CHAPTER EIGHTI go to Luxor and see the mummy of the Pharaoh Tut-ankh-Amun. I descend into the tombs of kings and nobles, visit temples, and see a Luxor sunset. I go to Aswan and see the ruins of a desert monastery, and make a voyage on the Nile.
§ I
A TRAIN of white sleeping-cars leaves Cairo every night to go south to Luxor and Aswan.
When I glance from this train in the early morning, I see that we are steadily pounding along an embankment high enough above the surrounding land to lift it clear of the Nile's inundation. The sun is up; the sky is blue; the villages are awake. Donkeys come along the embankments with a mincing quick-step, bearing on their backs shrouded and rotund forms. At the corner of a patch of sugar-cane I see a fox stealing home to his lair. Women in trailing robes stand at the wells, their water-pots held on head or shoulder; and in the villages among the palm trees, young and old sit warming themselves on the sunny sides of walls now streaked with the black, gigantic shadows of early morning.
No sooner does the warm light pour itself on Egypt than the whole land begins to wheeze, protest, and whine with a hundred aged voices like the sighs and groans of over-burdened men, for under tattered roofs of palm-matting oxen slowly revolve as they make a circular journey which must have known a beginning perhaps before the Pyramids were built, but seems to know no end. And as they travel thus, without a hope of arrival, the wheezing, whining sakiyeh wheels turn as slowly as the mills of God, and a number of poised water-jars discharge their minute contribution to the welfare of the land.
Someday a learned man digging in the eloquent sands of this ancient country may come upon a carved stone bearing the design of the first sakiyeh, that most involved yet most simple of all man's inventions. With a gasp of delight he will discover in the neat language of hieroglyphs the name of the inventor—He-ath Rob-in-Son. For who can doubt but that the sakiyeh is really a joke that was taken seriously?
Men whose skins are the colour of mahogany and shine with a polished glow like Chippendale furniture, stand in mud trenches and pull down the slim, curved mast of the shaduf; dipping the bucket in blue water, they lift it dripping to the channel above. In a few hours' time, when the sun grows stronger, they will throw off their clothes and work like living statues of bronze.
Now and again, as the train presses southward, the Nile is seen hushed and windless in the golden morning, lying among the emerald embroidery of maize and sugar-cane like a broad ribbon of palest blue. Upon the western bank the Libyan Desert rears itself in wild hills, sometimes the colour of a lion's skin, sometimes the colour of an orange; and in the valleys between these hills, and in their clefts and corries, the light is mauve, deepening to the misty blue of lavender in bloom.
The Nile twists and turns through the green land, often losing itself for a mile or two in groves of palm trees, then shining clear again, only to disappear into the green, its presence proclaimed by the tall sails of the giyasdt, like the wings of white birds poised above the palm trees.
And now a man passes down the train, knocking at the doors and crying " Luxor! " Tourists crowd to the windows, first at one side, then at the other, for they are nearing the great moment of travel in Egypt: Thebes, the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings, the Tomb of Tut-ankh-Amun, the great Temple of Karnak.
I step from the train and select a smart little 'arabia drawn by two dapple-grey Arab ponies. We pass with a jingle of harness and a tinkle of bells through the streets of this growing town, dreary streets even in the eternal sunlight, and we come at last to one of the most exquisite places in the world—the banks of the Nile at Luxor.
There are two hotels on the bank, one hidden in a scented garden, the other on the riverside, like a ship in dock. A row of little shops faces the Nile: souvenir shops, shops full of fake antiques, English book-shops, and a pharmacy kept by a Scotsman who used to be a chemist in Chelsea.
I go to the big hotel on the river-front. From the balcony of my room I look down on the river, which is twice as wide as the Thames at Westminster, but so smooth that the ferryboat which is crossing to the west bank appears to be moving on a pale mirror.
The pink Libyan Hills shine against the sky on the other side of the river, their valleys and corries filled with blue shadows as if an artist who had been painting the bluebells at Kew had taken his brush and made a series of delicate little downward strokes on their tawny flanks.
It is that hour of the morning when the sound of Luxor is the prickle of water on tough leaves. I see gardeners directing hoses on exotic flowers that might be stamped from red velvet, on trailing banks of blue bougainvillaea, and on thousands of red and yellow rose trees. If they stopped for a month, the garden would wilt and go back to desert. Rain does not fall sometimes for sixteen years at a time, yet the constant effort of the men who pour Nile water on the garden makes it one of the greenest places in Egypt. No rain for sixteen years! Can you imagine what the sun is like at Luxor; how it springs into a clear sky every morning, bringing long, golden hours, day after day, year after year, sinking to rest in the evening behind the Valley of the Dead, in a symphony of red, orange, lemon, and apple-green.
The certainty that to-morrow will be as lovely as to-day explains the sense of happiness and well-being which steals over you in this place.
§ 2
When I was at Luxor fourteen years ago, I used to step into a boat on the east bank of the Nile, sail across to the west bank, and, mounting a donkey, ride for an hour up into the Valley of the Kings to the tomb of Tut-ankh-Amun. It is different now. The Nile has thrown up a sandy island between its banks, and you must leave your boat, walk across this island, and take a second boat to the west bank. And—what a change awaits you!
Instead of the donkeys and sand carts, about twenty old Ford cars now stand with engines running, turned in the direction of the Valley. The drivers lean out of their seats and shout:
" You go to the Valley of the Kings, sir, jump in, sir, and on the way back I take you to the Ramesseum, or Der el-Bahari, as you wish ! Jump in, sir, this is the best car! "
It is a pity that the donkeys have almost disappeared, because the slow ride into the Valley of the Dead, the gradual approach to that fiery cleft in the hills, every yard becoming more grim and more desolate, was, I think, a better approach than the rush in a car over a bumpy road.
The Valley widens, the road ends, and the orange-yellow mountains become higher and rise more steeply on every side. Their lower slopes are covered with small limestone chips, the refuse flung out three thousand years ago, when the tombs were tunnelled. In the sunlight this limestone is as white as snow.
Sixty-one tombs have been found, but only about seventeen are open to inspection. How many more remain to be discovered no one can tell. Most of the existing tombs were rifled in ancient times, and the only untouched royal burial which has ever been found is the tomb of Tut-ankh-Amun.
There is no sound in the valley but the insistent stutter of a small petrol engine which makes electric light for the tombs. Gaffirs paid by the Government, and armed with guns and buck-shot, guard the tombs day and night. There is a certain poetic justice in the fact that these guardians are descended from the tomb robbers who until recent times spent their lives searching for mummies, ready to tear them limb from limb for the gold which they hoped was concealed about them.
The entrances to the tombs are all the same: a flight of limestone steps leading down into the mountain, and a black opening hewn in the face of the rock, protected by a grille like the door to a safety deposit vault. One of the first tombs on the right is that of the young Pharaoh Tut-ankh-Amun, the smallest and the plainest tomb in the valley. That its position had been forgotten when the architects tunnelled the later tomb of Rameses VI, immediately above, is well known.
Had their tunnels deviated only a yard or so in some places, they must have broken down into the golden treasury which, all unknown to them, was lying below.
As I descended the sixteen shallow steps into this tomb, I remembered the last time I had done so fourteen years ago, when the burial-chambers were piled almost to the ceiling with the treasures which are now in Cairo.
