Chapter 59
XX. SILCILUS AND EDFU, PART II. The great spios of Horemheb, the last pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty, lies farthest north, and the memorial shrines of the Rameses family lie farthest south of the series. The first is a long gallery, like a cloister supported on four square columns, and is excavated parallel with the river. The walls, inside and out, are covered with delicately executed sculptures
in low relief, some of which yet retain traces of color. The triumph of Horemheb returning from conquest in the land of Kush, and the famous subject on the south wall described by Mariette as one of the few really lovely things in Egyptian art, have been too often engraved to need description. The votive shrines of the Rameses family are grouped altogether in a picturesque nook, green with bushes to the water's edge. There are three—the work
of Seti I, Rameses II, and Meneptha—lovely alcoves, each like a little proscenium, with painted cornices and side-pillars, and groups of kings and gods still bright with color. In most of the votive sculptures of Silcilus there figure two deities but rarely seen elsewhere, namely Sebek, the crocodile god, and Happymu, the lotus-crowned god of the Nile. This last was the tutelary deity of the spot, and was worshiped at Silcilus with special rites.
Hymns in his honor are found carved here and there upon the rocks. Most curious of all, however, is a goddess named Ta-Arette, represented in one of the side subjects of the shrine of Rameses II. This charming person, who has the body of a hippopotamus and the face of a woman, wears a tie wig and a robe of state with five capes, and looks like a cross between a lord chancellor and a coachman. Behind her stand Thoth and Nut, all three receiving the
homage of Queen Nefertari, who advances with an offering of two cistrums. As a hippopotamus crowned with the disk and plumes we had met with this goddess before. She is not uncommon as an amulet, and the writer had already sketched her at Philae, where she occupies a prominent place in the façade of the Mamisi. But the grotesque elegance of her attire at Silcilus is, I imagine, quite unique.
The interest of the Western Bank centers in its sculptures and inscriptions, the interest of the Eastern Bank in its quarries. We rode over to a point nearly opposite the shrines of the Rameses, and climbing a steep verge of debris, came to the mouth of a narrow cutting between walls of solid rock from forty to fifty feet in height. These walls are smooth, clean-cut, and faultlessly perpendicular. The color of the sandstone is rich amber.
The passage is about ten feet in width and perhaps four hundred feet in length. Seen at a little after midday, with one side in shadow, the other in sunlight, and a narrow ribbon of blue sky overhead, it is like nothing else in the world, unless, perhaps, the entrance to Petra. Following this passage we came presently to an immense area, at least as large as Belgrave
Square, beyond which, separated by a thin partition of rock, opened a second and somewhat smaller area. On the walls of these huge amphitheaters the chisel marks and wedge-holes were as fresh as if the last blocks had been taken hence but yesterday, yet it is some two thousand years since the place last rang to the blows of the mallet, and echoed back the voices of the workmen. From the days of the Theban pharaohs to the days of the Ptolemies and
Caesars, those echoes can never have been silent. The temples of Karnak and Luxor, of Gurna, of Mendenet-Habu, of Ezna and Edfu and Hermonthus, all came from here, and from the quarries on the opposite side of the river. Returning we climbed long hills of chips, looked down into valleys of debris, and came at last to the riverside by way of an ancient inclined plain, along which the blocks were slid down to the transport boats
below. But the most wonderful thing about Silcilis is the way in which the quarrying has been done. In all these halls and passages and amphitheaters the sandstone has been sliced out smooth and straight, like hay from a hay-rick. Everywhere the blocks have been taken out square, and everywhere the best of the stone has been extracted, and the worst left. When it was fine and grain and even in color it has been cut out with the nicest economy.
Where it was whitish or brownish or traversed by veins of violet it has been left standing. Here and there we saw places where the lower part had been removed and the upper part left projecting, like the overhanging stories of our old medieval timber houses. Compared with this pussin and perfect quarrying our rough-and-ready blasting looks like the work of savages. Struggling hard against the wind we left Silcilis that same afternoon. The wrecked steamer was
now more than half under water. She had broken her back and begun filling immediately, with all Cook's party on board. Being row to shore with what necessaries they could gather together, these unfortunates had been obliged to encamp in tents borrowed from the mutter of the district. Luckily for them a couple of homeward-bound dahabias came by next morning and took off as many as they could accommodate. The Duke's steam-tug received the rest. The tents were
still there and a gang of natives under the superintendents of the mutter were busy getting off all that could be saved from the wreck. As evening drew on our headwind became a hurricane and that hurricane lasted day and night for thirty-six hours. All this time the Nile was driving up against the current in great rollers, like rollers on the Cornish coast when the tide and wind set together from the west. To hear them roaring past in the darkness
of the night, to feel the fillet rocking, shivering, straining at her mooring ropes, and bumping perpetually against the bank, was far from pleasant. By day the scene was extraordinary. There were no clouds, but the air was thick with sand, through which the sun glimmered feebly. Some palms, looking gray and ghost-like on the bank above, bent as if they must break before the blast. The Nile was yeasty and flecked with brown foam,
large lumps of which came swirling every now and then against our cabin windows. The opposite bank was simply nowhere. Judging only by what was visible from the deck, one would have vowed that the Dahabia was moored against an open coast, with an angry sea coming in. The wind fell about five a.m. the second day, when the men at once took to their oars, and by breakfast time brought us to Edfu. Nothing now could be more delicious than the weather.
