Part 6
Mr. Wallis Budge says in his book on the antiquities of Egypt: “It would be unjust to the memory of a great man and a loyal servant of Hatshepsu, if we omitted to mention the name of Senmut, the architect and overseer of works at Deir-el-Bahari.” By all means let Senmut be mentioned, and then let him be utterly forgotten. A radiant queen reigns here--a queen of fantasy and splendor, and of that divine shallowness--refined frivolity literally cut into the mountain--which is the note of Deir-el-Bahari. And what a clever background! Oh, Hatshepsu knew what she was doing when she built her temple here. It was not the solemn Senmut (he wore a beard, I’m sure) who chose that background, if I know anything of women.
Long before I visited Deir-el-Bahari I had looked at it from afar. My eyes had been drawn to it merely from its situation right underneath the mountains. I had asked: “What do those little pillars mean? And are those little doors?” I had promised myself to go there, as one promises oneself a _bonne bouche_ to finish a happy banquet. And I had realized the subtlety, essentially feminine, that had placed a temple there. And Mentu-Hotep’s temple, perhaps you say, was it not there before the queen’s? Then he must have possessed a subtlety purely feminine, or have been advised by one of his wives in his building operations, or by some favorite female slave. Blundering, unsubtle man would probably think that the best way to attract and to fix attention on any object was to make it much bigger than things near and around it, to set up a giant among dwarfs.
Not so Queen Hatshepsu. More artful in her generation, she set her long but little temple against the precipices of Libya. And what is the result? Simply that whenever one looks toward them one says, “What are those little pillars?” Or if one is more instructed, one thinks about Queen Hatshepsu. The precipices are as nothing. A woman’s wile has blotted them out.
And yet how grand they are! I have called them tiger-colored precipices. And they suggest tawny wild beasts, fierce, bred in a land that is the prey of the sun. Every shade of orange and yellow glows and grows pale on their bosses, in their clefts. They shoot out
[Illustration:
From stereograph, copyright, 1908, by Underwood & Underwood, New York
RECENT EXCAVATIONS AT DEIR-EL-BAHARI]
turrets of rock that blaze like flames in the day. They show great teeth, like the tiger when any one draws near. And, like the tiger, they seem perpetually informed by a spirit that is angry. Blake wrote of the tiger:
Tiger, tiger, burning bright In the forests of the night.
These tiger-precipices of Libya are burning things, avid like beasts of prey. But the restored apricot-colored pillars are not afraid of their impending fury--fury of a beast baffled by a tricky little woman, almost it seems to me; and still less afraid are the white pillars, and the brilliant paintings that decorate the walls within.
As many people in the sad but lovely islands off the coast of Scotland believe in “doubles,” as the old classic writers believed in man’s “genius,” so the ancient Egyptians believed in his “Ka,” or separate entity, a sort of spiritual other self, to be propitiated and ministered to, presented with gifts, and served with energy and ardor. On this temple of Deir-el-Bahari is the scene of the birth of Hatshepsu, and there are two babies, the princess and her Ka. For this imagined Ka, when a great queen, long after, she built this temple, or chapel, that offerings might be made there on certain appointed days. Fortunate Ka of Hatshepsu to have had so cheerful a dwelling! Liveliness pervades Deir-el-Bahari. I remember, when I was on my first visit to Egypt, lunching at Thebes with Monsieur Naville and Mr. Hogarth, and afterward going with them to watch the digging away of the masses of sand and rubbish which concealed this gracious building. I remember the songs of the half-naked workmen toiling and sweating in the sun. And I remember seeing a white temple wall come up into the light with all the painted figures surely dancing with joy upon it. And they are surely dancing still.
Here you may see, brilliant as yesterday’s picture anywhere, fascinatingly decorative trees growing bravely in little pots, red people offering incense which is piled up in mounds like mountains; Ptah-Seket, Osiris receiving a royal gift of wine, the queen in the company of various divinities, and the terrible ordeal of the cows. The cows are being weighed in scales. There are three of them. One is a philosopher, and reposes with an air that says, “Even this last indignity of being weighed against my will cannot perturb my soaring spirit.” But the other two, sitting up, look as apprehensive as old ladies in a rocking express, expectant of an accident. The vividness of the colors in this temple is quite wonderful. And much of its great attraction comes rather from its position, and from them, than essentially from itself. At Deir-el-Bahari, what the long shell contains--its happy murmur of life--is more fascinating than the shell. There, instead of being uplifted or overawed by form, we are rejoiced by
[Illustration: “THE HALF-NAKED WORKMEN TOILING AND SWEATING IN THE SUN”]
color, by the high vivacity of arrested movement, by the story that color and movement tell. And over all there is the bright, blue, painted sky, studded, almost distractedly studded, with a plethora of the yellow stars the Egyptians made like starfish.
