The Ship Dwellers Part 28

XL

KARNAK AND LUXOR

The temple of Karnak cannot be described. The guide-books attempt it, but the result is only a maze of figures and detail for which the mind cares little. All the Greek temples on the Acropolis combined would make but a miniature showing by the side of Karnak. Most of the Egyptian kings, beginning as far back as 3000 B.C., had a hand in its building, and for above two thousand years it was in a state of construction, restoration, or repair. The result is an amazing succession of halls and columns, monoliths, and mighty walls--many of them tumbled and tumbling now, but enough standing to show what a race once flourished here. Long ago the road over which we came from Luxor was an avenue eighty feet wide and a mile and a half long, connecting the two great temples. It was faced on each side with ram-headed sphinxes only a few feet apart.

Most of them are gone now, but the few mutilated specimens left prompt one's imagination of that mighty boulevard. The Karnak of that day, with its various enclosures, is said to have covered a thousand acres. The mind does not grasp that, any more than it comprehends the ages of its construction, the history it has seen. It is like trying to grasp the distance to the stars.

No one may say who began Karnak, but the Usertsens of the earliest Theban Dynasty had a hand in its building, and after them the other dynasties down to the Ptolemaic days. Thothmes III. and his aunt, the wonderful Queen Hatasu--the ablest woman of her time--were among its builders, and these two set up obelisks, erected pylons and vast columned halls. This was about 1600 B.C., when the glory of Egypt was at flood-tide. Two centuries later the mighty Seti I., whose mummied form sleeps to-day in the Museum at Cairo, began what is known as the great Hypostile Hall, finished by his still mightier son, Rameses II., whose mummy likewise reposes in Cairo, father and son together. Rameses built other additions to Karnak, and crowded most of them with pictures and statues of himself and the sculptured glorification of his deeds. He was, in fact, not only the greatest king, but the greatest egotist the world has ever known, and in the end believed himself a G.o.d. It is said that he built more than seventy temples altogether, chiefly to hold his statues, and that he put his name on a number that had been built by his predecessors. It has been hinted that to his t.i.tle of "The Great" the word "Advertiser" should have been added, and the fact that he is now on exhibition in a gla.s.s case must be a crowning gratification to him, if he knows it. It should be mentioned that Rameses II. is thought to be one of the oppressors of the Israelites, which may tend to arrange his period and personality in the Biblical mind.

I am wandering away from the subject in hand. I want to talk about Karnak, and I find myself talking of kings. But, then, one _cannot_ talk about Karnak--not intelligently. One must _see_ Karnak, and he will believe himself dreaming all the time, and he will come away silent. The Romans came to Karnak when the Egyptians had finished with their building, and by-and-by the early Christians, who could always be depended upon to pull down and mutilate and destroy anything that was particularly magnificent. Our old friend, the good Queen Helena, arrived, and the temples of Egypt crumbled before the blight of her fanaticism. But I must change cars again. I get a little rabid when I take up Queen Helena and her tribe.

We followed Gaddis from arch to pylon, from enclosure to sanctuary--we pa.s.sed down colonnades that one must see to believe. There are two kinds of columns in Egypt, by-the-way, the Lotus and the Papyrus--the former with a capital that opens out like a flaring bowl, the cup of the lotus-flower; the other with a capital that is more like an opening bud.

The lotus symbolizes the Delta country, Lower Egypt; the papyrus stands for Upper Egypt, the country of the Nile, where we now are. Both are used in these temples, and here in Karnak there is a hall of Lotus columns--one hundred and thirty-four in number--twelve of them sixty feet high and twelve feet through!

That is the great Hypostile Hall of Seti I., and I wish the English language were big enough, and I on sufficiently good terms with it to convey the overwhelming impression of that place. Try to conceive an architectural forest of the size of a city block, planted with sculptured and painted columns and filled with sunlight--the columns towering till they seem to touch the sky, and of such thickness that six men with extended arms, finger-tip to finger-tip, can barely span them round. The twelve mightier columns form a central avenue that simply dwarfs into insignificance any living thing that enters it. You suddenly become an insect when you stand between those columns and look up, and you have the feeling that you are likely to be stepped on. The rest of that colossal a.s.sembly stretch away on either side and are only a degree smaller. All are painted with the four colors of the Nile--mellow tones of blue, red, green and yellow, signifying high and low Nile, green fields and harvest--imperishable pigments as fresh and luminous under this sunlit sky as when they were laid there by artists who finished and put their brushes away more than three thousand years ago. How poor are mere words in the presence of this mighty reality which has outlived so many languages--will outlive all the puny languages that try to convey it now!

