 CHAPTER 11 THE RAMASIUM This, my lord, is the thinking-place of Ramesses the Great. So said Ibrahim Ayyad to me one morning, Ibrahim who is almost as prolific in the abrupt creation of peers as if he were a democratic government. I looked about me. We stood in a ruined hall with columns, architraves covered with inscriptions, segments of flat roof. Here and there traces of painting, dull red, pale, ethereal blue, the love-color of Egypt as the Egyptians often call it, still adhered to the stone. This hall, dignified, grand, but happy, was open on all sides to the sun and air. From it I could see tamarisk and acacia trees, and far-off shadowy mountains beyond the eastern verge of the Nile, and the trees were still as carbon things in an atmosphere that was a miracle of clearness and of purity. Behind me and near the hard Libyan mountains gleamed in the sun. Somewhere a boy was singing, and suddenly his singing died away. And I thought of the lay of the harper which is inscribed upon the tombs of Thebes, those tombs under those gleaming mountains. For no one carries away his goods with him, yea, no one returns again who has gone thither. It took the place of the song that had died as I thought of the great king's glory that he had been here and had long since passed away. The thinking-place of Ramesses the Great? Suddenly. You must leave me alone here, Ibrahim. I watched his gold-colored robe vanish into the gold of the sun through the copper color of the columns, and I was quite alone in the thinking-place of Ramesses. It was a brilliant day, the sky dark sapphire blue, without even the specter of a cloud, or any airy, vaporous veil. The heat already intense in the full sunshine, but delicious if one slid into a shadow. I slid into a shadow, and sat down on a warm block of stone. And the silence flowed upon me, the silence of the Remiseum. Is Horba Hutet, the winged disc, with crowned ureay ever set up above this temple's principal door to keep it from destruction? I do not know. But if he was, he failed to perfectly fulfill his mission. And I am glad he failed. I am glad of the ruin that is here, glad that the walls have crumbled or been overthrown, that columns have been cast down and ceilings torn off from the pillars that supported them, letting in the sky. I would have nothing different in the thinking-place of Ramesses. Like a cloud, a great golden cloud, a glory impending that will not, cannot, be dissolved into the ether, he loomed over the Egypt that is dead, he looms over the Egypt of today. Everywhere you meet his traces, everywhere you hear his name. You say to a tall young Egyptian, How big you are growing, Hassan. He answers, Come back next year, my gentleman, and I shall be like Ramesses the Great. Or you ask of the boatman who rose you, How can you pull all day against the current of the Nile? And he smiles, and lifting his brown arm, he says to you, Look, I am strong as Ramesses the Great. This familiar fame comes down through some twenty years, carved upon limestone and granite, now it seems engraven also on every Egyptian heart, that beats not only with the movement of the Shadoop, or is not buried in the black soil fertilized by Hopi. Thus can inordinate vanity prolong the true triumph of genius, and impress its own view of itself upon the minds of millions. This Ramesses is believed to be the Pharaoh who oppressed the children of Israel. As I sat in the Ramessium that morning I recalled his face, the face of an artist and a dreamer rather than that of a warrior and oppressor, Asiatic, handsome, not insensitive, not cruel, but subtle, aristocratic, and refined. I could imagine it bending above the little serpents of the system as they lifted their melodious voices to bid Typhon depart, or watching the dancing women's rhythmic movements, or smiling half kindly, half with irony upon the lovelorn maiden who made her plain. What is sweet to the mouth to me is as the gall of birds thy breath alone can comfort my heart. And I could imagine it looking profoundly grave, not sad, among the columns with their opening lotus flowers. For it is the hall of lotus columns that Ibrahim calls the thinking place of the king. There is something both lovely and touching to me in the lotus columns of Egypt, in the tall masses of stone opening out into flowers near the sun. Near the sun, yes, only that obvious falsehood will convey to those who have not seen them the effect of some of the hypostyle halls, the columns of which seem literally soaring to the sky. In flowers of stone, you will say, rudely carved and rugged. That does not matter. There was poetry in the minds that conceived them, in the thought that directed the hands which shaped them and placed them where they are. In Egypt perpetually one feels how the ancient Egyptians loved the Nymphaea Lotus, which is the white lotus, and the Nymphaea Corolla, the lotus that is blue. Did they not place Horus in its cup, and upon the head of Nefertum, the nature God, who represented in their mythology the heat of the rising sun, and who seems to have been credited with power to grant life in the world to come, said it as a sort of regal ornament? To set he the first when he returned in glory from his triumphs over the Syrians were given bouquets of lotus blossoms by the great officers of his household. The tiny column of green feldspar ending in the lotus typified eternal youth, even as the carnelian buckle typified the blood of Isis, which washed away all sin. Cold pots were fashioned in the form of the lotus, cartouches sprang from it, wine flowed from cups shaped like it. The lotus was part of the very life of Egypt, as the rose, the American beauty rose, is part of our social life of today. And here in the Ramaceum I found Campaniforum, or lotus flower capitals in the columns, here where Ramazes once perhaps dreamed of his Syrian campaigns, or of that famous combat when, like Baal and his fury, he fought single-handed against the host of the Hittites massed in two thousand, five hundred chariots to overthrow him. The Ramaceum is a temple not of winds, but of soft and kindly airs. Here comes Zephyrus, whispering love to Flora incarnate in the lotus. To every sunbeam, to every little breeze, the ruins stretch out arms. They adore the deep blue sky, the shining, sifted sand, untrampled in nature, all that whispers freedom. So I felt that day when Ibrahim left me, so I feel always when I sit in the Ramaceum, that exultant victim of time's here-not-sag religious hand. All strong souls cry out secretly for liberty as for a sacred necessity of life. Liberty seems to drench the Ramaceum. And all strong souls must exult there. The sun has taken it as a beloved possession. No massy walls keep him out. No shield-shaped battlements rear themselves up against the outer world, as at Madenit Abu. No huge pylons cast down upon the ground their forms in darkness. The stone glows with the sun, seems almost to have a soul glowing with the sense, the sun-ray sense, of freedom. The heart leaps up in the Ramaceum, not frivolously, but with a strange, sudden knowledge of the depths of passionate joy there are in life and in bountiful, glorious nature. Instead of the strength of a prison, one feels the ecstasy of space. Instead of the safety of enclosure, the rapture of naked publicity. But the public to whom this place of the great king is consigned is a public of Theban Hills, of the sunbeams striking from them over the wide world toward the east, of light airs, of drifting sand grains, of singing birds, and of butterflies with pure white wings. If you have ever ridden an Arab horse mounted in the heart of an oasis to the verge of the great desert, you will remember the bound thrilling with fiery animation which he gives when he sets his feet on the sand beyond the last tall date-palms. A bound like that the soul gives when you sit in the Ramaceum and see the crowding sunbeams, the far-off groves of palm trees, and the drowsy mountains like shadows that sleep beyond the Nile. When you look up, perhaps, as I looked that morning, and upon a lotus column near you, relieved, you perceive the figure of a young man singing. A young man singing? Let him be the tutelary god of this place, whoever he be, whether only some humble happy slave or the superintendent of song and the recreation of the king. Rather even than Amunra, let him be the god, for there is something nobly joyous in this architecture a dignity that sings. It has been said, but not established, that Rameses the Great was buried in the Ramaceum, and when I first entered it the lay of the harbour came to my mind, with the sadness that attends the passing away of glory into the shades of death. But an optimism almost as determined as Emerson's was quickly bred in me there. I could not be sad, though I could be happily thoughtful in the light of the Ramaceum. And even when I left the thinking-place, and, coming down the central isle, saw in the immersing sunshine of the Osiride court the fallen colossus of the king, I was not struck to sadness. Imagine the greatest figure in the world, such a figure as this Rameses was in his day, with all might, all glory, all climbing power, all vigour, tenacity of purpose, and granite strength of will concentrated within it, struck suddenly down, and falling backward in the collapse of which the thunder might shake the vitals of the earth, you have this prostrate colossus. Even now one seems to hear it fall, to feel the warm soil trembling beneath one's feet as one approaches it, a row of statues of enormous size, with arms crossed as in resignation, glowing in the sun, in colour not gold or amber, but a delicate desert yellow, watch near it like servants of the dead. On a slightly lower level than there it lies, and a little nearer than Nile. Only the upper half of the figure is left, but its size is really terrific. The colossus was fifty-seven feet high, it weighed eight hundred tons. Eight hundred tons of cyanite went to its making, and across the shoulders its breadth is, or was, over twenty-two feet. But one does not think of measurements as one looks upon it. It is stupendous. That is obvious, and that is enough. Nor does one think of its finish, of its beautiful, rich colour, of any of its details. One thinks of it as a tremendous personage laid low, as the mightiest of the mighty fallen. One thinks of it as the dead romances whose glory still looms over Egypt like a golden cloud that will not disperse. One thinks of it as the soul that commanded, and low, there rose up above the sands at the foot of the hills of thieves, the exultant merry noise of thin bright music, backed by a clashing of barbaric cymbals, along the corridors of the past, this queen who is shown upon Egyptian walls dressed as a man, who is said to have worn a beard, and who sent to the land of Punt the famous expedition which covered her with glory, and brought gold to the god Amun. To me most feminine she seemed when I saw her temple at Dair al-Bahari. With its brightness and its suavity, its pretty shallowness and sunshine, its white and blue and yellow and red and green and orange, all very trim and fanciful, all very smart and delicate, full of finesse and laughter and breathing out to me of the twentieth century, the coquetry of a woman in fifteen hundred B.C. After the terrific masculinity of Madenet Habu, after the great freedom of