious and impetuous life. And meanwhile the orange-trees, the
jasmine and the honeysuckle, which men have taken care to water with
water from the Nile, are full of riotous bloom. As we pass the gardens
of Old Cairo, which alternate with the tumbling houses, this continual
cloud of white dust that envelops us comes suddenly laden with their
sweet fragrance; so that, despite the drought and the bareness of the
trees, the scents of a sudden and feverish springtime are already in
the air.

When we arrive at the walls of what used to be the Roman citadel we
have to descend from our carriage, and passing through a low doorway
penetrate on foot into the labyrinth of a Coptic quarter which is
dying of dust and old age. Deserted houses that have become the
refuges of outcasts; mushrabiyas, worm-eaten and decayed; little
mousetrap alleys that lead us under arches of the Middle Ages, and
sometimes close over our heads by reason of the fantastic bending of
the ruins. Even by such a route as this are we conducted to a famous
basilica! Were it not for these groups of Copts, dressed in their
Sunday garb, who make their way like us through the ruins to the
Easter mass, we should think that we had lost our way.

And how pretty they look, these women draped like phantoms in their
black silks. Their long veils do not completely hide them, as do those
of the Moslems. They are simply placed over their hair and leave
uncovered the delicate features, the golden necklet and the half-bared
arms that carry on their wrists thick twisted bracelets of virgin
gold. Pure Egyptians as they are, they have preserved the same
delicate profile, the same elongated eyes, as mark the old goddesses
carved in bas-relief on the Pharaonic walls. But some, alas, amongst
the young ones have discarded their traditional costume, and are
arrayed /a la franque/, in gowns and hats. And such gowns, such hats,
such flowers! The very peasants of our meanest villages would disdain
them. Oh! why cannot someone tell these poor little women, who have it
in their power to be so adorable, that the beautiful folds of their
black veils give to them an exquisite and characteristic distinction,
while this poor tinsel, which recalls the mid-Lent carnivals, makes of
them objects that excite our pity!

In one of the walls which now surround us there is a low and shrinking
doorway. Can this be the entrance to the basilica? The idea seems
absurd. And yet some of the pretty creatures in the black veils and
bracelets of gold, who were in front of us, have disappeared through
it, and already the perfume of the censers is wafted towards us. A
kind of corridor, astonishingly poor and old, twists itself
suspiciously, and then issues into a narrow court, more than a
thousand years old, where offertory boxes, fixed on Oriental brackets,
invite our alms. The odour of the incense becomes more pronounced, and
at last a door, hidden in shadow at the end of this retreat, gives
access to the venerable church itself.

The church! It is a mixture of Byzantine basilica, mosque and desert
hut. Entering there, it is as if we were introduced suddenly to the
nave infancy of Christianity, as if we surprised it, as it were, in
its cradle--which was indeed Oriental. The triple nave is full of
little children (here also, that is what strikes us first), of little
mites who cry or else laugh and play; and there are mothers suckling
their new-born babes--and all the time the invisible mass is being
celebrated beyond, behind the iconostasis. On the ground, on mats,
whole families are seated in circle, as if they were in their homes. A
thick deposit of white chalk on the defaced, shrunken walls bears
witness to great age. And over all this is a strange old ceiling of
cedarwood, traversed by large barbaric beams.

In the nave, supported by columns of marble, brought in days gone by
from Pagan temples, there are, as in all these old Coptic churches,
high transverse wooden partitions, elaborately wrought in the Arab
fashion, which divide it into three sections: the first, into which
one comes on entering the church, is allotted to the women, the second
is for the baptistery, and the third, at the end adjoining the
iconostasis, is reserved for the men.

These women who are gathered this morning in their apportioned space--
so much at home there with their suckling little ones--wear, almost
all of them, the long black silk veils of former days. In their
harmonious and endlessly restless groups, the gowns /a la franque/ and
the poor hats of carnival are still the exception. The congregation,
as a whole, preserves almost intact its nave, old-time flavour.

And there is movement too, beyond, in the compartment of the men,
which is bounded at the farther end by the iconostasis--a thousand-
year-old wall decorated with inlaid cedarwood and ivory of precious
antique workmanship, and adorned with strange old icons, blackened by
time. It is behind this wall--pierced by several doorways--that mass
is now being said. From this last sanctuary shut off thus from the
people comes the vague sound of singing; from time to time a priest
raises a faded silk curtain and from the threshold makes the sign of
blessing. His vestments are of gold, and he wears a golden crown, but
the humble faithful speak to him freely, and even touch his gorgeous
garments, that might be those of one of the Wise Kings. He smiles, and
letting fall the curtain, which covers the entrance to the tabernacle,
disappears again into this innocent mystery.

Even the least things here tell of decay. The flagstones, trodden by
the feet of numberless dead generations, are become uneven through the
settling of the soil. Everything is askew, bent, dusty and worn-out.
The daylight comes from above, through narrow barred windows. There is
a lack of air, so that one almost stifles. But though the sun does not
enter, a certain indefinable reflection from the whitened walls
reminds us that outside there is a flaming, resplendent Eastern
spring.

In this, the old grandfather, as it were, of churches, filled now with
a cloud of odorous smoke, what one hears, more even than the chanting
of the mass, is the ceaseless movement, the pious agitation of the
faithful; and more even than that, the startling noise that rises from
the holy crypt below--the sharp clashing of cymbals and those
multitudinous little wailings, that sound like the mewings of kittens.

But let me not harbour thoughts of irony! Surely not. If, in our
Western lands, certain ceremonies seem to me anti-Christian--as, for
example, one of those spectacular high masses in the over-pompous
Cathedral of Cologne, where halberdiers overawe the crowd--here, on
the contrary, the simplicity of this primitive cult is touching and
respectable in the extreme. These Copts who install themselves in
their church, as round their firesides, who make their home there and
encumber the place with their fretful little ones, have, in their own
way, well understood the word of Him who said: "Suffer the little
children to come unto Me, and do not forbid them, for of such is the
kingdom of God."



CHAPTER IX

THE RACE OF BRONZE

A monotonous chant on three notes, which must date from the first
Pharaohs, may still be heard in our days on the banks of the Nile,
from the Delta as far as Nubia. At different places along the river,
half-made men, with torsos of bronze and voices all alike, intone it
in the morning when they commence their endless labours and continue
it throughout the day, until the evening brings repose.

Whoever has journeyed in a dahabiya up the old river will remember
this song of the water-drawers, with its accompaniment, in slow
cadence, of creakings of wet wood.

It is the song of the "shaduf," and the "shaduf" is a primitive
rigging, which has remained unchanged since times beyond all
reckoning. It is composed of a long antenna, like the yard of a
tartan, which is supported in see-saw fashion on an upright beam, and
carries at its extremity a wooden bucket. A man, with movements of
singular beauty, works it while he sings, lowers the antenna, draws
the water from the river, and raises the filled bucket, which another
man catches in its ascent and empties into a basin made out of the mud
of the river bank. When the river is low there are three such basins,
placed one above the other, as if they were stages by which the
precious water mounts to the fields of corn and lucerne. And then
three "shadufs," one above the other, creak together, lowering and
raising their great scarabaeus' horns to the rhythm of the same song.

All along the banks of the Nile this movement of the antennae of the
shadufs is to be seen. It had its beginning in the earliest ages and
is still the characteristic manifestation of human life along the
river banks. It ceases only in the summer, when the river, swollen by
the rains of equatorial Africa, overflows this land of Egypt, which it
itself has made in the midst of the Saharan sands. But in the winter,
which is here a time of luminous drought and changeless blue skies, it
is in full swing. Then every day, from dawn until the evening prayer,
the men are busy at their water-drawing, transformed for the time into
tireless machines, with muscles that work like metal bands. The action
never changes, any more than the song, and often their thoughts must
wander from their automatic toil, and lose themselves in some dream,
akin to that of their ancestors who were yoked to the same rigging
four or five thousands years ago. Their torsos, deluged at each rising
of the overflowing bucket, stream constantly with cold water; and
sometimes the wind is icy, even while the sun burns; but these
perpetual workers are, as we have said, of bronze, and their hardened
bodies take no harm.

These men are the fellahs, the peasants of the valley of the Nile--
pure Egyptians, whose type has not changed in the course of centuries.
In the oldest of the bas-reliefs of Thebes or Memphis you may see many
such, with the same noble profile and thickish lips, the same
elongated eyes shadowed by heavy eyelids, the same slender figure,
surmounted by broad shoulders.

The women who from time to time descend to the river, to draw water
also, but in their case in the vases of potters' clay which they
carry--this fetching and carrying of the life-giving water is the one
primordial occupation in this Egypt, which has no rain, nor any living
spring, and subsists only by its river--these women walk and posture
with an inimitable grace, draped in black veils, which even the
poorest allow to trail behind them, like the train of a court dress.
In this bright land, with its rose-coloured distances, it is strange
to see them, all so sombrely clothed, spots of mourning, as it were,
in the gay fields and the flaring desert. Machine-like creatures, all
untaught, they yet possess by instinct, as did once the daughters of
Hellas, a sense of nobility in attitude and carriage. None of the
women of Europe could wear these coarse black stuffs with such a
majestic harmony, and none surely could so raise their bare arms to
place on their heads the heavy jars filled with Nile water, and then,
departing, carry themselves so proudly, so upright and resilient under
their burden.

The muslin tunics which they wear are invariably black like the veils,
set off perhaps with some red embroidery or silver spangles. They are
unfastened across the chest, and, by a narrow opening which descends
to the girdle, disclose the amber-coloured flesh, the median swell of
bosoms of pale bronze, which, during their ephemeral youth at least,
are of a perfect contour. The faces, it is true, when they are not
hidden from you by a fold of the veil, are generally disappointing.
The rude labours, the early maternity and lactations, soon age and
wither them. But if by chance you see a young woman she is usually an
apparition of beauty, at once vigorous and slender.

As for the fellah babies, who abound in great numbers and follow, half
naked their mammas or their big sisters, they would for the most part
be adorable little creatures, were it not for the dirtiness which in
this country is a thing almost prescribed by tradition. Round their
eyelids and their moist lips are glued little clusters of Egyptian
flies, which are considered here to be beneficial to the children, and
the latter have no thought of driving them away, so resigned are they
become, by force of heredity, to whatever annoyance they thereby
suffer. Another example indeed of the passivity which their fathers
show when brought face to face with the invading foreigners!

Passivity and meek endurance seem to be the characteristics of this
inoffensive people, so graceful in their rags, so mysterious in their
age-old immobility, and so ready to accept with an equal indifference
whatever yoke may come. Poor, beautiful people, with muscles that
never grow tired! Whose men in olden times moved the great stones of
the temples, and knew no burden that was too heavy; whose women, with
their slender, pale-tawny arms and delicate small hands, surpass by
far in strength the burliest of our peasants! Poor beautiful race of
bronze! No doubt it was too precocious and put forth too soon its
astonishing flower--in times when the other peoples of the earth were
till vegetating in obscurity; no doubt its present resignation comes
from lassitude, after so many centuries of effort and expansive power.
Once it monopolised the glory of the world, and here it is now--for
some two thousand years--fallen into a kind of tired sleep, which has
left it an easy prey alike to the conquerors of yesterday and to the
exploiters of to-day.

Another trait which, side by side with their patience, prevails
amongst these true-blooded Egyptians of the countryside is their
attachment to the soil, to the soil which nourishes them, and in which
later on they will sleep. To possess land, to forestall at any price
the smallest portion of it, to reclaim patches of it from the shifting
desert, that is the sole aim, or almost so, which the fellahs pursue
in this world: to possess a field, however small it may be--a field,
moreover, which they till with the oldest plough invented by man, the
exact design of which may be seen carved on the walls of the tombs at
Memphis.

And this same people, which was the first of any to conceive
magnificence, whose gods and kings were formerly surrounded with an
over-powering splendour, contrives, to live to-day, pell-mell with its
sheep and goats, in humble, low-roofed cabins made out of sunbaked
mud! The Egyptian villages are all of the neutral colour of the soil;
a little white chalk brightens, perhaps, the minaret or cupola of the
mosque; but except for that little refuge, whither folk come to pray
each evening--for no one here would retire for the night without
having first prostrated himself before the majesty of Allah--
everything is of a mournful grey. Even the costumes of the people are
dull-coloured and wretched-looking. It is an East grown poor and old,
although the sky remains as wonderful as ever.

But all this past grandeur has left its imprint on the fellahs. They
have a refinement of appearance and manner, all unknown amongst the
majority of the good people of our villages. And those amongst them
who by good fortune become prosperous have forthwith a kind of
distinction, and seem to know, as if by birth, how to dispense the
gracious hospitality of an aristocrat. The hospitality of even the
humblest preserves something of courtesy and ease, which tells of
breed. I remember those clear evenings when, after the peaceful
navigation of the day, I used to stop and draw up my dahabiya to the
bank of the river. (I speak now of out-of-the-way places--free as yet
from the canker of the tourist element--such as I habitually chose.)
It was in the twilight at the hour when the stars began to shine out
from the golden-green sky. As soon as I put foot upon the shore, and
my arrival was signalled by the barking of the watchdogs, the chief of
the nearest hamlet always came to meet me. A dignified man, in a long
robe of striped silk or modest blue cotton, he accosted me with
formulae of welcome quite in the grand manner; insisted on my
following him to his house of dried mud; and there, escorting me,
after the exchange of further compliments, to the place of honour on
the poor divan of his lodging, forced me to accept the traditional cup
of Arab coffee.

*****

To wake these fellahs from their strange sleep, to open their eyes at
last, and to transform them by a modern education--that is the task
which nowadays a select band of Egyptian patriots is desirous of
attempting. Not long ago, such an endeavour would have seemed to me a
crime; for these stubborn peasants were living under conditions of the
least suffering, rich in faith and poor in desire. But to-day they are
suffering from an invasion more undermining, more dangerous than that
of the conquerors who killed by sword and fire. The Occidentals are
there, everywhere, amongst them, profiting by their meek passivity to
turn them into slaves for their business and their pleasure. The work
of degradation of these simpletons is so easy: men bring them new
desires, new greeds, new needs,--and rob them of their prayers.

Yet, it is time perhaps to wake them from their sleep of more than
twenty centuries, to put them on their guard, and to see what yet they
may be capable of, what surprises they may have in store for us after
that long lethargy, which must surely have been restorative. In any
case the human species, in course of deterioration through overstrain,
would find amongst these singers of the shaduf and these labourers
with the antiquated plough, brains unclouded by alcohol, and a whole
reserve of tranquil beauty, of well-balanced physique, of vigour
untainted by bestiality.



CHAPTER X

A CHARMING LUNCHEON

We are making our way through the fields of Abydos in the dazzling
splendour of the forenoon, having come, like so many pilgrims of old,
from the banks of the Nile to visit the sanctuaries of Osiris, which
lie beyond the green plains, on the edge of the desert.

It is a journey of some ten miles or so, under a clear sky and a
burning sun. We pass through fields of corn and lucerne, whose
wonderful green is piqued with little flowers, such as may be seen in
our climate. Hundreds of little birds sing to us distractedly of the
joy of life; the sun shines radiantly, magnificently; the impetuous
corn is already in the ear; it might be some gay pageant of our days
of May. One forgets that it is February, that we are still in the
winter--the luminous winter of Egypt.

Here and there amongst the outspread fields are villages buried under
the thick foliage of trees--under acacias which, in the distance,
resemble ours at home; beyond indeed the mountain chain of Libya, like
a wall confining the fertile fields, looks strange perhaps in its
rose-colour, and too desolate; but, nevertheless amidst this glad
music of the fields, these songs of larks and twitterings of sparrows,
you scarcely realise that you are in a foreign land.

Abydos! What magic there is in the name! "Abydos is at hand, and in
another moment we shall be there." The mere words seem somehow to
transform the aspect of the homely green fields, and make this
pastoral region almost imposing. The buzzing of the flies increases in
the overheated air and the song of the birds subsides until at last it
dies away in the approach of noon.

We have been journeying a little more than an hour amongst the verdure
of the growing corn that lies upon the fields like a carpet, when
suddenly, beyond the little houses and tress of a village, quite a
different world is disclosed--the familiar world of glare and death
which presses so closely upon inhabited Egypt: the desert! The desert
of Libya, and now as ever when we come upon it suddenly from the banks
of the old river it rises up before us; beginning at once, without
transition, absolute and terrible, as soon as we leave the thick
velvet of the last field, the cool shade of the last acacia. Its sands
seem to slope towards us, in a prodigious incline, from the strange
mountains that we saw from the happy plain, and which now appear,
enthroned beyond, like the monarchs of all this nothingness.

The town of Abydos, which has vanished and left no wrack behind, rose
once in this spot where we now stand, on the very threshold of the
solitudes; but its necropoles, more venerated even than those of
Memphis, and its thrice-holy temples, are a little farther on, in the
marvellously conserving sand, which has buried them under its tireless
waves and preserved them almost intact up till the present day.

The desert! As soon as we put foot upon its shifting soil, which
smothers the sound of our steps, the atmosphere too seems suddenly to
change; it burns with a strange new heat, as if great fires had been
lighted in the neighbourhood.

And this whole domain of light and drought, right away into the
distance, is shaded and streaked with the familiar brown, red and
yellow colours. The mournful reflection of adjacent things augments to
excess the heat and light. The horizon trembles under the little
vapours of mirage like water ruffled by the wind. The background,
which mounts gradually to the foot of the Libyan mountains, is strewn
with the debris of bricks and stones--shapeless ruins which, though
they scarcely rise above the sand, abound nevertheless in great
numbers, and serve to remind us that here indeed is a very ancient
soil, where men laboured in centuries that have drifted out of
knowledge. One divines instinctively and at once the catacombs, the
hypogea and the mummies that lie beneath!

These necropoles of Abydos once--and for thousands of years--exercised
an extraordinary fascination over this people--the precursor of
peoples--who dwelt in the valley of the Nile. According to one of the
most ancient of human traditions, the head of Osiris, the lord of the
/other world/, reposed in the depths of one of the temples which
to-day are buried in the sands. And men, as soon as their thought
commenced to issue from the primeval night, were haunted by the idea
that there were localities helpful, as if were, to the poor corpses
that lay beneath the earth, that there were certain holy places where
it behoved them to be buried if they wished to be ready when the
signal of awakening was given. And in old Egypt, therefore, each one,
at the hour of death, turned his thoughts to these stones and sands,
in the ardent hope that he might be able to sleep near the remains of
his god. And when the place was becoming crowded with sleepers, those
who could obtain no place there conceived the idea of having humble
obelisks planted on the holy ground, which at least should tell their
names; or even recommended that their mummies might be there for some
weeks, even if they were afterwards removed. And thus, funeral
processions passed to and fro without ceasing through the cornfields
that separate the Nile from the desert. Abydos! In the sad human dream
dominated by the thought of dissolution, Abydos preceded by many
centuries the Valley of Jehosophat of the Hebrews, the cemeteries
around Mecca of the Moslems, and the holy tombs beneath our oldest
cathedrals! . . . Abydos! It behoves us to walk here pensively and
silently out of respect for all those thousands of souls who formerly
turned towards this place, with outstretched hands, in the hour of
death.

The first great temple--that which King Seti raised to the mysterious
Prince of the Other World, who in those days was called Osiris--is
quite close--a distance of little more than 200 yards in the glare of
the desert. We come upon it suddenly, so that it almost startles us,
for nothing warns us of its proximity. The sand from which it has been
exhumed, and which buried it for 2000 years, still rises almost to its
roof. Through an iron gate, guarded by two tall Bedouin guards in
black robes, we plunge at once into the shadow of enormous stones. We
are in the house of the god, in a forest of heavy Osiridean columns,
surrounded by a world of people in high coiffures, carved in bas-
relief on the pillars and walls--people who seem to be signalling one
to another and exchanging amongst themselves mysterious signs,
silently and for ever.

But what is this noise in the sanctuary? It seems to be full of
people. There, sure enough, beyond a second row of columns, is quite a
little crowd talking loudly in English. I fancy that I can hear the
clinking of glasses and the tapping of knives and forks.

Oh! poor, poor temple, to what strange uses are you come. . . . This
excess of grotesqueness in profanation is more insulting surely than
to be sacked by barbarians! Behold a table set for some thirty guests,
and the guests themselves--of both sexes--merry and lighthearted,
belong to that special type of humanity which patronises Thomas Cook &
Son (Egypt Ltd.). They wear cork helmets, and the classic green
spectacles; drink whisky and soda, and eat voraciously sandwiches and
other viands out of greasy paper, which now litters the floor. And the
women! Heavens! what scarecrows they are! And this kind of thing, so
the black-robed Bedouin guards inform us, is repeated every day so
long as the season lasts. A luncheon in the temple of Osiris is part
of the programme of pleasure trips. Each day at noon a new band
arrives, on heedless and unfortunate donkeys. The tables and the
crockery remain, of course, in the old temple!