Looking down the great central avenue of Seti's hall, we beheld at the end--standing as true to-day as when she placed it there--the graceful granite obelisk of Queen Hatasu.

"Set up in honor of father Amen," she relates in her inscription on the base. She adds that she covered the tip with copper that it might be seen at a great distance, and tells how the monolith and its mate (now lying broken near it) were hewn from the a.s.suan quarries and brought down the Nile to Thebes. I may say here that we did not read these inscriptions ourselves. We could do it, of course, if we had time, but Gaddis, who is at least five thousand years old, inside, is better at it than we could be in a brief period like that, so we depend on him a good deal. Gaddis can read anything. A bird without a head, followed by a pair of legs walking, a row of sawteeth, a picked chicken, a gum-drop and a comb, all done in careful outline, mean "Homage to the Horus of the two horizons" to Gaddis, though I have been unable as yet to see why.

We went into the Hall, or Temple, of Khonsu, the moon-G.o.d, and here was a breath-taking collection of papyrus columns, short, thick, built to stand through the ages on the uncertain foundation of this alluvial plain. We pa.s.sed into a sanctuary where the priests of Amen prepared the sacrifice, and Gaddis read the story on the walls, and pointed out for the twentieth time, perhaps, Horus, the hawk-headed G.o.d, and Hapi, his son, who has a dog head and can hardly be called handsome; also Anubis, the jackal-headed G.o.d of the Under World. We came to a temple with a wall upon which Seti recorded his victories over the forces of Syria, and pictured himself in the act of destroying an army single handed by gathering their long hair into a single twist preparatory to smiting off this combined mult.i.tude of heads at a blow. We follow Gaddis through long tumbling avenues and corridors of decorated walls; we climbed over fallen columns that prostrate were twice as high as our heads; we studied the records which those old kings, in ages when all the rest of the world was myth and fable set up to preserve the story of their deeds. And remember, all these columns and walls were not only completely covered with figures carved in relief, but tinted in those unfading colors, subdued, harmonious, and more beautiful than I can tell.

[Ill.u.s.tration: I MADE A PICTURE OF THE FLY-BRUSH BRIGADE]

How little and how feebly I seem to be writing about this stupendous ruin, yet I must conclude presently for lack of room. We went into the Ramesseum, a temple literally lined with heroic statues of Rameses, where I made a picture of the fly-brush brigade, as we call ourselves now, because in Upper Egypt a fly-brush is absolutely necessary not alone to comfort, but to very existence. The fly here is not the ordinary house variety, fairly coy and flirtatious if one has a newspaper or other impromptu weapon, retiring now and again to a safe place for contemplation; no, the Egyptian fly is different. He never retires and he is not in the least coy. He makes for you in a cloud, and it is only by continuous industry that you can beat him off at all.

Furthermore, he begins business the instant he touches, and he has continuously the gift which our fly sometimes has on a sultry, muggy day--the art of sticking with his feet, which drives you frantic. So you buy a fly-brush the instant you land in Upper Egypt, and you keep it going constantly from dawn to dark. The flies retire then, for needed rest.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ITS MAGNIFICENT PYLONS OR ENTRANCE WALLS ... AND THEN ONCE MORE WE WERE ON THE DONKEYS]

We pa.s.sed through another avenue of ram-headed sphinxes (some of the heads were gone) which Rameses built, and stood outside of the great temple of Amen, once called the "Throne of the World." Its magnificent pylons, or entrance walls, are one hundred and fifty feet high and three hundred broad. We ascended one of these for a general view of the vast field of ruin.

Piled and tumbled and flung about lay the mighty efforts of a mighty race. At one place excavating was still going on, and a regiment of little boys were running back and forth with baskets of dirt on their heads, singing and sweating in the blazing sun, earning as much as two piastres (ten cents) a day. Men were working, too; they receive quite fancy sums--twenty cents a day, some of them.

Now that we were outside of the shaded temple and sanctuary enclosures our party was not very game. It was our first day in Upper Egypt, and the flies and the sun made a pretty deadly combination. We began to complain, and to long for the cool corridors and fizzy drinks and protecting screens of the hotel. We might have played golf or tennis in that sun, but seeing ruins was different, and we began to pray for the donkeys again. So Gaddis led us around by the Sacred Lake, where once the splendid ceremonials were performed--it is only a shallow pool now--and then once more we were on the donkeys, strung out in a crazy, shrieking stampede for the hotel. Gaddis rode near me. His donkey was a racer, too, but Gaddis did not laugh or cry out, or anything of the sort. He only wore that gentle serene smile, the smile of Egypt, observing trivial things.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE TEMPLE OF LUXOR ... ONCE MORE REFLECTING ITS COLUMNS IN THE NILE]

