Warner Charles Dudley
My Winter on the Nile
CHAPTER XXIV.—GIANTS IN STONE
WHEN daylight came the Colossi of Aboo Simbel (or Ipsambool) were looking into our windows; greeting the sunrise as they have done every morning for three thousand five hundred years; and keeping guard still over the approach to the temple, whose gods are no longer anywhere recognized, whose religion disappeared from the earth two thousand years ago:—vast images, making an eternity of time in their silent waiting.
The river here runs through an unmitigated desert. On the east the sand is brown, on the west the sand is yellow; that is the only variety. There is no vegetation, there are no habitations, there is no path on the shore, there are no footsteps on the sand, no one comes to break the spell of silence. To find such a monument of ancient power and art as this temple in such a solitude enhances the visitor’s wonder and surprise. The Pyramids, Thebes, and Aboo Simbel are the three wonders of Egypt. But the great temple of Aboo Simbel is unique. It satisfies the mind. It is complete in itself, it is the projection of one creative impulse of genius. Other temples are growths, they have additions, afterthoughts, we can see in them the workings of many minds and many periods. This is a complete thought, struck out, you would say, at a heat.
In order to justify this opinion, I may be permitted a little detail concerning this temple, which impressed us all as much as anything in Egypt. There are two temples here, both close to the shore, both cut in the mountain of rock which here almost overhangs the stream. We need not delay to speak of the smaller one, although it would be wonderful, if it were not for the presence of the larger. Between the two was a rocky gorge. This is now nearly filled up, to the depth of a hundred feet, by the yellow sand that has drifted and still drifts over from the level of the desert hills above.
This sand, which drifts exactly like snow, lies in ridges like snow, and lies loose and sliding under the feet or packs hard like snow, once covered the façade of the big temple altogether, and now hides a portion of it. The entrance to the temple was first cleared away in 1817 by Belzoni and his party, whose gang of laborers worked eight hours a day for two weeks with the thermometer at 1120 to 1160 Fahrenheit in the shade—an almost incredible endurance when you consider what the heat must have been in the sun beating upon this dazzling wall of sand in front of them.
The rock in which the temple is excavated was cut back a considerable distance, but in this cutting the great masses were left which were to be fashioned into the four figures. The façade thus made, to which these statues are attached, is about one hundred feet high. The statues are seated on thrones with no intervening screens, and, when first seen, have the appearance of images in front of and detached from the rock of which they form a part. The statues are all tolerably perfect, except one, the head of which is broken and lies in masses at its feet; and at the time of our visit the sand covered the two northernmost to the knees. The door of entrance, over which is a hawk-headed figure of Re, the titular divinity, is twenty feet high. Above the colossi, and as a frieze over the curve of the cornice, is a row of monkeys, (there were twenty-one originally, but some are split away), like a company of negro minstrels, sitting and holding up their hands in the most comical manner. Perhaps the Egyptians, like the mediaeval cathedral builders, had a liking for grotesque effects in architecture; but they may have intended nothing comic here, for the monkey had sacred functions; he was an emblem of Thoth, the scribe of the under-world, who recorded the judgments of Osiris.
These colossi are the largest in the world3; they are at least fifteen feet higher than the wonders of Thebes, but it is not their size principally that makes their attraction. As works of art they are worthy of study. Seated, with hands on knees, in that eternal, traditional rigidity of Egyptian sculpture, nevertheless the grandeur of the head and the noble beauty of the face take them out of the category of mechanical works. The figures represent Rameses II. and the features are of the type which has come down to us as the perfection of Egyptian beauty.
I climbed up into the lap of one of the statues; it is there only that you can get an adequate idea of the size of the body. What a roomy lap! Nearly ten feet between the wrists that rest upon the legs! I sat comfortably in the navel of the statue, as in a niche, and mused on the passing of the nations. To these massive figures the years go by like the stream. With impassive, serious features, unchanged in expression in thousands of years, they sit listening always to the flowing of the unending Nile, that fills all the air and takes away from that awful silence which would else be painfully felt in this solitude.