The restored apricot-colored columns outside look unhappily suburban when you are near them. The white columns with their architraves are more pleasant to the eyes. The niches full of bright hues, the arched chapels, the small, white steps leading upward to shallow sanctuaries, the small black foxes facing each other on little yellow pedestals--attract one like the details and amusing ornaments of a clever woman’s boudoir. Through this most characteristic temple one roves in a gaily attentive mood, feeling all the time Hatshepsu’s fascination.
You may see her, if you will, a little lady on the wall, with a face decidedly sensual--a long, straight nose, thick lips, an expression rather determined than agreeable. Her mother looks as Semitic as a Jew moneylender in Brick Lane, London. Her husband, Thothmes II, has a weak and poor-spirited countenance. Decidedly an accomplished performer on the second violin. The mother wears on her head a snake, no doubt a cobra-di-capello, the symbol of her sovereignty. Thothmes is clad in a loin-cloth. And a god, with a sleepy expression and a very fishlike head, appears in this group of personages to offer the key of life. Another painting of the queen shows her on her knees drinking milk from the sacred cow, with an intent and greedy figure, and an extraordinarily sensual and expressive face. That she was well guarded is surely proved by a brave display of her soldiers--red men on a white wall. Full of life and gaiety, all in a row they come, holding weapons, and, apparently, branches, and advancing with a gait of triumph that tells of “spacious days.” And at their head is an officer, who looks back, much like a modern drill sergeant, to see how his men are marching.
In the southern shrine of the temple, cut in the rock as is the northern shrine, once more I found traces of the “Lady of the Under-world.” For this shrine was dedicated to Hathor, though the whole temple was sacred to the Theban god Amun. Upon a column were the remains of the goddess’s face, with a broad brow and long, large eyes. Some fanatic had hacked away the mouth.
The tomb of Hatshepsu was found by Mr. Theodore M. Davis, and the famous _Vache_ of Deir-el-Bahari by Monsieur Naville as lately as 1905. It stands in the museum at Cairo, but forever it will be connected in the minds of men with the tiger-colored precipices and the Colonnades of Thebes. Behind the ruins of the temple of Mentu-Hotep III, in a chapel of painted rock, the Vache-Hathor was found.
It is not easy to convey by any description the
[Illustration: THE VACHE HATHOR OF DENDERAH]
impression this marvelous statue makes. Many of us love our dogs, our horses, some of us adore our cats; but which of us can think, without a smile, of worshiping a cow? Yet the cow was the Egyptian Aphrodite’s sacred animal. Under the form of a cow she was often represented. And in the statue she is presented to us as a limestone cow. And positively this cow is to be worshiped.
She is shown in the act apparently of stepping gravely forward out of a small arched shrine, the walls of which are decorated with brilliant paintings. Her color is red and yellowish red, and is covered with blotches of very dark green, which look almost black. Only one or two are of a bluish color. Her height is moderate. I stand about five foot nine, and I found that on her pedestal the line of her back was about level with my chest. The lower part of the body, much of which is concealed by the under block of limestone, is white, tinged with yellow. The tail is red. Above the head, open and closed lotus flowers form a head-dress, with the lunar disk and two feathers. And the long lotus stalks flow down on each side of the neck toward the ground. At the back of this head-dress are a scarab and a cartouche. The goddess is advancing solemnly and gently. A wonderful calm, a matchless, serene dignity enfold her.
In the body of this cow one is able, indeed one is almost obliged, to feel the soul of a goddess. The incredible is accomplished. The dead Egyptian makes the ironic, the skeptical modern world feel deity in a limestone cow. How is it done? I know not; but it is done. Genius can do nearly anything, it seems. Under the chin of the cow there is a standing statue of the King Mentu-Hotep, and beneath her the king kneels as a boy. Wonderfully expressive and solemnly refined is the cow’s face, which is of a dark color, like the color of almost black earth--earth fertilized by the Nile. Dignified, dominating, almost but just not stern, strongly intelligent, and, through its beautiful intelligence, entirely sympathetic (“to understand all, is to pardon all”), this face, once thoroughly seen, completely noticed, can never be forgotten. This is one of the most beautiful statues in the world.
