Cairo to Kisumu

by Frank G. Carpenter

From Cairo I drove out five miles to the site of Heliopolis, the ancient City of the Sun, where stands the oldest obelisk in the world. This monument was very old when Abraham came down into Egypt, and under its shadow Joseph, when he was manager of Pharaoh’s estates, came to court Asenath, the daughter of a priest in the great temple to which the obelisk belonged. Near it Mary rested with the child Jesus during the flight from the wrath of Herod the King. Heliopolis, first set up for the worship of the sun-god Ra, the ancestor of all the Pharaohs, later became the Boston of Egypt where two thousand years ago the wise men studied logic, and it was in the Temple of Heliopolis that Plato taught philosophy and Herodotus studied history. We learn from some of the hieroglyphics of Egypt that the temple had more than twelve thousand employees connected with it. The road to it leads through a long avenue of acacia trees past the royal summer palace, and the city stood in one of the most fertile portions of the valley of the Nile. Not a vestige of its ruins now remains save this obelisk, which stands sixty feet above the ground in the midst of green crops. Not far from it two buffaloes, with cloths over their faces, went round and round pulling the bar which turns the great water-wheel of a squeaking sakieh. I found a few beggars asking for backsheesh and saw half-a-dozen Mohammedans sitting gossiping by the roadside; but there was nothing else except the green of the fields, with a bleak and bare desert stretching away beyond them and the shadowy ghosts of the Pyramids looming large on the distant horizon. The obelisk is almost the twin of the one in Central Park, New York, save that the hieroglyphics on its sides are more deeply cut and the bees have made their nests in many of the figures. Bees very like our honey bees swarm over the monuments of Egypt. I saw one colony living on the side of the Sphinx, and the whole of one surface of this obelisk is covered with their cells.

Seen from a distance, the Pyramids are like gray cones rising above the horizon and are frequently disappointing in their first impression. It is only on closer view that their enormous size and the miracle of their ever being built are realized.

Gangs of brown-skinned fellaheen dig day after day, uncovering the tombs and the history of centuries ago. Contractors say that the Egyptian peasant prefers a basket to a wheelbarrow for dirt carrying, solely because his grandfather used a basket.

CHAPTER XI
THE PYRAMIDS REVISITED

This is the third time that I have made lengthy visits to the Pyramids of Egypt. On my first trip I rode to them on a donkey. The next time I came out from Cairo in a comfortable carriage, and to-day I passed over the same route on an electric trolley, paying seven and a half cents for the trip. The street cars to the Pyramids start at the end of the bridge, opposite Cairo, and pass along the side of the wide avenue shaded by acacia trees. The cars are open so that one can look out over the Nile valley as he goes. We whizzed by caravans of donkeys, loaded with all sorts of farm products, and by camels, ridden by gowned men, bobbing up and down in the saddles as they went. There were men, women, and children on foot, and veiled women on donkeys.

The cars were filled with Egyptians. Two dark-faced men in black gowns and white turbans sat on the seat beside me. In front was a yellow-skinned Arab dandy in a red fez and long gown, while just behind me sat a woman with a black veil fastened to her head-dress by a brass spool. As we neared the Pyramids we stopped at a café where American drinks were sold, and a little farther on was a great modern hotel with telephones and electric lights.

When I previously visited Egypt, the sands about the Pyramids were almost as smooth as those of the seashore. I galloped on my donkey over them and had no idea that I was tramping down innumerable graves.