A thousand miles up the Nile

by Amelia B. Edwards

which, in conjunction with the sign known as the determinative of metals, signifies gold (nub); but when represented, as here, without the determinative, stands for Nubia, the Land of Gold. This addition, which I do not remember to have seen elsewhere in connection with the cartouches of Rameses II,[112] is here used in an heraldic sense, as signifying the sovereignty of Nubia.

The relative positions of the two temples of Abou Simbel have been already described—how they are excavated in two adjacent mountains and divided by a cataract of sand. The front of the small temple lies parallel to the course of the Nile, here flowing in a northeasterly direction. The façade of the great temple is cut in the flank of the mountain and faces due east. Thus the colossi, towering above the shoulder of the sand-drift, catch, as it were, a side view of the small temple and confront vessels coming up the river. As for the sand-drift, it curiously resembles the glacier of the Rhone. In size, in shape, in position, in all but color and substance, it is the same. Pent in between the rocks at top, it opens out like a fan at bottom. In this, its inevitable course, it slants downward across the façade of the great temple. Forever descending, drifting, accumulating, it wages the old stealthy war; and, unhasting, unresting, labors, grain by grain, to fill the hollowed chambers and bury the great statues and wrap the whole temple in a winding-sheet of golden sand, so that the place thereof shall know it no more.

It had very nearly come to this when Burckhardt went up (A.D. 1813). The top of the doorway was then thirty feet below the surface. Whether the sand will ever reach that height again must depend on the energy with which it is combated. It can only be cleared as it accumulates. To avert it is impossible. Backed by the illimitable wastes of the Libyan desert, the supply from above is inexhaustible. Come it must; and come it will, to the end of time.

The drift rose to the lap of the northernmost colossus and half-way up the legs of the next when the Philæ lay at Abou Simbel. The doorway was clear, however, almost to the threshold, and the sand inside was not more than two feet deep in the first hall. The whole façade, we were told, had been laid bare, and the interior swept and garnished, when the Empress of the French, after opening the Suez Canal in 1869, went up the Nile as far as the second cataract. By this time, most likely, that yellow carpet lies thick and soft in every chamber, and is fast silting up the doorway again.

How well I remember the restless excitement of our first day at Abou Simbel! While the morning was yet cool, the painter and writer wandered to and fro, comparing and selecting points of view and superintending the pitching of their tents. The painter planted his on the very brink of the bank, face to face with the colossi and the open doorway. The writer perched some forty feet higher on the pitch of the sandslope; so getting a side view of the façade and a peep of distance looking up the river. To fix the tent up there was no easy matter. It was only by sinking the tent-pole in a hole filled with stones that it could be trusted to stand against the steady push of the north wind, which at this season is almost always blowing.

Meanwhile the travelers from the other dahabeeyahs were tramping backward and forward between the two temples; filling the air with laughter and waking strange echoes in the hollow mountains. As the day wore on, however, they returned to their boats, which one by one spread their sails and bore away for Wady Halfeh.

When they were fairly gone and we had the marvelous place all to ourselves we went to see the temples.

The smaller one, though it comes first in order of sailing, is generally seen last; and seen therefore to disadvantage. To eyes fresh from the “Abode of Ra,” the “Abode of Hathor” looks less than its actual size; which is, in fact, but little inferior to that of the temple at Derr. A first hall, measuring some forty feet in length by twenty-one in width, leads to a transverse corridor, two side-chambers, and a sanctuary seven feet square, at the upper end of which are the shattered remains of a cow-headed statue of Hathor. Six square pillars, as at Derr, support what, for want of a better word, one must call the ceiling of the hall; though the ceiling is, in truth, the superincumbent mountain.

In this arrangement, as in the general character of the bas-relief sculptures which cover the walls and pillars, there is much simplicity, much grace, but nothing particularly new. The façade, on the contrary, is a daring innovation. Here the whole front is but a frame for six recesses, from each of which a colossal statue, erect and lifelike, seems to be walking straight out from the heart of the mountain. These statues, three to the right and three to the left of the doorway, stand thirty feet high, and represent Rameses II and Nefertari, his queen. Mutilated as they are, the male figures are full of spirit and the female figures full of grace. The queen wears on her head the plumes and disk of Hathor. The king is crowned with the pschent and with a fantastic helmet adorned with plumes and horns. They have their children with them; the queen her daughters, the king his sons—infants of ten feet high, whose heads just reach to the parental knee.