Warner Charles Dudley
My Winter on the Nile
A large barge lies here waiting for a steamboat to tow it to Keneh. It is crowded, packed solidly, with young fellows who have been conscripted for the army, so that it looks like a floating hulk covered by a gigantic swarm of black bees. And they are all buzzing in a continuous hum, as if the queen bee had not arrived. On the shore are circles of women, seated in the sand, wailing and mourning as if for the dead—the mothers and wives of the men who have just been seized for the service of their country. We all respect grief, and female grief above all; but these women enter into grief as if it were a pleasure, and appear to enjoy it. If the son of one of the women in the village is conscripted, all the women join in with her in mourning.
I presume there are many hard cases of separation, and that there is real grief enough in the scene before us. The expression of it certainly is not wanting; relays of women relieve those who have wailed long enough; and I see a little clay hut into which the women go, I have no doubt for refreshments, and from which issues a burst of sorrow every time the door opens.
Yet I suppose that there is no doubt that the conscription (much as I hate the trade of the soldier) is a good thing for the boys and men drafted, and for Egypt. Shakirr Pasha told us that this is the first conscription in fifteen years, and that it does not take more than two per cent, of the men liable to military duty—one or two from a village. These lumpish and ignorant louts are put for the first time in their lives under discipline, are taught to obey; they learn to read and write, and those who show aptness and brightness have an opportunity, in the technical education organized by General Stone, to become something more than common soldiers. When these men have served their time and return to their villages, they will bring with them some ideas of the world and some habits of discipline and subordination. It is probably the speediest way, this conscription, by which the dull cloddishness of Egypt can be broken up. I suppose that in time we shall discover something better, but now the harsh discipline of the military service is often the path by which a nation emerges into a useful career.
Leaving this scene of a woe over which it is easy to be philosophical—the raw recruits, in good spirits, munching black bread on the barge while the women howl on shore—we celebrate the night of the New Year by sailing on, till presently the breeze fails us, when it is dark; the sailors get out the small anchor forward, and the steersman calmly lets the sail jibe, and there is a shock, a prospect of shipwreck, and a great tumult, everybody commanding, and no one doing anything to prevent the boat capsizing or stranding. It is exactly like boys’ play, but at length we get out of the tangle, and go on, Heaven knows how, with much pushing and hauling, and calling upon “Allah” and “Mohammed.”
No. We are not going on, but fast to the bottom, near the shore.
In the morning we are again tracking with an occasional puff of wind, and not more than ten miles from Luxor. We can, however, outwalk the boat; and we find the country very attractive and surprisingly rich; the great fields of wheat, growing rank, testify to the fertility of the soil, and when the fields are dotted with palm-trees the picture is beautiful.
It is a scene of wide cultivation, teeming with an easy, ragged, and abundant life. The doleful sakiyas are creaking in their ceaseless labor; frequent mud-villages dot with brown the green expanse, villages abounding in yellow dogs and coffee-colored babies; men are working in the fields, directing the irrigating streams, digging holes for melons and small vegetables, and plowing. The plow is simply the iron-pointed stick that has been used so long, and it scratches the ground five or six inches deep. The effort of the government to make the peasants use a modern plow, in the Delta, failed. Besides the wheat, we find large cotton-fields, the plant in yellow blossoms, and also ripening, and sugar-cane. With anything like systematic, intelligent agriculture, what harvests this land would yield.
“Good morning!”
The words were English, the speaker was one of two eager Arabs, who had suddenly appeared at our side.
“Good morning. O, yes. Me guide Goorna.”
“What is Goorna?”
“Yes. Temp de Goorna. Come bime by.”
“What is Goorna?”
“Plenty. I go you. You want buy any antiques? Come bime by.”
“Do you live in Goorna?”
“All same. Memnonium, Goorna, I show all gentlemens. Me guide. Antiques! O plenty. Come bime by.”
Come Bime By’s comrade, an older man, loped along by his side, unable to join in this intelligent conversation, but it turned out that he was the real guide, and all the better in that he made no pretence of speaking any English.
“Can you get us a mummy, a real one, in the original package, that hasn’t been opened?”
“You like. Come plenty mummy. Used be. Not now. You like, I get. Come bime by, bookra.”
We are in fact on the threshold of great Thebes. These are two of the prowlers among its sepulchres, who have spied our dahabeeh approaching from the rocks above the plain, and have come to prey on us. They prey equally upon the living and the dead, but only upon the dead for the benefit of the living. They try to supply the demand which we tourists create. They might themselves be content to dwell in the minor tombs, in the plain, out of which the dead were long ago ejected; but Egyptologists have set them the example and taught them the profit of digging. If these honest fellows cannot always find the ancient scarabæi and the vases we want, they manufacture very good imitations of them. So that their industry is not altogether so ghastly as it may appear.
We are at the north end of the vast plain upon which Thebes stood; and in the afternoon we land, and go to visit the northernmost ruin on the west bank, the Temple of Koorneh (Goorneh), a comparatively modern structure, begun by Sethi I., a great warrior and conqueror of the nineteenth dynasty, before the birth of Moses.
CHAPTER XV.—AMONG THE RUINS OF THEBES
YOU need not fear that you are to have inflicted upon you a description of Thebes, its ruins of temples, its statues, obelisks, pylons, tombs, holes in the ground, mummy-pits and mounds, with an attempt to reconstruct the fabric of its ancient splendor, and present you, gratis, the city as it was thirty-five hundred years ago, when Egypt was at the pinnacle of her glory, the feet of her kings were on the necks of every nation, and this, her capital, gorged with the spoils of near and distant maraudings, the spectator of triumph succeeding triumph, the depot of all that was precious in the ancient world, at once a treasure-house and a granary, ruled by an aristocracy of cruel and ostentatious soldiers and crafty and tyrannical priests, inhabited by abject Egyptians and hordes of captive slaves—was abandoned to a sensuous luxury rivaling that of Rome in her days of greatest wealth and least virtue in man or woman.
I should like to do it, but you would go to sleep before you were half through it, and forget to thank the cause of your comfortable repose. We can see, however, in a moment, the unique situation of the famous town.
We shall have to give up, at the outset, the notion of Homer’s “hundred-gated Thebes.” It is one of his generosities of speech. There never were any walls about Thebes, and it never needed any; if it had any gates they must have been purely ornamental structures; and perhaps the pylons of the many temples were called gates. If Homer had been more careful in the use of his epithets he would have saved us a deal of trouble.
Nature prepared a place here for a vast city. The valley of the Nile, narrow above and below, suddenly spreads out into a great circular plain, the Arabian and Libyan ranges of mountains falling back to make room for it. In the circle of these mountains, which are bare masses of limestone, but graceful and bold in outline, lies the plain, with some undulation of surface, but no hills: the rim of the setting is grey, pink, purple, according to the position of the sun; the enclosure is green as the emerald. The Nile cuts this plain into two unequal parts. The east side is the broader, and the hills around it are neither so near the stream nor so high as the Libyan range.
When the Nile first burst into this plain it seems to have been undecided what course to take through it. I think it has been undecided ever since, and has wandered about, shifting from bluff to bluff, in the long ages. Where it enters, its natural course would be under the eastern hills, and there, it seems to me, it once ran. Now, however, it sweeps to the westward, leaving the larger portion of the plain on the right bank.
The situation is this: on the east side of the river are the temple of Luxor on a slight elevation and the modern village built in and around it; a mile and a half below and further from the river, are the vast ruins of Karnak; two or three miles north-east of Karnak are some isolated columns and remains of temples. On the west side of the river is the great necropolis. The crumbling Libyan hills are pierced with tombs. The desert near them is nothing but a cemetery. In this desert are the ruins of the great temples, Medeenet Hâboo, Dayr el Bahree, the Memnonium (or Rameseum, built by Rameses IL, who succeeded in affixing his name to as many things in Egypt as Michael Angelo did in Italy), the temple of Koorneh, and several smaller ones. Advanced out upon the cultivated plain a mile or so from the Memnonium, stand the two Colossi. Over beyond the first range of Libyan hills, or precipices, are the Tombs of the Kings, in a wild gorge, approached from the north by a winding sort of canon, a defile so hot and savage that a mummy passing through it couldn’t have had much doubt of the place he was going to.
