The Spell of Egypt

by Robert Hichens

Near it, in the street, were several Copts—large, fat, yellow-skinned, apparently sleeping, in attitudes that made them look like bundles. I woke one up, and asked to see the church. He stared, changed slowly from a bundle to a standing man, went away and presently, returning with a key and a pale, intelligent-looking youth, admitted me into one of the strangest buildings it was ever my lot to enter.

The average Coptic church is far less fascinating than the average mosque, but the church of Abu Sargah is like no other church that I visited in Egypt. Its aspect of hoary age makes it strangely, almost thrillingly impressive. Now and then, in going about the world, one comes across a human being, like the white-bearded man beneath the arch, who might be a thousand years old, two thousand, anything, whose appearance suggests that he or she, perhaps, was of the company which was driven out of Eden, but that the expulsion was not recorded. And now and then one happens upon a building that creates the same impression. Such a building is this church. It is known and recorded that more than a thousand years ago it had a patriarch whose name was Shenuti; but it is supposed to have been built long before that time, and parts of it look as if they had been set up at the very beginning of things. The walls are dingy and whitewashed. The wooden roof is peaked, with many cross-beams. High up on the walls are several small square lattices of wood. The floor is of discolored stone. Everywhere one sees wood wrought into lattices, crumbling carpets that look almost as frail and brittle and fatigued as wrappings of mummies, and worn-out matting that would surely become as the dust if one set his feet hard upon it. The structure of the building is basilican, and it contains some strange carvings of the Last Supper, the Nativity, and St. Demetrius. Around the nave there are monolithic columns of white marble, and one column of the red and shining granite that is found in such quantities at Assuan. There are three altars in three chapels facing toward the East. Coptic monks and nuns are renowned for their austerity of life, and their almost fierce zeal in fasting and in prayer, and in Coptic churches the services are sometimes so long that the worshippers, who are almost perpetually standing, use crutches for their support. In their churches there always seems to me to be a cold and austere atmosphere, far different from the atmosphere of the mosques or of any Roman Catholic church. It sometimes rather repels me, and generally make me feel either dull or sad. But in this immensely old church of Abu Sargah the atmosphere of melancholy aids the imagination.

In Coptic churches there is generally a great deal of woodwork made into lattices, and into the screens which mark the divisions, usually four, but occasionally five, which each church contains, and, which are set apart for the altar, for the priests, singers, and ministrants, for the male portion of the congregation, and for the women, who sit by themselves. These divisions, so different from the wide spaciousness and airiness of the mosques, where only pillars and columns partly break up the perspective, give to Coptic buildings an air of secrecy and of mystery, which, however, is often rather repellent than alluring. In the high wooden lattices there are narrow doors, and in the division which contains the altar the door is concealed by a curtain embroidered with a large cross. The Mohammedans who created the mosques showed marvellous taste. Copts are often lacking in taste, as they have proved here and there in Abu Sargah. Above one curious and unlatticed screen, near to a matted dais, droops a hideous banner, red, purple, and yellow, with a white cross. Peeping in, through an oblong aperture, one sees a sort of minute circus, in the form of a half-moon, containing a table with an ugly red-and-white striped cloth. There the Eucharist, which must be preceded by confession, is celebrated. The pulpit is of rosewood, inlaid with ivory and ebony, and in what is called the “haikal-screen” there are some fine specimens of carved ebony.

As I wandered about over the tattered carpets and the crumbling matting, under the peaked roof, as I looked up at the flat-roofed galleries, or examined the sculpture and ivory mosaics that, bleared by the passing of centuries, seemed to be fading away under my very eyes, as upon every side I was confronted by the hoary wooden lattices in which the dust found a home and rested undisturbed, and as I thought of the narrow alleys of grey and silent dwellings through which I had come to this strange and melancholy “Temple of the Father,” I seemed to feel upon my breast the weight of the years that had passed since pious hands erected this home of prayer in which now no one was praying. But I had yet to receive another and a deeper impression of solemnity and heavy silence. By a staircase I descended to the crypt, which lies beneath the choir of the church, and there, surrounded by columns of venerable marble, beside an altar, I stood on the very spot where, according to tradition, the Virgin Mary soothed the Christ Child to sleep in the dark night. And, as I stood there, I felt that the tradition was a true one, and that there indeed had stayed the wondrous Child and the Holy Mother long, how long ago.

The pale, intelligent Coptic youth, who had followed me everywhere, and who now stood like a statue gazing upon me with his lustrous eyes, murmured in English, “This is a very good place; this most interestin’ place in Cairo.”

Certainly it is a place one can never forget. For it holds in its dusty arms—what? Something impalpable, something ineffable, something strange as death, spectral, cold, yet exciting, something that seems to creep into it out of the distant past and to whisper: “I am here. I am not utterly dead. Still I have a voice and can murmur to you, eyes and can regard you, a soul and can, if only for a moment, be your companion in this sad, yet sacred, place.”

Contrast is the salt, the pepper, too, of life, and one of the great joys of travel is that at will one can command contrast. From silence one can plunge into noise, from stillness one can hasten to movement, from the strangeness and the wonder of the antique past one can step into the brilliance, the gaiety, the vivid animation of the present. From Babylon one can go to Bulak; and on to Bab Zouweleh, with its crying children, its veiled women, its cake-sellers, its fruiterers, its turbaned Ethiopians, its black Nubians, and almost fair Egyptians; one can visit the bazaars, or on a market morning spend an hour at Shareh-el-Gamaleyeh, watching the disdainful camels pass, soft-footed, along the shadowy streets, and the flat-nosed African negroes, with their almost purple-black skins, their bulging eyes, in which yellow lights are caught, and their huge hands with turned-back thumbs, count their gains, or yell their disappointment over a bargain from which they have come out not victors, but vanquished. If in Cairo there are melancholy, and silence, and antiquity, in Cairo may be found also places of intense animation, of almost frantic bustle, of uproar that cries to heaven. To Bulak still come the high-prowed boats of the Nile, with striped sails bellying before a fair wind, to unload their merchandise. From the Delta they bring thousands of panniers of fruit, and from Upper Egypt and from Nubia all manner of strange and precious things which are absorbed into the great bazaars of the city, and are sold to many a traveller at prices which, to put it mildly, bring to the sellers a good return. For in Egypt if one leave his heart, he leaves also not seldom his skin. The goblin men of the great goblin market of Cairo take all, and remain unsatisfied and calling for more. I said, in a former chapter, that no fierce demands for money fell upon my ears. But I confess, when I said it, that I had forgotten certain bazaars of Cairo.

But what matters it? He who has drunk Nile waters must return. The golden country calls him; the mosques with their marble columns, their blue tiles, their stern-faced worshippers; the narrow streets with their tall houses, their latticed windows, their peeping eyes looking down on the life that flows beneath and can never be truly tasted; the Pyramids with their bases in the sand and their pointed summits somewhere near the stars; the Sphinx with its face that is like the enigma of human life; the great river that flows by the tombs and the temples; the great desert that girdles it with a golden girdle.

Egypt calls—even across the space of the world; and across the space of the world he who knows it is ready to come, obedient to its summons, because in thrall to the eternal fascination of the “land of sand, and ruins, and gold”; the land of the charmed serpent, the land of the afterglow, that may fade away from the sky above the mountains of Libya, but that fades never from the memory of one who has seen it from the base of some great column, or the top of some mighty pylon; the land that has a spell—wonderful, beautiful Egypt.