Egypt: An Impression

by Algernon Blackwood

A considerable amount of nonsense has been written about the spell of Egypt. Cheapened by exaggeration, vulgarised by familiarity, it has become for many a picture postcard spell, pinned against the mind like the posters at a railway terminus. The moment Alexandria is reached, this huge postcard hangs across the heavens, blazing in an over-coloured sunset, composed theatrically of temple, pyramid, palm trees by the shining Nile, and the inevitable Sphinx. And the monstrosity of it paralyses the mind. Its strident shout deafens the imagination. Memory escapes with difficulty from the insistent, gross advertisement. The postcard and the poster smother sight.

Behind this glare and glitter there hides, however, another delicate yet potent thing that is somehow nameless⁠—not acknowledged by all, perhaps because so curiously elusive, yet surely felt by all because it is so true: intensely vital, certainly, since it thus survives the suffocation of its vile exaggeration. For the ordinary tourist yields to it, and not alone the excavator and archeologist; the latter, indeed, who live long in the country, cease to be aware of it as an outside influence, having changed insensibly in thought and feeling till they have become it: it is in their blood. An effect is wrought subtly upon the mind that does not pass away. Having once “gone down into Egypt,” you are never quite the same again. Certain values have curiously changed, perspective has altered, emotions have shifted their specific gravity, some attitude to life, in a word, been emphasised, and another, as it were, obliterated. The spell works underground, and, being not properly comprehensible, is nameless. Moreover, it is the casual visitor, unburdened by antiquarian and historical knowledge, who may best estimate its power⁠—the tourist who knows merely what he has gleaned, for instance, from reading over Baedeker’s general synopsis on the voyage. He is aware of this floating power everywhere, yet unable to fix it to a definite cause. It remains at large, evasive, singularly fascinating.

All countries, of course, colour thought and memory, and work a spell upon the imagination of any but the hopelessly inanimate. Greece, India, Japan, Ireland or the Channel Islands leave their mark and imprint⁠—whence the educational value of travel-psychology⁠—but from these the traveller brings back feelings and memories he can evoke at will and label. He returns from Egypt with a marvellous blur. All, in differing terms, report a similar thing. From the first few months in Egypt, saturated maybe with overmuch, the mind recalls with definiteness⁠—nothing. There comes to its summons a colossal medley that half stupefies: vast reaches of yellow sand drenched in a sunlight that stings; dim, solemn aisles of granite silence; stupendous monoliths that stare unblinking at the sun; the shining river, licking softly at the lips of a murderous desert; and an enormous night-sky literally drowned in stars. A score of temples melt down into a single monster; the Nile spreads everywhere; great pyramids float across the sky like clouds; palms rustle in midair; and from caverned leagues of subterranean gloom there issues a roar of voices, thunderous yet muffled, that seem to utter the hieroglyphics of a forgotten tongue. The entire mental horizon, oddly lifted, brims with this procession of gigantic things, then empties again without a word of explanation, leaving a litter of big adjectives chasing one another chaotically⁠—chief among them “mysterious,” “unchanging,” “formidable,” “terrific.” But the single, bigger memory that should link all these together intelligibly hides from sight the emotion too deep for specific recognition, too vast, somehow, for articulate recovery. The Acropolis, the wonders of Japan and India, the mind can grasp⁠—or thinks so; but this composite enormity of Ramesseum, Serapeum, Karnak, Cheops, Sphinx, with a hundred temples and a thousand miles of sand, it knows it cannot. The mind is a blank. Egypt, it seems, has faded. Memory certainly fails, and description wilts. There seems nothing precisely to report, no interesting, clear, intelligible thing. “What did you see in Egypt? What did you like best? What impression did Egypt make upon you?” seem questions impossible to answer. Imagination flickers, stammers and goes out. Thought hesitates and stops. A little shudder, probably, makes itself felt. There is an impotent attempt to describe a temple or two, an expedition on donkey-back into the desert; but it sounds unreal, the language wrong, foolish, even affected. That dreadful Postcard rises like a wall. “Oh, I liked it all immensely. The delightful dry heat, you know⁠—and one can always count upon the weather for picnics arranged ahead, and⁠—” until the conversation can be changed to theatres or the crops at home. Yet, behind the words, behind the Postcard, one is aware all the time of some huge, alluring thing, alive with a pageantry of ages, strangely brilliant, dignified, magnificent, appealing almost to tears⁠—something that drifts past like a ghostly full-rigged vessel with crowded decks and sails painted in an underworld, and yet the whole too close before the eyes for proper sight. The spell has become operative! Having been warned to expect this, I, personally, had yet remained sceptical⁠—until I experienced its truth.⁠ ⁠… And it was undeniably disappointing. After time and money spent, one had apparently brought back so little.

