The waters of the Nile being already low my dahabiya - delayed by
strandings - had not been able to reach Luxor, and we had moored
ourselves, as the darkness began to fall, at a casual spot on the
bank.
"We are quite near," the pilot had told me before departing to make
his evening prayer; "in an hour, to-morrow, we shall be there."
And the gentle night descended upon us in this spot which did not seem
to differ at all from so any others where, for a month past now, we
had moored our boat at hazard to await the daybreak. On the banks were
dark confused masses of foliage, above which here and there a high
date-palm outlined its black plumes. The air was filled with the
multitudinous chirpings of the crickets of Upper Egypt, which make
their music here almost throughout the year in the odorous warmth of
the grass. And, presently, in the midst of the silence, rose the cries
of the night birds, like the mournful mewings of cats. And that was
all - save for the infinite calm of the desert that is always present,
dominating everything, although scarcely noticed and, as it were,
latent.
*****
And this morning, at the rising of the sun, is pure and splendid as
all other mornings. A tint of rosy coral comes gradually to life on
the summit of the Libyan mountains, standing out from the gridelin
shadows which, in the heavens, were the rearguard of the night.
But my eyes, grown accustomed during the last few weeks to this
glorious spectacle of the dawn, turn themselves, as if by force of
some attraction, towards a strange and quite unusual thing, which,
less than a mile away along the river, on the Arabian bank, rises
upright in the midst of the mournful plains. At first it looks like a
mass of towering rocks, which in this hour of twilight magic have
taken on a pale violet colour, and seem almost transparent. And the
sun, scarcely emerged from the desert, lights them in a curious
gradation, and orders their contours with a fringe of fresh rose-
colour. And they are not rocks, in fact, for as we look more closely,
they show us lines symmetrical and straight. Not rocks, but
architectural masses, tremendous and superhuman, placed there in
attitudes of quasi-eternal stability. And out of them rise the points
of two obelisks, sharp as the blade of a lance. And then, at once, I
understand - Thebes!
Thebes! Last evening it was hidden in the shadow and I did not know it
was so near. But Thebes assuredly it is, for nothing else in the world
could produce such an apparition. And I salute with a kind of shudder
of respect this unique and sovereign ruin, which had haunted me for
many years, but which until now life had not left me time to visit.
And now for Luxor, which in the epoch of the Pharaohs was a suburb of
the royal town, and is still its port. It is there, it seems, where we
must stop our dahabiya in order to proceed to the fabulous palace
which the rising sun has just disclosed to us.
And while my equipage of bronze - intoning that song, as old as Egypt
and everlastingly the same, which seems to help the men in their
arduous work - is busy unfastening the chain which binds us to the
bank, I continue to watch the distant apparition. It emerges gradually
from the light morning mists which, perhaps, made it seem even larger
than it is. The clear light of the ascending sun shows it now in
detail; and reveals it as all battered, broken and ruinous in the
midst of a silent plain, on the yellow carpet of the desert. And how
this sun, rising in its clear splendour, seems to crush it with its
youth and stupendous duration. This same sun had attained to its
present round form, had acquired the clear precision of its disc, and
begun its daily promenade over the country of the sands, countless
centuries of centuries, before it saw, as it might be yesterday, this
town of Thebes arise; an attempt at magnificence which seemed to
promise for the human pygmies a sufficiently interesting future, but
which, in the event, we have not been able even to equal. And it
proved, too, a thing quite puny and derisory, since here it is laid
low, after having subsisted barely four negligible thousands of years.
*****
An hour later we arrive at Luxor, and what a surprise awaits us there!
The thing which dominates the whole town, and may be seen five or six
miles away, is the Winter Palace, a hasty modern production which has
grown on the border of the Nile during the past year: a colossal
hotel, obviously sham, made of plaster and mud, on a framework of
iron. Twice or three times as high as the admirable Pharaonic Temple,
its impudent facade rises there, painted a dirty yellow. One such
thing, it will readily be understood, is sufficient to disfigure
pitiably the whole of the surroundings. The old Arab town, with its
little white houses, its minarets and its palm-trees, might as well
not exist. The famous temple and the forest of heavy Osiridean columns
admire themselves in vain in the waters of the river. It is the end of
Luxor.
And what a crowd of people is here! While, on the contrary, the
opposite bank seems so absolutely desertlike, with its stretches of
golden sand and, on the horizon, its mountains of the colour of
glowing embers, which, as we know, are full of mummies.
Poor Luxor! Along the banks is a row of tourist boats, a sort of two
or three storeyed barracks, which nowadays infest the Nile from Cairo
to the Cataracts. Their whistlings and the vibration of their dynamos
make an intolerable noise. How shall I find a quiet place for my
dahabiya, where the functionaries of Messrs.
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