The nine days’ festival closes with a peculiar ceremony called doseh, the treading, but which I was myself prevented from witnessing. The sheîkh of the Saadîeh-derwishes rides to the chief sheîkh of all the derwishes of Egypt, El Bekri. On the way thither, a great number of these holy folk, and others too, who fancy themselves not a whit behindhand in piety, throw themselves flat on the ground, with their faces downward, and so that the feet of one lie close to the head of the next; over this living carpet, the sheikh rides on his horse, which is led on each side by an attendant, in order to compel the animal to the unnatural march. Each man’s body receives two treads of the horse; most of them jump up again without hurt, but whoever suffers serious, or, as it occasionally happens, mortal injury, has the additional ignominy to bear, for not having pronounced, or for not being able to pronounce, the proper prayers and magical charms that alone could save him.[23]
On the 7th of April, I and Erbkam accompanied the prince to the pyramids, and first to those of Gizeh. The pyramid of Cheops was ascended, and the inside visited; the beautiful tomb of Prince Merhet I had had laid open for the purpose of showing it. Then we left for our camp at Saqâra.
Here we heard that a barefaced robbery had been committed in Abeken’s tent the night before. While he was asleep, with a light burning, after his return from Cairo, his knapsack, pistols, and a few other matters lying about, were stolen; as the thief was departing, a noise was perceived by the guard, but the darkness precluded all pursuit.
After the prince had inspected the most beautiful tomb of Saqâra, we rode across the plain to Mitrahinneh to visit the mound of Memphis, and the half-buried colossus of Ramses Miamun (Sesostris), the face of which is almost perfectly preserved.[24] Late at night, we arrived again in Cairo, after sixteen hours of motion, scarcely interrupted by short pauses of rest; the unusual fatigue, however, rather raised the lively taste for travelling in the prince’s mind than otherwise.
The next day the mosques of the city were visited, which are partly worthy of notice for their magnificence, and are partly of interest in the history of mediæval art on account of the earliest specimen of the general application of the pointed arch. The questions touching this characteristic architectural branch of the so-called Gothic style had employed me so much some years ago, that I could not avoid pursuing the old traces; the pointed arch is found in the oldest mosques up to the ninth century. With the conquest of Sicily by the Arabs, this form of the arch was carried over to the island, where the next conquerors, the Normans, found it in the eleventh century, and were led to employ it much. To deny some historical connection between the Norman pointed arch of Palermo and our northern style appears to me to be impossible; the admission of such a connection would certainly render it more difficult to explain of the sporadically but not lawlessly used rows of pointed arches which occur in the cathedral of Naumburg in the eleventh century, and at Memleben already in the tenth. The theorists will not yet admit this; but I must await the confutation of these reasons.[25]
The Nilometer on the island of Roda, which we visited after the mosques, also contains a row of pointed arches, which belong to the original building, going back to the ninth century, as the carefully-examined Kufic inscriptions testify.
Egypt does not only lay claim to the oldest employment, and therefore probable invention, of the pointed arches, but also upon that of the circular arch.[26] Near the pyramids a group of tombs may be seen, the single blocks of which manifest the proper concentric way of cutting. They belong to the twenty-sixth Manethonic dynasty of the Psammetici, i. e. in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., are therefore of about the same antiquity as the Cloaca maxima and the Carcer Mamertinus at Rome. We have also found tombs with vaults of Nile bricks, that go back as far as the era of the pyramids. Now I deny, in contradistinction to the opinion of others, that the brick arch, the single flat bricks of which are only placed concentrically by the aid of the trowel, admits of a previous knowledge of the actual principle of the arch, and particularly with respect to its sustaining power, of which denial there is already proof in the fact that before the Psammetici there is no instance of a concentrically laid arch, but many pseudo-arches, cut, as it were, in horizontal layers. But where the brick arch was ancient, we may also most naturally place the origin of the later concentric stone arch, or at least admit of its appearing contemporaneously in other lands.
I was about to accompany the prince the next morning to the interesting institution of Herr Lieder, when Erbkam unexpectedly arrived from our camp. He reported that on the previous night, between three and four o’clock A.M., a number of shots were suddenly fired in the neighbourhood of our tents, and at the same time a crowd of more than twenty people rushed into the encampment. Our tents stand on a small surface before the rock tombs, which are excavated half-way up the steep wall of the Libyan Vale, and have a considerable terrace in front, formed by the rubbish. Almost the only way in which it was to be approached was on one side by a gorge that passes down from above by our tents. Thence the attack was made. It was first directed against the tent which served as a salōn for our whole society. This soon fell down in a mass. Then followed the other great tent in which slept Erbkam, Frey, Ernst Weidenbach, and Franke. This was also torn down, and covered up its inhabitants, who had great difficulty in creeping out from among the ropes and tent-cloths. Besides this, all the guns had been placed in one tent together on the previous day, at the visit of the prince, and fastened to the centre pole, so that they were not at hand. The guards, cowardly in the extreme, and knowing that they had made themselves liable to punishment, even if such a thing had happened without their being in fault, immediately fled with loud cries in every direction, and have not yet returned. The thieves now stuck to what was nearest at hand, rolled everything they could lay hold of down the hill, and were soon lost in the plains below. Their shots had evidently been blank, for no one had been hurt by them; but they had gained their object of rendering the confusion greater. Only Ernst Weidenbach and a few of our attendants were wounded in the head or shoulders by blows from gunstocks, bludgeons, or stones, but they were none of them dangerous. The things stolen will have bitterly disappointed the expectation of the thieves. The great trunks scarcely contained anything but European clothes and other things that no Arab can use. A number of coloured sketches is most to be regretted, the artistical Sunday amusement of the talented Frey.
We are perfectly aware of the quarter whence this attack originated. We live on the frontier of the territory of Abusir, an Arab village long bearing but a doubtful reputation, between Kafr-el-Batran, at the foot of the pyramids of Gizeh and Saqâra. By Arabs (’Arab, pl. ’Urbân) I mean, according to custom, those inhabitants of the land who have settled in the valley of the Nile, at a late period, and have built villages with some show of right. They distinguish themselves very markedly, by their free origin and manlier character, from the Fellahs (Fellah‘, pl. Fellah‘in), those original tillers of the soil, who, by centuries of slavery, have been pressed down and enervated, and who could not withstand the invading Islam. A Bedouin (Bedaui, pl. Bedauîn) is ever the free son of the desert, hovering upon the coasts of the inhabited lands. Along the pyramids, therefore, there are situated a number of Arab villages. To them belong the three places named above. The sheikh of Abusir, a young, handsome, and enterprising man, had a kind of claim, by the reason of our camp lying on his border, to post a number of excellently-paid guards around us. I preferred, however, to withdraw ourselves to the protection of the sheîkh of Saqâra, a mightier man and more to be relied on, whom I had previously known, and to whose district the larger portion of the scene of our labours belonged. This determination cost the people of Abusir a service, and us their friendship, as I had already observed for some time without troubling myself further about it. Evidently, they had now taken advantage of my absence in Cairo, with several attendants, to carry out this design. To Abusir the traces led through the plain; a little active boy, the grandson of an old Turk of the Mameluke time, the only stranger dwelling in Abusir, with whom we occasionally changed visits, seems to have served as a spy. This boy, who was often in our camp, must have carried out the first robbery, in Abukir’s tent, with which he was well acquainted.
The attack was a serious matter, and a precedent for the future, if it were left unpunished. I immediately went with Herr von Wagner to Sherif Pasha, the minister, in order to discover the thieves.