 CHAPTER IV Sakara and Memphis, Pt. 1 Having arrived at Bedrashain after dark, and there moored for the night, we were roused early next morning by the furious squabbling and chattering of some fifty or sixty men and boys who, with a score or two of little rough-coated, depressed-looking donkeys, were assembled on the high bank above. Seen thus against the sky their tattered garments fluttering in the wind, their brown arms and legs and frantic movement they looked like a troop of mad monkeys let loose. Every moment the uproar grew shriller, every moment more men, more boys, more donkeys appeared upon the scene. It was as if some new cadmus had been sowing boys and donkeys broadcast, and they had all come up at once for our benefit. Then it appeared that Ptolemy, knowing how eight donkeys would be wanted for our united forces, had sent up to the village for twenty-five, intending with perhaps more wisdom than justice, to select the best and dismiss the others. The result was overwhelming, misled by the magnitude of the order and concluding that Cook's party had arrived. Every man, boy, and donkey in Bedrashain in the neighboring village of Mitrajina had turned out in hot haste and rushed down to the river, so that by the time breakfast was over there were steeds enough in readiness for all the English and Cairo. I pass over the tumult that ensued when our party at last mounted the eight likeliest beasts and rode away, leaving the indignant multitude to disperse at leisure. And now our way lies over a dusty flat across the railway line, past the long straggling village, and through the famous plantations known as the Palms of Memphis. There was a crowd of patient-looking fellowheen at the little whitewashed station, waiting for the train, and the usual rabble of clamorous water, bread, and fruit-sellers. Bedrashain, though a collection of mere mud-hovels, looks pretty, nestling in the midst of stately-date palms. Square pigeon-towers embedded round the top with layers of wide-mouth pots and stuck with rows of leafless acacia-bows, like ragged banner-polls, stand up at intervals among the huts. The pigeons go in and out of the pots, or sit preening their feathers on the branches. The dogs dash out and bark madly at us as we go by. The little brown children pursue us with cries of buck-sheesh. The potter, laying out rows of soft gray, freshly molded clay-bowls and cullas to bake in the sun, stops open-mouthed and stares as if he had never seen a European till this moment. His young wife snatches up her baby and pulls her veil more closely over her face, fearing the evil eye. The village, being left behind, we ride on through one long palm-grove after another. Now skirting the borders of a large sheet of tranquil back-water, now catching a glimpse of the far-off pyramids of Giza, now passing between the huge, irregular mounds of crumbled clay which mark the site of Memphis. Next, beyond these, we come out upon a high and banked road, some twenty feet above the plain, which here spreads out like a wide lake and spends its last dark-brown alluvial wave against the yellow rocks which define the edge of the desert. High on this barren plateau, seen for the first time in one unbroken panoramic line, there stands a solemn company of pyramids, those of Sokara straight before us, those of Dasur to the left, those of Abusir to the right, and the great pyramids of Giza always in the remotest distance. It might be thought there would be some monotony in such a scene, and but little beauty. On the contrary, however, there is beauty of a most subtle and exquisite kind, transcendent beauty of color and atmosphere and sentiment, and no monotony either in the landscape or in the forms of the pyramids. One of these which we are now approaching is built in a succession of platforms gradually decreasing towards the top. Another, down yonder at Dasur, curves outward at the angles, half dome, half pyramid, like the roof of the Palais de Justice in Paris. No two are of precisely the same size or built at precisely the same angle, and each cluster differs somehow in the grouping. Then again the coloring, coloring not to be matched with any pigments yet invented, the Libyan rocks like Rusticold, the paler hue of the driven sand slopes, the warm maze of the nearer pyramids which, seen from this distance, takes a tender hint of rose like the red bloom on an apricot, the delicate tone of these objects against the sky, the infinite gradation of that sky, soft and pearly towards the horizon, blue and burning towards the zenith, the opalescent shadows, pale blue and violet and greenish gray that nestle in the hollows of the rock and the curves of the sand drifts. All this is beautiful in a way impossible to describe, and alas, impossible to copy. Nor does the lake-like plain with its palm groves and cornflats form to tame a foreground. It is exactly what is wanted to relieve that glowing distance. And now as we follow the zigzag of the road, the new pyramids grow gradually larger, the sun mounts higher, the heat increases. We meet a train of camels, buffaloes, shabby-grown sheep, men, women and children of all ages. The camels are laden with bedding, rugs, mats and crates of poultry, and carry besides two women with babies and one very old man. The younger men drive the tired beasts, the rest follow behind. The dust rises after them in a cloud. It is evidently the migration of a family of three, if not four generations. One cannot help being struck by the patriarchal simplicity of the incident. Just thus with flocks and herds and all this clan went Abraham into the land of Canaan close upon four thousand years ago, and at least one of these Sakara pyramids was even then the oldest building in the world. It is a touching and picturesque procession, much more picturesque than ours, and much more numerous, notwithstanding that our united forces, including donkey boys, porters, and miscellaneous hangers on, number nearer thirty than twenty persons. For there are the M.B.s and their nephew, and L. and the rider, and L.s maid and Ptolemy all on donkeys, and then there are the owners of the donkeys, also on donkeys, and then every donkey has a boy, and every boy has a donkey, and every donkey boy's donkey has an inferior boy in attendance. Our style of dress, too, however convenient, is not exactly in harmony with the surrounding scenery, and one cannot but feel, as these draped and dusty pilgrims pass us on the road, that we cut a sorry figure with our hideous palm-leaf hats, green veils, and white umbrellas. But the most amazing and incongruous personage in our whole procession is unquestionably George. Now George is an English North Country groom whom the M.B.s have brought out from the wilds of Lancashire, partly because he is a good shot and may be useful to Master Alfred after birds and crocodiles, and partly from a well-founded belief in his general abilities. And George, who is a fellow of infinite jest and infinite resource, takes to Eastern life as a duckling to the water. He picks up Arabic as if it were his mother tongue. He skins birds like a practised taxidermist. He can even wash an iron on occasion. He is, in short, groom, footman, housemaid, laundrymaid, stroke oar, gamekeeper, and general factotum all in one. And besides all this, he is gifted with a comic gravity of countenance that no surprises and no disasters can upset for a moment. To see this worthy anachronism cantering along in his groom's coat and gaiters, livery buttons, spotted netcloth, tall hat, and all the rest of it, his long legs dangling within an inch of the ground on either side of the most diminutive of donkeys, his double-barreled fouling-piece under his arm, and that impeturbable look on his face, one would have sworn that he and Egypt were friends of old, and that he had been brought up on pyramids from his earliest childhood. It is a long and shelterless ride from the palms to the desert, but we come to the end of it at last, mounting just such another sand-slope as that which leads up from the Giza road to the foot of the Great Pyramid. The edge of the plateau here rises abruptly from the plain in one long range of low perpendicular cliffs, pierced with dark mouths of rock-cut sepulchres, while the sand-slope by which we are climbing pours down through a breach in the rock as an alpine snow-drift flows through a mountain gap from the ice level above. And now, having dismounted through compassion for our unfortunate little donkeys, the first thing we observe is the curious mixture of debris underfoot. At Giza one treads only sand and pebbles, but here at Sakara the whole plateau is thickly strewn with scraps of broken pottery, limestone, marble and alabaster, flakes of green and blue glaze, bleached bones, shreds of yellow linen, and lumps of some odd-looking dark brown substance, like dried-up sponge. Presently someone picks up a little nose-less head of one of the common blue-water funeral statuettes, and immediately we all fall to work, grubbing for treasure, a pure waste of precious time, for though the sand is full of debris it has been sifted so often and so carefully by the Arabs that it no longer contains anything worth looking for. Meanwhile one finds a fragment of iridescent glass, another a morsel of shattered vase, a third an opaque bead of some kind of yellow paste, and then, with a shock which the present writer at all events will not soon forget, we suddenly discover that these scattered bones are human, that those linen shreds are shreds of sediment cloths, that yonder odd-looking brown lumps are rent fragments of what once was living flesh. And now, for the first time, we realize that every inch of this ground on which we are standing, and all those hillocks and hollows and pits in the sand, are violated graves. Sunei que le premier parc-coute. We soon become quite hardened to such sites, and learned to rummage among dusty sepulchres with no more compunction than would have benefited a gang of professional body snatchers. These are experiences upon which one looks back afterwards with wonder and something like remorse, but so infectious as the universal callousness and so over-mastering is the passion for relic-hunting that I do not doubt we should again do the same things under the same circumstances. Most Egyptian travelers, if questioned, would have to make a similar confession. When they were knocked at first, they denounced with horror the whole system of sepulchre excavation, legal as well as predatory, acquiring, however, a taste for scarabs and funerary statuettes. They soon begin to buy with eagerness the spoils of the dead. Finally they forget all their former scruples, and ask no better fortune than to discover and confiscate a tomb for themselves. Notwithstanding that I had first seen the pyramids of Giza, the size of the Sakara group, especially of the pyramid and platforms, took me by surprise. They are all smaller than the pyramids of Kufu and Kafra, and would no doubt look sufficiently insignificant if seen with them in close juxtaposition, but taken by themselves they are quite vast enough for grandeur. As for the pyramid and platforms, which is the largest at Sakara and next largest to the pyramid of Kafra, its position is so fine, its architectural style so exceptional, its age so immense, that one altogether loses sight of these questions of relative magnitude. If Egyptologists are right in ascribing the royal title hieroglyphed on the inner door of this pyramid to, on Ephesus, the fourth king of the first dynasty, then it is the most ancient building in the world. It had been standing from five to seven hundred years when King Kufu began his great pyramid at Giza. It was over two thousand years old when Abraham was born. It is