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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Egypt (La Mort De Philae), by Pierre Loti
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Egypt (La Mort De Philae)
+
+Author: Pierre Loti
+
+Translator: W. P. Baines
+
+Release Date: April 12, 2006 [EBook #3685]
+Last Updated: March 6, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EGYPT (LA MORT DE PHILAE) ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Dagny; John Bickers; David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+EGYPT (LA MORT DE PHILAE)
+
+by Pierre Loti
+
+
+Translated from the French by
+
+W. P. Baines
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+A WINTER MIDNIGHT BEFORE THE GREAT SPHINX
+
+A night wondrously clear and of a colour unknown to our climate; a place
+of dreamlike aspect, fraught with mystery. The moon of a bright silver,
+which dazzles by its shining, illumines a world which surely is no
+longer ours; for it resembles in nothing what may be seen in other
+lands. A world in which everything is suffused with rosy color beneath
+the stars of midnight, and where granite symbols rise up, ghostlike and
+motionless.
+
+Is that a hill of sand that rises yonder? One can scarcely tell, for it
+has as it were no shape, no outline; rather it seems like a great rosy
+cloud, or some huge, trembling billow, which once perhaps raised itself
+there, forthwith to become motionless for ever. . . . And from out this
+kind of mummified wave a colossal human effigy emerges, rose-coloured
+too, a nameless, elusive rose; emerges, and stares with fixed eyes and
+smiles. It is so huge it seems unreal, as if it were a reflection cast
+by some mirror hidden in the moon. . . . And behind this monster
+face, far away in the rear, on the top of those undefined and gently
+undulating sandhills, three apocalyptic signs rise up against the sky,
+those rose-coloured triangles, regular as the figures of geometry, but
+so vast in the distance that they inspire you with fear. They seem to be
+luminous of themselves, so vividly do they stand out in their clear
+rose against the deep blue of the star-spangled vault. And this apparent
+radiation from within, by its lack of likelihood, makes them seem more
+awful.
+
+And all around is the desert; a corner of the mournful kingdom of sand.
+Nothing else is to be seen anywhere save those three awful things that
+stand there upright and still--the human likeness magnified beyond all
+measurement, and the three geometric mountains; things at first sight
+like exhalations, visionary things, with nevertheless here and there,
+and most of all in the features of the vast mute face, subtleties
+of shadow which show that _it_ at least exists, rigid and immovable,
+fashioned out of imperishable stone.
+
+Even had we not known, we must soon have guessed, for these things are
+unique in the world, and pictures of every age have made the knowledge
+of them commonplace: the Sphinx and the Pyramids! But what is strange is
+that they should be so disquieting. . . . And this pervading colour of
+rose, whence comes it, seeing that usually the moon tints with blue the
+things it illumines? One would not expect this colour either, which,
+nevertheless, is that of all the sands and all the granites of Egypt and
+Arabia. And then too, the eyes of the statue, how often have we not seen
+them? And did we not know that they were capable only of their one fixed
+stare? Why is it then that their motionless regard surprises and chills
+us, even while we are obsessed by the smile of the sealed lips that seem
+to hold back the answer to the supreme enigma? . . .
+
+It is cold, but cold as in our country are the fine nights of January,
+and a wintry mist rises low down in the little valleys of the sand. And
+that again we were not expecting; beyond question the latest invaders of
+this country, by changing the course of the old Nile, so as to water the
+earth and make it more productive, have brought hither the humidity
+of their own misty isle. And this strange cold, this mist, light as it
+still is, seem to presage the end of ages, give an added remoteness
+and finality to all this dead past, which lies here beneath us in
+subterranean labyrinths haunted by a thousand mummies.
+
+And the mist, which, as the night advances, thickens in the valleys,
+hesitates to mount to the great daunting face of the Sphinx; and covers
+it with the merest and most transparent gauze; and, like everything
+else here to-night, this gauze, too, is rose-colored. And meanwhile the
+Sphinx, which has seen the unrolling of all the history of the world,
+attends impassively the change in Egypt's climate, plunged in profound
+and mystic contemplation of the moon, its friend for the last 5000
+years.
+
+Here and there on the soft pathway of the sandhills are pigmy figures
+of men that move about or sit squatting as if on the watch; and small
+as they are, low down in the hollows and far away, this wonderful silver
+moon reveals even their slightest gestures; for their white robes
+and black cloaks stand sharply out against the monotonous rose of the
+desert. At times they call to one another in a harsh, aspirate tongue,
+and then go off at a run, noiselessly, barefooted, with burnous flying,
+like moths in the night. They lie in wait for the parties of tourists
+who arrive from time to time. For the great symbols, during the hundreds
+and thousands of years that have elapsed since men ceased to venerate
+them, have nevertheless scarcely ever been alone, especially on nights
+with a full moon. Men of all races, of all times, have come to wander
+round them, vaguely attracted by their immensity and mystery. In
+the days of the Romans they had already become symbols of a lost
+significance, legacies of a fabulous antiquity, but people came
+curiously to contemplate them, and tourists in toga and in peplus carved
+their names on the granite of their bases for the sake of remembrance.
+
+The tourists who have come to-night, and upon whom have pounced the
+black-cloaked Bedouin guides, wear cap and ulster or furred greatcoat;
+their intrusion here seems almost an offence; but, alas, such visitors
+become more numerous in each succeeding year. The great town hard
+by--which sweats gold now that men have started to buy from it its
+dignity and its soul--is become a place of rendezvous and holiday
+for the idlers and upstarts of the whole world. The modern spirit
+encompasses the old desert of the Sphinx on every side. It is true that
+up to the present no one has dared to profane it by building in the
+immediate neighbourhood of the great statue. Its fixity and calm disdain
+still hold some sway, perhaps. But little more than a mile away there
+ends a road travelled by hackney carriages and tramway cars, and noisy
+with the delectable hootings of smart motor cars; and behind the pyramid
+of Cheops squats a vast hotel to which swarm men and women of fashion,
+the latter absurdly feathered, like Redskins at a scalp dance; and sick
+people, in search of purer air; and consumptive English maidens; and
+ancient English dames, a little the worse for wear, who bring their
+rheumatisms for the treatment of the dry winds.
+
+Passing on our way hither, we had seen this road and this hotel and
+these people in the glare of the electric lights, and from an orchestra
+that was playing there we caught the trivial air of a popular refrain
+of the music halls; but when in a dip of the ground all this had
+disappeared, what a sense of deliverance possessed us, how far off
+this turmoil seemed! As soon as we commenced to tread upon the sand of
+centuries, where all at once our footsteps made no sound, nothing seemed
+to have existence, save only the great calm and the religious awe of
+this world into which we were come, of this world with its so crushing
+commentary upon our own, where all seemed silent, undefined, gigantic
+and suffused with rose-colour.
+
+And first there is the pyramid of Cheops, whose immutable base we had
+to skirt on our way hither. In the moonlight we could see the separate
+blocks, so enormous, so regular, so even in their layers, which lie
+one above the other to infinity, getting ever smaller and smaller, and
+mounting, mounting in diminishing perspective, until at last high up
+they form the apex of this giddy triangle. And the pyramid seemed to be
+illumined by some sad dawn of the end of the world, a dawn which made
+ruddy only the sands and the granites of earth, and left the heavens,
+pricked with their myriad stars, more awful in their darkness. How
+impossible it is for us to conceive the mental attitude of that
+king who, during some half-century, spent the lives of thousands and
+thousands of his slaves in the construction of this tomb, in the fond
+and foolish hope of prolonging to infinity the existence of his mummy.
+
+The pyramid once passed there was still a short way to go before we
+confronted the Sphinx, in the middle of what our contemporaries have
+left him of his desert. We had to descend the slope of that sandhill
+which looked like a cloud, and seemed as if covered with felt, in order
+to preserve in such a place a more complete silence. And here and there
+we passed a gaping black hole--an airhole, as it seemed, of the profound
+and inextricable kingdom of mummies, very populous still, in spite of
+the zeal of the exhumers.
+
+As we descended the sandy pathway we were not slow to perceive the
+Sphinx itself, half hill, half couchant beast, turning its back upon
+us in the attitude of a gigantic dog, that thought to bay the moon; its
+head stood out in dark silhouette, like a screen before the light it
+seemed to be regarding, and the lappets of its headgear showed like
+downhanging ears. And then gradually, as we walked on, we saw it in
+profile, shorn of its nose--flat-nosed like a death's head--but having
+already an expression even when seen afar off and from the side; already
+disdainful with thrust-out chin and baffling, mysterious smile. And
+when at length we arrived before the colossal visage, face to face with
+it--without however encountering its gaze, which passed high above
+our heads--there came over us at once the sentiment of all the secret
+thought which these men of old contrived to incorporate and make eternal
+behind this mutilated mask.
+
+But in full daylight their great Sphinx is no more. It has ceased as
+it were to exist. It is so scarred by time, and by the hands of
+iconoclasts; so dilapidated, broken and diminished, that it is as
+inexpressive as the crumbling mummies found in the sarcophagi, which no
+longer even ape humanity. But after the manner of all phantoms it comes
+to life again at night, beneath the enchantments of the moon.
+
+For the men of its time whom did it represent? King Amenemhat? The Sun
+God? Who can rightly tell? Of all hieroglyphic images it remains the
+one least understood. The unfathomable thinkers of Egypt symbolised
+everything for the benefit of the uninitiated under the form of
+awe-inspiring figures of the gods; and it may be, perhaps, that, after
+having meditated so deeply in the shadow of their temples, and sought so
+long the everlasting wherefore of life and death, they wished simply to
+sum up in the smile of these closed lips the vanity of the most profound
+of our human speculations. . . . It is said that the Sphinx was once
+of striking beauty, when harmonious contour and colouring animated the
+face, and it was enthroned at its full height on a kind of esplanade
+paved with long slabs of stone. But was it then more sovereign than it
+is to-night in its last decrepitude? Almost buried beneath the sand of
+the Libyan desert, which now quite hides its base, it rises at this hour
+like a phantom which nothing solid sustains in the air.
+
+*****
+
+It has gone midnight. In little groups the tourists of the evening
+have disappeared; to regain perhaps the neighbouring hotel, where the
+orchestra doubtless has not ceased to rage; or may be, remounting their
+cars, to join, in some club of Cairo, one of those bridge parties, in
+which the really superior intellects of our time delight; some--the
+stouthearted ones--departed talking loudly and with cigar in mouth;
+others, however, daunted in spite of themselves, lowered their voices as
+people instinctively do in church. And the Bedouin guides, who a moment
+ago seemed to flutter about the giant monument like so many black
+moths--they too have gone, made restless by the cold air, which
+erstwhile they had not known. The show for to-night is over, and
+everywhere silence reigns.
+
+The rosy tint fades on the Sphinx and the pyramids; all things in the
+ghostly scene grow visibly paler; for the moon as it rises becomes
+more silvery in the increasing chilliness of midnight. The winter mist,
+exhaled from the artificially watered fields below, continues to rise,
+takes heart and envelops the great mute face itself. And the latter
+persists in its regard of the dead moon, preserving still the old
+disconcerting smile. It becomes more and more difficult to believe that
+here before us is a real colossus, so surely does it seem nothing other
+than a dilated reflection of a thing which exists _elsewhere_, in
+some other world. And behind in the distance are the three triangular
+mountains. Them, too, the fog envelops, till they also cease to exist,
+and become pure visions of the Apocalypse.
+
+Now it is that little by little an intolerable sadness is expressed
+in those large eyes with their empty sockets--for, at this moment, the
+ultimate secret, that which the Sphinx seems to have known for so many
+centuries, but to have withheld in melancholy irony, is this: that all
+these dead men and women who sleep in the vast necropolis below have
+been fooled, and the awakening signal has not sounded for a single
+one of them; and that the creation of mankind--mankind that thinks and
+suffers--has had no rational explanation, and that our poor aspirations
+are vain, but so vain as to awaken pity.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE PASSING OF CAIRO
+
+Ragged, threatening clouds, like those that bring the showers of our
+early spring, hurry across a pale evening sky, whose mere aspect makes
+you cold. A wintry wind, raw and bitter, blows without ceasing, and
+brings with it every now and then some furtive spots of rain.
+
+A carriage takes me towards what was once the residence of the great
+Mehemet Ali: by a steep incline it ascends into the midst of rocks and
+sand--and already, and almost in a moment, we seem to be in the desert;
+though we have scarcely left behind the last houses of an Arab quarter,
+where long-robed folk, who looked half frozen, were muffled up to the
+eyes to-day. . . . Was there formerly such weather as this in this
+country noted for its unchanging mildness?
+
+This residence of the great sovereign of Egypt, the citadel and the
+mosque which he had made for his last repose, are perched like eagles'
+nests on a spur of the mountain chain of Arabia, the Mokattam, which
+stretches out like a promontory towards the basin of the Nile, and
+brings quite close to Cairo, so as almost to overhang it, a little of
+the desert solitude. And so the eye can see from far off and from
+all sides the mosque of Mehemet Ali, with the flattened domes of its
+cupolas, its pointed minarets, the general aspect so entirely Turkish,
+perched high up, with a certain unexpectedness, above the Arab town
+which it dominates. The prince who sleeps there wished that it should
+resemble the mosques of his fatherland, and it looks as if it had been
+transported bodily from Stamboul.
+
+A short trot brings us up to the lower gate of the old fortress; and, by
+a natural effect, as we ascend, all Cairo which is near there, seems to
+rise with us: not yet indeed the endless multitude of its houses; but at
+first only the thousands of its minarets, which in a few seconds point
+their high towers into the mournful sky, and suggest at once that an
+immense town is about to unfold itself under our eyes.
+
+Continuing to ascend--past the double rampart, the double or triple
+gates, which all these old fortresses possess, we penetrate at length
+into a large fortified courtyard, the crenellated walls of which shut
+out our further view. Soldiers are on guard there--and how unexpected
+are such soldiers in this holy place of Egypt! The red uniforms and the
+white faces of the north: Englishmen, billeted in the palace of Mehemet
+Ali!
+
+The mosque first meets the eye, preceding the palace. And as we
+approach, it is Stamboul indeed--for me dear old Stamboul--which
+is called to mind; there is nothing, whether in the lines of its
+architecture or in the details of its ornamentation, to suggest the
+art of the Arabs--a purer art it may be than this and of which many
+excellent examples may be seen in Cairo. No; it is a corner of Turkey
+into which we are suddenly come.
+
+Beyond a courtyard paved with marble, silent and enclosed, which serves
+as a vast parvis, the sanctuary recalls those of Mehemet Fatih or the
+Chah Zade: the same sanctified gloom, into which the stained glass of
+the narrow windows casts a splendour as of precious stones; the same
+extreme distance between the enormous pillars, leaving more clear space
+than in our churches, and giving to the domes the appearance of being
+held up by enchantment.
+
+The walls are of a strange white marble streaked with yellow. The ground
+is completely covered with carpets of a sombre red. In the vaults, very
+elaborately wrought, nothing but blacks and gold: a background of black
+bestrewn with golden roses, and bordered with arabesques like gold lace.
+And from above hang thousands of gold chains supporting the vigil lamps
+for the evening prayers. Here and there are people on their knees,
+little groups in robe and turban, scattered fortuitously upon the red of
+the carpets, and almost lost in the midst of the sumptuous solitude.
+
+In an obscure corner lies Mehemet Ali, the prince adventurous and
+chivalrous as some legendary hero, and withal one of the greatest
+sovereigns of modern history. There he lies behind a grating of gold, of
+complicated design, in that Turkish style, already decadent, but still
+so beautiful, which was that of his epoch.
+
+Through the golden bars may be seen in the shadow the catafalque of
+state, in three tiers, covered with blue brocades, exquisitely faded,
+and profusely embroidered with dull gold. Two long green palms freshly
+cut from some date-tree in the neighbourhood are crossed before the door
+of this sort of funeral enclosure. And it seems that around us is an
+inviolable religious peace. . . .
+
+But all at once there comes a noisy chattering in a Teutonic tongue--and
+shouts and laughs! . . . How is it possible, so near to the great dead?
+. . . And there enters a group of tourists, dressed more or less in the
+approved “smart” style. A guide, with a droll countenance, recites to
+them the beauties of the place, bellowing at the top of his voice like
+a showman at a fair. And one of the travellers, stumbling in the sandals
+which are too large for her small feet, laughs a prolonged, silly little
+laugh like the clucking of a turkey. . . .
+
+Is there then no keeper, no guardian of this holy mosque? And amongst
+the faithful prostrate here in prayer, none who will rise and make
+indignant protest? Who after this will speak to us of the fanaticism of
+the Egyptians? . . . Too meek, rather, they seem to me everywhere. Take
+any church you please in Europe where men go down on their knees
+in prayer, and I should like to see what kind of a welcome would
+be accorded to a party of Moslem tourists who--to suppose the
+impossible--behaved so badly as these savages here.
+
+Behind the mosque is an esplanade, and beyond that the palace. The
+palace, as such, can scarcely be said to exist any longer, for it has
+been turned into a barrack for the army of occupation. English soldiers,
+indeed, meet us at every turn, smoking their pipes in the idleness of
+the evening. One of them who does not smoke is trying to carve his
+name with a knife on one of the layers of marble at the base of the
+sanctuary.
+
+At the end of this esplanade there is a kind of balcony from which one
+may see the whole of the town, and an unlimited extent of verdant
+plains and yellow desert. It is a favourite view of the tourists of the
+agencies, and we meet again our friends of the mosque, who have preceded
+us hither--the gentlemen with the loud voices, the bellowing guide and
+the cackling lady. Some soldiers are standing there too, smoking their
+pipes contemplatively. But spite of all these people, in spite, too,
+of the wintry sky, the scene which presents itself on arrival there is
+ravishing.
+
+A very fairyland--but a fairyland quite different from that of Stamboul.
+For whereas the latter is ranged like a great amphitheatre above the
+Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmora, here the vast town is spread out
+simply, in a plain surrounded by the solitude of the desert and
+dominated by chaotic rocks. Thousands of minarets rise up on every side
+like ears of corn in a field; far away in the distance one can see their
+innumerable slender points--but instead of being simply, as at Stamboul,
+so many white spires, they are here complicated by arabesques, by
+galleries, clock-towers and little columns, and seem to have borrowed
+the reddish colour of the desert.
+
+The flat rocks tell of a region which formerly was without rain. The
+innumerable palm-trees of the gardens, above this ocean of mosques and
+houses, sway their plumes in the wind, bewildered as it were by these
+clouds laden with cold showers. In the south and in the west, at the
+extreme limits of the view, as if upon the misty horizon of the plains,
+appear two gigantic triangles. They are Gizeh and Memphis--the eternal
+pyramids.
+
+At the north of the town there is a corner of the desert quite singular
+in its character--of the colour of bistre and of mummy--where a whole
+colony of high cupolas, scattered at random, still stand upright in
+the midst of sand and desolate rocks. It is the proud cemetery of the
+Mameluke Sultans, whose day was done in the Middle Ages.
+
+But if one looks closely, what disorder, what a mass of ruins there
+are in this town--still a little fairylike--beaten this evening by the
+squalls of winter. The domes, the holy tombs, the minarets and terraces,
+all are crumbling: the hand of death is upon them all. But down there,
+in the far distance, near to that silver streak which meanders through
+the plains, and which is the old Nile, the advent of new times is
+proclaimed by the chimneys of factories, impudently high, that disfigure
+everything, and spout forth into the twilight thick clouds of black
+smoke.
+
+The night is falling as we descend from the esplanade to return to our
+lodgings.
+
+We have first to traverse the old town of Cairo, a maze of streets
+still full of charm, wherein the thousand little lamps of the Arab shops
+already shed their quiet light. Passing through streets which twist at
+their caprice, beneath overhanging balconies covered with wooden trellis
+of exquisite workmanship, we have to slacken speed in the midst of a
+dense crowd of men and beasts. Close to us pass women, veiled in black,
+gently mysterious as in the olden times, and men of unmoved gravity, in
+long robes and white draperies; and little donkeys pompously bedecked in
+collars of blue beads; and rows of leisurely camels, with their loads of
+lucerne, which exhale the pleasant fragrance of the fields. And when
+in the gathering gloom, which hides the signs of decay, there appear
+suddenly, above the little houses, so lavishly ornamented with
+mushrabiyas and arabesques, the tall aerial minarets, rising to a
+prodigious height into the twilight sky, it is still the adorable East.
+
+But nevertheless, what ruins, what filth, what rubbish! How present is
+the sense of impending dissolution! And what is this: large pools of
+water in the middle of the road! Granted that there is more rain here
+than formerly, since the valley of the Nile has been artificially
+irrigated, it still seems almost impossible that there should be all
+this black water, into which our carriage sinks to the very axles; for
+it is a clear week since any serious quantity of rain fell. It would
+seem that the new masters of this land, albeit the cost of annual upkeep
+has risen in their hands to the sum of fifteen million pounds, have
+given no thought to drainage. But the good Arabs, patiently and without
+murmuring, gather up their long robes, and with legs bare to the knee
+make their way through this already pestilential water, which must be
+hatching for them fever and death.
+
+Further on, as the carriage proceeds on its course, the scene changes
+little by little. The streets become vulgar: the houses of “The Arabian
+Nights” give place to tasteless Levantine buildings; electric lamps
+begin to pierce the darkness with their wan, fatiguing glare, and at a
+sharp turning the new Cairo is before us.
+
+What is this? Where are we fallen? Save that it is more vulgar, it might
+be Nice, or the Riviera, or Interkalken, or any other of those towns
+of carnival whither the bad taste of the whole world comes to disport
+itself in the so-called fashionable seasons. But in these quarters,
+on the other hand, which belong to the foreigners and to the Egyptians
+rallied to the civilisation of the West, all is clean and dry, well
+cared for and well kept. There are no ruts, no refuse. The fifteen
+million pounds have done their work conscientiously.
+
+Everywhere is the blinding glare of the electric light; monstrous hotels
+parade the sham splendour of their painted facades; the whole length of
+the streets is one long triumph of imitation, of mud walls plastered so
+as to look like stone; a medley of all styles, rockwork, Roman, Gothic,
+New Art, Pharaonic, and, above all, the pretentious and the absurd.
+Innumerable public-houses overflow with bottles; every alcoholic
+drink, all the poisons of the West, are here turned into Egypt with a
+take-what-you-please.
+
+And taverns, gambling dens and houses of ill-fame. And parading the
+side-walks, numerous Levantine damsels, who seek by their finery to
+imitate their fellows of the Paris boulevards, but who by mistake, as
+we must suppose, have placed their orders with some costumier for
+performing dogs.
+
+This then is the Cairo of the future, this cosmopolitan fair! Good
+heavens! When will the Egyptians recollect themselves, when will they
+realise that their forebears have left to them an inalienable patrimony
+of art, of architecture and exquisite refinement; and that, by their
+negligence, one of those towns which used to be the most beautiful in
+the world is falling into ruin and about to perish?
+
+And nevertheless amongst the young Moslems and Copts now leaving
+the schools there are so many of distinguished mind and superior
+intelligence! When I see the things that are here, see them with
+the fresh eyes of a stranger, landed but yesterday upon this soil,
+impregnated with the glory of antiquity, I want to cry out to them, with
+a frankness that is brutal perhaps, but with a profound sympathy:
+
+“Bestir yourselves before it is too late. Defend yourselves against
+this disintegrating invasion--not by force, be it understood, not by
+inhospitality or ill-humour--but by disdaining this Occidental rubbish,
+this last year's frippery by which you are inundated. Try to preserve
+not only your traditions and your admirable Arab language, but also
+the grace and mystery that used to characterise your town, the refined
+luxury of your dwelling-houses. It is not a question now of a poet's
+fancy; your national dignity is at stake. You are _Orientals_--I
+pronounce respectfully that word, which implies a whole past of early
+civilisation, of unmingled greatness--but in a few years, unless you are
+on your guard, you will have become mere Levantine brokers, exclusively
+preoccupied with the price of land and the rise in cotton.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE MOSQUES OF CAIRO
+
+They are almost innumerable, more than 3000, and this great town,
+which covers some twelve miles of plain, might well be called a city of
+mosques. (I speak, of course, of the ancient Cairo, of the Cairo of
+the Arabs. The new Cairo, the Cairo of sham elegance and of “Semiramis
+Hotels,” does not deserve to be mentioned except with a smile.)
+
+A city of mosques, then, as I was saying. They follow one another along
+the streets, sometimes two, three, four in a row; leaning one against
+the other, so that their confines become merged. On all sides their
+minarets shoot up into the air, those minarets embellished with
+arabesques, carved and complicated with the most changing fancy. They
+have their little balconies, their rows of little columns; they are so
+fashioned that the daylight shows through them. Some are far away in the
+distance; others quite close, pointing straight into the sky above our
+heads. No matter where one looks--as far as the eye can see--still there
+are others; all of the same familiar colour, a brown turning into rose.
+The most ancient of them, those of the old easy-tempered times, bristle
+with shafts of wood, placed there as resting-places for the great free
+birds of the air, and vultures and ravens may always be seen perched
+there, contemplating the horizon of the sands, the line of the yellow
+solitudes.
+
+Three thousand mosques! Their great straight walls, a little severe
+perhaps, and scarcely pierced by their tiny ogive windows, rise above
+the height of the neighbouring houses. These walls are of the same brown
+colour as the minarets, except that they are painted with horizontal
+stripes of an old red, which has been faded by the sun; and they are
+crowned invariably with a series of trefoils, after the fashion
+of battlements, but trefoils which in every case are different and
+surprising.
+
+Before the mosques, which are raised like altars, there is always a
+flight of steps with a balustrade of white marble. From the door one
+gets a glimpse of the calm interior in deep shadow. Once inside there
+are corridors, astonishingly lofty, sonorous and enveloped in a kind of
+half gloom; immediately on entering one experiences a sense of coolness
+and pervading peace; they prepare you as it were, and you begin to be
+filled with a spirit of devotion, and instinctively to speak low. In
+the narrow street outside there was the clamorous uproar of an Oriental
+crowd, cries of sellers, and the noise of humble old-world trading; men
+and beasts jostled you; there seemed a scarcity of air beneath those so
+numerous overhanging mushrabiyas. But here suddenly there is silence,
+broken only by the vague murmur of prayers and the sweet songs of birds;
+there is silence too, and the sense of open space, in the holy garden
+enclosed within high walls; and again in the sanctuary, resplendent in
+its quiet and restful magnificence. Few people as a rule frequent the
+mosques, except of course at the hours of the five services of the day.
+In a few chosen corners, particularly cool and shady, some greybeards
+isolate themselves to read from morning till night the holy books and to
+ponder the thought of approaching death: they may be seen there in their
+white turbans, with their white beards and grave faces. And there may
+be, too, some few poor homeless outcasts, who are come to seek the
+hospitality of Allah, and sleep, careless of the morrow, stretched to
+their full length on mats.
+
+The peculiar charm of the gardens of the mosques, which are often very
+extensive, is that they are so jealously enclosed within their high
+walls--crowned always with stone trefoils--which completely shut out the
+hubbub of the outer world. Palm-trees, which have grown there for some
+hundred years perhaps, rise from the ground, either separately or in
+superb clusters, and temper the light of the always hot sun on the
+rose-trees and the flowering hibiscus. There is no noise in the gardens,
+any more than in the cloisters, for people walk there in sandals and
+with measured tread. And there are Edens, too, for the birds, who
+live and sing therein in complete security, even during the services,
+attracted by the little troughs which the imams fill for their benefit
+each morning with water from the Nile.
+
+As for the mosque itself it is rarely closed on all sides as are
+those in the countries of the more sombre Islam of the north. Here in
+Egypt--since there is no real winter and scarcely ever any rain--one of
+the sides of the mosque is left completely open to the garden; and the
+sanctuary is separated from the verdure and the roses only by a simple
+colonnade. Thus the faithful grouped beneath the palm-trees can pray
+there equally as well as in the interior of the mosque, since they can
+see, between the arches, the holy Mihrab.[*]
+
+     [*] The Mihrab is a kind of portico indicating the direction
+     of Mecca. It is placed at the end of each mosque, as the
+     altar is in our churches, and the faithful are supposed to
+     face it when they pray.
+
+Oh! this sanctuary seen from the silent garden, this sanctuary in which
+the pale gold gleams on the old ceiling of cedarwood, and mosaics of
+mother-of-pearl shine on the walls as if they were embroideries of
+silver that had been hung there.
+
+There is no faience as in the mosques of Turkey or of Iran. Here it is
+the triumph of patient mosaic. Mother-of-pearl of all colours, all kinds
+of marble and of porphyry, cut into myriads of little pieces, precise
+and equal, and put together again to form the Arab designs, which, never
+borrowing from the human form, nor indeed from the form of any animal,
+recall rather those infinitely varied crystals that may be seen under
+the microscope in a flake of snow. It is always the Mihrab which is
+decorated with the most elaborate richness; generally little columns of
+lapis lazuli, intensely blue, rise in relief from it, framing mosaics so
+delicate that they look like brocades of fine lace. In the old ceilings
+of cedarwood, where the singing birds of the neighbourhood have their
+nests, the golds mingle with some most exquisite colourings, which time
+has taken care to soften and to blend together. And here and there very
+fine and long consoles of sculptured wood seem to fall, as it were, from
+the beams and hang upon the walls like stalactites; and these consoles,
+too, in past times, have been carefully coloured and gilded. As for the
+columns, always dissimilar, some of amaranth-coloured marble, others
+of dark green, others again of red porphyry, with capitals of every
+conceivable style, they are come from far, from the night of the ages,
+from the religious struggles of an earlier time and testify to the
+prodigious past which this valley of the Nile, narrow as it is, and
+encompassed by the desert, has known. They were formerly perhaps in the
+temples of the pagans, or have known the strange faces of the gods of
+Egypt and of ancient Greece and Rome; they have been in the churches of
+the early Christians, or have seen the statues of tortured martyrs,
+and the images of the transfigured Christ, crowned with the Byzantine
+aureole. They have been present at battles, at the downfall of kingdoms,
+at hecatombs, at sacrileges; and now brought together promiscuously
+in these mosques, they behold on the walls of the sanctuary simply the
+thousand little designs, ideally pure, of that Islam which wishes that
+men when they pray should conceive Allah as immaterial, a Spirit without
+form and without feature.
+
+Each one of these mosques has its sainted dead, whose name it bears,
+and who sleeps by its side, in an adjoining mortuary kiosk; some priest
+rendered admirable by his virtues, or perhaps a khedive of earlier
+times, or a soldier, or a martyr. And the mausoleum, which communicates
+with the sanctuary by means of a long passage, sometimes open, sometimes
+covered with gratings, is surmounted always by a special kind of cupola,
+a very high and curious cupola, which raises itself into the sky like
+some gigantic dervish hat. Above the Arab town, and even in the sand of
+the neighbouring desert, these funeral domes may be seen on every side
+adjoining the old mosques to which they belong. And in the evening, when
+the light is failing, they suggest the odd idea that it is the dead man
+himself, immensely magnified, who stands there beneath a hat that is
+become immense. One can pray, if one wishes, in this resting-place of
+the dead saint as well as in the mosque. Here indeed it is always more
+secluded and more in shadow. It is more simple, too, at least up to the
+height of a man: on a platform of white marble, more or less worn and
+yellowed by the touch of pious hands, nothing more than an austere
+catafalque of similar marble, ornamented merely with a Cufic
+inscription. But if you raise your eyes to look at the interior of the
+dome--the inside, as it were, of the strange dervish hat--you will see
+shining between the clusters of painted and gilded stalactites a number
+of windows of exquisite colouring, little windows that seem to be
+constellations of emeralds and rubies and sapphires. And the birds, you
+may be sure, have their nests also in the house of the holy one.
+They are wont indeed to soil the carpets and the mats on which the
+worshippers kneel, and their nests are so many blots up there amid the
+gildings of the carved cedarwood; but then their song, the symphony that
+issues from that aviary, is so sweet to the living who pray and to the
+dead who dream. . . .
+
+*****
+
+But yet, when all is said, these mosques seem somehow to be wanting.
+They do not wholly satisfy you. The access to them perhaps is too easy,
+and one feels too near to the modern quarters of the town, where the
+hotels are full of visitors--so that at any moment, it seems, the spell
+may be broken by the entry of a batch of Cook's tourists, armed with
+the inevitable _Baedeker_. Alas! they are the mosques of Cairo, of
+poor Cairo, that is invaded and profaned. The memory turns to those of
+Morocco, so jealously guarded, to those of Persia, even to those of Old
+Stamboul, where the shroud of Islam envelops you in silence and gently
+bows your shoulders as soon as you cross their thresholds.
+
+And yet what pains are being taken to-day to preserve these mosques,
+which in olden times were such delightful retreats. Neglected for whole
+centuries, never repaired, notwithstanding the veneration of their
+heedless worshippers, the greater part of them were fallen into ruin;
+the fine woodwork of their interiors had become worm-eaten, their
+cupolas were cracked and their mosaics covered the floor as with a hail
+of mother-of-pearl, of porphyry and marble. It seemed that to repair
+all this was a task incapable of fulfilment; it was sheer folly, people
+said, to conceive the idea of it.
+
+Nevertheless, for nearly twenty years now an army of workers has been at
+the task, sculptors, marble-cutters, mosaicists. Already certain of
+the sanctuaries, the most venerable of them indeed, have been entirely
+renovated. After having re-echoed for some years to the sounds of
+hammers and chisels, during the course of these vast renovations, they
+are restored now to peace and to prayer, and the birds have recommenced
+to build their nests in them.