Let us escape quickly, if possible before the sight shall have become
graven on our memory.

But alas! even when we are outside, alone again on the expanse of
dazzling sands, we can no longer take things seriously. Abydos and the
desert have ceased to exist. The faces of those women remain to haunt
us, their faces and their hats, and those looks which they vouchsafed
us from over their solar spectacles. . . . The ugliness associated
with the name of Cook was once explained to me in this wise, and the
explanation at first sight seemed satisfactory: "The United Kingdom,
justifiably jealous of the beauty of its daughters, submits them to a
jury when they reach the age of puberty; and those who are classed as
too ugly to reproduce their kind are accorded an unlimited account at
Thomas Cook & Sons, and thus vowed to a course of perpetual travel,
which leaves them no time to think of certain trifles incidental to
life." The explanation, as I say, seduced me for the time being. But a
more attentive examination of the bands who infest the valley of the
Nile enables me to aver that all these good English ladies are of an
age notoriously canonical; and the catastrophe of procreation
therefore, supposing that such an accident could ever have happened to
them, must date back to a time long anterior to their enrolment. And I
remain perplexed!

Without conviction now, we make our way towards another temple,
guaranteed solitary. Indeed the sun blazes there a lonely sovereign in
the midst of a profound silence, and Egypt and the past take us again
into their folds.

Once more to Osiris, the god of heavenly awakening in the necropolis
of Abydos, this sanctuary was built by Ramses II. But the sands have
covered it with their winding sheet in vain, and have been able to
preserve for us only the lower and more deeply buried parts. Men in
their blind greed have destroyed the upper portions,[*] and its ruins,
protected and cleared as they are to-day, rise only some ten or twelve
feet from the ground. In the bas-reliefs the majority of the figures
have only legs and a portion of the body; their heads and shoulders
have disappeared with the upper parts of the walls. But they seem to
have preserved their vitality: the gesticulations, the exaggerated
pantomime of the attitudes of these headless things, are more strange,
more striking, perhaps, than if their faces still remained. And they
have preserved too, in an extraordinary degree, the brightness of
their antique paintings, the fresh tints of their costumes, of their
robes of turquoise blue, or lapis, or emerald-green, or golden-yellow.
It is an artless kind of fresco-work, which nevertheless amazes us by
remaining perfect after thirty-five centuries. All that these people
did seems as if made for immortality. It is true, however, that such
brilliant colours are not found in any of the other Pharaonic
monuments, and that here they are heightened by the white background.
For, notwithstanding the bluish, black and red granite of the
porticoes, the walls are all of a fine limestone, of exceeding
whiteness, and, in the holy of holies, of a pure alabaster.

[*] Not long ago a manufacturer, established in the neighbourhood,
    discovering that the limestone of its walls was friable, used this
    temple as a quarry, and for some years bas-reliefs beyond price
    served as aliment to the mills of the factory.

Above the truncated walls, with their bright clear colours, the desert
appears, and shows quite brown by contrast; one sees the great yellow
swell of sand and stones above the pictures of these decapitated
people. It rises like a colossal wave and stretches out to bathe the
foot of the Libyan mountains beyond. Towards the north and west of the
solitudes, shapeless ruins of tawny-coloured blocks follow one another
in the sands until the dazzling distance ends in a clear-cut line
against the sky. Apart from this temple of Ramses, where we now stand,
and that of Seti in the vicinity, where the enterprise of Thomas Cook
& Son flourishes, there is nothing around us but ruins, crumbled and
pulverised beyond all possible redemption. But they give us pause,
these disappearing ruins, for they are the debris of that ageless
temple, where sleeps the head of the god, the debris of the tombs of
the Middle and Ancient Empires, and they indicate still the wide
extent and development of the necropoles of Abydos, so old that it
almost makes one giddy to think of their beginning.

Here, as at Thebes and Memphis, the tombs of the Egyptians are met
with only amongst the sands and the parched rocks. The great ancestral
people, who would have shuddered at our black trees, and the
corruption of the damp graves, liked to place its embalmed dead in the
midst of this luminous, changeless splendour of death, which men call
the desert.

*****

And what is this now that is happening in the holy neighbourhood of
unhappy Osiris? A troupe of donkeys, belaboured by Bedouin drivers, is
being driven in the direction of the adjacent temple, dedicated to the
god by Seti! The luncheon no doubt is over and the band about to
depart, sharp to the appointed hour of the programme. Let us watch
them from a prudent distance.

To be brief, they all mount into their saddles, these Cooks and
Cookesses, and opening, not without a conscious air of majesty, their
white cotton parasols, take themselves off in the direction of the
Nile. They disappear and the place belongs to us.

When we venture at last to return to the first sanctuary, where they
had lunched their fill in the shade, the guardians are busy clearing
away the leavings and the dirty paper. And they pack the dubious
crockery, which will be required for to-morrow's luncheon, into large
chests on which may be read in large letters of glory the names of the
veritable sovereigns of modern Egypt: "Thomas Cook & Son (Egypt
Ltd.)."

All this happily ends with the first hypostyle. Nothing dishonours the
halls of the interior, where silence has again descended, the vast
silence of the noon of the desert.

In the reign of the Emperor Tiberius, men already marvelled at this
temple, as at a relic of the most distant and nebulous past. The
geographer Strabo wrote in those days: "It is an admirable palace
built in the fashion of the Labyrinth save that it has fewer
galleries." There are galleries enough however, and one can readily
lose oneself in its mazy turnings. Seven chapels, consecrated to
Osiris and to different gods and goddesses of his suite; seven vaulted
chambers; seven doors for the processions of kings and multitudes;
and, at the sides, numberless halls, corridors, secondary chapels,
dark chambers and hidden doorways. That very primitive column,
suggestive of reeds, which is called in architecture the "plant
column" and resembles a monstrous stem of papyrus, rises here in a
thick forest, to support the stones of the blue ceilings, which are
strewn with stars, in the likeness of the sky of this country. In many
cases these stones are missing and leave large openings on to the real
sky above. Their massiveness, which one might have thought would
secure them an endless duration, has availed them nothing; the sun of
so many centuries has cracked them, and their own weight, then, has
brought them headlong to the ground. And floods of light now enter
through the gaps, into the very chapels where the men of old had
thought to ensure a holy gloom.

Despite the disaster which has overtaken the ceilings, this is
nevertheless one of the most perfect of the sanctuaries of ancient
Egypt. The sands, those gentle sextons, have here succeeded
miraculously in their work of preservation. They might have been
carved yesterday, these innumerable people, who, everywhere--on the
walls, on this forest of columns--gesticulate and, with their arms and
long hands, continue with animation their eternal mute conversation.
The whole temple, with the openings which give it light, is more
beautiful perhaps than in the time of the Pharaohs. In place of the
old-time darkness, a transparent gloom now alternates with shafts of
sunlight. Here and there the subjects of the bas-reliefs, so long
buried in the darkness, are deluged with burning rays which detail
their attitudes, their muscles, their scarcely altered colours, and
endow them again with life and youth. There is no part of the wall, in
this immense place, but is covered with divinities, with hieroglyphs
and emblems. Osiris in high coiffure, the beautiful Isis in the helmet
of a bird, jackal-headed Anubis, falcon-headed Horus, and ibis-headed
Thoth are repeated a thousand times, welcoming with strange gestures
the kings and priests who are rendering them homage.

The bodies, almost nude, with broad shoulders and slim waist, have a
slenderness, a grace, infinitely chaste, and the features of the faces
are of an exquisite purity. The artists who carved these charming
heads, with their long eyes, full of the ancient dream, were already
skilled in their art; but through a deficiency, which puzzles us, they
were only able to draw them in profile. All the legs, all the feet are
in profile too, although the bodies, on the other hand, face us fully.
Men needed yet some centuries of study before they understood
perspective--which to us now seems so simple--and the foreshortening
of figures, and were able to render the impression of them on a plane
surface.

Many of the pictures represent King Seti, drawn without doubt from
life, for they show us almost the very features of his mummy,
exhibited now in the museum at Cairo. At his side he holds
affectionately his son, the prince-royal, Ramses (later on Ramses II.,
the great Sesostris of the Greeks). They have given the latter quite a
frank air, and he wears a curl on the side of his head, as was the
fashion then in childhood. He, also, has his mummy in a glass case in
the museum, and anyone who has seen that toothless, sinister wreck,
who had already attained the age of nearly a hundred years before
death delivered him to the embalmers of Thebes, will find it difficult
to believe that he could ever have been young, and worn his hair
curled so; that he could ever have played and been a child.

*****

We thought we had finished with the Cooks and Cookesses of the
luncheon. But alas! our horses, faster than their donkeys, overtake
them in the return journey amongst the green cornfields of Abydos; and
in a stoppage in the narrow roadway, caused by a meeting with a number
of camels laden with lucerne, we are brought to a halt in their midst.
Almost touching me is a dear little white donkey, who looks at me
pensively and in such a way that we at once understand each other. A
mutual sympathy unites us. A Cookess in spectacles surmounts him--the
most hideous of them all, bony and severe. Over her travelling
costume, already sufficiently repulsive, she wears a tennis jersey,
which accentuates the angularity of her figure, and in her person she
seems the very incarnation of the respectability of the British Isles.
It would be more equitable, too--so long are those legs of hers,
which, to be sure, have scant interest for the tourist--if she carried
the donkey.

The poor little white thing regards me with melancholy. His ears
twitch restlessly and his beautiful eyes, so fine, so observant of
everything, say to me as plain as words:

"She is a beauty, isn't she?"

"She is, indeed, my poor little donkey. But think of this: fixed on
thy back as she is, thou hast this advantage over me--thou seest her
not!"

But my reflection, though judicious enough, does not console him, and
his look answers me that he would be much prouder if he carried, like
so many of his comrades, a simple pack of sugarcanes.



CHAPTER XI

THE DOWNFALL OF THE NILE

Some thousands of years ago, at the beginning of our geological
period, when the continents had taken, in the last great upheaval,
almost the forms by which we now know them, and when the rivers began
to trace their hesitating courses, it happened that the rains of a
whole watershed of Africa were precipitated in one formidable torrent
across the uninhabitable region which stretches from the Atlantic to
the Indian Ocean, and is called the region of the deserts. And this
enormous waterway, lost as it was in the sands, by-and-by regulated
its course: it became the Nile, and with untiring patience set itself
to the proper task of river, which in this accursed zone might well
have seemed an impossible one. First it had to round all the blocks of
granite scattered in its way in the high plains of Nubia; and then,
and more especially, to deposit, little by little, successive layers
of mud, to form a living artery, to create, as it were, a long green
ribbon in the midst of this infinite domain of death.

How long ago is it since the work of the great river began? There is
something fearful in the thought. During the 5000 years of which we
have any knowledge the incessant deposit of mud has scarcely widened
this strip of inhabited Egypt, which at the most ancient period of
history was almost as it is to-day. And as for the granite blocks on
the plains of Nubia, how many thousands of years did it need to roll
them and to polish them thus? In the times of the Pharaohs they
already had their present rounded forms, worn smooth by the friction
of the water, and the hieroglyphic inscriptions on their surfaces are
not perceptibly effaced, though they have suffered the periodical
inundation of the summer for some forty or fifty centuries!

It was an exceptional country, this valley of the Nile; marvellous and
unique; fertile without rain, watered according to its need by the
great river, without the help of any cloud. It knew not the dull days
and the humidity under which we suffer, but kept always the changeless
sky of the immense surrounding deserts, which exhaled no vapour that
might dim the horizon. It was this eternal splendour of its light, no
doubt, and this easiness of life, which brought forth here the first
fruits of human thought. This same Nile, after having so patiently
created the soil of Egypt, became also the father of that people,
which led the way for all others--like those early branches that one
sees in spring, which shoot first from the stem, and sometimes die
before the summer. It nursed that people, whose least vestiges we
discover to-day with surprise and wonder; a people who, in the very
dawn, in the midst of the original barbarity, conceived magnificently
the infinite and the divine; who placed with such certainty and
grandeur the first architectural lines, from which afterwards our
architecture was to be derived; who laid the bases of art, of science,
and of all knowledge.

Later on, when this beautiful flower of humanity was faded, the Nile,
flowing always in the midst of its deserts, seems to have had for
mission, during nearly two thousand years, the maintenance on its
banks of a kind of immobility and desuetude, which was in a way a
homage of respect for these stupendous relics. While the sand was
burying the ruins of the temples and the battered faces of the
colossi, nothing changed under this sky of changeless blue. The same
cultivation proceeded on the banks as in the oldest ages; the same
boats, with the same sails, went up and down the thread of water; the
same songs kept time to the eternal human toil. The race of fellahs,
the unconscious guardian of a prodigious past, slept on without desire
of change, and almost without suffering. And time passed for Egypt in
a great peace of sunlight and of death.

But to-day the foreigners are masters here, and have wakened the old
Nile--wakened to enslave it. In less than twenty years they have
disfigured its valley, which until then had preserved itself like a
sanctuary. They have silenced its cataracts, captured its precious
water by dams, to pour it afar off on plains that are become like
marshes and already sully with their mists the crystal clearness of
the sky. The ancient rigging no longer suffices to water the land
under cultivation. Machines worked by steam, which draw the water more
quickly, commence to rise along the banks, side by side with new
factories. Soon there will scarcely be a river more dishonoured than
this, by iron chimneys and thick, black smoke. And it is happening
apace, this exploitation of the Nile--hastily, greedily, as in a hunt
for spoils. And thus all its beauty disappears, for its monotonous
course, through regions endless alike, won us only by its calm and its
old-world mystery.

Poor Nile of the prodigies! One feels sometimes still its departing
charm, stray corners of it remain intact. There are days of
transcendent clearness, incomparable evenings, when one may still
forget the ugliness and the smoke. But the classic expedition by
dahabiya, the ascent of the river from Cairo to Nubia, will soon have
ceased to be worth making.

Ordinarily this voyage is made in the winter, so that the traveller
may follow the course of the sun as it makes its escape towards the
southern hemisphere. The water then is low and the valley parched.
Leaving the cosmopolitan town of modern Cairo, the iron bridges, and
the pretentious hotels, with their flaunting inscriptions, it imparts
a sense of sudden peacefulness to pass along the large and rapid
waters of this river, between the curtains of palm-trees on the banks,
borne by a dahabiya where one is master and, if one likes, may be
alone.

At first, for a day or two, the great haunting triangles of the
pyramids seem to follow you, those of Dashur and that of Sakkarah
succeeding to those of Gizeh. For a long time the horizon is disturbed
by their gigantic silhouettes. As we recede from them, and they
disengage themselves better from neighbouring things, they seem, as
happens in the case of mountains, to grow higher. And when they have
finally disappeared, we have still to ascend slowly and by stages some
six hundred miles of river before we reach the first cataract. Our way
lies through monotonous desert regions where the hours and days are
marked chiefly by the variations of the wonderful light. Except for
the phantasmagoria of the mornings and evenings, there is no
outstanding feature on these dull-coloured banks, where may be seen,
with never a change at all, the humble pastoral life of the fellahs.
The sun is burning, the starlit nights clear and cold. A withering
wind, which blows almost without ceasing from the north, makes you
shiver as soon as the twilight falls.

One may travel for league after league along this slimy water and make
head for days and weeks against its current--which glides
everlastingly past the dahabiya, in little hurrying waves--without
seeing this warm, fecundating river, compared with which our rivers of
France are mere negligible streams, either diminish or increase or
hasten. And on the right and left of us as we pass are unfolded
indefinitely the two parallel chains of barren limestone, which
imprison so narrowly the Egypt of the harvests: on the west that of
the Libyan desert, which every morning the first rays of the sun tint
with a rosy coral that nothing seems to dull; and in the east that of
the desert of Arabia, which never fails in the evening to retain the
light of the setting sun, and looks then like a mournful girdle of
glowing embers. Sometimes the two parallel walls sheer off and give
more room to the green fields, to the woods of palm-trees, and the
little oases, separated by streaks of golden sand. Sometimes they
approach so closely to the Nile that habitable Egypt is no wider than
some two or three poor fields of corn, lying right on the water's
edge, behind which the dead stones and the dead sands commence at
once. And sometimes, even, the desert chain closes in so as to
overhang the river with its reddish-white cliffs, which no rain ever
comes to freshen, and in which, at different heights, gape the square
holes leading to the habitations of the mummies. These mountains,
which in the distance look so beautiful in their rose-colour, and
make, as it were, interminable back-cloths to all that happens on the
river banks, were perforated, during some 5000 years, for the
introduction of sarcophagi and now they swarm with old dead bodies.

And all that passes on the banks, indeed, changes as little as the
background.

First there is that gesture, supple and superb, but always the same,
of the women in their long black robes who come without ceasing to
fill their long-necked jars and carry them away balanced on their
veiled heads. Then the flocks which shepherds, draped in mourning,
bring to the river to drink, goats and sheep and asses all mixed up
together. And then the buffaloes, massive and mud-coloured, who
descend calmly to bathe. And, finally, the great labour of the
watering: the traditional noria, turned by a little bull with bandaged
eyes and, above all, the shaduf, worked by men whose naked bodies
stream with the cold water.

The shadufs follow one another sometimes as far as the eye can see. It
is strange to watch the movement--confused in the distance--of all
these long rods which pump the water without ceasing, and look like
the swaying of living antennae. The same sight was to be seen along
this river in the times of the Ramses. But suddenly, at some bend of
the river, the old Pharaonic rigging disappears, to give place to a
succession of steam machines, which, more even than the muscles of the
fellahs, are busy at the water-drawing. Before long their blackish
chimneys will make a continuous border to the tamed Nile.

Did one not know their bearings, the great ruins of this Egypt would
pass unnoticed. With a few rare exceptions they lie beyond the green
plains on the threshold of the solitudes. And against the changeless,
rose-coloured background of these cliffs of the desert, which follow
you during the whole of this tranquil navigation of some 600 miles,
are to be seen only the humble towns and villages of to-day, which
have the neutral colour of the ground. Some openwork minarets dominate
them--white spots above the prevailing dullness. Clouds of pigeons
whirl round in the neighbourhood. And amongst the little houses, which
are only cubes of mud, baked in the sun, the palm-trees of Africa,
either singly or in mighty clusters, rise superbly and cast on these
little habitations the shade of their palms which sway in the wind.
Not long ago, although indeed everything in these little towns was
mournful and stagnant, one would have been tempted to stop in passing,
drawn by that nameless peace that belonged to the Old East and to
Islam. But, now, before the smallest hamlet--amongst the beautiful
primitive boats, that still remain in great numbers, pointing their
yards, like very long reeds, into the sky--there is always, for the
meeting of the tourist boats, an enormous black pontoon, which spoils
the whole scene by its presence and its great advertising inscription:
"Thomas Cook & Son (Egypt Ltd.)." And, what is more, one hears the
whistling of the railway, which runs mercilessly along the river,
bringing from the Delta to the Soudan the hordes of European invaders.
And to crown all, adjoining the station is inevitably some modern
factory, throned there in a sort of irony, and dominating the poor
crumbling things that still presume to tell of Egypt and of mystery.

And so now, except at the towns or villages which lead to celebrated
ruins, we stop no longer. It is necessary to proceed farther and for
the halt of the night to seek an obscure hamlet, a silent recess,
where we may moor our dahabiya against the venerable earth of the
bank.

And so one goes on, for days and weeks, between these two interminable
cliffs of reddish chalk, filled with their hypogea and mummies, which
are the walls of the valley of the Nile, and will follow us up to the
first cataract, until our entrance into Nubia. There only will the
appearance and nature of the rocks of the desert change, to become the
more sombre granite out of which the Pharaohs carved their obelisks
and the great figures of their gods.

We go on and on, ascending the thread of this eternal current, and the
regularity of the wind, the persistent clearness of the sky, the
monotony of the great river, which winds but never ends, all conspire
to make us forget the hours and days that pass. However deceived and
disappointed we may be at seeing the profanation of the river banks,
here, nevertheless, isolated on the water, we do not lose the peace of
being a wanderer, a stranger amongst an equipage of silent Arabs, who
every evening prostrate themselves in confiding prayer.

And, moreover, we are moving towards the south, towards the sun, and
every day has a more entrancing clearness, a more caressing warmth,
and the bronze of the faces that we see on our way takes on a deeper
tint.

