The Spell of Egypt

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THE SPELL OF EGYPT

by Robert Hichens


PREPARER'S NOTE

This text was prepared from a 1911 edition, published by The
Century Co., New York.



CONTENTS

THE PYRAMIDS
THE SPHINX
SAKKARA
ABYDOS
THE NILE
DENDERAH
KARNAK
LUXOR
COLOSSI OF MEMNON
MEDINET-ABU
THE RAMESSEUM
DEIR-EL-BAHARI
THE TOMBS OF THE KINGS
EDFU
KOM OMBOS
PHILAE
"PHARAOH'S BED"
OLD CAIRO





I

THE PYRAMIDS

Why do you come to Egypt? Do you come to gain a dream, or to regain lost
dreams of old; to gild your life with the drowsy gold of romance,
to lose a creeping sorrow, to forget that too many of your hours are
sullen, grey, bereft? What do you wish of Egypt?

The Sphinx will not ask you, will not care. The Pyramids, lifting their
unnumbered stones to the clear and wonderful skies, have held, still
hold, their secrets; but they do not seek for yours. The terrific
temples, the hot, mysterious tombs, odorous of the dead desires of men,
crouching in and under the immeasurable sands, will muck you with their
brooding silence, with their dim and sombre repose. The brown children
of the Nile, the toilers who sing their antique songs by the shadoof and
the sakieh, the dragomans, the smiling goblin merchants, the Bedouins
who lead your camel into the pale recesses of the dunes--these will not
trouble themselves about your deep desires, your perhaps yearning hunger
of the heart and the imagination.

Yet Egypt is not unresponsive.

I came back to her with dread, after fourteen years of absence--years
filled for me with the rumors of her changes. And on the very day of my
arrival she calmly reassured me. She told me in her supremely magical
way that all was well with her. She taught me once more a lesson I had
not quite forgotten, but that I was glad to learn again--the lesson that
Egypt owes her most subtle, most inner beauty to Kheper, although she
owes her marvels to men; that when he created the sun which shines upon
her, he gave her the lustre of her life, and that those who come to her
must be sun-worshippers if they would truly and intimately understand
the treasure or romance that lies heaped within her bosom.

Thoth, says the old legend, travelled in the Boat of the Sun. If you
would love Egypt rightly, you, too, must be a traveller in that bark.
You must not fear to steep yourself in the mystery of gold, in the
mystery of heat, in the mystery of silence that seems softly showered
out of the sun. The sacred white lotus must be your emblem, and Horus,
the hawk-headed, merged in Ra, your special deity. Scarcely had I set
foot once more in Egypt before Thoth lifted me into the Boat of the sun
and soothed my fears to sleep.

I arrived in Cairo. I saw new and vast hotels; I saw crowded streets;
brilliant shops; English officials driving importantly in victorias,
surely to pay dreadful calls of ceremony; women in gigantic hats, with
Niagaras of veil, waving white gloves as they talked of--I guess--the
latest Cairene scandal. I perceived on the right hand and on the left
waiters created in Switzerland, hall porters made in Germany, Levantine
touts, determined Jews holding false antiquities in their lean fingers,
an English Baptist minister, in a white helmet, drinking chocolate on a
terrace, with a guide-book in one fist, a ticket to visit monuments
in the other. I heard Scottish soldiers playing, "I'll be in Scotland
before ye!" and something within me, a lurking hope, I suppose, seemed
to founder and collapse--but only for a moment. It was after four in the
afternoon. Soon day would be declining. And I seemed to remember that
the decline of day in Egypt had moved me long ago--moved me as few, rare
things have ever done. Within half an hour I was alone, far up the
long road--Ismail's road--that leads from the suburbs of Cairo to the
Pyramids. And then Egypt took me like a child by the hand and reassured
me.

