CHAPTER XLVI--LUXOR, THE CITY OF GIANTS.--AMONG THE MUMMIES OF ANCIENT THEBES.

_Luxor on the Site of Ancient Thebes--A City with a Hundred Gates--Enjoying a Consul’s Hospitality--An American Citizen of African Descent--A Dignified Rhinoceros--Karnak--A City of Wonders--Promenading in an Avenue of Sphinxes--A Gigantic Temple--Monster Obelisks--A Story in Stone--A Statue Weighing Nine Hundred Tons--The Sitting Colossi--A Singing Statue--Mysteries of Priestcraft--Lunching in the Tomb of Rameses--A Wonderful Treasure--How They Made Mummies--A Curious Process--The “Doubter” and the Mummy Sellers--The Judge Comes to Grief._

LUXOR is now an insignificant town of four thousand inhabitants, occupying the site, or a small portion of it, of the ancient city of Thebes, from whose hundred gates twenty thousand armed chariots could be sent to the battle-field. What a’ melancholy decline from the days of Thotmes and Rameses to the present!

A crowd of dirty Arabs, and a collection of hovels, with here and there a house having some pretence of respectability and comfort are the Thebes of to-day. Were it not for the ruins that lie around us we should have only to write “Thebes was,” and the story of to-day would be complete. But the city which fills bright pages in the history of Egypt was too great and glorious in her time, and the monuments she built were too stupendous to be easily removed. So grand were her temples that the work of destruction was an enormous one, what then must have been the labors of erection! {586}In the present town of Luxor there is little to be seen beyond the temple which is now greatly fallen and of which much of the sculptures lie buried. There is no effort made to remove the rubbish that lies around the walls and upon all the floors; in one part the English Consul has his office, and in others the Arabs have built their mud hovels among the columns and against the sculptured walls. The magnificence around them has not served in any way to elevate the thoughts of these natives; they live in a superabundance of dirt, and the contemplation of the works of art ever in their sight has been no more to them than to their chickens or donkeys. They regard the ruins solely as a source of profit, and they persistently beg from strangers who come to visit Thebes. Most of the Arabs believe that the strangers who come here are pagans, and that they make pilgrimages to Thebes, Denderah, and Esneh, just as good Moslems make pilgrimages to Mecca.

We devoted an hour to calling on the consul, where we were treated to pipes and to coffee, and were seated on the divans that filled part of the official rooms. The American Consul is of a dark hue, something more than a mulatto, and one of our party whose notions were formerly in sympathy with slaveholding, was rather disinclined to accept the hospitality of a gentleman of African descent. But we pacified him by the information that we were in Africa and approaching the region where white men were at a discount, and with this view of the case he subsided and smoked his pipe in silence.

The “Doubter” was rude as he always was when among gentlemanly natives, and as he had not the vice of smoking he wondered what we were staying for. The Judge reproved him for his incivility, and for a minute or two there was a fair prospect that the consul would be able to collect a fee for suppressing a row in his own office. During the turmoil the Professor and I slipped out and called upon the German Consul, who was as dignified as a rhinoceros in a menagerie. He speaks hardly anything but Arabic, and knows of only one man--Bismarck--in Germany and of only one city--Berlin. The Professor passed as a resident of Berlin and a relative of Bismarck, and with this view of the case he was most cordially received. The American

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{589}Consul speaks English quite fairly. The vice-consulate was formerly held by Mustapha Agar, who is also English Vice-Consul, and his removal has soured him somewhat so that he is not over-polite to Americans. He is the oldest consul at Luxor, and one of the oldest residents, and has grown wealthy in the service of other countries than his own. He has been so often petted by travellers and praised by authors who have been here, that he has become spoiled, and has the pomposity of a turkey-cock. He deals in scarabees, mummies, coins--everything that you like,--and he showed us as did the other consuls, quite a collection of antiquities. They can furnish you with the head of a king or the foot of a princess at short order, and as for old coins the Professor found enough at Luxor to set up a museum of numismatics.

We hired donkeys and went to Karnak--something more than a mile from Luxor--and we went not only once but three times.

Karnak is more than marvellous; to do justice to it one requires to have a dozen or so superlative words specially invented for the place. You remain silent in contemplating it as you find that you have no word to express your feelings; you are sensible that to speak of it in ordinary terms would be like the cockney’s expression of “neat” applied to Niagara, and though I am intending to make the attempt I am satisfied that I shall fall far short of portraying the full grandeur of the scene to the reader.

