Kitabı oku: «Eastern Life», sayfa 4
IV. Asyoot – Old sites – Some Elements of Egyptian Thought – First Crocodiles – Soohadj – Girgeh – Kenneh
In the morning, our canvas was down, along the landward side of our boats, so that the people on shore could not pry. It was pleasant, however, to play the spy upon them. There were many donkeys, and gay groups of their owners, just above the boat. On the one hand were a company of men washing clothes in the river under a picturesque old wall; and on the other, boat-builders diligently at work on the shore. The Arab artisans appear to work well. The hammers of these boat-builders were going all day; and the tinman, shoemakers, and others whom I observed in the bazaars, appeared dexterous and industrious.
Asyoot is the residence of the Governor of Upper Egypt. Selim Pasha held this office as we went up the river. While we were coming down, he was deposed, to the great regret of all whom we heard speak of it. He was so well thought of that there was every hope of his reinstatement. Selim Pasha is he who married his sister, and made the terrible discovery while at supper on his wedding-day, in his first interview with his bride. Both were Circassian slaves; and he had been carried away before the birth of this sister. This adventure happened when the now grey-bearded man was young: but it invests him with interest still, in addition to that inspired by his high character. We passed his garden to-day, and thought it looked well, – the palace being embosomed among palms, acacias, and the yellow-flowering mimosa; which last, when intermixed with other trees, gives a kind of autumnal tinge to masses of dark foliage.
We were much struck by the causeway, which would be considered a vast work in England. It extends from the river bank to the town, and thence on to the Djebel (mountain) with many limbs from this main trunk. In direct extent, I think it can hardly be less than two miles; but of this I am not sure. Its secondary object is to retain the Nile water after the inundation, the water flowing in through sluices which can be easily closed. The land is divided by smaller embankments, within this large one, into compartments or basins, where the most vigorous crops of wheat, clover, and millet were flourishing when we rode by. The water stands not more than two feet deep at high Nile in the most elevated of these basins. Inside the causeway was the canal which yielded its earth to its neighbour. In this canal many pools remained; and the seed was only just springing in the driest parts. In some places I saw shaken piers, and sluices where the unbaked brick seemed to have melted down in the water: but the new walls and bridges appeared to be solidly constructed. – On the banks of the causeway and canal on the south side of the town were flowering mimosas as large, we thought, as oaks of fifty years' growth in England. The causeway afforded an admirable road – high, broad, and level. The effect was strange of entering from such a road into such a town.
The streets had, for the most part, blank walls, brown, and rarely perpendicular. Some sloped purposely, and some from the giving way of the mud bricks. Many were cracked from top to bottom. Jars were built in near the top of several of the houses, for the pigeons. The bazaars appeared well stocked, and the business going forward was brisk. I now began to feel the misery which every Frank woman has to endure in the provincial towns of the East – the being stared at by all eyes. The staring was not rude or offensive; but it was enough to be very disagreeable; at least, to one who knew, as I did, that the appearance of a woman with an uncovered face is an indecency in the eyes of the inhabitants. At Cairo, Jerusalem, and Damascus, one feels nothing of this, and the staring is no more than we give to a Turk in the streets of London or Liverpool: but in the provincial towns there is an air of amazement in the people, mingled in some places with true Mohammedan hatred of the Christians, which it is hard to meet with composure. The gentlemen of my party, who did not care for their share as Christians, wondered at my uneasiness, and disapproved of it: but I could not help it: and though I never gave way to it so far as to omit seeing anything on account of it, I never got over it at all, and felt it throughout to be the greatest penalty of my Eastern travel. Yet I would not advise any Englishwoman to alter her dress or ways. She can never, in a mere passage through an Eastern country, make herself look like an Eastern woman; and an unsupported assumption of any native custom will obtain for her no respect, but only make her appear ashamed of her own origin and ways. It is better to appear as she is, at any cost, than to attempt any degree of imposture.
While we were waiting in the street to have our letters addressed in Arabic to the care of our consul at Cairo, I was, for the first time, struck by the number of blind and one-eyed people among those who surrounded us. Several young boys were one-eyed. As everybody knows, this is less owing to disease than to dread of the government.