And then too one mixes intimately with the life of the river bank,
which is still so absorbing and, at certain hours, when the horizon is
unsullied by the smoke of pit-coal, recalls you to the days of artless
toil and healthy beauty. In the boats that meet us, half-naked men,
revelling in their movement, in the sun and air, sing, as they ply
their oars, those songs of the Nile that are as old as Thebes or
Memphis. When the wind rises there is a riotous unfurling of sails,
which, stretched on their long yards, give to the dahabiyas the air of
birds in full flight. Bending right over in the wind, they skim along
with a lively motion, carrying their cargoes of men and beasts and
primitive things. Women are there draped still in the ancient fashion,
and sheep and goats, and sometimes piles of fruit and gourds, and
sacks of grain. Many are laden to the water's edge with these
earthenware jars, unchanged for 3000 years, which the fellaheens know
how to place on their heads with so much grace--and one sees these
heaps of fragile pottery gliding along the water as if carried by the
gigantic wings of a gull. And in the far-off, almost fabulous, days
the life of the mariners of the Nile had the same aspect, as is shown
by the bas-reliefs on the oldest tombs; it required the same play of
muscles and of sails; was accompanied no doubt by the same songs, and
was subject to the withering caress of this same desert wind. And
then, as now, the same unchanging rose coloured the continuous curtain
of the mountains.

But all at once there is a noise of machinery, and whistlings, and in
the air, which was just now so pure, rise noxious columns of black
smoke. The modern steamers are coming, and throw into disorder the
flotillas of the past; colliers that leave great eddies in their wake,
or perhaps a wearisome lot of those three-decked tourist boats, which
make a great noise as they plough the water, and are laden for the
most part with ugly women, snobs and imbeciles.

Poor, poor Nile! which reflected formerly on its warm mirror the
utmost of earthly splendour, which bore in its time so many barques of
gods and goddesses in procession behind the golden barge of Amen, and
knew in the dawn of the ages only an impeccable purity, alike of the
human form and of architectural design! What a downfall is here! To be
awakened from that disdainful sleep of twenty centuries and made to
carry the floating barracks of Thomas Cook & Son, to feed sugar
factories, and to exhaust itself in nourishing with its mud the raw
material for English cotton-stuffs.



CHAPTER XII

IN THE TEMPLE OF THE GODDESS OF LOVE AND JOY

It is the month of March, but as gay and splendid as in our June.
Around us are fields of corn, of lucerne, and the flowering bean. And
the air is full of restless birds, singing deliriously for very joy in
the voluptuous business of their nests and coveys. Our way lies over a
fertile soil, saturated with vital substances--some paradise for
beasts no doubt, for they swarm on every side: flocks of goats with a
thousand bleating kids; she-asses with their frisking young; cows and
cow-buffaloes feeding their calves; all turned loose among the crops,
to browse at their leisure, as if there were here a superabundance of
the riches of the soil.

What country is this that shows no sign of human habitation, that
knows no village, nor any distant spire? The crops are like ours at
home--wheat, lucerne, and the flowering bean that perfumes the air
with its white blossoms. But there is an excess of light in the sky
and, in the distance, an extraordinary clearness. And then these
fertile plains, that might be those of some "Promised Land," seem to
be bounded far away, on left and right, by two parallel stone walls,
two chains of rose-coloured mountains, whose aspect is obviously
desertlike. Besides, amongst the numerous animals that are familiar,
there are camels, feeding their strange nurslings that look like four-
legged ostriches. And finally some peasants appear beyond in the
cornfields; they are veiled in long black draperies. It is the East
then, an African land, or some oasis of Arabia?

The sun at this moment is hidden from us by a band of clouds, that
stretches, right above our head, from one end of the sky to the other,
like a long skein of white wool. It is alone in the blue void, and
seems to make more peaceful, and even a little mysterious, the
wonderful light of the fields we traverse--these fields intoxicated
with life and vibrant with the music of birds; while, by contrast, the
distant landscape, unshaded by clouds, is resplendent with a more
incisive clearness and the desert beyond seems deluged with rays.

The pathway that we have been following, ill defined as it is in the
grassy fields, leads us at length under a large ruinous portico--a
relic of goodness knows what olden days--which still rises here, quite
isolated, altogether strange and unexpected, in the midst of the green
expanse of pasture and tillage. We had seen it from a great distance,
so pure and clear is the air; and in approaching it we perceive that
it is colossal, and in relief on its lintel is designed a globe with
two long wings outspread symmetrically.

It behoves us now to make obeisance with almost religious reverence,
for this winged disc is a symbol which gives at length an indication
of the place immediate and absolute. It is Egypt, the country--Egypt,
our ancient mother. And there before us must once have stood a temple
reverenced of the people, or some great vanished town; its fragments
of columns and sculptured capitals are strewn about in the fields of
lucerne. How inexplicable it seems that this land of ancient
splendours, which never ceased indeed to be nutritive and prodigiously
fertile, should have returned, for some hundreds of years now, to the
humble pastoral life of the peasants.

Through the green crops and the assembled herds our pathway seems to
lead to a kind of hill rising alone in the midst of the plains--a hill
which is neither of the same colour nor the same nature as the
mountains of the surrounding deserts. Behind us the portico recedes
little by little in the distance; its tall imposing silhouette, as
mournful and solitary, throws an infinite sadness on this sea of
meadows, which spread their peace where once was a centre of
magnificence.

The wind now rises in sharp, lashing gusts--the wind of Egypt that
never seems to fall, and is bitter and wintry for all the burning of
the sun. The growing corn bends before it, showing the gloss of its
young quivering leaves, and the herded beasts move close to one
another and turn their backs to the squall.

As we draw nearer to this singular hill it is revealed as a mass of
ruins. And the ruins are all of a kind, of a brownish-red. They are
the remains of the colonial towns of the Romans, which subsisted here
for some two or three hundred years (an almost negligible moment of
time in the long history of Egypt), and then fell to pieces, to become
in time mere shapeless mounds on the fertile margins of the Nile and
sometimes even in the submerging sands.

A heap of little reddish bricks that once were fashioned into houses;
a heap of broken jars or amphorae--myriads of them--that served to
carry the water from the old nourishing river; and the remains of
walls, repaired at diverse epochs, where stones inscribed with
hieroglyphs lie upside down against fragments of Grecian obelisks or
Coptic sculptures or Roman capitals. In our countries, where the past
is of yesterday, we have nothing resembling such a chaos of dead
things.

Nowadays the sanctuary is reached through a large cutting in this hill
of ruins; incredible heaps of bricks and broken pottery enclose it on
all sides like a jealous rampart. Until recently indeed they covered
it almost to its roof. From the very first its appearance is
disconcerting: it is so grand, so austere and gloomy. A strange
dwelling, to be sure, for the Goddess of Love and Joy. It seems more
fit to be the home of the Prince of Darkness and of Death. A severe
doorway, built of gigantic stones and surmounted by a winged disc,
opens on to an asylum of religious mystery, on to depths where massive
columns disappear in the darkness of deep night.

Immediately on entering there is a coolness and a resonance as of a
sepulchre. First, the pronaos, where we still see clearly, between
pillars carved with hieroglyphs. Were it not for the large human faces
which serve for the capitals of the columns, and are the image of the
lovely Hathor, the goddess of the place, this temple of the decadent
epoch would scarcely differ from those built in this country two
thousand years before. It has the same square massiveness.

And in the dark blue ceilings there are the same frescoes, filled with
stars, with the signs of the Zodiac, and series of winged discs; in
bas-relief on the walls, the same multitudinous crowd of people who
gesticulate and make signs to one another with their hands--eternally
the same mysterious signs, repeated to infinity, everywhere--in the
palaces, the hypogea, the syringes, and on the sarcophagi and papyri
of the mummies.

The Memphite and Theban temples, which preceded this by so many
centuries, and far surpassed it in grandeur, have all lost, in
consequence of the falling of the enormous granites of their roofs,
their cherished gloom, and, what is the same thing, their religious
mystery. But in the temple of the lovely Hathor, on the contrary,
except for some figures mutilated by the hammers of Christians or
Moslems, everything has remained intact, and the lofty ceilings still
throw their fearsome shadows.

The gloom deepens in the hypostyle which follows the pronaos. Then
come, one after another, two halls of increasing holiness, where the
daylight enters regretfully through narrow loopholes, barely lighting
the superposed rows of innumerable figures that gesticulate on the
walls. And then, after other majestic corridors, we reach the heart of
this heap of terrible stones, the holy of holies, enveloped in deep
gloom. The hieroglyphic inscriptions name this place the "Hall of
Mystery" and formerly the high priest /alone, and he only once in each
year/, had the right to enter it for the performance of some now
unknown rites.

The "Hall of Mystery" is empty to-day, despoiled long since of the
emblems of gold and precious stones that once filled it. The meagre
little flames of the candles we have lit scarcely pierce the darkness
which thickens over our heads towards the granite ceilings; at the
most they only allow us to distinguish on the walls of the vast
rectangular cavern the serried ranks of figures who exchange among
themselves their disconcerting mute conversations.

Towards the end of the ancient and at the beginning of the Christian
era, Egypt, as we know, still exercised such a fascination over the
world, by its ancestral prestige, by the memory of its dominating
past, and the sovereign permanence of its ruins, that it imposed its
gods upon its conquerors, its handwriting, its architecture, nay, even
its religious rites and its mummies. The Ptolemies built temples here,
which reproduce those of Thebes and Abydos. Even the Romans, although
they had already discovered the /vault/, followed here the primitive
models, and continued those granite ceilings, made of monstrous slabs,
placed flat, like our beams. And so this temple of Hathor, built
though it was in the time of Cleopatra and Augustus, on a site
venerable in the oldest antiquity, recalls at first sight some
conception of the Ramses.

If, however, you examine it more closely, there appears, particularly
in the thousands of figures in bas-relief, a considerable divergence.
The poses are the same indeed, and so too are the traditional
gestures. But the exquisite grace of line is gone, as well as the
hieratic calm of the expressions and the smiles. In the Egyptian art
of the best periods the slender figures are as pure as the flowers
they hold in their hands; their muscles may be indicated in a precise
and skilful manner, but they remain, for all that, immaterial. The god
Amen himself, the procreator, drawn often with an absolute crudity,
would seem chaste compared with the hosts of this temple. For here, on
the contrary, the figures might be those of living people, palpitating
and voluptuous, who had posed themselves for sport in these
consecrated attitudes. The throat of the beautiful goddess, her hips,
her unveiled nakedness, are portrayed with a searching and lingering
realism; the flesh seems almost to quiver. She and her spouse, the
beautiful Horus, son of Iris, contemplate each other, naked, one
before the other, and their laughing eyes are intoxicated with love.

Around the holy of holies is a number of halls, in deep shadow and
massive as so many fortresses. They were used formerly for mysterious
and complicated rites, and in them, as everywhere else, there is no
corner of the wall but is overloaded with figures and hieroglyphs.
Bats are asleep in the blue ceilings, where the winged discs, painted
in fresco, look like flights of birds; and the hornets of the
neighbouring fields have built their nests there in hundreds, so that
they hang like stalactites.

Several staircases lead to the vast terraces formed by the great roofs
of the temple--staircases narrow, stifling and dimly lighted by
loopholes that reveal the heart-breaking thickness of the walls. And
here again are the inevitable rows of figures, carved on all the
walls, in the same familiar attitudes; they mount with us as we
ascend, making all the time the self-same signs one to another.

As we emerge on to the roofs, bathed now in Egyptian sunlight and
swept by a cold and bitter wind, we are greeted by a noise as of an
aviary. It is the kingdom of the sparrows, who have built their nests
in thousands in this temple of the complaisant goddess. They twitter
now all together and with all their might out of very joy of living.
It is an esplanade, this roof--a solitude paved with gigantic
flagstones. From it we see, beyond the heaps of ruins, those happy
plains, which are spread out with such a perfect serenity on the very
ground where once stood the town of Denderah, beloved of Hathor and
one of the most famous of Upper Egypt. Exquisitely green are these
plains with the new growth of wheat and lucerne and bean; and the
herds that are grouped here and there on the fresh verdure of the
level pastures, swaying now and undulating in the wind, look like so
many dark patches. And the two chains of mountains of rose-coloured
stone, that run parallel--on the east that of the desert of Arabia, on
the west that of the Libyan desert--enclose, in the distance, this
valley of the Nile, this land of plenty, which, alike in antiquity as
in our days, has excited the greed of predatory races. The temple has
also some underground dependencies or crypts into which you descend by
staircases as of dungeons; sometimes even you have to crawl through
holes to reach them. Long superposed galleries which might serve as
hiding-places for treasure; long corridors recalling those which, in
bad dreams, threaten to close in and bury you. And the innumerable
figures, of course, are here too, gesticulating on the walls; and
endless representations of the lovely goddess, whose swelling bosom,
which has preserved almost intact the flesh colour applied in the
times of the Ptolemies, we have perforce to graze as we pass.

*****

In one of the vestibules that we have to traverse on our way out of
the sanctuary, amongst the numerous bas-reliefs representing various
sovereigns paying homage to the beautiful Hathor, is one of a young
man, crowned with a royal tiara shaped like the head of a uraeus. He
is shown seated in the traditional Pharaonic pose and is none other
than the Emperor Nero!

The hieroglyphs of the cartouche are there to affirm his identity,
albeit the sculptor, not knowing his actual physiognomy, has given him
the traditional features, regular as those of the god Horus. During
the centuries of the Roman domination the Western emperors used to
send from home instructions that their likeness should be placed on
the walls of the temples, and that offerings should be made in their
name to the Egyptian divinities--and this notwithstanding that in
their eyes Egypt must have seemed so far away, a colony almost at the
end of the earth. (And it was such a goddess as this, of secondary
rank in the times of the Pharaohs, that was singled out as the
favourite of the Romans of the decadence.)

The Emperor Nero! As a matter of fact at the very time these bas-
reliefs--almost the last--and these expiring hieroglyphics were being
inscribed, the confused primitive theogonies had almost reached their
end and the days of the Goddess of Joy were numbered. There had been
conceived in Judaea symbols more lofty and more pure, which were to
rule a great part of the world for two thousand years--afterwards,
alas, to decline in their turn; and men were about to throw themselves
passionately into renunciation, asceticism and fraternal pity.

How strange it is to say! Even while the sculptor was carving this
archaic bas-relief, and was using, for the engraving of its name,
characters that dated back to the night of the ages, there were
already Christians assembled in the catacombs at Rome and dying in
ecstasy in the arena!



CHAPTER XIII

MODERN LUXOR

The waters of the Nile being already low my dahabiya--delayed by
strandings--had not been able to reach Luxor, and we had moored
ourselves, as the darkness began to fall, at a casual spot on the
bank.

"We are quite near," the pilot had told me before departing to make
his evening prayer; "in an hour, to-morrow, we shall be there."

And the gentle night descended upon us in this spot which did not seem
to differ at all from so any others where, for a month past now, we
had moored our boat at hazard to await the daybreak. On the banks were
dark confused masses of foliage, above which here and there a high
date-palm outlined its black plumes. The air was filled with the
multitudinous chirpings of the crickets of Upper Egypt, which make
their music here almost throughout the year in the odorous warmth of
the grass. And, presently, in the midst of the silence, rose the cries
of the night birds, like the mournful mewings of cats. And that was
all--save for the infinite calm of the desert that is always present,
dominating everything, although scarcely noticed and, as it were,
latent.

*****

And this morning, at the rising of the sun, is pure and splendid as
all other mornings. A tint of rosy coral comes gradually to life on
the summit of the Libyan mountains, standing out from the gridelin
shadows which, in the heavens, were the rearguard of the night.

But my eyes, grown accustomed during the last few weeks to this
glorious spectacle of the dawn, turn themselves, as if by force of
some attraction, towards a strange and quite unusual thing, which,
less than a mile away along the river, on the Arabian bank, rises
upright in the midst of the mournful plains. At first it looks like a
mass of towering rocks, which in this hour of twilight magic have
taken on a pale violet colour, and seem almost transparent. And the
sun, scarcely emerged from the desert, lights them in a curious
gradation, and orders their contours with a fringe of fresh rose-
colour. And they are not rocks, in fact, for as we look more closely,
they show us lines symmetrical and straight. Not rocks, but
architectural masses, tremendous and superhuman, placed there in
attitudes of quasi-eternal stability. And out of them rise the points
of two obelisks, sharp as the blade of a lance. And then, at once, I
understand--Thebes!

Thebes! Last evening it was hidden in the shadow and I did not know it
was so near. But Thebes assuredly it is, for nothing else in the world
could produce such an apparition. And I salute with a kind of shudder
of respect this unique and sovereign ruin, which had haunted me for
many years, but which until now life had not left me time to visit.

And now for Luxor, which in the epoch of the Pharaohs was a suburb of
the royal town, and is still its port. It is there, it seems, where we
must stop our dahabiya in order to proceed to the fabulous palace
which the rising sun has just disclosed to us.

And while my equipage of bronze--intoning that song, as old as Egypt
and everlastingly the same, which seems to help the men in their
arduous work--is busy unfastening the chain which binds us to the
bank, I continue to watch the distant apparition. It emerges gradually
from the light morning mists which, perhaps, made it seem even larger
than it is. The clear light of the ascending sun shows it now in
detail; and reveals it as all battered, broken and ruinous in the
midst of a silent plain, on the yellow carpet of the desert. And how
this sun, rising in its clear splendour, seems to crush it with its
youth and stupendous duration. This same sun had attained to its
present round form, had acquired the clear precision of its disc, and
begun its daily promenade over the country of the sands, countless
centuries of centuries, before it saw, as it might be yesterday, this
town of Thebes arise; an attempt at magnificence which seemed to
promise for the human pygmies a sufficiently interesting future, but
which, in the event, we have not been able even to equal. And it
proved, too, a thing quite puny and derisory, since here it is laid
low, after having subsisted barely four negligible thousands of years.

*****

An hour later we arrive at Luxor, and what a surprise awaits us there!

The thing which dominates the whole town, and may be seen five or six
miles away, is the Winter Palace, a hasty modern production which has
grown on the border of the Nile during the past year: a colossal
hotel, obviously sham, made of plaster and mud, on a framework of
iron. Twice or three times as high as the admirable Pharaonic Temple,
its impudent facade rises there, painted a dirty yellow. One such
thing, it will readily be understood, is sufficient to disfigure
pitiably the whole of the surroundings. The old Arab town, with its
little white houses, its minarets and its palm-trees, might as well
not exist. The famous temple and the forest of heavy Osiridean columns
admire themselves in vain in the waters of the river. It is the end of
Luxor.

And what a crowd of people is here! While, on the contrary, the
opposite bank seems so absolutely desertlike, with its stretches of
golden sand and, on the horizon, its mountains of the colour of
glowing embers, which, as we know, are full of mummies.

Poor Luxor! Along the banks is a row of tourist boats, a sort of two
or three storeyed barracks, which nowadays infest the Nile from Cairo
to the Cataracts. Their whistlings and the vibration of their dynamos
make an intolerable noise. How shall I find a quiet place for my
dahabiya, where the functionaries of Messrs. Cook will not come to
disturb me?

We can now see nothing of the palaces of Thebes, whither I am to
repair in the evening. We are farther from them than we were last
night. The apparition during our morning's journey had slowly receded
in the plains flooded by sunlight. And then the Winter Palace and the
new boats shut out the view.

But this modern quay of Luxor, where I disembark at ten o'clock in the
morning in clear and radiant sunshine, is not without its amusing
side.

In a line with the Winter Palace a number of stalls follow one
another. All those things with which our tourists are wont to array
themselves are on sale there: fans, fly flaps, helmets and blue
spectacles. And, in thousands, photographs of the ruins. And there too
are the toys, the souvenirs of the Soudan: old negro knives, panther-
skins and gazelle horns. Numbers of Indians even are come to this
improvised fair, bringing their stuffs from Rajputana and Cashmere.
And, above all, there are dealers in mummies, offering for sale
mysteriously shaped coffins, mummy-cloths, dead hands, gods, scarabaei
--and the thousand and one things that this old soil has yielded for
centuries like an inexhaustible mine.

Along the stalls, keeping in the shade of the houses and the scattered
palms, pass representatives of the plutocracy of the world. Dressed by
the same costumiers, bedecked in the same plumes, and with faces
reddened by the same sun, the millionaire daughters of Chicago
merchants elbow their sisters of the old nobility. Pressing amongst
them impudent young Bedouins pester the fair travellers to mount their
saddled donkeys. And as if they were charged to add to this babel a
note of beauty, the battalions of Mr. Cook, of both sexes, and always
in a hurry, pass by with long strides.

Beyond the shops, following the line of the quay, there are other
hotels. Less aggressive, all of them, than the Winter Palace, they
have had the discretion not to raise themselves too high, and to cover
their fronts with white chalk in the Arab fashion, even to conceal
themselves in clusters of palm-trees.

And finally there is the colossal temple of Luxor, looking as out of
place now as the poor obelisk which Egypt gave us as a present, and
which stands to-day in the Place de la Concorde.

Bordering the Nile, it is a colossal grove of stone, about three
hundred yards in length. In epochs of a magnificence that is now
scarcely conceivable this forest of columns grew high and thick,
rising impetuously at the bidding of Amenophis and the great Ramses.
And how beautiful it must have been even yesterday, dominating in its
superb disarray this surrounding country, vowed for centuries to
neglect and silence!