the Ramiseum and the grandeur of its colossus, the manhood of all the ages concentrated in granite, the temple at Dair al-Bahari came upon me like a delicate woman, perfumed and arranged, clothed in a creation of white and blue and orange, standing ever so knowingly against a background of orange and pink, of red and brown red, a smiling coquette of the mountain, a gay and sweet enchantress who knew her pretty powers and meant to exercise them. Had shetsoot with a beard, never will I believe it. Or if she ever seemed to wear one, I will swear it was only the tattooed ornament, with which all the lovely women of the Fayum decorate their chins today, throwing into relief the smiling soft lips, the delicate noses, the liquid eyes, and leading one from it step by step to the beauties it proceeds. After Wallace Budge says in his book on the Antiquities of Egypt, it would be unjust to the memory of a great man and a loyal servant of his shetsoot if we omitted to mention the name of Sennmet, the architect and overseer of works at Dair al-Bahari. By all means, let Sennmet be mentioned, and then let him be utterly forgotten. A radiant queen reigns here, a queen of fantasy and splendor, and of that divine shallowness refined frivolity literally cut into the mountain, which is the note of Dair al-Bahari. And what a clever background! Oh! Had shetsoot knew what she was doing when she built her temple here. It was not the solemn Sennmet. He wore a beard, I'm sure, who chose that background if I know anything of women. Long before I visited Dair al-Bahari I had looked on it from afar. My eyes had been drawn to it merely from its situation right underneath the mountains. I had asked, what do those little pillars mean, and are those little doors? I had promised myself to go there, as one promises oneself a bon-bâche to finish a happy banquet. And I had realized the subtlety essentially feminine that had placed a temple there. And Menuhotep's temple, perhaps you say, was it not there before the queens? And he must have possessed a subtlety purely feminine, or have been advised by one of his wives in his building operations, or by some favorite female slave. Blundering, unsubtle men would probably think that the best way to attract and to fix attention on any object was to make it much bigger than things near and around it, to set up a giant among dwarfs. Not so, queen had shetsoot. More artful in her generation she set her long but little temple against the precipices of Libya. And what is the result? Simply that, whenever one looks towards them, one says, what are those little pillars? Or if one is more instructed, one thinks about queen had shetsoot. The precipices are as nothing. A woman's wile has blotted them out. And yet how grand they are! I have called them tiger-colored precipices. And they suggest tawny wild beasts, fierce, bred in a land that is the prey of the sun. Every shade of orange and yellow glows and grows pale on their bosses in their clefs. They shoot out turrets of rock that blaze like flames in the day. They show great teeth like the tiger when anyone draws near. And like the tiger they seem perpetually informed by a spirit that is angry. Like wrote of the tiger, tiger-tiger burning bright in the forests of the night. These tiger precipices of Libya are burning things, avid like beasts of prey. But the restored apricot-colored pillars are not afraid of their impending fury. Fury of a beast baffled by a tricky little woman, almost it seems to me, and still less afraid are the white pillars and the bright paintings that decorate the walls within. As many people in the sad but lovely islands off the coast of Scotland believe in doubles, as the old classic writers believed in man's genius, so the ancient Egyptian believed in his ka, or separate entity, a sort of spiritual other self, to be propitiated and ministered to, presented with gifts and served with energy and ardor. On this temple of dear Al-Bahari is the scene of the birth of Hashepsut, and there are two babies, the princess and her ka. For this imagined ka, when a great queen long after she built this temple or chapel, that offerings might be made there on certain appointed days. Fortunate ka of Hashepsut to have had so cheerful a dwelling. Livelyness pervades dear Al-Bahari. I remember when I was on my first visit to Egypt, lunching at Thebes with Mr. Naveel and Mr. Hogarth, and afterwards going with them to watch the digging away of the masses of sand and rubbish, which concealed this gracious building. I remember the songs of the half-naked workmen toiling and sweating in the sun, and I remember seeing a white temple wall come up into the light with all the painted figures surely dancing with joy upon it. And they are surely dancing still. Here you may see, brilliant as yesterday's picture anywhere, fascinatingly decorative trees growing bravely in little pots, red people offering incense which is piled up on mounds like mountains, Ptasekhet Osiris receiving a royal gift of wine, the queen and the company of various divinities, and the terrible ordeal of the cows. The cows are being weighed in scales. There are three of them. One is a philosopher and reposes with an air that says, Even this last indignity of being weighed against my will cannot perturb my soaring spirit. But the other two, sitting up, look as apprehensive as old ladies in a rocking express, expectant of an accident. The vividness of the colors in this temple is quite wonderful, and much of its great attraction comes rather from its position and from them than essentially from itself. At dear al-Bahari what the long shell contains its happy murmur of life is more fascinating than the shell. There instead of being uplifted or overawed by form we are rejoiced by color, by the high vivacity of arrested movement, by the story that color and movement tell. And overall there is the bright, blue-painted sky, studded, almost distractedly studded, with a plethora of the yellow stars the Egyptians made like starfish. The restored apricot-colored columns outside look unhappily suburban when you are near them. The white columns with their architraves are more pleasant to the eyes. The niches full of bright hues, the arched chapels, the small white steps leading upward to shallow sanctuaries, the small black foxes facing each other on little yellow pedestals, attract one like the details and amusing ornaments of a clever woman's boudoir. Through this most characteristic temple one roves in a gaily attentive mood, feeling all the time had shepsoots fascination. You may see her, if you will, a little lady on the wall with a face decidedly sensual, a long, straight nose, thick lips, an expression rather determined than agreeable. Her mother looks as Semetic as a Jew moneylender in Brick Lane, London. Her husband, Tutmost II, has a weak and poor-spirited countenance, decidedly an accomplished performer on the second violin. The mother wears on her head a snake, no doubt a cobra di capello, the symbol of her sovereignty. Tutmost is clad in a loincloth, and a god with a sleepy expression and a very fish-like head appears in this group of personages to offer the key of life. Another painting of the queen shows her on her knees drinking milk from the sacred cow with an intent and greedy figure, an extraordinarily sensual and expressive face. That she was well guarded is surely proved by a brave display of her soldiers, red men on a white wall. Full of life and gaiety, all in a row they come, holding weapons and apparently branches, and advancing with the gate of triumph that tells of spacious days. And at their head is an officer who looks back, much like a modern drill sergeant, to see how his men are marching. In the southern shrine of the temple, cut in the rock, as is the northern shrine, once more I found traces of the Lady of the Underworld. For this shrine was dedicated to Hathor, though the whole temple was sacred to the Theban god Amun. Upon a column were the remains of the goddess's face, with a broad brow and long, large eyes. Some fanatic had hacked away the mouth. The tomb of Hatshepsut was found by Mr. Theodore M. Davis, and the famous Vash of Del Al-Bahari by Mishur Naveel as lately as 1905. It stands in the museum at Cairo, but forever it will be connected in the minds of men with the tiger-colored precipices and the colonnades of thieves. Behind the ruins of the temple of Mentuhotep III, in a chapel of painted rock, the Vash Hathor was found. It is not easy to convey, by an indescription, the impression this marvelous statue makes. Many of us love our dogs, our horses, and some of us adore our cats, but which of us can think without a smile of worshiping a cow? Yet the cow was the Egyptian Aphrodite's sacred animal. Under the form of a cow she was often represented, and in the statue she is represented to us as a limestone cow, and positively this cow is to be worshiped. She is shown in the act apparently of stepping gravely forward out of a small arched shrine, the walls of which are decorated with brilliant paintings. Her color is red and yellowish red, and is covered with dark blotches of a very dark green, which look almost black. Only one or two are of a bluish color. Her height is moderate. I stand about five foot nine, and I found that on her pedestal the line of her back was about level with my chest. The lower part of the body, much of which is concealed by the underblock of limestone, is white, tinged with yellow. The tail is red. Above the head open and closed lotus flowers form a head dress with the lunar disc and two feathers, and the long lotus stalks flow down on each side of the neck toward the ground. At the back of this headdress are a scarab and a cartouche. The goddess is advancing solemnly and gently. A wonderful calm, a matchless serene dignity enfold her. In the body of this cow one is able, indeed one is almost obliged, to feel the soul of a goddess. The incredible is accomplished. The dead Egyptian makes the ironic, the skeptical modern world, feel deity in a limestone cow. How is it done? I know not, but it is done. Genius can do nearly everything, it seems. Under the chin of the cow there is a standing statue of King Mentuhotep, and beneath her the king kneels as a boy. Wonderfully expressive and solemnly refined is the cow's face, which is of dark color like the color of almost black earth, earth fertilized by the Nile. Unified, dominating, almost but just not stern, strongly intelligent, and through its beautiful intelligence entirely sympathetic. To understand all is to pardon all. This face, once thoroughly seen, completely noticed, can now never be forgotten. This is one of the most beautiful statues in the world. When I was at Deir el-Bahari I thought of it, and wished that it still stood there near the colonnades of Thebes under the tiger-coated precipices. And then I thought of Hatshepsut. Surely she would not brook a rival today near the temple which she made, a rival long lost and long forgotten. Is not her influence still there upon the terrace platforms, among the apricot and the white columns near the paintings of the land of Punt? Did it not whisper to the antiquaries, even to the soldiers from Cairo who guarded the Vash Hathor in the night, to make haste to take her away from the hills of Thebes and from the Nile's long southern reaches, that the great queen might once