Among The Temples Of Egypt, Edfu Is
The House Divine Of "The Hidden One," The Perfect Temple Of Worship.
XV
KOM OMBOS
Some people talk of the "sameness" of the Nile; and there is a lovely
sameness of golden light, of delicious air, of people, and of scenery.
For Egypt is, after all, mainly a great river with strips on each side
of cultivated land, flat, green, not very varied. River, green plains,
yellow plains, pink, brown, steel-grey, or pale-yellow mountains, wail
of shadoof, wail of sakieh. Yes, I suppose there is a sameness, a sort
of golden monotony, in this land pervaded with light and pervaded with
sound. Always there is light around you, and you are bathing in it,
and nearly always, if you are living, as I was, on the water, there is
a multitude of mingling sounds floating, floating to your ears. As
there are two lines of green land, two lines of mountains, following
the course of the Nile; so are there two lines of voices that cease
their calling and their singing only as you draw near to Nubia. For
then, with the green land, they fade away, these miles upon miles of
calling and singing brown men; and amber and ruddy sands creep
downward to the Nile. And the air seems subtly changing, and the light
perhaps growing a little harder. And you are aware of other regions
unlike those you are leaving, more African, more savage, less suave,
less like a dreaming. And especially the silence makes a great
impression on you. But before you enter this silence, between the
amber and ruddy walls that will lead you on to Nubia, and to the land
of the crocodile, you have a visit to pay. For here, high up on a
terrace, looking over a great bend of the river is Kom Ombos. And Kom
Ombos is the temple of the crocodile god.
Sebek was one of the oldest and one of the most evil of the Egyptian
gods. In the Fayum he was worshipped, as well as at Kom Ombos, and
there, in the holy lake of his temple, were numbers of holy
crocodiles, which Strabo tells us were decorated with jewels like
pretty women. He did not get on with the other gods, and was sometimes
confused with Set, who personified natural darkness, and who also was
worshipped by the people about Kom Ombos.
I have spoken of the golden sameness of the Nile, but this sameness is
broken by the variety of the temples. Here you have a striking
instance of this variety. Edfu, only forty miles from Kom Ombos, the
next temple which you visit, is the most perfect temple in Egypt. Kom
Ombos is one of the most imperfect. Edfu is a divine house of "the
Hidden One," full of a sacred atmosphere. Kom Ombos is the house of
crocodiles. In ancient days the inhabitants of Edfu abhorred, above
everything, crocodiles and their worshippers. And here at Kom Ombos
the crocodile was adored. You are in a different atmosphere.
As soon as you land, you are greeted with crocodiles, though
fortunately not by them. A heap of their black mummies is shown to you
reposing in a sort of tomb or shrine open at one end to the air. By
these mummies the new note is loudly struck. The crocodiles have
carried you in an instant from that which is pervadingly general to
that which is narrowly particular; from the purely noble, which seems
to belong to all time, to the entirely barbaric, which belongs only to
times outworn. It is difficult to feel as if one had anything in
common with men who seriously worshipped crocodiles, had priests to
feed them, and decorated their scaly necks with jewels.
Yet the crocodile god had a noble temple at Kom Ombos, a temple which
dates from the times of the Ptolemies, though there was a temple in
earlier days which has now disappeared. Its situation is splendid. It
stands high above the Nile, and close to the river, on a terrace which
has recently been constructed to save it from the encroachments of the
water. And it looks down upon a view which is exquisite in the clear
light of early morning. On the right, and far off, is a delicious pink
bareness of distant flats and hills. Opposite there is a flood of
verdure and of trees going to mountains, a spit of sand where is an
inlet of the river, with a crowd of native boats, perhaps waiting for
a wind. On the left is the big bend of the Nile, singularly beautiful,
almost voluptuous in form, and girdled with a radiant green of crops,
with palm-trees, and again the distant hills. Sebek was well advised
to have his temples here and in the glorious Fayum, that land flowing
with milk and honey, where the air is full of the voices of the flocks
and herds, and alive with the wild pigeons; where the sweet sugar-cane
towers up in fairy forests, the beloved home of the jackal; where the
green corn waves to the horizon, and the runlets of water make a maze
of silver threads carrying life and its happy murmur through all the
vast oasis.
At the guardian's gate by which you go in there sits not a watch dog,
nor yet a crocodile, but a watch cat, small, but very determined, and
very attentive to its duties, and neatly carved in stone. You try to
look like a crocodile-worshipper. It is deceived, and lets you pass.
And you are alone with the growing morning and Kom Ombos.
I was never taken, caught up into an atmosphere, in Kom Ombos. I
examined it with interest, but I did not feel a spell. Its grandeur is
great, but it did not affect me as did the grandeur of Karnak. Its
nobility cannot be questioned, but I did not stilly rejoice in it, as
in the nobility of Luxor, or the free splendor of the Ramesseum.
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