It was a queer experience to stand beside the two guardian statues of the king and to know that when Alexander the Great was born they had already been there for over a thousand years, grasping their thin wands of office, and that their incredible vigil had lengthened to more than two thousand years by the time William the Conqueror set foot in England. The awe which dawns in the mind at such a moment is partly due to the feeling that Time, whose inexorable demands cease not even when we sleep, had somehow spared this hidden cave under the mountain. That the gold and the wood had not perished did not seem so wonderful to me as that wreaths of flowers, brown with age and tender as ash, had still retained their shape; and from these I turned to thoughts ^ of the hands which had plucked the flowers and had cast them in the places where they still lay.
I remembered, too, how I had sat waiting on the wall outside and had heard, muffled by the rock, the sound of hammers and chisels breaking in upon the king's silence. Bit by bit the wall which separated the ante-chamber from the tomb-chamber was broken sufficiently for those who were watching to see, in the darkness beyond, the tall, gleaming tabernacle which rose over the nest of coffins in which the mummy of the king was found.
I stood again in the tomb of Tut-ankh-Amun. By the pale radiance of an electric light I mounted a wooden platform and looked down into another chamber, where I saw a beautiful sarcophagus of red granite. Inside is a gold coffin shaped to the human figure, which encloses the badly preserved mummy of a youth of eighteen; for that was the age at which death overtook Tut-ankh-Amun.
The gold face gazes calmly with open eyes towards the roof of the tomb. The king is portrayed wearing a close-fitting war-helmet of gold, with the symbols of his country, the Vulture and the Cobra, rising from his forehead. His gold hands are crossed on his breast; in the right he grasps the Flail, in the left the Crook, emblems of royalty. Tall figures painted on the wall show him, followed by his Ka, or spirit, embracing the mummied figure of Osiris, the God of the Dead.
In this silent tomb, where many thoughts crowd into the mind, one thought perhaps comes first: gladness that the discoverers have not taken the mummy of the king away to Cairo, but have left it in the tomb where it was placed over three thousand years ago.
§ 3
I spent the morning descending into the tomb of pharaoh after pharaoh. Painted corridors slope gently into the rock so that the king's mummy could be dragged downward on a sledge. The passages end in lofty halls whose walls, seen by a dim light, are a theological tapestry of figures and scenes still as bright as on the distant day when they were painted. Ever downward the shafts lead, and into an ever stuffier darkness until, at last, you stand perhaps five hundred feet from the tomb entrance, in the burial-chamber of the pharaoh.
The floor is inches deep in black dust, and is scattered with chips of stone. Some are fine white limestone, others are red granite or alabaster; and they tell you that at some time treasure-hunters smashed everything in their frenzy to reach the gold. The electric light casts only a pale glow, leaving the corners in shadow. It is switched on and off as it is required, and when it goes on suddenly various dark objects, like black rags attached to the ceiling, swiftly detach themselves and go flapping noiselessly in the hot, still air.
The big bats in the tomb of Amenophis II, which filled me with such horror fourteen years ago, are still performing their danse macabre above the dead face of the king. He who was. once master of all this fair land now lies in the dark hall, gazing up through a sheet of plate-glass at the flickering of bats.
While I was exploring one of the royal tombs, the light which fell from the shaft was obscured by the bodies of two descending human beings, one an American and the other his dragoman. When the American had mopped his brow and removed his coat, he turned to me and said:
" How do you suppose they painted these pictures on the walls ? Had they gotten electric light, do you think ? "
Many people have wondered how the artists painted such exquisite scenes deep down in the earth, without leaving behind a trace of lamp-smoke. I told him I had read that a smokeless oil was used, and there is a theory that sunlight was trained round corners into the darkness by means of a series of reflecting discs.
" And now, gentlemen, if you please," chipped in his guide, " here is the Eye of Horus and over there you see the sacred ape..."
I stayed just long enough to observe on the face of the visitor the bewildered but attentive expression which the features of Herodotus probably wore on such occasions; and leaving him to follow the explanations of his guide as best he could, I climbed up into the sunlight. Hardly a day passes now on which you may not stand above a pharaoh's tomb and know that in the darkness below stands a perplexed Christian, an inaccurate Moslem, and all about them the confident theology of ancient Egypt.
I decided to go to El-Quma and see the Tombs of the Nobles. Instead of the puzzling and conventional glimpses into the Underworld, here are amusing and infinitely touching little pictures of real life. You can see people who lived in Egypt thirty centuries ago, dressed in their best clothes, seated at banquets, listening to music, watching dancers, fishing, hunting, gathering the harvest, and sitting together in affectionate happiness, with their families around them.
What an astonishing gulf separated the pharaoh from ordinary men. The convention that he was divine is nowhere more obvious than in the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings. He was not allowed to take with him into the other world any charming reminders of his past life. His wife could not sit beside him, hand in hand. No children were allowed to play about the throne. The lovely days he had spent in his garden, or boating on the palace lake, were not considered fit subjects for his soul's comfort. He was obliged to walk a god among gods, his soul nourished by no memories of earth, but by the grim comradeship of forbidding fellow-deities who, having asked for his credentials like passport officials, passed him onward to the chill realms of the Osirified. Even home-sickness, so common with the ordinary soul, was denied the pharaoh. A god was simply returning home, and could not therefore retain any interest in his sojourn on earth. But how different it was with common men. How clearly the walls of ordinary tombs—those snapshot albums for the soul—express the belief that the lonely Ka would return many times to dwell upon the days that were gone.
I think the most attractive couple in any of the tombs are Ramose and his pretty little wife at Qurna. They sit together at a feast. She places her left hand on his shoulder and grasps his right arm in that affectionate and charming pose seen so frequently in the marital couples of Ancient Egypt. He holds the badge of his rank, a wooden baton, and they both gaze sedately in front of them towards their guests.
What a delightful pair they are, and what a model of conjugal companionship to have come down to us from 1300 B.C. It is not until early Christian times that we are again privileged to see the lord and his lady sitting together in their hall in dignity and in peace; each supreme in their own spheres, as, no one can doubt. Ramose and his wife were in theirs.
It seems so strange to me that tourists spend many heated hours exploring the royal tombs of Thebes, when they might see something so understandable and so human in the lesser known tombs of the ordinary citizens.
§ 4
When I came out of the tombs at Quma, and before my eyes had become used to the light, I was aware that people were running towards me. One of the first to arrive thrust something into my hand, I looked down and saw that I was holding the hand of a mummy. I did not wonder to whom it bad belonged, or whether it had once been a beautiful hand or an ugly one: I was anxious only to get rid of it. It was dry, black, and claw-like, and was even more hideous than it need have been by the loss of one finger.
The man to whom it belonged refused to take it back, believing that as long as I held it there was a chance that I might give him the shilling he was asking in preference to all the other things that old and young were thrusting on me. While I was wondering what to do, I saw a man who looked as old, as brown, as dried up, and as horrible as any mummy, coming slowly in my direction, leaning on a staff. Although his eyes were closed and he seemed to be blind, he found his way nimbly over the stone-scattered ground, and when he came near he cleared a way for himself by making savage swings with his staff at the legs of the crowd. Several children ran away howling, but I noticed that not one of those who received his blows showed any resentment, for such is the respect for age in the East.