now about six thousand eight hundred years old according to Manetho and Mariette, or about four thousand eight hundred according to the computation of Bunson. One's imagination recoils upon the brink of such a gulf of time. The door of this pyramid was carried off with other precious spoils by Lepceus and is now in the museum at Berlin. The evidence that identifies the inscription is tolerably direct. According to Manetho, an Egyptian historian who wrote in Greek and lived in the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus, King Onaphas built for himself a pyramid at a place called Kakom. Now a tablet discovered in the Serapium by Mariette gives the name of Kakem to the necropolis of Sakara, and as the pyramid in stages is not only the largest on this platform, but is also the only one in which a royal cartouche has been found, the conclusion seems obvious. When a building has already stood five or six thousand years in a climate where mosses and lichens and all those natural signs of age to which we are accustomed in Europe are unknown, it is not to be supposed that a few centuries more or less can tell upon its outward appearance. Yet to my thinking the pyramid of Onaphas looks older than those of Giza. If this be only fancy it gives one, at all events, the impression of belonging structurally to a ruder architectural period. The idea of a monument composed of diminishing platforms is in its nature more primitive than that of a smooth four-sided pyramid. We remarked that the masonry on one side, I think on the side facing eastwards, was in a much more perfect condition than on either of the others. Wilkinson describes the interior as a hollow dome supported here and there by wooden rafters, and states that the sepulcher chamber was lined with blue porcelain tiles. We would have liked to go inside, but this is no longer possible, the entrance being blocked by a recent fall of masonry. Making up now for lost time we rode on as far as the house built in 1850 for Mariette's accommodation during the excavation of the Serapium, a labor which extended over a period of more than four years. The Serapium, it need hardly be said, is the famous and long lost sepulchre temple of the sacred bulls. These bulls, honored by the Egyptians as successive incarnations of Osiris, inhabited the temple of Apis at Memphis while they lived, and being mummied after death were buried in catacombs prepared for them in the desert. In 1850 Mariette, traveling in the interests of the French government, discovered both the temple and the catacombs, being according to his own narrative indebted for the clue to a certain passage in Strabo, which describes the temple of Serapis as being situate in a district where the sand was so drifted by the wind that the approach to it was in danger of being overwhelmed, while the sphinxes on either side of the Great Avenue were already more or less buried, some having only their heads above the surface. If Strabo had not written this passage, says Mariette, it is probable that the Serapium would still be lost under the sands of the necropolis of Sakara. One day, however, in 1850, being attracted to Sakara by my Egyptological studies, I perceived the head of a sphinx showing above the surface. It evidently occupied its original position. This by lay a libation-table on which was engraved a hieroglyphic inscription to Apisocyrus. Then that passage in Strabo came to my memory, and I knew that beneath my feet lay the avenue leading to the long and vainly sought Serapium. Without saying a word to any one, I got some workmen together and we began excavating. The beginning was difficult, but soon the lions, the peacocks, the Greek statues of the dromos, the inscribed tablets of the Temple of Nectanibo rose up from the sands, thus was the Serapium discovered. End of Section 10 A Thousand Miles Up the Nile, Section 11 A Thousand Miles Up the Nile by Amelia B. Edwards Chapter 4 Sakara and Memphis, Part 2 The house, a slight one-story building on a space of rocky platform, looks down upon a sandy hollow which now presents much the same appearance that it must have presented when Mariette was first reminded of the fortunate passage in Strabo. One or two heads of sphinxes peep up here and there in a ghastly way above the sand and mark the line of the Great Avenue. The upper half of a boy riding on a peacock, apparently of rude execution, is also visible. The rest is already as completely overwhelmed as if it had never been uncovered. One can scarcely believe that only twenty years ago the whole place was entirely cleared at so vast an expenditure of time and labor. The work, as I have already mentioned, took four years to complete. This avenue alone was six hundred feet in length and bordered by an army of sphinxes, one hundred and forty-one of which were found in situ. As the excavation neared the end of the avenue, the causeway which followed a gradual descent between massive walls lay seventy feet below the surface. The labor was immense and the difficulties were innumerable. The ground had to be contested inch by inch. In certain places, says Mariette, the sand was fluid, so to speak, and baffled us like water continually driven back and seeking to regain its level. If however the toil was great, so also was the reward. A main avenue terminated by a semi-circular platform around which stood statues of famous Greek philosophers and poets, a second avenue at right angles to the first, the remains of the Great Temple of the Serapium, three smaller temples and three distinct groups of aphisk catacombs were brought to light. A descending passage opening from a chamber in the Great Temple led to the catacombs, vast labyrinths of vaults and passages hewn out of the solid rock on which the temples were built. These three groups of excavations represented three epics of Egyptian history. The first and most ancient series consists of isolated vaults dating from the 18th to 22nd dynasty, that is to say, from about BC 1703 to BC 980. The second group, which dates from the reign of Sheshank I, the 22nd dynasty, BC 980, to that of Tirhakha, the last king of the 25th dynasty, is more systematically planned and consists of one long tunnel bordered on each side by a row of funerial chambers. The third belongs to the Greek period, beginning with Samedicus I, the 26th dynasty, BC 665, and ending with the latest Ptolemies. Of these the first are again choked with sand, the second are considered unsafe, and the third only is accessible to travelers. There is short but toilsome walk, and some delay outside a prison-like door at the bottom of a steep descent. We are admitted by the guardian, a gaunt old Arab with a lantern in his hand. It was not an inviting looking place within. The outer daylight fell upon a rough step or two, beyond which all was dark. We went in. A hot, heavy atmosphere met us on the threshold. The door fell, too, with a dull clang, the echoes of which went wandering away as if into the central recesses of the earth. The Arab chattered and gesticulated. He was telling us that we were now in the great vestibule, and that it measured ever so many feet in this and that direction, but we could see nothing, neither the vaulted roof overhead nor the walls on any side nor even the ground beneath our feet. It was like the darkness of infinite space. A lighted candle was then given to each person, and the Arab led the way. He went dreadfully fast, and it seemed at every step as if one were on the brink of some frightful chasm. Gradually, however, our eyes became accustomed to the gloom, and we found that we had passed out of the vestibule into the first great corridor. All was vague, mysterious, shadowy. A dim perspective loomed out of the darkness. The lights twinkled and flitted like wandering sparks of stars. The Arab held his lantern to the walls here and there, and showed us some votive tablets inscribed with records of pious visits paid by devout Egyptians to the sacred tombs. Of these they found five hundred when the catacombs were first opened, but Mariette sent nearly all to the Louvre. A few steps farther, and we came to the tombs, a succession of great vaulted chambers hewn out at irregular distances along both sides of the central corridor, and sunk some six or eight feet below the surface. In the middle of each chamber stood an enormous sarcophagus of polished granite. The Arab, flitting on ahead like a black ghost, paused a moment before each cavernous opening, flashed the light of his lantern on the sarcophagus, and sped away again, leaving us to follow as we could. So we went on, going every moment deeper into the solid rock, and farther from the open air in the sunshine. Thinking it would be cold underground, we had brought warm wraps and plenty, but the heat, on the contrary, was intense, and the atmosphere stifling. We had not calculated on the dryness of the place, nor had we remembered that ordinary mines and tunnels are cold because they are damp. But here, for incalculable ages, for thousands of years, probably before the Nile had even cut its path through the rocks of Silcilis, a cloudless African sun had been pouring its daily floods of light and heat upon the douless desert overhead. The place might well be unendurable. It was like a great oven stored with the slowly accumulated heat of cycles so remote and so many that the earliest periods of Egyptian history seem when compared with them to belong to yesterday. Having gone on thus for a distance of nearly two hundred yards, we came to a chamber containing the first hieroglyphed sarcophagus we had yet seen, all the rest being polished but plain. Here the Arab paused and finding access provided by means of a flight of wooden steps, we peeped inside by the help of a ladder, and examined the hieroglyphs with which it is covered. Enormous as they look from above, one can form no idea of the bulk of these huge monolithic cases except from the level on which they stand. The sarcophagus, which dates from the reign of Amasus, of the 26th dynasty, measured fourteen feet in length by eleven in height, and consisted of a single block of highly wrought black granite. More persons might sit in it round a small card table and play a rubber comfortably. From this point the corridor branches off for another two hundred yards or so, leading always to more chambers and more sarcophagi, of which last there are altogether twenty-four. Three only are inscribed, none measures less than from thirteen to fourteen feet in length and all are empty. The lids in every instance have been pushed back a little way and some are fractured, but the spoilers have been unable wholly to remove them. According to Mariette the place was pillaged by the early Christians, who besides carrying off whatever they could find in the way of gold and jewels, seemed to have destroyed the mummies of the bulls and raised the great temple nearly to the ground. Fortunately however they either overlooked or left as worthless some hundreds of exquisite bronzes and the five hundred votive tables before mentioned, which as they record not only the name and rank of the visitor, but also with few exceptions the name and year of the reigning pharaoh, afford invaluable historical data, and are likely to do more than any previously discovered documents toward clearing up disputed points of Egyptian chronology. It is a curious fact that one out of the three inscribed sarcophagi should bear the oval of canvases, that canvases of whom it is related that, having desired the priests of Memphis to bring before him the god Apis, he drew his dagger in a transport of rage and contempt, and stabbed the animal in the thigh. According to Plutarch he slew the beast and cast out its body to the dogs. According to Herodotus