CHAPTER XVIII
Landing at Alexandria
LANDING at
Alexandria is
like landing yourself in a
bunker. It is worse than
landing at Marseilles; much
worse than landing at
Tunis. Naples is a joke to it. Here
on the threshold of his country, the Egyptian commences
the
sacrifice of the goose which lays the golden egg.
Egypt, having a population of eleven million people who
can live on nothing; Egypt, a nation of born valets
and
born cooks; Egypt, which has water-carriage from
Alexandria to Khartûm; Egypt,
which, wherever it has water,
is three or four times as
productive as other countries, ought
to be as cheap to
live in as Italy.
If Egypt was as cheap as Italy, half the English who live
in Italy and the Riviera would go to
Cairo,
Luxor,
and
Assuan. The English people who live
abroad, mainly in
pensions, because they have not enough
to live on in England,
would all, instead of none of them,
go to Egypt; for Egypt
is the only place where you can be
decently warm in winter
without a fire.
How wise the Italian is! He knows that if a man, and
more especially a woman, can get pension at his own
price—be
it five, seven, ten, or twelve francs a
day—he will allow
himself to be pillaged in any other
direction, smiling. In
Italy you pay almost every time you
enter a door; you can
hardly ask a question without
tipping some one. Italy is
only cheap if you go without
any luggage, and see nothing
when you get there, except
the views and the streets—churches
count as streets in
Italy. The Italian knows that
people who want pension for
seven francs a day in Rome,
and four and a half in San
Gimignano, will often pour out
money the whole day on
cabs, guides, caretakers, curios,
photographs, postcards,
cafés, and local products. Cheap
living is the Italian
spider's web. He knows the importance
of inducing the fly
to enter the web. When the victim is
once inside,
blood-sucking can begin.
The Egyptian has not the sense to see this: he allows
Egypt to be expensive solely for the benefit of a few
big
hotels; he allows the expensiveness of Egypt to be
paraded,
with the result that no one goes to Egypt,
except those who
are paid to go, and those who can pay any
price.
The most patriotic thing which the Khedive, who has
plenty of land in
Cairo, could do would be to put up buildings
suitable for pensions, and let them at a moderate price to
pension-keepers who undertook to charge five shillings a
day for pension. Five Egyptian shillings come to about
seven francs. The crying need of
Cairo is to have pensions
as comfortable as those
of Florence at five shillings a day.
A slummy Egyptian
pension, where you always have maids
of every character
and ladies of none, costs seven or eight
shillings a day.
The fun begins at
Alexandria, where you have to pay
Cook four
shillings a head (and other landing agents more),
with a
tip to the dragoman, to pass your baggage through
the
Customs, and take it and you from the ship to the
railway
station. At the railway station every pound of
baggage you
register is charged for, and, in addition to the
porter,
the man, who dusts the carriage before you get in,
expects
to be paid.
Paying is not your only excitement when you land. You
have to get your luggage off the ship. When you have
engaged Cook's uniformed giants you imagine that your
troubles are at an end; but they are not allowed to
begin
for another half an hour, till every mail-bag
has been taken
out and counted and put into carts, or
otherwise the Egyptian
would make use of the confusion to
steal the mails. When
Cook's men do come
on board they are so hampered by
precautions against theft
that you take an eternity to get
off with your belongings.
It is no good not having belongings;
you have to wait for
other people's if you have
none of your own. It is only,
when all the passengers'
baggage has been taken off the
steamer, that the procession
to the custom-house is
allowed to begin.
The custom-house harpies will not trouble you if you
employ Cook. If he says “Nothing dutiable,” they take
his
word for it. Is there anything for which the
Egyptian will
not take the word of Thomas Cook &
Son?
You will already have been waiting for an hour or two.
You will really have been on the quay seeing that all
your
baggage has been brought out of the ship. But you
are
under the belief that you have been in an Egyptian
open-air
servants' registry office, where the tables
are turned and
employers are scarce, not servants. The
servants, with which
you are bombarded, are long-legged
things called dragomans,
who assure you that they are all
kinds of servants
rooled into
one, and ready to accompany you anywhere.
Assuan is
nothing of
a journey; Khartûm is a flea-bite; Gondokoro is
perfectly
simple; Uganda nothing extraordinary; anything
as far as
the Cape is within their compass, and they wish to
accompany you back to London afterwards.
The only way to pacify them is to take their names and
say that you will ask Cook about them; even then they
go
on trying to impress you with their powers of
conversation.
As if there was any doubt of them.
There was a would-be employee named Hassan, who
wearied me to death at
Alexandria,
and showed me many
politenesses afterwards. To escape from
his conversation I
stooped to pat a friendly little
Egyptian mongrel which was
following me with equal
persistence.
“That very good dogs,” said Hassan—“follow you all
day.” We christened Hassan “Very good dogs” in my
family circle. We met him everywhere we went. He was
standing on the banks of the Blue Nile when we got to
Khartûm North. “This way to Cook's steamer, gentlemen.”
Alexandria is not an engaging city to
arrive at. The
Egyptians who come down to the quay to meet
a steamer
do not array themselves like tropical birds,
after the manner
of the Tunisian. They look more like
black-coated Neapolitans
in tarbooshes, except Cook's
porters, who have a uniform
like a Chinese policeman,
minus his pudding-basin helmet.
Alexandria has two ports divided by a
spit of land, which
was the Heptastadium of the Ptolemies.
The eastern port
is the beautiful circular bay round which
a new
Alexandria
is growing up—another Bay of Naples. The western port,
the Eunostos, or safe harbourage of the Greeks, is a
busy
commercial port after the style of Genoa, with
hardly more
Eastern life on its waters than an Italian
port would have.
The streets between the harbour and the railway station
might have been imported from Naples; they are not
what
you would expect of any part of the Golden East.
At the station Egypt asserts itself. The poor Egyptian
hangs about railways as he hangs about police courts,
and
orientalises them. There is only one post on
railways from
which he is sternly excluded, and to which,
indeed, he does not
aspire, as it would prevent his fellow
countrymen from using
the railways at all—that of
engine-driver. No Egyptian
would trust his life on a train
with an Egyptian engine-driver;
he knows the national
irresponsibility too well for that.
But the railway has great fascinations for the Egyptian.
His idea in being a railway guard is to wear a uniform
without danger, and to be in a position of authority,
even
over foreigners to a certain extent. He does not
reflect that
he runs much greater risks with his life on
the railway than
he would in the army.
The porters do not have the glory of wearing uniforms.
They adhere to the blue galabeahs which men of their
profession—that
of human beast of burden—wear
everywhere in
Egypt, with brass badges on their arms like
golf-caddies. The
profession is popular, being a
recognised avenue to bakshish.
The carriage-duster is the
understudy of the porter.
The poor Egyptian arrives hours before his train starts,
or the train, on which he has friends to meet, comes in.
He
sits on the ground
outside the station until he is allowed to
enter, and then
sits on the ground inside; he spends some of
the time in
saying his prayers with full ceremony, whenever
the
Muezzin, which sounds every three hours, calls him to
pray. He carries a bundle of ridiculous possessions, and
travels shut up in a luggage van, in which he sits on the
floor. The better classes travel like Europeans, mostly in
the second class, and the men mostly in European dress
except for the tarboosh. Compartments for ladies only are
a prominent feature, and smell very bad.
You want to get away from natives on a train: it is their
nature to crowd. And you can have comfort if you can
afford
to pay for it. The Wagon-lits Company have
admirable
carriages and admirable food. You cannot
reproach the
environs of
Alexandria with being unoriental, though the
city is so European. Once out of the city and travelling
south, you are back in the days of the Ptolemies, if not of
the Pharaohs. You are in the land of mud; the crops are
planted in it, the houses are built of it; they are more like
ovens than houses, and there is very often a whole street
of
them under one roof, not by any means restricted to
human
beings.
The splendid masses of date-palms and fig-trees make a
fine background; the pools of the drying-up inundation
are
rainbow-dyed at sunrise and sunset, and wear a
cool, blue
smile in the middle of the day; and there is
always a procession
of quaint inhabitants and animals. The
desert,
marshes, and cotton share the Delta between
them, broken
only by mud villages and saints' tombs, till
you come to a
town big enough to have a cemetery larger
than itself. Then
there may be a few mosques, even a
bridge.
But I must not forget
Alexandria.
Alexandria is an
Italian
city: its vegetation is almost Italian; it has
wild flowers.
Its climate is almost Italian; it has wind
and rain as well
as fierce blue skies. Its streets are
almost entirely Italian;
and Italian is its staple
language. Even its ruins are Roman.
If it was not for the
mosque of Kait Bey, where the Pharos
ought to be, and a
few minarets in the strip of old
Alexandria
between the two
forts, you would not believe that you were
in a city of
Islam. I never was in such a rebuilt place.
When Mehemet
Ali a century ago determined to restore
Alexandria, so that his name might be
coupled with Alexander
the Great's, the city had dwindled
down to a village of 5,000
inhabitants. The cutting of the
Mahmûdiya Canal made
Alexandria the Nile seaport, instead
of
Rosetta and
Damietta.
They have no commerce
now. To-day
Alexandria is a city
of 350,000 inhabitants, and the accommodation for them
all
had to built. A few of the classical ruins are
showing, most
of the rest lie undisturbed under the mounds
between
Alexandria and Aboukir. Another Rome
may await their
investigator.
Alexandria consists therefore of history and
unhistorical buildings.
It is like the modern part of an Italian city; it has even an
Italian watering-place at
Ramleh, a few miles out, and it is
surrounded
by water, like Mantua—a welcome sight under
the hot
Egyptian sky, though most of the water is salt.
The beauty
of these lakes is enhanced by the numerous
palms and
fruit-trees round them.
Another watery attraction of
Alexandria is the old
Mahmûdiya Canal. It is
not really old; it was only constructed
by Mehemet Ali,
but it looks as old as the
Bahr
Yusuf,
which the Egyptians say was cut by the
Joseph of the Book of
Genesis, while the banks and the
villas which adorn them have
obviously seen better days.
If Egyptians could only leave well
alone this would be an
attraction. The cafés hanging over
the waters have some of
the picturesqueness of the tea-houses
of Japan, while the
decaying villas give the effect of one of
those delightful
back-canals of Venice, which have palaces
with gardens, if
Venice only had mosques.
Unfortunately,
Alexandria
is a commercial city, and the
Mahmûdiya Canal gives, as it
was designed to give, water
carriage. So many an old villa
has given way to a modern
factory, though the factories,
to do them justice, look as if
they would soon enter into
the general scheme of decay.
You seldom see one human
being at work in them.
As yet the old palm-gardens, mostly in the process of
destruction, and
the
gyassas, crawling or beached along
the
canal, with tall brown wings or spidery masts and
yards,
keep the Mahmûdiya a picture, especially when
the sunset
is pouring through the stately sycamore avenue
of the city
bank. I have even seen a pasha's dahabeah on
it, and there
are charming seats round the spreading trees
in belvederes
over the water, commanding views of the
great Lake
Mareotis.
We went there one Sunday afternoon, so we saw Greek
ladies, very smart—Greeks love finery, and at
Alexandria
they can afford to buy French clothes—promenading
along
the Mahmûdiya. Our cabman witticised them; he
was
rather a comical person. Seeing a lot of little
boys, walking
along in pairs escorted by a master, he gave
this terse
definition: “School—no papa—no mama.” He was a
Copt
of kinds.
Occasionally we passed a splendid country-house still
kept up like that of Prince Toosoon, the Khedive's
speculative
cousin. It had a beautiful garden in front
of it,
rather in the style of the Villa Lante, with copies
of the
famous Molossian dogs of Florence at the entrance.
The
cabman insisted on taking us on to Nogha, one of
the gay
gardens which are as numerous at
Alexandria as they are
lacking at
Cairo. The principle of
an Alexandrine garden is
generally the same. There is a
wall on one side, to keep the
north wind off, I expect;
from it stretches an expanse of
refreshing turf broken
with young trees, and a gorgeous display
of flowers. At
Nogha we found the inevitable police
band you get in
Italy, making a jumble-sale of the tune, and
municipal
‘buses drawn by mules which had lured Levantines
to their
fête. For some reason, I can hardly explain why,
Levantines at a picnic always remind me of blue-bottles. The
comic cabman, since he was driving us at so much an hour,
suggested a few things we might take in on the way home.
I did not understand what they were, but I let him have his
head, and he proceeded to lose himself. As it turned out,
it
did not signify, because they gave us our regular
dinner
without a murmur, when we arrived at the hotel
an hour and
a half late; and
cabs in
Alexandria, which we might
never
visit again, are absurdly cheap by the hour.
We saw some really delightful lake scenery, and a great
collection of dust-heaps, which looked as if they had
been
evolved from a sulphur mine, but really contain
ancient
Alexandria, whenever the funds and
energy are forthcoming
to excavate it. This will never be
till they want
the earth to make another mole, or to turn
more of the
eastern harbour into a garden suburb. After
long wanderings
we entered a gate representing roughly the
Canopic gate of
the city of the Ptolemies, and trailed
through endless streets,
bordered with shops or
restaurants, according to the success
of the suburb.
Next morning we went to the Alexandrian Museum. It was
small. Alexandrian millionaires do not try to
immortalise
themselves by exploiting the antiquities
of such a favourable
site as the rich retired
Greeks—retired from Manchester—
do at Athens. The
Alexandrian Museum has hardly any
ancient Egyptian
exhibits except a few misfits from the
Cairo
Museum. It is better off for Roman antiquities, found
locally
when they are digging foundations for
insurance offices—
one of real importance, the glorious
life-sized basalt bull of
the Emperor Hadrian, discovered
in 1895. There is rather
a charming collection of little
gods and jewellery, including a
net of gold fluff which
once mingled with a young girl's hair,
and a bracelet of
matrix emeralds which reminded me of
Swan &
Edgar's jewellery bargains. There is a frescoed
Roman tomb
as fresh and vulgar as a modern Italian ceiling;
another
as impressionistic as the New English Art Club.
There are
Roman portraits, taken from tombs, painted in wax,
which
look like cheap oil colours, but are of high interest
as
showing us what the Levantine of that day looked like,
when the artist flattered him.
When Tanagra, a hitherto obscure Boeotian city, commenced
that series of nouveau-art statuettes, which tell us more
about
Greek domestic life and fashions than the
marbles of
Praxiteles—the most charming plastic portraits
which the
world has ever known—in the era of Alexander the
Great,
his new city of
Alexandria paid them the flattery
of imitation,
and the best examples of the Alexandrian
school are preserved
locally.
Egypt, the land whose very soil embalms the vestiges of
the past, has preserved the colours of these figurines to
an
extent unrivalled in Magna Grecia. Their hues are
extraordinarily
bright—pink and pale blue seem to have
been the
mode with the belles of
Alexandria. Many have lovely
faces, all have very modern heads of hair. But the figurines,
as a rule, are hardly in such pure taste, hardly so
refined as
the best of Tanagra and Myrina. There are
numerous
specimens also of the coarse comic
terra-cottas of ancien-Greek
Egypt, which are nothing to
what they would be if
they belonged to modern-Greek Egypt.
Fat round cherubs
are very popular. As to jewellery, some
of the gold fillets,
with natural coloured leaves and
flowers, recall or may have
inspired the charming
head-bands of Etruria.
We set out conscientiously to explore the classical
antiquities
of
Alexandria. We began with the antique cistern
in the Rue d'Allemagne, not very far from the museum.
It
is subterranean, about fifty feet long, and a little less in
width and height. Its inside is rather like a church; it has
three tiers of arches with stone beams across each tier,
the
top tier being pointed and the columns of granite.
The Hypogeum of Anfushi, near the Khedive's palace,
another Roman building, is even less interesting; but
it
serves to show the debased style of the tombs of
Roman
Egypt.
On the other hand, the ruins round Pompey's Pillar and
the Kom-es-Shogafa are at once considerable and of
uncommon
interest. The latter, in spite of its debased
style, is
by far the best; there is nothing like it in
Egypt.
The
Serapeum lies almost
under Pompey's Pillar. It was
here that they found the
black Apis bull, which is the glory
of the museum, in a
niche about seven feet long, five feet high,
and four feet
wide, cut in the sandstone. You go down into
a bear-pit
twenty-five feet deep, to get into the
Serapeum.
What remains of it is chiefly
catacomb. The so-called
POMPEY'S PILLAR AT ALEXANDRIA.
WOMAN HOLDING THE HUGE WOODEN EGYPTIAN DOOR-KEY IN
HER RIGHT HAND.
Unchanged from the time of Cleopatra. On the road to
Heliopolis.
Catacomb of the
Men, of considerable length, runs under
Pompey's Pillar,
divided from it by more than fifty feet of
solid
sandstone. The bull was found in the ladies' catacomb,
which does not sound much more appropriate than a china
shop. There is still a fragment of the
Serapeum near
Pompey's Pillar.
The
Serapeum, besides
being a temple of the Bull-god, in
whom the Romans,
without much sense of humour, saw their
Jupiter, contained
half of the library of
Alexandria;
the two
hundred thousand volumes taken by Mark Antony
from
Pergamus to present to Cleopatra, were kept here.
One can
imagine the humiliation, the stupefaction
succeeded by wild
fury of the citizens of Pergamus, for
Pergamus had been the
rival of
Alexandria in its manuscripts of the classics. So
great had been the rivalry between the Ptolemies and
the
Attalid kings of Pergamus, that the Egyptian
monarchs
forbade the exportation of papyrus from Egypt
to Pergamus,
in the hopes of stopping the reproduction of
books there.
The Attalids met the situation by using the
skins of sheep:
these Pergamine skins were the origin in
name as well as
substance of the
parchment we use for deeds and other
documents, which we wish to be more imperishable than
mere gems of literature.
Pompey's Pillar has nothing to do with Pompey, though
the Alexandrines “did for” him, and might quite well
have
done him the tardy justice of erecting this
magnificent
column of red granite in his honour, when
they had realised
that it would not offend Caesar, but
please his magnanimous
soul. The granite is of the best
quality, highly polished,
elegant, and of good style, and
measures with its base nearly
a hundred feet high, of
which three-quarters are shaft. It is
about thirty feet
round at the bottom and fifteen feet and
a half at the
top, and as you approach it from the decent
parts of the
city, where foreigners are hotelled, it looks magnificent,
soaring against the sunset. It was put up by
a quite
unimportant person named Pompey, in honour of
Diocletian,
who had captured
Alexandria and
murdered all
his enemies among the citizens. El-Makrizi
says that it
stood in a
colonnade of four hundred columns which contained
the
Pergamine Library, destroyed by the fanatical
Omar. At
present it is surrounded by a garden, rather
pleasing,
though its vegetation is almost entirely mesenbryan-themum,
vulgarly called
pig's-face. There are
many levels in
the garden, and many remains of catacombs,
bottle cisterns,
wells, and so on, with a couple of
Ptolemaic sphinxes to
guard the column, like the lions of
Trafalgar Square. But it
cannot be denied that the only
outstanding monument here
is Pompey Minor's pillar.
The Kom-es-Shogafa is a Roman rival of the Tombs of
Thebes or
Memphis. We went through a hoarding into a
Golgotha. I knew what the original Golgotha must have
been like directly I stood on that hill of desolation.
We
went down by a staircase that recalled the descent
to Joseph's
Well at
Cairo till we found ourselves in a room supported by
four columns, carved out of virgin rock, with branches supporting
the roof. It looked like the larder; there were bones
on the ledges, and amphorae for wine-jars; but it was
more
likely the banqueting-hall, which, I suppose, was
what the
Ghaffir meant to imply when he gave it the terse
Arab
definition of “Animal and human feast-chamber.”
Close by
there was a good well with a stair, in a chamber
surrounded
by tombs. Tombs radiated from every side of
the rotunda
on this floor. The staircase had an admirably
cut cupola.
As we entered the beautiful pronaos we saw carved above
our heads a scollop-shell a yard long, emblematic, I
suppose,
of the Long Pilgrimage. The art of that
pronaos would not
please the purist, but it was meant to
be very grand. It is
like a sculptured Etruscan tomb where
expense was no
object, and carved on a shield is the
gorgon's head, like the
man in the sun which we have on
the modern Arms and so
many of the ancient coins of
Sicily.
The authorities, who are responsible for the presentation of
this tomb to the public, have a somewhat histrionic
taste.
There is a staircase dropping down into it
between graceful
Egyptian columns, underneath which flows
a stream of
clear water of some depth. Electric lights
have been introduced
under this water
with the happiest effect—there is
nothing to equal it at
Earl's Court. I should have said that
the man who built
this tomb had certainly seen the splendid
Etruscan tombs
of Caere, if there did not seem to be equally
good
evidence that he had seen the tombs of Westminster
Abbey,
for that altar tomb in the wall, with its lions at head
and foot, looked like a work of the Middle Ages. The
situation was saved by there being canopic jars under the bier
—the jars used by the Egyptians to receive the parts of
the
body which would not embalm. The mixture of
styles
on that tomb was only Egyptian, Greek, Roman,
and
Etruscan; the carvings were spirited and
effective. They
were almost coarse in execution, but the
sandstone was of a
charming colour; and as one looked back
on it from the tomb-door,
and through the Ptolemaic
columns, the effect of that
staircase, with the electric
lights shining like lilies through its
conduits of clear
running water, was magical.
We stepped from that chamber into a corridor of tombs
on the Saracenic plan. Clear water was flowing
everywhere,
clear as crystal. It seemed a profanation
when the Ghaffir,
a Nubian, who looked as if he had been
blacked, lighted a
fresh cigarette from the stump of the
old one and threw the
paper saturated by his lips into its
pure current. Here there
was another handsome tomb with
three lunettes divided by
three columns. Catacombs
radiated from the main tomb
all round—some had never had
the marble slabs which closed
them removed, and the names
scribbled on them in red chalk
were the names of the
occupants, whose relations would not
go to the expense of
having them engraved, but just wrote
them. After all, what
did it signify in the days before electric
light? It is
hard to believe that the ancients had nothing
better than
the light emitted by fibres soaked in olive oil,
when they
went to all this trouble over their tombs. Their
ideas of
cause and effect must have been different from ours,
or
they could never have taken so much trouble about these
obscure passages. Some of the carvings of this tomb were
only half finished. This is not surprising, as experts say
that the chief sepulchres in the tomb were never occupied,
though hundreds of
dependants seem to have been buried
round. As there is so
much moisture there are some horrible
decaying bones.