The interior of this temple is in keeping with its introduction. You enter a grand hall supported by eight massive Osiride columns, about twenty-two feet high as we estimated them. They are figures of Rameses become Osiris—to be absorbed into Osiris is the end of all the transmigrations of the blessed soul. The expression of the faces of such of these statues as are uninjured, is that of immortal youth—a beauty that has in it the promise of immortality. The sides of this hall are covered with fine sculptures, mainly devoted to the exploits of Rameses II.; and here is found again, cut in the stone the long Poem of the poet Pentaour, celebrating the single-handed exploit of Rameses against the Khitas on the river Orontes. It relates that the king, whom his troops dared not follow, charged with his chariot alone into the ranks of the enemy and rode through them again and again, and slew them by hundreds. Rameses at that time was only twenty-three; it was his first great campaign. Pursuing the enemy, he overtook them in advance of his troops, and, rejecting the councils of his officers, began the fight at once. “The footmen and the horsemen then,” says the poet (the translator is M. de Rouge), “recoiled before the enemy who were masters of Kadesh, on the left bank of the Orontes.... Then his majesty, in the pride of his strength, rising up like the god Mauth, put on his fighting dress. Completely armed, he looked like Baal in the hour of his might. Urging on his chariot, he pushed into the army of the vile Khitas; he was alone, no one was with him. He was surrounded by 2,500 chariots, and the swiftest of the warriors of the vile Khitas, and of the numerous nations who accompanied them, threw themselves in his way.... Each chariot bore three men, and the king had with him neither princes nor generals, nor his captains of archers nor of chariots.”
Then Rameses calls upon Amun; he reminds him of the obelisk he has raised to him, the bulls he has slain for him:—“Thee, I invoke, O my Father! I am in the midst of a host of strangers, and no man is with me. My archers and horsemen have abandoned me; when I cried to them, none of them has heard, when I called for help. But I prefer Amun to thousands of millions of archers, to millions of horsemen, to millions of young heroes all assembled together. The designs of men are nothing, Amun overrules them.”
Needless to say the prayer was heard, the king rode slashing through the ranks of opposing chariots, slaying, and putting to rout the host. Whatever basis of fact the poem may have had in an incident of battle or in the result of one engagement, it was like one of Napoleon’s bulletins from Egypt. The Khitas were not subdued and, not many years after, they drove the Egyptians out of their land and from nearly all Palestine, forcing them, out of all their conquests, into the valley of the Nile itself. During the long reign of this Rameses, the power of Egypt steadily declined, while luxury increased and the nation was exhausted in building the enormous monuments which the king projected. The close of his pretentious reign has been aptly compared to that of Louis XIV.—a time of decadence; in both cases the great fabric was ripe for disaster.
But Rameses liked the poem of Pentaour. It is about as long as a book of the Iliad, but the stone-cutters of his reign must have known it by heart. He kept them carving it and illustrating it all his life, on every wall he built where there was room for the story. He never, it would seem, could get enough of it. He killed those vile Khitas a hundred times; he pursued them over all the stone walls in his kingdom. The story is told here at Ipsambool; it is carved in the Rameseum; the poem is graved on Luxor and Karnak.
Out of this great hall open eight other chambers, all more or less sculptured, some of them covered with well-drawn figures on which the color is still vivid. Two of these rooms are long and very narrow, with a bench running round the walls, the front of which is cut out so as to imitate seats with short pillars. In one are square niches, a foot deep, cut in the wall. The sculptures in one are unfinished, the hieroglyphics and figures drawn in black but not cut—some event having called off the artists and left their work incomplete We seem to be present at the execution of these designs, and so fresh are the colors ot those finished, that it seems it must have been only yesterday that the workman laid down the brush. (A small chamber in the rock outside the temple, which was only opened in 1874, is wonderful in the vividness of its colors; we see there better than anywhere else the colors of vestments.)
These chambers are not the least mysterious portion of this temple. They are in absolute darkness, and have no chance of ventilation. By what light was this elaborate carving executed? If people ever assembled in them, and sat on these benches, when lights were burning, how could they breathe? If they were not used, why should they have been so decorated? They would serve very well for the awful mysteries of the Odd Fellows. Perhaps they were used by the Free Masons in Solomon’s time.
Beyond the great hall is a transverse hall (having two small chambers off from it) with four square pillars, and from this a corridor leads to the adytum. Here, behind an altar of stone, sit four marred gods, facing the outer door, two hundred feet from it. They sit in a twilight that is only-brightened by rays that find their way in at the distant door; but at morning they can see, from the depth of their mountain cavern, the rising sun.
