Warner Charles Dudley
My Winter on the Nile
The plain on top presented a singular appearance. It was strewn with small boulders, many of them round and as shapely as cannon-balls, all formed no doubt before the invention of the conical missiles. While we were amusing ourselves with the thousand fantastic freaks of nature in hardened clay, two sinister Arabs approached us from behind and cut off our retreat. One was armed with a long gun and the other with a portentous spear. We saluted them in the most friendly manner, and hoped that they would pass on: but, no, they attached themselves to us. I tried to think of cases of travelers followed into the desert on the Nile and murdered, but none occurred to me. There seemed to be no danger from the gun so long as we kept near its owner, for the length of it would prevent his bringing it into action close at hand. The spear appeared to be the more effective weapon of the two; it was so, for I soon ascertained that the gun was not loaded and that its bearer had neither powder nor balls. It turned out that this was a detachment of the local guard, sent out to protect us; it would have been a formidable party in case of an attack.
Continuing our walk over the stone-clad and desolate swells, it suddenly occurred to us that we had become so accustomed to this sort of desert-walking, with no green or growing thing in sight, that it had ceased to seem strange to us. It gave us something like a start, therefore, shortly after, to see, away to the right, blue water forming islands out of the hill-tops along the horizon; there was an appearance of verdure about the edge of the water, and dark clouds sailed over it. There was, however, when we looked steadily, about the whole landscape a shimmer and a shadowy look that taught us to know that it was a mirage, the rich Nile valley below us, with the blue water, the green fields, the black lines of palms, was dimly mirrored in the sky and thrown upon the desert hills in the distance. We stood where we could compare the original picture with the blurred copy.
Making our way down the face of the cliff, along some ledges, we came upon many grottoes and mummy-pits cut in the rock, all without sculptures, except one; this had on one side an arched niche and pilasters from which the arch sprung. The vault of the niche had been plastered and painted, and a Greek cross was chiseled in each pilaster; but underneath the plaster the rock was in ornamental squares, lozenges and curves in Saracenic style, although it may have been ancient Egyptian. How one religion has whitewashed, and lived on the remains of another here; the tombs of one age become the temples of another and the dwellings of a third. On these ledges, and on the desert above, we found bits of pottery. Wherever we have wandered, however far into the desert from the river, we never get beyond the limit of broken pottery; and this evidence of man’s presence everywhere, on the most barren of these high or low plains of stone and sand, speak of age and of human occupation as clearly as the temples and monuments. There is no virgin foot of desert even; all is worn and used. Human feet have trodden it in every direction for ages. Even on high peaks where the eagles sit, men have piled stones and made shelters, perhaps lookouts for enemies, it may be five hundred, it may be three thousand years ago. There is nowhere in Egypt a virgin spot.
By moonlight we are creeping under the frowning cliffs of Aboofeyda, and voyage on all night in a buccaneerish fashion; and next day sail by Hadji Kandeel, where travelers disembark for Tel el Amarna. The remains of a once vast city strew the plain, but we only survey it through a field-glass. What, we sometimes say in our more modern moments, is one spot more than another? The whole valley is a sepulchre of dead civilizations; its inhabitants were stowed away, tier on tier, shelf on shelf, in these ledges.
However, respect for age sent us in the afternoon to the grottoes on the north side of the cliff of Sheykh Said. This whole curved range, away round to the remains of Antinoë, is full of tombs. Some that we visited are large and would be very comfortable dwellings; they had been used for Christian churches, having been plastered and painted. Traces of one painting remain—trees and a comical donkey, probably part of the story of the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt. We found in one the ovals of Cheops, the builder of the great pyramid, and much good sculpture in the best old manner—agricultural scenes, musicians, dancers, beautifully cut, with careful details and also with spirit. This is very old work, and, even abused as it has been, it is as good as any the traveler will find in Egypt. This tomb no doubt goes back to the fourth dynasty, and its drawing of animals, cows, birds, and fish is better than we usually see later. In a net in which fish are taken, many kinds are represented, and so faithfully that the species are recognizable; in a marsh is seen a hippopotamus, full of life and viciousness, drawn with his mouth stretched asunder wide enough to serve for a menagerie show-bill. There are some curious false doors and architectural ornaments, like those of the same epoch in the tombs at the pyramids.
