A thousand miles up the Nile

by Amelia B. Edwards

Meanwhile, the sand being now filled in and mounded up, the men betook themselves to a place where the rock had given way and selected a couple of big stones from the débris. These they placed at the head and foot of the grave and all was done.

Instantly—perhaps at an appointed signal, though we saw none given—the wailing ceased; the women rose; every tongue was loosened; and the whole became a moving, animated, noisy throng dispersing in a dozen different directions.

We turned away with the rest, the writer and the painter rambling off in search of the temple, while the other three devoted themselves to the pursuit of baskets and native jewelry. When we looked back presently the crowd was gone; but the desolate mother still lay motionless in the dust.

It chanced that we witnessed many funerals in Nubia; so many that one sometimes felt inclined to doubt whether the governor of Assûan had not reported over-favorably of the health of the province. The ceremonial, with its dancing and chanting, was always much the same; always barbaric, and in the highest degree artificial. One would like to know how much of it is derived from purely African sources, and how much from ancient Egyptian tradition. The dance is most probably Ethiopian. Lepsius, traveling through the Soudan in A.D. 1844,[72] saw something of the kind at a funeral in Wed Medineh, about half-way between Sennaar and Khartûm. The white fillet worn by the choir of mourners is, on the other hand, distinctly Egyptian. We afterward saw it represented in paintings of funeral processions on the walls of several tombs at Thebes,[73] where the wailing women are seen to be gathering up the dust in their hands and casting it upon their heads, just as they do now. As for the wail—beginning high and descending through a scale divided not by semi-tones but thirds of tones to a final note about an octave and a half lower than that from which it started—it probably echoes to this day the very pitch and rhythm of the wail that followed the Pharaohs to their sepulchers in the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings. Like the zaghareet, or joy-cry, which every mother teaches to her little girls and which, it is said, can only be acquired in very early youth, it has been handed down from generation to generation through an untold succession of ages. The song to which the fellâh works his shâdûf and the monotonous chant of the sakkieh-driver have, perhaps, as remote an origin. But of all old, mournful, human sounds, the death-wail that we heard at Derr is perhaps one of the very oldest—certainly the most mournful.

The temple here, dating from the reign of Rameses II, is of rude design and indifferent execution. Partly constructed, partly excavated, it is approached by a forecourt, the roof of which was supported by eight square columns. Of these columns only the bases remain. Four massive piers, against which once stood four colossi, upheld the roof of the portico and gave admission by three entrances to the rock-cut chambers beyond. The portico is now roofless. Nothing is left of the colossi but their feet. All is ruin; and ruin without beauty.

Seen from within, however, the place is not without a kind of gloomy grandeur. Two rows of square columns, three at each side, divide the large hall into a nave and two aisles. This hall is about forty feet square, and the pillars have been left standing in the living rock, like those in the early tombs at Siût. The daylight, half-blocked out by the fallen portico, is pleasantly subdued, and finds its way dimly to the sanctuary at the farther end. The sculptures of the interior, though much damaged, are less defaced than those of the outer court. Walls, pillars, doorways, are covered with bas-reliefs. The king and Ptah, the king and Ra, the king and Amen, stand face to face, hand in hand, on each of the four sides of every column. Scenes of worship, of slaughter, of anointing, cover the walls; and the blank spaces are filled in as usual with hieroglyphic inscriptions. Among these Champollion discovered an imperfect list of the sons and daughters of Rameses II. Four gods once sat enthroned at the upper end of the sanctuary; but they have shared the fate of the colossi outside and only their feet remain. The wall sculptures of this dark little chamber are, however, better preserved, and better worth preservation, than those of the hall. A procession of priests, bearing on their shoulders the bari, or sacred boat, is quite unharmed; and even the color is yet fresh upon a full-length figure of Hathor close by.

But more interesting than all these—more interesting because more rare—is a sculptured palm-tree against which the king leans while making an offering to Amen Ra. The trunk is given with elaborate truthfulness; and the branches, though formalized, are correct and graceful in curvature. The tree is but an accessory. It may have been introduced with reference to the date-harvests which are the wealth of the district; but it has no kind of sacred significance, and is noticeable only for the naturalness of the treatment. Such naturalness is unusual in the art of this period, when the conventional persea and the equally conventional lotus are almost the only vegetable forms which appear on the walls of the temples. I can recall, indeed, but one similar instance in the bas-relief sculpture of the new empire—namely, the bent, broken and waving bulrushes in the great lion-hunting scene at Medinet Habu, which are admirably free and studied, apparently, from nature.

Coming out, we looked in vain along the court-yard walls for the battle-scene in which Champollion was yet able to trace the famous fighting lion of Rameses II with the legend describing him as “the servant of his majesty rending his foes in pieces.” But that was forty-five years ago. Now it is with difficulty that one detects a few vague outlines of chariot-wheels and horses.

There are some rock-cut tombs in the face of the cliffs close by. The painter explored them while the writer sketched the interior of the temple; but he reported of them as mere sepulchers, unpainted and unsculptured.

The rocks, the sands, the sky, were at a white heat when we again turned our faces toward the river. Where there had so lately been a great multitude there was now not a soul. The palms nodded; the pigeons dozed; the mud town slept in the sun. Even the mother had gone from her place of weeping and left her dead to the silence of the desert.