From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V
THE FATHER OF TERROR
When that amiable amateur coachman, Count R., who drives the four-horse drag daily from Cairo to the Pyramids for sheer love of the art, assures the passengers who mount beside and behind him in a blazing sun, that they will need no umbrella or parasol, inasmuch as "the road is shaded all the way," they are apt on the first impulse to suspect that the statement is one of those expressions of affectionate partiality which require a strong dash of seasoning from the salt-cellar of scepticism. To drive for ten or a dozen miles along a public highway, and to be protected from the rays of the sun throughout the whole route is a blessing not often vouchsafed to travellers in a dry and thirsty land. The world is not built that way, as a rule, and it is not easy to believe that it is so constructed between Cairo and Ghizeh. It turns out, however, that the pleasing assurance of our charioteer is a good deal nearer the literal truth than such assurances usually manage to get. Perhaps the grain of salt is wanted, but it is a very small one. In the town itself we have the protecting walls of the houses with an occasional strip of boulevard-planted avenue where the street is too wide to afford us mural shade; and, once through the Kasr-en-Nil and out of Cairo by the great Nile Bridge, we do in very truth enter what, without material exaggeration, might be called a continuous covered way.
For miles before us the road to Ghizeh lies straight and white between two almost unbroken lines of acacia-like lebbek trees, through whose embowering shade the sunbeams filter diluted when they penetrate at all. A light wind, too, is abroad, enough to refresh without stirring too much of the easily-raised and almost impalpable dust; and the air and scene together breathe an exhilaration which even the notes of the guards horn are powerless to dash. For we have a guard, and our guard has a horn, and both guard and horn, as might be expected in the turn-out of the agreeable Anglo-maniac who is coaching us, are all that the most exacting orthodoxy of the English road could require, in every respect save one. The result of the combined, yet not always concerted efforts of guard and horn to produce music leaves something to be desired. This, however, is a matter not easy to provide for even in England, where indeed, one often hears less harmonious strains than are just now being wafted on the breeze. There is, perhaps, no musical performer in the world who has more need than the average post-horn player to entreat his audience, in the terms in which a newly-elected Speaker of the House of Commons approaches the Crown or its representative Commission, to "place the most favourable construction on all his acts." To demand a pedantic accuracy of musical phrasing in the cheerful flourishes with which a guard is accustomed to herald the arrival of the coach would be to fail in reasonable indulgence for human shortcomings. It is probable that unless the will of the performer were liberally accepted as equivalent to the deed, and his good intentions treated as atoning for a proportion of not less than three or four flat notes out of every half-dozen, the art of playing a post-horn from the top of a mail-coach would speedily become extinct.
Inspirited by the stimulating sound of this manly struggle with difficulties we speed along. Cairo fades behind us into a mere picturesquely-broken mass of houses, dominated to the last by the two exquisite minarets of the Mosque of Mohammed Ali. A few more miles and you catch your first glimpse of the Pyramids—a disappointing one, as first glimpses of all great objects, except certain mountains from a distance, usually are; and, finally, after a drive of about an hour and a quarter from Cairo you pull up before the pleasant terrace of the Mena House Hotel, with the world-famed Pyramid of Cheops—all but the oldest, as it is quite the vastest of those great sepulchres—a few hundred yards from the spot at which you alight. Yet, now that you have reached it, the chances are that it is not this huge structure which first arrests your gaze. Unless, indeed, you are a fanatical Egyptologist first, and a Nature worshipper afterwards, it is upon the landscape you have left behind, and not on that in front of you that your eye will be fixed. Assuredly will this be so with any one who here for the first time makes acquaintance with that most delightful of earthly sights—the yellow desert marching league on league with the river-belt of vivid green. Far as the eye can travel stretches out that union of the living and the dead—the arid Libyan wilderness, its parched and stony levels broken here and there by the low rolling billows of the sandhills and bounded only by the western horizon, and side by side with it along the river-marge that broad bright strip of verdure chequered everywhere with rich brown patches of fresh-sown soil, the priceless gift of Nilus to the children of his banks.