At night we were at Rhoda, where is one of the largest of the Khedive’s sugar-factories; and the next morning at Beni Hassan, famed, next to Thebes, for its grottoes, which have preserved to us, in painted scenes, so much of the old Egyptian life. Whoever has seen pictures of these old paintings and read the vast amount of description and inferences concerning the old Egyptian life, based upon them, must be disappointed when he sees them to-day. In the first place they are only painted, not cut, and in this respect are inferior to those in the grottoes of Sheykh Saïd; in the second place, they are so defaced, as to be with difficulty deciphered, especially those depicting the trades.
Some of the grottoes are large—sixty feet by forty feet; fine apartments in the rock, high and well lighted by the portal. Architecturally, no tombs are more interesting; some of the ceilings are vaulted, in three sections; they are supported by fluted pillars some like the Doric, and some in the beautiful lotus style; the pillars have architraves; and there are some elaborately wrought false doorways. And all this goes to show that, however ancient these tombs are, they imitated stone buildings already existing in a highly developed architecture.
Essentially the same subjects are represented in all the tombs; these are the trades, occupations, amusements of the people. Men are blowing glass, working in gold, breaking flax, tending herds (even doctoring animals that are ill), chiseling statues, painting, turning the potter’s wheel; the barber shaves his customer; two men play at draughts; the games most in favor are wrestling and throwing balls, and in the latter women play. But what one specially admires is the honesty of the decorators, which conceals nothing from posterity; the punishment of the bastinado is again and again represented, and even women are subject to it; but respect was shown for sex; the women was not cast upon the ground, she kneels and takes the flagellation on her shoulders.
We saw in these tombs no horses among the many animals; we have never seen the horse in any sculptures except harnessed in a war-chariot; “the horse and his rider” do not appear.
There is a scene here which was the subject of a singular mistake, that illustrates the needless zeal of early explorers to find in everything in Egypt confirmation of the Old Testament narrative. A procession, painted on the wall, now known to represent the advent of an Asiatic tribe into Egypt, perhaps the Shepherds, in a remote period, was declared to represent the arrival of Joseph’s brethren. The tomb, however, was made several centuries before the advent of Joseph himself. And even if it were of later date than the event named, we should not expect to find in it a record of an occurrence of such little significance at that time. We ought not to be surprised at the absence in Egypt of traces of the Israelitish sojourn, and we should not be, if we looked at the event from the Egyptian point of view and not from ours. In a view of the great drama of the ancient world in the awful Egyptian perspective, the Jewish episode is relegated to its proper proportion in secular history. The whole Jewish history, as a worldly phenomenon, occupies its narrow limits. The incalculable effect upon desert tribes of a long sojourn in a highly civilized state, the subsequent development of law and of a literature unsurpassed in after times, and the final flower into Christianity,—it is in the light of all this that we read the smallest incident of Jewish history, and are in the habit of magnifying its contemporary relations. It was the slenderest thread in the days of Egyptian puissance. In the ancient atmosphere of Egypt, events purely historical fall into their proper proportions. Many people have an idea that the ancient world revolved round the Jews, and even hold it as a sort of religious faith.