The ancient city of Thebes spread from its cemetery under and in the Libyan hills, over the plain beyond Ivarnak. Did the Nile divide that city? Or did the Nile run under the eastern bluff and leave the plain and city one?
It is one of the most delightful questions in the world, for no one knows anything about it, nor ever can know. Why, then, discuss it? Is it not as important as most of the questions we discuss? What, then, would become of learning and scholarship, if we couldn’t dispute about the site of Troy, and if we all agreed that the temple of Pandora Regina was dedicated to Neptune and not to Jupiter? I am for united Thebes.
Let the objector consider. Let him stand upon one of the terraces of Dayr el Bahree, and casting his eye over the plain and the Nile in a straight line to Ivarnak, notice the conformity of directions of the lines of both temples, and that their avenues of sphinxes produced would have met; and let him say whether he does not think they did meet.
Let the objector remember that the Colossi, which now stand in an alluvial soil that buries their bases over seven feet and is annually inundated, were originally on the hard sand of the desert; and that all the arable land of the west side has been made within a period easily reckoned; that every year adds to it the soil washed from the eastern bank.
Farther, let him see how rapidly the river is eating away the bank at Luxor; wearing its way back again, is it not? to the old channel under the Arabian bluff, which is still marked. The temple at Luxor is only a few rods from the river. The English native consul, who built his house between the pillars of the temple thirty years ago, remembers that, at that time, he used to saddle his donkey whenever he wanted to go to the river. Observation of the land and stream above, at Erment, favors the impression that the river once ran on the east side and that it is working its way back to the old channel.
The village of Erment is about eight miles above Luxor, and on the west side of the river. An intelligent Arab at Luxor told me that one hundred and fifty years ago Erment was on the east side. It is an ancient village, and boasts ruins; among the remaining sculptures is an authentic portrait of Cleopatra, who appears to have sat to all the stone-cutters in Upper Egypt. Here then is an instance of the Nile going round a town instead of washing it away.
One thing more: Karnak is going to tumble into a heap some day, Great Hall of Columns and all. It is slowly having its foundations sapped by inundations and leachings from the Nile. Now, does it stand to reason that Osirtasen, who was a sensible king and a man of family; that the Thothmes people, and especially Hatasoo Thothmes, the woman who erected the biggest obelisk ever raised; and that the vain Rameses II., who spent his life in an effort to multiply his name and features in stone, so that time couldn’t rub them out, would have spent so much money in structures that the Nile was likely to eat away in three or four thousand years?
The objector may say that the bed of the Nile has risen; and may ask how the river got over to the desert of the west side without destroying Karnak on its way. There is Erment, for an example.
Have you now any idea of the topography of the plain? I ought to say that along the western bank, opposite Luxor, stretches a long sand island joined to the main, in low water, and that the wide river is very shallow on the west side.
We started for Koorneh across a luxuriant wheat-field, but soon struck the desert and the debris of the old city. Across the river, we had our first view of the pillars of Luxor and the pylons of Karnak, sights to heat the imagination and set the blood dancing. But how far off they are; on what a grand scale this Thebes is laid out—if one forgets London and Paris and New York.
The desert we pass over is full of rifled tombs, hewn horizontally in rocks that stand above the general level. Some of them are large chambers, with pillars left for support. The doors are open and the sand drifts in and over the rocks in which they are cut. A good many of them are inhabited by miserable Arabs, who dwell in them and in huts among them. I fancy that, if the dispossessed mummies should reappear, they would differ little, except perhaps in being better clad, from these bony living persons who occupy and keep warm their sepulchres.
Our guide leads us at a lively pace through these holes and heaps of the dead, over sand hot to the feet, under a sky blue and burning, for a mile and a half. He is the first Egyptian I have seen who can walk. He gets over the ground with a sort of skipping lope, barefooted, and looks not unlike a tough North American Indian. As he swings along, holding his thin cotton robe with one hand, we feel as if we were following a shade despatched to conduct us to some Unhappy Hunting-Grounds.
Near the temple are some sycamore-trees and a collection of hovels called Koorneh, inhabited by a swarm of ill-conditioned creatures, who are not too proud to beg and probably are not ashamed to steal. They beset us there and in the ruins to buy all manner of valuable antiquities, strings of beads from mummies, hands and legs of mummies, small green and blue images, and the like, and raise such a clamor of importunity that one can hold no communion, if he desires to, with the spirits of Sethi I., and his son Rameses II., who spent the people’s money in erecting these big columns and putting the vast stones on top of them.