It was the first week of November, high Nile had not subsided, and all
the land here, between the river and the sand where the Sphinx keeps
watch, was hidden beneath the vast and tranquil waters of what seemed a
tideless sea--a sea fringed with dense masses of date-palms, girdled in
the far distance by palm-trees that kept the white and the brown houses
in their feathery embrace. Above these isolated houses pigeons circled.
In the distance the lateen sails of boats glided, sometimes behind the
palms, coming into view, vanishing and mysteriously reappearing among
their narrow trunks. Here and there a living thing moved slowly, wading
homeward through this sea: a camel from the sands of Ghizeh, a buffalo,
two donkeys, followed by boys who held with brown hands their dark blue
skirts near their faces, a Bedouin leaning forward upon the neck of his
quickly stepping horse. At one moment I seemed to look upon the lagoons
of Venice, a watery vision full of a glassy calm. Then the palm-trees in
the water, and growing to its edge, the pale sands that, far as the
eyes could see, from Ghizeh to Sakkara and beyond, fringed it toward
the west, made me think of the Pacific, of palmy islands, of a paradise
where men grow drowsy in well-being, and dream away the years. And
then I looked farther, beyond the pallid line of the sands, and I saw
a Pyramid of gold, the wonder Khufu had built. As a golden wonder it
saluted me after all my years of absence. Later I was to see it grey as
grey sands, sulphur color in the afternoon from very near at hand, black
as a monument draped in funereal velvet for a mourning under the stars
at night, white as a monstrous marble tomb soon after dawn from the
sand-dunes between it and Sakkara. But as a golden thing it greeted me,
as a golden miracle I shall remember it.

Slowly the sun went down. The second Pyramid seemed also made of gold.
Drowsily splendid it and its greater brother looked set on the golden
sands beneath the golden sky. And now the gold came traveling down from
the desert to the water, turning it surely to a wine like the wine of
gold that flowed down Midas's throat; then, as the magic grew, to a
Pactolus, and at last to a great surface that resembled golden ice,
hard, glittering, unbroken by any ruffling wave. The islands rising from
this golden ice were jet black, the houses black, the palms and their
shadows that fell upon the marvel black. Black were the birds that flew
low from roof to roof, black the wading camels, black the meeting leaves
of the tall lebbek-trees that formed a tunnel from where I stood to Mena
House. And presently a huge black Pyramid lay supine on the gold, and
near it a shadowy brother seemed more humble than it, but scarcely less
mysterious. The gold deepened, glowed more fiercely. In the sky above
the Pyramids hung tiny cloud wreaths of rose red, delicate and airy as
the gossamers of Tunis. As I turned, far off in Cairo I saw the first
lights glittering across the fields of doura, silvery white, like
diamonds. But the silver did not call me. My imagination was held
captive by the gold. I was summoned by the gold, and I went on, under
the black lebbek-trees, on Ismail's road, toward it. And I dwelt in it
many days.

The wonders of Egypt man has made seem to increase in stature before the
spirits' eyes as man learns to know them better, to tower up ever higher
till the imagination is almost stricken by their looming greatness.
Climb the great Pyramid, spend a day with Abou on its summit, come down,
penetrate into its recesses, stand in the king's chamber, listen to the
silence there, feel it with your hands--is it not tangible in this hot
fastness of incorruptible death?--creep, like the surreptitious midget
you feel yourself to be, up those long and steep inclines of polished
stone, watching the gloomy darkness of the narrow walls, the far-off
pinpoint of light borne by the Bedouin who guides you, hear the twitter
of the bats that have their dwelling in this monstrous gloom that man
has made to shelter the thing whose ambition could never be embalmed,
though that, of all qualities, should have been given here, in the land
it dowered, a life perpetual. Now you know the Great Pyramid. You know
that you can climb it, that you can enter it. You have seen it from all
sides, under all aspects. It is familiar to you.

No, it can never be that. With its more wonderful comrade, the Sphinx,
it has the power peculiar, so it seems to me, to certain of the rock and
stone monuments of Egypt, of holding itself ever aloof, almost like the
soul of man which can retreat at will, like the Bedouin retreating from
you into the blackness of the Pyramid, far up, or far down, where the
pursuing stranger, unaided, cannot follow.




II

THE SPHINX

One day at sunset I saw a bird trying to play with the Sphinx--a bird
like a swallow, but with a ruddy brown on its breast, a gleam of blue
somewhere on its wings. When I came to the edge of the sand basin where
perhaps Khufu saw it lying nearly four thousand years before the birth
of Christ, the Sphinx and the bird were quite alone. The bird flew near
the Sphinx, whimsically turning this way and that, flying now low, now
high, but ever returning to the magnet which drew it, which held it,
from which it surely longed to extract some sign of recognition. It
twittered, it posed itself in the golden air, with its bright eyes
fixed upon those eyes of stone which gazed beyond it, beyond the land of
Egypt, beyond the world of men, beyond the centre of the sun to the last
verges of eternity. And presently it alighted on the head of the Sphinx,
then on its ear, then on its breast; and over the breast it tripped
jerkily, with tiny, elastic steps, looking upward, its whole body
quivering apparently with a desire for comprehension--a desire for some
manifestation of friendship. Then suddenly it spread its wings, and,
straight as an arrow, it flew away over the sands and the waters toward
the doura-fields and Cairo.