It is difficult to believe that the race we see here are descendants of the active, inventive, joyous people who painted their life upon these tombs. As we lie all the afternoon before a little village opposite Beni Hassan I wonder for the hundredth time what it is that saves such miserable places from seeming to us as vile as the most wretched abodes of poverty in our own land. Is it because, with an ever-cheerful sun and a porous soil, this village is not so filthy as a like abode of misery would be with us? Is it that the imagination invests the foreign and the Orient with its own hues; or is it that our reading, prepossessing our minds, gives the lie to all our senses? I cannot understand why we are not more disgusted with such a scene as this. Not to weary you with a repetition of scenes sufficiently familiar, let us put the life of the Egyptian fellah, as it appears at the moment, into a paragraph.
Here is a jumble of small mud-hovels, many of them only roofed with cornstalks, thrown together without so much order as a beaver would use in building a village, distinguishable only from dog-kennels in that they have wooden doors—not distinguishable from them when the door is open and a figure is seen in the aperture. Nowhere any comfort or cleanliness, except that sometimes the inner kennel, of which the woman guards the key, will have its floor swept and clean matting in one corner. The court about which there are two or three of these kennels, serves the family for all purposes; there the fire for cooking is built, there are the water-jars, and the stone for grinding corn; there the chickens and the dogs are; there crouch in the dirt women and men, the women spinning, making bread, or nursing children, the men in vacant idleness. While the women stir about and go for water, the men will sit still all day long. The amount of sitting down here in Egypt is inconceivable; you might almost call it the feature of the country. No one in the village knows anything, either of religion or of the world; no one has any plans; no one exhibits any interest in anything; can any of them have any hopes? From this life nearly everything but the animal is eliminated. Children, and pretty children, swarm, tumbling about everywhere; besides, nearly every woman has one in her arms.
We ought not to be vexed at this constant north wind which baffles us, for they say it is necessary to the proper filling out of the wheat heads. The boat drifts about all day in a mile square, having passed the morning on a sand-spit where the stupidity and laziness of the crew placed it; and we have leisure to explore the large town of Minieh, which lies prettily along the river. Here is a costly palace, which I believe has never been occupied by the Khedive, and a garden attached, less slovenly in condition than those of country palaces usually are. The sugar-factory is furnished with much costly machinery, which could not have been bought for less than half a million of dollars. Many of the private houses give evidences of wealth in their highly ornamented doorways and Moorish arches, but the mass of the town is of the usual sort here—tortuous lanes in which weary hundreds of people sit in dirt, poverty, and resignation. We met in the street and in the shops many coal-black Nubians and negroes, smartly dressed in the recent European style, having an impudent air, who seemed to be persons of wealth and consideration here. In the course of our wanderings I came to a large public building, built in galleries about an open court, and unwittingly in my examination of it, stumbled into the apartment of the Governor, Osman Bey, who was giving audience to all comers. Justice is still administered in patriarchal style; the door is open to all; rich and poor were crowding in, presenting petitions and papers of all sorts, and among them a woman preferred a request. Whether justice was really done did not appear, but Oriental hospitality is at least unfailing. Before I could withdraw, having discovered my blunder, the governor welcomed me with all politeness and gave me a seat beside him. We smiled at each other in Arabic and American, and came to a perfect understanding on coffee and cigarettes.
The next morning we are slowly passing the Copt convent of Gebel e’ Tayr, and expecting the appearance of the swimming Christians. There is a good opportunity to board us, but no one appears. Perhaps because it is Sunday and these Christians do not swim on Sunday. No. We learn from a thinly clad and melancholy person who is regarding us from the rocks that the Khedive has forbidden this disagreeable exhibition of muscular Christianity. It was quite time. But thus, one by one, the attractions of the Nile vanish.
What a Sunday! But not an exceptional day. “Oh dear,” says madame, in a tone of injury, “here’s another fine day!” Although the north wind is strong, the air is soft, caressing, elastic.
