The Egyptian Desert from Helouan

by Algernon Blackwood

I

Cruelty was the word I took with me on my first walk into the Desert, but at the end of ten hours spent in its silent spaces I rejected it as utterly unjustified. The glow of the majestic Desert sunset was on the Mokattam Hills behind Helouan, making them burn inwardly with strange fiery torches of their own, and the limestone ridges, so curiously eroded by the wind-borne sand of centuries, nodded fantastic heads towards the old Pyramids far off across the Nile. There was a first star in the east. The short twilight came rushing up. Presently the jackals would begin to whine and howl. The touch of cold was in the air, and in half-an-hour these many thousand-leagued wastes of African sands would be at their old, silent vigil of counting the stars.

No living thing besides myself was in sight, and the light wind that whipped with a noise of running water against the desolate cliffs of the ancient gorges (Wadis) brought no trace of human sound upon its wings. And again I sought the word⁠—the word that should replace this “cruelty” everyone had dinned into my ears. But for a time in vain. Cruelty is in sea and mountains, in great forests, too, as also in the air⁠—where prey is the essence of existence; almost, indeed, in our own kind as well. But here, in this lifeless, barren, windswept region that covers half a continent with a grandeur too simple to marry with even simplest words, it could not, in my own mind at least, find justification. It was, in a sense, too human, too deliberately and consciously human. The terror was here, that terror I had been warned to look for, especially after dusk, and it was beyond question a terror gigantic and overwhelming. But neither was that the word I sought which should sum up the greater mass of the vivid impressions this awful Desert lays like a spell upon the heart and mind. There was something far more penetrating, sweeter and infinite than either cruelty or terror⁠—more subtle, delicate and true. And then the word came suddenly to me of its own accord. Few who know the Desert will agree, least of all those who know its perils at close quarters, and have read into it the emotions of their own severe personal experience. For what rushed into me as the vital key-word that summed up a thousand amazing impressions can only be expressed by a term that one has really no right to apply to inanimate Nature⁠—tenderness. I found myself continually thinking, as I walked home among these sculptured, threatening physiognomies the driven sand has carved in the bewildering hills and ridges⁠—thinking of the wee white flowers I found in the savage bed of the Wadi Hof, tiny, little spotless faces that shone, unawed, amid the waste of ruin and loneliness; thinking, too, of the vivid green plant, bursting with succulent juice, the camels eat; of that prickly, thorny bush, with soft eyes of blue among its sharpness, they devour, too, as if it were meadow grass; of occasional wild geraniums, and of a spear-shaped, dainty yellow flower that grows singly upon a soil of muddy, sunbaked sand that sounds like solid concrete underneath one’s boots. Of many others, too, more exquisite than any forest flowers, more radiant and gentle than those that even grow in watered gardens. Their names I do not know; the wild geranium is probably no geranium at all; but the names the Arab boy has subsequently given me are perhaps as accurate as his answer when I asked him what the numerous kites could possibly find by way of food⁠—“leetle roses”! The tenderness, however, was there, for it forced itself upon me. The very heat and light and wind are tender; it is an incongruous, queer marriage of appalling desolation in a ruined world with a tenderness that the contrast renders infinitely sweet. A giant holds a fairy by the fingertip⁠—yet somehow it is her tenderness that wields the greater spell. For it runs, soft as little children, through the ruin, an enormous tenderness, unfathomable, even inexplicable, modifying beyond description the monstrous element it has so strangely mated. This, and an endless, ineffable peace became for me the passwords to the desert that begins at Helouan and stretches through many thousand miles down to the great Sahara itself.

