Egypt (La Mort de Philae) Part 12

The cataract, on the other hand, has disappeared from a.s.souan. The tutelary Albion wisely considered that it would be better to sacrifice that futile spectacle and, in order to increase the yield of the soil, to dam the waters of the Nile by an artificial barrage: a work of solid masonry which (in the words of the Programme of Pleasure Trips) "affords an interest of a very different nature and degree" (sic).

But nevertheless Cook & Son--a business concern glossed with poetry, as all the world knows--have endeavoured to perpetuate the memory of the cataract by giving its name to a hotel of 500 rooms, which as a result of their labours has been established opposite to those rocks--now reduced to silence--over which the old Nile used to seethe for so many centuries. "Cataract Hotel!"--that gives the illusion still, does it not?--and looks remarkably well at the head of a sheet of notepaper.

Cook & Son (Egypt Ltd.) have even gone so far as to conceive the idea that it would be original to give to their establishment a certain _cachet_ of Islam. And the dining-room reproduces (in imitation, of course--but then you must not expect the impossible) the interior of one of the mosques of Stamboul. At the luncheon hour it is one of the prettiest sights in the world to see, under this imitation holy cupola, all the little tables crowded with Cook's tourists of both s.e.xes, the while a concealed orchestra strikes up the "Mattchiche."

The dam, it is true, in suppressing the cataract has raised some thirty feet or so the level of the water upstream, and by so doing has submerged a certain Isle of Philae, which pa.s.sed, absurdly enough, for one of the marvels of the world by reason of its great temple of Isis, surrounded by palm-trees. But between ourselves, one may say that the beautiful G.o.ddess was a little old-fas.h.i.+oned for our times. She and her mysteries had had their day. Besides, if there should be any chagrined soul who might regret the disappearance of the island, care has been taken to perpetuate the memory of it, in the same way as that of the cataract. Charming coloured postcards, taken before the submerging of the island and the sanctuary, are on sale in all the bookshops along the quay.

Oh! this quay of a.s.souan, already so British in its orderliness, its method! Nothing better cared for, nothing more altogether charming could be conceived. First of all there is the railway, which, pa.s.sing between bal.u.s.trades painted a gra.s.s-green, gives out its fascinating noise and joyous smoke. On one side is a row of hotels and shops, all European in character--hairdressers, perfumers, and numerous dark rooms for the use of the many amateur photographers, who make a point of taking away with them photographs of their travelling companions grouped tastefully before some celebrated hypogeum.

And then numerous cafes, where the whisky is of excellent quality. And, I ought to add, in justice to the result of the _Entente Cordiale_, you may see there, too, aligned in considerable quant.i.ties on the shelves, the products of those great French philanthropists, to whom indeed our generation does not render sufficient homage for all the good they have done to its stomach and its head. The reader will guess that I have named Pernod, Picon and Cusenier.

It may be indeed that the honest fellahs and Nubians of the neighbourhood, so sober a little while ago, are apt to abuse these tonics a little. But that is the effect of novelty, and will pa.s.s. And anyhow, amongst us Europeans, there is no need to conceal the fact--for we do not all make use of it involuntarily?--that alcoholism is a powerful auxiliary in the propagation of our ideas, and that the dealer in wines and spirits const.i.tutes a valuable vanguard pioneer for our Western civilisation. Races, insensibly depressed by the abuse of our "appetisers," become more supple, more easy to lead in the true path of progress and liberty.

On this quay of a.s.souan, so carefully levelled, defiles briskly a continual stream of fair travellers ravis.h.i.+ngly dressed as only those know how who have made a tour with Cook & Son (Egypt Ltd.). And along the Nile, in the shade of the young trees, planted with the utmost nicety and precision, the flower-beds and straight-cut turf are protected efficaciously by means of wire-netting against certain acts of forgetfulness to which dogs, alas, are only too much addicted.