The old man evidently had something important to say to me. When a few yards away, he slowly opened his eyes; and they were white. A desire to get away from this terrible old man came over me, but I waited to see what he wanted. Slowly he thrust his hand into the body of his shirt and drew forth a piece of coffin. It was horrible to see this old man, himself a walking mummy, trying to sell me a bit of coffin, and a nausea for this disgusting trade in tomb relics swept over me until I was ready to put distinguished archaeologists and all others who have dug up Egypt's dead on the same level with this dreadful apparition.
I looked down at the mummy's hand, which I was still holding, and decided to buy it for a shilling and bury it, or get rid of it somehow to put it out of its misery. My purchase seemed to astonish the crowd, and especially the man who had sold it, and they all disappeared shouting into the sandhills, leaving only the terrible old man standing in a bewildered, half-witted way, holding a piece of yellow coffin wood.
I had no newspaper in which to wrap the mummy's hand, and when I tried to put it in my pocket it clawed at the edge of the cloth and refused to go in. I began to feel sorry that I had bought it. To have buried it where I stood, or to have slipped it behind a rock, would have been futile, for it would have been rediscovered within a few hours and offered to some other visitor. There was nothing to do but to walk about hand in hand with it until I could find a safe place to bury it.
I had promised to take coffee with the sheik of Qurna, and while I did not relish the idea of appearing at the house of the most important man in the village holding this grisly relic, I thought it best to offer no explanations, but to behave as if I were in the habit of carrying such things about with me. The sheik led the way into a bare room on the ground floor of his house. It was teeming with animal life. A group of hens made way, rather resentfully I thought, in the passage; crickets were trilling somewhere in the mud walls; and a line of ants, like one's conception of a military expedition in Afghanistan, was proceeding along what was to them the mountainous inequality of the floor. In a corner of the palm trunks which served as rafters a swift had built a nest like a small yellow sponge. Every now and then he would fly into the room over our heads, flatten himself against the nest for a second, and curve out into the sunlight.
A barefoot boy entered with a tray of Turkish coffee, and while I was helping myself to a cup I thought I saw a movement in the corner, but I could not be sure. Looking again, I saw an extraordinary mouse. He was the size of four English mice, and his coat was of the pale fawn colour worn nowadays only by royal coachmen. His ears were large and almost round and all his characteristics were those familiar to admirers of Mr. Walt Disney. I was astonished that a creature as large as a rat, and so nearly related to it, should have retained all its mousy charm. There was nothing sinister and rat-like about it. It came running merrily in as if on wheels, busily nosing here and there, looking round intelligently all the time, and then darting away again. The sheik saw my interest in this creature, but neither of us made any remark about it, just as we accepted in silence the mummy's hand, which lay . between us on the divan.
While we sipped our coffee in the cool, dark room, I asked him if he had ever met 'Abd er-Rasul Ahmad. He looked at me sharply, for I had plunged from the harmless triviality of polite conversation into reality. I had touched the deathless story of Qurna. He replied that he remembered 'Abd er-Rasul well as a man of over ninety, and also the old man's mother, who used to walk about on two sticks until she died at the age of a hundred and ten years. This story of 'Abd er-Rasul of Qurna is one of the most romantic that I know.
A little over sixty years ago a number of wonderful antiquities were sold quietly to tourists in Luxor. Many of them were objects associated with kings and queens of Egypt whose mummies had never been found. The authorities, realising that a discovery of great importance had been made, set men to watch, and eventually an Arab family, whose ancestors had lived in an old tomb at Qurna since the Twelfth Century, came under suspicion. Arrests failed to drag the secret out of them, but, as usually happens in the East, someone made a clean breast of it; and so the whole story came out.
It appeared that one day in the summer of 1871, 'Abd er-Rasul Ahmad, when climbing the hills behind Der el-Bahari, discovered a shaft which went down into the earth for forty feet. When he descended to the bottom, he saw that a tunnel, which proved to be two hundred and twenty feet long, led from it into the mountain. He crawled along and emerged in a rock-cut chamber. As the light of his torch flickered over its contents, he caught his breath in astonishment, for he saw a scene which even he, the descendant of a race of tomb-robbers, had not considered possible in his most optimistic dreams. The cave was piled to the roof with coffins, mummies, and funeral furniture, whose gold decoration glittered in the light which he held aloft. He did not know it at the time, but he had stumbled by chance on a secret cache in which the priests had hidden about thirty royal mummies in 966 B.C., to save them from the thieves who robbed the tombs of Egypt even in ancient times.
His joy must have ended abruptly as he realised that, in order to move the heavy sarcophagi and to prise open the cartonnage cases, he would need help, for that meant admitting others into his astounding secret. After thinking it over, he confided in his son and his two brothers. These four men then began to visit the cave of treasures at dead of night, rifling the mummies and removing the small and easily portable objects, which they unloaded gradually on the market. Their fortunes grew, and it was necessary for them to observe great self-control in order to prevent others from guessing that they were sitting on the greatest gold mine which it had ever been the good fortune of tomb-robbers to discover. But such treasures could not remain hidden. As soon as the purchasers had shown them in Europe, their value and interest roused such curiosity that it was only a question of time before the secret of the cave was made known.
It was a bitter day for 'Abd er-Rasul Ahmad when, having made his confession, he was ordered to lead Emile Brugsch Bey, of the Antiquities Service, to the cave.
"It is true that I was armed to the teeth, and my faithful rifle, full of shells, hung over my shoulder," wrote M. Brugsch, in describing his adventure, " but my assistant from Cairo, Ahmed Effendi Kemal, was the only person with me whom I could trust. Any one of the natives would have killed me willingly, had we been alone, for everyone of them knew better than I did that I was about to deprive them of a great source of revenue. But I exposed no sign of fear, and proceeded with the work. The well cleared out, I descended, and began the exploration of the passage.
" Soon we came upon cases of porcelain funeral offerings, metal and alabaster vessels, draperies and trinkets, until, reaching the turn in the passage, a cluster of mummy cases came into view in such number as to stagger me. Collecting my senses, I made the best examination of them I could by the light of my torch, and at once saw that they contained the mummies of royal personages of both sexes; and yet that was not all. Plunging on ahead of my guide, I came to the chamber, and there, standing against the walls, or lying on the floor, I found even a greater number of mummy cases of stupendous size and weight. Their gold coverings and their polished surfaces so plainly reflected my own excited visage that it seemed as though I was looking into the faces of my own ancestors."
Among the mummies discovered in this cache were those of the most famous kings and queens of the New Empire: Seqenen-Re, Amenhotep I, Queen Nefertari, Thutmosis II and Thutmosis III, Seti I, Ramesses II (who was once identified as the Pharaoh of the Exodus), Ramesses III, and many others. It was a whole catacomb of ancient Egyptian royalty, and nothing like it had ever before been known.
A special boat was sent from Cairo, and three hundred Arabs laboured for six days, carrying the mummies of the kings and queens aboard. As the boat sailed down the Nile, an extraordinary scene took place. The banks of the river were lined by frantic crowds on both sides, from Luxor to Quft, the women wailing, tearing their hair, and casting dust on their faces, the men firing rifles into the air, in salute to the dead Pharaohs.