I am glad to have seen this tomb. The famous mortuary
galleries of Palazzolo Acreide in Sicily may have been
something like this when they were made.
When we emerged from that fantastic and complete
mausoleum of a wealthy Alexandrine in the city's prime,
we could not help being struck by the poverty and vulgarity
of the quarter which surrounded it. It was a tangled mass
of puff-bread, onions, small cucumbers, cocoa-nuts, monkey-nuts,
fried fish, sugar cane, and tarbooshes. Its one splash
of colour was the approach to a low theatre with its
furious
posters.
I should imagine that St. Menas, a few hours from
Alexandria, which Mr. Ewald Falls
calls the ancient
Egyptian Lourdes, must be more
interesting than any of
the Egyptian remains round
Alexandria. He quotes Severus
as saying that the sanctuary of St. Menas was more
splendid
than any similar building in ancient
Christian Egypt, not even
excepting
Alexandria. Very few explorers had ever visited
it before Mr. Falls and the Rev. C. M. Kaufmann in the
summer of 1905 halted there in the course of a
thirty-days'
camel trip in the Auladali desert,
because Mr. Kaufmann
was suffering so from malnutrition.
They discovered the long-lost city—a marble city buried
in the desert sand—by Mr. Falls noticing the relief of
a
camel's head on a kom, with fragments of broken
pottery. He
ran back to Mr. Kaufmann, crying out, “This,
Charley, ought
to be the lost city!” The discovery was
made in the summer,
but Mr. Kaufmann was so ill that they
could not stay there.
However, they went back five months
later, with the permission
of the Ministry and the support
of the Khedive, and excavated
the famous basilica of
Arcadius. The Bedawin
were at first hostile to the
operations, because they thought
a big European city would
come there, and that the excavators
were digging for the
treasure, guarded by big thick snakes,
which they
themselves had always been trying to find. But the
Bedawin afterwards
became their devoted workmen. The
results of the
excavation I must give in Mr. Falls's own words
from a
beautifully illustrated article in the
Cairo
Sphinx
.
EXTRACT FROM
“THE SPHINX,” JANUARY 16, 1909
“At the same time work began on the large apse in the
centre. It was hard work before the white,
resplendent
basilica of Arcadius, supported by
fifty marble columns, came
to light. At the end of
this huge building, according to the
old Arab
manuscript, lay the tomb of the saint, the marble
grave of the patron of the Lybian desert and of
Alexandria.
And, indeed, one
day in January 1906, on the very spot,
the entrance of
a sort of cellar was discovered, so small
that
scarcely one man could enter. It took over a month
to
open a fine subterranean portico which leads deep under
the church, and our satisfaction was great when first we
deciphered on the walls near the crypt the Greek
acclamations
of the pilgrims, ‘Father, help us,
The Lord may help,’ and
so forth.
“The principal features of further work were then as
follows:
After the complete clearing of the
basilica of Arcadius and
the connecting of the elder
basilica with the holy well, the
crypt, and the tomb,
the baptistery of Menas city was
excavated. In 1906
and 1907 a part of the monastery and
one of the
cemeteries of Karm Abou Mina, with a fine old
basilica
on the north-east, were opened, and also many
interesting cisterns, private houses, etc.
“Our last concluding finds in determining this city, the
real Lourdes of ancient Egypt, to which once
journeyed the
imperial daughter of Byzane, to be cured
of leprosy, were the
baths for the sick and the
afflicted. A group of them, connected
with large therme and hypokaustea, lay in a fine
marble basilica; and in this church are yet to be seen the
two small tanks where the holy water was dispensed to
the
pilgrims. ‘Take of Menas beautiful water,’
says a Greek
hexameter inscribed by a traveller from
Smyrna, ‘and pain
will leave you.’”
All this is specially interesting, because Egypt has
hardly
any Christian ruins of pre-Byzantine times
which are not
inconspicuous and ruinous, though she
played such an important
part in the development of
Christianity.
Modern Alexandrians are often like the portraits that come
out of Ptolemaic tombs, showing how little the type
of
villany has changed. It looks extra odd in
Alexandria,
where there are police regulating the traffic like they do
in London, though they wear white clothes in May—a
thing
which I should not like to do in that
climate after sundown;
I always took an overcoat if I
was going to be out after tea.
Alexandria has a beautiful bay
between the fort of Silsileh
and the fort of Kait Bey,
which stands on the site of the
ancient Pharos. But it
is rather spoiled by a public garden
of land reclaimed
from its waters, which is innocent of one
blade of
green, and has not yet got beyond the dust-heap
stage.
Otherwise, from its bold crescent it would be like
the
Bay of Naples, with Lochias standing for Posilippo and
Kait Bey's fort for the Castel del Uovo. Once in a way
you see a European driving through this “park” in a dogcart,
with a native coachman, whose jet-black hands and
face
make a fine contrast to his snow-white
clothes and puggarree;
but generally there is nothing
more exciting than a boy
riding on a donkey, sitting
just over its rudder, and the usual
street Arabs, with
long robes and bare feet, gambling with
the straitened
means at their disposal. Our hotel commanded
a view of
this eastern bay. Our bedroom had a
pleasant arcaded
balcony which tempted us to dwell on it.
Cleopatra's
palace might have stood on this very spot, with
the
theatre behind it, and the museum or hall of culture,
which contained the famous library, behind that and a little
to the left.
But Cleopatra is as completely forgotten in
Alexandria
as elsewhere in Egypt now. Nobody tries to show you
the
place where she sported with Mark Antony or
committed
suicide over him; indeed, when you are
in this part of the
town, if it were not for the
ocular evidence of Kait Bey's
fort rising white
against the blue sky and blue sea, on the
point between
the two harbours, and a row of minarets in
the town
which has grown up on the Heptastadium built
by the
great Alexander (or another) to connect the island
of
the Pharos with the mainland, one might not be in Egypt
at all.
And in Kait Bey's fort, if it were not for the mosque,
which is its most conspicuous building, one might
well be in
Sicily standing on the castle of Maniace
looking over the
waters of the great harbour where
Athens fell. The fort
looks best from the outside;
indeed, it would be hardly worth
while to take the
trouble to get the
permesso for
entering it,
were it not that it is the site of the
lighthouse of the
Ptolemies, the famous Pharos of
Alexandria, which, till it
was thrown down by the elements seven hundred
years
ago, rose in receding tiers of pure white
marble. It was
square, and each storey diminished in
size, with a gallery
running round it to occupy the
unused area. Inside, you
mounted to the top, as you
used to in the fallen campanile
at Venice, by a ramp
instead of stairs. Horses and chariots
could ascend
it. It stood for nearly fifteen hundred years,
and,
when the water is very clear and calm, boatmen rowing
to Kait Bey's fort claim to have seen its marbles bearded
with seaweed. I could see no trace of them from the
roof
of the fort, though the day was favourable,
and I am familiar,
from Syracuse, with submerged
fragments of masonry. It
is said that the Pharos, when
its time came, simply fell into
the sea from the rock
where the fort now stands.
The bazars of
Alexandria are disappointing, except for
buying Arab cottons, though parts of them are sufficiently
Oriental and fascinating to those who have never seen
the
bazars of places like
Cairo and
Tunis.
The few old houses which remain of the mediaeval
Alexandria—mansions like you get
at
Rosetta, built of burnt
brick with loggias of ancient columns—are near Kait
Bey's
fort, Here, too, on the point between the
two harbours, is
the khedivial palace of Ras-el-Tin,
where the Prince of
Egypt holds levees for
Alexandrians. It is a plain barrack,
with a
gingerbread Egyptian gate. It has rather a nice
view, and a
garden, where his band were struggling with
Matchiche when I went to see it.
The guide was very funny. He pointed out a sort of
guard-room occupied by custom-house officials.
“Contraband
people live here,” he said, and with
another wave of his
hand he indicated a boat-house
belonging to the rowing
enthusiasts of
Alexandria. “Club for small boats,”
he said.
The new Pharos of
Alexandria stands here. When I pointed
out to Miss Norma Lorimer that the same wild,
mauve-blossomed
geranium was growing up it as we
saw on the
lighthouse of Carthage, he said: “Yes,
nicey view.” But
his English was better than his
French, because I do not
to this day know what he
meant by “Hey chassent dix huit
good for manger.”
Close to the Khedive's Palace are the forts of
Alexandria,
which
stood a short bombardment from the British fleet
during the rebellion of Arabi Pasha. The clearing up after
the battle is not finished yet; there are still
remains of
pounded bastions and English shells half
buried in the sand.
The fortifications have not been
kept up at all.
To turn from Arabi Bey, who is living in Egypt now, an
unconsidered nonentity, to Alexander the Great, you
get
a rude shock when you find that the place
where the greatest
of all the Greeks, the world's
chief conqueror, was buried,
has had to sacrifice its
site to a mosque where the ladies
of the Khedivial
family are entombed. It is a poor little
new thing
called Nebi Danil, a sort of shoddy Brighton
Pavilion.
Our guide-book informed us that no Christians
were
admitted, but the custodian let us in glibly; he did
not even trouble us to put on overshoes to walk into the
two rooms where tall plaster tombs—two or three deckers in
the Turkish style, with pillars at head and foot,
covered
with Arabic writing, gilt and bright
blue—marked the
substitution of Khedivial lady corpses
for that of the invincible
Alexander.
There is a glorious sarcophagus, discovered, I think, at
Sidon, and now in the museum at Constantinople, which
the
Turkish officials describe as the tomb of
Alexander the Great,
though
archaeologists consider it certain that it was the tomb,
not of Alexander, but of one of his generals, It possesses
inestimable value of a twofold kind. For not only is
it
the finest sarcophagus in the world in the
point of sculpture,
worthy of comparison with the
frieze of the Parthenon, but
it contains a portrait of
Alexander executed by a sculptor
who was his
contemporary.
It is mortifying to admit the contention of the
archæologists.
It would be so infinitely
interesting to think that
the world still possessed,
and had before its eyes, the very
tomb in which the
greatest of all its rulers was laid to rest.
CHAPTER XIX
Some Reflections on the Forgotten Cleopatra
EVEN Cleopatra was a fly on the wheel. For if one
regards her as an instrument of Providence, sent to
deliver the world from the prodigal and profligate hands of
Antony into the strong, well-ordered, temperate grasp of
Augustus, one has to remember that Augustus bound the
world hand and foot for Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero, to say
nothing of the later monsters, who made it their sport, like
evil gods, from the throne of the Cæsars.
If Antony had conquered Octavian, would there have been
any Roman Empire?
And what would Cæsarion have done, when he grew to
manhood, if Octavian had spared him, Cæsarion, the son
of
one who disputes with Alexander and Napoleon the
honour
of being the greatest man who ever lived—Caius
Julius
Cæsar—and the woman whom history has taken as
its type
of physical splendour.
As Professor Mahaffy says: “History preserves an obstinate
silence about Cæsarion. It is a case like that of the son
of
Alexander the Great and Roxane, whose life is
hidden from
us, though his titles to fame are not only his
superb origin,
but the gigantic heritage of which he was
defrauded, and the
captivity and early death to which his
bitterest foe consigned
him. Yet, who had better claims to
be known of all men
than the young Alexander? So it is
with Cæsarion. He
had reached an age when several of his
dynasty had not
only sat upon the throne, but led armies,
begotten children,
and engaged in councils of state. Yet
not one word of his
appearance, of his habits, of his
betrothal in marriage to any
princess, is
recorded. We are only told by Dion that, upon
their final
return to
Alexandria, Antony and
Cleopatra
had his eldest son Antyllus (Antonius), and
her eldest,
Cæsarion, declared
ephebi, that the populace might regard
them as men, fit to rule if any casualty removed their
parents. This, he adds, was the cause of both their
deaths
at Octavian's hands.”
In the same way, modern Egypt knows nothing of Cleopatra.
The traveller on the Nile never hears of her except
when he is at
Denderah, looking at the conventionalised
relief,
which stands for her portrait, on the back wall of the
beautiful temple founded or restored by her liberality, of
which Mahaffy sarcastically remarks: “The artist had probably
never seen the queen, and, if he had, it would not
have
produced the slightest alteration in his
drawing.”
But to picture to ourselves one of the acknowledged
beauties of the world and of all time, we have to rely on
the
Denderah relief and on her coins.
While agreeing with Professor Mahaffy on the shortcomings
of the
Denderah
relief as a portrait, it is worth while
to analyse its
features, which are those of the voluptuous,
Semitic women
who please the Arabs as courtesans, with
long eyes, a
well-formed hawk nose, and a curved smile.
The coin is more likely to be truthful because it is not
beautiful, and the daughter of the Ptolemies would not
have
been lenient to an artist who exaggerated her
defects.
Here the head is of a masculine, athletic
type, with a
straight, rather turned-up nose, a large
mouth with a confident
smile, and a very firm chin.
Mahaffy considers that Shakespeare is responsible for our
stereotyped idea of Cleopatra, and that, although the
derivation
was before the poet's mind, and he may
simply have
meant Egyptian when he wrote gipsy—-still, the gipsy type
must also have been
before his mind, and made him write:
“‘His goodly eyes now
turn the office and devotion of their
view upon a tawny
front’; and again, ‘To cool a gipsy's
lust’; and again,
IV., xii., 28, ‘Like a right gipsy.’”
“The Egyptian portrait,” says Mahaffy, “is likely to
confirm in the
spectator's mind the impression derived from
Shakespeare's
play, that Cleopatra was a swarthy Egyptian,
in strong
contrast to the fair Roman ladies, and suggesting
a wide
difference of race. She was no more an Egyptian
than she
was an Indian, but a pure Macedonian, of a race
akin to,
and perhaps fairer than, the Greeks.” And he
reminds us
that Plutarch expressly says “that it was not in
peerless
beauty that her fascination lay, but in the combination
of
more than average beauty with many other personal
attractions.”
In the
Denderah portrait
Cleopatra is represented as Isis.
She has a slender
figure, though this is conventionalised, and
we should
consider the way, in which it is displayed, wanting
in all
decency. The figure of Cæsarion hardly comes up to
his
mother's thigh.
It should be observed that the absence of beauty in
Cleopatra's face is not due to any inability in the
sculptor
to express beauty; for, though the reliefs of
Denderah
belong to a late period, there is hardly any temple
where
the faces in the sculpture are more charming.
Who was Cleopatra? She was Cleopatra VI., for she
had five predecessors of the same name who shared the
throne of Egypt. She was the daughter of Ptolemy Auletes,
and born about 68 B.C. She married both her brothers,
Ptolemy XIV., who was older, and Ptolemy XV., who was
younger than herself. Ptolemy XIV. was drowned in an
attack upon Julius Cæsar. She had her younger brother
and
her beautiful sister
Arsinoe (whom
she had already sent
to Rome fettered, to grace Cæsar's
triumph in her chains)
put to death by Antony. All the
world knows that she
was the mistress of Mark Antony, but
not every one remembers
that she lived with Julius Cæsar
as his mistress
almost from the day that he landed in
Egypt to the day of
his death three years afterwards, and
that she aspired to be
the mistress of Octavian when he
conquered Antony at
Actium. She was taken prisoner by all
three, and she had
been the ward of Pompey; and, if fame
be true, the mistress
of his son.
And, finally, she was the last Queen of Egypt—the last
of a succession of queens who had ruled or shared the
ruler's throne for four thousand years. With her came
to
an end a kingdom in which the civilisation of the
world had
begun, and which bade fair to be eternal.
Nearly two thousand years have passed since then. But
still there is no other kingdom whose years are more than
a
span in respect of the kingdom of the Pharaohs and
the
Ptolemies.
In 47 B.C., soon after the murder of Pompey, Julius Cæsar
landed at
Alexandria with 800 horse, 3,200 infantry, and
15
warships belonging to Rhodes and other ports of Asia
Minor.
The famous papyrus has died right out in Egypt. There
might come a time, not very distant, if the English
withdrew,
when not one kanto of cotton would find its
way from all Egypt
to the wharves of
Alexandria and
Port
Said; but there has
always been, and always
will be, a plentiful crop of treachery;
and, as the last
millenium before Christianity was drawing
to its close,
Egyptian treachery came within an ace of
murdering Julius
Cæsar as well as Pompey the Great.
It would have been the very climax of irony if the two
great rivals, who had first shared the world between
them,
and then fought to see which should have the
whole, had both
been killed like dogs by traitors, with no
force but treachery,
at
Alexandria.
These Alexandrians intended to serve Caesar as they had
served Pompey, when he was imprudent enough to dash
down to Egypt after his defeated rival, relying on a
force
which was adequate only if the prestige of the
Roman arms
prevented the Egyptians from interfering.
But the Egyptians of that day were strangely like the
Egyptians of to-day; they were too ignorant, too
inflated
with conceit to grasp the fact that the
assassination of a few
of the ruling race, stranded in
Egypt without a sufficient
bodyguard, could have no effect
on the autonomy of Egypt,
but could only lead to condign
punishment and greater
political restrictions.
They chanced not to succeed in the second assassination,
and they chanced to be dealing with Cæsar, the most
clement
of the conquerors of antiquity. So they
escaped, as they so
often have escaped, the penalty. One
cannot help wishing,
as one reads the episode, that they
had been dealing with
Sylla, for the lesson which he would
have taught them was
needed in Egypt. He would have made
even the Nile run
red. As Cæsar had only brought about
4,000 men and 15
warships with him, the army of 20,000
desperadoes, which
held
Alexandria, and the 72 ships lying ready in the harbour
constituted a sufficient force to overwhelm him. But
Cæsar
threw himself into the fortified palace of the
Ptolemies, and
waited for the arrival of another legion by
sea and the army
led by Mithridates on land. Assaults and
treachery alternated;
the one assault which succeeded was
Cleopatra's.
She and her brother-husband both
“appealed unto Cæsar.”
She imagined that her agent was
betraying her. It is
difficult to imagine him not
betraying her. She made her
way into the palace. According
to tradition, she was carried
in on the back of a slave,
in a bundle of bedding. Once
there her position, with a
man so made for love as Cæsar,
was secure. She became his
mistress, and remained his
mistress till the end of his
life. From that time forward,
even in the periods he
passed at Rome, he was seldom
without her. By her he had a
son, Cæsarion. Against her,
during this great epoch of her
life, we have nothing recorded.
Much has been written
against Cleopatra; she had the faults
of her race and her
time; but it may be that, like the mistress
of the victor
of the Nile, she was capable of rising above
herself when
living with a hero.
Mr. Phillip Sergeant, her latest biographer, in his “Cleopatra
of Egypt,”
1 dismisses as improbable the idea
that she
arrived in Rome in time for Cæsar's triumph over
Gaul,
Egypt, Pontus, and Numidia, which was in June
B.C. 46.
He thinks it more likely that she arrived in the
summer
of B.C. 45. She was certainly
in Rome at the time with
her
boy-husband and brother, Ptolemy XV., and probably
Cæsarion, her son
by Julius Cæsar, whom his father might
naturally want to
see. She was lodged in a villa of Cæsar's
on the
Janiculum, near the modern Villa Doria. She was
much
courted by Cæsar's party; but Cicero, who tried to
borrow
some books from the library of
Alexandria through
her, was put off with fair
words, and wrote of her in one
of his letters to Atticus,
as quoted by Mr. Sergeant:
1 Hutchinson, 1909; 16s. net.
“I detest the Queen; and the voucher for her promises,
Hammonios, knows that I have good cause for saying so.
What she promised, indeed, were all things of the
learned
sort and suitable to my character—such as I
could avow even
in a public meeting. As for Sara, besides
finding him an
unprincipled rascal, I also found him
inclined to give himself
airs toward me. I only saw him
once at my house; and
when I asked him politely what I
could do for him, he said
that he had come in hopes of
seeing Atticus. The Queen's
insolence, too, when she was
living in Cæsar's transtiberine
villa I cannot recall
without a pang. So I won't have anything
to do with that
lot. They think not so much that I
have no spirit as that
I have scarcely any proper pride
at all.”
Cæsar's living with her was resented, though the adulteries
of the wives of Pompey, Crassus, Lepidus, Hortensius,
and
others were notorious, and the austere Brutus
himself was
openly profligate without disgusting the
public. An Egyptian
woman was thought as contaminating at
Rome then as a
Jewess was in the Middle Ages. And Cæsar
erected a
statue to Cleopatra, beside the goddesses, in
the temple he
dedicated to his ancestress Venus.
When Cæsar was murdered Cleopatra for a moment
entertained hopes that, as he had no other son, Cæsarion
would be declared his heir. But when Cæsar's will was read
it expressly named Octavian, and Cleopatra, fearing for their
personal safety, smuggled herself and her son off to
Egypt
somehow.
The Palace of the Ptolemies stood almost in the centre of
the shore of the eastern bay of
Alexandria. The Pharos stood
where
the grand old fifteenth-century fort of Kait Bey juts out
between the eastern
and western bays. The royal harbour
lay near the eastern
arm of the eastern bay close to Silsileh.
To secure the
landing of the relieving force, it was necessary
for Cæsar
to be master of the fortifications round the Pharos.
It
was here that he was surprised, and only saved his life by
swimming. He lost the Pharos again and won it again before
he was finally made master of
Alexandria by the arrival of
his other legion and
Mithridates. It is unfortunate that the
chief tradition of
the life of Cæsar and Cleopatra in Egypt
which concerns
the world has neither been proved nor disproved.
We do
know that to prevent their being employed
against his
reinforcements, Cæsar ordered the seventy-two
Egyptian
ships lying in the harbour to be set on fire. The
tradition is that the fire spread, and consumed the famous
Library of
Alexandria, and that
Cleopatra, to repair the
ravage, afterwards persuaded
Antony to transfer to
Alexandria
the two hundred thousand manuscripts of the Library of
Pergamus. The chief argument against the report is
that
Cicero, who was a great gossip, and no lover of
Cæsar, and,
more than any Roman interested in the immortal
literature
of Greece preserved in the Library of
Alexandria, does mention
the library, and does not mention this. We have seen
that
he knew Cleopatra, and tried to get some books
from the
Library of
Alexandria through her. Surely in such a context
he must have mentioned the destruction of the library by
Cæsar, if it had happened. Instead of this he tells us that he
found her haughty; he says nothing about her beauty or
fascinations.
In the war between Antony and Octavian against Cæsar's
murderers she refused supplies to the latter, though,
with
Oriental diplomacy, she pleaded famine and
pestilence as the
reason of her refusal. After the battle
of Philippi, in 41 B.C.,
Antony advanced into Asia Minor,
and sent for Cleopatra to
appear before him, to prove that
she had not aided Cassius.
Dellius, the envoy whom he
sent, saw at a glance the hold
that the Egyptian queen was
likely to have upon the passions
of Antony, and assuring
her that she would have nothing to
fear, paid assiduous
court to her.
PLOUGHING IN THE FAYUM.
This is called the Virgillian plough in Italy, and in
Egypt has been in use since the times of the Pharaohs. It is drawn
by Egyptian buffaloes.
In Cleopatra's day Egypt
was one of the chief granaries of the Roman Empire.
AN EGYPTIAN COUNTRY HOUSE.
Much the same as in Cleopatra's time. About an hour's
ride from
Karnak.
The meeting of Antony and Cleopatra in Cilicia has become
a proverb of the luxury and splendour and dissipation
of
the last days of the Egyptian Kingdom and the
Roman
Republic. Plutarch's pages glow with it;
Shakespeare was
inspired by it.
Acting upon Dellius's hints, Cleopatra did not hurry to
Antony or approach him as a suppliant, but made
herself
as covetable as she could with wealth and
splendour and
every meretricious device for the
enhancement of her beauty.
At last she reached the mouth
of the river Cydnus, twelve
miles below Tarsus, the
capital of Cilicia, where Antony lay.
This is how
Plutarch, as quoted by Mr. Sergeant, describes
her
progress up the river:
“Cleopatra, as if in mockery, sailed up the river in a vessel
with a gilded stern, with sails of purple outspread, and
with
silver oars moving in time to the sound of flutes
and pipes
and harps. She herself, decked like Aphrodite in
a picture,
lay under an awning bespangled with gold, while
boys like
painted cupids stood on either side fanning her.
At the
helm and by the rigging stood her most beautiful
slave-women
in the guise of Nereids and Graces.
Marvellous
odours from many censers spread to the
banks, along which
some of the multitude followed her from
the river-mouth, others
coming down from the city to gaze
upon the spectacle. As
the crowd from the market-place
also poured forth, at last
Antony was left sitting alone
upon the tribunal, while the
rumour spread about that
Aphrodite was come to feast with
Dionysos for the common
good of Asia.”
And Athenæus, as quoted by Mr. Sergeant, thus describes
the famous banquet:
“A royal entertainment, in which every dish was golden
and inlaid with precious stones, wonderfully chased
and
embossed. The walls were hung with cloths
embroidered in
purple and gold. And she had twelve triple
couches laid,
and invited Antony to a banquet, and desired
him to bring
with him whatever companions he pleased. And
he, being
astonished at the magnificence of the sight,
expressed his
surprise; and she, smiling, said she made
him a present of
everything he saw ,
and invited him to sup with her again the
next day and to
bring his friends and captains with him.
Then she prepared
a banquet far more splendid than the
former one, so as to
make the first appear contemptible; and
again she
presented to him everything that there was on the
table.
And she desired each of his captains to take for his
own
the couch on which he lay and the goblets which were
set
before each couch. And when they were departing she
gave
to all those of the highest rank litters, with slaves as
litter-bearers; and to the rest she gave horses, adorned with
gold trappings; and to every one she gave Ethiopian
boys
to bear torches before them. And on the fourth
day she
paid more than a talent (nearly £250) for roses;
and the
floor of the chamber for the men was strewn a
cubit deep,
nets being spread over the blooms.”
And we have the authority of Appian for knowing that
Antony was amazed at her wit as well as her beauty,
and
became her captive as if he were a young man,
although he
was forty years of age.
From this day forward, till, eight years later, Antony and
Octavian fought for the possession of the world at the
Battle
of Actium, Antony sank deeper and deeper in the
flood of
his passion for Cleopatra. From time to time he
was rescued
from it, or strove for a little to keep his
head above water,
but he always sank back. Cleopatra's
behaviour at the
Battle of Actium is not likely ever to be
absolutely cleared
up. Mahaffy, in his history of the
Ptolemies, inclines to the
view that Cleopatra's intuition
warned her that Octavian
with his great commander Agrippa
to conduct his campaigns
for him, and his own cold-blooded
sagacity to dictate his
policy, was certain in the end to
triumph over Antony; that
even in the present campaign
Antony was sure to be defeated.
If the power of Egypt was
shattered in fighting for Antony,
only suicide would save
her from being put in chains, and
carried to Rome to grace
the triumph of Octavian. But if,
at the cost of betraying
Antony, she could save the forces of
Egypt intact, she
might be able to make terms with Octavian.
Mr. Sergeant's
view I give below. Professor Mahaffy does
not see any
argument against this in her subsequent fidelity
to Antony
as a lover, explaining that as a strong blast of
passion,
which warped her judgment.
The death of Cleopatra has been so immortally described
by Plutarch and Shakespeare, and so gorgeously and
faithfully
presented to the public by Sir H. Beerbohm
Tree, that I need
say little about it. Mr. Sergeant's
account of it, the most
up-to-date which we have,
practically bears out the actor's
presentation of it. The
temple of Isis Lochias, near which
Cleopatra built her
tomb, was at the eastern end of the
eastern harbour, where
Fort Silsileh stands to-day.
Antony, when he first returned to
Alexandria after his
unsuccessful attempt to
win back the fidelity of the four
legions he had left in
the province of Cyrenaica, the modern
Tripoli, at first
shut himself up on an island in the harbour,
living like a
hermit, and upbraiding the treachery of friends
and the
ingratitude of the world. He called the island the
Timonium, and compared himself to the Timon of Athens who
furnished the subject of Shakespeare's play.
At last Cleopatra persuaded him to come and spend the
last few days of his life with her in the old debauchery
and
splendour. They founded a sort of club called the
Synapothanoumenoi
—the people who are about to die
together, and
Cleopatra began her famous experiments
in poisons upon
her slaves to find out the easiest way of
dying. She decided
in favour of snake-bite, with the
results which the world
knows.
Antony's last hope lay in his garrison's holding out in the
strong fortress of
Pelusium, the key of Egypt, against a force
advancing from the east, not very far from the modern Port
Said. But the garrison, whether because they thought his
cause hopeless, or for another reason, made terms with the
enemy. The end came on much the same battle-ground as
Abercromby fought on when he sealed the fate of France in
Egypt on the second day of Aboukir, three years after that
first great day at Aboukir, on which Nelson destroyed the
fleets of France, and withered Napoleon's hope of ever
reaching India. It is noteworthy that though one is reckoning
the calendar in the
old style and the other in the new, the
final battle
between Antony and Octavian was, like the battle
of the
Nile, fought on August 1.
On this last day Antony showed his old courage and dash,
as he had in the victorious cavalry action on the night
before;
but his soldiers and sailors had nothing to
fight for. It was
civil war; Octavian was a Roman as much
as he; and
nothing could prevent the final success of
Octavian. But
Antony fought well, and went from the battle
to death by his
own hand, because he had heard that
Cleopatra was already
dead. From this point forward there
is nothing to add to the
splendid picture which the
dramatist and the actor (Sir H. B.
Tree) have given us.
But I must say a few words about the asp story, which
Mr. Sergeant has not attempted to explain more than
earlier
writers, though it really has such a simple
explanation, based
on natural-history facts.
The asp has been identified by most writers with the
Egyptian cobra. But the Egyptian cobra is a large snake:
a
full-grown one is a couple of yards in length, and
could not
therefore be introduced in a basket of figs,
even if a boy
could be found brave enough to carry it
about. But I do not
see any insuperable natural-history
difficulty in the story. I
see in it rather the stupidity
of commentators. There was
no scientific nomenclature for
serpents in the days of
Plutarch; so there is on the one
hand no proof that the
Egyptian cobra was the asp of the
tradition, while, on the
other hand, modern investigations
have a tendency to prove
that obstinate traditions
generally have a basis in fact.
Common sense suggests that
the asp should have been
identified, not with the cobra,
but with the highly venomous
little Cerastes, or horned
viper of Egypt, which when full-grown
is only between a
foot and two feet in length. All the
descriptions, all the
pictures, all the statues of the death of
Cleopatra
suggest the Cerastes, and if the Cerastes had been
put in
a bag, it could have been carried in the basket of figs,
without any danger to any one, except the person who was
rash enough to put it into the bag. I am convinced that it
was the
desert-coloured Cerastes that killed Cleopatra and
Charmian.
The time may come when history will have more to say
about this historical
Sphinx, for singularly few papyri of
the
period have yet been discovered and deciphered. Till
then
it is satisfactory to note that the first great temple one
sees in
Upper Egypt, the temple whose
bas-reliefs impress
the traveller most, by the human
beauty of their faces, is
Cleopatra's Temple of
Denderah, of which she was the
founder or restorer, and which bears, still perfect, upon
its
exterior her image and that of her child,
Cæsarion. Historians
and Egyptologists are at one in
saying that we must
not take this as the true image of the
marvellous Egyptian
queen, that even if the sculptor had
known her in the flesh
he would not have portrayed her as
she was, but in accordance
with some convention. That may
be as it is. But there
are many, besides myself, who
cannot look on the lineaments
of Cleopatra, traced by a
contemporary upon the walls of her
favourite temple,
without a thrill which all the Colossi of
Rameses fail to
excite.
There is no book on Cleopatra in the classified catalogue
just issued by the London Library. But one has
recently
been published, “Cleopatra of Egypt,” by Mr.
Philip W.
Sergeant, B.A., former Scholar of Trinity
College, Oxford
(Hutchinson, 16s.), which is just what such a book ought to
be. It is not unreasonably long; it is not overladen
with
notes or scholarship, but it is the work of a
scholar. To
write a good book about Cleopatra a man must
be sound in
his classics; and to write a readable book he
ought not to be
a don or a schoolmaster. The view Mr.
Sergeant takes of
Cleopatra is much the same as Professor
Mahaffy and Professor
Petrie take. He gives us the benefit
of later research,
and of course devotes much more space
to Cleopatra than
they do. Mr. Sergeant is also more
human. They aimed at
history only; he at biography—a
biography of Cleopatra. That
is what he has given us, and
he brings out the complexity of
her character very well.
Her ruling passion was to be a monarch of a greater
Egypt. The
resources of her country were still unimpaired;
she was as
rich as the Pharaohs had been, and cast her eyes
back to
the time when Thothmes III., Rameses II., and
Rameses III.
were the greatest monarchs of the world. But
she
recognised the fact that in the interval an omnipotent
power had arisen on the Mediterranean, and that it was only
by the grace of Rome that Egypt could be a power at all or
she remain upon its throne. To obtain what she wanted,
she
was willing to be the mistress of any Roman leader
who
could help her. She seems to have yielded to
Cneius
Pompey, when he went to Egypt for his father,
the great
Pompey, preparing for his conflict with Cæsar.
If Pompey
had not been murdered directly he landed in
Egypt, she
would probably have made him her lover and
placed the
resources of her kingdom at his disposal to
create a new
army, with gratitude for favours to come.
When Julius
Cæsar came to Egypt she became his mistress
and the mother
of his child, Cæsarion. And finally, when
Mark Antony
became the autocrat of the East, she became
his mistress
and mother of three children by him. The odd
feature was
that this ambitious and calculating woman was
also capable
of blind devotion, as her adherence to Antony
in his last
days proved. Mr. Sergeant points out that it
is not clear
that she meant to die for him; she liked life
too well. She
killed herself because she found out that
Octavian was
playing her false, and meant to put her in
chains and take
her to Rome. She was determined not to
walk in chains in
his triumph at Rome, like her sister
Arsinoe in Cæsar's
triumph.
Mr. Sergeant is a very impartial writer; he does not make
her appear any blacker than before for treachery,
cruelty, or
general Oriental wickedness, and on the other
hand he does
not whitewash her as Lucrezia Borgia has been
whitewashed
by recent writers. He has made good use of
his materials;
he presents a very vivid picture derived
from Plutarch, and
less known classical writers, of her
extravagances and
splendour. His chapters on the
Inimitables and the
Die-togethers
may be particularly commended in this context.
The most valuable
part of the book is, I think, the last; I
have never seen
the Battle of Actium and the brief campaign
which followed
it made so lucid. There has been a
good deal of confusion
on this subject. Actium was one of
the most astonishing
battles in history. Antony, who had a
much more seasoned
army, and a numerically superior fleet,
sacrificed his
chances by following Cleopatra in her flight.
One cannot
say that, demoralised as he was by his reckless
decadence,
he would have won. But if he could have pulled
himself
together and shown his old genius and resolution, he
should have won. For even when he had fled his fleet went
on fighting, and remained unconquered. One of the pleasantest
reminiscences of history is that the brave Antonians
were not massacred on account of the loss of their
leader,
but were able to make their own terms. They
went over to
Octavian because they recognised that there
was only one
man left in the Roman world, and that being
in his service
was equivalent to being in the service of
the Republic that
was so soon to die.
It is said that history never repeats itself; it came near it,
at
Alexandria, in
those latter days before the birth of Christ.
For when the
first Triumvirate had narrowed itself down to a
duel, with
the whole forces of the Roman Empire, between
its two
chief members, the end came with the death of
Pompey on
the seashore at
Alexandria. And, but
a few
years later, when the second Triumvirate had
narrowed itself
down to a duel, with the whole forces of
East and West,
between its two chief members, the end came
with the death
of Mark Antony on that same seashore of
Alexandria.
Egypt sent Octavian, as it had sent his uncle Julius, to rule
the world from Rome.
THE END OF CLEOPATRA
The Daily Telegraph of Tuesday,
November 30 had in its
Paris letter a couple of
paragraphs headed “Cleopatra's
Grave,” which ran as
follows:
“Mark Antony's ‘Serpent of Old Nile’ lies buried in
Paris, a
stone's throw from the Stock Exchange. An anonymous
writer makes this strange revelation, and vouches for
the truth of it. Every student who has read in the Bibliothèque
Nationale knows the melancholy little old bit of
garden shut in on three sides by the buildings of the
library,
and on the fourth by railings along the
Rue Vivienne, which
is accessible to none save the
Keeper of the Printed Books,
and in which he has most
probably never set foot. There,
it seems, are buried
the remains of Cleopatra, and they have
lain there
these forty years. Under a glass case in the
cabinet
of medals of the Bibliothèque Nationale is an
Egyptian
sarcophagus, and Egyptologists are positive that
the
inscriptions upon it prove it to have contained the body
of Cleopatra.
“The sarcophagus was brought from Egypt to Paris over
forty years ago by a French savant, who placed it in
the
National Library. After some months it was
found impossible
to preserve the mummy which it
contained, and the
question arose as to what should be
done with the remains
of the Queen of Egypt. It was at
last decided to bury her
quietly, without pomp or
publicity, in the old bit of garden
enclosed in the
building; where she was accordingly laid
secretly in
the earth forty years ago.”
One may be allowed to doubt if it was the right Cleopatra.
Five queens of Egypt had borne the name before
the last Queen; one may ask why in a place like
the
Bibliothèque Nationale of France the
inscriptions have not
been deciphered and printed; for
there is no lack of expert
Egyptologists in Paris; and
one may challenge what the
writer of this paragraph
means by saying that it was impossible
to preserve the
mummy which it contained. A
mummy which was
imperfectly preserved would have gone
bad and perished
in much less than two thousand years, and,
however it
was corrupting, it could have been placed in a
hermetically sealed glass case with powerful drugs to arrest
its further decay. The only excuse for thrusting it
into the
earth, where it was certain to dissolve, in
this ignorant way,
would be its being notoriously
unfortunate to all who were
brought into
contact with it. If this was so, and this mummy
was
really Antony's Cleopatra, there would have been a fitting
climax to her extraordinary career.
I insert this correspondent's note in the hopes that some
competent person will thrash the question out. For of
the
conduct attributed to the National Library of
France no one
could say as Shakespeare made Charmian
say of Cleopatra:
It is well done, and fitting for a princess
Descended of so many royal kings.
CHAPTER XX
The Egyptian State Railways
TOURISTS do not make half enough use of the
Egyptian State railways. North of
Assuan you
can go anywhere by them just as easily
as you can by the
Nile, though you cannot take your hotel
with you as you
do on Cook's steamers. The trains between
Cairo and
Assuan are extremely comfortable if
you go by the wagon-lits,
for you get the best
sleeping-cars in the world; and
English wagon-lit
passengers are treated with great respect
by Egyptian
officials. The humbler officials, like porters, are
polite
to every one—it is the Egyptian's nature to be polite.
It
is also his nature, however much you overpay him in
bakshish, to look at it reproachfully and say that it is not
enough. To which, from an Englishman, he expects the
rejoinder of “Get out.” Second class is not so comfortable,
because Egyptians, other than fellahin, use it themselves,
and collectively they smell, apart from their habit of
bringing
merchandise into the carriage. An Egyptian,
who might be
taking up several dozen large water-jars
would give the guard
a little tip to be allowed to take
them in the carriage with
him instead of paying for them
in the luggage van. Until
English officials took over the
administration of the railways,
Egyptians used to tip the
guard to let them travel without
a ticket.
The traveller who has merely travelled from
Cairo to one
of the ports, and
Cairo to
Assuan, by train-de-luxe, and that
mostly at night, has not seen the humours of Egyptian
railways. For this he should make the day journey from
Cairo to
Damietta, which takes him through the Delta, the
richest and
wickedest part of Egypt. It was the Khedive
who told me
that the better-off a district is the more crime
there
will be.
Tanta, the chief town of the Delta,
is noted for its turbulence.
It is not always safe for
Europeans to go there
during the annual pilgrimage.
We went to
Damietta late
in the spring of 1907. We
started from
Cairo in complete comfort. We had not a
wagon-lit—there are no wagon-lits to
Damietta—but an
excellent
first-class apartment, obsequiously dusted, all to
ourselves. In Egypt when you have chosen your railway
carriage a deputy-porter steps in with the inevitable ostrich-feather
broom, and removes the dust, which settles on
the seats like snow. We bought our
Egyptian Gazette
and our
Egyptian Morning
News and the latest English
paper, and settled
down to read till we had shaken clear
of
Cairo, with its pashas' gardens in the
maw of the jerrybuilder,
looking very Sicilian with their
prickly pears and
artichokes if it had not been for the
palm-groves.
When we came to real villages with manure stacked on
their roofs and sakiyas groaning under the shade of
lebbek-trees,
we looked up from our papers. Egypt was
there in
full force, consisting mostly of camels and
donkeys, with a
few buffaloes and others. The stooping
fellahin in their
long blue gowns, in the distance, looked
more like mummy-beads
than ever. They stoop over their
work as much as
the Japanese. I wonder they don't learn to
work standing
on their heads: their eyes and arms would be
so much
nearer to the ground.
There were many trains of camels led by men on
asses. Camels are not as wise as they look. Two camels
of
the Coldstream Guards, which had eaten too much
berseem,
quietly burst all over the barrack-yard and died.
Most of
the camels here were laden with crates for oranges.
They
and the donkeys were returning from their early
morning
jobs on a never-ending track, which ran straight
through
bright, bright patches of mustard, green, green
berseem,
and brown Nile earth in the wake of Virgilian
ploughs. The
cemeteries really are the best part of the
scenery here.
If our cemeteries at home were like these, one
could
understand the lugubrious love which our lower classes
entertain for them. Here in the Delta of the Nile you only
need a mosque with a minaret, and a few saints' tombs with
whitewashed domes, built of mud, to make a picture. When
the tombs are built of burnt bricks, as they sometimes are in
the Delta, they do not look half so nice as when they
are
built of mud. Sometimes the domes about here are
as
conical as a cypress.
Arab writing is a wonderful and beautiful thing. It can
make the name of a railway station as impressive as a
prayer.
Ben-ha looks simple—almost ridiculous when
written up in
bald English, but in Arabic it looks like a
blessing.
Ben-ha is an important town, just the place to give a new
arrival an idea of the humours of an Egyptian railway
station,
with its flocks of natives sitting on the
ground, its screamers
selling mandarins and cakes, its
women in face veils, its
effendis in tarbooshes and
fearful English clothes, but clean
and correct collars;
its poorer and nobler-looking men in
Eastern robes and
turbans; and a few flamboyant ladies,
belonging to the
lower orders of nations like Levantines, in
fussy European
garments, with little girls in unabashed
flannel
night-dresses—mostly magenta—Levantine children
always run
about in flannel night-dresses—they look like
galabeahs.
An Egyptian station is an admirable place for
photographing. There is always somebody doing something
absolutely idiotic for a foreground. I should always give
up my ticket to any one who asked me, if he had a tarboosh
on. It has the look of a uniform about it. The
personnel
of the Egyptian railways often wear no other
uniform. One
came along at
Benha and tapped the
window
with a pencil, to draw my attention to the fact
that he would
like to see my ticket. He returned it with
an elaborate
flourish, and a smile like the advertisement
of Bovril in
Trafalgar Square, which illuminates the night
with running
glimpses of the alphabet.
The broad green flats of the Delta are something like the
flats round Venice;
the minarets of the mosques suggest the
campanili, but the
fellahin are much more attractive figures
in the
landscape, and make brilliant flashes of colour. I once
saw a man bicycling on the deep sand of a donkey-path in the
middle of camels and blacked-robed women with pitchers on
their heads. Perhaps he was cycling from
Cairo to
Alexandria
--it has been done, though no one has yet succeeded in
motoring it in a roadless place like Egypt.
The Virgilian plough was in full force as we passed, sometimes
extra picturesque from being driven by the beautifully
hideous Egyptian buffalo, uncommonly like one of the
prehistoric
animals by the lake at the Crystal Palace,
which impressed
me so much in my childhood, that I did not
care for any
real animals except the elephant and the
rhinoceros and the
hippopotamus. The Virgilian plough,
which is of wood, with
a steel tooth, is still used in the
highly farmed Delta, because
the steel plough, unless the
soil is very well “washed,” brings
up the salt—which is
always present in that brackish province
—to the surface,
while the Virgilian, or perhaps I should say
the Pharaonic
plough, only gives the earth a scratch and
a promise.
Egypt is saved from many railway disasters by its
unsuitability
for railway tunnels. As its railways
always run
along the Nile or across the desert,
engineering difficulties
are few. Rails have been laid at
the rate of three miles
a day, when Lord Kitchener was
impatient to meet the
Mahdi.
Presently we came to a very large town with very dirty
streets. It was surrounded with birkets—pools of stagnant
water,
which at the same time served for liquid dustheaps,
and
had Bedâwin camping round them.
There was an enormous mosque in the background, so we
knew that it must be
Tanta, and that this must be the
celebrated
Pilgrims' mosque. The pilgrimage is in honour
of a native
of Fez, in Morocco—the Seyyid Ahmed el-Bedâwi.
He was so
struck with
Tanta when passing
through it with
his family, on his way to Mecca, that on
his return he established
himself here and lived here till
he died. The Nile
may have seemed a
very blessed sight to a native of
Morocco, who had come
across the
Sahara from home, and
across the Arabian deserts from Mecca.
Tanta is, in a way,
the capital of
the garden of Egypt.
Seyyid Ahmed el-Bedâwi is supposed to have succeeded to
the attributes of Shu, the Egyptian Hercules. He is
appealed
to by all who are in need of strength to
stand a sudden
calamity, such as a storm or an accident.
Mr. Hall says that to
avert them, people call out “Ya
Seyyid, ya Bedâwi”; and
the song of “Gad el-Yûsara,” “He
brought back the captives,”
records the might and prowess
of this hero. In the second
call to prayer, chanted by the
muezzin an hour before daybreak,
he is invoked under the
name of Abû Farrâg, Shêkh
of the Arabs, and coupled with
El-Hasan and El-Husên,
and “all the favourites of God.”
There used to be fairs held in his honour three times a
year at
Tanta,
each of which lasted a week or more, and
even now the
pilgrimage assumes vast dimensions. As
many as 200,000
people have attended it. Pleasure and
business play quite
as great a part in it as religion, except
in the matter of
fanaticism against Christians.
At
Tanta the reposefulness
of our journey was rudely
interrupted. The English of the
guard was equal to telling
us that we had to change, but
not equal to answering any
of our questions, nor could we
find an English-speaking
station official. But we found
what was even more efficacious,
a big-wig in the National
Bank of Egypt, whom we had met
inspecting his branch at
Khartûm. He volunteered to see
us into our train, which
was right at the other side of the
station.
We had just comfortably ensconced ourselves in an empty
compartment, when the guard came along, and asked us
to get out and go into an adjoining compartment, half
full
of smoking Levantines, because an Egyptian had
come with
his family and wished our compartment to be
turned into a
harem compartment for his wives, and a
ridiculous child in
the worst style of Levantine splendour
with anklets clasped
round high yellow boots. An officious
policeman interfered,
and said that we
must turn out, but the Bank magnifico
assured us that we
were within our rights in refusing to stir,
and we
refused, because the gyppy was so consequential
about it.
The gyppy was consequential, perhaps because he wanted
his wives to have a compartment without other women,
so that he could go with them. I thought we might
just as well have a compartment to ourselves; at any
rate there was plenty of room for them in the women's
compartment, into which the guard forthwith conducted
them.
There were other humours for my note-book and my
kodak.
The very typical fellahin women of the Delta
jingled from
ankle to forehead; their foreheads were
covered with gold
chains and crescents. A shoddy Italian
was pouring out
such an Italian torrent of words, that he
walked full tilt into
a pillar, which he had not noticed.
The same fate befell a
callow Egyptian of the golf-collar
type, who was gaping
open-mouthed at the prettiness and
pretty clothes of an
English lady—not a very common sight
in
Tanta Station.
This was made more ridiculous because this gorgeous young
man, who wore very light flannels, and one of the then-new
green felt hats, and pale lemon-coloured suede gloves, was
walking arm in arm with a full-rigged Arab of the old style,
reading his Koran as Roman Catholic priests mutter from
their breviary.
I always wonder what the priests fall back on to interest
them in that oft-read book. When I went to Oxford, and
had to go to chapel every day, I consoled myself with
reading the parts of the Prayer-book, which did not
come
into the services I had ordinarily attended, such
as the
Thirty-Nine Articles. This had the further effect
of familiarising
me with a subject, in which I knew I
should have to be
examined, at the close of my University
career. A great
deal of it was good food for sardonic
reflection. As it
happened, I reaped a harvest. When I did
come to be
examined in the Thirty-Nine Articles, the three
examiners
(for the first time in many years)
determined to make the
Rudiments, as we briefly called
them, a reality. Out of
sixteen men who
went up from Trinity all except myself
were “caught on the
hop” and “spun”; other colleges
suffered as severely. I
astonished my examiners. I had
read the Thirty-Nine
Articles (as being the only part of the
Prayer-book, in
which a very religiously brought up young
man like myself
had not had all his interest exhausted)
so often in chapel
that its expressions and statements of
opinion were as
familiar to me as “Dearly beloved Brethren.”
The examiners
and I had quite a witty warfare over the
Rudiments, and I
was complimented and passed, while the son
of a Bishop,
who rather bored the Fellows of the College
with his “unco
guidness,” was ignominiously ploughed. With
a little
encouragement, and reading them over once or twice,
I
could still bring the Thirty-Nine Articles with great effect
into the kind of articles I write.
Tanta is, I believe, a rich business
place, but very unabashed
in its Egyptianness: it has many
minarets and few gentlemen.
On the outskirts its houses
are no better than
Bedrashên's and have their roofs
similarly decorated with
dung cakes, casks, and so on.
Boys were bathing naked
in the filthy swamp by the kind of
market outside the station.
There is nothing more Egyptian
than that objectless sheep,
hugely fat, with a disgusting
beef-pudding of a tail, tied
outside a shop, with a little
fodder to munch. Most shops
near the
Tanta Station had a sheep. To show how little
Tanta enters into the calculations of
the Europeans in Egypt,
even Baedeker believes that the
dome of the big mosque is
still unachieved, whereas it has
for some time enjoyed a
grandiose dome with two minarets.
I was glad to get away from
Tanta Station, with its unlovely
surroundings and
its persistent hawkers of oranges,
bananas, and
orange-coloured sponge-cake. The little Delta
towns are
quite picturesque. They are rather like Sudanese
towns
with a loose reed thatch. Here and there we passed
one of
the type you get outside
Alexandria,
looking like the
mastaba tombs round the pyramids, with a
door at each
end and rows of little pimply domes on the
top—really rather
on the principle of the bazars of
Constantinople and
Tunis,
a whole village
under one dish-cover—for purposes, I suppose,
of defence;
for the atmosphere must be undesirable, especially
as
domestic animals like donkeys and pigs and goats would
have to share in its security. The minarets of the little
Delta towns are short, and might be taken for forge chimneys.
Tanta, by the by, has two hotels of
sorts (“The Blooming
Hellas” and “The Pyramids”), a palace
of the Khedive, and
consular agents of four Great Powers.
Samanud excited us more than anything we had seen
on the railway so far; it had a really splendid cemetery,
with Sheikh's tombs good enough for a minor caliph. The
cemetery was much larger than the town; it went on for
a
mile or two—a most fascinating exhibition of mud domes.
It
has also, I believe, mounds of real interest belonging to the
days when it was the capital of the Sebennyte Nome,
which
gave its name to the dynasty of Nektanebo, the
Pharaoh
who entertained Plato. With the reign of the
second
Nektanebo the native kings of Egypt came to an
end. He
was conquered by the Persians, who were conquered
by
the Macedonians. Alexander was succeeded by the
Ptolemies,
and the Ptolemies by the Roman Emperors.
Only four or
five miles from Samanud are the ruins of the
famous Busiris,
the original residence of Osiris. Here the
cultivation was
given a novel character in our eyes by the
use of the double-threaded
Archimedean screw, which
Archimedes is said to
have invented during his stay in
Egypt. I had never seen it
before. A fellah turns the
handle as if he was grinding a
piano-organ, and it drains
or irrigates the land according as
he pumps from the land
to the water or from the water to
the land. It looks
rather like a cannon of exaggerated
rifling, with its nose
just below the water and a rod going
up the middle. It is
used here because the canal banks
are low. It could not
compete with the shadûf and the
sakiya on the high banks
of the Nile in
Upper Egypt. It
has the effect of a cascade running up instead of down,
and
is quite an interesting toy.
It may be hard work, for there were two men to it.
While one was grinding the organ the other was lying
on
his belly, holding
on to the very sloping side of the canal
by his toes,
while he had a long drink. The usual ferment
of life was
going on along the banks of the canal, which
the train was
following, freshened up a little by the splash
a buffalo,
led by a tiny girl, made when he tried to have
a drink and
fell in. He liked it so much that he would
not come out
again, and of course a child of four could
not make him.
We saw the whole comedy, because our
engine was suffering
from hot boxes, a common complaint
in Egypt. I might have
been vexed at the delay if I had
not looked out of the
window on the other side, and seen the
sky-line of a
splendid Arab city broken by many minarets—
such a
fantastic outline—the
Mansura of St.
Louis.
Mansura,
which means The Victorious, received its name from the
defeat of the Crusaders here in 1221 while it was being
erected as a base for the siege of
Damietta, about fifty miles
away. The Crusaders
were defeated here again twenty-eight
years afterwards,
when their fleet was destroyed, and
their army, including
St. Louis, had to surrender. The
house in which St. Louis
was imprisoned is still shown.
As we went into
Mansura
station we passed two delightful
little saints' tombs with
bulbous domes like the Kremlin.
We had another long wait
at
Mansura, with fresh
opportunities
of observing the humours of Egyptian
railway travel. There
was, though it was a very hot day, a
gorgeous Egyptian
wearing a red-lined Raleigh cape with a
heavy astrachan
collar, striking an attitude on the
platform. I got out to
have a closer look at him, and with
the treacherous intention
of kodaking him, if I could
manage it without his noticing.
While I was waiting I
looked into the door, which was
open, of the first-class
carriage reserved for ladies. Egyptians
have a genius for
looking idiotic. The ladies were all sitting
on the floor;
babies were lying about the seats, being sick
as they
liked. Right in the middle of the platform a man
was
squatting down proudly beside a miscellaneous lot of
luggage, including articles which are always kept out of sight
in England. The police in all these country stations
carry
rifles.
After
Mansura we had no
station of sufficient importance
to have tarbooshed
people. There was nothing above the
rank of a galabeah,
and few galabeahs troubled to wind
a turban round their
skull-caps, though some had the mange.
I hope that the inhabitants of the Delta do themselves
an injustice by their appearance. I never saw so many
pock-marked, one-eyed stage-villains. But we soon
forgot
them, for we were getting into the wilder
scenery of the coast
Delta—brown seaflats with here a
saint's tomb, there a farm
on a knoll with a few
palm-trees round it, very dry-looking
country; and it must
have been dry, because we saw here
the best mirage we had
ever seen in Egypt, with grand pink
clouds playing over
it, and a white mosque with a tall
minaret.
As the train drew still nearer to the sea, the scenery
assumed a fresh charm; little cities with their mosques
and
palm groves stood out in silhouette across the
flats. We
had plenty of opportunity of seeing their
points, because our
train was always reversing. It did not
seem sure which
way it wanted to go. And so we drew in to
Damietta, a
city enshrined in enchanting palm groves.
CHAPTER XXI
Damietta
DAMIETTA is a town of forty-three
thousand inhabitants,
which has never seen a picturesque
postcard.
It is too poor even to have an Italian
living there. The
Governor of
Damietta said that no one had ever been there
sight-seeing before, except a man from
Assuan who wanted
to see rain, and
heard that they had it at
Damietta.
It
looks like Venice must have looked in the
pre-Ruskin days,
before it began to take a pride in its
personal appearance.
Damietta is called the Venice of
Egypt, and the title fits it
better than any of the other
towns described as Venices which
I have seen. Osaka used
to call itself the Venice of the
East, but several miles
of it have been burnt down. It had
better claims than its
rivals in Japan and China which I
visited. But
Damietta really is like Venice, the
Venice of
the Grand Canal, which is what most people mean
when they
say Venice,
Damietta stands on one side of the Nile and
its railway station on the other. Of course there is no
bridge. Bridges on the Nile are as scarce as horses in
Venice; and as foreigners are almost unknown, the boatmen
have a free fight for them when they do come. In our
case
the railway guard arrogated the rights of patronage, and
chose the
gyassa, which was to have the
honour of ferrying
us and our baggage across for the sum
of sevenpence half-penny
—three piastres. For this it
sailed us to the quay of
the Governor's palace. We were
more or less flung on board,
and the other
gyassas raced us and barged into us all
the
way. But the mass of sails made such good
photographs
that we forgave them.
THE CITY OF DAMIETTA ON THE NILE,
Which reminds one of the Grand Canal at Venice, and has
old palaces in the Venetian style.
DAMIETTA,
A mosque, a saint's tomb, and houses hidden behind the
stacks of palm leaves, with which the famous basket-weaving
industry
of
Damietta is carried on.
We also had a view of the best bit of
Damietta, the great
curve of
palace-bordered river which suggests the Grand
Canal of
Venice—a humble Venice tottering to decay. The
houses,
though built of wood, are distinctly Venetian in type;
they have the same arched and grouped windows, the same
broad flights of steps leading down to the river; the
minarets of
Damietta look passably
like the campanili of
the faded Queen of the Adriatic.
When we landed we realised what
Nubia and the Sudan
would have been like
without Cook? Be it never so humble,
there is no place
like Cook's office in a country where you
don't speak the
language.
But in Egypt there is generally some poor man with a
Pentecostal gift of tongues; and while we were
shivering
on the brink of the
Damietta arm of the Nile, there arose,
before us, as if by magic, a man following the
apostolic
profession of fisherman, who had the
apostolic gift. His
name was Shoukry Bey. Why he was a bey
I can't
imagine; even Beys ought to have at least two
piastres in
their pockets to jingle against each other.
The Bey volunteered to place himself and his gift of
tongues at our disposal for the rest of the day for one
shilling
Egyptian, and with him we went in search of a
hotel. His
“gift” consisted of six words of English, five
of Italian, four
of French, three of German, and, as he
said, though we had
only his word for it, “Many, yes, many
of Greek.”
He recommended the Hôtel Khedivieh. It sounded all
right, so we allowed him to conduct us there. When we
got
there we could not see anything, but he dived down
a passage
and landed us in a large Egyptian house. The
dirt rose in
stacks, and the landlady, apparently a Greek,
looked such
a murderess that we decided not to go there,
and said loftily
that the accommodation would not do; and
it wouldn't.
The Bey admitted that there was another inn, the Hótel de
France, and seemed to have no objection to our trying
it.
Its entrance was still more unpromising; we had,
in fact,
to go through a donkey-stable and up a ship's
companion
into another large Egyptian house, built of
mud. The land
lord was not in the
city, and the landlady would not come
out of the harem.
But with fine illogic she allowed her
daughters to come
out, one of whom spoke a little German
and the other a
little French. We interviewed them in a
large room
surrounded by mastabas. The daughters were
closely veiled,
and sat, with their legs under them, on the
mastabas while
we discussed terms.
The Bey had to show us the rooms, and was bursting with
pride because each had a toothcomb. The various
drawbacks
of that hotel I have dwelt on in my chapter
on the humours
of Egyptian hotels. It was no blow to us to
be told that we
could not have anything to eat or drink in
the hotel.
There we left the various packages, which the Bey had
been carrying for us, and went off to see
Damietta. I never
saw
such a tumbly place. All the houses are being pulled
down,
or look as if they ought to be, though some of them
are so
picturesque that they might well be made national
monuments to preserve the tradition of
Damietta architecture.
Damietta is all front, like the
Palazzata of Messina
after the earthquake. If you go
behind the splendid sweep
of Venetian-looking palaces
fringing that elbow of the Nile,
you see nothing but ruins
and hovels.
The architecture of
Damietta is as perishable as that of
Rosetta is permanent. Instead of good
fire-baked bricks to
defy the moisture of the climate, and
loggias of antique
columns,
Damietta houses are built of wood. At a glance
one can see that woodwork is the speciality of
Damietta.
Instead of
ordinary
meshrebiya, some of the houses
had
massive lattices of carved hard-wood like the
screens of the
fourteenth century mosques in
Cairo. And the ceilings and
eaves, supported on heavy brackets under the harem
windows,
were of specially handsome appliqué
wood-work. The other
speciality, chiefly used in passages
and under the arcades
round courtyards, was a coarse
plaster imitation of palm-trees,
rather like the fanwork
of our Perpendicular ceilings
at Christ Church, Oxford,
and elsewhere. There were some
nice courtyards, and a few
old mosques of no great size or
richness, though they were
decidedly picturesque, in the
town. One old
mosque we went into had a good painted
ceiling, a quaint
pulpit on antique classical columns, and
very fine
specimens of
Damietta
window-woodwork. Its
courtyards, like the other
Damietta mosques, were decorated
with classical columns. The noble old mansions, of
which
the guide-books speak as bordering the bazar for
a mile and
a half, no longer exist, though
Rosetta is so rich in them.
Damietta is a primitive place; it has
no drains, but a
ditch a foot wide running down each side
of the street. It is
such a very native place that nothing
which would pass for
a curio is sold in the whole bazar.
Its principal industries
are basket-weaving and silk-yarn
making. It is in preparation
for the former that half the
houses in
Damietta have
great stacks of palm-leaves leaning against them; the
silk-spinning
establishments might be in Italy if it
was not for
the dress of the workmen. As we made our way
through the
city to see the great mosque of Abu'l-Ma'ata,
in the suburb
of El'-Gebana, we were shocked at the ruins
of fine old
mansions, which showed what
Damietta must have been in
its
glory. There was hardly anything perfect, except here
and
there a beautiful colonnade. The Abu'l-Ma'ata mosque
looks
as old as the days of the Crusades; it may well have
been
standing when
Damietta was taken by
King John of
Jerusalem nearly seven hundred years ago, or,
at all events,
when St. Louis occupied it, exactly six
hundred and sixty
years ago. It belongs to the day when
Damietta was famous
for its leather and weaving and oil of sesame, as tasty
to the
Oriental as it is abominable to the Westerner:
rancid butter
is less objectionable.
Damietta fell as
Rosetta fell, by the conquest of commerce,
not of arms. Mehemet Ali killed it by diverting the
produce
of the Nile along the
Mahmudiya Canal to
Alexandria.
The Abu'l-Ma'ata mosque has the
appearance of being
abandoned, though it is kept locked
from beggars and
children, a consideration for foreigners
visiting the forgotten
Damietta. They hammered at the door,
as if they were
thirsting for our blood, all the time that
we were in the
mosque. It has three excellent colonnades
with perished
classical columns
of verde antico and other precious marbles,
some of which
are shored up with timber to prevent them
falling. The
pulpit is of old painted woodwork, the
mihrab
is unimportant. There are two Oriental alabaster
columns
in it, worn with tongues and the rubbing of
lemons, used for
the same purpose as their prototype in
the mosque of Amr'
at
Cairo. I have forgotten what the exact purpose was, but
I have an idea that the pillars were first rubbed with
lemon,
and then with new-born babies' tongues. The
sour taste
made the babies cry, and ensured them against
spending their
lives in dumbness. This did not seem to me
so reasonable
as women squeezing themselves between the
pair of columns
on the opposite side of Amr's mosque—to
show what they
would be expected to show; though some
people say that
both sexes did it to show that they were
Mohammedans and
not unbelievers. But that would have been
preposterous in a
country, where half of the Faithful
become uncomfortably
obese as they approach middle age.
That is almost as
difficult to believe in as the column,
which transported itself
through the air from Mecca at the
command of the Caliph
Omar, that successful Mohammedan
Canute.
To turn to the Abu'l-Ma'ata mosque, I should have
mentioned its picturesque old reading-desk on wooden
columns, and its little old minaret. It was very venerable-looking,
and had much beauty in its decay. As the most
sacred spot in
Damietta, it was surrounded with old tombs
of the
Faithful, some of them very odd old tombs. Near
this
mosque was a small bazar, much more ornamental and
Oriental than the principal bazar, and a very busy fish-market,
where they really sold fish, unlike the
Cairo Fish-market.
Old
Damietta was in such a
very fragmentary condition,
that we had to think what we
should do with ourselves on
the next day, to make up for
the ordeal of passing the night
in a
Damietta hotel. We decided to go to the
police-station
and ask the captain, who would be sure
to talk English or
French, what was the best way of going
to the
Damietta
mouth of the Nile. We would get him to decide what we
were to pay the
boatman, or coachman.
Damietta
seemed
to possess a cab. Sailing down the river would
doubtless
be preferable, if we could be sure of
getting back in time.
The police-captain was a very youthful-looking person, as
spruce and elegant as an Italian officer. He did speak
English very well, and he was delighted to see us. If not
a
native of
Damietta, he must have been
ennuyé: he exhibited
the usual incompetence of the
Egyptian to take the smallest
initiative. He said he
should have to inquire. We did not
know then that he meant
to refer the question to the
Governer of
Damietta. At
Damietta the arrival of English
people is an event which needs the interposition of Jove.
