My Winter on the Nile

CHAPTER XXX.—FAREWELL TO THEBES

SOCIAL life at Thebes, in the season, is subject to peculiar conditions. For one thing, you suspect a commercial element in it. Back of all the politeness of native consuls and resident effendis, you see spread out a collection of antiques, veritable belongings of the ancient Egyptians, the furniture of their tombs, the ornaments they wore when they began their last and most solemn journey, the very scarabæus, cut on the back in the likeness of the mysterious eye of Osiris, which the mummy held over his head when he entered the ominously silent land of Kar-Neter, the intaglio seal which he always used for his signature, the “charms” that he wore at his guard-chain, the necklaces of his wife, the rings and bracelets of his daughter.

These are very precious things, but you may have them—such is the softening influence of friendship—for a trifle of coined gold, a mere trifle, considering their value and the impossibility of replacing them. What are two, five, even ten pounds for a genuine bronze figure of Isis, for a sacred cat, for a bit of stone, wrought four thousand years ago by an artist into the likeness of the immortal beetle, carved exquisitely with the name of the Pharaoh of that epoch, a bit of stone that some Egyptian wore at his chain during his life and which was laid upon his breast when he was wrapped up for eternity. Here in Thebes, where the most important personage is the mummy and the Egyptian past is the only real and marketable article, there comes to be an extraordinary value attached to these trinkets of mortality. But when the traveler gets away, out of this charmed circle of enthusiasm for antiquity, away from this fictitious market in sentiment, among the cold people of the world who know not Joseph, and only half believe in Potiphar, and think the little blue images of Osiris ugly, and the me my-beads trash, and who never heard of the scarabæus, when, I say, he comes with his load of antiques into this air of scepticism, he finds that he has invested in a property no longer generally current, objects of vertu for which Egypt is actually the best market. And if he finds, as he may, that a good part of his purchases are only counterfeits of the antique, manufactured and doctored to give them an appearance of age, he experiences a sinking of the heart mingled with a lively admiration of the adroitness of the smooth and courtly Arabs of Luxor.

Social life is so peculiar in the absence of the sex that is thought to add a charm to it in other parts of the world. We receive visits or ceremony or of friendship from the chief citizens of the village, we entertain them at dinner, but they are never accompanied by their wives or daughters; we call at their houses and are feted in turn, but the light of the harem never appears. Dahabeëhs of all nations are arriving and departing, there are always several moored before the town, some of them are certain to have lovely passengers, and the polite Arabs are not insensible to the charm of their society: there is much visiting constantly on the boats; but when it is returned at the houses of the natives, at an evening entertainment, the only female society offered is that of the dancing-girls.

Of course, when there is so much lingual difficulty in intercourse, the demonstrations of civility must be mainly overt, and in fact they are mostly illuminations and “fantasies.” Almost every boat once in the course of its stay, and usually upon some natal day or in honor of some arrival, will be beautifully illuminated and display fireworks. No sight is prettier than a dahabeëh strung along its decks and along its masts and yards with many colored lanterns. The people of Luxor respond with illuminations in the houses, to which they add barbarous music and the kicking and posturing of the Ghawazees. In this consists the gaiety of the Luxor season.

Perhaps we reached the high-water mark of this gaiety in an entertainment given us by Ali Moorad Effendi, the American consular agent, in return for a dinner on the dahabeëh. Ali is of good Bedawee blood; and has relations at Karnak enough to fill an opera-house, we esteemed him one of the most trustworthy Arabs in the country, and he takes great pains and pleasure in performing all the duties of his post, which are principally civilities to American travelers. The entertainment consisted of a dinner and a ‘fantasia.’ It was understood that it was to be a dinner in Arab style.

We go at sunset when all the broad surface of the Nile is like an opal in the reflected light. The consul’s house is near the bank of the river, and is built against the hill so that we climb two or three narrow stairways before we get to the top of it. The landing-places of the stairways are terraces overlooking the river; and the word terrace has such a grand air that it is impossible to describe this house without making it appear better than it is. The consul comes down to the bank to receive us; we scramble up its crumbling face. We ascend a stairway to the long consular reception-room, where we sit for half an hour, during which coffee is served and we get the last of the glowing sunset from the windows.