more reign alone? They obeyed. Hatshepsut was pleased. And like a delicate woman, perfumed and arranged, clothed in a creation of white and blue and orange, standing ever so knowingly against a background of orange and pink, of red and of brown red, she rules at Deir el-Bahari. CHAPTER XIII. On the way to the tombs of the kings I went to the temple of Khurna, that lonely cenotaph, with its sand-colored, massive façade, its heaps of fallen stone, its wide and ruined doorway, its thick, almost rough columns recalling Madinit Habu. There is not very much to see, but from there one has a fine view of other temples, of the Ramaseyam looking superb, like a grand skeleton, of Madinit Habu, a distant, very pale gold in the morning sunlight, of little Deir el-Madinit, the pretty child of the Tulummies, with the heads of the Seven Hathors. And from Khurna the Colossae are exceptionally grand and exceptionally personal, so personal that one imagines one sees the expressions of the faces that they no longer possess. Even if you do not go into the tombs, but you will go, you must ride to the tombs of the kings, and you must, if you care for the finesse of impressions, ride on a blazing day and toward the hour of noon. Then the ravine is itself, like the great act that demonstrates a temperament. It is the narrow home of fire, hemmed in by brilliant colors, nearly all, perhaps quite all, of which could be found in a glowing furnace. Every shade of yellow is there, lemon yellow, sulfur yellow, the yellow of amber, the yellow of orange with its tendency toward red, the yellow of gold, sand color, sun color. Cannot all these yellows be found in a fire? And there are the reds, pink of the carnation, pink of the coral, red of the little rose that grows in certain places of sands, red of the bright flame's heart. And all these colors are mingled in complete sterility, and all are fused into a fierce brotherhood by the sun, and like a flood they seem flowing to the red and the yellow mountains, like a flood that is flowing to its sea. You are taken by them toward the mountains, on and on till the world is closing in, and you know the way must come to an end, and it comes to an end in a tomb. You go to a door in the rock, and a guardian lets you in and wants to follow you in. Prevent him if you can. Pay him. Go in alone, for this is the tomb of Amenhotep II, and he himself is here far down at rest under the mountain, this king who lived and reigned more than fourteen hundred years before the birth of Christ. The ravine valley leads to him, and you should go to him alone. He lies in the heart of the living rock. In the dull heat of the earth's bowels, which is like no other heat. You descend by stairs and corridors. You pass over a well by a bridge. You pass through a naked chamber, and the king is not there. And you go on down another staircase and along another corridor, and you come into a pillared chamber with paintings on its walls, and on its pillars paintings of the king in the presence of the gods of the underworld, under stars in a soft blue sky. And below you, shut in on the farther side by the solid mountain in whose breast you have all this time been walking, there is a crypt. And you turn away from the bright paintings, and down there you see the king. Many years ago in London I went to the private view of the royal academy at Burlington House. I went in the afternoon when the galleries were crowded with politicians and artists, with dealers, gossips, quidnunks and flaniers, with authors, fashionable lawyers, and doctors, with men and women of the world, with young dandies and actresses on vogue. Aurora voices went up to the roof. Everyone was talking, smiling, laughing, commenting, and criticizing. It was a little picture of the very worldly world that loves the things of today and the chime of the passing hours. And suddenly some people near me were silent, and some turned their heads to stare with a strangely fixed attention. And I saw coming toward me an emaciated figure, rather bent, much drawn together, walking slowly on legs like sticks. It was clad in black, with a gleam of color. Above it was a face so intensely thin that it was like the face of death. And in this face shown two eyes that seemed full of the other world. And like a breath from the other world passing, this man went by me and was hidden from me by the throng. It was cardinal manning in the last days of his life. The face of the king is like his, but it has an even deeper pathos as it looks upward to the rock. And the king's silence bids you be silent, and his immobility bids you be still. And his sad and unutterable resignation sifts awe, as by the desert wind the sand is shifted into the temples, into the temple of your heart. And you feel the touch of time, but the touch of eternity, too. And as in that rock-une sanctuary you whisper, Pax Vobescom, you say it for all the world. CHAPTER XIV. PRAYER PERVADES THE EAST. Far off across the sands, when one is traveling in the desert, one sees thin minarets rising towards the sky. A desert city is there. It signals its presence by this mute appeal to Allah. And where there are no minarets, in the great wastes of the dunes, in the eternal silence, the lifelessness that is not broken, even by any lonely wandering bird, the camels are stopped at the appointed hours, the poor and often ragged robes are laid down, the brown pilgrims prostrate themselves in prayer. And the rich man spreads his carpet and prays. And the half-naked nomad spreads nothing but he prays, too. The east is full of lust and full of money-getting, and full of bartering and full of violence, but it is full of worship, of worship that disdains concealment, that rakes not of ridicule or comment, that believes too utterly to care if others disbelieve. There are in the east many men who do not pray. They do not laugh at the man who does, like the un-praying Christian. There is nothing ludicrous to them in prayer. In Egypt your Nubian sailor prays in the stern of your Dahabiya, and your Egyptian boatman prays by the rudder of your boat, and your black donkey-boy prays behind a red rock in the sand, and your camel-man prays when you are resting in the noontide, watching the far-off, quivering mirage, lost in some wayward dream. And must you not pray, too, when you enter certain temples where once strange gods were worshiped in whom no man now believes? There is one temple on the Nile which seems to embrace in its arms all the worship of the past, to be full of prayers and solemn praises, to be the holder, the noble keeper, of the sacred longings, of the unearthly desires and aspirations of the dead. It is the temple of Edfu. From all the other temples it stands apart. It is the temple of inward flame, of the secret soul of man, of that mystery within us that is exquisitely sensitive and exquisitely alive, that has longings it cannot tell, and sorrows it dare not whisper, and loves it can only love. To Horus it was dedicated, hawk-headed Horus, the son of Isis and Osiris, who was crowned with many crowns, who was the young Apollo of the old Egyptian world. But though I know this, I am never able to associate Edfu with Horus, that child wearing the sidewalk, when he is not hawk-headed in his solar aspect, that boy with his finger in his mouth, that youth who fought against set, murderer of his father. Edfu, in its solemn beauty, in its perfection of form, seems to me to pass into a region altogether beyond identification with the worship of any special deity, with particular attributes, perhaps with particular limitations, one who can be graven upon walls and graven upon architraves, and pillars painted in brilliant colors, one who can personally pursue a criminal, like some policeman in the street, even one who can rise upon the world in the visible glory of the sun. To me Edfu must always represent the world worship of the hidden one, not Amun, God of the dead, fused with Ra, with Amsu, or with Canum, but that other hidden one, who is God of the happy hunting ground of savages, with whom the Buddhist strives to merge his strange serenity of soul, one who is adored in the holy places by the Muslim, and lifted mystically above the heads of kneeling Catholics in cathedrals dim with incense, and merrily praised with the banjo and the trumpet in the streets of black English cities, who is asked for children by longing women, and for new dolls by lisping babes, whom the atheist denies in the day and fears in the darkness of night, who is on the lips alike of priest and blasphemer, and in the soul of all human life. Edfu stands alone, not near any other temple. It is not pagan, it is not Christian. It is a place in which to worship according to the dictates of your heart. Edfu stands alone on the bank of the Nile between Luxor and Aswan. It is not very far from El Kab, once the capital of Upper Egypt, and it is about two thousand years old. The building of it took over one hundred and eighty years, and it is the most perfectly preserved temple today of all the antique world. It is huge and it is splendid. It has towers one hundred and twelve feet high, a propellant two hundred and fifty-two feet broad, and walls four hundred and fifty feet long. Begun in the rain of Ptolemy III it was completed only fifty-seven years before the birth of Christ. You know these facts about it, and you forget them, or at least you do not think of them. What does it all matter when you are alone in Edfu? Let the antiquarian go with his anxious nose almost touching the stone. Let the Egyptologist peer through his glasses at hieroglyphs and puzzle out the meaning of cartouches. But let us wander at ease and worship and regard the exquisite form and drink in the mystical spirit of this very wonderful temple. Do you care about form? Here you will find it in absolute perfection. Edfu is the consecration of form. In proportion it is supreme above all other Egyptian temples. Its beauty of form is like the chiseled loveliness of a perfect sonnet. While the world lasts no architect can arise to create a building more satisfying, more calm with the calm of faultlessness, more serene with the just serenity. Or so it seems to me. I think of the most lovely buildings I know in Europe, of the Alhambra at Granada, of the Capella Palatina in the palace at Palermo, and Edfu I place with them, Edfu, utterly different from them, more different perhaps even than they are from each other, but akin to them as all great beauty is mysteriously akin. I have spent morning after morning in the Alhambra, and many and many an hour in the Capella Palatina, and I have never been weary of either or longed to go away. And the same sweet desire to stay came over me in Edfu. The Lulia was tied up by the high bank of the Nile. The sailors were glad to rest. There was no steamer sounding its hideous siren to call me to its crowded deck. So I yielded to my desire, and for long I stayed in Edfu. And when at last I left it I said to myself, this is a supreme thing. And I knew that within me had suddenly developed the curious passion for buildings that some people never feel, and that others feel ever growing and growing. Yes, Edfu is supreme. No alteration could improve it. Any change made in it, however slight, could only be harmful to it. Pure and perfect is its design. A propylene, great open courtyard with pillared