He asked us to come back at eight o'clock. We thought
this
meant that we were to go now, but that was not the police-captain's
idea. He was only speaking of the time at which
we were to receive the official decision. In the interval
he
invited us to see the town with him and his very
rich friend.
The rich friend was there, and squinted
horribly at the
suggestion. It did not mean that he was
displeased, but that
he was paralysed with pleasure, for
one member of our party
was an uncommonly pretty and
well-dressed girl. The very
rich friend at once suggested
that we should dine with him, but
we felt that we could
not accept such a invitation from a man
we had only known
for an instant, who did not look more
than eighteen. He
seemed knocked out for a few seconds,
but came up from his
corner before time with: “Then may I
be allowed to have
the young lady's photograph?” We thought
the best thing to
say was that the young lady had never been
photographed in
her life. But he produced a camera and
asked if he might
be allowed to take one. As it was now
six o'clock, and it
gets dusk pretty early in Egypt, we agreed
to this. The
camera was a Brownie No. I. He then invited
us to go to
his house, which the police-captain said was the
only old
mansion left perfect in
Damietta.
When we got
there we found it had all been renewed except
one room, and
that room had not been unlocked for so long,
that nobody
knew where the key was: eventually he had the
door forced.
There was nothing to show but a fine old
Damietta woodwork
ceiling which had
had measures taken for its preservation.
The best part of
the house was its back, where there
was a delightful porch
in the Sicilian style (with mastabas—broad
Arab lounges—on
each side, and terraced steps, with an
antique iron
gateway such as our own eighteenth-century mansions
have
to their high-walled gardens), commanding a view
of the
sunset, and the masts of old coasting craft outlined
against it, and the palm groves across the Nile. “
Damietta
is the shape of an Arab “n,” said the very rich young
man
with the squint, which the Arabs call “The eye of
the needle.”
The Arab “n” is nearly a crescent. The gate
was artistically
set just at the water-line.
We had already settled the question of the champagne
dinner (goodness knows where we could have had it at
Damietta except at the Governor's
house), and the exchange
of photographs which the ladies
were unable to effect. Just
as we were leaving, the very
rich young man wanted to know
of a magazine which arranges
exchanges of postcards, while
the police-captain murmured
that the admired one was not
like an English woman at all.
She was a Greuze. It was no
wonder that the Governor, as
will be seen, prevented him
from meeting us again. “That
young man is becoming too
forward,” said the Governor of
Damietta.
We looked about in vain for a place where we could get
any kind of a dinner, till our dragoman, who had been
rather
shy of the police-captain, turned up and took
us to a Greek
restaurant. The proprietor, who was also the
cook, could
only speak Greek and Arab. His uncooked viands
reposed
in a sort of showcase containing tinned
apricots, pâté de fois
gras, sardines, cherry-brandy,
cognac, Greek wine, and
Levantine whisky. The meat looked
so like leather imitations
of itself that we were afraid
to eat any. We ordered soup and
spaghetti. There were so
many mang cats about scratching
for food that we could
hardly eat our broth—too many cats
spoil the broth; but
presently some Arabs came in, and the
cats, despising the
frugality of our meal, deserted to them.
They were desert
Arabs with striped head-shawls. We
wondered what they
would order—they went in for stuffed
tomatoes and tomato
salad, and all dipped their bread into
the salad. Then two
Egyptians arrived in tarbooshes and
frock-coats. One dined
off sliced fennel and bread, and the
other off sliced
cream cheese. Then more Arabs came in
—not in the desert
dress—and ate mysterious things besides
macaroni. We could
not find anything further that invited
our stomachs except
mandarin oranges—I wished that I had
brought my tin of
potted meat with me. Our dragoman
waited upon us with
impressive politeness. I did wish that
we could do
something more worthy of his attentions. The
restaurant
itself was like the passage under Clapham Junction.
It was
imperfectly lighted, but had portraits of the Greek and
Russian royal families and the allegorical Hellas. There
was quite a nice-looking restaurant opposite, an upstairs
affair consisting of a balcony with bamboos in pots, but the
dragoman said that they never had any food there. It was
like the hotel.
At eight-thirty we went back to the Governor to get
the police-captain's answer. We supposed that he had
given his orderly, who spoke no English, instructions. At
all
events, the orderly received us smilingly, and
conducted us
to a sort of selamlik, with pale green
panelling and broad
mastabas, luxuriously cushioned, all
round it, and here we sat,
and sat, but no police-captain
came. Finally, however, a very
dignified man, between
forty and fifty, in a fine silk dressing-gown
like a
Norwich muffler, arrived. He spoke French and
a little
English, and invited us to sit down, and asked us
what we
would take, but seemed entirely at sea as to what
we
wanted. We concluded that he was the real police-captain,
and that the young man was only the lieutenant.
At that moment one of the most extraordinary individuals
I ever ran across turned up. He was a Corsican, the son
of
some fancy kind of bishop in Constantinople, who
had ended
up with being an American Protestant missionary.
He told
us that he spoke fourteen languages with equal
fluency. We
wondered if he spoke them all with as strong
an American
accent as he spoke English. He was apparently
the chief
agent of the Standard Oil Company in Egypt, and
was
astonishingly
obliging and agreeable. He detected at once
that we were
talking at cross-purposes, and asked, “Well, what
is it
you want?” I replied, “I want the police-captain to. …”
He
said, “But this is not the police-captain—this is the
Governor of
Damietta.” We made
profuse apologies, with
the fancy bishop's son
interpreting, and explained that we
had only asked the
police-captain whether we ought to go
to the mouth of the
Nile by land or water, and to fix the
price for us with
the dry or wet equipage, because the man
we employed would
be certain not to know any language we
spoke.
The Governor said, “That is all right; I shall take you in
my launch. I will send round now to see what time it
will
be ready.” We protested that we did not want to
trouble
him. “Trouble?” he said; “I wish all English
tourists who
come here to be my guests. I wish English
tourists to see
my beautiful city and province, and they
never come. While
you are here you are my guests.”
In the interval, what would we take? “Brandy-and-soda,
whisky-and-soda, champagne, cigars, cigarettes?
“Knowing
that we must take something, we said, “Only a
cigarette,
thank you; we have just dined.” We had
already had
coffee—the servants brought this directly we
came in. But
the Governor did not intend to be balked in
that way. As
we refused everything, he said something to
the servant in
Arabic, and the servant came back with
various boxes of
wonderful Egyptian cigarettes, which do
not come into the
market, and champagne. The Governor
continued his protestations
of welcome with beautiful Arab
politeness. The
fancy bishop's son translated their
flowers, and presently the
servant came in and said that
the launch would be ready
at nine. We then rose to say
good-bye with renewed thanks.
But the Governor said, “Why
good-bye? You will stay
at the Governorat while you are in
Damietta? Where will
my servants find your baggage?” We had, however,
unpacked
our kit, when we went to the hotel to freshen
ourselves
up for dinner, and did not feel equal to the
exertion of going
to put our things in again and return to
the Governorat, so
we excused
ourselves and said good-night. But the Governor
would not
release us until we had promised to lunch with
him on our
return from the mouth of the Nile.
When we got back to the hotel we wished that we had
accepted the Governor's hospitality, whatever effort it
had
cost us to go back and repack. It was fairly
simple to
find the Hôtel de France, even in a town lit
like
Damietta,
for
it was just round the corner from the Governorat. But,
when we got there, it was painful finding our way up the
dark sort of ladder at the back of the donkey stable, and
when at length we got into the selamlik it was only lit by a
single, horribly smelly, sputtery, little benzine lamp; and
various uncouth forms were lying about on the
mastabas.
Then a better-class sort of woman than we
had yet seen—
tall and dark and without a face-veil,
though she drew her
head-veil together in front of her
face while she was talking
to us—came forward and produced
candlesticks and accompanied
us to our rooms to see that
we had what we wanted.
We entered our beds, which looked
like cages, with some
trepidation, but there were no
insects in the cages, and we
soon left off hearing each
other in those funny little wooden
cubicles, which
reminded us of the divisions of an egg-box.
We had to be up betimes, and I forget how we achieved
it, for we had promised to meet the Governor at the quay
at
nine; and we had to go out for breakfast, because
our hotel
had stipulated that we were not to have anything
to eat or
drink there, and our restaurant of the previous
night did
not get up till lunch-time. Our dragoman was of
course
waiting in the selamlik when we got out of our
rooms. He
had been there since six, and he knew of a café
where
we could get coffee, which is something at
Damietta.
He could
buy bread for us, and we had brought a pot of
potted meat
in case there was nothing but bread to tempt
a Christian
in
Damietta.
He led the way to a place which took our fancy very much.
It was on the bank of the Nile at the end of the reach
which
is so like the Grand Canal. It had a terrace of
soft yellow
sand, overhanging the water like a Japanese
tea-house,
decorated with a
row of green tubs, in which oleanders,
caneas, and sickly
castor-oil plants were being coaxed to
continue their
existence. The crumbling balustrade was
of a simple, Jappy
kind.
There was coffee, but it was only black till the dragoman
borrowed the tea-pot to go and fetch some milk. While
he
was away we revelled in the view.
Damietta in misty morning
lights looked so charmingly Venetian: there was even a
man in a fantastic boat doing the gondolier stroke.
The
near bank looked more than ever Venetian, with its
curved
sweep of old mansions and campanile-like
minarets. The
opposite bank was lined with drunken
schooners careened
upon the mud. In front, lying out in
the broad bend, were
the launch that was to take us, a new
gyassa, whose suntwood
sides were still yellow, and schooners heeling over,
with their masts at lazing angles.
All through that simple breakfast we sat and gazed at the
long line of palaces against the grey Canaletti sky,
making
a broken outline with the crumbling Arab
buildings in
between. The lattices all along made blue
vertical dashes,
and the fine crazy minarets spaced it out
with charming
irregularity.
As we still had some time before we were to start, we
wandered about looking at the old houses near the
quay.
The bishop's son joined us. The very rich young
man who
squinted had joined us at breakfast; the
police-captain was
not there: the interdict must have
fallen on him. They
showed us some beautiful carved
woodwork and palm tracery
in various houses that were
coming down for rebuilding, or
by accident. There was one
exquisite courtyard which we
never should have seen if
they had not told us to go in. In
its centre was an old
carved dikka, with a young man on it
saying his prayers.
Its graceful columns had light surface
carvings on their
capitals and a sort of
meshrebiya
storey
above; it had a splendid old carved door like a
mosque, and
the ceiling resting on brackets under one of
its projecting
windows was the handsomest piece of the
famous
Damietta
woodwork which we saw .
Presently His Excellency made his appearance in a spruce
blue serge suit, white buckskin boots pipeclayed to
perfection,
and the pale lemon-coloured gloves of the
newest vogue.
We steamed down the river past those
Venetian-looking
steps and palaces. The
Damietta boats in the distance
have the effect of steeples.
In a very few minutes we were away from the town, passing
magnificent palm-groves, the finest we have seen on
the
Nile, with masts silhouetted against them. Here
there were
palm-groves stretching away like lawns, without
any intervening
mudbank. There were stray perishing
schooners all
along, and Egyptian sea-going feluccas. The
Governor, who
had stepped on board with a gold-headed cane
and an Arab
newspaper, pointed out things to the ladies
with charming
politeness, while I talked to the fancy
bishop's son engaged in
Standard oil. It was a grey-mirror
day of perfect reflections.
The water seemed painted with
palm-trees and the white
wings of boats, all the way down.
The Governor was saying
that
Damietta could be a seaport now if they dredged
the
bar at the mouth of the Nile. Inside “the water is
fifty feet
deep. Unfortunately, no one wants
Damietta to be a port;
it can do its own commerce as it is; and for the rest, ships
go to
Alexandria
or
Port Said.”
It was easy to see that
Damietta had known better days,
for there was an
old yellow fort abandoned to a few coastguardsmen.
Once
upon a time there was a large Egyptian
town here—quite a
city with mosques. The English dismantled
it at the time
of Arabi Pasha, and now there is only
a bank of reeds. The
desolation of
Damietta can best be
imagined when one knows that it is used for political
prisoners. One of its peculiarities is that in summer
every
one of any importance goes into a sort of summer
camp near
the Nile mouth, called Ras-el-Bar. In the winter
Ras-el-Bar
is only a shoal two kilometres long, with
some sand-hummocks
and old forts behind. In summer the
Governor has a hut
put up, and so do the police-station
and the post-office.
There are twelve hotels or huts,
mostly made of matting.
Three parts of the officials of
Damietta were here in the
summer, the
Governor informed us. I wondered what sort
of officials
they were. He spoke of them as if there were
hundreds. He
pointed out a fort. It had guns, he said, but
no men.
Ras-el-Bar, from his descriptions, must look something
like Bisley during its fortnight. The only dignified
things about it were the great three-masted, sea-going feluccas,
regular towers of canvas when they were coming towards
you,
bows on. The Governor said that they were just
colliers
from
Port
Said. He was a good sailor, for he took us right
out to sea, and it was rather rough. We had to come in
because the launch shipped too much water.
We did not find the
Damietta
mouth of the Nile very
imposing. It was only a
narrow stream of pale blue water
running out between
shoals. But in the distance in the
palm groves there was a
nice old town with an elegant
mosque.
When we turned round and went up-stream again, first the
innumerable palm groves with their fringe of masts, then
the
bold sweep of palaces backed by domes and
minarets, gave
a most romantic and Oriental effect.
As we were standing up the river feasting our eyes on the
horizon, one of the sailors suddenly grew excited, and
came
and said something to the Governor: “Do you know
what
he said to His Excellency?” asked the fancy
bishop's son.
Of course we didn't. “He said, big fish
standing in front
of the boat. Go and see.” We went
forward. A pair of
dolphins were crossing the bow. I had
never seen them so
well before—this boat was so low in the
water. They were
pied black and silver, and as smooth as a
shaved donkey.
We could see their beaks distinctly; they
looked like representations
of themselves in Venetian
glass; they had such
silvery bellies. Sometimes they
crossed our bows in the act
of turning on their backs;
their somersaults were most
graceful; they were as fond of
doing trick dives as an
American swimming-master. For half
an hour or more they
were almost touching the boat in
their friendly gambols, ft
was doubtless their habit of
showing off to human beings
which makes them come so much
into classical legend.
“Why do you take the huts of Ras-el-Bar down in winter?”
I asked the Governor. “Is the place flooded?”
“Sometimes,”
he said. “But it is more on account of
the sun.
Everything would crack if it were up for a year.”
As we approached the city, which in her decay looks like
a warning to Venice, we could hear the muezzin going
at
all the minarets in
Damietta. “What a very religious
place!” I
said. But the fancy bishop's son replied, “
Damietta
is not more religious than other places, but more
deserted;
therefore you hear all the muezzins.” He
himself, he said,
had been awake nearly all night with the
muezzin of the
mosquito. He was a very strange man. He had
spent three
whole months in Mecca, staying with the
Shereef, who took
him there. Having been born and brought
up in Constantinople,
his Turkish accent was perfect, and
he knew all the
habits of the Turkish Moslems perfectly.
It doubtless
prevented inconvenient curiosity and
inquiries that the
Shereef of Mecca had him in his house,
and knew that he
was a Christian. He did not speak of
Mecca as a very
interesting place; but I think that he was
a little censorious
on the subject of Moslems, for he said
that the only way in
which the upper-class Egyptians keep
Ramadan is by not
offering you the customary cigarette
The Governor had ordered lunch for twelve because our
train went at two. But he generally had it at two, so
he
mistrusted his cook. He carried his good nature and
politeness
to his guests so far that he sat in his
kitchen with,
I suppose, more or less of a staff, seeing
that the lunch
really was being prepared—I am sure without
the least
loss of dignity. He informed us of this as an
excuse for
his absence when he returned to us about one.
In the
interval the fancy bishop's son enlarged upon the
subject
of Mecca and Moslem institutions. But he did
not say
one thing about Mecca which brought it distinctly
before
my eyes. He had not noticed the things that
matter. Some
years before, I had been told of an American
in the employ
of the Standard Oil Company having visited
Mecca, and
did not believe it. I expect that he was the
man. But
it had not been in
connection with his business, as I used
to be told.
After we had waited for an hour in the square drawing-room,
with mastabas all round it, lunch was announced.
The Governor had been reading this letters. One of
them,
which seemed to interest him very much,
contained the
catalogue of the sale of Harrod's models. He
handed it
to us.
When lunch did come it was worthy of the Carlton, so
was the waiting. We had no meal like it all the time
we
were in Egypt; it was so delightfully cooked, and
the
Governor's plate and linen were irreproachable.
The menu
he had ordered for us consisted, except the wine,
entirely of
local dainties. He wished to show us what
Damietta could
do, as a reproach to the
Cairo and
Luxor hotels, who order
all their food from Austria. The menu was as follows:
I.
Damietta rice
served with chicken, liver, and curried
pigeon. 2. Rodas,
a toothsome Nile fish, served with new
potatoes and a
mayonaise as thick as butter, which would
have secured its
maker a handsome salary at the Ritz.
3.
Damietta steak and green peas. 4. A cauliflower
cooked
to perfection in a wonderful creamy white
sauce. 5.
Damietta
ducklings. 6. Blancmange with guava jelly (made from
Damietta guavas), pistachios, and
candied cherries. 7. Jaffa
oranges, Yusuf effendis, and
local blood-oranges, shaped
like lemons, with juice as
dark as burgundy;
Damietta
bananas.
All through the meal the wine flowed profusely—champagne,
chablis, choice claret, and excellent burgundy. The
appointments were French, except a rather
English-looking
sideboard. The Governor is one of
those Moslems who do
not consider that champagne is wine.
I forget what he
thought about chablis.
At the conclusion of the meal, at which he had been very
witty, and showed many charming little politenesses,
he
washed his hands after the manner of the Arabian
Nights—
a gold bowl was brought in and held under his
hands by
one attendant, while another poured rose-water
over them
from a gold
izreek. Perhaps they were only silver
gilt, but
they were beautiful pieces of plate, Just as the
cigarettes
were brought he suddenly discovered that we
must start at
that moment if we wished to catch our train.
Fortunately
his launch was there to take us across to
the station. And
so we left
Damietta, as in a dream.
P.S.—We thought we had left
Damietta, but the very rich
young man with a
squint was at the railway station, with a
bundle of his
own photographs.
CHAPTER XXII
Rosetta
ROSETTA, undiscovered by the tourist,
is one of the
most beautiful places in Egypt. As the
traveller
approaches it his hopes rise high, for the
train takes him
past lagoons, more gracious than those of
Venice, in a setting
of golden sand-hills and breezy
palms. He is prepared in
a way for the magnificence of the
Rosetta reach. For
sailing
Rosetta
has greater natural advantages than
Assuan
itself; the river is straighter and wider, the wind of
the
Mediterranean visits it nearly every day; it is
also incomparably
lovely, with its banks of palm-groves,
enshrining
mosques, and the white-domed tombs of
saints.
I shall never forget sailing at
Rosetta; we had served
a strenuous
apprenticeship for it; all the morning long we
had tramped
up and down the city, hunting out mediæval
mansions, and
the month was May, and the day was
gloriously bright.
Rosetta
1 is worthy of its graceful name—it is a rose
among
cities; there is nothing in Egypt like it except the
cluster of old houses which survives from the village of
Alexandria—a village of 5,000 souls a
hundred years ago,
turned by Mehemet Ali, with the
magician's wand of a
far-seeing autocrat, into a city of a
thousand inhabitants for
every day in the year.
1 The name has no real connection with
roses: it is derived from the Arabic
Rashid.
To match it one would have to go to the Flanders of the
Van Dycks: it is made up of old burnt-brick houses,
recalling
the Vieille Boucherie of Antwerp. The bricks
being
OLD MOSQUE AT ROSETTA,
At
Rosetta the
mosques are ancient, beautiful, and unrestored, There is no city in
Egypt which
has so many unrestored mediæval
buildings in good condition as
Rosetta.
ALEXANDRIA.
Old houses of the
Rosetta type-some of the few domestic buildings left of the
ancient village of 5,000 inhabitants
out of which
Mehemet All developed his great seaport.
burnt confers much
distinction on it, for Egypt is a mud-brick
country.
Cities have survived since the days of Rameses the
Great,
built of no more durable material than mud cut into
ingots; but that was at
Thebes and
other desert capitals,
where rain is as rare as rubies.
Rosetta, like
Alexandria,
is climatically not of
Egypt at all; it is a city of the
Mediterranean littoral;
in this favoured strip you have the
scenery, and not a few
of the flowers, of Sicily.
What of those palaces of
Rosetta? They rise from
colonnades that are purely
ornamental; their heavy columns,
pirated from Ptolemaic
temples, are
engaged, and yield but
shallow and narrow recesses—mere statue niches,
without
their marble tenants. Above their colonnades
are three
storeys, each beetling over the storey below it
with mediæval
perverseness. One supposes that this was a
device to console
the ladies of the harem for the absence
of the oriels of
meshrebiya lattice-work, from which the
odalisques in
Cairo saw the gay festivals and busy
working-days of the
Gamaliya. There is hardly one such
oriel in
Rosetta, where
all the numerous windows are filled with shutters of
meshrebiya work like the panels in a
mosque screen.
The basement colonnade must not be dismissed too
lightly; it is often of great beauty and architectural ambition.
It may have a portal, for instance, like the portals of
Taormina,
a bold rectangle which does not reach high,
with ornamental
brick work not seldom laid out in diamonds
round the
doorway, and a band of oak carried across the
head of
the doorway, engraved in antique letters with a
text from the
Koran. Occasionally the text is incised on a
panel of stone;
and the wide portal is of fine old
masonry. The door
itself fills only a small round-headed
arch, but it will be
decorated with the bold geometrical
patterns in hard-wood
overlays, which for four centuries
have been the favoured
pulpit decorations of
Cairo mosques. Straight up from the
door, in every house, a dark strip of narrow, vaulted
stairway
leads to the interior, which begins one
storey up.
Many of these houses are of great size, solid cubes of
building, like the vast mansions, which the freebooters
of St.
