It was the "Little Christmas," and from the villages in the plain the
Egyptians came pouring out to visit their dead in the desert
cemeteries as I passed by to visit the dead in the tombs far off on
the horizon.
Women, swathed in black, gathered in groups and jumped
monotonously up and down, to the accompaniment of stained hands
clapping, and strange and weary songs. Tiny children blew furiously
into tin trumpets, emitting sounds that were terribly European. Men
strode seriously by, or stood in knots among the graves, talking
vivaciously of the things of this life. As the sun rose higher in the
heavens, this visit to the dead became a carnival of the living.
Laughter and shrill cries of merriment betokened the resignation of
the mourners. The sand-dunes were black with running figures, racing,
leaping, chasing one another, rolling over and over in the warm and
golden grains. Some sat among the graves and ate. Some sang. Some
danced. I saw no one praying, after the sun was up. The Great Pyramid
of Ghizeh was transformed in this morning hour, and gleamed like a
marble mountain, or like the hill covered with salt at El-Outaya, in
Algeria. As we went on it sank down into the sands, until at last I
could see only a small section with its top, which looked almost as
pointed as a gigantic needle. Abou was there on the hot stones in the
golden eye of the sun - Abou who lives to respect his Pyramid, and to
serve Turkish coffee to those who are determined enough to climb it.
Before me the Step Pyramid rose, brown almost as bronze, out of the
sands here desolate and pallid. Soon I was in the house of Marriette,
between the little sphinxes.
Near Cairo, although the desert is real desert, it does not give, to
me, at any rate, the immense impression of naked sterility, of almost
brassy, sun-baked fierceness, which often strikes one in the Sahara to
the south of Algeria, where at midday one sometimes has a feeling of
being lost upon a waste of metal, gleaming, angry, tigerish in color.
Here, in Egypt, both the people and the desert seem gentler, safer,
more amiable. Yet these tombs of Sakkara are hidden in a desolation of
the sands, peculiarly blanched and mournful; and as you wander from
tomb to tomb, descending and ascending, stealing through great
galleries beneath the sands, creeping through tubes of stone,
crouching almost on hands and knees in the sultry chambers of the
dead, the awfulness of the passing away of dynasties and of race
comes, like a cloud, upon your spirit. But this cloud lifts and floats
from you in the cheerful tomb of Thi, that royal councillor, that
scribe and confidant, whose life must have been passed in a round of
serene activities, amid a sneering, though doubtless admiring,
population.
Into this tomb of white, vivacious figures, gay almost, though never
wholly frivolous - for these men were full of purpose, full of an ardor
that seduces even where it seems grotesque - I took with me a child of
ten called Ali, from the village of Kafiah; and as I looked from him
to the walls around us, rather than the passing away of the races, I
realized the persistence of type.
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