Part 65

“We mounted and rode with fast-beating hearts to the western or main entrance, facing the Nile. The two towers of the propylon (pyramidal masses of solid stone) are three hundred and twenty-nine feet in length, and the one which is least ruined, is nearly one hundred feet in hight. On each side of the sculptured portal connecting them, is a tablet left by the French army, recording the geographical position of the principal Egyptian temples. We passed through, and entered an open court, more than three hundred feet square, with a corridor of immense pillars on each side, connecting it with the towers of a second pylon, nearly as gigantic as the first. A colonnade of lofty shafts, leading through the center of the court, once united the two entrances, but they have all been hurled down, and lay as they fell, in long lines of disjointed blocks, except one, which holds its solitary lotus-bell against the sky. Two mutilated colossi of red granite still guard the doorway, whose lintel-stones are forty feet in length. Climbing over the huge fragments which have fallen from above and almost blocked up the passage, we looked down into the grand hall of the temple. I knew the dimensions of this hall, beforehand; I knew the number and size of the pillars, but I was no more prepared for the reality than those will be, who may read this account of it and afterward visit Karnak for themselves. It is the great good luck of travel that many things must be seen to be known. Nothing could have compensated for the loss of that overwhelming confusion of awe, astonishment, and delight, which came upon me like a flood. I looked down an avenue of twelve pillars, six on each side, each of which was thirty-six feet in circumference and nearly eighty feet in hight. Crushing as were these ponderous masses of sculptured stone, the spreading bell of the lotus-blossoms which crowned them, clothed them with an atmosphere of lightness and grace. In front, over the top of another pile of colossal blocks, two obelisks rose sharp and clear, with every emblem legible on their polished sides. On each side of the main aisle are seven other rows of columns, _one hundred and twenty-two_ in all; each of which is about fifty feet high and twenty-seven in circumference. They have the Osiride form, without capitals, and do not range with the central shafts. In the efforts of the conquerors to overthrow them, two have been hurled from their places and thrown against the neighboring ones, where they still lean, as if weary with holding up the roof of massive sandstone. I walked alone through this hall, trying to bear the weight of its unutterable majesty and beauty. That I had been so oppressed by Dendera, seemed a weakness which I was resolved to conquer, and I finally succeeded in looking on Karnak with a calmness more commensurate with its sublime repose; but not by daylight. My next visit was at night, at the time of the full moon. There was a wan haze in the air, and a pale halo around the moon, on each side of which appeared two faint mock-moons. It was a ghostly light, and the fresh north wind, coming up the Nile, rustled solemnly in the palm-trees. We trotted silently to Karnak, and leaped our horses over the fragments until we reached the foot of the first obelisk. Here we dismounted and entered the grand hall of pillars. There was no sound in all the temple, and the guide, who seemed to comprehend my wish, moved behind me as softly as a shadow, and spoke not a word. It needs this illumination to comprehend Karnak. The unsightly rubbish has disappeared: the rents in the roof are atoned for by the moonlight they admit; the fragments shivered from the lips of the mighty capitals are only the crumpled edges of the flower; a maze of shadows hides the desolation of the courts, but every pillar and obelisk, pylon and propylon is glorified by the moonlight. The soul of Karnak is soothed and tranquillized. Its halls look upon you no longer with an aspect of pain and humiliation. Every stone seems to say: ‘I am not fallen, for I have defied the ages. I am a part of that grandeur which has never seen its peer, and I shall endure forever, for the world has need of me.’ I climbed to the roof, and sat looking down into the hushed and awful colonnades, till I was thoroughly penetrated with their august and sublime expression. I should probably have remained all night, an amateur colossus, with my hands on my knees, had not the silence been disturbed by two arrivals of romantic tourists, an Englishman and two Frenchmen. We exchanged salutations, and I mounted my restless mare again, touched her side with the stirrup, and sped back to Luxor. The guide galloped beside me, occasionally hurling his spear into the air and catching it as it fell, delighted with my readiness to indulge his desert whims. I found the captain and sailors all ready and my friend smoking his pipe on deck. In half an hour we had left Thebes.”

