My Winter on the Nile / Eighteenth Edition

by Charles Dudley Warner

Without seeing this mass of buildings, you can have no notion of the labor expended in decorating them. All the surfaces of the gigantic pylons, of the walls and courts, exterior and interior, are covered with finely and carefully cut figures and hieroglyphics, and a great deal of the work is minute and delicate chiselling. You are lost in wonder if you attempt to estimate the time and the number of workmen necessary to accomplish all this. It seems incredible that men could ever have had patience or leisure for it. A great portion of the figures, within and without, have been, with much painstaking, defaced; probably it was done by the early Christians, and this is the only impress they have left of their domination in this region.

The most interesting sculptures, however, at Philæ are those in a small chamber, or mortuary chapel, on the roof of the main temple, touching the most sacred mystery of the Egyptian religion, the death and resurrection of Osiris. This myth, which took many fantastic forms, was no doubt that forbidden topic upon which Herodotus was not at liberty to speak. It was the growth of a period in the Egyptian theology when the original revelation of one God grew weak and began to disappear under a monstrous symbolism. It is possible that the priests, who held their religious philosophy a profound secret from the vulgar (whose religion was simply a gross worship of symbols), never relinquished the belief expressed in their sacred texts, which say of God “that He is the sole generator in heaven and earth, and that He has not been begotten.... That He is the only living and true God, who was begotten by Himself.... He who has existed from the beginning.... who has made all things and was not Himself made.” It is possible that they may have held to this and still kept in the purity of its first conception the myth of the manifestation of Osiris, however fantastic the myth subsequently became in mythology and in the popular worship.

Osiris, the personification of the sun, the life-giving, came upon the earth to benefit men, and one of his titles was the “manifester of good and truth.” He was slain in a conflict with Set the spirit of evil and darkness; he was buried; he was raised from the dead by the prayers of his wife, Isis; he became the judge of the dead; he was not only the life-giving but the saving deity; “himself the first raised from the dead, he assisted to raise those who were justified, after having aided them to overcome all their trials.”

But whatever the priests and the initiated believed, this myth is here symbolized in the baldest forms. We have the mummy of Osiris passing through its interment and the successive stages of the under-world; then his body is dismembered and scattered, and finally the limbs and organs are reassembled and joined together, and the resurrection takes place before our eyes. It reminds one of a pantomime of the Ravels, who used to chop up the body of a comrade and then put him together again as good as new, with the insouciance of beings who lived in a world where such transactions were common. This whole temple indeed, would be a royal place for the tricks of a conjurer or the delusions of a troop of stage wizards. It is full of dark chambers and secret passages, some of them in the walls and some subterranean, the entrances to which are only disclosed by removing a close-fitting stone.

The great pylons, ascended by internal stairways, have habitable chambers in each story, lighted by deep slits of windows, and are like palace fortresses. The view from the summit of one of them is fascinating, but almost grim; that is, your surroundings are huge masses of granite mountains and islands, only relieved by some patches of green and a few palms on the east shore. But time has so worn and fashioned the stones of the overtopping crags, and the color of the red granite is so warm, and the contours are so softened that under the brilliant sky the view is mellowed and highly poetical, and ought not to be called grim.

This little island, gay with its gorgeously colored walls, graceful colonnades, garden-roofs and spreading terraces, set in its rim of swift water, protected by these granite fortresses, bent over by this sky, must have been a dear and sacred place to the worshippers of Isis and Osiris, and we scarcely wonder that the celebration of their rites was continued so long in our era. We do not need, in order to feel the romance of the place, to know that it was a favorite spot with Cleopatra, and that she moored her silken-sailed dahabeëh on the sandbank where ours now lies. Perhaps she was not a person of romantic nature. There is a portrait of her here (the authenticity of which rests upon I know not what authority) stiffly cut in the stone, in which she appears to be a resolute woman with full sensual lips and a determined chin. Her hair is put up in decent simplicity. But I half think that she herself was like her other Egyptian sisters and made her silken locks to shine with the juice of the castor-oil plant. But what were these mysteries in which she took part, and what was this worship, conducted in these dark and secret chambers? It was veiled from all vulgar eyes; probably the people were scarcely allowed to set foot upon the sacred island.

Sunday morning was fresh and cool, with fleecy clouds, light and summer-like. Instead of Sabbath bells, when I rose late, I heard the wild chant of a crew rowing a dahabeëh down the echoing channel. And I wondered how church bells, rung on the top of these pylons, would sound reverberating among these granite rocks and boulders. We climbed, during the afternoon, to the summit of the island of Biggeh, which overshadows Philæ, and is a most fantastic pile of crags. You can best understand this region by supposing that a gigantic internal explosion lifted the granite strata into the air, and that the fragments fell hap-hazard. This Biggeh might have been piled up by the giants who attempted to scale heaven, when Zeus blasted them and their work with his launched lightning.

From this summit, we have in view the broken, rock-strewn field called the Cataract, and all the extraordinary islands of rock above, that almost dam the river; there, over Philæ, on the north shore, is the barrack-like Austrian Mission, and neat it the railway that runs through the desert waste, round the hills of the Cataract, to Assouan. These vast piled-up fragments and splintered ledges, here and all about us, although of raw granite and syenite, are all disintegrating and crumbling into fine atoms. It is this decay that softens the hardness of the outlines, and harmonizes with the ruins below. Wild as the convulsion was that caused this fantastic wreck, the scene is not without a certain peace now, as we sit here this Sunday afternoon, on a high crag, looking down upon the pagan temples, which resist the tooth of time almost as well as the masses of granite rock that are in position and in form their sentinels.

Opposite, on the hill, is the mosque, and the plastered dome of the sheykh's tomb, with its prayer-niche, a quiet and commanding place of repose. The mosque looks down upon the ever-flowing Nile, upon the granite desolation, upon the decaying temple of Isis,—converted once into a temple of the true God, and now merely the marvel of the traveler. The mosque itself, representative of the latest religion, is falling to ruin. What will come next? What will come to break up this civilized barbarism?

“Abd-el-Atti, why do you suppose the Lord permitted the old heathen to have such a lovely place as this Philæ for the practice of their superstitions?”