And Helouan, this little oasis of the Arabs, is an admirable place to enter it; so easily accessible⁠—half-an-hour from Cairo⁠—and living close against its very lips. You may go twenty days on camels, with great expense and trouble and discomfort, yet not see anything more marvellous, more bewilderingly grand and beautiful, than you shall see on a humble Egyptian donkey within an hour’s ride of your cosy, up-to-date hotel. My windows in a cool and airy building, formerly a viceregal palace, with spacious halls, wide, lofty corridors, and palms that rustle endlessly in a shady garden, look forth to the Pyramids across the strip of brilliant vegetation where the Nile meanders with its freight of sweeping, pointed sails that rise like great wings of birds from the very ground. And from another window, facing south and east, I can see the sun rise over the Arabian wilderness of sand. The streets are silent as in Venice; only the singsong of the Arab cries rises through the still air. And when the moon comes up behind the dim Mokattam Hills, and the fragrant Desert air blows across my writing-table, it is difficult to believe the stately building is not a tent and that the stirring of the mosquito curtains round the bed is not the flapping of its canvas sides. And in the daytime, too, it is equally difficult to believe that the temperature, in this dry, stimulating air, is what the thermometer proclaims. The sunshine pricks the skin, but there is no discomfort; you can walk and ride, play tennis or climb the sandy mountains without any of the exhaustion that usually goes with 80-deg in the shade.

To speak of mountains in the Desert sounds queer enough no doubt; but anyone who expects to find a mere endless stretch of Margate sands⁠—though, of course, there are vast regions of smooth, soft sand in other parts across the Nile and a further south⁠—will be surprised at the gorges, ridges, summits, and high, flat plateaux terminating in precipitous cliffs, break the Desert here for hundreds of miles into diverse and rugged scenery that really belongs to mountainous country. This, and the extraordinary variations of colour⁠—color that surpasses in contrast, richness and almost violent shading anything I have ever seen in pastoral or woodland regions⁠—are the things that first help to take the breath away. Within half-an-hour’s walk of my dining-room, with its five-course luncheon and its clever, ubiquitous headwaiter, you may stand alone amid the desolate majesty of Desert scenery that blinds you with its power, its awful loneliness, its wild, intolerable beauty. Surely, you think, these savage gorges have been carved by torrents that grind and thunder through the hills from one year’s end to another. Those peaks and pointed summits that rise like islands out of the level plateaux have just discharged their covering of snow. Avalanches must have tossed these igneous boulders where they lie strewn like huge marbles in the valley beds.

Glaciers have ground these furrows out. Only the waves of violent seas can have worn these scooped-out circles in the cliffs of sand and limestone. The sea must lie just beyond that next line of hills that stand against the blue⁠—for the illusion that the sea lies somewhere close is ever present. Yet, though so much of this Desert along the Nile Delta has been under the sea quite recently, geologically speaking (about six thousand years ago, authorities claim, and as far as Assouan), you will look for the sea as vainly as you may look for any results of genuine water-work in all this wilderness of bewildering and fantastic erosion that makes the Helouan Desert so indescribably fascinating. The eroding instruments have been of a simpler, quieter kind, tireless but gentler, continuing their delicate labour for centuries, almost with tenderness. Alone their results are so stupendous. For the erosion, which I shall presently describe, is due to meteorological conditions⁠—rain, dew, temperature, especially changes of temperature, unequal expansion of various rock constituents, the varying hardness of the different strata, and⁠—the ceaseless friction of the wind-borne sand. It is this latter chiefly that seizes the lay imagination. For this carving due to blasts of sand, driven for hours against the uneven levels, has furrowed and scoured the softer rock away, and etched the hard, siliceous crust into a series of grooved, ribbed outlines that suggest the fretwork of some mighty, cunning fingers. From the alignment of the sweeping ridges you may tell the direction of the sand-bearing winds as easily as you may guess the prevailing winds on a seacoast by the angle of the cliff-grown trees; for to the south and southwest the hills are eaten into the striking outlines mentioned above, while the northern and northeastern sides present sharp, precipitous escarpments, hardly touched. Most of this wind-borne sand, the books explain, is brought from vast distances away in the sandstone reaches of the Nubian Desert. And this curious striped and variegated appearance, this terraced look of vivid painted layers, is due to the alternating strata of sandstone, limestone, gravel and the rest. The sandstone ranges from red and brown to bright yellow, grey and almost pink; while the limestone, suffering even more startling changes from the weathering action, shows purples, blacks, deep slaty blues, and often a mottled, streaked appearance that could only be seen in a faithfully-coloured painting. And this world of colour changes incessantly from dawn to sunset. The sunset colourings, indeed, force one to turn from the sky, where the brilliant effects are themselves amazing enough, and watch the great dead Desert turn alive with coloured fire no man could possibly invent or dream of. And all through the short dusk, as well as when the stars shine through the later hours of darkness, there are patches of yellow sand and gleaming limestone, almost white, that continue to glow as with internal furnaces just behind their sculptured surface. They light your journey home, these strange faint torches.

