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CHAPTER XIII
ALL ABOUT OUR VISIT TO THE PYRAMID OF CHEOPS
During the first three days in Cairo a brilliant and original plan of action had been outlining itself in my mind. At last I could not keep it to myself any longer, so I told Mr. Peasley.
"Do you know what I am going to do?" I asked.
Mr. Peasley did not.
"I am going to write up the Pyramids. I am going to tell who built them and how long it took and how many blocks of stone they contain. I shall have myself photographed sitting on a camel and holding an American flag. Also, I shall describe in detail the emotions that surge within me as I stand in the shadow of the Sphinx and gaze up at that vast and imperturbable expanse of face."
"It's a great scheme," said Mr. Peasley, "but you've been scooped. They've been written up already."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes, sir; the whole outfit of Pyramids has been described in a special article by a man named Herodotus."
"How long since?"
"About 470 B.C."
He produced a guide book and proved that he was right. All the things that I had been getting ready to say about the Pyramids had been said by Herodotus. He had got there ahead of me – just 2376 years ahead of me. In daily newspaper competition, when some man gets his news twenty-four hours ahead of another one he is proud of his "beat" and is the hero of the office for fifteen or twenty minutes. But think of trailing along twenty-four centuries behind a Greek space writer! It took all the starch out of me.
Mr. Peasley suggested that inasmuch as considerable time had elapsed since the appearance of the first write-up, possibly the average reader would have only a dim recollection of it and accept my account as brand new stuff. But I knew better. I knew that some old subscriber, with a complete file put away in the bureau, would rise up and draw the deadly parallel on me. All I can safely do in regard to the Pyramids is touch up a few points overlooked by my predecessor.
Herodotus, by the way, had quite a time in Egypt. At that time Shepheard's Hotel was not in operation, although it must have been under way, and no round trip tickets were being issued by Cook, so Herodotus had to do his own booking and put up at a boarding house. In Memphis, which is now a fragmentary suburb of Cairo, Herodotus engaged a guide. He does not tell us what he paid, but he does give us a line on the character of the dragoman, who was full of superfluous and undesirable information, but who fell down when asked to divulge facts of real importance. This proves that the breed has not changed since 500 B.C.
The guide took Herodotus out to the Pyramids and filled him up. It is now believed that most of what Herodotus sent back was merely hearsay, but it made good reading. The Pyramids had been standing some two thousand years, and any information in regard to their origin could hardly come under the head of personal recollections. Whatever Herodotus had to say about the Pyramids is now accepted as gospel, in spite of the fact that he never saw them until twenty centuries after the last block of stone had been put in place and Cheops had taken possession of the tomb chambers. Rather late for a grand opening.
When he arrived at the Great Pyramid he stepped it off and put down the dimensions, and then he remarked to some of the natives standing around that it must have been quite a job to build a tomb of that size. They said yes; it had been a big contract, and as the work had been completed only two thousand years they were enabled to go into details. They gave Herodotus a fine lay-out of round figures. They said that one hundred thousand men had worked on the job and that the time required was thirty years – ten years to build the road and the huge incline for bringing the blocks of stone into place, and then twenty years to quarry the stone and transport it across the Nile and the valley. The stone cutters worked all the year, and during the three months' inundation, when farming was at a standstill, the entire rural population turned out, just as they would at a husking bee or a barn raising, and helped Cheops with his tomb. They did this year after year for thirty years, until they had piled up 2,300,000 blocks of stone, each containing forty cubic feet.
Herodotus discovered some large hieroglyphics on the face of the Pyramid and asked the guide for a translation. It is now supposed that the guide could not read. Anyone with education or social standing wouldn't have been a guide, even in that remote period. But this guide wanted to appear to be earning his salary and be justified in demanding a tip, so he said that the inscription told how much garlic and onions the labourers had consumed while at work on the job, and just how much these had cost. Herodotus put it all down in his notebook without batting an eye.
"How much did they spend for onions and garlic?" he asked, poising his pencil.