I learned from the sheik that 'Abd er-Rasul Ahmad, like many another who has presided for a while over unlimited wealth, died in abject poverty, an old man of nearly a hundred. He was haunted for the rest of his life by the dream that came true, only to vanish as his fingers were stretched out to grasp it. He would never consent to approach the shaft after the departure of the mummies, until, when ninety years of age, a visiting archaeologist, Robert de Rustafjaell, persuaded him to go there and be photographed at the entrance. But when the old man reached the place, he was so overcome by emotion that he fainted.
The sheik accompanied me in the polite Arab way to the edge of his territory, and then left me to the heat that beat upward from the rocks. As I passed down to the place where I had left my hired Ford, a small group came racing towards me with the usual collection of relics. It was led by an eager child holding the hand of a mummy. I recoiled in horror and passed on. A second group was waiting behind some rocks. A young man ran up and drew from the pocket of his gallabia another mummified hand. I waved the claw I was carrying threateningly at him, but he followed, pestering me, and I heard in the conversation of the crowd behind me the words " Abu yadd." So they had given me a name. I was " Father of the Hand." The news had gone round that at last a man had come who was willing to pay good piastres for the hands of mummies, and every person with such a relic had produced them. There were many more, which I refused to notice as I strode indignantly to the car.
As I was stepping into the boat to cross the Nile, a youth who had been sitting in the shade of a rush hut came racing down to the water's edge, and, of course, I knew that he had another hand for me. I left him standing on the sand with an expression of bewildered disappointment, as, thrusting the mummy's hand into the folds of his garments, he walked slowly away.
With the feeling of futility which must occasionally come to all reformers, I managed to sink the hand in the depths of the Nile, in whose mud, I trust, it will find decent oblivion.
§ 5
It is difficult to convey to anyone who has not been there, the extraordinary beauty of the Nile at Luxor. The words " blue," " hot," " calm," and " yellow," no matter how you use them, do not really convey the true atmosphere of this place. By some fortunate accident of light and climate Luxor greets each sunrise with a hushed serenity which, although every morning is precisely the same as the one before, never becomes monotonous.
I would step out on my balcony in the early morning and find everything exactly as I knew it would be. The Nile, lying below, is untouched by any wind, and I can tell what time it is by the way the light is lying on the Libyan Hills opposite. The rising sun touches first the crests of the tall mountain behind the Valley of the Tombs, lighting its ridge in a slender bar of warm, pinkish light which, even as I look, begins to travel down the mountain as the sun mounts into the sky. This line of light pours downward over the hills, turning lower ridges and peaks from lifeless sulphur into glowing gold. Then a cascade of light pours itself over the trees in the garden like a warm shower; and I can feel it on my hands and face. A ship, with white sails lifted, moves slowly in a breeze that is just strong enough to fill the tall canvas without rippling the water; and it moves forward as if on blue oil, making a path in the smoothness and sending out two expanding lines on either side, which travel slowly to the banks. It is so still that I can hear an Arab boy singing far across the Nile, in the sugar-cane near Qurna. I know that he is singing at the top of his voice, with his head flung back and his mouth wide open; but even so it is a long way for sound to travel. Hawks hang in the sky, hoopoes come and cock their heads, and bring their wives to look at me in the most impertinent way, and the old gardener walks out carrying a length of hose-pipe, which he directs at the flaming flowers and the burning earth.
In the evening, when the sun goes down behind the Libyan Hills, an enchanted hush repeats the spell of early morning. And there are evenings when the whole western sky turns to a sheet of orange flame shot with thin tongues of crimson, and behind the massed colour you can see the throbbing vitality of fire blazing in mid-air. The natives think nothing of these sunsets, indeed they hardly look at them, but a visitor arriving at Luxor in the middle of one might well fear that he had arrived during the opening moments of Judgment Day.
Minute by minute the fierceness of the colour fades from angry crimson into pink. Feathery wings of light ascend the sky like flocks of heavenly flamingoes, and hang there glowing; then the fires fade in dull metallic bars of red and gold which lie upon a background of apple-green. There are perhaps ten minutes of stillness, in which, it seems, one should be able to hear the stars getting ready, and then darkness, like an overdue assassin, swoops down upon the world.
§ 6
The horse carriage stops at the avenue of ram-headed sphinxes which guards the entrance pylon of Karnak. Sand is everywhere. It lies in hills and hummocks and in drifted dunes. Date palms and villages are planted on it. But this temple, the mightiest ruin of antiquity, lies in a hollow. It was built ages ago in an Egypt that was twenty to forty feet lower than the Egypt of to-day.
I enter the temple by a gateway that leads to a vast court scattered with drum and capital, with shattered sphinx and broken god, and the stone limbs of unknown kings.
Dark temples roofed with massive slabs of stone lead from this court. They reek of bats. When I walk into the darkness, the bats squeal and I hear the beat of wings; looking up, I see these creatures flapping against the roof.
Dim temples and open halls lead on, one after the other. The Hypostyle Hall, against whose forest of fantastic columns a man becomes less than a midget, would alone be one of the world's wonders; but here it is only one of a series of halls, all vast in conception, all covered with stiff pictures of men, gods, wars, tribute, and devotion.
You can wander all day in Karnak, trying to discover a pattern. It is a pious architectural competition that lasted for centuries. Each pharaoh, from the virile Eighteenth Dynasty to the Ptolemaic decadence—a period of fifteen hundred years—either pulled down a bit of it or added something new; and frequently he did both. It is as if every king of England, from William the Conqueror to George VI, had added something to Westminster Abbey, until a labyrinth of church buildings began at Gharing Cross and ended in pious confusion somewhere near Victoria Station.
To call Karnak " the temple " of Karnak is obviously absurd. Even if one called it " the temple town " of Karnak, it would hardly describe the wilderness of ruins which testify to the devotion of the pharaohs to the great god of Thebes— Amun Re.
After seeing Karnak, with its insistence on sheer power and size, and all the implications such things suggest—the mighty vested interests, the army of priests and nobles, the lip-service of centuries—you wonder what kind of man Akhnaton was, that queer, consumptive-looking, almost feminine creature, who yet had the strength to revolt against the god of Thebes, to remove his capital to El Amarna, and to head the most remarkable religious revolution of ancient times.
The story of his revolution means little until you have walked through Karnak and have seen the institution that he defied.
If Karnak is beautiful, it is with the beauty of golden pylons slanting back against a sky almost the colour of a violet. It is the beauty of an absurd, inquisitive hoopoe shaking his crested head on the statue of a god, or cracking a dung beetle on the walls of an apartment where long ago the high priest of Amun changed his vestments.
§ 7
When I was an earnest young reporter at the tomb of Tut-ankh-Amun, there was a lot of fuss and bother about the freedom of the Press and the moral right of a certain great journal to control the news of this discovery. But control it, it did; for the news was at the bottom of the locked tomb and at the top of the tomb was a platoon of infantry with ball cartridge.
Now the other newspapers, righteously indignant that this famous freedom of the Press should have been endangered, and anxious that their readers should have that something extra which every newspaper feels only its own special correspondent can provide, sent three men out from England with instructions to break the monopoly by any means which seemed proper to them. These villains, or champions of freedom, whichever you prefer, were the late Arthur Weigall, Valentine Williams, and myself. Between us, we probably represented more newspapers than any three men have ever represented. My own allowance was ninety-six journals all over the Empire.
