A thousand miles up the Nile

by Amelia B. Edwards

These tremendous warders sit sixty-six feet high, without the platform under their feet. They measure across the chest twenty-five feet and four inches; from the shoulder to the elbow fifteen feet and six inches; from the inner side of the elbow joint to the tip of the middle finger, fifteen feet; and so on, in relative proportion. If they stood up, they would tower to a height of at least eighty-three feet, from the soles of their feet to the tops of their enormous double-crowns.

Nothing in Egyptian sculpture is perhaps quite so wonderful as the way in which these Abou Simbel artists dealt with the thousands of tons of material to which they here gave human form. Consummate masters of effect, they knew precisely what to do and what to leave undone. These were portrait statues; therefore they finished the heads up to the highest point consistent with their size. But the trunk and the lower limbs they regarded from a decorative rather than a statuesque point of view. As decoration, it was necessary that they should give size and dignity to the façade. Everything, consequently, was here subordinated to the general effect of breadth, of massiveness, of repose. Considered thus, the colossi are a triumph of treatment. Side by side they sit, placid and majestic, their feet a little apart, their hands resting on their knees. Shapely though they are, those huge legs look scarcely inferior in girth to the great columns of Karnak. The articulations of the knee-joint, the swell of the calf, the outline of the peroneus longus are indicated rather than developed. The toe-nails and toe-joints are given in the same bold and general way; but the fingers, because only the tips of them could be seen from below, are treated en bloc.

The faces show the same largeness of style. The little dimple which gives such sweetness to the corners of the mouth, and the tiny depression in the lobe of the ear, are, in fact, circular cavities as large as saucers.

How far this treatment is consistent with the most perfect delicacy and even finesse of execution may be gathered from the sketch. The nose there shown in profile is three feet and a half in length; the mouth, so delicately curved, is about the same in width; even the sensitive nostril, which looks ready to expand with the breath of life, exceeds eight inches in length. The ear (which is placed high and is well detached from the head) measures three feet and five inches from top to tip.

A recent writer,[109] who brings sound practical knowledge to bear upon the subject, is of opinion that the Egyptian sculptors did not even “point” their work beforehand. If so, then the marvel is only so much the greater. The men who, working in so coarse and friable a material, could not only give beauty and finish to heads of this size, but could, with barbaric tools, hew them out ab initio, from the natural rock, were the Michael Angelos of their age.

It has already been said that the last Rameses to the southward is the best preserved. His left arm and hand are injured, and the head of the uræus sculptured on the front of the pschent is gone; but with these exceptions the figure is as whole, as fresh in surface, as sharp in detail, as on the day it was completed. The next is shattered to the waist. His head lies at his feet, half-buried in sand. The third is nearly as perfect as the first; while the fourth has lost not only the whole beard and the greater part of the uræus, but has both arms broken away and a big, cavernous hole in the front of the body. From the double-crowns of the two last the top ornament is also missing. It looks a mere knob; but it measures eight feet in height.

Such an effect does the size of these four figures produce on the mind of the spectator that he scarcely observes the fractures they have sustained. I do not remember to have even missed the head and body of the shattered one, although nothing is left of it above the knees. Those huge legs and feet, covered with ancient inscriptions, [110] some of Greek, some of Phœnician origin, tower so high above the heads of those who look at them from below that one scarcely thinks of looking higher still.

The figures are naked to the waist and clothed in the usual striped tunic. On their heads they wear the double-crown, and on their necks rich collars of cabochon drops cut in very low relief. The feet are bare of sandals and the arms of bracelets; but in the front of the body, just where the customary belt and buckle would come, are deep holes in the stone, such as might have been made to receive rivets, supposing the belts to have been made of bronze or gold. On the breast, just below the necklace, and on the upper part of each arm, are cut in magnificent ovals, between four and five feet in length, the ordinary cartouches of the king. These were probably tattooed upon his person in the flesh.

Some have supposed that these statues were originally colored, and that the color may have been effaced by the ceaseless shifting and blowing of the sand. Yet the drift was probably at its highest when Burckhardt discovered the place in 1813; and on the two heads that were still above the surface he seems to have observed no traces of color. Neither can the keenest eye detect any vestige of that delicate film of stucco with which the Egyptians invariably prepared their surfaces for painting. Perhaps the architects were for once content with the natural color of the sandstone, which is here very rich and varied. It happens, also, that the colossi come in a light-colored vein of the rock, and so sit relieved against a darker background. Toward noon, when the level of the façade has just passed into shade and the sunlight still strikes upon the statues, the effect is quite startling. The whole thing, which is then best seen from the island, looks like a huge onyx-cameo cut in high relief.

A statue of Ra,[111] to whom the temple is dedicated, stands some twenty feet high in a niche over the doorway, and is supported on either side by a bas-relief portrait of the king in an attitude of worship. Next above these comes a superb hieroglyphic inscription reaching across the whole front; above the inscription, a band of royal cartouches; above the cartouches, a frieze of sitting apes; above the apes, last and highest, some fragments of a cornice. The height of the whole may have been somewhat over a hundred feet. Wherever it has been possible to introduce them as decoration, we see the ovals of the king. Under those sculptured on the platform and over the door I observed the hieroglypic character