From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI
THE CITY OF THE HUNDRED GATES
A smile of ineffable pity rests on the countenance of the aged, disabled, and supremely dirty beggar who squats at the base of the Northern Pylon of the great Temple of Karnak, as, powdered from head to foot with desert dust, we file past him at the tail of our dragoman through its gigantic portals. He is too lazy, too sublimely content with mere living, is this aged sage, to join for the moment in the pursuit of bakshish. Moreover, he has observed how his brother pests have sped on the hunt for piastres, and the result, so far, has not been encouraging. When Ali was thirty years younger he would have had more perseverance. Thirty years ago he would gladly enough have formed one of that crowd of human flies which buzzes round and settles upon the visitor at the gates of every temple and on the steps of every tomb in Egypt; and he would then, no doubt, have proved himself as pertinaciously importunate, as imperturbably good-humoured, as impenetrably proof against every known form of appeal, protest, or denunciation as is now the most widely exasperating of their number. And how much that is to say of him! What an unbounded tribute to his powers of provocation and his willingness to provoke! Our familiar English definition of such or such a man as "one who will not take No for an answer" would be a deplorably inadequate description of the Egyptian "bakshish fly," the donkey-boy and his fellow-nuisances.
Take No for an answer, indeed! They will not take it for an answer in any tongue spoken of man, whether in the East or West. They will not take it in any tone expressive of any variety of emotion, or appropriated to any mode of address—in the tone of amiable deprecation, or of grave remonstrance, or of passionate entreaty, or of deadly hate. They will not take it in any form of language however potently fortified with the most vigorous phrases of European invective, or however richly arabesqued with the most highly decorative specimens of Oriental imprecation. They will take it only when emphasised with the stick, and unless the traveller feels sufficiently at home with them to punctuate his refusals with a stout cudgel, he is practically at their mercy. The venerable Ali is well aware of this; yet it is apparently without any wish to join them that he watches the black swarm of Hamids and Hassans at their maddening work. The agonised voices of the victims are audible to him, where he squats, as their heart-felt utterances, sounding like so many extracts from an animated and somewhat profane Ollendorf, fill the dusty air. "No! no, thank you! No, I tell you! No, no! Be off! Get away! Imshi! I don't want it! I tell you I don't want it! No, nor that, nor anything! I don't want a scarabæus; no, nor the foot of a mummy, nor a coin of the Ptolemies, nor a piece of sun-dried Nile mud inscribed with the cartouche of Rameses the Great. No! No, I tell you! No, confound you! No! No! No!!! . . . . Look here, if you don't go away I'll———" and so on, da capo.
All these and many other ejaculations long familiar to him reach the ears of the aged man, as also do the cheerful cries of his fellow-countrymen. "Scarabee! Forpiaster! Very good Ramses! Mummy anteeker, Mister! Say 'ow much! You no want Ramses! Orright!" He sees the sufferers gradually shake off the terrible "bakshish fly" (musca piastrisuga vulgaris) and flee for sanctuary into the vast hall of the vastest temple in the world. Whereupon, having observed that hardly one of the tormentors has succeeded in drawing a single drop of blood, he composes himself to sleep with the complacent reflection that Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate, brings wisdom to the old; and that it does not follow because Franks are so mad as to leave their own countries by thousands and tramp about foreign lands in droves of forty or fifty head, that they can be bled at any given moment by the exercise of sufficient importunity. Better for Ali to enjoy another hour's sleep in the shadow of the great Pylon, and fall upon his prey when they come forth exhausted by the perambulation of those acres of ruins, and confused to the last point of mental bewilderment by the explanations of their dragoman.