Apis slays some time pining in the temple, but at last died of his wound and the priests buried him secretly. But according to one of those previous Serapium tablets the wounded bull did not die till the fourth year of the reign of Darius. So wonderfully does modern discovery correct and illustrate tradition. And now comes the sequel to this ancient story in the shape of an anecdote related by Monsieur Abu who tells how Mariette, being recalled suddenly to Paris some months after the opening of the Serapium, found himself without the means of carrying away all his newly excavated antiquities, and so buried fourteen cases in the desert there to await his return. One of these cases contained an Apis mummy which had escaped discovery by the early Christians, and this mummy was that of the identical Apis stabbed by Canvases. That the creature had actually survived his wound was proved by the condition of one of the thigh bones which showed unmistakable signs of both injury and healing. Where does the story end here? Mariette being gone and having taken with him all that was most portable among his treasures there came to Memphis one whom Monsieur Abu indicates as a young and august stranger traveling in Egypt for his pleasure. The Arabs tempted perhaps by a princely back sheaths revealed the secret of the hidden cases whereupon the archduke swept off the whole fourteen, dispatched them to Alexandria and immediately shipped them for Trieste. Quant à coupable, says Monsieur Abu, who professes to have had the story directly from Mariette, il a fini si tragiquement dans une autre hemisphere quo tout bien passé je renonce à publier son nom. But through so transparent a disguise it is not difficult to identify the unfortunate hero of this curious anecdote. The sarcophagus in which the Apis was found remains in the vaults of the Serapium, but we did not see it. Having come more than two hundred yards already, and being by this time well nigh suffocated, we did not care to put two hundred yards more between ourselves and the light of day. So we turned back at the half-distance, having however first burned a pan of magnesium powder which flared up wildly for a few seconds lit the huge gallery and all its cavernous recesses and the wandering faces of the Arabs, and then went out with a plunge leaving the darkness denser than before. From hence across a farther space of stand we went, in all the blaze of noon, to the tomb of one tea, a priest and commoner of the Fifth Dynasty, who married with a lady named Nefer Hoteps, the granddaughter of a Pharaoh, and here built himself a magnificent tomb in the desert. Of the façade of this tomb, which must originally have looked like a little temple, only two large pillars remain. Next comes a square courtyard surrounded by a ruthless colonnade, from one corner of which a covered passage leads to two chambers. In the center of the courtyard yawns an open pit some twenty-five feet in depth, with a shattered sarcophagus just visible in the gloom of the vault below. All here is limestone, walls, pillars, pavements, even the excavated debris with which the pit had been filled in when the vault was closed forever. The quality of this limestone is close and fine like marble, and so white that, although the walls and columns of the courtyard are covered with sculptures of most exquisite execution and of the greatest interest, the reflected light is so intolerable that we find it impossible to examine them with the interest they deserve. In the passage, however, where there is shade and in the large chamber where it is so dark that we can see only by the help of lighted candles, we find a succession of bas-reliefs so numerous and so closely packed that it would take half a day to see them properly. Ranged in horizontal parallel lines about a foot and a half in depth, these extraordinary pictures, row upon row, cover every inch of wall space from floor to ceiling. The relief is singularly low. I should doubt if it anywhere exceeds a quarter of an inch. The surface, which is covered with a thin film of very fine cement, has a low quality and polish like ivory. The figures measure an average height of about twelve inches and all are colored. Here as in an open book we have the bibliography of tea. His whole life, his pleasures, his business, his domestic relations are brought before us with just that faithful simplicity which makes the charm of Montaña and Pepis. A child might read the pictured chronicles which illuminate these walls and take as keen a pleasure in them as the wisest of archaeologists. Tea was a wealthy man and his wealth was of the agricultural sort. He owned flocks and herds and vassals in plenty. He kept many kinds of birds and beasts. Geese, ducks, pigeons, cranes, oxen, goats, asses, antelopes, and gazelles. He was fond of fishing and fouling and used sometimes to go after crocodiles and hippopotamuses which came down as low as Memphis in his time. He was a kind husband too and a good father and loved to share his pleasures with his family. Here we see him sitting in state with his wife and children while professional singers and dancers performed before them. Yonder they walk out together and look on while farm servants are at work and watch the coming in of the boats that bring home the produce of tea's more distant lands. Here the geese are being driven home, the cows are crossing a ford, the oxen are plowing, the sower is scattering his seed, the reaper plies his sickle, the oxen tread the grain, the corn is stored in the grainery. There are evidently no independent tradesfolk in these early days of the world. Tea has his own artificers on his own estate and all his goods and chattels are homemade. Here the carpenters are fashioning new furniture for the house. The shipwrights are busy on new boats, the potters mold pots, the metal workers smelt ingots of red gold. It is plain to see that tea lived like a king within his own boundaries. He makes an imposing figure, too, in all these scenes, and being represented about eight times as large as his servants sits and stands like a giant among pygmies. His wife, we must not forget that she was of the blood royal, is as big as himself and the children are depicted about half the size of their parents. Curiously enough Egyptian art never outgrew this early naivete. The great man remained a big man to the last days of the Ptolemies, and the Fella was always a dwarf. CHAPTER IV SACARA AND MEMPHIS, PART III Apart from these and one or two other mannerisms, nothing can be more natural than the drawing or more spirited than the action of all these men and animals. The most difficult and transitory movements are expressed with masterly certitude. The donkey kicks up his heels and braze, the crocodile plunges, the wild duck rises on the wing, and the fleeting action is caught in each instance with a truthfulness that no land seer can distance. The forms which have none of the conventional stiffness of later Egyptian work are modeled roundly and boldly, yet finished with an exquisite precision and delicacy. The coloring, however, is purely decorative, and being laid on in single tins with no attempt at gradation or shading conceals rather than enhances the beauty of the sculptures. These indeed are best seen where the color is entirely rubbed off. The tins are yet quite brilliant in parts of the larger chamber, but in the passage and courtyard which have been excavated only a few years and are with difficulty kept clear from day to day, there is not a vestige of color left. This is the work of the sand, that patient laborer whose office it is not only to preserve but to destroy. The sand secrets and preserves the work of the sculptor, but it effaces the work of the painter. In sheltered places where it accumulates passively like a snowdrift, it brings away only the surface detail, leaving the undercolors rubbed and dim. But nothing, as I had occasioned constantly to remark in the course of the journey, removes color so effectually as sand which is exposed to the shifting action of the wind. This tomb, as we have seen, consists of a portico, a courtyard, two chambers, and a sepulchre vault, but it also contains a secret passage of the kind known as a sardab. These sardabs, which are constructed in the thickness of the walls and have no entrances, seem to be peculiar to the tombs of the ancient empire, i.e. the period of the pyramid kings, and they contain statues of the deceased of all sizes in wood, limestone, and granite. Twenty statues of tea were here found emurred in the sardab of his tomb. All broken save one, a spirited figure in limestone standing about seven feet high and now in the museum at Bulak. This statue represents a fine young man in a white tunic, and is evidently a portrait. The features are regular, the expression is good-natured, the whole turnure of the head is more Greek than Egyptian. The flesh is painted of a yellowish brick tint, and the figure stands in the usual hieratic attitude, with the left leg advanced, the hands clenched, and the arms straightened close to the sides. One seems to know tea so well after seeing the wonderful pictures in his tomb that this charming statue interests one like the portrait of a familiar friend. How pleasant it is, after being suffocated in the serapium and broiled in the tomb of tea, to return to Mariette's deserted house, and eat our luncheon on the cool stone terrace that looks northward over the desert. Some wooden tables and benches are hospitably left here for the accommodation of travelers, and fresh water in ice-cold colors is provided by the old Arab guardian. The yards and offices at the back are full of broken statues and fragments of inscriptions in red and black granite. Two sphinxes from the famous avenue adorn the terrace, and look down upon their half-buried companions in the sand-tallow below. The yellow desert, barren and undulating with a line of purple peaks on the horizon, reaches away into the far distance. To the right, under a jutting ridge of rocky plateau not two hundred yards from the house, yawns an open-mouthed, black-looking cavern shored up with heavy beams and approached by a slope of debris. This is the forced entrance to the earlier vaults of the serapium, in one of which was found a mummy described by Mariette as that of an apus, but pronounced by Brugge to be the body of Prince Caimus, governor of Memphis, and the favorite son of Remseys the Great. This remarkable mummy, which looked as much like a bull as a man, was found covered with jewels and gold chains and precious amulets engraved with the name of Caimus, and had on its face a golden mask, all which treasures are now to be seen in the Louvre. If it was a mummy of an apus, then the jewels with which it was adorned were probably the offering of a prince at that time ruling in Memphis. If on the contrary it was the mummy of a man, then in order to be buried in a place of peculiar sanctity, he probably usurped one of the vaults prepared for the god. The question is a curious one, and remains unsolved to this day, but it could no doubt be settled at a glance by Professor Owen. Far more startling, however, than the discovery of either apus or jewels was a sight beheld by Mariette on first entering that long closed sepulchre chamber. The mind being sprung, and the opening cleared, he went in alone, and there, on the thin layer of sand that covered the floor, he found the footprints of the workmen who, thirty-seven hundred years before, had laid this shapeless mummy in its tomb and closed the doors upon it, as they believed, forever. And now, for this afternoon is already waning fast, the donkeys are brought round, and we are told that it is time to move on. We have the sight of Memphis and the