Here, In Egypt,
Where The Need Is Felt To Change So Many Things, It Is Proposed, Too,
To Reform The Old University Of El-Azhar, One Of The Chief Centres Of
Islam.
One thinks of it with a kind of fear, knowing what danger there
is in laying hands upon institutions which have lasted for a thousand
years.
Reform, however, has, in principle, been decided upon. New
knowledge, brought from the West, is penetrating into the tabernacle
of the Fatimites. Has not the Prophet said: "Go; seek knowledge far
and wide, if needs be even into China"? What will come of it? Who can
tell? But this, at least, is certain: that in the dazzling hours of
noon, or in the golden hours of evening, when the crowd of these
modernised students spreads itself over the vast courtyard, overlooked
by its countless minarets, there will no longer be seen in their eyes
the mystic light of to-day; and it will no longer be the old
unshakable faith, nor the lofty and serene indifference, nor the
profound peace, that these messengers will carry to the ends of the
Mussulman earth. . . .
CHAPTER VI
IN THE TOMBS OF THE APIS
The dwelling-places of the Apis, in the grim darkness beneath the
Memphite desert, are, as all the world knows, monster coffins of black
granite ranged in catacombs, hot and stifling as eternal stoves.
To reach them from the banks of the Nile we have first to traverse the
low region which the inundations of the ancient river, regularly
repeated since the beginning of time, have rendered propitious to the
growth of plants and to the development of men; an hour or two's
journey, this evening through forests of date-trees whose beautiful
palms temper the light of the March sun, which is now half veiled in
clouds and already declining. In the distance herds are grazing in the
cool shade. And we meet fellahs leading back from the field towards
the village on the river-bank their little donkeys, laden with sheaves
of corn. The air is mild and wholesome under the high tufts of these
endless green plumes, which move in the warm wind almost without
noise. We seem to be in some happy land, where the pastoral life
should be easy, and even a little paradisiacal.
But beyond, in front of us, quite a different world is gradually
revealed. Its aspect assumes the importance of a menace from the
unknown; it awes us like an apparition of chaos, of universal death.
. . . It is the desert, the conquering desert, in the midst of which
inhabited Egypt, the green valleys of the Nile, trace merely a narrow
ribbon. And here, more than elsewhere, the sight of this sovereign
desert rising up before us is startling and thrilling, so high up it
seems, and we so low in the Edenlike valley shaded by the palms. With
its yellow hues, its livid marblings, and its sands which make it look
somehow as if it lacked consistency, it rises on the whole horizon
like a kind of soft wall or a great fearsome cloud - or rather, like a
long cataclysmic wave, which does not move indeed, but which, if it
did, would overwhelm and swallow everything. It is the /Memphite
desert/ - a place, that is to say, such as does not exist elsewhere on
earth; a fabulous necropolis, in which men of earlier times, heaped up
for some three thousand years the embalmed bodies of their dead,
exaggerating, as time went on, the foolish grandeur of their tombs.
Now, above the sand which looks like the front of some great tidal
wave arrested in its progress, we see on all sides, and far into the
distance, triangles of superhuman proportions which were once the
tombs of mummies; pyramids, still upright, all of them, on their
sinister pedestal of sand. Some are comparatively near; others almost
lost in the background of the solitudes - and perhaps more awesome in
that they are merely outlined in grey, high up among the clouds.
*****
The little carriages that have brought us to the necropolis of
Memphis, through the interminable forest of palm-trees, had their
wheels fitted with large pattens for their journey over the sand.
Now, arrived at the foot of the fearsome region, we commence to climb
a hill where all at once the trot of our horses ceases to be heard;
the moving felting of the soil establishes a sudden silence around us,
as indeed is always the case when we reach these sands. It seems as if
it were a silence of respect which the desert itself imposes.
The valley of life sinks and fades behind us, until at last it
disappears, hidden by a line of sandhills - the first wave, as one
might say, of this waterless sea - and we are now mounted into the
kingdom of the dead, swept at this moment by a withering and almost
icy wind, which from below one would not have expected.
This desert of Memphis has not yet been profaned by hotels or motor
roads, such as we have seen in the "little desert" of the Sphinx -
whose three pyramids indeed we can discern at the extreme limit of the
view, prolonging almost to infinity for our eyes this domain of
mummies. There is nobody to be seen, nor any indication of the present
day, amongst these mournful undulations of yellow or pale grey sand,
in which we seem lost as in the swell of an ocean. The sky is cloudy -
such as you can scarcely imagine the sky of Egypt. And in this immense
nothingness of sand and stones, which stands out now more clearly
against the clouds on the horizon, there is nothing anywhere save the
silhouettes of those eternal triangles; the pyramids, gigantic things
which rise here and there at hazard, some half in ruin, others almost
intact and preserving still their sharp point. To-day they are the
only landmarks of this necropolis, which is nearly six miles in
length, and was formerly covered by temples of a magnificence and a
vastness unimaginable to the minds of our day.
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