Such is a faint view of these ruins of forty centuries, the remains of that splendid city, Thebes, in comparison with which New York is but an infant to the mighty giant! “Yes, proud upstart of _this_ nineteenth century,” says Thompson, “the so-called Empire city, commercial emporium of the west, great metropolis of the new world, if thy rivers should sweep over and bury thee, not all the stone of the Croton reservoir, and the city hall, and the Astor house, and of a hundred churches forsooth, would make one pile like Karnak; nor could any of these furnish a single stone for the lintels of its gates. Yet Karnak, which began to be in that _other_ nineteenth century _before_ Christ, is not yet a ruin! Its gateways stand; its grand hall stands, its columns nearly all unbroken, and not one spire of grass, or tuft of moss, or leaf of ivy, hides its speaking sculptures. Only the sand has covered them; and when this is removed, they are as fresh as yesterday.”

“Such is the skeleton of Thebes, as we can reconstruct it of such materials and from such localities as yet mark its site. But what was Thebes when, resting upon the Lybian mountains on the west and the Arabian on the east, with the Nile flowing through its center, it filled a circuit of twenty-five miles in a plain of twice that area, teeming with fertility! What was Thebes when she could pour forth twenty thousand chariots of war, and when the grand triumphal procession of priests, and officers of state, and soldiers, and captives, swept through these colossal avenues to grace the conqueror’s return! What was Thebes when, by the way of the Red sea, Arabia and the Indies poured all their commerce into her lap, and the Nile brought her the spoils of Ethiopia and of the great sea! What was Thebes when she possessed wealth, and mechanic arts, and physical force, to rear such monuments even in the midst of war, and sometimes more than one in the reign of a single monarch! What was Thebes, with all the arts and inventions of civilized life that are sculptured upon the tombs of her kings to mark the progress of their day; from building arches and bridges, to glass-blowing and porcelain manufactures, to the making of umbrellas, fans, chairs, and divans, fine linens, and all the appurtenances of a modern drawing-room! What was Thebes when all merchants resorted thither from Persia, from Ethiopia, from Lybia, and the Levant! What was Thebes when the artists and scholars of infant Greece and Rome went thither to school! Was not Egypt the mother of nations? Where is the art of Greece or Rome that was not tutored in Egypt; that has not simply graced Egyptian forms—nor always this? Where is the philosophy of Greece or Rome that was not borrowed from Egypt? Even the divine Plato, who only waited for the true Logos, learned at Egypt’s shrine. Egypt gave birth to art, gave birth to thought, before Greece and Rome were born. She was the grand repository of human power; the originator of all great forms of human development; the originator, the inventor, the great prototype of the world’s history, here laid up in her hieroglyphic archives. In all material things, yes, and in all great intellectual forms, in poetry, in art, in philosophy, in science, and in the religion of nature, this nineteenth century is but the recipient of the mighty past. Whatever she has of these, she but inherits through Rome and Greece from their old mother Egypt. What she has better than these, she has by gift divine, through that Christianity which purifies, enfranchises, and ennobles man, reforms society, and makes free the state. If she hold fast by this, she will become resplendent with a glory that Egypt never knew; but if she slight this, and sell her birthright for luxury and power, the meanest grave at Thebes would suffice to bury this nineteenth century with its boasted inventions.“

THEBES, AS SEEN IN HISTORY.

