Some fish was sent to us as a departing present when we were starting on our return journey to the Nile valley. The whitewashed town was pink in the light from the rising sun when we again mounted our camels. Kosseir was asleep, and Kosseir has probably slept ever since, just waking up for a short while when the coasting steamer brings the bags of flour.
CHAPTER XXII
EDFU AND THE QUARRIES OF GEBEL SILSILEH
THE few incidents which occurred during the following six months, after I was reinstalled in my hut at Der el-Bahri, have been related in previous chapters. During the short season at Luxor friends and acquaintances often paid me a visit when going the rounds on the Theban side of the Nile. Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Parker induced me to leave my camp to spend Christmastide with them in the delightful house they had lately built at Assuan. It is one of the few new houses in Upper Egypt which in aspect fits in exactly with its surroundings. Situated as it is on the western bank of the Nile, it commands a beautiful view both up and down the river, and Elephantine Island, the only green spot near Assuan, lies just opposite. A more ideal residence in which to pass the winter months would be hard to conceive. Would that he who built it had been spared to enjoy it for more than a few short seasons! Two years previously I had spent three months with them on their dahabieh. Henry Simpson, the artist, was of our company. We visited everything worth visiting between the first and second cataracts, mooring the ship wherever we found a subject we wished to paint. This is the ideal way of seeing the Nile, and when, as in this case, congenial companionship is added to the comforts of a well-equipped dahabieh, no more delightful way of tiding over the winter months is imaginable.
A diary in the form of caricatures of the daily events, which Mr. Simpson had left with the Parkers, brought those pleasant times vividly back to us.
Mrs. Parker and I made several excursions to Philae while there was still a chance of recording some of its beauty before it would be entirely submerged by the raising of the Assuan dam. As it is proposed that I should treat of Nubia in another volume, I shall defer what I may have to say on Assuan and of the country south of it.
Towards the end of my season at Der el-Bahri, which as usual was two months after the hotels at Luxor had put up the shutters, Mr. Weigall suggested my spending June with him in the tombs and temples south of Thebes. The valley in which I camped had become a veritable oven, and my hut was untenable till the sun sank behind the cliffs which form the amphitheatre behind Hatshepsu’s shrine. Some work I wished to do in the temple of Edfu, as well as to get shelter from the burning sun, tempted me to accept this kind invitation. The quarries and shrines at Gebel Silsileh, the tombs of Assuan and the courts and colonnades at Philae, all held out hopes of shady places in which I should find plenty of subjects to paint.
Our preparations were soon made. On the first day of June we took the train from Luxor to Edfu, and were encamped that afternoon in the dark shades of the great temple of Horus.
The thermometer fell to 100° Fahrenheit in the hypostyle hall, and we were grateful for this comparative coolness. Our attire could safely be of the scantiest, as there was no fear of a party of trippers arriving at this time of the year. Shoes were advisable till the pavements had been examined, for in some seasons the temple is infested with scorpions. Happily this was a poor scorpion season, and barely a dozen were killed during the eight days we spent there.
We decided on the hypostyle hall as our dining-room, unless the open court should cool down sufficiently after sundown; our beds were to be made on the roof of the great vestibule, and no cooler spot could be apportioned for our midday siesta than in one of the corridors which run round the sanctuary. What earthly potentate could claim so majestic a dwelling-place? If an apology for its modernity be needed to those whose interests lie in the earlier dynastic remains, we at all events had a roof over our heads, and Edfu temple, though shorn of its furniture, is not a ruin. Going back to pre-Ptolemaic times, no temple in Egypt exists where imagination has not to fill in great portions which are not in the places which the builders designed for them. Edfu temple is doubtless the grandest preserved edifice in the world which can date back rather more than two thousand years.