We are impressed with the massiveness and sombreness of the Egyptian work, but this temple is too squat to be effective, and is scarcely worth visiting, in comparison with others, except for its sculptures. Inside and out it is covered with them; either the face of the stone cut away, leaving the figures in relief, or the figures are cut in at the sides and left in relief in the center. The rooms are small—from the necessary limitations of roof-stones that stretched from wall to wall, or from column to column; but all the walls, in darkness or in light, are covered with carving.
The sculptures are all a glorification of the Pharaohs. We should like to know the unpronounceable names of the artists, who, in the conventional limits set them by their religion, drew pictures of so much expression and figures so life-like, and chiseled these stones with such faultless execution; but there are no names here but of Pharaoh and of the gods.
The king is in battle, driving his chariot into the thick of the fight; the king crosses rivers, destroys walled cities, routs armies the king appears in a triumphal procession with chained captives, sacks of treasure, a menagerie of beasts, and a garden of exotic trees and plants borne from conquered countries; the king is making offerings to his predecessors, or to gods many, hawk-headed, cow-headed, ibis-headed, man-headed. The king’s scribe is taking count of the hands, piled in a heap, of the men the king has slain in battle. The king, a gigantic figure, the height of a pylon, grasps by the hair of the head a bunch of prisoners, whom he is about to slay with a raised club—as one would cut off the tops of a handful of radishes.
There is a vein of “Big Injun” running through them all. The same swagger and boastfulness, and cruelty to captives. I was glad to see one woman in the mythic crowd, doing the generous thing: Isis, slim and pretty, offers her breast to her son, and Horus stretches up to the stone opportunity and takes his supper like a little gentleman. And there is color yet in her cheek and robe that was put on when she was thirty-five hundred years younger than she is now.
Towards the south we saw the more extensive ruins of the Memnonium and, more impressive still, the twin Colossi, one of them the so-called vocal statue of Memnon, standing up in the air against the evening sky more than a mile distant. They rose out of a calm green plain of what seemed to be wheat, but which was a field of beans. The friendly green about them seemed to draw them nearer to us in sympathy. At this distance we could not see how battered they were. And the unspeakable calm of these giant figures, sitting with hands on knees, fronting the east, like the Sphinx, conveys the same impression of lapse of time and of endurance that the pyramids give.
The sunset, as we went back across the plain, was gorgeous in vermilion, crimson, and yellow. The Colossi dominated the great expanse, and loomed up in the fading light like shapes out of the mysterious past.
Our dahabeëh had crept up to the east side of the island, and could only be reached by passing through sand and water. A deep though not wide channel of the Nile ran between us and the island. We were taken over this in a deep tub of a ferryboat. Laboriously wading through the sand and plowed fields of the island, we found our boat anchored in the stream, and the shore so shallow that even the sandal could not land. The sailors took us off to the row-boat on their backs.
In the evening the dahabeëh is worked across and secured to the crumbling bank of the Luxor. And the accomplishment of a voyage of four hundred and fifty miles in sixteen days is, of course, announced by rockets.
CHAPTER XVI.—HISTORY IN STONE
IT NEVER rains at Thebes; you begin with that fact. But everybody is anxious to have it rain, so that he can say, “It rained when I was at Thebes, for the first time in four thousand years.”
It has not rained for four thousand years, and the evidence of this is that no representation of rain is found in any of the sculptures on temples or monuments; and all Egyptologists know that what is not found thus represented has had no existence.
To-day, it rained for the first time in four thousand years The circumstances were these. We were crossing at sunset from the west side to the island, in a nasty little ferry, built like a canal-barge, its depths being full of all uncleanliness and smell—donkeys, peasants, and camels using it for crossing. (The getting of a camel in and out of such a deep trough is a work of time and considerable pounding and roaring of beast and men.) The boat was propelled by two half-clad, handsome, laughing Egyptian boys, who rowed with some crooked limbs of trees, and sang “Hà! Yâlesah,” and “Yah! Mohammed” as they stood and pulled the unwieldy oars.
