A thousand miles up the Nile

by Amelia B. Edwards

Then again the coloring—coloring not to be matched with any pigments yet invented. The Libyan rocks, like rusty gold—the paler line of the driven sand-slopes—the warm maize of the nearer pyramids which, seen from this distance, takes a tender tint of rose, like the red bloom on an apricot—the delicate tone of these objects against the sky—the infinite gradations of that sky, soft and pearly toward the horizon, blue and burning toward the zenith—the opalescent shadows, pale blue and violet and greenish-gray, that nestle in the hollows of the rock and the curves of the sand-drifts—all this is beautiful in a way impossible to describe, and, alas! impossible to copy. Nor does the lake-like plain with its palm-groves and corn-flats form too tame a foreground. It is exactly what is wanted to relieve that glowing distance.

And now, as we follow the zigzags of the road, the new pyramids grow gradually larger; the sun mounts higher; the heat increases. We meet a train of camels, buffaloes, shaggy brown sheep, men, women, and children of all ages. The camels are laden with bedding, rugs, mats, and crates of poultry, and carry, besides, two women with babies and one very old man. The younger men drive the tired beasts. The rest follow behind. The dust rises after them in a cloud. It is evidently the migration of a family of three, if not four generations. One cannot help being struck by the patriarchal simplicity of the incident. Just thus, with flocks and herds and all his clan, went Abraham into the land of Canaan close upon four thousand years ago; and one at least of these Sakkârah pyramids was even then the oldest building in the world.

It is a touching and picturesque procession—much more picturesque than ours and much more numerous; notwithstanding that our united forces, including donkey boys, porters and miscellaneous hangers-on, number nearer thirty than twenty persons. For there are the M. B.’s and their nephew, and L—— and the writer, and L——’s maid, and Talhamy, all on donkeys; and then there are the owners of the donkeys, also on donkeys; and then every donkey has a boy; and every boy has a donkey; and every donkey-boy’s donkey has an inferior boy in attendance. Our style of dress, too, however convenient, is not exactly in harmony with the surrounding scenery; and one cannot but feel, as these draped and dusty pilgrims pass us on the road, that we cut a sorry figure with our hideous palm-leaf hats, green veils, and white umbrellas.

But the most amazing and incongruous personage in our whole procession is unquestionably George. Now George is an English north-country groom whom the M. B.’s have brought out from the wilds of Lancashire, partly because he is a good shot and may be useful to “Master Alfred” after birds and crocodiles, and partly from a well-founded belief in his general abilities. And George, who is a fellow of infinite jest and infinite resource, takes to eastern life as a duckling to the water. He picks up Arabic as if it were his mother tongue. He skins birds like a practiced taxidermist. He can even wash and iron on occasion. He is, in short, groom, footman, house-maid, laundry-maid, stroke-oar, gamekeeper and general factotum all in one. And, besides all this, he is gifted with a comic gravity of countenance that no surprises and no disasters can upset for a moment. To see this worthy anachronism cantering along in his groom’s coat and gaiters, livery-buttons, spotted neckcloth, tall hat, and all the rest of it; his long legs dangling within an inch of the ground on either side of the most diminutive of donkeys; his double-barreled fowling-piece under his arm, and that imperturbable look in his face, one would have sworn that he and Egypt were friends of old, and that he had been brought up on pyramids from his earliest childhood.

It is a long and shelterless ride from the palms to the desert; but we come to the end of it at last, mounting just such another sand-slope as that which leads up from the Ghîzeh road to the foot of the great pyramid. The edge of the plateau here rises abruptly from the plain in one long range of low perpendicular cliffs pierced with dark mouths of rock-cut sepulchers, while the sand-slope by which we are climbing pours down through a breach in the rock, as an Alpine snow-drift flows through a mountain gap from the ice-level above.