It was strange to see, in the middle of a large town, vultures and other wild birds flying overhead. Among others, we saw an eagle, with a fish in its beak. – On our way to the caves in the Djebel, we met a funeral procession coming from the cemetery which lies between the town and the hills. The women were uttering a funeral howl worthy of Ireland.
Our donkeys took us up a very steep path, nearly to the first range of caves. When we turned to overlook the landscape, what a view was there! Mr. E., who has travelled much, said he had never seen so rich an expanse of country. I felt that I had seen something like it; but I could not, at the moment, remember where. It was certainly not in England: nor was it like the plains of Lombardy; nor yet the unfenced expanse of cultivation that one sees in Germany. At last it struck me that the resemblance was to an Illinois prairie. The rich green, spreading on either hand to the horizon, was prairie-like: but I never was, in Illinois, on a height which commanded one hundred miles of unbroken fertility, such as I now saw. And even in Illinois, in the finest season, there is never such an atmosphere as here gave positive brilliancy to every feature of the scenery. A perfect level of the most vivid green extended north and south, till it was lost, not in haze, but from the mere inability of the eye to take in more; and through this wound away, from end to end, the full blue river. To the east, facing us, was the varied line of the Arabian hills, of a soft lilac tint. Seventeen villages, overshadowed by dark palms, were set down beside the river, or some little way into the land; and the plain was dotted with Arab husbandmen and their camels, here and there, as far as the eye could reach. Below us lay the town, with its brown, flat-roofed houses, relieved by the palms of its gardens, and two or three white cupolas, and fourteen minarets, of various heights and forms. Between it and us lay the causeway, enlivened by groups of Arabs, with their asses and camels, appearing and disappearing among the thickets of acacia which bordered it. Behind all lay the brilliant Djebel, with its glowing yellow lights and soft blue shadows. The whole scene looked to my eyes as gay as the rainbow, and as soft as the dawn. As I stood before the cave, I thought nothing could be more beautiful: but one section of it looked yet lovelier when seen through the lofty dark portal of an upper cave. But there is no conveying such an impression as that.
The caves are tombs; some of them very ancient: so ancient, that Abraham might have seen them, if he had come so far up the country. One race of those old times remains – the wolves. They were sacred here (Asyoot being the Lycopolis of the Greek times); their mummies are in many pits of the Djebel; and we saw the tracks of two in the dust of the caves. – The cave called Stabl d'Antar (Stable of the Architect, or, as others say, Stable of Antar) is lofty and large – about seventy-two feet by thirty-six. Its ceiling is covered with patterns which we should call Greek borders anywhere else: but this ceiling is older than Greek art. The colours are chiefly blue, light grey, and white. The colours of the hieroglyphic sculptures were red and blue, the blue predominating. Two large figures flanked the portal; one much defaced; the other nearly perfect.
I have since seen so much of the old Egyptian monuments, and they have become so familiarly interesting to me, that I look back with amusement to this hour of my first introduction to hieroglyphics and burial Caves. I can scarcely believe it was only a few months ago, so youthful and ignorant seem now the feelings of mere curiosity and wonder with which I looked upon such painting and sculpture as afterwards became an intelligible language to me. I do not mean by this that I made any attempts to learn the old Egyptian language or its signs, beyond a few of the commonest symbols. It is a kind of learning which requires the devotion of years; and it is perhaps the only kind of learning of which a smattering can be of no use, and may probably be mischievous. – I remember being extremely surprised at the amount of sculptured inscriptions here – little imagining what a mere sprinkling they were compared with what I should see in other places.
In the succession of chambers within, and in the caves above, we found ranges of holes for the deposit of wolf mummies, and pits for the reception of coffins. The roofs of some of these caves had been supported by large square pillars, whose capitals remain attached, while the shafts are gone. This gave us a hint of the architectural adornment of which we were to see so much hereafter in the tombs of Thebes and Benee Hasan. In the corner of a tomb lay a human skull, the bone of which was remarkably thick. Many bones and rags of mummy-cloth lay scattered about. On the side of the hill below we found a leg and a foot. The instep was high by compression, but very long. There was also a skull, wrapped in mummy-cloth; not fragrant enough now, for all its antique spicery, to bring away.
