Lastly, there are the minor inconveniences of sun, sand, wind, and flies. The whole place radiates heat, and seems almost to radiate light. The glare from above and the glare from below are alike intolerable. Dazzled, blinded, unable to even look at his subject without the aid of smoke-colored glasses, the sketcher whose tent is pitched upon the sandslope over against the great temple enjoys a foretaste of cremation.
When the wind blows from the north (which at this time of the year is almost always) the heat is perhaps less distressing, but the sand is maddening. It fills your hair, your eyes, your water-bottles; silts up your color-box; dries into your skies; and reduces your Chinese white to a gritty paste the color of salad-dressing. As for the flies, they have a morbid appetite for water-colors. They follow your wet brush along the paper, leave their legs in the yellow ocher, and plunge with avidity into every little pool of cobalt as it is mixed ready for use. Nothing disagrees with them; nothing poisons them—not even olive-green.
It was a delightful time, however—delightful alike for those who worked and those who rested—and these small troubles counted for nothing in the scale. Yet it was pleasant, all the same, to break away for a day or two, and be off to Wady Halfeh.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE SECOND CATARACT.
A fresh breeze, a full sail, and the consciousness of a holiday well earned, carried us gayly along from Abou Simbel to Wady Halfeh. We started late in the afternoon of the first day, made about twelve miles before the wind dropped, and achieved the remaining twenty-eight miles before noon the next day. It was our last trip on the Nile under canvas. At Wady Halfeh the Philæ was doomed to be dismantled. The big sail that had so long been our pride and delight would there be taken down, and our good boat, her grace and swiftness gone at one fell swoop, would become a mere lumbering barge, more suggestive of civic outings on the Thames than of Cleopatra’s galley.
For some way beyond Abou Simbel, the western bank is fringed by a long line of volcanic mountains, as much alike in height, size, and shape, as a row of martello towers. They are divided from one another by a series of perfectly uniform sand-drifts; while on the rounded top of each mountain, thick as the currants on the top of a certain cake, known to schoolboys by the endearing name of “black-caps,” lies a layer of the oddest black stones in the world. Having more than once been to the top of the rock of Abshek (which is the first large mountain of the chain, and strewn in the same way) we recognized the stones, and knew what they were like. In color they are purplish black, tinged here and there with dull red. They ring like clinkstone when struck, and in shape are most fantastic. L—— picked up some like petrified bunches of grapes. Others are twisted and writhen like the Vesuvian lava of 1871. They lie loose upon the surface, and are of all sizes; some being as small as currants, and others as large as quartern loaves. Speaking as one having no kind of authority, I should say that these stones are unquestionably of fiery parentage. One seems to see how, boiling and bubbling in a state of fusion, they must have been suddenly checked by contact with some cooler medium.
Where the chain ends, about three or four miles above Abou Simbel, the view widens, and a host of outlying mountains are seen scattered over an immense plain reaching for miles into the western desert. On the eastern bank, Kalat Adda,[122] a huge, rambling Roman citadel, going to solitary ruin on the last water-washed precipice to the left—brings the opposite range to a like end, and abuts on a similar plain, also scattered over with detached peaks. The scene here is desolately magnificent. A large island covered with palms divides the Nile in two branches, each of which looks as wide as the whole river. An unbounded distance opens away to the silvery horizon. On the banks there is no verdure; neither is there any sign of human toil. Nothing lives, nothing moves, save the wind and the river.
Of all the strange peaks we have yet seen, the mountains hereabout are the strangest. Alone or in groups, they start up here and there from the desert, on both sides, like the pieces on a chess-board. They are for the most part conical; but they are not extinct craters, such as are the volcanic cones of Korosko and Dakkeh. Seeing how they all rose to about the same height and were alike capped with that mysterious couche of shining black stones, the writer could not help fancying that, like the isolated Rocher de Corneille and Rocher de St. Michael at Puy, they might be but fragments of a rocky crust, rent and swept away at some infinitely remote period of the world’s history, and that the level of their present summits might represent perhaps the ancient level of the plain.
As regards form, they are weird enough for the wildest geological theories. All taper more or less toward the top. One is four-sided, like a pyramid; another, in shape a truncated cone, looks as if crowned with a pagoda summer-house; a third seems to be surmounted by a mosque and cupola; a fourth is scooped out in tiers of arches; a fifth is crowned, apparently, with a cairn of piled stones; and so on, with variations as endless as they are fantastic. A geologist might perhaps account for these caprices by showing how fire and earthquake and deluge had here succeeded each other; and how, after being first covered with volcanic stones and then split into chasms, the valleys thus opened had by and by been traversed by torrents which wore away the softer parts of the rock and left the harder standing.
Some way beyond Kalat Adda, when the Abou Simbel range and palm island have all but vanished in the distance and the lonely peak called the Mountain of the Sun (Gebel esh-Shems), has been left far behind, we came upon a new wonder—namely: upon two groups of scattered tumuli, one on the eastern, one on the western bank. Not volcanic forms these; not even accidental forms, if one may venture to form an opinion from so far off. They are of various sizes; some little, some big; all perfectly round and smooth and covered with a rich, greenish-brown alluvial soil. How did they come there? Who made them? What did they contain? The Roman ruin close by—the two hundred and forty thousand[123] deserters who must have passed this way—the Egyptian and Ethiopian armies that certainly poured their thousands along these very banks, and might have fought many a battle on this open plain, suggest all kinds of possibilities and fill one’s head with visions of buried arms and jewels and cinerary urns. We are more than half-minded to stop the boat and land that very moment; but are content on second thoughts with promising ourselves that we will at least excavate one of the smaller hillocks on our way back.