More and more is forced upon us the contrast of the scenery of Upper and Lower Egypt. Here it is not simply that the river is wider and the mountains more removed and the arable land broader; the lines are all straight and horizontal, the mountain-ranges are level-topped, parallel to the flat prairies—at sunset a low level of white limestone hills in the east looked exactly like a long line of fence whitewashed. In Upper Egypt, as we have said, the plains roll, the hills are broken, there are pyramidal mountains, and evidences of upheaval and disorder. But these wide sweeping and majestic lines have their charm; the sunsets and sunrises are in some respects finer than in Nubia; the tints are not so delicate, the colors not so pure, but the moister atmosphere and clouds make them more brilliant and various. The dawn, like the after-glow, is long; the sky burns half round with rose and pink, the color mounts high up. The sunsets are beyond praise, and always surprise. Last night the reflection in the east was of a color unseen before—almost a purple below and a rose above; and the west glowed for an hour in changing tints. The night was not less beautiful—we have a certain comfort in contrasting both with March in New England. It was summer; the Nile slept, the moon half-full, let the stars show; and as we glided swiftly down, the oars rising and falling to the murmured chorus of the rowers, there were deep shadows under the banks, and the stately palms, sentinelling the vast plain of moonlight over which we passed,—the great silence of an Egyptian night—seemed to remove us all into dreamland. The land was still, except for the creak of an occasional shadoof worked by some wise man who thinks it easier to draw water in the night than in the heat of the day, or an aroused wolfish dog, or a solitary bird piping on the shore.
Thus we go, thus we stay, in the delicious weather, encouraged now and again by a puff of southern wind, but held back from our destination by some mysterious angel of delay. But one day the wind comes, the sail is distended, the bow points downstream, and we move at the dizzy rate of five miles an hour.
It is a day of incomparable beauty. We see very little labor along the Nile; the crops are maturing. But the whole population comes to the river, to bathe, to sit in the shallows, to sit on the bank. All the afternoon we pass groups, men, women, children, motionless, the picture of idleness. There they are, hour after hour, in the sun. Women, coming for water, put down their jars, and bathe and frolic in the grateful stream. In some distant reaches of the river there are rows of women along the shore, exactly like the birds which stand in the shallow places or sun themselves on the sand. There are more than twenty miles of bathers, of all sexes and ages.
When at last we come to a long sand-reef, dotted with storks, cranes and pelicans, the critic says he is glad to see something with feathers on it.
We are in full tide of success and puffed up with confidence: it is perfectly easy to descend the Nile. All the latter part of the afternoon we are studying the False Pyramid of Maydoom, that structure, older than Cheops, built, like all the primitive monuments, in degrees, as the Tower of Babel was, as the Chaldean temples were. It lifts up, miles away from the river, only a broken mass from the debris at its base. We leave it behind. We shall be at Bedreshayn, for Memphis, before daylight. As we turn in, the critic says, “We’ve got the thing in our own hands now.”
Alas! the Lord reached down and took it out. The wind chopped suddenly, and blew a gale from the north. At breakfast time we were waltzing round opposite the pyramids of Dashoor, liable to go aground on islands and sandbars, and unable to make the land. Determined not to lose the day, we anchored, took the sandal, had a long pull, against the gale, to Bedreshayn, and mounted donkeys for the ruins of ancient Memphis.
When Herodotus visited Memphis, probably about four hundred and fifty years before Christ, it was a great city. He makes special mention of its temple of Vulcan, whose priests gave him a circumstantial account of the building of the city by Menes, the first Pharaoh. Four hundred years later, Diodorus found it magnificent; about the beginning of the Christian era, Strabo says it was next in size to Alexandria. Although at the end of the twelfth century it had been systematically despoiled to build Cairo, an Arab traveler says that, “its ruins occupy a space half a day’s journey every way,” and that its wonders could not be described. Temples, palaces, gardens, villas, acres of common dwellings—the city covered this vast plain with its splendor and its squalor.