The guide waited for a moment, so that his imagination could get a running start, and then he replied, "They cost 1600 talents of silver."
Now, that sum in talents is equivalent, under modern computation, to 350,000 English pounds, or $1,750,000. Think of a million dollars' worth of garlic! Try to imagine the bouquet that permeated the desert when one hundred thousand men who had been eating garlic began to call for more bricks and mortar!
Herodotus told his story and got away with it. By the time the next letter-writing traveller came along, a good many centuries later, the outer casing of the Pyramid had been stripped off and the inscription had disappeared. His story has stood because he was here ahead of the rest of us and saw the marks with his own eyes and had them translated by a ten-cent guide. But can you believe that a great monarch would devote thirty years and sacrifice thousands of lives and work the whole male population of his kingdom to skin and bones putting up a colossal sepulchre and then set aside the most valuable space on this glorious monument for telling how much onions and garlic had been fed to the help?
Marco Polo, Mark Twain, and all the other great travellers of history love to tell tall ones once in a while, but the garlic story by Herodotus will doubtless be regarded as a record performance for a long time to come.
Cheops was possibly the most successful contractor in history. It is estimated that he really did work one hundred thousand men in the building of the great Pyramid, as related by Herodotus, and that he must have devoted at least thirty years to the big undertaking. During all that time he never had a strike or even a clash with the walking delegate. The eight hour day was unknown, and no one dreamed of such a thing as an arbitration committee. All he had to do was to give orders and the entire population obeyed him. Everybody worked but Cheops. He didn't even pay salaries. It is true that in a spirit of generosity he set out a free lunch for the labourers – about $2,000,000 worth of garlic and onions. If he had tried to feed them on quail probably he would have gone broke.
Nowadays visitors go out to the Pyramids by tramcar. For some reason we had the notion, doubtless shared by many who have not been there, that to get to the Pyramids one simply rides through Cairo and out onto the flat desert. As a matter of fact, the Great Pyramid at Ghizeh, its two smaller companions and the Sphinx are on a rocky plateau five miles to the west of the city. There is a bee-line road across the lowlands. It is a wide and graded thoroughfare, set with acacia trees, and as you ride out by trolley or carriage you look up at the Pyramids, and when you are still three miles away they seem to be at least a half-mile distant. At the end of the avenue and at the foot of the hill there is a hotel, and from this point one may climb or else charter a dumb animal.
Not knowing the ropes, we engaged a carriage at 100 piastres to take us from the city out to the plateau. This is not as much as it sounds, but it is about twice the usual rate. After we struck the long road leading across the valley and saw the trolley cars gliding by and leaving us far behind, we decided to send the carriage back to the city and take to the trolley, where we would feel at home. The driver informed us that he could not return to the city, as the big bridge had been opened to permit the passing of boats, and that it would be three hours before he could drive back to town. It seems that he was right. The big bridge swings open but once a day, and then it stays open for a few hours, and the man who finds himself "bridged" must either swim or engage a boat.
It is a five minutes' climb from the end of the drive up to the rocky plateau on which the pyramids are perched, and the ordinary tourist goes afoot. But we were pining for Oriental extravagance and new sensations, so we engaged camels. The camel allotted to me was destitute of hair, and when first discovered was in a comatose condition. His or her name was Zenobia, and the brunette in charge said that its age was either six or sixty. It sounded more like "six," but the general appearance of the animal seemed to back up the "sixty" theory. As we approached, Zenobia opened one eye and took a hard look at the party, and then made a low wailing sound which doubtless meant "More trouble for me." The venerable animal creaked at every joint as it slowly rose into the air on the instalment plan, a foot or two at a time.
We had come thousands of miles to see the Pyramids, and for the next ten minutes we were so busy hanging on to those undulating ships of the desert that we overlooked even the big Pyramid, which was spread out before us 750 feet wide and 450 feet high. Riding a camel is like sitting on a high trestle that is giving way at the joints and is about to collapse. The distance to the ground is probably ten feet, but you seem to be fifty feet in the air. As soon as we could escape from the camels we walked around and gazed in solemn silence at the Sphinx and the three Pyramids and doubtless thought all of the things that were appropriate to the time and place.
