IN AND AROUND LUXOR, WITH A SIDE
LIGHT ON RAMESES THE GREAT
Until we arrived at Luxor we did not know the total meaning of the word "old." The ruins, which are the stock in trade of this ancient City of Thebes, date so far back into the dimness of Nowhere that all the other antiquities of earth seem as fresh and recent as a morning newspaper.
"Old" is merely a relative term, after all. I remember in my native town we small boys used to gaze in reverent awe at a court house that was actually built before the Civil War. We would look up at that weather-beaten frame structure, two stories high, with a square bird cage on top of it, and to us it had all the historic interest of a mediæval castle. Later, in Chicago, when the special writer on the newspaper ran short of topics he would dish up an illustrated story on the oldest building in town. It was constructed away back in 1833.
When a man from the West goes East for the first time and sees Independence Hall in Philadelphia, he takes off his hat and tries to grasp the overwhelming fact that the building stood there even in the far distant Colonial period. When he travels to London and walks through St. Paul's or stands in the Henry VII. Chapel at Westminster he begins to get a new line on the meaning of "old." Later he sees the Forum at Rome and declares to himself:—"At last I have found something really ancient."
But when he arrives at Luxor and rambles among the elephantine ruins and sits in the deep cool shade of temples that had been standing a good many centuries before anyone thought of laying out the Forum in Rome he will begin to understand how everything else in the world is comparatively hot from the griddle. One day we were in the shop of Mouhammed Mouhassib, in Luxor, and the old antiquarian reached under the counter and lugged out a mummy. The body was well preserved, and the embalming cloth in which it was wrapped and cross-wrapped still retained a definite texture.
"This mummy dates back beyond any of the dynasties of which we have a record," said the dealer. "There were no inscriptions on the mummy case, because when this gentleman lived it was not the custom to inscribe the cocoon. You will observe, however, that he was buried in a sitting posture, and we know that this manner of burial was discontinued about 6000 B.C."
As we stood there gazing into the calm features of the unidentified has-been and realised that he had been sitting in that easy attitude for eight thousand years waiting for us to come along and be presented to him, we began to get a faint inkling of what the word "old" really means.
Goodness knows I am not going to attempt any detailed description of the stupendous ruins which make Luxor the most interesting spot in Egypt. Anyone who is going to describe Luxor needs a new box of adjectives every few minutes, and, besides, to repeat over and over again that the columns and cavernous sanctuaries at Karnak are "gigantic," and "colossal," and "huge," and so on, cannot bring the reader to any actual conception of the barbaric massiveness of these ancient structures.
The rulers who built the main temple of Karnak, a section at a time, thought they were not doing themselves credit unless they piled up columns about the size of the redwood trees in California and guarded each entrance with statues as big as the Goddess of Liberty in New York Harbour, and when they made a wall to enclose a courtyard, they put up something to resemble a mountain range. The ordinary 150 pound mortal edging his way through the corridors and under the vast shadows of these overwhelming uplifts of masonry feels about as large and as important as a gnat.
Everywhere about these temples there are uniformed guards whose duty it is to protect the remains against the vandal and the relic hunter. The guard follows a few feet behind you as you roam through the many acres of toppling ruin. He is afraid that you will steal something. Inasmuch as the smallest fragment of one of these huge statues, or obelisks, would weigh probably six hundred pounds, we felt that he was not justified in suspecting us. But he followed along and then, when we were leaving, he calmly came forward and indicated that he was ready to take a money insult. This move on his part was most characteristic of the Egyptian attitude toward visitors in general. Every native expects to get something out of a traveller for the simple reason that he needs the money. Suppose that a suspicious character should arrive in an American city and the chief of police sent out a detective to shadow him and see that he did not blow open any safes or crawl into any second stories. The detective, having followed the suspect all day, approaches him at nightfall and says, "Look here; you have put me to a lot of trouble. I have been on my feet all day watching you for fear that you were going to commit a burglary, and I think it is only right that you should pay me something."