Beyond The
Wiry Tamarisk-Bushes, Which Grow Far Out From The Shore, Thousands
Upon Thousands Of Wild Duck Were Floating As Far As The Eyes Could
See.
We took a strange native boat, manned by two half-naked
fishermen, and were rowed with big, broad-bladed oars out upon the
silent flood that the silent desert surrounded.
But the duck were too
wary ever to let us get within range of them. As we drew gently near,
they rose in black throngs, and skimmed low into the distance of the
wintry landscape, trailing their legs behind them, like the duck on
the wall of Kom Ombos. There was no duck for dinner in camp that
night, and the cook was inconsolable. But I had seen a relief come to
life, and surmounted my disappointment.
Kom Ombos and Edfu, the two houses of the lovers and haters of
crocodiles, or at least of the lovers and the haters of their worship,
I shall always think of them together, because I drifted on the
/Loulia/ from one to the other, and saw no interesting temple between
them and because their personalities are as opposed as were, centuries
ago, the tenets of those who adored within them. The Egyptians of old
were devoted to the hunting of crocodiles, which once abounded in the
reaches of the Nile between Assuan and Luxor, and also much lower
down. But I believe that no reliefs, or paintings, of this sport are
to be found upon the walls of the temples and the tombs. The fear of
Sebek, perhaps, prevailed even over the dwellers about the temple of
Edfu. Yet how could fear of any crocodile god infect the souls of
those who were privileged to worship in such a temple, or even
reverently to stand under the colonnade within the door? As well,
perhaps, one might ask how men could be inspired to raise such a
perfect building to a deity with the face of a hawk? But Horus was not
the god of crocodiles, but a god of the sun. And his power to inspire
men must have been vast; for the greatest concentration in stone in
Egypt, and, I suppose, in the whole world, the Sphinx, as De Rouge
proved by an inscription at Edfu, was a representation of Horus
transformed to conquer Typhon. The Sphinx and Edfu! For such marvels
we ought to bless the hawk-headed god. And if we forget the hawk,
which one meets so perpetually upon the walls of tombs and temples,
and identify Horus rather with the Greek Apollo, the yellow-haired god
of the sun, driving "westerly all day in his flaming chariot," and
shooting his golden arrows at the happy world beneath, we can be at
peace with those dead Egyptians. For every pilgrim who goes to Edfu
to-day is surely a worshipper of the solar aspect of Horus. As long as
the world lasts there will be sun-worshippers. Every brown man upon
the Nile is one, and every good American who crosses the ocean and
comes at last into the sombre wonder of Edfu, and I was one upon the
deck of the /Loulia/.
And we all worship as yet in the dark, as in the exquisite dark, like
faith, of the Holy of Holies of Horus.
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