But to-day, with all these things that men have built around it, you
might say that it no longer exists.

We reach an iron-barred gate and, to enter, have to show our permit to
the guards. Once inside the immense sanctuary, perhaps we shall find
solitude again. But, alas, under the profaned columns a crowd of
people passes, with /Baedekers/ in their hands, the same people that
one sees here everywhere, the same world as frequents Nice and the
Riviera. And, to crown the mockery, the noise of the dynamos pursues
us even here, for the boats of Messrs. Cook are moored to the bank
close by.

Hundreds of columns, columns which are anterior by many centuries to
those of Greece, and represent, in their nave enormity, the first
conceptions of the human brain. Some are fluted and give the
impression of sheaves of monstrous weeds; others, quite plain and
simple, imitate the stem of the papyrus, and bear by way of capital
its strange flower. The tourists, like the flies, enter at certain
times of the day, which it suffices to know. Soon the little bells of
the hotels will call them away and the hour of midday will find me
here alone. But what in heaven's name will deliver me from the noise
of the dynamos? But look! beyond there, at the bottom of the
sanctuaries, in the part which should be the holy of holies, that
great fresco, now half effaced, but still clearly visible on the wall
--how unexpected and arresting it is! An image of Christ! Christ
crowned with the Byzantine aureole. It has been painted on a coarse
plaster, which seems to have been added by an unskilful hand, and is
wearing off and exposing the hieroglyphs beneath. . . . This temple,
in fact, almost indestructible by reason of its massiveness, has
passed through the hands of diverse masters. Its antiquity was already
legendary in the time of Alexander the Great, on whose behalf a chapel
was added to it; and later on, in the first ages of Christianity, a
corner of the ruins was turned into a cathedral. The tourists begin to
depart, for the lunch bell calls them to the neighbouring /tables
d'hote/; and while I wait till they shall be gone, I occupy myself in
following the bas-reliefs which are displayed for a length of more
than a hundred yards along the base of the walls. It is one long row
of people moving in their thousands all in the same direction--the
ritual procession of the God Amen. With the care which characterised
the Egyptians to draw everything from life so as to render it eternal,
there are represented here the smallest details of a day of festival
three or four thousand years ago. And how like it is to a holiday of
the people of to-day! Along the route of the procession are ranged
jugglers and sellers of drinks and fruits, and negro acrobats who walk
on their hands and twist themselves into all kinds of contortions. But
the procession itself was evidently of a magnificence such as we no
longer know. The number of musicians and priests, of corporations, of
emblems and banners, is quite bewildering. The God Amen himself came
by water, on the river, in his golden barge with its raised prow,
followed by the barques of all the other gods and goddesses of his
heaven. The reddish stone, carved with minute care, tells me all this,
as it has already told it to so many dead generations, so that I seem
almost to see it.

And now everybody has gone: the colonnades are empty and the noise of
the dynamos has ceased. Midday approaches with its torpor. The whole
temple seems to be ablaze with rays, and I watch the clear-cut shadows
cast by this forest of stone gradually shortening on the ground. The
sun, which just now shone, all smiles and gaiety, upon the quay of the
new town amid the uproar of the stall-keepers, the donkey drivers and
the cosmopolitan passengers, casts here a sullen, impassive and
consuming fire. And meanwhile the shadows shorten--and just as they do
every day, beneath this sky which is never overcast, just as they have
done for five and thirty centuries, these columns, these friezes and
this temple itself, like a mysterious and solemn sundial, record
patiently on the ground the slow passing of the hours. Verily for us,
the ephemerae of thought, this unbroken continuity of the sun of Egypt
has more of melancholy even than the changing, overcast skies of our
climate.

And now, at last, the temple is restored to solitude and all noise in
the neighbourhood has ceased.

An avenue bordered by very high columns, of which the capitals are in
the form of the full-blown flowers of the papyrus, leads me to a place
shut in and almost terrible, where is massed an assembly of colossi.
Two, who, if they were standing, would be quite ten yards in height,
are seated on thrones on either side of the entrance. The others,
ranged on the three sides of the courtyard, stand upright behind
colonnades, but look as if they were about to issue thence and to
stride rapidly towards me. Some broken and battered, have lost their
faces and preserve only their intimidating attitude. Those that remain
intact--white faces beneath their Sphinx's headgear--open their eyes
wide and smile.

This was formerly the principal entrance, and the office of these
colossi was to welcome the multitudes. But now the gates of honour
flanked by obelisks of red granite, are obstructed by a litter of
enormous ruins. And the courtyard has become a place voluntarily
closed, where nothing of the outside world is any longer to be seen.
In moments of silence, one can abstract oneself from all the
neighbouring modern things, and forget the hour, the day, the century
even, in the midst of these gigantic figures, whose smile disdains the
flight of ages. The granites within which we are immured--and in such
terrible company--shut out everything save the point of an old
neighbouring minaret which shows now against the blue of the sky: a
humble graft of Islam which grew here amongst the ruins some centuries
ago, when the ruins themselves had already subsisted for three
thousand years--a little mosque built on a mass of debris, which it
new protects with its inviolability. How many treasures and relics and
documents are hidden and guarded by this mosque of the peristyle! For
none would dare to dig in the ground within its sacred walls.

Gradually the silence of the temple becomes profound. And if the
shortened shadows betray the hour of noon, there is nothing to tell to
what millennium that hour belongs. The silences and middays like to
this, which have passed before the eyes of these giants ambushed in
their colonnades--who could count them?

High above us, lost in the incandescent blue, soar the birds of prey--
and they were there in the times of the Pharaohs, displaying in the
air identical plumages, uttering the same cries. The beasts and
plants, in the course of time, have varied less than men, and remain
unchanged in the smallest details.

Each of the colossi around me--standing there proudly with one leg
advanced as if for a march, heavy and sure, which nothing should
withstand--grasps passionately in his clenched fist, at the end of the
muscular arm, a kind of buckled cross, which in Egypt was the symbol
of eternal life. And this is what the decision of their movement
symbolises: confident all of them in this poor bauble which they hold
in their hand, they cross with a triumphant step the threshold of
death. . . . "Eternal Life"--the thought of immortality--how the human
soul has been obsessed by it, particularly in the periods marked by
its greatest strivings! The tame submission to the belief that the
rottenness of the grave is the end of all is characteristic of ages of
decadence and mediocrity.

The three similar giants, little damaged in the course of their long
existence, who align the eastern side of this courtyard strewn with
blocks, represent, as indeed do all the others, that same Ramses II.,
whose effigy was multiplied so extravagantly at Thebes and Memphis.
But these three have preserved a powerful and impetuous life. They
might have been carved and polished yesterday. Between the monstrous
reddish pillars, they look like white apparitions issuing from their
embrasure of columns and advancing together like soldiers at
manoeuvres. The sun at this moment falls perpendicularly on their
heads and strange headgear, details their everlasting smile, and then
sheds itself on their shoulders and their naked torso, exaggerating
their athletic muscles. Each holding in his hand the symbolical cross,
the three giants rush forward with a formidable stride, heads raised,
smiling, in a radiant march into eternity.

Oh! this midday sun, that now pours down upon the white faces of these
giants, and displaces ever so slowly the shadows cast upon their
breasts by their chins and Osiridean beards. To think how often in the
midst of this same silence, this same ray has fallen thus, fallen from
the same changeless sky, to occupy itself in this same tranquil play!
Yes, I think that the fogs and rains of our winters, upon these
stupendous ruins, would be less sad and less terrible than the calm of
this eternal sunshine.

*****

Suddenly a ridiculous noise begins to make the air tremble; the
dynamos of the Agencies have been put in motion, and ladies in green
spectacles arrive, a charming throng, with guidebooks and cameras. The
tourists, in short, are come out of their hotels, at the same hour as
the flies awake. And the midday peace of Luxor has come to an end.



CHAPTER XIV

A TWENTIETH-CENTURY EVENING AT THEBES

An impalpable dust floats in a sky which scarcely ever knows a cloud;
a dust so impalpable that, even while it powders the heavens with
gold, it leaves them their infinite transparency. It is a dust of
remote ages, of things destroyed; a dust that is here continually--of
which the gold at this moment fades to green at the zenith, but flames
and glistens in the west, for it is now that magnificent hour which
marks the end of the day's decline, and the still burning globe of the
sun, quite low down in the heaven, begins to light up on all sides the
conflagration of the evening.

This setting sun illumines with splendour a silent chaos of granite,
which is not that of the slipping of mountains, but that of ruins. And
of such ruins as, to our eyes unaccustomed hereditarily to proportions
so gigantic, seem superhuman. In places, huge masses of carven stone--
pylons--still stand upright, rising like hills. Others are crumbling
in all directions in bewildering cataracts of stone. It is difficult
to conceive how these things, so massive that they might have seemed
eternal, could come to suffer such an utter ruin. Fragments of
columns, fragments of obelisks, broken by downfalls of which the mere
imagination is awful, heads and head-dresses of giant divinities, all
lie higgledy-piggledy in a disorder beyond possible redress. Nowhere
surely on our earth does the sun in his daily revolution cast his
light on such debris as this, on such a litter of vanished palaces and
dead colossi.

It was even here, seven or eight thousand years ago, under this pure
crystal sky, that the first awakening of human thought began. Our
Europe then was still sleeping, wrapped in the mantle of its damp
forests; sleeping that sleep which still had thousands of years to
run. Here, a precocious humanity, only recently emerged from the Age
of Stone, that earliest form of all, an infant humanity, which saw
massively on its issue from the massiveness of the original matter,
conceived and built terrible sanctuaries for gods, at first dreadful
and vague, such as its nascent reason allowed it to conceive them.
Then the first megalithic blocks were erected; then began that mad
heaping up and up, which was to last nearly fifty centuries; and
temples were built above temples, palaces over palaces, each
generation striving to outdo its predecessor by a more titanic
grandeur.

Afterwards, four thousand years ago, Thebes was in the height of her
glory, encumbered with gods and with magnificence, the focus of the
light of the world in the most ancient historic periods; while our
Occident was still asleep and Greece and Assyria were scarcely
awakened. Only in the extreme East, a humanity of a different race,
the yellow people, called to follow in totally different ways, was
fixing, so that they remain even to our day, the oblique lines of its
angular roofs and the rictus of its monsters.

The men of Thebes, if they still saw too massively and too vastly, at
least saw straight; they saw calmly, at the same time as they saw
forever. Their conceptions, which had begun to inspire those of
Greece, were afterwards in some measure to inspire our own. In
religion, in art, in beauty under all its aspects, they were as much
our ancestors as were the Aryans.

Later again, sixteen hundred years before the birth of Christ, in one
of the apogees of the town which, in the course of its interminable
duration, experienced so many fluctuations, some ostentatious kings
thought fit to build on this ground, already covered with temples,
that which still remains the most arresting marvel of the ruins: the
hypostyle hall, dedicated to the God Amen, with its forest of columns,
as monstrous as the trunk of the baobab and as high as towers,
compared with which the pillars of our cathedrals are utterly
insignificant. In those days the same gods reigned at Thebes as three
thousand years before, but in the interval they had been transformed
little by little in accordance with the progressive development of
human thought, and Amen, the host of this prodigious hall, asserted
himself more and more as the sovereign master of life and eternity.
Pharaonic Egypt was really tending, in spite of some revolts, towards
the notion of a divine unity; even, one might say, to the notion of a
supreme pity, for she already had her Apis, emanating from the All-
Powerful, born of a virgin mother, and come humbly to the earth in
order to make acquaintance with suffering.

After Seti I. and the Ramses had built, in honour of Amen, this
temple, which, beyond all doubt, is the grandest and most durable in
the world, men still continued for another fifteen centuries to heap
up in its neighbourhood those blocks of granite and marble and
sandstone, whose enormity now amazes us. Even for the invaders of
Egypt, the Greeks and Romans, this old ancestral town of towns
remained imposing and unique. They repaired its ruins, and built here
temple after temple, in a style which hardly ever changes. Even in the
ages of decadence everything that raised itself from the old, sacred
soil, seemed to be impregnated a little with the ancient grandeur.

And it was only when the early Christians ruled here, and after them
the Moslem iconoclasts, that the destruction became final. To these
new believers, who, in their simplicity, imagined themselves to be
possessed of the ultimate religious formula and to know by His right
name the great Unknowable, Thebes became the haunt of "false gods,"
the abomination of abominations, which it behoved them to destroy.

And so they set to work, penetrating with an ever-present fear into
the profound depths of the gloomy sanctuaries, mutilating first of all
the thousands of visages whose disconcerting smile frightened them,
and then exhausting themselves in the effort to uproot the colossi,
which even with the help of levers, they could not move. It was no
easy task indeed, for everything was as solid as geological masses, as
rocks or promontories. But for five or six hundred years the town was
given over to the caprice of desecrators.

And then came the centuries of silence and oblivion under the shroud
of the desert sands, which, thickening each year, proceeded to bury,
and, in the event, to preserve for us, this peerless relic.

And now, at last, Thebes is being exhumed and restored to a semblance
of life--now, after a cycle of seven or eight thousand years, when our
Western humanity, having left the primitive gods that we see here, to
embrace the Christian conception, which, even yesterday, made it live,
is in way of denying everything, and struggles before the enigma of
death in an obscurity more dismal and more fearful than in the
commencement of the ages. (More dismal and more fearful still in this,
that plea of youth is gone.) From all parts of Europe curious and
unquiet spirits, as well as mere idlers, turn their steps towards
Thebes, the ancient mother. Men clear the rubbish from its remains,
devise ways of retarding the enormous fallings of its ruins, and dig
in its old soil, stored with hidden treasure.

And this evening on one of the portals to which I have just mounted--
that which opens at the north-west and terminates the colossal artery
of temples and palaces, many very diverse groups have already taken
their places, after the pilgrimage of the day amongst the ruins. And
others are hastening towards the staircase by which we have just
climbed, so as not to miss the grand spectacle of the sun setting,
always with the same serenity, the same unchanging magnificence,
behind the town which once was consecrated to it.

French, German, English; I see them below, a lot of pygmy figures,
issuing from the hypostyle hall, and making their way towards us. Mean
and pitiful they look in their twentieth-century travellers' costumes,
hurrying along that avenue where once defiled so many processions of
gods and goddesses. And yet this, perhaps, is the only occasion on
which one of these bands of tourists does not seem to me altogether
ridiculous. Amongst these groups of unknown people, there is none who
is not collected and thoughtful, or who does not at least pretend to
be so; and there is some saving quality of grace, even some grandeur
of humility, in the sentiment which has brought them to this town of
Amen, and in the homage of their silence.

We are so high on this portal that we might fancy ourselves upon a
tower, and the defaced stones of which it is built are immeasurably
large. Instinctively each one sits with his face to the glowing sun,
and consequently to the outspread distances of the fields and the
desert.

Before us, under our feet, an avenue stretches away, prolonging
towards the fields the pomp of the dead city--an avenue bordered by
monstrous rams, larger than buffaloes, all crouched on their pedestals
in two parallel rows in the traditional hieratic pose. The avenue
terminates beyond at a kind of wharf or landing-stage which formerly
gave on to the Nile. It was there that the God Amen, carried and
followed by long trains of priests, came every year to take his golden
barge for a solemn procession. But it leads to-day only to the
cornfields, for, in the course of successive centuries, the river has
receded little by little and now winds its course a thousand yards
away in the direction of Libya.

We can see, beyond, the old sacred Nile between the clusters of palm-
trees on its banks; meandering there like a rosy pathway, which
remains, nevertheless, in this hour of universal incandescence,
astonishingly pale, and gleams occasionally with a bluish light. And
on the farther bank, from one end to the other of the western horizon,
stretches the chain of the Libyan mountains behind which the sun is
about to plunge; a chain of red sandstone, parched since the beginning
of the world--without a rival in the preservation to perpetuity of
dead bodies--which the Thebans perforated to its extreme depths to
fill it with sarcophagi.

We watch the sun descend. But we turn also to see, behind us, the
ruins in this the traditional moment of their apotheosis. Thebes, the
immense town-mummy, seems all at once to be ablaze--as if its old
stones were able still to burn; all its blocks, fallen or upright,
appear to have been suddenly made ruddy by the glow of fire.

On this side, too, the view embraces great peaceful distances. Past
the last pylons, and beyond the crumbling ramparts the country, down
there behind the town, presents the same appearance as that we were
facing a moment before. The same cornfields, the same woods of date-
trees, that make a girdle of green palms around the ruins. And, right
in the background, a chain of mountains is lit up and glows with a
vivid coral colour. It is the chain of the Arabian desert, lying
parallel to that of Libya, along the whole length of the Nile Valley--
which is thus guarded on right and left by stones and sand stretched
out in profound solitudes.

In all the surrounding country which we command from this spot there
is no indication of the present day; only here and there, amongst the
palm-trees, the villages of the field labourers, whose houses of dried
earth can scarcely have changed since the days of the Pharaohs. Our
contemporary desecrators have up till now respected the infinite
desuetude of the place, and, for the tourists who begin to haunt it,
no one yet has dared to build a hotel.

Slowly the sun descends; and behind us the granites of the town-mummy
seem to burn more and more. It is true that a slight shadow of a
warmer tint, an amaranth violet, begins to encroach upon the lower
parts, spreading along the avenues and over the open spaces. But
everything that rises into the sky--the friezes of the temples, the
capitals of the columns, the sharp points of the obelisks--are still
red as glowing embers. These all become imbued with light and continue
to glow and shed a rosy illumination until the end of the twilight.

It is a glorious hour, even for the old dust of Egypt, which fills the
air eternally, without detracting at all from its wonderful clearness.
It savours of spices, of the Bedouin, of the bitumen of the
sarcophagus. And here now it is playing the role of those powders of
different shades of gold which the Japanese use for the backgrounds of
their lacquered landscapes. It reveals itself everywhere, close to and
on the horizon, modifying at its pleasure the colour of things, and
giving them a kind of metallic lustre. The phantasy of its changes is
unimaginable. Even in the distances of the countryside, it is busy
indicating by little trailing clouds of gold the smallest pathways
traversed by the herds.

And now the disc of the God of Thebes has disappeared behind the
Libyan mountains, after changing its light from red to yellow and from
yellow to green.

And thereupon the tourists, judging that the display is over for the
night, commence to descend and make ready for departure. Some in
carriages, others on donkeys, they go to recruit themselves with the
electricity and elegance of Luxor, the neighbouring town (wines and
spirits are paid for as extras, and we dress for dinner). And the dust
condescends to mark their exodus also by a last cloud of gold beneath
the palm-trees of the road.

An immediate solemnity succeeds to their departure. Above the mud
houses of the fellah villages rise slender columns of smoke, which are
of a periwinkle-blue in the midst of the still yellow atmosphere. They
tell of the humble life of these little homesteads, subsisting here,
where in the backward of the ages were so many palaces and splendours.

And the first bayings of the watchdogs announce already the vague
uneasiness of the evenings around the ruins. There is no one now
within the mummy-town, which seems all at once to have grown larger in
the silence. Very quickly the violet shadow covers it, all save the
extreme points of its obelisks, which keep still a little of their
rose-colour. The feeling comes over you that a sovereign mystery has
taken possession of the town, as if some vague phantom things had just
passed into it.



CHAPTER XV

THEBES BY NIGHT

The feeling, almost, that you have grown suddenly smaller by entering
there, that you are dwarfed to less than human size--to such an extent
do the proportions of these ruins seem to crush you--and the illusion,
also, that the light, instead of being extinguished with the evening,
has only changed its colour, and become blue: that is what one
experiences on a clear Egyptian night, in walking between the
colonnades of the great temple at Thebes.

The place is, moreover, so singular and so terrible that its mere name
would at once cast a spell upon the spirit, even if one were ignorant
of the place itself. The hypostyle of the temple of the God Amen--that
could be no other thing but one. For this hall is unique in the world,
in the same way as the Grotto of Fingal and the Himalayas are unique.

*****

To wander absolutely alone at night in Thebes requires during the
winter a certain amount of stratagem and a knowledge of the routine of
the tourists. It is necessary, first of all, to choose a night on
which the moon rises late and then, having entered before the close of
the day, to escape the notice of the Bedouin guards who shut the gates
at nightfall. Thus have I waited with the patience of a stone Osiris,
till the grand transformation scene of the setting of the sun was
played out once more upon the ruins. Thebes, which, during the day, is
almost animate by reason of the presence of the visitors and the gangs
of fellahs who, singing the while, are busy at the diggings and the
clearing away of the rubbish, has emptied itself little by little,
while the blue shadows were mounting from the base of the monstrous
sanctuaries. I watched the people moving in a long row, like a trail
of ants, towards the western gate between the pylons of the Ptolemies,
and the last of them had disappeared before the rosy light died away
on the topmost points of the obelisks.

