A thousand miles up the Nile

by Amelia B. Edwards

This roof is an intricate, up-and-down place, and the room is not easy to find. It lies at the bottom of a little flight of steps—a small stone cell some twelve feet square, lighted only from the doorway. The walls are covered with sculptures representing the shrines, the mummification and the resurrection of Osiris.[65] These shrines, containing some part of his body, are variously fashioned. His head,

for instance, rests on a nilometer; his arm, surmounted by a head, is sculptured on a stela, in shape resembling a

high-shouldered bottle, surmounted by one of the head-dresses peculiar to the god; his legs and feet lie in a pylon-shaped mausoleum. Upon another shrine stands the miter-shaped crown which he wears as judge of the lower world. Isis and Nephthys keep guard over each shrine. In a lower frieze we see the mummy of the god laid upon a bier, with the four so-called canopic jars[66] ranged underneath. A little farther on he lies in state, surrounded by

RESURRECTION OF OSIRIS.

lotus buds on tall stems, figuratively of growth, or returning life.[67] Finally, he is depicted lying on a couch; his limbs reunited; his head, left hand, and left foot upraised, as in the act of returning to consciousness. Nephthys, in the guise of a winged genius, fans him with the breath of life. Isis, with outstretched arms, stands at his feet and seems to be calling him back to her embraces. The scene represents, in fact, that supreme moment when Isis pours forth her passionate invocations, and Osiris is resuscitated by virtue of the songs of the divine sisters.[68]

Ill-modeled and ill-cut as they are, there is a clownish naturalness about these little sculptures which lifts them above the conventional dead level of ordinary Ptolemaic work. The figures tell their tale intelligibly. Osiris seems really struggling to rise, and the action of Isis expresses clearly enough the intention of the artist. Although a few heads have been mutilated and the surface of the stone is somewhat degraded, the subjects are by no means in a bad state of preservation. In the accompanying sketches, nothing has been done to improve the defective drawing or repair the broken outlines of the originals. Osiris in one has lost his foot and in another his face; the hands of Isis are as shapeless as those of a bran doll; and the naïveté of the treatment verges throughout upon caricature. But the interest attaching to them is altogether apart from the way in which they are executed. And now, returning to the roof, it is pleasant to breathe the fresher air that comes with sunset—to see the island, in shape like an ancient Egyptian shield, lying mapped out beneath one’s feet. From here, we look back upon the way we have come, and forward to the way we are going. Northward lies the cataract—a network of islets with flashes of river between. Southward, the broad current comes on in one smooth, glassy sheet, unbroken by a single rapid. How eagerly we turn our eyes that way; for yonder lie Abou Simbel and all the mysterious lands beyond the cataracts! But we cannot see far, for the river curves away grandly to the right and vanishes behind a range of granite hills. A similar chain hems in the opposite bank; while high above the palm-groves fringing the edge of the shore stand two ruined convents on two rocky prominences, like a couple of castles on the Rhine. On the east bank opposite, a few mud houses and a group of superb carob trees mark the site of a village, the greater part of which lies hidden among palms. Behind this village opens a vast sand valley, like an arm of the sea from which the waters have retreated. The old channel along which we rode the other day went plowing that way straight across from Philæ. Last of all, forming the western side of this fourfold view, we have the island of Biggeh—rugged, mountainous, and divided from Philæ by so narrow a channel that every sound from the native village on the opposite steep is as audible as though it came from the court-yard at our feet. That village is built in and about the ruins of a tiny Ptolemaic temple, of which only a screen and doorway and part of a small propylon remain. We can see a woman pounding coffee on the threshold of one of the huts, and some children scrambling about the rocks in pursuit of a wandering turkey. Catching sight of us up here on the roof of the temple, they come whooping and scampering down to the water side and with shrill cries importune us for backshîsh. Unless the stream is wider than it looks one might almost pitch a piaster into their outstretched hands.

Mr. Hay, it is said, discovered a secret passage of solid masonry tunneled under the river from island to island. The entrance on this side was from a shaft in the Temple of Isis.[69] We are not told how far Mr. Hay was able to penetrate in the direction of Biggeh; but the passage would lead up, most probably, to the little temple opposite.