+
+It will be the glory of the present reign that it has preserved, before
+it was too late, all this magnificent legacy of Moslem art. When the
+city of “The Arabian Nights,” which was formerly there, shall have
+entirely disappeared, to give place to a vulgar _entrepot_ of commerce
+and of pleasure, to which the plutocracy of the whole world comes every
+winter to disport itself, so much at least will remain to bear testimony
+to the lofty and magnificent thought that inspired the earlier Arab
+life. These mosques will continue to remain into the distant future,
+even when men shall have ceased to pray in them, and the winged guests
+shall have departed, for the want of those troughs of water from the
+Nile, filled for them by the good imams, whose hospitality they repay
+by making heard in the courts, beneath the arched roofs, beneath the
+ceilings of cedarwood, the sweet, piping music of birds.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE HALL OF THE MUMMIES
+
+There are two of us, and as we light our way by the aid of a lantern
+through these vast halls we might be taken for a night watch on its
+round. We have just shut behind us and doubly locked the door by which
+we entered, and we know that we are alone, rigorously alone, although
+this place is so vast, with its endless, communicating halls, its high
+vestibules and great flights of stairs; mathematically alone, one might
+say, for this palace that we are in is one quite out of the ordinary,
+and all its outlets were closed and sealed at nightfall. Every night
+indeed the doors are sealed, on account of the priceless relics that
+are collected here. So we shall not meet with any living being in these
+halls to-night, in spite of their vast extent and endless turnings, and
+in spite too of all these mysterious things that are ranged on every
+side and fill the place with shadows and hiding-places.
+
+Our round takes us first along the ground floor over flagstones that
+resound to our footsteps. It is about ten of the clock. Here and there
+through some stray windows gleams a small patch of luminous blue sky,
+lit by the stars which for the good folk outside lend transparency to
+the night; but there, none the less, the place is filled with a solemn
+gloom, and we lower our voices, remembering perhaps the dead that fill
+the glass cases in the halls above.
+
+And these things which line the walls on either side of us as we pass
+also seem to be in the nature of receptacles for the dead. For the most
+part they are sarcophagi of granite, proud and indestructible: some of
+them, in the shape of gigantic boxes, are laid out in line on pedestals;
+others, in the form of mummies, stand upright against the walls and
+display enormous faces, surmounted by equally enormous head-dresses.
+Assembled there they look like a lot of malformed giants, with oversized
+heads sunk curiously in their shoulders. There are, besides, some that
+are merely statues, colossal figures that have never held a corpse in
+their interiors; these all wear a strange, scarcely perceptible smile;
+in their huge sphinxlike headgear they reach nearly to the ceiling and
+their set stare passes high above our heads. And there are others that
+are not larger than ourselves, some even quite little, with the stature
+of gnomes. And, every now and then, at some sudden turning, we encounter
+a pair of eyes of enamel, wide-open eyes, that pierce straight into the
+depths of ours, that seem to follow us as we pass and make us shiver as
+if by the contact of a thought that comes from the abysm of the ages.
+
+We pass on rapidly, however, and somewhat inattentively, for our
+business here to-night is not with these simulacra on the ground floor,
+but with the more redoubtable hosts above. Besides our lantern sheds so
+little light in these great halls that all these people of granite and
+sandstone and marble appear only at the precise moment of our passage,
+appear only to disappear, and, spreading their fantastic shadows on the
+walls, mingle the next moment with the great mute crowd, that grows ever
+more numerous behind us.
+
+Placed at intervals are apparatus for use in case of fire, coils of hose
+and standpipes that shine with the warm glow of burnished copper, and I
+ask my companion of the watch: “What is there that could burn here? Are
+not these good people all of stone?” And he answers: “Not here indeed;
+but consider how the things that are above would blaze.” Ah! yes.
+The “things that are above”--which are indeed the object of my visit
+to-night. I had no thought of fire catching hold in an assembly of
+mummies; of the old withered flesh, the dead, dry hair, the venerable
+carcasses of kings and queens, soaked as they are in natron and oils,
+crackling like so many boxes of matches. It is chiefly on account of
+this danger indeed that the seals are put upon the doors at nightfall,
+and that it needs a special favour to be allowed to penetrate into this
+place at night with a lantern.
+
+In the daytime this “Museum of Egyptian Antiquities” is as vulgar a
+thing as you can conceive, filled though it is with priceless treasures.
+It is the most pompous, the most outrageous of those buildings, of no
+style at all, by which each year the New Cairo is enriched; open to all
+who care to gaze at close quarters, in a light that is almost brutal,
+upon these august dead, who fondly thought that they had hidden
+themselves for ever.
+
+But at night! . . . Ah! at night when all the doors are closed, it
+is the palace of nightmare and of fear. At night, so say the Arab
+guardians, who would not enter it at the price of gold--no, not even
+after offering up a prayer--at night, horrible “forms” escape, not only
+from the embalmed bodies that sleep in the glass cases above, but also
+from the great statues, from the papyri, and the thousand and one things
+that, at the bottom of the tombs, have long been impregnated with human
+essence. And these “forms” are like unto dead bodies, and sometimes to
+strange beasts, even to beasts that crawl. And, after having wandered
+about the halls, they end by assembling for their nocturnal conferences
+on the roofs.
+
+We next ascend a staircase of monumental proportions, empty in the whole
+extent, where we are delivered for a little while from the obsession of
+those rigid figures, from the stares and smiles of the good people in
+white stone and black granite who throng the galleries and vestibules on
+the ground floor. None of them, to be sure, will follow us; but all the
+same they guard in force and perplex with their shadows the only way by
+which we can retreat, if the formidable hosts above have in store for us
+too sinister a welcome.
+
+He to whose courtesy I owe the relaxation of the orders of the night is
+the illustrious savant to whose care has been entrusted the direction
+of the excavations in Egyptian soil; he is also the comptroller of this
+vast museum, and it is he himself who has kindly consented to act as my
+guide to-night through its mazy labyrinth.
+
+Across the silent halls above we now proceed straight towards those of
+whom I have demanded this nocturnal audience.
+
+To-night the succession of these rooms, filled with glass cases, which
+cover more than four hundred yards along the four sides of the building,
+seems to be without end. After passing, in turn, the papyri, the
+enamels, the vases that contain human entrails, we reach the mummies
+of the sacred beasts: cats, ibises, dogs, hawks, all with their mummy
+cloths and sarcophagi; and monkeys, too, that remain grotesque even
+in death. Then commence the human masks, and, upright in glass-fronted
+cupboards, the mummy cases in which the body, swathed in its mummy
+cloths, was moulded, and which reproduced, more or less enlarged, the
+figure of the deceased. Quite a lot of courtesans of the Greco-Roman
+epoch, moulded in paste in this wise after death and crowned with roses,
+smile at us provokingly from behind their windows. Masks of the colour
+of dead flesh alternate with others of gold which gleam as the light of
+our lantern plays upon them momentarily in our rapid passage. Their eyes
+are always too large, the eyelids too wide open and the dilated pupils
+seem to stare at us with alarm. Amongst these mummy cases and these
+coffin lids fashioned in the shape of the human figure, there are some
+that seem to have been made for giants; the head especially, beneath its
+cumbrous head-dress, the head stuffed as it were between the hunchback
+shoulders, looks enormous, out of all proportion to the body which,
+towards the feet, narrows like a scabbard.
+
+Although our little lantern maintains its light we seem to see here
+less and less: the darkness around us in these vast rooms becomes almost
+overpowering--and these are the rooms, too, that, leading one into the
+other, facilitate the midnight promenade of those dread “forms” which,
+every evening, are released and roam about. . . .
+
+On a table in the middle of one of these rooms a thing to make you
+shudder gleams in a glass box, a fragile thing that failed of life some
+two thousand years ago. It is the mummy of a human embryo, and someone,
+to appease the malice of this born-dead thing, had covered its face with
+a coating of gold--for, according to the belief of the Egyptians, these
+little abortions became the evil genii of their families if proper
+honour was not paid to them. At the end of its negligible body, the
+gilded head, with its great foetus eyes, is unforgettable for its
+suffering ugliness, for its frustrated and ferocious expression.
+
+In the halls into which we next penetrate there are veritable dead
+bodies ranged on either side of us as we pass; their coffins are
+displayed in tiers one above the other; the air is heavy with the
+sickly odour of mummies; and on the ground, curled always like some
+huge serpent, the leather hoses are in readiness, for here indeed is the
+danger spot for fire.
+
+And the master of this strange house whispers to me: “This is the place.
+Look! There they are.”
+
+In truth I recognise the place, having often come here in the daytime,
+like other people. In spite of the darkness, which commences at some ten
+paces from us--so small is the circle of light cast by our lantern--I
+can distinguish the double row of the great royal coffins, open without
+shame in their glass cases. And standing against the walls, upright,
+like so many sentinels, are the coffin lids, fashioned in the shape of
+the human figure.
+
+We are there at last, admitted at this unseasonable hour into the
+guest-chamber of kings and queens, for an audience that is private
+indeed.
+
+And there, first of all, is the woman with the baby, upon whom, without
+stopping, we throw the light of our lantern. A woman who died in giving
+to the world a little dead prince. Since the old embalmers no one has
+seen the face of this Queen Makeri. In her coffin there she is simply
+a tall female figure, outlined beneath the close-bound swathings of
+brown-coloured bandages. At her feet lies the fatal baby, grotesquely
+shrivelled, and veiled and mysterious as the mother herself; a sort
+of doll, it seems, put there to keep her eternal company in the slow
+passing of endless years.
+
+More fearsome to approach is the row of unswathed mummies that follow.
+Here, in each coffin over which we bend, there is a face which stares at
+us--or else closes its eyes in order that it may not see us; and meagre
+shoulders and lean arms, and hands with overgrown nails that protrude
+from miserable rags. And each royal mummy that our lantern lights
+reserves for us a fresh surprise and the shudder of a different
+fear--they resemble one another so little. Some of them seem to laugh,
+showing their yellow teeth; others have an expression of infinite
+sadness and suffering. Sometimes the faces are small, refined and still
+beautiful despite the pinching of the nostrils; sometimes they are
+excessively enlarged by putrid swelling, with the tip of the nose eaten
+away. The embalmers, we know, were not sure of their means, and the
+mummies were not always a success. In some cases putrefaction ensued,
+and corruption and even sudden hatchings of larvae, those “companions
+without ears and without eyes,” which died indeed in time but only after
+they had perforated all the flesh.
+
+Hard by are ranked according to dynasty, and in chronological order, the
+proud Pharaohs in a piteous row: father, son, grandson, great-grandson.
+And common paper tickets tell their tremendous names, Seti I., Ramses
+II., Seti II., Ramses III., Ramses IV. . . . Soon the muster will be
+complete, with such energy have men dug in the heart of the rocks
+to find them all; and these glass cases will no doubt be their final
+resting-place. In olden days, however, they made many pilgrimages after
+their death, for in the troubled times of the history of Egypt it was
+one of the harassing preoccupations of the reigning sovereign to hide,
+to hide at all costs, the mummies of his ancestors, which filled the
+earth increasingly, and which the violators of tombs were so swift to
+track. Then they were carried clandestinely from one grave to another,
+raised each from his own pompous sepulchre, to be buried at last
+together in some humble and less conspicuous vault. But it is here, in
+this museum of Egyptian antiquities, that they are about to accomplish
+their return to dust, which has been deferred, as if by miracle, for
+so many centuries. Now, stripped of their bandages, their days are
+numbered, and it behoves us to hasten to draw these physiognomies of
+three or four thousand years ago, which are about to perish.
+
+In that coffin--the last but one of the row on the left--it is the great
+Sesostris himself who awaits us. We know of old that face of ninety
+years, with its nose hooked like the beak of a falcon; and the gaps
+between those old man's teeth; the meagre, birdlike neck, and the hand
+raised in a gesture of menace. Twenty years have elapsed since he was
+brought back to the light, this master of the world. He was wrapped
+_thousands of times_ in a marvellous winding-sheet, woven of aloe
+fibres, finer than the muslin of India, which must have taken years in
+the making and measured more than 400 yards in length. The unswathing,
+done in the presence of the Khedive Tewfik and the great personages of
+Egypt, lasted two hours, and after the last turn, when the illustrious
+figure appeared, the emotion amongst the assistants was such that they
+stampeded like a herd of cattle, and the Pharaoh was overturned. He has,
+moreover, given much cause for conversation, this great Sesostris, since
+his installation in the museum. Suddenly one day with a brusque gesture,
+in the presence of the attendants, who fled howling with fear, he raised
+that hand which is still in the air, and which he has not deigned since
+to lower.[*] And subsequently there supervened, beginning in the old
+yellowish-white hair, and then swarming over the whole body, a hatching
+of cadaveric fauna, which necessitated a complete bath in mercury. He
+also has his paper ticket, pasted on the end of his box, and one may
+read there, written in a careless hand, that name which once caused the
+whole world to tremble--“Ramses II. (Sesostris)”! It need not be said
+that he has greatly fallen away and blackened even in the fifteen yeas
+that I have known him. He is a phantom that is about to disappear; in
+spite of all the care lavished upon him, a poor phantom about to fall to
+pieces, to sink into nothingness. We move our lantern about his hooked
+nose, the better to decipher, in the play of shadow, his expression,
+that still remains authoritative. . . . To think that once the destinies
+of the world were ruled, without appeal, by the nod of this head, which
+looks now somewhat narrow, under the dry skin and the horrible whitish
+hair. What force of will, of passion and colossal pride must once have
+dwelt therein! Not to mention the anxiety, which to us now is scarcely
+conceivable, but which in his time overmastered all others--the anxiety,
+that is to say, of assuring the magnificence and inviolability of
+sepulture! . . . And this horrible scarecrow, toothless and senile,
+lying here in its filthy rags, with the hand raised in an impotent
+menace, was once the brilliant Sesostris, the master of kings, and by
+virtue of his strength and beauty the demigod also, whose muscular limbs
+and deep athletic chest many colossal statues at Memphis, at Thebes, at
+Luxor, reproduce and try to make eternal. . . .
+
+     [*] This movement is explained by the action of the sun,
+     which, falling on the unclothed arm, is supposed to have
+     expanded the bone of the elbow.
+
+In the next coffin lies his father, Seti I., who reigned for a much
+shorter period, and died much younger than he. This youthfulness is
+apparent still in the features of the mummy, which are impressed besides
+with a persistent beauty. Indeed this good King Seti looks the picture
+of calm and serene reverie. There is nothing shocking in his dead
+face, with its long closed eyes, its delicate lips, its noble chin
+and unblemished profile. It is soothing and pleasant even to see him
+sleeping there with his hands crossed upon his breast. And it seems
+strange, that he, who looks so young, should have for son the old man,
+almost a centenarian, who lies beside him.
+
+In our passage we have gazed on many other royal mummies, some tranquil
+and some grimacing. But, to finish, there is one of them (the third
+coffin there, in the row in front of us), a certain Queen Nsitanebashru,
+whom I approach with fear, albeit it is mainly on her account that I
+have ventured to make this fantastical round. Even in the daytime she
+attains to the maximum of horror that a spectral figure can evoke. What
+will she be like to-night in the uncertain light of our little lantern?
+
+There she is indeed, the dishevelled vampire in her place right enough,
+stretched at full length, but looking always as if she were about to
+leap up; and straightway I meet the sidelong glance of her enamelled
+pupils, shining out of half-closed eyelids, with lashes that are still
+almost perfect. Oh! the terrifying person! Not that she is ugly, on the
+contrary we can see that she was rather pretty and was mummied young.
+What distinguishes her from the others is her air of thwarted anger, of
+fury, as it were, at being dead. The embalmers have coloured her very
+religiously, but the pink, under the action of the salts of the skin,
+has become decomposed here and there and given place to a number of
+green spots. Her naked shoulders, the height of the arms above the
+rags which were once her splendid shroud, have still a certain sleek
+roundness, but they, too, are stained with greenish and black splotches,
+such as may be seen on the skins of snakes. Assuredly no corpse, either
+here or elsewhere, has ever preserved such an expression of intense
+life, of ironical, implacable ferocity. Her mouth is twisted in a little
+smile of defiance; her nostrils pinched like those of a ghoul on the
+scent of blood, and her eyes seem to say to each one who approaches:
+“Yes, I am laid in my coffin; but you will very soon see I can get out
+of it.” There is something confusing in the thought that the menace of
+this terrible expression, and this appearance of ill-restrained ferocity
+had endured for some hundreds of years before the commencement of our
+era, and endured to no purpose in the secret darkness of a closed coffin
+at the bottom of some doorless vault.
+
+Now that we are about to retire, what will happen here, with the
+complicity of silence, in the darkest hours of the night? Will they
+remain inert and rigid, all these embalmed bodies, once left to
+themselves, who pretended to be so quiet because we were there? What
+exchanges of old human fluid will recommence, as who can doubt they
+do each night between one coffin and another. Formerly these kings and
+queens, in their anxiety as to the future of their mummy, had foreseen
+violation, pillage and scattering amongst the sands of the desert, but
+never this: that they would be reunited one day, almost all unveiled,
+so near to one another under panes of glass. Those who governed Egypt in
+the lost centuries and were never known except by history, by the papyri
+inscribed with hieroglyphics, brought thus together, how many things
+will they have to say to one another, how many ardent questions to
+ask about their loves, about their crimes! As soon as we shall have
+departed, nay, as soon as our lantern, at the end of the long galleries,
+shall seem no more than a foolish, vanishing spot of fire, will not the
+“forms” of whom the attendants are so afraid, will they not start
+their nightly rumblings and in their hollow mummy voices, whisper, with
+difficulty, words? . . .
+
+Heavens! How dark it is! Yet our lantern has not gone out. But it seems
+to grow darker and darker. And at night, when all is shut up, how one
+smells the odour of the oils in which the shrouds are saturated, and,
+more intolerable still, the sickly stealthy stench, almost, of all these
+dead bodies! . . .
+
+As I traverse the obscurity of these endless halls, a vague instinct of
+self-preservation induces me to turn back again, and look behind. And
+it seems to me that already the woman with the baby is slowly raising
+herself, with a thousand precautions and stratagems, her head still
+completely covered. While farther down, that dishevelled hair. . . . Oh!
+I can see her well, sitting up with a sudden jerk, the ghoul with the
+enamel eyes, the lady Nsitanebashru!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+A CENTRE OF ISLAM
+
+     “To learn is the duty of every Moslem.”
+      --Verse from the Hadith or Words of the Prophet.
+
+In a narrow street, hidden in the midst of the most ancient Arab
+quarters of Cairo, in the very heat of a close labyrinth mysteriously
+shady, an exquisite doorway opens into a wide space bathed in sunshine;
+a doorway formed of two elaborate arches, and surmounted by a high
+frontal on which intertwined arabesques form wonderful rosework, and
+holy writings are enscrolled with the most ingenious complications.
+
+It is the entrance to El-Azhar, a venerable place in Islam, whence
+have issued for nearly a thousand years the generations of priests and
+doctors charged with the propagation of the word of the Prophet amongst
+the nations, from the Mohreb to the Arabian Sea, passing through the
+great deserts. About the end of our tenth century the glorious Fatimee
+Caliphs built this immense assemblage of arches and columns, which
+became the seat of the most renowned Moslem university in the world. And
+since then successive sovereigns of Egypt have vied with one another
+in perfecting and enlarging it, adding new halls, new galleries, new
+minarets, till they have made of El-Azhar almost a town within a town.
+
+*****
+
+     “He who seeks instruction is more loved of God than he who fights
+     in a holy war.”
+      --A verse from the Hadith.
+
+Eleven o'clock on a day of burning sunshine and dazzling light. El-Azhar
+still vibrates with the murmur of many voices, although the lessons of
+the morning are nearly finished.
+
+Once past the threshold of the double ornamented door we enter the
+courtyard, at this moment empty as the desert and dazzling with
+sunshine. Beyond, quite open, the mosque spreads out its endless
+arcades, which are continued and repeated till they are lost in the
+gloom of the far interior, and in this dim place, with its perplexing
+depths, innumerable people in turbans, sitting in a close crowd, are
+singing, or rather chanting, in a low voice, and marking time as it were
+to their declamation by a slight rhythmic swaying from the hips. They
+are the ten thousand students come from all parts of the world to absorb
+the changeless doctrine of El-Azhar.
+
+At the first view it is difficult to distinguish them, for they are far
+down in the shadow, and out here we are almost blinded by the sun. In
+little attentive groups of from ten to twenty, seated on mats around a
+grave professor, they docilely repeat their lessons, which in the course
+of centuries have grown old without changing like Islam itself. And we
+wonder how those in the circles down there, in the aisles at the
+bottom where the daylight scarcely penetrates, can see to read the old
+difficult writings in the pages of their books.
+
+In any case, let us not trouble them--as so many tourists nowadays do
+not hesitate to do; we will enter a little later, when the studies of
+the morning are over.
+
+This court, upon which the sun of the forenoon now pours its white fire,
+is an enclosure severely and magnificently Arab; it has isolated us
+suddenly from time and things; it must lend to the Moslem prayer what
+formerly our Gothic churches lent to the Christian. It is vast as a
+tournament list; confined on one side by the mosque itself, and on the
+others by a high wall which effectively separates it from the outer
+world. The walls are of a reddish hue, burnt by centuries of sun into
+the colour of raw sienna or of bloodstone. At the bottom they are
+straight, simple, a little forbidding in their austerity, but their
+summits are elaborately ornamented and crowned with battlements, which
+show in profile against the sky a long series of denticulated stonework.
+And over this sort of reddish fretwork of the top, which seems as if it
+were there as a frame to the deep blue vault above us, we see rising up
+distractedly all the minarets of the neighbourhood; and these minarets
+are red-coloured too, redder even than the jealous walls, and are
+decorated with arabesques, pierced by the daylight and complicated
+with aerial galleries. Some of them are a little distance away; others,
+startlingly close, seem to scale the zenith; and all are ravishing and
+strange, with their shining crescents and outstretched shafts of wood
+that call to the great birds of space. Spite of ourselves we raise our
+heads, fascinated by all the beauty that is in the air; but there is
+only this square of marvellous sky, a sort of limpid sapphire, set
+in the battlements of El-Azhar and fringed by those audacious slender
+towers. We are in the religious East of olden days and we feel how the
+mystery of this magnificent court--whose architectural ornament consists
+merely in geometrical designs repeated to infinity, and does not
+commence till quite high up on the battlements, where the minarets point
+into the eternal blue--must cast its spell upon the imagination of the
+young priests who are being trained here.
+
+*****
+
+“He who instructs the ignorant is like a living man amongst the dead.”
+
+“If a day passes without my having learnt something which brings me
+nearer to God, let not the dawn of that day be blessed.”
+
+Verses from the Hadith.
+
+He who has brought me to this place to-day is my friend, Mustapha Kamel
+Pacha, the tribune of Egypt, and I owe to his presence the fact that I
+am not treated like a casual visitor. Our names are taken at once to
+the great master of El-Azhar, a high personage in Islam, whose pupil
+Mustapha formerly was, and who no doubt will receive us in person.
+
+It is in a hall very Arab in its character, furnished only with divans,
+that the great master welcomes us, with the simplicity of an ascetic and
+the elegant manners of a prelate. His look, and indeed his whole face,
+tell how onerous is the sacred office which he exercises: to preside,
+namely, at the instruction of these thousands of young priests, who
+afterwards are to carry faith and peace and immobility to more than
+three hundred millions of men.
+
+And in a few moments Mustapha and he are busy discussing--as if it were
+a matter of actual interest--a controversial question concerning the
+events which followed the death of the Prophet, and the part played by
+Ali. . . . In that moment how my good friend Mustapha, whom I had seen
+so French in France, appeared all at once a Moslem to the bottom of
+his soul! The same thing is true indeed of the greater number of these
+Orientals, who, if we meet them in our own country, seem to be quite
+parisianised; their modernity is only on the surface: in their inmost
+souls Islam remains intact. And it is not difficult to understand,
+perhaps, how the spectacle of our troubles, our despairs, our miseries,
+in these new ways in which our lot is cast, should make them reflect and
+turn again to the tranquil dream of their ancestors. . . .
+
+While waiting for the conclusion of the morning studies, we are
+conducted through some of the dependencies of El-Azhar. Halls of every
+epoch, added one to another, go to form a little labyrinth; many contain
+_Mihrabs_, which, as we know already, are a kind of portico, festooned
+and denticulated till they look as if covered with rime. And library
+after library, with ceilings of cedarwood, carved in times when men
+had more leisure and more patience. Thousands of precious manuscripts,
+dating back some hundreds of years, but which here in El-Azhar are no
+whit out of date. Open, in glass cases, are numerous inestimable Korans,
+which in olden times had been written fair and illuminated on parchment
+by pious khedives. And, in a place of honour, a large astronomical
+glass, through which men watch the rising of the moon of Ramadan. . . .
+All this savours of the past. And what is being taught to-day to the ten
+thousand students of El-Azhar scarcely differs from what was taught to
+their predecessors in the glorious reign of the Fatimites--and which was
+then transcendent and even new: the Koran and all its commentaries; the
+subtleties of syntax and of pronunciation; jurisprudence; calligraphy,
+which still is dear to the heart of Orientals; versification; and, last
+of all, mathematics, of which the Arabs were the inventors.
+
+Yes, all this savours of the past, of the dust of remote ages. And
+though, assuredly, the priests trained in this thousand-year-old
+university may grow to men of rarest soul, they will remain, these calm
+and noble dreamers, merely laggards, safe in their shelter from the
+whirlwind which carries us along.
+
+*****
+
+“It is a sacrilege to prohibit knowledge. To seek knowledge is to
+perform an act of adoration towards God; to instruct is to do an act of
+charity.”
+
+“Knowledge is the life of Islam, the column of faith.”
+
+Verses from the Hadith.
+
+The lesson of the morning is now finished and we are able, without
+disturbing anybody, to visit the mosque.
+
+When we return to the great courtyard, with its battlemented walls,
+it is the hour of recreation for this crowd of young men in robes and
+turbans, who now emerge from the shadow of the sanctuary.
+
+Since the early morning they have remained seated on their mats,
+immersed in study and prayer, amid the confused buzzing of their
+thousands of voices; and now they scatter themselves about the
+contiguous Arab quarters until such time as the evening lessons
+commence. They walk along in little groups, sometimes holding one
+another's hands like children; most of them carry their heads high and
+raise their eyes to the heavens, although the sun which greets them
+outside dazzles them a little with its rays. They seem innumerable, and
+as they pass show us faces of the most diverse types. They come from
+all quarters of the world; some from Baghdad, others from Bassorah, from
+Mossul and even from the interior of Hedjaz. Those from the north have
+eyes that are bright and clear; and amongst those from Moghreb, from
+Morocco and the Sahara, are many whose skins are almost black. But
+the expression of all the faces is alike: something of ecstasy and of
+aloofness marks them all; the same detachment, a preoccupation with the
+self-same dream. And in the sky, to which they raise their eyes, the
+heavens--framed always by the battlements of El-Azhar--are almost white
+from the excess of light, with a border of tall, red minarets, which
+seem to be aglow with the refection of some great fire. And, watching
+them pass, all these young priests or jurists, at once so different
+and so alike, we understand better than before how Islam, the old, old
+Islam, keeps still its cohesion and its power.
+
+The mosque in which they pursue their studies is now almost empty.
+In its restful twilight there is silence, and the unexpected music of
+little birds; it is the brooding season and the ceilings of carved wood
+are full of nests, which nobody disturbs.
+
+A world, this mosque, in which thousands of people could easily find
+room. Some hundred and fifty marble columns, brought from ancient
+temples, support the arches of the seven parallel aisles. There is
+no light save that which comes through the arcade opening into the
+courtyard, and it is so dark in the aisles at the far end that we wonder
+again how the faithful can see to read when the sun of Egypt happens to
+be veiled.
+
+Some score of students, who seem almost lost in the vast solitude, still
+remain during the hour of rest, and are busy sweeping the floor with
+long palms made into a kind of broom. These are the poor students, whose
+only meal is of dry bread, and who at night stretch themselves to sleep
+on the same mat on which they have sat studying during the day.
+
+The residence at the university is free to all the scholars, the cost of
+their education and maintenance being provided by pious donations. But,
+inasmuch as the bequests are restricted according to nationality, there
+is necessarily inequality in the treatment doled out to the different
+students: thus the young men of a given country may be almost rich,
+possessing a room and a good bed; while those of a neighbouring country
+must sleep on the ground and have barely enough to keep body and soul
+together. But none of them complain, and they know how to help one
+another.[*]
+
+     [*] The duration of the studies at El-Azhar varies from
+     three to six years.
+
+Near to us, one of these needy students is eating, without any false
+shame, his midday meal of dry bread; and he welcomes with a smile the
+sparrows and the other little winged thieves who come to dispute with
+him the crumbs of his repast. And farther down, in the dimly lighted
+vaults at the end, is one who disdains to eat, or who, maybe, has no
+bread; who, when his sweeping is done, reseats himself on his mat,
+and, opening his Koran, commences to read aloud with the customary
+intonation. His voice, rich and facile, and moderated with discretion,
+has a charm that is irresistible in the sonorous old mosque, where at
+this hour the only other sound is the scarcely perceptible twittering of
+the little broods above, among the dull gold beams of the ceiling. Those
+who have been familiar with the sanctuaries of Islam know, as well as I,
+that there is no book so exquisitely rhythmical as that of the Prophet.
+Even if the sense of the verses escape you, the chanted reading, which
+forms part of certain of the offices, acts upon you by the simple magic
+of its sounds, in the same way as the oratorios which draw tears in
+the churches of Christ. Rising and falling like some sad lullaby, the
+declamation of this young priest, with his face of visionary, and garb
+of decent poverty, swells involuntarily, till gradually it seems to fill
+the seven deserted aisles of El-Azhar.
+
+We stop in spite of ourselves, and listen, in the midst of the silence
+of midday. And in this so venerable place, where dilapidation and
+the usury of centuries are revealed on every side--even on the marble
+columns worn by the constant friction of hands--this voice of gold
+that rises alone seems as if it were intoning the last lament over the
+death-pang of Old Islam and the end of time, the elegy, as it were, of
+the universal death of faith in the heart of man.
+
+*****
+
+“Science is one religion; prayer is another. Study is better than
+worship. Go; seek knowledge everywhere, if needs be, even into China.”
+
+Verses from the Hadith.
+
+Amongst us Europeans it is commonly accepted as a proven fact that
+Islam is merely a religion of obscurantism, bringing in its train the
+stagnation of nations, and hampering them in that march to the unknown
+which we call “progress.” But such an attitude shows not only an
+absolute ignorance of the teaching of the Prophet, but a blind
+forgetfulness of the evidence of history. The Islam of the earlier
+centuries evolved and progressed with the nations, and the stimulus it
+gave to men in the reign of the ancient caliphs is beyond all question.
+To impute to it the present decadence of the Moslem world is altogether
+too puerile. The truth is that nations have their day; and to a period
+of glorious splendour succeeds a time of lassitude and slumber. It is a
+law of nature. And then one day some danger threatens them, stirs them
+from their torpor and they awake.
+
+This immobility of the countries of the Crescent was once dear to me.
+If the end is to pass through life with the minimum of suffering,
+disdaining all vain striving, and to die entranced by radiant hopes, the
+Orientals are the only wise men. But now that greedy nations beset them
+on all sides their dreaming is no longer possible. They must awake,
+alas.
+
+They must awake; and already the awakening is at hand. Here, in Egypt,
+where the need is felt to change so many things, it is proposed, too,
+to reform the old university of El-Azhar, one of the chief centres of
+Islam. One thinks of it with a kind of fear, knowing what danger there
+is in laying hands upon institutions which have lasted for a thousand
+years. Reform, however, has, in principle, been decided upon. New
+knowledge, brought from the West, is penetrating into the tabernacle
+of the Fatimites. Has not the Prophet said: “Go; seek knowledge far and
+wide, if needs be even into China”? What will come of it? Who can tell?
+But this, at least, is certain: that in the dazzling hours of noon,
+or in the golden hours of evening, when the crowd of these modernised
+students spreads itself over the vast courtyard, overlooked by its
+countless minarets, there will no longer be seen in their eyes the
+mystic light of to-day; and it will no longer be the old unshakable
+faith, nor the lofty and serene indifference, nor the profound peace,
+that these messengers will carry to the ends of the Mussulman
+earth. . . .
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+IN THE TOMBS OF THE APIS
+
+The dwelling-places of the Apis, in the grim darkness beneath the
+Memphite desert, are, as all the world knows, monster coffins of black
+granite ranged in catacombs, hot and stifling as eternal stoves.
+
+To reach them from the banks of the Nile we have first to traverse
+the low region which the inundations of the ancient river, regularly
+repeated since the beginning of time, have rendered propitious to
+the growth of plants and to the development of men; an hour or two's
+journey, this evening through forests of date-trees whose beautiful
+palms temper the light of the March sun, which is now half veiled in
+clouds and already declining. In the distance herds are grazing in the
+cool shade. And we meet fellahs leading back from the field towards the
+village on the river-bank their little donkeys, laden with sheaves
+of corn. The air is mild and wholesome under the high tufts of these
+endless green plumes, which move in the warm wind almost without noise.
+We seem to be in some happy land, where the pastoral life should be
+easy, and even a little paradisiacal.
+
+But beyond, in front of us, quite a different world is gradually
+revealed. Its aspect assumes the importance of a menace from the
+unknown; it awes us like an apparition of chaos, of universal death.
