Starting out by carriage from Heliopolis, we soon are beyond its limits and in the open country. At once we are transported to the customs of Bible times. Nothing seems to have changed in the space of four thousand years. Here are the hewers of wood, the drawers of water, and the old mode of plowing the soil and of threshing the grain.
On all sides we notice the great fertility of the soil. Work and water seem the only agents lacking to render the country the garden of the world in the course of a few years.
Heliopolis was at one time counted among the wonders of the world. Little remains of its former glory. Gone are the avenues of sphinxes, the groves of statues, and the renowned Temple of the Sun. One solitary obelisk—the sheik of obelisks, the Egyptians call it—remains just where hands which now rest from all labor placed it four thousand years ago.
The hands which planted Mary's tree have long since crumbled and mingled with the dust of eighteen hundred years, yet the tree, of immense size, still stands, and is likely to live for centuries.
We cannot leave Egypt without having viewed the magnificent ruins of Thebes, the ancient capital of Upper Egypt. Both at Thebes and Karnac we may behold the glories of ancient ruins. Imagination finds it difficult to picture the beauties of the ancient palaces and halls when they were in their early splendor.
"Thebes must have been the greatest and most magnificent city in Egypt. Almost as old as the flood, situated in a fertile valley, where it expanded to a vast and splendid amphitheater, and adorning both banks of the Nile, it was, in extent, wealth, and architectural glory, the flower and crown of ancient civilization."
Homer sang the praises of its hundred gates nearly a thousand years before Christ. Some of the sacred prophets speak of it as containing a "multitude" of people. We cannot gaze on its wondrous ruins, nor linger among its splendid mausoleums of kings and princes, without receiving lasting impressions of its former grandeur and beauty.
The Thebes of the present and of the past come before the imagination in sharp contrast, and we find it difficult to reconcile the ever present fact of Arab filth and squalor with visions of former glory.
We vainly wish for some magic wand that could cause this ancient city to stand again as in the days of its early magnificence. It may not be. Both Thebes and Karnac are too remote from the path of commerce, too far removed from the great trade centers, in too close proximity to the burning sands of the desert, for us ever to hope to see them restored to the ranks of modern life, moved by its spirit of progress.
About a mile and a half north of Luxor we find the ruins of Karnac. This was the grandest temple in Egypt, possibly in the whole world. We have but to visit it in the early evening to enjoy as glorious a sunset as mortals could desire. Who shall say what varied scenes, what gorgeous pageants, what centuries of glory and of ruin the great sun has looked upon in past ages!