Other
Canoes, Which Are Also Crossing, Glide By The Side Of Mine On The
Tranquil Water.
The passengers seem to belong to that variety of
Anglo-Saxons which is equipped by Thomas Cook & Sons (Egypt Ltd.), and
like me, no doubt, they are bound for the royal presence.
We land on the sand of the opposite bank, which to-day is almost
deserted. Formerly there stretched here a regular suburb of Thebes -
that, namely, of the preparers of mummies, with thousands of ovens
wherein to heat the natron and the oils, which preserved the bodies
from corruption. In this Thebes, where for some fifty centuries,
everything that died, whether man or beast, was minutely prepared and
swathed in bandages, it will readily be understood what importance
this quarter of the embalmers came to assume. And it was to the
neighbouring mountains that the products of so many careful wrappings
were borne for burial, while the Nile carried away the blood from the
bodies and the filth of their entrails. That chain of living rocks
that rises before us, coloured each morning with the same rose, as of
a tender flower, is literally stuffed with dead bodies.
We have to cross a wide plain before reaching the mountains, and on
our way cornfields alternate with stretches of sand already
desertlike. Behind us extends the old Nile and the opposite bank which
we have lately quitted - the bank of Luxor, whose gigantic Pharaonic
colonnades are as it were lengthened below by their own reflection in
the mirror of the river. And in this radiant morning, in this pure
light, it would be admirable, this eternal temple, with its image
reversed in the depth of the blue water, were it not that at its
sides, and to twice its height, rises the impudent Winter Palace, that
monster hotel built last year for the fastidious tourists. And yet,
who knows? The jackanapes who deposited this abomination on the sacred
soil of Egypt perhaps imagines that he equals the merit of the artist
who is now restoring the sanctuaries of Thebes, or even the glory of
the Pharaohs who built them.
As we draw nearer to the chain of Libya, where this king awaits us, we
traverse fields still green with growing corn - and sparrows and larks
sing around us in the impetuous spring of this land of Thebes.
And now beyond two menhirs, as it were, become gradually distinct. Of
the same height and shape, alike indeed in every respect, they rise
side by side in the clear distance in the midst of these green plains,
which recall so well our fields of France. They wear the headgear of
the Sphinx, and are gigantic human forms seated on thrones - the
colossal statues of Memnon. We recognise them at once, for the
picture-makers of succeeding ages have popularised their aspect, as in
the case of the pyramids. What is strange is that they should stand
there so simply in the midst of these fields of growing corn, which
reach to their very feet, and be surrounded by these humble birds we
know so well, who sing without ceremony on their shoulders.
They do not seem to be scandalised even at seeing now, passing quite
close to them, the trucks of a playful little railway belonging to a
local industry, that are laden with sugar-canes and gourds.
The chain of Libya, during the last hour, has been growing gradually
larger against the profound and excessively blue sky. And now that it
rises up quite near to us, overheated, and as it were incandescent,
under this ten o'clock sun, we begin to see on all sides, in front of
the first rocky spurs of the mountains, the debris of palaces,
colonnades, staircases and pylons. Headless giants, swathed like dead
Pharaohs, stand upright, with hands crossed beneath their shroud of
sandstone. They are the temples and statues for the manes of
numberless kings and queens, who during three or four thousand years
had their mummies buried hard by in the heart of the mountains, in the
deepest of the walled and secret galleries.
And now the cornfields have ceased; there is no longer any herbage -
nothing. We have crossed the desolate threshold, we are in the desert,
and tread suddenly upon a disquieting funereal soil, half sand, half
ashes, that is pitted on all sides with gaping holes. It looks like
some region that had long been undermined by burrowing beasts. But it
is men who, for more than fifty centuries, have vexed this ground,
first to hide the mummies in it, and afterwards, and until our day, to
exhume them. Each of these holes has enclosed its corpse, and if you
peer within you may see yellow-coloured rags still trailing there; and
bandages, or legs and vertebrae of thousands of years ago. Some lean
Bedouins, who exercise the office of excavators, and sleep hard by in
holes like jackals, advance to sell us scarabaei, blue-glass trinkets
that are half fossilised, and feet or hands of the dead.
And now farewell to the fresh morning. Every minute the heat becomes
more oppressive. The pathway that is marked only by a row of stones
turns at last and leads into the depths of the mountain by a tragical
passage. We enter now into that "Valley of the Kings" which was the
place of the last rendezvous of the most august mummies. The breaths
of air that reach us between these rocks are become suddenly burning,
and the site seems to belong no longer to earth but to some calcined
planet which had for ever lost its clouds and atmosphere. This Libyan
chain, in the distance so delicately rose, is positively frightful now
that it overhangs us. It looks what it is - an enormous and fantastic
tomb, a natural necropolis, whose vastness and horror nothing human
could equal, an ideal stove for corpses that wanted to endure for
ever. The limestone, on which for that matter no rain ever falls from
the changeless sky, looks to be in one single piece from summit to
base, and betrays no crack or crevice by which anything might
penetrate into the sepulchres within.
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