Meanwhile, instead of the little island that I knew, and thought a little paradise breathing out enchantment in the midst of titanic sterility, I found a something diseased. Philae now, when out of the water, as it was all the time when I was last in Egypt, looks like a thing stricken with some creeping malady--one of those maladies which begin in the lower members of a body, and work their way gradually but inexorably upward to the trunk, until they attain the heart.
I came to it by the desert, and descended to Shellal--Shellal with its railway-station, its workmen's buildings, its tents, its dozens of screens to protect the hewers of stone from the burning rays of the sun, its bustle of people, of overseers, engineers, and workmen, Egyptian, Nubian, Italian, and Greek. The silence I had known was gone, though the desert lay all around--the great sands, the great masses of granite that look as if patiently waiting to be fashioned into obelisks, and sarcophagi, and statues. But away there across the bend of the river, dominating the ugly rummage of this intrusive beehive of human bees, sheer grace overcoming strength both of nature and human nature, rose the fabled "Pharaoh's Bed"; gracious, tender, from Shellal most delicately perfect, and glowing with pale gold against the grim background of the hills on the western shore. It seemed to plead for mercy, like something feminine threatened with outrage, to protest through its mere beauty, as a woman might protest by an attitude, against further desecration.
And in the distance the Nile roared through the many gates of the dam, making answer to the protest.
What irony was in this scene! In the old days of Egypt Philae was sacred ground, was the Nile-protected home of sacerdotal mysteries, was a veritable Mecca to the believers in Osiris, to which it was forbidden even to draw near without permission. The ancient Egyptians swore solemnly "By him who sleeps in Philae." Now they sometimes swear angrily at him who wakes in, or at least by, Philae, and keeps them steadily going at their appointed tasks. And instead of it being forbidden to draw near to a sacred spot, needy men from foreign countries flock thither in eager crowds, not to worship in beauty, but to earn a living wage.
And "Pharaoh's Bed" looks out over the water and seems to wonder what will be the end.
I was glad to escape from Shellal, pursued by the shriek of an engine announcing its departure from the station, glad to be on the quiet water, to put it between me and that crowd of busy workers. Before me I saw a vast lake, not unlovely, where once the Nile flowed swiftly, far off a grey smudge--the very damnable dam. All around me was a grim and cruel world of rocks, and of hills that look almost like heaps of rubbish, some of them grey, some of them in color so dark that they resemble the lava torrents petrified near Catania, or the "Black Country" in England through which one rushes on one's way to the north. Just here and there, sweetly almost as the pink blossoms of the wild oleander, which I have seen from Sicilian seas lifting their heads from the crevices of sea rocks, the amber and rosy sands of Nubia smiled down over grit, stone, and granite.
The setting of Philae is severe. Even in bright sunshine it has an iron look. On a grey or stormy day it would be forbidding or even terrible. In the old winters and springs one loved Philae the more because of the contrast of its setting with its own lyrical beauty, its curious tenderness of charm--a charm in which the isle itself was mingled with its buildings. But now, and before my boat had touched the quay, I saw that the island must be ignored--if possible.
The water with which it is entirely covered during a great part of the year seems to have cast a blight upon it. The very few palms have a drooping and tragic air. The ground has a gangrened appearance, and much of it shows a crawling mass of unwholesome-looking plants, which seem crouching down as if ashamed of their brutal exposure by the receded river, and of harsh and yellow-green grass, unattractive to the eyes. As I stepped on shore I felt as if I were stepping on disease. But at least there were the buildings undisturbed by any outrage. Again I turned toward "Pharaoh's Bed," toward the temple standing apart from it, which already I had seen from the desert, near Shellal, gleaming with its gracious sand-yellow, lifting its series of straight lines of masonry above the river and the rocks, looking, from a distance, very simple, with a simplicity like that of clear water, but as enticing as the light on the first real day of spring.
I went first to "Pharaoh's Bed."
Imagine a woman with a perfectly lovely face, with features as exquisitely proportioned as those, say, of Praxiteles's statue of the Cnidian Aphrodite, for which King Nicomedes was willing to remit the entire national debt of Cnidus, and with a warmly white rose-leaf complexion--one of those complexions one sometimes sees in Italian women, colorless, yet suggestive almost of glow, of purity, with the flame of passion behind it. Imagine that woman attacked by a malady which leaves her features exactly as they were, but which changes the color of her face--from the throat upward to just beneath the nose-- from the warm white to a mottled, greyish hue. Imagine the line that would seem to be traced between the two complexions--the mottled grey below the warm white still glowing above. Imagine this, and you have "Pharaoh's Bed" and the temple of Philae as they are to-day.
