He shook his head at first, not understanding the question; then looked grave and held up one finger.
Our stock of Arabic was so small and his so interlarded with Kensee, that we had great difficulty in making out what he said next. We gathered, however, that some howadji, traveling alone and on foot, had once gone in search of this birbeh and never come back. Was he lost? Was he killed? Who could say?
“It was a long time ago,” said the man with the beads. “It was a long time ago and he took no guide with him.”
We would have given much to trace the river to its source and search for this unknown temple in the desert. But it is one of the misfortunes of this kind of traveling that one cannot easily turn aside from the beaten track. The hot season is approaching; the river is running low; the daily cost of the dahabeeyah is exorbitant; and, in Nubia, where little or nothing can be bought in the way of food, the dilatory traveler risks starvation. It was something, however, to have seen with one’s own eyes that the Nile, instead of flowing for a distance of twelve hundred miles unfed by any affluent, had here received the waters of a tributary.[157]
To those who have a south breeze behind them the temples must now follow in quick succession. We, however, achieved them by degrees and rejoiced when our helpless dahabeeyah lay within rowing reach of anything worth seeing. Thus we pull down one day to Maharrakeh—in itself a dull ruin but picturesquely desolate. Seen as one comes up the bank on landing, two parallel rows of columns stand boldly up against the sky, supporting a ruined entablature. In the foreground a few stunted Dôm palms starve in an arid soil. The barren desert closes in the distance.
We are beset here by an insolent crowd of savage-looking men and boys and impudent girls with long frizzy hair and Nubian fringes, who pester us with beads and pebbles; dance, shout, slap their legs and clap their hands in our faces; and pelt us when we go away. One ragged warrior brandishes an antique brass-mounted firelock full six feet long in the barrel; and some of the others carry slender spears.
The temple—a late Roman structure—would seem to have been wrecked by an earthquake before it was completed. The masonry is all in the rough—pillars as they came from the quarry; capitals blocked out, waiting for the carver. These unfinished ruins—of which every stone looks new, as if the work was still in progress—affect one’s imagination strangely. On a fallen wall south of the portico[158] the idle man detected some remains of a Greek inscription; but for hieroglyphic characters or cartouches, by which to date the building, we looked in vain.[159]
Dakkeh comes next in order; then Gerf Hossayn, Dendoor and Kalebsheh. Arriving at Dakkeh soon after sunrise we find the whole population—screaming, pushing, chattering, laden with eggs, pigeons and gourds for sale—drawn up to receive us. There is a large sand island in the way here, so we moor about a mile above the temple.
We first saw the twin pylons of Dakkeh some weeks ago from the deck of the Philæ and we then likened them to the majestic towers of Edfu. Approaching them now by land, we are surprised to find them so small. It is a brilliant, hot morning; and our way lies by the river, between the lentil-slope and the castor-berry patches. There are flocks of pigeons flying low overhead; barking dogs and crowing cocks in the village close by; and all over the path hundreds of beetles—real live scarabs, black as coal and busy as ants—rolling their clay pellets up from the water’s edge to the desert. If we were to examine a score or so of these pellets we should here and there find one that contained no eggs; for it is a curious fact that the scarab-beetle makes and rolls her pellets, whether she has an egg to deposit or not. The female beetle, though assisted by the male, is said to do the heavier share of the pellet-rolling; and if evening comes on before her pellet is safely stowed away, she will sleep, holding it with her feet all night, and resume her labor in the morning.[160]
The temple here—begun by an Ethiopian king named Arkaman (Ergamenes) about whom Diodorus has a long story to tell, and carried on by the Ptolemies and Cæsars—stands in a desolate open space to the north of the village, and is approached by an avenue, the walls of which are constructed with blocks from some earlier building. The whole of this avenue and all the waste ground for three or four hundred yards round about the temple is not merely strewn, but piled, with fragments of pottery, pebbles and large, smooth stones of porphery, alabaster, basalt, and a kind of marble like verde antico. These stones are puzzling. They look as if they might be fragments of statues that had been rolled and polished by ages of friction in the bed of a torrent. Among the potsherds we find some inscribed fragments like those of Elephantine.[161] Of the temple I will only say that, as masonry, it is better put together than any work of the eighteenth or nineteenth dynasties with which I am acquainted. The sculptures, however, are atrocious. Such misshapen hieroglyphs; such dumpy, smirking goddesses; such clownish kings in such preposterous head-dresses, we have never seen till now. The whole thing, in short, as regards sculpturesque style, is the Ptolemaic out-Ptolemied.