It seemed as if the silence and the night arrived together from beyond
the Arabian desert, advanced together across the plain, spreading out
like a rapid oil-stain; then gained the town from east to west, and
rose rapidly from the ground to the very summits of the temples. And
this march of the darkness was infinitely solemn.

For the first few moments, indeed, you might imagine that it was going
to be an ordinary night such as we know in our climate, and a sense of
uneasiness takes hold of you in the midst of this confusion of
enormous stones, which in the darkness would become a quite
inextricable maze. Oh! the horror of being lost in those ruins of
Thebes and not being able to see! But in the event the air preserved
its transparency to such a degree, and the stars began soon to
scintillate so brightly that the surrounding things could be
distinguished almost as well as in the daytime.

Indeed, now that the time of transition between the day and night has
passed, the eyes grow accustomed to the strange, blue, persistent
clearness so that you seem suddenly to have acquired the pupils of a
cat; and the ultimate effect is merely as if you saw through a smoked
glass which changed all the various shades of this reddish-coloured
country into one uniform tint of blue.

Behold me then, for some two or three hours, alone among the temples
of the Pharaohs. The tourists, whom the carriages and donkeys are at
this moment taking back to the hotels of Luxor, will not return till
very late, when the full moon will have risen and be shedding its
clear light upon the ruins. My post, while I waited, was high up among
the ruins on the margin of the sacred Lake of Osiris, the still and
enclosed water of which is astonishing in that it has remained there
for so many centuries. It still conceals, no doubt, numberless
treasures confided to it in the days of slaughters and pillages, when
the armies of the Persian and Nubian kings forced the thick,
surrounding walls.

In a few minutes, thousands of stars appear at the bottom of this
water, reflecting symmetrically the veritable ones which now
scintillate everywhere in the heavens. A sudden cold spreads over the
town-mummy, whose stones, still warm from their exposure to the sun,
cool very rapidly in this nocturnal blue which envelops them as in a
shroud. I am free to wander where I please without risk of meeting
anyone, and I begin to descend by the steps made by the falling of the
granite blocks, which have formed on all sides staircases as if for
giants. On the overturned surfaces, my hands encounter the deep,
clear-cut hollows of the hieroglyphs, and sometimes of those
inevitable people, carved in profile, who raise their arms, all of
them, and make signs to one another. On arriving at the bottom I am
received by a row of statues with battered faces, seated on thrones,
and without hindrance of any kind, and recognising everything in the
blue transparency which takes the place of day, I come to the great
avenue of the palaces of Amen.

We have nothing on earth in the least degree comparable to this
avenue, which passive multitudes took nearly three thousand years to
construct, expending, century after century, their innumerable
energies in carrying these stones, which our machines now could not
move. And the objective was always the same: to prolong indefinitely
the perspectives of pylons, colossi and obelisks, continuing always
this same artery of temples and palaces in the direction of the old
Nile--while the latter, on the contrary, receded slowly, from century
to century, towards Libya. It is here, and especially at night, that
you suffer the feeling of having been shrunken to the size of a pygmy.
All round you rise monoliths mighty as rocks. You have to take twenty
paces to pass the base of a single one of them. They are placed quite
close together, too close, it seems, in view of their enormity and
mass. There is not enough air between them, and the closeness of their
juxtaposition disconcerts you more, perhaps, even than their
massiveness.

The avenue which I have followed in an easterly direction abuts on as
disconcerting a chaos of granite as exists in Thebes--the hall of the
feasts of Thothmes III. What kind of feasts were they, that this king
gave here, in this forest of thick-set columns, beneath these
ceilings, of which the smallest stone, if it fell, would crush twenty
men? In places the friezes, the colonnades, which seem almost
diaphanous in the air, are outlined still with a proud magnificence in
unbroken alignment against the star-strewn sky. Elsewhere the
destruction is bewildering; fragments of columns, entablatures, bas-
reliefs lie about in indescribable confusion, like a lot of scattered
wreckage after a world-wide tempest. For it was not enough that the
hand of man should overturn these things. Tremblings of the earth, at
different times, have also come to shake this Cyclops palace which
threatened to be eternal. And all this--which represents such an
excess of force, of movement, of impulsion, alike for its erection as
for its overthrow--all this is tranquil this evening, oh! so tranquil,
although toppling as if for an imminent downfall--tranquil forever,
one might say, congealed by the cold and by the night.

I was prepared for silence in such a place, but not for the sounds
which I commence to hear. First of all an osprey sounds the prelude,
above my head and so close to me that it holds me trembling throughout
its long cry. Then other voices answer from the depths of the ruins,
voices very diverse, but all sinister. Some are only able to mew on
two long-drawn notes: some yelp like jackals round a cemetery, and
others again imitate the sound of a steel spring slowly unwinding
itself. And this concert comes always from above. Owls, ospreys,
screech-owls, all the different kinds of birds, with hooked beaks and
round eyes, and silken wings that enable them to fly noiselessly, have
their homes amongst the granites massively upheld in the air; and they
are celebrating now, each after its own fashion, the nocturnal
festival. Intermittent calls break upon the air, and long-drawn
infinitely mournful wailings, that sometimes swell and sometimes seem
to be strangled and end in a kind of sob. And then, in spite of the
sonority of the vast straight walls, in spite of the echoes which
prolong the cries, the silence obstinately returns. Silence. The
silence after all and beyond all doubt is the true master at this hour
of this kingdom at once colossal, motionless and blue--a silence that
seems to be infinite, because we know that there is nothing around
these ruins, nothing but the line of the dead sands, the threshold of
the deserts.

*****

I retrace my steps towards the west in the direction of the hypostyle,
traversing again the avenue of monstrous splendours, imprisoned and,
as it were, dwarfed between the rows of sovereign stones. There are
obelisks there, some upright, some overthrown. One like those of
Luxor, but much higher, remains intact and raises its sharp point into
the sky; others, less well known in their exquisite simplicity, are
quite plain and straight from base to summit, bearing only in relief
gigantic lotus flowers, whose long climbing stems bloom above in the
half light cast by the stars. The passage becomes narrower and more
obscure, and it is necessary sometimes to grope my way. And then again
my hands encounter the everlasting hieroglyphs carved everywhere, and
sometimes the legs of a colossus seated on its throne. The stones are
still slightly warm, so fierce has been the heat of the sun during the
day. And certain of the granites, so hard that our steel chisels could
not cut them, have kept their polish despite the lapse of centuries,
and my fingers slip in touching them.

There is now no sound. The music of the night birds has ceased. I
listen in vain--so attentively that I can hear the beating of my
heart. Not a sound, not even the buzzing of a fly. Everything is
silent, everything is ghostly; and in spite of the persistent warmth
of the stones the air grows colder and colder, and one gets the
impression that everything here is frozen--definitely--as in the
coldness of death.

A vast silence reigns, a silence that has subsisted for centuries, on
this same spot, where formerly for three or four thousand years rose
such an uproar of living men. To think of the clamorous multitudes who
once assembled here, of their cries of triumph and anguish, of their
dying agonies. First of all the pantings of those thousands of
harnessed workers, exhausting themselves generation after generation,
under the burning sun, in dragging and placing one above the other
these stones, whose enormity now amazes us. And the prodigious feasts,
the music of the long harps, the blares of the brazen trumpets; the
slaughters and battles when Thebes was the great and unique capital of
the world, an object of fear and envy to the kings of the barbarian
peoples who commenced to awake in neighbouring lands; the symphonies
of siege and pillage, in days when men bellowed with the throats of
beasts. To think of all this, here on this ground, on a night so calm
and blue! And these same walls of granite from Syene, on which my puny
hands now rest, to think of the beings who have touched them in
passing, who have fallen by their side in last sanguinary conflicts,
without rubbing even the polish from their changeless surfaces!

*****

I now arrive at the hypostyle of the temple of Amen, and a sensation
of fear makes me hesitate at first on the threshold. To find himself
in the dead of night before such a place might well make a man falter.
It seems like some hall for Titans, a remnant of fabulous ages, which
has maintained itself, during its long duration, by force of its very
massiveness, like the mountains. Nothing human is so vast. Nowhere on
earth have men conceived such dwellings. Columns after columns, higher
and more massive than towers, follow one another so closely, in an
excess of accumulation, that they produce a feeling almost of
suffocation. They mount into the clear sky and sustain there traverses
of stone which you scarcely dare to contemplate. One hesitates to
advance; a feeling comes over you that you are become infinitesimally
small and as easy to crush as an insect. The silence grows
preternaturally solemn. The stars through all the gaps in the fearful
ceilings seem to send their scintillations to you in an abyss. It is
cold and clear and blue.

The central bay of this hypostyle is in the same line as the road I
have been following since I left the hall of Thothmes. It prolongs and
magnifies as in an apotheosis that same long avenue, for the gods and
kings, which was the glory of Thebes, and which in the succession of
the ages nothing has contrived to equal. The columns which border it
are so gigantic[*] that their tops, formed of mysterious full-blown
petals, high up above the ground on which we crawl, are completely
bathed in the diffuse clearness of the sky. And enclosing this kind of
nave on either side, like a terrible forest, is another mass of
columns--monster columns, of an earlier style, of which the capitals
close instead of opening, imitating the buds of some flower which will
never blossom. Sixty to the right, sixty to the left, too close
together for their size, they grow thick like a forest of baobabs that
wanted space: they induce a feeling of oppression without possible
deliverance, of massive and mournful eternity.

[*] About 30 feet in circumference and 75 feet in height including the
    capital.

And this, forsooth, was the place that I had wished to traverse alone,
without even the Bedouin guard, who at night believes it his duty to
follow the visitors. But now it grows lighter and lighter. Too light
even, for a blue phosphorescence, coming from the eastern horizon,
begins to filter through the opacity of the colonnades on the right,
outlines the monstrous shafts, and details them by vague glimmerings
on their edges. The full moon is risen, alas! and my hours of solitude
are nearly over.

*****

The moon! Suddenly the stones of the summit, the copings, the
formidable friezes, are lighted by rays of clear light, and here and
there, on the bas-reliefs encircling the pillars, appear luminous
trails which reveal the gods and goddesses engraved in the stone. They
were watching in myriads around me, as I knew well,--coifed, all of
them, in discs or great horns. They stare at one another with their
arms raised, spreading out their long fingers in an eager attempt at
conversation. They are numberless, these eternally gesticulating gods.
Wherever you look their forms are multiplied with a stupefying
repetition. They seem to have some mysterious secret to convey to one
another, but have perforce to remain silent, and for all the
expressiveness of their attitudes their hands do not move. And
hieroglyphs, too, repeated to infinity, envelop you on all sides like
a multiple woof of mystery.

*****

Minute by minute now, everything amongst these rigid dead things grows
more precise. Cold, hard rays penetrate through the immense ruin,
separating with a sharp incisiveness the light from the shadows. The
feeling that these stones, wearied as they were with their long
duration, might still be thoughtful, still mindful of their past,
grows less--less than it was a few moments before, far less than
during the preceding blue phantasmagoria. Under this clear, pale
light, as in the daytime, under the fire of the sun, Thebes has lost
for the moment whatever remained to it of soul; it has receded farther
into the backward of time, and appears now nothing more than a vast
gigantic fossil that excites only our wonder and our fear.

*****

But the tourists will soon be here, attracted by the moon. A league
away, in the hotels of Luxor, I can fancy how they have hurried away
from the tables, for fear of missing the celebrated spectacle. For me,
therefore, it is time to beat a retreat, and, by the great avenue
again, I direct my steps towards the pylons of the Ptolemies, where
the night guards are waiting.

They are busy already, these Bedouins, in opening the gates for some
tourists, who have shown their permits, and who carry Kodaks,
magnesium to light up the temples--quite an outfit in short.

Farther on, when I have taken the road to Luxor, it is not long before
I meet, under the palm-trees and on the sands, the crowd, the main
body of the arrivals--some in carriages, some on horseback, some on
donkeys. There is a noise of voices speaking all sorts of non-Egyptian
languages. One is tempted to ask: "What is happening? A ball, a
holiday, a grand marriage?" No. The moon is full to-night at Thebes,
upon the ruins. That is all.



CHAPTER XVI

THEBES IN SUNLIGHT

It is two o'clock in the afternoon. A white angry fire pours from the
sky, which is pale from excess of light. A sun inimical to the men of
our climate scorches the enormous fossil which, crumbling in places,
is all that remains of Thebes and which lies there like the carcass of
a gigantic beast that has been dead for thousands of years, but is too
massive ever to be annihilated.

In the hypostyle there is a little blue shade behind the monstrous
pillars, but even that shade is dusty and hot. The columns too are
hot, and so are all the blocks--and yet it is winter and the nights
are cold, even to the point of frost. Heat and dust; a reddish dust,
which hangs like an eternal cloud over these ruins of Upper Egypt,
exhaling an odour of spices and mummy.

The great heat seems to augment the retrospective sensation of fatigue
which seizes you as you regard these stones--too heavy for human
strength--which are massed here in mountains. One almost seems to
participate in the efforts, the exhaustions and the sweating toils of
that people, with their muscles of brand new steel, who in the
carrying and piling of such masses had to bear the yoke for thirty
centuries.

Even the stones themselves tell of fatigue--the fatigue of being
crushed by one another's weight for thousands of years; the suffering
that comes of having been too exactly carved, and too nicely placed
one above the other, so that they seem to be riveted together by the
force of their mere weight. Oh! the poor stones of the base that bear
the weight of these awful pilings!

And the ardent colour of these things surprises you. It has persisted.
On the red sandstone of the hypostyle, the paintings of more than
three thousand years ago are still to be seen; especially above the
central chamber, almost in the sky, the capitals, in the form of great
flowers, have kept the lapis blues, the greens and yellows with which
their strange petals were long ago bespeckled.

Decrepitude and crumbling and dust. In broad daylight, under the
magnificent splendour of the life-giving sun, one realises clearly
that all here is dead, and dead since days which the imagination is
scarcely able to conceive. And the ruin appears utterly irreparable.
Here and there are a few impotent and almost infantine attempts at
reparation, undertaken in the ancient epochs of history by the Greeks
and Romans. Columns have been put together, holes have been filled
with cement. But the great blocks lie in confusion, and one feels,
even to the point of despair, how impossible it is ever to restore to
order such a chaos of crushing, overthrown things--even with the help
of legions of workers and machines, and with centuries before you in
which to complete the task.

And then, what surprises and oppresses you is the want of clear space,
the little room that remained for the multitudes in these halls which
are nevertheless immense. The whole space between the walls was
encumbered with pillars. The temples were half filled with colossal
forests of stone. The men who built Thebes lived in the beginning of
time, and had not yet discovered the thing which to us to-day seems so
simple--namely, the vault. And yet they were marvellous pioneers,
these architects. They had already succeeded in evolving out of the
dark, as it were, a number of conceptions which, from the beginning no
doubt, slumbered in mysterious germ in the human brain--the idea of
rectitude, the straight line, the right angle, the vertical line, of
which Nature furnishes no example, even symmetry, which, if you
consider it well, is less explicable still. They employed symmetry
with a consummate mastery, understanding as well as we do all the
effect that is to be obtained by the repetition of like objects placed
/en pendant/ on either side of a portico or an avenue. But they did
not invent the vault. And therefore, since there was a limit to the
size of the stones which they were able to place flat like beams, they
had recourse to this profusion of columns to support their stupendous
ceilings. And thus it is that there seems to be a want of air, that
one seems to stifle in the middle of their temples, dominated and
obstructed as they are by the rigid presence of so many stones. And
yet to-day you can see quite clearly in these temples, for, since the
suspended rocks which served for roof have fallen, floods of light
descend from all parts. But formerly, when a kind of half night
reigned in the deep halls, beneath the immovable carapaces of
sandstone or granite, how oppressive and sepulchral it must all have
been--how final and pitiless, like a gigantic palace of Death! On one
day, however, in each year, here at Thebes, a light as of a
conflagration used to penetrate from one end to the other of the
sanctuaries of Amen; for the middle artery is open towards the north-
west, and is aligned in such a fashion that, once a year, one solitary
time, on the evening of the summer solstice, the sun as it sets is
able to plunge its reddened rays straight into the sanctuaries. At the
moment when it enlarges its blood-coloured disc before descending
behind the desolation of the Libyan mountains, it arrives in the very
axis of this avenue, of this suite of aisles, which measures more than
800 yards in length. Formerly, then, on these evenings it shone
horizontally beneath the terrible ceilings--between these rows of
pillars which are as high as our Colonne Vendome--and threw, for some
seconds, its colours of molten copper into the obscurity of the holy
of holies. And then the whole temple would resound with the clashing
of music, and the glory of the god of Thebes was celebrated in the
depths of the forbidden halls.

*****

Like a cloud, like a veil, the continual red-coloured dust floats
everywhere above the ruins, and, athwart it, here and there, the sun
traces long, white beams, But at one point of the avenue, behind the
obelisks, it seems to rise in clouds, this dust of Egypt, as if it
were smoke. For the workers of bronze are assembled there to-day and,
hour by hour, without ceasing, they dig in the sacred soil.
Ridiculously small and almost negligible by the side of the great
monoliths they dig and dig. Patiently they clear the ruins, and the
earth goes away in little parcels in rows of baskets carried by
children in the form of a chain. The periodical deposits of the Nile,
and the sand carried by the wind of the desert, had raised the soil by
about six yards since the time when Thebes ceased to live. But now men
are endeavouring to restore the ancient level. At first sight the task
seemed impossible, but they will achieve it in the end, even with
their simple means, these fellah toilers, who sing as they labour at
their incessant work of ants. Soon the grand hypostyle will be freed
from rubbish, and its columns, which even before seemed so tremendous,
uncovered now to the base, have added another twenty feet to their
height. A number of colossal statues, which lay asleep beneath this
shroud of earth and sand, have been brought back to the light, set
upright again and have resumed their watch in the intimidating
thoroughfares for a new period of quasi-eternity. Year by year the
town-mummy is being slowly exhumed by dint of prodigious effort; and
is repeopled again by gods and kings who had been hidden for thousands
of years![*] Year in, year out, the digging continues--deeper and
deeper. It is scarcely known to what depth the debris and the ruins
descend. Thebes had endured for so many centuries, the earth here is
so penetrated with human past, that it is averred that, under the
oldest of the known temples there are still others, older still and
more massive, of which there was no suspicion, and whose age must
exceed eight thousand years.

[*] As is generally known, the maintenance of the ancient monuments of
    Egypt and their restoration, so far as that may be possible, has
    been entrusted to the French. M. Maspero has delegated to Thebes
    an artist and a scholar, M. Legrain by name, who is devoting his
    life passionately to the work.

In spite of the burning sun, and of the clouds of dust raised by the
blows of the pickaxes, one might linger for hours amongst the dust-
stained, meagre fellahs, watching the excavations in this unique soil
--where everything that is revealed is by way of being a surprise and
a lucky find, where the least carved stone had a past of glory, formed
part of the first architectural splendours, was /a stone of Thebes/.
Scarcely a moment passes but, at the bottom of the trenches, as the
digging proceeds, some new thing gleams. Perhaps it is the polished
flank of a colossus, fashioned out of granite from Syene, or a little
copper Osiris, the debris of a vase, a golden trinket beyond price, or
even a simple blue pearl that has fallen from the necklace of some
waiting-maid of a queen.

This activity of the excavators, which alone reanimates certain
quarters during the day, ends at sunset. Every evening the lean
fellahs receive the daily wage of their labour, and take themselves
off to sleep in the silent neighbourhood in their huts of mud; and the
iron gates are shut behind them. At night, except for the guards at
the entrance, no one inhabits the ruins.

*****

Crumbling and dust. . . . Far around, on every side of these palaces
and temples of the central artery--which are the best preserved and
remain proudly upright--stretch great mournful spaces, on which the
sun from morning till evening pours an implacable light. There,
amongst the lank desert plants, lie blocks scattered at hazard--the
remains of sanctuaries, of which neither the plan nor the form will
ever be discovered. But on these stones, fragments of the history of
the world are still to be read in clear-cut hieroglyphs.

To the west of the hypostyle hall there is a region strewn with discs,
all equal and all alike. It might be a draught-board for Titans with
draughts that would measure ten yards in circumference. They are the
scattered fragments, slices, as it were, of a colonnade of the Ramses.
Farther on the ground seems to have passed through fire. You walk over
blackish scoriae encrusted with brazen bolts and particles of melted
glass. It is the quarter burnt by the soldiers of Cambyses. They were
great destroyers of the queen city, were these same Persian soldiers.
To break up the obelisks and the colossal statues they conceived the
plan of scorching them by lighting bonfires around them, and then,
when they saw them burning hot, they deluged them with cold water. And
the granites cracked from top to base.