In the pits of these caves were the mummies lying when Cambyses was busy at Thebes, overthrowing the Colossus in the plain. And Jong after, came the upstart Greeks, relating here their personal adventures in India under their great Alexander, and calling the place Lycopolis, and putting a wolf on the reverse of their local coins. And, long after, came the Romans, and called Lycopolis the ancient name of the place, and laid the ashes of their dead in some of the caves. And, long after, came the Christian anchorites, and lived a hermit life in these rock abodes. Among them was John of Lycopolis, who was consulted as an oracle by the Emperor Theodosius, as by many others, from his supposed knowledge of futurity. A favourite eunuch, Eutropius, was sent hither from Constantinople, to learn from the hermit what would be the event of the civil war. I once considered the times of the Emperor Theodosius old times. How modern do they appear on the hill-side at Asyoot!
Our Scotch friends came up in the evening. As they were detained for the same reason as ourselves, we left them behind when we started the next afternoon. They gave us bows and waving of handkerchiefs, when the shouts of our crew gave notice of our departure; and they no doubt hoped to see us again speedily.
The next day, I told Mr. E. that a certain area we were coming to on the east bank must be the site of some old town. I judged this from the advantages evident at a glance. The space was nearly semicircular, its chord being the river-bank, and the rest curiously surrounded by three ranges of hills, whose extremities overlapped each other. There was thus obtained a river frontage, shelter from the sands of the desert behind, and a free ventilation through the passages of the hills. We referred to our books and map, and found that here stood Antaeopolis. From this time, it was one of my amusements to determine, by observation of the site, where to look for ancient towns; and the requisites were so clear that I seldom found myself deceived.
Diodorus Siculus tells us that Antae (supposed by Wilkinson to be probably the same with Ombte) had charge of the Ethiopian and Lybian parts of the kingdom of Osiris, while Osiris went abroad through the earth to benefit it with his gifts. Antae seems not to have been always in friendship with the house of Osiris, and was killed here by Hercules,9 on behalf of Osiris: but he was worshipped here, near the spot where the wife and son of Osiris avenged his death on his murderer Typho. The temple sacred to Antae (or, in the Greek, Antaeus), parts of which were standing thirty years ago, was a rather modern affair, having been built about the time of the destruction of the Colossus of Rhodes. Ptolemy Philopater built it; and he was the Egyptian monarch who sent presents and sympathy to Rhodes, on occasion of the fall of the Colossus. Now nothing remains of the monuments but some heaps of stones – nothing whatever that can be seen from the river. The traveller can only look upon hamlets of modern Arabs, and speculate on the probability of vast »treasures hid in the sand.«
If I were to have the choice of a fairy gift, it should be like none of the many things I fixed upon in my childhood, in readiness for such an occasion. It should be for a great winnowing fan, such as would, without injury to human eyes and lungs, blow away the sand which buries the monuments of Egypt. What a scene would be laid open then! One statue and sarcophagus, brought from Memphis, was buried one hundred and thirty feet below the mound surface. Who knows but that the greater part of old Memphis, and of other glorious cities, lies almost unharmed under the sand! Who can say what armies of sphinxes, what sentinels of colossi, might start up on the banks of the river, or come forth from the hill-sides of the interior, when the cloud of sand had been wafted away! The ruins which we now go to study might then appear occupying only eminences, while below might be ranges of pylons, miles of colonnade, temples intact, and gods and goddesses safe in their sanctuaries. What quays along the Nile, and the banks of forgotten canals! What terraces, and flights of wide shallow steps! What architectural stages might we not find for a thousand miles along the river, where now the orange sands lie so smooth and light as to show the track – the clear footprint – of every beetle that comes out to bask in the sun! – But it is better as it is. If we could once blow away the sand, to discover the temples and palaces, we should next want to rend the rocks, to lay open the tombs; and Heaven knows what this would set us wishing further. It is best as it is; for the time has not come for the full discovery of the treasures of Egypt. It is best as it is. The sand is a fine means of preservation; and the present inhabitants perpetuate enough of the names to serve for guidance when the day for exploration shall come. The minds of scholars are preparing for an intelligent interpretation of what a future age may find: and science, chemical and mechanical, will probably supply such means hereafter as we have not now for treating and removing the sand when its conservative office has lasted long enough. We are not worthy yet of this great unveiling: and the inhabitants are not, from their ignorance, trustworthy as spectators. It is better that the world should wait, if only care be taken that the memory of no site now known be lost. True as I feel it to be that we had better wait, I was for ever catching myself in a speculation, not only on the buried treasures of the mounds on shore, but on means for managing this obstinate sand.