And the sunset waned, and the afterglow flamed and faded, and the clear,
soft African night fell. The pilgrims who day by day visit the Sphinx,
like the bird, had gone back to Cairo. They had come, as the bird
had come; as those who have conquered Egypt came; as the Greeks came,
Alexander of Macedon, and the Ptolemies; as the Romans came; as the
Mamelukes, the Turks, the French, the English came.

They had come--and gone.

And that enormous face, with the stains of stormy red still adhering
to its cheeks, grew dark as the darkness closed in, turned brown as a
fellah's face, as the face of that fellah who whispered his secret in
the sphinx's ear, but learnt no secret in return; turned black almost
as a Nubian's face. The night accentuated its appearance of terrible
repose, of super-human indifference to whatever might befall. In the
night I seemed to hear the footsteps of the dead--of all the dead
warriors and the steeds they rode, defiling over the sand before the
unconquerable thing they perhaps thought that they had conquered. At
last the footsteps died away. There was a silence. Then, coming down
from the Great Pyramid, surely I heard the light patter of a donkey's
feet. They went to the Sphinx and ceased. The silence was profound.
And I remembered the legend that Mary, Joseph, and the Holy Child once
halted here on their long journey, and that Mary laid the tired Christ
between the paws of the Sphinx to sleep. Yet even of the Christ the soul
within that body could take no heed at all.

It is, I think, one of the most astounding facts in the history of
man that a man was able to contain within his mind, to conceive, the
conception of the Sphinx. That he could carry it out in the stone is
amazing. But how much more amazing it is that before there was the
Sphinx he was able to see it with his imagination! One may criticize the
Sphinx. One may say impertinent things that are true about it: that
seen from behind at a distance its head looks like an enormous mushroom
growing in the sand, that its cheeks are swelled inordinately, that
its thick-lipped mouth is legal, that from certain places it bears a
resemblance to a prize bull-dog. All this does not matter at all. What
does matter is that into the conception and execution of the Sphinx has
been poured a supreme imaginative power. He who created it looked beyond
Egypt, beyond the life of man. He grasped the conception of Eternity,
and realized the nothingness of Time, and he rendered it in stone.

I can imagine the most determined atheist looking at the Sphinx and, in
a flash, not merely believing, but feeling that he had before him proof
of the life of the soul beyond the grave, of the life of the soul of
Khufu beyond the tomb of his Pyramid. Always as you return to the Sphinx
you wonder at it more, you adore more strangely its repose, you steep
yourself more intimately in the aloof peace that seems to emanate from
it as light emanates from the sun. And as you look on it at last perhaps
you understand the infinite; you understand where is the bourne to which
the finite flows with all its greatness, as the great Nile flows from
beyond Victoria Nyanza to the sea.

And as the wonder of the Sphinx takes possession of you gradually, so
gradually do you learn to feel the majesty of the Pyramids of Ghizeh.
Unlike the Step Pyramid of Sakkara, which, even when one is near it,
looks like a small mountain, part of the land on which it rests, the
Pyramids of Ghizeh look what they are--artificial excrescences, invented
and carried out by man, expressions of man's greatness. Exquisite as
they are as features of the drowsy golden landscape at the setting of
the sun, I think they look most wonderful at night, when they are black
beneath the stars. On many nights I have sat in the sand at a distance
and looked at them, and always, and increasingly, they have stirred
my imagination. Their profound calm, their classical simplicity, are
greatly emphasized when no detail can be seen, when they are but black
shapes towering to the stars. They seem to aspire then like prayers
prayed by one who has said, "God does not need any prayers, but I need
them." In their simplicity they suggest a crowd of thoughts and of
desires. Guy de Maupassant has said that of all the arts architecture is
perhaps the most aesthetic, the most mysterious, and the most nourished
by ideas. How true this is you feel as you look at the Great Pyramid by
night. It seems to breathe out mystery. The immense base recalls to you
the labyrinth within; the long descent from the tiny slit that gives you
entrance, your uncertain steps in its hot, eternal night, your falls
on the ice-like surfaces of its polished blocks of stone, the crushing
weight that seemed to lie on your heart as you stole uncertainly on,
summoned almost as by the desert; your sensation of being for ever
imprisoned, taken and hidden by a monster from Egypt's wonderful light,
as you stood in the central chamber, and realized the stone ocean into
whose depths, like some intrepid diver, you had dared deliberately to
come. And then your eyes travel up the slowly shrinking walls till they
reach the dark point which is the top. There you stood with Abou, who
spends half his life on the highest stone, hostages of the sun, bathed
in light and air that perhaps came to you from the Gold Coast. And
you saw men and camels like flies, and Cairo like a grey blur, and the
Mokattam hills almost as a higher ridge of the sands. The mosque of
Mohammed Ali was like a cup turned over. Far below slept the dead in
that graveyard of the Sphinx, with its pale stones, its sand, its palm,
its "Sycamores of the South," once worshipped and regarded as Hathor's
living body. And beyond them on one side were the sleeping waters, with
islands small, surely, as delicate Egyptian hands, and on the other the
great desert that stretches, so the Bedouins say, on and on "for a march
of a thousand days."