The traveler now needs a guide to discover a vestige, a stone here and there, of this once most magnificent capital. Here came Moses and Aaron, from the Israelitish settlement in the Delta, from Zoan (Tanis) probably, to beg Menephtah to let the Jews depart; here were performed the miracles of the Exodus. This is the Biblical Noph, against which burned the wrath of the prophets. “No (Heliopolis, or On) shall be rent asunder, and Noph shall have distresses daily.” The decree was “published in Noph”:—“Noph shall be waste and desolate without an inhabitant;” “I will cause their images to cease out of Noph.”
The images have ceased, the temples have either been removed or have disappeared under the deposits of inundations; you would ride over old Memphis without knowing it, but the inhabitants have returned to this fertile and exuberant plain. It is only in the long range of pyramids and the great necropolis in the desert that you can find old Memphis.
The superabundant life of the region encountered us at once. At Bedreshayn is a ferry, and its boats were thronged, chiefly by women, coming and going, and always with a load of grain or other produce on the head. We rode round the town on an elevated dyke, lined with palms, and wound onward over a flat, rich with wheat and barley, to Mitrahenny, a little village in a splendid palm-grove. This marks the central spot of the ruins of old Memphis. Here are some mounds, here are found fragments of statues and cut stones, which are preserved in a temporary shelter. And here, lying on its side, in a hollow from which the water was just subsiding, is a polished colossal statue of Rameses II.—the Pharaoh who left more monuments of less achievements than any other “swell” of antiquity. The face is handsome, as all his statues are, and is probably conventionalized like our pictures of George Washington, or Napoleon’s busts of himself. I confess to a feeling of perfect satisfaction at seeing his finely chiseled nose rooting in the mud.
This—some mounds, some fragments of stone, and the statue,—was all we saw of Memphis. But I should like to have spent a day in this lovely grove, which was carpeted with the only turf I saw in Egypt; reclining upon the old mounds in the shade, and pretending to think of Menes and Moses and Menephtah; and of Rhampsinitus, the king who “descended alive into the place which the Greeks call Hades, and there played at dice with Ceres, and sometimes won, and other times lost,” and of the treasure-house he built here; and whether, as Herodotus believed, Helen, the beautiful cause of the Iliad, really once dwelt in a palace here, and whether Homer ever recited his epic in these streets.
We go on over the still rich plain to the village of Sakkarah—chiefly babies and small children. The cheerful life of this prairie fills us with delight—flocks of sheep, herds of buffaloes, trains of dromedaries, hundreds of laborers of both sexes in the fields, children skylarking about; on every path are women, always with a basket on the head, their blue cotton gown (the only article of dress except a head-shawl,) open in front, blowing back so as to show their figures as they walk.
When we reach the desert we are in the presence of death—perhaps the most mournful sight on this earth is a necropolis in the desert, savage, sand-drifted, plundered, all its mounds dug over and over. We ride along at the bases of the pyramids. I stop at one, climb over the débris at its base, and break off a fragment of stone. The pyramid is of crumbling limestone, and, built in stages or degrees, like that of Maydoom; it is slowly becoming an unsightly heap. And it is time. This is believed to be the oldest structure in the world, except the Tower of Babel. It seems to have been the sepulchre of Keken, a king of the second dynasty. At this period hieroglyphic writing was developed, but the construction and ornamentation of the doorway of the pyramid exhibit art in its infancy. This would seem to show that the Egyptians did not emigrate from Asia with the developed and highly perfected art found in the sculptures of the tombs of the fourth, fifth, and sixth dynasties, as some have supposed, but that there was a growth, which was arrested later.
But no inference in regard to old Egypt is safe; a discovery tomorrow may upset it. Statues recently found, representing persons living in the third dynasty, present a different type of race from that shown in statues of the fourth and fifth dynasties. So that, in that period in which one might infer a growth of art, there may have been a change of the dominating race.
