But though the carking tooth of time has in no way set its mark on the monument of Osirtasen, a small fly has for the present obliterated, on three sides of it, the record he placed upon them. It has done this by filling up the incised hieroglyphics with its mud-cells. Whether it be a mason-wasp, or a bee, I was unable to discover, the cells being out of reach. I saw the same temporary eclipse of the sculptures and hieroglyphics going on at Dendera and elsewhere. The venom of this little insect is, I was told, equal to what I saw of its impudence.
The drive to Heliopolis is well worth taking on its own account. I found by the wayside a greater variety of culture, and of plants, than elsewhere in Egypt; oranges, lemons, ricinus, (which, with its spikes of red flowers and broad leaves, is, here, a handsome plant,) cactuses, vineyards, olive-trees, Australian eucalyptuses, and many other trees and plants.
Before I went to Heliopolis I asked a Scotchman I found myself seated next to at dinner one day at the table d’hôte, whether it was worth one’s while to go? ‘I will tell you just how it is,’ he replied. ‘I have been there. There is nothing to see; but it will give you a pleasant afternoon. It is like going out a fishing. The day is fine. The country looks well. You have a pleasant friend, and a good luncheon, with cigars and whisky. You come home without having seen a fish; but you are not dissatisfied with yourself for having gone.’ Having again met this gentleman after I had been there, he asked me how I had liked Heliopolis? He seemed so thoroughly satisfied with his own matter-of-fact, and very intelligible, way of regarding the world, and all it contains, that I refrained from telling him what I had thought. In his presence I almost doubted whether any pearls, excepting his, were not counterfeits: at all events, I was sure they would appear so to him. This, however, was but a momentary misgiving. There are some other sorts which, though not so common, are quite as genuine as his; perhaps, too, (but when one writes in English this must not be said without expressions of humility, and of readiness to receive correction,) they may have been formed by animals, the ingredients of whose food were somewhat more varied than is the case with the ordinary mollusk. But, be this as it may, those that are of the rarer sort have the advantage that, while they do not in the least interfere with the enjoyment of the sunshine, the pleasant scene, the friend, the good cigar, and the old whisky (perhaps rather giving depth to the enjoyment, because refining it), they are in themselves, and even without these agreeable adjuncts, a source of never-failing enjoyment. They are, as was said of such things long ago, as good for the night as for the day. They go with us into the country, and accompany us on our travels. It may, however, be objected to them that, in this country, they generally make their possessor unpractical, and leave him poorer, except in ideas, than they found him. There is no denying that it is so here, very often. Is the reason of this that our governing class, whether we interpret those words to mean the class from which our legislators, and administrators, have hitherto very generally been taken, or the class that put them in their places, that is, the shopocracy (can we hope anything better from our new governing class, that of the British artizan?) have cared but little for these things? Influences of this kind have made us a money-worshipping people—not that we have loved money more than other people, but that money has had too much power amongst us—so that too many of us, like my Scotch acquaintance, have learnt to pooh-pooh everything which does not fetch money—that is to say, nature and history, which are the materials out of which truth is constructed; and art, poetry, philosophy, and science, which are the construction itself: everything but money, and what will bring money in the market. And so, too, it came about that our highest education was merely a form of classicism accommodated to a narrow and shortsighted theology: what both nature and history might have taught would have been inconvenient, or, be that as it may, was not needed.
We know that in certain exceptional cases (they ought not to be so very exceptional) a man may possess the world that is to come, as well as the world my Scotch acquaintance had so tight a grip of. This is a difficult thing to do: on our system, and with our ideas, a very difficult thing; still one that may be done. The difficulty, however, appears to be very considerably increased, when the attempt is made to add to these two the possession of the world that has been. It is hard to keep two balls up in the air, and going, at the same time; but, to add a third, and to attend to all three properly, to give each its own due space and time, and to get them all to work harmoniously together, is a feat that reveals a very un-English mind, but still it is the master-mind. What were the performances of Egyptian Proteus to this? By turns he was many things, but here is a man who, at one and the same time, has three souls, and lives three lives. It is so, however, only in appearance: the interpretation of the Parable is that the man has passed mentally out of the flat-fish stage of being, in which sight is possible only in one direction; and has reached the higher stage in which it is possible to look in every direction; and so to connect all that is seen all around, as that the different objects shall not reciprocally obscure, but illumine each other.
CHAPTER XVI.
THEBES—LUXOR AND KARNAK.
For all Egyptian Thebes displays of wealth,
Whose palaces its greatest store contain:
That hundred-gated city that sends forth
Through every gate an hundred cars of war,