We are then taken across a little terrace, up another flight of steps, to the main house, which is seen to consist of a broad hall with small rooms on each side. No other members of the consul’s family appear, and, regarding Arab etiquette, we make no inquiry for them. We could not commit a greater breach of good-breeding than to ask after the health of any members of the harem. Into one of the little rooms we are shown for dinner. It is very small, only large enough to contain a divan and a round table capable of seating eight persons. The only ornaments of the room are an American flag, and a hand-mirror hung too high for anyone to see herself in it. The round table is of metal, hammered out and turned at the edge,—a little barrier that prevents anything rolling off. At each place are a napkin and a piece of bread—no plate or knives or forks.

Deference is so far paid to European prejudice that we sit in chairs, but I confess that when I am to eat with my fingers I prefer to sit on the ground—the position in a chair is too formal for what is to follow. When we are seated, a servant brings water in a basin and ewer, and a towel, and we wash our right hands—the left hand is not to be used. Soup is first served. The dish is placed in the middle of the table, and we are given spoons with which each one dips in, and eats rapidly or slowly according to habit; but there is necessarily some deliberation about it, for we cannot all dip at once. The soup is excellent, and we praise it, to the great delight of our host, who shows his handsome teeth and says tyeb all that we have hitherto said was tyeb, we now add kateér. More smiles; and claret is brought in—another concession to foreign tastes.

After the soup, we rely upon our fingers, under the instructions of Ali and an Arab guest. The dinner consists of many courses, each article served separately, but sometimes placed upon the table in three or four dishes for the convenience of the convive in reaching it. There are meats and vegetables of all sorts procurable, fish, beef, mutton, veal, chickens, turkeys, quails and other small birds, pease, beans, salad, and some compositions which defied such analysis as one could make with his thumb and finger. Our host prided himself upon having a Turkish artist in the kitchen, and the cooking was really good and toothsome, even to the pastry and sweetmeats; we did not accuse him of making the champagne.

There is no difficulty in getting at the meats; we tear off strips, mutually assisting each other in pulling them asunder; but there is more trouble about such dishes as pease and a purée of something. One hesitates to make a scoop of his four fingers, and plunge in; and then it is disappointing to an unskilled person to see how few peas he can convey to his mouth at a time. I sequester and keep by me the breast-bone of a chicken, which makes an excellent scoop for small vegetables and gravies, and I am doing very well with it, until there is a universal protest against the unfairness of the device.

Our host praises everything himself in the utmost simplicity, and urges us to partake of each dish; he is continually picking out nice bits from the dish and conveying them to the mouth of his nearest guest. My friend who sits next to All, ought to be grateful for this delicate attention, but I fear he is not. The fact is that Ali, by some accident, in fishing, hunting, or war, has lost the tip of the index finger of his right hand, the very hand that conveys the delicacies to my friend’s mouth. And he told me afterwards, that he felt each time he was fed that he had swallowed that piece of the consul’s finger.

During the feast there is music by performers in the adjoining hall, music in minor, barbaric strains insisted on with the monotonous nonchalance of the Orient, and calculated, I should say, to excite a person to ferocity, and to make feeding with his fingers a vent to his aroused and savage passions. At the end of the courses water is brought for us to lave our hands, and coffee and chibooks are served.

“Dinner very nice, very fine,” says Ali, speaking the common thought which most hosts are too conventional to utter.

“A splendid dinner, O! consul; I have never seen such an one in America.”

The Ghawazees have meantime arrived; we hear a burst of singing occasionally with the wail of the instruments. The dancing is to be in the narrow hall of the house, which is lighted as well as a room can be with so many dusky faces in it. At the far end are seated on the floor the musicians, with two stringed instruments, a tambourine and a darabooka. That which answers for a violin has two strings of horsehair, stretched over a cocoanut-shell; the bowstring, which is tightened by the hand as it is drawn, is of horsehair. The music is certainly exciting, harassing, plaintive, complaining; the very monotony of it would drive one wild in time. Behind the musicians is a dark cloud of turbaned servants and various privileged retainers of the house. In front of the musicians sit the Ghawazees, six girls, and an old women with parchment skin and twinkling eyes, who has been a famous dancer in her day. They are waiting a little wearily, and from time to time one of them throws out the note or two of a song, as if the music were beginning to work in her veins. The spectators are grouped at the entrance of the hall and seated on chairs down each side, leaving but a narrow space for the dancers between; and there are dusky faces peering in at the door.

