A thousand miles up the Nile

by Amelia B. Edwards

It seems that when the khedive[151] entertains distinguished guests and sends them in gorgeous dahabeeyahs up the Nile, he grants them a virgin mound, or so many square feet of a famous necropolis; lets them dig as deep as they please; and allows them to keep whatever they may find. Sometimes he sends out scouts to beat the ground; and then a tomb is found and left unopened, and the illustrious visitor is allowed to discover it. When the scouts are unlucky, it may even sometimes happen that an old tomb is re-stocked; carefully closed up; and then, with all the charm of unpremeditation, re-opened a day or two after.

Now Sheik Rashwan Ebn Hassan el Kashef told us that in 1869, when the empress of the French was at Abou Simbel, and again when the Prince and Princess of Wales came up in 1872, after the prince’s illness, he received strict orders to find some hitherto undiscovered tomb,[152] in order that the khedive’s guests might have the satisfaction of opening it. But, he added, although he left no likely place untried among the rocks and valleys on both sides of the river, he could find nothing. To have unearthed such a birbeh as this would have done him good service with the government, and have insured him a splendid backshîsh from prince or empress. As it was, he was reprimanded for want of diligence, and he believed himself to have been out of favor ever since.

I may here mention—in order to have done with this subject—that besides being buried outside to a depth of about eight feet, the adytum had been partially filled inside by a gradual infiltration of sand from above. This can only have accumulated at the time when the old sand-drift was at its highest. That drift, sweeping in one unbroken line across the front of the great temple, must at one time have risen here to a height of twenty feet above the present level. From thence the sand had found its way down the perpendicular fissure already mentioned. In the corner behind the door, the sand-pile rose to the ceiling, in shape just like the deposit at the bottom of an hour-glass. I am informed by the painter that when the top of the doorway was found and an opening first effected, the sand poured out from within, like water escaping from an opened sluice.

Here, then, is positive proof (if proof were needed) that we were first to enter the place, at all events since the time when the great sand-drift rose as high as the top of the fissure.

The painter wrote his name and ours, with the date (February 10, 1874), on a space of blank wall over the inside of the doorway; and this was the only occasion upon which any of us left our names upon an Egyptian monument. On arriving at Korosko, where there is a postoffice, he also dispatched a letter to the “Times,” briefly recording the facts here related. That letter, which appeared on the 18th of March following, is reprinted in the appendix at the end of this book.

I am told that our names are partially effaced and that the wall-paintings which we had the happiness of admiring in all their beauty and freshness are already much injured. Such is the fate of every Egyptian monument, great or small. The tourist carves it all over with names and dates and in some instances with caricatures. The student of Egyptology, by taking wet-paper “squeezes,” sponges away every vestige of the original color. The “collector” buys and carries off everything of value that he can get; and the Arab steals for him. The work of destruction, meanwhile, goes on apace. There is no one to prevent it; there is no one to discourage it. Every day, more inscriptions are mutilated—more tombs are rifled—more paintings and sculptures are defaced. The Louvre contains a full-length portrait of Seti I, cut out bodily from the walls of his sepulcher in the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings. The museums of Berlin, of Turin, of Florence, are rich in spoils which tell their own lamentable tale. When science leads the way, is it wonderful that ignorance should follow?

CHAPTER XIX.
BACK THROUGH NUBIA.

There are fourteen temples between Abou Simbel and Philæ; to say nothing of grottoes, tombs and other ruins. As a rule, people begin to get tired of temples about this time and vote them too plentiful. Meek travelers go through them as a duty; but the greater number rebel. Our happy couple, I grieve to say, went over to the majority. Dead to shame, they openly proclaimed themselves bored. They even skipped several temples.

For myself, I was never bored by them. Though they had been twice as many, I should not have wished them fewer. Miss Martineau tells how, in this part of the river, she was scarcely satisfied to sit down to breakfast without having first explored a temple; but I could have breakfasted, dined, supped on temples. My appetite for them was insatiable and grew with what it fed upon. I went over them all. I took notes of them all. I sketched them every one.

I may as well say at once that I shall reproduce but few of those notes and only some of those sketches in the present volume. If, surrounded by their local associations, these ruins fail to interest many who travel far to see them, it is not to be supposed that they would interest readers at home. Here and there, perhaps, might be one who would care to pore with me over every broken sculpture; to spell out every half-legible cartouche; to trace through Greek and Roman influences (which are nowhere more conspicuous than in these Nubian buildings) the slow deterioration of the Egyptian style. But the world for the most part reserves itself, and rightly, for the great epochs and the great names of the past; and because it has not yet had too much of Karnak, of Abou Simbel, of the pyramids, it sets slight store by those minor monuments which record the periods of foreign rule and the decline of native art. For these reasons, therefore, I propose to dismiss very briefly many places upon which I bestowed hours of delightful labor.