In Recent Years I Have Paid Many Visits To
Northern Africa, But Only To Tunisia And Algeria, Countries That Are
Wilder Looking, And Much Wilder Seeming Than Egypt.
Now, as I
approached Assuan, I seemed at last to be also approaching the real,
the intense Africa that
I had known in the Sahara, the enigmatic
siren, savage and strange and wonderful, whom the typical Ouled Nail,
crowned with gold, and tufted with ostrich plumes, painted with kohl,
tattooed, and perfumed, hung with golden coins and amulets, and framed
in plaits of coarse, false hair, represents indifferently to the eyes
of the travelling stranger. For at last I saw the sands that I love
creeping down to the banks of the Nile. And they brought with them
that wonderful air which belongs only to them - the air that dwells
among the dunes in the solitary places, that is like the cool touch of
Liberty upon the face of a man, that makes the brown child of the
nomad as lithe, tireless, and fierce-spirited as a young panther, and
sets flame in the eyes of the Arab horse, and gives speed of the wind
to the Sloughi. The true lover of the desert can never rid his soul of
its passion for the sands, and now my heart leaped as I stole into
their pure embraces, as I saw to right and left amber curves and
sheeny recesses, shining ridges and bloomy clefts. The clean delicacy
of those sands that, in long and glowing hills, stretched out from
Nubia to meet me, who could ever describe them? Who could ever
describe their soft and enticing shapes, their exquisite gradations of
color, the little shadows in their hollows, the fiery beauty of their
crests, the patterns the cool winds make upon them? It is an enchanted
/royaume/ of the sands through which one approaches Isis.
Isis and engineers! We English people have effected that curious
introduction, and we greatly pride ourselves upon it. We have
presented Sir William Garstin, and Mr. John Blue, and Mr. Fitz
Maurice, and other clever, hard-working men to the fabled Lady of
Philae, and they have given her a gift: a dam two thousand yards in
length, upon which tourists go smiling on trolleys. Isis has her
expensive tribute - it cost about a million and a half pounds - and no
doubt she ought to be gratified.
Yet I think Isis mourns on altered Philae, as she mourns with her
sister, Nepthys, at the heads of so many mummies of Osirians upon the
walls of Egyptian tombs. And though the fellaheen very rightly
rejoice, there are some unpractical sentimentalists who form a company
about her, and make their plaint with hers - their plaint for the peace
that is gone, for the lost calm, the departed poetry, that once hung,
like a delicious, like an inimitable, atmosphere, about the palms of
the "Holy Island."
I confess that I dreaded to revisit Philae. I had sweet memories of
the island that had been with me for many years - memories of still
mornings under the palm-trees, watching the gliding waters of the
river, or gazing across them to the long sweep of the empty sands;
memories of drowsy, golden noons, when the bright world seemed softly
sleeping, and the almost daffodil-colored temple dreamed under the
quivering canopy of blue; memories of evenings when a benediction from
the lifted hands of Romance surely fell upon the temple and the island
and the river; memories of moonlit nights, when the spirits of the old
gods to whom the temples were reared surely held converse with the
spirits of the desert, with Mirage and her pale and evading sisters of
the great spaces, under the brilliant stars. I was afraid, because I
could not believe the asservations of certain practical persons, full
of the hard and almost angry desire of "Progress," that no harm had
been done by the creation of the reservoir, but that, on the contrary,
it had benefited the temple. The action of the water upon the stone,
they said with vehement voices, instead of loosening it and causing it
to crumble untimely away, had tended to harden and consolidate it.
Here I should like to lie, but I resist the temptation. Monsieur
Naville has stated that possibly the English engineers have helped to
prolong the lives of the buildings of Philae, and Monsieur Maspero has
declared that "the state of the temple of Philae becomes continually
more satisfactory." So be it! Longevity has been, by a happy chance,
secured. But what of beauty? What of the beauty of the past, and what
of the schemes for the future? Is Philae even to be left as it is, or
are the waters of the Nile to be artificially raised still higher,
until Philae ceases to be? Soon, no doubt, an answer will be given.
Meanwhile, instead of the little island that I knew, and thought a
little paradise breathing out enchantment in the midst of titanic
sterility, I found a something diseased. Philae now, when out of the
water, as it was all the time when I was last in Egypt, looks like a
thing stricken with some creeping malady - one of those maladies which
begin in the lower members of a body, and work their way gradually but
inexorably upward to the trunk, until they attain the heart.
I came to it by the desert, and descended to Shellal - Shellal with its
railway-station, its workmen's buildings, its tents, its dozens of
screens to protect the hewers of stone from the burning rays of the
sun, its bustle of people, of overseers, engineers, and workmen,
Egyptian, Nubian, Italian, and Greek. The silence I had known was
gone, though the desert lay all around - the great sands, the great
masses of granite that look as if patiently waiting to be fashioned
into obelisks, and sarcophagi, and statues. But away there across the
bend of the river, dominating the ugly rummage of this intrusive
beehive of human bees, sheer grace overcoming strength both of nature
and human nature, rose the fabled "Pharaoh's Bed"; gracious, tender,
from Shellal most delicately perfect, and glowing with pale gold
against the grim background of the hills on the western shore.
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