Not that these well-meant attempts of incomplete knowledge to enlighten complete ignorance through the medium of an imperfectly mastered language are necessary to the full obfuscation of the ordinary tourist. In any case, he is likely enough to emerge from the Temple of Karnak stupefied by that mere vastness of scale, those Titanic proportions of architecture which ranked it ages ago, when it was intact or nearly so, and which rank it to-day, when it is a ruin, among the Wonders of the World. It is not the mere area of the mighty building which oppresses one, though four Cathedrals of Notre Dame would go, it is said, into the Hypostyle Hall. Nor is it merely the altitude to which the towering columns mount, or their enormous girth, or their forest-like array. You think of those huge pillars that lose themselves in the upper gloom at Seville, and of the endlessly intersecting avenues of the Mosque of Cordova; and you feel that in these two points, at any rate, Karnak, if it be not exactly rivalled, is not so very far ahead. It is the astonishing successful combination of all the widely differing architectural effects which are severally produced by number, by size, by proportion, by disposition, by the imperious influence of mass, and the winning appeal of perspective—it is the combination of these into a phalanx of forces to be launched irresistibly against the senses and the soul of the beholder that make the great temple what it is. Those Atlantean columns, which were built, surely, to uphold the heavens themselves, and which seem to bear up their enormous surmounting monoliths as a giant would lift a child, have no suggestion of unwieldiness in their colossal size, leave no sense of excess in their multitudinous number. The calyx-capital into which each column blossoms would take ten men to span its monstrous girth; yet it opens out against the blue Egyptian sky above its roofless head as lightly as if it were the finest Gothic tracery above an English cathedral nave.
Everywhere the feeling of absolute fitness, of perfect proportion redeems this majestic hall of the offence of mere Brobdingnagerie; and whether the eye dwells upon the parts or sweeps the whole—whether it travels through the endless alleys of this forest of stone, and rests by turns upon base and shaft and flower-like capital of its component columns, or pauses to peruse walls deep-graven with colossal gods and kings, and still glowing here and there with the undying colours of 4000 years, the artistic taste is alike satisfied. So admirable, indeed, are the proportions of the whole that the stupendous bulk of its constituent parts is hardly realised. Derangement of their symmetry seems necessary to enable one to measure it in its full awfulness, as we do there, where one of these gigantic pillars has fallen and bows its hundreds of tons of weight and the superincumbent burden of its huge plinth, dislocated and askew, towards one of its fellows. The cause of this portentous displacement no man knows; but the vague tradition that ascribes it to the conqueror Cambyses may be safely dismissed. No mortal hands, relying solely on the strength of human muscles and the only known forces of an age that knew not of gunpowder could ever have done the work of inchoate destruction which is above our heads. Nothing short of an earthquake could have thrust one of those tremendous plinths into the position of that overhanging horror.
Karnak is the greatest of the ruins of hundred-gated Thebes, as perhaps it is the greatest ruin of the world, but it is only one of many monuments, the least of which would suffice to make Luxor and its surroundings famous. For here, on the west bank of the Nile, are the Ramesseum, and the exquisite temple of Hathor at Medinet Habu, and those wonderful rock-built Tombs of the Kings which were rescued by so strange a series of chances from the hands of their Arab exploiters but a few years ago. Above all, here are those two dread effigies of Amenophis, the Colossi who sit for ever gazing side by side from the desert border over the green plain towards the Nile and that sunrise which was fabled to draw from the granite lips of the northern figure its mysterious morning song. Perhaps no Egyptian monument more keenly excites the interest of the Western traveller, largely, no doubt, in virtue of its strange legend, than this, the so-called Vocal Memnon; yet, seen after the Sphinx, it disappoints. Its position and surroundings are against it. All the associations of the Sphinx are with the loneliness of the inhuman desert, with the leagues of barren wind-blown sand, in the midst of which it rests half buried, and which in the course of ages has again and again submerged it. The Colossi, it is true, have the bare yellow spurs of the Libyan range behind them; but their feet are actually set in the verdure of cultivation, and they look over smiling plots of wheat and lentil and dura, a kindly land enriched by human labour and made cheerful with the voice of man. Placed where they are they have too much the air of transported antiquities, of gigantic "curios" brought over from their native site and planted by some eccentric English landed proprietor in the midst of his fields. Arab fanaticism, moreover, or the rage of the Persian conqueror, has chipped and battered their stony countenances out of all resemblance to a human face; so that the effect of their towering figures and their attitude of majestic repose is unassisted by any of that strange fascination of expression which the Sphinx so powerfully exerts. Nevertheless, it would be an uncanny sight enough, one can well believe, to see those gigantic featureless figures glimmering through the grey twilight of an Egyptian dawn, the while one waited for the first level shaft of light from the East to smite the vocal effigy, and awaken that weird strain of music which the traveller of olden days so often journeyed from afar to hear. To the Greeks of the classic period, with their happy knack of poetising legend, the note uttered by the statue was the sweet and plaintive greeting of Memnon, slain at Troy, to his dawn-mother Eos. To the sceptical Strabo, writing three centuries after that period, it seemed the effect of some natural, though conjectural cause, and one can see plainly enough that the worthy geographer more than suspected it to be a mere imposture of the priests designed to increase their hold on the superstition of the faithful.