All the mere ruins of Thebes, however, immense and magnificent as they are, fail to give us true views of her greatness, till we go back to her origin, and trace up her history; and this is so graphically done by Thompson, in his “Egypt, Past and Present,” that we quote from it, what he so appropriately calls “_Dissolving Views: Panorama of Karnak._” “In order,” he says, “to a complete view of Thebes, past and present, one should reproduce its sculptured story, and make it witness for itself. The temple of Karnak, in its several parts, marks the rise, the growth, the decline, and the fall of Egypt. This temple had a growth of twenty-five hundred years, from a small sanctuary to ‘a city of temples.’ Every principal era of the national history is represented in this stupendous pile; and as we go leisurely around it, and translate into our own language, or vivify into present actual scenes, the processions, the battles, the ceremonies, the religious offerings, and the state displays, sculptured on its walls and columns, and for the most part still legible, we behold all Egypt move before us _as in a panorama_, whose scenes and actors are instinct with life. This animated reproduction of the sculptures, which I attempted when on the ground, I would hope to convey to the reader by following in course the histories here written on the stone.

“I stood in Karnak, under the light of the full moon. It was an hour for silence, and we enjoined this upon each other, and gave ourselves to solitary musing. The cuckoo, that had wooed us with his note as we reposed under the great pillars in the sultry noon, had gone to nestle with his mate; and the myriad birds that by day had fluttered along the corridors, had hid themselves in the crevices of the capitals. Even the owl that hooted as we entered, was still. Only the moon was there, threading the avenues with silver footsteps, and holding her clear light that we might read the sculptured chronicles of kings. We sat down in the center of the grand avenue. Twelve majestic pillars, on either hand, towered along its length, and seemed, as of old, to support an arch of azure studded with stars. The dismantled towers of the grand entrance, whose bases stand like pyramids truncated to sustain the firmament, grew more gigantic in the shadow of the columns, while their once massive gates, uncovered by the hand of time, seemed only to have lifted up their heads to let the King of Glory in. In the avenue that crossed beside our seat, (one of twelve, having each ten columns of huge dimensions,) at either extremity, a column had fallen crosswise against its neighbor, carrying with it its fragment of the stone roof, and there it hung almost ethereal in the still moonlight, a symbol of the struggle between man and time. Under the corridors, darkness brooded over the fragments of sculptured stone; but beyond the other portal, the yet perfect obelisk stood in pensive majesty among its fallen mates, and from its clear, hard face projected in the moonbeams the symbols of the power that built these halls, and of the worship that sustained them. The spell of Egypt was complete. For two months I had lived under its deepening power. At length, in the sepulchers of its kings, and on the walls and pillars of its temples, I had seen the Egypt of forty centuries revived as in a panorama fresh from the artist’s pencil, and had lived in the Egypt that the Nile _then_ watered, as in the so-called Egypt that it waters now. And here I had come to bid it farewell, to take a last look at its grave; and yet the witching moonlight made it _live_ again. The breath of the south fanning the columns that in their fourth decade of centuries wear no ivied wreath of age, warmed their still grandeur into life, and with Memnon’s charm they sang to the moon the great epic of the past. As I listened, all art, all learning, all religion, all poetry, all history, all empire, and all time, swept through my wondering soul. Leaving my companions, I wandered over the fragments of columns and sphinxes and colossi, till, gaining a mound that half buries the front area of the temple, I clambered up the steps worn by age in its stupendous wall, and standing in their foremost tower, looked back on Karnak. But no change of place, nor sight of fallen columns and decaying walls, could break the spell. I had walked over the grave of Egypt, I had stumbled against the fragments of its sepulcher, yet Egypt stood before me.

