There is another ruined temple near Luxor. Although it is a mile north of Karnak, it was once connected with the temples of that town by an avenue bordered on either side with ram-headed sphinxes. The temple is of sandstone, and until the digging for it was begun in 1883 it was entirely buried in sand and rubbish. About it six enormous statues of an Egyptian king are still standing.
No one at the inn could tell me anything about the ruins that the tourists came to see. The Greek keeper of the inn knew nothing of the ruins of Thebes except the story of a man who had once stopped at his hotel. This man had tried to make the excursion, and had returned wild with thirst, mumbling a confused tale of having floundered about in a sea of sand.
“For our betters,” said Pietro, in the softened Italian in which he chose to address me, “for the rich ladies and gentlemen who can ride on donkeys and be guarded by many guides, a visit to Thebes is very well. But common folk like you and me! Bah! We are not wanted there. They would send no army to look for us if we disappeared in the desert. Besides, you must have a ticket to see anything.”
I rose at dawn the next morning, and hastened away to the bazaars to get food for the day’s trip—bread-cakes for hunger and oranges for thirst. A native boatman tried to charge me ten piasters for rowing me to the other side; but when I refused to pay him that much, he accepted one instead, and set me down on the western bank. The shrill screams of a troop of donkey-boys, who were crossing the river with their animals, greeted the rising sun. A moment later a party of tourists, wearing veils and helmets, stepped ashore from a steamer, and, mounting the animals, sped away into the trackless desert. It was an interesting sight. The half-mile train of donkeys that trailed off across the desert was bestridden by every kind of European, from thin scholars and slender maidens to heavy women and mighty masses of men, who had to beat their animals continually to make them keep up with the rest.
The sharp climb to the Tomb of the Kings was more difficult to an overburdened ass than to a man on foot. I kept pace with the band, and even got ahead of the stragglers, often stopping to shake the sand from my shoes. Even though the jeering donkey-boys kept pushing me into the narrow gorges between the rocks, it was I who reached the gate first. An Arabian policeman was on hand to help the keeper take tickets. But he spoke Italian, and was so delighted to find that he could talk with me without being understood by the rest of the crowd that he gave me permission to enter.
I was now so used to such places that I was able to find my way about alone. I left the party and struck southward toward a steep cliff of stone and sand. To go past this, those on donkeys had to make a circuit of many miles; but I made up my mind to climb over it. Clinging to sharp edges of rock, I began the climb. Half way up, a roar of voices sounded from the plain below. I felt for a safer hand-hold and looked down. About the policeman at the foot of the cliff was grouped the party of Europeans, gazing upward—certain now, no doubt, of their earlier belief that I was a madman who had escaped from his guardians. Before they had gone one fourth the distance around the mountain, I had reached the top, while they had still many a weary mile to travel.
The view that spread out from the top of that mountain was one that might have awakened the envy of the tourists below. North and south stretched sand-colored hills, deep and brilliant vermilion in the valleys, the highest peaks splashed blood-red by the sunshine. Below lay the plain of Thebes, its thick green carpet weighted down by a few farm villages and the great heavy playthings of an ancient people. As I looked off before me, an old saying came to my mind: “Egypt is the Nile.” Clinging tightly to the life-giving river, easily seen in that clear air for a hundred miles, the slender hand of Egypt looked like a spotless ribbon of richest green, following every curve of the Father of Waters. All else to the east and to the west was nothing but an endless sea of choking yellow sand.
The Egyptian fellah dwells in a hut of reeds and mud.
I climbed down, and spent the afternoon among the ruins at the edge of the plain. I had examined almost everything before the tourists, worn out and drooping from a day in the saddle, overtook me, and I went on before them to the bank of the river. There they shook me off, however. The guides in charge of the party snarled in anger when I offered to pay for crossing the river in the company boat. There was nothing else for me to do, much as I disliked the idea, but to be ferried over with the donkeys.