Malo put up with
their ill-gotten gains in the piping
eighteenth century.
It is difficult to convey to a reader
their dignity and
decorativeness, the former depending on
their massive
proportions, the latter on their singularly naïve
ornamentation. The ceilings of the colonnades, for example,
are of dark wood, with the same fine arabesque overlays as
the doors. The architect who built these walls
understood
the value of breaking up flat surfaces.
Here he sunk a panel
with some kind of ornament, there
inserted a beam boldly
carved with a text from the Koran;
every yard of the
elevation he broke with a fine course of
woodwork. In
the structural bricks, which have so
successfully defied the
centuries, and the winds and
moisture of the Delta, are sunk
other bricks,
vari-coloured, in every arabesque and moresque
pattern,
the most beautiful being the ogee arch immortalised
in
Venetian windows; but the three prime characteristics in
these houses are the overhanging storeys, the shutters of
fine
meshrebiya work, which fills every
window, and the
colonnades of temple pillars below.
Where did these pillars come from?
Rosetta was a
foundation of the
Saracen conquerors. There was no
classical city, on the
spot, for them to take over. But there
was a mysterious
Bolbitine which, some say, stood
where
the mosque of Abû Mandûr makes the culminating
note
in the most beautiful picture on the Nile; and
some prefer
to locate at Fort St. Julien, which betrayed
to the world
the erst-unfathomable secrets of old Egypt,
by the discovery
in its precincts of the
Rosetta Stone; of which anon. But
if
Bolbitine lay
north at Fort St. Julien, what about Mandur?
what of the
prostrate columns which break the roadways
of
Rosetta streets? what of the colonnades
which line the
quiet alleys, almost overarched above,
which look as if you had
only to walk down them to find
yourself in the Middle Ages
at the end? Orientals do not
pass in and out of their houses
much, so you can look down
alley after alley without seeing a
single figure to break
your vision. Indeed, if you saw them
they might well leave
it unbroken, for the costume of the
Arab is little changed
to-day from the long yesterday of
the Caliphate; and
here in
Rosetta there is a grace
not
universal in Egypt. You see men working in the
elegant
costumes confined to the
saises of the rich at
Cairo—the fine
shirts, the embroidered
waistcoats, the generous pantaloons,
the gay caps.
Here and there in
Cairo,
the city of matchless mosques,
you find a too-short street
of old Mameluke houses with
glorious oriels of carved and
fretted and latticed woodwork
in bewildering
profusion—Oriental fantasias upon the same
theme as the
old timber houses of Chester and Rouen; but
they are
fragments almost lost in the great city.
Rosetta at
the back of its bazar is a city of
one age—a city of these
noble old mansions of Arabian art,
with long colonnades
recalling the hypostyle halls of the
ancient Egyptian temples.
Their brick is of a curious dark red. Without the firing,
which gives it its rich colour, the brick could not have
stood
the moisture of the Delta.
There are few cities so entirely antique as
Rosetta, where
you have half a
mile square of old houses broken only by the
streets in
which they stand. It can but be compared to the
old part
of Rouen round the Halles.
Rosetta as a city consists of this
aristocratic quarter of
dwellings, the bazar, and the
quay. No business of exporting
and importing disfigures,
with the hideous adjuncts of modern
docks, the ancient
port, which when Mehemet Ali wrested
Egypt from the Turk
had five times the population of
Alexandria. The Nile bears nothing
more important on its
bosom than
gyassas of artisans or peasants, but the native
craft are launched, and repaired, and broken up, and
beached
along the whole front. It is the dockyard of
the
gyassa.
The bazar of
Rosetta is as
unspoiled as that of Omdurman,
though they differ as
places with such a gulf of time and
space set between them
would. It is purely native. It has
no native wares
selected irrespective of use to tempt the
tourist's eye;
it has no cheap European wares to seduce the
Arab from his
own durable, suitable, picturesque, hand-made
articles.
Here you have the native in fellah simplicity as
you find
him only where the white man never goes—able to
supply all his
wants himself, regardless of whether there is
any one in
the world besides himself or not. The bazar of
Rosetta! How shall I describe it? It
is very long; it winds
as inconsequently as an Arab bazar
should; it is open here,
there shaded by a loosely boarded
roof, or a loosely strung
mat of palm leaves, or a trellis
grown with young vine leaves.
The shops are of the larger
order, open-fronted, of course, and
each with its dikker
outside it, on which the owner sits, mostly
chatting with
or waiting for customers. The tradesmen are
those who
supply the simplest wants: the tinker, the coppersmith,
the shoemaker, even the tailor—though Arabs are
apt to
make their own clothes—with the vendors of vegetables,
of
poor Arab hosiery, and of cottons dominated by speckled
red handkerchiefs—headkerchiefs. The shoes are distinctive,
for the red and yellow goat-skin slippers are almost excluded
by a stout patent leather as stiff as cowhide.
The bazars are broken by many old houses, by mosques
and mills. The mills of
Rosetta deserve a word to themselves.
I saw
oil-mills and flour-mills much alike. The
mill would be
separated from the street by an important
and picturesque
entrance like a khan's; the mill chamber
would have for an
entrance on each side a fine arch
with a trefoil head, and
all round would have moresque
arches inlaid or overlaid on
its walls. There might be
another such chamber behind it,
and, beyond that, the
colonnaded courtyard where the
beasts were stabled. In
the mill chamber would be sakiyas
grinding the oil-seed
or grain with the same gear as the
sakiyas for driving water-wheels,
and all in a subdued
light.
Rosetta is rich in mosques, but the
others are overshadowed
by the Sakhlûn mosque, which is
very fine and old—a
mosque after the order of the grand
mosque of Kairouan, the
holy city of Africa—and the old
mosques of Amr and El-Azhar
at
Cairo, though its court is minute compared to
theirs.
I was amazed by my first glimpse of the interior, as I was
passing through the bazar, for the outer walls gave no
indication
of its extent or its character. The minaret
is old and
fantastic; its long walls, mere curtains of
crumbling brick as
blank as the side
of a tent, looked venerable, nothing more,
even where we
surveyed them from the top of one of the old
houses, into
which a friendly Arab, after chasing the females
of his
household into the harem, invited us to take coffee.
We
accepted the invitation to his roof, and took photographs
instead of coffee.
But when we had descended, and were trying to find our
way into the mosque, we did think, too, that the door
took an
unconscionable time to reach; and when at last we
reached
it our Arab made signs that the right door was
farther yet,
but we stopped to peep in, and looked down on
a scene
that reminded us of El-Azhar, deserted by its
students, for
there was a long liwân, and three hundred antique columns
supporting old stilted Saracenic arches.
We suffered ourselves to be hurried on to the other
entrance, the reason being that there was no matting
there,
and
Rosetta, having no tourists, keeps no slippers for
Unbelievers in its mosques. We found ourselves in a quaint,
small court. One side, opposite the
liwân, was formed by
an ancient mansion, the other
three had uncut brick piers
and stilted arches
delightfully moresque. In the centre was
a ruined
fountain, ugly, formless. I wished to take a photograph.
Miss Lorimer begged me not to, as she thought the
crowd
were incensed at the idea; I persisted, and the crowd
helped me. Only once in Egypt has there been any real
attempt to stop me—when I was trying to take a snap at
the
Emir of the Hadj on his return from Mecca. The Holy
Carpet
was stopped for me to photograph it. Egypt is not
fanatical about photographs: it reserves that for its politics,
which are to it indistinguishable from religion.
Not content with letting me photograph the courtyard,
they conducted me through the
liwân, to a shutter three
feet from
the ground, carefully lifting up the matting, so that
it
should not be soiled by infidel feet. They unbolted it, and
made signs to me to climb through it with my camera, seeming
to explain that I had not seen the best half of the
mosque. It
was rather disconcerting to have the shutter
bolted behind
me, with Miss Lorimer left on the other side
of it. We were
the only Europeans
in a city of fifteen thousand Arabs. I
did not know that
they had begged her to climb through too,
so I hurried
through my kodaking of that Penelopian web.
Before me was
another small court, another vast
liwân,
with
side colonnades, and pillars innumerable, more
polished, more
beautiful. From the court itself, filled up
with a tangle of
verdure, where serpents should have
lurked, I took my
photographs quickly, for I thought that
Miss Lorimer must
be anxious.
A sheikh had now arrived, and conducted me round the
edge of the matting to the far side of the liwân, to see the
pulpit of carved wood, painted, not important, and three
plain mihrabs. The beauty, the dignity,
the charm of the
mosque lay not in its detail, but in the
accumulated effect
of so many venerable columns, from the
temples of Egypt
and Greece and Rome, with their lines
mellowed or eaten
away by the salt air of the Delta. It
was the beauty of
decay, the majesty of numbers.
Another of the city mosques had a
liwân of many columns
and graceful niches, but
it was not old. At the southern end
of the town, too,
there was a little square mosque, whose
beauty of outline,
and graceful dome and minaret, are worthy
of a place on
the enchanted plain of the Tombs of the Caliphs
at
Cairo.
Rosetta is a city of many graces;
besides its old mansions,
and its undevastated bazar, and
its antique mosques, and long
quay swarming with Oriental
craft; besides the wonderful
beauty of its river, it is
green and gay with trees and flowers:
the garden of the
saints' tomb by the railway station is a gem
for the
photographer. It has sakiyas, with the water-wheels
of the
Delta, working in its streets, and it has the most
beautiful khans I have seen in Egypt.
One is not likely to forget the khans of
Rosetta; unlike
those of
Cairo and other cities, each stands
detached. Some
are built of the burnt
Rosetta brick, some are of massive
masonry. Both kinds have stately portals, with a text from
the Koran engraved on a wooden beam or a slab of stone
over the door, and generally a rich ornament of brickwork
THE AVENUE OF SPHINXES AND PTOLEMAIC PYLON AT KARNAK.
The old man in the foreground is a Mohammedan saint going
through his religious exercises.
THE KHAN OF THE RED
SEA MERCHANTS AT ROSETTA.
round it. The doors
themselves are overlaid with the hard
wood arabesques:
they open into lofty, vaulted passages.
One had four
fanwork groins meeting in the centre of its
vault, more
ambitious than the
Damietta fanwork,
and
executed in stone. Their courtyards are extremely
fine, and
often very large; they once had cloisters of
fine masonry,
but only a few arches now remain, though so
graceful and
so well-built, that they serve to show the
splendour of these
caravanseries of
Rosetta, when it and
Damietta were the two
great ports of Egypt.
One
khan had above its cloister a
clerestory of charming moresque windows. While I was
photographing this, three dromedaries were lying under
them,
and some boys were making, with lightning
rapidity, hencoops
out of palm-ribs: their feet were as
nimble as their
hands.
Few of the khans were more
than a storey high, and I saw
none used by merchants for
their camels. Hardly to be distinguished
from the khans, outside, were other buildings
used
for various kinds of trades, one storey high, but
roofed over
and with a double row of columns up their
centres, carried
right across from their doors like a hall
of an Egyptian
temple.
When we stepped out of the train at
Rosetta a few Arabs
attached
themselves to us—but none was the usual polyglot,
who
hangs about stations and quays to offer his services to
the tourist for whatever he can get, and is very thankful for
so very few piastres:
Rosetta is too unspoiled for that. They
had
fine Arab manners, so we did not drive them away,
especially since one of them murmured
Felookah, and the
other,
Antika, the two commodities which we happened to
want. The
antika man
showed intelligence; finding that
cloistered
khans and colonnaded mansions of
mediæval
Arabs for some inscrutable reason seemed to
interest me—he
conducted me to several admirable
specimens. The
felookah man held grimly on, for three
hours or more, for what
must have appeared to him mere
waste of time. He reaped
his reward, for when we had
exhausted the city we determined
to eat our lunch, and
spend the rest of our day at
Rosetta, on the Nile. We naturally
took his
felookah after the
sanitary officer—whose nationality we did not discover,
but
who spoke a certain amount of English—had reduced
his
demands from six shillings to two.
Our lunch had been consigned, for safety, to the assistant
station-master's safe, and, when we had fetched it from
the
station, we stepped gleefully on board our stout
felookah,
helped
with Arab courtesy by the two picturesque boatmen
in dark
red galabeahs.
The moment we pushed out the spell began. The boat
heeled half way over with the fresh breeze, the blue
water
rushed hissing past us as we flew over to the
farther shore,
where the outline of the palm groves was
broken by a graceful
villa, the retreat of some pasha, and
two of the white domes,
which mark the tombs of saints
(and secure the success of
any picture). Four wild-looking
Arabs commenced shouting,
and made a rush for the boat—as
I guessed with no feller
intent than to secure a free
passage to the farther shore.
They did not wait for the
boat to put in, they waded out, in
Egyptian fashion, and
clambered on board. As we had a
nice fresh breeze we
cruised up and down, while we ate our
lunch and
photographed mosques and tombs of saints, and
felookahs with great white bellying
sails. At the end of a
mile of blue water to the north was
a factory, built in such
an open, pleasing way that in my
photographs it will be
taken for an Egyptian temple. To
the south the river contracted,
with high banks of sand,
bold enough for
Assuan,
and one dear little mosque nestling under the hill,
and
another with a soaring minaret down on the river
edge, at the
point of the picture—I think the most
beautiful effect we
have seen on the river.
Rosetta itself, with its tall, old
mansions and all its fantastic minarets and its fringe of
quaint
native craft drawn up on the steep bank, made a
delightful
picture. Whichever way we tacked, some
vision of pure
beauty met our eyes on that sky-blue lake
with its quaint
Oriental setting. The lunch we had brought
from the hotel
was not for such surroundings. We gave all
those savoury
viands to the Arab boatmen, who had never
known such a
banquet. They gave
us their bread in exchange, and Arab
bread with pâté de
fois gras, washed down by good wine and
nice cold
soda-water, was good picnic food.
Then we allowed the boatmen to land us at the Mosque
Point, strangely like the landing by the old church of
the
weird Campo Santo at Venice on that lonely isle.
The
mosques were simple but charming; the river bank
was
shady with tall palms. We climbed the cluster of
little
golden hills where tradition puts that
mysterious city of
Bolbitine. That may be or may not be.
Our eyes were
not for it; we looked northwards where the
Nile winds
into the sea—the Nile which we had seen from
its birth,
where the White Nile and the Blue Nile meet, to
the point
when it forks again into the Delta—the Nile, the
other
half of which we had seen lose itself in the
Mediterranean
at
Damietta. On the left bank lay Fort St. Julien, which
played such a dramatic part in the story of Egypt. The
Rosetta Stone was found at Fort St.
Julien by the French
conquerors of Egypt digging to lay
the foundations of the
fort. Its existence there was
shrouded with mystery, for
no other remains were found to
keep in countenance so
important a monument. There was no
Bolbitine, but the
Rosetta Stone, in the precincts of
Fort St. Julien. Nor
did the dramatic end here, for when
the French conquerors
in their turn were conquered by the
English, and forced to
evacuate Egypt, the surrender of
the trilingual decree, written
in stone by the Pharaohs,
was ceded as a trophy of victory.
CHAPTER XXIII
Abûkir and the Battle of the Nile
THERE is no spot in all Egypt which has the same
significance to the Englishman as Abûkir, for here were
dealt the blows by sea and land, but for which Egypt would to-day,
as Algeria, be a department of France. To-day we could
regard such a contingency with more equanimity than in
the
closing years of the nineteenth century, for
France is a nation
that no longer pursues a policy of
pin-pricks against England,
though there are individual
Frenchmen in Egypt who lose
no opportunity of breeding
trouble for England. To-day we
regard Nelson's and
Abercromby's victories in another light,
as the first
blood drawn in the long fight-to-a-finish between
England
and Napoleon, rather than between England and
France. With
Abercromby at Abûkir I shall not linger long.
I shall only
point out the coincidence that the man who
shattered
France's dreams of Empire in old Egypt was a
single-battle
man, carried home from his victory to die, like
Wolfe, who
struck down for ever, on the plains of Quebec,
the lilies
that had waved for two hundred years in the new
France
which we call Canada.
Though Abercromby drove the French out of Egypt and
Nelson did not, it would be idle to pretend that his
victory,
which takes its name from Abûkir, is of the
same significance
as Nelson's in Abûkir Bay; for that was
the superlative
Battle of the Nile, which was the
foundation of England's
position as the greatest sea-power
in history.
I had the proud story of the battle related to me again at
Abûkir by a captain in the Italian army, who told me that
his
sympathies were with the Egyptian Nationalists,
and was,
therefore, not
bitten with English prestige. He could not find
words
sufficient to express his admiration of Nelson. “I can
only say,” he said, “that there could never be such a sailor
again.”
I own that I was consumed with curiosity as the train, which,
for some unfathomable reason, starts from a suburb
some
miles out of
Alexandria, carried me towards Abûkir. I will
not describe the journey's beauties as you glide between the
fresh-water lake of
Ramleh, like
the sparkle of champagne in
a thirsty land, on one side,
and a shady palm grove on the
other. Before you come to
Abûkir there is desert, but
the deserts of the
Mediterranean littoral are not like the
deserts of the
Nile Valley; for here in places fine palm-trees
spring
from the golden sand, witnessing to lurking moisture.
Just
before the station of Abûkir the train plunges into sand-hummocks,
with a large encampment of very tidy Bedouins
amid the dwarf prickly pears, which are a mass of
yellow
blossom in May. As I stepped out of the train
my heart
sank within me, for I could see nothing but
dust-heapy sand-hummocks,
and the poor little hotel, which
had not had the
courage to open. But the usual Arab, with
a smattering of
all languages, appeared as if he had
arisen from the earth at
the summons of a genie, and led
us sharp down to the right.
Then an enchanting scene broke upon my eyes. A deep,
blue roadstead, with a fringe of fishing
felookahs on a grassy
shore, was in
front of me; the old yellow fort of Abûkir rose
high on
the left, connected by a dotted line of reefs with
Nelson's Island, while on my right was a palm grove, with a
gay little minaret towering over it, and the golden blossoms
of the dwarf prickly pears spreading over the sand in
front of
it, like the Beard of Jove on the sands of the
Bay of Naples.
I could just see through the trees the fort
on the other brow
of the bay, and the pale-blue line of
coast stretching away to
the
Rosetta mouth of the Nile. The colouring was
perfect.
I turned my footsteps instinctively towards the fort on the
Abûkir headland crowning the termination of the high
ridge
on which the village stands. The slopes of the
ridge presented
a blessed sight, for they were covered
with wild
flowers—more wild
flowers than all we had seen in Egypt
put together,
especially the dwarf mauve unscented wild stock,
the
bright blue alkamet, a gay and delicate heath, and that
dwarf prickly pear.
The calmness of the roadstead, in which the French met
their fate a hundred and ten years to a day before the
night
on which I write these words, was shown by the
stillness of
the dark-blue mirror as we came upon it at
sunset, though
we could hear the surf breaking round the
head. The picturesque
fort, with its two crumbling moats
and its dismantled
guns, and its polygonal tower of poor,
rough masonry, looked
as if it might be of any age. We
passed in through the
vaulted gateway, unchallenged. The
little houses for barracks,
which ring the enceinte
inside, were garrisoned only by native
women and a swarm
of children. It looked such a deserted
place, with its old
mortars and rusty Armstrongs. We
seemed to be back at
Syracuse in the castle of Maniace,
which guards the mouth
of the Great Harbour, as we walked
on the wide ramparts
with dwarf stocks spreading their
bright flowers over the
old masonry, and the carriages of the
guns just as they do
in the Sicilian Castle. It was all so
like Syracuse, for
the line of reefs which connected the fort
with Nelson's
Island recalled irresistibly the more famous
reefs of the
Marble Harbour of Dionysius at the ancient
capital of
Sicily. This was a good point for taking in the
lie of the
battlefield, if one may use such a term of water.
The
roadstead of Abûkir has the outline of a fret-saw —the
French fleet being on the line of the actual saw and the land
taking the form of the steel bow which holds the saw .
There is a fort at each end of the bow, the left-hand
point
from the sea being a very bold object in the
landscape, at
the end of its high ridge, continued in
almost a straight line
by a succession of reefs to
Nelson's Island, which also rises
boldly out of the water.
It cannot be said that Admiral Brueys, the French
Commander-in-Chief, took, as much pains about securing his
position as the fearless Nelson would have taken. The
semicircle of high ground, which encloses the roadstead, was
THE CASTLE OF ABûKIR AND THE SCENE OF THE BATTLE OF
THE NILE.
The sea beyond is Abûkir Bay, in which Nelson won the
Battle of the Nile. The French held this castle during the
battle.
A FELLAH'S FARM NEAR KARNAK.
In the foreground are a pair of baby buffaloes.
not of the same
value in supporting the fleet as it would be
nowadays, for
the guns of the Nelsonic era were not like
ours, and the
French fleet had to lie three miles from the
shore on
account of the shallowness of the coast water. But
Brueys,
as Nelson divined from the rough chart taken from
a prize,
which was all he had to guide him in the most
daring piece
of seamanship in the whole history of the world,
had not
anchored as close to the shoal water as he might
have done
either on the side or at the head of his column.
Otherwise
Nelson could never have executed his unutterably
daring
manœuvre of penetrating between the French and the
shore.
And instead of anchoring his ships so close to each
other
that his line could not be pierced, he anchored them
five
hundred yards apart. The skilled eyes of Nelson and
his
captains took in the points of the situation at a glance.
“Where a French ship can swing,” said Nelson, “an English
ship can pass,” or words to that effect; and proceeded to
advance to the task, with his own ship in the centre of his
line, so as to be in the best position for adapting the attack
to circumstances. To show the full daring of the attack,
I
must recall a few facts of the history of that
eventful day.
