The Rulers of the Mediterranean

by Richard Harding Davis

The other thing was the act of a native woman, who brought her child to the door and handed it to a priest, who took it in his arms and passed with it in front of the swinging, gasping, crazy semicircle of men. The child was about three years old, and was dying, and the mother had brought it there to be cured by the breath of the dervishes. As it passed before them, the hair of some of the men swept its arm, and it turned its frightened eyes up to those of the priest, who smiled gravely down upon the baby and bore him outstretched in his arms three times in front of the swinging crescent. The faith of the child's mother appealed to some of us more than did the Englishman's desire to get his money's worth. The incident is only of interest here as showing perhaps why the Army of Occupation is not as popular as it might be. This officer was no doubt an excellent soldier—the ribbons on his tunic showed that—and no one would have thought of questioning his ability to handle raw recruits or his knowledge of tactics. But in handling the Egyptian tactics do not count for so much as tact.

There are several ways of reaching the pyramids, and it is eminently in keeping with the other incongruities of the place and time that the most popular way of visiting them is on a four-in-hand coach, with a guard in a red coat and a bell-shaped white beaver tooting on his horn, and a young gentleman with a boutonnière and an unhappy smile holding the reins and working his way in and out between long strings of camels. There is a very smart hotel about two hundred yards from the foot of the pyramids, and you take a donkey there or a camel and ride up a sandy road to the base of the Pyramid of Cheops. There are then several things that you may do. You can either climb to the top of this first pyramid, or crawl into its interior, or walk over to see the Sphinx, or make a tour of subterranean tombs and passageways of alabaster and polished stones, which are lighted for you by magnesium wire or stumps of candles.

It seems absurd to say that the Sphinx is disappointing, but so many who have seen it say so that I feel I am one of many, and not individually lacking in reverence or imagination. In the first place, the approach to it is bad; you come at the Sphinx not from the front, but from the rear, where all you can see of it is a round ball of crumbling stone spreading out from a neck of broken outline, much smaller and meaner than you had imagined it would be. In the second place, instead of looking up at it, or having it look down at you, you view it first from a semicircular ridge of sand, at the bottom of which it reposes, and at such a near view that whatever outline or character of countenance it once possessed is lost. I have seen photographs of the Sphinx, taken while I was in Cairo, much more impressive than the Sphinx itself. Lying in a hollow of the sand hills as it does, the farther you move away from it in order to get a better focus, the less you see of it, and as you draw nearer to it it loses its meaning, as does the scenery of a theatre when you are on the wrong side of the foot-lights. I know that that is an unpopular thing to say, and that there are many who feel thrills when they first look upon the face of the Sphinx, and who describe their emotions to you at length, and who write down their impressions in their diaries when they get back to the hotel. But they have come a long way expecting to be thrilled, and they do not intend to be disappointed. Some of the sphinxes in the museum of Gizeh, which you pass on your way to the pyramids, impressed me more than did the one great Sphinx, though they were indoors and surrounded by attendants and the cheap decoration of the museum, once a palace for the harem. They were of green stone and of huge proportions, and with "the curling lip and sneer of cold command"; and if you look at them long enough you feel uncomfortable shivers down your back, and a perfectly irrational impulse to rush at them and beat them in the face and force them to tell you what they know and what they have kept back and have been keeping back for centuries and centuries. Their faces show that they know all that we know and much besides that we shall never know, and when the world at last comes to an end they will stretch themselves and smile at one another and say: "Now they know it, but we knew it all the while. We could have told had we liked, but we have enjoyed watching them fretting and fuming and prying about and tinkering at our faces with their little hammers, and blowing us up with saltpetre only to try and put us back again with steam. We who have kept our secret from Herodotus and Cæsar, are we likely to give it up to Ebers and Mark Twain?"

But this same Sphinx by moonlight impressed me more than did anything I saw in the East. Not as one sees it by day, with tourists and photographers and donkey-boys making it cheap and familiar, but at night, when the tourists had gone to bed, and the donkey-boys had been paid to keep out of sight, and the moonlight threw the great negro face and the pyramids back of it into shadows of black and lines of silver, and the yellow desert stretched away on either side so empty and silent that I thought I was alone and back two thousand years in the past, discovering the great monuments for myself, and for the first time.