galleries, halls, chambers, sanctuary. Its dignity and its sobriety are matchless. I know they must be because they touched me so strangely with a kind of reticent enchantment, and I am not by nature enamored of sobriety, of reticence and calm, but I am inclined to delight in almost violent force, in brilliance and especially in combinations of color. In the Alhambra one finds both force and fairy-like lightness, delicious proportions, delicate fantasy, a spell as of subtle magicians, in the Capella patina a jeweled splendor, combined with a small perfection of form which simply captivates the whole spirit and leads it to adoration. In Edfu you are face to face with hugeness and with grandeur, but soon you are scarcely aware of either, in the sense at least that connects these qualities with a certain overwhelming, almost striking down of the spirit and the faculties. What you are aware of is your own immense and beautiful calm of utter satisfaction, a calm which has quietly inundated you like a waveless tide of the sea. How rare it is to feel this absolute satisfaction, this praising serenity! The critical spirit goes like a bird from an opened window. The excited, laudatory, voluble spirit goes, and this splendid calm is left. If you stay here, you, as this temple has been, will be molded into a beautiful sobriety. From the top of the pylon you have received this still and glorious impression, from the matchless design of the whole building, which you see best from there. When you descend the shallow staircase, when you stand in the great court, when you go into the shadowy halls, then it is that the utter satisfaction within you deepens. Then it is that you feel the need to worship in this place created for worship. CHAPTER XIV. The ancient Egyptians made most of their temples in conformity with a single type. The sanctuary was at the heart, the core of each temple. The sanctuaries surrounded by the chambers in which were laid up the precious objects connected with ceremonies and sacrifices. Leading to the core of this temple, which was sometimes called the Divine House, were various halls the roofs of which were supported by columns, those hypostyle halls which one sees perpetually in Egypt. Before the first of these halls was a courtyard surrounded by a colonnade. In the courtyard the priests of the temple assembled. The people were allowed to enter the colonnade. A gateway with towers gave entrance to the courtyard. If one visits many of the Egyptian temples, one soon becomes aware of the subtlety, combined with a sort of high simplicity and sense of mystery and poetry, of these builders of the past. As a great writer leads one on with a concealed but beautiful art, from the first words to which all the other words are ministering servants, as the great musician, Wagner in his Meister Singer, for instance, leads one from the first notes of his score to those final notes which magnificently reveal to the listeners the real meaning of those first notes, and of all the notes which follow them, so the Egyptian builders lead the spirit gently, mysteriously forward from the gateway between the towers to the distant house divine. When one enters the outer court one feels the far-off sanctuary. Almost unconsciously is one aware that for the sanctuary all the rest of the temple was created, that to that sanctuary everything leads, and in spirit one is drawn softly onward to that very holy place. Slowly perhaps the body moves from courtyard to hypostyle hall, and from one hall to another. Hieroglyphs are examined, cartouches puzzled out, paintings and processions or barreliefs of past times and of sacrifices looked at with care and interest, but all the time one has the sense of waiting, of a want unsatisfied, and only when one at last reaches the sanctuary is one perfectly at rest, for then the spirit feels this is the meaning of it all. One of the means which the Egyptian architects used to create this sense of approach is very simple, but perfectly effective. It consisted only in making each hall on a very slightly higher level than the one preceding it, and the sanctuary, which is narrow and mysteriously dark on the highest level of all. Each time one takes an upward step, or walks up a little incline of stone, the body seems to convey to the soul a deeper message of reverence and awe. In no other temple is this sense of approach to the heart of a thing so acute as it is when one walks in edfoo. In no other temple, when the sanctuary is reached, has one such a strong consciousness of being indeed within a sacred heart. The color of edfoo is a pale and delicate brown, warm in the strong sunshine, but seldom glowing. Its first doorway is extraordinarily high, and is narrow, but very deep, with a roof showing traces of that delicious clear blue-green which is like a thin cry of joy rising up in the solemn temples of Egypt. A small sphinx keeps watch on the right, just where the guardian stands. This guardian, the gift of the past, squat even fat with a very perfect face of a determined and handsome man. In the court upon a pedestal stands a big bird, and near it is another bird, or rather half a bird, leaning forward and very much defaced. And in this great courtyard there are swarms of living birds twittering in the sunshine. Through the doorway between the towers one sees a glimpse of a native village with the cupolas of a mosque. I stood and looked at the cupolas for a moment. Then I turned and forgot for a time the life of the world without. That men, perhaps, were praying beneath those cupolas, or praising the Muslims God. For when I turned I felt, as I have said, as if all the worship of the world must be concentrated here. Standing far down the open court in the full sunshine I could see into the first Tybal-style hall, but beyond only a darkness, a darkness which led me on in which the further chambers of the house divine were hidden. As I went on slowly the perfection of the plan of the dead architects was gradually revealed to me, when the darkness gave up its secrets, when I saw not clearly but dimly the long way between the columns, the noble columns themselves, the gradual slight upward slope. Graduated by genius there is no other word which led to the sanctuary seen at last as a little darkness in which all the mystery of worship and of the silent desires of men was surely concentrated and kept by the stone forever. Even the succession of the darknesses, like shadows growing deeper and deeper, seemed planned by some great artist in the management of light and so of shadow effects. The perfection of form is in edfoo, impossible to describe, impossible not to feel. The tremendous effect it has and effect upon the soul is created by a combination of shapes, of proportions, of different levels, of different heights, by consummate gradation. And these shapes, proportions, different levels and heights are seen in dimness. Not that jeweled dimness one loves in Gothic cathedrals, but the heavy dimness of windowless mighty chambers lighted only by a rebuked daylight ever trying to steal in. One is captured by no ornament seduced by no lovely colors. Better than any ornament, greater than any radiant glory of color is this massive austerity. It is like the ultimate in an art. Everything has been tried, every strangeness, bizarre, absurdity, every wild scheme of hues, every preposterous subject, to take an extreme instance, a camel wearing a top hat and lighted up by fireworks, which I saw recently in a picture gallery of Munich. And at the end a genius paints a portrait of a wrinkled old woman's face, and the world regards and worships. Or all discords have been flung together, pale mel, resolution of them has been deferred perpetually, perhaps even denied altogether, a chord of B major has been struck with C major, works have closed upon the leading note or the dominant seventh, symphonies have been composed to be played in the dark or be accompanied by a magic lantern's efforts, operas have been produced which are merely carnage and a row, and at the end a genius writes a little song and the world gives the tribute of its breathless silence and its tears. And it knows that though other things may be done, better things can never be done, for no perfection can exceed any other perfection. And so in Edfoo I feel that this untinted austerity is perfect. That whatever may be done in architecture during future ages of the world, Edfoo, while it lasts, will remain a thing supreme, supreme in form and, because of the supremacy, supreme in the spell which it casts upon the soul. The sanctuary is just a small, beautifully proportioned, in most chamber, with a black roof, containing a sort of altar of granite, and a great polished granite shrine which no doubt once contained the God Horus. I am glad he is not there now. How far more impressive it is to sand in an empty sanctuary in the house divine of the hidden one, whom the nations of the world worship, whether they spread their robes on the sand and turn their faces to Mecca, or beat the tambourine and sing glory hymns of salvation, or flagellate themselves in the night before the patron saint of the passionists, or only gaze at the snow-white plume that floats from the snows of Etna under the rows of dawn and feel the soul behind nature. Among the temples of Egypt Edfoo is the house divine of the hidden one, the perfect temple of worship. CHAPTER XV. COME AMBOS. Some people talk of the sameness of the Nile, and there is a lovely sameness of golden light, of delicious air, of people, and of scenery. For Egypt is, after all, mainly a great river with strips on each side of cultivated land, flat, green, not very varied. River, green plains, yellow plains, pink, brown, steel gray or pale yellow mountains, a whale of Shadoof, a whale of Sakia. Yes, I suppose there is a sameness, a sort of golden monotony in this land pervaded with light and pervaded with sound. Always there is light around you, and you are bathing in it, and nearly always, if you are living, as I was, on the water, there is a multitude of mingling sounds floating, floating to your ears. As there are two lines of green land, two lines of mountains, following the course of the Nile, so are there two lines of voices that cease their calling and singing only as you draw near to Nubia. For then, with the green land, they fade away, these miles upon miles of calling and singing brown men, and amber and ruddy sands creep downward to the Nile, and the air seems subtly changing, and the light perhaps growing a little harder. And you are aware of other regions, unlike those you are leaving, more African, more savage, less swab, less like a dreaming, and especially the silence makes a great impression on you. But before you enter this silence, between the amber and ruddy walls that will lead you on to Nubia, and to the land of the Crocodile, you have a visit to pay. For here, high up on a terrace, looking over a great bend of the river is Com Ambos, and Com Ambos is the temple of the Crocodile God. Sebek was one of the oldest and one of the most evil of the Egyptian gods. In the Phaeum he was worshiped, as well as at Com Ambos, and there in the holy lake of his temple were numbers of holy crocodiles, which Strabo tells us were decorated with jewels like pretty women. He did not get on with the other gods, and was sometimes confused with Set, who