Cairo to Kisumu

by Frank G. Carpenter

Looking at the valley from the Nile one would not suppose it to be anything other than a desert ravine, so I did not at first realize that it was a cemetery. There are neither gravestones nor monuments, for the kings obliterated every sign that might indicate their burial places. They dug out great chambers under the bed of this dried-up river and built cisterns for their proper drainage, but when they had finished they did all they could to make the spot look as it was in nature. For this reason their tombs remained for ages untouched and unknown.

From time to time, however, one or another was discovered. Strabo, the Greek geographer, who was alive when Christ was born, speaks of forty of them as being worthy of a visit, and others are mentioned by subsequent writers. Later they were again lost, and not until in our generation when some Arabs began to sell curious antiquities was it learned that the tombs had been rediscovered and were being rifled by these vandals. The archæologists then went to work on their explorations which resulted in the opening up of tomb after tomb, until we now have what might almost be called a subterranean city of the dead in the heart of the desert.

The tombs are nothing like our burial vaults. They are large rooms cut out of the solid rock, with walls straight and smooth. They are reached by many steps, going down inclined planes until they bring one far below the surface of the valley and deep under the mountains. Each king had his own tomb, which he decorated with sketches and paintings representing the life of his time and the achievements of his reign. The ceilings are beautiful. From some of them the figures of gods and goddesses look down upon us. Others are decorated with geometric designs in beautiful colours. In some, men and women are carved in bas-relief out of the solid rock and then coloured. Many of the scenes are religious, so that from them the Egyptologist is able to learn what the people of that day believed. The carvings show, too, how they lived when our remotest ancestors were savages in the wilds of Europe and Asia.

The Americans have had remarkably good luck in their finds. One of them was the tomb of the parents of Queen Tiy in which all the objects were in as good condition as if they had been in a house just closed for the summer. There were armchairs beautifully carved and decorated with gold. The cushion on one of them was stuffed with down and covered with linen perfectly preserved. In another part of the chamber were two beds decorated with gold, while a light chariot stood in a corner. But most wonderful of all was the discovery in this tomb of a jar of honey, still liquid and still fragrant after thirty-three hundred years.

In some of the tombs I saw the massive stone boxes in which lay the mummies of the dead kings. I measured one ten feet long, six feet wide, and eight feet high. It was hollowed out of a block of granite, and would weigh many tons. That mighty burial casket was cut out of the quarries of Aswan far above here, on the banks of the Nile. It must have been brought down the river on a barge and carried to this place. When it was finally on the ground it had to be lowered into the vault. All these feats were done without modern machinery. As I went through the tombs I saw several such caskets, and the archæologist who guided me showed me the holes in the stone walls of the entrance ways where beams had been put across in order that ropes might be used to prevent these stone masses from sliding too far when let down. It is a difficult job for us to handle safes. One of these stone boxes would weigh as much as several safes, yet the old Egyptians moved them about as they pleased.

Indeed, I venture to say that the civil engineers of the Pharaohs could teach us much. All through this region there are enormous monuments which it would puzzle the engineers of to-day to handle. For instance, there are the Colossi of Memnon, the two mammoth stone statues that sit upon pedestals in the Nile valley within a few miles of where I am writing. Each is as high as a six-story building, and the stone pedestals rise thirteen feet above the ground. As I rode by them on my way home from the Valley of the Kings I climbed up and ran a tape measure over their legs. Each leg is nineteen feet from sole to knee. The feet are each over three yards in length, so long that one would fill the box of a farm wagon from end to end, and so wide that it could hardly be fitted within it. Each arm from finger tips to elbow measures five yards, and the middle finger of each hand is a yard and a half long. As I stood beside the pedestal, with my feet on Gingerbread’s saddle, I could not reach the top.

These two colossal figures sit side by side on the edge of the Nile valley with the desert mountains at their backs. They were set up in honour of an Egyptian king who lived more than thirty-five centuries ago. The temple he constructed behind them has now entirely disappeared. The statues overlook green fields, and as I gazed at the giant shapes I thought how they had watched the people sowing and reaping through all these centuries.

Not far from these monuments are the ruins of the temple of Rameses II, according to some authorities the Pharaoh who “would not let the people go.” Among them I saw the remains of a statue of that old king, once part of a structure at least sixty feet high. There is no granite nearer here than in the quarries of Aswan, so this mighty monument must have been cut there and brought down the Nile to Thebes, a distance of one hundred and thirty-five miles.

Consider the obelisks which the Egyptians made at those quarries and carried down the Nile to Thebes, to Cairo, and to Alexandria. There are two of them still at this place. You may see them in the great Temple of Karnak, which is not more than a twenty-minute walk from Luxor. They weigh something like four hundred tons each, and if they were broken up and loaded upon wagons it would take one thousand six hundred horses to haul them. Each is a single block of granite, and each was carried in that shape to this place. There are inscriptions on the Deir-el-Bahari Temple here which show that these two shafts were dug out of the quarries, covered with hieroglyphic carvings, brought here, and put up all in the space of seven months. I doubt whether our engineers could do such a job as quickly or as well.