+. . . It is the desert, the conquering desert, in the midst of which
+inhabited Egypt, the green valleys of the Nile, trace merely a narrow
+ribbon. And here, more than elsewhere, the sight of this sovereign
+desert rising up before us is startling and thrilling, so high up it
+seems, and we so low in the Edenlike valley shaded by the palms. With
+its yellow hues, its livid marblings, and its sands which make it look
+somehow as if it lacked consistency, it rises on the whole horizon like
+a kind of soft wall or a great fearsome cloud--or rather, like a long
+cataclysmic wave, which does not move indeed, but which, if it did,
+would overwhelm and swallow everything. It is the _Memphite desert_--a
+place, that is to say, such as does not exist elsewhere on earth; a
+fabulous necropolis, in which men of earlier times, heaped up for some
+three thousand years the embalmed bodies of their dead, exaggerating, as
+time went on, the foolish grandeur of their tombs. Now, above the sand
+which looks like the front of some great tidal wave arrested in its
+progress, we see on all sides, and far into the distance, triangles of
+superhuman proportions which were once the tombs of mummies; pyramids,
+still upright, all of them, on their sinister pedestal of sand. Some
+are comparatively near; others almost lost in the background of the
+solitudes--and perhaps more awesome in that they are merely outlined in
+grey, high up among the clouds.
+
+*****
+
+The little carriages that have brought us to the necropolis of Memphis,
+through the interminable forest of palm-trees, had their wheels fitted
+with large pattens for their journey over the sand.
+
+Now, arrived at the foot of the fearsome region, we commence to climb
+a hill where all at once the trot of our horses ceases to be heard; the
+moving felting of the soil establishes a sudden silence around us, as
+indeed is always the case when we reach these sands. It seems as if it
+were a silence of respect which the desert itself imposes.
+
+The valley of life sinks and fades behind us, until at last it
+disappears, hidden by a line of sandhills--the first wave, as one might
+say, of this waterless sea--and we are now mounted into the kingdom of
+the dead, swept at this moment by a withering and almost icy wind, which
+from below one would not have expected.
+
+This desert of Memphis has not yet been profaned by hotels or motor
+roads, such as we have seen in the “little desert” of the Sphinx--whose
+three pyramids indeed we can discern at the extreme limit of the view,
+prolonging almost to infinity for our eyes this domain of mummies. There
+is nobody to be seen, nor any indication of the present day, amongst
+these mournful undulations of yellow or pale grey sand, in which we seem
+lost as in the swell of an ocean. The sky is cloudy--such as you can
+scarcely imagine the sky of Egypt. And in this immense nothingness of
+sand and stones, which stands out now more clearly against the clouds
+on the horizon, there is nothing anywhere save the silhouettes of those
+eternal triangles; the pyramids, gigantic things which rise here and
+there at hazard, some half in ruin, others almost intact and preserving
+still their sharp point. To-day they are the only landmarks of this
+necropolis, which is nearly six miles in length, and was formerly
+covered by temples of a magnificence and a vastness unimaginable to the
+minds of our day. Except for one which is quite near us (the fantastic
+grandfather of the others, that of King Zoser, who died nearly
+5000 years ago), except for this one, which is made of six colossal
+superposed terraces, they are all built after that same conception of
+the _Triangle_, which is at once the most mysteriously simple figure
+of geometry, and the strongest and most permanently stable form of
+architecture. And now that there remains no trace of the frescoed
+portraits which used to adorn them, nor of their multicoloured coatings,
+now that they have taken on the same dead colour as the desert, they
+look like the huge bones of giant fossils, that have long outlasted
+their other contemporaries on earth. Beneath the ground, however, the
+case is different; there, still remain the bodies of men, and even
+of cats and birds, who with their own eyes saw these vast structures
+building, and who sleep intact, swathed in bandages, in the darkness
+of their tunnels. _We know_, for we have penetrated there before, what
+things are hidden in the womb of this old desert, on which the yellow
+shroud of the sand grows thicker and thicker as the centuries pass.
+The whole deep rock had been perforated patiently to make hypogea and
+sepulchral chambers, great and small, and veritable palaces for the
+dead, adorned with innumerable painted figures. And though now, for
+some two thousand years, men have set themselves furiously to exhume
+the sarcophagi and the treasures that are buried here, the subterranean
+reserves are not yet exhausted. There still remain, no doubt, pleiads of
+undisturbed sleepers, who will never be discovered.
+
+As we advance the wind grows stronger and colder beneath a sky that
+becomes increasingly cloudy, and the sand is flying on all sides. The
+sand is the undisputed sovereign of the necropolis; if it does not surge
+and roll like some enormous tidal wave, as it appears to do when seen
+from the green valley below, it nevertheless covers everything with an
+obstinate persistence which has continued since the beginning of time.
+Already at Memphis it has buried innumerable statues and colossi and
+temples of the Sphinx. It comes without a pause, from Libya, from the
+great Sahara, which contain enough to powder the universe. It harmonises
+well with the tall skeletons of the pyramids, which form immutable rocks
+on its always shifting extent; and if one thinks of it, it gives a more
+thrilling sense of anterior eternities even than all these Egyptian
+ruins, which, in comparison with it, are things of yesterday. The
+sand--the sand of the primitive seas--which represents a labour of
+erosion of a duration impossible to conceive, and bears witness to a
+continuity of destruction which, one might say, had no beginning.
+
+Here, in the midst of these solitudes, is a humble habitation, old and
+half buried in sand, at which we have to stop. It was once the house
+of the Egyptologist Mariette, and still shelters the director of the
+excavations, from whom we have to obtain permission to descend amongst
+the Apis. The whitewashed room in which he receives us is encumbered
+with the age-old debris which he is continually bringing to light. The
+parting rays of the sun, which shines low down from between two clouds,
+enter through a window opening on to the surrounding desolation; and the
+light comes mournfully, yellowed by the sand and the evening.
+
+The master of the house, while his Bedouin servants are gone to open and
+light up for us the underground habitations of the Apis, shows us his
+latest astonishing find, made this morning in a hypogeum of one of the
+most ancient dynasties. It is there on a table, a group of little people
+of wood, of the size of the marionettes of our theatres. And since it
+was the custom to put in a tomb only those figures or objects which were
+most pleasing to him who dwelt in it, the man-mummy to whom this toy
+was offered in times anterior to all precise chronology must have been
+extremely partial to dancing-girls. In the middle of the group the man
+himself is represented, sitting in an armchair, and on his knee he holds
+his favourite dancing-girl. Other girls posture before him in a dance
+of the period; and on the ground sit musicians touching tambourines and
+strangely fashioned harps. All wear their hair in a long plait, which
+falls below their shoulders like the pigtail of the Chinese. It was
+the distinguishing mark of these kinds of courtesans. And these little
+people had kept their pose in the darkness for some three thousand years
+before the commencement of the Christian era. . . . In order to show it
+to us better the group is brought to the window, and the mournful light
+which enters from across the infinite solitudes of the desert colours
+them yellow and shows us in detail their little doll-like attitudes
+and their comical and frightened appearance--frightened perhaps to find
+themselves so old and issuing from so deep a night. They had not seen a
+setting of the sun, such as they now regard with their queer eyes, too
+long and too wide oepn, they had not seen such a thing for some five
+thousand years. . . .
+
+The habitation of the Apis, the lords of the necropolis, is little more
+than two hundred yards away. We are told that the place is now lighted
+up and that we may betake ourselves thither.
+
+The descent is by a narrow, rapidly sloping passage, dug in the soil,
+between banks of sand and broken stones. We are now completely sheltered
+from the bitter wind which blows across the desert, and from the dark
+doorway that opens before us comes a breath of air as from an oven. It
+is always dry and hot in the underground funeral places of Egypt, which
+make indeed admirable stoves for mummies. The threshold once crossed we
+are plunged first of all in darkness and, preceded by a lantern, make
+our way, by devious turnings, over large flagstones, passing obelisks,
+fallen blocks of stone and other gigantic debris, in a heat that
+continually increases.
+
+At last the principal artery of the hypogeum appears, a thoroughfare
+more than five hundred yards long, cut in the rock, where the Bedouins
+have prepared for us the customary feeble light.
+
+It is a place of fearful aspect. As soon as one enters one is seized
+by the sense of a mournfulness beyond words, by an oppression as of
+something too heavy, too crushing, almost superhuman. The impotent
+little flames of the candles, placed in a row, in groups of fifty, on
+tripods of wood from one end of the route to the other, show on the
+right and left of the immense avenue rectangular sepulchral caverns,
+containing each a black coffin, but a coffin as if for a mastodon.
+And all these coffins, so sombre and so alike, are square shaped too,
+severely simple like so many boxes; but made out of a single block
+of rare granite that gleams like marble. They are entirely without
+ornament. It is necessary to look closely to distinguish on the smooth
+walls the hieroglyphic inscriptions, the rows of little figures, little
+owls, little jackals, that tell in a lost language the history of
+ancient peoples. Here is the signature of King Amasis; beyond, that of
+King Cambyses. . . . Who were the Titans who, century after century,
+were able to hew these coffins (they are at least twelve feet long by
+ten feet high), and, having hewn them, to carry them underground (they
+weigh on an average between sixty and seventy tons), and finally to
+range them in rows here in these strange chambers, where they stand as
+if in ambuscade on either side of us as we pass? Each in its turn has
+contained quite comfortably the mummy of a bull Apis, armoured in plates
+of gold. But in spite of their weight, in spite of their solidity which
+effectively defies destruction, they have been despoiled[*]--when is
+not precisely known, probably by the soldiers of the King of Persia.
+And this notwithstanding that merely to open them represents a labour
+of astonishing strength and patience. In some cases the thieves have
+succeeded, by the aid of levers, in moving a few inches the formidable
+lid; in others, by persevering with blows of pickaxes, they have
+pierced, in the thickness of the granite, a hole through which a man has
+been enabled to crawl like a rat, or a worm, and then, groping his way,
+to plunder the sacred mummy.
+
+     [*] One, however, remains intact in the walled cavern, and
+     thus preserves for us the only Apis which has come down to
+     our days. And one recalls the emotion of Mariette, when, on
+     entering it, he saw on the sandy ground the imprint of the
+     naked feet of the last Egyptian who left it thirty-seven
+     centuries before.
+
+What strikes us most of all in the colossal hypogeum is the meeting
+there, in the middle of the stairway by which we leave, with yet another
+black coffin, which lies across our path as if to bar it. It is as
+monstrous and as simple as the others, its seniors, which many centuries
+before, as the deified bulls died, had commenced to line the great
+straight thoroughfare. But this one has never reached its place and
+never held its mummy. It was the last. Even while men were slowly
+rolling it, with tense muscles and panting cries, towards what might
+well have seemed its eternal chamber, others gods were born, and the
+cult of the Apis had come to an end--suddenly, then and there! Such a
+fate may happen indeed to each and all of the religions and institutions
+of men, even to those most deeply rooted in their hearts and their
+ancestral past. . . . That perhaps is the most disturbing of all our
+positive notions: to know that there will be a _last_ of all things,
+not only a last temple, and a last priest, but a last birth of a human
+child, a last sunrise, a last day. . . .
+
+*****
+
+In these hot catacombs we had forgotten the cold wind that blew outside,
+and the physiognomy of the Memphite desert, the aspects of horror that
+were awaiting us above had vanished from our mind. Sinister as it is
+under a blue sky, this desert becomes absolutely intolerable to look
+upon if by chance the sky is cloudy when the daylight fails.
+
+On our return to it, from the subterranean darkness, everything in its
+dead immensity has begun to take on the blue tint of the night. On the
+top of the sandhills, of which the yellow colour has greatly paled since
+we went below, the wind amuses itself by raising little vortices of sand
+that imitate the spray of an angry sea. On all sides dark clouds stretch
+themselves as at the moment of our descent. The horizon detaches itself
+more and more clearly from them, and, farther towards the east, it
+actually seems to be tilted up; one of the highest of the waves of this
+waterless sea, a mountain of sand whose soft contours are deceptive in
+the distance, makes it look as if it sloped towards us, so as almost to
+produce a sensation of vertigo. The sun itself has deigned to remain on
+the scene a few seconds longer, held beyond its time by the effect of
+mirage; but it is so changed behind its thick veils that we would prefer
+that it should not be there. Of the colour of dying embers, it seems
+too near and too large; it has ceased to give any light, and is become a
+mere rose-coloured globe, that is losing its shape and becoming oval.
+No longer in the free heavens, but stranded there on the extreme edge of
+the desert, it watches the scene like a large dull eye, about to close
+itself in death. And the mysterious superhuman triangles, they too, of
+course, are there, waiting for us on our return from underground, some
+near, some far, posted in their eternal places; but surely they have
+grown gradually more blue. . . .
+
+Such a night, in such a place, it seems the _last_ night.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE OUTSKIRTS OF CAIRO
+
+Night. A long straight road, the artery of some capital, through which
+our carriage drives at a fast trot, making a deafening clatter on the
+pavement. Electric light everywhere. The shops are closing; it must
+needs be late.
+
+The road is Levantine in its general character; and we should have no
+clear notion of the place did we not see in our rapid, noisy passage
+signs that recall us to the land of the Arabs. People pass dressed in
+the long robe and tarboosh of the East; and some of the houses, above
+the European shops, are ornamented with mushrabiyas. But this blinding
+electricity strikes a false note. In our hearts are we quite sure we are
+in the East?
+
+The road ends, opening on to darkness. Suddenly, without any warning,
+it abuts upon a void in which the eyes see nothing, and we roll over
+a yielding, felted soil, where all noise abruptly ceases--it is the
+_desert_! . . . Not a vague, nondescript stretch of country such as in
+the outskirts of our towns, not one of the solitudes of Europe, but the
+threshold of the vast desolations of Arabia. _The desert_; and, even if
+we had not known that it was awaiting us, we should have recognised it
+by the indescribable quality of harshness and uniqueness which, in spite
+of the darkness, cannot be mistaken.
+
+But the night after all is not so black. It only seemed so, at the first
+moment, by contrast with the glaring illumination of the street. In
+reality it is transparent and blue. A half-moon, high up in the heavens,
+and veiled by a diaphanous mist, shines gently, and as it is an Egyptian
+moon, more subtle than ours, it leaves to things a little of their
+colour. We can see now, as well as feel, this desert, which has opened
+and imposed its silence upon us. Before us is the paleness of its sands
+and the reddish-brown of its dead rocks. Verily, in no country but Egypt
+are there such rapid surprises: to issue from a street flanked by shops
+and stalls and, without transition, to find this! . . .
+
+Our horses have, inevitably, to slacken speed as the wheels of our
+carriage sink into the sand. Around us still are some stray ramblers,
+who presently assume the air of ghosts, with their long black or white
+draperies, and noiseless tread. And then, not a soul; nothing but the
+sand and the moon.
+
+But now almost at once, after the short intervening nothingness, we
+find ourselves in a new town; streets with little low houses, little
+cross-roads, little squares, all of them white, on whitened sands,
+beneath a white moon. . . . But there is no electricity in this town, no
+lights, and nobody is stirring; doors and windows are shut: no movement
+of any kind, and the silence, at first, is like that of the surrounding
+desert. It is a town in which the half-light of the moon, amongst so
+much vague whiteness, is diffused in such a way that it seems to come
+from all sides at once and things cast no shadows which might give them
+definiteness; a town where the soil is so yielding that our progress
+is weakened and retarded, as in dreams. It seems unreal; and, in
+penetrating farther into it, a sense of fear comes over you that can
+neither be dismissed nor defined.
+
+For assuredly this is no ordinary town. . . . And yet the houses,
+with their windows barred like those of a harem, are in no way
+singular--except that they are shut and silent. It is all this
+whiteness, perhaps, which freezes us. And then, too, the silence is
+not, in fact, like that of the desert, which did at least seem natural,
+inasmuch as there was nothing there; here, on the contrary, there is
+a sense of innumerable presences, which shrink away as you pass but
+nevertheless continue to watch attentively. . . . We pass mosques in
+total darkness and they too are silent and white, with a slight bluish
+tint cast on them by the moon. And sometimes, between the houses, there
+are little enclosed spaces, like narrow gardens, but which can have no
+possible verdure. And in these gardens numbers of little obelisks rise
+from the sand--white obelisks, it is needless to say, for to-night
+we are in the kingdom of absolute whiteness. What can they be, these
+strange little gardens? . . . And the sand, meanwhile, which covers the
+streets with its thick coatings, continues to deaden the sound of our
+progress, out of compliment no doubt to all these watchful things that
+are so silent around us.
+
+At the crossings and in the little squares the obelisks become more
+numerous, erected always at either end of a slab of stone that is about
+the length of a man. Their little motionless groups, posted as if on the
+watch, seem so little real in their vague whiteness that we feel tempted
+to verify them by touching, and, verily, we should not be astonished if
+our hand passed through them as through a ghost. Farther on there is a
+wide expanse without any houses at all, where these ubiquitous little
+obelisks abound in the sand like ears of corn in a field. There is
+now no further room for illusion. We are in a cemetery, and have been
+passing in the midst of houses of the dead, and mosques of the dead, in
+a town of the dead.
+
+Once emerged from this cemetery, which in the end at least disclosed
+itself in its true character, we are involved again in the continuation
+of the mysterious town, which takes us back into its network. Little
+houses follow one another as before, only now the little gardens are
+replaced by little burial enclosures. And everything grows more and more
+indistinct, in the gentle light, which gradually grows less. It is as if
+someone were putting frosted globes over the moon, so that soon, but for
+the transparency of this air of Egypt and the prevailing whiteness of
+things, there would be no light at all. Once at a window the light of a
+lamp appears; it is the lantern of gravediggers. Anon we hear the voices
+of men chanting a prayer; and the prayer is a prayer for the dead.
+
+These tenantless houses were never built for dwellings. They are simply
+places where men assemble on certain anniversaries, to pray for the
+dead. Every Moslem family of any note has its little temple of this
+kind, near to the family graves. And there are so many of them that now
+the place is become a town--and a town in the desert--that is to say, in
+a place useless for any other purpose; a secure place indeed, for we
+may be sure that the ground occupied by these poor tombs runs no risk of
+being coveted--not even in the irreverent times of the future. No, it is
+on the other side of Cairo--on the other bank of the Nile, amongst the
+verdure of the palm-trees, that we must look for the suburb in course
+of transformation, with its villas of the invading foreigner, and the
+myriad electric lights along its motor roads. On this side there is no
+such fear; the peace and desuetude are eternal; and the winding sheet of
+the Arabian sands is ready always for its burial office.
+
+At the end of this town of the dead, the desert again opens before us
+its mournful whitened expanse. On such a night as this, when the wind
+blows cold and the misty moon shows like a sad opal, it looks like a
+steppe under snow.
+
+But it is a desert planted with ruins, with the ghosts of mosques; a
+whole colony of high tumbling domes are scattered here at hazard on the
+shifting extent of the sands. And what strange old-fashioned domes they
+are! The archaism of their silhouettes strikes us from the first,
+as much as their isolation in such a place. They look like bells, or
+gigantic dervish hats placed on pedestals, and those farthest away give
+the impression of squat, large-headed figures posted there as sentinels,
+watching the vague horizon of Arabia beyond.
+
+They are the proud tombs of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
+where the Mameluke Sultans, who oppressed Egypt for nearly three hundred
+years, sleep now in complete abandonment. Nowadays, it is true, some
+visits are beginning to be paid to them--on winter nights when the moon
+is full and they throw on the sands their great clear-cut shadows. At
+such times the light is considered favourable, and they rank among the
+curiosities exploited by the agencies. Numbers of tourists (who persist
+in calling them the tombs of the caliphs) betake themselves thither of
+an evening--a noisy caravan mounted on little donkeys. But to-night
+the moon is too pale and uncertain, and we shall no doubt be alone in
+troubling them in their ghostly communion.
+
+To-night indeed the light is quite unusual. As just now in the town of
+the dead, it is diffused on all sides and gives even to the most massive
+objects the transparent semblance of unreality. But nevertheless
+it shows their detail and leaves them something of their daylight
+colouring, so that all these funeral domes, raised on the ruins of the
+mosques, which serve them as pedestals, have preserved their reddish or
+brown colours, although the sand which separates them, and makes between
+the tombs of the different sultans little dead solitudes, remains pale
+and wan.
+
+And meanwhile our carriage, proceeding always without noise, traces
+on this same sand little furrows which the wind will have effaced by
+to-morrow. There are no roads of any kind; they would indeed be as
+useless as they are impossible to make. You may pass here where you
+like, and fancy yourself far away from any place inhabited by living
+beings. The great town, which we know to be so close, appears from
+time to time, thanks to the undulations of the ground, as a mere
+phosphorescence, a reflection of its myriad electric lights. We are
+indeed in the desert of the dead, in the sole company of the moon,
+which, by the fantasy of this wonderful Egyptian sky, is to-night a moon
+of grey pearl, one might almost say a moon of mother-of-pearl.
+
+Each of these funeral mosques is a thing of splendour, if one examines
+it closely in its solitude. These strange upraised domes, which from
+a distance look like the head-dresses of dervishes or magi, are
+embroidered with arabesques, and the walls are crowned with denticulated
+trefoils of exquisite fashioning.
+
+But nobody venerates these tombs of the Mameluke oppressors, or keeps
+them in repair; and within them there are no more chants, no prayers
+to Allah. Night after night they pass in an infinity of silence. Piety
+contents itself with not destroying them; leaving them there at the
+mercy of time and the sun and the wind which withers and crumbles
+them. And all around are the signs of ruin. Tottering cupolas show us
+irreparable cracks; the halves of broken arches are outlined to-night
+in shadow against the mother-of-pearl light of the sky, and debris of
+sculptured stones are strewn about. But nevertheless these tombs,
+that are well-nigh accursed, still stir in us a vague sense of
+alarm--particularly those in the distance, which rise up like
+silhouettes of misshapen giants in enormous hats--dark on the white
+sheet of sand--and stand there in groups, or scattered in confusion, at
+the entrance to the vast empty regions beyond.
+
+*****
+
+We had chosen a time when the light was doubtful in order that we might
+avoid the tourists, but as we approach the funeral dwelling of Sultan
+Barkuk, the assassin, we see, issuing from it, a whole band, some twenty
+in a line, who emerge from the darkness of the abandoned walls, each
+trotting on his little donkey and each followed by the inevitable
+Bedouin driver, who taps with his stick upon the rump of the beast. They
+are returning to Cairo, their visit ended, and exchange in a loud voice,
+from one ass to another, more or less inept impressions in various
+European languages. . . . And look! There is even amongst them the
+almost proverbial belated dame who, for private reasons of her own,
+follows at a respectable distance behind. She is a little mature
+perhaps, so far as can be judged in the moonlight, but nevertheless
+still sympathetic to her driver, who, with both hands, supports her from
+behind on her saddle, with a touching solicitude that is peculiar to
+the country. Ah! these little donkeys of Egypt, so observant, so
+philosophical and sly, why cannot they write their memoirs! What a
+number of droll things they must have seen at night in the outskirts of
+Cairo!
+
+This good lady evidently belongs to that extensive category of hardy
+explorers who, despite their high respectability at home, do not
+hesitate, once they are landed on the banks of the Nile, to supplement
+their treatment by the sun and the dry winds with a little of the
+“Bedouin cure.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+ARCHAIC CHRISTIANITY
+
+Dimly lighted by the flames of a few poor slender tapers which flicker
+against the walls in stone arches, a dense crowd of human figures veiled
+in black, in a place overpowering and suffocating--underground, no
+doubt--which is filled with the perfume of the incense of Arabia; and a
+noise of almost wicked movement, which sirs us to alarm and even horror:
+bleatings of new-born babies, cries of distress of tiny mites whose
+voices are drowned, as if on purpose, by a clinking of cymbals.
+
+What can it be? Why have they descended into this dark hole, these
+little ones, who howl in the midst of the smoke, held by these phantoms
+in mourning? Had we entered it unawares we might have thought it a den
+of wicked sorcery, an underground cavern for the black mass.
+
+But no. It is the crypt of the basilica of St. Sergius during the Coptic
+mass of Easter morning. And when, after the first surprise, we examine
+these phantoms, we find that, for the most part, they are young mothers,
+with the refined and gentle faces of Madonnas, who hold the plaintive
+little ones beneath their black veils and seek to comfort them. And the
+sorcerer, who plays the cymbals, is a kind old priest, or sacristan,
+who smiles paternally. If he makes all this noise, in a rhythm which
+in itself is full of joy, it is to mark the gladness of Easter morn, to
+celebrate the resurrection of Christ--and a little, too, no doubt, to
+distract the little ones, some of whom are woefully put out. But
+their mammas do not prolong the proof--a mere momentary visit to this
+venerable place, which is to bring them happiness, and they carry their
+babes away: and others are led in by the dark, narrow staircase, so low
+that one cannot stand upright in it. And thus the crypt is not emptied.
+And meanwhile mass is being said in the church overhead.
+
+But what a number of people, of black veils, are in this hovel, where
+the air can scarcely be breathed, and where the barbarous music, mingled
+with wailings and cries, deafens you! And what an air of antiquity marks
+all things here! The defaced walls, the low roof that one can easily
+touch, the granite pillars which sustain the shapeless arches are all
+blackened by the smoke of the wax candles, and scarred and worn by the
+friction of human hands.
+
+At the end of the crypt there is a very sacred recess round which a
+crowd presses: a coarse niche, a little larger than those cut in the
+wall to receive the tapers, a niche which covers the ancient stone on
+which, according to tradition, the Virgin Mary rested, with the child
+Jesus, in the course of the flight into Egypt. This holy stone is sadly
+worn to-day and polished smooth by the touch of many pious hands, and
+the Byzantine cross which once was carved on it is almost effaced.
+
+But even if the Virgin had never rested there, the humble crypt of St.
+Sergius would remain no less one of the oldest Christian sanctuaries in
+the world. And the Copts who still assemble there with veneration have
+preceded by many years the greater part of our Western nations in the
+religion of the Bible.
+
+Although the history of Egypt envelops itself in a sort of night at the
+moment of the appearance of Christianity, we know that the growth of the
+new faith there was as rapid and impetuous as the germination of plants
+under the overflow of the Nile. The old Pharaonic cults, amalgamated at
+that time with those of Greece, were so obscured under a mass of rites
+and formulae, that they had ceased to have any meaning. And nevertheless
+here, as in imperial Rome, there brooded the ferment of a passionate
+mysticism. Moreover, this Egyptian people, more than any other, was
+haunted by the terror of death, as is proved by the folly of its
+embalmments. With what avidity therefore must it have received the Word
+of fraternal love and immediate resurrection?
+
+In any case Christianity was so firmly implanted in this Egypt that
+centuries of persecution did not succeed in destroying it. As one goes
+up the Nile, many little human settlements are to be seen, little groups
+of houses of dried mud, where the whitened dome of the modest house
+of prayer is surmounted by a cross and not a crescent. They are the
+villages of those Copts, those Egyptians, who have preserved the
+Christian faith from father to son since the nebulous times of the first
+martyrs.
+
+*****
+
+The simple Church of St. Sergius is a relic hidden away and almost
+buried in the midst of a labyrinth of ruins. Without a guide it is
+almost impossible to find your way thither. The quarter in which it is
+situated is enclosed within the walls of what was once a Roman fortress,
+and this fortress in its turn is surrounded by the tranquil ruins of
+“Old Cairo”--which is to the Cairo of the Mamelukes and the Khedives, in
+a small degree, what Versailles is to Paris.
+
+On this Easter morning, having set out from the Cairo of to-day to be
+present at this mass, we have first to traverse a suburb in course of
+transformation, upon whose ancient soil will shortly appear numbers of
+these modern horrors, in mud and metal--factories or large hotels--which
+multiply in this poor land with a stupefying rapidity. Then comes a mile
+or so of uncultivated ground, mixed with stretches of sand, and already
+a little desertlike. And then the walls of Old Cairo; after which begins
+the peace of the deserted houses, of little gardens and orchards among
+the ruins. The wind and the dust beset us the whole way, the almost
+eternal wind and the eternal dust of this land, by which, since the
+beginning of the ages, so many human eyes have been burnt beyond
+recovery. They keep us now in blinding whirlwinds, which swarm with
+flies. The “season” indeed is already over, and the foreign invaders
+have fled until next autumn. Egypt is now more Egyptian, beneath a more
+burning sky. The sun of this Easter Sunday is as hot as ours of July,
+and the ground seems as if it would perish of drought. But it is always
+thus in the springtime of this rainless country; the trees, which have
+kept their leaves throughout the winter, shed them in April as ours
+do in November. There is no shade anywhere and everything suffers.
+Everything grows yellow on the yellow sands. But there is no cause for
+uneasiness: the inundation is at hand, which has never failed since
+the commencement of our geological period. In another few weeks the
+prodigious river will spread along its banks, just as in the times
+of the God Amen, a precocious and impetuous life. And meanwhile the
+orange-trees, the jasmine and the honeysuckle, which men have taken care
+to water with water from the Nile, are full of riotous bloom. As we pass
+the gardens of Old Cairo, which alternate with the tumbling houses, this
+continual cloud of white dust that envelops us comes suddenly laden with
+their sweet fragrance; so that, despite the drought and the bareness of
+the trees, the scents of a sudden and feverish springtime are already in
+the air.
+
+When we arrive at the walls of what used to be the Roman citadel we
+have to descend from our carriage, and passing through a low doorway
+penetrate on foot into the labyrinth of a Coptic quarter which is dying
+of dust and old age. Deserted houses that have become the refuges of
+outcasts; mushrabiyas, worm-eaten and decayed; little mousetrap alleys
+that lead us under arches of the Middle Ages, and sometimes close over
+our heads by reason of the fantastic bending of the ruins. Even by such
+a route as this are we conducted to a famous basilica! Were it not for
+these groups of Copts, dressed in their Sunday garb, who make their way
+like us through the ruins to the Easter mass, we should think that we
+had lost our way.
+
+And how pretty they look, these women draped like phantoms in their
+black silks. Their long veils do not completely hide them, as do
+those of the Moslems. They are simply placed over their hair and leave
+uncovered the delicate features, the golden necklet and the half-bared
+arms that carry on their wrists thick twisted bracelets of virgin
+gold. Pure Egyptians as they are, they have preserved the same delicate
+profile, the same elongated eyes, as mark the old goddesses carved in
+bas-relief on the Pharaonic walls. But some, alas, amongst the young
+ones have discarded their traditional costume, and are arrayed _a la
+franque_, in gowns and hats. And such gowns, such hats, such flowers!
+The very peasants of our meanest villages would disdain them. Oh! why
+cannot someone tell these poor little women, who have it in their power
+to be so adorable, that the beautiful folds of their black veils give
+to them an exquisite and characteristic distinction, while this poor
+tinsel, which recalls the mid-Lent carnivals, makes of them objects that
+excite our pity!
+
+In one of the walls which now surround us there is a low and shrinking
+doorway. Can this be the entrance to the basilica? The idea seems
+absurd. And yet some of the pretty creatures in the black veils and
+bracelets of gold, who were in front of us, have disappeared through it,
+and already the perfume of the censers is wafted towards us. A kind of
+corridor, astonishingly poor and old, twists itself suspiciously, and
+then issues into a narrow court, more than a thousand years old, where
+offertory boxes, fixed on Oriental brackets, invite our alms. The odour
+of the incense becomes more pronounced, and at last a door, hidden in
+shadow at the end of this retreat, gives access to the venerable church
+itself.
+
+The church! It is a mixture of Byzantine basilica, mosque and desert
+hut. Entering there, it is as if we were introduced suddenly to the
+naïve infancy of Christianity, as if we surprised it, as it were, in
+its cradle--which was indeed Oriental. The triple nave is full of little
+children (here also, that is what strikes us first), of little mites
+who cry or else laugh and play; and there are mothers suckling their
+new-born babes--and all the time the invisible mass is being celebrated
+beyond, behind the iconostasis. On the ground, on mats, whole families
+are seated in circle, as if they were in their homes. A thick deposit of
+white chalk on the defaced, shrunken walls bears witness to great age.
+And over all this is a strange old ceiling of cedarwood, traversed by
+large barbaric beams.
+
+In the nave, supported by columns of marble, brought in days gone by
+from Pagan temples, there are, as in all these old Coptic churches, high
+transverse wooden partitions, elaborately wrought in the Arab fashion,
+which divide it into three sections: the first, into which one comes
+on entering the church, is allotted to the women, the second is for
+the baptistery, and the third, at the end adjoining the iconostasis, is
+reserved for the men.
+
+These women who are gathered this morning in their apportioned space--so
+much at home there with their suckling little ones--wear, almost all of
+them, the long black silk veils of former days. In their harmonious and
+endlessly restless groups, the gowns _a la franque_ and the poor hats
+of carnival are still the exception. The congregation, as a whole,
+preserves almost intact its naïve, old-time flavour.
+
+And there is movement too, beyond, in the compartment of the men, which
+is bounded at the farther end by the iconostasis--a thousand-year-old
+wall decorated with inlaid cedarwood and ivory of precious antique
+workmanship, and adorned with strange old icons, blackened by time. It
+is behind this wall--pierced by several doorways--that mass is now being
+said. From this last sanctuary shut off thus from the people comes the
+vague sound of singing; from time to time a priest raises a faded silk
+curtain and from the threshold makes the sign of blessing. His vestments
+are of gold, and he wears a golden crown, but the humble faithful speak
+to him freely, and even touch his gorgeous garments, that might be those
+of one of the Wise Kings. He smiles, and letting fall the curtain,
+which covers the entrance to the tabernacle, disappears again into this
+innocent mystery.
+
+Even the least things here tell of decay. The flagstones, trodden by
+the feet of numberless dead generations, are become uneven through the
+settling of the soil. Everything is askew, bent, dusty and worn-out.
+The daylight comes from above, through narrow barred windows. There is
+a lack of air, so that one almost stifles. But though the sun does not
+enter, a certain indefinable reflection from the whitened walls reminds
+us that outside there is a flaming, resplendent Eastern spring.
+
+In this, the old grandfather, as it were, of churches, filled now with
+a cloud of odorous smoke, what one hears, more even than the chanting
+of the mass, is the ceaseless movement, the pious agitation of the
+faithful; and more even than that, the startling noise that rises
+from the holy crypt below--the sharp clashing of cymbals and those
+multitudinous little wailings, that sound like the mewings of kittens.
