XVI
PHILAE
As I Drew Slowly Nearer And Nearer To The Home Of "The Great
Enchantress," Or, As Isis Was Also Called In Bygone Days, "The Lady Of
Philae," The Land Began To Change In Character, To Be Full Of A New
And Barbaric Meaning.
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.
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