A thousand miles up the Nile

by Amelia B. Edwards

We came to Abou Simbel on the night of the 31st of January and we left at sunset on the 18th of February. Of these eighteen clear days we spent fourteen at the foot of the rock of the great temple, called in the old Egyptian tongue the Rock of Abshek. The remaining four (taken at the end of the first week and the beginning of the second) were passed in the excursion to Wady-Halfeh and back. By thus dividing the time our long sojourn was made less monotonous for those who had no especial work to do.

Meanwhile it was wonderful to wake every morning close under the steep bank, and, without lifting one’s head from the pillow, to see that row of giant faces so close against the sky. They showed unearthly enough by moonlight, but not half so unearthly as in the gray of dawn. At that hour, the most solemn of the twenty-four, they wore a fixed and fatal look that was little less than appalling. As the sky warmed this awful look was succeeded by a flush that mounted and deepened like the rising flush of life. For a moment they seemed to glow—to smile—to be transfigured. Then came a flash, as of thought itself. It was the first instantaneous flash of the risen sun. It lasted less than a second. It was gone almost before one could say it was there. The next moment mountain, river and sky were distinct in the steady light of day; and the colossi—mere colossi now—sat serene and stony in the open sunshine.

Every morning I waked in time to witness that daily miracle. Every morning I saw those awful brethren pass from death to life, from life to sculptured stone. I brought myself almost to believe at last that there must sooner or later come some one sunrise when the ancient charm would snap asunder and the giants must arise and speak.

Stupendous as they are, nothing is more difficult than to see the colossi properly. Standing between the rock and the river one is too near; stationed on the island opposite one is too far off; while from the sand-slope only a side view is obtainable. Hence, for want of a fitting standpoint, many travelers have seen nothing but deformity in the most perfect face handed down to us by Egyptian art. One recognizes in it the negro and one the Mongolian type;[108] while another admires the fidelity with which “the Nubian characteristics” have been seized.

Yet, in truth, the head of the young Augustus is not cast in a loftier mold. These statues are portraits—portraits of the same man four times repeated; and that man is Rameses the Great.

Now, Rameses, the Great if he was as much like his portraits as his portraits are like each other, must have been one of the handsomest men, not only of his own day, but of all history. Wheresoever we meet with him, whether in the fallen colossus at Memphis or in the syenite torso of the British Museum, or among the innumerable bas-reliefs of Thebes, Abydos, Gournah, and Bayt-el-Welly, his features (though bearing in some instances the impress of youth and in others of maturity) are always the same. The face is oval; the eyes are long, prominent, and heavy-lidded; the nose is slightly aquiline and characteristically depressed at the tip; the nostrils are open and sensitive; the under lip projects; the chin is short and square.

Here, for instance, is an outline from a bas-relief at Bayt-el-Welly. The subject is commemorative of the king’s first campaign. A beardless youth, fired with the rage of battle, he clutches a captive by the hair and lifts his mace to slay. In this delicate and Dantesque face, which lacks as yet the fullness and repose of the later portraits, we recognize all the distinctive traits of the older Rameses.

Here, again, is a sketch from Abydos in which the king, although he has not yet ceased to wear the side-lock of youth, is seen with a boyish beard, and looks four years older than in the previous portrait.