+
+But let me not harbour thoughts of irony! Surely not. If, in our Western
+lands, certain ceremonies seem to me anti-Christian--as, for example,
+one of those spectacular high masses in the over-pompous Cathedral of
+Cologne, where halberdiers overawe the crowd--here, on the contrary,
+the simplicity of this primitive cult is touching and respectable in the
+extreme. These Copts who install themselves in their church, as round
+their firesides, who make their home there and encumber the place with
+their fretful little ones, have, in their own way, well understood the
+word of Him who said: “Suffer the little children to come unto Me, and
+do not forbid them, for of such is the kingdom of God.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE RACE OF BRONZE
+
+A monotonous chant on three notes, which must date from the first
+Pharaohs, may still be heard in our days on the banks of the Nile,
+from the Delta as far as Nubia. At different places along the river,
+half-made men, with torsos of bronze and voices all alike, intone it
+in the morning when they commence their endless labours and continue it
+throughout the day, until the evening brings repose.
+
+Whoever has journeyed in a dahabiya up the old river will remember this
+song of the water-drawers, with its accompaniment, in slow cadence, of
+creakings of wet wood.
+
+It is the song of the “shaduf,” and the “shaduf” is a primitive rigging,
+which has remained unchanged since times beyond all reckoning. It
+is composed of a long antenna, like the yard of a tartan, which is
+supported in see-saw fashion on an upright beam, and carries at its
+extremity a wooden bucket. A man, with movements of singular beauty,
+works it while he sings, lowers the antenna, draws the water from the
+river, and raises the filled bucket, which another man catches in its
+ascent and empties into a basin made out of the mud of the river bank.
+When the river is low there are three such basins, placed one above the
+other, as if they were stages by which the precious water mounts to
+the fields of corn and lucerne. And then three “shadufs,” one above
+the other, creak together, lowering and raising their great scarabaeus'
+horns to the rhythm of the same song.
+
+All along the banks of the Nile this movement of the antennae of the
+shadufs is to be seen. It had its beginning in the earliest ages and
+is still the characteristic manifestation of human life along the river
+banks. It ceases only in the summer, when the river, swollen by the
+rains of equatorial Africa, overflows this land of Egypt, which it
+itself has made in the midst of the Saharan sands. But in the winter,
+which is here a time of luminous drought and changeless blue skies, it
+is in full swing. Then every day, from dawn until the evening prayer,
+the men are busy at their water-drawing, transformed for the time into
+tireless machines, with muscles that work like metal bands. The action
+never changes, any more than the song, and often their thoughts must
+wander from their automatic toil, and lose themselves in some dream,
+akin to that of their ancestors who were yoked to the same rigging four
+or five thousands years ago. Their torsos, deluged at each rising of the
+overflowing bucket, stream constantly with cold water; and sometimes the
+wind is icy, even while the sun burns; but these perpetual workers are,
+as we have said, of bronze, and their hardened bodies take no harm.
+
+These men are the fellahs, the peasants of the valley of the Nile--pure
+Egyptians, whose type has not changed in the course of centuries. In the
+oldest of the bas-reliefs of Thebes or Memphis you may see many such,
+with the same noble profile and thickish lips, the same elongated eyes
+shadowed by heavy eyelids, the same slender figure, surmounted by broad
+shoulders.
+
+The women who from time to time descend to the river, to draw water
+also, but in their case in the vases of potters' clay which they
+carry--this fetching and carrying of the life-giving water is the one
+primordial occupation in this Egypt, which has no rain, nor any living
+spring, and subsists only by its river--these women walk and posture
+with an inimitable grace, draped in black veils, which even the poorest
+allow to trail behind them, like the train of a court dress. In this
+bright land, with its rose-coloured distances, it is strange to see
+them, all so sombrely clothed, spots of mourning, as it were, in the
+gay fields and the flaring desert. Machine-like creatures, all untaught,
+they yet possess by instinct, as did once the daughters of Hellas, a
+sense of nobility in attitude and carriage. None of the women of Europe
+could wear these coarse black stuffs with such a majestic harmony, and
+none surely could so raise their bare arms to place on their heads the
+heavy jars filled with Nile water, and then, departing, carry themselves
+so proudly, so upright and resilient under their burden.
+
+The muslin tunics which they wear are invariably black like the veils,
+set off perhaps with some red embroidery or silver spangles. They are
+unfastened across the chest, and, by a narrow opening which descends
+to the girdle, disclose the amber-coloured flesh, the median swell of
+bosoms of pale bronze, which, during their ephemeral youth at least, are
+of a perfect contour. The faces, it is true, when they are not hidden
+from you by a fold of the veil, are generally disappointing. The rude
+labours, the early maternity and lactations, soon age and wither them.
+But if by chance you see a young woman she is usually an apparition of
+beauty, at once vigorous and slender.
+
+As for the fellah babies, who abound in great numbers and follow, half
+naked their mammas or their big sisters, they would for the most part be
+adorable little creatures, were it not for the dirtiness which in this
+country is a thing almost prescribed by tradition. Round their eyelids
+and their moist lips are glued little clusters of Egyptian flies, which
+are considered here to be beneficial to the children, and the latter
+have no thought of driving them away, so resigned are they become, by
+force of heredity, to whatever annoyance they thereby suffer. Another
+example indeed of the passivity which their fathers show when brought
+face to face with the invading foreigners!
+
+Passivity and meek endurance seem to be the characteristics of this
+inoffensive people, so graceful in their rags, so mysterious in their
+age-old immobility, and so ready to accept with an equal indifference
+whatever yoke may come. Poor, beautiful people, with muscles that never
+grow tired! Whose men in olden times moved the great stones of the
+temples, and knew no burden that was too heavy; whose women, with their
+slender, pale-tawny arms and delicate small hands, surpass by far in
+strength the burliest of our peasants! Poor beautiful race of bronze!
+No doubt it was too precocious and put forth too soon its astonishing
+flower--in times when the other peoples of the earth were till
+vegetating in obscurity; no doubt its present resignation comes from
+lassitude, after so many centuries of effort and expansive power. Once
+it monopolised the glory of the world, and here it is now--for some two
+thousand years--fallen into a kind of tired sleep, which has left it an
+easy prey alike to the conquerors of yesterday and to the exploiters of
+to-day.
+
+Another trait which, side by side with their patience, prevails amongst
+these true-blooded Egyptians of the countryside is their attachment to
+the soil, to the soil which nourishes them, and in which later on they
+will sleep. To possess land, to forestall at any price the smallest
+portion of it, to reclaim patches of it from the shifting desert, that
+is the sole aim, or almost so, which the fellahs pursue in this world:
+to possess a field, however small it may be--a field, moreover, which
+they till with the oldest plough invented by man, the exact design of
+which may be seen carved on the walls of the tombs at Memphis.
+
+And this same people, which was the first of any to conceive
+magnificence, whose gods and kings were formerly surrounded with an
+over-powering splendour, contrives, to live to-day, pell-mell with its
+sheep and goats, in humble, low-roofed cabins made out of sunbaked
+mud! The Egyptian villages are all of the neutral colour of the soil;
+a little white chalk brightens, perhaps, the minaret or cupola of the
+mosque; but except for that little refuge, whither folk come to pray
+each evening--for no one here would retire for the night without having
+first prostrated himself before the majesty of Allah--everything is of
+a mournful grey. Even the costumes of the people are dull-coloured and
+wretched-looking. It is an East grown poor and old, although the sky
+remains as wonderful as ever.
+
+But all this past grandeur has left its imprint on the fellahs. They
+have a refinement of appearance and manner, all unknown amongst the
+majority of the good people of our villages. And those amongst them who
+by good fortune become prosperous have forthwith a kind of distinction,
+and seem to know, as if by birth, how to dispense the gracious
+hospitality of an aristocrat. The hospitality of even the humblest
+preserves something of courtesy and ease, which tells of breed. I
+remember those clear evenings when, after the peaceful navigation of the
+day, I used to stop and draw up my dahabiya to the bank of the river. (I
+speak now of out-of-the-way places--free as yet from the canker of the
+tourist element--such as I habitually chose.) It was in the twilight at
+the hour when the stars began to shine out from the golden-green sky. As
+soon as I put foot upon the shore, and my arrival was signalled by the
+barking of the watchdogs, the chief of the nearest hamlet always came to
+meet me. A dignified man, in a long robe of striped silk or modest
+blue cotton, he accosted me with formulae of welcome quite in the grand
+manner; insisted on my following him to his house of dried mud; and
+there, escorting me, after the exchange of further compliments, to the
+place of honour on the poor divan of his lodging, forced me to accept
+the traditional cup of Arab coffee.
+
+*****
+
+To wake these fellahs from their strange sleep, to open their eyes at
+last, and to transform them by a modern education--that is the task
+which nowadays a select band of Egyptian patriots is desirous of
+attempting. Not long ago, such an endeavour would have seemed to me a
+crime; for these stubborn peasants were living under conditions of the
+least suffering, rich in faith and poor in desire. But to-day they are
+suffering from an invasion more undermining, more dangerous than that of
+the conquerors who killed by sword and fire. The Occidentals are there,
+everywhere, amongst them, profiting by their meek passivity to turn
+them into slaves for their business and their pleasure. The work of
+degradation of these simpletons is so easy: men bring them new desires,
+new greeds, new needs,--and rob them of their prayers.
+
+Yet, it is time perhaps to wake them from their sleep of more than
+twenty centuries, to put them on their guard, and to see what yet they
+may be capable of, what surprises they may have in store for us after
+that long lethargy, which must surely have been restorative. In any case
+the human species, in course of deterioration through overstrain, would
+find amongst these singers of the shaduf and these labourers with the
+antiquated plough, brains unclouded by alcohol, and a whole reserve
+of tranquil beauty, of well-balanced physique, of vigour untainted by
+bestiality.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+A CHARMING LUNCHEON
+
+We are making our way through the fields of Abydos in the dazzling
+splendour of the forenoon, having come, like so many pilgrims of old,
+from the banks of the Nile to visit the sanctuaries of Osiris, which lie
+beyond the green plains, on the edge of the desert.
+
+It is a journey of some ten miles or so, under a clear sky and a burning
+sun. We pass through fields of corn and lucerne, whose wonderful green
+is piqued with little flowers, such as may be seen in our climate.
+Hundreds of little birds sing to us distractedly of the joy of life; the
+sun shines radiantly, magnificently; the impetuous corn is already in
+the ear; it might be some gay pageant of our days of May. One forgets
+that it is February, that we are still in the winter--the luminous
+winter of Egypt.
+
+Here and there amongst the outspread fields are villages buried under
+the thick foliage of trees--under acacias which, in the distance,
+resemble ours at home; beyond indeed the mountain chain of Libya, like
+a wall confining the fertile fields, looks strange perhaps in its
+rose-colour, and too desolate; but, nevertheless amidst this glad music
+of the fields, these songs of larks and twitterings of sparrows, you
+scarcely realise that you are in a foreign land.
+
+Abydos! What magic there is in the name! “Abydos is at hand, and in
+another moment we shall be there.” The mere words seem somehow to
+transform the aspect of the homely green fields, and make this pastoral
+region almost imposing. The buzzing of the flies increases in the
+overheated air and the song of the birds subsides until at last it dies
+away in the approach of noon.
+
+We have been journeying a little more than an hour amongst the verdure
+of the growing corn that lies upon the fields like a carpet, when
+suddenly, beyond the little houses and tress of a village, quite a
+different world is disclosed--the familiar world of glare and death
+which presses so closely upon inhabited Egypt: the desert! The desert of
+Libya, and now as ever when we come upon it suddenly from the banks
+of the old river it rises up before us; beginning at once, without
+transition, absolute and terrible, as soon as we leave the thick velvet
+of the last field, the cool shade of the last acacia. Its sands seem to
+slope towards us, in a prodigious incline, from the strange mountains
+that we saw from the happy plain, and which now appear, enthroned
+beyond, like the monarchs of all this nothingness.
+
+The town of Abydos, which has vanished and left no wrack behind, rose
+once in this spot where we now stand, on the very threshold of the
+solitudes; but its necropoles, more venerated even than those of
+Memphis, and its thrice-holy temples, are a little farther on, in the
+marvellously conserving sand, which has buried them under its tireless
+waves and preserved them almost intact up till the present day.
+
+The desert! As soon as we put foot upon its shifting soil, which
+smothers the sound of our steps, the atmosphere too seems suddenly to
+change; it burns with a strange new heat, as if great fires had been
+lighted in the neighbourhood.
+
+And this whole domain of light and drought, right away into the
+distance, is shaded and streaked with the familiar brown, red and yellow
+colours. The mournful reflection of adjacent things augments to excess
+the heat and light. The horizon trembles under the little vapours of
+mirage like water ruffled by the wind. The background, which mounts
+gradually to the foot of the Libyan mountains, is strewn with the debris
+of bricks and stones--shapeless ruins which, though they scarcely rise
+above the sand, abound nevertheless in great numbers, and serve to
+remind us that here indeed is a very ancient soil, where men laboured in
+centuries that have drifted out of knowledge. One divines instinctively
+and at once the catacombs, the hypogea and the mummies that lie beneath!
+
+These necropoles of Abydos once--and for thousands of years--exercised
+an extraordinary fascination over this people--the precursor of
+peoples--who dwelt in the valley of the Nile. According to one of the
+most ancient of human traditions, the head of Osiris, the lord of the
+_other world_, reposed in the depths of one of the temples which to-day
+are buried in the sands. And men, as soon as their thought commenced to
+issue from the primeval night, were haunted by the idea that there were
+localities helpful, as if were, to the poor corpses that lay beneath the
+earth, that there were certain holy places where it behoved them to
+be buried if they wished to be ready when the signal of awakening was
+given. And in old Egypt, therefore, each one, at the hour of death,
+turned his thoughts to these stones and sands, in the ardent hope that
+he might be able to sleep near the remains of his god. And when the
+place was becoming crowded with sleepers, those who could obtain no
+place there conceived the idea of having humble obelisks planted on the
+holy ground, which at least should tell their names; or even recommended
+that their mummies might be there for some weeks, even if they were
+afterwards removed. And thus, funeral processions passed to and fro
+without ceasing through the cornfields that separate the Nile from
+the desert. Abydos! In the sad human dream dominated by the thought of
+dissolution, Abydos preceded by many centuries the Valley of Jehosophat
+of the Hebrews, the cemeteries around Mecca of the Moslems, and the holy
+tombs beneath our oldest cathedrals! . . . Abydos! It behoves us to walk
+here pensively and silently out of respect for all those thousands of
+souls who formerly turned towards this place, with outstretched hands,
+in the hour of death.
+
+The first great temple--that which King Seti raised to the mysterious
+Prince of the Other World, who in those days was called Osiris--is quite
+close--a distance of little more than 200 yards in the glare of the
+desert. We come upon it suddenly, so that it almost startles us, for
+nothing warns us of its proximity. The sand from which it has been
+exhumed, and which buried it for 2000 years, still rises almost to its
+roof. Through an iron gate, guarded by two tall Bedouin guards in black
+robes, we plunge at once into the shadow of enormous stones. We are in
+the house of the god, in a forest of heavy Osiridean columns, surrounded
+by a world of people in high coiffures, carved in bas-relief on the
+pillars and walls--people who seem to be signalling one to another and
+exchanging amongst themselves mysterious signs, silently and for ever.
+
+But what is this noise in the sanctuary? It seems to be full of people.
+There, sure enough, beyond a second row of columns, is quite a little
+crowd talking loudly in English. I fancy that I can hear the clinking of
+glasses and the tapping of knives and forks.
+
+Oh! poor, poor temple, to what strange uses are you come. . . . This
+excess of grotesqueness in profanation is more insulting surely than to
+be sacked by barbarians! Behold a table set for some thirty guests, and
+the guests themselves--of both sexes--merry and lighthearted, belong to
+that special type of humanity which patronises Thomas Cook & Son (Egypt
+Ltd.). They wear cork helmets, and the classic green spectacles; drink
+whisky and soda, and eat voraciously sandwiches and other viands out of
+greasy paper, which now litters the floor. And the women! Heavens! what
+scarecrows they are! And this kind of thing, so the black-robed Bedouin
+guards inform us, is repeated every day so long as the season lasts. A
+luncheon in the temple of Osiris is part of the programme of pleasure
+trips. Each day at noon a new band arrives, on heedless and unfortunate
+donkeys. The tables and the crockery remain, of course, in the old
+temple!
+
+Let us escape quickly, if possible before the sight shall have become
+graven on our memory.
+
+But alas! even when we are outside, alone again on the expanse of
+dazzling sands, we can no longer take things seriously. Abydos and the
+desert have ceased to exist. The faces of those women remain to haunt
+us, their faces and their hats, and those looks which they vouchsafed us
+from over their solar spectacles. . . . The ugliness associated with the
+name of Cook was once explained to me in this wise, and the explanation
+at first sight seemed satisfactory: “The United Kingdom, justifiably
+jealous of the beauty of its daughters, submits them to a jury when
+they reach the age of puberty; and those who are classed as too ugly to
+reproduce their kind are accorded an unlimited account at Thomas Cook &
+Sons, and thus vowed to a course of perpetual travel, which leaves
+them no time to think of certain trifles incidental to life.” The
+explanation, as I say, seduced me for the time being. But a more
+attentive examination of the bands who infest the valley of the Nile
+enables me to aver that all these good English ladies are of an age
+notoriously canonical; and the catastrophe of procreation therefore,
+supposing that such an accident could ever have happened to them, must
+date back to a time long anterior to their enrolment. And I remain
+perplexed!
+
+Without conviction now, we make our way towards another temple,
+guaranteed solitary. Indeed the sun blazes there a lonely sovereign in
+the midst of a profound silence, and Egypt and the past take us again
+into their folds.
+
+Once more to Osiris, the god of heavenly awakening in the necropolis
+of Abydos, this sanctuary was built by Ramses II. But the sands have
+covered it with their winding sheet in vain, and have been able to
+preserve for us only the lower and more deeply buried parts. Men in
+their blind greed have destroyed the upper portions,[*] and its ruins,
+protected and cleared as they are to-day, rise only some ten or twelve
+feet from the ground. In the bas-reliefs the majority of the figures
+have only legs and a portion of the body; their heads and shoulders have
+disappeared with the upper parts of the walls. But they seem to have
+preserved their vitality: the gesticulations, the exaggerated pantomime
+of the attitudes of these headless things, are more strange, more
+striking, perhaps, than if their faces still remained. And they have
+preserved too, in an extraordinary degree, the brightness of their
+antique paintings, the fresh tints of their costumes, of their robes of
+turquoise blue, or lapis, or emerald-green, or golden-yellow. It is an
+artless kind of fresco-work, which nevertheless amazes us by remaining
+perfect after thirty-five centuries. All that these people did seems
+as if made for immortality. It is true, however, that such brilliant
+colours are not found in any of the other Pharaonic monuments, and that
+here they are heightened by the white background. For, notwithstanding
+the bluish, black and red granite of the porticoes, the walls are all of
+a fine limestone, of exceeding whiteness, and, in the holy of holies, of
+a pure alabaster.
+
+     [*] Not long ago a manufacturer, established in the
+     neighbourhood, discovering that the limestone of its walls
+     was friable, used this temple as a quarry, and for some
+     years bas-reliefs beyond price served as aliment to the
+     mills of the factory.
+
+Above the truncated walls, with their bright clear colours, the desert
+appears, and shows quite brown by contrast; one sees the great yellow
+swell of sand and stones above the pictures of these decapitated people.
+It rises like a colossal wave and stretches out to bathe the foot of the
+Libyan mountains beyond. Towards the north and west of the solitudes,
+shapeless ruins of tawny-coloured blocks follow one another in the sands
+until the dazzling distance ends in a clear-cut line against the sky.
+Apart from this temple of Ramses, where we now stand, and that of Seti
+in the vicinity, where the enterprise of Thomas Cook & Son flourishes,
+there is nothing around us but ruins, crumbled and pulverised beyond all
+possible redemption. But they give us pause, these disappearing ruins,
+for they are the debris of that ageless temple, where sleeps the head of
+the god, the debris of the tombs of the Middle and Ancient Empires, and
+they indicate still the wide extent and development of the necropoles
+of Abydos, so old that it almost makes one giddy to think of their
+beginning.
+
+Here, as at Thebes and Memphis, the tombs of the Egyptians are met
+with only amongst the sands and the parched rocks. The great ancestral
+people, who would have shuddered at our black trees, and the corruption
+of the damp graves, liked to place its embalmed dead in the midst of
+this luminous, changeless splendour of death, which men call the desert.
+
+*****
+
+And what is this now that is happening in the holy neighbourhood of
+unhappy Osiris? A troupe of donkeys, belaboured by Bedouin drivers, is
+being driven in the direction of the adjacent temple, dedicated to the
+god by Seti! The luncheon no doubt is over and the band about to depart,
+sharp to the appointed hour of the programme. Let us watch them from a
+prudent distance.
+
+To be brief, they all mount into their saddles, these Cooks and
+Cookesses, and opening, not without a conscious air of majesty, their
+white cotton parasols, take themselves off in the direction of the Nile.
+They disappear and the place belongs to us.
+
+When we venture at last to return to the first sanctuary, where they had
+lunched their fill in the shade, the guardians are busy clearing away
+the leavings and the dirty paper. And they pack the dubious crockery,
+which will be required for to-morrow's luncheon, into large chests on
+which may be read in large letters of glory the names of the veritable
+sovereigns of modern Egypt: “Thomas Cook & Son (Egypt Ltd.).”
+
+All this happily ends with the first hypostyle. Nothing dishonours
+the halls of the interior, where silence has again descended, the vast
+silence of the noon of the desert.
+
+In the reign of the Emperor Tiberius, men already marvelled at this
+temple, as at a relic of the most distant and nebulous past. The
+geographer Strabo wrote in those days: “It is an admirable palace built
+in the fashion of the Labyrinth save that it has fewer galleries.” There
+are galleries enough however, and one can readily lose oneself in its
+mazy turnings. Seven chapels, consecrated to Osiris and to different
+gods and goddesses of his suite; seven vaulted chambers; seven doors for
+the processions of kings and multitudes; and, at the sides, numberless
+halls, corridors, secondary chapels, dark chambers and hidden doorways.
+That very primitive column, suggestive of reeds, which is called in
+architecture the “plant column” and resembles a monstrous stem of
+papyrus, rises here in a thick forest, to support the stones of the blue
+ceilings, which are strewn with stars, in the likeness of the sky of
+this country. In many cases these stones are missing and leave large
+openings on to the real sky above. Their massiveness, which one might
+have thought would secure them an endless duration, has availed them
+nothing; the sun of so many centuries has cracked them, and their own
+weight, then, has brought them headlong to the ground. And floods of
+light now enter through the gaps, into the very chapels where the men of
+old had thought to ensure a holy gloom.
+
+Despite the disaster which has overtaken the ceilings, this is
+nevertheless one of the most perfect of the sanctuaries of ancient
+Egypt. The sands, those gentle sextons, have here succeeded miraculously
+in their work of preservation. They might have been carved yesterday,
+these innumerable people, who, everywhere--on the walls, on this forest
+of columns--gesticulate and, with their arms and long hands, continue
+with animation their eternal mute conversation. The whole temple, with
+the openings which give it light, is more beautiful perhaps than in the
+time of the Pharaohs. In place of the old-time darkness, a transparent
+gloom now alternates with shafts of sunlight. Here and there the
+subjects of the bas-reliefs, so long buried in the darkness, are deluged
+with burning rays which detail their attitudes, their muscles, their
+scarcely altered colours, and endow them again with life and youth.
+There is no part of the wall, in this immense place, but is covered with
+divinities, with hieroglyphs and emblems. Osiris in high coiffure,
+the beautiful Isis in the helmet of a bird, jackal-headed Anubis,
+falcon-headed Horus, and ibis-headed Thoth are repeated a thousand
+times, welcoming with strange gestures the kings and priests who are
+rendering them homage.
+
+The bodies, almost nude, with broad shoulders and slim waist, have a
+slenderness, a grace, infinitely chaste, and the features of the faces
+are of an exquisite purity. The artists who carved these charming heads,
+with their long eyes, full of the ancient dream, were already skilled
+in their art; but through a deficiency, which puzzles us, they were only
+able to draw them in profile. All the legs, all the feet are in profile
+too, although the bodies, on the other hand, face us fully. Men needed
+yet some centuries of study before they understood perspective--which to
+us now seems so simple--and the foreshortening of figures, and were able
+to render the impression of them on a plane surface.
+
+Many of the pictures represent King Seti, drawn without doubt from life,
+for they show us almost the very features of his mummy, exhibited now
+in the museum at Cairo. At his side he holds affectionately his son, the
+prince-royal, Ramses (later on Ramses II., the great Sesostris of the
+Greeks). They have given the latter quite a frank air, and he wears a
+curl on the side of his head, as was the fashion then in childhood. He,
+also, has his mummy in a glass case in the museum, and anyone who has
+seen that toothless, sinister wreck, who had already attained the age
+of nearly a hundred years before death delivered him to the embalmers of
+Thebes, will find it difficult to believe that he could ever have been
+young, and worn his hair curled so; that he could ever have played and
+been a child.
+
+*****
+
+We thought we had finished with the Cooks and Cookesses of the luncheon.
+But alas! our horses, faster than their donkeys, overtake them in the
+return journey amongst the green cornfields of Abydos; and in a stoppage
+in the narrow roadway, caused by a meeting with a number of camels laden
+with lucerne, we are brought to a halt in their midst. Almost touching
+me is a dear little white donkey, who looks at me pensively and in such
+a way that we at once understand each other. A mutual sympathy unites
+us. A Cookess in spectacles surmounts him--the most hideous of them
+all, bony and severe. Over her travelling costume, already sufficiently
+repulsive, she wears a tennis jersey, which accentuates the angularity
+of her figure, and in her person she seems the very incarnation of the
+respectability of the British Isles. It would be more equitable, too--so
+long are those legs of hers, which, to be sure, have scant interest for
+the tourist--if she carried the donkey.
+
+The poor little white thing regards me with melancholy. His ears twitch
+restlessly and his beautiful eyes, so fine, so observant of everything,
+say to me as plain as words:
+
+“She is a beauty, isn't she?”
+
+“She is, indeed, my poor little donkey. But think of this: fixed on thy
+back as she is, thou hast this advantage over me--thou seest her not!”
+
+But my reflection, though judicious enough, does not console him, and
+his look answers me that he would be much prouder if he carried, like so
+many of his comrades, a simple pack of sugarcanes.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE DOWNFALL OF THE NILE
+
+Some thousands of years ago, at the beginning of our geological period,
+when the continents had taken, in the last great upheaval, almost the
+forms by which we now know them, and when the rivers began to trace
+their hesitating courses, it happened that the rains of a whole
+watershed of Africa were precipitated in one formidable torrent across
+the uninhabitable region which stretches from the Atlantic to the
+Indian Ocean, and is called the region of the deserts. And this enormous
+waterway, lost as it was in the sands, by-and-by regulated its course:
+it became the Nile, and with untiring patience set itself to the proper
+task of river, which in this accursed zone might well have seemed
+an impossible one. First it had to round all the blocks of granite
+scattered in its way in the high plains of Nubia; and then, and more
+especially, to deposit, little by little, successive layers of mud, to
+form a living artery, to create, as it were, a long green ribbon in the
+midst of this infinite domain of death.
+
+How long ago is it since the work of the great river began? There is
+something fearful in the thought. During the 5000 years of which we have
+any knowledge the incessant deposit of mud has scarcely widened this
+strip of inhabited Egypt, which at the most ancient period of history
+was almost as it is to-day. And as for the granite blocks on the plains
+of Nubia, how many thousands of years did it need to roll them and to
+polish them thus? In the times of the Pharaohs they already had their
+present rounded forms, worn smooth by the friction of the water, and the
+hieroglyphic inscriptions on their surfaces are not perceptibly effaced,
+though they have suffered the periodical inundation of the summer for
+some forty or fifty centuries!
+
+It was an exceptional country, this valley of the Nile; marvellous and
+unique; fertile without rain, watered according to its need by the great
+river, without the help of any cloud. It knew not the dull days and the
+humidity under which we suffer, but kept always the changeless sky of
+the immense surrounding deserts, which exhaled no vapour that might dim
+the horizon. It was this eternal splendour of its light, no doubt, and
+this easiness of life, which brought forth here the first fruits of
+human thought. This same Nile, after having so patiently created the
+soil of Egypt, became also the father of that people, which led the way
+for all others--like those early branches that one sees in spring,
+which shoot first from the stem, and sometimes die before the summer.
+It nursed that people, whose least vestiges we discover to-day with
+surprise and wonder; a people who, in the very dawn, in the midst of the
+original barbarity, conceived magnificently the infinite and the divine;
+who placed with such certainty and grandeur the first architectural
+lines, from which afterwards our architecture was to be derived; who
+laid the bases of art, of science, and of all knowledge.
+
+Later on, when this beautiful flower of humanity was faded, the Nile,
+flowing always in the midst of its deserts, seems to have had for
+mission, during nearly two thousand years, the maintenance on its banks
+of a kind of immobility and desuetude, which was in a way a homage of
+respect for these stupendous relics. While the sand was burying the
+ruins of the temples and the battered faces of the colossi, nothing
+changed under this sky of changeless blue. The same cultivation
+proceeded on the banks as in the oldest ages; the same boats, with the
+same sails, went up and down the thread of water; the same songs kept
+time to the eternal human toil. The race of fellahs, the unconscious
+guardian of a prodigious past, slept on without desire of change, and
+almost without suffering. And time passed for Egypt in a great peace of
+sunlight and of death.
+
+But to-day the foreigners are masters here, and have wakened the
+old Nile--wakened to enslave it. In less than twenty years they have
+disfigured its valley, which until then had preserved itself like a
+sanctuary. They have silenced its cataracts, captured its precious water
+by dams, to pour it afar off on plains that are become like marshes and
+already sully with their mists the crystal clearness of the sky. The
+ancient rigging no longer suffices to water the land under cultivation.
+Machines worked by steam, which draw the water more quickly, commence to
+rise along the banks, side by side with new factories. Soon there will
+scarcely be a river more dishonoured than this, by iron chimneys and
+thick, black smoke. And it is happening apace, this exploitation of
+the Nile--hastily, greedily, as in a hunt for spoils. And thus all its
+beauty disappears, for its monotonous course, through regions endless
+alike, won us only by its calm and its old-world mystery.
+
+Poor Nile of the prodigies! One feels sometimes still its departing
+charm, stray corners of it remain intact. There are days of transcendent
+clearness, incomparable evenings, when one may still forget the ugliness
+and the smoke. But the classic expedition by dahabiya, the ascent of the
+river from Cairo to Nubia, will soon have ceased to be worth making.
+
+Ordinarily this voyage is made in the winter, so that the traveller may
+follow the course of the sun as it makes its escape towards the southern
+hemisphere. The water then is low and the valley parched. Leaving the
+cosmopolitan town of modern Cairo, the iron bridges, and the pretentious
+hotels, with their flaunting inscriptions, it imparts a sense of sudden
+peacefulness to pass along the large and rapid waters of this river,
+between the curtains of palm-trees on the banks, borne by a dahabiya
+where one is master and, if one likes, may be alone.
+
+At first, for a day or two, the great haunting triangles of the pyramids
+seem to follow you, those of Dashur and that of Sakkarah succeeding
+to those of Gizeh. For a long time the horizon is disturbed by their
+gigantic silhouettes. As we recede from them, and they disengage
+themselves better from neighbouring things, they seem, as happens in
+the case of mountains, to grow higher. And when they have finally
+disappeared, we have still to ascend slowly and by stages some six
+hundred miles of river before we reach the first cataract. Our way lies
+through monotonous desert regions where the hours and days are marked
+chiefly by the variations of the wonderful light. Except for the
+phantasmagoria of the mornings and evenings, there is no outstanding
+feature on these dull-coloured banks, where may be seen, with never
+a change at all, the humble pastoral life of the fellahs. The sun is
+burning, the starlit nights clear and cold. A withering wind, which
+blows almost without ceasing from the north, makes you shiver as soon as
+the twilight falls.
+
+One may travel for league after league along this slimy water and make
+head for days and weeks against its current--which glides everlastingly
+past the dahabiya, in little hurrying waves--without seeing this warm,
+fecundating river, compared with which our rivers of France are mere
+negligible streams, either diminish or increase or hasten. And on
+the right and left of us as we pass are unfolded indefinitely the two
+parallel chains of barren limestone, which imprison so narrowly the
+Egypt of the harvests: on the west that of the Libyan desert, which
+every morning the first rays of the sun tint with a rosy coral that
+nothing seems to dull; and in the east that of the desert of Arabia,
+which never fails in the evening to retain the light of the setting sun,
+and looks then like a mournful girdle of glowing embers. Sometimes the
+two parallel walls sheer off and give more room to the green fields, to
+the woods of palm-trees, and the little oases, separated by streaks
+of golden sand. Sometimes they approach so closely to the Nile that
+habitable Egypt is no wider than some two or three poor fields of corn,
+lying right on the water's edge, behind which the dead stones and the
+dead sands commence at once. And sometimes, even, the desert chain
+closes in so as to overhang the river with its reddish-white cliffs,
+which no rain ever comes to freshen, and in which, at different heights,
+gape the square holes leading to the habitations of the mummies. These
+mountains, which in the distance look so beautiful in their rose-colour,
+and make, as it were, interminable back-cloths to all that happens
+on the river banks, were perforated, during some 5000 years, for the
+introduction of sarcophagi and now they swarm with old dead bodies.
+
+And all that passes on the banks, indeed, changes as little as the
+background.