If you wish to read how the monopoly was broken, you will find the story well told by Valentine Williams in his admirable autobiography, The World of Action. He did most of the work; Weigall was always ready to share his archaeological knowledge; and I did only two things on which I look back with any pride: I suggested that the three of us, instead of working in rivalry, should unite against the combine, which we did, and once, in the interests of the cause, I stayed out all night in the Valley of the Tombs.
This was a silly thing to do. Rumours of the gold in the tomb had brought together into the Libyan hills a record collection of murderers, thieves, and bandits from both deserts, and visitors who stayed out after dark on the west bank were in danger of being robbed and murdered. One tourist was found dead in the sugar-cane at Qurna, and another was discovered at daybreak floating in the Nile; and this brought down on Luxor a detachment of the camel corps under a cheerful officer named, if I remember rightly, Mitchell, who forbade anyone to cross the river after sundown.
Now I had got it into my head that the tomb was to be opened secretly on a certain night, when everybody was safely tucked away on the other side of the river, and I felt that someone should keep watch on it. So telling my allies that if anything should happen, I would find some way of summoning them, I arranged to be ferried over the Nile at about ten o'clock with my donkey and its boy. It was a dark night and cold. I remember feeling dangerously alone as, astride my reluctant mount, I climbed slowly out of the belt of cultivation into the solitude of the Valley of the Tombs. I was interested to discover that the cold night air of the river was left behind as I travelled through the defile, for the rocks still held the stored warmth of the day.
Mounting the hills that rise up sheer behind Der el-Bahari, we came out on a high ridge; there was nothing above us but the stars; to our right lay the sombre shadow of the gorge. We descended to the brow of a hill whose slopes fell straight down to the Valley, and from here I could see, through night glasses, a dark oblong which was the doorway of the tomb of Ramesses VI; below it were the limestone walls of the tomb I was watching. I remember ordering the donkey boy to lie down so that his white garments would not be seen. So we stayed there in the appalling silence.
Suddenly the donkey, horrified by such unorthodox behaviour, lifted his head and gave forth a long and bloodcurdling hee-haw, which I think must have been heard, as he intended it to be, away back in Luxor. I leapt to my feet, frantic to stop him. But how do you stop a braying donkey? Every time he uttered his cry, I saw the darkness creeping with advancing forms of assassins, drawn towards us by the noise; and finally, in despair, I removed my braces and bound them tightly round his muzzle.
The hours passed, as such hours do, with inconceivable slowness. This night seemed twice as long as any other night.
And nothing happened. Once I saw a movement in the valley below, but it was only the tomb sentries. Now and again the donkey-boy, who was even more jumpy than I was, would pull my sleeve and ask if I had heard something, and we would turn together, scanning the stone-scattered crest behind us, fortunately in vain.
After three o'clock the time began to speed up in an unaccountable manner, but the feeling of anti-climax grew with every moment. When four o'clock came, I was sure that nothing would be attempted, but I continued to lie there, unwilling to go. Towards five o'clock a pearl-grey light began to come into the sky, and I saw myself no longer the romantic watcher in the darkness of the hills, but an absurd figure lying out in the morning sunlight with a pair of glasses. So unstrapping the donkey, who revenged himself instantly for his long silence, we slowly descended the hill.
Although the value of my deed was non-existent, I have often looked back on it with considerable pleasure. I shall never forget the silence of the Valley, with the sombre tombs of the pharaohs gathered darkly in its shadows.
I made my way on a donkey up the same path to have a look at the place where I had spent the night fourteen years ago. I am sure no one has hidden there since, and probably no one ever will again. And after one of those wistful appointments with the past which become more frequent as one grows older, I descended by the steep hill-path to Der el-Bahari, where all that fiery beauty bursts suddenly into view, lying eastward to the Nile.
I rode my donkey over the sandhills, where the heat trembled in a white distortion, and into the great temple of Queen Hatshepsut. Her temple is the only one in Egypt which relies for effect not on massive bulk and repetition, but on line and balance, so that its air, almost of lightness and happiness, seems like a promise of the Parthenon.
Der el-Bahari means the " northern monastery," a name that perpetuates an early Christian settlement, all traces of which have been lost. The first Christians took over the immense halls, erected partitions in them, covered the pagan inscriptions with a coat of plaster on which they painted saints, and made their churches. So one generation worshipped Christ where its fathers had sacrificed to Osiris and bent the knee to the Blessed Virgin in the halls of Isis.
§ 8
For some way the road runs out towards Karnak, and then goes off into the desert, taking you in time to a white wall standing among palm trees. Several low white domes rise above the parapet of the wall. This is the Church of Der Anba Bakhum, the only survivor of all the saints of Luxor.
There was a time when, as a Copt in Luxor expressed it to me, " the church bells rang at Luxor and were answered all the way down the river, until all Egypt was ringing with them "; but the evidence of that time has now been largely destroyed. Egyptologists have swept away the remains of Christian churches in order to discover the ancient temples underneath, or they have torn them down in order to see the halls and courtyards in which they were built. There are still a few traces of coloured saints on the pillars of the festival hall of Thutmosis III at Karnak, and in several tombs in the Valley of the Kings I noticed the writing, in Coptic and in Latin, of hermits who once lived in them. But of the once mighty Thebaid, whose saints were so famous in the early centuries of Christianity, there is hardly a vestige left. We can only imagine that every temple contained many churches, and that the desert around was scattered with an unknown number of hermitages.
A Moslem dragoman told me about the Church of St. Bakhum, and I asked him to take me there. He said that Moslems as well as Christians revere this saint, and attend his annual feast, the last public Christian ceremony in the district. Its character, however, seems to have relapsed into paganism, for he told me that every April six or seven garlanded oxen, escorted by a great crowd of people, are led to the saint's tomb and are there slaughtered. The followers of Christ and Mohammed then sit down to feast together side by side.
He could tell me nothing about Anba Bakhum beyond the fact that he was a Roman soldier who became a Christian and came to Thebes, where he died.
When we entered the enclosure in which the church stands, I could see that it had been a walled monastery in ancient times, but the monastic buildings are now turned into squalid, dwellings. Donkeys, goats, and the ubiquitous flock of turkeys, roamed about the courtyard among piles of fodder and rubbish. Huge copper pans were lying about, which are used every year to cook the sacrificed oxen at the Feast of St. Bakhum. The church which we now entered is a curious structure, and I have not seen another Coptic church quite like it. There are five altars in a row, the central one dedicated to the saint, and his tomb is said to lie beneath it. The altar on the left is dedicated to St. George, or Mar Girghis, as the Copts call him, but the fellahin who crowded into the church could not tell me, or rather could not agree among themselves, on the dedication of the other three altars.
I have never entered a more disgraceful Christian building in the whole course of my life. I was ashamed to stand there beside a Moslem and for him to see into what appalling and disgusting squalor Christians can allow their place of worship to sink. For years no attempt can have been made to sweep out the church. Those altars which were not dismantled and falling into ruin were in a horrible condition of filth, and, in addition to the natural dirt of the place, someone was using it as a store for chicken baskets and a dump for rags and bones. It would be better for this church to fall into complete decay and achieve the status of a ruin, for at the moment it is an insult to the saint to whom it is dedicated.