That base and that summit--what suggestion and what mystery in their
contrast! What sober, eternal beauty in the dark line which unites them,
now sharply, yet softly, defined against the night, which is purple as
the one garment of the fellah! That line leads the soul irresistibly
from earth to the stars.




III

SAKKARA

It was the "Little Christmas" of the Egyptians as I rode to Sakkara,
after seeing a wonderful feat, the ascent and descent of the second
Pyramid in nineteen minutes by a young Bedouin called Mohammed Ali who
very seriously informed me that the only Roumi who had ever reached the
top was an "American gentlemens" called Mark Twain, on his first visit
to Egypt. On his second visit, Ali said, Mr. Twain had a bad foot, and
declared he could not be bothered with the second Pyramid. He had been
up and down without a guide; he had disturbed the jackal which lives
near its summit, and which I saw running in the sunshine as Ali drew
near its lair, and he was satisfied to rest on his immortal laurels. To
the Bedouins of the Pyramids Mark Twain's world-wide celebrity is owing
to one fact alone: he is the only Roumi who has climbed the second
Pyramid. That is why his name is known to every one.

It was the "Little Christmas," and from the villages in the plain the
Egyptians came pouring out to visit their dead in the desert cemeteries
as I passed by to visit the dead in the tombs far off on the horizon.
Women, swathed in black, gathered in groups and jumped monotonously up
and down, to the accompaniment of stained hands clapping, and strange
and weary songs. Tiny children blew furiously into tin trumpets,
emitting sounds that were terribly European. Men strode seriously by,
or stood in knots among the graves, talking vivaciously of the things of
this life. As the sun rose higher in the heavens, this visit to the dead
became a carnival of the living. Laughter and shrill cries of merriment
betokened the resignation of the mourners. The sand-dunes were black
with running figures, racing, leaping, chasing one another, rolling over
and over in the warm and golden grains. Some sat among the graves and
ate. Some sang. Some danced. I saw no one praying, after the sun was up.
The Great Pyramid of Ghizeh was transformed in this morning hour, and
gleamed like a marble mountain, or like the hill covered with salt at
El-Outaya, in Algeria. As we went on it sank down into the sands, until
at last I could see only a small section with its top, which looked
almost as pointed as a gigantic needle. Abou was there on the hot stones
in the golden eye of the sun--Abou who lives to respect his Pyramid, and
to serve Turkish coffee to those who are determined enough to climb
it. Before me the Step Pyramid rose, brown almost as bronze, out of the
sands here desolate and pallid. Soon I was in the house of Marriette,
between the little sphinxes.

Near Cairo, although the desert is real desert, it does not give, to
me, at any rate, the immense impression of naked sterility, of almost
brassy, sun-baked fierceness, which often strikes one in the Sahara to
the south of Algeria, where at midday one sometimes has a feeling of
being lost upon a waste of metal, gleaming, angry, tigerish in color.
Here, in Egypt, both the people and the desert seem gentler, safer, more
amiable. Yet these tombs of Sakkara are hidden in a desolation of the
sands, peculiarly blanched and mournful; and as you wander from tomb to
tomb, descending and ascending, stealing through great galleries beneath
the sands, creeping through tubes of stone, crouching almost on hands
and knees in the sultry chambers of the dead, the awfulness of the
passing away of dynasties and of race comes, like a cloud, upon your
spirit. But this cloud lifts and floats from you in the cheerful tomb of
Thi, that royal councillor, that scribe and confidant, whose life must
have been passed in a round of serene activities, amid a sneering,
though doubtless admiring, population.

