Egypt (La Mort de Philae) Part 9

Sixty to the right, sixty to the left, too close together for their size, they grow thick like a forest of baobabs that wanted s.p.a.ce: they induce a feeling of oppression without possible deliverance, of ma.s.sive and mournful eternity.

[*] About 30 feet in circ.u.mference and 75 feet in height including the capital.

And this, forsooth, was the place that I had wished to traverse alone, without even the Bedouin guard, who at night believes it his duty to follow the visitors. But now it grows lighter and lighter. Too light even, for a blue phosph.o.r.escence, coming from the eastern horizon, begins to filter through the opacity of the colonnades on the right, outlines the monstrous shafts, and details them by vague glimmerings on their edges. The full moon is risen, alas! and my hours of solitude are nearly over.

The moon! Suddenly the stones of the summit, the copings, the formidable friezes, are lighted by rays of clear light, and here and there, on the bas-reliefs encircling the pillars, appear luminous trails which reveal the G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses engraved in the stone. They were watching in myriads around me, as I knew well,--coifed, all of them, in discs or great horns. They stare at one another with their arms raised, spreading out their long fingers in an eager attempt at conversation. They are numberless, these eternally gesticulating G.o.ds. Wherever you look their forms are multiplied with a stupefying repet.i.tion. They seem to have some mysterious secret to convey to one another, but have perforce to remain silent, and for all the expressiveness of their att.i.tudes their hands do not move. And hieroglyphs, too, repeated to infinity, envelop you on all sides like a multiple woof of mystery.

Minute by minute now, everything amongst these rigid dead things grows more precise. Cold, hard rays penetrate through the immense ruin, separating with a sharp incisiveness the light from the shadows.

The feeling that these stones, wearied as they were with their long duration, might still be thoughtful, still mindful of their past, grows less--less than it was a few moments before, far less than during the preceding blue phantasmagoria. Under this clear, pale light, as in the daytime, under the fire of the sun, Thebes has lost for the moment whatever remained to it of soul; it has receded farther into the backward of time, and appears now nothing more than a vast gigantic fossil that excites only our wonder and our fear.

But the tourists will soon be here, attracted by the moon. A league away, in the hotels of Luxor, I can fancy how they have hurried away from the tables, for fear of missing the celebrated spectacle. For me, therefore, it is time to beat a retreat, and, by the great avenue again, I direct my steps towards the pylons of the Ptolemies, where the night guards are waiting.

They are busy already, these Bedouins, in opening the gates for some tourists, who have shown their permits, and who carry Kodaks, magnesium to light up the temples--quite an outfit in short.

Farther on, when I have taken the road to Luxor, it is not long before I meet, under the palm-trees and on the sands, the crowd, the main body of the arrivals--some in carriages, some on horseback, some on donkeys.

There is a noise of voices speaking all sorts of non-Egyptian languages.

One is tempted to ask: "What is happening? A ball, a holiday, a grand marriage?" No. The moon is full to-night at Thebes, upon the ruins. That is all.

CHAPTER XVI

THEBES IN SUNLIGHT

It is two o'clock in the afternoon. A white angry fire pours from the sky, which is pale from excess of light. A sun inimical to the men of our climate scorches the enormous fossil which, crumbling in places, is all that remains of Thebes and which lies there like the carca.s.s of a gigantic beast that has been dead for thousands of years, but is too ma.s.sive ever to be annihilated.

In the hypostyle there is a little blue shade behind the monstrous pillars, but even that shade is dusty and hot. The columns too are hot, and so are all the blocks--and yet it is winter and the nights are cold, even to the point of frost. Heat and dust; a reddish dust, which hangs like an eternal cloud over these ruins of Upper Egypt, exhaling an odour of spices and mummy.

The great heat seems to augment the retrospective sensation of fatigue which seizes you as you regard these stones--too heavy for human strength--which are ma.s.sed here in mountains. One almost seems to partic.i.p.ate in the efforts, the exhaustions and the sweating toils of that people, with their muscles of brand new steel, who in the carrying and piling of such ma.s.ses had to bear the yoke for thirty centuries.

Even the stones themselves tell of fatigue--the fatigue of being crushed by one another's weight for thousands of years; the suffering that comes of having been too exactly carved, and too nicely placed one above the other, so that they seem to be riveted together by the force of their mere weight. Oh! the poor stones of the base that bear the weight of these awful pilings!

