CHAPTER FOURI go to Cairo, meet the descendants of the Ancient Egyptians, visit their churches and a nunnery, hear of strange saints, and attend a Coptic wedding. At Malaria, where the Holy Family are said to have lived during the Flight into Egypt, is a tree, a legend, and an obelisk.
§ I
I TOOK the morning train from Alexandria to Cairo. As it sped south on its three-hour journey, I sat at the window of a white Pullman car and looked out on Egypt.
I saw a flat and low-lying land, stretching to the sky, emerald-coloured with crops of maize and sugar-cane, chocolate-coloured where the plough had turned it: a land steeped in sunshine. There were dense groves of date palms, and banana plantations where the yellow fruit lay among leaves huge and tattered like the ears of green elephants.
Embankments rising twenty feet or so above the fields carried the varied traffic of the Delta: a slow-moving string of camels, arching their necks towards some neighbouring market, or donkeys trit-trotting in the dust, bearing upon their backs, with an air of blithe servitude, a more than full-sized human being. Sometimes brown girls passed by in single file with water-jars on their heads, followed by a herd of goats in charge of a child, both girls and goats moving in a foot-high black powder which is the Eleventh Plague of Egypt—dust.
In the fields stood the fellah, who has probably changed less with the centuries than any character in Egypt. He stood bent above his hoe, the same kind of hoe which is to be seen in museums, labelled 3000 B.C., or he walked behind a plough drawn by two black oxen or by an ox and a camel, a plough like those to be seen on the tomb paintings of the Old Empire.
All the way from Alexandria to Cairo I saw young men and old men, burned almost black by the sun's rays, sitting beside the irrigation canals, ceaselessly turning the handle of an object like a slender wooden barrel, which sucked up water from the canal and directed it to a higher level.
These poor brown men are pumping life blood into Egypt. Day after day, year after year, century after century, they have been at their monotonous task, moving water from here to there; and if they ceased to do so the land of Egypt would dry up and become a desert. The student of ancient things looks at these water turners with amazement, for the thing they are turning all over the Nile Delta to-day is the water-screw which the mathematician Archimedes invented over two hundred years before Christ.
The train passed village after village, many of them set with exquisite picturesqueness among groves of date palms, or beside blue canals where high-masted giyasat lay at anchor with reefed sails, like butterflies with folded wings.
The houses in these villages were small brown boxes of two and three storeys, built of mud. Unshaped palm trunks form roofs and ceilings, and protruded from the walls. On the flat roofs were built elaborate pigeon houses, round which thousands of blue and white birds fluttered.
Brown children, turkeys, chickens, donkeys, camels, and water-buffaloes crowded the narrow, dusty space between the houses, while the women, quite aged at twenty-five and old at thirty, sat at their house doors, or beneath acacia and eucalyptus trees, pounding maize for bread or baking flat cakes in outdoor ovens.
Even during a short railway journey in Egypt you can understand the two main factors in the life of the people: the sun and the Nile. The Nile makes life possible in the narrow strip of green which is Egypt, and the sun pulls up the crops as if by a magnet.
From the beginnings of civilisation Egyptian agriculture has always depended on the annual flooding of the Nile, and on the covering of fresh mud which the river brings down from the Abyssinian highlands and spreads over the valley. This mud raises the level of the land four inches a century, and the general level of the Nile valley is to-day seven feet higher than it was in the time of Cleopatra, and from twenty to thirty feet higher than it was when the Pyramids were built.
Every year Nature carefully spreads a new carpet of mud on which the Egyptians grow crops, which in ancient times was chiefly corn. It was not until a century ago that cotton was introduced into Egypt, and with it came a great change in the system of irrigation. Nile water is now stored in dams during flood time and released as it is required, so that in addition to the annual inundation there is a controlled irrigation which has made it possible to grow two and three crops a year instead of one. And that is why, as you travel in Egypt, it often seems that the seasons are all mixed up in the space of a few acres. Here a field is brown from the plough, there it is green with growing crops, and next to it is a field ripe for harvest.
The peaceful countryside gave place to the outskirts of Cairo, where only the eternal sunlight redeemed from squalor an incredible assortment of shacks and houses. Palm trees and the minarets of mosques stood up above the low flat roof-line, and kites hung in mid-air watching the earth.
§2
When I jump out of bed and push forward the green slatted shutters, the sun leaps in, yellow and strong. The dim room becomes full of blinding light. In the hotel garden palm trees are standing in a windless morning, outlined against a blue sky. A gardener below on the paths of reddish sand is directing a water-hose towards a bank of purple bougainvillaea, and kites fly whistling from roof to roof.
The plaintive whistle of the kite is one of the characteristic sounds of early morning in Cairo. These big brown birds, which sometimes measure five feet from wing-tip to wing-tip, have for centuries scavenged the streets of Cairo. No one would kill a kite in Egypt. To do so would bring bad luck, and there is also a belief that if a kite haunts a certain balcony or window, it is a sign of death. Like the ibis and the cat in ancient Egypt, the kite is privileged and protected.
I stand on my balcony every morning to watch these birds.
They have no fear of human beings, and many a time I have seen them swoop among a group of street cleaners and, without pausing in their flight, rise grasping in their claws some fragment of offal. They love to perch on high places such as the tops of flag-poles, where they look rather like eagles as they keep watch on the streets below.
Some people say that a kite will never attack a living animal, but friends in Cairo assure me that they have seen these birds rising in the air with rats and snakes in their claws. One friend tells me that a kite went off with a kitten from his balcony; another told me a story of an out-door lunch party ruined by the arrival of a kite, which flew off with the fish course!
These birds, now so rare in England, were once common to all our cities. Visitors to London four centuries ago mention their whistling, and the way they swooped down on the street garbage. There is an old English proverb which says:
" a carrion kite will never make a good hawk," which is equivalent to that eloquent maxim: " You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear," a belief seldom heard in these democratic days, when you have only to open the purse to see a hair or two.As I stood on my balcony one morning, a kite illustrated a line of Shakespeare for me. There is a portion of Shepheard's Hotel garden which is railed off as a drying ground for table napkins and cloths. Some of these had fallen from the line. The kite dived and, with his beautiful unchecked motion, which one never tires of watching, went up into the air grasping a napkin in his claws.
" When the kite builds, look to lesser linen," says Autolycus in The Winter's Tale—a puzzling warning until you see a kite fly off with a linen cloth to pack between the sticks of his nest.
Having breakfasted, how good it is to find the sun warm on the hotel terrace. Open carriages are clip-clopping through the streets. School-boys, European in appearance save for the little red flowerpots of felt on their heads, walk sedately to school with books under their arms
The streets of modern Cairo are wide and spacious, and the romantic Cairo which appealed so strongly to our grandfathers is rapidly vanishing. It still exists in a warren of narrow streets always crammed with traffic, winding lanes crowded with little shops, and in the bazaars, with their alluring reek of musk and attar of roses, of incense and coffee, where you can spend a whole day in pleasant conversation over a possible purchase and leave without buying anything.
Embedded in the acres of tiny booths are a series of magnificent buildings constructed of immense blocks of honey-coloured stone, much of it stripped centuries ago from the Pyramids. These are the mosques of Cairo, whose minarets rise high above the roofs of the surrounding buildings. The most spectacular is the Mosque of Mohammed Ali, perched high on the rock of the Citadel, its slender Turkish minarets rising above everything in Cairo, poised above the city like a dream of the Bosphorus.
West of the city runs the Nile, the life-giver, the very mother of Egypt as the sun is the father, calm and blue in the heat of afternoon. House-boats and Nile steamers are anchored to the shore. Flotillas of giyasat, their slim masts towering to the sky, their white sails reefed, lie together in mid-stream. Some of them come slowly down the river loaded with cargoes of sugar-cane, grain, rice, and cotton.
The crowds are as varied as the city. There is the modern Cairene in a European suit, with a tarbush on his head. You see him sitting at the pavement cafes, eagerly reading the latest political sensation in the newspaper, for Egyptian politics proceed from crisis to crisis, while he drinks a little cup of Turkish coffee and slowly lifts first one foot, then the other, towards a kneeling bootblack.
Women of the rich classes, who only a few years ago used to drive about the streets attended by slaves, now drive their own cars and attend dance teas at Shepheard's Hotel. But in the poorer streets of Cairo the women still go veiled. You can see them coming in from the country or the suburbs, seated, five or six together, on a two-wheeled cart drawn by a donkey. Sometimes the cart is stopped before the mediaeval gate, the Bab-el-Mitwalli, in order that a woman may get down and attach to the massive structure some fragment of rag, or a tooth. The whole gate is covered with such relics.
They are tied there in order to gain the sympathy of a spirit which is believed to live behind the gate.
Only a short walk from regions which have not changed spiritually since the time of the Caliphs is another part of Cairo, where motor cars, saxophones, the radio, the film, and other superficialities of modern life, are assessed at more than their true value.
§3
I had not come to Egypt to see the familiar land of the Pharaohs, but the almost unknown Egypt of St. Mark.
Egypt has been a Moslem country for so long that many people are surprised to learn she was once one of the cornerstones of Christianity. Even those who know this are sometimes unaware that Christianity has never died out in Egypt, and that nearly a million Egyptians, who regard themselves as the true descendants of the ancient Egyptians, still owe spiritual allegiance to an Egyptian Pope, the ii3th successor of St. Mark.
The present head of the Egyptian Church is Yuannes (John) XIX, who is now eighty years old. His splendid title is: " The Most Holy Pope and Patriarch of the Great City of Alexandria and of all the Land of Egypt, of Jerusalem the Holy City, of Nubia, Abyssinia and Pentapolis, and of all the Preaching of St. Mark."
St. Mark the Evangelist is said to have been the founder of the Egyptian Church and to have been martyred and buried in Alexandria, where his relics were venerated until the Moslem Conquest. His first converts were Greeks, and Greek was the language of the Church. Second only in authority to Rome, and at one period her superior in intellect, the Patriarchate of Alexandria was one of the pillars of the Universal Church until the Fifth Century. Such names as St. Clement of Alexandria, St. Athanasius, Origen, and St. Anthony, the founder of Monasticism, indicate the contribution made by Egypt to Christianity during the first great period of her Church.
In order to understand how this intellectual equal of Rome crashed down in schism and heresy, it is necessary to know that Egypt was ruled from Constantinople by a Greek minority. This was nothing new in itself. For centuries Egypt had endured foreign masters, but so long as the Egyptians worshipped Amen-Re and the old gods, they were a race apart and lived in a different world from that of Alexandria, always the centre of Greek influence in Egypt. When the whole country became Christian, however, and millions of men and women up and down the Nile deserted the ancient temples and went to church, they found themselves in the spiritual world of their masters; and the result was the demand for a national church. Intense racial and other differences boiled up and took the form of a theological definition known as Monophysism, which concerns the nature of our Lord. The Monophysites declared that Christ was not Man, but only God, and that His earthly life was therefore only an apparition. This heresy was condemned by the Council of Chalcedon in 451 A.D., and from that moment the national church of Egypt separated itself from the rest of Christendom and went its own way in heresy.
The great bulk of the native-born population of Egypt either believed in Monophysism, or was ready to believe because this heresy had been condemned by the Byzantine Emperor. When the Monophysite Patriarch of Alexandria was deposed as a heretic, it had the same effect on Fifth Century Egypt as the exile of Zaghlul Pasha had on nationalist Egypt in the Twentieth. The whole country went up in riot and bloodshed, a situation which lasted on and off for nearly two centuries, as patriarchs representing the Egyptian or the Greek creeds succeeded each other on the throne. The riotous monks who broke into Alexandria and supported this or that patriarch or bishop, burning and slaying and then rushing back to the desert, were mostly ignorant fellahin, and the lover of parallels may see in them a faithful forecast of the ridiculous student demonstrators of modern Egyptian politics.
Nevertheless, out of this deplorable situation emerged the Egyptian National Monophysite Church, which was content to break away from the rest of Christendom in order to follow this heresy. It was natural, feeling as they did, that the Egyptians should wish no longer to use Greek in their churches, and the liturgy and the Gospels were therefore translated into Egyptian. It is to this that we owe the extraordinary fact— one of the greatest romances in the history of languages— that the Egyptian Church to-day still celebrates the Korban, or Mass, in the language of the Pharaohs, or the debased form of it that was spoken in the Fifth Century.
Upon this divided Christian country the Arabs swooped in the Seventh Century, rightly scenting an easy prey. The Byzantine garrisons were soon driven out and Moslem invaders quietly occupied the country, receiving no opposition from the Egyptians, who may even, as it has been suggested, have welcomed this change of masters. At first the Arabs turned almost with affection to their Christian subjects. They gave a name to them which has remained ever since: they called them Copts, which simply means Egyptians. It is an Arabic contraction of the Greek Egyptus, and if we spelt it gypt, or gupt, we should approach nearer to the Arabic pronunciation of the word. The Copts were as useful to the Arabs as the Christian Greeks were to the Turks when Constantinople was captured. And the Arabs had the good sense to let the Christians run the country for them, build their mosques, add up their books, and make their jewellery. But it was not long before religious persecution crept into the relationship.
Copts were tortured and persecuted in every possible way. With extraordinary resilience they would recover during a lull in the storm, only to be flattened out by the next gale. Enormous numbers of them turned Moslem, but always a proportion was ready to suffer and die for the Faith. " The wonder is rather that any Copts at all kept faith during these hideous centuries," wrote Adrian Fortescue, the Catholic historian. " When the last day comes, weightier than their theological errors will count the glorious wounds they bore for Him under the blood-stained banner of Islam."
Until recently the Coptic Patriarch had to be chosen from the simple monks of the desert monasteries, a good rule in days when the monasteries were seats of learning. For many centuries, unfortunately, it has resulted in the elevation to the Chair of St. Mark of an ignorant and generally reluctant recluse. In 1928 the rule was cancelled, and bishops have now become eligible for the position of Patriarch. The head of the Coptic Church must be over fifty, must never have been married, and must abstain from meat and fish. He ordains the bishops, of whom there are seventeen, and consecrates the holy chrism, or sacred oil. The bishops are celibate, but the priests, who are drawn from the artisan class and are often uneducated, must be married before their ordination. The language of ancient Egypt, which is the liturgical language, is now dead, and few of the priests understand it. About thirty per cent. of the Coptic vocabulary consists of Greek words which crept into the Egyptian language at the time when the native Christians embalmed it, so to speak, in their liturgy fourteen centuries ago. There are two reasons why this ancient language died. After the Arabs had conquered Egypt, Arabic became the spoken language of the country; also, the Church Coptic was the Alexandrian dialect, the Boheiric, which was not spoken by the country at large. Upper Egypt spoke the Sahidic, which differs from the official Church Coptic about as much as Cockney English differs from broad Glasgow. Therefore the last vestige of the old language of the Pharaohs died gradually as a spoken tongue, and it is difficult to say how much of the Boheiric Coptic spoken nowadays in the churches would be understood by a Fifth Century Egyptian of Alexandria.
It is strange that so little has been written in English about the Copts and their religious observances. Separated from the rest of Christendom for fourteen centuries, and hidden away in their own misfortunes since the Arab Conquest, their one object has been to preserve and hand down intact their ancient religious life and customs. This causes them to be archaeologically the most interesting of all the Eastern churches. They observe to this day customs once common to the Universal Church, which now have died out everywhere except in Egypt. In many of these customs can be heard the beautiful voice of Primitive Christianity. If it should be said that these Christians are ignorant, and that some of them have no very clear or elevated idea of the faith they profess, we should remember that they can boast as many martyrs as any community of their size in history.
Their virtues and their faults spring alike from the fact that for many centuries their whole energy has been spent in an effort to survive.
§4
I went to Old Cairo one morning to see the Coptic churches. I had been told that I should never be able to find them by myself, but I thought I would try.
The taxi travelled four miles to the south and left me not far from the Nile, in a vague, dusty district of mounds, tombs, tanneries, and pottery kilns. It had the look of having been terribly kicked about by history. A stark aqueduct marched across the stricken ground. Ghoulish men squatted in black sand-pits, grubbing for the grave-cloths and vestments of early Christians, which now have a market value. These bright embroideries emerge badly crumpled after many centuries in the earth, but their colours are still beautiful. European collectors and museums eagerly buy bits of shirts, shoes, copes and so forth, and mount them between sheets of glass. The Victoria and Albert Museum has a wonderful collection.
I thought Old Cairo infinitely preferable to the Cairo of the big banks, the cinema, and the cabaret. It is dirty, ruined, poverty-stricken, but it is not pretending to be anything else: it is an honest piece of ground which the feet of history have trampled before moving elsewhere. And no one, fortunately, has tidied it up.
The busy quaysides were lovely to look at in that sharp morning light: the quick movement of the crowds expending terrific vitality in argument, the slender masts of giyasat lying against the sky, the singing men unloading corn, the lines of black female figures moving veiled along the river-side, with water-pots on their shoulders, and the half-naked children running to the water's edge—all this was beautiful to see. A brown man naked to the waist rose in the bows of a wooden boat and hauled at a rope, his body frozen for a second in that hieratic pose which the artists of ancient Egypt have carved on a hundred tombs. As I stood on the banks of the Nile, I could see three dark triangles to the west, away over the flat land, one slightly larger than the others, rising against the blueness of the sky like three brown cones: the Pyramids of Gizeh.
Turning from the quaysides, I came to a sight which is astonishing even in a land famous for ruins: the remains of the Roman fortress of Babylon. Buildings have been erected on the top, clustering and hiding most of it; and within its walls lies Old Cairo, a mass of tortuous lanes. One gateway of the fortress is almost perfect. It lies between high, rounded bastions, far down in the earth, and the present bed of the Nile, which in Roman times was below the level of the gate, is now above it. I think nothing more vividly illustrates the great age of a building than to look down into a pit and see far beneath the earth a dead roadway on which the feet of men walked many hundreds of years ago. The old fortress of Babylon, with its five courses of stone and three of brick, stands like a piece of Europe in Africa, and even in its decay it seems to cry the word " Rome " with a loud voice. Inside Babylon are the hidden Christian churches of Old Cairo, whose candles have shone through the darkest hours of Coptic history.
I descended some steps which led down towards a furtive little nail-studded postern which would not be out of place in one of the dungeons of the Tower of London. It opens protestingly with a wooden key about two feet long, called a dabba. The old woman who opens it sighs and groans with dramatic exaggeration as she pushes back the gate on its rusty hinges, shrewdly eyeing the visitor as she asks alms, not for the love of Allah, but for the sake of Jesus Christ and His Blessed Mother, Sitt Mariam. Such is one's introduction to the home of Christianity in Cairo.
I passed from the fierce sunlight of the quaysides into a network of shadowy lanes where houses nod together in an uncanny silence. The lanes were of beaten mud, the air was stale, and the only people I met were old men and women groping their way along the walls or peering out with pale eyes from dark cellars. The lanes are too narrow for wheeled traffic, and the busy jostling throng was absent which in the East fills the narrowest lanes with life; and I went on between the tumble-down old houses into a strange, deathly silence.
This, I could see, was a Christian ghetto. It had all the signs: poverty, silence, and, although the Copts have not been persecuted for many a long year, fear. The terror of past centuries lives still in these furtive lanes, where the houses nod together, not sleepily or from old age, but as if huddled together in fright. But where were the Coptic churches that I had come to see ?
I had been told that the churches of Old Cairo are unique in Christendom in having no exterior architecture. This, by the way, is not correct, for the churches of Verria, in Macedonia, are even better hidden than these Coptic churches proved to be. And as I went on, looking for some sign of a church, I was reminded of a similar experience in Verria, when I once searched everywhere for the numerous churches which the Christians had built inside houses, or behind courtyards, in order to hide them from the eyes of the Turk. And the Copt in the Eighth and Ninth Centuries did exactly the same thing. He made his church look like anything but a church, so that the Moslem should pass it by.
At last, tired and defeated, I approached an old woman who was crouching in the dust of a courtyard. When I spoke to her, she got up and flapped away like an old crow. A small boy, who might have been her great-grandson, came out, and leading me back the way I had come, suddenly pointed to a flight of steps descending below the modern street level. I was sure I had passed the place before and had not noticed it.
" Abu Sarga," said the child.So this was the famous church of St. Sergius and St. Bacchus, though the name of St. Bacchus is considered too pagan to be perpetuated and the church is always called simply St. Sergius, or Abu Sarga, by the Copts.
I went down the steps towards what now I saw was obviously the door of a church. I entered a large, dark building smelling of stale incense and of something else which I can only call old age. It was oblong, of basilican shape, and the nave was divided into two aisles by twelve columns, eleven of grey marble and one of red granite. There were five columns on each side, and two at the west end, with a screen between them which shut off the nave and formed the wall of the narthex, or outer portico, where in early times converts not yet baptised were instructed and admonished. The sanctuary at the east end of the church was invisible, for it was concealed by a high screen of inlaid wood with a curtained opening in it. It was not covered with ikons like a Greek screen, and I could see the top of a domed canopy which stood over the altar. I ventured to draw this curtain aside in order to see the sanctuary. The altar stood by itself, under the painted wooden canopy whose top I had seen above the screen. This canopy rested on four small Saracenic columns, one at each end of the altar. Behind the altar was a wonderful rounded apse with a tribune decorated with alternate perpendicular stripes of light and dark marble, and in the centre of the tribune was a marble throne for the bishop or patriarch. The marble seats curved round the apse in seven tiers, with this throne in the centre.
While I was making some notes, I turned to see a rather angry-looking priest watching me. He was short, stout and dark, a soft black beard ringed his face, and he wore a black gown buttoned to the neck and a low round black turban on his head. From his expression I gathered that I had offended him by looking into the sanctuary, and I hastened to apologise ; his anger was not with me, however, but with himself for being absent when I arrived. We got on well together, and I discovered that he spoke English, which he had taught himself.
He asked me to remove my shoes before he took me into the sanctuary. I did this, for when the Copt enters the sanctuary of his church he always obeys the words which the Lord spake to Moses from the Burning Bush: " Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground."
In our stockinged feet we passed through the opening in the screen into the holy of holies. I asked him the word for " altar " and he said " madbah," which is derived from an Arabic word which means to slaughter, or sacrifice. He told me that the altar in all Coptic churches must stand alone in an open space. It must never be fixed to a wall, as in many of our Western churches. It is necessary in the Coptic Mass for the celebrant to move right round the altar and cense it. Lifting the cloth, he showed me that the altar was made of stone; on the top was a ridge cut in the stone to take a wooden tray on which the chalice and paten stand during the Mass. I asked if any Coptic altars were made of wood. He shook his finger violently and said no, such a thing was against the rules of his Church, but the vessels must always stand on a wooden tray. This is a reversal of Western practice. In the Latin Church the Eucharistic vessels must always rest on stone, and the stone slab is the only part of the altar which is consecrated.
I noticed a little cavity in the altar, which I thought might at one time have been a reliquary. He told me that on Good Friday a cross is always buried in this cavity on a bed of rose leaves, and taken out on Easter morning.
He allowed me to examine the painted wooden box which was standing on the altar. This is also a feature of all Coptic churches and is not used for the reservation of the Sacrament, a practice which was discontinued in the Coptic Church centuries ago; it is for the reception of the chalice during Mass. There is a semi-circular opening in the top of the box with which the rim of the chalice is level when it is standing inside, and it is placed inside the box during the consecration.
Seeing that I was interested, the priest went into a sacristy and came back with the vessels used in the Mass. These were a silver chalice, a round paten, a dome, and a spoon. The dome was two hoops of silver crossed at right angles. It is placed over the bread on the paten, and on top of it is cast a veil or corporal. The spoon is used for giving the sacrament, for it is the custom to place the eucharistic bread in the wine and to give each communicant both kinds together.
There was also a round fan which is used during Mass to wave away flies from the sacred elements. I believe the only survival of the fan to be seen in the ritual of the West is when the Pope enters St. Peter's in state, with men walking on each side of the papal litter holding magnificent fans of peacocks' feathers, mounted on handles about six feet in length. I asked him if fans were used in all the Coptic churches, and he said they were.
The eucharistic bread of the Coptic Church must always be freshly baked on church premises on the morning of the Mass, and it is generally made by the sacristan of the church. Every church has its own little bake-house where the bread, made from the finest flour, is carefully prepared on Sunday morning and stamped with a device of crosses. This is called the Korban, a word the Copts also apply to the Mass itself. It is leavened bread, and each cake is about three inches in diameter and one inch in thickness. The priest was sorry he could not show one to me.
When we left the sanctuary and had put on our shoes, he took great trouble to explain the church. All Coptic churches have three altars in a line at the east end. In Abu Sarga they are hidden, like the high altar, by a continuation of the haikal screen. The reason for the three altars is interesting. One Mass only may be celebrated on a Coptic altar in one day, for the altar, like the celebrant and the communicant, must come " fasting." If it is necessary to celebrate more than one Mass, the high altar is first used and then one of the two side altars; otherwise the side altars are used only on the day of the saint to which they are dedicated.
While we were passing down the nave, I pointed out the one pillar of red granite among the eleven marble pillars and asked if there was any significance in this. He replied that the pillars represented the twelve apostles, and that the odd pillar stood for Judas, who betrayed his Lord, and was therefore different from the others.
In the narthex we came to a space in the floor which was boarded over. He lifted a plank and exposed an enormous baptismal font, like a small swimming-bath. Coptic baptism is by total immersion, and in the early days, when the Church gained adult converts, they entered this tank of water together, but now the tanks are rarely used. I noticed that the pillars of the nave had once been painted with figures of saints, but on only two columns is it still possible to see a trace of painting. The priest told me that these figures represented Abu Sarga and his brother. I did not know that St. Sergius had a brother, and I wondered if the companion figure might not have been St. Bacchus. Having been to Resafa, I was naturally interested to hear if the priest had any stories about St. Sergius, but all he could say was that the saint was a gallant Roman soldier who was martyred long ago " at the village of Resafa."
The priest then led the way to the crypt of Abu Sarga, in which, says Coptic tradition, the Holy Family rested during the Flight into Egypt. This legend has given the church such fame that it is perhaps the only one of Old Cairo's churches where an European traveller may occasionally be seen.
Two flights of steps lead down from opposite sides of the nave and meet underground in a dark little miniature church whose vaulted roof is supported by two rows of pillars. This little building is not more than seven yards long and five yards wide, and it must lie about twenty feet below the level of the streets outside. In one of the walls is a niche which the priest pointed out to me as the place where the Infant Jesus was cradled.
As I was leaving the church the priest gave me a pamphlet in which he had exercised his knowledge of English. It is a modest production of under a thousand words, but it interested me because I had read somewhere that the modern Copts are not seriously monophysite and know little of the heresy which had cut them off from Christendom in the Fifth Century. Evidently the priest of Abu Sarga is not one of these, for this is what he says:
" In 451 A.D. the Church was divided into two groups, each supporting one side of the belief in the Nature of Christ. The Western Church and the Greek accepted the belief that Jesus Christ had two Natures, while the Copts, the Ethiopians, Armenians and the Syriacs retained the belief that out of the two natures there arose one single Nature. The former accused the latter of following the heresy of Eutechius, while the latter accused the former of following the heresy of Nestorius. The controversy is only a matter of wording. No doubt the belief of the Coptic Church is the correct and true one."
Here surely is the true voice of the Christians of ancient Egypt.
§5
I spent many a morning in the churches of Old Cairo, and one sight never failed to surprise and interest me. In all these churches at some time or other I saw women sitting cross-legged on the ground, nursing what appeared to be long leather bolsters. They held them in their arms as if hushing children to sleep, swaying to And fro and whispering to them in Arabic.
The bundles contain the bones of Coptic martyrs, and are surely the most extraordinary reliquaries which have ever been known. Every church seems to have four or five of them. They are kept either in boxes or on shelves in the church, and are sometimes covered with palls of frayed red velvet. Whenever a woman wishes to confide her woes to a saint or to ask his intercession, she goes to the box or shelf and takes out the bolster containing his bones and nurses it while she makes her prayers.
Although, like the Greeks, the Copts will not allow statues in their churches, they reverence ikons, and some of these sacred pictures are of remarkable antiquity. The belief that certain ikons, generally of the Blessed Virgin or St. George, are capable of working miracles, is as frequent among the Copts as it is among the Greeks. The Copts do not cover their ikons with silver work as the Greeks sometimes do, to preserve the painting from kisses, and the result is that many of the holiest ikons are either kissed almost bare of colour or are so begrimed by candle-grease and smoke as to be almost black wooden boards.
All the churches of Old Cairo have the same main characteristics : the three altars in a line at the east end, the haikal screen which conceals them, the line of marble pillars, some of them obviously taken long ago from pagan temples, the big baptism tanks, and the single furtive entrance.
Until recent times it was the custom to place the women in the Coptic church behind a harem screen in one of the galleries. But nowadays women come into the churches and sit anywhere they like, usually on the floor. Most of the churches contain a few benches which the more devout worshippers never use, for the Copt believes there is great virtue in standing throughout the interminable services. They communicate standing, and the people never kneel in prayer as we do. Their attitude during prayer is, I think, very beautiful. They stand upright, their feet together and their hands held outwards, the palms upward, the elbows close to the body. This is the attitude of prayer seen on the earliest Christian monuments, notably in the catacombs of Rome.
I went one day to a strange church called Al Mu'allakah, the " Hanging Church," which is built between two of the bastions of the fortress of Babylon. Although the date of all these churches is purely conjectural, there seems little doubt that this church was built in the Fourth Century, and a smaller one, which is attached to it, in the Third, or even the Second, Century. The church is full of intricate inlay work and carved screens, so that the general effect is a curious compromise between a church and a mosque.
The ancient Egyptians were experts in all kinds of delicate inlay work, as we can see in any museum and as the treasures from the tomb of Tut-ankh-Amun prove, and it seems that their descendants have inherited this gift. Coptic inlay work is generally a geometric pattern carried out in wood and mother-of-pearl. A remarkable screen in this church is made of cedar-wood, inlaid with thin plates of ivory set in a complex pattern. When illuminated from the back, the whole screen glows with a beautiful rose colour as the light shines through the ivory.
But I was more interested in the poorer, shabbier churches of Old Cairo. Whenever I went to them, I now was preceded by a crowd of people eager to show me the way and determined that I should miss nothing. As I followed them through the narrow lanes between the gaunt, shuttered houses, the strange-ness of Old Cairo grew on me, always so quiet that the mild excitement of my arrival and the sound of voices would draw faces to the grilles overhead. Sometimes a door would be opened wide enough to reveal an eye. Then I would suddenly find myself alone in a lane. The crowd had melted away through a narrow door, and I knew that we had come to a church.
There is the church of Silt Burbarah, or St. Barbara, a huge, dark place where the stiff figures of saints gaze down from the screens. St. Barbara, the patron saint of gunsmiths, artillerymen and, strangely enough, architects, was a Greek of Helio-polis who was martyred in the year 235, and I wondered how much these Egyptians knew about her life. When I asked them, a scene of the utmost confusion took place. First one man started to tell me, then another interrupted, three or four joined in, and very soon violent arguments were going on in various parts of the church. Eventually someone produced an old man who was, I think, the sacristan. He was suspicious and confused, but, given time, and with repeated interruptions from the crowd,-managed to tell an accurate story of the saint's life, although I was surprised that he did not know that St. Barbara had been born within a few miles of the place in which he was standing.
She was a great lady, the " daughter of a Roman general," he said, and her father, loving her very much and disliking the thought that some man would wish to marry her, locked her in a high tower where she was allowed to see no one. But she had heard of Christianity, and a missionary was taken in to her disguised as a doctor, with the result that she was converted to the true Faith. Her father decided to build for her a beautiful hammam—a bathroom—and one day, when it was being built, she went to see it and gave orders that three windows, instead of two, should be placed in the walls. Her father was angry when he learned that she had altered his plans, and came in a towering rage to ask for an explanation. St. Barbara told him that the light of the soul came through three windows, one called the Son, a second called the Father, and a third called the Holy Ghost. The father, horrified to discover that his daughter had joined the new Faith, denounced her to the authorities and she was beheaded. On the day of her martyrdom a sudden storm broke when the father was returning from the execution, and he was killed by lightning; and that is the reason why St. Barbara is the patron saint of soldiers and gunsmiths, who deal in sudden death.
A saint popular all over Egypt is commemorated by the fine old church of Abu Sefain, " Father of the Two Swords." Here is a building that simply drips antiquity, although it is probably not so venerable as either Abu Sarga or Al Mu'allakah. It is, however, dustier and less frequented, and the screens lean together with their ikons as if tired of the weight of years. All kinds of dark, mysterious passages and side chapels lie around in almost pitch darkness, and the very wood reeks of incense.
My friends uncovered a leathern bolster which is said to contain the arm-bone of Abu Sefain. Above the relic hangs an ikon showing the saint riding on a black horse, carrying the two swords with which he is always painted and bearing the body of a dead man across the crupper of his saddle. An angel is appearing from the clouds, and a bishop in the foreground is appealing to the saint. This is the story as they told it to me.
Abu Sefain's Greek name was St. Mercurius, and he was a Christian officer in the army of the Emperor Decius. When the army was fighting the Persians, an angel appeared to the saint and gave him a new sword, commanding him to make the sign of the Gross on all war material. This he did, and the Persians were vanquished. But the Emperor, seeing the Cross, ordered Mercurius to sacrifice to idols. He refused to do so, proclaiming his faith in Jesus Christ, and was tortured and put to death at Cassarea in Asia Minor. The Egyptian Patriarch Athanasius journeyed to Asia Minor and returned with the saint's arm.
Here they reverently patted the leathern bolster in confirmation.
The bishop in the picture was St. Basil. One day when he was praying before an ikon of St. Mercurius, he begged the saint to avenge the Christians who were being murdered by the wicked Governor of Alexandria. The saint faded from the picture and reappeared, and as he did so St. Basil saw that the two swords had turned red, and knew that the Governor had been slain.
Although the Copts have eccentric ideas of chronology and mix up people and events with cheerful inconsequence, the story agrees surprisingly well with known facts. All the historical persons in this story could have done the things attributed to them. The " Governor of Alexandria " was the Emperor Julian the Apostate. Athanasius lived long enough after Abu Sefain's death to collect the relic, and Julian died while St. Basil was alive.
§ 6
I asked one of my Coptic friends if it were-possible to see a Coptic nunnery. We were walking through the streets of Old Cairo at the time and, rather to my surprise, he said that we might see one at that-moment. He stopped and pushed open an unpromising-looking gate in a high wall, and we entered an untidy yard from which a flight of steps led to several Arab houses. An old woman was grinding corn at the bottom of the steps and another was crouched in the dust, picking over a mass of wilted-looking lettuce leaves.
Other women, some of them young girls, were sitting cross-legged on the balcony of one of the houses, and numerous infants playing about the stairs took to flight as soon as they saw us. A Coptic nunnery is more like an almshouse than our idea of a convent. The inmates are women whose husbands have died or who have no means of supporting themselves. They receive permission from the Patriarch to enter a nunnery, where their life seems singularly free from spiritual strain. They take no veil and make no vows, and are allowed to visit their friends. Some even leave the convent and marry.
A tall, dark woman in a black Arab dress descended the steps and nervously inquired who we were. She was the Mother Superior.
She led the way to the houses where the nuns live. There are about eighteen in the nunnery at present. She opened the door of a room which is kept for the reception of guests. A divan ran round the walls, piled with pillows for the guest to lean on. The walls were decorated with ikons of various saints. I noticed St. Paul the anchorite, with a beard that touched his knees.
The infants began to play again, and down in the narrow lane outside the quiet, furtive life of Old Cairo went on its way. I told her how interested I was in the traditions of the Coptic Church, and so the ice was broken; for these people are pathetically grateful if a fellow Christian visits them and asks to see their churches.
" We pray in the morning," said the Mother Superior in reply to a question of mine, " and then we busy ourselves with our household work. Once a week the priest comes for the Korban."
A young nun entered with the little cups of coffee which form a preliminary to everything in the East. Each time I sipped my coffee I bowed and offered salaams to the Mother Superior; every time she sipped her cup she bent towards me and gravely uttered a compliment. I felt that we were getting along so well that I ventured to offer her a cigarette. She said that she never smoked as a rule, but that on this occasion she would break the rule.
I gathered that the chief duty of the nuns was to guard the shrine of Mari Girgis, which is the Arabic name for St. George. When the coffee was finished we went to see his shrine.
We entered a remarkable hall which might have come from a Norman castle in England. Stone walls towered to the shadows of the roof, and the stones were so massive that, had they been in Syria, they would almost certainly have been of the crusading period.
The hall was bare and empty save at one end, where an apse, or alcove, was railed off. This was the shrine of Mart Girgis. Tapers of unbleached wax were burning before an ikon which showed St. George in the act of destroying a terrifying dragon.
This picture reposed on the wall in a nest of rags of every size, shape, and colour. They were scraps from the clothing of people who had suffered from some illness; many of them, said the Mother Superior, had been tied there by Moslems.
One of the interesting things in Egypt is the reverence which many Moslems show for the magic powers of Christian saints, especially St. George. Most of the Christian festivals in the country are attended by Christians and Moslems, and one cannot help feeling that these pious Moslems are those whose ancestors apostasised centuries ago and, so to speak, have Christianity and a reverence for Christian saints in their blood.
The strangest object in the shrine, which I nearly overlooked in the darkness, was a heavy iron halter. This was attached to a long chain which was firmly bolted into a stone below the ikon.
The Mother Superior explained that mad people were brought here to be chained for a night, sometimes for days, until St. George lifted the madness from them. This, she said, often happened, and the mad were cured. At first they raged and foamed at the mouth and fought to get loose, and in this effort they exhausted themselves, eventually falling into a deep sleep. And while they slept St. George came in a dream and healed them.
This is a wonderful example of a living belief in the Esculapian dream-cures that were once practised in pagan temples all over the world. The generals who kept vigil in the temple at Babylon just before Alexander's death were there to ask the god whether their general should be moved into the sacred precincts, probably to submit his fever to a dream-cure. And in all parts of Egypt to-day, wherever there is a church of Mari Girgis, the faith in the efficacy of a dream-cure is as strong as it was in ancient times.
As I bade her farewell, the Mother Superior said that if I would come back some Sunday, she was sure that she would be able to show me a patient waiting to be cured by St. George.
§7
In the Coptic Museum in Old Cairo early Christian relics are preserved amid lovely surroundings, thanks to the enthusiasm of Morcos Simaika Pasha, a gifted member of the Coptic community. Here may be seen the most interesting and varied collection of Coptic objects in the world.
What must astonish anyone who knows Ireland is the resemblance between Coptic antiquities^ and those of the Celtic Church. Though so far apart, the two countries must have been in close touch on religious matters during the first Christian centuries. Ireland's pre-eminence in classical studies during the dark ages, and the number of Greek and Latin scholars which she sent to educate Europe from the time of Charlemagne onwards, have often been cited as a remarkable and inexplicable fact of history. But I do not know why it should be so. The Irish monks were great travellers, and it is highly probable that they drew their Hellenistic culture straight from the theological schools of Alexandria. I would suggest that Egypt may be the answer to what so many writers have called the mystery of Ireland's intellectual brilliance at a time when the lamps of learning had been extinguished in the fall of the Roman Empire.
It is known that many Irishmen travelled to Egypt in the first six centuries of the Christian era, and that Egyptian monks visited Ireland. Seven Coptic monks are said to be buried in Ireland, at Disert Ulidh, and Professor O'Leary mentions in his recent book, The Saints of Egypt, that the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris possesses an Irish guide book for the use of pilgrims to the Holy Land of Scetis, which was in the Egyptian desert.
But the association between the two countries was based on much deeper matters than the visits of occasional travellers or the interchange of scholars. It is believed that the Irish continued to observe the Egyptian monastic rule after the rest of Europe had adopted that of St. Benedict. The Egyptian rule first came to Europe when St. Athanasius visited Rome in 340 A.D. It was a system of individualistic asceticism as opposed to the asceticism in community which was a later Western development. Hermits lived alone in caves and rocks, and would build not one large church, but a number of diminutive churches scattered over a small area. The " Seven Churches " of Glendalough, in County Wicklow, are a perfect example of a primitive Egyptian monastery of the time of the Desert Fathers.
The wagon-vaulted Celtic churches of Ireland have frequently been termed unique and an Irish invention. But they are not. The wagon-vault is a characteristic of the Coptic Church, and was in use in Egypt from the earliest times. It is certain that Egypt is the home of the wagon-vaulted basilica, and that this type of roof should be unknown in the West except in Ireland would seem to indicate another significant link between the Celtic and the Egyptian churches.
No one can look at the illuminated gospels in the Coptic Museum without thinking of the Book of Kells. There is also a close resemblance between the beautifully ornate gospel-cases, of which every Coptic church has one example, and the cumhdachs so famous in Ireland. Another curious resemblance are the bells still used in the Coptic Mass. These little handbells are very like the bells known to every visitor to an Irish Museum as " St. Patrick's bells." I noticed a metal gospel-case in the Coptic Museum, decorated with spirals and richly jewelled, which might be placed side by side with the famous bell-shrine of St. Patrick. The carvings in wood and stone, showing men and beasts within circles, also bear a strong family resemblance to the sculptured stone crosses of Ireland.
When anyone tries to explain Ireland's classical brilliance during the dark ages, it is usually said that scholars fled there from Gaul and from the ancient seats of learning during the barbarian wars. And it is true that in biographies of the time the phrase that so and so, " forsaking his own country, sojourned in Ireland for the love of God and learning," becomes monotonously repetitive. I suggest that long before this, possibly in the Third and Fourth Centuries, Irishmen liad studied in the schools of Alexandria and had taken back to their own country the riches of learning which could be found in that city.
There is a curious incident in the life of St. Patrick which did not seem to me to have any special significance until I became interested in the possible link between the Egyptian and the Celtic churches. When St. Patrick was travelling in the hills, I forget in what part of Ireland, he entered a cave and saw there an altar on which stood four glass chalices. The point of this story is that these chalices belonged to Christians who had worshipped in Ireland long before the time of St. Patrick. Chalices were obviously made of metal at the time of this discovery, otherwise glass chalices would not have struck St. Patrick as curious antiquities.
Now it is surely significant that glass chalices were commonly in use throughout Christendom during the first two centuries. It is believed that St. Urban prescribed the use of metal instead of glass in 226 A.D., over two hundred years before St. Patrick entered the cave. The Egyptian Church used chalices of glass in the First Century and uses them to this day, generally from reasons of poverty; but that they are still in use proves that Egypt has never known any rule or prejudice against chalices of glass.
It is possible, therefore, that when St. Patrick was walking the holy hills of Ireland so long ago, he stumbled by chance upon the oratory of some ancient Irish hermits who had learned their Christianity in Egypt. And I would also suggest that the lives and habits of the Desert Fathers of Egypt can be paralleled nowhere so well as in the story of the Celtic hermits. St. Kevin, who founded the settlement at Glendalough, in County Wicklow, was rather like St. Anthony. I remember hearing the story, when I was there, of the temptations of St. Kevin. He was pursued by an ardent maiden named Kathleen, who, says one version of the story, penetrated to his fastness in the Wicklow Hills, just as visions of women tempted St. Anthony among the hills near the Red Sea. The poet Moore causes St. Kevin to push the vision of beauty into the lake, which is probably exactly what St. Anthony would have done in a similar situation. It is known that after St. Athanasius visited Rome in 340 A.D. his Life of St. Anthony, translated into Latin, had a wide circulation in the West, where it stimulated the contemplative ideal. Who knows but that St. Kevin was in the habit of reading the temptations of St. Anthony in his Wicklow cave, and that the story of the beautiful maiden is a twisted memory of this book ?
Perhaps scholars will some day work on this hidden chapter of Christian history and establish beyond doubt the connection between the Celtic Church and the Church that was probably its parent, the Church of St. Mark in Egypt. " The great difficulty in understanding the evolution of Celtic art lies in the fact that although the Celt never seems to have invented any new ideas, they professed an extraordinary aptitude for picking up ideas from the different people with whom war and commerce brought them into contact," writes A. J. Romilly in Celtic Art in Pagan and Christian Times. " And once the Celt had borrowed an idea from his neighbour, he was able to give it such a strong Celtic tinge that it soon became something so different from what it was originally as to be almost unrecognisable."
Still, I think it is possible to recognise the origins of Celtic art in the relics which are to be seen beside the Nile.
While I was in the Coptic Museum one day, the kindly founder, Morcos Simaika Pasha, came out leaning on his stick and walked round with me, lovingly caressing the brands which he has torn literally from the burning.
" By the way," he said, " you are so interested in my church that you might like to come to a ceremony to-night. It is a wedding. Be at the Church of El Adra, the Blessed Virgin, in the Mouski, at seven-thirty. . . ."
§8
It was dark when I set out to" find the church in the Mouski. The Moslem driver did not know where it was and we were soon lost in narrow, crowded lanes, where the horse nosed his way over the shoulders of the crowd to an accompaniment of maniac cries and much whip-cracking. The Cairo cab-drivers use their whips, I am glad to say, not so much on their steeds as on their compatriots.
Once we had to stop, for the lane was so narrow, while, a man moved from our path a bright rampart of the superb vegetables which the black soil of Egypt produces in profusion: majestic cauliflowers which would win a prize anywhere at home, leeks as thick as one's wrist, fat purple aubergines, and lizard-green cucumbers. Anyone unfamiliar with the East might have expected murder at any moment, as greengrocer and driver flung themselves into an ecstacy of vituperation. Their faces became distorted with rage. They waved their arms, their indignant palms lay upward in the lamplight, their fingers outstretched, and at the precise moment when Englishmen would have knocked each other down and gangsters would probably have produced their " rods," the contest in abuse concluded and, with a smile which indicated that he had enjoyed it all very much, the greengrocer politely removed his cauliflowers. And we went on.
I enjoyed the feeling of gliding peacefully through dark canyons full of life. Each lighted booth was a vivid picture framed by darkness: in some, cross-legged men sat at coffee or commerce ; in others, Syrians or Armenians sat like spiders in their webs, in shops loaded with Persian rugs ; and sometimes, when we came to a standstill and the faces seemed to close in on me, I would see three or four black, veiled ghosts gazing into the carriage, their dark eyes ringed with kohl, placid and expressionless. We came to a corner where several streets met. A minaret, rising from the deeper darkness below, lay against the sky, washed in a green light of its own, and the driver, pointing down a lane with his whip, told me that even he could not venture there: it was filled from side to side with cars, taxi-cabs, and 'arabiydt.
The wedding guests were dodging round the bonnets of the cars, making for the end of the lane, where a large crowd had gathered before the church door. They were waiting for the bride. Facing each other in two lines stood a choir of young men stretching from door to street. They wore white gowns like night-shirts, with stoles crossed on the left shoulder. On each head was a stiff little cap of white with a silver cross on the top; in each hand was a lighted candle. One man held cymbals, another held a triangle. As they stood in the darkness, the candle-light moving over their dark, clean-shaven faces, I thought that I might be looking at priests of Isis.
There was some commotion as a car ploughed its way among the spectators, and from it stepped a girl like a dark, full-blown peony. She wore an evening dress of cream-coloured lace. Her raven-black hair shone from recent treatment. Her plump, good-looking face was flushed beneath the rouge that sits so feverishly on dark skins. Four bridesmaids, likewise in evening dress, took their places beside her, whereupon the choir, suddenly breaking into a harsh chant punctuated by a clash of cymbals, led the way into the church.
In the confusion of the arrival, I was conscious only that we had entered a hot, crowded place in which lights from pendulous candelabra blazed everywhere. Presently a young usher took me away from my modest seat at the back, and, to my confusion and embarrassment, gave me a seat among the officiating clergy. There was, however, nothing to be done about it.
The bride and bridegroom sat a few yards from me on red and gilt chairs placed before the haikal screen. The bridegroom sat at the bride's left hand, wearing an expression of self-consciousness which is probably an international one at such a moment in a man's life. Candles burned all round them, so that they sat in a pool of golden light. The bridegroom wore evening dress, over which was draped a richly decorated cope. He wore a tarbush on his head, and gazed uneasily through horn-rimmed glasses beyond the fence of candles.
Here, I thought, we have a typical Coptic mixture of past and present, of East and West. The choir were singing an anthem in the tongue of the Pharaohs, the bridegroom wore a head-dress which suggested Mohammedanism, with a cope that might have been worn by St. Athanasius, and the evening dress of modern civilisation, with a pair of glasses that once suggested America. The bridesmaids, on the other hand, were as near Paris as they could be. And it was upon this fantasy in origins that the saints and fathers of the Egyptian Church gazed from their aged ikons through an ascending mist of incense.
Among the dignitaries with whom I sat were the Bishop of Tanta, the Bishop of Jerusalem, and the acting Bishop of Khartum. They wore black soutanes with silver pectoral crosses, and on their heads were the tight black turbans of the Coptic priesthood. The ceremony was a long and interesting one. Tlie bishops rose one after the other to say .prayers or to deliver long and powerful exhortations. A member of the laity read from the Scriptures in Arabic with considerable dramatic force; and I thought how strange it was to see a man in a tarbush reading lessons in a church. Between every prayer, and at the conclusion of the lessons, the choir, led by a young man who quietly beat time with one finger, plunged into long, harsh anthems. The sound of the triangle and the rhythmic beat of cymbals, which accompanied all the quicker anthems, lent an air of paganism to the scene. There were two choirmen in particular who might have come straight from a painting in any tomb of ancient Egypt. They had the same lips, noses, and almond eyes, and their hands, I noticed, were extraordinarily slender and well-shaped.
The bride was fanned throughout the ceremony by one of her maids. This bridesmaid was dark and slender, her face neat, round, and slightly negroid, with pouting lips, a type seen on the walls of certain i8th Dynasty Theban tombs. The dancers in the tomb of Nacht are the type I am trying to describe, and so are the women in the festive fresco in the British Museum, the one which depicts the full-face figures and the two naked girl tumblers. As this girl stood moving the ostrich feathers and gazing beyond the candle-light with dark, deer-like eyes, I thought that Charmian probably looked like that when she fanned her mistress in Alexandria.
To a solemn chanting, the bride and bridegroom were anointed with oil, and then came the culminating moment of the ceremony. Two golden crowns were produced and, as the bishop took them in his hands, he uttered the following prayer in Arabic:
" O God, the Holy One, who crownest Thy saints with unfading Crowns and hast joined heavenly things and earthly things in unity, now also, O our Master, bless these Crowns which we have prepared for Thy servants; may they be to them a Crown of glory and honour. Amen. A Crown of blessing and salvation. Amen. A Crown of joy and gladness. Amen. A Crown of delight and pleasure. Amen. A Crown of virtue and righteousness. Amen. A Crown of wisdom and understanding. Amen. A Grown of strength and confirmation. Amen. Grant to Thy servants who shall wear them the Angel of Peace, and the bonds of love, save them from all shameful thoughts and base desires, and deliver them from all evil assaults and all temptations of the devil. Let Thy mercy be upon them, hear the voice of their prayer, let Thy fear fall upon their hearts, watch over their lives, that they may be without want until old age. Gladden them with the sight of sons and daughters and bring up those that shall be born to them as useful members of Thy one only Holy Catholic Apostolic Church; and let them be established in the Orthodox faith to the end. Watch over them in the way of truth, according to the will of God."
Here he paused a moment and placed one crown over the tarbush of the groom and one on the dark hair of the bride, saying, as he did so:
" With glory and honour thou hast crowned them, O Lord;
the Father blesses, the Son crowns, and the Spirit comes down upon them and perfects them. Worthy, worthy, worthy, place, O Lord upon thy servants a Crown of grace that shall not be overcome. Amen. A Crown of high and abundant glory. Amen. A Crown of good and invincible faith. Amen. And bless all their actions, for Thou art the giver of all good things, O Christ our God."Two rings were brought tied together by a red ribbon. The bishop untied them and placed one on the finger of the groom and the other on that of the bride. He then pronounced a benediction and, drawing their heads close together, touched them with his hand-cross. A beautiful and ancient ceremony was over.
All the wedding guests now approached to congratulate the enthroned couple as they sat together in the yellow light like Pharaoh and his queen. The ostrich fan moved all the time over the bride's head, and the bridesmaids, in modern taffeta dance-frocks of mauve and yellow, rustled and whispered behind the throne, making large eyes at the court.
As we left the church we were each given a little present. It was hard and knobbly, and when I unwrapped mine in the hotel, I found a small gilt casket, velvet-lined, full of sugared almonds and silvered sweets.
It occurred to me that I had seen a faithful version of a marriage in primitive Christian times. Like all ceremonies of the Coptic Church, it had come down singularly unchanged from the Graeco-Roman world, unvaried by the emendations, the omissions, and the alterations which Western churches have introduced into the ceremony.
All pagan and primitive Christian weddings were in two parts: the Betrothal and the Wedding. I had seen only the Wedding, or the second part, for the Betrothal had taken place weeks, perhaps months, before. This is a solemn business, as the attending priest reminds the contracting parties. The parents of the bride and bridegroom settle the bride's dowry, draw up a marriage contract, and choose the date of the wedding. This corresponds with ancient custom in Greece and Rome. The pagan and the early Christian bridegrooms all gave the bride an engagement ring at this stage of the proceedings. We have inherited our " ring finger" from the Romans, who wore an engagement ring on the fourth finger of the left hand because, as Gellius said, it is connected to the heart by a nerve. The solemn character of this contract, and a memory of its religious solemnity in Christian times, is still preserved in Coptic custom by the fact that it is the priest, and not the bridegroom, who hands the bride her engagement ring.
The marriage at night is an obvious survival of a custom which goes back into a remote past, for no marriages were celebrated by daylight in the ancient world. Again, the crowning of bride and bridegroom is another pagan custom adopted by the primitive Church, although only the Eastern Church still observes it: the wedding veil, which is Roman, was always more symbolically important in the West. As in ancient times, the Coptic Church regards the crowns as symbols of virtue and purity and, as in the earliest times, they are the property of the Church and are solemnly returned when a stated interval after the wedding has elapsed.
It is still the custom, though not among the modern members of Coptic communities in the cities, to take the bride from her own home to that of her husband by torchlight, attended by musicians, and a noisy crowd in which walks a man carrying a lighted candle in a bunch of flowers. This is an extraordinarily interesting survival of the pagan " marriage pomp " that was sometimes condemned by the early Christian Fathers because it tended to become riotous. In the lighted candle we can see, no doubt, the nuptial torch of the Roman wedding, which was lit by the bride's mother before the procession set forth on its way. St. Gregory of Nazienzus wrote a charming little letter in the Fourth Century, in which he excused himself from the gaiety of a wedding on the plea that a gouty old gentleman would be out of place among dancers, though in his heart he would be with them in their amusements. Therefore some of these routs, although high-spirited, were among the functions to which saints were sometimes invited, and it is indeed pleasant to think of the Early Fathers of the Church smiling benevolently on such celebrations.
The casket of sugared almonds was clearly a token from the ancient world, for it was the custom of Roman bridegrooms to cast nuts among the crowd as the procession passed through the streets, while in ancient Greece sweetmeats were thrown over the bride as she entered her new home. Therefore sugared almonds are a happy blend of Greek and Roman custom.
I remembered that the last time I had seen this true confetti was in strangely different surroundings. It was at the wedding of Umberto, Crown Prince of Italy, to Princess Marie Jose of Belgium, in the Quirinal Palace at Rome. As guests left the palace, sugared almonds were flung in such enormous quantities that stairs were strewn with them in every direction. It is obvious that our confetti and rice are a variation of this old custom, though real confetti is, as the name tells us, a sweetmeat.
All the venerable customs embalmed in the Coptic wedding have come from Hellenistic Alexandria in an unbroken chain of observance. But older than any of them is the scene at the bridegroom's door after the church ceremony, when the bride must not only witness the sacrifice of a calf but must step over its blood into her new home. That is neither Greek nor Roman; Christian nor Moslem: it is something that has come down to the Copts of to-day from their ancestors of ancient Egypt.
§9
The story of the Flight into Egypt has naturally inspired a mass of Coptic legend, most of it based on piety rather than on history. One only of the four Evangelists, St. Matthew, mentions the Flight into Egypt, and his words are the only record we possess of this event.
It is true that there are other accounts as full of detail as the account of St. Matthew is brief and reserved, but these are to be found in the apocryphal gospels which are compositions of a later time and have little historical value.
This incident in the life of Christ has always captured the imagination of artists. Some of the most beautiful pictures in Christian Art show the Holy Family travelling under cover of night, or passing in starlight beneath the shadow of the Pyramids. Those monuments were already ancient, and the bodies buried in them had long since been robbed, when Jesus, Mary, and Joseph journeyed into the land of Egypt.
" Behold, the angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt, and be thou there until I bring thee word: for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him,
" When he arose, he took the young child and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt: and was there until the death of Herod: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Out of Egypt have I called my son...
" But when Herod was dead, behold, an angel of the Lord appeareth in a dream to Joseph in Egypt, saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and go into the land of Israel: for they are dead which sought the young child's life...
" But when he heard that Archelaus did reign in Judaea in the room of his father Herod, he was afraid to go thither: notwithstanding, being warned of God in a dream, he turned aside into the parts of Galilee: and he came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets, He shall be called a Nazarene."
Thus St. Matthew tells us that Jesus was taken out of Palestine in infancy and that he remained in Egypt until Herod's son, Archelaus, succeeded to the throne of Judsea. On the return journey, St. Joseph " turned aside into the parts of Galilee " because he was afraid to venture into the territory of Archelaus. St. Matthew does not mention the reason for this fear, but it was probably on account of the rebellion which broke out after Herod's death and was quelled by Archelaus only after three thousand Jews, among them many Passover pilgrims, had been slaughtered. This is almost certain to have been the reason why the Holy Family turned aside from Judeea. It may have been St. Joseph's intention to attend the Passover in Jerusalem, but, hearing of the massacre, he " turned aside into the parts of Galilee."
It is clear from St. Matthew's account of the Flight that the Holy Family were only present in Egypt for a very short time, possibly only for three or four weeks, for Archelaus succeeded immediately on the death of Herod, and his accession seems to have been the signal for St. Joseph to return. Herod is believed to have died in February, and the Passover at which the riot occurred was held that year in March; therefore a month is probably the longest period during which the Holy Family could have rested in Egypt.
The Egypt which the Holy Family entered stands in the clear light of history. Twenty-seven years previously Antony and Cleopatra had been defeated at the naval battle of Actium, and with Cleopatra's death ended for ever the Greek dynasty which had begun with Alexander's general, Ptolemy. Rome then stepped in and added Egypt to the Empire of Augustus Caesar. The Prefect of Egypt at the time of the Flight was Turrianus, about whom nothing is known except that, after the death of Augustus, he was the first to swear allegiance to Tiberius, the Caesar of the Crucifixion.
The country which sheltered the Holy Family was a very different country from the land which Joseph and Moses had known. The Pharaohs, their glories over, lay in painted tombs, and the grandeur that once had been Egypt was merely a record written on a temple gate. In the reign of Augustus, Egypt had a Greek head and an Egyptian body. The head, Alexandria, was the New York and Paris of the age, a brilliant city, wealthy and famous all over the world for its intellectual achievements and its mechanical inventions. Its Library was the greatest university of its time, and its temples, public buildings, and baths were celebrated for their splendour.
But to the south the Nile left all this modern brilliance behind and entered the ancient country which was still the land of the Pharaohs. Upper Egypt had nothing in common with the foreign city of Alexandria: it belonged to a different world. The native temples lifted their painted pylons above the still waters, and the shaven priests still offered sacrifices to the old gods of the land. The great cities from which the Pharaohs had once ridden in a splendour of nodding plumes, driving their gilded chariots of acacia wood, were now slowly dying of old age. Greek and Roman tourists sailed up the Nile to see the curiosities of that strange, unlikely country, gazing in awe on the face of the Sphinx, writing their names on the knees of the Colossi at Thebes, and coming, perhaps, to some small, lost temple in the palm groves where a few poor priests still fed the sacred crocodiles from force of habit, and mumbled prayers whose meaning they had forgotten. This was the old, dying country of the Flight into Egypt.
No wonder that artists have always seized with eagerness on this incident in the life of Jesus. What a significant picture it makes: the Infant Christ journeying through a land where the Egyptian, the Greek, and the Roman civilisations, the three great empires of antiquity, were living side by side in the last years of paganism. There is a picture—I cannot remember where I have seen it—which shows the Blessed Virgin with the Child in her arms, drawing aside from a great crowd which comes shouting down a street beside a mighty temple. And in the centre of the crowd, lifted high on the shoulders of the priests, is the image of an Egyptian god. Clouds of incense blow about him, priestesses strew flowers in his path; and Jesus and His Mother move to the side of the road to let this idol go past. Who can say that a meeting such as this did not, in fact, take place ?
When we ask ourselves where the Holy Family stayed in Egypt, we are faced by a perplexing choice of locality. Devout monks, writing centuries after, have claimed all kinds of improbable places, some far up the Nile, as the resting-place of the Infant Christ. The oldest and the most likely tradition is that the Holy Family stayed at a place now called Mataria, which was near ancient Heliopolis.
I went to Mataria one morning. It is an easy drive of six miles from Cairo, and beside a dusty road on the outskirts of Heliopolis I found the little garden which contains the Virgin's Tree. This is a noble Egyptian sycamore, which bears a pink fruit rather like a fig, called jamaiz. Its gnarled arms sprawl about the garden and are held up by posts and stumps, so that it looks like a colossal invalid on crutches. Although it was not planted until after 1672, it is not difficult to understand why the peasants believe that it is the same tree beneath whose shade the Infant Jesus was laid to rest. Except, perhaps, for the great yew in Selborne churchyard, I cannot remember a tree which so impresses one with its age. But even the Selborne tree, which is infinitely older than this sycamore, has not the same kind of bearded and gnarled antiquity. A yew tree always carries its age with a certain heavy sprightliness, whereas the sycamore of Mataria wears all the wrinkles possible to a tree in extreme old age. Every branch within reaching distance is covered with rags tied by Christians and Moslems, for it is believed that the tree has potent magical properties.
A little bare-legged girl in a yellow dress was running about the garden. She said her name was Fatima, and she stood watching me with a shy finger on her lip. Her father came along, and I asked him why rags were tied to the tree. He replied: " If a lady have no child, she come and tie a rag and speak the name of Allah and go away." That is evidently the simple Moslem version.
The Copts believe that the Holy Family rested in the garden, and that as the feet of Jesus touched the earth two springs of sweet water sprang up. These springs still exist in the garden, and I was told that they are not brackish, like the other Nile-filtered water of the locality, but clear and good to drink. The garden was renowned in the Middle Ages as the Garden of Herbs, and is mentioned by many a mediaeval pilgrim and traveller. Sir John Maundeville has a lot to say about it in his travels. It was noted for the balsam trees, which, it was claimed, grew nowhere else in Egypt. Sir John described them as " small trees that are no higher than the girdle of a man's breeches and resemble the wood of the wild vine." When he visited the garden in 1322, he was told by the Saracens that the trees had to be tended by Christians, otherwise they would decline to render the balm.
The balm formed the most important ingredient in the elaborate myron, or chrism, the holy oil of the Coptic Church. In the Western Church, consecrated oil is a mixture of balm and oil, and was compared by St. Gregory the Great to the gifts of the Holy Spirit. The Church of Egypt has apparently always considered its extremely complicated myron to be the same " sweet spices " and " ointments " which Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of James, and Salome, took to our Lord's Sepulchre. Every drug used in the preparation of this chrism was defined by rigid prescription and the oil had to be boiled many times. Balsam from Mataria was mixed with herbs and spices, which included lilies and cassia, and the mixture had to steep for a day in fresh water. Next morning eight pounds of pure olive oil, which must never have touched a goat-skin or other leather receptacle, was poured over the herbs and allowed to bail all day on a fire fed with olive wood or old ikons. While the mixture was boiling, the whole of the Psalms were recited. On the following day Persian rose petals were added, with white sandal-wood and other aromatic herbs, and the mixture was again boiled. On the third and fourth days white storax, saffron, aloes, and more red roses were added, and the oil was boiled as before, each boiling, of course, diminishing the liquid. On the fifth day amber and storax were added over a fire fed with oak charcoal, after which the chrism was cooled, strained through a linen cloth, and was ready for consecration.
This chrism was used in the Coptic Church at least as early as the Fourth Century, but the balsam trees of Mataria died out at some unknown period in the Seventeenth Century, so that balm used in the chrism is now replaced by balm from other sources. Morcos Simaika Pasha tells me that the chrism is now consecrated only twice in a century, and it is marked still, as it always has been, by a ceremony of great religious solemnity.
What is so interesting about the balsam trees of Mataria is that they were originally planted by Cleopatra, from cuttings taken from the famous balsam grove at Jericho. These groves were among the rich gifts which Antony gave her in the days of his success, and they were of great commercial value. Josephus tells us that Cleopatra once visited these groves and took back with her to Egypt a number of balsam cuttings, which she planted at Heliopolis or Mataria. When the Holy Family entered Egypt, the gardens had been in existence for about thirty years. Is it not possible, perhaps probable, that Cleopatra took Jewish gardeners from Palestine to tend these trees, which were such a rarity in Egypt ? These men would have belonged to the Jewish community, which, it is almost certain, had existed near Heliopolis for centuries. It would be natural for St. Joseph, faced suddenly with the problem of flight, to turn to such a community of his fellow-countrymen. So far as I know, these curious circumstances have never been linked together, and they may perhaps explain why the garden should have been visited by the Holy Family, and have become a sacred site to the Christians of Egypt.
French Jesuits have built a little church next to the Garden of Herbs. It is called the Church of the Holy Family, and over the porch blaze in the hot sunlight the words: Sanctae Famliae in Aegypto Exuli. Among the frescoes which decorate this church is one which shows the Holy Family entering Heliopolis. This illustrates an ancient Coptic legend which says that as the Holy Child entered Heliopolis, the noise of a rushing of a mighty wind was heard, the earth trembled, and idols crashed from their pedestals.
I walked over to the site of Heliopolis. Nothing now remains but one lonely obelisk of red granite rising from a field of sugar-cane. It is the last of many that once stood in front of the Temple of the Sun, a temple in which Moses may have been educated.
There is a fence round the obelisk, and when you look down you see in the soil below the pedestal of the ancient stone. That was the level on which men were walking in Egypt many centuries ago, and perhaps under this accumulated earth, which the Nile has spread over the fields century after century, may some day be found remains of the once mighty city of On, or Heliopolis, the City of the Sun.
Long ago the lonely obelisk saw the departure of its companions. In 13-12 B.C., eight years before the Holy Family entered Egypt, Augustus removed two of them to Alexandria. One of the obelisks, now blackened by the smoke of London, Stands on the Thames Embankment; the other is in Central Park, New York. If, as tradition says, the Holy Family went to Heliopolis, well may the obelisk still standing there have cast its shadow on them as they went by; if they entered Egypt at Alexandria, they may have passed the twin stones which London and New York know as " Cleopatra's Needle." How gladly would we sacrifice the history written on such stones for a glimpse of that unrecorded moment in the year 4 B.C., when a Mother and her Child may have passed in and out of their shadows.