And yet, vexatious as is its presence in many a daily scene, this sand has a bright side to its character, like everything else. Besides its great office of preserving unharmed for a future age the records of the oldest times known to man, the sand of the desert has, for many thousand years, shared equally with the Nile the function of determining the character and the destiny of a whole people, who have again operated powerfully on the characters and destiny of other nations. Everywhere, the minds and fortunes of human races are mainly determined by the characteristics of the soil on which they are horn and reared. In our own small island, there are, as it were, three tribes of people, whose lives are much determined still, in spite of all modern facilities for intercourse, by the circumstance of there being born and reared on the mineral strip to the west, the pastoral strip in the middle, or the eastern agricultural portion. The Welsh and Cornwall miners are as widely different from the Lincolnshire or Kentish husbandmen, and the Leicestershire herdsmen, as Englishmen can be from Englishmen. Not only their physical training is different; their intellectual faculties are differently exercised, and their moral ideas and habits vary accordingly. So it is in every country where there is a diversity of geological formation: and nowhere is the original constitution of their earth so strikingly influential on the character of its inhabitants as in Egypt. There everything depends – life itself, and all that it includes – on the state of the unintermitting conflict between the Nile and the Desert. The world has seen many struggles; but no other so pertinacious, so perdurable, and so sublime as the conflict of these two great powers. The Nile, ever young because perpetually renewing its youth, appears to the inexperienced eye to have no chance, with its stripling force, against the great old Goliath, the Desert, whose might has never relaxed from the earliest days till now; but the giant has not conquered yet. Now and then he has prevailed for a season; and the tremblers whose destiny hung on the event have cried out that all was over: but he has once more been driven back, and Nilus has risen up again, to do what we see him doing in the sculptures – bind up his water-plants about the throne of Egypt. These fluctuations of superiority have produced extraordinary effects on the people for the time: but these are not the forming and training influences which I am thinking of now. It is true that when Nile gains too great an accession of strength, and runs in destructively upon the Desert, men are in despair at seeing their villages swept away, and that torrents come spouting out from the sacred tombs in the mountain, as the fearful clouds of the sky come down to aid the river of the valley. It is true that, in the opposite case, they tremble when the heavens are alive with meteors, and the Nile is too weak to rise and meet the sand columns that come marching on, followed by blinding clouds of the enemy: and that famine is then inevitable, bringing with it the moral curses which attend upon hunger. It is true that at such times strangers have seen (as we know from Abdallatif, himself an eye-witness) how little children are made food of,10 and even men slaughtered for meat, like cattle. It is true that such have been the violent effects produced on men's conduct by extremity here – effects much like what are produced by extremity everywhere. It is not of this that I am thinking when regarding the influence on a nation of the incessant struggle between the Nile and the Desert. It is of the formation of their ideas and habits, and the training of their desires.