I could not find a priest or any responsible person, and when the villagers saw that I was displeased, they shut up like oysters or faded away. The building is beautiful and unusual, and even if there is not enough Christianity in Luxor to look after it, some society interested in Coptic architecture should spare it some attention.
My dragoman told me that it is a custom both of Copts and Moslems to go there and swear to fulfil their obligations on the saint's tomb; an oath that is never disregarded, because it is believed that terrible ill luck will dog a man who utters a falsehood at the tomb of Anba Bakhum.
Wandering round the courtyard and picking my way over the confused farmyard litter, I came to a roofless outbuilding in which a few brown boys were sitting against a mud wall, murmuring a lesson over and again. A young schoolmaster stood before them, beating time with a stick and holding a book in his hand. I asked what the boys were repeating, and was told that they were learning the Bible by heart, as Moslems learn the Koran. After the hideous sight of the church, I was astonished to discover this spiritual effort in the place. The young schoolmaster had that quick, intelligent willingness which I have noticed as a characteristic of the Copts. I felt that this young man was worthy of a better schoolroom and that he deserved also the help of those, whoever they may be, in authority over him. I was touched by the fact that the Bible he was using had been written by himself, every word carefully copied from some old manuscript and the initial letters picked out in colour.
The young schoolmaster told me that St. Bakhum ruled a monastery containing four thousand monks and that, in order to keep himself awake during his protracted devotions, he used to cover his chair with nails. That was all he knew about the saint.
§ 9
On the edge of the desert, overlooking the Nile at Aswan, is the ruined Monastery of St. Simeon. Its local name is Der Anba Hadra. I had taken the train to Aswan, which is a hundred and thirty miles south of Luxor, in order to see the monastery, and I found myself in heat that glitters and trembles over the rocks even in winter.
I sailed across the Nile one morning, and after a good half mile's walk over soft sand, climbed up into what must at one time have been a magnificent fortified Coptic monastery. The man who went with me was a Copt who knew something about the history of the building. He said that no monks have lived there since the thirteenth century. St. Hadra, to whom the church is dedicated, was a Fourth Century saint.
He was the son of Christian parents, and was married at the age of eighteen. On the day after his wedding, Hadra followed a funeral procession to a church and became so impressed that he decided to leave the world and become the disciple of a hermit. After studying austerity for eight years under a saint called St. Baiman, he asked permission to go away and seek a cell of his own in the desert. During his life in the desert, stories of his holiness spread abroad and he diligently strove to model himself on that lodestar of Egyptian monasticism, St. Anthony. The time came when the Bishop of Aswan died, and the citizens went out to his cell and took Hadra by main force to make him bishop.
His monastery at Aswan was, I think, a community which followed the rule of Pachomius, for among the few recognisable buildings is a dormitory in which three monks slept together on hard stone couches, and that was one of the Pachomian regulations. The church itself, roofless and ruined, still preserves a few interesting frescoes showing several raven-haired figures in hieratical attitudes. The Copts always portray our Lord with a jet-black beard and eyes dark and flaming, and it is unusual to find an ikon or a fresco painting in which the colouring is not a striking contrast to the traditions of the West. The earlier the ikons or frescoes, the more European are the figures, but, as you come forward in time, the Hellenistic tradition grows fainter and fainter, until the Christian saints and martyrs, could they speak from their wood or stucco, would undoubtedly use, not Greek, but the language of Islam.
§ 10
Someone in Cairo had said to me that " Unless you travel on the Nile, you have not seen Egypt," and the remark lingered in my mind. I decided to hire a motor-boat and spend two days travelling slowly down the river to Luxor.
The suave emissary, who is always ready to do one's most reckless bidding for a consideration, came to see me and said that the very boat was at that moment available: it was a superb motor-boat with a reliable engine, and a cabin in which I could sleep at night. I could have it to take me to Luxor "for a sum." When we had cut this sum in two, thrown them both away, made another one, and drunk five cups of coffee, I went to see the vessel. She was moored to a wooden landing-stage and, as I know nothing about boats, I can only say that she was more or less white in colour, about thirty feet in length, and there was a cabin with glass windows right astern; and on its roof was a small upper deck with a foot-high rail round it, approached by a short flight of steps.
It was arranged for the launch to come round to the hotel landing-stage at five o'clock on the following morning. I rose at four and was slightly startled to find that the polite Swiss hotel manager had actually risen at that unearthly hour to say good-bye. As we walked down through the dark garden by the light of an electric torch, we heard the sound of a few sharp explosions on the Nile. Each explosion seemed wrung in agony from whatever piece of machinery was responsible for it.
"That, I think, is your boat," said the manager with uplifted finger.
A faint tinge of uneasiness came into my mind. Was he being very gentle and kind to me, as if he never expected to see me again? As we passed under the dark palm trees, I shivered, for I seemed to see him standing neat and well-groomed in a morning coat, saying to somebody: "Yes, I saw the poor fellow off. Such a nice man, and so keen on this unfortunate voyage. Ah, well! Will you take dinner in your apartment? "
We stood at last on the big, smooth rocks near the landing-stage, and watched a white blur with a lantern hanging to it detach itself from the shadows and approach the pier in a slow, uncertain way. It would give an occasional cough like a horse with a bad cold, and then dark arms would be seen punting it along with poles from rock to rock. Once it gave a series of quick coughs and shot ahead for a few yards, and then sidled up to the steps with a bump.
" Good-bye," said the manager, " and—good luck! "
" Good-bye," I replied with tremendous heartiness. " I am looking forward to this immensely."I stood on the little deck and waved my hand in farewell, hoping that the crew would get her smartly out into the river; but instead a man in a white shirt, still grasping a pole, came up to say that the chief engineer was missing. I asked where he was. The man said, " He sleeps."
I told him to go and wake him and bring him instantly. He returned to the forward portion of the boat, where a cavity revealed the faces of three dark persons who were crouched there like men in a trap. A heated quarrel took place, which ended in one of these men being pulled out of the cavity by his shoulders and kicked ashore, where he shambled off in the darkness.
"Don't you think it would be better to. come back and have a cup of coffee?" asked the manager.
" I beg of you, go back to bed, my dear sir. You have been more than kind, and we shall be off in a minute."So we parted with many handshakes, he into the shadows of the garden and I to sit fuming impatiently in the cabin, which smelt strongly of insect-powder. This was, however, a sign that they meant well. One of the tragedies of the East, by the way, is that everybody means so well.
In ten minutes or so, a sleepy figure wearing a tarbush and a suit plastered with grease came aboard and silently let himself down into the cavity. The sound of hammering followed and continued for some time. The three other members of the crew squatted on the deck, humming and smoking cigarettes. As the man with the hammer was obviously our engineer, I went forward to ask why we could not be away. The captain, who was the man with the pole, rose respectfully, and said that the man who had been sent to wake up the chief engineer had not returned and it was impossible to leave without him. I said that a crew of five for a small motor-boat seemed to me unusual, but the captain said that it was always so. However, just as I was contemplating the advisability of stepping ashore and continuing by train, the lost man appeared, bringing good fortune with him, for the engine set up a shrill hysterical cackle, and we parted from the landing-stage.
