We devoted an hour to calling on the consul, where we were treated to pipes and to coffee, and were seated on the divans that filled part of the official rooms. The American Consul is of a dark hue, something more than a mulatto, and one of our party whose notions were formerly in sympathy with slaveholding, was rather disinclined to accept the hospitality of a gentleman of African descent. But we pacified him by the information that we were in Africa and approaching the region where white men were at a discount, and with this view of the case he subsided and smoked his pipe in silence.
The “Doubter” was rude as he always was when among gentlemanly natives, and as he had not the vice of smoking he wondered what we were staying for. The Judge reproved him for his incivility, and for a minute or two there was a fair prospect that the consul would be able to collect a fee for suppressing a row in his own office. During the turmoil the Professor and I slipped out and called upon the German Consul, who was as dignified as a rhinoceros in a menagerie. He speaks hardly anything but Arabic, and knows of only one man—Bismarck—in Germany and of only one city—Berlin. The Professor passed as a resident of Berlin and a relative of Bismarck, and with this view of the case he was most cordially received. The American
Consul speaks English quite fairly. The vice-consulate was formerly held by Mustapha Agar, who is also English Vice-Consul, and his removal has soured him somewhat so that he is not over-polite to Americans. He is the oldest consul at Luxor, and one of the oldest residents, and has grown wealthy in the service of other countries than his own. He has been so often petted by travellers and praised by authors who have been here, that he has become spoiled, and has the pomposity of a turkey-cock. He deals in scarabees, mummies, coins—everything that you like,—and he showed us as did the other consuls, quite a collection of antiquities. They can furnish you with the head of a king or the foot of a princess at short order, and as for old coins the Professor found enough at Luxor to set up a museum of numismatics.
We hired donkeys and went to Karnak—something more than a mile from Luxor—and we went not only once but three times.
Karnak is more than marvellous; to do justice to it one requires to have a dozen or so superlative words specially invented for the place. You remain silent in contemplating it as you find that you have no word to express your feelings; you are sensible that to speak of it in ordinary terms would be like the cockney’s expression of “neat” applied to Niagara, and though I am intending to make the attempt I am satisfied that I shall fall far short of portraying the full grandeur of the scene to the reader.
As you approach the temple you enter an avenue of ramheaded sphinxes (huge fellows carved in stone), on opposite sides of the avenue. Formerly this street extended all the way to Luxor—six thousand feet away. What a splendid promenade it must have been! Only a few of the sphinxes are here now, and of those every one has been more or less mutilated. Passing the avenue you reach a pronaos, or pylon,—a gateway with two enormous towers large enough of themselves to make a temple. There were no less than six of these entrances. Just to give an idea of their size I will give the dimensions of one of the peristyles. Its total length is three hundred and seventy feet, its depth is fifty feet, and its height one hundred and forty feet. The temple faces the river, and the towers can be seen from a long distance. One of these fronting the river is partly fallen, but the other is nearly perfect. A detailed description of the temple at Karnak would be dry reading, and I will simply state that from end to end the length is eleven hundred and eighty feet, and that it is about six hundred feet in breadth. The whole was surrounded by a wall twenty-five feet thick and from sixty to a hundred feet high. All this space inclosed by the wall is filled with ruins of an architecture of the most magnificent character. In one place there are the fragments of a fallen obelisk, and close by it is a standing obelisk ninety-two feet high and eight feet square at the base, the largest obelisk now known. There is another, seventy-five feet high, a little from it, and there is another obelisk standing at Luxor, the mate of it having been removed to Paris. The French government removed the Luxor obelisk only after many attempts and failures. The obelisk at Karnak—the great one—was given to the English government, but they never attempted to take it away.