The absence of any object, such as trees, by which a standard of measurement were possible, makes it extraordinarily difficult to judge either size or distance. These domed and turreted knolls that poke their heads on all sides to the sky seem at first several miles away⁠—then, suddenly, are in front of you. A Bedouin one moment is a speck moving far ahead, and the next is upon you or melting into the distance far behind you. And everywhere on the plateaux are visible the holes he has dug to find the plentiful rock salt, which he sells for a few piastres in the towns and villages. Then, abruptly, you find yourself upon the ancient track the feet of countless camels have beaten hard⁠—the trail that leads to Suez⁠—and the friendly lights of gentle, little, silent Helouan blink kindly through the night. They are welcome. There is no denying that. One wonders how the people can flock to Cairo in such herds for their gaieties⁠—so close to the solemn aristocracy of this splendid, ageless Desert. The vulgarity of its social whirl must strike unpleasantly any real Nature-lover. They might have chosen another place, one finds one’s self thinking with a faint sensation of contempt. Not that the Desert cares.⁠ ⁠… ! And Helouan certainly does not care, with its pure, sweet air, its dustless brilliance, its great enveloping peace and silence, which are the fingers of the Desert feeling along its very streets.

II

From Helouan one may study with never-ceasing interest, even though not geologically expert, the curious phenomenon of the Desert film. This and the examination of the results of erosion are questions of wonder that go with one upon every trip. The surface of the plateaux is a darkly shining crust, often nearly black, and sometimes a deep purply hue that makes one think at once of volcanic rocks. Beneath it, where the face of the worn cliffs becomes visible, one sees the bright colouring of the softer red and yellow sandstone or the whitish limestone. But the top is sombre to a strange degree. This film is a “genuine desert phenomenon, and no part of the colour is in any way due to dust or dirt on the surface.” ’ An interesting account of it, given by Mr. Lucas of the Survey Department Laboratory at Cairo, says: “At Helouan the surfaces of the limestone hills are sombre and dark, which is due to the innumerable fragments of hard, siliceous material splintered by weathering that cover the sides of the hills and the tops of the plateaux; all these fragments are more or less coloured, the colour varying from a light brown to a deep black.⁠ ⁠… The flints are uniformly coloured on any one surface. Where the colour is uniform in tint the stone is uniform in composition, but where the stone is coloured unequally the black or darker portions are harder and more siliceous than the rest. This peculiar patchy coloration has all the appearance of being definite black layer several millimetres in thickness once existing as a vein in the rock and now partly exposed by the splitting and splintering action of the weather⁠ ⁠… but this blackening, although apparently extending into the interior of the stone, is merely a film on the surface⁠ ⁠… This protecting film is an appearance produced by the desert climate. It depends upon the action of the sun and a certain silica content of the rock.” This curious film, which furnishes such vivid contrast in the Desert colouring, cannot be rubbed off and weighed separately, and therefore its percentage composition has never been determined. It is, however, of a ferruginous nature, and its origin is due, apparently, to the dissolving action of rain or dew, which drives out certain salts and acids and leaves the manganese and iron compounds on the surface. All the rocks of Egypt are more or less porous, and contain traces of easily soluble salts, especially common salt. One has only to try to scale the cliffs to find how everything crumbles at the touch. Lumps of rock that look hard as iron are found to be utterly honeycombed by the dissolving of their more soluble constituents through the action of heat and water. They fall into dust by the pressure of the hand. And everywhere is a loose, friable rubble that settles into soft powder beneath the feet. Climbing here is a dangerous and exciting business altogether!