+
+First there is that gesture, supple and superb, but always the same,
+of the women in their long black robes who come without ceasing to fill
+their long-necked jars and carry them away balanced on their veiled
+heads. Then the flocks which shepherds, draped in mourning, bring to
+the river to drink, goats and sheep and asses all mixed up together.
+And then the buffaloes, massive and mud-coloured, who descend calmly to
+bathe. And, finally, the great labour of the watering: the traditional
+noria, turned by a little bull with bandaged eyes and, above all, the
+shaduf, worked by men whose naked bodies stream with the cold water.
+
+The shadufs follow one another sometimes as far as the eye can see. It
+is strange to watch the movement--confused in the distance--of all
+these long rods which pump the water without ceasing, and look like the
+swaying of living antennae. The same sight was to be seen along this
+river in the times of the Ramses. But suddenly, at some bend of
+the river, the old Pharaonic rigging disappears, to give place to a
+succession of steam machines, which, more even than the muscles of
+the fellahs, are busy at the water-drawing. Before long their blackish
+chimneys will make a continuous border to the tamed Nile.
+
+Did one not know their bearings, the great ruins of this Egypt would
+pass unnoticed. With a few rare exceptions they lie beyond the green
+plains on the threshold of the solitudes. And against the changeless,
+rose-coloured background of these cliffs of the desert, which follow you
+during the whole of this tranquil navigation of some 600 miles, are to
+be seen only the humble towns and villages of to-day, which have
+the neutral colour of the ground. Some openwork minarets dominate
+them--white spots above the prevailing dullness. Clouds of pigeons whirl
+round in the neighbourhood. And amongst the little houses, which are
+only cubes of mud, baked in the sun, the palm-trees of Africa, either
+singly or in mighty clusters, rise superbly and cast on these little
+habitations the shade of their palms which sway in the wind. Not long
+ago, although indeed everything in these little towns was mournful and
+stagnant, one would have been tempted to stop in passing, drawn by that
+nameless peace that belonged to the Old East and to Islam. But, now,
+before the smallest hamlet--amongst the beautiful primitive boats, that
+still remain in great numbers, pointing their yards, like very long
+reeds, into the sky--there is always, for the meeting of the tourist
+boats, an enormous black pontoon, which spoils the whole scene by its
+presence and its great advertising inscription: “Thomas Cook & Son
+(Egypt Ltd.).” And, what is more, one hears the whistling of the
+railway, which runs mercilessly along the river, bringing from the
+Delta to the Soudan the hordes of European invaders. And to crown all,
+adjoining the station is inevitably some modern factory, throned there
+in a sort of irony, and dominating the poor crumbling things that still
+presume to tell of Egypt and of mystery.
+
+And so now, except at the towns or villages which lead to celebrated
+ruins, we stop no longer. It is necessary to proceed farther and for the
+halt of the night to seek an obscure hamlet, a silent recess, where we
+may moor our dahabiya against the venerable earth of the bank.
+
+And so one goes on, for days and weeks, between these two interminable
+cliffs of reddish chalk, filled with their hypogea and mummies, which
+are the walls of the valley of the Nile, and will follow us up to the
+first cataract, until our entrance into Nubia. There only will the
+appearance and nature of the rocks of the desert change, to become the
+more sombre granite out of which the Pharaohs carved their obelisks and
+the great figures of their gods.
+
+We go on and on, ascending the thread of this eternal current, and
+the regularity of the wind, the persistent clearness of the sky, the
+monotony of the great river, which winds but never ends, all conspire
+to make us forget the hours and days that pass. However deceived and
+disappointed we may be at seeing the profanation of the river banks,
+here, nevertheless, isolated on the water, we do not lose the peace of
+being a wanderer, a stranger amongst an equipage of silent Arabs, who
+every evening prostrate themselves in confiding prayer.
+
+And, moreover, we are moving towards the south, towards the sun, and
+every day has a more entrancing clearness, a more caressing warmth, and
+the bronze of the faces that we see on our way takes on a deeper tint.
+
+And then too one mixes intimately with the life of the river bank,
+which is still so absorbing and, at certain hours, when the horizon is
+unsullied by the smoke of pit-coal, recalls you to the days of artless
+toil and healthy beauty. In the boats that meet us, half-naked men,
+revelling in their movement, in the sun and air, sing, as they ply their
+oars, those songs of the Nile that are as old as Thebes or Memphis. When
+the wind rises there is a riotous unfurling of sails, which, stretched
+on their long yards, give to the dahabiyas the air of birds in full
+flight. Bending right over in the wind, they skim along with a lively
+motion, carrying their cargoes of men and beasts and primitive things.
+Women are there draped still in the ancient fashion, and sheep and
+goats, and sometimes piles of fruit and gourds, and sacks of grain. Many
+are laden to the water's edge with these earthenware jars, unchanged for
+3000 years, which the fellaheens know how to place on their heads with
+so much grace--and one sees these heaps of fragile pottery gliding along
+the water as if carried by the gigantic wings of a gull. And in the
+far-off, almost fabulous, days the life of the mariners of the Nile had
+the same aspect, as is shown by the bas-reliefs on the oldest tombs; it
+required the same play of muscles and of sails; was accompanied no doubt
+by the same songs, and was subject to the withering caress of this same
+desert wind. And then, as now, the same unchanging rose coloured the
+continuous curtain of the mountains.
+
+But all at once there is a noise of machinery, and whistlings, and
+in the air, which was just now so pure, rise noxious columns of black
+smoke. The modern steamers are coming, and throw into disorder the
+flotillas of the past; colliers that leave great eddies in their wake,
+or perhaps a wearisome lot of those three-decked tourist boats, which
+make a great noise as they plough the water, and are laden for the most
+part with ugly women, snobs and imbeciles.
+
+Poor, poor Nile! which reflected formerly on its warm mirror the utmost
+of earthly splendour, which bore in its time so many barques of gods and
+goddesses in procession behind the golden barge of Amen, and knew in the
+dawn of the ages only an impeccable purity, alike of the human form and
+of architectural design! What a downfall is here! To be awakened from
+that disdainful sleep of twenty centuries and made to carry the floating
+barracks of Thomas Cook & Son, to feed sugar factories, and to
+exhaust itself in nourishing with its mud the raw material for English
+cotton-stuffs.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+IN THE TEMPLE OF THE GODDESS OF LOVE AND JOY
+
+It is the month of March, but as gay and splendid as in our June. Around
+us are fields of corn, of lucerne, and the flowering bean. And the
+air is full of restless birds, singing deliriously for very joy in
+the voluptuous business of their nests and coveys. Our way lies over a
+fertile soil, saturated with vital substances--some paradise for beasts
+no doubt, for they swarm on every side: flocks of goats with a
+thousand bleating kids; she-asses with their frisking young; cows and
+cow-buffaloes feeding their calves; all turned loose among the crops, to
+browse at their leisure, as if there were here a superabundance of the
+riches of the soil.
+
+What country is this that shows no sign of human habitation, that
+knows no village, nor any distant spire? The crops are like ours at
+home--wheat, lucerne, and the flowering bean that perfumes the air with
+its white blossoms. But there is an excess of light in the sky and, in
+the distance, an extraordinary clearness. And then these fertile plains,
+that might be those of some “Promised Land,” seem to be bounded far
+away, on left and right, by two parallel stone walls, two chains of
+rose-coloured mountains, whose aspect is obviously desertlike. Besides,
+amongst the numerous animals that are familiar, there are camels,
+feeding their strange nurslings that look like four-legged ostriches.
+And finally some peasants appear beyond in the cornfields; they are
+veiled in long black draperies. It is the East then, an African land, or
+some oasis of Arabia?
+
+The sun at this moment is hidden from us by a band of clouds, that
+stretches, right above our head, from one end of the sky to the other,
+like a long skein of white wool. It is alone in the blue void, and seems
+to make more peaceful, and even a little mysterious, the wonderful
+light of the fields we traverse--these fields intoxicated with life
+and vibrant with the music of birds; while, by contrast, the distant
+landscape, unshaded by clouds, is resplendent with a more incisive
+clearness and the desert beyond seems deluged with rays.
+
+The pathway that we have been following, ill defined as it is in the
+grassy fields, leads us at length under a large ruinous portico--a
+relic of goodness knows what olden days--which still rises here, quite
+isolated, altogether strange and unexpected, in the midst of the green
+expanse of pasture and tillage. We had seen it from a great distance, so
+pure and clear is the air; and in approaching it we perceive that it is
+colossal, and in relief on its lintel is designed a globe with two long
+wings outspread symmetrically.
+
+It behoves us now to make obeisance with almost religious reverence, for
+this winged disc is a symbol which gives at length an indication of
+the place immediate and absolute. It is Egypt, the country--Egypt,
+our ancient mother. And there before us must once have stood a temple
+reverenced of the people, or some great vanished town; its fragments
+of columns and sculptured capitals are strewn about in the fields of
+lucerne. How inexplicable it seems that this land of ancient splendours,
+which never ceased indeed to be nutritive and prodigiously fertile,
+should have returned, for some hundreds of years now, to the humble
+pastoral life of the peasants.
+
+Through the green crops and the assembled herds our pathway seems to
+lead to a kind of hill rising alone in the midst of the plains--a hill
+which is neither of the same colour nor the same nature as the mountains
+of the surrounding deserts. Behind us the portico recedes little by
+little in the distance; its tall imposing silhouette, as mournful and
+solitary, throws an infinite sadness on this sea of meadows, which
+spread their peace where once was a centre of magnificence.
+
+The wind now rises in sharp, lashing gusts--the wind of Egypt that never
+seems to fall, and is bitter and wintry for all the burning of the
+sun. The growing corn bends before it, showing the gloss of its young
+quivering leaves, and the herded beasts move close to one another and
+turn their backs to the squall.
+
+As we draw nearer to this singular hill it is revealed as a mass of
+ruins. And the ruins are all of a kind, of a brownish-red. They are the
+remains of the colonial towns of the Romans, which subsisted here for
+some two or three hundred years (an almost negligible moment of time in
+the long history of Egypt), and then fell to pieces, to become in time
+mere shapeless mounds on the fertile margins of the Nile and sometimes
+even in the submerging sands.
+
+A heap of little reddish bricks that once were fashioned into houses; a
+heap of broken jars or amphorae--myriads of them--that served to carry
+the water from the old nourishing river; and the remains of walls,
+repaired at diverse epochs, where stones inscribed with hieroglyphs lie
+upside down against fragments of Grecian obelisks or Coptic sculptures
+or Roman capitals. In our countries, where the past is of yesterday, we
+have nothing resembling such a chaos of dead things.
+
+Nowadays the sanctuary is reached through a large cutting in this hill
+of ruins; incredible heaps of bricks and broken pottery enclose it on
+all sides like a jealous rampart. Until recently indeed they covered it
+almost to its roof. From the very first its appearance is disconcerting:
+it is so grand, so austere and gloomy. A strange dwelling, to be sure,
+for the Goddess of Love and Joy. It seems more fit to be the home of
+the Prince of Darkness and of Death. A severe doorway, built of gigantic
+stones and surmounted by a winged disc, opens on to an asylum of
+religious mystery, on to depths where massive columns disappear in the
+darkness of deep night.
+
+Immediately on entering there is a coolness and a resonance as of a
+sepulchre. First, the pronaos, where we still see clearly, between
+pillars carved with hieroglyphs. Were it not for the large human faces
+which serve for the capitals of the columns, and are the image of the
+lovely Hathor, the goddess of the place, this temple of the decadent
+epoch would scarcely differ from those built in this country two
+thousand years before. It has the same square massiveness.
+
+And in the dark blue ceilings there are the same frescoes, filled with
+stars, with the signs of the Zodiac, and series of winged discs; in
+bas-relief on the walls, the same multitudinous crowd of people who
+gesticulate and make signs to one another with their hands--eternally
+the same mysterious signs, repeated to infinity, everywhere--in the
+palaces, the hypogea, the syringes, and on the sarcophagi and papyri of
+the mummies.
+
+The Memphite and Theban temples, which preceded this by so many
+centuries, and far surpassed it in grandeur, have all lost, in
+consequence of the falling of the enormous granites of their roofs,
+their cherished gloom, and, what is the same thing, their religious
+mystery. But in the temple of the lovely Hathor, on the contrary, except
+for some figures mutilated by the hammers of Christians or Moslems,
+everything has remained intact, and the lofty ceilings still throw their
+fearsome shadows.
+
+The gloom deepens in the hypostyle which follows the pronaos. Then come,
+one after another, two halls of increasing holiness, where the daylight
+enters regretfully through narrow loopholes, barely lighting the
+superposed rows of innumerable figures that gesticulate on the walls.
+And then, after other majestic corridors, we reach the heart of this
+heap of terrible stones, the holy of holies, enveloped in deep gloom.
+The hieroglyphic inscriptions name this place the “Hall of Mystery” and
+formerly the high priest _alone, and he only once in each year_, had the
+right to enter it for the performance of some now unknown rites.
+
+The “Hall of Mystery” is empty to-day, despoiled long since of the
+emblems of gold and precious stones that once filled it. The meagre
+little flames of the candles we have lit scarcely pierce the darkness
+which thickens over our heads towards the granite ceilings; at the most
+they only allow us to distinguish on the walls of the vast rectangular
+cavern the serried ranks of figures who exchange among themselves their
+disconcerting mute conversations.
+
+Towards the end of the ancient and at the beginning of the Christian
+era, Egypt, as we know, still exercised such a fascination over the
+world, by its ancestral prestige, by the memory of its dominating past,
+and the sovereign permanence of its ruins, that it imposed its gods
+upon its conquerors, its handwriting, its architecture, nay, even its
+religious rites and its mummies. The Ptolemies built temples here, which
+reproduce those of Thebes and Abydos. Even the Romans, although they had
+already discovered the _vault_, followed here the primitive models, and
+continued those granite ceilings, made of monstrous slabs, placed flat,
+like our beams. And so this temple of Hathor, built though it was in
+the time of Cleopatra and Augustus, on a site venerable in the oldest
+antiquity, recalls at first sight some conception of the Ramses.
+
+If, however, you examine it more closely, there appears, particularly in
+the thousands of figures in bas-relief, a considerable divergence. The
+poses are the same indeed, and so too are the traditional gestures. But
+the exquisite grace of line is gone, as well as the hieratic calm of the
+expressions and the smiles. In the Egyptian art of the best periods the
+slender figures are as pure as the flowers they hold in their hands;
+their muscles may be indicated in a precise and skilful manner, but they
+remain, for all that, immaterial. The god Amen himself, the procreator,
+drawn often with an absolute crudity, would seem chaste compared with
+the hosts of this temple. For here, on the contrary, the figures might
+be those of living people, palpitating and voluptuous, who had posed
+themselves for sport in these consecrated attitudes. The throat of the
+beautiful goddess, her hips, her unveiled nakedness, are portrayed with
+a searching and lingering realism; the flesh seems almost to quiver.
+She and her spouse, the beautiful Horus, son of Iris, contemplate
+each other, naked, one before the other, and their laughing eyes are
+intoxicated with love.
+
+Around the holy of holies is a number of halls, in deep shadow and
+massive as so many fortresses. They were used formerly for mysterious
+and complicated rites, and in them, as everywhere else, there is no
+corner of the wall but is overloaded with figures and hieroglyphs. Bats
+are asleep in the blue ceilings, where the winged discs, painted in
+fresco, look like flights of birds; and the hornets of the neighbouring
+fields have built their nests there in hundreds, so that they hang like
+stalactites.
+
+Several staircases lead to the vast terraces formed by the great
+roofs of the temple--staircases narrow, stifling and dimly lighted by
+loopholes that reveal the heart-breaking thickness of the walls. And
+here again are the inevitable rows of figures, carved on all the walls,
+in the same familiar attitudes; they mount with us as we ascend, making
+all the time the self-same signs one to another.
+
+As we emerge on to the roofs, bathed now in Egyptian sunlight and swept
+by a cold and bitter wind, we are greeted by a noise as of an aviary. It
+is the kingdom of the sparrows, who have built their nests in thousands
+in this temple of the complaisant goddess. They twitter now all together
+and with all their might out of very joy of living. It is an esplanade,
+this roof--a solitude paved with gigantic flagstones. From it we see,
+beyond the heaps of ruins, those happy plains, which are spread out with
+such a perfect serenity on the very ground where once stood the town of
+Denderah, beloved of Hathor and one of the most famous of Upper Egypt.
+Exquisitely green are these plains with the new growth of wheat and
+lucerne and bean; and the herds that are grouped here and there on the
+fresh verdure of the level pastures, swaying now and undulating in the
+wind, look like so many dark patches. And the two chains of mountains of
+rose-coloured stone, that run parallel--on the east that of the desert
+of Arabia, on the west that of the Libyan desert--enclose, in the
+distance, this valley of the Nile, this land of plenty, which, alike in
+antiquity as in our days, has excited the greed of predatory races. The
+temple has also some underground dependencies or crypts into which you
+descend by staircases as of dungeons; sometimes even you have to crawl
+through holes to reach them. Long superposed galleries which might serve
+as hiding-places for treasure; long corridors recalling those which,
+in bad dreams, threaten to close in and bury you. And the innumerable
+figures, of course, are here too, gesticulating on the walls; and
+endless representations of the lovely goddess, whose swelling bosom,
+which has preserved almost intact the flesh colour applied in the times
+of the Ptolemies, we have perforce to graze as we pass.
+
+*****
+
+In one of the vestibules that we have to traverse on our way out of
+the sanctuary, amongst the numerous bas-reliefs representing various
+sovereigns paying homage to the beautiful Hathor, is one of a young man,
+crowned with a royal tiara shaped like the head of a uraeus. He is shown
+seated in the traditional Pharaonic pose and is none other than the
+Emperor Nero!
+
+The hieroglyphs of the cartouche are there to affirm his identity,
+albeit the sculptor, not knowing his actual physiognomy, has given him
+the traditional features, regular as those of the god Horus. During the
+centuries of the Roman domination the Western emperors used to send from
+home instructions that their likeness should be placed on the walls
+of the temples, and that offerings should be made in their name to the
+Egyptian divinities--and this notwithstanding that in their eyes Egypt
+must have seemed so far away, a colony almost at the end of the earth.
+(And it was such a goddess as this, of secondary rank in the times of
+the Pharaohs, that was singled out as the favourite of the Romans of the
+decadence.)
+
+The Emperor Nero! As a matter of fact at the very time these
+bas-reliefs--almost the last--and these expiring hieroglyphics were
+being inscribed, the confused primitive theogonies had almost reached
+their end and the days of the Goddess of Joy were numbered. There had
+been conceived in Judaea symbols more lofty and more pure, which were to
+rule a great part of the world for two thousand years--afterwards,
+alas, to decline in their turn; and men were about to throw themselves
+passionately into renunciation, asceticism and fraternal pity.
+
+How strange it is to say! Even while the sculptor was carving this
+archaic bas-relief, and was using, for the engraving of its name,
+characters that dated back to the night of the ages, there were already
+Christians assembled in the catacombs at Rome and dying in ecstasy in
+the arena!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+MODERN LUXOR
+
+The waters of the Nile being already low my dahabiya--delayed by
+strandings--had not been able to reach Luxor, and we had moored
+ourselves, as the darkness began to fall, at a casual spot on the bank.
+
+“We are quite near,” the pilot had told me before departing to make his
+evening prayer; “in an hour, to-morrow, we shall be there.”
+
+And the gentle night descended upon us in this spot which did not seem
+to differ at all from so any others where, for a month past now, we had
+moored our boat at hazard to await the daybreak. On the banks were dark
+confused masses of foliage, above which here and there a high date-palm
+outlined its black plumes. The air was filled with the multitudinous
+chirpings of the crickets of Upper Egypt, which make their music here
+almost throughout the year in the odorous warmth of the grass. And,
+presently, in the midst of the silence, rose the cries of the night
+birds, like the mournful mewings of cats. And that was all--save for
+the infinite calm of the desert that is always present, dominating
+everything, although scarcely noticed and, as it were, latent.
+
+*****
+
+And this morning, at the rising of the sun, is pure and splendid as
+all other mornings. A tint of rosy coral comes gradually to life on the
+summit of the Libyan mountains, standing out from the gridelin shadows
+which, in the heavens, were the rearguard of the night.
+
+But my eyes, grown accustomed during the last few weeks to this
+glorious spectacle of the dawn, turn themselves, as if by force of some
+attraction, towards a strange and quite unusual thing, which, less than
+a mile away along the river, on the Arabian bank, rises upright in the
+midst of the mournful plains. At first it looks like a mass of towering
+rocks, which in this hour of twilight magic have taken on a pale violet
+colour, and seem almost transparent. And the sun, scarcely emerged
+from the desert, lights them in a curious gradation, and orders their
+contours with a fringe of fresh rose-colour. And they are not rocks, in
+fact, for as we look more closely, they show us lines symmetrical
+and straight. Not rocks, but architectural masses, tremendous and
+superhuman, placed there in attitudes of quasi-eternal stability. And
+out of them rise the points of two obelisks, sharp as the blade of a
+lance. And then, at once, I understand--Thebes!
+
+Thebes! Last evening it was hidden in the shadow and I did not know it
+was so near. But Thebes assuredly it is, for nothing else in the world
+could produce such an apparition. And I salute with a kind of shudder
+of respect this unique and sovereign ruin, which had haunted me for many
+years, but which until now life had not left me time to visit.
+
+And now for Luxor, which in the epoch of the Pharaohs was a suburb of
+the royal town, and is still its port. It is there, it seems, where we
+must stop our dahabiya in order to proceed to the fabulous palace which
+the rising sun has just disclosed to us.
+
+And while my equipage of bronze--intoning that song, as old as Egypt
+and everlastingly the same, which seems to help the men in their arduous
+work--is busy unfastening the chain which binds us to the bank, I
+continue to watch the distant apparition. It emerges gradually from the
+light morning mists which, perhaps, made it seem even larger than it is.
+The clear light of the ascending sun shows it now in detail; and reveals
+it as all battered, broken and ruinous in the midst of a silent plain,
+on the yellow carpet of the desert. And how this sun, rising in its
+clear splendour, seems to crush it with its youth and stupendous
+duration. This same sun had attained to its present round form, had
+acquired the clear precision of its disc, and begun its daily promenade
+over the country of the sands, countless centuries of centuries, before
+it saw, as it might be yesterday, this town of Thebes arise; an
+attempt at magnificence which seemed to promise for the human pygmies
+a sufficiently interesting future, but which, in the event, we have
+not been able even to equal. And it proved, too, a thing quite puny and
+derisory, since here it is laid low, after having subsisted barely four
+negligible thousands of years.
+
+*****
+
+An hour later we arrive at Luxor, and what a surprise awaits us there!
+
+The thing which dominates the whole town, and may be seen five or six
+miles away, is the Winter Palace, a hasty modern production which has
+grown on the border of the Nile during the past year: a colossal hotel,
+obviously sham, made of plaster and mud, on a framework of iron. Twice
+or three times as high as the admirable Pharaonic Temple, its impudent
+facade rises there, painted a dirty yellow. One such thing, it will
+readily be understood, is sufficient to disfigure pitiably the whole of
+the surroundings. The old Arab town, with its little white houses, its
+minarets and its palm-trees, might as well not exist. The famous temple
+and the forest of heavy Osiridean columns admire themselves in vain in
+the waters of the river. It is the end of Luxor.
+
+And what a crowd of people is here! While, on the contrary, the opposite
+bank seems so absolutely desertlike, with its stretches of golden sand
+and, on the horizon, its mountains of the colour of glowing embers,
+which, as we know, are full of mummies.
+
+Poor Luxor! Along the banks is a row of tourist boats, a sort of two or
+three storeyed barracks, which nowadays infest the Nile from Cairo to
+the Cataracts. Their whistlings and the vibration of their dynamos make
+an intolerable noise. How shall I find a quiet place for my dahabiya,
+where the functionaries of Messrs. Cook will not come to disturb me?
+
+We can now see nothing of the palaces of Thebes, whither I am to repair
+in the evening. We are farther from them than we were last night. The
+apparition during our morning's journey had slowly receded in the plains
+flooded by sunlight. And then the Winter Palace and the new boats shut
+out the view.
+
+But this modern quay of Luxor, where I disembark at ten o'clock in the
+morning in clear and radiant sunshine, is not without its amusing side.
+
+In a line with the Winter Palace a number of stalls follow one another.
+All those things with which our tourists are wont to array themselves
+are on sale there: fans, fly flaps, helmets and blue spectacles. And,
+in thousands, photographs of the ruins. And there too are the toys, the
+souvenirs of the Soudan: old negro knives, panther-skins and gazelle
+horns. Numbers of Indians even are come to this improvised fair,
+bringing their stuffs from Rajputana and Cashmere. And, above all, there
+are dealers in mummies, offering for sale mysteriously shaped coffins,
+mummy-cloths, dead hands, gods, scarabaei--and the thousand and
+one things that this old soil has yielded for centuries like an
+inexhaustible mine.
+
+Along the stalls, keeping in the shade of the houses and the scattered
+palms, pass representatives of the plutocracy of the world. Dressed
+by the same costumiers, bedecked in the same plumes, and with faces
+reddened by the same sun, the millionaire daughters of Chicago merchants
+elbow their sisters of the old nobility. Pressing amongst them impudent
+young Bedouins pester the fair travellers to mount their saddled
+donkeys. And as if they were charged to add to this babel a note of
+beauty, the battalions of Mr. Cook, of both sexes, and always in a
+hurry, pass by with long strides.
+
+Beyond the shops, following the line of the quay, there are other
+hotels. Less aggressive, all of them, than the Winter Palace, they have
+had the discretion not to raise themselves too high, and to cover their
+fronts with white chalk in the Arab fashion, even to conceal themselves
+in clusters of palm-trees.
+
+And finally there is the colossal temple of Luxor, looking as out of
+place now as the poor obelisk which Egypt gave us as a present, and
+which stands to-day in the Place de la Concorde.
+
+Bordering the Nile, it is a colossal grove of stone, about three hundred
+yards in length. In epochs of a magnificence that is now scarcely
+conceivable this forest of columns grew high and thick, rising
+impetuously at the bidding of Amenophis and the great Ramses. And how
+beautiful it must have been even yesterday, dominating in its superb
+disarray this surrounding country, vowed for centuries to neglect and
+silence!
+
+But to-day, with all these things that men have built around it, you
+might say that it no longer exists.
+
+We reach an iron-barred gate and, to enter, have to show our permit to
+the guards. Once inside the immense sanctuary, perhaps we shall find
+solitude again. But, alas, under the profaned columns a crowd of people
+passes, with _Baedekers_ in their hands, the same people that one sees
+here everywhere, the same world as frequents Nice and the Riviera. And,
+to crown the mockery, the noise of the dynamos pursues us even here, for
+the boats of Messrs. Cook are moored to the bank close by.
+
+Hundreds of columns, columns which are anterior by many centuries to
+those of Greece, and represent, in their naïve enormity, the first
+conceptions of the human brain. Some are fluted and give the impression
+of sheaves of monstrous weeds; others, quite plain and simple, imitate
+the stem of the papyrus, and bear by way of capital its strange flower.
+The tourists, like the flies, enter at certain times of the day, which
+it suffices to know. Soon the little bells of the hotels will call
+them away and the hour of midday will find me here alone. But what in
+heaven's name will deliver me from the noise of the dynamos? But look!
+beyond there, at the bottom of the sanctuaries, in the part which should
+be the holy of holies, that great fresco, now half effaced, but still
+clearly visible on the wall--how unexpected and arresting it is! An
+image of Christ! Christ crowned with the Byzantine aureole. It has
+been painted on a coarse plaster, which seems to have been added by an
+unskilful hand, and is wearing off and exposing the hieroglyphs beneath.
+. . . This temple, in fact, almost indestructible by reason of its
+massiveness, has passed through the hands of diverse masters. Its
+antiquity was already legendary in the time of Alexander the Great, on
+whose behalf a chapel was added to it; and later on, in the first ages
+of Christianity, a corner of the ruins was turned into a cathedral.
+The tourists begin to depart, for the lunch bell calls them to the
+neighbouring _tables d'hote_; and while I wait till they shall be gone,
+I occupy myself in following the bas-reliefs which are displayed for a
+length of more than a hundred yards along the base of the walls. It
+is one long row of people moving in their thousands all in the same
+direction--the ritual procession of the God Amen. With the care which
+characterised the Egyptians to draw everything from life so as to render
+it eternal, there are represented here the smallest details of a day
+of festival three or four thousand years ago. And how like it is to a
+holiday of the people of to-day! Along the route of the procession are
+ranged jugglers and sellers of drinks and fruits, and negro acrobats who
+walk on their hands and twist themselves into all kinds of contortions.
+But the procession itself was evidently of a magnificence such as we no
+longer know. The number of musicians and priests, of corporations, of
+emblems and banners, is quite bewildering. The God Amen himself came by
+water, on the river, in his golden barge with its raised prow, followed
+by the barques of all the other gods and goddesses of his heaven. The
+reddish stone, carved with minute care, tells me all this, as it has
+already told it to so many dead generations, so that I seem almost to
+see it.
+
+And now everybody has gone: the colonnades are empty and the noise of
+the dynamos has ceased. Midday approaches with its torpor. The whole
+temple seems to be ablaze with rays, and I watch the clear-cut shadows
+cast by this forest of stone gradually shortening on the ground. The
+sun, which just now shone, all smiles and gaiety, upon the quay of the
+new town amid the uproar of the stall-keepers, the donkey drivers
+and the cosmopolitan passengers, casts here a sullen, impassive and
+consuming fire. And meanwhile the shadows shorten--and just as they do
+every day, beneath this sky which is never overcast, just as they have
+done for five and thirty centuries, these columns, these friezes
+and this temple itself, like a mysterious and solemn sundial, record
+patiently on the ground the slow passing of the hours. Verily for us,
+the ephemerae of thought, this unbroken continuity of the sun of Egypt
+has more of melancholy even than the changing, overcast skies of our
+climate.
+
+And now, at last, the temple is restored to solitude and all noise in
+the neighbourhood has ceased.
+
+An avenue bordered by very high columns, of which the capitals are in
+the form of the full-blown flowers of the papyrus, leads me to a place
+shut in and almost terrible, where is massed an assembly of colossi.
+Two, who, if they were standing, would be quite ten yards in height, are
+seated on thrones on either side of the entrance. The others, ranged on
+the three sides of the courtyard, stand upright behind colonnades, but
+look as if they were about to issue thence and to stride rapidly towards
+me. Some broken and battered, have lost their faces and preserve only
+their intimidating attitude. Those that remain intact--white faces
+beneath their Sphinx's headgear--open their eyes wide and smile.
+
+This was formerly the principal entrance, and the office of these
+colossi was to welcome the multitudes. But now the gates of honour
+flanked by obelisks of red granite, are obstructed by a litter of
+enormous ruins. And the courtyard has become a place voluntarily closed,
+where nothing of the outside world is any longer to be seen. In moments
+of silence, one can abstract oneself from all the neighbouring modern
+things, and forget the hour, the day, the century even, in the midst
+of these gigantic figures, whose smile disdains the flight of ages. The
+granites within which we are immured--and in such terrible company--shut
+out everything save the point of an old neighbouring minaret which shows
+now against the blue of the sky: a humble graft of Islam which grew
+here amongst the ruins some centuries ago, when the ruins themselves had
+already subsisted for three thousand years--a little mosque built on a
+mass of debris, which it new protects with its inviolability. How many
+treasures and relics and documents are hidden and guarded by this mosque
+of the peristyle! For none would dare to dig in the ground within its
+sacred walls.
+
+Gradually the silence of the temple becomes profound. And if the
+shortened shadows betray the hour of noon, there is nothing to tell
+to what millennium that hour belongs. The silences and middays like
+to this, which have passed before the eyes of these giants ambushed in
+their colonnades--who could count them?
+
+High above us, lost in the incandescent blue, soar the birds of
+prey--and they were there in the times of the Pharaohs, displaying in
+the air identical plumages, uttering the same cries. The beasts and
+plants, in the course of time, have varied less than men, and remain
+unchanged in the smallest details.
+
+Each of the colossi around me--standing there proudly with one leg
+advanced as if for a march, heavy and sure, which nothing should
+withstand--grasps passionately in his clenched fist, at the end of the
+muscular arm, a kind of buckled cross, which in Egypt was the symbol
+of eternal life. And this is what the decision of their movement
+symbolises: confident all of them in this poor bauble which they hold in
+their hand, they cross with a triumphant step the threshold of death.
+. . . “Eternal Life”--the thought of immortality--how the human soul has
+been obsessed by it, particularly in the periods marked by its greatest
+strivings! The tame submission to the belief that the rottenness of
+the grave is the end of all is characteristic of ages of decadence and
+mediocrity.
+
+The three similar giants, little damaged in the course of their long
+existence, who align the eastern side of this courtyard strewn with
+blocks, represent, as indeed do all the others, that same Ramses II.,
+whose effigy was multiplied so extravagantly at Thebes and Memphis. But
+these three have preserved a powerful and impetuous life. They might
+have been carved and polished yesterday. Between the monstrous reddish
+pillars, they look like white apparitions issuing from their embrasure
+of columns and advancing together like soldiers at manoeuvres. The
+sun at this moment falls perpendicularly on their heads and strange
+headgear, details their everlasting smile, and then sheds itself on
+their shoulders and their naked torso, exaggerating their athletic
+muscles. Each holding in his hand the symbolical cross, the three giants
+rush forward with a formidable stride, heads raised, smiling, in a
+radiant march into eternity.
+
+Oh! this midday sun, that now pours down upon the white faces of these
+giants, and displaces ever so slowly the shadows cast upon their breasts
+by their chins and Osiridean beards. To think how often in the midst of
+this same silence, this same ray has fallen thus, fallen from the same
+changeless sky, to occupy itself in this same tranquil play! Yes, I
+think that the fogs and rains of our winters, upon these stupendous
+ruins, would be less sad and less terrible than the calm of this eternal
+sunshine.
