A thousand miles up the Nile

by Amelia B. Edwards

Flourishing as it is, the trade of Luxor labors, however, under some uncomfortable restrictions. Private excavation being prohibited, the digger lives in dread of being found out by the governor. The forger, who has nothing to fear from the governor, lives in dread of being found out by the tourist. As for the dealer, whether he sells an antique or an imitation, he is equally liable to punishment. In the one case he commits an offense against the state; and in the other, he obtains money under false pretenses. Meanwhile, the governor deals out such even-handed justice as he can, and does his best to enforce the law on both sides of the river.

By a curious accident, L—— and the writer once actually penetrated into a forger’s workshop. Not knowing that it had been abolished, we went to a certain house in which a certain consulate had once upon a time been located and there knocked for admission. An old deaf fellâha opened the door and after some hesitation showed us into a large unfurnished room with three windows. In each window there stood a workman’s bench strewn with scarabs, amulets and funerary statuettes in every stage of progress. We examined these specimens with no little curiosity. Some were of wood; some were of limestone; some were partly colored. The colors and brushes were there; to say nothing of files, gravers and little pointed tools like gimlets. A magnifying glass of the kind used by engravers lay in one of the window recesses. We also observed a small grindstone screwed to one of the benches and worked by a treadle; while a massive fragment of mummy-case in a corner behind the door showed whence came the old sycamore wood for the wooden specimens. That three skilled workmen furnished with European tools had been busy in this room shortly before we were shown into it was perfectly clear. We concluded that they had just gone away to breakfast.

Meanwhile we waited, expecting to be ushered into the presence of the consul. In about ten minutes, however, breathless with hurrying, arrived a well-dressed Arab whom we had never seen before. Distracted between his oriental politeness and his desire to get rid of us, he bowed us out precipitately, explaining that the house had changed owners and that the power in question had ceased to be represented at Luxor. We heard him rating the old woman savagely, as soon as the door had closed behind us. I met that well-dressed Arab a day or two after, near the governor’s house, and he immediately vanished round the nearest corner.

The Boulak authorities keep a small gang of trained excavators always at work in the Necropolis of Thebes. These men are superintended by the governor and every mummy-case discovered is forwarded to Boulak unopened. Thanks to the courtesy of the governor, we had the good fortune to be present one morning at the opening of a tomb. He sent to summon us, just as we were going to breakfast. With what alacrity we manned the felucca and how we ate our bread and butter half in the boat and half on donkey-back, may easily be imagined. How well I remember that early-morning ride across the western plain of Thebes—the young barley rippling for miles in the sun; the little water-channel running beside the path; the white butterflies circling in couples; the wayside grave with its tiny dome and prayer-mat, its well and broken kulleh, inviting the passer-by to drink and pray; the wild vine that trailed along the wall; the vivid violet of the vetches that blossomed unbidden in the barley. We had the mounds and pylons of Medinet Habu to the left—the ruins of the Ramesseum to the right—the colossi of the plain and the rosy western mountains before us all the way. How the great statues glistened in the morning light! How they towered up against the soft blue sky! Battered and featureless, they sat in the old patient attitude, looking as if they mourned the vanished springs.

We found the new tomb a few hundred yards in the rear of the Ramesseum. The diggers were in the pit; the governor and a few Arabs were looking on. The vault was lined with brick-work above and cut square in the living rock below. We were just in time; for already, through the sand and rubble with which the grave had been filled in, there appeared an outline of something buried. The men, throwing spades and picks aside, now began scraping up the dust with their hands, and a mummy-case came gradually to light. It was shaped to represent a body lying at length with the hands crossed upon the breast. Both hands and face were carved in high relief. The ground-color of the sarcophagus was white;[191] the surface covered with hieroglyphed legends and somewhat coarsely painted figures of four lesser gods of the dead. The face, like the hands, was colored a brownish-yellow and highly varnished. But for a little dimness of the gaudy hues, and a little flaking off of the surface here and there, the thing was as perfect as when it was placed in the ground. A small wooden box roughly put together lay at the feet of the mummy. This was taken out first, and handed to the governor, who put it aside without opening it. The mummy-case was then raised upright, hoisted to the brink of the pit, and laid upon the ground.

It gave one a kind of shock to see it first of all lying just as it had been left by the mourners; then hauled out by rude hands, to be searched, unrolled, perhaps broken up as unworthy to occupy a corner of the Boulak collection. Once they are lodged and catalogued in a museum, one comes to look upon these things as “specimens,” and forgets that they once were living beings like ourselves. But this poor mummy looked startlingly human and pathetic lying at the bottom of its grave in the morning sunlight.

After the sarcophagus had been lifted out, a small blue porcelain cup, a ball of the same material, and another little object shaped like a cherry, were found in the débris. The last was hollow, and contained something that rattled when shaken. The mummy, the wooden box, and these porcelain toys, were then removed to a stable close by; and the excavators, having laid bare what looked like the mouth of a bricked-up tunnel in the side of the tomb, fell to work again immediately. A second vault—perhaps a chain of vaults—it was thought would now be discovered.

We went away, meanwhile, for a few hours, and saw some of the famous painted tombs in that part of the mountain side just above, which goes by the name of Sheik Abd-el-Koorneh.

It was a hot climb; the sun blazing overhead; the cliffs reflecting light and heat; the white débris glaring under foot. Some of the tombs up here are excavated in terraces, and look from a distance like rows of pigeon-holes; others are pierced in solitary ledges of rock; many are difficult of access; all are intolerably hot and oppressive. They were numbered half a century ago by the late Sir Gardner Wilkinson, and the numbers are there still. We went that morning into fourteen, sixteen, seventeen, and thirty-five.

As a child “The Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians” had shared my affections with “The Arabian Nights.” I had read every line of the old six-volume edition over and over again. I knew every one of the six hundred illustrations by heart. Now I suddenly found myself in the midst of old and half-forgotten friends. Every subject on these wonderful walls was already familiar to me. Only the framework, only the coloring, only the sand under foot, only the mountain slope outside, were new and strange. It seemed to me that I had met all these kindly brown people years and years ago—perhaps in some previous stage of existence; that I had walked with them in their gardens; listened to the music of their lutes and tambourines; pledged them at their feasts. Here is the funeral procession that I know so well; and the trial scene after death, where the mummy stands upright in the presence of Osiris, and sees his heart weighed in the balance. Here is that well-remembered old fowler crouching in the rushes with his basket of decoys. One withered hand is lifted to his mouth; his lips frame the call; his thin hair blows in the breeze. I see now that he has placed himself to the leeward of the game; but that subtlety escaped me in the reading days of my youth. Yonder I recognize a sculptor’s studio into which I frequently peeped at that time. His men are at work as actively as ever; but I marvel that they have not yet finished polishing the surface of that red-granite colossus. This patient angler, still waiting for a bite, is another old acquaintance; and yonder, I declare, is that evening party at which I was so often an imaginary guest! Is the feast not yet over? Has that late-comer whom we saw hurrying along just now in a neighboring corridor not yet arrived? Will the musicians never play to the end of their concerto? Are those ladies still so deeply interested in the patterns of one another’s ear-rings? It seems to me that the world has been standing still in here for these last five-and-thirty years.