"When I was at those places with Œlius Gallus, and numerous friends about him, I heard a noise (says he) at the first hour of the day, but whether proceeding from the base or from the Colossus, or produced on purpose by some of those standing round the base, I cannot confidently assert. But from the uncertainty of the cause I am disposed to believe anything rather than that stones disposed in that manner could send forth sound." To the modern man of science the morning song of the Memnon, when audible at all, which is very rarely the case, is a simple physical phenomenon, easily explicable in terms of force and matter. According to eminent physicists it is perfectly possible for a hard resonant stone, exposed to the sudden heat of the morning sun-rays following upon the cold Egyptian nights, to emit a sound. Professor Ebers has heard the like under the porphyry cliffs of Sinai; the granite sanctuary of Karnak, the granite quarries of Assouan are said to be musical also; and the "music-stones" of the Orinoco are well known. The extensive broken and sloping surface of the Colossus, wet with the dews of early morning—the tears of Eos over her child, according to the Greek myth—becomes suddenly warm at sunrise, and "the current of air produced by this rapid change of temperature passing over its rough and pebbly surface" produces the mystic sound. The "eminent physicists" who offer us this explanation of the song of the Northern Colossus have omitted, it will be seen, to explain the silence of its colleague; but this by the way. Enough that science satisfies herself in the matter, and hat as the chant of the Memnon was holy to the mytho-poet and fraudulent to the ancient geographer, so it is simply a natural effect of heat and moisture to the modern sage. To our assembled party at the base of the statue it is the resonant clang of a small metallic gong or tambourine, stricken by an exceptionally tattered Arab, who has with catlike agility swarmed up the twenty feet or so of pedestal and granite calf and clambered over the thigh of the Colossus into his monstrous lap, in the hollow of which both instrument and musician could easily lie concealed. It was typical of the history of human thought! First, the age of myth; secondly, the age of religious faith; thirdly, the age of philosophic doubt; and lastly, the age of blank and ribald materialism. At one end of the long chain of the centuries a hushed and awe-stricken throng of kneeling worshippers waiting for a sign; at the other, a crowd of globe-trotters gazing upward from the backs of their donkeys, while a ragged Arab clambers on to the knees of the desecrated Memnon to bang a gong for a piastre.
Let us be thankful; however, that the descent from the sublime to the vulgar is no worse than this. Better the weaponless native, who slides down the statue, leaving it none the worse for his having mounted it, than the terrible foreigner, armed with jackknife and chisel, bent on immortalising his name by inscribing it side by side with the cartouche of a Pharaoh.
There is, or was, an American—his identity the relator of his exploits mercifully conceals—who went the round of the Egyptian temples with a pot of tar in one hand and a brush in the other, and daubed his idiotic signature on the walls of each. The motive which prompts these outrages defies psychological analysis. One can only tentatively conjecture that men like the Yankee with the tar brush hope that we, who disgustedly read their names, will "wonder who and what they are." Whereas we do not wonder, we know. We could name and classify them as easily as we can the animals they probably rode; and our only wonder is what particular circle of the Inferno is reserved for their final abode. Happily there are none such among the (generally speaking) helpless, but invariably respectful and well-conducted ignoramuses who are gathered at this moment round the feet of the twin giants.
We are a motley and polyglot band, no doubt, numbering, as we do, among us a highly-respected English Bishop in partibus infidelium, a London surgeon of world-wide fame alike for his personal skill and for the success with which he has advanced the borders of his science, a German sculptor of high distinction, and a jockey whose name, as that of one of the foremost and most accomplished of English horsemen, is familiar to every turf-loving member of our widely-scattered race. Invalids in search of health, idlers in search of distraction, busy men in search of rest, or at any rate change; Germans indulging their newly-acquired national taste for rambling; Frenchmen anxious to look on the land with which they claim so mysteriously sentimental a connection; Americans calmly bent upon doing the world within a fixed period and being "on time" at the finish—these make up the remainder of our company. A harmless, nay, an eminently respectable, if for the most part an, Egyptologically speaking, unlearned party. Yet what irony in the thought that these mighty stones around us were piled by groaning millions under the scourges of their square-browed tyrants to make a holiday sight for us! Shelley's well-known sonnet on the empty boast of "Osymandias, King of Kings" did that potentate injustice. Osymandias, it is agreed, was Rameses the Great, and certainly the mightiest monarchs "looking on his works" might well "despair." But though the Ramesseum and the Temple of Karnak have survived to render his name eternal, he, like every Pharaoh of them all, has missed the far more vital eternity that he sought.
With infinite care and pains did the great king labour to protect his mortal remains from displacement, so that after the lapse of long ages the soul might find them ready for reunion with it under the decree of the gods of the dead. It was for this purpose that the highest and costliest skill of the embalmer was secured for the preparation of the mummy; for this that the Royal Tombs of Der-el-Bahari were scooped deep in the living rock, and the ponderous sarcophagi disposed far down in its lowest and inmost recesses. Nay, it might almost have seemed as if Nature, co-operating with the designs of the Pharaohs, had assisted to secure the everlasting sanctity of these sepulchres by covering them for ages under the desert sands. But in vain. Rameses the Great proposed (about 1300 b.c.), but in 1871 Abd-er-Rasul Ahmed, native of the Arab village of Kurnah, virtually disposed. For in that year Abd-er-Rasûl, "prospecting around" among these sand-strewn rocks, chanced upon a large buried tomb filled with coffins heaped one upon another. On the greater number of them the cartouche and other signs indicated that their tenants were Royal personages, and that their lucky discoverer had made a "find" of the greatest value. They were the mummies of kings, queens, and princesses belonging to no fewer than five Egyptian dynasties, and among them was that of Rameses the Great.
But alas! for Abd-er-Rasûl! They were too heavy for one man to remove, or even effectively to rifle. He had to let two of his brothers and one of his sons into the secret, and unable to dispose of the mummies en gros they determined to exploit them en détail. For some time the firm drove a prosperous trade among chance tourists on the Nile, selling them these priceless treasures doubtless for, comparatively speaking, so many "songs," and replenishing their store, whenever it ran short, by gruesome descents, under cover of the night, to the bottom of these long hidden tombs, forty feet beneath the earth's surface, and approached by a sculptured and pictured corridor of seventy yards in length. The game, however, was too good to last. Scarabs, papyri, jewels, of startling age and yet undoubted genuineness, began to find their way into the hands of experts, and Egyptologists began to smell a rat. M. Maspero, the indefatigable Director of the Boulak Museum, was communicated with, and promptly betook himself to Thebes, armed with full powers of investigation. Abd-er-Rasûl was arrested by the police, examined—some say "put to the question" in the old grim sense of the phrase—imprisoned, released, and finally frightened into turning "Khedive's evidence" and making a clean breast of it to the Mudîr of Keneh. Then all the Royal mummies were exhumed, and as some of them were found to be decomposing, M. Maspero decided to unroll the whole collection, and Rameses II. was the first of these mighty rulers and builders whose features were shown to the world once more, after a lapse of 3200 years. That exposure meant the final defeat of the crowning effort of his religious creed. Osiris and his forty-two colleagues may have long since pronounced favourable sentence on him in the judgment-hall of the under world; and Thoth, the clerk of the gods, may have duly inscribed it on his papyrus roll. But the body of Osymandias, King of Kings, which was embalmed so carefully and hidden so sedulously within tons of granite sarcophagus, and under fathoms of limestone rock, to be in everlasting readiness for re-animation, lies black and mouldering in the Ghizeh Museum, as unfit for reunion with the soul as are the bones of his son, Seti Meneptah, the Pharaoh of the Exodus, bleaching at the bottom of the Red Sea.