Queer Things About Egypt | Page 2

no yellow fever, no malaria, not one of
the pestilences of miasma to throw a shadow on the sport and gaiety at
its Cataract Hotel. Luxor, that has never known a winter, has a Winter
Palace—a hotel on the same palatial scale. At the one, the northerner,
flying from winter, can have his golf, his Tennis , his croquet, his
riding, and his sailing, in the most perfect winter climate in the world;
at the other he can wander through the most extensive ruins of antiquity
in the next most perfect climate. If he is satisfied with sunshine,
without uniformity of temperature, in Cairo he can have the gayest of
winter Society, combined with all sorts of sport and the contemplation
of monuments innumerable in a mediæval Arabian city—the capital
of the Caliphs, against whom the Crusades were waged.
Of all the climates of the world there is none to equal the winter climate
of Upper Egypt: it is so dry, so genial, so equable, so wedded to blue
skies and pageants of sunrise and sunset.
Such is the call of Egypt's climate. There remains the call of the
Motherland.
I do not mean by this that any of us—except perhaps the not too
reputable gipsies—are descended from the Ancient Egyptians, or that
our countries were colonised by them. Not one inch of Europe was ever
included in the Empire of the greatest of the Pharaohs. But civilisation
makes us all one country, and civilisation was born in Egypt. There is
no historical and attested antiquity to compare with that of Egypt and
Chaldæa. The Chinese and Japanese use large figures; but their proofs

get shaky no further back than the Middle Ages. The world-power of
Babylon was as short-lived as that of Athens. But in Egypt we have
documentary proofs for at least five thousand years. We need take
nothing from hearsay; for in their marvellous system of hieroglyphics
the Pharaohs and their subjects wrote on every temple and tomb the
date and circumstances of its erection, the story of its founder, and the
uses to which it was to be put. The Carthaginians and Etruscans frankly
borrowed their civilisation from the Egyptians—many of their tombs
might have been hewn out by Egyptian artificers, and they are rich in
Egyptian jewels and implements. Through them, as well as direct, the
Greeks and Romans felt the influences of Egypt.
Of what character are the remains left by the Pharaohs in the fifty
centuries during which they were laying the basis of civilisation?
Tombs and temples, and the tiniest minutiæ of household implements
and personal ornaments, but hardly one house that was not built of mud.
From their houses we learn little except the antiquity of the vaulted
ceiling. All we know of their dwellings we learn from their tombs,
when they had left off building mountains of stone, and taken to
hewing mausoleums—some of the dimensions of cathedrals—out of
the living rock. It would be worth while going to Egypt, were it only to
see the tombs of the Pharaohs at Thebes, and of their viziers at
Memphis, which have the whole life of ancient Egypt illuminated on
their smooth limestone walls, and have yielded furniture (put into them
for the use of the doubles of the dead) which helps us to picture almost
every detail in the domestic life of ancient Egypt.
For perfect preservation the temples of Egypt have no rivals among
monuments of high antiquity. If the religion of the Pharaohs were to be
revived the Edfu temple would only need the attentions of the
upholsterer. For majesty, the ruins of others, such as Karnak's, a mile
and a half round, are hard to match, and they possess the extraordinary
interest of having all their uses marked in plain figures on their walls.
Everything has its hieroglyphic explanation painted on it.
There are few more impressive moments in your life than when you
enter for the first time a perfect temple of ancient Egypt, with every

foot of its vast interior sculptured and painted with the mythologies of
gods and men.
There are some—and I am one of them—who feel the call of the City
of the Caliphs as strongly as the call of the temples of Karnak and
tombs of Thebes. In the Arab city at Cairo you seem to be walking in
Bagdad or Granada and back in the Middle Ages. There is such a
bewildering succession of antique mosques, tombs, palaces, fountains,
and baths, culminating in the domed and minareted tombs of the
Caliphs on the edge of the Eastern Desert and the mosque-crowned
citadel of Saladin.
That is the white side of the shield. If the Egyptian had as much sense
as the Greek—out of Greece—there would be no other. The Greek
knows when he