Between Esneh and Luxor we passed a steamer with some English officers on board, and their steamer was towing two flat-boats containing their regiments, all going to Kitchener in the Soudan. I used the field-glass on-them, while my companion photographed them. We waved to them, and they waved to us and swung their hats and saluted. At Edfou they caught up with us, and passed so close to our boat that the gentlemen talked to them and asked what their regiments were. They said the Twenty-first Lancers and the Seaforth and Cameron Highlanders. Then their boat was gone. How could we know that those gallant officers of the Twenty-first Lancers would so soon lead that daring cavalry charge at Omdurman, and possibly one of those who saluted so gayly was the one killed on the awful day? It touched us very much, however, to think that they might be going to their death, and we were glad they did not belong to us, little dreaming that the blowing-up of the Maine, of which we had just heard, would so soon plunge our own dear country into war, and that our own fathers and brothers and friends would be marching and sailing away to defend that same “Old Glory” whose stars and stripes were floating over our heads, and whose gallant colors would succor the oppressed and avenge insult with equal promptness and equal dignity.
The temple of Denderah is not, to my mind, more beautiful than those of Luxor and Karnak; in fact, both of those are more majestic, but the mural decorations of Denderah are in a state of marvellous preservation. I own, after seeing that in some places even the original colors remained, that I quite held my breath as we approached the famous figure of Cleopatra. The sorceress of the Nile! The favorite of the goddess Hathor herself! The siren who could tempt an emperor to forsake his empire or a general to renounce fame and honor more easily than a modern woman could persuade a man to break an engagement to dine with her rival! Queen of the Lotus! Empress of the Pyramids! What grace, what charm I anticipated! I wondered if she would be portrayed floating down to meet Antony, with her purple and perfumed sails, her cloth of gold garments, her peacocks, her ibex, her lotus-blooms, and if all her mysterious fascinations would be spread before the delighted gaze of her humble worshipper.
What I found is shown in the [frontispiece] to this volume. Beauty unadorned with a vengeance! From this time on I shall question the taste of Antony. I only wish he could have lived to see some American girls I know.
We saw Karnak and Philae by moonlight, and we lunched in the tombs of the kings, with hieroglyphics thousands of years old looking down upon our pickled onions and cold fowl, and we ploughed through the sands at Assouan and saw the naked Nubians, with a silver ear-ring in the top of their left ear, shoot the rapids of the first cataract. We stood, too, in the temple of Luxor, before the altar of Hathor, with the sunset on one side and the moonrise on the other, and heard what her votaries say to the Goddess of Beauty. It was so mystical that we almost joined in the worship of the Egyptian Venus Aphrodite. It was so still, so majestic, so aloof from everything modern and new.
The Nile is essentially a river of silence and mystery. The ibis is always to be seen, standing alone, seemingly absorbed in meditation. The camels turn their beautiful soft eyes upon you as if you were intruding upon their silence and reserve. Never were the eyes in a human head so beautiful as a camel’s. There is a limpid softness, an appealing plaintiveness in their expression which drags at your sympathies like the look in the eyes of a hunchback. It means that, with your opportunities, you might have done more with your life. Your mother looks at you that way sometimes in church, when the sermon touches a particularly raw nerve in your spiritual make-up. I always feel like apologizing when a camel looks at me.
One moonlight night was so bright that our boat started about three o’clock instead of waiting for daylight, and the start swung my state-room door open. It was so warm that I let it remain, and lay there hearing the gentle swish of the water curling against the side of the steamer, and seeing the soft moonlight form a silver pathway from the yellow bank across the river to my cabin door. The machinery made no noise. There was no more vibration than on a sail-boat. And there was the whole panorama of the Nile spread before my eyes, with all its romance and all its mystery bathed in an enchanting radiance. Occasionally a raven croaked. Sometimes a jackal howled. An obelisk made an exclamation-point against the sky, or the ruins of a temple fretted the horizon. It was the land of Ptolemy, of Rameses, of Hathor, of Horus, of Isis and Osiris, of Herodotus and Cleopatra, of Pharaoh’s daughter and Moses. It was the silence of the ages which fell upon me, and then and there, in that hour of absolute stillness and solitude and beauty unspeakable, all my dreams of the Nile came true.