From the beginning, the people of Egypt have had everything to hope from the river; nothing from the desert: much to fear from the desert; and little from the river. What their Fear may reasonably be, anyone may know who looks upon a hillocky expanse of sand, where the little jerboa burrows, and the hyaena prowls at night. Under these hillocks lie temples and palaces, and under the level sands, a whole city. The enemy has come in from behind, and stifled and buried it. What is the Hope of the people from the river, anyone may witness who, at the regular season, sees the people grouped on the eminences, watching the advancing waters, and listening for the voice of the crier, or the boom of the cannon which is to tell the prospect or event of the inundation of the year. Who can estimate the effect on a nation's mind and character of a perpetual vigilance against the desert (see what it is in Holland of a similar vigilance against the sea!), and of an annual mood of Hope in regard to the Nile? Who cannot see what a stimulating and enlivening influence this periodical anxiety and relief must exercise on the character of a nation? – And then, there is the effect on their Ideas. The Nile was naturally deified by the old inhabitants. It was a god to the mass; and at least one of the manifestations of deity to the priestly class. As it was the immediate cause of all they had, and all they hoped for, the creative power regularly at work before their eyes, usually conquering, though occasionally checked, it was to them the Good Power; and the Desert was the Evil one. Hence came a main part of their faith, embodied in the allegory of the burial of Osiris in the sacred stream, whence he rose, once a year, to scatter blessings over the earth. – Then, the structure of their country originated or modified their ideas of death and life. As to the disposal of their dead; – they could not dream of consigning their dead to the waters, which were too sacred to receive any meaner body than the incorruptible one of Osiris: nor must any other be placed within reach of its waters, or in the way of the pure production of the valley. There were the boundary rocks, with the hints afforded by their caves. These became sacred to the dead. After the accumulation of a few generations of corpses, it became clear how much more extensive was the world of the dead than that of the living: and as the proportion of the living to the dead became, before men's eyes, smaller and smaller, the state of the dead became a subject of proportionate importance to them, till their faith and practice grew into what we see them in the records of the temples and tombs – engrossed with the idea of death and in preparation for it. The unseen world became all in all to them; and the visible world and present life of little more importance than as the necessary introduction to the higher and greater. The imagery before their eyes perpetually sustained these modes of thought. Everywhere they had in presence the symbols of the worlds of death and life; – the limited scene of production, activity, and change; – the valley with its verdure, its floods, and its busy multitudes, who were all incessantly passing away, to be succeeded by their like; while, as a boundary to this scene of life, lay the region of death, to their view unlimited, and everlastingly silent to the human ear. Their imagery of death was wholly suggested by the scenery of their abode. Our reception of this is much injured by our having been familiarised with it first through the ignorant and vulgarised Greek adoption of it, in their imagery of Charon. Styx, Cerberus, and Rhadamanthus: but if we can forget these, and look upon the older records with fresh eyes, it is inexpressibly interesting to contemplate the symbolical representations of death by the oldest of the Egyptians, before Greek or Persian was heard of in the world; the passage of the dead across the river or lake of the valley, attended by the Conductor of souls, the god Anubis; the formidable dog, the guardian of the mansion of Osiris (or the divine abode); the balance in which the heart or deeds of the deceased are weighed against the symbol of Integrity; the infant Harpocrates, the emblem of a new life, seated before the throne of the judge; the range of assessors who are to pronounce on the life of the being come up to judgment; and finally the judge himself, whose suspended sceptre is to give the sign of acceptance or condemnation. Here the deceased has crossed the living valley and river; and in the Caves of the death region, where the howl of the wild dog is heard by night, is this process of judgment going forward: and none but those who have seen the contrasts of the region with their own eyes – none who have received the idea through the borrowed imagery of the Greeks, or the traditions of any other people – can have any adequate notion how the mortuary ideas of the primitive Egyptians, and, through them, of the civilised world at large, have been originated by the everlasting conflict of the Nile and the Desert.
How the presence of these elements has, in all ages, determined the occupations and habits of the inhabitants, needs only to be pointed out; the fishing, the navigation, and the almost amphibious habits of the people are what they owe to the Nile; and their practice of laborious tillage to the Desert. A more striking instance of patient industry can nowhere be found than in the method of irrigation practised in all times in this valley. After the subsidence of the Nile, every drop of water needed for tillage, and for all other purposes, for the rest of the year, is hauled up and distributed by human labour – up to the point where the sakia, worked by oxen, supersedes the shadoof, worked by men. Truly the Desert is here a hard taskmaster, or, rather, a pertinacious enemy, to be incessantly guarded against: but yet a friendly adversary, inasmuch as such natural compulsion to toil is favourable to a nation's character.