It was at a quarter to three in the afternoon of August I,
1798, that the mast-head-man of the
Zealous discovered the
long-sought-for enemy lying in Abûkir Bay, fifteen miles east
of
Alexandria. The
enemy was so distant that Nelson knew
he could not reach
them till nightfall, and that he would not
only have to
fight the battle in the dark, but that some of
his ships
would have to take up their positions in the dark,
with
hardly anything to guide them but their knowledge
of the
margin, which a bad seaman like the French admiral
would
allow himself. Each side had thirteen ships, but
Nelson's
were all two-deckers, and some of the French were
three-deckers, so their preponderance in the number of guns
and the weight of metal was enormous. Further, only ten of
Nelson's thirteen ships were with him. Two of them,
the
Alexander and the
Swiftsure, were a dozen miles to leeward,
doing frigate's duty; and the
Culloden, captained by
Troubridge,
the finest sailor in the fleet after Nelson, was
seven miles to
windward, towing a prize. It was almost
too much to expect
of mortal man to make the attack that
night, short of
three of his best ships, and facing the awful
perils of
penetrating between a hostile fleet and a shoaling
shore,
almost uncharted, as darkness fell. But Nelson saw
it in
a different light. “The admiral,” said Berry, who was
so
long his flag-captain, “viewed the obstacles with the eye
of a seaman determined to attack.” To wait for the next
morning was to give the French admiral time to correct some
of his errors. He was almost certain to be unprepared for
an attack that night. It mattered not that there was no
time for Nelson to hold a council of war with his captains;
they had discussed the whole situation so often before, that,
when called upon to give battle, in unknown waters in
the
dusk, without previous consultation with their
admiral, they
were all competent for the task. One shines
with a special
glory, Captain Foley; for it was Foley who
said to himself, as
he led the line, with Hood in the
Zealous almost abreast of
him, that the French would not be so ready for action
on
the side protected by the shore; and this fired him
to lead
inside the French line. Nelson had perforce left
the course
of the fleet to the van-ships, as his chart was
such a rough
one. The awful carnage on the French ships at
the Battle
of the Nile testifies to the perspicacity of
admiral and
captain. Brueys, when the signal of the
approach of the
English was made in the afternoon, was not
properly cleared
for action. A great deal of furniture and
partitions, and other
woodwork deadly for splinters, was
encumbering his decks.
As Foley contemplated, he did not
throw them overboard,
but stowed them on the side of the
ships protected by the
shore, making the handling of the
guns on that side more
difficult, and exceedingly
dangerous.
The English took a wide course round Nelson's Island and
stood in, between the sandbanks and the mudbanks,
close
to the head of the French line. The wind was
blowing down
the line, which enabled him to execute with
precision the
manœuvre he desired. It was at half-past
five that Nelson
hoisted his signal for line of battle.
But in spite of that, and
of the French fire,
they sailed in with the greatest deliberation—all
except
Troubridge in the
Culloden, who, cutting
his
prize adrift, was in such a hurry to take part in
the battle
that he grounded on the edge of a shoal, and
lay there pounding
heavily till the next morning. The
little
Leander, of fifty
guns, and the brig
Mutine, strove
heroically to tug him off;
but Troubridge saw that it was
vain, and ordered the
Leander
to take her place in the battle. One thing he could
do—by
dint of signal and lantern he kept the
Alexander and the
Swiftsure from sharing his fate, and
saved them for Nelson.
Meanwhile Nelson executed his ideal manœuvre of throwing
the whole of his fleet on a portion of the fleet of an
enemy
less skilled in seamanship. His was the sixth
ship, and
instead of following the first five inside the
French line, he
altered his course, and led the remaining
ships outside the
line, laying his own ship, the
Vanguard, within a pistol-shot
of the
Spartiate, the
third ship in the French line. The first
two were already
shattered. The
Zealous had dismasted
the
Guerrier within ten minutes; the
Goliath and the
Audacious
had riddled the
Conquérant with their broadsides. As the
other
English ships came up, each was to lay itself alongside
the first French ship it came to; but two of them, the
Bellerophon and the
Majestic, were carried down the line, the
Bellerophon fetching up against the
gigantic
L'Orient, which
had a hundred and twenty guns against her seventy-four, and
a still greater inequality in the size of the guns.
Their
failure to take their places in the concentrated
British attack
on the French van caused very great loss in
killed and
wounded, not only on the
Bellerophon, exposed to the terrific
fire of
L'Orient, but on Nelson's own
ship, the
Vanguard,
which, while she was fighting the
Spartiate, had her bows
raked by the
Aquilon, which was for awhile unengaged.
The
actual firing began at half-past six; the
Guerrier's masts
were
all shot away before sundown, a quarter of an hour
later.
None of the ships engaged shifted their positions until
after eight. Just as the
Bellerophon,
unable to resist the fire
of
L'Orient at close quarters any longer, had cut her
cable
and hauled off, the
Alexander and the
Swiftsure and the
little
Leander, three of the English ships
which had been
delayed, sailed up. The
Leander, only a fifty-gun ship, threw
herself across the bows of two great three-deckers, the
Franklin and the mighty
L'Orient, with consummate skill,
so
as to make the most of her feeble battery by raking them.
The captains of the
Alexander and the
Swiftsure threw themselves
grimly upon
L'Orient,
already badly mauled by the
Bellerophon before the latter had been
compelled to relinquish
the unequal fight. The
Swiftsure anchored outside the line,
where her captain could divide his fire between the
Franklin
and
L'Orient. The
Alexander sailed right under the
stern
of
L'Orient
and anchored close to her inner quarter. In less
than an
hour
L'Orient was on fire. Under the
terrible
cannonade of the two ships all attempts to
put the fire out
were unavailing. At a quarter to ten
L'Orient blew up, to
the infinite danger of the boats of the British ships, who were
trying to save her crew. Nelson, meanwhile, had been
so
badly wounded that his captains were compelled to
fight out
the remainder of the action on their own
initiative. It was
due to this fact that the three rear
French ships were left
unengaged, and sailed away on the
following morning when
day broke and showed the condition
of the rest of their fleet.
They could not be pursued,
because only one British ship had
sufficient rigging left
to follow them.
Ten out of the thirteen French ships having been taken
or destroyed, the first order Nelson issued when he
recovered
from the stunning effects of his wound was:
“Vanguard, off
the
Mouth of the Nile, August 22, 1798.—Almighty God
having
blessed His Majesty's arms with victory, the Admiral
intends returning public thanksgiving for the same at two
o'clock this day: and he recommends every ship doing the
same as soon as convenient.”
Such was the battle of the Nile, fought in this roadstead of
Abûkir, which fills the curve of the coast between
Alexandria
and the
Rosetta
mouth of the Nile. There is no monument
of any kind
to this most supreme of all naval victories, one
of the
most decisive battles of the world.
But Abûkir is very somnolent, even for immemorial Egypt,
the land of short
memories. Truly the Pharaohs were wise
when they
catalogued every detail upon every monument in
their
imperishable hieroglyphics. But for that Egypt would
have
forgotten that there ever were any Pharaohs. Of Abercromby's
battle—the land-battle of Abûkir, fought nearly
three
years after Nelson's, and even more immediate in its
results, since it secured the evacuation of Egypt by Napoleon's
army, which had obtained possession of the country in
spite
of Nelson's victory—the landmarks are almost
lost.
Canopus, the pleasure-city of
Alexandria, has fared even
worse. It is vaguely identified with Abûkir, but some
savants place it to the north and some to the south,
though
a large Roman temple dedicated to Serapis,
discovered not
so very long ago on the estate of Prince
Omar Toussoun,
may help them to come to a decision,
because we know from
Plutarch that there was a
much-frequented shrine and oracle
of Serapis at
Canopus. It is incredible how little we
know
of
Canopus
and its site, when we consider that the city gave
its name
to a branch of the Nile, and that the eponymous
god
connected with it gave his name to the human-headed
Canopic jars, in which the ancient Egyptians preserved the
intestines of their important dead. We know vaguely that
Canopus was a watering-place
notorious for its number of
religious festivals and the
general dissoluteness of its morals,
and we know that the
red dye of the henna, used so widely
in the East for
colouring the hands and feet, was manufactured
here. We
know that the Emperor Hadrian established
a miniature
Canopus in his pleasure-city on
the way
out to Tivoli, known as the Villa of Hadrian; but
no one
has ever yet made out the exact nature of this
Canopus.
Some
ancient writers imagined that
Canopus
was called after
the pilot of Menelaus, who died and was
buried here, after
the return of the Greeks from Troy;
some imagined that it
was called after the god
Canopus. Modern writers will be
more inclined to believe that both the god and the
pilot
were invented to account for the name of the
town, which is
generally the truth about eponymous heroes
in the classics.
We shall know more about it, a great
deal, when the wealthy
city of
Alexandria wakes up to the importance
of excavating
some of the square miles of ancient sites
which lie unexcavated
in its vicinity. At present
Alexandria cares so little
about anything except commerce, that photographs are
almost unprocurable in the city, and the postcard
business
is in its infancy.
To most people who visit Abûkir the blue bay, with its
memories of Nelson, will be but a faint background.
Their
vision will be one of Arab women squatting in
the sun,
as still as Lot's wife; of little Arab girls in
the long dress
which pervades half Italy, playing about
like the kids of
goats; of a grove of date-palms by the
shore, and a gay
little mosque at the corner of the yellow
native village—too
poor to support a civilised shop, or to
keep its hotel alive,
though it is surrounded by the
summer villas of pashas.
CHAPTER XXIV
A Visit to the Fayum, the Land of a Thousand
Days
THE
Fayum is well worth a
visit. It is so unlike other
parts of Egypt—it is so
pleasant to the eye, so instructive,
and so easy to get
to.
A railway takes you direct in about three hours to Medinet
Fayum, the capital, an interesting
place itself, and the natural
centre from which the whole
district can be visited by railway
or carriage.
The
Fayum is a real oasis,
a land flowing with sparkling
waters, which is surrounded
by the desert on all sides. Except
that its waters are not
still, but blest with a swift, natural
current, which
turns the water-wheels automatically, and
sweeps away the
dread of malaria, the beginning of the twenty-third
psalm,
“He maketh me to lie down in green pastures;
He leadeth me
beside the still waters,” might have been
written of the
Fayum—the land of many waters,
whose
pastures are so green in the midst of the
desert. In the
Fayum are the rich palm groves which
the teachings of one's
childhood have associated with the
idea of an oasis.
Considering how close it is to
Cairo, tourists know surprisingly
little of
the
Fayum, which is a pity, for there
are
features in the
Fayum which adapt it for a tourist-centre,
and
make it a future Mena or
Luxor or
Assuan.
The dearth of postcards of the
Fayum—the almost entire
absence of photographs
of the
Fayum—is partly responsible
for this. At only one
Cairo photographer could I discover
any photos
of it—at Lekejian's; and his pictures, though
exquisitely
beautiful, were not very up-to-date or comprehensive.
The books about the
Fayum also are not up-to-date
in their pictures. I went there with an entirely
wrong view of the place. I imagined Medinet
Fayum to be
a place
picturesque in its decay, like
Rosetta or
Damietta, full
of old mosques and tumble-down palaces.
Instead of this I found a thriving modern town, with an
old bit here and there, it is true, but depending for
its
picturesqueness on the Bahr Yûsuf, and the
Oriental aspect
of its great modern houses.
There is the air of wealth about the place. Its houses are
like the villas of
Shubra, without their immense gardens.
They would
make an imposing suburb in
Cairo.
They are
the kind of houses one would expect to find in
that desolate
Garden City, whose foundations grin
at you, like toothless
gums, on the banks of the Nile all
the way from
old Cairo to
new
Cairo.
The
Fayum is a very
wealthy place, and its rich Arab and
Syrian landowners
live in these palaces, and superintend
the cultivation of
their lands. Some of them live there
altogether, others,
as their wealth increases, have houses in
Cairo also, and use their Medinet
Fayum houses, when they
want to visit their property, and as country-houses for
passing
the summer months.
Medinet is saved from ugliness and vulgarity because there
are no Europeans living in it. Its palaces are purely
Arab,
and as they are spreading and lofty, and have
overhanging,
meshrebiya-latticed harem windows, and
gay Arab decorations,
the effect is Oriental and pleasing.
But the old mosque, which once spanned the Bahr Yûsuf,
in the main street, overhangs it no longer with its
picturesque
and tumble-down adjuncts: and the bazar is
of the unredeemed sort you find in a prosperous native town which
does not disturb itself about foreigners.
Medinet
Fayum, the capital
for four thousand years, is a
beautiful city. It is the
famous Bahr Yûsuf which gives it its
beauty.
The Bahr Yûsuf is the river-like canal which flows through
the centre of the city as the Torrente S. Maria flows
through
the
earthquake-stricken city of Modica in the south of Sicily.
It is spanned by many bridges; its palaces overhang it as if
they belonged to Venice.
Nobody can truly say whether it is river or canal. But
the latest scientific theory is that it is a naturally
formed
branch of the Nile; that at some date before
the dawn of
history the Nile in flood burst through the
banks separating
it from a chain of depressions and hurled
its waters through
the heart of the
Fayum at High Nile, cutting a fresh channel
for itself. At Low Nile whatever is left of the water
flows
back into the Nile. The swift current of the
Bahr Yûsuf,
which turns so many water-wheels, is certainly
suggestive
of this. Others are equally positive that
it is an artifically
cut canal, and tradition, which generally has some kind
of
foundation, is in favour of this.
Major Hanbury-Brown quotes an Arab tradition from
an article by Mr. Cope Whitehouse in The
Contemporary
Review of September 1887:
“Joseph, to whom may Allah show mercy and grant peace,
when he was Prime Minister of Egypt and high in favour
with Raiyan, his sovereign, after that he was more than
a
hundred years old, became an object of envy to the
favourites
of the king and the puissant seigneurs of
the Court of
Memphis,
on account of the great power which he wielded and the
affection entertained for him by his monarch. They accordingly
thus addressed the king: ‘Great king, Joseph is now
very old; his knowledge has diminished, his beauty has
faded, his judgment is unsound, his sagacity has
failed.’
The king said: ‘Set him a task which shall
serve as a test.’
At that time the El-
Fayum was called El-Hun, or the Marsh.
It served as a waste-basin for the waters of
Upper Egypt,
which
flowed in and out unrestrained. The courtiers having
taken
counsel together what to propose to the king, gave
this
reply to Pharaoh: ‘Lay the royal commands upon
Joseph that
he shall divert the water of the Nile from El-Hun
and
drain it so as to give you a new province and an
additional source of revenue.’ The king assented, and, summoning
Joseph to his presence, said: ‘You know how dearly
I love my daughter,
and you see that the time has arrived in
which I ought to
carve an estate for her out of the crown
lands, and give
her a separate establishment, of which she
would be the
mistress. I have, however, no territory available
for this
purpose except the submerged land of El-Hun.
It is in many
respects favourably situated. It is a convenient
distance
from my capital. It is surrounded by desert. My
daughter
will thus be independent and protected.’ ‘Quite
true,
great king,’ responded Joseph: ‘when would you wish it
done? for accomplished it shall be by the aid of Allah,
the all-powerful.’ ‘The sooner the better,’ said the king.
Then Allah inspired Joseph with a plan. He directed him to
make three canals: one from
Upper
Egypt, a canal on the
east, and a canal on the
west. Joseph collected workmen and
dug the canal of Menhi
from Ashmunin to El-
Lahun. Then
he excavated the canal of El-
Fayum, and the eastern canal,
with
another canal from El-Hun; then he set an army of
labourers at work. They cut down the tamarisks and bushes
which grew there and carried them away. At the season
when
the Nile begins to rise the marsh had been converted
into
good cultivable land. The Nile rose; the water entered
the
mouth of the Menhi canal, and flowed down the Nile
Valley
to El-
Lahun; thence it turned towards
El-
Fayum, and
entered that canal in such volume that it filled it, and converted
the land into a region irrigated by the Nile. King
Raiyan thereupon came to see his new province with the
courtiers who had advised him to set Joseph this task.
When they saw the result they greatly marvelled at the
skill
and inventive genius of Joseph, and exclaimed:
‘We do not
know which most to admire, the draining of the
marsh and
the destruction of the noxious plants, or the
conversion of its
surface into fertile land and
well-watered fields.’ Then the
king said to Joseph, ‘How
long did it take you to bring this
district into the
excellent state in which I find it?’ Seventy
days,'
responded Joseph. Then Pharaoh turned to his
courtiers and
said: ‘Apparently one could not have done it in
a thousand
days.’ Thus the name was changed from El-Hun,
or the
Marsh, to El-
Fayum, ‘the land of a
thousand days.’”
The artist's bits in Medinet are vanishing as far as old
houses are concerned, but the riverscape of palms both up
and
down stream is delicious. Even the far-famed
Mahmûdiya
Canal at
Alexandria does not yield such dream-pictures.
The
Fayum is a place to
which you need to be personally
conducted unless you can
speak Arabic; even modern Greek
does not always carry you,
and French and Italian are
almost as useless as English,
except at the principal hotel,
where they speak a little
Italian, and the head waiter, when
he is not out at lake
Kurun, can speak a little English. In
the absence of that
functionary we might have starved but
for my knowledge of
Italian.
English people must not yield to their fears at the aspect
of this hotel; though the restaurant, the bar, and the
billiard-room
are one, the bedrooms are not unclean
and have no
insects, and visitors will not be required to
take their meals
in the billiard-room restaurant. An
unoccupied bedroom
was set apart for our meals. The
cooking is not bad, nor
is the hotel dear if you take your
meals à la carte. The
servants are a little mysterious. You never know the exact
nationality or status of any of them. I suspected one of
them of being the proprietor. There were no women servants.
The butter had been left there by the last guests in
the preceding year.
The
Fayum Hotel stands on
the banks of the Bahr
Yûsuf, a stone's throw from the
railway station. The other
hotel is a little beyond it. It
is worth while looking at, for
it is characteristic. But
it is not possible.
Having established ourselves in the hotel, we went out to
see the town and discover two Syrians, a doctor and a
land-owner,
to whom thoughtful friends had given us
introductions,
knowing the language difficulty in the
Fayum. The doctor
gave us some useful information about the antiquities, but
Mr. Nicholas Khouri Haddad was out in the country.
We wandered on, feeling so flat at the newness of the town,
that we were quite rejoiced when we came to a Pasha's
awful blue-and-yellow house of moulded plaster. The
only
redeeming feature about the bazar was the nice
old Kait Bey
mosque at the end,
which had a quaint minaret, a tomb-dome,
and an
arcade—old, shapeless, and charming. This was the
mosque
that used to span the Bahr Yüsuf. But the course
of the
canal has been deflected, and it no longer tunnels
through
Saracenic arches under the venerable structure.
In the same way the delightful old Saracenic bridge carrying
an ancient piece of the bazar across the canal, which
has
formed the subject of so many pictures, has been
sacrificed
to modern utilitarianism, much to the loss
of Medinet
Fayum from the tourist-attractions
point of view. Even
the famous “high-lift water-wheel” on
the
Tamiya Canal
has gone. On the way back we unearthed two modest curio
shops, one with some very good things in it—of which anon.
There are no shops in the town worthy of the name except
a
few moderately good Greek grocers—Medinet is sufficiently
unspoiled to depend on its bazar.
Towards sundown we wended our footsteps to
Crocodilopolis,
the Arsinoë of the
Ptolemies, the Shodit of the
Pharaohs. The ruins of that
classical city on Lake Kurun,
the great Lake Moeris of the
ancients, at which the sacred
crocodiles with jewels on
their feet (and possibly gilt, which
must have interfered
very much with their comfort) came to
be fed with
delicacies intended for human stomachs. They
must have
felt more bored than poodles. It is many a day,
perhaps
two thousand years and more, since Lake Moeris
came to
meet the terraces of
Crocodilopolis,
if it ever did
come. Scientific opinion prefers to think
that the sacred
crocodiles were kept in mere ponds. There
is no geological
trace of the lake having extended so
far—it is not certain
that even the colossi of Biahmu were
on the lake.
1
1 There has been a city on the site of
Medinet-Fayum for four or five thousand
years. The
Pharaohs called it Shodit, “the Reclaimed,” from the draining of
the Great Marsh. The crocodile god, Sobku, the chief of
the aqueous gods, was
naturally most in favour. Maspero
speaks of “the unique character of the
religious rites
which took place there daily. The sacred lake contained a family
of tame crocodiles, the image and incarnation of the god,
whom the faithful fed
with offerings—cakes, fried fish,
and drinks sweetened with honey. Advantage
was taken of
the moment when one of these creatures, wallowing on the bank,
basked contentedly in the sun. Two priests opened his
jaws, and a third threw in
the cakes, the fried morsels,
and finally the liquid. The crocodile bore all this
without even winking; he swallowed down his provender, plunged into the
lake,
and lazily reached the opposite bank, hoping to
escape for a few minutes from the
oppressive liberality of
his devotees. As soon, however, as another of these
approached, he was again beset at his new post, and stuffed in a similar
manner.”
Of the ancient splendours of
Crocodilopolis nothing remains
but the site
and a few foundations. These cover
a large area, but two
things militate against a proper
examination—a Mohammedan
cemetery of large extent has
grown up among the ruins, and
the thrifty fellah has been
using the debris to manure the
fields on account of the
nitrates which it contains. By
far the most antique-looking
thing in
Crocodilopolis is the mastaba, of poor modern
masonry, in which a potter has established himself with
the
primitive wheel and table that were in use in the
time of
the Pharaohs. This mastaba, built of pots, was
like a bit
of ancient Egypt—for it was in form of the
tombs round
the Pyramids, and had a column up its centre,
and a light
roof of reeds, under which a boy sat spinning.
The eternal demand for bakshish was not long delayed.
I wonder why nobody has discovered the hieroglyphic
for
bakshish yet. It must have existed.
Crocodilopolis is a
“potter's field” in the New Testament sense; there are not
even mud-brick ruins of any importance. Yet it was capable
of looking picturesque with its fringe of palms, and the right
atmospheric effects.
Night changed the whole scene for us. The other Syrian
to whom we had brought an introduction, Mr. Nicholas
Khouri Haddad, came in just as night fell. All Medinet
talks
of Nicholas Khouri—a singularly handsome boy of
twenty-one
in absolutely correct English riding kit.