personified natural darkness, and who also was worshiped by the people about Com Ambos. I have spoken of the golden sameness of the Nile, but this sameness is broken by the variety of the temples. Here you have a striking instance of this variety. Edfu, only forty miles from Com Ambos, the next temple which you visit, is the most perfect temple in Egypt. Com Ambos is one of the most imperfect. Edfu is a divine house of the hidden one, full of a sacred atmosphere. Com Ambos is the house of crocodiles. In ancient days the inhabitants of Edfu abhorred above everything, crocodiles and their worshipers. And here at Com Ambos the crocodile was adored. You are in a different atmosphere. As soon as you land you are greeted with crocodiles, though fortunately not by them. A heap of their black mummies is shown to you, reposing in a sort of tomb or shrine open at one end to the air. By these mummies the new note is loudly struck. The crocodiles have carried you in an instant from that which is pervading general to that which is narrowly particular, from the purely noble which seems to belong to all time, to the entirely barbaric which belongs only to times outworn. It is difficult to feel as if one had anything in common with men who seriously worshipped crocodiles, had priests to feed them and decorated their scaly nets with jewels. Yet the crocodile god had a noble temple at Com Ambos, a temple which dates from the times of the Ptolemies, though there was a temple in earlier days which has now disappeared. Its situation is splendid. It stands high above the Nile and close to the river on a terrace which has recently been constructed to save it from the encroachments of the water. And it looks down upon a view which is exquisite in the clear light of early morning. On the right and far off is a delicious pink bearness of distant flats and hills. Opposite there is a flood of verdure and of trees going to mountains, a spit of stand where is an inlet of the river with a crowd of native boats, perhaps waiting for a wind. On the left is the big bend of the Nile, singularly beautiful, almost voluptuous in form, and girdled with a radiant green of crops, with palm trees and again the distant hills. It was well advised to have his temples here and in the glorious Fayum, that land flowing with milk and honey, where the air is full of the voices of the flocks and herds, and alive with the wild pigeons, where the sweet sugar cane towers up in fairy forests, the beloved home of the jackal, where the green corn waves to the horizon, and the runlets of water make a maze of silver threads carrying life and its happy murmur through all the vast oasis. At the guardian's gate by which you go in there sits not a watchdog, nor yet a crocodile, but a watch cat, small but very determined and very attentive to its duties, and neatly carved in stone. You try to look like a crocodile worshiper. It is deceived, and lets you pass, and you are alone with the growing mourning and comombos. I was never taken, caught up into an atmosphere in comombos. I examined it with interest, but I did not feel a spell. Its grandeur is great, but it did not affect me, as did the grandeur of Karnak. Its nobility cannot be questioned, but I did not stillly rejoice in it, as in the nobility of Luxor, or the free splendor of the Ramiseum. The oldest thing at comombos is a gateway of sandstone placed there by Tutmos III, as a tribute to Sebek. The great temple is of a warm brown color, a very rich and particularly beautiful brown, that soothes and almost comforts the eyes that have been for many days boldly assaulted by the sun. Upon the terrace platform above the river you face a low and ruined wall, on which there are some lively reliefs, beyond which is a large open court containing a quantity of stunted, these big columns standing on big bases. Immediately before you the temple towers up, very gigantic, very majestic, with a stone pavement, walls on which still remain some traces of paintings, and really grand columns, enormous in size and in good formation. There are fine architraves and some bits of roofing, but the greater part is open to the air. Through a doorway is a second hall containing columns much less noble, and beyond this one walk and ruin, among crumbled or partly destroyed chambers, broken statues, become mere slabs of granite and fallen blocks of stone. At the end is a wall, with a pavement bordering it, and a row of chambers that look like monkish cells closed by small doors. At comombos there are two sanctuaries, one dedicated to Sebek, the other to Heru'er, or Heru'is, a form of Horus in Egyptian called the Elder, which was worshipped with Sebek here by the admirers of crocodiles. Each of them contains a pedestal of granite upon which once rested a sacred bark bearing an image of the deity. There are some fine reliefs scattered through these mighty ruins, showing Sebek with the head of a crocodile, Heru'er with the head of a hawk so characteristic of Horus, and one strange animal which has no fewer than four heads, apparently meant for the heads of lions. One relief which I specially noticed for its life, its charming vivacity and its almost amusing fidelity to details, unchanged today, depicts a number of ducks in full flight near a mass of lotus flowers. I remembered it one day in the Fayum, so intimately associated with Sebek, when I rode twenty miles out from camp on a dromedary to the end of the Great Lake of Karun, where the sand wastes of the Libyan desert stretched to the pale and waveless waters which, that day, looked curiously desolate and even sinister under a low gray sky. Beyond the wiry tamarisk bushes, which grow far out from the shore, thousands upon thousands of wild duck were floating as far as the eyes could see. We took a strange native boat, manned by two half-naked fishermen, and were rode with big, broad-bladed oars out upon the silent flood that the silent desert surrounded. But the duck were too wary ever to let us get within range of them. As we drew gently near, they rose in black throngs and skimmed low into the distance of the wintry landscape, trailing their legs behind them, like the duck on the wall of Komambos. There was no duck for dinner in camp that night, and the cook was inconsolable. But I had seen a relief come to life and surmounted my disappointment. Komambos and Edfu, the two houses of the lovers and haters of crocodiles, or at least of the lovers and haters of their worship, I shall always think of them together because I drifted on the Luye from one to the other and saw no interesting temple between them, and because their personalities are as opposed as were centuries ago the tenants of those who adored within them. The Egyptians of old were devoted to the hunting of crocodiles, which once abounded in the reaches of the Nile between Aswan and Luxor, and also much lower down. But I believe that no reliefs or paintings of this sort are to be found upon the walls of the temples and tombs. The fear of Sebek perhaps prevailed even over the dwellers about the temple of Edfu. But how could fear of any crocodile god infect the souls of those who were privileged to worship in such a temple or even reverently to stand under the colonnade within the door? As well perhaps one might ask how men could be inspired to raise such a perfect building to a deity with the face of a hawk. But Horus was not the god of crocodiles but a god of the sun, and his power to inspire men must have been vast. For the greatest concentration in stone in Egypt, and I suppose in the whole world the Sphinx, as Derouge proved by an inscription at Edfu, was a representation of Horus transformed to conquer Typhon. The Sphinx and Edfu. For such marvels we ought to bless the hawk-headed god. And if we forget the hawk, which one meets so perpetually upon the walls of tombs and temples, and identify Horus rather with the Greek Apollo, the yellow-haired god of the sun, driving westerly all day in his flaming chariot and shooting his golden arrows at the happy world beneath, we can be at peace with those dead Egyptians. For every pilgrim who goes to Edfu today is surely a worshipper of the solar aspect of Horus. As long as the world lasts there will be sun-worshippers. Every brown man upon the Nile is one, and every good American who crosses the ocean, and comes at last into the somber wonder of Edfu, and I was one upon the deck of the Luya. And we all worship as yet in the dark, as in the exquisite dark, like faith of the holy of holies of Horus. End of Section 17 Section 18 of the Spell of Egypt. This is a Librivox recording. All Librivox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Librivox.org. The Spell of Egypt by Robert Smythe-Hitchens. Chapter 16 Philae As I drew slowly nearer and nearer to the home of the Great Enchantress, or as Isis was also called in Bygone Days, the Lady of Philae, the land began to change in character to be full of a new and barbaric meaning. In recent years I have paid many visits to Northern Africa, but only to Tunisia and Algeria, countries that are wilder-looking and much more wilder-seeming than Egypt. Now as I approached Aswan, I seemed at last to be also approaching the real, the intense Africa that I had known in the Sahara, the enigmatic siren, savage and strange and wonderful, whom the typical OLED nail, crowned with gold and tufted with ostrich plumes, painted with coal, tattooed and perfumed, hung with golden coins and amulets and framed in plates of coarse false hair, represents indifferently to the eyes of the traveling stranger. For at last I saw the sands that I love creeping down to the banks of the Nile, and they brought with them that wonderful air which belongs only to them, the air that dwells among the dunes in the solitary places, that is like the cool touch of liberty upon the face of a man, that makes the brown child of the nomad as leaf, tireless and fierce-spirited as a young panther, and sets flame in the eyes of the Arab horse, and gives speed of the wind to the sluggy. The true lover of the desert can never rid his soul of its passion for the sands, and now my heart leaped as I stole into their pure embraces, as I saw to right and left amber curves and sheeny recesses, shining ridges and blooming clefs. The clean delicacy of those sands that, in long and glowing hills, stretched out from Nubia to meet me. Who could ever describe them? Who could ever describe their soft and enticing shapes, their exquisite gradations of color, the little shadows in their hollows, the fiery beauty of their crests, the patterns the cool winds make upon them? It is an enchanted reum of the sands through which one approaches Isis. Isis and engineers. We English people have affected that curious introduction, and we greatly pride ourselves upon it. We have presented Sir William Garsten, Mr. John Blue, and Mr. Fitz Maurice, and other clever, hardworking men to the fabled lady of Filet, and they have given her a gift, a dam two thousand yards in length, upon which tourists go smiling on trolleys. Isis has her expensive tribute. It cost about a million and a half pounds, and no doubt she ought to be gratified. Yet I think Isis mourns on Altered Filet, as she mourns with her sister Nephthys at the heads of so many mummies of Osirons upon the walls of Egyptian tombs. And though the Felaen very rightly rejoice, there are some unpractical