Indescribable in words as is the glow and glare of the desert which, grey on the skyline and yellow in the middle distance, seems in the foreground almost incandescent under the pitiless sunblaze, it is hardly easier to do descriptive justice to the charm and refreshment of its cultivated fringe. A native of our own moist islands would naturally be fastidious, one might think, as a connoisseur of verdure, and would hardly expect to find within a few score miles of the tropics a successful rival of the beauty of an English field in April. Yet never and nowhere, not even in the rainiest spring of rainy Ireland, could you match the deep, cool, glossy green of these Nile-watered meadows, from which the bare red-brown stems of the palm trees, hardly elsewhere visible, save with their roots embedded in sandy, sterile-looking soil, uplift themselves into the golden air. Is there any other region in the world in which fertility so sweet and gracious and barrenness so fierce and forbidding can be so instantaneously exchanged? On the right, within a stone's-throw of where you stand, lie the boundless reaches of the Libyan Desert—a land inhospitable and accursed for unnumbered ages and unexplored by all-subduing man even to the present day. To the left this rich selvage of prolific soil, which the waters of the Nile have for as many recurring seasons strewn upon its shores. What wonder that so ancient a benefactor of mortals should have been worshipped as a god?
There can be very little that has been left unsaid about anything in Egypt, and least of all about that most wondrous of its many wonders, the Great Pyramid. The Titanic tomb which rises, dominating its fellows, from this range of low sandhills has for so many thousand years aroused the awe of mankind that the faculty of human speech and the resources of human imagination have had a considerable time to exercise and exhaust themselves upon it. That justice has still to be done to it in spite of all these efforts, and that probably such justice never will be done to it, is not surprising. For, after all, how should it have been; how should it ever be possible for description to deal adequately with an object possessing two characteristics which overshadow all the rest, and of which one eludes the eye and the other paralyses the imagination? Size too huge to be visually measured; age too vast to be mentally realised; that is the Pyramid of Cheops. It is discernible so far off that, as has been said already, the first glimpse of it disappoints the beholder with an appearance of insignificance, while when you are close to it the absence of any standard of comparison disables you from appreciating its dimensions. You perceive, of course, that it is considerably bigger than its two adjacent companions; but then how big are its two companions? They also are set in this sandy desert with no building on the same level to dwarf with their stature.
To be sure, it is open to you to adopt the desperate expedient of climbing the Great Pyramid. There are more, many more, Arabs ready to help you up its face for a consideration than you "have any use for." This method, however, like a drawn battle between two brave enemies, is heroic, but inconclusive. The "personal equation" comes in to impair its validity in a quadruple form; in the "form," first, of the traveller himself, which varies considerably as between one traveller and another; and secondly, thirdly, and fourthly, in the form of the three Arabs, who—one on your right hand, the other on your left, and their companion using the peculiar means described in the outspoken title of a once famous tract by the eminent Nonconformist divine, Richard Baxter—together hale or propel you up the flight of yard-high steps by which you gain the apex of the Pyramid.
The exactitude of this method of computation is gravely impaired by the introduction of these four indeterminates; for there is certainly many a traveller to whom the mere fact that the ascent of the Pyramid of Cheops has exhausted him and "pumped" three Arabs would afford no solid ground for the inference that it is one of the wonders of the world. Figures help us no better. What is the use of knowing, as a bare proposition of linear measurement, that the Great Pyramid is 451 feet high, and that each of its sides is 250 yards long at its base? There is just as little use in it, as there is in any of those ingenious comparisons with domestic (and now therefore distant) objects, whereby people attempt to bring the proportions of this mighty sepulchre within the grasp of their imaginations. It may well be, as they tell us, that the Great Pyramid would fill Lincoln's Inn Fields, and that its apex would tower above the cross of St. Paul's. But this, alas, is not Lincoln's Inn Fields, nor are we now surveying the summit of our great metropolitan cathedral from the top of Ludgate Hill; and to fancy ourselves on the steps of the College of Surgeons, or facing the statue of Queen Anne, is surely an imaginative effort no less difficult than that which it is supposed to facilitate.
As to the age of the Pyramid, it is no more possible to conceive of that than it is to realise its size. We may flatter ourselves that we do so when we are mechanically repeating as the result of the latest and most authoritative computations of Egyptologists that Cheops flourished about 3733 B.C., or some 5627 years ago. But it is in fact a mere idle form of words. We simply lose our mental way in these enormous tracts of time, as we should lose our geographical way in the illimitable spaces of the desert. The periods of which we have any record in our own or in European history are all too ludicrously short for comparison. Eighteen times as long a period as divides us from the birth of Shakespeare; fourteen times as long as the New World has existed for the Old. What measure of the awful age of these monuments do we get from such comparisons? Or, again, a good deal of water has flowed through the valley of the Thames since Cæsar crossed it at the head of his legions; yet the distance which we have to look back to descry the first historic conqueror of our islands through the haze of the ages is but one-third of the distance which would have had to be imaginatively spanned by Cæsar himself if the conqueror of Ptolemaic Egypt had striven to recall the builder of the Great Pyramid. The 800 years during which that infinitely complex, tremulously nervous, exquisitely refined organism which we call modern England has evolved itself from the almost protoplasmic simplicity of Saxon manners seems a long and slow-unfolded period to us; yet ancient Egypt thrice completed an era of equal length between the civilisation of the first pyramid-builders and the civilisation of the Ptolemies. This great tomb was nearly 4000 years old when Antony "well lost" the world for Cleopatra; it was over 3000 years old when Greek art and literature reached their zenith in the closing years of Athenian supremacy; it was more than 2000 when the Israelites made their exodus from Egypt and Jewish history began.