But, next to this striking colouring, it is the sculpture of the rocky cliffs due to erosion that touches the imagination, and touches it very powerfully. Many of the gorges run to a depth of several hundred feet, the soft, lower strata worn away, and the resisting siliceous layers left upon the top like solid tablecloths. These valleys end abruptly, often in a cirque⁠—a crater-like semicircle of sheer cliff. So smoothly have these walls been carved that one looks for signs of chisels and blasting. Yet it has all been done by sandblasts, repeated year after year for centuries. The sand comes driving up in thick clouds, travelling at a high rate of speed, strikes the wall and, finding no way of escape, tears round and round with an effect like sheets of emery-paper. It scours the cliffs and wears all roughness down. You find it in heaps against the foot of the precipices. In more exposed places, especially near the top of a plateau, where the driving force must be considerably greater, the softer layers are picked out and carried off with ease, and the hard, ribbed edges of the tougher strata project like the bones of giant skeletons. This curious terraced result gives birth to singular outlines, animal and human outlines, monstrous shapes that lift their heads to watch you as you pass beneath them. And they all run into a mould which may be described as sphinx-like. The Desert round Helouan is filled with these embryonic sphinxes. The physiognomies are very marked, yet just escape breaking into definite visages. The level strata lend them a stern expression that is forbidding, even menacing, and beneath the huge, straight eyebrows, with lidless, staring eyes, you easily divine a kind of smile they scarcely take the trouble to conceal. The heaps of piled-up sand suggest their heavy, drooping jowls, and the thick lips of yellow sandstone or pallid white lime curve here and there a little above protruding jaws with an expression difficult to describe, but clearly discernible. The heads, moreover, have a hooded appearance; and sometimes in the same section of cliff may be seen a profile and a full face side by side. They stare across the waste of wilderness with an air of serene contempt that, as I have said, seems only just to conceal a definite smile. One thinks of Kinglake’s “comely the creature is, but with a comeliness not of this earth,” and wonders if the Egyptians did not borrow their Sphinx conception from these natural effects of desert erosion. Similarly, you may see apelike heads, and birdlike heads, and heads of jackal, crocodile and hyena. Coming home in the bewitching twilight, these figures crowd round and seem to move. The effect is undeniablv impressive.

Altogether the geology of these various interrelated Deserts⁠—Nubian, Arabian, Libyan and so forth⁠—is a pretty complex matter, judging by the divergence of opinions in expert reports. This is no place to mention them in detail. It seems generally agreed, however, that some six thousand years ago⁠—mere matter of a weekend geologically!⁠—the sea extended probably as far as Assouan. Oyster-beds, fossilised, have been found near the western foot of the Mokattam Hills, which flank Helouan so strikingly to the north and east; and in deep deposits of sand in the neighbourhood half the fossils discovered are the same as species known in the Mediterranean at the present day. One authority shows both the Nile and Jordan valleys as long, thin arms of the sea during the Pluvial period. Another writer claims as probable that the “whole Sahara was not only under the sea, but was connected with the Atlantic Ocean otherwise than through the Straits of Gibraltar,” and concludes that “during the great Ice Age the higher hills of Egypt were covered with ice, at least during the greater part of the year, and the Nile, entering the sea at Assouan, carried ice during the same period.” A third authority says: “The Nile Valley was first an arm of the sea extending at least as far as Esna, then gradual elevation led to the formation of a series of freshwater lakes⁠ ⁠… and finally the Nile itself carved its channel through the valley deposits, and the present river commenced its career, depositing the Nile mud.”