I remember asking myself point blank, in solitude, what I had gained, and I remember the fruitless result. Nothing came but that abominable, shouting Postcard, endlessly extended. Its very endlessness, however, was a clue. Egypt is endless and inexhaustible; some hint of eternity lies there, an awareness of immortality almost. Today, after a doze of four or five thousand years, subterranean Egypt peeps up again at the sun. The vast Memphian cemetery that stretches from Sakkhâra to the Mena House has begun to whisper in the daylight. The Theban worship of the sun is being reconstructed. There is a sense of deathlessness about the ancient Nile, about the grim Sphinx and Pyramids, in the very colonnades of Karnak, whose pylons now once more stand upright after a sleep of forty centuries on their backs; above all, in the appealing strength of the floating, rustling sand⁠—something that defies time and repudiates change in death. Out of that flat, undifferentiated landscape which is Egypt, still stand the unconquerable finger-posts of stone, pointing, like symbols of eternity, to the equally unchanging skies. The spell is laid upon you once you have looked into the battered visages those Memnon terrors, which reveal, yet hide, far better than the Sphinx. They have neither eyes nor lips nor nose; their features, as their message, inscrutable. Yet they tell this nameless thing plainly because they have no words. Out of the green fields of millet they stand like portions of the Theban Mountains that have slid down into the plain, then stopped for a few more centuries to stare across the Nile watch the sunrise. From them, as partly from the opened tombs of priest and Pharaoh, comes some ingredient of this singular spell.

But the mind has to escape first from the picture postcard influence before the genuine effect emerges. For the mind has in reality suffered a bludgeoning that is partly stunning. Then, with the passing of the weeks amid surroundings of lesser scale, the glamour asserts its magical accomplishment. Slowly it stirred to life in me; and its grip may be, with some, tremendous. It has attacked unseen, and few escape it altogether, while yet it can neither be told nor painted, nor quite explained. Unguessed at first, because sought for in some crude, tangible form it never, never assumes, it flames up unexpectedly⁠—perhaps in a London street when fog shrouds the chimneys; perhaps at a concert; perhaps in a tearoom among perfumed, gossiping women; in church, at the club, even in bed when falling asleep just after a commonplace evening at a commonplace play. A sound recalls the street cries of the Arabs, with its haunting singsong melody, a breath of air brings back the heated sand, a rustle of the curtain whispers as the palms and acacia whisper⁠—and the truth is realised. Up steals the immense Egyptian glamour. It pours, it rushes up. It is over you in a moment. All this time it has lain coiled in deep recesses of the inner being⁠—recesses where there is silence because they are inaccessible amid the clamour of daily life. There is awe in it, a hint of cold eternity, a glimpse of something unchanging and terrific, yet, at the same time, soft and very tender too. The pictures unroll and spread. You feel again the untold melancholy of the Nile. The grandeur of a hundred battered temples beats upon the heart. There is a sense of unutterable beauty. Something in you bows to the procession that includes great figures of nonhuman lineage. Up sweeps the electric desert air, the alive wind, the wild and delicate perfume of the sand; the luminous grey shadows brush you; you feel the enormous scale of naked desolation which yet brims with strange vitality. An Arab on his donkey flits in colour across the mind, melting off into tiny perspective. A string of camels stands against the sky, swaying forwards the same moment as though it never ceased. A dozen pyramids cleave the air with monstrous wedges, pointing holes in space. In peace and silence, belonging to a loneliness of ages, rise heads and shoulders of towering gods of stone, little jackals silhouetted, perhaps, an instant against thighs half buried in sand. Great winds, great blazing spaces, great days and nights of shining wonder float past from the pavement or the theatre stall, and London, dim-lit England, the whole of modern life indeed, are reduced sharply to a miniature of trifling ugliness that seems the unreality. Egypt rolls through the heart for a second, and is gone. You remember resignedly that you have an appointment to play golf tomorrow with Jones, or you are to lunch with Lady X., and that it may probably rain, and you must go in tubes and taxis, be crowded, jostled, pressed upon by ugly details of time and space. Conventions drive you; our hat has to be blocked before you can wear it. You have calls to pay. But out there the days swam past in a flood of golden light, and, caught in a procession of ancient splendours, changeless as the leisured Nile, majestic as the tameless desert, and fresh still with the wonder that first created them, you moved with the tide as of some unconditioned world. Egypt steals out and whispers to you in your dreams. Once more you float in an atmosphere of passionate mirages. The spell is upon you heavily. And this is not mere spinning of words in an attempt to conjure up an atmosphere. The thing is really there. You feel it always, and it always evades analysis. The mind is aware of something that is unmanageable. The idea suggests itself that, while some countries give, others may take away.