It is well known, of course, that Thebes used to extend for a
considerable distance both on this, the right, bank of the Nile, where
the Pharaohs resided, and opposite, on the Libyan bank, given over to
the preparers of mummies and to the mortuary temples. But to-day,
except for the great palaces of the centre, it is little more than a
litter of ruins, and the long avenues, lined with endless rows of
sphinxes or rams, are lost, goodness knows where, buried beneath the
sand.

At wide intervals, however, in the midst of these cemeteries of
things, a temple here and there remains upright, preserving still its
sanctified gloom beneath its cavernous carapace. One, where certain
celebrated oracles used to be delivered, is even more prisonlike and
sepulchral than the others in its eternal shadow. High up in a wall
the black hole of a kind of grotto opens, to which a secret corridor
coming from the depths used to lead. It was there that the face of the
priest charged with the announcement of the sibylline words appeared--
and the ceiling of his niche is all covered still with the smoke from
the flame of his lamp, which was extinguished more than two thousand
years ago!

*****

What a number of ruins, scarcely emerging from the sand of the desert,
are hereabout! And in the old dried-up soil, how many strange
treasures remain hidden! When the sun lights thus the forlorn
distances, when you perceive stretching away to the horizon these
fields of death, you realise better what kind of a place this Thebes
once was. Rebuilt as it were in the imagination it appears excessive,
superabundant and multiple, like those flowers of the antediluvian
world which the fossils reveal to us. Compared with it how our modern
towns are dwarfed, and our hasty little palaces, our stuccoes and old
iron!

And it is so mystical, this town of Thebes, with its dark sanctuaries,
once inhabited by gods and symbols. All the sublime, fresh-minded
striving of the human soul after the Unknowable is as it were
petrified in these ruins, in forms diverse and immeasurably grand. And
subsisting thus down to our day it puts us to shame. Compared with
this people, who thought only of eternity, we are a lot of pitiful
dotards, who soon will be past caring about the wherefore of life, or
thought, or death. Such beginnings presaged, surely, something greater
than our humanity of the present day, given over to despair, to
alcohol and to explosives!

*****

Crumbling and dust! This same sun of Thebes is in its place each day,
parching, exhausting, cracking and pulverising.

On the ground where once stood so much magnificence there are fields
of corn, spread out like green carpets, which tell of the return of
the humble life of tillage. Above all, there is the sand, encroaching
now upon the very threshold of the Pharaohs; there is the yellow
desert; there is the world of reflections and of silence, which
approaches like a slow submerging tide. In the distance, where the
mirage trembles from morning till evening, the burying is already
almost achieved. The few poor stones which still appear, barely
emerging from the advancing dunes, are the remains of what men, in
their superb revolts against death, had contrived to make the most
massively indestructible.

And this sun, this eternal sun, which parades over Thebes the irony of
its duration--for us so impossible to calculate or to conceive!
Nowhere so much as here does one suffer from the dismay of knowing
that all our miserable little human effervescence is only a sort of
fermentation round an atom emanated from that sinister ball of fire,
and that that fire itself, the wonderful sun, is no more than an
ephemeral meteor, a furtive spark, thrown off during one of the
innumerable cosmic transformations, in the course of times without end
and without beginning.



CHAPTER XVII

AN AUDIENCE OF AMENOPHIS II.

King Amenophis II. has resumed his receptions, which he found himself
obliged to suspend for three thousand, three hundred and some odd
years, by reason of his decease. They are very well attended; court
dress is not insisted upon, and the Grand Master of ceremonies is not
above taking a tip. He holds them every morning in the winter from
eight o'clock, in the bowels of a mountain in the desert of Libya; and
if he rests himself during the remainder of the day it is only
because, as soon as midday sounds, they turn off the electric light.

Happy Amenophis! Out of so many kings who tried so hard to hide for
ever their mummies in the depths of impenetrable caverns he is the
only one who has been left in his tomb. And he "makes the most of it"
every time he opens his funeral salons.

*****

It is important to arrive before midday at the dwelling of this
Pharaoh, and at eight o'clock sharp, therefore, on a clear February
morning, I set out from Luxor, where for many days my dahabiya had
slumbered against the bank of the Nile. It is necessary first of all
to cross the river, for the Theban kings of the Middle Empire all
established their eternal habitations on the opposite bank--far beyond
the plains of the river shore, right away in those mountains which
bound the horizon as with a wall of adorable rose-colour. Other
canoes, which are also crossing, glide by the side of mine on the
tranquil water. The passengers seem to belong to that variety of
Anglo-Saxons which is equipped by Thomas Cook & Sons (Egypt Ltd.), and
like me, no doubt, they are bound for the royal presence.

We land on the sand of the opposite bank, which to-day is almost
deserted. Formerly there stretched here a regular suburb of Thebes--
that, namely, of the preparers of mummies, with thousands of ovens
wherein to heat the natron and the oils, which preserved the bodies
from corruption. In this Thebes, where for some fifty centuries,
everything that died, whether man or beast, was minutely prepared and
swathed in bandages, it will readily be understood what importance
this quarter of the embalmers came to assume. And it was to the
neighbouring mountains that the products of so many careful wrappings
were borne for burial, while the Nile carried away the blood from the
bodies and the filth of their entrails. That chain of living rocks
that rises before us, coloured each morning with the same rose, as of
a tender flower, is literally stuffed with dead bodies.

We have to cross a wide plain before reaching the mountains, and on
our way cornfields alternate with stretches of sand already
desertlike. Behind us extends the old Nile and the opposite bank which
we have lately quitted--the bank of Luxor, whose gigantic Pharaonic
colonnades are as it were lengthened below by their own reflection in
the mirror of the river. And in this radiant morning, in this pure
light, it would be admirable, this eternal temple, with its image
reversed in the depth of the blue water, were it not that at its
sides, and to twice its height, rises the impudent Winter Palace, that
monster hotel built last year for the fastidious tourists. And yet,
who knows? The jackanapes who deposited this abomination on the sacred
soil of Egypt perhaps imagines that he equals the merit of the artist
who is now restoring the sanctuaries of Thebes, or even the glory of
the Pharaohs who built them.

As we draw nearer to the chain of Libya, where this king awaits us, we
traverse fields still green with growing corn--and sparrows and larks
sing around us in the impetuous spring of this land of Thebes.

And now beyond two menhirs, as it were, become gradually distinct. Of
the same height and shape, alike indeed in every respect, they rise
side by side in the clear distance in the midst of these green plains,
which recall so well our fields of France. They wear the headgear of
the Sphinx, and are gigantic human forms seated on thrones--the
colossal statues of Memnon. We recognise them at once, for the
picture-makers of succeeding ages have popularised their aspect, as in
the case of the pyramids. What is strange is that they should stand
there so simply in the midst of these fields of growing corn, which
reach to their very feet, and be surrounded by these humble birds we
know so well, who sing without ceremony on their shoulders.

They do not seem to be scandalised even at seeing now, passing quite
close to them, the trucks of a playful little railway belonging to a
local industry, that are laden with sugar-canes and gourds.

The chain of Libya, during the last hour, has been growing gradually
larger against the profound and excessively blue sky. And now that it
rises up quite near to us, overheated, and as it were incandescent,
under this ten o'clock sun, we begin to see on all sides, in front of
the first rocky spurs of the mountains, the debris of palaces,
colonnades, staircases and pylons. Headless giants, swathed like dead
Pharaohs, stand upright, with hands crossed beneath their shroud of
sandstone. They are the temples and statues for the manes of
numberless kings and queens, who during three or four thousand years
had their mummies buried hard by in the heart of the mountains, in the
deepest of the walled and secret galleries.

And now the cornfields have ceased; there is no longer any herbage--
nothing. We have crossed the desolate threshold, we are in the desert,
and tread suddenly upon a disquieting funereal soil, half sand, half
ashes, that is pitted on all sides with gaping holes. It looks like
some region that had long been undermined by burrowing beasts. But it
is men who, for more than fifty centuries, have vexed this ground,
first to hide the mummies in it, and afterwards, and until our day, to
exhume them. Each of these holes has enclosed its corpse, and if you
peer within you may see yellow-coloured rags still trailing there; and
bandages, or legs and vertebrae of thousands of years ago. Some lean
Bedouins, who exercise the office of excavators, and sleep hard by in
holes like jackals, advance to sell us scarabaei, blue-glass trinkets
that are half fossilised, and feet or hands of the dead.

And now farewell to the fresh morning. Every minute the heat becomes
more oppressive. The pathway that is marked only by a row of stones
turns at last and leads into the depths of the mountain by a tragical
passage. We enter now into that "Valley of the Kings" which was the
place of the last rendezvous of the most august mummies. The breaths
of air that reach us between these rocks are become suddenly burning,
and the site seems to belong no longer to earth but to some calcined
planet which had for ever lost its clouds and atmosphere. This Libyan
chain, in the distance so delicately rose, is positively frightful now
that it overhangs us. It looks what it is--an enormous and fantastic
tomb, a natural necropolis, whose vastness and horror nothing human
could equal, an ideal stove for corpses that wanted to endure for
ever. The limestone, on which for that matter no rain ever falls from
the changeless sky, looks to be in one single piece from summit to
base, and betrays no crack or crevice by which anything might
penetrate into the sepulchres within. The dead could sleep, therefore,
in the heart of these monstrous blocks as sheltered as under vaults of
lead. And of what there is of magnificence the centuries have taken
care. The continual passage of winds laden with dust has scaled and
worn away the face of the rocks, so as to leave only the denser veins
of stone, and thus have reappeared strange architectural fantasies
such as Matter, in the beginning, might have dimly conceived.
Subsequently the sun of Egypt has lavished on the whole its ardent
reddish patines. And now the mountains imitate in places great organ-
pipes, badigeoned with yellow and carmine, and elsewhere huge
bloodstained skeletons and masses of dead flesh.

Outlined upon the excessive blue of the sky, the summits, illumined to
the point of dazzling, rise up in the light--like red cinders of a
glowing fire, splendours of living coal, against the pure indigo that
turns almost to darkness. We seem to be walking in some valley of the
Apocalypse with flaming walls. Silence and death, beneath a
transcendent clearness, in the constant radiance of a kind of mournful
apotheosis--it was such surroundings as these that the Egyptians chose
for their necropoles.

The pathway plunges deeper and deeper in the stifling defiles, and at
the end of this "Valley of the Kings," under the sun now nearly
meridian, which grows each minute more mournful and terrible, we
expected to come upon a dread silence. But what is this?

At a turning, beyond there, at the bottom of a sinister-looking
recess, what does this crowd of people, what does this uproar mean? Is
it a meeting, a fair? Under awnings to protect them from the sun stand
some fifty donkeys, saddled in the English fashion. In a corner an
electrical workshop, built of new bricks, shoots forth the black
smoke, and all about, between the high blood-coloured walls, coming
and going, making a great stir and gabbling to their hearts' content,
are a number of Cook's tourists of both sexes, and some even who
verily seem to have no sex at all. They are come for the royal
audience; some on asses, some in jaunting cars, and some, the stout
ladies who are grown short of wind, in chairs carried by the Bedouins.
From the four points of Europe they have assembled in this desert
ravine to see an old dried-up corpse at the bottom of a hole.

Here and there the hidden palaces reveal their dark, square-shaped
entrances, hewn in the massive rock, and over each a board indicates
the name of a kingly mummy--Ramses IV., Seti I., Thothmes III., Ramses
IX., etc. Although all these kings, except Amenophis II., have
recently been removed and carried away to Lower Egypt, to people the
glass cases of the museum of Cairo, their last dwellings have not
ceased to attract crowds. From each underground habitation are
emerging now a number of perspiring Cooks and Cookesses. And from that
of Amenophis, especially, they issue rapidly. Suppose that we have
come too late and that the audience is over!

And to think that these entrances had been walled up, had been masked
with so much care, and lost for centuries! And of all the perseverance
that was needed to discover them, the observation, the gropings, the
soundings and random discoveries!

But now they are being closed. We loitered too long around the colossi
of Memnon and the palaces of the plain. It is nearly noon, a noon
consuming and mournful, which falls perpendicularly upon the red
summits, and is burning to its deepest recesses the valley of stone.

At the door of Amenophis we have to cajole, beseech. By the help of a
gratuity the Bedouin Grand Master of Ceremonies allows himself to be
persuaded. We are to descend with him, but quickly, quickly, for the
electric light will soon be extinguished. It will be a short audience,
but at least it will be a private one. We shall be alone with the
king.

In the darkness, where at first, after so much sunlight, the little
electric lamps seem to us scarcely more than glow-worms, we expected a
certain amount of chilliness as in the undergrounds of our climate.
But here there is only a more oppressive heat, stifling and withering,
and we long to return to the open air, which was burning indeed, but
was at least the air of life.

Hastily we descend: by steep staircases, by passages which slope so
rapidly that they hurry us along of themselves, like slides; and it
seems that we shall never ascend again, any more than the great mummy
who passed here so long ago on his way to his eternal chamber. All
this brings us, first of all, to a deep well--dug there to swallow up
the desecrators in their passage--and it is on one of the sides of
this oubliette, behind a casual stone carefully sealed, that the
continuation of these funeral galleries was discovered. Then, when we
have passed the well, by a narrow bridge that has been thrown across
it, the stairs begin again, and the steep passages that almost make
you run; but now, by a sharp bend, they have changed their direction.
And still we descend, descend. Heavens! how deep down this king
dwells! And at each step of our descent we feel more and more
imprisoned under the sovereign mass of stone, in the centre of all
this compact and silent thickness.

*****

The little electric globes, placed apart like a garland, suffice now
for our eyes which have forgotten the sun. And we can distinguish
around us myriad figures inviting us to solemnity and silence. They
are inscribed everywhere on the smooth, spotless walls of the colour
of old ivory. They follow one another in regular order, repeating
themselves obstinately in parallel rows, as if the better to impose
upon our spirit, with gestures and symbols that are eternally the
same. The gods and demons, the representatives of Anubis, with his
black jackal's head and his long erect ears, seem to make signs to us
with their long arms and long fingers: "No noise! Look, there are
mummies here!" The wonderful preservation of all this, the vivid
colours, the clearness of the outlines, begin to cause a kind of
stupor and bewilderment. Verily you would think that the painter of
these figures of the shades had only just quitted the hypogeum. All
this past seems to draw you to itself like an abyss to which you have
approached too closely. It surrounds you, and little by little masters
you. It is so much at home here that it has /remained the present/.
Over and above the mere descent into the secret bowels of the rock
there has been a kind of seizure with vertigo, which we had not
anticipated and which has whirled us far away into the depths of the
ages.

These interminable, oppressive passages, by which we have crawled to
the innermost depths of the mountain, lead at length to something
vast, the walls divide, the vault expands and we are in the great
funeral hall, of which the blue ceiling, all bestrewn with stars like
the sky, is supported by six pillars hewn in the rock itself. On
either side open other chambers into which the electricity permits us
to see quite clearly, and opposite, at the end of the hall, a large
crypt is revealed, which one divines instinctively must be the
resting-place of the Pharaoh. What a prodigious labour must have been
entailed by this perforation of the living rock! And this hypogeum is
not unique. All along the "Valley of the Kings" little insignificant
doors--which to the initiated reveal the "Sign of the Shadow,"
inscribed on their lintels--lead to other subterranean places, just as
sumptuous and perfidiously profound, with their snares, their hidden
wells, their oubliettes and the bewildering multiplicity of their
mural figures. And all these tombs this morning were full of people,
and, if we had not had the good fortune to arrive after the usual
hour, we should have met here, even in this dwelling of Amenophis, a
battalion equipped by Messrs. Cook.

In this hall, with its blue ceiling, the frescoes multiply their
riddles: scenes from the book of Hades, all the funeral ritual
translated into pictures. On the pillars and walls crowd the different
demons that an Egyptian soul was likely to meet in its passage through
the country of shadows, and underneath the passwords which were to be
given to each of them are recapitulated so as not to be forgotten.

For the soul used to depart simultaneously under the two forms of a
flame[*] and a falcon[+] respectively. And this country of shadows,
called also the west, to which it had to render itself, was that where
the moon sinks and where each evening the sun goes down; a country to
which the living were never able to attain, because it fled before
them, however fast they might travel across the sands or over the
waters. On its arrival there, the scared soul had to parley
successively with the fearsome demons who lay in wait for it along its
route. If at last it was judged worthy to approach Osiris, the great
Dead Sun, it was subsumed in him and reappeared, shining over the
world the next morning and on all succeeding mornings until the
consummation of time--a vague survival in the solar splendour, a
continuation without personality, of which one is scarcely able to say
whether or not it was more desirable than eternal non-existence.

[*] The Khou, which never returned to our world.

[+] The Bai, which might, at its will, revisit the tomb.

And, moreover, it was necessary to preserve the body at whatever cost,
for a certain /double/ of the dead man continued to dwell in the dry
flesh, and retained a kind of half life, barely conscious. Lying at
the bottom of the sarcophagus it was able to see, by virtue of those
two eyes, which were painted on the lid, always in the same axis as
the empty eyes of the mummy. Sometimes, too, this /double/, escaping
from the mummy and its box, used to wander like a phantom about the
hypogeum. And, in order that at such times it might be able to obtain
nourishment, a mass of mummified viands wrapped in bandages were
amongst the thousand and one things buried at its side. Even natron
and oils were left, so that it might re-embalm itself, if the worms
came to life in its members.

Oh! the persistence of this /double/, sealed there in the tomb, a prey
to anxiety, lest corruption should take hold of it; which had to serve
its long duration in suffocating darkness, in absolute silence,
without anything to mark the days and nights, or the seasons or the
centuries, or the tens of centuries without end! It was with such a
terrible conception of death as this that each one in those days was
absorbed in the preparation of his eternal chamber.

And for Amenophis II. this more or less is what happened to his
/double/. Unaccustomed to any kind of noise, after three or four
hundred years passed in the company of certain familiars, lulled in
the same heavy slumber as himself, he heard the sound of muffled blows
in the distance, by the side of the hidden well. The secret entrance
was discovered: men were breaking through its walls! Living beings
were about to appear, pillagers of tombs, no doubt, come to unswathe
them all! But no! Only some priests of Osiris, advancing with fear in
a funeral procession. They brought nine great coffins containing the
mummies of nine kings, his sons, grandsons and other unknown
successors, down to that King Setnakht, who governed Egypt two and a
half centuries after him. It was simply to hide them better that they
brought them hither, and placed them all together in a chamber that
was immediately walled up. Then they departed. The stones of the door
were sealed afresh, and everything fell again into the old mournful
and burning darkness.

Slowly the centuries rolled on--perhaps ten, perhaps twenty--in a
silence no longer even disturbed by the scratchings of the worms, long
since dead. And a day came when, at the side of the entrance, the same
blows were heard again. . . . And this time it was the robbers.
Carrying torches in their hands, they rushed headlong in, with shouts
and cries and, except in the safe hiding-place of the nine coffins,
everything was plundered, the bandages torn off, the golden trinkets
snatched from the necks of the mummies. Then, when they had sorted
their booty, they walled up the entrance as before, and went their
way, leaving an inextricable confusion of shrouds, of human bodies, of
entrails issuing from shattered vases, of broken gods and emblems.

Afterwards, for long centuries, there was silence again, and finally,
in our days, the /double/, then in its last weakness and almost non-
existent, perceived the same noise of stones being unsealed by blows
of pickaxes. The third time, the living men who entered were of a race
never seen before. At first they seemed respectful and pious, only
touching things gently. But they came to plunder everything, even the
nine coffins in their still inviolate hiding-place. They gathered the
smallest fragments with a solicitude almost religious. That they might
lose nothing they even sifted the rubbish and the dust. But, as for
Amenophis, who was already nothing more than a lamentable mummy,
without jewels or bandages, they left him at the bottom of his
sarcophagus of sandstone. And since that day, doomed to receive each
morning numerous people of a strange aspect, he dwells alone in his
hypogeum, where there is now neither a being nor a thing belonging to
his time.

But yes, there is! We had not looked all round. There in one of the
lateral chambers some bodies are lying, dead bodies--three corpses
(unswathed at the time of the pillage), side by side on their rags.
First, a woman, the queen probably, with loosened hair. Her profile
has preserved its exquisite lines. How beautiful she still is! And
then a young boy with the little greyish face of a doll. His head is
shaved, except for that long curl at the right side, which denotes a
prince of the royal blood. And the third a man. Ugh! How terrible he
is--looking as if he found death a thing irresistibly comical. He even
writhes with laughter, and eats a corner of his shroud as if to
prevent himself from bursting into a too unseemly mirth.

And then, suddenly, black night! And we stand as if congealed in our
place. The electric light has gone out--everywhere at once. Above, on
the earth, midday must have sounded--for those who still have
cognisance of the sun and the hours.