When I was at Deir-el-Bahari I thought of it and wished that it still stood there near the Colonnades of Thebes under the tiger-colored precipices. And then I thought of Hatshepsu. Surely she could not brook a rival to-day near the temple which she made--a rival long lost and long forgotten. Is not her influence still there upon the terraced platforms, among the apricot and the white columns, near the paintings of the land of Punt? Did it not whisper to the antiquaries, even to the soldiers from Cairo, who guarded the Vache-Hathor in the night, to make haste to take her away far from the hills of Thebes, and from the Nile’s long southern reaches, that the great queen might once more reign alone? They obeyed. Hatshepsu was appeased. And, like a delicate woman, perfumed and arranged, clothed in a creation of white and blue and orange, standing ever so knowingly against a background of orange and pink, of red and of brown-red, she rules at Deir-el-Bahari.
XIII
THE TOMBS OF THE KINGS
On the way to the tombs of the kings I went to the temple of Kurna, that lonely cenotaph, with its sand-colored, massive façade, its heaps of fallen stone, its wide and ruined doorway, its thick, almost rough, columns recalling Medinet-Abu. There is not very much to see, but from there one has a fine view of other temples--of the Ramesseum, looking superb, like a grand skeleton; of Medinet-Abu, distant, very pale gold in the morning sunlight; of little Deir-al-Medinet, the pretty child of the Ptolemies, with the heads of the seven Hathors. And from Kurna the Colossi are exceptionally grand and exceptionally personal, so personal that one imagines one sees the expressions of the faces that they no longer possess.
Even if you do not go into the tombs,--but you will go,--you must ride to the tombs of the kings; and you must, if you care for the finesse of impressions, ride on a blazing day and toward the hour of noon. Then the ravine is itself, like the great act that demonstrates a temperament. It is the narrow home of fire,
[Illustration:
From stereograph, copyright, 1904, by Underwood & Underwood, New York
PAINTED TOMB CHAMBER OF PRINCE SEN-NOFER, THEBES]
hemmed in by brilliant colors, nearly all--perhaps quite all--of which could be found in a glowing furnace. Every shade of yellow is there,--lemon yellow, sulphur yellow, the yellow of amber, the yellow of orange with its tendency toward red, the yellow of gold, sand color, sun color. Cannot all these yellows be found in a fire? And there are reds--pink of the carnation, pink of the coral, red of the little rose that grows in certain places of sands, red of the bright flame’s heart. And all these colors are mingled in complete sterility. And all are fused into a fierce brotherhood by the sun. And like a flood, they seem flowing to the red and the yellow mountains, like a flood that is flowing to its sea. You are taken by them toward the mountains, on and on, till the world is closing in, and you know the way must come to an end. And it comes to an end--in a tomb.
You go to a door in the rock, and a guardian lets you in, and wants to follow you in. Prevent him if you can. Pay him. Go in alone. For this is the tomb of Amenhotep II; and he himself is here, far down, at rest under the mountain, this king who lived and reigned more than fourteen hundred years before the birth of Christ. The ravine-valley leads to him, and you should go to him alone. He lies in the heart of the living rock, in the dull heat of the earth’s bowels, which is like no other heat. You descend by stairs and corridors, you pass over a well by a bridge, you pass through a naked chamber; and the king is not there. And you go on down another staircase, and along another corridor, and you come into a pillared chamber, with paintings on its walls, and on its pillars, paintings of the king in the presence of the gods of the under-world, under stars in a soft blue sky. And below you, shut in on the farther side by the solid mountain in whose breast you have all this time been walking, there is a crypt. And you turn away from the bright paintings, and down there you see the king.
Many years ago in London I went to the private view of the Royal Academy at Burlington House. I went in the afternoon when the galleries were crowded with politicians and artists, with dealers, gossips, quidnuncs, and _flâneurs_; with authors, fashionable lawyers, and doctors; with men and women of the world; with young dandies and actresses _en vogue_. A roar of voices went up to the roof. Every one was talking, smiling, laughing, commenting, and criticizing. It was a little picture of the very worldly world that loves the things of to-day and the chime of the passing hours. And suddenly some people near me were silent, and some turned their heads to stare with a strangely fixed attention. And I saw coming toward me an emaciated figure, rather bent, much drawn together, walking slowly on legs like sticks. It was clad in black, with a gleam of color. Above it was a face so intensely thin that it was like the face of death. And in this face shone
[Illustration:
From stereograph, copyright, 1908, by Underwood & Underwood, New York
TEMPLE OF ESNEH]
two eyes that seemed full of--the other world. And, like a breath from the other world passing, this man went by me and was hidden from me by the throng. It was Cardinal Manning in the last days of his life.
