Labyrinth.
July 18, 1843.
Our tour in the Faiûm, this remarkable province so seldom visited by Europeans, which may be called the garden of Egypt by reason of its fertility, is now ended; and as these regions are almost as unknown as the distant Libyan oases, it may be pleasing to you to hear something more about this from me.
I set out on the 3rd of July, in company with Erbkam, Ernst Weidenbach, and Abeken; from the Labyrinth we followed the Bahr Wardâni, which traverses the eastern boundary of the desert, and marks the frontier to which the shores of Lake Mœris once extended. Now the canal is dry, and its place is taken by the still more modern Bahr Sherkîeh, which, it is said, was the work of Sultan Barquq, and leads through the middle of the Labyrinth, crosses and recrosses the Wardâni, but then keeps more inland. In three hours we arrived at the place where the monster dam of Mœris, from the middle of the Faiûm, touches the desert. It runs from there in a direct line for one and a half geographical miles to El Elâm; in the middle of this course it is interrupted by the Bahr bela-mâ, a deep river bed, which now passes through the old lake bottom, and is generally dry, but is used at a great inundation to draw off the surplus toward Tamîeh and into the Birqet el Qorn. This gave us the advantage of being able to examine more closely the dyke itself. The occasionally high-swelling and tearing stream has not only penetrated the disturbed bed of the lake, but also several other strata, and even the lowest, crumbling limestone, so that the water now flows during the dryest season of the year, at sixty feet below the now dry surface. I measured the single strata carefully, and brought away a specimen of each. The breadth of the embankment cannot be exactly given, but was probably 150 feet. Its height has probably decreased in the lapse of time. I found 1 m. 90. above the present basin, and 5 m. 60. above the opposite surface. If we take that to be of an equal height with the original lake bottom (which, however, appears to have been deeper, because the outer region was watered, and was therefore made higher), the former height of the embankment, its gradual declension not being considered, would have been 5 m. 60., i. e. 17 feet, and the bottom of the lake would thus have been raised by the sediment about 11 feet in its existence of 2,000 years. But if we take for granted that the 11 or 12 feet of black earth were deposited in historical times, the above amounts would be almost double. Thus it may be understood how it is that its usefulness is so much, diminished, for, by the deposit of 11 feet, the lake lost (if we accept Linant’s statement as to its circumference) about 13,000,000,000 square feet of water, which it could formerly contain. Raising the dykes would not, it may be readily understood, have counteracted it, because they had already been put into the proper connection with the point of entrance of the Bahr Jussuf into the Faiûm. This may have been one of the most cogent reasons for the neglect into which Lake Mœris had been permitted to fall, and even if Linant had the Bahr Jussuf turned off much higher from the Nile than the ancient Pharaohs found it good, his daring project of restoring the lake again would not completely succeed.
In two hours and a half from this breach, we arrived by El Elâm, where the dam ends, at the remarkable ruins of the two monuments of Biahmu, which Linant considers to be the two pyramids of Mœris and his wife, mentioned by Herodotus as seen in the lake. They are built up of massive blocks; there is yet a heart existing of each of them, but not in the middle of the square rectangles, which appear as if they had been originally quite filled by them. They rose in an angle of 64°, therefore much more steeply than pyramids usually do. Their present height is only twenty-three feet, to which must be added, however, a protruding base of seven feet. A slight excavation convinced me, that the undermost layer of stone, which only reaches four feet below the present surface of the ground, is neither founded upon sand or rock, but upon Nile-earth, by which the high antiquity of this structure is much to be doubted. At least this proved that they did not stand in the Lake, which must have had a considerable bend to the north-west if it included them.
Up to this time we had ridden along the boundary of the ancient lake, and the adjoining region. This was bare and unfruitful, because the land now lies so high, that it cannot be inundated. The land, however, immediately enclosing the old lake, forms by far the most beautiful and fertile part of the Faiûm. This we now traversed, leaving the metropolis of the province, Medînet el Faiûm, with the hills of ancient Crocodilopolis, to our left, and riding by Selajîn and Fidimîn to Agamîeh, where we staid for the night. Next morning we arrived by way of Bisheh on the frontier of the uninterrupted garden land. Here we entered a new region, particularly striking by its unfertility and desolateness, which lies round the other like a girdle, and separates it from the deepest, and most distant, crescent-shaped Birqet el Qorn. About noon we reached the lake. The only bark we could possibly find here, carried us in an hour and a half over the waters, surrounded on all sides by desert, to an island in the middle of the lake, called Gezîret el Qorn. However, we found nothing remarkable upon it, not a single trace of building: towards evening we returned back again.
On the following morning, we cruized in a more northerly direction across the lake, and landed on a little peninsula on the opposite side, that rises immediately to a plateau of the Libyan desert, one hundred and fifty feet high, commanding the whole oasis. Thither we ascended and found, about an hour distant from the shores, in the middle of the inhospitable water and barren desert, the extended ruins of an ancient city, which is called in earlier maps Medînet Nimrud. Of this name no one knew anything; the place was known as Diméh. Next morning, the 7th of July, the regular plan of these ruins, with the remains of their temple was made by Erbkam, who had stopped the night here with Abeken. The temple bears no inscription, and what we found of sculptures point to the late origin of this remarkable site. Its purpose can only have been a military station against Libyan incursions into the rich Faiûm.
On the 8th of July we went in our boat to Qasr Qerûn, an old city at the southern end of the lake, with a temple, in excellent preservation, but bearing no inscriptions of recent date, the plan of which was taken next day. Hence we pursued the southern boundary of the oasis by Neslet, to the ruins of Medînet Mâdi at lake Gharaq, in the neighbourhood of which the old embankments of Lake Mœris run down from the north, and we arrived in our camp at the ruins of the labyrinth, on the 11th of July. We found all well except our Frey, whom we had left indisposed, and whose recurring, seemingly climatic, illness gives me some pain.
To-morrow I am thinking of going to Cairo, with Abeken and Bonomi, to hire a bark for our journey to the south, and to prepare everything required by our final departure from the neighbourhood of the metropolis. We shall take four camels with us, for the transport of the monuments gathered in the Faiûm, and go the shortest way, by Tamiêh, which we did not touch on our tour, and thence over the desert heights, which divide this part of the Faiûm from the valley of the Nile. We shall enter this by the pyramids of Dahshur. Thus we expect to reach Cairo in two days and a half.
LETTER XIII.
Cairo.
August 14, 1843.