The guard who has brought us hither shouts in his Bedouin falsetto, in
order to get the light switched on again, but the infinite thickness
of the walls, instead of prolonging the vibrations, seems to deaden
them; and besides, who could hear us, in the depths where we now are?
Then, groping in the absolute darkness, he makes his way up the
sloping passage. The hurried patter of his sandals and the flapping of
his burnous grow faint in the distance, and the cries that he
continues to utter sound so smothered to us soon that we might
ourselves be buried. And meanwhile we do not move. But how comes it
that it is so hot amongst these mummies? It seems as if there were
fires burning in some oven close by. And above all there is a want of
air. Perhaps the corridors, after our passage, have contracted, as
happens sometimes in the anguish of dreams. Perhaps the long fissure
by which we have crawled hither, perhaps it has closed in upon us.

But at length the cries of alarm are heard and the light is turned on
again. The three corpses have not profited by the unguarded moments to
attempt any aggressive movement. Their positions, their expressions
have not changed: the queen calm and beautiful as ever; the man eating
still the corner of his rags to stifle the mad laughter of thirty-
three centuries.

The Bedouin is now returned, breathless from his journey. He urges us
to come to see the king before the electric light is again
extinguished, and this time for good and all. Behold us now at the end
of the hall, on the edge of a dark crypt, leaning over and peering
within. It is a place oval in form, with a vault of a funereal black,
relieved by frescoes, either white or of the colour of ashes. They
represent, these frescoes, a whole new register of gods and demons,
some slim and sheathed narrowly like mummies, others with big heads
and big bellies like hippopotami. Placed on the ground and watched
from above by all these figures is an enormous sarcophagus of stone,
wide open; and in it we can distinguish vaguely the outline of a human
body: the Pharaoh!

At least we should have liked to see him better. The necessary light
is forthcoming at once: the Bedouin Grand Master of Ceremonies touches
an electric button and a powerful lamp illumines the face of
Amenophis, detailing with a clearness that almost frightens you the
closed eyes, the grimacing countenance, and the whole of the sad
mummy. This theatrical effect took us by surprise; we were not
prepared for it.

He was buried in magnificence, but the pillagers have stripped him of
everything, even of his beautiful breastplate of tortoiseshell, which
came to him from a far-off Oriental country, and for many centuries
now he has slept half naked on his rags. But his poor bouquet is there
still--of mimosa, recognisable even now, and who will ever tell what
pious or perhaps amorous hand it was that gathered these flowers for
him more than three thousand years ago.

The heat is suffocating. The whole crushing mass of this mountain, of
this block of limestone, into which we have crawled through relatively
imperceptible holes, like white ants or larvae, seems to weigh upon
our chest. And these figures too, inscribed on every side, and this
mystery of the hieroglyphs and the symbols, cause a growing
uneasiness. You are too near them, they seem too much the masters of
the exits, these gods with their heads of falcon, ibis and jackal,
who, on the walls, converse in a continual exalted pantomime. And then
the feeling comes over you, that you are guilty of sacrilege standing
there, before this open coffin, in this unwonted insolent light. The
dolorous, blackish face, half eaten away, seems to ask for mercy:
"Yes, yes, my sepulchre has been violated and I am returning to dust.
But now that you have seen me, leave me, turn out that light, have
pity on my nothingness."

In sooth, what a mockery! To have taken so many pains, to have adopted
so many stratagems to hide his corpse; to have exhausted thousands of
men in the hewing of this underground labyrinth, and to end thus, with
his head in the glare of an electric lamp, to amuse whoever passes.

And out of pity--I think it was the poor bouquet of mimosa that
awakened it--I say to the Bedouin: "Yes, put out the light, put it
out--that is enough."

And then the darkness returns above the royal countenance, which is
suddenly effaced in the sarcophagus. The phantom of the Pharaoh is
vanished, as if replunged into the unfathomable past. The audience is
over.

And we, who are able to escape from the horror of the hypogeum,
reascend rapidly towards the sunshine of the living, we go to breathe
the air again, the air to which we have still a right--for some few
days longer.



CHAPTER XVIII

AT THEBES IN THE TEMPLE OF THE OGRESS

This evening, in the vast chaos of ruins--at the hour in which the
light of the sun begins to turn to rose--I make my way along one of
the magnificent roads of the town-mummy, that, in fact, which goes off
at a right angle to the line of the temples of Amen, and, losing
itself more or less in the sands, leads at length to a sacred lake on
the border of which certain cat-headed goddesses are seated in state
watching the dead water and the expanse of the desert. This particular
road was begun three thousand four hundred years ago by a beautiful
queen called Makeri,[*] and in the following centuries a number of
kings continued its construction. It was ornamented with pylons of a
superb massiveness--pylons are monumental walls, in the form of a
trapezium with a wide base, covered entirely with hieroglyphs, which
the Egyptians used to place at either side of their porticoes and long
avenues--as well as by colossal statues and interminable rows of rams,
larger than buffaloes, crouched on pedestals.

[*] To-day the mummy with the baby in the museum at Cairo.

At the first pylons I have to make a detour. They are so ruinous that
their blocks, fallen down on all sides, have closed the passage. Here
used to watch, on right and left, two upright giants of red granite
from Syene. Long ago in times no longer precisely known, they were
broken off, both of them, at the height of the loins. But their
muscular legs have kept their proud, marching attitude, and each in
one of the armless hands, which reach to the end of the cloth that
girds their loins, clenches passionately the emblem of eternal life.
And this Syenite granite is so hard that time has not altered it in
the least; in the midst of the confusion of stones the thighs of these
mutilated giants gleam as if they had been polished yesterday.

Farther on we come upon the second pylons, foundered also, before
which stands a row of Pharaohs.

On every side the overthrown blocks display their utter confusion of
gigantic things in the midst of the sand which continues patiently to
bury them. And here now are the third pylons, flanked by their two
marching giants, who have neither head nor shoulders. And the road,
marked majestically still by the debris, continues to lead towards the
desert.

And then the fourth and last pylons, which seem at first sight to mark
the extremity of the ruins, the beginning of the desert nothingness.
Time-worn and uncrowned, but stiff and upright still, they seem to be
set there so solidly that nothing could ever overthrow them. The two
colossal statues which guard them on the right and left are seated on
thrones. One, that on the eastern side, has almost disappeared. But
the other stands out entire and white, with the whiteness of marble,
against the brown-coloured background of the enormous stretch of wall
covered with hieroglyphs. His face alone has been mutilated; and he
preserves still his imperious chin, his ears, his Sphinx's headgear,
one might almost say his meditative expression, before this deployment
of the vast solitude which seems to begin at his very feet.

Here however was only the boundary of the quarters of the God Amen.
The boundary of Thebes was much farther on, and the avenue which will
lead me directly to the home of the cat-headed goddesses extends
farther still to the old gates of the town; albeit you can scarcely
distinguish it between the double row of Krio-sphinxes all broken and
well-nigh buried.

The day falls, and the dust of Egypt, in accordance with its
invariable practice every evening, begins to resemble in the distance
a powder of gold. I look behind me from time to time at the giant who
watches me, seated at the foot of his pylon on which the history of a
Pharaoh is carved in one immense picture. Above him and above his
wall, which grows each minute more rose-coloured, I see, gradually
mounting in proportion as I move away from it, the great mass of the
palaces of the centre, the hypostyle hall, the halls of Thothmes and
the obelisks, all the entangled cluster of those things at once so
grand and so dead, which have never been equalled on earth.

And as I continue to gaze upon the ruins, resplendent now in the rosy
apotheosis of the evening, they come to look like the crumbling
remains of a gigantic skeleton. They seem to be begging for a merciful
surcease, as if they were tired of this endless gala colouring at each
setting of the sun, which mocks them with its eternity.

All this is now a long way behind me; but the air is so limpid, the
outlines remain so clear that the illusion is rather that the temples
and the pylons grow smaller, lower themselves and sink into the earth.
The white giant who follows me always with his sightless stare is now
reduced to the proportions of a simple human dreamer. His attitude
moreover has not the rigid hieratic aspect of the other Theban
statues. With his hands upon his knees he looks like a mere ordinary
mortal who had stopped to reflect.[*] I have known him for many days--
for many days and many nights, for, what with his whiteness and the
transparency of these Egyptian nights, I have seen him often outlined
in the distance under the dim light of the stars--a great phantom in
his contemplative pose. And I feel myself obsessed now by the
continuance of his attitude at this entrance of the ruins--I who shall
pass without a morrow from Thebes and even from the earth--even as we
all pass. Before conscious life was vouchsafed to me he was there, had
been there since times which make you shudder to think upon. For three
and thirty centuries, or thereabouts, the eyes of myriads of unknown
men and women, who have gone before me, saw him just as I see him now,
tranquil and white, in this same place, seated before this same
threshold, with his head a little bent, and his pervading air of
thought.

[*] Statue of Amenophis III.

I make my way without hastening, having always a tendency to stop and
look behind me, to watch the silent heap of palaces and the white
dreamer, which now are all illumined with a last Bengal fire in the
daily setting of the sun.

And the hour is already twilight when I reach the goddesses.

Their domain is so destroyed that the sands had succeeded in covering
and hiding it for centuries. But it has lately been exhumed.

There remain of it now only some fragments of columns, aligned in
multiple rows in a vast extent of desert. Broken and fallen stones and
debris.[*] I walk on without stopping, and at length reach the sacred
lake on the margin of which the great cats are seated in eternal
council, each one on her throne. The lake, dug by order of the
Pharaohs, is in the form of an arc, like a kind of crescent. Some
marsh birds, that are about to retire for the night, now traverse its
mournful, sleeping water. Its borders, which have known the utmost of
magnificence, are become mere heaps of ruins on which nothing grows.
And what one sees beyond, what the attentive goddesses themselves
regard, is the empty desolate plain, on which some few poor fields of
corn mingle in this twilight hour with the sad infinitude of the
sands. And the whole is bounded on the horizon by the chain, still a
little rose-coloured, of the limestones of Arabia.

[*] The temple of the Goddess Mut.

They are there, the cats, or, to speak more exactly, the lionesses,
for cats would not have those short ears, or those cruel chins,
thickened by tufts of beard. All of black granite, images of Sekhet
(who was the Goddess of War, and in her hours the Goddess of Lust),
they have the slender body of a woman, which makes more terrible the
great feline head surmounted by its high bonnet. Eight or ten, or
perhaps more, they are more disquieting in that they are so numerous
and so alike. They are not gigantic, as one might have expected, but
of ordinary human stature--easy therefore to carry away, or to
destroy, and that again, if one reflects, augments the singular
impression they cause. When so many colossal figures lie in pieces on
the ground, how comes it that they, little people seated so tranquilly
on their chairs, have contrived to remain intact, during the passing
of the three and thirty centuries of the world's history?

The passage of the march birds, which for a moment disturbed the clear
mirror of the lake, has ceased. Around the goddesses nothing moves and
the customary infinite silence envelops them as at the fall of every
night. They dwell indeed in such a forlorn corner of the ruins! Who,
to be sure, even in broad daylight, would think of visiting them?

Down there in the west a trailing cloud of dust indicates the
departure of the tourists, who had flocked to the temple of Amen, and
now hasten back to Luxor, to dine at the various /tables d'hote/. The
ground here is so felted with sand that in the distance we cannot hear
the rolling of their carriages. But the knowledge that they are gone
renders more intimate the interview with these numerous and identical
goddesses, who little by little have been draped in shadow. Their
seats turn their backs to the palaces of Thebes, which now begin to be
bathed in violet waves and seem to sink towards the horizon, to lose
each minute something of their importance before the sovereignty of
the night.

And the black goddesses, with their lioness' heads and tall headgear--
seated there with their hands upon their knees, with eyes fixed since
the beginning of the ages, and a disturbing smile on their thick lips,
like those of a wild beast--continue to regard--beyond the little dead
lake--that desert, which now is only a confused immensity, of a bluish
ashy-grey. And the fancy seizes you that they are possessed of a kind
of life, which has come to them after long waiting, by virtue of that
/expression/ which they have worn on their faces so long, oh! so long.

*****

Beyond, at the other extremity of the ruins, there is a sister of
these goddesses, taller than they, a great Sekhet, whom in these parts
men call the Ogress, and who dwells alone and upright, ambushed in a
narrow temple. Amongst the fellahs and the Bedouins of the
neighbourhood she enjoys a very bad reputation, it being her custom of
nights to issue from her temple, and devour men; and none of them
would willingly venture near her dwelling at this late hour. But
instead of returning to Luxor, like the good people whose carriages
have just departed, I rather choose to pay her a visit.

Her dwelling is some distance away, and I shall not reach it till the
dead of night.

First of all I have to retrace my steps, to return along the whole
avenue of rams, to pass again by the feet of the white giant, who has
already assumed his phantomlike appearance, while the violet waves
that bathed the town-mummy thicken and turn to a greyish-blue. And
then, leaving behind me the pylons guarded by the broken giants, I
thread my way among the palaces of the centre.

It is among these palaces that I encounter for good and all the night,
with the first cries of the owls and ospreys. It is still warm there,
on account of the heat stored by the stones during the day, but one
feels nevertheless that the air is freezing.

At a crossing a tall human figure looms up, draped in black and armed
with a baton. It is a roving Bedouin, one of the guards, and this more
or less is the dialogue exchanged between us (freely and succinctly
translated):

"Your permit, sir."

"Here it is."

(Here we combine our efforts to illuminate the said permit by the
light of a match.)

"Good, I will go with you."

"No. I beg of you."

"Yes; I had better. Where are you going?"

"Beyond, to the temple of that lady--you know, who is great and
powerful and has a face like a lioness."

"Ah! . . . Yes, I think I understand that you would prefer to go
alone." (Here the intonation becomes infantine.) "But you are a kind
gentleman and will not forget the poor Bedouin all the same."

He goes on his way. On leaving the palaces I have still to traverse an
extent of uncultivated country, where a veritable cold seizes me.
Above my head no longer the heavy suspended stones, but the far-off
expanse of the blue night sky--where are shining now myriads upon
myriads of stars. For the Thebans of old this beautiful vault,
scintillating always with its powder of diamonds, shed no doubt only
serenity upon their souls. But for us, /who knows, alas!/ it is on the
contrary the field of the great fear, which, out of pity, it would
have been better if we had never been able to see; the incommensurable
black void, where the worlds in their frenzied whirling precipitate
themselves like rain, crash into and annihilate one another, only to
be renewed for fresh eternities.

All this is seen too vividly, the horror of it becomes intolerable, on
a clear night like this, in a place so silent and littered so with
ruins. More and more the cold penetrates you--the mournful cold of the
sidereal spheres from which nothing now seems to protect you, so
rarefied--almost non-existent--does the limpid atmosphere appear. And
the gravel, the poor dried herbs, that crackle under foot, give the
illusion of the crunching noise we know at home on winter nights when
the frost is on the ground.

I approach at length the temple of the Ogress. These stones which now
appear, whitish in the night, this secret-looking dwelling near the
boundary wall of Thebes, proclaim the spot, and verily at such an hour
as this it has an evil aspect. Ptolemaic columns, little vestibules,
little courtyards where a dim blue light enables you to find your way.
Nothing moves; not even the flight of a night bird: an absolute
silence, magnified awfully by the presence of the desert which you
feel encompasses you beyond these walls. And beyond, at the bottom,
three chambers made of massive stone, each with its separate entrance.
I know that the first two are empty. It is in the third that the
Ogress dwells, unless, indeed, she has already set out upon her
nocturnal hunt for human flesh. Pitch darkness reigns within and I
have to grope my way. Quickly I light a match. Yes, there she is
indeed, alone and upright, almost part of the end wall, on which my
little light makes the horrible shadow of her head dance. The match
goes out--irreverently I light many more under her chin, under that
heavy, man-eating jaw. In very sooth, she is terrifying. Of black
granite--like her sisters, seated on the margin of the mournful lake--
but much taller than they, from six to eight feet in height, she has a
woman's body, exquisitely slim and young, with the breasts of a
virgin. Very chaste in attitude, she holds in her hand a long-stemmed
lotus flower, but by a contrast that nonplusses and paralyses you the
delicate shoulders support the monstrosity of a huge lioness' head.
The lappets of her bonnet fall on either side of her ears almost down
to her breast, and surmounting the bonnet, by way of addition to the
mysterious pomp, is a large moon disc. Her dead stare gives to the
ferocity of her visage something unreasoning and fatal; an
irresponsible ogress, without pity as without pleasure, devouring
after the manner of Nature and of Time. And it was so perhaps that she
was understood by the initiated of ancient Egypt, who symbolised
everything for the people in the figures of gods.

In the dark retreat, enclosed with defaced stones, in the little
temple where she stands, alone, upright and grand, with her enormous
head and thrust-out chin and tall goddess' headdress--one is
necessarily quite close to her. In touching her, at night, you are
astonished to find that she is less cold than the air; she becomes
somebody, and the intolerable dead stare seems to weigh you down.

During the /tete-a-tete/, one thinks involuntarily of the
surroundings, of these ruins in the desert, of the prevailing
nothingness, of the cold beneath the stars. And, now, that summation
of doubt and despair and terror, which such an assemblage of things
inspires in you, is confirmed, if one may say so, by the meeting with
this divinity-symbol, which awaits you at the end of the journey, to
receive ironically all human prayer; a rigid horror of granite, with
an implacable smile and a devouring jaw.



CHAPTER XIX

A TOWN PROMPTLY EMBELLISHED

Eight years and a line of railway have sufficed to accomplish its
metamorphosis. Once in Upper Egypt, on the borders of Nubia, there was
a little humble town, rarely visited, and wanting, it must be owned,
in elegance and even in comfort.

Not that it was without picturesqueness and historical interest. Quite
the contrary. The Nile, charged with the waters of equatorial Africa,
flung itself close by from the height of a mass of black granite, in a
majestic cataract; and then, before the little Arab houses, became
suddenly calm again, and flowed between islets of fresh verdure where
clusters of palm-trees swayed their plumes in the wind.

And around were a number of temples, of hypogea, of Roman ruins, of
ruins of churches dating from the first centuries of Christianity. The
ground was full of souvenirs of the great primitive civilisations. For
the place, abandoned for ages and lulled in the folds of Islam under
the guardianship of its white mosque, was once one of the centres of
the life of the world.

And, moreover, in the adjoining desert, some three or four thousand
years ago, the ancient history of the world had been written by the
Pharaohs in immortal hieroglyphics--well-nigh everywhere, on the
polished sides of the strange blocks of blue and red granite that lie
scattered about the sands and look now like the forms of antediluvian
monsters.

*****

Yes, but it was necessary that all this should be co-ordinated,
focused as it were, and above all rendered accessible to the delicate
travellers of the Agencies. And to-day we have the pleasure of
announcing that, from December to March, Assouan (for that is the name
of the fortunate locality) has a "season" as fashionable as those of
Ostend or Spa.

In approaching it, the huge hotels erected on all sides--even on the
islets of the old river--charm the eye of the traveller, greeting him
with their welcoming signs, which can be seen a league away. True,
they have been somewhat hastily constructed, of mud and plaster, but
they recall none the less those gracious palaces with which the
Compagnie des Wagon-Lits has dowered the world. And how negligible
now, how dwarfed by the height of their facades, is the poor little
town of olden times, with its little houses, whitened with chalk, and
its baby minaret.

The cataract, on the other hand, has disappeared from Assouan. The
tutelary Albion wisely considered that it would be better to sacrifice
that futile spectacle and, in order to increase the yield of the soil,
to dam the waters of the Nile by an artificial barrage: a work of
solid masonry which (in the words of the Programme of Pleasure Trips)
"affords an interest of a very different nature and degree" (sic).

But nevertheless Cook & Son--a business concern glossed with poetry,
as all the world knows--have endeavoured to perpetuate the memory of
the cataract by giving its name to a hotel of 500 rooms, which as a
result of their labours has been established opposite to those rocks--
now reduced to silence--over which the old Nile used to seethe for so
many centuries. "Cataract Hotel!"--that gives the illusion still, does
it not?--and looks remarkably well at the head of a sheet of
notepaper.

Cook & Son (Egypt Ltd.) have even gone so far as to conceive the idea
that it would be original to give to their establishment a certain
/cachet/ of Islam. And the dining-room reproduces (in imitation, of
course--but then you must not expect the impossible) the interior of
one of the mosques of Stamboul. At the luncheon hour it is one of the
prettiest sights in the world to see, under this imitation holy
cupola, all the little tables crowded with Cook's tourists of both
sexes, the while a concealed orchestra strikes up the "Mattchiche."

The dam, it is true, in suppressing the cataract has raised some
thirty feet or so the level of the water upstream, and by so doing has
submerged a certain Isle of Philae, which passed, absurdly enough, for
one of the marvels of the world by reason of its great temple of Isis,
surrounded by palm-trees. But between ourselves, one may say that the
beautiful goddess was a little old-fashioned for our times. She and
her mysteries had had their day. Besides, if there should be any
chagrined soul who might regret the disappearance of the island, care
has been taken to perpetuate the memory of it, in the same way as that
of the cataract. Charming coloured postcards, taken before the
submerging of the island and the sanctuary, are on sale in all the
bookshops along the quay.