Egypt, with a power of seduction almost uncanny, has robbed the mind of a faculty best described perhaps as the faculty of measurement. Its scale has stupefied the ability to measure, appraise, estimate; and this balance once destroyed, wonder and awe capture the heart, going what pace they please. Size works half the miracle, for it is size including a quality of terror⁠—monstrous; and, but for the glorious beauty that thunders through it, this sheer size might easily work a very different spell⁠—dismay. The modern mind, no longer terrified by Speed, to which it has grown contemptuously accustomed, yet shrinks a little before this display of titanic and bewildering size. Egypt makes it realise that it has no handy standard of measurement. It listens to words that are meaningless. The vast proportions uplift, then stupefy. The girth of the Pyramids, the height of the Colossi, the cubic content of the granite columns and the visage of the Sphinx expressed in yards⁠—these convey as little truth as the numbered leagues of the frightening desert or the length of that weary and interminable Nile. You draw a deep breath of astonishment⁠—then give up the vain attempt to grapple with a thing you cannot readily assimilate. A dizziness of star-distances steals over you; there is a breathlessness of astronomical scale in it that exhilarates while it stuns. What mind can gain by the information that our sun, with all its retinue of planets, sweeps annually thirty-five million miles nearer to a certain star in Hercules⁠—yet that Hercules looks no closer than it did thousands of years ago? Such distance lies beyond comprehension. Similarly, in Egypt, there is something that continually evades capture in the monstrous details of sheer size, beautiful with majesty, that day and night tower above the shrinking reason. You believe because you see, but though you know you see, you are not sure what you quite believe. Herein lies one letter, at least, of the spell of Egypt. The mind is forever aware of something that haunts from the further side of experience.

But assuredly it is only one letter in a sentence that no one hears complete, for there seems an otherworldly element in this strange land that is acknowledged by every type, its presence detected in the most ordinary remarks. At a Cairo dance or a Heliopolis gymkhana you may hear a thoughtless woman observe: “But, you know, there is something queer in Egypt, isn’t there? One simply can’t deny it!” while the man, half puzzled and half contemptuous, laughs it off, falling back for explanation upon historical associations, vanished civilisations, mummies, temples, and the rest. The “queer thing,” however, is not so easily denied, for it is more than any of these. Just as in good conversation there is present among the talkers something that is greater than any one of them separately, so, when your mind meets Egypt and communes with it, there rises up this odd otherworldly presence, equally real, equally undecipherable. A party of us⁠—to quote an instance of its effect upon an ordinary wholesome mind, called usually “levelheaded”⁠—were on our way one night to see the Sphinx by moonlight under the guidance of a distinguished Egyptologist. We were on donkey-back. The night was very still, the sky thick with stars, moonlight flooding everything. As we skirted the huge flanks of the Great Pyramid, half in silver, half in black, its soaring edges lit by stars as by stationary lanterns, the business man asked a question of our learned leader. And in daily life he was a man of acute intelligence, guided by logic and reason, successful, rich. “Did they build the pyramid from within outwards?” was his question, as he gazed up at the towering mystery of the colossal outline. The question seemed quite natural, its utter absurdity not at first apparent. A second afterwards one realised the nonsense of it, and longed to hear the grave reply: “No; they hung the apex in midair, and then built downwards from it.” But, though the Egyptologist resisted the temptation to be funny at his questioner’s expense, one somehow felt that, had he answered thus, the man would have accepted the explanation without demur. It would have caused him no surprise, for credo quia incredibile does actually represent one’s attitude to things in this ancient and mysterious country. “Ah, I see,” was all he said, with a sigh, when told that a pyramid was merely a king’s mausoleum, and that a layer of stone was added for each year he lived; “a big job for a contractor, wasn’t it?” He was no whit ashamed of his idiotic question. “A hundred thousand men working for twenty years built this one,” added the other, as we turned its corner and saw the dark head of the monster guarding its approach through all the centuries.

