(From a 1911 edition, published by The Century Co., New York.)
CONTENTS
THE PYRAMIDS
THE SPHINX
SAKKARA
ABYDOS
THE NILE
DENDERAH
KARNAK
LUXOR
COLOSSI OF MEMNON
MEDINET-ABU
THE RAMESSEUM
DEIR-EL-BAHARI
THE TOMBS OF THE KINGS
EDFU
KOM OMBOS
PHILAE
"PHARAOH'S BED"
OLD CAIRO
I
THE PYRAMIDS
Why do you come to Egypt? Do you come to gain a dream, or to regain
lost dreams of old; to gild your life with the drowsy gold of romance,
to lose a creeping sorrow, to forget that too many of your hours are
sullen, grey, bereft? What do you wish of Egypt?
The Sphinx will not ask you, will not care. The Pyramids, lifting
their unnumbered stones to the clear and wonderful skies, have held,
still hold, their secrets; but they do not seek for yours. The
terrific temples, the hot, mysterious tombs, odorous of the dead
desires of men, crouching in and under the immeasurable sands, will
muck you with their brooding silence, with their dim and sombre
repose. The brown children of the Nile, the toilers who sing their
antique songs by the shadoof and the sakieh, the dragomans, the
smiling goblin merchants, the Bedouins who lead your camel into the
pale recesses of the dunes--these will not trouble themselves about
your deep desires, your perhaps yearning hunger of the heart and the
imagination.
Yet Egypt is not unresponsive.
I came back to her with dread, after fourteen years of absence--years
filled for me with the rumors of her changes. And on the very day of
my arrival she calmly reassured me. She told me in her supremely
magical way that all was well with her. She taught me once more a
lesson I had not quite forgotten, but that I was glad to learn again -
the lesson that Egypt owes her most subtle, most inner beauty to
Kheper, although she owes her marvels to men; that when he created the
sun which shines upon her, he gave her the lustre of her life, and
that those who come to her must be sun-worshippers if they would truly
and intimately understand the treasure or romance that lies heaped
within her bosom.
Thoth, says the old legend, travelled in the Boat of the Sun. If you
would love Egypt rightly, you, too, must be a traveller in that bark.
You must not fear to steep yourself in the mystery of gold, in the
mystery of heat, in the mystery of silence that seems softly showered
out of the sun. The sacred white lotus must be your emblem, and Horus,
the hawk-headed, merged in Ra, your special deity. Scarcely had I set
foot once more in Egypt before Thoth lifted me into the Boat of the
sun and soothed my fears to sleep.
I arrived in Cairo. I saw new and vast hotels; I saw crowded streets;
brilliant shops; English officials driving importantly in victorias,
surely to pay dreadful calls of ceremony; women in gigantic hats, with
Niagaras of veil, waving white gloves as they talked of - I guess - the
latest Cairene scandal. I perceived on the right hand and on the left
waiters created in Switzerland, hall porters made in Germany,
Levantine touts, determined Jews holding false antiquities in their
lean fingers, an English Baptist minister, in a white helmet, drinking
chocolate on a terrace, with a guide-book in one fist, a ticket to
visit monuments in the other. I heard Scottish soldiers playing, "I'll
be in Scotland before ye!" and something within me, a lurking hope, I
suppose, seemed to founder and collapse - but only for a moment. It was
after four in the afternoon. Soon day would be declining. And I seemed
to remember that the decline of day in Egypt had moved me long ago -
moved me as few, rare things have ever done. Within half an hour I was
alone, far up the long road - Ismail's road - that leads from the
suburbs of Cairo to the Pyramids. And then Egypt took me like a child
by the hand and reassured me.
It was the first week of November, high Nile had not subsided, and all
the land here, between the river and the sand where the Sphinx keeps
watch, was hidden beneath the vast and tranquil waters of what seemed
a tideless sea - a sea fringed with dense masses of date-palms, girdled
in the far distance by palm-trees that kept the white and the brown
houses in their feathery embrace. Above these isolated houses pigeons
circled. In the distance the lateen sails of boats glided, sometimes
behind the palms, coming into view, vanishing and mysteriously
reappearing among their narrow trunks. Here and there a living thing
moved slowly, wading homeward through this sea: a camel from the sands
of Ghizeh, a buffalo, two donkeys, followed by boys who held with
brown hands their dark blue skirts near their faces, a Bedouin leaning
forward upon the neck of his quickly stepping horse. At one moment I
seemed to look upon the lagoons of Venice, a watery vision full of a
glassy calm. Then the palm-trees in the water, and growing to its
edge, the pale sands that, far as the eyes could see, from Ghizeh to
Sakkara and beyond, fringed it toward the west, made me think of the
Pacific, of palmy islands, of a paradise where men grow drowsy in
well-being, and dream away the years. And then I looked farther,
beyond the pallid line of the sands, and I saw a Pyramid of gold, the
wonder Khufu had built. As a golden wonder it saluted me after all my
years of absence. Later I was to see it grey as grey sands, sulphur
color in the afternoon from very near at hand, black as a monument
draped in funereal velvet for a mourning under the stars at night,
white as a monstrous marble tomb soon after dawn from the sand-dunes
between it and Sakkara.
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