Oh! this quay of Assouan, already so British in its orderliness, its
method! Nothing better cared for, nothing more altogether charming
could be conceived. First of all there is the railway, which, passing
between balustrades painted a grass-green, gives out its fascinating
noise and joyous smoke. On one side is a row of hotels and shops, all
European in character--hairdressers, perfumers, and numerous dark
rooms for the use of the many amateur photographers, who make a point
of taking away with them photographs of their travelling companions
grouped tastefully before some celebrated hypogeum.

And then numerous cafes, where the whisky is of excellent quality.
And, I ought to add, in justice to the result of the /Entente
Cordiale/, you may see there, too, aligned in considerable quantities
on the shelves, the products of those great French philanthropists, to
whom indeed our generation does not render sufficient homage for all
the good they have done to its stomach and its head. The reader will
guess that I have named Pernod, Picon and Cusenier.

It may be indeed that the honest fellahs and Nubians of the
neighbourhood, so sober a little while ago, are apt to abuse these
tonics a little. But that is the effect of novelty, and will pass. And
anyhow, amongst us Europeans, there is no need to conceal the fact--
for we do not all make use of it involuntarily?--that alcoholism is a
powerful auxiliary in the propagation of our ideas, and that the
dealer in wines and spirits constitutes a valuable vanguard pioneer
for our Western civilisation. Races, insensibly depressed by the abuse
of our "appetisers," become more supple, more easy to lead in the true
path of progress and liberty.

On this quay of Assouan, so carefully levelled, defiles briskly a
continual stream of fair travellers ravishingly dressed as only those
know how who have made a tour with Cook & Son (Egypt Ltd.). And along
the Nile, in the shade of the young trees, planted with the utmost
nicety and precision, the flower-beds and straight-cut turf are
protected efficaciously by means of wire-netting against certain acts
of forgetfulness to which dogs, alas, are only too much addicted.

Here, too, everything is ticketed, everything has its number: the
donkeys, the donkey-drivers, the stations even where they are allowed
to stand--"Stand for six donkeys, stand for ten, etc." Some very
handsome camels, fitted with riding saddles, wait also in their
respective places and a number of Cook ladies, meticulous on the point
of local colour, even when it is merely a question of making some
purchases in the town, readily mount for some moments one or other of
these "ships of the desert."

And at every fifty yards a policeman, still Egyptian in his
countenance, but quite English in his bearing and costume, keeps a
vigilant eye on everything--would never suffer, for example, that an
eleventh donkey should dare to take a place in a stand for ten, which
was already full.

Certain people, inclined to be critical, might consider, perhaps, that
these policemen were a little too ready to chide their fellow-
countrymen; whereas on the contrary they showed themselves very
respectful and obliging whenever they were addressed by a traveler in
a cork helmet. But that is in virtue of an equitable and logical
principle, derived by them from the high places of the new
administration--namely, that the Egypt of to-day belongs far less to
the Egyptians than to the noble foreigners who have come to brandish
there the torch of civilisation.

In the evening, after dark, the really respectable travellers do not
quit the brilliant dining saloons of the hotels, and the quay is left
quite solitary beneath the stars. It is at such a time that one is
able to realise how extremely hospitable certain of the natives are
become. If, in an hour of melancholy, you walk alone on the bank of
the Nile, smoking a cigarette, you will not fail to be accosted by one
of these good people, who misunderstanding the cause of the unrest in
your soul, offers eagerly, and with a touching frankness, to introduce
you to the gayest of the young ladies of the country.

In the other towns, which still remain purely Egyptian, the people
would never practise such an excess of affability and good manners,
which have been learnt, beyond all question from our beneficent
contact.

Assouan possesses also its little Oriental bazaar--a little
improvised, a little new perhaps; but then one, at least, was needed,
and that as quickly as possible, in order that nothing might be
wanting to the tourists.

The shopkeepers have contrived to provision themselves (in the leading
shops, under the arcades of the Rue de Rivoli) with as much tact as
good taste, and the Cook ladies have the innocent illusion of making
bargains every day. One may even buy there, hung up by the tail,
stuffed with straw and looking extremely real, the last crocodiles of
Egypt, which, particularly at the end of the season, may be had at
very advantageous prices.

Even the old Nile has allowed itself to be fretted and brought up to
date in the progress of evolution.

First, the women, draped in black veils, who come daily to draw the
precious water, have forsaken the fragile amphorae of baked earth,
which had come to them from barbarous times--and which the
Orientalists grossly abused in their picture; and in their stead have
taken to old tin oil-cans, placed at their disposal by the kindness of
the big hotels. But they carry them in the same easy graceful manner
as erstwhile the discarded pottery, and without losing in the least
the gracious tanagrine outline.

And then there are the great tourist boats of the Agencies, which are
here in abundance, for Assouan has the privilege of being the terminus
of the line; and their whistlings, their revolving motors, their
electric dynamos maintain from morning till night a captivating
symphony. It might be urged perhaps against these structures that they
resemble a little the washhouses on the Seine; but the Agencies,
desirous of restoring to them a certain local colour, have given them
names so notoriously Egyptian that one is reduced to silence. They are
called Sesostris, Amenophis or Ramses the Great.

And finally there are the rowing boats, which carry passengers
incessantly backwards and forwards between the river-banks. So long as
the season remains at its height they are bedecked with a number of
little flags of red cotton-cloth, or even of simple paper. The rowers,
moreover, have been instructed to sing all the time the native songs
which are accompanied by a derboucca player seated in the prow. Nay,
they have even learnt to utter that rousing, stimulating cry which
Anglo-Saxons use to express their enthusiasm or their joy: "Hip! Hip!
Hurrah!" and you cannot conceive how well it sounds, coming between
the Arab songs, which otherwise might be apt to grow monotonous.

*****

But the triumph of Assouan is its desert. It begins at once without
transition as soon as you pass the close-cropped turf of the last
square. A desert which, except for the railroad and the telegraph
poles, has all the charm of the real thing: the sand, the chaos of
overthrown stones, the empty horizons--everything, in short, save the
immensity and infinite solitude, the horror, in a word which formerly
made it so little desirable. It is a little astonishing, it must be
owned, to find, on arriving there, that the rocks have been carefully
numbered in white paint, and in some cases marked with a large cross
"which catches the eye from a greater distance still"(sic). But I
agree that the effect of the whole has lost nothing.

In the morning before the sun gets too hot, between breakfast and
luncheon to be precise, all the good ladies in cork helmets and blue
spectacles (dark-coloured spectacles are recommended on account of the
glare) spread themselves over these solitudes, domesticated as it were
to their use, with as much security as in Trafalgar Square or
Kensington Gardens. Not seldom even you may see one of them making her
way alone, book in hand, towards one of the picturesque rocks--No.
363, for example, or No. 364, if you like it better--which seems to be
making signs to her with its white ticket, in a manner which, to the
uninitiated observer, might seem even a little improper.

But what a sense of safety families may feel here, to be sure! In
spite of the huge numbers, which at first sight look a little
equivocal, nothing in the least degree reprehensible can happen among
these granites; which are, moreover, in a single piece, without the
least crack or hole into which the straggler could contrive to crawl.
No. The figures and the crosses denote simple blocks of stones,
covered with hieroglyphics, and correspond to a chaste catalogue where
each Pharaonic inscription may be found translated in the most
becoming language.

This ingenious ticketing of the stones of the desert is due to the
initiative of an English Egyptologist.



CHAPTER XX

THE PASSING OF PHILAE

Leaving Assouan--as soon as we have passed the last house--we come at
once upon the desert. And now the night is falling, a cold February
night, under a strange, copper-coloured sky.

Incontestably it is the desert, with its chaos of granite and sand,
its warm tones and reddish colour. But there are telegraph poles and
the lines of a railroad, which traverse it in company, and disappear
in the empty horizon. And then too how paradoxical and ridiculous it
seems to be travelling here on full security and in a carriage! (The
most commonplace of hackney-carriages, which I hired by the hour on
the quay of Assouan.) A desert indeed which preserves still its
aspects of reality, but has become domesticated and tamed for the use
of the tourists and the ladies.

First, immense cemeteries surrounded by sand at the beginning of these
quasi-solitudes. Such old cemeteries of every epoch of history. The
thousand little cupolas of saints of Islam are crumbling side by side
with the Christian obelisks of the first centuries; and, underneath,
the Pharaonic hypogea. In the twilight, all these ruins of the dead,
all the scattered blocks of granite are mingled in mournful groupings,
outlined in fantastic silhouette against the pale copper of the sky;
broken arches, tilted domes, and rocks that rise up like tall
phantoms.

Farther on, when we have left behind this region of tombs, the
granites alone litter the expanse of sand, granites to which the usury
of centuries has given the form of huge round beasts. In places they
have been thrown one upon the other and make great heaps of monsters.
Elsewhere they lie alone among the sands, as if lost in the midst of
the infinitude of some dead sea-shore. The rails and the telegraph
poles have disappeared; by the magic of twilight everything is become
grand again, beneath one of those evening skies of Egypt which, in
winter, resemble cold cupolas of metal. And now it is that you feel
yourself verily on the threshold of the profound desolations of
Arabia, from which no barrier, after all separates you. Were it not
for the lack of verisimilitude in the carriage that has brought us
hither, we should be able now to take this desert quite seriously--for
in fact it has no limits.

After travelling for about three-quarters of an hour, we see in the
distance a number of lights, which have already been kindled in the
growing darkness. They seem too bright to be those of an Arab
encampment. And our driver turning round and pointing to them says:
"Chelal!"

Chelal--that is the name of the Arab village, on the riverside, where
you take the boat for Philae. To our disgust the place is lighted by
electricity. It consists of a station, a factory with a long smoking
chimney, and a dozen or so suspicious-looking taverns, reeking of
alcohol, without which, it would seem, our European civilisation could
not implant itself in a new country.

And here we embark for Philae. A number of boats are ready: for the
tourists allured by many advertisements flock hither every winter in
docile herds. All the boats, without a single exception, are profusely
decorated with little English flags, as if for some regatta on the
Thames. There is no escape therefore from this beflagging of a foreign
holiday--and we set out with a homesick song of Nubia, which the
boatmen sing to the cadence of the oars.

The copper-coloured heaven remains so impregnated with cold light that
we still see clearly. We are amid magnificent tragic scenery on a lake
surrounded by a kind of fearful amphitheatre outlined on all sides by
the mountains of the desert. It was at the bottom of this granite
circus that the Nile used to flow, forming fresh islets, on which the
eternal verdure of the palm-trees contrasted with the high desolate
mountains that surrounded it like a wall. To-day, on account of the
barrage established by the English, the water has steadily risen, like
a tide that will never recede; and this lake, almost a little sea,
replaces the meanderings of the river and has succeeded in submerging
the sacred islets. The sanctuary of Isis--which was enthroned for
thousands of years on the summit of a hill, crowded with temples and
colonnades and statues--still half emerges; but it is alone and will
soon go the way of the others, There it is, beyond, like a great rock,
at this hour in which the night begins to obscure everything.

Nowhere but in Upper Egypt have the winter nights these transparencies
of absolute emptiness nor these sinister colourings. As the light
gradually fails, the sky passes from copper to bronze, but remains
always metallic. The zenith becomes brownish like a brazen shield,
while the setting sun alone retains its yellow colour, growing slowly
paler till it is almost of the whiteness of latten; and, above, the
mountains of the desert edge their sharp outlines with a tint of burnt
sienna. To-night a freezing wind blows fiercely in our faces. To the
continual chant of the rowers we pass slowly over the artificial lake,
which is upheld as it were in the air by the English masonry,
invisible now in the distance, but divined nevertheless and revolting.
A sacrilegious lake one might call it, since it hides beneath its
troubled waters ruins beyond all price; temples of the gods of Egypt,
churches of the first centuries of Christianity, obelisks,
inscriptions and emblems. It is over these things that we now pass,
while the spray splashes in our faces, and the foam of a thousand
angry little billows.

We draw near to what was once the holy isle. In places dying palm-
trees, whose long trunks are to-day under water, still show their
moistened plumes and give an appearance of inundation, almost of
cataclysm.

Before coming to the sanctuary of Isis, we touch at the kiosk of
Philae, which has been reproduced in the pictures of every age, and is
as celebrated even as the Sphinx and the pyramids. It used to stand on
a pedestal of high rocks, and around it the date-trees swayed their
bouquets of aerial palms. To-day it has no longer a base; its columns
rise separately from this kind of suspended lake. It looks as if it
had been constructed in the water for the purpose of some royal
naumachy. We enter with our boat--a strange port indeed, in its
ancient grandeur; a port of a nameless melancholy, particularly at
this yellow hour of the closing twilight, and under these icy winds
that come to us mercilessly from the neighbouring deserts. And yet how
adorable it is, this kiosk of Philae, in this the abandonment that
precedes its downfall! Its columns placed, as it were, upon something
unstable, become thereby more slender, seem to raise higher still the
stone foliage of their capitals. A veritable kiosk of dreamland now,
which one feels is about to disappear for ever under these waters
which will subside no more!

And now, for another few moments, it grows quite light again, and
tints of a warmer copper reappear in the sky. Often in Egypt when the
sun has set and you think the light is gone, this furtive recoloration
of the air comes thus to surprise you, before the darkness finally
descends. The reddish tints seem to return to the slender shafts that
surround us, and also, beyond, to the temple of the goddess, standing
there like a sheer rock in the middle of this little sea, which the
wind covers with foam.

On leaving the kiosk our boat--on this deep usurping water, among the
submerged palm-trees--makes a detour in order to lead us to the temple
by the road which the pilgrims of olden times used to travel on foot--
by that way which, a little while ago, was still magnificent, bordered
with colonnades and statues. But now the road is entirely submerged,
and will never be seen again. Between its double row of columns the
water lifts us to the height of the capitals, which alone emerge and
which we could touch with our hands. It seems like some journey of the
end of time, in a kind of deserted Venice, which is about to topple
over, to sink and be forgotten.

We arrive at the temple. Above our heads rise the enormous pylons,
ornamented with figures in bas-relief: an Isis who stretches out her
arms as if she were making signs to us, and numerous other divinities
gesticulating mysteriously. The door which opens in the thickness of
these walls is low, besides being half flooded, and gives on to depths
already in darkness. We row on and enter the sanctuary, and as soon as
one boat has crossed the sacred threshold the boatmen stop their song
and suddenly give voice to the new cry that has been taught them for
the benefit of the tourists: "Hip! Hip! Hip! Hurrah!" Coming at this
moment, when, with heart oppressed by all the utilitarian vandalism
that surrounds us, we were entering the sanctuary, what an effect of
gross and imbecile profanation this bellowing of English joy produces!
The boatmen know, moreover, that they have been displaced, that their
day has gone for ever; perhaps even, in the depths of their Nubian
souls, they understand us, for all that we have imposed silence on
them. The darkness increases within, although the place is open to the
sky, and the icy wind blows more mournfully than it did outside. A
penetrating humidity--a humidity altogether unknown in this country
before the inundation--chills us to the bone. We are now in that part
of the temple which was left uncovered, the part where the faithful
used to kneel. The sonority of the granites round about exaggerates
the noise of the oars on the enclosed water, and there is something
confusing in the thought that we are rowing and floating between the
walls where formerly, and for centuries, men were used to prostrate
themselves with their foreheads on the stones.

And now it is quite dark; the hour grows late. We have to bring the
boat close to the walls to distinguish the hieroglyphs and rigid gods
which are engraved there as finely as by the burin. These walls,
washed for nearly four years by the inundation, have already taken on
at the base that sad blackish colour which may be seen on the old
Venetian palaces.

Halt and silence. It is dark and cold. The oars no longer move, and we
hear only the sighing of the wind and the lapping of the water against
the columns and the bas-reliefs--and then suddenly there comes the
noise of a heavy body falling, followed by endless eddies. A great
carved stone has plunged, at its due hour, to rejoin in the black
chaos below its fellows that have already disappeared, to rejoin the
submerged temples and old Coptic churches, and the town of the first
Christian centuries--all that was once the Isle of Philae, the "pearl
of Egypt," one of the marvels of the world.

The darkness is now extreme and we can see no longer. Let us go and
shelter, no matter where, to await the moon. At the end of this
uncovered hall there opens a door which gives on to deep night. It is
the holy of holies, heavily roofed with granite, the highest part of
the temple, the only part which the waters have not yet reached, and
there we are able to put foot to earth. Our footsteps resound noisily
on the large resonant flags, and the owls take to flight. Profound
darkness; the wind and the dampness freeze us. Three hours to go
before the rising of the moon; to wait in this place would be our
death. Rather let us return to Chelal, and shelter ourselves in any
lodging that offers, however wretched it may be.

*****

A tavern of the horrible village in the light of an electric lamp. It
reeks of absinthe, this desert tavern, in which we warm ourselves at a
little smoking fire. It has been hastily built of old tin boxes, of
the debris of whisky cases, and by way of mural decoration the
landlord, an ignorant Maltese, has pasted everywhere pictures cut from
our European pornographic newspapers. During our hours of waiting,
Nubians and Arabians follow one another hither, asking for drink, and
are supplied with brimming glassfuls of our alcoholic beverages. They
are the workers in the new factories who were formerly healthy beings,
living in the open air. But now their faces are stained with coal
dust, and their haggard eyes look unhappy and ill.

*****

The rising of the moon is fortunately at hand. Once more in our boat
we make our way slowly towards the sad rock which to-day is Philae.
The wind has fallen with the night, as happens almost invariably in
this country in winter, and the lake is calm. To the mournful yellow
sky has succeeded one that is blue-black, infinitely distant, where
the stars of Egypt scintillate in myriads.

A great glimmering light shows now in the east and at length the full
moon rises, not blood-coloured as in our climates but straightway very
luminous, and surrounded by an aureole of a kind of mist, caused by
the eternal dust of the sands. And when we return to the baseless
kiosk--lulled always by the Nubian song of the boatmen--a great disc
is already illuminating everything with a gentle splendour. As our
little boat winds in and out, we see the great ruddy disc passing and
repassing between the high columns, so striking in their archaism,
whose images are repeated in the water, that is now grown calm--more
than ever a kiosk of dreamland, a kiosk of old-world magic.

In returning to the temple of the goddess, we follow for a second time
the submerged road between the capitals and friezes of the colonnade
which emerge like a row of little reefs.

In the uncovered hall which forms the entrance to the temple, it is
still dark between the sovereign granites. Let us moor our boat
against one of the walls and await the good pleasure of the moon. As
soon as she shall have risen high enough to cast her light here, we
shall see clearly.

It begins by a rosy glimmer on the summit of the pylons; and then
takes the form of a luminous triangle, very clearly defined, which
grows gradually larger on the immense wall. Little by little it
descends towards the base of the temple, revealing to us by degrees
the intimidating presence of the bas-reliefs, the gods, goddesses and
hieroglyphs, and the assemblies of people who make signs among
themselves. We are no longer alone--a whole world of phantoms has been
evoked around us by the moon, some little, some very large. They had
been hiding there in the shadow and now suddenly they recommence their
mute conversations, without breaking the profound silence, using only
their expressive hands and raised fingers. And now also the colossal
Isis begins to appear--the one carved on the left of the portico by
which you enter; first, her refined head with its bird's helmet,
surmounted by a solar disc; then, as the light continues to descend,
her neck and shoulders, and her arm, raised to make who knows what
mysterious, indicating sign; and finally the slim nudity of her torso,
and her hips close bound in a sheath. Behold her now, the goddess,
come completely out of the shadow. . . . But she seems surprised and
disturbed at seeing at her feet, instead of the stones she had known
for two thousand years, her own likeness, a reflection of herself,
that stretches away, reversed in the mirror of the water. . . .

And suddenly, in the mist of the deep nocturnal calm of this temple,
isolated here in the lake, comes again the sound of a kind of mournful
booming, of things that topple, precious stones that become detached
and fall--and then, on the surface of the lake, a thousand concentric
circles form, close one another and disappear, ruffling indefinitely
this mirror embanked between the terrible granites, in which Isis
regards herself sorrowfully.

/Postscript./--The submerging of Philae, as we know, has increased by
no less than seventy-five millions of pounds the annual yield of the
surrounding land. Encouraged by this success, the English propose next
year to raise the barrage of the Nile another twenty feet. As a
consequence this sanctuary of Isis will be completely submerged, the
greater part of the ancient temples of Nubia will be under water, and
fever will infect the country. But, on the other hand, the cultivation
of cotton will be enormously facilitated. . . .





End of Project Gutenberg Etext of Egypt (La Mort De Philae), by Pierre Loti

