I Made The Acquaintance Of Two When I Was There, One Of Whom Offered For A Couple Of Pounds To Provide Me With A Preservative Against All Such Dangers As Beset The Traveller In Wild Places.

In order to prove its efficacy he asked me to come to his house by night, bringing a dog and my revolver with me.

He would hang the charm about the dog's neck, and I was then to put six shots into the animal's body. He positively assured me that the dog would be uninjured. I half-promised to come and, when night began to fall, looked vaguely about for a dog. At last I found one, but it howled so dismally when I asked Ibrahim Ayyad to take possession of it for experimental purposes, that I weakly gave up the project, and left the magician clamoring for his hundred and ninety-five piastres.

Its warlike aspect gives a special personality to Medinet-Abu. The shield-shaped battlements; the courtyards, with their brutal columns, narrowing as they recede towards the mountains; the heavy gateways, with superimposed chambers; the towers; quadrangular bastion to protect, inclined basement to resist the attacks of sappers and cause projectiles to rebound - all these things contribute to this very definite effect.

I have heard travelers on the Nile speak piteously of the confusion wakened in their minds by a hurried survey of many temples, statues, monuments, and tombs. But if one stays long enough this confusion fades happily away, and one differentiates between the antique personalities of Ancient Egypt almost as easily as one differentiates between the personalities of one's familiar friends. Among these personalities Medinet-Abu is the warrior, standing like Mentu, with the solar disk, and the two plumes erect above his head of a hawk, firmly planted at the foot of the Theban mountains, ready to repel all enemies, to beat back all assaults, strong and determined, powerful and brutally serene.

XI

THE RAMESSEUM

"This, my lord, is the thinking-place of Rameses the Great."

So said Ibrahim Ayyad to me one morning - Ibrahim, who is almost as prolific in the abrupt creation of peers as if he were a democratic government.

I looked about me. We stood in a ruined hall with columns, architraves covered with inscriptions, segments of flat roof. Here and there traces of painting, dull-red, pale, ethereal blue - the "love-color" of Egypt, as the Egyptians often call it - still adhered to the stone. This hall, dignified, grand, but happy, was open on all sides to the sun and air. From it I could see tamarisk- and acacia-trees, and far- off shadowy mountains beyond the eastern verge of the Nile. And the trees were still as carven things in an atmosphere that was a miracle of clearness and of purity. Behind me, and near, the hard Libyan mountains gleamed in the sun. Somewhere a boy was singing; and suddenly his singing died away. And I thought of the "Lay of the Harper" which is inscribed upon the tombs of Thebes - those tombs under those gleaming mountains:

Enter page number Go  Previous Next
Page 32 of 71
Words from 16148 to 16662 of 36756