XII
GREECE
After our ship left Smyrna, where the camels are the finest in the world, and where the rugs set you crazy, we came across to the Piraeus, and arrived so late that very few of the passengers dared to land for fear the ship would sail without them. It was blowing a perfect gale, the sea was rough, and the captain too cross to tell us how long we would have on shore. I looked at my companion and she looked at me. In that one glance we decided that we would see the Acropolis or die in the attempt. A Cook’s guide was watching our indecision with hungry eyes. We have since named him Barabbas, for reasons known to every unfortunate who ever fell into his hands. But he was clever. He said that we might cut his head off if he did not get us back to the boat in time. We assured him that we would gladly avail ourselves of his permission if that ship sailed without us. Then we scuttled down the heaving stairway at the ship’s side, and away we went over (or mostly through) the waves to the Piraeus. There we took a carriage, and at the maddest gallop it ever was my lot to travel we raced up that lovely smooth avenue, between rows of wild pepper-trees which met overhead, to Athens; through Athens at a run, and reached the Acropolis, blown almost to pieces ourselves, and with the horses in a white foam.
Up to that time the Acropolis had been but a name to me. I landed because it was a sight to see, and I thought an hour or so would be better than to miss it altogether. But when I climbed that hill and set my foot within that majestic ruin, something awful clutched at my heart. I could not get my breath. The tears came into my eyes, and all at once I was helpless in the grasp of the most powerful emotion which ever has come over me in all Europe. I could not understand it, for I came in an idle mood, no more interested in it than in scores of other wonders I was thirsting to see; Luxor, Karnak, Philae, Denderah—all of those invited me quite as much as the Acropolis, but here I was speechless with surprise at my own emotion, I can imagine that such violence of feeding might turn a child into a woman, a boy into a man. All at once I saw the whole of Greek art in its proper setting. The Venus of Milo was no longer in the Louvre against its red background, where French taste has placed it, the better to set it off. Its cold, proud beauty was here again in Greece; the Hermes at Olympia; the Wingless Victory from the temple of Niké Apteros, made wingless that victory might never depart from Athens; the lovelier Winged Victory from the Louvre, with her electric poise, the most exhilarating, the most inspiring, the most intoxicating Victory the world has ever known, was loosed from her marble prison, and was again breathing the pure air of her native hills. Their white figures came crowding into my mind.
The learning of the philosophers of Greece; the “plain living and high thinking” they taught; the unspeakable purity of her art; the ineffable manner in which her masters reproduced the idea of the stern, cold pride of aloofness in these sublime types of perfect men, wrung my heart with a sense of personal loss. I can imagine that Pygmalion felt about Galatea as I felt that first hour in the Acropolis. I can imagine that a woman who had loved with the passion of her life a man of matchless integrity, of superb pride, of lofty ideals, and who had lost that love irretrievably through a fault of her own, whose gravity she first saw through his eyes when it was too late, might have felt as I felt in that hour. All the agony of a hopeless love for an art which never can return; all the sense of personal loss for the purity which I was completely realizing for the first time when it was too late; all the intense longing to have the dead past live again, that I might prove myself more worthy of it, assailed me with as mighty a force as ever the human heart could experience and still continue to beat. The piteous fragments of this lost art which remained—a few columns, the remnants of an immortal frieze, the long lines of drapery from which the head and figure were gone, the cold brow of the Hermes, the purity of his profile, the proud curve of his lips, the ineffable wanness of his smile—I could have cast myself at the foot of the Parthenon and wept over the personal disaster which befell me in that hour of realization.