Here, too, everything is ticketed, everything has its number: the donkeys, the donkey-drivers, the stations even where they are allowed to stand--"Stand for six donkeys, stand for ten, etc." Some very handsome camels, fitted with riding saddles, wait also in their respective places and a number of Cook ladies, meticulous on the point of local colour, even when it is merely a question of making some purchases in the town, readily mount for some moments one or other of these "s.h.i.+ps of the desert."

And at every fifty yards a policeman, still Egyptian in his countenance, but quite English in his bearing and costume, keeps a vigilant eye on everything--would never suffer, for example, that an eleventh donkey should dare to take a place in a stand for ten, which was already full.

Certain people, inclined to be critical, might consider, perhaps, that these policemen were a little too ready to chide their fellow-countrymen; whereas on the contrary they showed themselves very respectful and obliging whenever they were addressed by a traveler in a cork helmet. But that is in virtue of an equitable and logical principle, derived by them from the high places of the new administration--namely, that the Egypt of to-day belongs far less to the Egyptians than to the n.o.ble foreigners who have come to brandish there the torch of civilisation.

In the evening, after dark, the really respectable travellers do not quit the brilliant dining saloons of the hotels, and the quay is left quite solitary beneath the stars. It is at such a time that one is able to realise how extremely hospitable certain of the natives are become.

If, in an hour of melancholy, you walk alone on the bank of the Nile, smoking a cigarette, you will not fail to be accosted by one of these good people, who misunderstanding the cause of the unrest in your soul, offers eagerly, and with a touching frankness, to introduce you to the gayest of the young ladies of the country.

In the other towns, which still remain purely Egyptian, the people would never practise such an excess of affability and good manners, which have been learnt, beyond all question from our beneficent contact.

a.s.souan possesses also its little Oriental bazaar--a little improvised, a little new perhaps; but then one, at least, was needed, and that as quickly as possible, in order that nothing might be wanting to the tourists.

The shopkeepers have contrived to provision themselves (in the leading shops, under the arcades of the Rue de Rivoli) with as much tact as good taste, and the Cook ladies have the innocent illusion of making bargains every day. One may even buy there, hung up by the tail, stuffed with straw and looking extremely real, the last crocodiles of Egypt, which, particularly at the end of the season, may be had at very advantageous prices.

Even the old Nile has allowed itself to be fretted and brought up to date in the progress of evolution.

First, the women, draped in black veils, who come daily to draw the precious water, have forsaken the fragile amphorae of baked earth, which had come to them from barbarous times--and which the Orientalists grossly abused in their picture; and in their stead have taken to old tin oil-cans, placed at their disposal by the kindness of the big hotels. But they carry them in the same easy graceful manner as erstwhile the discarded pottery, and without losing in the least the gracious tanagrine outline.

And then there are the great tourist boats of the Agencies, which are here in abundance, for a.s.souan has the privilege of being the terminus of the line; and their whistlings, their revolving motors, their electric dynamos maintain from morning till night a captivating symphony. It might be urged perhaps against these structures that they resemble a little the washhouses on the Seine; but the Agencies, desirous of restoring to them a certain local colour, have given them names so notoriously Egyptian that one is reduced to silence. They are called Sesostris, Amenophis or Ramses the Great.

And finally there are the rowing boats, which carry pa.s.sengers incessantly backwards and forwards between the river-banks. So long as the season remains at its height they are bedecked with a number of little flags of red cotton-cloth, or even of simple paper. The rowers, moreover, have been instructed to sing all the time the native songs which are accompanied by a derboucca player seated in the prow. Nay, they have even learnt to utter that rousing, stimulating cry which Anglo-Saxons use to express their enthusiasm or their joy: "Hip! Hip!

Hurrah!" and you cannot conceive how well it sounds, coming between the Arab songs, which otherwise might be apt to grow monotonous.