The first great work of Mariette Bey in Egypt—and it is a monument of his sagacity, enthusiasm, and determination, was the unearthing, in this waste of Memphis, the lost Serapeum and the Apis Mausoleum, the tombs of the sacred bulls. The remains of the temple are again covered with sand; but the visitor can explore the Mausoluem. He can walk, taper in hand, through endless galleries, hewn in the rock, passing between rows of gigantic granite sarcophagi, in which once rested the mummies of the sacred bulls. Living, the bull was daintily fed—the Nile water unfiltered was thought to be too fattening for him—and devotedly worshipped; and dying, he was entombed in a sepulchre as magnificent as that of kings, and his adorers lined the walls of his tomb with votive offerings. It is partly from these stelæ, or slabs with inscriptions, that Mariette Bey has added so much to our knowledge of Egyptian history.
Near the Serapeum is perhaps the most elegant tomb in Egypt, the tomb of Tih, who lived in the fifth dynasty, some time later than Cheops, but when hippopotami abounded in the river in front of his farm, Although Tih was a priest, he was a gentleman of elegant tastes, an agriculturist, a sportsman. He had a model farm, as you may see by the buildings and by the thousand details of good management here carved. His tomb does him great credit. In all the work of later times there is nothing so good as this sculpture, so free, so varied, so beautiful; it promises everything. Tih even had, what we do not expect in people of that early time, humor; you are sure of it from some of the pictures here. He must have taken delight in decorating his tomb, and have spent, altogether, some pleasant years in it before he occupied it finally; so that he had become accustomed to staying here.
But his rule was despotic, it was that of the “stick.” Egyptians have never changed in this respect, as we have remarked before. They are now, as then, under the despotism of some notion of governance—divine or human—despotic and fateful. The “stick” is as old as the monarchy; it appears in these tombs; as to day, nobody then worked or paid taxes without its application.
The sudden arrest of Egyptian art was also forced upon us next day, in a second visit to the pyramids of Geezeh. We spent most of the day in the tombs there. In some of them we saw the ovals of all the kings of the fourth dynasty, many of them perfect and fresh in color. As to drawing, cutting, variety, liveliness of attitude and color, there is nothing better, little so good, in tombs of recent date. We find almost every secular subject in the early tombs that is seen in the latest. In thousands of years, the Egyptians scarcely changed or made any progress. The figures of men and animals are better executed in these old tombs than in the later. Again, these tombs are free from the endless repetitions of gods and of offerings to them. The life of the people represented is more natural, less superstitious; common events are naively portrayed, with the humorous unconsciousness of a simple age; art has thought it not unworthy its skill to represent the fact in one tomb, that men acted as midwives to cows, in the dawn of history.
While we lay at Geezeh we visited one of the chicken-hatching establishments for which the Egyptians have been famous from a remote period. It was a very unpretending affair, in a dirty suburb of the town. We were admitted into a low mud-building, and into a passage with ovens on each side. In these ovens the eggs are spread upon mats, and the necessary fire is made underneath. The temperature is at 100° to 108° Fahrenheit. Each oven has a hole in the center, through which the naked attendant crawls to turn the eggs from time to time. The process requires usually twenty-one days, but some eggs hatch on the twentieth. The eggs are supplied by the peasants who usually receive, without charge, half as many chickens as they bring eggs. About one third of the eggs do not hatch. The hatching is only performed about three months in the year, during the spring.
In the passage, before one of the ovens, was a heap of soft chickens, perhaps half a bushel, which the attendant scraped together whenever they attempted to toddle off. We had the pleasure of taking up some handfuls of them. We also looked into the ovens, where there was a stir of life, and were permitted to hold some eggs while the occupants kicked off the shell.
I don’t know that a plan will ever be invented by which eggs, as well as chickens, will be produced without the intervention of the hen. If one could be, it would leave the hen so much more time to scratch—it would relieve her from domestic cares so that she could take part in public affairs. The hen in Egypt is only partially emancipated, But since she is relieved from setting, I do not know that she is any better hen. She lays very small eggs.
This ends what I have to say about the hen. We have come to Cairo, and the world is again before us.