famous prostrate Colossus yet to see, and the long road lies all before us. So back we ride across the desolate sands, and with a last long wistful glance at the pyramid and platforms go down the territory of the dead into the land of the living. There is a wonderful fascination about this pyramid. One is never weary of looking at it, of repeating to oneself that it is indeed the oldest building on the face of the whole earth. The king who erected it came to the throne according to Menetho, about eighty years after the death of Mina, the founder of the Egyptian monarchy. All we have of him is his pyramid. All we know of him is his name. And these belong, as it were, to the infancy of the human race. In dealing with Egyptian dates one is apt to think lightly of periods that count only by centuries, but it is a habit of mind which leads to error and it should be combated. The present writer found it useful to be constantly comparing relative chronological eras, as, for instance, in realizing the immense antiquity of the Sakara pyramid. It is some help to remember that from the time when it was built by King Onifas to the time when King Khufu erected the great pyramid of Giza, there probably lies a space of years equivalent to that which, in the history of England, extends from the date of the conquest to the accession of George II. And yet Khufu himself, the chaos of the Greek historians, is but a shadowy figure hovering upon the threshold of Egyptian history. And now the desert is left behind, and we are nearing the palms that lead to Memphis. We have, of course, been dipping into Herodotus. Everyone takes Herodotus up the Nile, and our heads are full of the ancient glories of this famous city. We know that Mina turned the course of the river in order to build it on the very spot, and that all the most illustrious pharaohs adorned it with temples, palaces, pylons, and precious sculptures. We had read of the great temple of Pataw that Ramsay's the great enriched with Colossae of himself, and of the sanctuary where Apis lived in state, taking his exercise in a pillared courtyard where every column was a statue, and of the artificial lake, and the sacred groves, and the obelisks, and all the wonders of a city which even in its later days was one of the most populous in Egypt. Thinking over these things, by the way, we agreed that it is well to have left Memphis till the last. We shall appreciate it the better for having first seen that other city on the edge of the desert, to which, for nearly six thousand years, all Memphis was quietly migrating, generation after generation. We know how poor folk labored, and how great gentlemen amused themselves in those early days when there were hundreds of country gentlemen like tea, with townhouses at Memphis and villas by the Nile. On the Seraphim too, buried and ruined as it is, one cannot but come away with a profound impression of the splendor and power of a religion which could command for its myth such faith, such homage, and such public works. And now we are once more in the midst of the palm woods, threading our way among the same mounds that we passed in the morning. Presently those in front strike away from the beaten road across a grassy flat to the right, and the next moment we are all gathered round the brink of a muddy pool in the midst of which lies a shapeless block of hardened black and corroded limestone. This it seems is the famous prostrate colossus of Ramses the Great, which belongs to the British nation but which the British government is too economical to remove. So here it lies, face downward, drowned once a year by the Nile, only when the pools left by the inundation have evaporated, and all the muddy hollows are dried up. It is one of two which stood at the entrance to the Great Temple of Ptah, and by those who have gone down into the hollow and seen it from below in the dry season, it is reported as of a noble and very beautiful specimen of one of the best periods of Egyptian art. Where, however, is the companion colossus? Where is the temple itself? Where are the pylons, the obelisks, the avenues of sphinxes? Where, in short, is Memphis? The Drago-man shrugs his shoulders and points to the barren mounds among the palms. They look like gigantic dust heaps, and stand from thirty to forty feet above the plain. Nothing grows upon them save here and there a tuft of stunted palm, and their substance seems to consist chiefly of crumbled brick, broken pot-shirts, and fragments of limestone. Some few traces of brick foundations and an occasional block or two of shaped stone are to be seen in places low down against the foot of one or two of the mounds, but one looks in vain for any sign which might indicate the outline of a boundary wall, or the position of a great public building. And is this all? No, not quite all. There are some mud-huts yonder in among the trees, and in front of these we find a number of sculptured fragments, battered sphinxes, torsos without legs, sitting figures without heads, in green, black, and red granite. Ranged in an irregular semicircle on the sword, they seem to sit in forlorn conclave, half solemn, half ludicrous, with the goats browsing round and the little Arab children hiding behind them. Near this, in another pool, lies another red granite colossus, not the fellow to that which we saw first, but a smaller one, also faced downwards. And this is all that remains of Memphis, eldest of cities, a few huge rubbish heaps, a dozen or so of broken statues, and a name. One looks round and tries in vain to realize the lost splendors of the place. Where is the Memphis that King Mina came from thinnest to find? The Memphis of Onophus, and Kufu, and Kafra, and all the early kings who built their pyramid tombs in the adjacent desert. Where is the Memphis of Herodotus, of Strabo, of Ab El-Larif? Where are those stately ruins which, even in the Middle Ages, extended over a space estimated at half a day's journey in every direction? One can hardly believe that a great city ever flourished on this spot, or understand how it should have been effaced so utterly. Yet here it stood, here where the grass is green and the palms are growing, and the Arabs build their hovels on the verge of the inundation. The great colossus marks the site of the main entrance to the temple of Ftah. It lies where it fell, and no man has moved it. That tranquil sheet of palm-fringed backwater, beyond which we see the village of Miturhina, and catch a distant glimpse of the pyramids of Giza, occupies the basin of a vast artificial lake excavated by Mina. The very name of Memphis survives in the dialect of the Fela, who calls the place of the mounds Tel-Munf, just as Sakara fossilizes the name of Sakari, one of the special denominations of the Memphis of Cyrus. No capital in the world dates so far back as this, or kept its place in history so long. Founded four thousand years before our era, it beheld the rise and fall of thirty-one dynasties. It survived the rule of the Persian, the Greek, and the Roman. It was even in its decadence second only to Alexandria in population and extent, and it continued to be inhabited up to the time of the Arab invasion. It then became the quarry from which Faustat was built, and as the new city rose on the eastern bank the people of Memphis quickly abandoned their ancient capital to desolation and decay. While a vast field of ruins remained, Abid El-Larif, writing at the commencement of the thirteenth century, speaks with enthusiasm of the colossal statues and lions, the enormous pedestals, the archways formed of only three stones, the barreliefs, and other wonders that were yet to be seen upon the spot. Marco Polo, if his wandering tastes had led him to the Nile, might have found some of the palaces and temples of Memphis still standing, and Sandis, who in A.D. 1610 went at least as far south of Cairo as Khafer El-Illit, says that up the river for twenty miles space there was nothing but ruins. Since then, however, the very ruins have vanished, the palms have had time to grow, and modern Cairo has doubtless absorbed all the building material that remained from the Middle Ages. Memphis is a place to read about and think about and remember, but it is a disappointing thing to see. To miss it, however, would be to miss the first link in the whole chain of monumental history which unites the Egypt of antiquity with the world of today. Those melancholy mounds and that heron-haunted lake must be seen if only that they may take their due place in the picture-gallery of one's memory. It had been a long day's work, but it came to an end at last, and as we trotted our donkeys back towards the river a gorgeous sunset was crimsoning the palms and pigeon-towers of bedrushain. Everything seemed now to be at rest. A buffalo, contemplatively chewing the cud, lay close against the path and looked at us without moving. The children and pigeons were gone to bed. The pods had baked in the sun and been taken in long since. A tiny column of smoke went up here and there from amid the clustered huts, but there was scarcely a moving creature to be seen. Presently we passed a tall, beautiful fellow woman standing grandly by the wayside, with her veil thrown back and falling in long folds to her feet. She smiled, put out her hand, and murmured, Baxish. Her fingers were covered with rings and her arms with silver bracelets. She begged because to beg is honorable and customary and a matter of inveterate habit. But she evidently neither expected nor needed the Baxish she condescended to ask for. A few moments more and the sunset has faded. The village is left behind. The last half mile of plain is trotted over. And now, hungry, thirsty, dusty, worn out with new knowledge, new impressions, new ideas, we are once more at home and at rest. End of Section 12 A thousand miles up the Nile, Section 13. It is the rule of the Nile to hurry up the river as fast as possible, leaving the ruins to be seen as the boat comes back with the current. But this, like many other cannon, is by no means of universal application. The traveler who starts late in the season has, indeed, no other course open to him. He must press on with speed to the end of his journey if he would get back again at low Nile without being irretrievably stuck on a sandbank till the next inundation floats him off again. But for those who desire not only to see the monuments, but to follow, however superficially, the course of Egyptian history as it is handed down through Egyptian art, it is above all things necessary to start early and to see many things, by the way. For the history of ancient Egypt goes against the stream. The earliest monuments lie between Cairo and Siot, while the latest temples to the old gods are chiefly found in Nubia. Those travelers, therefore, who hurry blindly forward with or without a wind, now sailing, now tracking, now punting, passing this place by night and that by day and never resting till they have gained the farthest point of their journey, begin at the wrong end and see all their sights in precisely inverse order. Memphis and Sakara and the tombs of Benihassan should undoubtedly be visited on the way up. So should El Kab and Tel El Amarna and the oldest parts of Karnak and Luxor. It is not necessary to delay long at any of these places. They may be seen cursorily on the way up and be more carefully studied on the way down, but they should be seen as they come no matter at what trifling cost of present delay and despite any amount of ignorant opposition. For in this way only is it possible to trace the progression and retrogression of the arts from the pyramid builders to the caesars, or to understand at the time and on the spot in what order that vast and august procession of dynasties