But the triumph of a.s.souan is its desert. It begins at once without transition as soon as you pa.s.s the close-cropped turf of the last square. A desert which, except for the railroad and the telegraph poles, has all the charm of the real thing: the sand, the chaos of overthrown stones, the empty horizons--everything, in short, save the immensity and infinite solitude, the horror, in a word which formerly made it so little desirable. It is a little astonis.h.i.+ng, it must be owned, to find, on arriving there, that the rocks have been carefully numbered in white paint, and in some cases marked with a large cross "which catches the eye from a greater distance still"(sic). But I agree that the effect of the whole has lost nothing.

In the morning before the sun gets too hot, between breakfast and luncheon to be precise, all the good ladies in cork helmets and blue spectacles (dark-coloured spectacles are recommended on account of the glare) spread themselves over these solitudes, domesticated as it were to their use, with as much security as in Trafalgar Square or Kensington Gardens. Not seldom even you may see one of them making her way alone, book in hand, towards one of the picturesque rocks--No. 363, for example, or No. 364, if you like it better--which seems to be making signs to her with its white ticket, in a manner which, to the uninitiated observer, might seem even a little improper.

But what a sense of safety families may feel here, to be sure! In spite of the huge numbers, which at first sight look a little equivocal, nothing in the least degree reprehensible can happen among these granites; which are, moreover, in a single piece, without the least crack or hole into which the straggler could contrive to crawl. No. The figures and the crosses denote simple blocks of stones, covered with hieroglyphics, and correspond to a chaste catalogue where each Pharaonic inscription may be found translated in the most becoming language.

This ingenious ticketing of the stones of the desert is due to the initiative of an English Egyptologist.

CHAPTER XX

THE Pa.s.sING OF PHILAE

Leaving a.s.souan--as soon as we have pa.s.sed the last house--we come at once upon the desert. And now the night is falling, a cold February night, under a strange, copper-coloured sky.

Incontestably it is the desert, with its chaos of granite and sand, its warm tones and reddish colour. But there are telegraph poles and the lines of a railroad, which traverse it in company, and disappear in the empty horizon. And then too how paradoxical and ridiculous it seems to be travelling here on full security and in a carriage! (The most commonplace of hackney-carriages, which I hired by the hour on the quay of a.s.souan.) A desert indeed which preserves still its aspects of reality, but has become domesticated and tamed for the use of the tourists and the ladies.

First, immense cemeteries surrounded by sand at the beginning of these quasi-solitudes. Such old cemeteries of every epoch of history. The thousand little cupolas of saints of Islam are crumbling side by side with the Christian obelisks of the first centuries; and, underneath, the Pharaonic hypogea. In the twilight, all these ruins of the dead, all the scattered blocks of granite are mingled in mournful groupings, outlined in fantastic silhouette against the pale copper of the sky; broken arches, tilted domes, and rocks that rise up like tall phantoms.

Farther on, when we have left behind this region of tombs, the granites alone litter the expanse of sand, granites to which the usury of centuries has given the form of huge round beasts. In places they have been thrown one upon the other and make great heaps of monsters.

Elsewhere they lie alone among the sands, as if lost in the midst of the infinitude of some dead sea-sh.o.r.e. The rails and the telegraph poles have disappeared; by the magic of twilight everything is become grand again, beneath one of those evening skies of Egypt which, in winter, resemble cold cupolas of metal. And now it is that you feel yourself verily on the threshold of the profound desolations of Arabia, from which no barrier, after all separates you. Were it not for the lack of verisimilitude in the carriage that has brought us. .h.i.ther, we should be able now to take this desert quite seriously--for in fact it has no limits.

After travelling for about three-quarters of an hour, we see in the distance a number of lights, which have already been kindled in the growing darkness. They seem too bright to be those of an Arab encampment. And our driver turning round and pointing to them says: "Chelal!"