We described a graceful curve outwards on the Nile, missing one of the rocks by a yard or so (the captain prodded it as we went by), and seeking the centre of the river, we exploded northwards with great rapidity, the boat trembling and shuddering with every revolution of the propeller. I sat in the cabin watching the sun rise, thinking how cruel and wrong it is to blame these excellent fellows simply because they do not go about things as we do. They have their own amazing way of making things work.
An appalling smell of oil began to spread around us, while dense oily clouds passed overhead and lay drifting in our wake. The engine began to miss badly, but the man in the tarbush gave it a smart rap and brought it to its senses; and so, with the sun in the sky and this lovely land passing in review, I felt that everything was wonderful.
We had been going for perhaps two hours when I climbed up to the roof of the cabin. I saw a member of the crew sitting there at his ease and flicking cigarette ash on a pile of petrol tins which contained our fuel supply. There were nineteen tins. He accepted with good grace the suggestion that he should smoke his cigarettes somewhere else. The only other object on the roof was an extraordinarily homely-looking basket arm-chair, which had thoughtfully been provided for me. It was the sort of chair that should have been at home in England, with a cat asleep in it, instead of standing up ridiculously above the waters of the Nile. When I sat down in it, I realised that the slightest list to one side or the other would precipitate the chair and myself straight into the river, for the rail was too low to prevent our departure. Still, it was good to be there in the sunlight, watching the green strip of land which is Egypt narrow almost to nothing, and noting how in places the belt of cultivation becomes so slender that the desert peeps over the tops of the palm trees. Women with pots on their shoulders, donkeys, camels, and walking figures, all clear-cut, strode along the high embankments, bearing a remarkable resemblance to ancient Egyptian friezes.
Suddenly the engine stopped! The boat gave a hideous list to port and stayed there. The chair began to tilt, and I leapt to my feet only just in time. The engine started again, and stopped. This time we were in a current, and the boat began to turn slowly round in the middle of the river. It was a sickening, horrible movement, and I began to wonder whether the cabin below was filling, for its windows were only about six inches above the water. We now began to drift, and the captain stood ready with his pole in a magnificent attitude of defence, though what he intended to do I have no idea, because the Nile is a wide river and we were in the middle of it. I called him up and told him that the engine was in a shocking condition. He said it was really a very good engine, but it had been lying idle for a year. There was a lot of rust on it. The engineer was a very clever man, and he would soon make it go—whoof!
I went down to have a look at it, and peering into the cavity, I saw the engineer playing about with petrol in a way that terrified me, so I decided not to watch. Sitting aloft in lonely isolation, observing our steady drift, the thought came to me that we really might sink or founder, or do whatever a boat of this kind does as a last gesture of defeat.
Happily the engine started up again and we straightened ourselves, but our progress now was desperately slow. Every hour the same breakdown occurred, the same sickening list, the same humiliating drift. I got out a map and looked for the nearest railway station. It was at Edfu. With any luck we might be at Edfu before dark. I wondered if the night train from Aswan would be there before us, and I decided to abandon ship and make my escape.
To my astonishment the temple of Kom Ombo came into view on the eastern bank of the river. The sight of it encouraged me enormously. We really were getting somewhere. We had done about twenty-five miles in nine hours, which is almost three miles an hour. This was better than I had imagined.
I stepped ashore at Koro Ombo and explored a perfect Ptolemaic temple of the crocodile god. What interested me about this temple was its curious air of revivalism. The stonemasons, it is true, were still good at their work, but the artists who covered the walls with figures and hieroglyphics no longer believed in themselves or in what they were doing. They were attempting to revive something which had expired.
The old strength and, above all, the old conviction, are absent, and instead of figures inspired by a mighty sense of power and stability, we have a number of almost Parisian profiles, weak and exotic, masquerading as the deities and monarchs of Egypt. There is nevertheless a charm and a sophistication about this Ptolemaic art which easily degenerates into superficiality and self-consciousness, and as you look at these figures, it almost seems as if Greek art were attempting to force its curves into the rigid angularity of Egyptian tradition. And it may be that the artists of this time, who were born into the Hellenistic world, admired Greek art and despised their own as an old-fashioned relic of a faith in which they no longer believed. It is interesting to see how an art, which at its best shines with a hidden life, can find its way eventually to such a graceful death bed.
Returning again to my unhappy boat, we pushed off and were soon making our way northward. It would be tedious to relate how many times we stopped, it seemed for good, and how hope quickened with every renewed beat of our now heroic engine. As the sun was setting, we arrived at Edfu with wild cries and waving arms, bumping heavily into the steps of the landing-stage. There was a train leaving in about two hours. In the meantime I explored the temple of Edfu, which is the best preserved in the whole of Egypt. Its courtyards, its halls, and even the dark little holy of holies in which the statue of the God Horus was kept, are in a state of perfect preservation; the granite pedestal on which the sacred barque of the God reposed is still in position in the centre of the sanctuary. To the Christian archaeologist this chamber is interesting, because a corridor surrounds it which bears a close resemblance to the ambulatory of a church.
I had to leave all this ancient splendour and return to inform the crew of my decision to proceed no further with them. I expected an explosion which, oddly enough, never occurred. The captain merely sighed, and the clever engineer lit another cigarette. As for the rest of the crew, they seemed to have vanished. Anyhow we parted the best of friends, and I caught the night train up to Luxor. A tourist guide to Egypt was lying in the carriage, and as I idly opened it, my eyes fell upon the following sentence : " Navigation along the Nile, the oldest method of transport in Egypt, is also one of the most delightful. To sail or steam between its fertile banks is to realise that . . ."
But such words were not for me.
§ II
I took the morning train from Luxor, and left it before noon at a large market town called Sohag, the capital of the Province of Girga. It is a clean, pleasant town with a fine river-front. On the opposite bank are the mud houses and minarets of Akhmim, a town on which Europe has made no impression, and from whose mounds and cellars rise relics of the Greek Panopolis, to delight the hearts of dealers in the antique.
I had come to Sohag to see the White and the Red monasteries, two of the most interesting Christian buildings in Egypt. I called on the Bishop of Sohag, an impressive, bearded figure, with a gold pectoral cross on his chest and a black, melon-shaped turban on his head. He was a very different type of ecclesiastic from the simple monks I had met in the desert monasteries, a man of refinement and culture. We drank coffee together, and I thought that if all Coptic priests possessed his broad outlook and education, his church might experience the spiritual revival which is several centuries overdue.
He told me a story about the origin of the White and Red monasteries which is interesting, because little is known of the early history of these buildings. The Coptic tradition is that they were founded by St. Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine, when she was " on her way back " from Jerusalem, after her discovery of the Holy Cross. The Copts say that she came to Egypt with a military escort and went straight to El-Manshah, which is on the same bank of the Nile as Sohag, and about nine miles south of it. Here she is believed to have founded a small monastery. She then moved north to Sohag and camped in the desert, on roughly what is now the site of the White Monastery, which she founded; and, keeping her bodyguard in the hills, she founded also the Red Monastery, about four miles to the north-west.
This story seems to me a likely one. Some authorities believe that St. Helena arrived in Jerusalem in December, 326, and others think in January, 327. The Empress was then in her eightieth year. She arrived escorted by a large number of soldiers and accompanied by wagons full of coined silver. Her first act was to pull down the temple of Venus, which Hadrian had built on the site of Calvary, and to discover in a pit near by the relics of the True Cross. She then founded the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem ; and in about a year's time, when these buildings were advanced, she left to rejoin Constantine in Nicomedia.
