One knows now what the old philosopher desired to express; for the wilderness is indeed Paradise, and here one may find the true happiness.
The day slips past in a half-dream of pleasure, and to the student of archæology, who finds so much for his pencil to record and his mind to consider, the hours race by at an absurd speed. The two days which we spent here passed like an afternoon’s dream, and the memories which remain in the mind are almost too slight to record. Writing here in the study one reconstructs the rugged scene, and searches for the incidents which gave gentle colour to it. There was a flight of cranes, which sailed overhead, moving from south-east to north-west, on their way to spend the summer in Europe. Why should one’s memory recall so charmedly the passage of a hundred birds? There was a hyæna which, in the red dusk, stood upon a hill-top to watch us, and presently disappeared. There were three vultures which rose from the bones of a dead camel, soared into the sky, and alighted again when we had passed. There came a flock of goats and sheep at noonday to the well, with much bleating and with the gentle patter of many hoofs. The shepherd in his picturesque rags eyed us curiously as his charges drank, and, still watching us, passed down the wady towards the west when they had quenched their thirst. And so one’s memory wanders over the two days, recalling the trivialities, and passing over the more precise details of camp life and of work, until presently one sees the tent struck and the baggage bumping down the valley once more on the backs of the grunting camels. The return journey to Edfu was soon accomplished, and the accumulated mail of five or six days which was in waiting at the end of the ride quickly brought one back to the business of life, and relegated the Wady Abâd to the store-chamber of happy recollections.
Greek inscription relating to an elephant hunt, on a rock to the east of the Temple of Wady Abâd.—Page [163].
Sketch-plan of the Temple of Wady Abâd.
Pl. xxxi.
VII.
A NUBIAN HIGHWAY.
Opposite the town of Aswân, a short distance below the First Cataract of the Nile, there rises an island known to travellers by its Greek name of Elephantine. The river sweeps down from the cataract to east and west; southwards one may watch it flowing around a dozen dark clumps of granite rocks, which thrust themselves, as it were, breathless above the water; and northwards almost without hindrance it passes between the hills and palm-trees of the mainland. Nowadays should one stand upon the mounds which mark the site of the ancient city of Elephantine, and look east and north, one would feel that modern civilisation had hidden for ever the scenes of the past, and had prevented the imagination from re-picturing the place as it was in the elder days. The huge Cataract Hotel overshadows the ruined city, and stares down from its pinnacle of granite on to the tumbled stones of ancient temples. On the island itself, opposite this hotel, the elaborate and ultramodern rest-house of the Ministry of Public Works rises amidst its terraced gardens; and farther to the north stands the imposing Savoy Hotel, surrounded by luxuriant trees and flowers unknown to the ancient Egyptians. Eastwards the long, neat promenade of Aswân edges the river, backed by the Grand Hotel, the Government offices, and other large buildings; and at one end the noisy railway station tells the insistent tale of the Present. During the winter one may watch the busy launches and small craft plying to and fro, and may see the quality and fashion of Europe amusing itself at either end of the passage; while at night the brilliant lights blaze into the waters of the Nile from a thousand electric lamps, and the sounds of the latest valse drift out through open windows. The place is modern: one sips one’s whisky-and-soda above the crushed-down remains of Pharaonic splendours, plays tennis in a garden laid out above the libraries of the Ptolemies, and reads ‘The Times’ where, maybe, melancholy Juvenal wrote his Fifteenth Satire.
But should one turn now to the west and south a different impression might be obtained. On the island still stands the imposing gateway of the rich temple destroyed for the sake of its building-stone in the days of Muhammed Ali; and near it, only recently, an archæologist uncovered the intact burial vault of the sacred rams of the Nile-god Khnum. The rocky hills of the western mainland tower above the island, great drifts of golden sand carrying the eye from the summit to the water’s edge; and here, cut into the rocks, are the tombs of the ancient princes of Elephantine. In this direction there is almost nothing that is more modern than the ruined monastery of St Simeon, built at the head of a sandy valley in the early days of Christianity, and destroyed by the fierce brother of Saladin in 1173 A.D. With one’s back to the hotels, and one’s face to these changeless hills, the history of the old city is able to be traced with something of the feeling of reality to aid the thoughts.