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. Its
youthfulness - it is only about two thousand years of age - identifies
it happily with the happiness and beauty of its presiding deity, and
as I rode toward it on the canal-bank in the young freshness of the
morning, I thought of the goddess Safekh and of the sacred Persea-
tree.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 12 of 71
Words from 5688 to 6201
of 36756