And the ardent colour of these things surprises you. It has persisted.

On the red sandstone of the hypostyle, the paintings of more than three thousand years ago are still to be seen; especially above the central chamber, almost in the sky, the capitals, in the form of great flowers, have kept the lapis blues, the greens and yellows with which their strange petals were long ago bespeckled.

Decrepitude and crumbling and dust. In broad daylight, under the magnificent splendour of the life-giving sun, one realises clearly that all here is dead, and dead since days which the imagination is scarcely able to conceive. And the ruin appears utterly irreparable. Here and there are a few impotent and almost infantine attempts at reparation, undertaken in the ancient epochs of history by the Greeks and Romans.

Columns have been put together, holes have been filled with cement. But the great blocks lie in confusion, and one feels, even to the point of despair, how impossible it is ever to restore to order such a chaos of crushing, overthrown things--even with the help of legions of workers and machines, and with centuries before you in which to complete the task.

And then, what surprises and oppresses you is the want of clear s.p.a.ce, the little room that remained for the mult.i.tudes in these halls which are nevertheless immense. The whole s.p.a.ce between the walls was enc.u.mbered with pillars. The temples were half filled with colossal forests of stone. The men who built Thebes lived in the beginning of time, and had not yet discovered the thing which to us to-day seems so simple--namely, the vault. And yet they were marvellous pioneers, these architects. They had already succeeded in evolving out of the dark, as it were, a number of conceptions which, from the beginning no doubt, slumbered in mysterious germ in the human brain--the idea of rect.i.tude, the straight line, the right angle, the vertical line, of which Nature furnishes no example, even symmetry, which, if you consider it well, is less explicable still. They employed symmetry with a consummate mastery, understanding as well as we do all the effect that is to be obtained by the repet.i.tion of like objects placed _en pendant_ on either side of a portico or an avenue. But they did not invent the vault. And therefore, since there was a limit to the size of the stones which they were able to place flat like beams, they had recourse to this profusion of columns to support their stupendous ceilings. And thus it is that there seems to be a want of air, that one seems to stifle in the middle of their temples, dominated and obstructed as they are by the rigid presence of so many stones. And yet to-day you can see quite clearly in these temples, for, since the suspended rocks which served for roof have fallen, floods of light descend from all parts. But formerly, when a kind of half night reigned in the deep halls, beneath the immovable carapaces of sandstone or granite, how oppressive and sepulchral it must all have been--how final and pitiless, like a gigantic palace of Death!

On one day, however, in each year, here at Thebes, a light as of a conflagration used to penetrate from one end to the other of the sanctuaries of Amen; for the middle artery is open towards the north-west, and is aligned in such a fashion that, once a year, one solitary time, on the evening of the summer solstice, the sun as it sets is able to plunge its reddened rays straight into the sanctuaries. At the moment when it enlarges its blood-coloured disc before descending behind the desolation of the Libyan mountains, it arrives in the very axis of this avenue, of this suite of aisles, which measures more than 800 yards in length. Formerly, then, on these evenings it shone horizontally beneath the terrible ceilings--between these rows of pillars which are as high as our Colonne Vendome--and threw, for some seconds, its colours of molten copper into the obscurity of the holy of holies. And then the whole temple would resound with the clashing of music, and the glory of the G.o.d of Thebes was celebrated in the depths of the forbidden halls.

Like a cloud, like a veil, the continual red-coloured dust floats everywhere above the ruins, and, athwart it, here and there, the sun traces long, white beams, But at one point of the avenue, behind the obelisks, it seems to rise in clouds, this dust of Egypt, as if it were smoke. For the workers of bronze are a.s.sembled there to-day and, hour by hour, without ceasing, they dig in the sacred soil. Ridiculously small and almost negligible by the side of the great monoliths they dig and dig. Patiently they clear the ruins, and the earth goes away in little parcels in rows of baskets carried by children in the form of a chain.

