And I loved the columns that seemed blown out with
exuberant strength, and I loved the delicate white walls
That, like
the lotus-flower, give to the world a youth that seems eternal - a
youth that is never frivolous, but that is full of the divine, and yet
pathetic, animation of happy life.
The great bees hummed more drowsily. I sat quite still in the sun. And
then presently, moved by some prompting instinct, I turned my head,
and, far off, through the narrow portal of the temple, I saw the girl-
child swathed in purple still lying, sinuously as a young snake, upon
the palm-wood roof above the brown earth wall to watch me with her
eyes of cloud and fire.
And upon me, like cloud and fire - cloud of the tombs and the great
temple columns, fire of the brilliant life painted and engraved upon
them - there stole the spell of Egypt.
V
THE NILE
I do not find in Egypt any more the strangeness that once amazed, and
at first almost bewildered me. Stranger by far is Morocco, stranger
the country beyond Biskra, near Mogar, round Touggourt, even about El
Kantara. There I feel very far away, as a child feels distance from
dear, familiar things. I look to the horizon expectant of I know not
what magical occurrences, what mysteries. I am aware of the summons to
advance to marvellous lands, where marvellous things must happen. I am
taken by that sensation of almost trembling magic which came to me
when first I saw a mirage far out in the Sahara. But Egypt, though it
contains so many marvels, has no longer for me the marvellous
atmosphere. Its keynote is seductiveness.
In Egypt one feels very safe. Smiling policemen in clothes of spotless
white - emblematic, surely, of their innocence! - seem to be everywhere,
standing calmly in the sun. Very gentle, very tender, although perhaps
not very true, are the Bedouins at the Pyramids. Up the Nile the
fellaheen smile as kindly as the policemen, smile protectingly upon
you, as if they would say, "Allah has placed us here to take care of
the confiding stranger." No ferocious demands for money fall upon my
ears; only an occasional suggestion is subtly conveyed to me that even
the poor must live and that I am immensely rich. An amiable, an almost
enticing seductiveness seems emanating from the fertile soil, shining
in the golden air, gleaming softly in the amber sands, dimpling in the
brown, the mauve, the silver eddies of the Nile. It steals upon one.
It ripples over one. It laps one as if with warm and scented waves. A
sort of lustrous languor overtakes one. In physical well-being one
sinks down, and with wide eyes one gazes and listens and enjoys, and
thinks not of the morrow.
The dahabiyeh - her very name, the /Loulia/, has a gentle, seductive,
cooing sound - drifts broadside to the current with furled sails, or
glides smoothly on before an amiable north wind with sails unfurled.
Upon the bloomy banks, rich brown in color, the brown men stoop and
straighten themselves, and stoop again, and sing. The sun gleams on
their copper skins, which look polished and metallic. Crouched in his
net behind the drowsy oxen, the little boy circles the livelong day
with the sakieh. And the sakieh raises its wailing, wayward voice and
sings to the shadoof; and the shadoof sings to the sakieh; and the
lifted water falls and flows away into the green wilderness of doura
that, like a miniature forest, spreads on every hand to the low
mountains, which do not perturb the spirit, as do the iron mountains
of Algeria. And always the sun is shining, and the body is drinking in
its warmth, and the soul is drinking in its gold. And always the ears
are full of warm and drowsy and monotonous music. And always the eyes
see the lines of brown bodies, on the brown river-banks above the
brown waters, bending, straightening, bending, straightening, with an
exquisitely precise monotony. And always the /Loulia/ seems to be
drifting, so quietly she slips up, or down, the level waterway.
And one drifts, too; one can but drift, happily, sleepily, forgetting
every care. From Abydos to Denderah one drifts, and from Denderah to
Karnak, to Luxor, to all the marvels on the western shore; and on to
Edfu, to Kom Ombos, to Assuan, and perhaps even into Nubia, to Abu-
Simbel, and to Wadi-Halfa. Life on the Nile is a long dream, golden
and sweet as honey of Hymettus. For I let the "divine serpent," who at
Philae may be seen issuing from her charmed cavern, take me very
quietly to see the abodes of the dead, the halls of the vanished, upon
her green and sterile shores. I know nothing of the bustling,
shrieking steamer that defies her, churning into angry waves her
waters for the edification of those who would "do" Egypt and be gone
before they know her.
If you are in a hurry, do not come to Egypt. To hurry in Egypt is as
wrong as to fall asleep in Wall street, or to sit in the Greek Theatre
at Taormina, reading "How to Make a Fortune with a Capital of Fifty
Pounds."
VI
DENDERAH
From Abydos, home of the cult of Osiris, Judge of the Dead, I came to
Denderah, the great temple of the "Lady of the Underworld," as the
goddess Hathor was sometimes called, though she was usually worshipped
as the Egyptian Aphrodite, goddess of joy, goddess of love and
loveliness. It was early morning when I went ashore. The sun was above
the eastern hills, and a boy, clad in a rope of plaited grass, sent me
half shyly the greeting, "May your day be happy!"
Youth is, perhaps, the most divine of all the gifts of the gods, as
those who wore the lotus-blossom amulet believed thousands of years
ago, and Denderah, appropriately, is a very young Egyptian temple,
probably, indeed, the youngest of all the temples on the Nile.
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