sentimentalists who form a company about her, and make their plaint with hers. Their plaint for the peace that is gone, for the lost calm, the departed poetry that once hung like a delicious, like an inimitable atmosphere about the palms of the holy island. I confess that I dreaded to revisit Filet. I had sweet memories of the island that had been with me for many years, memories of still mornings under the palm trees, watching the gliding waters of the river, or gazing across them to the long sweep of the empty sands, memories of drowsy golden noons when the bright world seemed softly sleeping, and the almost daffodil-colored temple dreamed under the quivering canopy of blue. Memories of evenings when a benediction from the lifted hands of romance surely fell upon the temple and the island and the river, memories of moonlit nights when the spirits of the old gods to whom the temples were reared surely held converse with the spirits of the desert, with Mirage and her pale and evading sisters of the great spaces under the brilliant stars. I was afraid, because I could not believe the asservations of certain practical persons, full of the hard and almost angry desire of progress, that no harm had been done by the creation of the reservoir, but that on the contrary it had benefited the temple. The action of the water upon the stone, they said with vehement voices, instead of loosening it and causing it to crumble untimely away, had tended to harden and consolidate it. Here I should like to lie, but I resist the temptation. Monsieur Naville has stated that possibly the English engineers have helped to prolong the lives of the buildings of Filet, and Monsieur Maspero has declared that the state of the temple of Filet becomes continually more satisfactory. So be it, longevity has been by a happy chance secured. But what of beauty? What of the beauty of the past, and what of the schemes for the future? Is Filet even to be left as it is, or are the waters of the Nile to be artificially raised still higher, until Filet ceases to be? Soon no doubt an answer will be given. Meanwhile, instead of the little island that I knew, and thought a little paradise breathing out enchantment in the midst of titanic sterility, I found a something diseased. Filet now, when out of the water, as it was all the time when I was last in Egypt, looks like a thing stricken with some creeping malady. One of those malades which begin in the lower members of a body, and work their way gradually but inexorably upward to the trunk, until they attain the heart. I came to it by the desert, and astended to Shellel, Shellel with its railway station, its workmen's buildings, its tents, its dozens of screens to protect the hewers of stone from the burning rays of the sun. This bustle of people, of overseers, of engineers and workmen, Egyptian, Nubian, Italian, and Greek. The silence I had known was gone, though the desert lay all around, the great sands, the great masses of granite that look as if patiently waiting to be fashioned into obelisks and sarcophagi and statues. But away there, across the bend of the river, dominating the ugly rummage of this intrusive beehive of human bees, sheer grace, overcoming strength both of nature and human nature, rose the fabled Pharaoh's bed, gracious, tender from Shellel most delicately perfect, and glowing with pale gold against the grim background of the hills on the western shore. It seemed to plead for mercy, like something feminine threatened with outrage, to protest through its mere beauty as a woman might protest by an attitude against further desecration. And in the distance the Nile roared through the many gates of the dam, making answer to the protest. What irony was this seen? In the old days of Egypt, Phile was sacred ground, was the Nile protected home of sacerdotal mysteries, was a veritable mecca to the believers in Osiris, to which it was forbidden even to draw near without permission. The ancient Egyptians swore solemnly by him who sleeps in Phile. Now they sometimes swear angrily at him who wakes in, or at least by Phile, and keeps them steadily going at their appointed tasks. And instead of it being forbidden to draw near to a sacred spot, needy men from foreign countries flock thither in eager crowds, not to worship in beauty but to earn a living wage. And Pharaoh's bed looks out over the water and seems to wonder what will be the end. I was glad to escape from Chalal, pursued by the shriek of an engine announcing its departure from the station, glad to be on the quiet water to put it between me and that crowd of busy workers. Before me I saw a vast lake, not unlovely, where once the Nile flowed swiftly, far off a gray smudge, the very damnable dam. All around me was a grim and cruel world of rocks and of hills that look almost like heaps of rubbish. Some of them gray, some of them in color so dark that they resemble the lava torrents petrified near Catania, or the black country in England through which one rushes on one's way to the north. Just here and there, sweetly almost as the pink blossoms of the wild oleander, which I have seen from Sicilian seas lifting their heads from the crevices of sea-rocks, the amber and rosy sands of Nubia smiled down over grit, stone, and granite. The setting of Filet is severe. Even in bright sunshine it has an iron look. On a gray or stormy day it would be forbidding or even terrible. In the old winters and springs one loved Filet the more because of the contrast of its setting with its own lyrical beauty, its curious tenderness of charm, a charm in which the isle itself was mingled with its buildings. But now, and before my boat had touched the quay, I saw that the island must be ignored if possible. The water with which it is entirely covered during a great part of the year seems to have cast a blight upon it. The very few palms have a drooping and tragic air. The ground has a gangreneed appearance, and much of it shows a crawling mass of unwholesome-looking plants, which seem crouching down as if ashamed of their brutal exposure by the receded river, and of harsh and yellow-green grass unattractive to the eyes. As I stepped on shore I felt as if I were stepping on disease. But at least there were the buildings undisturbed by any outrage. Again I turned toward Pharaoh's bed, toward the temple standing apart from it, which already I had seen from the desert near Shalal, gleaming with its gracious sand, yellow lifting its series of straight lines of masonry above the river and the rocks, looking from a distance very simple with a simplicity like that of clear water, but as enticing as the light on the first real day of spring. I went first to Pharaoh's bed. Imagine a woman with a perfectly lovely face, with features as exquisitely proportioned as those, say, of Praxiteles's statue of the Senadian Aphidite, for which King Nicodemus was willing to remit the entire national debt of Sinaitis, and with a warmly white rose-leaf complexion. One of those complexions one seldom sees in Italian women, colorless, yet suggestive almost of glow, of purity with the flame of passion behind it. Imagine that woman attacked by a malady which leaves her features exactly as they were, but which changes the color of her face, from the throat upward to just beneath the nose, from the warm white to a mottled grayish hue. Imagine the line that would seem to be traced between the two complexions, the mottled gray below the warm white still glowing above. Imagine this, and you have Pharaoh's bed and the temple of Phile as they are today. End of section 18. Section 19 of the Spell of Egypt. This is a Librivox recording. All Librivox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Librivox.org. The Spell of Egypt by Robert Smythe Hitchens. Chapter 17. Pharaoh's Bed. Part 1. Pharaoh's bed, which stands alone close to the Nile on the eastern side of the island, is not one of those rugged, majestic buildings full of grandeur and splendor which can bear, can carry off, as it were, a cruelly imposed ugliness without being affected as a whole. It is, on the contrary, a small, almost an airy and a femininely perfect thing in which a singular loveliness of form was combined with a singular loveliness of color. The spell it threw over you was not so much a spell woven of details as a spell woven of divine uniformity. To put it in very practical language, Pharaoh's bed was all of a piece. The form was married to the color. The color seemed to melt into the form. It was indeed a bed in which the soul that worships beauty could rest happily entranced. Nothing jarred. Antiquaries say that apparently this building was left unfinished. That may be so. But for all that it was one of the most finished things in Egypt—essentially a thing to inspire within one the perfect calm that is Greek. The blighting touch of the Nile, which has changed the beautiful pale yellow of the stone of the lower part of the building, to a hideous and dreary gray, which made me think of a steel knife on which liquid has been spilt and allowed to run, has destroyed the uniformity, the balance, the faultless melody lifted up by form and color. And so it is with the temple. It is, as it were, cut in two by the intrusion into it of this hideous, modeled complexion left by the receded water. Everywhere one sees disease on the walls and columns, almost blotting out bow-reliefs, giving to their active figures a morbid, acycly look. The effect is specially distressing in the open court that proceeds the temple dedicated to the Lady of Filet. In this court, which is at the southern end of the island, the Nile at certain seasons is now forced to rise very nearly as high as the capitals of many of the columns. The consequence of this is that here the disease seems making rapid strides. One feels it is drawing nearer to the heart and that the poor, hardened invalid may collapse at any moment. Yes, there is much to make one sad at Filet, but how much of pure beauty there is left of beauty that merely protests against any further outrage. As there is something epic in the grandeur of the Lotus Hall at Carnac, so there is something lyrical in the soft charm of the Filet temple. Certain things or places, certain things in certain places, always suggest to my mind certain people in whose genius I take delight, who have won me and moved me by their art. Whenever I go to Filet, the name of Shelley comes to me. I scarcely could tell why. I have no special reason to connect Shelley with Filet. But when I see that almost airy loveliness of stone, so simply elegant, so somehow spring-like in its pale-colored beauty, its happy, daffodil charm with its touch of the Greek, the sensitive hand from Atticus stretched out over Nubia, I always think of Shelley. I think of Shelley the youth who dived down into the pool so deep that it seemed he was lost forever to the sun. I think of Shelley the poet, full of a lyric ecstasy who was himself like an embodied, longing for something afar from the sphere of our sorrow. Michael Filet is like a temple of dreams, and of all poets Shelley might have dreamed the dream and have told it to the world in a song. For all its solidity there are a strange lightness and grace in the temple of Filet. There is an elegance you will not find in the other temples of Egypt. But it is an elegance quite undefiled by weakness, by any sentimentality. Even