The periodical deposits of the Nile, and the sand carried by the wind of the desert, had raised the soil by about six yards since the time when Thebes ceased to live. But now men are endeavouring to restore the ancient level. At first sight the task seemed impossible, but they will achieve it in the end, even with their simple means, these fellah toilers, who sing as they labour at their incessant work of ants. Soon the grand hypostyle will be freed from rubbish, and its columns, which even before seemed so tremendous, uncovered now to the base, have added another twenty feet to their height. A number of colossal statues, which lay asleep beneath this shroud of earth and sand, have been brought back to the light, set upright again and have resumed their watch in the intimidating thoroughfares for a new period of quasi-eternity. Year by year the town-mummy is being slowly exhumed by dint of prodigious effort; and is repeopled again by G.o.ds and kings who had been hidden for thousands of years![*] Year in, year out, the digging continues--deeper and deeper. It is scarcely known to what depth the debris and the ruins descend. Thebes had endured for so many centuries, the earth here is so penetrated with human past, that it is averred that, under the oldest of the known temples there are still others, older still and more ma.s.sive, of which there was no suspicion, and whose age must exceed eight thousand years.

[*] As is generally known, the maintenance of the ancient monuments of Egypt and their restoration, so far as that may be possible, has been entrusted to the French. M. Maspero has delegated to Thebes an artist and a scholar, M. Legrain by name, who is devoting his life pa.s.sionately to the work.

In spite of the burning sun, and of the clouds of dust raised by the blows of the pickaxes, one might linger for hours amongst the dust-stained, meagre fellahs, watching the excavations in this unique soil--where everything that is revealed is by way of being a surprise and a lucky find, where the least carved stone had a past of glory, formed part of the first architectural splendours, was _a stone of Thebes_. Scarcely a moment pa.s.ses but, at the bottom of the trenches, as the digging proceeds, some new thing gleams. Perhaps it is the polished flank of a colossus, fashioned out of granite from Syene, or a little copper Osiris, the debris of a vase, a golden trinket beyond price, or even a simple blue pearl that has fallen from the necklace of some waiting-maid of a queen.

This activity of the excavators, which alone reanimates certain quarters during the day, ends at sunset. Every evening the lean fellahs receive the daily wage of their labour, and take themselves off to sleep in the silent neighbourhood in their huts of mud; and the iron gates are shut behind them. At night, except for the guards at the entrance, no one inhabits the ruins.

Crumbling and dust. . . . Far around, on every side of these palaces and temples of the central artery--which are the best preserved and remain proudly upright--stretch great mournful s.p.a.ces, on which the sun from morning till evening pours an implacable light. There, amongst the lank desert plants, lie blocks scattered at hazard--the remains of sanctuaries, of which neither the plan nor the form will ever be discovered. But on these stones, fragments of the history of the world are still to be read in clear-cut hieroglyphs.

To the west of the hypostyle hall there is a region strewn with discs, all equal and all alike. It might be a draught-board for t.i.tans with draughts that would measure ten yards in circ.u.mference. They are the scattered fragments, slices, as it were, of a colonnade of the Ramses.

Farther on the ground seems to have pa.s.sed through fire. You walk over blackish scoriae encrusted with brazen bolts and particles of melted gla.s.s. It is the quarter burnt by the soldiers of Cambyses. They were great destroyers of the queen city, were these same Persian soldiers. To break up the obelisks and the colossal statues they conceived the plan of scorching them by lighting bonfires around them, and then, when they saw them burning hot, they deluged them with cold water. And the granites cracked from top to base.

It is well known, of course, that Thebes used to extend for a considerable distance both on this, the right, bank of the Nile, where the Pharaohs resided, and opposite, on the Libyan bank, given over to the preparers of mummies and to the mortuary temples. But to-day, except for the great palaces of the centre, it is little more than a litter of ruins, and the long avenues, lined with endless rows of sphinxes or rams, are lost, goodness knows where, buried beneath the sand.

At wide intervals, however, in the midst of these cemeteries of things, a temple here and there remains upright, preserving still its sanctified gloom beneath its cavernous carapace. One, where certain celebrated oracles used to be delivered, is even more prisonlike and sepulchral than the others in its eternal shadow. High up in a wall the black hole of a kind of grotto opens, to which a secret corridor coming from the depths used to lead. It was there that the face of the priest charged with the announcement of the sibylline words appeared--and the ceiling of his niche is all covered still with the smoke from the flame of his lamp, which was extinguished more than two thousand years ago!

