A thousand miles up the Nile

by Amelia B. Edwards

The day was Sunday; the date February 16, 1874; the time, according to Philæ reckoning, about eleven A.M., when the painter, enjoying his seventh day’s holiday after his own fashion, went strolling about among the rocks. He happened to turn his steps southward and, passing the front of the great temple, climbed to the top of a little shapeless mound of fallen cliff and sand and crude-brick wall, just against the corner where the mountain slopes down to the river. Immediately round this corner, looking almost due south, and approachable only by a narrow ledge of rock, are two votive tablets, sculptured and painted, both of the thirty-eighth year of Rameses II. We had seen these from the river as we came back from Wady Halfeh, and had remarked how fine the view must be from that point. Beyond the fact that they are colored and that the color upon them is still bright, there is nothing remarkable about these inscriptions. There are many such at Abou Simbel. Our painter did not, therefore, come here to examine the tablets; he was attracted solely by the view.

Turning back presently his attention was arrested by some much mutilated sculptures on the face of the rock, a few yards nearer the south buttress of the temple, he had seen these sculptures before—so, indeed, had I, when wandering about that first day in search of a point of view—without especially remarking them. The relief was low, the execution slight; and the surface so broken away that only a few confused outlines remained.

The thing that now caught the painter’s eye, however, was a long crack running transversely down the face of the rock. It was such a crack as might have been caused, one would say, by blasting.

He stooped—cleared the sand away a little with his hand—observed that the crack widened—poked in the point of his stick and found that it penetrated to a depth of two or three feet. Even then it seemed to him to stop, not because it encountered any obstacle, but because the crack was not wide enough to admit the thick end of the stick.

This surprised him. No mere fault in the natural rock, he thought, would go so deep. He scooped away a little more sand; and still the cleft widened. He introduced the stick a second time. It was a long palm-stick, like an alpenstock, and it measured about five feet in length. When he probed the cleft with it this second time it went in freely up to where he held it in his hand—that is to say, to a depth of quite four feet.

Convinced now that there was some hidden cavity in the rock, he carefully examined the surface. There were yet visible a few hieroglyphic characters and part of two cartouches, as well as some battered outlines of what had once been figures. The heads of these figures were gone (the face of the rock, with whatever may have been sculptured upon it, having come away bodily at this point), while from the waist downward they were hidden under the sand. Only some hands and arms, in short, could be made out.

They were the hands and arms, apparently, of four figures; two in the center of the composition and two at the extremities. The two center ones, which seemed to be back to back, probably represented gods; the outer ones, worshipers.

All at once it flashed upon the painter that he had seen this kind of a group many a time before—and generally over a doorway.

Feeling sure now that he was on the brink of a discovery he came back, fetched away Salame and Mehemet Ali, and, without saying a syllable to any one, set to work with these two to scrape away the sand at the spot where the crack widened.

Meanwhile, the luncheon-bell having rung thrice, we concluded that the painter had rambled off somewhere into the desert, and so sat down without him. Toward the close of the meal, however, came a penciled note, the contents of which ran as follows: