CHAPTER FIVEIn which I go to see the gold of Tut-ankh-Amun, visit the Cairo Zoo, fall ill, and am sent to the Pyramids. I journey to the Faiyum, see the Canal of Joseph, live by a lonely lake-side, and return to Cairo to attend a Coptic Christening.
§ I
IN 1923, which seems so long ago, I went to Egypt on behalf of a London newspaper to describe the opening of the mummy-chamber of the tomb of Tut-ankh-Amun. It was an experience I shall never forget, for I was privileged to enter the tomb while the treasures were standing with the dust of three thousand years upon them.
Those wonderful objects, to which a floor of the Cairo Museum is devoted, are now among the best-known antiquities in the world. Visitors go to the Museum as soon as they arrive in Cairo, and return saying that it was worth while having come to Egypt to see them.
But I had my doubts. I was almost afraid to go there. Fifteen years ago I used to sit day after day in the sunlight outside the tomb, watching the treasures carried out to meet the sun after thirty centuries of darkness.
How could they be wonderful to me now, in the glass cases of a museum, with people peering at them and making inept remarks; with custodians sauntering about, gazing at their watches, hoping it is nearly closing time?
However, I went to the Museum one morning, and climbing a short flight of stairs, I came to the great floor which the Museum has devoted to the treasure; and my first impression was of gold.
Gold shining, gold gleaming, gold almost rose-red and dull, gold in solid masses, gold hammered paper-thin; everywhere, as far as I could see right down to the end of the sunlit corridor, gleamed the metal for whose sake men have betrayed and enslaved their fellows since the world began.
As I looked in amazement—for the first impression of this treasure is something almost impossible to convey to anyone who has not seen it—the uncompromising words of St. Paul came into my mind:
"We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out..."When I saw the inside of the tomb fifteen years ago, very little had been touched. The treasures lay in confusion, some on top of others, just as they had been piled up three thousand years ago. And my most vivid memory is of two life-size, black-faced statues of the dead man which stood guarding the unbroken wall, as if saying: "Stop; go no farther!"
Those two figures, now in glass cases, are the first objects to be seen in the Museum. They still guard the treasure as they guarded it in the tomb for three thousand years, standing with left foot advanced, a wand in the left hand and a gold mace in the right. As I looked at them, I remembered all kinds of little things: the feel of the shallow limestone steps leading down into the tomb, the hot, stuffy air, and the indescribable smell of age.
Although beauty and majesty were there, the drama had gone from the two statues now that they were in the Museum; and how impressive they once were, in the dark of the tomb, among the tumbled vases and the chariot wheels, defying men to desecrate the body of the king.
They have been cleaned and brightened. When I saw them first, the gold was tarnished and stained with streaks of red like dried blood, the result of standing in the hot air of that limestone vault while Athens rose, while Rome rose, while London rose, while Constantinople rose—a long time to stand on one spot.
And I remembered, too, that someone three thousand years ago had cast linen shawls round them, and this linen had turned dark brown after so many centuries in the tomb, and hung like cobwebs from their arms, the lightest touch sending it to dust. They wear no shawls now. They stride boldly forward, gazing, as the Sphinx gazes—as all Egyptian statues gaze— firmly, almost defiantly, into the eye of Eternity.
I moved from case to case, thrilled by what I saw in them. Even photographs in colour can give but a poor idea of the beauty and the delicacy of these objects. The skill of the artists, goldsmiths, silversmiths, and the workers in wood, ivory, and alabaster, who lived in Egypt three thousand years ago, has never been surpassed.
I saw a little loaf of bread which someone baked three thousand years ago to feed the Ka, or double, of the king; and it is still lying in the little form of palm fibres in which it went into the oven.
There are wreaths and bouquets of flowers which look like brown paper and are as brittle as sealing-wax. The mourners picked these one morning three thousand years ago in the gardens of Thebes, and carried them into the valley of death to cast on the king's coffin when at last the moment should come to leave him to the silence of centuries.
Scientists have examined these leaves and flowers. Some fell into dust when touched, but it was possible to find others strong enough to stand for a few hours in warm water. Some are cornflowers—which no longer grow in Egypt—some are olive leaves, some the petals of the blue water-lily, some are leaves of wild celery, and some the berries of the woody-nightshade, or bitter-sweet. These were the flowers cast on the coffin of Tut-ankh-Amun so long ago; and they tell us that he was buried either in mid-March or in April.
There is a fascinating room reserved only for those objects which were found on, or about, the king's mummy. The finest thing is the portrait of Tut-ankh-Amun as he was at the time of his death, a wistful boy of eighteen. This mask was found in position over the head of the mummy. The face is of burnished gold, and the striped headdress is of alternate bars of dark-blue glass and gold. Upon the forehead are the two emblems of his Kingdom, the vulture and the cobra of Upper and Lower Egypt, both of solid gold.
This is without doubt one of the great portraits of antiquity. I have been told by a man who has seen the uncovered face of the mummy that the mask is a superb portrait of the king. There is something ineffably sad and lonely about the face, as if the boy knew that he was fated to die before his time. He gazes at us across thirty centuries, a human being, and not a happy one, his eyes charged with the touching pathos of young manhood.
When they found Tut-ankh-Amun each finger and toe was carefully cased in a separate little sheath of gold. They took these from him, and you can see them, curious little finger and toe stalls, lying together in a glass case. I cannot tell you why they look so pathetic. Surely enough has been taken from him. I wish they could have left him with ten gold fingers and ten gold toes.
§2
Were it possible to bring to life the mummy of an ancient Egyptian, one of the things which would surprise him about modern Egypt would be the absence of wild animals.
Centuries ago, as the pictures on the tombs and sculptures in the temples prove, Egypt was a country in which the hippopotamus, the crocodile, and the lion were frequently hunted. To-day these animals have deserted Egypt, although they are still found in the Sudan. This is probably because a greater area of land is now under cultivation, and also because the Nile in flood no longer creates new marshes every year in which wild animals can make their lairs.
The cat, which in Egypt kills snakes as well as rats and mice, occupies a curiously privileged position. No Egyptian would dream of killing a cat. He might refuse to pull a drowning cat out of water, for a Moslem cannot interfere with the decrees of Allah, but he would never throw it in. In the atmosphere of almost superstitious awe which surrounds cats, there is no doubt a relic of the cat worship of ancient Egypt.
The cobra, which in ancient times was the symbol of royalty, is still found in town and country all over the Nile Valley. Although it is frequently killed—I have seen a policeman shoot one with his revolver—I have heard that in certain villages a cobra that takes up its abode in the cellar of a mud house is sometimes venerated as " the guardian of the hearth," and is fed on eggs and chickens. The peasant attributes extraordinary intelligence to the cobra. A country police officer, whom I met outside Cairo, told me a story which I do not believe— although I am sure he did—which illustrates the fellah's attitude to this snake.
He said that in a village in Upper Eygpt, where he was once stationed, two cobras hatched a family of young snakes in the cellar of a mud house. One day the children of the house discovered the little cobras lying in the sun and began to tease them with sticks. The female cobra appeared and coiled herself round the body of the youngest child, and the cries of the infant brought out the man and his wife.
The parents were terrified, but to have made one move against the cobra might have caused the death of the child. Suddenly the woman cried out:
" Perhaps if our children stop tormenting her children, she will go away! " The father ran over to his children and gave them a sound thrashing, whereupon the cobra quietly uncurled herself and went away. This story surely suggests that a reverence for the royal snake has come down from ancient times.
One morning I decided to visit the Cairo Zoo.
A taxi took me in about fifteen minutes to a beautiful garden on the west bank of the Nile. It is entered through a charming and impressive gateway decorated with animals in relief, the work of a modern Egyptian sculptor.
In the blinding sunlight, and among fifty-six acres of tropical vegetation, the animals are kept in open pens which reminded me of Regent's Park. The gardens were once the private property of an opulent pasha who, it is said, built the unnecessary suspension bridge over an artificial lake in answer to his wife, who once asked him what a suspension bridge looked like. It is fortunate that she never asked questions about Euston Station or the Arc de Triomphe.
What impressed me about Cairo's Zoo was that the animals were of a size, cheerfulness, and condition unknown to us in Europe. I have always considered a hippopotamus one of Nature's more sombre jokes, and I have often felt sorry for this lumbering creature with his vast jaw, his swollen body, and his small legs. And as we know him, he is a sorrowful sight. In his native Africa, however, he is cheerful and full of surprising vitality. The hippo in the Cairo Zoo is a royal beast, mighty of muscle, with a wicked and roving little eye, and a pinkness under his skin.
Giraffes in Europe are poor, puny things compared with the huge animals in Cairo, whose hides are like spotted velour. The ostriches in the Cairo Zoo are so much at home there that ostrich eggs are sold in the ticket-office! They cost {,1 each.
The one tragedy of the Cairo Zoo is the polar bear. Although a sympathetic authority has arranged a perpetual cold shower in its cage, this poor creature suffers agonies from the heat and should not be in Africa at all. It is a mangy and pitiable object, pointing the moral which would, I suppose, defeat the first object of all zoological societies, that wild animals should not be shown out of their natural climates. I wish the miserable polar bear of Cairo could be exchanged for some unhappy hippo from Europe.
The visitors to the Cairo Zoo interested me. I saw schools of Egyptian boys, aged about ten, dressed in European clothes with the exception of the little red tarbush on each small head. These children were just as excited about an elephant ride as little boys are in Regent's Park.
Numerous country sheiks and peasant farmers were wandering round the Zoo, men who had obviously come up to Cairo from the country. They would not dream of going to look at the mummies in the museum, but were thrilled to see the crocodiles, the hippopotami, and the lions. When they came to some unfamiliar animal they would often smile with pleasure, and, as I watched them, I thought that people who love and understand animals often regard them with affectionate amusement.
The English are always doing this. The first books which our children read are animal fantasies like those by Beatrix Potter, in which the humour of the animal characterisation is always delightful because it is based on observation and understanding. I am sure that Mickey Mouse would have been popular in ancient Egypt, for the people who built the Pyramids are the only people of antiquity who saw the humour of animals and attributed human characteristics to them.
Some of the most amusing tomb paintings of ancient Egypt are animal caricatures, one of which shows lions starting back in terror as a stately domestic cat walks across the road. Another shows a lion playing chess with a gazelle. Another shows a jackal paying a visit to a sick hippopotamus, and a fourth shows a leopard paying a flute to a flock of geese.
Even if the tomb paintings of birds and animals were not so full of life and so obviously the result of loving observation, we should know that the ancient Egyptians were fond of animals simply on the evidence of these few charming little caricatures, the work of some far-off Beatrix Potter.
As I watched the modern Egyptians in the Cairo Zoo, it seemed to me that they were touching hands across long centuries with the people who once lived on the banks of the Nile.
§3
One evening as the sun was setting and the shadows were already cold, I stood on a portion of Cairo's mediasval wall with a professor who is the greatest authority on Islamic architecture in the world. With the kindness and thoroughness which are characteristic of him, he was giving me the benefit of his scholarship, and I was horrified to discover that I was paying little attention to him. As I went away through the darkened streets in an 'arabia, I felt intensely melancholy. I looked at the vivid native crowds with nausea, and wondered if I could catch a boat home to-morrow. It seemed to me terrible to be so far away in this land of sharp, cruel sunlight; and I began to think of the softness of rain falling at home and the friendliness of the clouds and shadows.
Something in my appearance made me take my temperature, which was nearly 103. I thought this alarming, and going down to the terrace, I drank a long, iced drink which made me feel terrible. I soon sank into that painful coma known to so many visitors to Egypt. Gyppy tummy is a fierce combination of internal chill and gastric influenza. Residents in Egypt seem to think nothing of it, but I considered it one of the darkest moments of my life. Panic-stricken at the thought of the golden days that were going by while I lay unable to move, I worried and fretted, listening to the clip-clop of 'arabtydt outside, the bicycle bells, the whistle of the kites, and the sound of the boy selling paraffin, whose high chant at eight o'clock every morning became an event of my day.
A motherly Greek chambermaid would tell me, as the days went by, that I was better than yesterday, and the huge, black Berberine floor-boys, who entered from time to time with a bowl of soup, would grin all over their faces and enjoy my illness to the full.
When at last I got up, I could hardly walk, and the doctor suggested that I should go away from the dust and the noise of Cairo and stay out near the Pyramids. This pleased me, for, like all people who are not used to being ill, I have an animal's hatred of the place in which I have been in pain; so I looked forward with joy to the clear air of Giza.
The road ends on the edge of the desert, where the Pyramids are lifted on a high sandy plateau. There are a few shops, a stall where you can hire a camel by the hour, and a huge hotel, one of the finest in Egypt, whose swimming-pool and open dance-floor are literally in the shadow of the Great Pyramid of Kheops.
In the course of a fairly varied life I have slept in many strange and interesting places, and I shall always think of my room at Giza as one of the most remarkable. Lying in bed, I could see the Great Pyramid only about two minutes' walk away. Its colossal triangle, exactly filled the space of my balcony.
At first it inspired me with awe, especially by moonlight. Then becoming used to it, I would wish that it could move away a bit and give me a better view of the desert; and finally the sweat and blood of the unknown thousands who had slaved to build it, and the whistle of the lashes that drove them to their labour, began to haunt me; for the Pyramids are surely the monument of a vanity both cruel and futile. And even so they did not do their job properly— which was to guard the body of the Pharaoh in death— because they were broken into and robbed thousands of years ago.
For the first few mornings I was not allowed to go out. I would get up and lie on the balcony until the sun became too hot, watching the curious daily routine of the Pyramids.
The first thing that happens every morning is the arrival of police at seven a.m. Some march up to the Pyramids, others ride on smart little Arab horses; and they patrol the area until sunset, to see that nobody is robbed or pestered. There is little danger of robbery.
Then the guides assemble and with them the little pestering boys and the men who draw some incredible fake antique from their shabby robes with an air of tremendous secrecy; and they all go up the road and wait for the visitors.
From various points on the sandhills men appear leading camels and donkeys. They converge on the corral near the tram terminus. And they, too, wait for the visitors. From eight o'clock onwards the visitors arrive. There are earnest Germans in sun glasses and pith helmets, French, and Egyptians; the English, to the annoyance of the camel and donkey men, sometimes insist on walking up the hill.
One morning an air of excitement was noticeable below the balcony. A great day had evidently dawned. More camels, more donkeys, more sand-carts than usual, emerged from the dunes to wait near the tram terminus; and at last a string of cars arrived from Cairo from which stepped about a hundred tourists, dressed as if for the exploration of Central Africa.
Some wore jodhpur breeches and open-necked shirts, others wore field boots and breeches, with pith helmets and spine pads, and others were even more strangely clothed.
While the camels bubbled and groaned with hatred, and the donkey and sand-cart men screamed and waved their arms in the ordinary way of business, the weird cavalcade mounted and slowly wound its way up the hill. A liner was passing through the Suez Canal.
Her passengers had seized the chance of rushing to Cairo and the Pyramids, and returning to the ship at nightfall.
It is clear that the traditions of Nineteenth Century travel die hard. All these people were convinced that a visit to the Pyramids and the Sphinx involved moments of hardship, if not of physical danger. And as I watched them going up the hill, I could tell how the ship's courtships were progressing from the way the young men tried to urge their cynical beasts within protective distance of the young women. More often than not they were forced to cry from the humiliating distance of ten yards:
" I say, Miss Robinson, are you all right? " And the ship's funny man turned round on his camel and shouted to some member of the rearguard:— " Come on, Steve! "
§4
It was exasperating to be within sight of the Pyramids, and within five minutes' walk of the Sphinx, yet unable to go out and see them.
One morning the doctor said that I could go out, but he added, " Don't attempt to go inside the Pyramid, or you may get a chill. It isn't worth it, is it? " I agreed that it wasn't worth it; but no sooner had I walked to the platform of sand on which the Pyramids are built, than I forgot all about the doctor and of course I did as you and anyone else would have done—I went inside.
When I actually stood beneath the Pyramid of Kheops, it looked even larger and more improbable than any work of man's hands that I had ever seen.
When it was built, the Pyramid was sheeted from top to bottom in the finest white limestone, smoothed after the blocks had been placed in position, so that the immense structure looked as if made of one solid slab of polished stone. That was how the ancient world saw it, and the reason why the Pyramid is now a series of steep stone steps, narrowing to the summit, is because the Arabs stripped off the casing and used the stone to build Cairo.
The entrance is about forty feet from the ground, on the north side, and was made centuries ago by treasure-hunting Arabs. When you walk round the Pyramid, you notice that several attempts have been made to break a way in; but this is the only successful one, because the Arabs drove their tunnel immediately below the original entrance, and joined their passage with the main corridor up which the mummy of the Pharaoh had been dragged to the burial chamber.
This entrance is a big black hole in the hill of stone. I climbed up to it over slabs of limestone, where one of the Arab guardians took charge of me.
I walked upright for a few paces and then had to bend double and crawl for about twenty yards. I was surprised to find that the Pyramid is lit by electricity. When an Arab turned a switch, a row of naked electric lights shone in the darkness. After twenty yards the robbers' tunnel joins the main corridor which rises steeply into the Pyramid, a narrow stone tube about thirty feet in height, looking like a shaft of a moving staircase in a tube station.
The electric lights illuminate limestone walls whose masonry is so perfect that it is difficult to find the joints in the stones. Steps and a handrail have been fixed to one side. There was a steep climb for another fifty yards, when once again I had to crawl on hands and knees through a stone tunnel not more than three and a half feet high. This led to a really astonishing sight—the room in the heart of the Pyramid where Kheops was buried.
It was one of the most sinister apartments I have ever entered, a really horrible place, and I could well believe that it might be haunted. The air was stale and hot, and the reek of bats was so strong that I kept glancing up, expecting to see them hanging on the corners of the walls.
Although this room is a hundred and forty feet above the level of the sunlit sandhills outside, it gives the impression of being in the depths of the earth. The Arab who had followed me suddenly switched off the light and said with a horrid laugh:
"Dark— very dark! "It was indeed the darkness of the grave, and joined to the darkness was the silence of death. I have never known what claustrophobia is, but I have often felt frightened in coal mines. As I thought of the way up to this place, I was conscious of a faint feeling of panic.
The only object in the burial-chamber is a massive granite coffin without lid or inscription. The Arab went over and tapped it with his hand. It gave out a metallic, bell-like sound. This was the sarcophagus in which the Pharaoh Kheops was buried seven thousand years ago.
One of the remarkable things about the Pyramid is that it was built round this coffin; when the structure had reached the height of the mummy-chamber the coffin was brought in, and the top portion of the Pyramid was built over it.
Herodotus tells us that one hundred thousand men worked for three months every year, and that it took ten years to prepare the site and twenty years to build the Pyramid. During this time the king must have visited the site to see how it was getting on. He must have stood in this chamber when it was still open to the sun, with his coffin standing in the corner. He may have struck it with his hand to hear the sweet, bell-like note. He may have come again when the room was closed, dark, and ready. Then one day he came for the last time, with a gold mask on his face, to the straining of ropes and the chanting of priests.
In spite of all the ingenuity of the architects, those narrow tunnels blocked with granite slabs after the funeral, and the single stone swinging on a pivot known only to the priests, robbers entered the tomb within two hundred years or so of Kheops' death.
We shall never know who levered the lid from the great stone coffin and stripped the Pharaoh of his gold, strewing his bones about the floor. But we know that centuries after his tomb had been desecrated, men continued to smite the Great Pyramid, unable to believe that it did not still contain riches. Persians, Romans, and Arabs attacked it with battering-rams; they tunnelled and they mined. When gunpowder was invented, they even tried to blow it up. Now and then some would enter its dark passages and creep along them with beating hearts. Instead of piles of gold, they came to an empty coffin and the twittering of bats.
§5
I decided to visit the Faiyum, which lies some forty miles from the Pyramids, across the Libyan Desert. It is a depression about a hundred and forty feet deep, and roughly forty miles long by thirty broad, separated from the Nile by a range of low hills. There is, however, an opening in the hills through which a branch of the river used to flow in ancient times, forming an enormous natural lake which rose and fell with the Nile.
It was a brilliant hot morning when I set off by car for the Faiyum. Leaving the Pyramids on the left, there was soon nothing within sight but a featureless expanse of burning sand. Forty miles of desert are just enough to show you what a desert is like, but not enough to fill your heart with despair and weariness. The sandy track lost itself on the horizon. The sandhills shouldered each other mile after mile, here smooth as brown velvet, there rippled with the wind as if the tide has just gone out. And the sun beat down angrily upon this dead land until the eyes grew weary and sore with looking at the burning flatness; until any object—a bird, the white bones of a camel, the chassis of a burnt-out Ford car—was a welcome relief from the monotonous sterility.
One feature of the desert is beautiful: the dry, clear air, blowing over thousands of miles of clean sand, stirring up the bloodstream and cheering the heart.
The track led downhill towards a scene that looked to me like a child's impression of the Garden of Eden. The desert ended suddenly against a wall of date-palms. Where the palm fronds sprayed upwards against the sky, I saw bunches of dates lying in heavy clusters, like a swarm of bees and the colour of Spanish mahogany.
Instead of barren sand, the road now lay along a high embankment of black earth—the rich, pregnant black earth of Egypt; and on either side flowed sluggish canals of fresh water, the veins that carry the life blood of this land.
The richness of this oasis was proverbial in the days of the Pharaohs. The earth can produce almost anything : oranges bananas, mandarins, dates, sugar-cane, rice, maize, and olives.
How hard the fellah works! With what unremitting toil must he slave at this black land, giving his life in return for its fruitfulness. He stands knee-deep in water, his thin garment drenched with the drip of the shaduf; he stands in the clinging mud of the fields, the soles of his bare feet making him an easy victim to the terrible germ that lives in the soil of Egypt; he stands bowed above his Virgilian plough; he strides like Pharaoh's soldiers on a temple wall, slashing at the man-high maize stalks; covered like a Jack-in-the-Green, he staggers beneath a load of bersim.
Every day, year in and year out, century after century, it is the same. He is the fellah, the man whose sweat built the pyramids and the temples, the man whose sense of fatality is perhaps the most colossal of Egypt's monuments.
As I passed his pretty villages built in groves of date-palms beside shallow canals, the wood smoke was rising from the ovens where his women were baking the tough bread which is his staple food. I saw the little mud houses where he goes home to sleep for a few hours before the sun, like a trumpet in the morning, calls him out to strive again with water and with mud. There is little inside his house except small children playing in the dust.
I travelled through the villages to the edge of Lake Karoun, where a small, two-storey hotel, kept by a young German, stands within a few yards of the water's edge. The hotel was empty because it was the middle of the week. At week-ends it is filled with sportsmen from Cairo who come to shoot the duck, snipe, and teal which haunt the lake-side in thousands.
I thought that this lake was the most beautiful thing I had seen in Egypt. It is a sheet of blue water lying in the sunlight, with the tawny desert on its western shores; a desert in which lie forgotten cities of the Greek age and old temples falling into dust. In the hush of this remote place, the blend of blue water and desert hills, I was reminded of the Lake of Galilee.
An Arab servant took my bag to a little bedroom overlooking the lake. The bed was covered with a mosquito net and the room smelt cleanly of camphor.
" I have just opened the hotel," said young Mr. Schumacher, the proprietor, " for I keep it shut until the shooting season begins. What a business it is, opening a hotel that has been shut for an Egyptian summer! The lizards, the snakes, the birds, and the frogs come and live here; and also wild bees! "
I knew that I was going to like Lake Karoun.
The Pharaohs took a great interest in this lake and fitted it with lock-gates and an intricate system of water-control, so that its level remained constant and the water could be used as required for irrigation. Among the ancient dwellers on the lake-side were some who worshipped a deity to whom the crocodile was sacred. The priests kept a crocodile, which they regarded as the embodiment of Sebek, the crocodile god, in a sacred lake in the temple at Shedet. Rings of gold and crystal hung in its ears, and its paws were decorated with jewelled bracelets.
In Greek times the waterworks had fallen into disuse, and the level of the lake having fallen, large areas of marshland were formed which the kings of the Ptolemaic dynasty drained in order to reclaim land for Greek and Macedonian ex-soldiers. What was once a famous lake then became a hot, low-lying, but amazingly fertile agricultural area dotted with Greek cities. And to-day the Faiyum—an Arabic version of the Coptic word for " lake"—is noted for the richness of its soil and for the large farms and estates owned by rich Egyptians. The Faiyum endeared itself to the Greeks because it was the only place in Egypt where good crops of olives could be grown, and it remains to-day the only olive-producing area in the country. The lake has now shrunk to a fraction of its former size, and occupies the deepest portion of the depression. Its waters are as salt as the Mediterranean because evaporation under great heat leaves mineral salts in solution, as they are left in the bitter waters of the Dead Sea.
Both Herodotus and Strabo mention this district and, reading their accounts, it is interesting to see how little the tourist route in Egypt has altered since Greek and Roman times. Starting by boat from Alexandria, tourists made the Nile trip just as modern travellers do, visiting the same places to see the same things. But where we see a ruin, or nothing at all, they were fortunate in finding temples where priests still performed their ancient rites. From Heliopolis they made an excursion to the Temple of the Sun to smile, no doubt, as they heard of the nightly ceremony enacted to make sure that the sun would rise in the morning. From Gizeh, they visited the Pyramids and the Sphinx, which were then as dead and as plundered as they are to-day.
In modern times the Faiyum has dropped out of its place among the sights of Egypt. In Greek days, however, all tourists went there, for the old crocodile-god was by this time experiencing a god's final humiliation, which is to attract, not worshippers, but tourists.
It was the fashion to go there and feed him with fried fish and honey-cakes, which were sold by the priests. And as his iewelled paws broke the surface of the sacred lake, we can imagine with what Western irreverence the tourists may have greeted him. It was not, however, easy to make an offering to a sacred crocodile, for he evidently had his revenge by showing a preference for the tourist. Therefore the priests were always ready to exhibit a skill taught by long experience, They would wait until the creature was asleep in the sun, when, stealing up to him, they would quickly pop the fish and the honey-cakes into his jaws and leap back before he had time to bite them.
§6
Egypt is a land without twilight. The sun sets. There is a brief expectant hush in whose vast stillness it seems that Time itself has stopped. The hills turn black against a lemon-coloured sky. A star burns. A bat flies. And the wings of darkness swoop down upon the world.
As the light goes out of the sky, life goes from the fields and the rice-meadows, from the crops of maize and sugar-cane: and each mud embankment is the scene of a homeward procession, black against the last streaks of the afterglow like figures on a temple frieze.
Barefoot girls in bright gowns of red and blue drive goats before them, brown boys smack the angular flanks of water-buffaloes as they hurry on in the dusk; and from every patch of cultivation the red-brown fellah strides noiselessly on thin bare legs to his village in the palm-grove.
He is driven to rest by the weariness of his body and by his fear of the dark. Well can I understand his fear. This uncanny darkness, following on the heels of a golden day, must have inspired the weird pictures of the underworld which the people of ancient Egypt painted in their tombs. The ancient Egyptian believed that death would be like the night of Egypt, a death haunted by strange creatures of the imagination, half man and half animal, like creatures moving at night in the sugar-cane and the shapes seen for a moment flying against the moon.
So silence and blacfeness settle over Egypt. The fellah and his family curl up on mats spread on the mud floor. Wolf-like dogs prowl about the villages, barking furiously at the little jackalswho creep from the maize-fields to yap in the moonlight.
It is the hour when anything might happen to a lonely man on the roads, when anything might rise from the fields, from the water, or from the earth under his feet; it is a time when four mud walls protect a man from all the powers of darkness. It is eight o'clock. In nine hours the world will come to life again. . . .
I stand on my balcony to watch the sun rise. Stars still shine. Lake Karoun lies below, a wide sheet of silver. Date-palms in the garden rise black and motionless in the morning hush; there is a silence, as if the evil creatures of the night are flying before the coming day, back to the earth and to the waters of the earth and to the parched desert spaces.
A breath of wind springs up, just strong enough to move the palm fronds, and a grey light comes into the east. It is the breath of life, the beginning of a new day. The light spreads. The small stars fade and go. The greyness turns to yellow, to orange, to red, and suddenly the sun leaps over the world's edge and Egypt is wide awake.
Instantly the cocks crow, donkeys bray, camels bubble, and the red-brown men of Egypt set off to the fields. Some sing and laugh as they go, some walk prematurely bowed with labour and stiffened by a life spent in mud and water. In the early morning shadows of the palm-trunks which the sun draws aslant mud walls, women sit and nurse their babies, while little long-eared kids with coats like black velvet frisk about them in the dust.
There is an air of happiness about each new day in Egypt, as if all ugliness and injustice had been washed away in the night; as if Man were starting his pilgrimage afresh in a perfect world, with the sun to warm him and a blue sky overhead.
I went down to the lake-side to see what the fishermen had caught during the night. They alone of all the people in the Faiyum are not bound body and soul to the black earth. They are nomad Arabs of Bedouin stock, whose ancestors came long ago across the gold rim of desert lying on the northern shore of the lake. They erected their black tents and learned to fish, and their descendants have been fishing ever since.
Their boats are stout, canoe-shaped craft made on the lakeside, their oars are thick pieces of wood, and they use dragnets and also the hand-net, which has been known in the East for centuries. It is the same kind of hand-net that was cast by the Apostles in the Sea of Galilee.
Although the sea is one hundred and fifty miles away and the lake is land-locked, the fish are sea-fish. Lake Karoun is well and regularly stocked by the Egyptian Government with Mediterranean and Red Sea fish, brought in tanks by air.
At about six o'clock every morning the fishing-boats come slowly to the shore, where the morning market is held. Buyers who have been squatting on the sand rise and go down to the edge of the lake. Has Allah filled the nets? Yes ! The All Merciful has filled the nets to the point of breaking, indeed so generous has he been that only a giant could carry his bounty to the shore.
Curiously enough such optimistic accounts—so typical of fishermen all over the world—were instantly contradicted when one small boy lifted his gallabia and, leaping into the water, waded to the land with a basket on his head. Sometimes two men came ashore with the catch, but it never required the strength of more than two; at least, it never did while I was watching.
Spreading out the fish on the sand, buyer and seller plunged into those protracted arguments which complicate the purchase of even a shoe-lace in the East. They laughed. They frowned. They simulated indignation, anger, sorrow; but eventually a bargain was struck—a matter of a few shillings— and everyone was happy. How good it is to see a fisherman happy, for in other parts of the world he is the victim of price rings and middle-men.
At Lake Karoun the merchants load the fish in baskets, sling them on either side of waiting donkeys, and go off to do business in the villages. The fishermen buy themselves a handful of dates or a pinch of green tea, and spread out their nets to dry.
The strangest thing I heard about these fishermen is their method of catching duck. During the winter great flocks of migratory wild fowl come to Lake Karoun. They are exceedingly shy and the fowler must disguise a punt with reeds and hide himself in it, sometimes for hours, before he gets a shot. But the fishermen have devised a method which perhaps only a Bedouin fisherman could have invented.
They get a decoy and place it in about five feet of water, among reeds near the shore. Then they scatter rice on the water and, slipping their feet into stone stirrups, crouch waiting under the water, breathing through a blowpipe. They remain submerged sometimes for half an hour at a time.
As soon as a duck flies down and swims up to the rice, the Arab underneath the water grasps it by the legs and pulls it down; and he does it so swiftly and so quietly that often four or five birds are pulled under before their companions notice that anything is wrong.
If you look across the lake when the sun has set, you will see the fishermen putting out again for their night's work. How different are fishermen from men of the fields. All over the Faiyum, except on these twenty-five miles of water, darkness means the end of work and the shelter of home. The fisherman alone goes out to brave the perils of night. But that is not really surprising, for, as every fellah knows, no afrit would dare to come near him, because the ghosts and night creatures go in fear of a fisherman and his nets. And I have been told that should you be caught after dark some distance from home —which Allah forbid—you are safe if you can persuade a fisherman to walk beside you.
§7
The Captain of Police and the Captain of Coastguards called to present their compliments and to hope that I was enjoying Egypt, and the particular portion of Egypt which lay under their charge.
" Let us sit down and drink coffee, unless you would prefer a stronger drink," I suggested.
" Coffee is good," they replied.So we sat on the terrace of the little hotel beside Lake Karoun, where green lizards flash in the sun and where the hoopoe, which is the jay of Egypt, flies busily from tree to tree.
When the coffee came, we talked of many things, but the most interesting were our own particular jobs in life. They asked me questions about newspapers and books, and I answered them as well as I could. Then I turned to them.
" What is the worst crime you have to deal with ? " I asked the Captain of Police.
" Murder," he replied, sipping his coffee.
" How many do you have in a year? "
" About seventy or eighty," he replied.
" And the population of your province is about five hundred thousand? "
" Yes, that is so. Many of our murders are—what is the term in English ?—family squabbles. They are handed down from one generation to another, and when a murder happens for no reason that you can tell, it often means that two great-grandsons have . . ."He paused for the word and made the expressive Egyptian gesture of finality: a sudden wiping of the palm of one hand across the palm of the other.
" Another difficulty," he continued, " is that everyone in a village knows who did the murder except the police. This makes murderers very difficult to trace. You have to watch. You have to listen. No one will help you to find the murderer. They know nothing. Nothing ! "
" But why does it take so long to work off a family squabble? Why should great-grandsons commit a murder because their great-grandfathers quarrelled? "
" Ah, that is not so easy to answer. There is a tradition among the fellahm that a murder of this kind must be committed with the same kind of instrument as the original murder, and on the same spot."
" The law of atonement? "
" If you like. But you can see how carefully men avoid the place where their fathers were murdered! Years—generations —may pass before such a meeting happens. But when it does happen—skh! "
" What crimes do you deal with? " I asked the coastguard.
" Nowadays I have no real crime," he replied, " except when the fishermen make their nets of too close a mesh. This is a very simple matter. I collect the the nets and burn them once a month. This happens to be the day for burning. You can see the smoke over there."
We looked along the lovely foreshore and saw three coastguards, men in blue blouses, wide Turkish trousers, and tar-bushes, poking at a fire on the sand.
" Why do you say that you have no crime nowadays? " I asked.
" Because until recently I was stationed on the Suez Canal, where I had much crime. Oh much. . . ."
He paused and made the gesture of abundance which is used all over the near East.
" In those days," he continued, " I caught the smugglers of cocaine and hashish and heroin. And they are indeed clever people. There are some who drop packages of drugs worth thousands of pounds from steamers in the canal. These packages are wrapped in oil silk and are weighed down with salt. As the salt melts, the packages float to the top of the water where men who have been watching from the banks row out and pick them up. But there are many, many tricks. There are men with false tops to their tarbushes. There are men who walk with hollow canes. There are men who hide drugs most skilfully on donkeys and camels."
The police captain looked at his watch and said:—
" If you are ready, shall we go and pay some calls? "I had no idea what he meant, but I took my place in a limousine driven by a police orderly. Off we sped over the mud embankments, hooting loudly to warn camels, oxen, donkeys, and buffaloes of our approach.
We came to a peaceful little village among palm trees where the omdah, or mayor, a dignified elderly man, was waiting for us at his garden gate. He led the way into a bower of roses, the big red roses that bloom all through the Egyptian winter. There were banks of purple bougainvillaea and masses of honeysuckle falling from trellis-work arches.
We sat enjoying the shade, while the hot Egyptian morning lay in blinding whiteness beyond the tunnel of leaves. Servants appeared with coffee and with oranges plucked from the trees around us; the best oranges that I have ever tasted.
A hoopoe flew to a bough near us, lifting his cockade of feathers, and called for his mate to come and see what queer people had invaded the garden. Mrs. Hoopoe flew down and also sat watching, with an eye like a gold boot button.
" Do you know," asked the omdah, " how the hoopoe got the crest of feathers on his head? Well, I will tell you. Solomon was once making a journey across the desert. The sun was hot and there was no shade. Suddenly the king found himself moving in shadow, and looking up, he saw that the hoopoe was flying above, shading him with his wings. All day the hoopoe flew thus, and upon the next day he was there also, flying above the head of the king. When the journey was ended, Solomon, who, as you know, could speak the language of the birds, called the hoopoe before him and asked what he could do to reward him for his kindness. ' I should like a crown of gold, 0 king, like the crown you wear," answered the hoopoe—for you can see what a cheeky little bird he is! ' 0, hoopoe,' replied Solomon, ' I think you are a foolish bird, for a crown will not bring you happiness;
nevertheless, if that is your wish, you shall have a crown of gold.' And Solomon waved his hand, and a gold crown appeared and settled upon the hoopoe's head." Some months later the hoopoe appeared before Solomon, and the king said,' 0, hoopoe, what is it you wish this time ? ' And the hoopoe answered, ' 0, king, take from me this crown of gold, for the sons of men covet it and my life is in peril. I have no peace from the sun's rising until the dark.' And Solomon smiled in his beard and waved his hand. The gold crown faded from the hoopoe's head; but in order that the bird might not go unrewarded for his service, the king replaced it with the beautiful gold crown of feathers which he wears so proudly. That is the story as it is written and as it is told. . . ."
The omdah turned to me with a charming smile, and the hoopoes nodded their crested heads We said good-bye to our host and plunged again into the heat and dust of the roads.
But I shall always remember that garden with its running water, its green shade and quiet voices, for it is the peculiar genius of Moslem peoples to make an oasis on the other side of any g; rden wall.
" I have noticed," said the police captain as we were driving away, " that women cause much trouble in the world; and it was like that with the hoopoe, only the omdah did not tell the story properly."
" Well, what is the real story? "
" When Solomon asked the hoopoe what reward he would like, the hoopoe said he must fly home and ask his wife. The hoopoe's wife said: ' Ask for 'golden crowns so that we may be richer and grander than all the other birds.' When the crowns came, she was so proud that she refused to speak even to her cousin, the bee-eater. But one day a man put some looking-glass in a snare, and the hoopoe's wife walked into it because she wanted to look at herself. As soon as men knew how valuable the crowns were, no hoopoe was safe, so the King of the Hoopoes had to go to Solomon and ask for them to be taken away."§8
When a town is compared to Venice, it generally means that a few turgid canals creep unwillingly through its streets. I have every feeling of sympathy for the dismay with which the Venetians learn from time to time that this or that unlikely place has been compared with their own incomparable city. The big town of the Faiyum—Medinet or el-Madlna—is sometimes called the " Venice of Egypt,''' though I have never in my life seen a place less like Venice.
It is a typical Egyptian provincial town, some of it modern, bits of it ancient, lots of it falling down; and the whole roofed with a sky of brass. The main canal that links the Faiyum with the Nile, and ensures the fertility of the oasis, is the Bahr Yusuf, the canal of Joseph; for the Arabs believe that the ancient reservoir ofPharaonic times was the work of the Biblical Joseph, in Arab legend the " Grand Vizier " of Pharaoh.
I went to el-Medinet with my friend the police officer. In one of the streets I noticed a shop whose window was a confused mass of dusty, broken antiquities. In a moment of optimism the owner had suspended the blackened hand of a mummy from a nail, where it dangled horribly, slowly revolving with any breath of air, as if inviting the passer-by to enter.
In the old days the Faiyum was a rich source of antiquities found in the neighbouring ruins of Crocodilopolis, the largest ruins of a town in Egypt. Nowadays the natives are forbidden to dig for treasure and must report any finds to the Government.
The interior of the shop was an incredible confusion of worthless and mostly shapeless relics of Ptolemaic Crocodilopolis. There was a dark room at the back piled to the ceiling with reddish clay figurines, lamps, ushabti figures of the roughest kind, broken pots, scraps of mummy wrappings, and a hideous pile of dust and decay in which I was able to indentify a human head and the tail of a mummified crocodile. Every time I dislodged an object the whole pile threatened to avalanche to the floor, and each dislodged object brought with it a puff of horrible dead dust.
On our way to the ruins of Crocodilopolis I stopped to watch men working in a brickyard. They looked like men made of mud. It had caked on their faces, arms, and chests, and it covered their legs to the thighs. Their method of brick-making has been in use in Egypt since the earliest times, and is the same process which created a labour dispute among the Hebrews. I noticed that these Egyptians were making bricks without straw, and doing it with conspicuous success. They told me that chopped straw is sometimes mixed with the mud to bind it, but most brick-makers use only mud mixed with a little sand to prevent cracks.
It is extraordinarily quick and simple work. The mud is first mixed and well trampled in a pit near by. The brick-maker takes up a sufficient quantity, roughly smoothes it on the ground and presses over it a wooden mould, which he removes, leaving behind a wet oblong of mud. He makes the next brick two or three inches away, and soon has several rows drying in the sun. In four days the bricks are dry enough to be turned on end, and in about a week they are ready for building.
What, then, was the cause of the famous grievance among the Hebrews? They wanted the straw, not to mix with the mud, but to dust the moulds or the ground in order to prevent the mud from sticking. Thus our English proverb about the impossibility of making bricks without straw is clearly wrong and based on a misunderstanding: for bricks are made without straw in the brickyards of Egypt.
The ruins of Crocodilopolis stretched in hills and hummocks and pits which on examination proved to be the remains of mud-brick houses. There were fragments of pottery mixed with the churned earth, and in one place I picked up a bright blue bead. We encountered a gaffir, or watchman, with a gun slung on his back, who was guarding the site on behalf of the Government. He showed us the way to the site of the temple lake where the jewelled Petesuchos once accepted the offerings of Greek tourists. There is nothing to be seen now but a slight declivity in the hills of hard black mud.
We were glad to sit down and mop our brows, for the heat was beating fiercely upon the ruins. As we smoked cigarettes, I thought, as one is always thinking on archasological sites, how capricious are those chances which preserve knowledge when a civilisation has crashed. It may seem incredible to some of us today to think that a future age might have no knowledge of Watt's steam-condenser save from an essay written by a schoolboy, which happened to be used to line a steel box for some reason or other; or that all the works of Shakespeare might disappear except ten lines of Hamlet, which some eccentric admirer had caused to be carved in marble on a library mantelpiece. Far-fetched and impossible as this may sound, much the same sort of thing has happened to a civilisation as great as ours; and in these days of Air Raid Precautions, who would dare to say that they might not happen again ?
When the late Lord Carnarvon was digging at Thebes some years ago, he found a wooden palette which a schoolboy had used as a copy-book. On it was written what was evidently an inscription from the walls of a now vanished temple, and it told the story, hitherto unknown, of the expulsion of the Hyksos under the last king of the XVIIth Dynasty. Who could have dreamt that an idle schoolboy, unwillingly fulfilling some task with the fear of a caning in his mind, would be chosen by fate to fill a blank in history and to write on wood words destined to survive ages after the stone temple from whose walls they were copied had fallen into oblivion.
In much the same way the sacred crocodiles of the Faiyum were chosen as fate's safe deposit. When Grenfell and Hunt were digging in the Faiyum for papyri, which they eventually found in such splendid quantities, they were disgusted to turn up nothing but mummified crocodiles. The disappointment spread to the workmen, one of whom in his rage dashed a sacred animal to the ground, where it burst open and out fell oapyri! There was a rush for the other crocodiles, which ' proved to be libraries in disguise, for the priests had packed them with all kinds of old manuscripts: fragments of ancient classics, royal ordinances, private letters, land accounts, surveys, and petitions. It is by means of such fantastic chances that an age sometimes makes itself known to another across the silence of centuries.
Saying good-bye to my friend, I returned to Cairo by another route, a road that lies parallel with the Nile. It touches the river now and then before running, high and embanked, among fields of maize and sugar cane. High above the palm trees shone the white slanting sails of Nile boats as they drifted noiselessly up and down the river. Camels passed in file, donkeys trotted in the smothering black dust, geese cackled, turkeys gobbled, cocks crew, pigeons cooed, dogs barked, children cried and shouted, the sakiyeh groaned its age-long lament, and in the black mud of the canal banks half naked shadufmen lifted their dripping burdens.
If only the villages of Egypt could be freed from malaria and ophthalmia and a hundred other plagues and afflictions, they would be the most idyllic in the world. They look so lovely lying in the striped shadows of the palm groves, the flat-roofed houses so perfectly grouped together, white minarets rising above them, reflected maybe in the still blue water of a canal, and on the houses, or built apart in the fields, the white cowers above which thousands of pigeons catch the sunlight as they wheel in flight.
In the Faiyum, where these white towers sometimes look more important than the houses of men, I was told that the pigeons are kept for the manure, which is the best-known fertiliser for melons. It is interesting to connect this with II Kings vi. 25: "And there was a great famine in Samaria: and behold, they besieged it until an ass's head was sold for fourscore pieces of silver, and the fourth part of a cab of dove's dung for five pieces of silver." It would appear that this fertiliser was sold in the days of Elisha exactly as it is in Egypt at the present time.
I came to the ruins of Memphis, mysterious in a palm grove. Even less of Memphis than of Babylon remains to tell the world that the mightiest city of its time once stood there. Darkness was beginning to steal through the wood like an old witch, and it was eerie to walk under the trees, where the colossal figure of a pharaoh lies prostrate, gazing at the sky, and to come upon a bland, indifferent sphinx whose lips are curled in a faint smile, sitting white and silent.
A shed has been over built the gigantic figure ofRamesses II, and the attendant leads the way upstairs to a balcony from which you may gaze on the prostrate king. He lies like a captured Gulliver, with his face to the roof. The guardian whispers that his ear is over a foot long. He is so enormous that his shape is lost when you are so near to him. A child could slide on his lips as on a banister. His nose is a little hill jutting out of his immense, smooth cheeks.
I suddenly told the guardian very gravely that the place was haunted by a thousand afrits and demons, and from the ensuing look of horror in his eyes, I gathered that I had struck the nail on the head. And the last thing I saw of Memphis was the pale sphinx smiling in the wood.
§9
At eight o'clock on a Sunday morning I went to Old Cairo to attend the Korban, or Mass, in the church of Abu Sefain. There was to be a christening in the middle of the service, for it is the ancient rule of the Coptic Church that infants must receive their first communion immediately after baptism. This rule was general in the first age of Christianity, when converts were usually adult persons, and it is typical of the rigid tradition of the Egyptian Christians that they should not have modified it to fit different circumstances. So every Coptic baby is baptised to-day with the same rites that admitted grown-up and aged pagans into the Church of the First Century.
When I arrived, the dark old church was already half full of men and women. The long offering of the morning incense had filled the building with pungent fumes. The haikal screen shone in the light of candles and through its open door I could see the priest moving about the sanctuary beyond, where more candles burned on the altar.
Every now and then men and women would enter and fall on hands and knees in front of the haikal screen, picking up the hem of the curtain and carrying it to their lips. Some of the more devout would remain praying on hands and knees, bending their bodies forward and touching the threshold with their foreheads.
It is an attitude which suggests Islam, and I have read accounts of Coptic ceremonies in which Western observers invariably comment on this prostration as a curious invasion of Moslem ritual into a Christian church. It is really the other way round. The Moslems adopted the act of prostration from the Christians, for when the Koran was compiled, Christian saints and hermits might be seen performing their daily prostrations in all the deserts and mountains of the East, as indeed we are told St. Simeon Stylites did upon his pillar in Syria.
The writings of the Early Fathers contain many a reference to prostration, and to the kissing of even the porches and pillars of churches. Coptic monks still attach great importance to such acts, and the ordinary worshipper in a church, as I saw for myself in Abu Sefain, still approaches the altar on hands and knees, as our Christian forefathers used to do in ancient times. The only survivals of this custom in the West are the genuflection to the Sacrament, the " prostration," which is kneeling on both knees, and the Roman " prostratio," which is lying full length on the ground.
The congregation was composed of poor people from the streets around. The men wore their tarbushes in church—a truly Eastern touch—while most of the women sat cross-legged on the floor, with black veils drawn over their heads. I was charmed to see how the children, some of them hardly able to walk, were allowed to sit on the steps of the haikal, and how their little faces would peep into the sanctuary beyond. Gravely watching and peeping, they sat there while the priest prepared the altar for the Korban. On one occasion, when he had to leave the altar for a moment, he was obliged to step over two or three infants, and once a little brown boy strayed into the sanctuary, to be gently removed by the priest with a reproving pat on the head. These Copts, though some have said how deeply they are sunk in ignorance and superstition, have at least not forgotten that Jesus said: " Suffer the little children to come unto me."
While I was watching this interesting congregation, and thinking how well the Copts have camouflaged themselves among their conquerors, for there was nothing about their dress to distinguish them from a Moslem crowd, I felt a gentle pull at my sleeve. It was my friend, the young son of the sacristan, whom I had met during my visits to this church. Beckoning me from my seat, he led the way into an adjoining courtyard, where I smelt the sweet warmth of baking bread.
" My father prepares the holy bread," he whispered, and pointed into a dark bakehouse where an old man in a gallabia, and wearing a tarbush, was muttering the psalms in Arabic while he tended a brick oven.
Every time the Korban is celebrated, the eucharistic bread must go straight from the oven to the altar, and it must always be baked by the sacristan on church premises on the morning of the Mass. The loaves, of which he had baked perhaps twenty, were light brown in colour and were beautifully even and smooth, about three inches in diameter and an inch in thickness. Each one was stamped on top with a design of crosses.
When we returned to the church, the priest was vested for the Liturgy. He wore a tunic opening down the front, a long vestment that almost touched the ground, and was worn ungirded. It was made of cream-coloured silk and was undecorated. He did not wear the shamlah on his head, the primitive amice which Copts sometimes twist round the head like a turban, but a new-fashioned cap rather like a mitre, except that it was not cleft, neither was it as tall as a mitre. This cap was richly embroidered with crosses, and from it a long veil hung down the back to the wearer's heels, decorated only with a single cross. He wore nothing to correspond with the Western alb, cincture, maniple, or stole. His deacon was a barefoot young man dressed in an ungirded alb, with a stole crossed on his left shoulder and a white skull-cap on his head.
A choir of fourteen dark young men entered, wearing white linen vestments with stoles crossed on the left shoulder. One man carried cymbals, another held a triangle. Seeing them like this, without tarbushes and isolated from an Arabic background, I was immensely struck by their resemblance to the Egyptians and the Graeco-Egyptians whose portraits are to be seen on the Faiyum mummy cases.
The Liturgy began with the long sanctification, or oblation, of St. Basil. The priest intoned the prayers in Coptic and the congregation made their responses in Arabic. The choir sang in Coptic in a high nasal tone, seeming at times to tear the words out of the air, their heads lifted and their eyes closed. They were accompanied now and then with a touch of the triangle or a clash of cymbals.
Here again, is it right to call this enharmonic chanting " oriental," in the sense that it has an Arabian origin? Surely it is more reasonable to believe that the Arabs took their music from the Egyptians? As I listened to this Coptic choir, I wondered if this Church music might not be the last relic of the music of the Pharaohs, as the language of the Coptic Liturgy is the last relic of their language.
The sacristan brought in the Korban bread. The priest came to the haikal door and examined each loaf minutely, turning it over and over; selecting the most perfect, he returned with it to the altar and placed the bread on the paten. Raisin wine was brought to him. During the Moslem conquest the cultivation of the grape was forbidden in Egypt, and Christians were obliged to make their sacramental wine secretly in the churches, using raisins instead of grapes. He poured wine into the chalice and added a little water from an ordinary clay gulla. He placed the chalice in the painted box that stands on every Coptic altar, and on top of the chalice he placed the paten, covering them both with a veil of yellow silk.
Repeated processions round the altar now filled the sanctuary with a mist of incense. There was no sound for some time but the regular chink of the swinging thurible and the voice of the priest intoning prayers in the language of ancient Egypt. He appeared suddenly at the sanctuary door and came down into the church with the thurible, to pass among the people and swing a puff of incense towards each person. He also touched each member of the congregation on the head in blessing.
And now a disagreement arose on the question of the correct lessons for the day. A layman in a tarbush went to the haikal screen and called to the priest. A long and excited consultation took place, in which two or three leading members of the congregation joined. Books were produced, pages turned, and eventually the dispute was settled. This air of casual improvisation went strangely with the deep reverence and the general punctiliousness of the ceremony.
The lessons were read, first in Coptic and then in Arabic, and they were followed by the Liturgy of the Faithful.
" Come, stand with fear, look towards the East! " cried the deacon.
" Mercy, peace, and a sacrifice of praise," chanted the priest.While the words of institution were spoken, the people continually cried " amen," which they pronounced " ar-meen "; and a deep hush went through the church as the priest broke the bread and uncovered the chalice. The people prostrated themselves and cried out " Amen, amen, amen, we believe and confess and glorify Him." Incense was swung all the time and the priest covered the elements with a veil of crimson silk.
During the prayers of intercession, the names of Egyptian martyrs who died in Roman times were mentioned, and also saintly hermits of the Thebaid; and a prayer was offered for the fruits of the earth, including vineyards, which have not been cultivated in Egypt since the Tenth Century.
The fraction and the institution followed. The priest broke the holy bread into five pieces, and, dipping his finger in the chalice, signed them with the Cross. He took the central portion of the Korban—the isbodikon—and placed it in the chalice, crying: " This is in truth the Body and the Blood of Emmanuel, our God." And the people, uncovered and prostrate, answered: " Amen. I believe, I believe, I believe and confess until the last breath."
The deacon meanwhile took up his position at the opposite end of the altar, facing the priest and looking westward down the church. It is a position which was first adopted during the Egyptian and Greek riots after the Council of Chalcedon in 451 A.D., when Melkite mobs would enter the Monophysite churches and try to interrupt the Mass. Now, centuries after, every Sunday the deacon still takes up his position facing the church door, to give the priest warning of an attack.
As the priest knelt in adoration, the choir broke into a quick, triumphant anthem, a loud and victorious song of praise that was accompanied, not by the slow clash of cymbals, but by the quick, metallic sound of these instruments being hit rapidly rim against rim. Incense drifted in clouds through the church, seeping through the haikal screen and winding like a blue mist from the door of the sanctuary. In the candlelight of the altar the priest communicated and sank on his IA, knees in silent adoration.
Two or three people began to tiptoe towards the dark ^B little side chapel to the right of the altar. Among them was 1^1 a woman holding a small child in her arms. The baptism ^W was now about to take place. Rising, I followed them through the side chapel and came into a dark, whitewashed baptistry where a stone font, not standing clear as our fonts stand, was built into a corner of the wall.
Leaving the deacon to guard the Holy Eucharist, the priest entered the baptistry with a lighted candle and two phials of oil. The font held about three feet of cold water, and the unfortunate infant, as if aware of the complete immersion awaiting it, began to whimper and cry as its clothes were removed. The mother was a poor woman from the adjacent tenements, and the child was a three months old girl.
The priest first said prayers of purification over the mother and anointed her on the forehead with oil. As if addressing ; an adult First Century convert to the Christian Church, he | prayed that all remains of the worship of idols should be cast out of the infant's heart, and that she might prove worthy of the new birth that now awaited her. The small brown girl, by this time crying bitterly, was sent into a paroxysm of fear and rage as the priest grasped her wriggling body and touched it on the breast, hands, and back with oil.
Strangely enough the devils appeared to be, if not completely exorcised, at least severely startled, for she suddenly ceased her ear-splitting screams and looked round quietly with tear-dimmed eyes. One of her god-parents held her up while someone else lifted her tiny arms in the form of a cross. In this position the infant was made to renounce Satan and all his works.
" I renounce thee Satan " (said the infant by proxy) " and all thy impure works, and all thy evil angels, and all thy wicked demons, and all thy power, and all thy vile service, and all thy wicked wiles and deceits, and all thy army, and all thy authority, and all the rest of thy impieties."
The priest then asked the baby three times: " Do you believe? "; and three times the god-parents answered on her behalf: " I believe."
The priest then anointed the infant with the second oil, or chrism, more thoroughly than the first time, making the sign of the cross on the child's eyes, nose, mouth, arms, hands, knees, back, and heart. He then went to the font and consecrated the water. He knelt down and offered one of the most beautiful prayers I have ever heard—a prayer for himself.
" Thou who knowest the evil that is in me, do not laugh me to scorn, nor turn away Thy face from me, but let all sins flee away from me at this hour, 0 Thou who dost forgive the sins of men and lead them to repentance. Wash away the stains of my soul and body, purify me perfectly by Thy invisible power and Thy spiritual right hand, that I may not call upon others to seek absolution at my hands, and give it to them, namely the Faith which Thy great and unspeakable love for mankind has prepared, and be myself a castaway, as a servant of sin. Nay, Lord, let not the humble be put to shame, but be to me a Pardoner. Send down from on high Thy power; give me power to perform this service of great mystery, which is of heavenly origin. Let Christ take form in those who are to receive the baptism of new birth from me, vile as I am. Build them up upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets; and do not scatter them abroad, but plant them in the true plantation of Thy one only Catholic Apostolic Church, so that they may grow in piety, and that Thy Holy Name, glorious before all ages, may be glorified in every place, 0 Father, Son and Holy Ghost."
The priest then offered a prayer for the Pope (of Alexandria), and after the Creed had been said, he took holy oil and poured it into the font, which the Copts call " the Jordan." He burnt incense and then, bending down, breathed three times on the water, making the sign of the Cross with his breath. This is the act of insufflation, and it is employed to-day in Egypt as it was in the earliest days of the Church. The chrism was then poured on the water.
Taking the naked child, the priest first laid his hands upon her and breathed upon her to exorcise any evil spirit, precisely as Tertullian, who lived in the Second Century, described the act of Christian exorcism. His method of holding the infant interested me, because the few writers on this subject have generally disagreed on the Coptic method of holding a child at baptism. Vansleb, the Dominican missionary, wrote in the Seventeenth Century that in order to make the form of a cross the priest takes the child's right wrist and left foot in one hand, and the left wrist and right foot in the other, a position which Butler thought sounded like " a species of torture." This priest grasped the infant firmly by the nape of the neck with his left hand while with his right he held together the left wrist and left ankle, thus leaving the child's right arm and leg free to make whatever commotion was possible to them.
The squirming infant was now plunged firmly into the cold water as far as the waist, the priest saying in Arabic:
"Sabaat is baptised in the name of the Father. Amen."
He lifted her dripping and crying, and held her ready for the second immersion. Down she went again, this time up to the neck in water.
" In the name of the Son. Amen," cried the priest.
Sabaat's cries became louder. The third time she went in over the head and emerged howling." In the name of the Holy Ghost. Amen," concluded the priest.
While the mother dabbed at the waving legs of the now Christian Sabaat, the priest deconsecrated the water and, taking the chrism, came to Sabaat again and confirmed her, anointing her for the third time and breathing upon her, saying, " Receive the Holy Ghost." He laid his hands on the child and blessed her and gave her back to the mother, who clothed her in new garments: a dress of white, with a blue bonnet edged with white lace.
The priest meanwhile had returned to the altar, where the Holy Eucharist stood under a crimson veil. He took the chalice and advanced to the baptistry. Sabaat, now in her mother's arms, was carried forward. She was too small to receive the bread and wine together in a spoon, as the Copts receive communion, so the priest, dipping his finger in the chalice, placed a single drop of wine on the child's tongue. A deacon was standing near with a gulla full of water. He poured water on the priest's hand, and the priest swiftly dashed it in Sabaat's face. This made the child gasp and, in opening her mouth to cry, she received her first Communion.
While this was taking place, there was a movement in the church, and I saw what appeared to be a dying woman carried into the baptistry. She was one of the nuns from the convent of Mari Girgis. Supported by three sisters, dressed like herself in black, she was carried in and placed on the floor of the baptistry near the haikal, where she lay moaning and crying. I was told that she was desperately ill with dengue fever. The priest administered the Sacrament with a spoon, and the woman, now quiet except for her exhausted breathing, was carried out of the church.
The priest drained the chalice, rinsed it and drank the rinsings. The paten was washed and rinsed, and the deacon drank the rinsings. When the spoon had been washed, the deacon quickly laid it upon his eyes, a custom mentioned by St. Cyril of Jerusalem in the middle of the Fourth Century.
The congregation now crowded round the haikal screen in readiness for the surprising moment which concludes the Coptic Mass. The priest came to the door of the screen attended by the deacon, who held a guild of water. He poured a stream of water on the priest's hands and the priest instantly tossed it up towards the roof. There was a wild scramble as men and women pressed forward to receive a drop on face or body. Three times the priest tossed water into the air, and three times the congregation rushed for it. When they looked up from their last scramble, the priest had vanished, the haikal door was closed, and the sanctuary curtain had fallen back into place.
As the people left the church, they were given a fragment of the bread which had been baked for the Korban but had not been chosen. As a stranger, I was given a complete loaf. Here again I felt that I was touching some dim hand from the past, for the gift of unconsecrated bread—eulogise—to the faithful after the Mass was a custom in the Western Church fourteen centuries ago.
I returned to modern Cairo bewildered by the ghosts which haunt a Coptic altar. It would require long study to see them clearly for what they are. An interested passer-by can, however, see their vague shadowy forms moving in the incense;
and, having seen them, it is impossible not to feel respect for these Christians who, heresy or no heresy, have kept faith with Christ through twelve difficult centuries, and who have preserved in the secrecy of their churches much that is beautiful from the bright morning of Christianity.