One other obligation which the Egyptians owe to the Desert struck me freshly and forcibly, from the beginning of our voyage to the end. It plainly originated their ideas of Art. Not those of the present inhabitants, which are wholly Saracenic still; but those of the primitive race who appear to have originated art all over the world. The first thing that impressed me in the Nile scenery, above Cairo, was the angularity of almost all forms. The trees appeared almost the only exception. The line of the Arabian hills soon became so even as to give them the appearance of being supports of a vast tableland, while the sand heaped up at their bases was like a row of pyramids. Elsewhere, one's idea of sand-hills is that, of all round eminences, they are the roundest; but here their form is generally that of truncated pyramids. The entrances of the caverns are square. The masses of sand left by the Nile are square. The river banks are graduated by the action of the water, so that one may see a hundred natural Nilometers in as many miles. Then, again, the forms of the rocks, especially the limestone ranges, are remarkably grotesque. In a few days, I saw, without looking for them, so many colossal figures of men and animals springing from the natural rock, so many sphinxes and strange birds, that I was quite prepared for anything I afterwards met with in the temples. The higher we went up the country, the more pyramidal became the forms of even the mud houses of the modern people; and in Nubia they were worthy, from their angularity, of old Egypt. It is possible that the people of Abyssinia might, in some obscure age, have derived their ideas of art from Hindostan, and propagated them down the Nile. No one can now positively contradict it. But I did not feel on the spot that any derived art was likely to be in such perfect harmony with its surroundings as that of Egypt certainly is; – a harmony so wonderful as to be perhaps the most striking circumstance of all to a European, coming from a country where all art is derived,11 and its main beauty therefore lost. It is useless to speak of the beauty of Egyptian architecture and sculpture to those who, not going to Egypt, can form no conception of its main condition – its appropriateness. I need not add that I think it worse than useless to adopt Egyptian forms and decoration in countries where there is no Nile and no Desert, and where decorations are not, as in Egypt, fraught with meaning – pictured language – messages to the gazer. But I must speak more of this hereafter. Suffice it now that in the hills, angular at their summits, with angular mounds at their bases, and angular caves in their strata, we could not but at once see the originals of temples, pyramids, and tombs. Indeed, the pyramids look like an eternal fixing down of the shifting sand-hills which are here a main feature of the Desert. If we consider further what facility the Desert has afforded for scientific observation, how it was the field for the meteorological studies of the Egyptians, and how its permanent pyramidal forms served them, whether originally or by derivation, with instruments of measurement and calculation for astronomical purposes, we shall see that, one way or another, the Desert has been a great benefactor to the Egyptians of all time, however fairly regarded, in some senses, as an enemy. The sand may, as I said before, have a fair side to its character, if it has taken a leading part in determining the ideas, the feelings, the worship, the occupation, the habits, and the arts of the people of the Nile valley for many thousand years.
The hills now, above Antaeopolis, approached the river in strips, which, on arriving at them, we found to be united by a range at the back. Some fine sites for cities were thus afforded; and many of them were, no doubt, thus occupied in past ages. A little further on rises a lofty rock, a precipice three hundred feet high, which our Rais was afraid to pass at night. I was on deck before sunrise on the morning of the nth, to see it; but I found there was no hurry. A man was sent for milk from this place: so I landed too, and walked some way along the bank. On the Lybian side, I overlooked a rich, green, clumpy country. On the Arabian side, the hills came down so close to the water as to leave only a narrow path, scarcely passable for camels at high Nile. There were goats among the rocks; and on the other shore, sheep, whose brown wool is spun by distaff by men in the fields, or travelling along the bank. The unbleached wool makes the brown garments which all the men wear. I often wished that some one would set the fashion of red garments in the brown Nile scenery. We saw more or less good blue every day; but the only red dress I had seen yet was at Asyoot, where it looked so well chat one wished for more. The red tarboosh is a treat to the eye, when the sun touches it; or at night, the lamp on deck; but the crew did not wear the tarboosh – only little white cotton caps, in the absence of the full-dress turban.