As you approach the temple you enter an avenue of ramheaded sphinxes (huge fellows carved in stone), on opposite sides of the avenue. Formerly this street extended all the way to Luxor--six thousand feet away. What a splendid promenade it must have been! Only a few of the sphinxes are here now, and of those every one has been more or less mutilated. Passing the avenue you reach a pronaos, or pylon,--a gateway with two enormous towers large enough of themselves to make a temple. There were no less than six of these entrances. Just to give an idea of their size I will give the dimensions of one of the peristyles. Its total length is three hundred and seventy feet, its depth is fifty feet, and its height one hundred and forty feet. The temple faces the river, and the towers can be seen from a long distance. One of these fronting the river is partly fallen, but the other is nearly perfect. {590}A detailed description of the temple at Karnak would be dry reading, and I will simply state that from end to end the length is eleven hundred and eighty feet, and that it is about six hundred feet in breadth. The whole was surrounded by a wall twenty-five feet thick and from sixty to a hundred feet high. All this space inclosed by the wall is filled with ruins of an architecture of the most magnificent character. In one place there are the fragments of a fallen obelisk, and close by it is a standing obelisk ninety-two feet high and eight feet square at the base, the largest obelisk now known. There is another, seventy-five feet high, a little from it, and there is another obelisk standing at Luxor, the mate of it having been removed to Paris. The French government removed the Luxor obelisk only after many attempts and failures. The obelisk at Karnak--the great one--was given to the English government, but they never attempted to take it away.

How did the Egyptians manage to move these masses of stone from the quarries at Assouan, and to put them in place? I give it up.

Do you know where is the most stupendous hall in the world? It is in the temple at Karnak. It is three hundred and twenty-nine feet long and one hundred and seventy feet broad; it has down its centre, twelve columns, each sixty feet high (without counting capital and pedestal), and twelve feet in diameter. Then besides these there are one hundred and twenty-two other columns (arranged in fourteen rows, seven on each side of the central rows), forty-two feet high and nine feet in diameter. Thus there are one hundred and thirty-four columns in this great hall, and all of them are covered with sculptures. There was once a roof over the hall, but it is mostly gone now, and some of the columns have fallen. Seven of us, with our outstretched hands touching each other, were just able to encircle one of the great columns. Compared with this hall of the temple, the Parthenon at Athens becomes of dwarfish size. All around are stones of great size that once formed parts of the temple; everything around is so great that the stones do not appear large till you stand close beside them, and then you realize their extent and your littleness. {591}As at Abydos and Denderah the walls of the temple, the faces of the pylons, the columns, the pillars, the sides of the encircling wall, everything and everywhere, were covered with sculptures. The most of the sculptures were battle scenes, but there were many that represented offerings to the deities. In the historical pictures the campaigns of the kings were represented, and one who has time and patience to study them can read the story of a campaign. Here the king is marching out with his army, and next he is attacking a fortress; next he is routing the enemy and driving them across a river; next he is returning in triumph, and there is a long series of the cities he passes through on his return.

On the front wall of a tower of a pylon, the king is represented striking off the heads of a group of captives, and these representations are so frequent as to make it pretty certain that the Egyptians were accustomed to offer human sacrifices. The hands, and sometimes other portions of the bodies of the slain enemies, are cut off and piled before the king; and some of the pictures are of a kind that could hardly be reproduced in a family album of the present time. The king is nearly always represented of much greater stature than those that surround him, and the Egyptians were generally so doubtful of the faces of their rulers reaching posterity, that they were careful to engrave their names on most of the pictures and to detail the incidents described.

This temple was not the work of one but of several kings, and there is a chronological difference of two hundred and fifty years between the earliest and latest sculptures. There is much dispute as to the antiquity of the edifice, but it is generally conceded to have been completed not less than fifteen centuries before the Christian era.

One of our visits was made by moonlight, and the effect of light and shade, especially in the great hall, was beautiful beyond description, and therefore I forbear attempting to describe it We disturbed several jackals and bats, the only occupants of the ruins.

There is an Arab village close to the temple, but it does not extend into the great structure. The water of the Nile enters {592}the ruins at the time of the inundation, and is eating away the base of the columns, so that several have fallen from its effects. The Egyptian architects, while producing magnificent superstructures, were curiously negligent of the foundations.