+
+*****
+
+Suddenly a ridiculous noise begins to make the air tremble; the dynamos
+of the Agencies have been put in motion, and ladies in green spectacles
+arrive, a charming throng, with guidebooks and cameras. The tourists,
+in short, are come out of their hotels, at the same hour as the flies
+awake. And the midday peace of Luxor has come to an end.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+A TWENTIETH-CENTURY EVENING AT THEBES
+
+An impalpable dust floats in a sky which scarcely ever knows a cloud; a
+dust so impalpable that, even while it powders the heavens with gold, it
+leaves them their infinite transparency. It is a dust of remote ages, of
+things destroyed; a dust that is here continually--of which the gold at
+this moment fades to green at the zenith, but flames and glistens in
+the west, for it is now that magnificent hour which marks the end of the
+day's decline, and the still burning globe of the sun, quite low down
+in the heaven, begins to light up on all sides the conflagration of the
+evening.
+
+This setting sun illumines with splendour a silent chaos of granite,
+which is not that of the slipping of mountains, but that of ruins. And
+of such ruins as, to our eyes unaccustomed hereditarily to proportions
+so gigantic, seem superhuman. In places, huge masses of carven
+stone--pylons--still stand upright, rising like hills. Others are
+crumbling in all directions in bewildering cataracts of stone. It is
+difficult to conceive how these things, so massive that they might have
+seemed eternal, could come to suffer such an utter ruin. Fragments of
+columns, fragments of obelisks, broken by downfalls of which the mere
+imagination is awful, heads and head-dresses of giant divinities, all
+lie higgledy-piggledy in a disorder beyond possible redress. Nowhere
+surely on our earth does the sun in his daily revolution cast his light
+on such debris as this, on such a litter of vanished palaces and dead
+colossi.
+
+It was even here, seven or eight thousand years ago, under this pure
+crystal sky, that the first awakening of human thought began. Our Europe
+then was still sleeping, wrapped in the mantle of its damp forests;
+sleeping that sleep which still had thousands of years to run. Here, a
+precocious humanity, only recently emerged from the Age of Stone, that
+earliest form of all, an infant humanity, which saw massively on its
+issue from the massiveness of the original matter, conceived and built
+terrible sanctuaries for gods, at first dreadful and vague, such as its
+nascent reason allowed it to conceive them. Then the first megalithic
+blocks were erected; then began that mad heaping up and up, which was
+to last nearly fifty centuries; and temples were built above temples,
+palaces over palaces, each generation striving to outdo its predecessor
+by a more titanic grandeur.
+
+Afterwards, four thousand years ago, Thebes was in the height of her
+glory, encumbered with gods and with magnificence, the focus of the
+light of the world in the most ancient historic periods; while our
+Occident was still asleep and Greece and Assyria were scarcely awakened.
+Only in the extreme East, a humanity of a different race, the yellow
+people, called to follow in totally different ways, was fixing, so that
+they remain even to our day, the oblique lines of its angular roofs and
+the rictus of its monsters.
+
+The men of Thebes, if they still saw too massively and too vastly,
+at least saw straight; they saw calmly, at the same time as they saw
+forever. Their conceptions, which had begun to inspire those of Greece,
+were afterwards in some measure to inspire our own. In religion, in art,
+in beauty under all its aspects, they were as much our ancestors as were
+the Aryans.
+
+Later again, sixteen hundred years before the birth of Christ, in one
+of the apogees of the town which, in the course of its interminable
+duration, experienced so many fluctuations, some ostentatious kings
+thought fit to build on this ground, already covered with temples,
+that which still remains the most arresting marvel of the ruins: the
+hypostyle hall, dedicated to the God Amen, with its forest of columns,
+as monstrous as the trunk of the baobab and as high as towers, compared
+with which the pillars of our cathedrals are utterly insignificant.
+In those days the same gods reigned at Thebes as three thousand years
+before, but in the interval they had been transformed little by little
+in accordance with the progressive development of human thought, and
+Amen, the host of this prodigious hall, asserted himself more and more
+as the sovereign master of life and eternity. Pharaonic Egypt was really
+tending, in spite of some revolts, towards the notion of a divine unity;
+even, one might say, to the notion of a supreme pity, for she already
+had her Apis, emanating from the All-Powerful, born of a virgin
+mother, and come humbly to the earth in order to make acquaintance with
+suffering.
+
+After Seti I. and the Ramses had built, in honour of Amen, this temple,
+which, beyond all doubt, is the grandest and most durable in the world,
+men still continued for another fifteen centuries to heap up in its
+neighbourhood those blocks of granite and marble and sandstone, whose
+enormity now amazes us. Even for the invaders of Egypt, the Greeks and
+Romans, this old ancestral town of towns remained imposing and unique.
+They repaired its ruins, and built here temple after temple, in a style
+which hardly ever changes. Even in the ages of decadence everything
+that raised itself from the old, sacred soil, seemed to be impregnated a
+little with the ancient grandeur.
+
+And it was only when the early Christians ruled here, and after them
+the Moslem iconoclasts, that the destruction became final. To these new
+believers, who, in their simplicity, imagined themselves to be possessed
+of the ultimate religious formula and to know by His right name
+the great Unknowable, Thebes became the haunt of “false gods,” the
+abomination of abominations, which it behoved them to destroy.
+
+And so they set to work, penetrating with an ever-present fear into the
+profound depths of the gloomy sanctuaries, mutilating first of all the
+thousands of visages whose disconcerting smile frightened them, and then
+exhausting themselves in the effort to uproot the colossi, which even
+with the help of levers, they could not move. It was no easy task
+indeed, for everything was as solid as geological masses, as rocks or
+promontories. But for five or six hundred years the town was given over
+to the caprice of desecrators.
+
+And then came the centuries of silence and oblivion under the shroud of
+the desert sands, which, thickening each year, proceeded to bury, and,
+in the event, to preserve for us, this peerless relic.
+
+And now, at last, Thebes is being exhumed and restored to a semblance
+of life--now, after a cycle of seven or eight thousand years, when our
+Western humanity, having left the primitive gods that we see here, to
+embrace the Christian conception, which, even yesterday, made it live,
+is in way of denying everything, and struggles before the enigma
+of death in an obscurity more dismal and more fearful than in the
+commencement of the ages. (More dismal and more fearful still in this,
+that plea of youth is gone.) From all parts of Europe curious and
+unquiet spirits, as well as mere idlers, turn their steps towards
+Thebes, the ancient mother. Men clear the rubbish from its remains,
+devise ways of retarding the enormous fallings of its ruins, and dig in
+its old soil, stored with hidden treasure.
+
+And this evening on one of the portals to which I have just
+mounted--that which opens at the north-west and terminates the colossal
+artery of temples and palaces, many very diverse groups have already
+taken their places, after the pilgrimage of the day amongst the ruins.
+And others are hastening towards the staircase by which we have just
+climbed, so as not to miss the grand spectacle of the sun setting,
+always with the same serenity, the same unchanging magnificence, behind
+the town which once was consecrated to it.
+
+French, German, English; I see them below, a lot of pygmy figures,
+issuing from the hypostyle hall, and making their way towards us. Mean
+and pitiful they look in their twentieth-century travellers' costumes,
+hurrying along that avenue where once defiled so many processions of
+gods and goddesses. And yet this, perhaps, is the only occasion on
+which one of these bands of tourists does not seem to me altogether
+ridiculous. Amongst these groups of unknown people, there is none who is
+not collected and thoughtful, or who does not at least pretend to be
+so; and there is some saving quality of grace, even some grandeur of
+humility, in the sentiment which has brought them to this town of Amen,
+and in the homage of their silence.
+
+We are so high on this portal that we might fancy ourselves upon a
+tower, and the defaced stones of which it is built are immeasurably
+large. Instinctively each one sits with his face to the glowing sun, and
+consequently to the outspread distances of the fields and the desert.
+
+Before us, under our feet, an avenue stretches away, prolonging towards
+the fields the pomp of the dead city--an avenue bordered by monstrous
+rams, larger than buffaloes, all crouched on their pedestals in two
+parallel rows in the traditional hieratic pose. The avenue terminates
+beyond at a kind of wharf or landing-stage which formerly gave on to
+the Nile. It was there that the God Amen, carried and followed by long
+trains of priests, came every year to take his golden barge for a solemn
+procession. But it leads to-day only to the cornfields, for, in the
+course of successive centuries, the river has receded little by little
+and now winds its course a thousand yards away in the direction of
+Libya.
+
+We can see, beyond, the old sacred Nile between the clusters of
+palm-trees on its banks; meandering there like a rosy pathway, which
+remains, nevertheless, in this hour of universal incandescence,
+astonishingly pale, and gleams occasionally with a bluish light. And
+on the farther bank, from one end to the other of the western horizon,
+stretches the chain of the Libyan mountains behind which the sun is
+about to plunge; a chain of red sandstone, parched since the beginning
+of the world--without a rival in the preservation to perpetuity of dead
+bodies--which the Thebans perforated to its extreme depths to fill it
+with sarcophagi.
+
+We watch the sun descend. But we turn also to see, behind us, the ruins
+in this the traditional moment of their apotheosis. Thebes, the immense
+town-mummy, seems all at once to be ablaze--as if its old stones were
+able still to burn; all its blocks, fallen or upright, appear to have
+been suddenly made ruddy by the glow of fire.
+
+On this side, too, the view embraces great peaceful distances. Past the
+last pylons, and beyond the crumbling ramparts the country, down there
+behind the town, presents the same appearance as that we were facing a
+moment before. The same cornfields, the same woods of date-trees,
+that make a girdle of green palms around the ruins. And, right in the
+background, a chain of mountains is lit up and glows with a vivid coral
+colour. It is the chain of the Arabian desert, lying parallel to that of
+Libya, along the whole length of the Nile Valley--which is thus
+guarded on right and left by stones and sand stretched out in profound
+solitudes.
+
+In all the surrounding country which we command from this spot there
+is no indication of the present day; only here and there, amongst the
+palm-trees, the villages of the field labourers, whose houses of dried
+earth can scarcely have changed since the days of the Pharaohs. Our
+contemporary desecrators have up till now respected the infinite
+desuetude of the place, and, for the tourists who begin to haunt it, no
+one yet has dared to build a hotel.
+
+Slowly the sun descends; and behind us the granites of the town-mummy
+seem to burn more and more. It is true that a slight shadow of a warmer
+tint, an amaranth violet, begins to encroach upon the lower parts,
+spreading along the avenues and over the open spaces. But everything
+that rises into the sky--the friezes of the temples, the capitals of
+the columns, the sharp points of the obelisks--are still red as glowing
+embers. These all become imbued with light and continue to glow and shed
+a rosy illumination until the end of the twilight.
+
+It is a glorious hour, even for the old dust of Egypt, which fills the
+air eternally, without detracting at all from its wonderful clearness.
+It savours of spices, of the Bedouin, of the bitumen of the sarcophagus.
+And here now it is playing the role of those powders of different shades
+of gold which the Japanese use for the backgrounds of their lacquered
+landscapes. It reveals itself everywhere, close to and on the horizon,
+modifying at its pleasure the colour of things, and giving them a kind
+of metallic lustre. The phantasy of its changes is unimaginable. Even
+in the distances of the countryside, it is busy indicating by little
+trailing clouds of gold the smallest pathways traversed by the herds.
+
+And now the disc of the God of Thebes has disappeared behind the Libyan
+mountains, after changing its light from red to yellow and from yellow
+to green.
+
+And thereupon the tourists, judging that the display is over for
+the night, commence to descend and make ready for departure. Some in
+carriages, others on donkeys, they go to recruit themselves with the
+electricity and elegance of Luxor, the neighbouring town (wines and
+spirits are paid for as extras, and we dress for dinner). And the dust
+condescends to mark their exodus also by a last cloud of gold beneath
+the palm-trees of the road.
+
+An immediate solemnity succeeds to their departure. Above the mud houses
+of the fellah villages rise slender columns of smoke, which are of a
+periwinkle-blue in the midst of the still yellow atmosphere. They tell
+of the humble life of these little homesteads, subsisting here, where in
+the backward of the ages were so many palaces and splendours.
+
+And the first bayings of the watchdogs announce already the vague
+uneasiness of the evenings around the ruins. There is no one now within
+the mummy-town, which seems all at once to have grown larger in the
+silence. Very quickly the violet shadow covers it, all save the extreme
+points of its obelisks, which keep still a little of their rose-colour.
+The feeling comes over you that a sovereign mystery has taken possession
+of the town, as if some vague phantom things had just passed into it.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THEBES BY NIGHT
+
+The feeling, almost, that you have grown suddenly smaller by entering
+there, that you are dwarfed to less than human size--to such an extent
+do the proportions of these ruins seem to crush you--and the illusion,
+also, that the light, instead of being extinguished with the evening,
+has only changed its colour, and become blue: that is what one
+experiences on a clear Egyptian night, in walking between the colonnades
+of the great temple at Thebes.
+
+The place is, moreover, so singular and so terrible that its mere name
+would at once cast a spell upon the spirit, even if one were ignorant
+of the place itself. The hypostyle of the temple of the God Amen--that
+could be no other thing but one. For this hall is unique in the world,
+in the same way as the Grotto of Fingal and the Himalayas are unique.
+
+*****
+
+To wander absolutely alone at night in Thebes requires during the winter
+a certain amount of stratagem and a knowledge of the routine of the
+tourists. It is necessary, first of all, to choose a night on which the
+moon rises late and then, having entered before the close of the day, to
+escape the notice of the Bedouin guards who shut the gates at nightfall.
+Thus have I waited with the patience of a stone Osiris, till the grand
+transformation scene of the setting of the sun was played out once more
+upon the ruins. Thebes, which, during the day, is almost animate by
+reason of the presence of the visitors and the gangs of fellahs who,
+singing the while, are busy at the diggings and the clearing away of
+the rubbish, has emptied itself little by little, while the blue shadows
+were mounting from the base of the monstrous sanctuaries. I watched the
+people moving in a long row, like a trail of ants, towards the western
+gate between the pylons of the Ptolemies, and the last of them had
+disappeared before the rosy light died away on the topmost points of the
+obelisks.
+
+It seemed as if the silence and the night arrived together from beyond
+the Arabian desert, advanced together across the plain, spreading out
+like a rapid oil-stain; then gained the town from east to west, and rose
+rapidly from the ground to the very summits of the temples. And this
+march of the darkness was infinitely solemn.
+
+For the first few moments, indeed, you might imagine that it was going
+to be an ordinary night such as we know in our climate, and a sense of
+uneasiness takes hold of you in the midst of this confusion of enormous
+stones, which in the darkness would become a quite inextricable maze.
+Oh! the horror of being lost in those ruins of Thebes and not being able
+to see! But in the event the air preserved its transparency to such a
+degree, and the stars began soon to scintillate so brightly that the
+surrounding things could be distinguished almost as well as in the
+daytime.
+
+Indeed, now that the time of transition between the day and night
+has passed, the eyes grow accustomed to the strange, blue, persistent
+clearness so that you seem suddenly to have acquired the pupils of a
+cat; and the ultimate effect is merely as if you saw through a smoked
+glass which changed all the various shades of this reddish-coloured
+country into one uniform tint of blue.
+
+Behold me then, for some two or three hours, alone among the temples of
+the Pharaohs. The tourists, whom the carriages and donkeys are at this
+moment taking back to the hotels of Luxor, will not return till very
+late, when the full moon will have risen and be shedding its clear light
+upon the ruins. My post, while I waited, was high up among the ruins on
+the margin of the sacred Lake of Osiris, the still and enclosed water
+of which is astonishing in that it has remained there for so many
+centuries. It still conceals, no doubt, numberless treasures confided
+to it in the days of slaughters and pillages, when the armies of the
+Persian and Nubian kings forced the thick, surrounding walls.
+
+In a few minutes, thousands of stars appear at the bottom of this
+water, reflecting symmetrically the veritable ones which now scintillate
+everywhere in the heavens. A sudden cold spreads over the town-mummy,
+whose stones, still warm from their exposure to the sun, cool very
+rapidly in this nocturnal blue which envelops them as in a shroud. I
+am free to wander where I please without risk of meeting anyone, and I
+begin to descend by the steps made by the falling of the granite blocks,
+which have formed on all sides staircases as if for giants. On the
+overturned surfaces, my hands encounter the deep, clear-cut hollows of
+the hieroglyphs, and sometimes of those inevitable people, carved
+in profile, who raise their arms, all of them, and make signs to one
+another. On arriving at the bottom I am received by a row of statues
+with battered faces, seated on thrones, and without hindrance of any
+kind, and recognising everything in the blue transparency which takes
+the place of day, I come to the great avenue of the palaces of Amen.
+
+We have nothing on earth in the least degree comparable to this avenue,
+which passive multitudes took nearly three thousand years to construct,
+expending, century after century, their innumerable energies in carrying
+these stones, which our machines now could not move. And the objective
+was always the same: to prolong indefinitely the perspectives of pylons,
+colossi and obelisks, continuing always this same artery of temples
+and palaces in the direction of the old Nile--while the latter, on the
+contrary, receded slowly, from century to century, towards Libya. It
+is here, and especially at night, that you suffer the feeling of having
+been shrunken to the size of a pygmy. All round you rise monoliths
+mighty as rocks. You have to take twenty paces to pass the base of a
+single one of them. They are placed quite close together, too close,
+it seems, in view of their enormity and mass. There is not enough air
+between them, and the closeness of their juxtaposition disconcerts you
+more, perhaps, even than their massiveness.
+
+The avenue which I have followed in an easterly direction abuts on as
+disconcerting a chaos of granite as exists in Thebes--the hall of the
+feasts of Thothmes III. What kind of feasts were they, that this king
+gave here, in this forest of thick-set columns, beneath these ceilings,
+of which the smallest stone, if it fell, would crush twenty men? In
+places the friezes, the colonnades, which seem almost diaphanous in the
+air, are outlined still with a proud magnificence in unbroken alignment
+against the star-strewn sky. Elsewhere the destruction is bewildering;
+fragments of columns, entablatures, bas-reliefs lie about in
+indescribable confusion, like a lot of scattered wreckage after a
+world-wide tempest. For it was not enough that the hand of man should
+overturn these things. Tremblings of the earth, at different times, have
+also come to shake this Cyclops palace which threatened to be eternal.
+And all this--which represents such an excess of force, of movement,
+of impulsion, alike for its erection as for its overthrow--all this is
+tranquil this evening, oh! so tranquil, although toppling as if for an
+imminent downfall--tranquil forever, one might say, congealed by the
+cold and by the night.
+
+I was prepared for silence in such a place, but not for the sounds which
+I commence to hear. First of all an osprey sounds the prelude, above my
+head and so close to me that it holds me trembling throughout its long
+cry. Then other voices answer from the depths of the ruins, voices very
+diverse, but all sinister. Some are only able to mew on two long-drawn
+notes: some yelp like jackals round a cemetery, and others again imitate
+the sound of a steel spring slowly unwinding itself. And this concert
+comes always from above. Owls, ospreys, screech-owls, all the different
+kinds of birds, with hooked beaks and round eyes, and silken wings that
+enable them to fly noiselessly, have their homes amongst the granites
+massively upheld in the air; and they are celebrating now, each after
+its own fashion, the nocturnal festival. Intermittent calls break upon
+the air, and long-drawn infinitely mournful wailings, that sometimes
+swell and sometimes seem to be strangled and end in a kind of sob. And
+then, in spite of the sonority of the vast straight walls, in spite of
+the echoes which prolong the cries, the silence obstinately returns.
+Silence. The silence after all and beyond all doubt is the true master
+at this hour of this kingdom at once colossal, motionless and blue--a
+silence that seems to be infinite, because we know that there is
+nothing around these ruins, nothing but the line of the dead sands, the
+threshold of the deserts.
+
+*****
+
+I retrace my steps towards the west in the direction of the hypostyle,
+traversing again the avenue of monstrous splendours, imprisoned and,
+as it were, dwarfed between the rows of sovereign stones. There are
+obelisks there, some upright, some overthrown. One like those of Luxor,
+but much higher, remains intact and raises its sharp point into the sky;
+others, less well known in their exquisite simplicity, are quite plain
+and straight from base to summit, bearing only in relief gigantic lotus
+flowers, whose long climbing stems bloom above in the half light cast
+by the stars. The passage becomes narrower and more obscure, and it is
+necessary sometimes to grope my way. And then again my hands encounter
+the everlasting hieroglyphs carved everywhere, and sometimes the legs of
+a colossus seated on its throne. The stones are still slightly warm, so
+fierce has been the heat of the sun during the day. And certain of the
+granites, so hard that our steel chisels could not cut them, have kept
+their polish despite the lapse of centuries, and my fingers slip in
+touching them.
+
+There is now no sound. The music of the night birds has ceased. I listen
+in vain--so attentively that I can hear the beating of my heart. Not a
+sound, not even the buzzing of a fly. Everything is silent, everything
+is ghostly; and in spite of the persistent warmth of the stones the air
+grows colder and colder, and one gets the impression that everything
+here is frozen--definitely--as in the coldness of death.
+
+A vast silence reigns, a silence that has subsisted for centuries, on
+this same spot, where formerly for three or four thousand years rose
+such an uproar of living men. To think of the clamorous multitudes who
+once assembled here, of their cries of triumph and anguish, of their
+dying agonies. First of all the pantings of those thousands of harnessed
+workers, exhausting themselves generation after generation, under the
+burning sun, in dragging and placing one above the other these stones,
+whose enormity now amazes us. And the prodigious feasts, the music of
+the long harps, the blares of the brazen trumpets; the slaughters and
+battles when Thebes was the great and unique capital of the world,
+an object of fear and envy to the kings of the barbarian peoples who
+commenced to awake in neighbouring lands; the symphonies of siege and
+pillage, in days when men bellowed with the throats of beasts. To think
+of all this, here on this ground, on a night so calm and blue! And these
+same walls of granite from Syene, on which my puny hands now rest, to
+think of the beings who have touched them in passing, who have fallen by
+their side in last sanguinary conflicts, without rubbing even the polish
+from their changeless surfaces!
+
+*****
+
+I now arrive at the hypostyle of the temple of Amen, and a sensation of
+fear makes me hesitate at first on the threshold. To find himself in the
+dead of night before such a place might well make a man falter. It
+seems like some hall for Titans, a remnant of fabulous ages, which
+has maintained itself, during its long duration, by force of its very
+massiveness, like the mountains. Nothing human is so vast. Nowhere on
+earth have men conceived such dwellings. Columns after columns, higher
+and more massive than towers, follow one another so closely, in
+an excess of accumulation, that they produce a feeling almost of
+suffocation. They mount into the clear sky and sustain there traverses
+of stone which you scarcely dare to contemplate. One hesitates to
+advance; a feeling comes over you that you are become infinitesimally
+small and as easy to crush as an insect. The silence grows
+preternaturally solemn. The stars through all the gaps in the fearful
+ceilings seem to send their scintillations to you in an abyss. It is
+cold and clear and blue.
+
+The central bay of this hypostyle is in the same line as the road I
+have been following since I left the hall of Thothmes. It prolongs and
+magnifies as in an apotheosis that same long avenue, for the gods and
+kings, which was the glory of Thebes, and which in the succession of the
+ages nothing has contrived to equal. The columns which border it are
+so gigantic[*] that their tops, formed of mysterious full-blown petals,
+high up above the ground on which we crawl, are completely bathed in the
+diffuse clearness of the sky. And enclosing this kind of nave on either
+side, like a terrible forest, is another mass of columns--monster
+columns, of an earlier style, of which the capitals close instead of
+opening, imitating the buds of some flower which will never blossom.
+Sixty to the right, sixty to the left, too close together for their
+size, they grow thick like a forest of baobabs that wanted space: they
+induce a feeling of oppression without possible deliverance, of massive
+and mournful eternity.
+
+     [*] About 30 feet in circumference and 75 feet in height
+     including the capital.
+
+And this, forsooth, was the place that I had wished to traverse alone,
+without even the Bedouin guard, who at night believes it his duty to
+follow the visitors. But now it grows lighter and lighter. Too light
+even, for a blue phosphorescence, coming from the eastern horizon,
+begins to filter through the opacity of the colonnades on the right,
+outlines the monstrous shafts, and details them by vague glimmerings on
+their edges. The full moon is risen, alas! and my hours of solitude are
+nearly over.
+
+*****
+
+The moon! Suddenly the stones of the summit, the copings, the formidable
+friezes, are lighted by rays of clear light, and here and there, on the
+bas-reliefs encircling the pillars, appear luminous trails which reveal
+the gods and goddesses engraved in the stone. They were watching in
+myriads around me, as I knew well,--coifed, all of them, in discs or
+great horns. They stare at one another with their arms raised, spreading
+out their long fingers in an eager attempt at conversation. They are
+numberless, these eternally gesticulating gods. Wherever you look their
+forms are multiplied with a stupefying repetition. They seem to have
+some mysterious secret to convey to one another, but have perforce to
+remain silent, and for all the expressiveness of their attitudes their
+hands do not move. And hieroglyphs, too, repeated to infinity, envelop
+you on all sides like a multiple woof of mystery.
+
+*****
+
+Minute by minute now, everything amongst these rigid dead things grows
+more precise. Cold, hard rays penetrate through the immense ruin,
+separating with a sharp incisiveness the light from the shadows.
+The feeling that these stones, wearied as they were with their long
+duration, might still be thoughtful, still mindful of their past, grows
+less--less than it was a few moments before, far less than during the
+preceding blue phantasmagoria. Under this clear, pale light, as in
+the daytime, under the fire of the sun, Thebes has lost for the moment
+whatever remained to it of soul; it has receded farther into the
+backward of time, and appears now nothing more than a vast gigantic
+fossil that excites only our wonder and our fear.
+
+*****
+
+But the tourists will soon be here, attracted by the moon. A league
+away, in the hotels of Luxor, I can fancy how they have hurried away
+from the tables, for fear of missing the celebrated spectacle. For me,
+therefore, it is time to beat a retreat, and, by the great avenue again,
+I direct my steps towards the pylons of the Ptolemies, where the night
+guards are waiting.
+
+They are busy already, these Bedouins, in opening the gates for some
+tourists, who have shown their permits, and who carry Kodaks, magnesium
+to light up the temples--quite an outfit in short.
+
+Farther on, when I have taken the road to Luxor, it is not long before I
+meet, under the palm-trees and on the sands, the crowd, the main body
+of the arrivals--some in carriages, some on horseback, some on donkeys.
+There is a noise of voices speaking all sorts of non-Egyptian languages.
+One is tempted to ask: “What is happening? A ball, a holiday, a grand
+marriage?” No. The moon is full to-night at Thebes, upon the ruins. That
+is all.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THEBES IN SUNLIGHT
+
+It is two o'clock in the afternoon. A white angry fire pours from the
+sky, which is pale from excess of light. A sun inimical to the men of
+our climate scorches the enormous fossil which, crumbling in places, is
+all that remains of Thebes and which lies there like the carcass of a
+gigantic beast that has been dead for thousands of years, but is too
+massive ever to be annihilated.
+
+In the hypostyle there is a little blue shade behind the monstrous
+pillars, but even that shade is dusty and hot. The columns too are hot,
+and so are all the blocks--and yet it is winter and the nights are cold,
+even to the point of frost. Heat and dust; a reddish dust, which hangs
+like an eternal cloud over these ruins of Upper Egypt, exhaling an odour
+of spices and mummy.
+
+The great heat seems to augment the retrospective sensation of fatigue
+which seizes you as you regard these stones--too heavy for human
+strength--which are massed here in mountains. One almost seems to
+participate in the efforts, the exhaustions and the sweating toils of
+that people, with their muscles of brand new steel, who in the carrying
+and piling of such masses had to bear the yoke for thirty centuries.
+
+Even the stones themselves tell of fatigue--the fatigue of being crushed
+by one another's weight for thousands of years; the suffering that comes
+of having been too exactly carved, and too nicely placed one above the
+other, so that they seem to be riveted together by the force of their
+mere weight. Oh! the poor stones of the base that bear the weight of
+these awful pilings!
+
+And the ardent colour of these things surprises you. It has persisted.
+On the red sandstone of the hypostyle, the paintings of more than three
+thousand years ago are still to be seen; especially above the central
+chamber, almost in the sky, the capitals, in the form of great flowers,
+have kept the lapis blues, the greens and yellows with which their
+strange petals were long ago bespeckled.
+
+Decrepitude and crumbling and dust. In broad daylight, under the
+magnificent splendour of the life-giving sun, one realises clearly that
+all here is dead, and dead since days which the imagination is scarcely
+able to conceive. And the ruin appears utterly irreparable. Here and
+there are a few impotent and almost infantine attempts at reparation,
+undertaken in the ancient epochs of history by the Greeks and Romans.
+Columns have been put together, holes have been filled with cement. But
+the great blocks lie in confusion, and one feels, even to the point of
+despair, how impossible it is ever to restore to order such a chaos of
+crushing, overthrown things--even with the help of legions of workers
+and machines, and with centuries before you in which to complete the
+task.
+
+And then, what surprises and oppresses you is the want of clear space,
+the little room that remained for the multitudes in these halls
+which are nevertheless immense. The whole space between the walls was
+encumbered with pillars. The temples were half filled with colossal
+forests of stone. The men who built Thebes lived in the beginning of
+time, and had not yet discovered the thing which to us to-day seems so
+simple--namely, the vault. And yet they were marvellous pioneers, these
+architects. They had already succeeded in evolving out of the dark, as
+it were, a number of conceptions which, from the beginning no doubt,
+slumbered in mysterious germ in the human brain--the idea of rectitude,
+the straight line, the right angle, the vertical line, of which Nature
+furnishes no example, even symmetry, which, if you consider it well, is
+less explicable still. They employed symmetry with a consummate mastery,
+understanding as well as we do all the effect that is to be obtained by
+the repetition of like objects placed _en pendant_ on either side of a
+portico or an avenue. But they did not invent the vault. And therefore,
+since there was a limit to the size of the stones which they were able
+to place flat like beams, they had recourse to this profusion of columns
+to support their stupendous ceilings. And thus it is that there seems
+to be a want of air, that one seems to stifle in the middle of their
+temples, dominated and obstructed as they are by the rigid presence
+of so many stones. And yet to-day you can see quite clearly in these
+temples, for, since the suspended rocks which served for roof have
+fallen, floods of light descend from all parts. But formerly, when a
+kind of half night reigned in the deep halls, beneath the immovable
+carapaces of sandstone or granite, how oppressive and sepulchral it must
+all have been--how final and pitiless, like a gigantic palace of Death!
+On one day, however, in each year, here at Thebes, a light as of
+a conflagration used to penetrate from one end to the other of
+the sanctuaries of Amen; for the middle artery is open towards the
+north-west, and is aligned in such a fashion that, once a year, one
+solitary time, on the evening of the summer solstice, the sun as it sets
+is able to plunge its reddened rays straight into the sanctuaries. At
+the moment when it enlarges its blood-coloured disc before descending
+behind the desolation of the Libyan mountains, it arrives in the very
+axis of this avenue, of this suite of aisles, which measures more
+than 800 yards in length. Formerly, then, on these evenings it shone
+horizontally beneath the terrible ceilings--between these rows of
+pillars which are as high as our Colonne Vendome--and threw, for some
+seconds, its colours of molten copper into the obscurity of the holy
+of holies. And then the whole temple would resound with the clashing of
+music, and the glory of the god of Thebes was celebrated in the depths
+of the forbidden halls.
+
+*****
+
+Like a cloud, like a veil, the continual red-coloured dust floats
+everywhere above the ruins, and, athwart it, here and there, the sun
+traces long, white beams, But at one point of the avenue, behind the
+obelisks, it seems to rise in clouds, this dust of Egypt, as if it were
+smoke. For the workers of bronze are assembled there to-day and, hour by
+hour, without ceasing, they dig in the sacred soil. Ridiculously small
+and almost negligible by the side of the great monoliths they dig and
+dig. Patiently they clear the ruins, and the earth goes away in little
+parcels in rows of baskets carried by children in the form of a chain.
+The periodical deposits of the Nile, and the sand carried by the wind of
+the desert, had raised the soil by about six yards since the time when
+Thebes ceased to live. But now men are endeavouring to restore the
+ancient level. At first sight the task seemed impossible, but they
+will achieve it in the end, even with their simple means, these fellah
+toilers, who sing as they labour at their incessant work of ants. Soon
+the grand hypostyle will be freed from rubbish, and its columns, which
+even before seemed so tremendous, uncovered now to the base, have added
+another twenty feet to their height. A number of colossal statues, which
+lay asleep beneath this shroud of earth and sand, have been brought
+back to the light, set upright again and have resumed their watch in the
+intimidating thoroughfares for a new period of quasi-eternity. Year
+by year the town-mummy is being slowly exhumed by dint of prodigious
+effort; and is repeopled again by gods and kings who had been hidden for
+thousands of years![*] Year in, year out, the digging continues--deeper
+and deeper. It is scarcely known to what depth the debris and the ruins
+descend. Thebes had endured for so many centuries, the earth here is so
+penetrated with human past, that it is averred that, under the oldest of
+the known temples there are still others, older still and more massive,
+of which there was no suspicion, and whose age must exceed eight
+thousand years.
+
+     [*] As is generally known, the maintenance of the ancient
+     monuments of Egypt and their restoration, so far as that may
+     be possible, has been entrusted to the French. M. Maspero
+     has delegated to Thebes an artist and a scholar, M. Legrain
+     by name, who is devoting his life passionately to the work.