And now, having dismounted through compassion for our unfortunate little donkeys, the first thing we observe is the curious mixture of débris underfoot. At Ghîzeh one treads only sand and pebbles; but here at Sakkârah the whole plateau is thickly strewn with scraps of broken pottery, limestone, marble, and alabaster; flakes of green and blue glaze; bleached bones; shreads of yellow linen, and lumps of some odd-looking, dark-brown substance, like dried-up sponge. Presently some one picks up a little noseless head of one of the common blue-ware funereal statuettes, and immediately we all fall to work, grubbing for treasure—a pure waste of precious time; for, though the sand is full of débris, it has been sifted so often and so carefully by the Arabs that it no longer contains anything worth looking for. Meanwhile, one finds a fragment of iridescent glass—another, a morsel of shattered vase—a third, an opaque bead of some kind of yellow paste. And then, with a shock which the present writer, at all events, will not soon forget, we suddenly discover that these scattered bones are human—that those linen shreds are shreds of cerement cloths—that yonder odd-looking brown lumps are rent fragments of what once was living flesh! And now for the first time we realize that every inch of this ground on which we are standing, and all these hillocks and hollows and pits in the sand, are violated graves.

“Ce n’est que le premier pas que coûte.” We soon became quite hardened to such sights and learned to rummage among dusty sepulchers with no more compunction than would have befitted a gang of professional body-snatchers. These are experiences upon which one looks back afterward with wonder and something like remorse; but so infectious is the universal callousness, and so over-mastering is the passion for relic-hunting, that I do not doubt we should again do the same things under the same circumstances. Most Egyptian travelers, if questioned, would have to make a similar confession. Shocked at first, they denounce with horror the whole system of sepulchral excavation, legal as well as predatory; acquiring, however, a taste for scarabs and funerary statuettes, they soon begin to buy with eagerness the spoils of the dead; finally, they forget all their former scruples and ask no better fortune than to discover and confiscate a tomb for themselves.

Notwithstanding that I had first seen the pyramids of Ghîzeh, the size of the Sakkârah group—especially of the pyramid in platforms—took me by surprise. They are all smaller than the pyramids of Khufu and Khafra and would no doubt look sufficiently insignificant if seen with them in close juxtaposition; but taken by themselves they are quite vast enough for grandeur. As for the pyramid in platforms (which is the largest at Sakkârah, and next largest to the pyramid of Khafra), its position is so fine, its architectural style so exceptional, its age so immense that one altogether loses sight of these questions of relative magnitude. If Egyptologists are right in ascribing the royal title hieroglyphed on the inner door of this pyramid to Ouenephes, the fourth king of the first dynasty, then it is the most ancient building in the world. It had been standing from five to seven hundred years when King Khufu began his great pyramid at Ghîzeh. It was over two thousand years old when Abraham was born. It is now about six thousand eight hundred years old according to Manetho and Mariette, or about four thousand eight hundred according to the computation of Bunsen. One’s imagination recoils upon the brink of such a gulf of time.

The door of this pyramid was carried off with other precious spoils by Lepsius and is now in the museum at Berlin. The evidence that identifies the inscription is tolerably direct. According to Manetho, an Egyptian historian who wrote in Greek and lived in the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphia, King Ouenephes built for himself a pyramid at a place called Kokhome. Now a tablet discovered in the Serapeum by Mariette gives the name of Ka-kem to the necropolis of Sakkârah; and as the pyramid in stages is not only the largest on this platform, but is also the only one in which a royal cartouche has been found, the conclusion seems obvious.

When a building has already stood for five or six thousand years in a climate where mosses and lichens, and all those natural signs of age to which we are accustomed in Europe, are unknown, it is not to be supposed that a few centuries more or less can tell upon its outward appearance; yet to my thinking the pyramid of Ouenephes looks older than those of Ghîzeh. If this be only fancy, it gives one, at all events, the impression of belonging structurally to a ruder architectural period. The idea of a monument composed of diminishing platforms is in its nature more primitive than that of a smooth four-sided pyramid. We remarked that the masonry on one side—I think on the side facing eastward—was in a much more perfect condition than on either of the others.