We climbed, up the yielding sand-drifts, to the top of the precipice in which the temple is excavated, and walked back to a higher ridge. The view from there is perhaps the best desert view on the Nile, more extensive and varied than that of Aboosir. It is a wide sweep of desolation. Up and down the river we see vast plains of sand and groups of black hills; to the west and north the Libyan desert extends with no limit to a horizon fringed with sharp peaks, like aiguilles of the Alps, that have an exact resemblance to a forest.
At night, we give the ancient deities a sort of Fourth of July, and illuminate the temple with colored lights. A blue-light burns upon the altar in the adytum before the four gods, who may seem in their penetralia to receive again the worship to which they were accustomed three thousand years ago. A green flame in the great hall brings out mysteriously the features of the gigantic Osiride, and revives the midnight glow of the ancient ceremonies. In the glare of torches and colored lights on the outside, the colossi loom in their gigantic proportions and cast grotesque shadows.
Imagine this temple as it appeared to a stranger initiated into the mysteries of the religion of the Pharaohs—a cultus in which the mathematical secrets of the Pyramid and the Sphinx, art and architecture, were wrapped in the same concealment with the problem of the destiny of the soul; when the colors on these processions of gods and heroes, upon these wars and pilgrimages sculptured in large on the walls, were all brilliant; when these chambers were gorgeously furnished, when the heavy doors that then hung in every passage, separating the different halls and apartments, only swung open to admit the neophyte to new and deeper mysteries, to halls blazing with light, where he stood in the presence of these appalling figures, and of hosts of priests and acolytes.
The temple of Aboo Simbel was built early in the reign of Rameses II., when art, under the impulse of his vigorous predecessors was in its flower, and before the visible decadence which befel it later under a royal patronage and “protection,” and in the demand for a wholesale production, which always reduces any art to mechanical conditions. It seemed to us about the finest single conception in Egypt. It must have been a genius of rare order and daring who evoked in this solid mountain a work of such grandeur and harmony of proportion, and then executed it without a mistake. The first blow on the exterior, that began to reveal the Colossi, was struck with the same certainty and precision as that which brought into being the gods who are seated before the altar in the depth of the mountain. A bolder idea was never more successfully wrought out.
Our last view of this wonder was by moonlight and by sunrise. We arose and went forth over the sand-bank at five o’clock. Venus blazed as never before. The Southern Cross was paling in the moonlight. The moon, in its last half, hung over the south-west corner of the temple rock, and threw a heavy shadow across a portion of the sitting figures. In this dimness of the half-light their proportions were supernatural. Details were lost.
These might be giants of pre-historic times, or the old fabled gods of antediluvian eras, outlined largely and majestically, groping their way out of the hills.
Above them was the illimitable, purplish blue of the sky. The Moon, one of the goddesses of the temple, withdrew more and more before the coming of Re, the sun-god to whom the temple is dedicated, until she cast no shadow on the façade. The temple, even the interior, caught the first glow of the reddening east. The light came, as it always comes at dawn, in visible waves, and these passed over the features of the Colossi, wave after wave, slowly brightening them into life.
In the interior the first flush was better than the light of many torches, and the Osiride figures were revealed in their hiding-places. At the spring equinox the sun strikes squarely in, two hundred feet, upon the faces of the sitting figures in the adytum. That is their annual salute! Now it only sent its light to them; but it made rosy the Osiride faces on one side of the great hall.
The morning was chilly, and we sat on a sand-drift, wrapped up against the cutting wind, watching the marvellous revelation. The dawn seemed to ripple down the gigantic faces of the figures outside, and to touch their stony calm with something like a smile of gladness; it almost gave them motion, and we would hardly have felt surprised to see them arise and stretch their weary limbs, cramped by ages of inaction, and sing and shout at the coming of the sun-god. But they moved not, the strengthening light only revealed their stony impassiveness; and when the sun, rapidly clearing the eastern hills of the desert, gilded first the row of grinning monkeys, and then the light crept slowly down over faces and forms to the very feet, the old heathen helplessness stood confessed.