+
+In spite of the burning sun, and of the clouds of dust raised by
+the blows of the pickaxes, one might linger for hours amongst the
+dust-stained, meagre fellahs, watching the excavations in this unique
+soil--where everything that is revealed is by way of being a surprise
+and a lucky find, where the least carved stone had a past of glory,
+formed part of the first architectural splendours, was _a stone of
+Thebes_. Scarcely a moment passes but, at the bottom of the trenches, as
+the digging proceeds, some new thing gleams. Perhaps it is the polished
+flank of a colossus, fashioned out of granite from Syene, or a little
+copper Osiris, the debris of a vase, a golden trinket beyond price,
+or even a simple blue pearl that has fallen from the necklace of some
+waiting-maid of a queen.
+
+This activity of the excavators, which alone reanimates certain quarters
+during the day, ends at sunset. Every evening the lean fellahs receive
+the daily wage of their labour, and take themselves off to sleep in the
+silent neighbourhood in their huts of mud; and the iron gates are shut
+behind them. At night, except for the guards at the entrance, no one
+inhabits the ruins.
+
+*****
+
+Crumbling and dust. . . . Far around, on every side of these palaces and
+temples of the central artery--which are the best preserved and remain
+proudly upright--stretch great mournful spaces, on which the sun from
+morning till evening pours an implacable light. There, amongst the
+lank desert plants, lie blocks scattered at hazard--the remains of
+sanctuaries, of which neither the plan nor the form will ever be
+discovered. But on these stones, fragments of the history of the world
+are still to be read in clear-cut hieroglyphs.
+
+To the west of the hypostyle hall there is a region strewn with discs,
+all equal and all alike. It might be a draught-board for Titans with
+draughts that would measure ten yards in circumference. They are the
+scattered fragments, slices, as it were, of a colonnade of the Ramses.
+Farther on the ground seems to have passed through fire. You walk over
+blackish scoriae encrusted with brazen bolts and particles of melted
+glass. It is the quarter burnt by the soldiers of Cambyses. They were
+great destroyers of the queen city, were these same Persian soldiers. To
+break up the obelisks and the colossal statues they conceived the plan
+of scorching them by lighting bonfires around them, and then, when
+they saw them burning hot, they deluged them with cold water. And the
+granites cracked from top to base.
+
+It is well known, of course, that Thebes used to extend for a
+considerable distance both on this, the right, bank of the Nile, where
+the Pharaohs resided, and opposite, on the Libyan bank, given over to
+the preparers of mummies and to the mortuary temples. But to-day, except
+for the great palaces of the centre, it is little more than a litter
+of ruins, and the long avenues, lined with endless rows of sphinxes or
+rams, are lost, goodness knows where, buried beneath the sand.
+
+At wide intervals, however, in the midst of these cemeteries of things,
+a temple here and there remains upright, preserving still its sanctified
+gloom beneath its cavernous carapace. One, where certain celebrated
+oracles used to be delivered, is even more prisonlike and sepulchral
+than the others in its eternal shadow. High up in a wall the black hole
+of a kind of grotto opens, to which a secret corridor coming from the
+depths used to lead. It was there that the face of the priest charged
+with the announcement of the sibylline words appeared--and the ceiling
+of his niche is all covered still with the smoke from the flame of his
+lamp, which was extinguished more than two thousand years ago!
+
+*****
+
+What a number of ruins, scarcely emerging from the sand of the desert,
+are hereabout! And in the old dried-up soil, how many strange treasures
+remain hidden! When the sun lights thus the forlorn distances, when
+you perceive stretching away to the horizon these fields of death, you
+realise better what kind of a place this Thebes once was. Rebuilt as
+it were in the imagination it appears excessive, superabundant and
+multiple, like those flowers of the antediluvian world which the fossils
+reveal to us. Compared with it how our modern towns are dwarfed, and our
+hasty little palaces, our stuccoes and old iron!
+
+And it is so mystical, this town of Thebes, with its dark sanctuaries,
+once inhabited by gods and symbols. All the sublime, fresh-minded
+striving of the human soul after the Unknowable is as it were petrified
+in these ruins, in forms diverse and immeasurably grand. And subsisting
+thus down to our day it puts us to shame. Compared with this people, who
+thought only of eternity, we are a lot of pitiful dotards, who soon will
+be past caring about the wherefore of life, or thought, or death. Such
+beginnings presaged, surely, something greater than our humanity of the
+present day, given over to despair, to alcohol and to explosives!
+
+*****
+
+Crumbling and dust! This same sun of Thebes is in its place each day,
+parching, exhausting, cracking and pulverising.
+
+On the ground where once stood so much magnificence there are fields
+of corn, spread out like green carpets, which tell of the return of the
+humble life of tillage. Above all, there is the sand, encroaching now
+upon the very threshold of the Pharaohs; there is the yellow desert;
+there is the world of reflections and of silence, which approaches like
+a slow submerging tide. In the distance, where the mirage trembles from
+morning till evening, the burying is already almost achieved. The few
+poor stones which still appear, barely emerging from the advancing
+dunes, are the remains of what men, in their superb revolts against
+death, had contrived to make the most massively indestructible.
+
+And this sun, this eternal sun, which parades over Thebes the irony of
+its duration--for us so impossible to calculate or to conceive! Nowhere
+so much as here does one suffer from the dismay of knowing that all
+our miserable little human effervescence is only a sort of fermentation
+round an atom emanated from that sinister ball of fire, and that that
+fire itself, the wonderful sun, is no more than an ephemeral meteor,
+a furtive spark, thrown off during one of the innumerable cosmic
+transformations, in the course of times without end and without
+beginning.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+AN AUDIENCE OF AMENOPHIS II.
+
+King Amenophis II. has resumed his receptions, which he found himself
+obliged to suspend for three thousand, three hundred and some odd years,
+by reason of his decease. They are very well attended; court dress
+is not insisted upon, and the Grand Master of ceremonies is not above
+taking a tip. He holds them every morning in the winter from eight
+o'clock, in the bowels of a mountain in the desert of Libya; and if he
+rests himself during the remainder of the day it is only because, as
+soon as midday sounds, they turn off the electric light.
+
+Happy Amenophis! Out of so many kings who tried so hard to hide for ever
+their mummies in the depths of impenetrable caverns he is the only one
+who has been left in his tomb. And he “makes the most of it” every time
+he opens his funeral salons.
+
+*****
+
+It is important to arrive before midday at the dwelling of this Pharaoh,
+and at eight o'clock sharp, therefore, on a clear February morning,
+I set out from Luxor, where for many days my dahabiya had slumbered
+against the bank of the Nile. It is necessary first of all to cross the
+river, for the Theban kings of the Middle Empire all established their
+eternal habitations on the opposite bank--far beyond the plains of the
+river shore, right away in those mountains which bound the horizon
+as with a wall of adorable rose-colour. Other canoes, which are
+also crossing, glide by the side of mine on the tranquil water. The
+passengers seem to belong to that variety of Anglo-Saxons which is
+equipped by Thomas Cook & Sons (Egypt Ltd.), and like me, no doubt, they
+are bound for the royal presence.
+
+We land on the sand of the opposite bank, which to-day is almost
+deserted. Formerly there stretched here a regular suburb of
+Thebes--that, namely, of the preparers of mummies, with thousands of
+ovens wherein to heat the natron and the oils, which preserved the
+bodies from corruption. In this Thebes, where for some fifty centuries,
+everything that died, whether man or beast, was minutely prepared and
+swathed in bandages, it will readily be understood what importance this
+quarter of the embalmers came to assume. And it was to the neighbouring
+mountains that the products of so many careful wrappings were borne for
+burial, while the Nile carried away the blood from the bodies and the
+filth of their entrails. That chain of living rocks that rises before
+us, coloured each morning with the same rose, as of a tender flower, is
+literally stuffed with dead bodies.
+
+We have to cross a wide plain before reaching the mountains, and on
+our way cornfields alternate with stretches of sand already desertlike.
+Behind us extends the old Nile and the opposite bank which we have
+lately quitted--the bank of Luxor, whose gigantic Pharaonic colonnades
+are as it were lengthened below by their own reflection in the mirror of
+the river. And in this radiant morning, in this pure light, it would be
+admirable, this eternal temple, with its image reversed in the depth of
+the blue water, were it not that at its sides, and to twice its height,
+rises the impudent Winter Palace, that monster hotel built last year
+for the fastidious tourists. And yet, who knows? The jackanapes who
+deposited this abomination on the sacred soil of Egypt perhaps imagines
+that he equals the merit of the artist who is now restoring the
+sanctuaries of Thebes, or even the glory of the Pharaohs who built them.
+
+As we draw nearer to the chain of Libya, where this king awaits us, we
+traverse fields still green with growing corn--and sparrows and larks
+sing around us in the impetuous spring of this land of Thebes.
+
+And now beyond two menhirs, as it were, become gradually distinct. Of
+the same height and shape, alike indeed in every respect, they rise side
+by side in the clear distance in the midst of these green plains, which
+recall so well our fields of France. They wear the headgear of the
+Sphinx, and are gigantic human forms seated on thrones--the colossal
+statues of Memnon. We recognise them at once, for the picture-makers
+of succeeding ages have popularised their aspect, as in the case of the
+pyramids. What is strange is that they should stand there so simply in
+the midst of these fields of growing corn, which reach to their very
+feet, and be surrounded by these humble birds we know so well, who sing
+without ceremony on their shoulders.
+
+They do not seem to be scandalised even at seeing now, passing quite
+close to them, the trucks of a playful little railway belonging to a
+local industry, that are laden with sugar-canes and gourds.
+
+The chain of Libya, during the last hour, has been growing gradually
+larger against the profound and excessively blue sky. And now that it
+rises up quite near to us, overheated, and as it were incandescent,
+under this ten o'clock sun, we begin to see on all sides, in front
+of the first rocky spurs of the mountains, the debris of palaces,
+colonnades, staircases and pylons. Headless giants, swathed like dead
+Pharaohs, stand upright, with hands crossed beneath their shroud of
+sandstone. They are the temples and statues for the manes of numberless
+kings and queens, who during three or four thousand years had their
+mummies buried hard by in the heart of the mountains, in the deepest of
+the walled and secret galleries.
+
+And now the cornfields have ceased; there is no longer any
+herbage--nothing. We have crossed the desolate threshold, we are in the
+desert, and tread suddenly upon a disquieting funereal soil, half sand,
+half ashes, that is pitted on all sides with gaping holes. It looks like
+some region that had long been undermined by burrowing beasts. But it is
+men who, for more than fifty centuries, have vexed this ground, first
+to hide the mummies in it, and afterwards, and until our day, to exhume
+them. Each of these holes has enclosed its corpse, and if you peer
+within you may see yellow-coloured rags still trailing there; and
+bandages, or legs and vertebrae of thousands of years ago. Some lean
+Bedouins, who exercise the office of excavators, and sleep hard by in
+holes like jackals, advance to sell us scarabaei, blue-glass trinkets
+that are half fossilised, and feet or hands of the dead.
+
+And now farewell to the fresh morning. Every minute the heat becomes
+more oppressive. The pathway that is marked only by a row of stones
+turns at last and leads into the depths of the mountain by a tragical
+passage. We enter now into that “Valley of the Kings” which was the
+place of the last rendezvous of the most august mummies. The breaths of
+air that reach us between these rocks are become suddenly burning, and
+the site seems to belong no longer to earth but to some calcined planet
+which had for ever lost its clouds and atmosphere. This Libyan chain,
+in the distance so delicately rose, is positively frightful now that
+it overhangs us. It looks what it is--an enormous and fantastic tomb, a
+natural necropolis, whose vastness and horror nothing human could
+equal, an ideal stove for corpses that wanted to endure for ever.
+The limestone, on which for that matter no rain ever falls from the
+changeless sky, looks to be in one single piece from summit to base, and
+betrays no crack or crevice by which anything might penetrate into the
+sepulchres within. The dead could sleep, therefore, in the heart of
+these monstrous blocks as sheltered as under vaults of lead. And of what
+there is of magnificence the centuries have taken care. The continual
+passage of winds laden with dust has scaled and worn away the face of
+the rocks, so as to leave only the denser veins of stone, and thus
+have reappeared strange architectural fantasies such as Matter, in the
+beginning, might have dimly conceived. Subsequently the sun of Egypt has
+lavished on the whole its ardent reddish patines. And now the mountains
+imitate in places great organ-pipes, badigeoned with yellow and carmine,
+and elsewhere huge bloodstained skeletons and masses of dead flesh.
+
+Outlined upon the excessive blue of the sky, the summits, illumined
+to the point of dazzling, rise up in the light--like red cinders of a
+glowing fire, splendours of living coal, against the pure indigo that
+turns almost to darkness. We seem to be walking in some valley of the
+Apocalypse with flaming walls. Silence and death, beneath a transcendent
+clearness, in the constant radiance of a kind of mournful apotheosis--it
+was such surroundings as these that the Egyptians chose for their
+necropoles.
+
+The pathway plunges deeper and deeper in the stifling defiles, and
+at the end of this “Valley of the Kings,” under the sun now nearly
+meridian, which grows each minute more mournful and terrible, we
+expected to come upon a dread silence. But what is this?
+
+At a turning, beyond there, at the bottom of a sinister-looking recess,
+what does this crowd of people, what does this uproar mean? Is it a
+meeting, a fair? Under awnings to protect them from the sun stand some
+fifty donkeys, saddled in the English fashion. In a corner an electrical
+workshop, built of new bricks, shoots forth the black smoke, and all
+about, between the high blood-coloured walls, coming and going, making a
+great stir and gabbling to their hearts' content, are a number of Cook's
+tourists of both sexes, and some even who verily seem to have no sex
+at all. They are come for the royal audience; some on asses, some in
+jaunting cars, and some, the stout ladies who are grown short of wind,
+in chairs carried by the Bedouins. From the four points of Europe they
+have assembled in this desert ravine to see an old dried-up corpse at
+the bottom of a hole.
+
+Here and there the hidden palaces reveal their dark, square-shaped
+entrances, hewn in the massive rock, and over each a board indicates the
+name of a kingly mummy--Ramses IV., Seti I., Thothmes III., Ramses IX.,
+etc. Although all these kings, except Amenophis II., have recently been
+removed and carried away to Lower Egypt, to people the glass cases of
+the museum of Cairo, their last dwellings have not ceased to attract
+crowds. From each underground habitation are emerging now a number of
+perspiring Cooks and Cookesses. And from that of Amenophis, especially,
+they issue rapidly. Suppose that we have come too late and that the
+audience is over!
+
+And to think that these entrances had been walled up, had been masked
+with so much care, and lost for centuries! And of all the perseverance
+that was needed to discover them, the observation, the gropings, the
+soundings and random discoveries!
+
+But now they are being closed. We loitered too long around the colossi
+of Memnon and the palaces of the plain. It is nearly noon, a noon
+consuming and mournful, which falls perpendicularly upon the red
+summits, and is burning to its deepest recesses the valley of stone.
+
+At the door of Amenophis we have to cajole, beseech. By the help of a
+gratuity the Bedouin Grand Master of Ceremonies allows himself to be
+persuaded. We are to descend with him, but quickly, quickly, for the
+electric light will soon be extinguished. It will be a short audience,
+but at least it will be a private one. We shall be alone with the king.
+
+In the darkness, where at first, after so much sunlight, the little
+electric lamps seem to us scarcely more than glow-worms, we expected a
+certain amount of chilliness as in the undergrounds of our climate. But
+here there is only a more oppressive heat, stifling and withering, and
+we long to return to the open air, which was burning indeed, but was at
+least the air of life.
+
+Hastily we descend: by steep staircases, by passages which slope so
+rapidly that they hurry us along of themselves, like slides; and it
+seems that we shall never ascend again, any more than the great mummy
+who passed here so long ago on his way to his eternal chamber. All this
+brings us, first of all, to a deep well--dug there to swallow up the
+desecrators in their passage--and it is on one of the sides of this
+oubliette, behind a casual stone carefully sealed, that the continuation
+of these funeral galleries was discovered. Then, when we have passed
+the well, by a narrow bridge that has been thrown across it, the stairs
+begin again, and the steep passages that almost make you run; but
+now, by a sharp bend, they have changed their direction. And still we
+descend, descend. Heavens! how deep down this king dwells! And at each
+step of our descent we feel more and more imprisoned under the sovereign
+mass of stone, in the centre of all this compact and silent thickness.
+
+*****
+
+The little electric globes, placed apart like a garland, suffice now for
+our eyes which have forgotten the sun. And we can distinguish around us
+myriad figures inviting us to solemnity and silence. They are inscribed
+everywhere on the smooth, spotless walls of the colour of old ivory.
+They follow one another in regular order, repeating themselves
+obstinately in parallel rows, as if the better to impose upon our
+spirit, with gestures and symbols that are eternally the same. The gods
+and demons, the representatives of Anubis, with his black jackal's head
+and his long erect ears, seem to make signs to us with their long
+arms and long fingers: “No noise! Look, there are mummies here!” The
+wonderful preservation of all this, the vivid colours, the clearness of
+the outlines, begin to cause a kind of stupor and bewilderment. Verily
+you would think that the painter of these figures of the shades had only
+just quitted the hypogeum. All this past seems to draw you to itself
+like an abyss to which you have approached too closely. It surrounds
+you, and little by little masters you. It is so much at home here that
+it has _remained the present_. Over and above the mere descent into the
+secret bowels of the rock there has been a kind of seizure with vertigo,
+which we had not anticipated and which has whirled us far away into the
+depths of the ages.
+
+These interminable, oppressive passages, by which we have crawled to the
+innermost depths of the mountain, lead at length to something vast, the
+walls divide, the vault expands and we are in the great funeral hall,
+of which the blue ceiling, all bestrewn with stars like the sky, is
+supported by six pillars hewn in the rock itself. On either side open
+other chambers into which the electricity permits us to see quite
+clearly, and opposite, at the end of the hall, a large crypt is
+revealed, which one divines instinctively must be the resting-place of
+the Pharaoh. What a prodigious labour must have been entailed by this
+perforation of the living rock! And this hypogeum is not unique. All
+along the “Valley of the Kings” little insignificant doors--which to
+the initiated reveal the “Sign of the Shadow,” inscribed on their
+lintels--lead to other subterranean places, just as sumptuous and
+perfidiously profound, with their snares, their hidden wells, their
+oubliettes and the bewildering multiplicity of their mural figures. And
+all these tombs this morning were full of people, and, if we had not
+had the good fortune to arrive after the usual hour, we should have
+met here, even in this dwelling of Amenophis, a battalion equipped by
+Messrs. Cook.
+
+In this hall, with its blue ceiling, the frescoes multiply their
+riddles: scenes from the book of Hades, all the funeral ritual
+translated into pictures. On the pillars and walls crowd the different
+demons that an Egyptian soul was likely to meet in its passage through
+the country of shadows, and underneath the passwords which were to be
+given to each of them are recapitulated so as not to be forgotten.
+
+For the soul used to depart simultaneously under the two forms of a
+flame[*] and a falcon[+] respectively. And this country of shadows,
+called also the west, to which it had to render itself, was that where
+the moon sinks and where each evening the sun goes down; a country to
+which the living were never able to attain, because it fled before them,
+however fast they might travel across the sands or over the waters. On
+its arrival there, the scared soul had to parley successively with the
+fearsome demons who lay in wait for it along its route. If at last
+it was judged worthy to approach Osiris, the great Dead Sun, it was
+subsumed in him and reappeared, shining over the world the next morning
+and on all succeeding mornings until the consummation of time--a vague
+survival in the solar splendour, a continuation without personality, of
+which one is scarcely able to say whether or not it was more desirable
+than eternal non-existence.
+
+[*] The Khou, which never returned to our world.
+
+[+] The Bai, which might, at its will, revisit the tomb.
+
+And, moreover, it was necessary to preserve the body at whatever cost,
+for a certain _double_ of the dead man continued to dwell in the dry
+flesh, and retained a kind of half life, barely conscious. Lying at the
+bottom of the sarcophagus it was able to see, by virtue of those two
+eyes, which were painted on the lid, always in the same axis as the
+empty eyes of the mummy. Sometimes, too, this _double_, escaping from
+the mummy and its box, used to wander like a phantom about the hypogeum.
+And, in order that at such times it might be able to obtain nourishment,
+a mass of mummified viands wrapped in bandages were amongst the thousand
+and one things buried at its side. Even natron and oils were left,
+so that it might re-embalm itself, if the worms came to life in its
+members.
+
+Oh! the persistence of this _double_, sealed there in the tomb, a prey
+to anxiety, lest corruption should take hold of it; which had to serve
+its long duration in suffocating darkness, in absolute silence, without
+anything to mark the days and nights, or the seasons or the centuries,
+or the tens of centuries without end! It was with such a terrible
+conception of death as this that each one in those days was absorbed in
+the preparation of his eternal chamber.
+
+And for Amenophis II. this more or less is what happened to his
+_double_. Unaccustomed to any kind of noise, after three or four hundred
+years passed in the company of certain familiars, lulled in the same
+heavy slumber as himself, he heard the sound of muffled blows in the
+distance, by the side of the hidden well. The secret entrance was
+discovered: men were breaking through its walls! Living beings were
+about to appear, pillagers of tombs, no doubt, come to unswathe them
+all! But no! Only some priests of Osiris, advancing with fear in a
+funeral procession. They brought nine great coffins containing the
+mummies of nine kings, his sons, grandsons and other unknown successors,
+down to that King Setnakht, who governed Egypt two and a half centuries
+after him. It was simply to hide them better that they brought them
+hither, and placed them all together in a chamber that was immediately
+walled up. Then they departed. The stones of the door were sealed
+afresh, and everything fell again into the old mournful and burning
+darkness.
+
+Slowly the centuries rolled on--perhaps ten, perhaps twenty--in a
+silence no longer even disturbed by the scratchings of the worms, long
+since dead. And a day came when, at the side of the entrance, the same
+blows were heard again. . . . And this time it was the robbers. Carrying
+torches in their hands, they rushed headlong in, with shouts and cries
+and, except in the safe hiding-place of the nine coffins, everything was
+plundered, the bandages torn off, the golden trinkets snatched from
+the necks of the mummies. Then, when they had sorted their booty,
+they walled up the entrance as before, and went their way, leaving an
+inextricable confusion of shrouds, of human bodies, of entrails issuing
+from shattered vases, of broken gods and emblems.
+
+Afterwards, for long centuries, there was silence again, and finally,
+in our days, the _double_, then in its last weakness and almost
+non-existent, perceived the same noise of stones being unsealed by blows
+of pickaxes. The third time, the living men who entered were of a race
+never seen before. At first they seemed respectful and pious, only
+touching things gently. But they came to plunder everything, even the
+nine coffins in their still inviolate hiding-place. They gathered the
+smallest fragments with a solicitude almost religious. That they might
+lose nothing they even sifted the rubbish and the dust. But, as for
+Amenophis, who was already nothing more than a lamentable mummy, without
+jewels or bandages, they left him at the bottom of his sarcophagus of
+sandstone. And since that day, doomed to receive each morning numerous
+people of a strange aspect, he dwells alone in his hypogeum, where there
+is now neither a being nor a thing belonging to his time.
+
+But yes, there is! We had not looked all round. There in one of the
+lateral chambers some bodies are lying, dead bodies--three corpses
+(unswathed at the time of the pillage), side by side on their rags.
+First, a woman, the queen probably, with loosened hair. Her profile has
+preserved its exquisite lines. How beautiful she still is! And then a
+young boy with the little greyish face of a doll. His head is shaved,
+except for that long curl at the right side, which denotes a prince of
+the royal blood. And the third a man. Ugh! How terrible he is--looking
+as if he found death a thing irresistibly comical. He even writhes with
+laughter, and eats a corner of his shroud as if to prevent himself from
+bursting into a too unseemly mirth.
+
+And then, suddenly, black night! And we stand as if congealed in our
+place. The electric light has gone out--everywhere at once. Above, on
+the earth, midday must have sounded--for those who still have cognisance
+of the sun and the hours.
+
+The guard who has brought us hither shouts in his Bedouin falsetto, in
+order to get the light switched on again, but the infinite thickness of
+the walls, instead of prolonging the vibrations, seems to deaden them;
+and besides, who could hear us, in the depths where we now are? Then,
+groping in the absolute darkness, he makes his way up the sloping
+passage. The hurried patter of his sandals and the flapping of his
+burnous grow faint in the distance, and the cries that he continues to
+utter sound so smothered to us soon that we might ourselves be buried.
+And meanwhile we do not move. But how comes it that it is so hot amongst
+these mummies? It seems as if there were fires burning in some oven
+close by. And above all there is a want of air. Perhaps the corridors,
+after our passage, have contracted, as happens sometimes in the anguish
+of dreams. Perhaps the long fissure by which we have crawled hither,
+perhaps it has closed in upon us.
+
+But at length the cries of alarm are heard and the light is turned on
+again. The three corpses have not profited by the unguarded moments to
+attempt any aggressive movement. Their positions, their expressions have
+not changed: the queen calm and beautiful as ever; the man eating
+still the corner of his rags to stifle the mad laughter of thirty-three
+centuries.
+
+The Bedouin is now returned, breathless from his journey. He urges us
+to come to see the king before the electric light is again extinguished,
+and this time for good and all. Behold us now at the end of the hall, on
+the edge of a dark crypt, leaning over and peering within. It is a place
+oval in form, with a vault of a funereal black, relieved by frescoes,
+either white or of the colour of ashes. They represent, these frescoes,
+a whole new register of gods and demons, some slim and sheathed narrowly
+like mummies, others with big heads and big bellies like hippopotami.
+Placed on the ground and watched from above by all these figures is an
+enormous sarcophagus of stone, wide open; and in it we can distinguish
+vaguely the outline of a human body: the Pharaoh!
+
+At least we should have liked to see him better. The necessary light is
+forthcoming at once: the Bedouin Grand Master of Ceremonies touches an
+electric button and a powerful lamp illumines the face of Amenophis,
+detailing with a clearness that almost frightens you the closed
+eyes, the grimacing countenance, and the whole of the sad mummy. This
+theatrical effect took us by surprise; we were not prepared for it.
+
+He was buried in magnificence, but the pillagers have stripped him of
+everything, even of his beautiful breastplate of tortoiseshell, which
+came to him from a far-off Oriental country, and for many centuries
+now he has slept half naked on his rags. But his poor bouquet is there
+still--of mimosa, recognisable even now, and who will ever tell what
+pious or perhaps amorous hand it was that gathered these flowers for him
+more than three thousand years ago.
+
+The heat is suffocating. The whole crushing mass of this mountain, of
+this block of limestone, into which we have crawled through relatively
+imperceptible holes, like white ants or larvae, seems to weigh upon our
+chest. And these figures too, inscribed on every side, and this mystery
+of the hieroglyphs and the symbols, cause a growing uneasiness. You are
+too near them, they seem too much the masters of the exits, these gods
+with their heads of falcon, ibis and jackal, who, on the walls, converse
+in a continual exalted pantomime. And then the feeling comes over
+you, that you are guilty of sacrilege standing there, before this open
+coffin, in this unwonted insolent light. The dolorous, blackish face,
+half eaten away, seems to ask for mercy: “Yes, yes, my sepulchre has
+been violated and I am returning to dust. But now that you have seen me,
+leave me, turn out that light, have pity on my nothingness.”
+
+In sooth, what a mockery! To have taken so many pains, to have adopted
+so many stratagems to hide his corpse; to have exhausted thousands of
+men in the hewing of this underground labyrinth, and to end thus, with
+his head in the glare of an electric lamp, to amuse whoever passes.
+
+And out of pity--I think it was the poor bouquet of mimosa that awakened
+it--I say to the Bedouin: “Yes, put out the light, put it out--that is
+enough.”
+
+And then the darkness returns above the royal countenance, which is
+suddenly effaced in the sarcophagus. The phantom of the Pharaoh is
+vanished, as if replunged into the unfathomable past. The audience is
+over.
+
+And we, who are able to escape from the horror of the hypogeum, reascend
+rapidly towards the sunshine of the living, we go to breathe the air
+again, the air to which we have still a right--for some few days longer.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+AT THEBES IN THE TEMPLE OF THE OGRESS
+
+This evening, in the vast chaos of ruins--at the hour in which the
+light of the sun begins to turn to rose--I make my way along one of the
+magnificent roads of the town-mummy, that, in fact, which goes off at a
+right angle to the line of the temples of Amen, and, losing itself more
+or less in the sands, leads at length to a sacred lake on the border of
+which certain cat-headed goddesses are seated in state watching the
+dead water and the expanse of the desert. This particular road was
+begun three thousand four hundred years ago by a beautiful queen called
+Makeri,[*] and in the following centuries a number of kings
+continued its construction. It was ornamented with pylons of a superb
+massiveness--pylons are monumental walls, in the form of a trapezium
+with a wide base, covered entirely with hieroglyphs, which the Egyptians
+used to place at either side of their porticoes and long avenues--as
+well as by colossal statues and interminable rows of rams, larger than
+buffaloes, crouched on pedestals.
+
+[*] To-day the mummy with the baby in the museum at Cairo.
+
+At the first pylons I have to make a detour. They are so ruinous that
+their blocks, fallen down on all sides, have closed the passage. Here
+used to watch, on right and left, two upright giants of red granite from
+Syene. Long ago in times no longer precisely known, they were broken
+off, both of them, at the height of the loins. But their muscular legs
+have kept their proud, marching attitude, and each in one of the armless
+hands, which reach to the end of the cloth that girds their loins,
+clenches passionately the emblem of eternal life. And this Syenite
+granite is so hard that time has not altered it in the least; in the
+midst of the confusion of stones the thighs of these mutilated giants
+gleam as if they had been polished yesterday.
+
+Farther on we come upon the second pylons, foundered also, before which
+stands a row of Pharaohs.
+
+On every side the overthrown blocks display their utter confusion of
+gigantic things in the midst of the sand which continues patiently
+to bury them. And here now are the third pylons, flanked by their two
+marching giants, who have neither head nor shoulders. And the road,
+marked majestically still by the debris, continues to lead towards the
+desert.
+
+And then the fourth and last pylons, which seem at first sight to mark
+the extremity of the ruins, the beginning of the desert nothingness.
+Time-worn and uncrowned, but stiff and upright still, they seem to be
+set there so solidly that nothing could ever overthrow them. The two
+colossal statues which guard them on the right and left are seated on
+thrones. One, that on the eastern side, has almost disappeared. But the
+other stands out entire and white, with the whiteness of marble, against
+the brown-coloured background of the enormous stretch of wall covered
+with hieroglyphs. His face alone has been mutilated; and he preserves
+still his imperious chin, his ears, his Sphinx's headgear, one might
+almost say his meditative expression, before this deployment of the vast
+solitude which seems to begin at his very feet.
+
+Here however was only the boundary of the quarters of the God Amen. The
+boundary of Thebes was much farther on, and the avenue which will lead
+me directly to the home of the cat-headed goddesses extends farther
+still to the old gates of the town; albeit you can scarcely distinguish
+it between the double row of Krio-sphinxes all broken and well-nigh
+buried.
+
+The day falls, and the dust of Egypt, in accordance with its invariable
+practice every evening, begins to resemble in the distance a powder of
+gold. I look behind me from time to time at the giant who watches me,
+seated at the foot of his pylon on which the history of a Pharaoh is
+carved in one immense picture. Above him and above his wall, which grows
+each minute more rose-coloured, I see, gradually mounting in proportion
+as I move away from it, the great mass of the palaces of the centre,
+the hypostyle hall, the halls of Thothmes and the obelisks, all the
+entangled cluster of those things at once so grand and so dead, which
+have never been equalled on earth.
+
+And as I continue to gaze upon the ruins, resplendent now in the rosy
+apotheosis of the evening, they come to look like the crumbling remains
+of a gigantic skeleton. They seem to be begging for a merciful surcease,
+as if they were tired of this endless gala colouring at each setting of
+the sun, which mocks them with its eternity.
+
+All this is now a long way behind me; but the air is so limpid, the
+outlines remain so clear that the illusion is rather that the temples
+and the pylons grow smaller, lower themselves and sink into the earth.
+The white giant who follows me always with his sightless stare is now
+reduced to the proportions of a simple human dreamer. His attitude
+moreover has not the rigid hieratic aspect of the other Theban statues.
+With his hands upon his knees he looks like a mere ordinary mortal who
+had stopped to reflect.[*] I have known him for many days--for many days
+and many nights, for, what with his whiteness and the transparency of
+these Egyptian nights, I have seen him often outlined in the distance
+under the dim light of the stars--a great phantom in his contemplative
+pose. And I feel myself obsessed now by the continuance of his attitude
+at this entrance of the ruins--I who shall pass without a morrow from
+Thebes and even from the earth--even as we all pass. Before conscious
+life was vouchsafed to me he was there, had been there since times
+which make you shudder to think upon. For three and thirty centuries, or
+thereabouts, the eyes of myriads of unknown men and women, who have gone
+before me, saw him just as I see him now, tranquil and white, in this
+same place, seated before this same threshold, with his head a little
+bent, and his pervading air of thought.
+
+[*] Statue of Amenophis III.
+
+I make my way without hastening, having always a tendency to stop
+and look behind me, to watch the silent heap of palaces and the white
+dreamer, which now are all illumined with a last Bengal fire in the
+daily setting of the sun.
+
+And the hour is already twilight when I reach the goddesses.
+
+Their domain is so destroyed that the sands had succeeded in covering
+and hiding it for centuries. But it has lately been exhumed.
+
+There remain of it now only some fragments of columns, aligned in
+multiple rows in a vast extent of desert. Broken and fallen stones and
+debris.[*] I walk on without stopping, and at length reach the sacred
+lake on the margin of which the great cats are seated in eternal
+council, each one on her throne. The lake, dug by order of the Pharaohs,
+is in the form of an arc, like a kind of crescent. Some marsh birds,
+that are about to retire for the night, now traverse its mournful,
+sleeping water. Its borders, which have known the utmost of
+magnificence, are become mere heaps of ruins on which nothing grows. And
+what one sees beyond, what the attentive goddesses themselves regard, is
+the empty desolate plain, on which some few poor fields of corn mingle
+in this twilight hour with the sad infinitude of the sands. And
+the whole is bounded on the horizon by the chain, still a little
+rose-coloured, of the limestones of Arabia.