Before the dance begins we have an opportunity to see what these Ghawazees are like, a race which prides itself upon preserving a pure blood for thousands of years, and upon an ancestry that has always followed the most disreputable profession. These girls are aged say from sixteen to twenty; one appears much older and looks exactly like an Indian squaw, but, strange to say, her profile is also exactly that of Rameses as we see it in the sculptures. The leading dancer is dressed in a flaring gown of red and figured silk, a costly Syrian dress; she is fat, rather comely, but coarsely uninteresting, although she is said to have on more jewelry than any other dancing-girl in Egypt; her abundant black hair is worn long and in strands thickly hung with gold coins; her breast is covered with necklaces of gold-work and coins; and a mass of heavy twinkling silver ornaments hangs about her waist. A third dancer is in an almost equally striking gown of yellow, and wears also much coin; she is a Pharaonic beauty, with a soft skin and the real Oriental eye and profile. The dresses of all are plainly cut, and straight-waisted, like an ordinary calico gown of a milkmaid. They wear no shawls or any other Oriental wrappings, and dance in their stocking-feet.

At a turn in the music, the girl in red and the girl in yellow stand up; for an instant they raise their castanets till the time of the music is caught, and then start forward, with less of languor and a more skipping movement than we expected; and they are not ungraceful as they come rapidly down the hall, throwing the arms aloft and the feet forward, to the rattle of the castanets. These latter are small convex pieces of brass, held between the thumb and finger, which have a click like the rattle of the snake. In mid-advance they stop, face each other, chassée, retire, and again come further forward, stop, and the peculiar portion of the dance begins, which is not dancing at all, but a quivering, undulating motion given to the body, as the girl stands with feet planted wide apart. The feet are still, the head scarcely stirs, except with an almost imperceptible snakelike movement, but the muscles of the body to the hips quiver in time to the monotonous music, in muscular thrills, in waves running down, and at intervals extending below the waist. Sometimes one side of the body quivers while the other is perfectly still, and then the whole frame, for a second, shares in the ague. It is certainly an astonishing muscular performance, but you could not call it either graceful or pleasing. Some people see in the intention of the dance a deep symbolic meaning, something about the Old Serpent of the Nile, with its gliding, quivering movement and its fatal fascination. Others see in it only the common old Snake that was in Eden. I suppose in fact that it is the old and universal Oriental dance, the chief attraction of which never was its modesty.

After standing for a brief space, with the body throbbing and quivering, the castanets all the time held above the head in sympathetic throbs, the dancers start forward, face each other, pass, pirouette, and take some dancing steps, retire, advance and repeat the earthquake performance. This is kept up a long time, and with wonderful endurance, without change of figure; but sometimes the movements are more rapid, when the music hastens, and more passion is shown. But five minutes of it is as good as an hour. Evidently the dance is nothing except with a master, with an actress who shall abandon herself to the tide of feeling which the music suggests and throw herself into the full passion of it; who knows how to tell a story by pantomime, and to depict the woes of love and despair. All this needs grace, beauty, and genius. Few dancing-girls have either. An old resident of Luxor complains that the dancing is not at all what it was twenty years ago, that the old fire and art seem to be lost.

“The old hag, sitting there on the floor, was asked to exhibit the ancient style; she consented, and danced marvelously for a time, but the performance became in the end too shameful to be witnessed.”

I fancy that if the dance has gained anything in propriety, which is hard to believe, it has lost in spirit. It might be passionate, dramatic, tragic. But it needs genius to make it anything more than a suggestive and repulsive vulgarity.

During the intervals, the girls sing to the music; the singing is very wild and barbaric. The song is in praise of the Night, a love-song consisting of repeated epithets:—

The strain is minor, and there is a wail in the voices which stridently chant to the twanging strings. Is it only the echo of ages of sin in those despairing voices? How melancholy it all becomes! The girl in yellow, she of the oblong eyes, straight nose and high type of Oriental beauty, dances down alone; she is slender, she has the charm of grace, her eyes never wander to the spectators. Is there in her soul any faint contempt for herself or for the part she plays? Or is the historic consciousness of the antiquity of both her profession and her sin strong enough to throw yet the lights of illusion over such a performance? Evidently the fat girl in red is a prey to no such misgiving, as she comes bouncing down the line, and flings herself into her ague fit.

“Look out, the hippopotamus!” cries Abd-el-Atti, “I ‘fraid she kick me.”

While the dance goes on, pipes, coffee, and brandy are frequently passed; the dancers swallow the brandy readily. The house is illuminated, and the entertainment ends with a few rockets from the terrace. This is a full-blown “fantasia.”

As the night is still young and the moon is full, we decide to efface, as much as may be, the vulgarities of modern Egypt, by a vision of the ancient, and taking donkeys we ride to Karnak.