And when the sun swung free in the sky, we silently drew away and left the temple and the guardians alone and unmoved. We called the reis and the crew; the boat was turned to the current, the great sweeps dipped into the water, and we continued our voyage down the eternal river, which still sings and flows in this lonely desert place, where sit the most gigantic figures man ever made.
CHAPTER XXV.—FLITTING THROUGH NUBIA
WE HAVE been learning the language. The language consists merely of tyeb. With tyeb in its various accents and inflections, you can carry on an extended conversation. I have heard two Arabs talking for a half hour, in which one of them used no word for reply or response except tyeb “good.”
Tyeb is used for assent, agreement, approval, admiration, both interrogatively and affectionately. It does the duty of the Yankee “all right” and the vulgarism “that’s so” combined; it has as many meanings as the Italian va bene, or the German So! or the English girl’s yes! yes? ye-e-s, ye-e-as? yes (short), ‘n ye-e-es in doubt and really a negative—ex.:—“How lovely Blanche looks to-night!” “‘n ye-e-es.” You may hear two untutored Americans talking, and one of them, through a long interchange of views will utter nothing except, “that’s so,” “that’s so?” “that’s so,” “that’s so.” I think two Arabs meeting could come to a perfect understanding with:
“Tyeb?’
“Tyeb.”
“Tyeb!” (both together).
“Tyeb?” (showing something).
“Tyeb” (emphatically, in admiration).
“Tyeb” (in approval of the other’s admiration).
“Tyeb Ketér” (“good, much”).
“Tyeb Keter?”
“Tyeb.”
“Tyeb.” (together, in ratification of all that has been said).
I say tyeb in my satisfaction with you; you say tyeb in pleasure at my satisfaction; I say tyeb in my pleasure at your pleasure. The servant says tyeb when you give him an order; you say tyeb upon his comprehending it. The Arabic is the richest of languages. I believe there are three hundred names for earth, a hundred for lion, and so on. But the vocabulary of the common people is exceedingly limited. Our sailors talk all day with the aid of a very few words.
But we have got beyond tyeb. We can say eiwa (“yes”)—or nam, when we wish to be elegant—and la (“no”). The universal negative in Nubia, however, is simpler than this—it is a cluck of the tongue in the left check and a slight upward jerk of the head. This cluck and jerk makes “no,” from which there is no appeal. If you ask a Nubian the price of anything—be-kam dee?—and he should answer khamsa (“five”), and you should offer thelata (“three”), and he should kch and jerk up his head, you might know the trade was hopeless; because the kch expresses indifference as well as a negative. The best thing you could do would be to say bookra (“to-morrow”), and go away—meaning in fact to put off the purchase forever, as the Nubian very well knows when he politely adds, tyeb.
But there are two other words necessary to be mastered before the traveller can say he knows Arabic. To the constant call for “backsheesh” and the obstructing rabble of beggars and children, you must be able to say mafeesh (“nothing”), and im’shee (“getaway,” “clear out,” “scat.”) It is my experience that this im’shee is the most necessary word in Egypt.
We do nothing all day but drift, or try to drift, against the north wind, not making a mile an hour, constantly turning about, floating from one side of the river to the other. It is impossible to row, for the steersman cannot keep the boat’s bow to the current.
There is something exceedingly tedious, even to a lazy and resigned man, in this perpetual drifting hither and thither. To float, however slowly, straight down the current, would be quite another thing. To go sideways, to go stern first, to waltz around so that you never can tell which bank of the river you are looking at, or which way you are going, or what the points of the compass are, is confusing and unpleasant. It is the one serious annoyance of a dahabeëh voyage. If it is calm, we go on delightfully with oars and current; if there is a southerly breeze we travel rapidly, and in the most charming way in the world. But our high-cabined boats are helpless monsters in this wind, which continually blows; we are worse than becalmed, we are badgered.
However, we might be in a worse winter country, and one less entertaining. We have just drifted in sight of a dahabeëh, with the English flag, tied up to the bank. On the shore is a picturesque crowd; an awning is stretched over high poles; men are busy at something under it—on the rock near sits a group of white people under umbrellas. What can it be? Are they repairing a broken yard? Are they holding a court over some thief? Are they performing some mystic ceremony? We take the sandal and go to investigate.