“First came the second son of Ham, with a long retinue of camels and of servants, lured southward by the fertile valley of the Nile, till, where the mountains widen their embrace around the well-watered plain, he pitches his tent, and founds an infant city. Generations pass, and the son who in this plain inherits the patriarchal wealth and power, greedy of the patrimony of his brethren to the north, wages a fratricidal war, and seizing upon all Mizr or ‘the land of Ham,’ effaces from it the name of his ancestors, and, investing it with his own, gives _Egypt_ (Copt or Gurt) a name and a power in the newly divided earth. Other generations pass, and the first _king_ of Egypt comes with barbaric pomp, from the capital he has founded at the north, to visit his native _Theba_, the real ‘_head_’ or capital, and here offers to its divinity the rude shrine whose traces linger behind yonder obelisk. Ages roll on. The swelling Nile pours out increasing fatness on the land. The earth brings forth by handfuls. Fat-fleshed, well-favored cattle come up out of the river and feed in the meadow. There is great plenteousness for man and beast. But with all the plenty there is no waste. In every city huge granaries are built, and in these the grain is piled, as the sand of the sea, without measure. There is a strange wisdom near the throne of Pharaoh. Again, the east wind blows, and the scorching sands of the Arabian desert are heaped upon the fertile Nile. In the mountains of Ethiopia there is no rain. The river shrinks away. The plain of Thebes is dry. The people cry for bread, but the keys of the great storehouses are in the hand of the ruler of the land. They bring to him their money; they bring to him their cattle; they sell to him their land: they sell to him their very selves for bread. Again, the east wind ceases; the rains fall, the river rises; the desert retreats; the land revives. And now the great Pharaoh, whom the counsel of a captive Jew has made possessor of all the treasure and all the land of Egypt, moved by a religious sentiment but half enlightened, would make a votive offering to his god. A fleet of barges covers the bosom of the Nile, which with waving banners and gorgeous emblems and increasing music, have borne the monarch from his northern to his southern capital. With solemn pomp the procession of priests and soldiers and chief officers of state, with the uplifted monarch in the midst, files from the river to the rude sanctuary of _Menes_, which the skill of masons and of sculptors has already surrounded with columns of rich red granite, and chambers of polished stone, and with colossal statues of the king—the offering he brings to the divinity, whom he adores as the preserver of the land; and while the monarch bows before the god, the sound of trumpets, and the fragrance of incense, and the chanting of the priests, announce to the multitude that _Amun_ accepts the gift, and will be henceforth worshiped in their temple. _Osirtasen_ the Great passes away.

“The ages roll. A native Theban usurps the throne of the northern Pharaohs, and succeeds to the power they had consolidated through the counsel of the Hebrew, vouchsafed to them through fourscore years. But Joseph is dead; embalmed and coffined in a royal sarcophagus; and Amosis the usurper knows him not. Oppression fills the land, and falls most heavily upon the seed of Joseph. Another Theban Pharaoh mounts the throne, and to preserve the power that the wisdom of a Hebrew gave, determines to cut off the issue of the Hebrews from the land. Yet in his own house, even as a son, in all the learning of his schools, amid all the splendors of his court, is nurtured a young Hebrew who yet shall desolate the land that Joseph blessed. But just now this rising terror has fled into the desert, and the first _Thothmes_ comes in peaceful pomp to offer to the divinity of Thebes the gigantic obelisks that bear his name. He plants them yonder in the area before the sanctuary of Osirtasen. The third Thothmes is on the throne. There is groaning throughout the land of Egypt; there is deep sorrow in the land of Goshen. The monarch would make his name immortal by the temples, the palaces, and the monuments he rears in every city, from the great sea to the cataracts of Nubia. He adorns his native capital upon its western bank with a new sanctuary added to the temple of his father, and with another temple inclosed with brick, that bear in hieroglyphics his own initials; and here at Karnak, he builds behind the sanctuary, a thousand feet from where I stand, the grand edifice of fifty columns that surpasses all the royal architecture yet seen in Thebes. In its adytum he enshrines a colossal figure of the deified hawk that he worships. He is the great architect of Egypt, and he will fill the land with the memorials of his reign. Heliopolis and Noph, Zoan and Sin, attest his grandeur. But the voice of another God now thunders in his ear. The exiled Hebrew has returned. The land is filled with plagues, frogs, lice, flies, blood, murrain, hail, locusts, darkness, death. The king has gone from Thebes to Zoan, his most northern seat, where these judgments overtake him. The land of Goshen, that had sweltered under his exactions, breathes more freely, and he lets the people go. But gathering his chariots of war in mad haste, he pursues them, and hems them in between the mountains and the sea. Eager for his prey, he plunges into the channel God has made for them, and the proud architect of Egypt returns not, even to occupy the gorgeous tomb he had prepared for himself at Thebes.