About this time, also, we see one night a wild sort of festival going on for some miles along both sides of the river. Watch-fires break out toward twilight, first on this bank, then on that; becoming brighter and more numerous as the darkness deepens. By and by, when we are going to bed, we hear sounds of drumming on the eastern bank, and see from afar a torchlight procession and dance. The effect of this dance of torches—for it is only the torches that are visible—is quite diabolic. The lights flit and leap as if they were alive; circling, clustering, dispersing, bobbing, poussetting, pursuing each other at a gallop, and whirling every now and then through the air, like rockets. Late as it is, we would fain put ashore and see this orgy more nearly; but Reïs Hassan shakes his head. The natives hereabout are said to be quarrelsome; and if, as it is probable, they are celebrating the festival of some local saint, we might be treated as intruders.
Coming at early morning to Gerf Hossayn, we make our way up to the temple, which is excavated in the face of a limestone cliff, a couple of hundred feet, perhaps, above the river. A steep path, glaring hot in the sun, leads to a terrace in the rock; the temple being approached through the ruins of a built-out portico and an avenue of battered colossi. It is a gloomy place within—an inferior edition, so to say, of the Great Temple of Abou Simbel; and of the same date. It consists of a first hall supported by osiride pillars, a second and smaller hall with square columns, a smoke-blackened sanctuary, and two side-chambers. The osiride colossi, which stand twenty feet high without the entablature over their heads or the pedestal under their feet, are thick-set, bow-legged, and misshapen. Their faces would seem to have been painted black originally; while those of the avenue outside have distinctly Ethiopian features. One seems to detect here, as at Derr and Wady Sabooah, the work of provincial sculptors; just as at Abou Simbel one recognizes the master-style of the artists of the Theban Ramesseum.
The side-chambers at Gerf Hossayn are infested with bats. These bats are the great sight of the place and have their appointed showman. We find him waiting for us with an end of tarred rope, which he flings, blazing, into the pitch-dark doorway. For a moment we see the whole ceiling hung, as it were, with a close fringe of white, filmy-looking pendants. But it is only for a moment. The next instant the creatures are all in motion, dashing out madly in our faces like driven snowflakes. We picked up a dead one afterward, when the rush was over, and examined it by the outer daylight—a lovely little creature, white and downy, with fine transparent wings and little pink feet and the prettiest mousey mouth imaginable.
Bordered with dwarf palms, acacias and henna-bushes, the cliffs between Gerf Hossayn and Dendoor stand out in detached masses so like ruins that sometimes we can hardly believe they are rocks. At Dendoor, when the sun is setting and a delicious gloom is stealing up the valley, we visit a tiny temple on the western bank. It stands out above the river surrounded by a wall of inclosure and consists of a single pylon, a portico, two little chambers and a sanctuary. The whole thing is like an exquisite toy, so covered with sculptures, so smooth, so new-looking, so admirably built. Seeing them half by sunset, half by dusk, it matters not that these delicately wrought bas-reliefs are of the decadence school.[164] The rosy half-light of an Egyptian after-glow covers a multitude of sins, and steeps the whole in an atmosphere of romance.
Wondering what has happened to the climate, we wake shivering next morning an hour or so before break of day, and, for the first time in several weeks, taste the old, early chill upon the air. When the sun rises, we find ourselves at Kalabsheh, having passed the limit of the tropic during the night. Henceforth, no matter how great the heat may be by day, this chill invariably comes with the dark hour before dawn.
The usual yelling crowd, with the usual beads, baskets, eggs, and pigeons, for sale, greets us on the shore at Kalabsheh. One of the men has a fine old two-handed sword in a shabby blue velvet sheath, for which he asks five napoleons. It looks as if it might have belonged to a crusader. Some of the women bring buffalo-cream in filthy-looking black skins slung round their waists like girdles. The cream is excellent; but the skins temper one’s enjoyment of the unaccustomed dainty.
There is a magnificent temple here, and close by, excavated in the cliff, a rock-cut speos, the local name of which is Bay-tel-Well. The sculptures of this famous speos have been more frequently described and engraved than almost any sculptures in Egypt. The procession of Ethiopian tribute-bearers, the assault of the Amorite city, the triumph of Rameses, are familiar not only to every reader of Wilkinson, but to every visitor passing through the Egyptian rooms of the British Museum. Notwithstanding the casts that have been taken from them, and the ill-treatment to which they have been subjected by natives and visitors, they are still beautiful. The colour of those in the roofless court-yard, though so perfect when Bonomi executed his admirable fac-similes, has now almost entirely peeled off; but in the portico and inner chambers it is yet brilliant. An emerald-green Osiris, a crimson Anubis, and an Isis of the brightest chrome yellow, are astonishingly pure and forcibly in quality. As for the flesh-tones of the Anubis, this was, I believe, the only instance I observed of a true crimson in Egypt pigments.
Between the speos of Bayt-el-Welly and the neighboring temple of Kalabsheh there lies about half a mile of hilly pathway and a gulf of fourteen hundred years. Rameses ushers us into the presence of Augustus, and we pass, as it were, from an oratory in the great house of Pharaoh to the presence-chambers of the Cæsars.
But if the decorative work in the presence-chamber of the Cæsars was anything like the decorative work in the temple of Kalabsheh, then the taste thereof was of the vilest. Such a masquerade of deities; such striped and spotted and cross-barred robes; such outrageous head-dresses; such crude and violent coloring,[165] we have never seen the like of. As for the goddesses, they are gaudier than the dancing damsels of Luxur; while the kings balance on their heads diadems compounded of horns, moons, birds, balls, beetles, lotus-blossoms, asps, vases, and feathers. The temple, however, is conceived on a grand scale. It is the Karnak of Nubia. But it is a Karnak that has evidently been visited by a shock of earthquake far more severe than that which shook the mighty pillars of the hypostyle hall and flung down the obelisk of Hatasu. From the river it looks like a huge fortress; but, seen from the threshold of the main gateway, it is a wilderness of ruin. Fallen blocks, pillars, capitals, entablatures, lie so extravagantly piled that there is not one spot in all those halls and courtyards upon which it is possible to set one’s foot on the level of the original pavement. Here, again, the earthquake seems to have come before the work was completed. There are figures outlined on the walls, but never sculptured. Others have been begun, but never finished. You can see where the chisel stopped—you can even detect which was the last mark it made on the surface. One traces here, in fact, the four processes of wall decoration. In some places the space is squared off and ruled by the mechanic; in others, the subject is ready drawn within those spaces by the artist. Here the sculptor has carried it a stage farther; yonder the painter has begun to color it.
More interesting, however, than aught else at Kalabsheh is the Greek inscription of Silco of Ethiopia.[166] This inscription—made famous by the commentaries of Niebuhr and Letronne—was discovered by M. Gau in A.D. 1818. It consists of twenty-one lines very neatly written in red ink, and it dates from the sixth century of the Christian era. It commences thus: