The sun and soil of Egypt, we are told, demands one breed of men and will no other. The children of aliens die, and the special race characteristics remain to the present day. The Fellah woman, in the picture often seen, crouching beside the statue of an ancient king, has the same contour of face, the same high cheek bones and nose, and the same immutable expression. As the life rule of Egypt’s great river changes not, year after year repeating the same history, so the race shows the same characteristics, century after century. She shares with China her changelessness. Like Japan, she has her types of face, long, oval, slender, with heavy lidded eyes, and nose characteristically depressed at the tip, with sensitive open nostrils, the under lip slightly projecting, the chin short and square, with a slim square shouldered figure. Or a lower, squatter type, belonging to the plebeian, forehead low, nose depressed and short, face prognathous and sensual-looking, the chin heavy, the jaw large, the lips thick and projecting. Both exist on the earliest monuments and to our own time. One writer thinks that the mummies differ from the Arabs of the present day in having a better balance of the intellectual and moral faculties. It is also said that in men the countenance is narrower than in women. The forehead small and retreating, with a long large black and well-shaped eye, a long nose, with a slight bridge, cheek bones a little prominent, an expressive mouth, with full lips, and white regular teeth, and a small round chin. The complexion of men a dark brown, that of women olive to a pink flesh color. The women and girls are slender, with small straight brows and close lashes on each lid, which gives an animated expression to their almond-shaped eyes, the use of kohl (sometimes said to be sanitary in its effects) enhancing this. The forehead is receding, cheekbones high, the bridge of the nose low, the mouth wide and thick-lipped. The peasantry are darker than the townspeople and the color deepens from pale brown to bronze as you go south.
Co-existent with, prior even, perhaps, to the pyramids is the great Sphinx. Maspero believed that it dated before the time of Menes. Battered, mutilated, time worn, yet rearing itself nobly still with its majestic face in its tranquil grandeur, turned towards the East. Towering sixty feet above one of the sand dunes, with a background of yellow sand or sapphire sky, or whitening in the moonlight against the starlit indigo heavens rises this colossal head and shoulders. “Mutilated though it is,” says one traveller, “the changeless serenity, the eternal repose of the noble countenance impresses and awes all beholders.” The typical sphinx, a male or female head, with an animal’s body, in the Greek “the strangler,” signifies intelligence or force. It was a favorite form in architecture and sometimes the face was a portrait of an existing king or queen. The great Sphinx is said, from an inscription at Edfu, to represent one of the personifications of the god Horus. It was designated as Horem Khou, “Horus on the Horizon,” and bore the shape of a human-headed lion to vanquish Typhon (Set) principle of evil, and turning East awaited the resurrection of his father Osiris. As Horus was supposed to have reigned over Egypt, kings took the name Horus, or “Golden Hawk.”
A picture of the Sphinx, by Elihu Vedder, is very impressive. The great head looms skyward, the desert spreads around, the silence of Eternity broods over all. A crouching figure, old and tattered, kneels before it and lays his ear to the silent lips, as if to learn their hidden secrets.
The land is rich in fruits and vegetables, but it has comparatively few trees, and no great variety of flowers. Palms, sycamores, figs, and accasias are among the most frequent of the former. Vegetables are peas, lentils, leeks, onions, garlic, celery, cucumbers, carrots, turnips, tomatoes, egg-fruit, peppers, etc. Fruits are melons, of which the flesh is often a rich golden color, grapes, dates, almonds, figs, pomegranates, apricots, peaches, etc. The lotus, now comparatively rare, might once have been called the national, as it certainly was the favorite flower. It was used at feasts and for decorations, and its buds, blossoms and leaves were continually reproduced in architectural designs. It was chiefly because the water lily bud opened its petals at sunrise and closed them at sunset that the ancients held it sacred to the sun. Pliny says: “It is reported that in the Euphrates the flower of the lotus plunges into the water at night, remaining there until midnight, and to such a depth that it cannot be reached with the hand. After midnight it begins gradually to rise, and as the sun rises above the horizon the flower also rises above the water, expands and raises itself some distance above the element in which it grows.” “And it was also through this peculiarity,” says another writer, “that Hankerville proved that the Egyptians considered the lily an emblem of the world as it rose from the waters of the deep.”
Other flowers include the rose, jassamine, narcissus, lily, convolvulus, violet, chrysanthemum, geranium, dahlia, basil, etc.
The horse was not an early inhabitant—there were camels, elephants, and cattle of special breeds, doves and other birds and many varieties of fish. A number of animals were tamed in Egypt and some of them would seem to us a singular collection of pets, lions, leopards, monkeys, gazelles and even crocodiles, and, above all, cats were household pets, as were the last two among the sacred animals.
Everywhere possible at the present day excavation is going on. Seventy-five centimes a day was at one time the rate for the diggers and fifty for the children who carried away the baskets of rubbish, the food consisting of bread, water, a few dates, cucumbers or onions, and, rarely if ever, any meat.
“The Nile shore,” says Bayard Taylor, “shows either palm groves, fields of cane or doura, young wheat, or patches of bare sand blown from the desert. The villages have mud walls and the tombs of Moslem saints looking like white ovens. The Arabian and Libyan mountains sweep into the foreground, the yellow cliffs overhang and recede into a violet haze at the horizon, while the blue evening shadows lie on rose-hued mountain walls.”
Life in the East moves more slowly, even in modern times, than in the strenuous West. One traveller playfully remarks that one can perceive in the face after a Nile voyage something of the patience and resignation of the Sphinx, and another says that Egypt is the best place in the world to rest, and recommends that one “go 600 or 700 miles up the Nile before the season opens and occupy a hotel alone. You will find each day at least forty-eight hours long, and you will think of nothing but Egyptian antiquities and Arabs, both of which are wonderfully soothing to the tired mind.”
Egypt may be likened to a woman with coloring and charm, who surpasses sometimes in attraction another of more beautiful and regular form. In this land of golden light, of perpetual sunshine, lived and moved the Egyptian queen. Different and yet the same as her sisters of to-day, now she seemed a goddess in might and beauty, and again as the meanest of her slaves, swayed by ambitions, torn by passions, swept by waves of love and hate—a woman still. Each in turn played her little part on the stage of life and passed beyond the curtain, leaving a few, and but few, traces of her existence. Passed into “the land which loveth silence,” the dim Amenti of the gods.