For myself I prefer day to night, and abounding sunshine to the most generous moonlight; there is always some disappointment in the night effect in ruins, under the most favorable conditions. But I have great deference to that poetic yearning for half-light, which leads one to grope about in the heavy night-shadows of a stately temple; there is no bird more worthy of respect than the round-eyed attendant of Pallas-Athene.

And it cannot be denied that there is something mysterious and almost ghostly in our silent night ride. For once, our attendants fall into the spirit of the adventure, keep silent, and are only shades at our side. Not a word or a blow is heard as we emerge from the dark lanes of Luxor and come out into the yellow light of the plain; the light seems strong and yet the plain is spectral, small objects become gigantic, and although the valley is flooded in radiance, the end of our small procession is lost in dimness. Nothing is real, all things take fantastic forms, and all proportions are changed. One moves as in a sort of spell, and it is this unreality which becomes painful. The old Egyptians had need of little imagination to conjure up the phantasmagoria of the under-world; it is this without the sun.

So far as we can see it, the great mass of stone is impressive as we approach—I suspect because we know how vast and solid it is; and the pylons never seemed so gigantic before. We do our best to get into a proper frame of mind, by wandering apart, and losing ourselves in the heavy shadows. And for moments we succeed. It would have been the shame of our lives not to have seen Karnak by moonlight. The Great Hall, with its enormous columns planted close together, it is more difficult to see by night than by day, but such glimpses as we have of it, the silver light slanting through the stone forest and the heavy shadows, are profoundly impressive. I climb upon a tottering pylon where I can see over the indistinct field and chaos of stone, and look down into the weird and half-illumined Hall of Columns. In this isolated situation I am beginning to fall into the classical meditation of Marius at Carthage, when another party of visitors arrives, and their donkeys, meeting our donkeys in the center of the Great Hall, begin (it is their donkeys that begin) such a braying as never was heard before; the challenge is promptly responded to, and a duet ensues and is continued and runs into a chorus, so hideous, so unsanctified, so wretchedly attuned, and out of harmony with history, romance, and religion, that sentiment takes wings with silence and flies from the spot.

We can pick up again only some scattered fragments of emotion by wandering alone in the remotest nooks. But we can go nowhere that an Arab, silent and gowned, does not glide from behind a pillar or step out of the shade, staff in hand, and stealthily accompany us. Even the donkey-boys have cultivated their sensibilities by association with other nocturnal pilgrims, and encourage our gush of feeling by remarking in a low voice, “Karnak very good.” One of them, who had apparently attended only the most refined and appreciative, keeps repeating at each point of view, “Exquisite!”

As I am lingering behind the company a shadow glides up to me in the gloom of the great columns, with “good evening”; and, when I reply, it draws nearer, and, in confidential tones, whispers, as if it knew that the moonlight visit was different from that by day, “Backsheesh.”

There is never wanting something to do at Luxor, if all the excursions were made. There is always an exchange of courtesies between dahabeëhs, calls are made and dinners given. In the matter of visits the naval etiquette prevails, and the last comer makes the first call. But if you do not care for the society of travelers, you can at least make one of the picturesque idlers on the bank; you may chance to see a display of Arab horsemanship; you may be entertained by some new device of the curiosity-mongers; and there always remain the “collections” of the dealers to examine. One of the best of them is that of the German consul, who rejoices in the odd name of Todrous Paulos, which reappears in his son as Moharb Todrous; a Copt who enjoys the reputation among Moslems of a trustworthy man—which probably means that a larger proportion of his antiquities are genuine than of theirs. If one were disposed to moralize there is abundant field for it here in Luxor. I wonder if there is an insatiable demoralization connected with the dealing in antiquities, and especially in the relics of the departed. When a person, as a business, obtains his merchandise from the unresisting clutch of the dead, in violation of the firman of his ruler, does he add to his wickedness by manufacturing imitations and selling them as real? And what of the traveler who encourages both trades by buying?

One night the venerable Mustapha Aga gave a grand entertainment, in honor of his reception of a firman from the Sultan, who sent him a decoration of diamonds set in silver. Nothing in a Moslem’s eyes could exceed the honor of this recognition by the Khalif, the successor of the Prophet. It was an occasion of religious as well as of social demonstration of gratitude. There was service, with the reading of the Koran in the mosque, for the faithful only; there was a slaughter of sheep with a distribution of the mutton among the poor; and there was a fantasia at the residence of Mustapha (the house built into the columns of the temple of Luxor), to which everybody was bidden. There had been an arrival of Cook’s Excursionists by steamboat, and there must have been as many as two hundred foreigners at the entertainment in the course of the evening.