We were standing, above the reek, on a loose platform of sticks at the stern, when my comrade said, “It rains, I think I felt a drop on my hand.”
“It can’t be,” I said, “it has not rained here in four thousand years;” and I extended my hand. I felt nothing. And yet I could not swear that a drop or two did not fall into the river.
It had that appearance, nearly. And we have seen no flies skipping on the Nile at this season.
In the sculpture we remember that the king is often represented extending his hand. He would not put it out for nothing, for everything done anciently in Egypt, every scratch on a rock, has a deep and profound meaning. Pharaoh is in the attitude of fearing that it is going to rain. Perhaps it did rain last night. At any rate, there were light clouds over the sky.
The morning opens with a cool west wind, which increases and whirls the sand in great clouds over the Libyan side of the river, and envelopes Luxor in its dry storm. Luxor is for the most part a collection of miserable mud-hovels on a low ridge, with the half-buried temple for a nucleus, and a few houses of a better sort along the bank, from which float the consular flags.
The inhabitants of Luxor live upon the winter travelers. Sometimes a dozen or twenty gay dahabeëhs and several steamboats are moored here, and the town assumes the appearance of a fashionable watering-place. It is the best place on the river on the whole, considering its attractions for scholars and sightseers, to spend the winter, and I have no doubt it would be a great resort if it had any accommodations for visitors. But it has not; the stranger must live in his boat. There is not indeed in the whole land of Egypt above Cairo such a thing as an inn; scarcely a refuge where a clean Christian, who wishes to keep clean, can pass a night, unless it be in the house of some governor or a palace of the Khedive. The perfection of the world’s climate in winter is, to be sure, higher up, in Nubia; but that of Thebes is good enough for people accustomed to Europe and New England. With steamboats making regular trips and a railroad crawling up the river, there is certain to be the Rameses Hotel at Thebes before long, and its rival a Thothmes House; together with the Mummy Restaurant, and the Scarabæus Saloon.
You need two or three weeks to see properly the ruins of Thebes, though Cook’s “personally conducted tourists” do it in four days, and have a soiree of the dancing-girls besides. The region to be traveled over is not only vast (Strabo says the city was nine miles long) but it is exceedingly difficult getting about, and fatiguing, if haste is necessary. Crossing the swift Nile in a sandal takes time; you must wade or be carried over shallows to the island beach; there is a weary walk or ride over this; another stream is to be crossed, and then begins the work of the day. You set out with a cavalcade of mules, servants, water-carriers, and a retinue of hungry, begging Arabs, over the fields and through the desert to the temples and tombs. The distances are long, the sand is glaring, the incandescent sun is reflected in hot waves from the burning Libyan chain. It requires hours to master the plan of a vast temple in its ruins, and days to follow out the story of the wonderful people who built it, in its marvelous sculptures—acres of inside and outside walls of picture cut in stone.
Perhaps the easiest way of passing the time in an ancient ruin was that of two Americans, who used to spread their rugs in some shady court, and sit there, drinking brandy and champagne all day, letting the ancient civilization gradually reconstruct itself in their brains.
Life on the dahabeëh is much as usual; in fact, we are only waiting a favorable wind to pursue our voyage, expecting to see Thebes satisfactorily on our return. Of the inhabitants and social life of Luxor, we shall have more to say by and by. We have daily a levee of idlers on the bank, who spend twilight hours in watching the boat; we are visited by sharp-eyed dealers in antiquities, who pull out strings of scarabæi from their bosoms, or cautiously produce from under their gowns a sculptured tablet, or a stone image, or some articles from a mummy-case—antiques really as good as new. Abd-el-Atti sits on the forward-deck cheapening the poor chickens with old women, and surrounded by an admiring group of Arab friends, who sit all day smoking and sipping coffee, and kept in a lively enjoyment by his interminable facetiae and badinage.
Our most illustrious visitors are the American consul, Ali Effendi Noorad, and the English consul, Mustapha Aga. Ali is a well-featured, bronze-complexioned Arab of good family (I think of the Ababdehs), whose brother is Sheykh of a tribe at Karnak.
