CHAPTER XLVI—LUXOR, THE CITY OF GIANTS.—AMONG THE MUMMIES OF ANCIENT THEBES.
Luxor on the Site of Ancient Thebes—A City with a Hundred Gates—Enjoying a Consul’s Hospitality—An American Citizen of African Descent—A Dignified Rhinoceros—Karnak—A City of Wonders—Promenading in an Avenue of Sphinxes—A Gigantic Temple—Monster Obelisks—A Story in Stone—A Statue Weighing Nine Hundred Tons—The Sitting Colossi—A Singing Statue—Mysteries of Priestcraft—Lunching in the Tomb of Rameses—A Wonderful Treasure—How They Made Mummies—A Curious Process—The “Doubter” and the Mummy Sellers—The Judge Comes to Grief.
LUXOR is now an insignificant town of four thousand inhabitants, occupying the site, or a small portion of it, of the ancient city of Thebes, from whose hundred gates twenty thousand armed chariots could be sent to the battle-field. What a’ melancholy decline from the days of Thotmes and Rameses to the present!
A crowd of dirty Arabs, and a collection of hovels, with here and there a house having some pretence of respectability and comfort are the Thebes of to-day. Were it not for the ruins that lie around us we should have only to write “Thebes was,” and the story of to-day would be complete. But the city which fills bright pages in the history of Egypt was too great and glorious in her time, and the monuments she built were too stupendous to be easily removed. So grand were her temples that the work of destruction was an enormous one, what then must have been the labors of erection! In the present town of Luxor there is little to be seen beyond the temple which is now greatly fallen and of which much of the sculptures lie buried. There is no effort made to remove the rubbish that lies around the walls and upon all the floors; in one part the English Consul has his office, and in others the Arabs have built their mud hovels among the columns and against the sculptured walls. The magnificence around them has not served in any way to elevate the thoughts of these natives; they live in a superabundance of dirt, and the contemplation of the works of art ever in their sight has been no more to them than to their chickens or donkeys. They regard the ruins solely as a source of profit, and they persistently beg from strangers who come to visit Thebes. Most of the Arabs believe that the strangers who come here are pagans, and that they make pilgrimages to Thebes, Denderah, and Esneh, just as good Moslems make pilgrimages to Mecca.