In the afternoon we visited the Temple of Luxor, that beautiful structure which Amenophis III. built on the banks of the Nile. Luxor is Karnak on a smaller scale, though big enough in all conscience, and it is not all excavated yet. Debris had covered this temple to the very top, and it is not so long ago that a village was built on a level with the capitals of these columns. When M. Maspero, in 1883, began his work of excavation, the natives naturally protested against the uncovering of the "heathen" ruins at the expense of their mud huts. The work went on, however, and to-day a large part of the magnificent architecture stands revealed, once more reflecting its columns in the Nile.

There is still a quant.i.ty of debris to be removed. One end of the Temple is full of it, and may remain so a good while. On top of this ma.s.s, some five hundred years ago, a Mohammedan mosque was built by the descendants of a saint named Abu Haggag, and sufficient of his family are left to this day to hold that mosque intact against all would-be excavators.

However, the mosque itself begins to look pretty old. If the diggers keep encroaching, it may slide off into the Temple some day, saints and all.

Luxor, as a whole, is better preserved than Karnak. I suppose the heaped-up debris kept the columns in position during the last ten or a dozen centuries. I wish it had been there when the early Christian came along. Cambyses of Persia, who burned everything that would burn in Egypt, about 527 B.C., blackened the walls of this temple with fire, the marks of which show to this day, but he was nothing to the followers of Queen Helena. Even the guide-book, which is likely to be conservative in any comment that may touch upon the faith of its readers, says concerning the followers of Helena: "Not content with turning certain sections of it into churches, the more fanatical among them smashed statues, and disfigured bas-reliefs and wrecked shrines with characteristic savage and ignorant zeal."[7]

There ought to be a painting or a marble group somewhere ent.i.tled "Early Christian at Work"--a lean-faced, stringy-haired maniac with sledge, murdering a symbolized figure of Defenceless Art in the Far East. The early Christian is said to have destroyed forty-five thousand statues in Thebes in one day.

Still, those statues may not matter so much--they were probably all of Rameses the Great, and there are enough of him left. The Luxor Temple had them in all sizes, and of all materials, from granite to alabaster.

Also some of "Mrs. Rameses," as Gaddis called her--no particular Mrs.

Rameses--there having been several of her; just a sort of generic type of connubial happiness, I suppose. Mrs. Rameses, by the way, does not cut much figure in the statuary. She usually comes only about to the knee of the King, though she is life-size even then, for his own statues are colossal, ranging anywhere from fifteen to fifty feet high. That was to represent their difference in importance, of course, an idea which the women members of our party seemed to disapprove.[8]

One of the statues of Rameses was found in a curious manner. A guide only a little while ago was lecturing to a party of tourists, while a young lady not far away was sketching a corner of the ruin. The sketcher stopped to listen to the guide's talk, and when he had finished said to the boy who was keeping the flies from her:

"Go up on that heap of rubbish and see what that stone is."

It was the rubbish that slopes down from the old mosque. The boy climbed up, pulled away the trash, and uncovered the head of one of the most perfect Rameseses yet discovered.

Originally the Temple of Luxor was five hundred feet long, one hundred and eighty feet wide, and, as before mentioned, was connected with Karnak by a double row of ram-headed sphinxes. Amenophis III. built it about 1500 B.C., and it was regarded as the most beautiful of Egyptian temples. Then came his son, Amenophis IV., who, being a sun-wors.h.i.+pper after the manner of his Mesopotamian mother, cut away the name of the Egyptian G.o.d Amen and set up a new wors.h.i.+p here. It was a brief innovation. The priests made it too hot for the Heretic King. He gave up the struggle after a time, went into the desert farther down the Nile, and built there a city and temples of his own. Then this temple was sacred to the old religion again. It remained so until Alexander came, cut his name here and there, and probably wors.h.i.+pped his own a.s.sortment of G.o.ds. Later came the Roman and the early Christian; still later the Mohammedan established ceremonies and reconstructed shrines.

We had all the old sacrifices and processions and G.o.ds and victories over again in Luxor, including the picture story of the birth of Amenophis III., which depicts an immaculate conception; an annunciation; a visitation of wise men with gifts, executed about 1500 B.C.

After which we returned to the hotel; but when the sun was low in the west beyond the Nile and the air was getting balmy, I slipped back and sat in the old Temple in the quiet, and thought of a number of things.