On the west bank of the Nile are several temples, the most prominent of them being the Memnonium or Rameseum, and Med in et Aboo.

Both were on the same general plan of Egyptian temples, and second only to Karnak in greatness; there are other temples around here--half a dozen or more--and each has its peculiar historical and religious sculptures covering the walls.

In the court yard of the Rameseum is an overturned and broken statue of Rameses III, the builder of the temple. It was destroyed by the Persians at the time of the invasion of Egypt, but they did not succeed in obliterating it. The figure was a sitting one like many of the statues of Egypt. The throne and legs were reduced to comparatively small fragments, but the upper part, broken at the waist, lies comparatively perfect and enables us to judge of the great size of the figure. It is not sufficient to say that it was the largest statue ever hewn from a single block and transported two or three hundred miles. It is calculated to have weighed (when entire) not far from nine hundred tons. It was nearly twenty feet across the shoulders of the statue, and the foot of the figure was eleven feet from toe to heel. From the shoulder to the elbow was nearly five yards, and the other measurements were in proportion.

On the plain toward the river and quite a distance in front of the Rameseum are the sitting Colossi. They were made to represent one of the Kings, and one at least was cut from a single block. The height of the figures is about fifty feet, and they originally had pedestals ten feet high. The soil has risen considerably since their erection and is now about seven feet above their base.

There they sit as they have sat for centuries looking out upon the plain of Thebes and across the Nile to Luxor. What stories they might tell were they possessed of memory and the power of articulation; more than thirty centuries of the world’s history rest behind those stony lips; more than three thousand years have come and gone since first {593}these forms were fashioned.

History and tradition say that sounds issued from it when the rays of the rising sun fell upon its face; one authority says these sounds were musical, and others that they resembled the snapping of a bow-string or a blow upon a piece of metal. The statue was very fastidious in its youth, and many times when distinguished persons came {595}hands of man and placed where we find them to-day. The city they once adorned has crumbled to dust and disappeared, and they sit alone and uncared for, save when some passing stranger drawn by curiosity comes and gazes irreverently upon them and glances at the ground they have watched and guarded so long.

One of these statues is the famous Vocal Memnon which orators and poets have frequently drawn upon for illustrations and {596}from distant lands to see it, not a sound could be heard from it. Sometimes when Grand Moguls like the Emperor Hadrian and other heavy swells came along it was more complaisant, and ventured to let itself out, and on a few occasions it even sounded twice, a circumstance which ought to have been regarded with more suspicion than the absence of a date to Mr. Pickwick’s note announcing his non-return to dinner.

There can be but little doubt that the sound was a trick of the priests, as there is a stone in the lap of the statue and behind it is a niche where a person could be completely concealed from the view of the crowd below.

We hired an Arab to climb up and strike the stone, and we had the performance not only once but half a dozen times, all for half a franc for the entire party, or less than a third of a cent each. Some things are dearer now than in the olden time, but the Memnon business is cheaper. Two thousand years ago you had to be there at sunrise and sometimes you had to go two or three days in succession, before you heard the sound, as the priest who struck the stone would happen to be off on a drunk or neglecting his business. But now a little “backsheesh” will settle the matter at any hour of the day and it would keep on a week if you were willing to pay for the fun.

We spent a day among the tombs of the Kings, which are in a valley four or five miles back from the river; there are lots of tombs there, fifty or more, some of them being the burial places of the kings, and others those of queens, of priests, of common people, and even of cats, dogs, ibises, crocodiles, and other beasts, birds, and reptiles.

I have said fifty, I might better have said there are four times that number as nobody seems to know how many tombs there are in the hills back of Thebes, and every one admits they are very extensive.

The most interesting are the tombs of the Kings, and also those of the priests; we entered half a dozen of the first and one of the latter and made as thorough an investigation as was possible. Some were discovered by Bruce and some by Belzoni, and some by more modern explorers. Every few years a fresh tomb is opened and important revelations are made. Any person who {597}wishes to dig among these tombs can obtain the permission of the proper authorities and an officer will be sent to superintend his work and see that he gives a proper account of the treasures he finds. Most of the tombs that have been opened have been stripped of their contents and nothing remains except the mural sculptures and paintings. Some of these are of a most exquisite character and show that the Egyptians were well advanced in the art of drawing. The tombs consist of long passages cut into the rock, some of them horizontal; some descending and some with one, two, or it may be half a dozen lateral chambers and apartments. Passages, halls, and chambers are all decorated with the same profusion as are the temples, and in some of them the colors are laid on with great care. Egyptian life and its manners and customs, the arms and implements in use, the employments of the people, their religious belief, the ceremonies of burial, and many other things can be learned by a study of these tombs, and they have probably been more useful in this respect than have the temples, which are generally devoted to religious subjects and incidents in the life of the King whom they commemorate.