a building like a love-lorn maid can be sentimental. Edward Fitzgerald wants to find taste as the feminine of genius. Taste prevails in Filet, a certain delicious femininity that seduces the eyes and the heart of man. Shall we call it the spirit of Isis? I have heard a clever critic and an antiquarian declare that he is not very fond of Filet, that he feels a certain spuriousness in the temple due to the mingling of Greek with Egyptian influences. He may be right. I am no antiquarian, and as a mere lover of beauty I do not feel the spuriousness. I can see neither two quarreling strengths nor any weakness caused by division. I suppose I see only the beauty, as I might see only the beauty of a woman-bread of a handsome father and a mother of different races, and who, not typical of either, combined in her features and figure distinguishing merits of both. It is true that there is a particular pleasure which is roused in us only by the absolutely typical, the completely thoroughbred person or thing. It may be a pleasure not caused by beauty, and it may be very keen nevertheless. When it is combined with the joy roused in us by all beauty, it is a very pure emotion of exceptional delight. Filet does not, perhaps, give this emotion, but it certainly has a lovableness that attaches the heart in a quite singular degree. The Filet lover is the most faithful of lovers. The hold of his mistress upon him, once it has been felt, is never relaxed, and in his affection for Filet there is, I think, nearly always a rainbow strain of romance. When we love anything we love to be able to say of the object of our devotion there is nothing like it. Now in all Egypt, and I suppose in all the world, there is nothing just like Filet. There are temples, yes, but where else is there a bouquet of gracious buildings such as these gathered in such a holder as this tiny raft-like aisle? And where else are just such delicate and, as I have said, great and almost feminine elegance and charm set in the midst of such severe sterility? Once beyond Filet the great cataract roared down from the waste of Nubia into the green fertility of Upper Egypt. It roars no longer. But still the masses of the rocks, and still the amber and the yellow sands, and still the iron-colored hills, keep guard round Filet, and still, despite the vulgar desecration that has turned Chalal into a workman's suburb and dowered it with a railway station, there is a mystery in Filet, and the sense of isolation that only an island gives. Even now one can forget, in Filet, forget after a while and in certain parts of its buildings the presence of the gray disease, forget the threatening of the altruists who desire to benefit humanity by clearing as much beauty out of humanity's abiding place as possible. Forget the fact of the railway, except when the shriek of the engine floats over the water to one's ears. Forget economic problems and the destruction that their solving brings upon the silent world of things whose use, denied, unrecognized, or laughed at, to man is in their holy beauty, whose mission lies not upon the broad highways where tramps the hungry body, but upon the secret, shadowy byways where glides the hungry soul. Yes, one can forget even now in the hall of the Temple of Isis, where the capricious graces of color, where, like old and delicious music in the golden strings of a harp, dwells a something, what is it, a murmur or a perfume or a breathing of old and vanished years when forsaken gods were worshipped? And one can forget in the chapel of Hathor, on whose wall little chorus is borne, and in the gray hound's chapel beside it. One can forget for one walks in beauty. Lovely are the doorways in Philae. Enticing are the shallow steps that lead one onward and upward, gracious the yellow towers that seem to smile a quiet welcome. And there is one chamber that is simply a place of magic, the hall of the flowers. It is this chamber which always makes me think of Philae as a lovely temple of dreams, this silent, retired chamber where some fabled princess might well have been touched to a long, long sleep of enchantment, and lain for years upon years among the magical flowers, the lotus, and the palm, and the papyrus. CHAPTER XVII. In my youth it made upon me an indelible impression. Through intervening years filled with many new impressions, many wanderings, many visions of beauty in other lands, that retired painted chamber had not faded from my mind, or, shall I say, from my heart. There had seemed to me within it something that was ineffable, as in a lyric of Shelley's there is something that is ineffable, or in certain pictures of Bulklin, such as the villa by the sea. And when at last, almost afraid and hesitating, I came into it once more, I found in it again the strange spell of old enchantment. It seems as if this chamber had been imagined by a poet, who had set it in the center of the temple of his dreams. It is such a spontaneous chamber that one can scarcely imagine it more than a day and a night in the building. Yet in detail it is lovely, it is finished and strangely mighty, it is a lyric in stone, the most poetical chamber perhaps in the whole of Egypt. For Phile I count in Egypt, though really it is in Nubia. One who has not seen Phile may perhaps wonder how a tall chamber of solid stone, containing heavy and soaring columns, can be like a lyric of Shelley's, can be exquisitely spontaneous and yet hold a something of mystery that makes one tread softly in it, and fear to disturb within it some lovely sleeper of Nubia, some princess of the Nile. He must continue to wonder. To describe this chamber calmly, as I might, for instance, describe the temple of terror, would be simply to destroy it. For things ineffable cannot be fully explained, or not be fully felt by those the twilight of whose dreams is fitted to mingle with their twilight. They who are meant to love with ardor see passionement pour la passion. And they who are meant to take and to keep the spirit of the dream, whether it be hidden in a poem or held in the cup of a flower, or enfolded in arms of stone, will surely never miss it, even though they can hear roaring loudly above itself in voice the cry of directed waters rushing down to upper Egypt. How can one disentangle from their tapestry web the different threads of a spell? And even if one could, if one could hold them up and explain, the cause of the spell is that this comes in contact with this, and that this, which I showed you, blends with, fades into this, how could it advantage anyone? Nothing could be made clearer, nothing be really explained. The ineffable is, and must ever remain, something remote and mysterious. And so one may say many things of this painted chamber of filet, and yet never convey, perhaps never really know, the innermost cause of its charm. In it there is obvious beauty of form, and a seizing beauty of color, beauty of sunlight and shadow of antique association. This turquoise blue is enchanting, and ISIS was worshipped here. What has the one to do with the other? Nothing. And yet how much? Is there is not each of these facts a thread in the tapestry web of the spell? The eyes see the rapture of this very perfect blue. The imagination hears, as if very far off, the solemn chanting of priests, and smells the smoke of strange perfumes, and sees the long, aquiline nose and the thin, haughty lips of the goddess. And the color becomes strange to the eyes as well as very lovely, because perhaps it was there. It almost certainly was there, when, from Constantinople went forth the decree that all Egypt should be Christian, when the priests of the sacred brotherhood of ISIS were driven from their temple. ISIS nursing Horus gave way to the virgin and the child, but the cycles spin away down the ringing grooves of change. From Egypt has passed away that decreed Christianity. Now, from the minaret, the moezan cries, and in palm-shaded villages I hear the loud hymns of earnest pilgrims starting on the journey to Mecca. And ever this painted chamber shelters its mystery of poetry, its mystery of charm. And still its marvelous colors are fresh as in the far-off pagan days, and the opening lotus flowers, and the closed lotus buds, and the palm and the papyrus, are on the perfect columns. And their intrinsic loveliness, and their freshness, and their age, and the mysteries they have looked on, all these facts are part of the spell that governs us today. In Edfu one is enclosed in a wonderful austerity, and one can only worship. In Filet one is wrapped in a radiance of color, and one can only dream. For there is coral pink, and there a wonderful green, like the green light that lingers in the west. And there is a blue, as deep as the blue of a tropical sea. And there are green, blue, and lustrous, ardent red. And the odd fantasy in the coloring is not that, like the fantasy in the Temple of a Dream? For those who painted these capitals for the greater glory of Isis did not fear to depart from nature, and to their patient worship a blue palm perhaps seemed a rarely sacred thing. And that palm is part of the spell, and the reliefs upon the walls, and even the Coptic crosses that are cut into the stone. But at the end one can only say that this place is indescribable, and not because it is complex or terrifically grand like Karnak. Go to it on a sunlit morning, or stand in it on late afternoon, and perhaps you will feel that it suggests you, and that it carries you away out of familiar regions into a land of dreams, where among hidden ways the soul is lost in magic. Yes, you are gone. To the right, for alas, one cannot live in a dream forever, is a lovely doorway through which one sees the river. Facing it is another doorway, showing a fragment of the poor, vivisected island, some ruined walls, and still another doorway in which, again, is framed the Nile. Many people have cut their names upon the walls of Filet. Once as I sat there alone I felt strongly attracted to look upward to a wall, as if some personality enshrined within the stone were watching me or calling. I looked and saw written Balzac. Filet is the last temple that one visits before he gives himself to the wildness of the solitudes of Nubia. It stands at the very frontier. As one goes up the Nile, it is like a smiling adieu from the Egypt one is leaving. As one comes down it is like a smiling welcome. In its delicate charm I feel something of the charm of the Egyptian character. There are moments indeed when I identify Egypt with Filet. For in Filet one must dream, and on the Nile too one must dream. And always the dream is happy and shot through with radiant light, light that is as radiant as the colors in Filet's temple. The pylons of Ptolemy smile at you as you go up or come down the river, and the people of Egypt smile as they enter into your dream. A suavity too is theirs. I think of them often as artists, who know their parts in the dream play, who know exactly their function and how to fulfill it rightly. They sing while you are dreaming, but it is an undersong like the murmur of an eastern river far off from any sea. It never disturbs this music, but it helps you in your dream. And they are softly gay. And in their eyes there is often the gleam of sunshine, for they are the children, but not grown men of the sun. That indeed is one of the many strange things in Egypt, the youthfulness