An English gentleman has shot two crocodiles, and his people are skinning them, stuffing the skin, and scraping the flesh from the bones, preparing the skeletons for a museum. Horrible creatures they are, even in this butchered condition. The largest is twelve feet long; that is called a big crocodile here; but last winter the gentleman killed one that was seventeen feet long; that was a monster.
In the stomach of one of these he found two pairs of bracelets, such as are worn by Nubian children, two “cunning” little leathern bracelets ornamented with shells—a most useless ornament for a crocodile. The animal is becoming more and more shy every year, and it is very difficult to get a shot at one. They come out in the night, looking for bracelets. One night we nearly lost Ahmed, one of our black boys; he had gone down upon the rudder, when an enquiring crocodile came along and made a snap at him—when the boy climbed on deck he looked white even by starlight.
The invulnerability of the crocodile hide is exaggerated. One of these had two bullet-holes in his back. His slayer says he has repeatedly put bullets through the hide on the back.
When we came away we declined steaks, but the owner gave us some eggs, so that we might raise our own crocodiles.
Gradually we drift out of this almost utterly sterile country, and come to long strips of palm-groves, and to sakiyas innumerable, shrieking on the shore every few hundred feet. We have time to visit a considerable village, and see the women at their other occupation (besides lamentation) braiding each other’s hair; sitting on the ground, sometimes two at a head, patiently twisting odds and ends of loose hair into the snaky braids, and muddling the whole with sand, water, and clay, preparatory to the oil. A few women are spinning with a hand-spindle and producing very good cotton-thread. All appear to have time on their hands. And what a busy place this must be in summer, when the heat is like that of an oven! The men loaf about like the women, and probably do even less. Those at work are mostly slaves, boys and girls in the slightest clothing; and even these do a great deal of “standing round.” Wooden hoes are used.
The desert over which we walked beyond the town was very different from the Libyan with its drifts and drifts of yellow sand. We went over swelling undulations (like our rolling prairies), cut by considerable depressions, of sandstone with a light sand cover but all strewn with shale or shingle. This black shale is sometimes seen adhering like a layer of glazing to the coarse rock; and, though a part of the rock, it has the queer appearance of having been a deposit solidified upon it and subsequently broken off. On the tops of these hills we found everywhere holes scooped out by the natives in search of nitre; the holes showed evidence, in dried mud, of the recent presence of water.
We descended into a deep gorge, in which the rocks were broken squarely down the face, exhibiting strata of red, white, and variegated sandstone; the gorge was a Wady that ran far back into the country among the mountains; we followed it down to a belt of sunt acacias and palms on the river. This wady was full of rocks, like a mountain stream at home; a great torrent running long in it, had worn the rocks into fantastic shapes, cutting punch-bowls and the like, and water had recently dried in the hollows. But it had not rained on the river.
This morning we are awakened by loud talking and wrangling on deck, that sounds like a Paris revolution. We have only stopped for milk! The forenoon we spend among the fashionable ladies of Derr, the capital of Nubia, studying the modes, in order that we may carry home the latest. This is an aristocratic place. One of the eight-hundred-years-old sycamore trees, of which we made mention, is still vigorous and was bearing the sycamore fig. The other is in front of a grand mud-house with latticed windows, the residence of the Kashefs of Sultan Selim whose descendants still occupy it, and, though shorn of authority, are said to be proud of their Turkish origin. One of them, Hassan Kashef, an old man in the memory of our dragoman, so old that he had to lift up his eyelids with his finger when he wanted to see, died only a few years ago. This patriarch had seventy-two wives as his modest portion in this world; and as the Koran allows only four, there was some difficulty in settling the good man’s estate. The matter was referred to the Khedive, but he wisely refused to interfere. When the executor came to divide the property among the surviving children, he found one hundred and five to share the inheritance.
The old fellow had many other patriarchal ways. On his death-bed he left a legacy of both good and evil wishes, requests to reward this friend, and to “serve out” that enemy, quite in the ancient style, and in the Oriental style, recalling the last recorded words of King David, whose expiring breath was an expression of a wish for vengeance upon one of his enemies, whom he had sworn not to kill. It reads now as if it might have been spoken by a Bedawee sheykh to his family only yesterday:—“And, behold, thou hast with thee Shimei the son of Gera, a Benjamite of Bahurim, which cursed me with a grievous curse in the day when I went to Mahanaim; but he came down to meet me at Jordan, and I sware to him by the Lord, saying, I will not put thee to death with the sword. Now therefore hold him not guiltless: for thou art a wise man, and knowest what thou oughtest to do unto him; but his hoar head bring thou down to the grave with blood. So David slept with his fathers, and was buried in the city of David.”