We lighted them up with candles and magnesium wire; we wandered through the halls and chambers, and we took lunch one day in the entrance of a tomb which was once the post-mortem house of Rameses III. Did the old fellow ever suspect that a party of travellers would in the present century devour cold chicken and ham sandwiches, and smoke cigars and pipes and cigarettes at his door?

Most of the tombs that have been opened have been found rifled of their valuables, and the modern explorer has to be contented with the granite coffins, and is very fortunate if he can find a royal mummy. M. Mariette discovered and opened in 1859 the coffin of Queen Aah Hotep, which contained a remarkable collection of jewelry.

She is thought to have been one of the Queens of the XVIIIth Dynasty, and to have lived about thirty-five hundred years ago. There were bracelets and other ornaments of lapis lazuli, carnelian, feldspar, and turquoise set in gold, and there was a gold chain nearly a yard long and framed of fine wire intricately woven. {598}The collection was in the Paris exhibition of ‘67, where it took the prize. The French jewellers said it would be difficult for them with all their skill to mend this chain if it were broken, and they admitted that the goldsmith’s art in the days of Queen Aah Hotep was little inferior to that of to-day.

The body of an Egyptian was prepared for burial by the removal of the brains, intestines, and viscera generally; it was then soaked in nitre for seventy days, and afterwards filled with salt and aromatic herbs. It was then carefully bandaged, every finger and toe being separately wrapped, and there is not a bandage known to modern surgery with which the Egyptians were not familiar. The bandages were soaked in preservative gums and the body thus carefully prepared was placed in a wooden coffin, shaped to the body, and covered with hieroglyphics, which were generally passages from the Book of the Dead. Then this was placed in a stone coffin, this again in a larger one, and sometimes the whole was enclosed in another. The number of the coffins and the care of preparations depended upon the rank and wealth of the deceased very much as do the funeral ceremonies of today. The jewels of the deceased were enclosed with him, and this practice has led to the opening of so many tombs since the decline of the ancient Empire.

You can buy whole mummies, or parts of them, of the Arabs, around Thebes, but they are all the remains of common people. The supply of Kings was limited from the outset and has long been exhausted. The demand is far greater than the supply. I asked repeatedly for a king or for a live mummy, but in every instance was told that I could not be gratified I would give a good deal for a genuine monarch, and was in the market for one all the time I was at Luxor, but in vain.

All the way back to the river the Arabs kept near us trying to sell antiquities, but we were not inclined to purchase. One fellow had a mummy head that had a remarkably fresh look, and I was told by the dragoman that when the supply of mummies runs short, the natives dig up the skulls and arms from their own cemeteries and offer them for sale. I accused this merchant of endeavoring to dispose of the head of his grandfather, but he denied the imputation, and said it was a real mummy. I promised {599}him a piastre if he would walk by the side of the “Doubter” and continue to offer the head to him all the way back to the river, and to assist the offer by holding the skull in front of the old fellow’s face.

He earned his money, and the “Doubter” afterward said that he never saw an Arab so persistent as that one. I was sorry that we could not hire the native to go along with us and keep his bone-yard ever in view of our crusty and penurious companion.

The road from the tombs to the river winds among the limestone hills, and in the middle of the day the heat is great. Rain falls here very rarely, but there are indications of great torrents through these ravines at some remote day.

Rain was evidently not unknown to the ancients, as the temples of Denderah and other places were supplied with water spouts to carry off the showers that evidently fell there.

We crossed the river in a small boat. The water is shallow at the shore on the western bank and we had to be carried to and from the boat. The Arabs transported us with ease, and were rewarded very fairly for their work, but of course they wanted more. Some of them handled their burdens very carefully, and others tumbled them in with little ceremony. The Judge came in over the side much like a sack of wheat, and went into a lump at the bottom of the boat. He was rather disconcerted at the performance as it rended his already dilapidated garments and caused him to seek the seclusion of his own room as soon as we were on board the steamer. Another of the party was dropped into the water but was saved without any worse mishap than a good wetting and a provocation to profanity.

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