of its age, the childlikeness of its almost terrible antiquity. One goes there to look at the oldest things in the world and to feel perpetually young, young as Filet is young, as a lyric of Shelley's is young, as all of our daydreams are young, as the people of Egypt are young. Oh, that Egypt could be kept as it is, even as it is now, that Filet could be preserved even as it is now. The spoilers are there, those blithe, modern spirits, so frightfully clever and capable, so industrious, so determined, so unsparing of themselves and of others. Already they are at work benefiting Egypt. Tall chimneys begin to vomit smoke along the Nile. A damnable tram-line for little trolleys leads one toward the wonderful Colossi of Memnon. Close to Khamombo's some soul imbued with romance has had the inspiration to set up a factory, and Filet is it to go? Is beauty, then, of no value in the world? Is it always to be the prey of modern progress? Is nothing to be considered sacred, nothing to be left untouched, unsmerched by the grimy fingers of improvement? I suppose nothing. Then let those who still care to dream go now to Filet's painted chamber by the long reaches of the Nile. Go on, if they will, to the giant forms of Abu's symbol among the Nubian sands. And perhaps they will think with me that in some dreams there is a value greater than the value that is entered in any bank-book, and they will say with me, however uselessly, leave to the world some dreams, some places in which to dream, for if it needs dams to make the grain grow in the stretches of land that were barren, and railways and tram-lines and factory chimneys that vomit black smoke in the face of the sun, surely it also needs painted chambers of Filet and the silence that comes down from Isis. Section 21 of the Spell of Egypt This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Spell of Egypt by Robert Smythe Hitchens. CHAPTER XVIII. OLD CHIRO, PART I. By old Cairo I do not mean only live you care of the guide-book, the little, desolate village containing the famous Coptic Church of Abu Sergius, in the crypt of which the Virgin Mary and the Christ are said to have stayed when they fled to the land of Egypt to escape the fury of King Herod. But the Cairo that is not new, that is not wholly dedicated to officialdom and tourists, that in the midst of changes in the advance of civilization, civilization that does so much harm as well as so much good, that showers benefits with one hand and defaces beauty with the other, preserves its immemorial calm or immemorial tumult, that stands aloof, as stands aloof, ever the eastern from the western man, even in the midst of what seems perhaps like intimacy, eastern to the soul, though the fantasies, the passions, the vulgarities, the brilliant ineptitudes of the west beat about it like waves about some unyielding wall of the sea. When I went back to Egypt after a lapse of many years I fled at once from Cairo, and upon the long reaches of the Nile, in the great spaces of the Libyan desert, in the luxuriant palm groves of the Feum, among the tamarisk bushes and on the pale waters of Caron, I forgot the changes which, in my brief glimpse of the city and its environs, had moved me to despondency. But one cannot live in the solitude's forever. And at last, from Matinat al-Fayyum, with the first pilgrims starting for Mecca, I returned to the great city, determined to seek in it once more for the fascinations it used to hold, and perhaps still held in the hidden ways where modern feet, nearly always in a hurry, had seldom time to penetrate. A mist hung over the land, out of it with a sort of stern energy there came to my ears loud hymns sung by the pilgrim voices, hymns in which, mingled with the enthusiasm of devotees en route for the holiest shrine of their faith, there seemed to sound the resolution of men strung up to confront the fatigues and the dangers of a great journey through a wild and unknown country. Those hymns led my feet to the venerable mosques of Cairo, the city of mosques, guided me on my lesser pilgrimage among the cupolas and the colonnades, where grave men dream in the silence near marble fountains, or bend muttering their prayers beneath domes that are dimmed by the ruthless fingers of time. In the buildings consecrated to prayer and to meditation I first sought for the magic that still lurks in the teeming bosom of Cairo. Long as I had sought it elsewhere, in the brilliant bazaars by day and by night in the winding alleys, where the dark-eyed Jews look stealthily forth from the low-brow doorways, where the Circassian girls promenade, gleaming with golden coins and barbaric jewels, where the air is alive with music that is feverish and antique, and in strangely lighted interiors one sees forms clad in brilliant draperies, or severely draped in the simplest pale blue garments, living in languid dances, fluttering painted figures, bending, swaying, dropping down like the forms that people and dream. In the bazaars is the passion for gain, in the alleys of music and light is the passion for pleasure, in the mosques is the passion for prayer that connects the soul of men with the unseen but strongly felt world. Each of these passions is old, each of these passions in the heart of Islam is fierce. On my return to Cairo I sought for the hidden fire that is magic in the dusky places of prayer. A mist lay over the city as I stood in a narrow byway and gazed up at a heavy lattice, of which the decayed and blackened wood seemed on guard before some tragic or weary secret. Before me was the entrance to the Mosque of Ibn Talun, older than any mosque in Cairo save only the Mosque of Amru. It is approached by a flight of steps, on each side of which stand old impenetrable houses. Above my head strung a cross from one house to the other, where many little red and yellow flags ornamented with gold lozenges. These were to bear witness that in a couple of days' time, from the great open place beneath the citadel of Cairo, the second carpet was to set out on its long journey to Mecca. My guide struck on a door and uttered a fierce cry. A small shutter in the blackened lattice was opened, and a young girl with coal-tinted eyelids and a brilliant yellow handkerchief tied over her coarse black hair leaned out, held a short parlay, and vanished, drawing the shutter too behind her. The mist crept about the tawdry flags, a heavy door creaked, lined on its hinges, and from the house of the girl there came an old fat man bearing a mighty key. In a moment I was free of the Mosque of Ibn Talun. I astended the steps, passed through a doorway, and found myself on a piece of waste-ground, flanked on the right by an old mysterious wall, and on the left by the long wall of the Mosque, from which close to me rose a gray, unordimented minaret, full of the plain dignity of unpretending age. Upon its summit was perched a large and weary-looking bird with draggled feathers, which remained so still that it seemed to me to be a sad ornament set there above the city, and watching it forever with eyes that could not see. At right angles touching the Mosque was such a house as one can only see in the East, fantastically old, fantastically decayed, bleared, discolored, filthy, melancholy, showing hideous windows, like windows in the slum of a town set above coal pits in a colliery district, a degraded house, and yet a house which roused the imagination and drove it to its work. In this building once dwelt the high priest of the Mosque. This dwelling, the ancient wall, the gray minaret with its motionless bird, the lamentable waste-ground at my feet, made me rightly to appreciate the bit of old Cairo I had come to see. People who are bored by gothic churches would not love the Mosque of Ibn Talun. No longer is it used for worship. It contains no praying life. Abandoned, bare, and devoid of all lovely ornament, it stands like some hoary patriarch, naked and calm, waiting its destined end without impatience and without fear. It is a fantastic Mosque, and is impressive like a fatalistic man. The great Court of it, three hundred feet square with pointed arches supported by piers, double, and on the side looking toward Mecca, quintuple arcades, has a great dignity of somber simplicity. Not grace, not a light elegance of soaring beauty, but massiveness and heavy strength are distinguishing features of this Mosque. Even the octagonal basin and its protecting cupola that stands in the middle of the Court lack the charm that belongs to so many of the fountains of Cairo. There are two minarets, the minaret of the bird and a larger one, approached by a big stairway up which, so my dregoman told me, a sultan whose name I have forgotten loved to ride his favorite horse. Upon the summit of this minaret I stood for a long time looking down over the city. Gray it was that morning, almost as London is gray, but the sounds that came up softly to my ears out of the mist were not the sounds of London. Those many minarets, almost like columns of fog rising above the cupolas, spoke to me of the East even upon this sad and sunless morning. Once from where I was standing at the time appointed went forth the call to prayer, and in the barren court beneath me there were crowds of ardent worshipers. Stern men paced upon the huge terrace just at my feet, fingering their heads, and under that heavy cupola were made the long ablutions of the faithful. But now no man comes to this old place, no murmur to God disturbs the heavy silence. And the silence, the emptiness, and the grayness under the long arcades all seem to make a tremulous proclamation, all seem to whisper, I am very old, I am useless, I cumber the earth. Even the mosque of Amru, which stands also on ground that looks gone to waste, near dingy and squat houses built with gray bricks, seems less old than this mosque of Ibn Talun. For its long façade is striped with white and apricot, and there are lebic trees growing in its court near the two columns, between which, if you can pass, you are assured of heaven. But the mosque of Ibn Talun, seen upon a sad day, makes a powerful impression, and from the summit of its minaret you are summoned by the many minarets of Cairo to make the pilgrimage to the mosques, to pass from the broken arches of these Sarasenic cloisters to the blue mosque, the red mosque, the mosques of Muhammad Ali, of Sultan Hassan, of Kate Bey, of El Ashar, and so on to the Coptic Church that is the silent center of old Cairo. It is said that there are over four hundred mosques in Cairo. As I looked down from the minaret of Ibn Talun they called me through the mist that blotted completely out all the surrounding country, as if it would concentrate my attention upon the places of prayer during these holy days when the pilgrims were crowding in to depart with the holy carpet. And I went down by the staircase of the house, and in the mist I made my pilgrimage. As everyone who visits Rome goes to St. Peter's, so everyone who visits Cairo goes to the mosque of Muhammad Ali in the citadel, a gorgeous building in a magnificent situation, the interior of which always makes me think of court functions and of the pomp of life rather than of prayer and self-denial. More attractive to me is the blue mosque, to which I returned again and again, enticed almost as by the fascination of the living blue of a summer day. End of section twenty-one.