swept across the stage of history. For ourselves, as will presently be seen, it happened that we could carry only a part of this program into effect, but that part happily was the most important. We never ceased to congratulate ourselves on having made acquaintance with the pyramids of Giza and Sakara before seeing the tombs of the kings at Thebes, and I feel that it is impossible to overestimate the advantage of studying the sculptures of the tomb of tea before one's taste is brought into contact with the debased style of Dendera and Ezna. We began the great book, in short, as it always should be began, at its first page, thereby acquiring just that necessary insight without which many an after-chapter must have lost more than half its interest. If I seem to insist upon this point, it is because things contrary to custom need a certain amount of insistence, and are sure to be met by opposition. No dregoman, for example, could be made to understand the importance of historical sequence in a matter of this kind, especially in the case of a contract trip. To him, Khufu, Ramesses, and the Ptolemies are one. As for the monuments, they are all ancient Egyptian, and one is just as old and unintelligible as another. He cannot quite understand why travelers come so far and spend so much money to look at them, but he sets it down to a habit of harmless curiosity by which he profits. The truth is, however, that the mere sightseeing of the Nile demands some little reading and organizing, if only to be enjoyed. We cannot all be profoundly learned, but we can at least do our best to understand what we see, to get rid of obstacles, to put the right thing in the right place. For the land of Egypt is, as I have said, a great book. Not very easy reading, perhaps, under any circumstances, but at all events quite difficult enough already without the added puzzlement of being read backwards. And now our next point along the river, as well as our next link in the chain of early monuments, was Benihassan, with its famous rock-cut tombs of the Twelfth Dynasty, and Benihassan was still more than a hundred and forty-five miles distant. We ought to have gone on again directly, to have weighed anchor and made a few miles that very evening on returning to the boats, but we insisted on a second day in the same place. This, too, with the favorable wind still blowing. It was against all rule and precedent. The captain shook his head, the drago-man remonstrated, in vain. You will come to learn the value of a wind when you have been longer on the Nile, said the latter, with that air of melancholy resignation, which he always assumed was not allowed to have his own way. He was an indolent, good-tempered man, spoke English fairly well, and was perfectly manageable, but that air of resignation came to be aggravating in time. The M.B.s being of the same mind, however, we had our second day and spent it at Memphis. We ought to have crossed over to Tura, and have seen the great quarries from which the casing-stones of the pyramid came, and all the finer limestone, with which the temples and palaces of Memphis were built. But the whole mountain-side seemed as if glowing at a white heat on the opposite side of the river, and we said we would put off Tura till our return. So we went our own way, and Alfred shot pigeons, and the writer sketched Mitrajina and the palms and the sacred lake of Mina, and the rest grubbed among the mounds for treasure, finding many curious fragments of glass and pottery, and part of an engraved bronze apis, and we had a green, tranquil, lovely day, barren of incident but very pleasant to remember. The good wind continued to blow all that night, but fell at sunrise precisely when we were about to start. The river now stretched away before us, smooth as glass, and there was nothing for it, said Rais Hassan, but tracking. We had heard of tracking often enough since coming to Egypt, but without having any definite idea of the process. Coming on deck, however, before breakfast, we found nine of our poor fellows harnessed to a rope like barge horses towing the huge boat against the current. Seven of the M.B.'s crews, similarly harnessed, followed at a few yards' distance. The two ropes met and crossed and dipped into the water together. Already our last night's mooring-place was out of sight, and the pyramid of Onephus stood up amid its lesser brethren on the edge of the desert, as if bidding us good-bye. But the sight of the trackers jarred somehow with the placid beauty of the picture. We got used to it as one gets used to everything in time, but it looked like slaves' work and shocked our English notions disagreeably. That morning, still tracking, we passed the pyramids of Dashor, a dilapidated brick pyramid standing in the midst of them looks like an anguille of black rock thrusting itself up through the limestone bed of the desert. Palms lined the bank and intercept the view, but we catch flitting glimpses here and there, looking out especially for that dome-light pyramid which we observed the other day from Saqqara. Seen in the full sunlight, it looks larger and whiter, and more than ever like the roof of the old Palais de Justice far away in Paris. Once the morning passes, we sit on deck writing letters, reading, watching the sunny riverside pictures that glide by at a footspace and are so long in sight. Palm groves, sandbanks, patches of fuzzy-headed durel and fields of some yellow-flowering herb succeed each other. A boy plods along the bank, leading a camel. They go slowly, but they soon leave us behind. A native boat meets us, floating down sideways with the current. A girl comes to the water's edge with a great empty jar on her head, and waits to fill it till the trackers have gone by. The pigeon-towers of a mud-village peep above a clump of lebic trees, a quarter of a mile inland. Here a solitary brown man, with only a felt skull-cap on his head and a slip of scanty tunic fastened about his loins, works a stooping and rising, stooping and rising with the regularity of a pendulum. It is the same machine which we shall see, by and by, depicted in the tombs at Thebes, and the man is so evidently in ancient Egyptian that we find ourselves wondering how he escaped being mummified four or five thousand years ago. By and by a little breeze springs up. The men drop the rope and jump on board. The big sail is set, the breeze freshens, and away we go again as merrily as the day we left Cairo. Towards sunset we see a strange object, like a giant obelisk broken off halfway, standing up on the western bank against an orange-gold sky. This is the Pyramid of Medham, commonly called the False Pyramid. It looks quite near the bank, but this is in effect of powerful light and shadow, for it lies back at least four miles from the river. That night, having sailed on till past nine o'clock, we moor about a mile from Benesuif, and learn with some surprise that a man must be dispatched to the governor of the town for guards. Not that anything ever happened to anybody at Benesuif, says Ptolemy, but that the place is supposed not to have a first-rate reputation. If we have guards, we at all events make the governor responsible for our safety and the safety of our possessions. So the guards are sent for, and being posted on the bank, snore loudly all night long, just outside our windows. Meanwhile, the wind shifts round to the south, and next morning it blows full in our faces. The men, however, track up to Benesuif to a point where the buildings come down to the water's edge and the towing path ceases, and there we lay to for a while among a fleet of filthy native boats close to the landing-place. The approach to Benesuif is rather pretty. The Kediv has an Italian-looking villa here, which peeps up white and dazzling from the midst of a thickly wooded park. The town lies back a little from the river. A few coffee-houses and a kind of promenade face the landing-place, and a mosque built to the verge of the bank stands out picturesquely against the bend of the river. And now it is our object to turn that corner so as to get into a better position for starting when the wind drops. The current here runs deep and strong so that we have both wind and water dead against us. Half-hour men clamor round the corner like cats, carrying the rope with them. The rest keep the dahabiya off the bank with punting poles. The rope strains, a pole breaks, we struggle forward a few feet and can get no farther. Then the men rest a while, try again and are again defeated. So the fight goes on. The promenade and the windows of the mosque become gradually crowded with lookers on. Some three or four cloaked and bearded men have chairs brought and sit gravely smoking their shabuks on the bank above, enjoying the entertainment. Meanwhile, the water-carriers come and go, filling their goat-skins at the landing-place. Donkeys and camels are brought down to drink. Girls in dark blue gowns and coarse-black bales come with huge water-jars laid sideways upon their heads, and having filled and replaced them upright walk away with stately steps, as if each ponderous vessel were a crown. So the day passes, driven back again and again but still resolute our sailors by dint of sheer doggedness get us round the bad corner at last. The bagstones follow suit a little later, and we both more about a quarter of a mile above the town. Then follows a night of adventures. Men in our guards sleep profoundly, but the bad characters of Benny Suif are very wide awake. One gentleman, actuated no doubt by the friendliest motives, pays a midnight visit to the bagstones, but being detected, chased, and fired at escapes by jumping overboard. Our turn comes about two hours later, when the rider, happening to be awake, hears a man swim softly round the filet. To strike a light and frighten everybody into sudden activity is the work of a moment. The whole boat is instantly in an uproar. Lanterns are lighted on deck, a patrol of sailors is set, Ptolemy loads his gun, and the thief slips away in the dark like a fish. The guards, of course, slept sweetly through it all. Honest, fellows! They were paid a shilling a night to do it, and they had nothing on their minds. Having lodged a formal complaint next morning against the inhabitants of the town, we received a visit from a sallow personage clad in a long black robe and a voluminous white turban. This was the chief of the guards. He smoked a great many pipes, drank numerous cups of coffee, listened to all we had to say, looked wise, and finally suggested that the number of our guards should be doubled. End of section 13 A thousand miles up the Nile, section 14 This is a LibriVox recording. No LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A thousand miles up the Nile by Amelia B. Edwards. Chapter 5 Bedrashane to Mania. Part II I ventured to object that if they slept unanimously, forty would not be of much more use than four. Whereupon he rose, drew himself to his full height, touched his beard, and said with a magnificent melodramatic air, if they sleep they shall be bastionadoed till they die. And now our good luck seemed to have deserted us. For three days and nights the adverse wind continued to blow with such force that the men could not even track against it. Moured under that dreary bank we saw our ten days start melting away and could only make the best of our misfortunes. Finally the long island close by and the banks on both sides of the river were populous with sand-grouse, so Alfred went out daily with his faithful George and his unerring gun and brought home game in abundance, while we took long walks, sketched boats and camels, and shaffered with native women for silver torques and bracelets. These torques, in Arabic, tuck, are tubular