He cannot speak English, but he has a pleasanter smile than any other American consul I know. Mustapha, now very old and well known to all Nile travelers, is a venerable wise man of the East, a most suave, courtly Arab, plausible, and soft of speech; under his bushy eyebrows one sees eyes that are keen and yet glazed with a film of secrecy; the sort of eye that you cannot look into, but which you have no doubt looks into you.
Mustapha, as I said, built his house between two columns of the temple of Luxor. These magnificent columns, with flaring lotus capitals, are half-buried in sand, and the whole area is so built in and over by Arab habitations that little of the once extensive and splendid structure can be seen. Indeed, the visitor will do well to be content with the well-known poetic view of the columns from the river. The elegant obelisk, whose mate is in Paris, must however be seen, as well as the statues of Rameses II. sitting behind it up to their necks in sand—as if a sitz-bath had been prescribed. I went one day into the interior of the huts, in order to look at some of the sculptures, especially that of a king’s chariot which is shaded by a parasol—an article which we invented three or four thousand years after the Egyptians, who first used it, had gone to the shades where parasols are useless. I was sorry that I went. The private house I entered was a mud enclosure with a creaky wooden door. Opening this I found myself in what appeared to be a private hen-yard, where babies, chickens, old women, straw, flies, and dust, mingled with the odors of antiquity; about this were the rooms in which the family sleep—mere dog-kennels. Two of the women had nose-rings put through the right nostril, hoops of gold two or three inches across. I cannot say that a nose-ring adds to a woman’s beauty, but if I had to manage a harem of these sharp-tongued creatures I should want rings in their noses—it would need only a slight pull of the cord in the ring to cause the woman to cry, in Oriental language, “where thou goest, I will go.” The parasol sculpture was half-covered by the mud-wall and the oven; but there was Pharaoh visible, riding on in glory through all this squalor. The Pharaohs and priests never let one of the common people set foot inside these superb temples; and there is a sort of base satisfaction now! in seeing the ignorant and oppressed living in their palaces, and letting the hens roost on Pharaoh’s sun-shade. But it was difficult to make picturesque the inside of this temple-palace, even with all the flowing rags of its occupants.
We spend a day in a preliminary visit to the Memnonium and the vast ruins known as those of Medeenet Hâboo. Among our attendants over the plain are half a dozen little girls, bright, smiling lasses, who salute us with a cheery “Good morning,” and devote themselves to us the whole day. Each one carries on her head a light, thin water-koolleh, that would hold about a quart, balancing it perfectly as she runs along. I have seen mere infants carrying very small koollehs, beginning thus young to learn the art of walking with the large ones, which is to be the chief business of their lives.
One of the girls, who says her name is Fatimeh (the name of the Prophet’s favorite daughter is in great request), is very pretty, and may be ten or eleven years old, not far from the marriageable age. She has black hair, large, soft, black eyes, the lids stained with kohl, dazzling white teeth and a sweet smile. She wears cheap earrings, a necklace of beads and metal, and a slight ring on one hand; her finger-nails and the palms of her little hands are stained with henna. For dress she has a sort of shawl used as a head-veil, and an ample outer-garment, a mantle of dark-blue cotton, ornamented down the front seams with colored beads—a coquettish touch that connects her with her sisters of the ancient régime who seem to have used the cylindrical blue bead even more profusely than ladies now-a-day the jet “bugles,” in dress trimming. I fear the pretty heathen is beginning to be aware of her attractions.
The girls run patiently beside us or wait for us at the temples all day, bruising their feet on the stony ways, getting nothing to eat unless we give them something, chatting cheerfully, smiling at us and using their little stock of English to gain our good will, constantly ready with their koollehs, and say nothing of backsheesh until they are about to leave us at night and go to their homes. But when they begin to ask, and get a copper or two, they beg with a mixture of pathos and anxiety and a use of the pronouns that is irresistible.
“You tired. Plenty backsheesh for little girl. Yes.”
“Why don’t you give us backsheesh? We are tired too,” we reply.
“Yes. Me give you backsheesh you tired all day.”
Fatimeh only uses her eyes, conscious already of her power. They are satisfied with a piastre; which the dragoman says is too much, and enough to spoil them. But, after all, five cents is not a magnificent gift, from a stranger who has come five thousand miles, to a little girl in the heart of Africa, who has lighted up the desert a whole day with her charming smiles!