The face of this king is like his, but it has an even deeper pathos as it looks upward to the rock. And the king’s silence bids you be silent, and his immobility bids you be still. And his sad, and unutterable resignation sifts awe, as by the desert wind the sand is sifted into the temples, into the temple of your heart. And you feel the touch of time, but the touch of eternity, too. And as, in that rock-hewn sanctuary, you whisper “Pax vobiscum,” you say it for all the world.
XIV
EDFU
Prayer pervades the East. Far off across the sands, when one is traveling in the desert, one sees thin minarets rising toward the sky. A desert city is there. It signals its presence by this mute appeal to Allah. And where there are no minarets,--in the great wastes of the dunes, in the eternal silence, the lifelessness that is not broken even by any lonely, wandering bird,--the camels are stopped at the appointed hours, the poor, and often ragged, robes are laid down, the brown pilgrims prostrate themselves in prayer. And the rich man spreads his carpet, and prays. And the half-naked nomad spreads nothing; but he prays, too. The East is full of lust, and full of money-getting, and full of bartering, and full of violence; but it is full of worship--of worship that disdains concealment, that recks not of ridicule or comment, that believes too utterly to care if others disbelieve. There are in the East many men who do not pray. They do not laugh at the man who does, like the unpraying Christian. There is nothing ludicrous
[Illustration: PRAYER IN THE DESERT]
to them in prayer. In Egypt your Nubian sailor prays in the stern of your dahabiyeh; and your Egyptian boatman prays by the rudder of your boat; and your black donkey-boy prays behind a red rock in the sand; and your camel-man prays when you are resting in the noontide, watching the far-off, quivering mirage, lost in some wayward dream.
And must you not pray, too, when you enter certain temples where once strange gods were worshiped in whom no man now believes?
There is one temple on the Nile which seems to embrace in its arms all the worship of the past; to be full of prayers and solemn praises; to be the holder, the noble keeper, of the sacred longings, of the unearthly desires and aspirations, of the dead. It is the temple of Edfu. From all the other temples it stands apart. It is the temple of the inward flame, of the secret soul of man; of that mystery within us that is exquisitely sensitive, and exquisitely alive; that has longings it cannot tell, and sorrows it dare not whisper, and loves it can only love.
To Horus it was dedicated,--hawk-headed Horus,--the son of Isis and Osiris, who was crowned with many crowns, who was the young Apollo of the old Egyptian world. But though I know this, I am never able to associate Edfu with Horus, that child wearing the side-lock,--when he is not hawk-headed in his solar aspect,--that boy with his finger in his mouth, that youth who fought against Set, murderer of his father.
Edfu, in its solemn beauty, in its perfection of form, seems to me to pass into a region altogether beyond identification with the worship of any special deity, with particular attributes, perhaps with particular limitations; one who can be graven upon walls, and upon architraves and pillars painted in brilliant colors; one who can personally pursue a criminal, like some policeman in the street; even one who can rise upon the world in the visible glory of the sun. To me, Edfu must always represent the world-worship of “the Hidden One”; not Amun, god of the dead, fused with Ra, with Amsu, or with Khnum: but that other “Hidden One,” who is God of the happy hunting-ground of savages, with whom the Buddhist strives to merge his strange serenity of soul; who is adored in the “Holy Places” by the Moslem, and lifted mystically above the heads of kneeling Catholics in cathedrals dim with incense, and merrily praised with the banjo and the trumpet in the streets of black English cities; who is asked for children by longing women, and for new dolls by lisping babes; whom the atheist denies in the day, and fears in the darkness of night; who is on the lips alike of priest and blasphemer, and in the soul of all human life.
Edfu is the temple of “the Hidden One.” It is not pagan; it is not Christian: it is a place in which to worship according to the dictates of your heart.
[Illustration: THE TEMPLE OF EDFU]
Edfu stands alone, not near any other temple, on the bank of the Nile between Luxor and Assuan. It is not very far from El-Kab, once the capital of Upper Egypt and it is about two thousand years old. The building of it took over one hundred and eighty years, and it is the most perfectly preserved temple to-day of all the antique world. It is huge and it is splendid. It has towers one hundred and twelve feet high, a propylon two hundred and fifty-two feet broad, and walls four hundred and fifty feet long. Begun in the reign of Ptolemy III, it was completed only fifty-seven years before the birth of Christ.
You know these facts about it, and you forget them, or at least you do not think of them. What does all that matter when you are alone in Edfu? Let the antiquarian go with his anxious nose almost touching the stone; let the Egyptologist peer through his glasses at hieroglyphs and puzzle out the meaning of cartouches: but let us wander at ease, and worship, and regard the exquisite form, and drink in the mystical spirit, of this very wonderful temple.