Chelal--that is the name of the Arab village, on the riverside, where you take the boat for Philae. To our disgust the place is lighted by electricity. It consists of a station, a factory with a long smoking chimney, and a dozen or so suspicious-looking taverns, reeking of alcohol, without which, it would seem, our European civilisation could not implant itself in a new country.

And here we embark for Philae. A number of boats are ready: for the tourists allured by many advertis.e.m.e.nts flock hither every winter in docile herds. All the boats, without a single exception, are profusely decorated with little English flags, as if for some regatta on the Thames. There is no escape therefore from this beflagging of a foreign holiday--and we set out with a homesick song of Nubia, which the boatmen sing to the cadence of the oars.

The copper-coloured heaven remains so impregnated with cold light that we still see clearly. We are amid magnificent tragic scenery on a lake surrounded by a kind of fearful amphitheatre outlined on all sides by the mountains of the desert. It was at the bottom of this granite circus that the Nile used to flow, forming fresh islets, on which the eternal verdure of the palm-trees contrasted with the high desolate mountains that surrounded it like a wall. To-day, on account of the barrage established by the English, the water has steadily risen, like a tide that will never recede; and this lake, almost a little sea, replaces the meanderings of the river and has succeeded in submerging the sacred islets. The sanctuary of Isis--which was enthroned for thousands of years on the summit of a hill, crowded with temples and colonnades and statues--still half emerges; but it is alone and will soon go the way of the others, There it is, beyond, like a great rock, at this hour in which the night begins to obscure everything.

Nowhere but in Upper Egypt have the winter nights these transparencies of absolute emptiness nor these sinister colourings. As the light gradually fails, the sky pa.s.ses from copper to bronze, but remains always metallic. The zenith becomes brownish like a brazen s.h.i.+eld, while the setting sun alone retains its yellow colour, growing slowly paler till it is almost of the whiteness of latten; and, above, the mountains of the desert edge their sharp outlines with a tint of burnt sienna.

To-night a freezing wind blows fiercely in our faces. To the continual chant of the rowers we pa.s.s slowly over the artificial lake, which is upheld as it were in the air by the English masonry, invisible now in the distance, but divined nevertheless and revolting. A sacrilegious lake one might call it, since it hides beneath its troubled waters ruins beyond all price; temples of the G.o.ds of Egypt, churches of the first centuries of Christianity, obelisks, inscriptions and emblems. It is over these things that we now pa.s.s, while the spray splashes in our faces, and the foam of a thousand angry little billows.

We draw near to what was once the holy isle. In places dying palm-trees, whose long trunks are to-day under water, still show their moistened plumes and give an appearance of inundation, almost of cataclysm.

Before coming to the sanctuary of Isis, we touch at the kiosk of Philae, which has been reproduced in the pictures of every age, and is as celebrated even as the Sphinx and the pyramids. It used to stand on a pedestal of high rocks, and around it the date-trees swayed their bouquets of aerial palms. To-day it has no longer a base; its columns rise separately from this kind of suspended lake. It looks as if it had been constructed in the water for the purpose of some royal naumachy. We enter with our boat--a strange port indeed, in its ancient grandeur; a port of a nameless melancholy, particularly at this yellow hour of the closing twilight, and under these icy winds that come to us mercilessly from the neighbouring deserts. And yet how adorable it is, this kiosk of Philae, in this the abandonment that precedes its downfall! Its columns placed, as it were, upon something unstable, become thereby more slender, seem to raise higher still the stone foliage of their capitals.

A veritable kiosk of dreamland now, which one feels is about to disappear for ever under these waters which will subside no more!

And now, for another few moments, it grows quite light again, and tints of a warmer copper reappear in the sky. Often in Egypt when the sun has set and you think the light is gone, this furtive recoloration of the air comes thus to surprise you, before the darkness finally descends.

The reddish tints seem to return to the slender shafts that surround us, and also, beyond, to the temple of the G.o.ddess, standing there like a sheer rock in the middle of this little sea, which the wind covers with foam.

On leaving the kiosk our boat--on this deep usurping water, among the submerged palm-trees--makes a detour in order to lead us to the temple by the road which the pilgrims of olden times used to travel on foot--by that way which, a little while ago, was still magnificent, bordered with colonnades and statues. But now the road is entirely submerged, and will never be seen again. Between its double row of columns the water lifts us to the height of the capitals, which alone emerge and which we could touch with our hands. It seems like some journey of the end of time, in a kind of deserted Venice, which is about to topple over, to sink and be forgotten.

We arrive at the temple. Above our heads rise the enormous pylons, ornamented with figures in bas-relief: an Isis who stretches out her arms as if she were making signs to us, and numerous other divinities gesticulating mysteriously. The door which opens in the thickness of these walls is low, besides being half flooded, and gives on to depths already in darkness. We row on and enter the sanctuary, and as soon as one boat has crossed the sacred threshold the boatmen stop their song and suddenly give voice to the new cry that has been taught them for the benefit of the tourists: "Hip! Hip! Hip! Hurrah!" Coming at this moment, when, with heart oppressed by all the utilitarian vandalism that surrounds us, we were entering the sanctuary, what an effect of gross and imbecile profanation this bellowing of English joy produces! The boatmen know, moreover, that they have been displaced, that their day has gone for ever; perhaps even, in the depths of their Nubian souls, they understand us, for all that we have imposed silence on them. The darkness increases within, although the place is open to the sky, and the icy wind blows more mournfully than it did outside. A penetrating humidity--a humidity altogether unknown in this country before the inundation--chills us to the bone. We are now in that part of the temple which was left uncovered, the part where the faithful used to kneel. The sonority of the granites round about exaggerates the noise of the oars on the enclosed water, and there is something confusing in the thought that we are rowing and floating between the walls where formerly, and for centuries, men were used to prostrate themselves with their foreheads on the stones.

And now it is quite dark; the hour grows late. We have to bring the boat close to the walls to distinguish the hieroglyphs and rigid G.o.ds which are engraved there as finely as by the burin. These walls, washed for nearly four years by the inundation, have already taken on at the base that sad blackish colour which may be seen on the old Venetian palaces.

Halt and silence. It is dark and cold. The oars no longer move, and we hear only the sighing of the wind and the lapping of the water against the columns and the bas-reliefs--and then suddenly there comes the noise of a heavy body falling, followed by endless eddies. A great carved stone has plunged, at its due hour, to rejoin in the black chaos below its fellows that have already disappeared, to rejoin the submerged temples and old Coptic churches, and the town of the first Christian centuries--all that was once the Isle of Philae, the "pearl of Egypt,"

one of the marvels of the world.

The darkness is now extreme and we can see no longer. Let us go and shelter, no matter where, to await the moon. At the end of this uncovered hall there opens a door which gives on to deep night. It is the holy of holies, heavily roofed with granite, the highest part of the temple, the only part which the waters have not yet reached, and there we are able to put foot to earth. Our footsteps resound noisily on the large resonant flags, and the owls take to flight. Profound darkness; the wind and the dampness freeze us. Three hours to go before the rising of the moon; to wait in this place would be our death. Rather let us return to Chelal, and shelter ourselves in any lodging that offers, however wretched it may be.

A tavern of the horrible village in the light of an electric lamp. It reeks of absinthe, this desert tavern, in which we warm ourselves at a little smoking fire. It has been hastily built of old tin boxes, of the debris of whisky cases, and by way of mural decoration the landlord, an ignorant Maltese, has pasted everywhere pictures cut from our European p.o.r.nographic newspapers. During our hours of waiting, Nubians and Arabians follow one another hither, asking for drink, and are supplied with br.i.m.m.i.n.g gla.s.sfuls of our alcoholic beverages. They are the workers in the new factories who were formerly healthy beings, living in the open air. But now their faces are stained with coal dust, and their haggard eyes look unhappy and ill.