Again at home, and probably reflecting that the countries he had
hitherto visited were new in the history of man, this extraordinary
traveller resolved to proceed up the Nile to the second cataract. At the
next performance of the great ceremony of ‘opening the Nile,’ at Cairo,
MR. BOOLEY was present.
Along that wonderful river, associated with such stupendous fables, and
with a history more prodigious than any fancy of man, in its vast and
gorgeous facts; among temples, palaces, pyramids, colossal statues,
crocodiles, tombs, obelisks, mummies, sand and ruin; he proceeded, like
an opium-eater in a mighty dream. Thebes rose before him. An avenue of
two hundred sphinxes, with not a head among them,—one of six or eight,
or ten such avenues, all leading to a common centre,—conducted to the
Temple of Carnak: its walls, eighty feet high and twenty-five feet
thick, a mile and three-quarters in circumference; the interior of its
tremendous hall, occupying an area of forty-seven thousand square feet,
large enough to hold four great Christian churches, and yet not more
than one-seventh part of the entire ruin. Obelisks he saw, thousands of
years of age, as sharp as if the chisel had cut their edges yesterday;
colossal statues fifty-two feet high, with ‘little’ fingers five feet
and a half long; a very world of ruins, that were marvellous old ruins
in the days of Herodotus; tombs cut high up in the rock, where European
travellers live solitary, as in stony crows’ nests, burning mummied
Thebans, gentle and simple,—of the dried blood-royal maybe,—for their
daily fuel, and making articles of furniture of their dusty coffins.
Upon the walls of temples, in colors fresh and bright as those of
yesterday, he read the conquests of great Egyptian monarchs; upon the
tombs of humbler people in the same blooming symbols, he saw their
ancient way of working at their trades, of riding, driving, feasting,
playing games; of marrying and burying, and performing on instruments,
and singing songs, and healing by the power of animal magnetism, and
performing all the occupations of life. He visited the quarries of
Silsileh, whence nearly all the red stone used by the ancient Egyptian
architects and sculptors came; and there beheld enormous single-stoned
colossal figures nearly finished—redly snowed up, as it were, and trying
hard to break out—waiting for the finishing touches, never to be given
by the mummied hands of thousands of years ago. In front of the temple
of Abou Simbel, he saw gigantic figures sixty feet in height and
twenty-one across the shoulders, dwarfing live men on camels down to
pigmies. Elsewhere he beheld complacent monsters tumbled down like
ill-used Dolls of a Titanic make, and staring with stupid benignity at
the arid earth whereon their huge faces rested. His last look of that
amazing land was at the Great Sphinx, buried in the sand—sand in its
eyes, sand in its ears, sand drifted on its broken nose, sand lodging,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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