Into this tomb of white, vivacious figures, gay almost, though never
wholly frivolous--for these men were full of purpose, full of an ardor
that seduces even where it seems grotesque--I took with me a child of
ten called Ali, from the village of Kafiah; and as I looked from him
to the walls around us, rather than the passing away of the races,
I realized the persistence of type. For everywhere I saw the face of
little Ali, with every feature exactly reproduced. Here he was bending
over a sacrifice, leading a sacred bull, feeding geese from a cup,
roasting a chicken, pulling a boat, carpentering, polishing, conducting
a monkey for a walk, or merely sitting bolt upright and sneering. There
were lines of little Alis with their hands held to their breasts, their
faces in profile, their knees rigid, in the happy tomb of Thi; but he
glanced at them unheeding, did not recognize his ancestors. And he did
not care to penetrate into the tombs of Mera and Meri-Ra-ankh, into
the Serapeum and the Mestaba of Ptah-hotep. Perhaps he was right. The
Serapeum is grand in its vastness, with its long and high galleries and
its mighty vaults containing the huge granite sarcophagi of the sacred
bulls of Apis; Mera, red and white, welcomes you from an elevated niche
benignly; Ptah-hotep, priest of the fifth dynasty, receives you, seated
at a table that resembles a rake with long, yellow teeth standing on its
handle, and drinking stiffly a cup of wine. You see upon the wall near
by, with sympathy, a patient being plied by a naked and evidently an
unyielding physician with medicine from a jar that might have been
visited by Morgiana, a musician playing upon an instrument like a huge
and stringless harp. But it is the happy tomb of Thi that lingers
in your memory. In that tomb one sees proclaimed with a marvellous
ingenuity and expressiveness the joy and the activity of life. Thi must
have loved life; loved prayer and sacrifice, loved sport and war, loved
feasting and gaiety, labor of the hands and of the head, loved the arts,
the music of flute and harp, singing by the lingering and plaintive
voices which seem to express the essence of the east, loved sweet odors,
loved sweet women--do we not see him sitting to receive offerings with
his wife beside him?--loved the clear nights and the radiant days that
in Egypt make glad the heart of man. He must have loved the splendid
gift of life, and used it completely. And so little Ali had very right
to make his sole obeisance at Thi's delicious tomb, from which death
itself seems banished by the soft and embracing radiance of the almost
living walls.

This delicate cheerfulness, a quite airy gaiety of life, is often
combined in Egypt, and most beautifully and happily combined, with
tremendous solidity, heavy impressiveness, a hugeness that is well-nigh
tragic; and it supplies a relief to eye, to mind, to soul, that is sweet
and refreshing as the trickle of a tarantella from a reed flute
heard under the shadows of a temple of Hercules. Life showers us with
contrasts. Art, which gives to us a second and a more withdrawn life,
opening to us a door through which we pass to our dreams, may well
imitate life in this.




IV

ABYDOS

Through a long and golden noontide, and on into an afternoon whose
opulence of warmth and light it seemed could never wane, I sat alone,
or wandered gently quite alone, in the Temple of Seti I. at Abydos. Here
again I was in a place of the dead. In Egypt one ever seeks the dead in
the sunshine, black vaults in the land of the gold. But here in Abydos I
was accompanied by whiteness. The general effect of Seti's mighty temple
is that it is a white temple when seen in full sunshine and beneath
a sky of blinding blue. In an arid place it stands, just beyond an
Egyptian village that is a maze of dust, of children, of animals, and
flies. The last blind houses of the village, brown as brown paper,
confront it on a mound, and as I came toward it a girl-child swathed
in purple with ear-rings, and a twist of orange handkerchief above her
eyes, full of cloud and fire, leaned from a roof, sinuously as a young
snake, to watch me. On each side, descending, were white, ruined walls,
stretched out like defaced white arms of the temple to receive me.
I stood still for a moment and looked at the narrow, severely simple
doorway, at the twelve broken columns advanced on either side, white and
greyish white with their right angles, their once painted figures now
almost wholly colorless.

Here lay the Osirians, those blessed dead of the land of Egypt, who
worshipped the Judge of the Dead, the Lord of the Underworld, and who
hoped for immortality through him--Osiris, husband of Isis, Osiris,
receiver of prayers. Osiris the sun who will not be conquered by night,
but eternally rises again, and so is the symbol of the resurrection
of the soul. It is said that Set, the power of Evil, tore the body of
Osiris into fourteen fragments and scattered them over the land. But
multitudes of worshippers of Osiris believed him buried near Abydos and,
like those who loved the sweet songs of Hafiz, they desired to be buried
near him whom they adored; and so this place became a place of the dead,
a place of many prayers, a white place of many longings.