A thousand miles up the Nile

by Amelia B. Edwards

It is fine to see the sunrise on the front of the great temple; but something still finer takes place on certain mornings of the year, in the very heart of the mountain. As the sun comes up above the eastern hill-tops, one long, level, beam strikes through the doorway, pierces the inner darkness like an arrow, penetrates to the sanctuary and falls like fire from heaven upon the altar at the feet of the gods.

No one who has watched for the coming of that shaft of sunlight can doubt that it was a calculated effect and that the excavation was directed at one especial angle in order to produce it. In this way Ra, to whom the temple was dedicated, may be said to have entered in daily and by a direct manifestation of his presence to have approved the sacrifices of his worshipers.

I need scarcely say that we did not see half the wall-sculptures or even half the chambers that first afternoon at Abou Simbel. We rambled to and fro, lost in wonder and content to wonder, like rustics at a fair. We had, however, ample time to come again and again, and learn it all by heart. The writer went in constantly and at all hours; but most frequently at the end of the day’s sketching, when the rest were walking or boating in the cool of the late afternoon.

It is a wonderful place to be alone in—a place in which the very darkness and silence are old and in which time himself seems to have fallen asleep. Wandering to and fro among these sculptured halls, like a shade among shadows, one seems to have left the world behind; to have done with the teachings of the present: to belong one’s self to the past. The very gods assert their ancient influence over those who question them in solitude. Seen in the fast-deepening gloom of evening, they look instinct with supernatural life. There were times when I should scarcely have been surprised to hear them speak—to see them rise from their painted thrones and come down from the walls. There were times when I felt I believed in them.

There was something so weird and awful about the place, and it became so much more weird and awful the farther one went in, that I rarely ventured beyond the first hall when quite alone. One afternoon, however, when it was a little earlier, and therefore a little lighter than usual, I went to the very end and sat at the feet of the gods in the sanctuary. All at once (I cannot tell why, for my thoughts just then were far away) it flashed upon me that a whole mountain hung—ready, perhaps, to cave in—above my head. Seized by a sudden panic such as one feels in dreams, I tried to run; but my feet dragged and the floor seemed to sink under them. I felt I could not have called for help, though it had been to save my life. It is unnecessary, perhaps, to add that the mountain did not cave in, and that I had my fright for nothing. It would have been a grand way of dying, all the same; and a still grander way of being buried. My visits to the great temple were not always so dramatic. I sometimes took Salame, who smoked cigarettes when not on active duty, or held a candle while I sketched patterns of cornices, head-dresses of kings and gods, designs of necklaces and bracelets, heads of captives, and the like. Sometimes we explored the side-chambers. Of these there are eight; pitch-dark, and excavated at all kinds of angles. Two or three are surrounded by stone benches cut in the rock; and in one the hieroglyphic inscriptions are part cut, part sketched in black and left unfinished. As this temple is entirely the work of Rameses II, and betrays no sign of having been added to by any of his successors, these evidences of incompleteness would seem to show that the king died before the work was ended.

I was always under the impression that there were secret places yet undiscovered in these dark chambers, and Salame and I were always looking for them. At Denderah, at Edfû, at Medinet Habu, at Philæ,[120] there have been found crypts in the thickness of the walls and recesses under the pavements, for the safe-keeping of treasure in time of danger. The rock-cut temples must also have had their hiding-places; and these would doubtless take the form of concealed cells in the walls, or under the floors of the side-chambers.

To come out from these black holes into the twilight of the great hall and see the landscape set, as it were, in the ebon frame of the doorway, was alone worth the journey to Abou Simbel. The sun being at such times in the west, the river, the yellow sand-island, the palms and tamarisks opposite, and the mountains of the eastern desert, were all flooded with a glory of light and color to which no pen or pencil could possibly do justice. Not even the mountains of Moab in Holman Hunt’s “Scapegoat” were so warm with rose and gold.

Thus our days passed at Abou Simbel; the workers working; the idler idling; strangers from the outer world now and then coming and going. The heat on shore was great, especially in the sketching-tents; but the north breeze blew steadily every day from about an hour after sunrise till an hour before sunset, and on board the dahabeeyah it was always cool.

The happy couple took advantage of this good wind to do a good deal of boating, and by judiciously timing their excursions contrived to use the tail of the day’s breeze for their trip out, and the strong arms of four good rowers to bring them back again. In this way they managed to see the little rock-cut temple of Ferayg, which the rest of us unfortunately missed. On another occasion they paid a visit to a certain sheik who lived at a village about two miles south of Abou Simbel. He was a great man, as Nubian magnates go. His name was Hassan Ebn Rashwan el Kashef, and he was a grandson of that same old Hassan Kashef who was vice-regent of Nubia in the days of Burckhardt and Belzoni. He received our happy couple with distinguished hospitality, killed a sheep in their honor, and entertained them for more than three hours. The meal consisted of an endless succession of dishes, all of which, like that bugbear of our childhood, the hated air with variations, went on repeating the same theme under a multitude of disguises; and, whether roasted, boiled, stewed or minced, served on skewers, smothered in rice, or drowned in sour milk, were always mutton au fond.

We now despaired of ever seeing a crocodile; and but for a trail that our men discovered on the island opposite, we should almost have ceased to believe that there were crocodiles in Egypt. The marks were quite fresh when we went to look at them. The creature had been basking high and dry in the sun, and this was the point at which he had gone down again to the river. The damp sand at the water’s edge had taken the mold of his huge fleshy paws, and even of the jointed armor of his tail, though this last impression was somewhat blurred by the final rush with which he had taken to the water. I doubt if Robinson Crusoe, when he saw the famous footprint on the shore, was more excited than we of the Philæ at sight of this genuine and undeniable trail.