but massive, and annular, about as thick as one's little finger and finished with a hook at one end and a twisted loop at the other. The girls would sometimes put their veils aside and make a show of bargaining, but more frequently after standing for a moment with great wondering black velvety eyes staring shyly into hours they would take fright like a troop of startled deer and vanish with shrill cries, half a flafter, half of terror. At Benesuif we encountered our first sandstorm. It came down the river about noon showing like a yellow fog on the horizon and rolling rapidly before the wind. It tore the river into angry waves and blotted out the landscape as it came. The distant hills disappeared first, then the palms beyond the island, then the boats close by. Another second and the air was full of sand. The whole surface of the plain seemed in motion. The banks rippled, the yellow dust poured down through every rift and clefted hundreds of tiny cataracts. But it was a sight not to be looked upon with impunity. Hair, eyes, mouth, ears were instantly filled and we were driven to take refuge in the saloon. Here although every window and door had been shut before the storm came, the sand found its way in clouds. Books, papers, carpets were covered with it and it settled again as fast as it was cleared away. This lasted just one hour and was followed by a burst of heavy rain after which the sky cleared and we had a lovely afternoon. From this time forth we saw no more rain in Egypt. At length, on the morning of the fourth day after our first appearance at Benesuif and the seventh since leaving Cairo, the wind veered around again to the north and we once more got underway. It was delightful to see the big sail again towering up overhead and to hear the swish of the water under the cabin windows. But we were still one hundred and nine miles from Rhoda and we knew that nothing but an extraordinary run of luck could possibly get us there by the twenty-third of the month, with time to see Benny Hassan on the way. Meanwhile, however, we make fair progress mooring at sunset when the wind falls about three miles north of Beba. Next day, by help of the same light breeze which again springs up a little after dawn, we go at a good pace between flat banks fringed here and there with palms and studded with villages more or less picturesque. There is not much to see and yet one never wants for amusement. Now we pass an island of sandbank covered with snow-white patty-birds which rise tumultuously at our approach. Next comes Beba perched high along the edge of the precipitous bank, its odd-looking, coptic convent rooved all over with little mud domes like a cluster of earth bubbles. By and by we pass a deserted sugar factory with shattered windows and a huge gaunt blackened chimney worthy of Birmingham or Sheffield. And now we catch a glimpse of the railway and hear the last scream of a departing engine. At night we moor within sight of the factory chimneys and hydraulic tubes of Magaga, and next day get on nearly to Galosana, which is the last station town before Mania. It is now only too clear that we must give up all thought of pushing on to Benny Hassan before the rest of the party shall come on board. We have reached the evening of our ninth day. We are still forty-eight miles from Rhoda, and another adverse wind might again delay us indefinitely along the way. All risks taken into account we decide to put off our meeting till the twenty-fourth and transfer the appointment to Mania, thus giving ourselves time to track all the way in case of need. So an Arabic telegram is concocted, and our fleetest runner starts off with it to Galosana before the office closes for the night. The breeze, however, does not fail but comes back next morning with the dawn. Having passed Galosana we come to a wide reach in the river at which point we are honored by a visit from a Muslim sultan of particular sanctity, named Holy Shake Cotton. Now Holy Shake Cotton, who is a well-fed, healthy-looking young man of about thirty, makes his first appearance swimming with his garments twisted into a huge turban on the top of his head and only his chin above water. Having made his toilette in the small boat he presents himself on deck and receives an enthusiastic welcome. Raised Hassan hugs him, the pilot kisses him, the sailors come up one by one bringing little tributes of tobacco and payestras which he accepts with the air of a pope receiving Peter's pence. All dripping as he is and smiling like an affable triton, he next proceeds to touch the tiller, the ropes, and the ends of the yards in order, says Ptolemy, to make them holy, and then with some kind of final charm or muttered incantation he plunges into the river again and swims off to repeat the same performance on board the bagstones. From this moment the prosperity of our voyage is assured. The captain goes about with a smile on his stern face and the crew look as happy as if we had given them a guinea, for nothing can go wrong with a dahabiya that has been made holy by Holy Shake Cotton. We are now certain to have favorable winds, to pass the cataract without incident, to come back in health and safety as we set out. But what, it may be asked, has Holy Shake Cotton done to make his blessings so efficacious? He gets money and plenty, he fasts no oftener than other Mohamedans, he has two wives, he never does a stroke of work, and he looks the picture of sleek prosperity. Yet he is a saint of the first water, and when he dies miracles will be performed at his tomb and his eldest son will succeed him in the business. We had the pleasure of becoming acquainted with a good many saints in the course of our eastern travels, but I do not know that we ever found they had done anything to merit the position. One very horrible old man named Shake Salim has, it is true, been sitting on a dirt heap near Fahshut, unclothed, unwashed, unshaven for the last half-century or more, never even lifting his hand into his mouth to feed himself. But Shake Cotton had gone to no such pious lengths, and was not even dirty. We are by this time drawing towards a range of yellow cliffs that have long been visible on the horizon, and which figure in the maps is Gebel at Tehr. The Arabian desert has been closing up on the eastern bank for some time past, and now rolls in on undulating drifts to the water's edge. Yellow boulders crop out here and there above the mounded sand, which looks as if it might cover many a forgotten temple. Only the clay bank is gone and a low barrier of limestone rock, black and shiny next to the waterline, has taken its place. And now, a long way ahead, where the river bends and the level cliffs lead on into the far distance, a little brown speck is pointed out as the convent of the pulley. Perched on the brink of the precipice, it looks no bigger than an ant heap. We had heard much of the fine view to be seen from the platform on which this convent is built, and it had originally entered into our program as a place to be visited on the way. But many a has now to be gained at all costs, so this project has to be abandoned with a sigh. And now the rocky barrier rises higher, quarried here and there in dazzling gaps of snow-white cuttings. And now the convent shows clearer, and the cliffs become loftier, and the bend in the river is reached. And a long perspective of flat-topped precipice stretches away into the dim distance. It is a day of saints and swimmers. As the Dahabiya approaches, a brown pole is seen bobbing up and down in the water a few hundred yards ahead. Then one, two, three bronze figures dash down a steep ravine below the convent walls and plunge into the river. A shrill chorus of voices growing momentarily more audible is borne upon the wind, and in a few minutes the boat is beset by a shoal of medicaid monks vociferating with all their might. On a Christian Yajawaji, I am a Christian, O traveler. As these are only Coptic monks and not Muslim Santons, the sailors, half in rough play, half in earnest, drive them off with punting poles, and only one shivering, streaming object wrapped in a borrowed blanket is allowed to come on board. He is a fine, shapely man, aged about forty, with splendid eyes and teeth, a well-formed head, skin the color of a copper beach leaf, and a face expressive of such ignorance, timidity, and half-savage watchfulness as makes one's heart ache. And this is a Copt, a descendant of the true Egyptian stock, one of those whose remote ancestors exchanged the worship of the old gods for Christianity under the rule of Theodosius some fifteen hundred years ago, and whose blood is supposed to be purer of Muhammadi and intermixture than any in Egypt. Remembering these things it is impossible to look at him without a feeling of profound interest. It may be only fancy, yet I think I see in him a different type to that of the Arab, a something, however slight, which recalls the sculptured figures in the tomb of T. But while we are thinking about his magnificent pedigree, our poor cop's teeth are chattering piteously. So we give him a shilling or two for the sake of all he represents in the history of the world, and with these, and the donation of an empty bottle, he swims away contented, crying again and again. And now the convent, with its clustered domes, is passed and left behind. The rock here is of the same rich tawny hue as Etura, and the horizontal strata of which it is composed have evidently been deposited by water. That the Nile must at some remote time have flowed here in an immensely higher level seems also probable, for the whole face of the range is honeycombed and water-worn for miles in succession. Seeing how these fantastic forms, arch, clustered and pendant, resemble the recessed ornamentation of Saracenic buildings, I could not help wondering whether some early Arab architect might not once upon a time have taken a hint from some such rocks as these. As the day wanes and the level cliffs keep with us all the way, now breaking into little lateral valleys and coals to sack in which nestle clusters of tiny huts and green patches of lupin, now plunging sheer down into the river, now receding inland and leaving space for a belt of cultivated soil and a fringe of feathery palms. By and by comes sunset, when every cast shadow in the recesses of the cliffs turns to pure violet and the face of the rock glows with a rootier gold and the palms on the western banks stand up in solid bronze against a crimson horizon. Then the sun dips and instantly the whole range of cliffs turns to a dead greenish gray while the sky above and behind them is suddenly suffused with pink. When this effect has lasted for something like eight minutes, a vast arch of deep blue shade about as large in diameter as a rainbow creeps slowly up the eastern horizon and remains distinctly visible as long as the pink flush against which it is defined yet lingers in the sky. Finally the flush fades out, the blue becomes uniform, the stars begin to show and only a broad glow in the west marks which way the sun went down. About a quarter of an hour later comes the afterglow, when for a few minutes the sky is filled with a soft, magical light and the twilight gloom lies warm upon the landscape. When this goes it is night, but still one long beam of light streams up in the tracks of the sun and remains visible for more than two hours after the darkness has set in. End of section 14 A thousand miles up the Nile, section 15. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A thousand miles up the Nile by Amelia B. Edwards. Chapter 5 Bedrashane to Mania, Part 3 Such is the sunset we see this evening as we approach Mania, and such is the sunset we are destined to see with scarcely a shade of difference at the same hour and under precisely the same conditions for many a month to come. It is very beautiful, very tranquil, full of wonderful light and most subtle gradations of tone, and attended by certain phenomena of which I shall have more to say presently, but it lacks the variety and gorgeousness of our northern skies. Nor given the dry atmosphere of Egypt can it be otherwise. Those who go up the Nile expecting, as I did, to see magnificent turner-esque pageants of purple and flame-color and gold will be disappointed as I was. For your turner-esque pageant cannot be achieved without such accessories of cloud and vapor, as in Nubia are wholly unknown, and in Egypt are of the rarest occurrence. Once and only once in the course of an unusually protracted sojourn on the river had we the good fortune to witness a grand display of the kind, and then we had been nearly three months in the Dahabia. Meanwhile, however, we never weary of these stainless skies, but find in them, evening after evening, fresh depths of beauty and repose. As for that strange transfer of color from the mountains to the sky, we had repeatedly observed it while traveling in the Dolomites the year before, and had always found it take place, as now at the moment of the sun's first disappearance. But what of this mighty aftershadow climbing half the heavens and bringing night with it? Can it be the rising shadow of the world projected on the one horizon as the sun sinks on the other? I leave the problem for wiser travelers to solve. We have not science enough amongst us to account for it. That same evening, just as the twilight came on, we saw another wonder, the new moon on the first night of her quarter, a perfect orb, dusky, distinct, and outlined all round with a thread of light no thicker than a hair. Nothing could be more brilliant than this tiny rim of flashing silver, while every detail of the softly glowing globe within its compass was clearly visible. Tycho with its vast crater showed like a volcano on a raised map, and near the edge of the moon's surface where the light and shadow met, keen sparkles of mountain summits catching the light and relieved against the dusk were to be seen by the naked eye. Two or three evenings later, however, when the silver ring was changed to a broad crescent, the unilluminated part was, as it were, extinguished, and could no longer be discerned even by the help of a glass. The wind having failed, as usual, at sunset, the crew set to work with a will and punted the rest of the way, so bringing us to Minia about nine that night. Next morning we found ourselves moored close under the Khadeev summer palace, so close that one could have tossed a pebble against the lattice windows of his highness's harem. A fat gatekeeper sat outside in the sun, smoking his morning shabuque and gossiping with the passers-by. A narrow promenade scantily planted with sycamore figs ran between the palace and the river. A steamer or two and a crowd of native boats lay moored under the bank, and yonder at the far end of the promenade a minaret and a cluster of whitewashed houses showed which way one must turn in going to the town. It chanced to be market-day, so we saw Minia under its best aspect, than which nothing could well be more squalid, dreary, and depressing. It was like a town dropped unexpectedly into the midst of a plowed field, the streets being mere trodden lanes of mud-dust, and the houses a secession of windowless mud-prisons with their backs to the thoroughfare. The bazaar, which consists of two or three lanes a little wider than the rest, is rooved over here and there with rotting palm-rafters and bits of tattered matting, while the market is held in a space of waste-ground outside the town. The former, with its little cupboard-like shops in which the merchants sit cross-legged like shabby old idols and shabby old shrines, the ill-furnished shelves, the familiar Manchester goods, the gaudy native-stuffs, the old red saddles and faded rugs hanging up for sale, the smart Greek stores where basses ale, claret, curacao, cypress, vermouth, cheese, pickles, sardines, Worcestersauce, blacking, biscuits, preserved meats, candles, cigars, matches, sugar, salt, stationary fireworks, jams, and patent medicines can all be bought at one fell swoop. The native cook's shop, exhaling savory perfumes of kebabs and lentil soup, and presided over by an Abyssinian Sawyer blacker than the blackest historical personage ever was painted. The surging, elbowing, clamorous crowd, the donkeys, the camels, the street cries, the chatter, the dust, the flies, the fleas, and the dogs all put us in mind of the poorer quarters of Cairo. In the market it is even worse. Here are hundreds of country-folk sitting on the ground behind their baskets of fruits and vegetables. Some have eggs, butter, and buffalo cream for sale, while others sell sugar canes, limes, cabbages, tobacco, barley, dried lentils, split beans, maize, wheat, and dura. The women go to and fro with bouquets of live poultry. The chickens scream, the cellars rave, the buyers bargain at the top of their voices, the dust flies in clouds, the sun pours down floods of light and heat. You can scarcely hear yourself speak, and the crowd is as dense as that other crowd, which is at this very moment on this very Christmas eve, is circulating among the alleys of Ledinhal Market. The things were very cheap. A hundred eggs cost about fourteen pence in English money, chickens sold for five pence each, pigeons from two pence to two pence half-penny, and fine live geese for two shillings ahead. The turkeys, however, which were large and excellent, were priced as high as three and six pence, being about half as much as one pays in middle and upper Egypt for a lamb. A good sheet may be bought for sixteen shillings or a pound. The M.B.s, who had no dregel man and did their own marketing, were very busy here, laying in a store of fresh provision, standing fluently in Arabic and escorted by a bodyguard of sailors. A solitary dome-palm, the northernmost of its race and the first specimen one meets with on the Nile, grows in a garden adjoining this marketplace, but we could scarcely see it for the blinding dust. Now a dome-palm is just the sort of tree that de Wint should have painted, odd, angular, with forked stems, each of which terminates in a shock-headed crown of stiff finger-like fronds, shading heavy clusters of big, shiny nuts about the size of Jerusalem artichokes. It is, I suppose, the only nut in the world of which one throws away the kernel and eats the shell, but the kernel is as hard as marble, while the shell is fibrous and tastes like stale gingerbread. The dome-palm must bifurcate, for bifurcation is the law of its being, but I could never discover whether there was any fixed limit to the number of stems into which it might subdivide. At the same time I do not remember having seen any with less than two heads or more than six. Coming back through the town we were accosted by a withered one-eyed hag like a reanimated mummy who offered to tell us our fortunes. Before her lay a dirty rag of handkerchief full of shells, pebbles, and chips of broken glass and pottery. Squatting toad-like under a sunny bit of wall, the lower part of her face closely veiled, her skinny arms covered with blue and green glass bracelets and her fingers with misshapen silver rings, she hung over these treasures, shook, mixed, and interrogated them with all the fervor of divination, and delivered a string of the prophecies usually forthcoming on these occasions. You have a friend far away, and your friend is thinking of you. There is good fortune in store for you, and money is coming to you, and pleasant news on the way. You will soon receive letters in which there will be something to vex you, but more to make you glad. Within thirty days you will unexpectedly meet one whom you dearly love, etc., etc., etc. It was just the old familiar story retold in Arabic without even such variations as might have been expected from the lips of an old fellahab born and bred in a provincial town of Middle Egypt. It may be that ophthalmia especially prevailed in this part of the country, or that being brought unexpectedly into the midst of a large crowd one observed the people more narrowly, but I certainly never saw so many one-eyed human beings as that morning at Menea. There must have been present in the streets and marketplace from ten to twelve thousand natives of all ages, and I believe it is not an exaggeration to say that at least every twentieth person down to little-toddling children of three and four years of age was blind of an eye. Not being a particularly well-favored race, this defect added the last touch of repulsiveness to faces already sullen, ignorant, and unfriendly. A more unprepossessing population I would never wish to see, the men half stealthy, half insolent, the women bold and fierce, the children filthy, sickly, stunted, and stolid. Nothing in provincial Egypt is so painful to witness as the neglected condition of very young children. Those belonging even to the better class are for the most part shabbily clothed and of more than doubtful cleanliness, while the offspring of the very poor are simply encrusted with dirt and sores and swarming with vermin. It is at first hard to believe that the parents of these unfortunate babies air not from cruelty, but through sheer ignorance and superstition. Yet it is so, and the time when these people can be brought to comprehend the most elementary principles of sanitary reform is yet far distant. To wash young children is injurious to health, therefore the mothers suffer them to fall into a state of personal uncleanliness which is alone enough to engender a disease. To brush away the flies that beset their eyes is impious, hence ophthalmia and various kinds of blindness. I have seen infants lying in their mother's arms with six or eight flies in each eye. I have seen the little helpless hands put down reprievingly if they approached the seat of annoyance. I have seen children of four and five years old with a large fleshy lump growing out where the pupil had been destroyed. Taking these things into account the wonder is, after all, not that three children should die in Egypt out of every five, not that each twentieth person in certain districts should be blind or partially blind, but that so many as forty percent of the whole infant population should actually live to grow up, and that ninety-five percent should enjoy the blessing of sight. For my own part I had not been many weeks on the Nile before I began systematically to avoid going about the native towns whenever it was practicable to do so. That I may so have lost an opportunity of now and then seeing more of the street life of the people is very probable, but such outside glimpses are of little real value, and I at all events escaped the sight of much poverty, sickness, and squalor. The condition of the inhabitants is not worse, perhaps, in an Egyptian billet than in many an Irish village, but the condition of the children is so distressing that one would willingly go any number of miles out of the way rather than witness their suffering without the power to alleviate it. If the population in and about Minia are personally unattractive, their appearance at all events matches their reputation, which is as bad as that of their neighbors. Of the manners and customs of Benes-Souf we had already some experience, while public opinion charges Minia, Rhoda, and most of the towns and villages north of Siouxt with the like marauding propensities. As for the villages at the foot of Benes-Hassan they have been mere dens of thieves for many generations, and though raised to the ground some years ago by way of punishment are now rebuilt