We were not
to make any plans, he said, we were just to
tell him what
we wished to see, and what time we had at
our disposal.
He would fill it all in, and show us
anything else which he
thought we ought not to miss. He
would arrange for
carriages, donkeys, boats, anything that
was necessary; and
he insisted on taking us out in his
carriage, there and then,
for a drive through the rich
fields of the
Fayum in the dusk.
The drive was
delightful. The
Fayum has such
glorious
palm groves—such marvellous green crops
enveloping the
palm groves like a sea, and studded, as the
fields in Egypt
always are, with men and beasts. One did
see such happy
families of humans and animals in the
palm-ringed clover
at sunset. And for us there was a
delicious touch of the
wilds about it, when, as we were
passing a deep lush field
of berseem, the green forage on
which all the animals of
Egypt live in the spring-time, a
large porcupine came half
out of the hedge, and stood
looking at us. I need not
describe the
procession of Egypt which passed us as we flew
homewards, through the dusk, for it was beggared by
the
marvellous procession of the half-Bedâwin people
which met
us on our drive out to the great lake on the
following day.
After dinner we went out to see the
Fayum by moonlight.
Venice is
hardly more beautiful. It is Venice with a horizon
of
palms. The moon and the long line of lights made magic
on
the water. In the moonlight the irregular outlines of
the
palaces of the rich landowners along the canal looked
enchanting, and just now there was the added note of the gay
flutter of red-and-white flags (erected weeks ahead in that
dry climate for the approaching visit of the Khedive). It
was
simply glorious, that moonlight picture of palms
and water.
Beyond the water, at the foot of the palms,
were little will-o'-the-wisp
lights. These came from a
small black village with
houses four feet high. The poor
little glimmer of lamps of
old Pharaonic patterns showed
empty mud interiors. The
people were squatting outside,
and began talking to us in
Arabic with pleasant, smiling
voices. Nicholas Khouri rated
them soundly: they did not
know that any one who could
speak Arabic was with us,
least of all the principal inhabitant,
the great employer
of the district. It showed us how
treacherous the
Egyptians are; their smiles, their voices,
suggested all
manner of pleasant things, but what they said
was foul and
filthy. Outwardly the Egyptian likes to make
himself
pleasant and popular, but at heart he is an animal to
which it is useless to offer pearls.
At one end of the village there was a tent stretched from
the top of a reed
fence, with a low table of food, and cooking
utensils, and
the Sheikh and his family and a dog lying in
front of it.
The hut was occupied by two donkeys and a
goat. No matter
where you wander in Medinet, by moonlight
the effect is
enchanting; but, above all, outside the town,
on the Bahr
Yûsuf, you get inimitable outlines.
We were loth to return, and when we were in the hotel
hung about the balconies looking at the moonlight. We
had
not been asleep long before we were awakened by
the chanting
of the Koran, with which Mohammedans
accompany
marriages and deaths, and, I dare say,
births. There was
such a volume of it that we heard it a
quarter of a mile
off. When it drew near we saw a
procession of people with
candles and shades fastened to
rods on their shoulders, and
the clusters of cressets
fixed on frames which are called
meshals. For the rest, it was only a
throng of turbans with
a very worn Hadji, returning from
his pilgrimage to Mecca,
in their midst, and a little
child carried astride on a shoulder.
They take a
pilgrimage to Mecca very seriously in the
Fayum.
On the next day we had to start very early by train to
Ebshwai, where we found a carriage waiting to drive us
out
to the Karun Hotel, on the mysterious Lake Moeris,
now
called Karun or Kurun. Except for the palms, the
Fayum
might be the English fen country; it is not like Egypt
at all.
I am not going to enter here into the question whether
Lake Moeris did or did not cover the whole of the
Fayum
in ancient times. The archæologists, on one side, are
relying
on the remains and on Herodotus; the
engineers, on the other,
are relying on levels, which,
according to them, make it quite
impossible for the
country to have been submerged in the
manner indicated.
Even with its present bounds Lake Moeris
is the largest
freshwater lake in Egypt, and has a considerable
population congregated round it—the worst people, so
the
Khedive himself informed me, of any in Egypt, except
in a
small patch of the Delta. He accounted for it by the
fact
of their having more Bedâwin blood in them than any
other
settled population.
The day we chose to go to the lake was, fortunately,
market-day in Ebshwai. All the lake-siders were making
their way to it, the very best market-people we ever saw
.
There were Holy Family groups galore, the father
riding on
an ass with the child in his arms or astride of
the ass's
neck, and the mother a-pillion behind him. The
women
had huge gold nose-rings, and barbaric gold
necklaces that
would have done for the daughter of a
Pharaoh. Once in a
way we met the wife riding and her
husband leading the
ass, as in Roman Catholic countries;
over and over again we
met the husband riding and the wife
walking by the ass.
There were the usual sheikhs, in white
robes, on very fine
donkeys, gaily caparisoned; the usual
child, riding bare-backed
on the impracticable buffalo.
One thing I noted,
that though the women went in for
enormous ear-rings and
nose-rings, rows and rows of gold
beads round their necks,
processions of gold and silver
bracelets on their arms, not
one of them wore the anklets
so universal in other parts of
Egypt. One woman was
wearing twenty bracelets.
The girls, all of them, had the desert elegance, and were
mostly very pretty, though to us their faces were spoilt
a
little by the blue tattooing of the tribe-mark round
their
mouths and temples. They carried the oddest
things on
their heads. One had a regular
batterie de cuisine; another
a
goose sitting in a big saucepan—disagreeably prophetic for
the goose; while six pigeons, six goslings, and a large turkey
filled the baskets on the heads of
others;—combinations
hardly too daring for a
Rue-de-la-Paix hat-shop in that year
of grace. For miles
before we got near it we could see the
gleam of the great
lake, and women passed us with fish upon
their heads. The
plain between us was evidently inundated
land, for it was
covered with rich fields of maize and berseem,
and barley
or bearded wheat—one can hardly distinguish
them in Egypt.
Now, in March, they were ploughing for the
cotton,
wherever the berseem was cut. The plain was only
broken by
a few saints' tombs and the white hotel by the
lake's
edge. In the
Fayum they use what we
call the Virgilian
plough, as the men of the Pharaohs did
before them.
A FELLAH FAMILY IN THE FAYUM.
This is probably the way in which Joseph and Mary and the
Child Jesus went down into Egypt.
PIGEON-TOWERS IN THE FAYUM.
In the village at the foot of the Hawara Pyramid.
At first glance the site of the hotel appeared an
extraordinary
one, for it was right in the middle of a
swamp
at the edge of the lake. Egyptian lakes are
always
surrounded by swamps, for they are usually
either advancing
or receding according to the inundation.
The actual ground
upon which the hotel stands is dry, but
it is surrounded by
reeds, which look as if a hippopotamus
or wild elephant might
burst out of them at any
moment—delightful to the Cockney
in quest of wild life on
easy terms. The fishing-boats drawn
up on the side of the
lake seem to have been copied in
design from the
Tombs of the Kings; they are so large,
so
clumsy, and draw so much water that they seem quite
unfit
for navigating marshes until you understand the
ways of
the Egyptian fisherman, who only uses a boat when
it is
too deep for him to be his own boat. You often see
him
in the water when he is casting his nets. Quite
large boats
can be handled easily in shallow water when
the crew,
instead of being inside them are outside them,
pushing or
tugging. Even the crews of Cook's tourist
steamers take
to the water on the slightest provocation.
Every one who sees this hotel, called the Karun, is delighted
with it. The lake from here looks as picturesque as Lago
di
Garda from Sirmione. The hotel is built of
canvas—the gay
awnings of the Arab tentmaker. It stands on
a stretch of
gravel, with patches of gay flowers at its
edges, and a thick
fringe of reeds twelve feet high all
round; and sometimes in
winter it must be all upstairs,
for the basement, built of more
substantial materials, is
probably under water in flood-time.
The upstairs, divided
into the drawing- and dining-rooms,
is simply a tent of
rich Arab stuffs and awnings covered
with parodies of
ancient Egyptian life. I should like to
shoot the whole
lot of tentmakers for the vulgarity with
which they
caricature the scenes painted in the Tombs of
Memphis and
Thebes, playing down to the ignorant tourist's
sense of humour. It would be far better if they took
their
designs from Mr. Thackeray's inimitable “Light
Side of
Egypt”—it would be more Egyptian and more
amusing.
The sleeping arrangements of this hotel are
very pleasant for
those in need of a
thorough change after the artificialities of
Cairo; the bedrooms are two huts and
as many reed-thatched
sleeping-tents as happened to be
required. As the dining-rooms
and drawing-rooms are also
canvas, one combines
the pleasures of camping out with the
comforts of a fair
hotel. The food here was good enough,
though not so
plentiful as in the city; the waiting was
far better. It
was obvious that the profitable business of
the combined
hotels was out at the lake and not at Medinet
Fayum.
This place gave me a great idea of Central Africa—its
reeds were like trees. A huge and extraordinary
kingfisher
sat on one of them; the tents had kraal
roofs; the
landing was a hole in the reeds, where for once
there was
a sharp division between mud and water. A boat
like
a Roman galley, manned by three blacks in white
shirts,
glided up beside us. I felt that I ought to be
Sir Herbert
Tree in the clothes of Mark Antony. We stepped
on board
not knowing that we should have to fight our way
yard
by yard through a tamarisk swamp to the lake. We
started
off rowing. The waiter (who was the cook as
well) chose to
accompany us: he was a splendid oar, but
after we had
gone a few strokes, the heavy galley
grounded, and rowing
gave way to poling. A few yards
farther poling became
ineffectual. It seemed odd that the
hotel boatman did not
know how to get to the lake without
pioneering through
a swamp. But I suppose the inundation
was higher last
time they were out with a pleasure party.
The crew at
once took to the water in Egyptian fashion.
One man who
had no running-drawers borrowed the Captain's
turban to
make a waistcloth, when he jumped overboard. I
was struck
by the sense of decency and the cleverness with
which this
man contrived to take off his shirt without
wetting it, and
put on this alfresco apron under the lee
of the boat, without
any of us noticing what he was doing.
I could not help
thinking how lucky it was that there are
no crocodiles
now in Moeris, the Lake of Crocodiles;
surely jumping
overboard could not have been part of the
boatman's duty
in ancient Egypt. The same man smokes
cigarettes all the
time he rows. The
rais, as they call an Arab skipper,
explained that if we
had only come a little later we should
have got to the
lake in splendid style, as they were making
a channel for
the Khedive. Then we noticed the men who
were making the
channel. They were so covered with mud
that they were
hardly distinguishable as human beings till
you looked
very hard. Their method of working was to
stoop down with
their heads under water or otherwise,
according to depth,
detaching a great piece of mud, weighing
it may be, half a
hundredweight, with their hands. When
they had got
possession of this morceau they staggered
with it to the
bank. The mud which came out of the water
became the
embankment. There are mud walls in Egypt,
which have
lasted three and four thousand years, built not
much more
elaborately than this. The effect of this tamarisk
swamp
was rather like a bog on a Scotch moor with
the pink
flowers of the tamarisk to replace the heather.
The mud at
the bottom of the channels between the “mosses”
looked
appalling, but was in reality far less dangerous than
a
Scotch, let alone an Irish, bog. Egyptian mud is very
firm. Half the monuments of Egypt are built of mud.
At last we got into the open lake and hoisted our sail, of
the old galley shape. It was very welcome: when the
thermometer
is over a hundred in the shade even the
shadow
of a sail has its value. It was such an oily,
sleepy lake; it
gave us the very picture of a tropical
morning. And now
that we were out in the open, where a
wise bird can calculate
the range of a gun, the snipe and
the kingfishers of the
tamarisk swamp give way to
pelicans, those very monumental
birds! The lake, as our
boatmen tugged lustily across it
in the fierce heat, was
green in the sun and silver in the
shade; where it was
shallow enough there were men wading
in it dragging
fishing-nets. The vainness of setting a snare
in the sight
of the quarry does not seem to apply to the
Egyptian fish.
As our sail was no use except for shade, we had no time
to land and visit the dead Roman city, which lies about
two
miles back in the desert—a Pompeii more perfect
than the
original, though
only built of mud. So our cruise on the
lake was rather
flat and unprofitable—literally flat, since
the shores of
Lake Moeris are very low and devoid of
features. The lake
was only interesting while we were near
the shore and
could see the irrigation which forms a link with
Japan,
and the buffaloes, which form a link with the Pharaohs.
We were all glad to get back from the hot lake to lunch
in the cool canvas pavilion where, as you sat at table,
the
reeds seemed to come up to the very window cut in
the gay
Arab awning. But except for the sake of seeing the
great
Lake Moeris, of which the ancients wrote almost
as much as
they wrote of the statue of Memnon at
Thebes, I regretted
not staying at the market at Ebshwai, watching the
unending procession of biblical-looking Bedâwins and the
Omdurmanic primitiveness of the market.
On the next day our hospitable Nicholas Khouri drove us
to a large estate he has, running up to the Hawara
Pyramid,
and the celebrated
labyrinth. At his farm buildings
splendid donkeys, which are not easy to procure in the
Fayum, were waiting ready-saddled for
us. The drive out
from Medinet to Hawara is unusually
pretty for Egypt,
where the impressiveness of effects lies
chiefly in desolation.
Here our road ran between long
fields of rich corn and clover,
bordered by long, low
hills and palms blown sideways by
the prevailing winds.
Egypt is the most unflowered country
there ever was,
except on its Mediterranean coast. Mustard
is its general
wild flower. There was nothing to photograph
except a
porcupine and a house newly painted, with the
usual
preposterous designs, for the reception of a Hadji who
had
just returned from Mecca. He was sitting outside in
a gay
canvas pavilion receiving his friends. The sky was
quite
English, as it often is in the
Fayum.
Our road took
us past the high-lift water-wheel on the
Tamiya, which
makes such an effective picture in Major Hanbury Brown's
book. Like so many things in the
Fayum, it has been
improved away. Close here is
one of the prettiest bits in the
province, for just beyond
the spot where you see the mud
walls of an ancient Greek
village, half-buried in the deep
sand, the road
suddenly opens on to a gorge with a river
in its bottom,
and delightfully wooded. The
Tamiya
Canal
crosses it on a Roman-looking aqueduct, and it
was here
that the much-photographed wheel stood. The road
was a
frequented one. We met a procession of carts, like
the
painted carts of Sicily, drawn by mules or ponies,
and
buffaloes, who are always looking into the future.
We were
crossing a tableland with a sandy desert on our
left and a
long stretch of corn upon our right; the
Illahun Pyramid
towered in front of us. At length we came to a village with
the odd embattled pigeon-towers of the
Fayum, more
castle-like than ever, and
excellent houses, quite Sudanese
in their pretentiousness,
on the banks of a canal as swift as a
strong river. Just
outside the village were Nicholas Khouri's
farm buildings,
with a couple of steam ploughs at work near
them. He told
us that the
Fayum is exactly suited
for
modern agricultural machinery, which increases its
productiveness
marvellously. Here we found donkeys,
and a
splendid Arab horse was ready for him. We noticed
that
he had a beautiful seat, and we learned
afterwards that he
rides his own horses at races. We rode
across his estate to
the Hawara Pyramid, which stands on
its farther edge,
and soon found ourselves escorted only
by our donkey-boys,
for he was constantly being stopped by
his men for orders
about the working of different parts of
the estate. At the
foot of the pyramid we crossed an
ancient Egyptian grave-yard
ravaged by the elements. The
wind and the rain had
denuded the surface, leaving a
litter of skulls and thighbones
and mummy cloth, which
look like an illustration of
the Vision of Ezekiel. The
Hawara Pyramid is the tomb
of Amen-em-hat the third, the
greatest king of the Twelfth
Dynasty, who lived some two
thousand years before the
great Age of Greek Monuments,
which saw the Parthenon
arise. The casing of white
limestone as fine as marble
has disappeared, leaving only
a core of mud bricks about
half a yard long by nine inches
wide and six inches thick,
but it is still fairly perfect
and of considerable size. The
straw used for making its
bricks shows so plainly that it
came out in a
kodak, which I took. The ascent is quite easy,
but oh, so
mournful! for each footstep that you take does
more damage
to the mud bricks than the wind and the
wet of four
thousand years. The path by which the
Arab herds climb to
the top has gone back to the dust.
The Pyramid is a little
over three hundred feet square,
and kept its casing up to
Roman times. Flinders Petrie
excavated it in 1890, and
found the mummy chamber at the
end of a
labyrinth of passages. You see the real
Labyrinth,
the
Egyptian
Labyrinth (if tradition may
be trusted, which
is improbable), between it and the angle
of the canal, when
you stand on the Pyramid top. The Bahr
Selah, the swift,
river-like canal is, after the Bahr
Yûsuf, the principal stream
of the
Fayum. There is nothing visible of the
labyrinth
beyond a few granite columns, and fragments of
sculptured
granite and limestone, and buildings of mud
brick like you
get in the town of the twenty-second
dynasty outside the
temple of
Karnak. It may have been injured, as the cemetery
certainly was, by the natives carting away the dust for
manure.
According to Herodotus, it was an almost
inconceivably vast
and elaborate building, for which there
hardly seems room
between the Pyramid and the Bahr Selah.
He says:
“They (the twelve Kings of Egypt) built a
labyrinth, a
little above the lake
of Moeris, situated near that called
the City of
Crocodiles—this I have myself seen,
and found
it
greater than can be described. For if any one should
add
together the buildings and public works of the
Greeks, they
would be found to have cost less labour and
expense than
this
labyrinth, though the temple in Ephesus is deserving
of mention, and also that in Samos. The Pyramids
likewise
were beyond description, and each of them
comparable
to many of the great Greek structures. Yet
the
labyrinth
surpasses even the Pyramids. For it has twelve courts
enclosed with walls, with doors opposite each other,
six
facing the north, and six the south, contiguous to
one
another, and the same exterior wall encloses them.
It
contains two kinds of rooms, some underground and
some
above-ground over them, to the number of
3,000,
1,500 of each. The
rooms above-ground I myself went
through and saw , and
relate from personal inspection. But
the underground rooms
I only know from report, for the
Egyptians who have charge
of the building would, on no
account, show me them, saying
that there were the sepulchres
of the kings who originally
built this
labyrinth, and of
the sacred crocodiles. I can therefore only relate
what
I have learnt by hearsay concerning the lower
rooms; but
the upper ones, which surpass all human works I
myself saw :
for the passages through the corridors, and
the windings
through the courts, from their great variety,
presented a
thousand occasions of wonder, as I passed from
a court
to the rooms, and from the rooms to halls, and to
other
corridors from the halls, and to other courts
from the rooms.
The roofs of all these are of stone, as
also are the walls, but
the walls are full of sculptured
figures. Each court is surrounded
with a colonnade of
white stone, closely fitted.
And adjoining the extremity
of the
labyrinth is a pyramid,
forty orgyiæ in height, on which large figures are
carved, and
a way to it has been made underground.
“Although this
labyrinth
is such
as I have described, yet the
lake named from Moeris, near which this
labyrinth is built,
occasions greater wonder; its circumference measures three
thousand six hundred stades, or sixty schoeni, equal to the
sea-coast of Egypt. The lake stretches lengthways, north
and south, being in depth in the deepest part fifty orgyiæ.
That it is made by hand and dry, this circumstance
proves,
for about the middle of the lake stand two
pyramids, each
rising fifty orgyiæ above the surface of
the water, and the
part built under water extends to an
equal depth; on each
of these is placed a stone statue,
seated on a throne. Thus
these pyramids are one hundred
orgyiæ in height: and a
hundred orgyiæ are equal to a
stade of six plethra, the orgyia
measuring six feet, or
four cubits, the foot being four palms,
and the cubit six
palms. The water in this lake does not
spring from the
soil, for these parts are excessively dry, but
it is
conveyed through a channel from the Nile, and for
six
months it flows into the lake, and six months out again
into the Nile. And
during the six months that it flows out
again it yields a
talent of silver every day to the king's
treasury from the
fish; but when the water is flowing into
it, twenty minæ.”
Modern criticism inclines to the belief that these pyramids
with colossi seated on them are a mistaken inference
of
Herodotus from seeing the two colossi of Biahmu
emerging
from the waters of the lake. At present in
its deepest part
the lake has only one tenth of the depth
which he assigns to
it. But the immensity he assigns to
the
labyrinth is borne
out, for Breastead writes: “In the gap, on the north
bank
of the inflowing canal, was a vast building, some
eight
hundred by a thousand feet, which formed a kind
of religious
and administrative centre for the whole
country. It contained
a set of halls for each home, where
its gods were enshrined
and worshipped, and the councils
of its government gathered
from time to time. It would
seem from the remarks of
Strabo that each set of halls was
thus the office of the
central government pertaining to
the administration of the
respective nome, and the whole
building was therefore the
Pharaohs' seat of government
for the entire country.”
A building of these dimensions would be about twice the
size of the Vatican—nearly as long, more than twice as
wide;
but the Vatican is said to contain no fewer than
13,000
chambers. The
labyrinth, however, had probably only one
storey above ground.
As we stood on the windy top of the Pyramid our view
was superb; the
Illahun Pyramid, not very far away, rose
up so
majestically: a mirage had surrounded it with a lake
of
palms. In the distance we could see the Arabian hills
across the Nile, and, nearer in, the green oasis lapped all
round by the pink sands and hills of the
Libyan desert.
While I was inspecting the
labyrinth I flushed some
sand-grouse
so close that I could have knocked them
down with
my stick if I had not been more anxious to kodak
them,
for when I first came upon them, instead of
trying to escape,
they tried to hide by flattening
themselves in the sand.
They were almost the same colour
as the semi-transparent
lizard, which tried
to escape my notice in the same way,
in the next dip. If
the lizard had not been so white I should
have taken it
for the dreaded cerastes or horned viper—the
first thought
that came into my mind when I saw it. We
rode back along
the canal, whose banks were quite flowery,
for Egypt. But
I was more interested to see bulrushes,
which the
detractors of Mosaic legend say will not grow
in
