Like a mirage, too, that fairy town of Siût seemed always to hover at the same unattainable distance and after hours of tracking to be no nearer than at first. Sometimes, indeed, following the long reaches of the river, we appeared to be leaving it behind; and although, as I have said, we had eight miles of hard work to get to it, I doubt whether it was ever more than three miles distant as the bird flies. It was late in the afternoon, however, when we turned the last corner; and the sun was already setting when the boat reached the village of Hamra, which is the mooring-place for Siût—Siût itself, with clustered cupolas and arrowy minarets, lying back in the plain at the foot of a great mountain pierced with tombs.
Now, it was in the bond that our crew were to be allowed twenty-four hours for making and baking bread at Siût, Esneh and Assuân. No sooner, therefore, was the dahabeeyah moored than Reïs Hassan and the steersman started away at full speed on two little donkeys to buy flour; while Mehemet Ali, one of our most active and intelligent sailors, rushed off to hire the oven. For here, as at Esneh and Assuân, there are large flour stores and public bakehouses for the use of sailors on the river, who make and bake their bread in large lots; cut it into slices; dry it in the sun; and preserve it in the form of rusks for months together. Thus prepared, it takes the place of ship-biscuit; and it is so far superior to ship-biscuit that it neither molds nor breeds the maggot, but remains good and wholesome to the last crumb.
Siût, frequently written Asyoot, is the capital of Middle Egypt and has the best bazaars of any town up the Nile. Its red and black pottery is famous throughout the country; and its pipe-bowls (supposed to be the best in the east), being largely exported to Cairo, find their way not only to all parts of the Levant, but to every Algerine and Japanese shop in London and Paris. No lover of peasant pottery will yet have forgotten the Egyptian stalls in the ceramic gallery of the international exhibition of 1871. All those quaint red vases and lustrous black tazzas, all those exquisite little coffee services, those crocodile paperweights, those barrel-shaped and bird-shaped bottles came from Siût. There is a whole street of such pottery here in the town. Your dahabeeyah is scarcely made fast before a dealer comes on board and ranges his brittle wares along the deck. Others display their goods upon the bank. But the best things are only to be had in the bazaars; and not even in Cairo is it possible to find Siût ware so choice in color, form and design as that which the two or three best dealers bring out, wrapped in soft paper, when a European customer appears in the market.
Besides the street of pottery there is a street of red shoes; another of native and foreign stuffs; and the usual run of saddlers’ shops, kebab stalls and Greek stores for the sale of everything in heaven or earth, from third-rate cognac to patent wax vestas. The houses are of plastered mud or sun-dried bricks, as at Minieh. The thoroughfares are dusty, narrow, unpaved and crowded, as at Minieh. The people are one-eyed, dirty and unfragrant, as at Minieh. The children’s eyes are full of flies and their heads are covered with sores, as at Minieh. In short, it is Minieh over again on a larger scale; differing only in respect of its inhabitants, who, instead of being sullen, thievish and unfriendly, are too familiar to be pleasant, and the most unappeasable beggars out of Ireland. So our mirage turns to sordid reality, and Siût, which from afar off looked like the capital of Dreamland, resolves itself into a big mud town, as ugly and ordinary as its fellows. Even the minarets, so elegant from a distance, betray for the most part but rough masonry and clumsy ornamentation when closely looked into.
A lofty embanked road planted with fine sycamore figs leads from Hamra to Siût; and another embanked road leads from Siût to the mountain of tombs. Of the ancient Egyptian city no vestige remains, the modern town being built upon the mounds of the earlier settlement; but the City of the Dead—so much of it, at least, as was excavated in the living rock—survives, as at Memphis, to commemorate the departed splendor of the place.
We took donkeys next day to the edge of the desert and went up to the sepulchers on foot. The mountain, which looked a delicate salmon-pink when seen from afar, now showed bleached and arid and streaked with ocherous yellow. Layer above layer, in beds of strongly marked stratification, it towered overhead; tier above tier, the tombs yawned, open-mouthed, along the face of the precipice. I picked up a fragment of the rock, and found it light, porous and full of little cells, like pumice. The slopes were strewn with stones, as well as with fragments of mummy, shreds of mummy-cloth and human bones, all whitening and withering in the sun.
The first tomb we came to was the so-called Stabl Antar—a magnificent but cruelly mutilated excavation, consisting of a grand entrance, a vaulted corridor, a great hall, two side chambers and a sanctuary. The ceiling of the corridor, now smoke-blackened and defaced, has been richly decorated with intricate patterns in light green, white and buff, upon a ground of dark bluish-green stucco. The wall to the right on entering is covered with a long hieroglyphic inscription. In the sanctuary vague traces of seated figures, male and female, with lotus blossoms in their hands, are dimly visible. Two colossal warriors incised in outline upon the leveled rock—the one very perfect, the other hacked almost out of recognition—stand on each side of the huge portal. A circular hole in the threshold marks the spot where the great door once worked upon its pivot; and a deep pit, now partially filled in with rubbish, leads from the center of the hall to some long-rifled vault deep down in the heart of the mountain. Wilful destruction has been at work on every side. The wall-sculptures have been defaced—the massive pillars that once supported the superincumbent rock have been quarried away—the interior is heaped high with débris. Enough is left, however, to attest the antique stateliness of the tomb; and the hieroglyphic inscription remains almost intact to tell its age and history.
This inscription (erroneously entered in Murray’s Guide as uncopied, but interpreted by Brugsch, who published extracts from it as far back as 1862) shows the excavation to have been made for one Hepoukefa or Haptefa, monarch of the Lycopolite nome and the chief priest of the jackal god of Siût.[26] It is also famous among scientific students for certain passages which contain important information regarding the intercalary days of the Egyptian calendar.[27] We observed that the full-length figures on the jambs of the doorway appeared to have been incised, filled in with stucco and then colored. The stucco had for the most part fallen out, though enough remained to show the style of the work.[28]
From this tomb to the next we crept by way of a passage tunneled in the mountain, and emerged into a spacious, quadrangular grotto, even more dilapidated than the first. It had been originally supported by square pillars left standing in the substance of the rock; but, like the pillars in the tomb of Hepoukefa, they had been hewn away in the middle and looked like stalactite columns in process of formation. For the rest, two half-filled pits, a broken sarcophagus and a few painted hieroglyphs upon a space of stuccoed wall were all that remained.
One would have liked to see the sepulcher in which Ampère, the brilliant and eager disciple of Champollion, deciphered the ancient name of Siût; but since he does not specify the cartouche by which it could be identified, one might wander about the mountain for a week without being able to find it. Having first described the Stabl Antar, he says: “In another grotto I found twice over the name of the city written in hieroglyphic characters, Çi-ou-t. This name forms part of an inscription which also contains an ancient royal cartouche; so proving that the present name of the city dates back to Pharaonic times.”[29]