But if by these or any other methods of chronological computation we fail to realise the age of the Pyramids of Ghizeh, what are we to say of the still greater antiquity of that awful Figure which watches over them—the Father of Terror, as the Arabs call it—the tremendous and inscrutable Sphinx? For the Sphinx, it is now known, is older than the gigantic sepulchres which it seems to guard. Inscriptions discovered within recent years have proved that it is no mere mushroom growth of the Middle Empire, as was once supposed—no "jerry-built" edifice, if one may so express it, which had barely completed its two thousandth year at the commencement of the Christian era—but that it was in existence when the Pyramids themselves were being piled, and that, in all probability, one at least of their builders repaired it. It is certainly older, therefore, than the Fourth Dynasty, and, perhaps, even than the first; older, it may be, than Menes, the first human King of Egypt, and no more traceable to its beginnings than are the gods themselves. Even to think of its antiquity almost takes the breath away. Suppose it to have been only 300 years old when Cheops reigned, then it would already have been gazing for 4000 years across the desert when the Star of the Nativity was stayed over the manger at Bethlehem. One million four hundred and sixty thousand times had those stony features been smitten by the level rays of that rising sun to which the great statue is dedicated; 133 generations of men had been born and grown up, had married and been given in marriage, had aged and passed away, and mouldered, for all the wrappings of the embalmer, into dust. Napoleon, in his grandiose, Hugonesque manner, told the soldiers of his Egyptian expedition that "forty centuries were looking down upon them." He did not often understate the case in his public deliverances, but in this particular instance he was unduly, though no doubt undesignedly, modest. Why, Alexander might almost have said as much of the Sphinx when he entered Pelusium to deliver Egypt from the Persian yoke, and the Father of Terror had more than completed its fifth millennium when Amr-Ibn-el-Asi led the hosts of Omar to the destruction of the tottering Byzantine rule.
Sixty, and not forty, was the number of those shadowy spectators that looked down upon the struggle of Frenchmen and Arabs in 1798, and more than half that number had been witnesses of the overthrow of the rebel Ptolemy by the legionaries of Cæsar, of the meteor-like rush of the Macedonian conqueror on the richest spoil of the prostrate Persian—nay, even of the rout of the army of Psammetichus by the Immortals of Cambyses. The Father of Terror has seen it all. Of all these far-off historic conflicts—big each one of them with the fates of East and West—the Sphinx has been a witness, and it was old itself when the oldest of them raged out its day of shock and tumult and died away into the silence of the desert. "Everything fears Time, but Time fears the Pyramids," wrote Abd-el-Latif, an Arabian physician of the twelfth century; and the audacious vaunt appears as well warranted now as it did, when it was uttered 700 years ago. It certainly seems justified of their stupendous guardian. If anything of human origin may defy that which all else fears it is the Sphinx; for apparently neither Time nor those forces of Nature with which Time conspires have permanent power over it. The Libyan sands have for ages threatened to submerge it. Their wind-blown masses are even now heaped high upon the back of the couchant figure and have buried one of those gigantic paws between which there stood once an open shrine. It is more than 3000 years since Thothmes was commanded in a dream by his "divine father." Ra-Harmachis, whose effigy it is, to clear away the encroachments of the desert. Man, moreover, has reinforced the hostility of Nature by his own puny efforts at destruction. The face of the Sphinx has been mutilated by Moslem fanaticism within comparatively recent times, and the brutal Mamelukes used it for a target. But the power of these upstart barbarians, its last assailants, was swept away in blood by Mohammed Ali on the fatal 1st of March, 1811; and the Sphinx remains, still fixing upon the desert that mysterious gaze with which it had already for 2000 years confronted the endless caravan of days and nights when the Divine call came to Abraham in Ur of the Chaldees.