Then as the sun slipped below the verge, a figure stepped out on the minaret just over my head and began that weird thrilling chant which once heard will remain forever unforgotten, the cry of the East--"Allah il Allah," the Muezzin's call to prayer.

So it is still a place of wors.h.i.+p. The voice of faith has reached down thirty-four centuries, and whatever the form, or the prophet, or the priest, it is all embodied there at evening and at morning in the cry, "There is no G.o.d but G.o.d."

FOOTNOTES:

[7] _Cook's Egypt_, page 562.

[8] At Abou Simbel there are sitting statues of Rameses the Great which, if standing erect, would be eighty-three feet tall.

XLI

THE STILL VALLEY OF THE KINGS

It was early next morning when we crossed the Nile to the rhythm of a weird chorus which the boatmen sang to the beat of the oars. It is probably older than these temples, and the boatmen themselves do not know the meaning of the words, Gaddis said. One intones and the others answer, and it is in minor keys with a dying fall at the end, except now and then when a curious lifting note drops in, like a flash of light on the oars. Bound for the Valley of the Kings, the House of Hatasu, and the Colossi of Memnon, it seemed a fitting overture.

The donkeys were waiting on the other bank--the same we had used yesterday, fat and fresh as ever, and the same boys were there calling and gesticulating to their special charges of the day before. There are always a few more donkey-boys than is necessary, it seems, all of them wildly eager for the privilege of racing all day in the peris.h.i.+ng sun, urging the donkeys and yelling for baksheesh at every jump--not that they expect to get it until the end of the day, but as a traditional part of the performance. The donkey-boy gets nothing, we are told, but what one is pleased to give him--the donkey hire going to the Sheik, who owns the donkeys and lets the boys get what they can. I would write a good deal about those half-naked, half-savage, tireless donkey-boys if permitted. They and their brothers, and their cousins even to the fourth remove, who come in like a charging army in the wild baksheesh skirmish at the end, interest me.

Mounted, we led away in the usual stampede along ca.n.a.ls and by lush green fields, across the fertile strip that borders the Nile. The green is rather wide here--as much as a mile, I should think, and it was pleasant going through the still morning if one kept well forward in the procession--in front of the dust that rose mightily behind us. Every little way where we slackened speed, detachments of sellers would charge from the roadside with trinkets, imitation scarabs, and images, but more notably with fragments (and these were genuine enough) of what long ago--as much as three or four thousand years, perhaps--had been human beings like ourselves. Remnants of mummies they were, quarried out of the barren hills where lie not only the kings but the millions who in the glory of Egypt lived and died in Thebes. The hills are full of them, Gaddis said, and unearthing them has become an industry.

It was rather grewsome at first to be offered such things--to have a head, or a hand, or a foot thrust up under your eyes, and with it an outstretched palm for payment. The prices demanded were not very high, and the owners, the present owners, would take less--a good deal less than the first quotation. A physician in our party bought a head--hard and black as old mahogany, with some bits of gold-leaf still sticking to it--for five francs, and I was offered a baby's hand (it had been soft and dimpled once--it was dark and withered now) for a s.h.i.+lling.

We crossed the line which "divides the desert from the sown"--a sharp, perfectly distinguishable line in Egypt--and were in the sand, the sun getting high and blazing down, fairly drenching us with its flame. We thought it would be better when we entered the hills, but that was a mistake. It was worse, for there was not a particle of growing shade, not a blade of any green thing, and there seemed no breath of life in that stirless air.

Remember it never rains here; these hills have never known water since the Flood, but have been baking in this vast kiln for a million years.

You will realize that it must be hot, then, but you will never know how hot until you go there. Here and there a rock leaned over a little and made a skimpy blue shadow, which we sidled into as we pa.s.sed for a blessed instant of relief. We understood now the fuller meaning of that Bible phrase, "As the shadow of a great rock in a weary land." This was a weary land with shadows far between. Now and then those astonis.h.i.+ng donkeys broke into a gallop and stirred up a little scorching wind, the unflagging boys capering and shouting behind.

It seemed an endless way, up into these calcined hills to the Burial-place of Kings, but by-and-by there were traces of ruins and excavation, and we heard the throb of a dynamo on the quivering air. We dismounted then, and Gaddis led us up a burning little steep to what at first seemed a great tunnel into the mountain-side. How deep and cool and inviting it looked up there; we would go in, certainly. Was it really a tomb? No wonder those old kings looked forward to such a place.

It was merely an entrance to a tomb--a tunnel, truly, and of such size that I believe two railway trains could enter it side by side and two more on top of them! I think most of us had the idea--I know I did--that we would go down ladders into these tombs, and that they would be earthy, cheerless places, more interesting than attractive.