and in as bad odor as ever, it is necessary, therefore, in all this part of the river not only to hire guards at night, but when the boat is moored to keep a sharp look out against thieves by day. In Upper Egypt it is very different. There the natives are good-looking, good-natured, gentle and kindly, and though clever enough at manufacturing and selling modern antiquities are not otherwise dishonest. That same evening, it was Christmas Eve, nearly two hours earlier than their train was supposed to be due, the rest of our party arrived at Minia. A Thousand Miles Up the Nile by Amelia B. Edwards Chapter 6 Minia to Siouxt, Part I It is Christmas Day. The M.B.s are coming to dinner. The cooks are up to their eyes and entrees. The crew are treated to a sheep in honor of the occasion. The newcomers are unpacking and we are all gradually settling down into our respective places. Now, the newcomers consist of four persons, a painter, a happy couple, and a maid. The painter has already been up the Nile three times and brings a fund of experience into the council. He knows all about sandbanks and winds and mooring places and is acquainted with most of the native governors and consuls along the river, and is great on the subject of what to eat, drink, and avoid. The stern cabin is given to him for a studio and contains frames, canvases, drawing paper, and easels enough to start a provincial school of art. He is going to paint a big picture at Abu Sembel. The happy couple, it is unnecessary to say, are on their wedding tour. In point of fact, they have not yet been married a month. The bridegroom is what the world chooses to call an idle man. That is to say, he has scholarship, delicate health, and ledger. The bride, for convenience, shall be called the little lady. Of people who are struggling through that helpless idle phase of human life called the honeymoon, it is not fair to say more than that they are both young enough to make the situation interesting. Meanwhile, the deck must be cleared of the new luggage that has come on board and the day passes in a confusion of unpacking, arranging, and putting away. Such running to and fro as there is down below, such turning out of boxes and knocking up of temporary shelves, such talking and laughing and hammering. Nor is this bustle confined downstairs. Ptolemy and the waiters are just as busy above, adorning the upper deck with palm branches and hanging the boat all round with rows of colored lanterns. One can hardly believe, however, that it is Christmas day, that there are fires blazing at home in every room, that the church field, perhaps, is white with snow, and that the familiar bells are ringing merrily across the frosty air. Here at midday it is already too hot on deck without the yawning, and when we moor towards sunset near a riverside village in a grove of palms, the cooler air of evening is delicious. There is novelty even in such a commonplace matter as dining out on the Nile. You go and return in your faluka as if it were a carriage, and your entertainers summon you by firing a dinner-gun instead of sounding a gong. Wise people who respect the feelings of their cooks fire addressing gun as well, for watches soon differ in a hopeless way for want of the church-clock to set them by, and it is always possible that host and guest may be an hour or two apart in their reckoning. The customary guns, having therefore been fired, and the party assembled, we sat down to one of Cook Bedouin's prodigious banquets. How, however, till the plum pudding, blazing demonically, appeared on the scene, did any of us succeed in believing that it was really Christmas Day? Nothing could be prettier or gayer than the spectacle that awaited us when we rose from table. A hundred and fifty colored lanterns outlined the boat from end to end, sparkled up the masts, and cast broken reflections in the moving current. The upper deck, hung with flags, and partly closed in with awnings, looked like a bower of palms. The stars and the crescent moon shone overhead. Dim outlines of trees and headlands, and a vague perspective of gleaming river were visible in the distance, while a light gleamed now and then in the direction of the village, or a dusky figure flitted along the bank. Meanwhile, there was a sound of revelry by night, for our sailors had invited the Bagstones crew to unlimited coffee and tobacco, and had quite a large party on the lower deck. They drummed, they sang, they danced, they dressed up, improvised a comic scene, and kept their audience in a roar. Raise Hassan did the honors. George, Ptolemy, and the Maid sat apart at the second table and sipped their coffee gentilely. We looked on and applauded. At ten o'clock a pan of magnesium powder was burned, and our Fantasia ended with a blaze of light like a pantomime. In Egypt, by the way, any entertainment which is enlivened by music, dancing, or fireworks is called a Fantasia. And now, sometimes sailing, sometimes tracking, sometimes punting, we go on, day by day, making what speed we can. Things do not, of course, always fall out exactly as one would have them. The wind too often fails when we most need it, and gets up when there is something to be seen on shore. Thus after a whole morning of tracking we reach Benny Hassan at the moment when a good breeze has suddenly filled our sails for the first time in forty-eight hours. And so yielding to councils which we afterwards deplored, we pass on with many a longing look at the terraced doorways pierced along the cliffs. At Rhoda, in the same way, we touch for only a few minutes to post and inquire for letters, and put off till our return the inland excursion to Dyer el-Nakul, where is to be seen the famous painting of the Colossus on the Sledge. But sights deferred are faded sometimes to remain unseen, as we found by and by to our exceeding loss and regret. Meanwhile, the skies are always cloudless, the days warm, the evenings exquisite. We, of course, live very much in the open air. When there is no wind we land and take long walks by the riverside. When on board we sketch, write letters, read Champolion, Bunsen, and Gardner Wilkinson, and work hard at Egyptian dynasties. The sparrows and water-wagtails perch familiarly on the awnings and hop about the deck. The cocks and hens chatter, the geese cackle, the turkeys gobble in their coops close by, and our sacrificial sheep, leading a solitary life in the falooka, comes buying in the rear. Sometimes we have as many as a hundred chickens on board to say nothing of pigeons and rabbits, and two or even three sheep in the falooka. The poultry-yard is railed off, however, at the extreme end of the stern, so that the creatures are well away from the drawing room, and when we moor at a suitable place they are let out for a few hours to peck about the banks and enjoy their liberty. El and the little lady feed these hapless prisoners with breakfast scraps every morning through the profound amusement of the steersmen, who, unable to conceive any other motive, imagines they are fattening them for table. Such is our Noah's Ark life, pleasant, peaceful, and patriarchal. Even on days when there was little to see and nothing to do, it is never dull. Trifling incidents which have, for us, the excitement of novelty are continually occurring. Other dahabias, their flags and occupants, are a constant source of interest. Meeting at mooring places for the night, we now and then exchange visits. Passing each other by day, we dip ensigns, fire salutes, and punctiliously observe the laws of maritime etiquette. Sometimes a cook's excursion steamer hurries by, crowded with tourists, or a government tug-toeing three or four great barges closely packed with wretched-looking, half-naked fellaheem bound for forced labor on some new railway or canal. Occasionally we pass a dahabia sticking fast upon a sandbank, and sometimes we stick on one ourselves. Then the men fly to their punting poles, or jump into the river like water-dogs, and grunting in melancholy cadence shove the boat off with their shoulders. The birds, too, are new, and we are always looking out for them. Perhaps we see a top-heavy pelican balancing his huge yellow bill over the edge of the stream and fishing for his dinner, or a flight of wild geese trailing across the sky toward sunset, or a select society of vultures perched all in a row upon a ledge of rock, and solemn as the bench of bishops. Then there are the herons who stand on one leg in doze in the sun, the strutting hoopos with their legendary top-knots, the blue and green bee-eaters hovering over the uncut dura. The pied kingfisher, black and white like a magpie, sits fearlessly under the bank and never stirs, though the toe-rope swings close above his head and the dahabia glides within a few feet of the shore. The patty-birds whiten the sandbanks by hundreds, and rise in a cloud at our approach. The sacred hawk circling overhead utters the same sweet, piercing melancholy note that the pharaohs listen to of old. The scenery is, for the most part, of the ordinary Nile pattern, and for many a mile we see the same things over and over again, the level bank shelving down steeply to the river, the strip of cultivated soil green with maize or tawny with dura, the frequent mud village and palm grove, the deserter's sugar factory with its ungainly chimney and shattered windows, the water-wheel slowly revolving with its necklace of pots, the chadouf worked by two brown athletes, the field of laden camels, the desert, all sandhills and sandplains with its background of mountains, the long reach and the gleaming sail ahead. Sometimes, however, as at calm Ammar, we skirt the ancient brick mounds of some forgotten city, with fragments of art's foundation and even walls and doorways reaching down to the water's edge, or sailing close under ranges of huge perpendicular cliffs, as at Gebel, Abufada, startle the cormorants from their haunts and peer as we pass into the dim recesses of many a rock-cut tomb excavated just above the level of the inundation. This Gebel, Abufada, has a bad name for sudden winds, especially at the beginning and end of the range, where the denial bends abruptly and the valley opens out at right angles to the river. It is fine to see Rais Hassan as we approach one of the worst of these bad bits, a point where two steep ravines divided by a bold headland command the passage like a pair of grim cannon and rake it with blasts from the northeastern desert. Here the current, flowing deep and strong, is met by the wind and runs high, encrusted waves. Our little captain, kicking off his shoes, himself springs up the rigging and there stands silent and watchful. The sailors, ready to shift our mainsail at the word of command, cling some to the shog-hool and some to the end of the yard. The boat tears on before the wind. The great bluff looms up darker and nearer. Then comes a breathless moment. Then a sharp sudden word from the little man in the main rigging, a yell and a whoop from the sailors, a slow, heavy lurch of the flapping sail, and the corner is turned in safety. The cliffs here are very fine, much loftier and less uniform, than at Gebel at Tehr, rent into strange forms as of sphinxes, cheese rings, towers and bastions, honeycombed with long ranges of rock-cut tombs, and undermined by water-washed caverns in which lurk a few lingering crocodiles. If at Gebel at Tehr the rock is worn into some semblance of arabesque ornamentation. Here it looks as if inscribed all over with mysterious records in characters not unlike the Hebrew. Records they are, too, of prehistoric days, chronicles of his own deeds carved by the great God Nile himself, the hypemu of ancient time, but the language in which they are written has never been spoken by man.