We call at the sand-covered temple at A’mada, and crawl into it; a very neat little affair, with fresh color and fine sculptures, and as old as the time of Osirtasen III. (the date of the obelisk of Heliopolis, of the Tombs of Beni Hassan, say about fifteen hundred years before Rameses II.); and then sail quickly down to Korosko, passing over in an hour or so a distance that required a day and a half on the ascent.
At Korosko there are caravans in from Kartoom; the camel-drivers wear monstrous silver rings, made in the interior, the crown an inch high and set with blood-stone. I bought from the neck of a pretty little boy a silver “charm,” a flat plate with the name of Allah engraved on it. Neither the boy nor the charm had been washed since they came into being.
The caravan had brought one interesting piece of freight, which had just been sent down the river. It was the head of the Sultan of Darfoor, preserved in spirits, and forwarded to the Khedive as a present. This was to certify that the Sultan was really killed, when Darfoor was captured by the army of the Viceroy; though I do not know that there is any bounty on the heads of African Sultans. It is an odd gift to send to a ruler who wears the European dress and speaks French, and whose chief military officers are Americans.
The desolate hills behind Korosko rise a thousand feet, and we climbed one of the peaks to have a glimpse of the desert route and the country towards Kartoom. I suppose a more savage landscape does not exist. The peak of black disintegrated rocks on which we stood was the first of an assemblage of such as far as we could see south; the whole horizon was cut by these sharp peaks; and through these thickly clustering hills the caravan trail made its way in sand and powdered dust. Shut in from the breeze, it must be a hard road to travel, even with a winter sun multiplying its rays from all these hot rocks; in the summer it would be frightful. But on these summits, or on any desert swell, the air is an absolute elixir of life; it has a quality of lightness but not the rarity that makes respiration difficult.
At a village below Korosko we had an exhibition of the manner of fighting with the long Nubian war-spear and the big round shield made of hippopotamus-hide. The men jumped about and uttered frightening cries, and displayed more agility than fight, the object being evidently to terrify by a threatening aspect; but the scene was as barbarous as any we see in African pictures. Here also was a pretty woman (pretty for her) with beautiful eyes, who wore a heavy nose-ring of gold, which she said she put on to make her face beautiful; nevertheless she would sell the ring for nine dollars and a half. The people along here will sell anything they have, ornaments, charms to protect them from the evil-eye,—they will part with anything for money. At this village we took on a crocodile ten feet long, which had been recently killed, and lashed it to the horizontal yard. It was Abd-el-Atti’s desire to present it to a friend in Cairo, and perhaps he was not reluctant, when we should be below the cataract, to have it take the appearance, in the eyes of spectators, of having been killed by some one on this boat.
We obtained above Korosko one of the most beautiful animals in the world—a young gazelle—to add to our growing menagerie; which consists of a tame duck, who never gets away when his leg is tied; a timid desert hare, who has lived for a long time in a tin box in the cabin, trembling like an aspen leaf night and day; and a chameleon.
The chameleon ought to have a chapter to himself. We have reason to think that he has the soul of some transmigrating Egyptian. He is the most uncanny beast. We have made him a study, and find very little good in him. His changeableness of color is not his worst quality. He has the nature of a spy, and he is sullen and snappish besides. We discovered that his color is not a purely physical manifestation, but that it depends upon his state of mind, upon his temper. When everything is serene, he is green as a May morning, but anger changes him instantly for the worse. It is however true that he takes his color mainly from the substance upon which he dwells, not from what he eats; for he eats flies and allows them to make no impression on his exterior. When he was taken off an acacia-tree, this chameleon was of the bright-green color of the leaves. Brought into our cabin, his usual resting-place was on the reddish maroon window curtains, and his green changed muddily into the color of the woollen. When angry, he would become mottled with dark spots, and have a thick cloudy color. This was the range of his changes of complexion; it is not enough (is it?) to give him his exaggerated reputation.
