My Winter on the Nile / Eighteenth Edition

by Charles Dudley Warner

We started for Koorneh across a luxuriant wheat-field, but soon struck the desert and the debris of the old city. Across the river, we had our first view of the pillars of Luxor and the pylons of Karnak, sights to heat the imagination and set the blood dancing. But how far off they are; on what a grand scale this Thebes is laid out—if one forgets London and Paris and New York.

The desert we pass over is full of rifled tombs, hewn horizontally in rocks that stand above the general level. Some of them are large chambers, with pillars left for support. The doors are open and the sand drifts in and over the rocks in which they are cut. A good many of them are inhabited by miserable Arabs, who dwell in them and in huts among them. I fancy that, if the dispossessed mummies should reappear, they would differ little, except perhaps in being better clad, from these bony living persons who occupy and keep warm their sepulchres.

Our guide leads us at a lively pace through these holes and heaps of the dead, over sand hot to the feet, under a sky blue and burning, for a mile and a half. He is the first Egyptian I have seen who can walk. He gets over the ground with a sort of skipping lope, barefooted, and looks not unlike a tough North American Indian. As he swings along, holding his thin cotton robe with one hand, we feel as if we were following a shade despatched to conduct us to some Unhappy Hunting-Grounds.

Near the temple are some sycamore-trees and a collection of hovels called Koorneh, inhabited by a swarm of ill-conditioned creatures, who are not too proud to beg and probably are not ashamed to steal. They beset us there and in the ruins to buy all manner of valuable antiquities, strings of beads from mummies, hands and legs of mummies, small green and blue images, and the like, and raise such a clamor of importunity that one can hold no communion, if he desires to, with the spirits of Sethi I., and his son Rameses II., who spent the people's money in erecting these big columns and putting the vast stones on top of them.

We are impressed with the massiveness and sombreness of the Egyptian work, but this temple is too squat to be effective, and is scarcely worth visiting, in comparison with others, except for its sculptures. Inside and out it is covered with them; either the face of the stone cut away, leaving the figures in relief, or the figures are cut in at the sides and left in relief in the center. The rooms are small—from the necessary limitations of roof-stones that stretched from wall to wall, or from column to column; but all the walls, in darkness or in light, are covered with carving.

The sculptures are all a glorification of the Pharaohs. We should like to know the unpronounceable names of the artists, who, in the conventional limits set them by their religion, drew pictures of so much expression and figures so life-like, and chiseled these stones with such faultless execution; but there are no names here but of Pharaoh and of the gods.

The king is in battle, driving his chariot into the thick of the fight; the king crosses rivers, destroys walled cities, routs armies the king appears in a triumphal procession with chained captives, sacks of treasure, a menagerie of beasts, and a garden of exotic trees and plants borne from conquered countries; the king is making offerings to his predecessors, or to gods many, hawk-headed, cow-headed, ibis-headed, man-headed. The king's scribe is taking count of the hands, piled in a heap, of the men the king has slain in battle. The king, a gigantic figure, the height of a pylon, grasps by the hair of the head a bunch of prisoners, whom he is about to slay with a raised club—as one would cut off the tops of a handful of radishes.

There is a vein of “Big Injun” running through them all. The same swagger and boastfulness, and cruelty to captives. I was glad to see one woman in the mythic crowd, doing the generous thing: Isis, slim and pretty, offers her breast to her son, and Horus stretches up to the stone opportunity and takes his supper like a little gentleman. And there is color yet in her cheek and robe that was put on when she was thirty-five hundred years younger than she is now.

Towards the south we saw the more extensive ruins of the Memnonium and, more impressive still, the twin Colossi, one of them the so-called vocal statue of Memnon, standing up in the air against the evening sky more than a mile distant. They rose out of a calm green plain of what seemed to be wheat, but which was a field of beans. The friendly green about them seemed to draw them nearer to us in sympathy. At this distance we could not see how battered they were. And the unspeakable calm of these giant figures, sitting with hands on knees, fronting the east, like the Sphinx, conveys the same impression of lapse of time and of endurance that the pyramids give.

The sunset, as we went back across the plain, was gorgeous in vermilion, crimson, and yellow. The Colossi dominated the great expanse, and loomed up in the fading light like shapes out of the mysterious past.