Upon a face of cliff near the quarry I found a large inscription which showed that the alabaster had been worked in the reign of Queen Nefertari-Ahmosis, a name which means, by the way, “The Beautiful Companion of the Child of the Moon.” This queen was the wife of the Pharaoh Ahmosis I., who freed Egypt from the rule of the Hyksos in the sixteenth century B.C. Her monuments are not numerous, but it has been noticed that her name is given great prominence when it occurs beside that of her husband, although he was a popular hero. Here in this quarry no mention is made of the Pharaoh at all, and it would seem that the queen was paramount and that her name was sufficient upon public monuments.
As soon as the Hyksos had been driven from the land the temples were rebuilt, and there must have been a considerable demand for alabaster with which to ornament them. Inscriptions of this period describe the magnificent alabaster shrines which were constructed, and there are very numerous smaller objects of this material still extant. Most of the stone was procured from the famous Hatnub quarries, a few miles north of Assiout; and it is an indication of the quantity required that this new quarry was opened.
There appears to be no other ancient inscription in this valley; but there is abundant evidence that the stone was worked in modern times, perhaps in the days of Mohammed Ali or even later. The hill-side is covered with blocks of alabaster roughly hewn from the rock, and marked with numbers and short directions in Arabic writing. These magnificent white blocks, three or four feet square, abandoned here in the desert as though worthless, remind one very forcibly of the riches of this splendid country between the Nile and the Red Sea which has produced some of the finest ornamental stones ever used, some of the best gold of ancient times, and now is yielding a quantity of petroleum. In like manner one sees Imperial Porphyry lying abandoned at the quarries of Gebel Dukhân and Granito del Foro at those of Um Etgal, as though these materials were of no particular value. The Nile valley is rich enough, but the desert is prodigal.
At the foot of the hill several small huts are clustered, and a few yards away there is a well, now choked up. The large boulders have been rolled to one side in ancient days to form a roadway for the passage of the stone down this gauge and out to the open desert where the smoother road is picked up. In old times the stone was conveyed to the Nile on carts drawn by oxen and slaves, but in the more recent workings mules and horses were probably used; and it is as well not to think of the cruelties inflicted on either as the carts sank in the soft gravel or jolted over the stones in this valley.
Researches were over in an hour’s time, after which we made our breakfast upon the scraps left in the basket overnight. We then went for a stroll up a narrow valley leading off that in which we had camped, and here our attention was directed for the next quarter of an hour to the pursuit of a ten-inch grey lizard which we had found basking in the early blaze of the sun. Once or twice I have come across the same creature in desert places, and the natives have on each occasion expressed the greatest terror of it. They say that it will spring from the ground and fasten itself in the throat of a man on a camel or on any other elevation, whereupon he bursts into boils and blains and dies in horrible agonies. On one occasion the natives seized my camel’s head when one of these lizards was observed in the distance, and turned us round, while others cautiously hurled stones at the monster. My friend and I were therefore most interested when we saw so terrific a little creature at our feet, and we did not cease the pursuit till we had run him to ground and had tweaked his tail to see what he could do. I have no doubt he is absolutely harmless.
The ride home now commenced, and continued until the blinding heat proclaimed it to be nearly one o’clock. At last, roasted to a turn, we reached the river and crossed the glaring water to Assiout. All the way home we had discussed the iced drinks which, by special arrangement, were to be waiting for us; and I must admit that when tepid lemonade was brought to us with the remark that no ice was procurable the whole expedition seemed to have been a mistake.
CHAPTER XIII
A RIDE TO WADY SALAMÛNI
It was at about noon in the month of August when my friend and I, perspiring in a rest-house at Sohag in Upper Egypt, conceived the idea of setting out at once for a sixty-mile ride into the Eastern Desert and back. The weather during the last few days had been unusually hot, and the thermometer had registered with regularity each afternoon its 115 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade. Looking now through the half-closed shutters towards the Nile, one saw the muddy river rushing past in full flood with the sun glaring down upon it from a leaden sky; the parched fields and weakly coloured trees stirring in the baking hot wind; and, in the distance across the water, the hazy hills of the Eastern Desert with no apparent vestige of shade upon them. In the sandy garden around the house the few flowers appeared to be scorched, and the despairing gardener could be seen lying asleep in the single patch of shadow. The sparrows, sitting upon the palings, held their beaks open and kept remarkably still. A dog, with its tongue lolling out of its mouth, crawled dejectedly past the sentry at the gate, who was too hot to kick it.
The morning’s work being finished, we were seated in the long chairs, clad in pyjamas, drinking lukewarm lemonade, and talking about Scotch moors, when the idea came.
My friend had told me of a remarkable valley which he had visited some years ago, called the Wady Salamûni, wherein there were the ruins of a Coptic monastery still the object of a pilgrimage on certain occasions to pious Copts, and near by a well, known as Bir el Ain, charmingly situated amongst the rocks. It was to this well that we proposed to ride.