It was a cool, silvery, misty morning, such a morning as one never knows in Nubia, where the sun is no sooner up than one is plunged at once into the full blaze and stress of the day. There were donkeys waiting for us on the bank, and our way lay for about a mile through barley flats and cotton plantations. The country looked rich, the people smiling and well conditioned. We met a troop of them going down to the Dahabia with sheep, pigeons,
poultry, and a young ox for sale. Crossing a backwater bridged by a few rickety palm trunks we now approached the village, which is perched, as usual, on the mounds of the ancient city. Meanwhile the great pylons, seeming to grow larger every moment, rose creamy and light against a soft blue sky. Riding through lanes of huts we came presently to an open space and a long flight of roughly built steps in front of the temple. At the
top of these steps we were standing on the level of the modern village. At the bottom we saw the massive pavement that marked the level of the ancient city. From that level rose the pylons, which even from afar off had looked so large. We now found that those stupendous towers not only soared to a height of about seventy-five feet above our heads, but plunged down to a depth of at least forty more beneath our feet. Ten years ago nothing
was visible of the great temple of Edfu save the tops of these pylons. The rest of the building was as much lost to sight as if the earth had opened up and swallowed it. Its courtyards were choked with foul debris. Its sculptured chambers were buried under forty feet of soil. Its terraced roof was a maze of closely packed huts, swarming with human beings, poultry, dogs, kine, asses and vermin. Thanks to the indefatigable energy of Mariette,
these Ajaian stables were cleansed some thirty years ago. Writing himself of this tremendous task, he says, I cause to be demolished the sixty-four houses which encumbered the roof, as well as twenty-eight more which approached too near the outer wall of the temple. When the hull shall be isolated from its present surroundings by a massive wall, the work of restoration at Edfu will be accomplished. That wall has not yet been built, but the
encroaching mound has been cut clean away all around the building, now standing free in a deep open space, the sides of which are in some places as perpendicular as the quarried cliffs of Silcilis. In the midst of this pit, like a risen god issuing from the grave, the huge building stands before us in the sunshine erect and perfect. The effect at first sight is overwhelming.
Through the great doorway fifty feet in height we catch glimpses of a grand courtyard and of a vista of doorways one behind another. Going slowly down we see farther into those dark and distant halls at every step. At the same time the pylons, covered with gigantic sculptures, tower higher and higher, and seem to shut out the sky. The custode, a pygmy of six foot two, in semi-European dress, looks up grinning, expectant of Bakshish. For there
is actually a custode here, and which is more to the purpose a good strong gate, through which neither pilfering visitors nor pilfering Arabs can pass unnoticed. Who enters that gate crosses the threshold of the past and leaves two thousand years behind him. In these vast courts and storied halls all is unchanged. Every pavement, every column, every stair is in its place. The roof, but for a few roofing stones missing just over the sanctuary, is
not only uninjured, but in good repair. The hieroglyphic inscriptions are as sharp and legible as the day they were cut. If here and there a capital, or the face of a human-headed deity, has been mutilated, these are blemishes which at first one scarcely observes, and which in no wise mar the wonderful effect of the whole. We cross that great courtyard in the full blaze of the morning sunlight. In the colonnades on either side there is
shade, and in the pillared portico beyond, a darkness as of night, save where a patch of deep blue sky burns through a square opening in the roof, and is matched by a corresponding patch of blinding light on the pavement below. Hence we pass on through a hall of columns, two transverse corridors, a side chapel, a series of pitch-dark side chambers, and a sanctuary. Outside Aldi, surrounding the actual temple on three sides, runs an external corridor
open to the sky, and bounded by a superb wall full forty feet in height. When I have said that the entrance front, with its twin pylons and central doorway, measures two hundred and fifty feet in width by one hundred and twenty-five feet in height, that the first courtyard measures more than one hundred and sixty feet in length by one hundred and forty in width, that the entire length of the building is four hundred and fifty feet, and that it
covers an area of eighty thousand square feet, I have stated facts of a kind which convey no more than a general idea of largeness to the ordinary reader. Of the harmony of the proportions, of the amazing size and strength of the individual parts, of the perfect workmanship, of the fine grain and creamy amber of the stone, no description can do more than suggest an indefinite notion.
End of Section 59