It is quite possible that St. Helena visited Egypt, not, perhaps, " on her way home," as the Copts say, but during her year's sojourn in Palestine. An interesting point is the mention of El-Manshah as her destination in Egypt. No one who had invented a story about St. Helena since the Middle Ages could have chosen this now squalid town of fellahin as the scene of a royal visit. But in the time of St. Helena, El-Manshah was the great Greek city of Ptolemais Hermiou, which Strabo says was " the largest town in the Thebaid and not inferior in size to Memphis, with a constitution drawn up in the Hellenic manner." Therefore, this now unlikely town was just the place to offer hospitality to the mother of the Emperor sixteen centuries ago.
A car took me along an embanked road to the White Monastery, and in about twenty minutes we left the cultivated fields and came to the edge of a sandy, hilly desert. On its extreme edge stood an extraordinary building. At first sight, it looked like an Egyptian temple. The white walls, made of huge blocks of limestone, were about eighty feet high, and leaned inwards like the walls of the old pagan temples. The cornice curled over and outwards with the effect of a breaking wave, which is a characteristic of Egyptian temples and is known to architects as the " cavetto cornice."
If you looked at it only from the outside, you might imagine it to be an ancient Egyptian fortress. -Narrow slits are the only openings in the high wall, and at first there seem to be no doors to the building, for these have been blocked up.
Entering the monastery by a postern gate, I saw what at one time must have been the most majestic church in Egypt. It has been repeatedly attacked by raiders (when Denon passed with Napoleon's army in December, 1798, it was still smoking from a raid by the Mamelukes), and its nave is now uncovered to the sky, and broken pillars lie here and there. Houses of mud brick have been built in what was the body of the church, and a few old monks linger in them, celebrating the Korban once a week in a small church formed in the apse of the building.
It is confusing to call this building the White Monastery: it should be called the White Church. The monastery once lay all round it, but its buildings—cells, store rooms, mills, and kitchens—were made of mud brick and have now disappeared. The White Church rose in the centre, behind its high wall, and the plan of the settlement must have been the same as an ancient Egyptian town: the stone temple, or church, standing up in the centre of a mass of mud-brick dwellings.
Sir Flinders Petrie, who excavated the site of the monastery in 1907, came to the conclusion that a first church of the time of Constantine lay to the south of the present building, which supports the Coptic story of St. Helena. The existing White Church is therefore a later building, erected about 440 A.D., in which many of the pillars and decorative sculpture of the earlier church have been used.
What remains of the decoration of the church is remarkably rich. Magnificent classical columns with intricately moulded capitals still adorn the apse, and the semi-domes are still covered with mediaeval frescoes. But it must always have been one of the most incongruous buildings imaginable. The idea of a big, blank Egyptian wall embracing so much delicate Grasco-Romanism is fantastic. Yet it is also a marvellous illustration of Egyptian Christianity. The Christian hermits lived in the mummy chambers of the tombs, and the first churches of Upper Egypt were formed by putting up partitions in temples once used for the worship of Amun-RS and other deities. I am not aware that anyone has ever explained how the White Church, this Greek kernel, became embedded in its Egyptian shell. In my opinion we may find the solution in the life of the only great man associated with the monastery, Shenoudi, one of the most remarkable characters in the history of Egyptian Christianity. He was born in the Akhmim district about the year 334 A.D., and he was a pure Copt, untinged by any Greek influences. At an early age he began to show a fitness for the religious life and became the pupil of his uncle, Anba Bgoul, who was head of the first White Monastery, the community founded by St. Helena. The Copts say that when the young Shenoudi was led as a boy to his uncle, the saintly old man, realising that he was in the presence of a saint greater than himself, knelt down and, placing the child's hands on his head, asked for his blessing.
His uncle died when Shenoudi was about fifty, and he succeeded to the headship of the monastery. He had developed into no wraith-like hermit or pale ascetic, but combined a fervent piety with a violent temper. Shenoudi had become the greatest figure in Coptic literature. He made his own dialect of Coptic, the Sahidic, into a literary language, and his works, of which many survive, are as fiery as he was himself. He made violent war on the relic worshippers of the time and condemned the veneration of spurious relics. He then set himself the task of reforming the monasteries and drew up new and stricter standards of conduct and discipline. He entered into all the great church questions of his day, and attended the Council of Ephesus in 431 A.D., where he became violent in his conduct towards Nestorius. He also attended the Council of Chalcedon, and saw the Church of Egypt take its own way into heresy and isolation.
We are told that he came to rule over twenty-two thousand monks and eighteen thousand virgins. Even allowing for exaggeration, it is clear that he was the spiritual leader of an enormous community. About the year 440 A.D. it became necessary for him to enlarge and re-build his uncle's monastery, and it is perhaps natural that a man so completely Egyptian in birth, training, and outlook should have surrounded his new and still Greek church with a wall modelled on the temple walls of his native land. This would explain why we find a Greek church inside an Egyptian enclosure.
But it is as a saint and as a monastic leader that he is venerated in Coptic history. Although his rule was so stern and autocratic, he never lacked followers. He himself relates that he was in the habit of beating errant monks, and on one occasion, when civil authorities claimed the right of entering the monastery, the high-handed abbot kicked them off the premises and nearly strangled the chief official. But it is necessary to remember, before we condemn Shenoudi as a brutal man, that the majority of the monks were fellahin and that numbers of them were merely disobedient children. No doubt, like many another hot-tempered extremist, Shenoudi exaggerated his own violence, and, in the succeeding moods of equally violent repentance saw himself in a worse light than others would probably have done. His simple monks came from a class which had been disciplined with the stick since the Pyramids were made, and it was probably the only argument they recognised.
His failings, to which he freely confessed, were balanced by piety and tenderness. He believed that the Redeemer had come to him in visions and had gone everywhere about the monastery with him.
" There is no foot of ground in this monastery," he once wrote, " which the Saviour has not walked leading me by the hand. Whosoever cannot visit Jerusalem may make his offering in this church. This monastery is Jerusalem."
I went on to the Red Monastery, less than four miles away. Unlike its companion, this building does not stand alone in the desert, but lies partly concealed by houses and palm trees. It is called the Red Monastery because it is built of reddish baked brick.
As in the White Church, the only portion of the building which is in a tolerable state of preservation is the east end of the church. This undoubtedly is the most ornate Christian relic in Egypt. Hellenistic in style and perhaps rather over-decorated, the building has a grandeur and a dignity even to-day. ^ It belongs definitely to the classical tradition, which makes it such a strange sight in the stronghold of native, Coptic-speaking Christianity. The theory that it was built with pagan columns from a neighbouring Greek city is not at all convincing when you remember that the monks who were gathered round this church not only spoke no Greek, but detested the Greek Church. It is difficult to believe that the Egyptians should have built themselves a Greek church just when the Monophysite heresy had split the Church from top to bottom, but there must have been some unusual reason for it. ... If we accept the Coptic tradition that St. Helena built the Red and White churches, they would be hallowed by two centuries of religious observance, and thus it follows naturally that the monks would wish to rebuild them and to preserve their original features when the time came to reconstruct them.
That evening I caught the train from Sohag, and was in Cairo in the morning.