Cairo to Kisumu

by Frank G. Carpenter

The Egyptologists of the Metropolitan Museum in New York and Lord Carnarvon of England are responsible for some of the most remarkable finds of this generation. During my trip of to-day I met a young archæologist, in charge of the American operations, who showed me through the tombs of the kings and explained the symbols and pictures on the walls. I went to that part of the valley where the excavation is now going on and took pictures of a gang of one hundred and fifty Egyptian men and boys who are working there.

Let me describe the place that the ancient Egyptian monarchs selected for their burials, the Valley of the Kings. They wanted to hide their remains so that posterity could never find them, and to cover them so that future generations would have no idea that they and their treasures lay beneath. Our cemeteries are chosen for the beauty of their surroundings. We like to turn up our toes to the daisies and to have leafy trees whisper a requiem over our heads. The old Egyptian kings wanted to lie under the sterile desert waste and chose a region about as far up the Nile valley as Cleveland is inland from the Atlantic, and fully six miles back from the fertile strip on which their people lived. I can imagine no place more dreary. At this point the Nile is walled on the west by limestone mountains. As far as the moisture reaches, the valley is the greenest of green, but beyond lies a desert as brown as any part of the Sahara. There is not a blade of grass, nor a sprig of vegetation of any kind. There is nothing but sand and arid mountains, the latter almost as ragged in outline as the wildest parts of the Rockies. Some of their stony sides are built up in great precipices while in other places there are fort-like bluffs and similar convulsions of nature.

Rameses II, the greatest egoist of Egyptian history, covered his dominions with his monuments and inscriptions. Standing against the colossal leg of this statue is the figure of his sister, Nefertari, who was also his favourite wife.

Hatshepsut, the Queen Elizabeth of Egypt, reserved for herself the best space in the splendid temple-tomb at Deir-el-Bahari, tucking away in small quarters the bodies of her male relatives. A brother later retaliated by removing her name from the inscriptions.

Every great temple in ancient Egypt had its sacred lake, where the worshippers performed their ablutions and the religious processions of boats took place. The banks of this lake at Karnak were originally lined with smooth-cut stone.

To visit this valley one first comes to Luxor, which is very nearly on the site of Old Thebes, the capital of Egypt in the days of its most brilliant past. The ancient city lay on both sides of the Nile, but Luxor is on the east bank. Crossing the river in a ferry boat, I rode for an hour or more through the desert before I came into the Valley of the Kings. My donkey boy was a good one and his donkeys were young. His name was Joseph, and the brute I bestrode was called “Gingerbread.”

We traversed green fields, winding in and out along the canals, until we came to the desert and entered a gorge walled with rocks of yellow limestone and a conglomerate mixture of flint and limestone of curious formation. The gorge shows evidences of having been cut out by some mighty stream of the past. There are masses of débris along the sides, and the way is rough except on the road which has been made by the explorers.