What a number of ruins, scarcely emerging from the sand of the desert, are hereabout! And in the old dried-up soil, how many strange treasures remain hidden! When the sun lights thus the forlorn distances, when you perceive stretching away to the horizon these fields of death, you realise better what kind of a place this Thebes once was. Rebuilt as it were in the imagination it appears excessive, superabundant and multiple, like those flowers of the antediluvian world which the fossils reveal to us. Compared with it how our modern towns are dwarfed, and our hasty little palaces, our stuccoes and old iron!

And it is so mystical, this town of Thebes, with its dark sanctuaries, once inhabited by G.o.ds and symbols. All the sublime, fresh-minded striving of the human soul after the Unknowable is as it were petrified in these ruins, in forms diverse and immeasurably grand. And subsisting thus down to our day it puts us to shame. Compared with this people, who thought only of eternity, we are a lot of pitiful dotards, who soon will be past caring about the wherefore of life, or thought, or death. Such beginnings presaged, surely, something greater than our humanity of the present day, given over to despair, to alcohol and to explosives!

Crumbling and dust! This same sun of Thebes is in its place each day, parching, exhausting, cracking and pulverising.

On the ground where once stood so much magnificence there are fields of corn, spread out like green carpets, which tell of the return of the humble life of tillage. Above all, there is the sand, encroaching now upon the very threshold of the Pharaohs; there is the yellow desert; there is the world of reflections and of silence, which approaches like a slow submerging tide. In the distance, where the mirage trembles from morning till evening, the burying is already almost achieved. The few poor stones which still appear, barely emerging from the advancing dunes, are the remains of what men, in their superb revolts against death, had contrived to make the most ma.s.sively indestructible.

And this sun, this eternal sun, which parades over Thebes the irony of its duration--for us so impossible to calculate or to conceive! Nowhere so much as here does one suffer from the dismay of knowing that all our miserable little human effervescence is only a sort of fermentation round an atom emanated from that sinister ball of fire, and that that fire itself, the wonderful sun, is no more than an ephemeral meteor, a furtive spark, thrown off during one of the innumerable cosmic transformations, in the course of times without end and without beginning.

CHAPTER XVII

AN AUDIENCE OF AMENOPHIS II.

King Amenophis II. has resumed his receptions, which he found himself obliged to suspend for three thousand, three hundred and some odd years, by reason of his decease. They are very well attended; court dress is not insisted upon, and the Grand Master of ceremonies is not above taking a tip. He holds them every morning in the winter from eight o'clock, in the bowels of a mountain in the desert of Libya; and if he rests himself during the remainder of the day it is only because, as soon as midday sounds, they turn off the electric light.

Happy Amenophis! Out of so many kings who tried so hard to hide for ever their mummies in the depths of impenetrable caverns he is the only one who has been left in his tomb. And he "makes the most of it" every time he opens his funeral salons.

It is important to arrive before midday at the dwelling of this Pharaoh, and at eight o'clock sharp, therefore, on a clear February morning, I set out from Luxor, where for many days my dahabiya had slumbered against the bank of the Nile. It is necessary first of all to cross the river, for the Theban kings of the Middle Empire all established their eternal habitations on the opposite bank--far beyond the plains of the river sh.o.r.e, right away in those mountains which bound the horizon as with a wall of adorable rose-colour. Other canoes, which are also crossing, glide by the side of mine on the tranquil water. The pa.s.sengers seem to belong to that variety of Anglo-Saxons which is equipped by Thomas Cook & Sons (Egypt Ltd.), and like me, no doubt, they are bound for the royal presence.

We land on the sand of the opposite bank, which to-day is almost deserted. Formerly there stretched here a regular suburb of Thebes--that, namely, of the preparers of mummies, with thousands of ovens wherein to heat the natron and the oils, which preserved the bodies from corruption. In this Thebes, where for some fifty centuries, everything that died, whether man or beast, was minutely prepared and swathed in bandages, it will readily be understood what importance this quarter of the embalmers came to a.s.sume. And it was to the neighbouring mountains that the products of so many careful wrappings were borne for burial, while the Nile carried away the blood from the bodies and the filth of their entrails. That chain of living rocks that rises before us, coloured each morning with the same rose, as of a tender flower, is literally stuffed with dead bodies.