+
+[*] The temple of the Goddess Mut.
+
+They are there, the cats, or, to speak more exactly, the lionesses, for
+cats would not have those short ears, or those cruel chins, thickened
+by tufts of beard. All of black granite, images of Sekhet (who was the
+Goddess of War, and in her hours the Goddess of Lust), they have the
+slender body of a woman, which makes more terrible the great feline head
+surmounted by its high bonnet. Eight or ten, or perhaps more, they are
+more disquieting in that they are so numerous and so alike. They are
+not gigantic, as one might have expected, but of ordinary human
+stature--easy therefore to carry away, or to destroy, and that again, if
+one reflects, augments the singular impression they cause. When so many
+colossal figures lie in pieces on the ground, how comes it that they,
+little people seated so tranquilly on their chairs, have contrived to
+remain intact, during the passing of the three and thirty centuries of
+the world's history?
+
+The passage of the march birds, which for a moment disturbed the clear
+mirror of the lake, has ceased. Around the goddesses nothing moves and
+the customary infinite silence envelops them as at the fall of every
+night. They dwell indeed in such a forlorn corner of the ruins! Who, to
+be sure, even in broad daylight, would think of visiting them?
+
+Down there in the west a trailing cloud of dust indicates the departure
+of the tourists, who had flocked to the temple of Amen, and now hasten
+back to Luxor, to dine at the various _tables d'hote_. The ground here
+is so felted with sand that in the distance we cannot hear the rolling
+of their carriages. But the knowledge that they are gone renders more
+intimate the interview with these numerous and identical goddesses,
+who little by little have been draped in shadow. Their seats turn their
+backs to the palaces of Thebes, which now begin to be bathed in
+violet waves and seem to sink towards the horizon, to lose each minute
+something of their importance before the sovereignty of the night.
+
+And the black goddesses, with their lioness' heads and tall
+headgear--seated there with their hands upon their knees, with eyes
+fixed since the beginning of the ages, and a disturbing smile on their
+thick lips, like those of a wild beast--continue to regard--beyond the
+little dead lake--that desert, which now is only a confused immensity,
+of a bluish ashy-grey. And the fancy seizes you that they are possessed
+of a kind of life, which has come to them after long waiting, by virtue
+of that _expression_ which they have worn on their faces so long, oh! so
+long.
+
+*****
+
+Beyond, at the other extremity of the ruins, there is a sister of these
+goddesses, taller than they, a great Sekhet, whom in these parts men
+call the Ogress, and who dwells alone and upright, ambushed in a narrow
+temple. Amongst the fellahs and the Bedouins of the neighbourhood she
+enjoys a very bad reputation, it being her custom of nights to issue
+from her temple, and devour men; and none of them would willingly
+venture near her dwelling at this late hour. But instead of returning to
+Luxor, like the good people whose carriages have just departed, I rather
+choose to pay her a visit.
+
+Her dwelling is some distance away, and I shall not reach it till the
+dead of night.
+
+First of all I have to retrace my steps, to return along the whole
+avenue of rams, to pass again by the feet of the white giant, who has
+already assumed his phantomlike appearance, while the violet waves that
+bathed the town-mummy thicken and turn to a greyish-blue. And then,
+leaving behind me the pylons guarded by the broken giants, I thread my
+way among the palaces of the centre.
+
+It is among these palaces that I encounter for good and all the night,
+with the first cries of the owls and ospreys. It is still warm there, on
+account of the heat stored by the stones during the day, but one feels
+nevertheless that the air is freezing.
+
+At a crossing a tall human figure looms up, draped in black and armed
+with a baton. It is a roving Bedouin, one of the guards, and this more
+or less is the dialogue exchanged between us (freely and succinctly
+translated):
+
+“Your permit, sir.”
+
+“Here it is.”
+
+(Here we combine our efforts to illuminate the said permit by the light
+of a match.)
+
+“Good, I will go with you.”
+
+“No. I beg of you.”
+
+“Yes; I had better. Where are you going?”
+
+“Beyond, to the temple of that lady--you know, who is great and powerful
+and has a face like a lioness.”
+
+“Ah! . . . Yes, I think I understand that you would prefer to go alone.”
+ (Here the intonation becomes infantine.) “But you are a kind gentleman
+and will not forget the poor Bedouin all the same.”
+
+He goes on his way. On leaving the palaces I have still to traverse an
+extent of uncultivated country, where a veritable cold seizes me. Above
+my head no longer the heavy suspended stones, but the far-off expanse of
+the blue night sky--where are shining now myriads upon myriads of stars.
+For the Thebans of old this beautiful vault, scintillating always with
+its powder of diamonds, shed no doubt only serenity upon their souls.
+But for us, _who knows, alas!_ it is on the contrary the field of the
+great fear, which, out of pity, it would have been better if we had
+never been able to see; the incommensurable black void, where the worlds
+in their frenzied whirling precipitate themselves like rain, crash into
+and annihilate one another, only to be renewed for fresh eternities.
+
+All this is seen too vividly, the horror of it becomes intolerable, on a
+clear night like this, in a place so silent and littered so with ruins.
+More and more the cold penetrates you--the mournful cold of the sidereal
+spheres from which nothing now seems to protect you, so rarefied--almost
+non-existent--does the limpid atmosphere appear. And the gravel, the
+poor dried herbs, that crackle under foot, give the illusion of the
+crunching noise we know at home on winter nights when the frost is on
+the ground.
+
+I approach at length the temple of the Ogress. These stones which now
+appear, whitish in the night, this secret-looking dwelling near the
+boundary wall of Thebes, proclaim the spot, and verily at such an hour
+as this it has an evil aspect. Ptolemaic columns, little vestibules,
+little courtyards where a dim blue light enables you to find your way.
+Nothing moves; not even the flight of a night bird: an absolute
+silence, magnified awfully by the presence of the desert which you feel
+encompasses you beyond these walls. And beyond, at the bottom, three
+chambers made of massive stone, each with its separate entrance. I know
+that the first two are empty. It is in the third that the Ogress dwells,
+unless, indeed, she has already set out upon her nocturnal hunt for
+human flesh. Pitch darkness reigns within and I have to grope my way.
+Quickly I light a match. Yes, there she is indeed, alone and upright,
+almost part of the end wall, on which my little light makes the horrible
+shadow of her head dance. The match goes out--irreverently I light many
+more under her chin, under that heavy, man-eating jaw. In very sooth,
+she is terrifying. Of black granite--like her sisters, seated on the
+margin of the mournful lake--but much taller than they, from six to
+eight feet in height, she has a woman's body, exquisitely slim and
+young, with the breasts of a virgin. Very chaste in attitude, she
+holds in her hand a long-stemmed lotus flower, but by a contrast
+that nonplusses and paralyses you the delicate shoulders support the
+monstrosity of a huge lioness' head. The lappets of her bonnet fall on
+either side of her ears almost down to her breast, and surmounting the
+bonnet, by way of addition to the mysterious pomp, is a large moon disc.
+Her dead stare gives to the ferocity of her visage something unreasoning
+and fatal; an irresponsible ogress, without pity as without pleasure,
+devouring after the manner of Nature and of Time. And it was so
+perhaps that she was understood by the initiated of ancient Egypt, who
+symbolised everything for the people in the figures of gods.
+
+In the dark retreat, enclosed with defaced stones, in the little temple
+where she stands, alone, upright and grand, with her enormous head and
+thrust-out chin and tall goddess' headdress--one is necessarily quite
+close to her. In touching her, at night, you are astonished to find that
+she is less cold than the air; she becomes somebody, and the intolerable
+dead stare seems to weigh you down.
+
+During the _tete-a-tete_, one thinks involuntarily of the surroundings,
+of these ruins in the desert, of the prevailing nothingness, of the cold
+beneath the stars. And, now, that summation of doubt and despair
+and terror, which such an assemblage of things inspires in you, is
+confirmed, if one may say so, by the meeting with this divinity-symbol,
+which awaits you at the end of the journey, to receive ironically all
+human prayer; a rigid horror of granite, with an implacable smile and a
+devouring jaw.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+A TOWN PROMPTLY EMBELLISHED
+
+Eight years and a line of railway have sufficed to accomplish its
+metamorphosis. Once in Upper Egypt, on the borders of Nubia, there was
+a little humble town, rarely visited, and wanting, it must be owned, in
+elegance and even in comfort.
+
+Not that it was without picturesqueness and historical interest. Quite
+the contrary. The Nile, charged with the waters of equatorial Africa,
+flung itself close by from the height of a mass of black granite, in
+a majestic cataract; and then, before the little Arab houses, became
+suddenly calm again, and flowed between islets of fresh verdure where
+clusters of palm-trees swayed their plumes in the wind.
+
+And around were a number of temples, of hypogea, of Roman ruins, of
+ruins of churches dating from the first centuries of Christianity. The
+ground was full of souvenirs of the great primitive civilisations. For
+the place, abandoned for ages and lulled in the folds of Islam under
+the guardianship of its white mosque, was once one of the centres of the
+life of the world.
+
+And, moreover, in the adjoining desert, some three or four thousand
+years ago, the ancient history of the world had been written by the
+Pharaohs in immortal hieroglyphics--well-nigh everywhere, on the
+polished sides of the strange blocks of blue and red granite that lie
+scattered about the sands and look now like the forms of antediluvian
+monsters.
+
+*****
+
+Yes, but it was necessary that all this should be co-ordinated, focused
+as it were, and above all rendered accessible to the delicate travellers
+of the Agencies. And to-day we have the pleasure of announcing that,
+from December to March, Assouan (for that is the name of the fortunate
+locality) has a “season” as fashionable as those of Ostend or Spa.
+
+In approaching it, the huge hotels erected on all sides--even on the
+islets of the old river--charm the eye of the traveller, greeting him
+with their welcoming signs, which can be seen a league away. True, they
+have been somewhat hastily constructed, of mud and plaster, but they
+recall none the less those gracious palaces with which the Compagnie des
+Wagon-Lits has dowered the world. And how negligible now, how dwarfed
+by the height of their facades, is the poor little town of olden times,
+with its little houses, whitened with chalk, and its baby minaret.
+
+The cataract, on the other hand, has disappeared from Assouan. The
+tutelary Albion wisely considered that it would be better to sacrifice
+that futile spectacle and, in order to increase the yield of the soil,
+to dam the waters of the Nile by an artificial barrage: a work of solid
+masonry which (in the words of the Programme of Pleasure Trips) “affords
+an interest of a very different nature and degree” (sic).
+
+But nevertheless Cook & Son--a business concern glossed with poetry, as
+all the world knows--have endeavoured to perpetuate the memory of the
+cataract by giving its name to a hotel of 500 rooms, which as a result
+of their labours has been established opposite to those rocks--now
+reduced to silence--over which the old Nile used to seethe for so many
+centuries. “Cataract Hotel!”--that gives the illusion still, does it
+not?--and looks remarkably well at the head of a sheet of notepaper.
+
+Cook & Son (Egypt Ltd.) have even gone so far as to conceive the idea
+that it would be original to give to their establishment a certain
+_cachet_ of Islam. And the dining-room reproduces (in imitation, of
+course--but then you must not expect the impossible) the interior of
+one of the mosques of Stamboul. At the luncheon hour it is one of the
+prettiest sights in the world to see, under this imitation holy cupola,
+all the little tables crowded with Cook's tourists of both sexes, the
+while a concealed orchestra strikes up the “Mattchiche.”
+
+The dam, it is true, in suppressing the cataract has raised some
+thirty feet or so the level of the water upstream, and by so doing has
+submerged a certain Isle of Philae, which passed, absurdly enough, for
+one of the marvels of the world by reason of its great temple of Isis,
+surrounded by palm-trees. But between ourselves, one may say that the
+beautiful goddess was a little old-fashioned for our times. She and her
+mysteries had had their day. Besides, if there should be any chagrined
+soul who might regret the disappearance of the island, care has been
+taken to perpetuate the memory of it, in the same way as that of the
+cataract. Charming coloured postcards, taken before the submerging of
+the island and the sanctuary, are on sale in all the bookshops along the
+quay.
+
+Oh! this quay of Assouan, already so British in its orderliness, its
+method! Nothing better cared for, nothing more altogether charming could
+be conceived. First of all there is the railway, which, passing between
+balustrades painted a grass-green, gives out its fascinating noise and
+joyous smoke. On one side is a row of hotels and shops, all European in
+character--hairdressers, perfumers, and numerous dark rooms for the use
+of the many amateur photographers, who make a point of taking away
+with them photographs of their travelling companions grouped tastefully
+before some celebrated hypogeum.
+
+And then numerous cafes, where the whisky is of excellent quality. And,
+I ought to add, in justice to the result of the _Entente Cordiale_, you
+may see there, too, aligned in considerable quantities on the shelves,
+the products of those great French philanthropists, to whom indeed our
+generation does not render sufficient homage for all the good they have
+done to its stomach and its head. The reader will guess that I have
+named Pernod, Picon and Cusenier.
+
+It may be indeed that the honest fellahs and Nubians of the
+neighbourhood, so sober a little while ago, are apt to abuse these
+tonics a little. But that is the effect of novelty, and will pass. And
+anyhow, amongst us Europeans, there is no need to conceal the fact--for
+we do not all make use of it involuntarily?--that alcoholism is a
+powerful auxiliary in the propagation of our ideas, and that the dealer
+in wines and spirits constitutes a valuable vanguard pioneer for our
+Western civilisation. Races, insensibly depressed by the abuse of our
+“appetisers,” become more supple, more easy to lead in the true path of
+progress and liberty.
+
+On this quay of Assouan, so carefully levelled, defiles briskly a
+continual stream of fair travellers ravishingly dressed as only those
+know how who have made a tour with Cook & Son (Egypt Ltd.). And along
+the Nile, in the shade of the young trees, planted with the utmost
+nicety and precision, the flower-beds and straight-cut turf are
+protected efficaciously by means of wire-netting against certain acts of
+forgetfulness to which dogs, alas, are only too much addicted.
+
+Here, too, everything is ticketed, everything has its number: the
+donkeys, the donkey-drivers, the stations even where they are allowed to
+stand--“Stand for six donkeys, stand for ten, etc.” Some very handsome
+camels, fitted with riding saddles, wait also in their respective places
+and a number of Cook ladies, meticulous on the point of local colour,
+even when it is merely a question of making some purchases in the town,
+readily mount for some moments one or other of these “ships of the
+desert.”
+
+And at every fifty yards a policeman, still Egyptian in his countenance,
+but quite English in his bearing and costume, keeps a vigilant eye on
+everything--would never suffer, for example, that an eleventh donkey
+should dare to take a place in a stand for ten, which was already full.
+
+Certain people, inclined to be critical, might consider, perhaps,
+that these policemen were a little too ready to chide their
+fellow-countrymen; whereas on the contrary they showed themselves very
+respectful and obliging whenever they were addressed by a traveler in
+a cork helmet. But that is in virtue of an equitable and logical
+principle, derived by them from the high places of the new
+administration--namely, that the Egypt of to-day belongs far less to the
+Egyptians than to the noble foreigners who have come to brandish there
+the torch of civilisation.
+
+In the evening, after dark, the really respectable travellers do not
+quit the brilliant dining saloons of the hotels, and the quay is left
+quite solitary beneath the stars. It is at such a time that one is able
+to realise how extremely hospitable certain of the natives are become.
+If, in an hour of melancholy, you walk alone on the bank of the Nile,
+smoking a cigarette, you will not fail to be accosted by one of these
+good people, who misunderstanding the cause of the unrest in your soul,
+offers eagerly, and with a touching frankness, to introduce you to the
+gayest of the young ladies of the country.
+
+In the other towns, which still remain purely Egyptian, the people would
+never practise such an excess of affability and good manners, which have
+been learnt, beyond all question from our beneficent contact.
+
+Assouan possesses also its little Oriental bazaar--a little improvised,
+a little new perhaps; but then one, at least, was needed, and that
+as quickly as possible, in order that nothing might be wanting to the
+tourists.
+
+The shopkeepers have contrived to provision themselves (in the leading
+shops, under the arcades of the Rue de Rivoli) with as much tact as good
+taste, and the Cook ladies have the innocent illusion of making bargains
+every day. One may even buy there, hung up by the tail, stuffed with
+straw and looking extremely real, the last crocodiles of Egypt, which,
+particularly at the end of the season, may be had at very advantageous
+prices.
+
+Even the old Nile has allowed itself to be fretted and brought up to
+date in the progress of evolution.
+
+First, the women, draped in black veils, who come daily to draw the
+precious water, have forsaken the fragile amphorae of baked earth,
+which had come to them from barbarous times--and which the Orientalists
+grossly abused in their picture; and in their stead have taken to
+old tin oil-cans, placed at their disposal by the kindness of the
+big hotels. But they carry them in the same easy graceful manner as
+erstwhile the discarded pottery, and without losing in the least the
+gracious tanagrine outline.
+
+And then there are the great tourist boats of the Agencies, which are
+here in abundance, for Assouan has the privilege of being the terminus
+of the line; and their whistlings, their revolving motors, their
+electric dynamos maintain from morning till night a captivating
+symphony. It might be urged perhaps against these structures that
+they resemble a little the washhouses on the Seine; but the Agencies,
+desirous of restoring to them a certain local colour, have given them
+names so notoriously Egyptian that one is reduced to silence. They are
+called Sesostris, Amenophis or Ramses the Great.
+
+And finally there are the rowing boats, which carry passengers
+incessantly backwards and forwards between the river-banks. So long
+as the season remains at its height they are bedecked with a number of
+little flags of red cotton-cloth, or even of simple paper. The rowers,
+moreover, have been instructed to sing all the time the native songs
+which are accompanied by a derboucca player seated in the prow. Nay,
+they have even learnt to utter that rousing, stimulating cry which
+Anglo-Saxons use to express their enthusiasm or their joy: “Hip! Hip!
+Hurrah!” and you cannot conceive how well it sounds, coming between the
+Arab songs, which otherwise might be apt to grow monotonous.
+
+*****
+
+But the triumph of Assouan is its desert. It begins at once without
+transition as soon as you pass the close-cropped turf of the last
+square. A desert which, except for the railroad and the telegraph poles,
+has all the charm of the real thing: the sand, the chaos of overthrown
+stones, the empty horizons--everything, in short, save the immensity
+and infinite solitude, the horror, in a word which formerly made it so
+little desirable. It is a little astonishing, it must be owned, to find,
+on arriving there, that the rocks have been carefully numbered in white
+paint, and in some cases marked with a large cross “which catches the
+eye from a greater distance still” (sic). But I agree that the effect of
+the whole has lost nothing.
+
+In the morning before the sun gets too hot, between breakfast and
+luncheon to be precise, all the good ladies in cork helmets and blue
+spectacles (dark-coloured spectacles are recommended on account of the
+glare) spread themselves over these solitudes, domesticated as it were
+to their use, with as much security as in Trafalgar Square or Kensington
+Gardens. Not seldom even you may see one of them making her way alone,
+book in hand, towards one of the picturesque rocks--No. 363, for
+example, or No. 364, if you like it better--which seems to be
+making signs to her with its white ticket, in a manner which, to the
+uninitiated observer, might seem even a little improper.
+
+But what a sense of safety families may feel here, to be sure! In spite
+of the huge numbers, which at first sight look a little equivocal,
+nothing in the least degree reprehensible can happen among these
+granites; which are, moreover, in a single piece, without the least
+crack or hole into which the straggler could contrive to crawl. No. The
+figures and the crosses denote simple blocks of stones, covered with
+hieroglyphics, and correspond to a chaste catalogue where each Pharaonic
+inscription may be found translated in the most becoming language.
+
+This ingenious ticketing of the stones of the desert is due to the
+initiative of an English Egyptologist.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+THE PASSING OF PHILAE
+
+Leaving Assouan--as soon as we have passed the last house--we come at
+once upon the desert. And now the night is falling, a cold February
+night, under a strange, copper-coloured sky.
+
+Incontestably it is the desert, with its chaos of granite and sand, its
+warm tones and reddish colour. But there are telegraph poles and the
+lines of a railroad, which traverse it in company, and disappear in the
+empty horizon. And then too how paradoxical and ridiculous it seems
+to be travelling here on full security and in a carriage! (The most
+commonplace of hackney-carriages, which I hired by the hour on the
+quay of Assouan.) A desert indeed which preserves still its aspects
+of reality, but has become domesticated and tamed for the use of the
+tourists and the ladies.
+
+First, immense cemeteries surrounded by sand at the beginning of these
+quasi-solitudes. Such old cemeteries of every epoch of history. The
+thousand little cupolas of saints of Islam are crumbling side by side
+with the Christian obelisks of the first centuries; and, underneath, the
+Pharaonic hypogea. In the twilight, all these ruins of the dead, all the
+scattered blocks of granite are mingled in mournful groupings, outlined
+in fantastic silhouette against the pale copper of the sky; broken
+arches, tilted domes, and rocks that rise up like tall phantoms.
+
+Farther on, when we have left behind this region of tombs, the granites
+alone litter the expanse of sand, granites to which the usury of
+centuries has given the form of huge round beasts. In places they
+have been thrown one upon the other and make great heaps of monsters.
+Elsewhere they lie alone among the sands, as if lost in the midst of
+the infinitude of some dead sea-shore. The rails and the telegraph poles
+have disappeared; by the magic of twilight everything is become grand
+again, beneath one of those evening skies of Egypt which, in winter,
+resemble cold cupolas of metal. And now it is that you feel yourself
+verily on the threshold of the profound desolations of Arabia, from
+which no barrier, after all separates you. Were it not for the lack of
+verisimilitude in the carriage that has brought us hither, we should
+be able now to take this desert quite seriously--for in fact it has no
+limits.
+
+After travelling for about three-quarters of an hour, we see in the
+distance a number of lights, which have already been kindled in
+the growing darkness. They seem too bright to be those of an Arab
+encampment. And our driver turning round and pointing to them says:
+“Chelal!”
+
+Chelal--that is the name of the Arab village, on the riverside, where
+you take the boat for Philae. To our disgust the place is lighted by
+electricity. It consists of a station, a factory with a long smoking
+chimney, and a dozen or so suspicious-looking taverns, reeking of
+alcohol, without which, it would seem, our European civilisation could
+not implant itself in a new country.
+
+And here we embark for Philae. A number of boats are ready: for the
+tourists allured by many advertisements flock hither every winter in
+docile herds. All the boats, without a single exception, are profusely
+decorated with little English flags, as if for some regatta on the
+Thames. There is no escape therefore from this beflagging of a foreign
+holiday--and we set out with a homesick song of Nubia, which the boatmen
+sing to the cadence of the oars.
+
+The copper-coloured heaven remains so impregnated with cold light that
+we still see clearly. We are amid magnificent tragic scenery on a lake
+surrounded by a kind of fearful amphitheatre outlined on all sides by
+the mountains of the desert. It was at the bottom of this granite circus
+that the Nile used to flow, forming fresh islets, on which the eternal
+verdure of the palm-trees contrasted with the high desolate mountains
+that surrounded it like a wall. To-day, on account of the barrage
+established by the English, the water has steadily risen, like a tide
+that will never recede; and this lake, almost a little sea, replaces
+the meanderings of the river and has succeeded in submerging the sacred
+islets. The sanctuary of Isis--which was enthroned for thousands of
+years on the summit of a hill, crowded with temples and colonnades and
+statues--still half emerges; but it is alone and will soon go the way
+of the others, There it is, beyond, like a great rock, at this hour in
+which the night begins to obscure everything.
+
+Nowhere but in Upper Egypt have the winter nights these transparencies
+of absolute emptiness nor these sinister colourings. As the light
+gradually fails, the sky passes from copper to bronze, but remains
+always metallic. The zenith becomes brownish like a brazen shield, while
+the setting sun alone retains its yellow colour, growing slowly paler
+till it is almost of the whiteness of latten; and, above, the mountains
+of the desert edge their sharp outlines with a tint of burnt sienna.
+To-night a freezing wind blows fiercely in our faces. To the continual
+chant of the rowers we pass slowly over the artificial lake, which is
+upheld as it were in the air by the English masonry, invisible now in
+the distance, but divined nevertheless and revolting. A sacrilegious
+lake one might call it, since it hides beneath its troubled waters ruins
+beyond all price; temples of the gods of Egypt, churches of the first
+centuries of Christianity, obelisks, inscriptions and emblems. It is
+over these things that we now pass, while the spray splashes in our
+faces, and the foam of a thousand angry little billows.
+
+We draw near to what was once the holy isle. In places dying palm-trees,
+whose long trunks are to-day under water, still show their moistened
+plumes and give an appearance of inundation, almost of cataclysm.
+
+Before coming to the sanctuary of Isis, we touch at the kiosk of Philae,
+which has been reproduced in the pictures of every age, and is as
+celebrated even as the Sphinx and the pyramids. It used to stand on
+a pedestal of high rocks, and around it the date-trees swayed their
+bouquets of aerial palms. To-day it has no longer a base; its columns
+rise separately from this kind of suspended lake. It looks as if it had
+been constructed in the water for the purpose of some royal naumachy. We
+enter with our boat--a strange port indeed, in its ancient grandeur; a
+port of a nameless melancholy, particularly at this yellow hour of the
+closing twilight, and under these icy winds that come to us mercilessly
+from the neighbouring deserts. And yet how adorable it is, this kiosk of
+Philae, in this the abandonment that precedes its downfall! Its columns
+placed, as it were, upon something unstable, become thereby more
+slender, seem to raise higher still the stone foliage of their capitals.
+A veritable kiosk of dreamland now, which one feels is about to
+disappear for ever under these waters which will subside no more!
+
+And now, for another few moments, it grows quite light again, and tints
+of a warmer copper reappear in the sky. Often in Egypt when the sun has
+set and you think the light is gone, this furtive recoloration of the
+air comes thus to surprise you, before the darkness finally descends.
+The reddish tints seem to return to the slender shafts that surround us,
+and also, beyond, to the temple of the goddess, standing there like a
+sheer rock in the middle of this little sea, which the wind covers with
+foam.
+
+On leaving the kiosk our boat--on this deep usurping water, among the
+submerged palm-trees--makes a detour in order to lead us to the temple
+by the road which the pilgrims of olden times used to travel on foot--by
+that way which, a little while ago, was still magnificent, bordered with
+colonnades and statues. But now the road is entirely submerged, and will
+never be seen again. Between its double row of columns the water lifts
+us to the height of the capitals, which alone emerge and which we could
+touch with our hands. It seems like some journey of the end of time, in
+a kind of deserted Venice, which is about to topple over, to sink and be
+forgotten.
+
+We arrive at the temple. Above our heads rise the enormous pylons,
+ornamented with figures in bas-relief: an Isis who stretches out her
+arms as if she were making signs to us, and numerous other divinities
+gesticulating mysteriously. The door which opens in the thickness of
+these walls is low, besides being half flooded, and gives on to depths
+already in darkness. We row on and enter the sanctuary, and as soon as
+one boat has crossed the sacred threshold the boatmen stop their song
+and suddenly give voice to the new cry that has been taught them for the
+benefit of the tourists: “Hip! Hip! Hip! Hurrah!” Coming at this
+moment, when, with heart oppressed by all the utilitarian vandalism that
+surrounds us, we were entering the sanctuary, what an effect of gross
+and imbecile profanation this bellowing of English joy produces! The
+boatmen know, moreover, that they have been displaced, that their day
+has gone for ever; perhaps even, in the depths of their Nubian souls,
+they understand us, for all that we have imposed silence on them. The
+darkness increases within, although the place is open to the sky, and
+the icy wind blows more mournfully than it did outside. A penetrating
+humidity--a humidity altogether unknown in this country before the
+inundation--chills us to the bone. We are now in that part of the temple
+which was left uncovered, the part where the faithful used to kneel. The
+sonority of the granites round about exaggerates the noise of the oars
+on the enclosed water, and there is something confusing in the thought
+that we are rowing and floating between the walls where formerly,
+and for centuries, men were used to prostrate themselves with their
+foreheads on the stones.
+
+And now it is quite dark; the hour grows late. We have to bring the boat
+close to the walls to distinguish the hieroglyphs and rigid gods which
+are engraved there as finely as by the burin. These walls, washed for
+nearly four years by the inundation, have already taken on at the base
+that sad blackish colour which may be seen on the old Venetian palaces.
+
+Halt and silence. It is dark and cold. The oars no longer move, and we
+hear only the sighing of the wind and the lapping of the water against
+the columns and the bas-reliefs--and then suddenly there comes the noise
+of a heavy body falling, followed by endless eddies. A great carved
+stone has plunged, at its due hour, to rejoin in the black chaos below
+its fellows that have already disappeared, to rejoin the submerged
+temples and old Coptic churches, and the town of the first Christian
+centuries--all that was once the Isle of Philae, the “pearl of Egypt,”
+ one of the marvels of the world.
+
+The darkness is now extreme and we can see no longer. Let us go
+and shelter, no matter where, to await the moon. At the end of this
+uncovered hall there opens a door which gives on to deep night. It is
+the holy of holies, heavily roofed with granite, the highest part of the
+temple, the only part which the waters have not yet reached, and there
+we are able to put foot to earth. Our footsteps resound noisily on the
+large resonant flags, and the owls take to flight. Profound darkness;
+the wind and the dampness freeze us. Three hours to go before the rising
+of the moon; to wait in this place would be our death. Rather let us
+return to Chelal, and shelter ourselves in any lodging that offers,
+however wretched it may be.
+
+*****
+
+A tavern of the horrible village in the light of an electric lamp. It
+reeks of absinthe, this desert tavern, in which we warm ourselves at a
+little smoking fire. It has been hastily built of old tin boxes, of the
+debris of whisky cases, and by way of mural decoration the landlord, an
+ignorant Maltese, has pasted everywhere pictures cut from our European
+pornographic newspapers. During our hours of waiting, Nubians and
+Arabians follow one another hither, asking for drink, and are supplied
+with brimming glassfuls of our alcoholic beverages. They are the workers
+in the new factories who were formerly healthy beings, living in the
+open air. But now their faces are stained with coal dust, and their
+haggard eyes look unhappy and ill.
+
+*****
+
+The rising of the moon is fortunately at hand. Once more in our boat
+we make our way slowly towards the sad rock which to-day is Philae. The
+wind has fallen with the night, as happens almost invariably in this
+country in winter, and the lake is calm. To the mournful yellow sky has
+succeeded one that is blue-black, infinitely distant, where the stars of
+Egypt scintillate in myriads.
+
+A great glimmering light shows now in the east and at length the full
+moon rises, not blood-coloured as in our climates but straightway very
+luminous, and surrounded by an aureole of a kind of mist, caused by
+the eternal dust of the sands. And when we return to the baseless
+kiosk--lulled always by the Nubian song of the boatmen--a great disc is
+already illuminating everything with a gentle splendour. As our little
+boat winds in and out, we see the great ruddy disc passing and repassing
+between the high columns, so striking in their archaism, whose images
+are repeated in the water, that is now grown calm--more than ever a
+kiosk of dreamland, a kiosk of old-world magic.
+
+In returning to the temple of the goddess, we follow for a second time
+the submerged road between the capitals and friezes of the colonnade
+which emerge like a row of little reefs.
+
+In the uncovered hall which forms the entrance to the temple, it is
+still dark between the sovereign granites. Let us moor our boat against
+one of the walls and await the good pleasure of the moon. As soon as
+she shall have risen high enough to cast her light here, we shall see
+clearly.
+
+It begins by a rosy glimmer on the summit of the pylons; and then takes
+the form of a luminous triangle, very clearly defined, which grows
+gradually larger on the immense wall. Little by little it descends
+towards the base of the temple, revealing to us by degrees the
+intimidating presence of the bas-reliefs, the gods, goddesses and
+hieroglyphs, and the assemblies of people who make signs among
+themselves. We are no longer alone--a whole world of phantoms has been
+evoked around us by the moon, some little, some very large. They had
+been hiding there in the shadow and now suddenly they recommence their
+mute conversations, without breaking the profound silence, using only
+their expressive hands and raised fingers. And now also the colossal
+Isis begins to appear--the one carved on the left of the portico
+by which you enter; first, her refined head with its bird's helmet,
+surmounted by a solar disc; then, as the light continues to descend,
+her neck and shoulders, and her arm, raised to make who knows what
+mysterious, indicating sign; and finally the slim nudity of her torso,
+and her hips close bound in a sheath. Behold her now, the goddess,
+come completely out of the shadow. . . . But she seems surprised and
+disturbed at seeing at her feet, instead of the stones she had known
+for two thousand years, her own likeness, a reflection of herself, that
+stretches away, reversed in the mirror of the water. . . .
+
+And suddenly, in the mist of the deep nocturnal calm of this temple,
+isolated here in the lake, comes again the sound of a kind of mournful
+booming, of things that topple, precious stones that become detached
+and fall--and then, on the surface of the lake, a thousand concentric
+circles form, close one another and disappear, ruffling indefinitely
+this mirror embanked between the terrible granites, in which Isis
+regards herself sorrowfully.
+
+_Postscript._--The submerging of Philae, as we know, has increased by
+no less than seventy-five millions of pounds the annual yield of the
+surrounding land. Encouraged by this success, the English propose
+next year to raise the barrage of the Nile another twenty feet. As a
+consequence this sanctuary of Isis will be completely submerged, the
+greater part of the ancient temples of Nubia will be under water, and
+fever will infect the country. But, on the other hand, the cultivation
+of cotton will be enormously facilitated. . . .
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Egypt (La Mort De Philae), by Pierre Loti
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