Before you ascend the Pyramid of Cheops you must deal with a middle-man in the person of the sheik of the pyramids, who selects guides for you, and who acts as though the pyramids were his private show, and he was both sole proprietor and ticket-taker at the door. He lives in a village near by, and he and his forefathers have always been allowed a monopoly of the pyramids, and distribute their patronage to those guides who will pay them the highest percentage of what they receive from the visitors. You have three men to help you, two to pull, and one to push and to dilate on the view. It takes over ten minutes to climb to the top, with the men jerking at your wrists, and the third man shoving you from below. It is not a difficult feat, and women accomplish it every day, but it leaves you in a breathless state when you reach the summit, and you are stiff above the knees for a day or two after you have come down. When you have reached the summit the guides cheer feebly to give you the idea that you have accomplished something which has often been attempted before, but never so successfully; but you are not deceived, and you do not feel like cheering yourself. The view is worth the climb, however, and the sight of the shadow of the pyramid, spreading out over the villages and canals below like a black cloud, impresses you more with its immensity than the fact that it is a hundred feet higher than the top of the Diana on the Madison Square Garden tower. I am sure of this fact, because the man who built the Madison Square Garden assured me of it between breaths on the summit of the pyramid. While you are resting, the thing to do is to pay one of the guides to attempt to run down the pyramid you are on, cross the heavy sand to the pyramid beyond, and reach its top in eight minutes. When you give the word he disappears with a bound and drops into space, skipping and jumping and growing smaller and smaller as he goes, until he looks like a fluttering handkerchief; and when he reaches the sand he is as small as a child of three, and his ascent of the other pyramid suggests a white pigeon shuffling up the steep roof of a barn. It is distinctly on his part a sporting thing to do. The descent of the pyramid is very much worse than going up, and you need to go very slowly, and not to look too often at the people crawling about like ants below. Only four men, however, in six years have slipped and fallen during this descent, and one of them had been drinking. They were all killed. The more you see of the pyramids the more you want to see of them, although I think one ascent is all perhaps you will care about taking; but their dignity and the wonder of their being where they are, and for so long, increases with every look at them. You cannot grow too familiar with the pyramids. They will not have it.

DAHABEEYAHS ON THE NILE BEFORE CAIRO

On the road back from the Pyramids of Gizeh there are other pyramids within sight of Cairo, but these are those with which the Sphinx is associated. You will see here one of the most beautiful sights of Cairo, the dahabeeyahs on the Nile. They and their white sails, especially when they come wing and wing before the wind, are the most beautiful of floating objects, and when there are hundreds of them coming towards you in lessening perspective, with the sun shining on the sails, and the banks on either side alive and moving with the palms, the river Nile becomes the best part of Cairo.

There is another place on the Nile which you should visit, and to which tourists seldom go. This is the isle of Rodda, on the bank of which Moses was found, and where you may see the Nilometer. This is a well about sixteen feet in diameter, connected by a channel with the Nile. It is made of masonry, and down one side there runs a column on which are inscribed ancient Arabian and Cufic numerals, or what answer for numerals. It was dug many centuries ago, and it marks the rising and falling of the river, and at the same time the prosperity or dismay of Egypt. When the tide begins to rise, this rude instrument is watched hourly, and the hopes of the people rise and fall as the muddy water moves up or down the narrow well. When it reaches a certain height the sheik in charge declares that the time has come for cutting the banks and irrigating the land. In ancient days the rate of taxation was determined by the height of the inundation, and it is said that the sheik in charge of the Nilometer is still under the influence of the government, to whose advantage it is to make the fellahin believe that the inundation is favorable. It was the engineers under Napoleon who discovered that the Nilometer was being tampered with, but there is no likelihood of its being abused to-day under the English, whose improvement of the irrigation of Egypt has been their best work, and for the fellahin's best good. But it is interesting, nevertheless, to look down into the old well, overgrown with vines and surrounded by ruin and crumbling walls and broken lattices, and to think that for centuries it brought news of famine or of plenty, and that it was, primitive as its construction is, the pulse of Egypt.