So everywhere⁠—one hears this kind of question, as though the mind grew childish before an incomprehensible thing. Some shadowy magic pervades the faculties; their natural alertness fails; talk is in whispers, almost as if someone were listening; unreality broods over mood and speech and action. The Impossible, dressed in colours of strange, unfading brilliance, stoops down from some tremendous height, steals close past the windows of the mind, halts a moment, peers in⁠—and vanishes. But the mind has seen the outline, has felt the eerie fascination. What it would instantly reject in the Midlands, on a Scotch moor, on a Rhine steamer, or on Brighton Pier, it harbours here with semi-acceptance and belief. The land exhales a steam of enchantment that lulls the senses. You move through this almost visible glamour. All about you is a high, transparent screen, built by the centuries, and left standing; and here and there are gaps in it; modern life, cast like a cinema picture upon this screen, becomes the unreality; but, behind it, a vast audience gathered by the ages watches and looks on⁠—at us. And occasionally, aware of being watched, the mind sees through a gap⁠—and asks a wild question, as the business man at the pyramid asked one. Anything is possible, and anything may happen.

There are some who claim things do happen. Imagination constructs swiftly in Egypt, with small opposition from the reason. The creative instinct fairly strides. “I always expect something unusual to happen when I’m out here,” is a sentence repeatedly heard. “Last time I came out here, there was a disaster. Something unexpected will happen this year, too.” As though in this coaxing heat of climate, in this rich glory of a past now being unearthed from day to day, and in this brilliant, vivid quality of its present personality, so oddly stimulating, there lies some quality that acts with the effect of a forcing-house upon the character, bringing out latent possibilities, hurrying on events, developing a rush of life too swift for comfort or full understanding. Certainly no one can see Egypt and remain quite what they were before, however much interpretation of its haunting effect may vary for individuals.

For some, a rather dominant impression is undoubtedly “the monstrous.” A splendour of awful dream, yet never quite of nightmare, stalks everywhere, suggesting an atmosphere of Khubla Khan. There is nothing lyrical. Even the silvery river, the slender palms, the fields of clover and barley and the acres of flashing poppies convey no lyrical sweetness, as elsewhere they might. All moves to a statelier measure. Stern issues of life and death are in the air, and in the grandeur of the tombs and temples there is a solemnity of genuine awe that makes the blood run slow a little. Those Theban Hills where the kings and queens lay buried, are forbidding to the point of discomfort almost. The listening silence in the grim Valley of the Tombs of the Kings, the intolerable glare of sun shine on the stones, the naked absence of any sign of animal or vegetable life, the slow approach to the secret hiding-place where the mummy of a once powerful monarch lies ghastly now beneath the glitter of an electric light, the implacable desert, deadly with heat and distance on every side⁠—this picture, once seen rather colours one’s memory of the rest of Egypt with its sombre and funereal character. And with the great deific monolith the effect is similar. Proportions and sheer size strike blow after blow upon the mind. Stupendous figures, shrouded to the eyes, shoulder their way slowly through the shifting sands deathless themselves and half-appalling. Their attitudes and gestures express the hieroglyphic drawings come to life. Their towering heads, coiffed with zodiacal signs, or grotesque with animal or bird, bend down to watch you everywhere. There is no hurry in them; they move with the leisure of the moon, with the stateliness of the sun, with the slow silence of the constellations. But they move. There is, between you and them, this effect of a screen, erected by the ages, yet that any moment may turn thin and let them through upon you. A hand of shadow, but with granite grip, may steal forth and draw you away into some region where they dwell among changeless symbols like themselves, a region vast, ancient and undifferentiated as the desert that has produced them. Their effect in the end is weird, difficult to describe, but real. Talk with a mind that has been steeped for years in their atmosphere and presence, and you will appreciate this odd reality. The spell of Egypt is an otherworldly spell. Its vagueness, its elusiveness, its undeniable reality are ingredients, at any rate, in a total result whose detailed analysis lies hidden in mystery and silence⁠—inscrutable.