The great Pyramid of Cheops has been advertised so extensively that doubtless many people will be surprised to learn that there is a whole flock of Pyramids on this plateau along the edge of the Libyan desert. There are Pyramids to the north and Pyramids to the south, five groups in all, sixty of them, and they vary in size from a stingy little mound looking like an extinct lime kiln up to the behemoth specimen which is photographed by every Cook tourist.
Why do these Pyramids vary so greatly in size? Each was built by some royal personage as an enduring monument to his administration and the last resting place of his remains. The most eminent students of Egyptology now agree that the size of each of these Pyramids is a fair measure of the length of each king's reign. The reason that Cheops has the biggest Pyramid is that he held office longer than the others. When a king mounted the throne, if he was feeling rugged and was what an insurance company would call a "preferred risk" he would block out the foundation of a Pyramid tomb that would require, say, ten years for the building. If, at the end of ten years, he was still feeling in good physical condition and confident of lasting a while longer he would widen the foundations and put on additional layers up to the summit. Labor was free and materials were cheap, and he kept everybody working on his tomb as long as he lived. Finally, when the court physicians began to warn him that his time was limited, he would begin putting on the outer coating of dressed stone and arrange for the inscriptions. The ruler who lasted only three or four years was buried in a squatty little Pyramid, which soon became hidden under the drifting sands of the desert. Cheops kept piling up the huge blocks for thirty years, and that is why his Pyramid holds the record. If Methusaleh had been a Pyramid builder he would have been compelled to put up a tomb probably a mile and a half high and about eleven miles around the base. In a revolutionary South American republic the ruler would probably get no further than laying the corner stone.
We visited the pyramids. Also, we looked at the golf links, staked out across the barren sands – not to be played on, but merely to be featured in the hotel advertisement. Think of a golf course which is one huge hazard! Drive the ball in any direction and you can't play out of the sand! Forty centuries gazing down on a bow-legged tourist in fuzzy Scotch stockings!
Most of the pleasure seekers that we encountered in the neighbourhood of the Pyramids seemed to be quite elderly – some of the more sprightly as young as sixty, and from that going up to where it would be better to stop guessing. Mr. Peasley gave an explanation of their presence. He said that the dry climate of Egypt would preserve antiquities for an indefinite period.
Here they were, these male and female octogenarians, not propped up in arm chairs dividing the family silverware and arranging bequests to hospitals and libraries, but out on the blinding desert, thousands of miles from home, falling off donkeys, climbing up on camels, devouring guide books, rummaging around for time tables, kicking on the charges, and leading on the whole a life of purple strenuosity. We heard of two English women, sisters, both over seventy, who had just returned from Khartoum, from which point they had gone on a hunting expedition still further into the interior. They had to wear mosquito bags and semi-male attire, and were out in the wild country for days at a time, chasing gazelles, hyenas, and other indigenous fauna.
Just as I am about to conclude this treatise it occurs to me that, although I have given a wealth of useful information regarding the Pyramids, I have rather overlooked our old friend the Sphinx. I can only say in passing that it looks exactly like the printed advertisements. There is no deception about it. It is in a bad state of repair, but this is not surprising when we consider its age. Herodotus does not mention the Sphinx. It was right there at the time. In fact, it had been there fourteen hundred years when he first arrived. It seems strange that an observing traveller should have overlooked a monument sixty-six feet high, with a face nearly fourteen feet wide, a nose five feet and seven inches long, and wearing a smile that measures over seven feet! Herodotus either walked by without seeing it or else he did not think it worthy of mention. The only plausible explanation is that he was too busy figuring up the garlic statistics.
ON THE NILE
CHAPTER XIV
DASHING UP THE NILE IN COMPANY WITH MR. PEASLEY AND OTHERS
The dream of many years has come true. We are moving (southward) up the Nile. Like busy sand flies we are flitting, almost daily, across white patches of desert to burrow into second-hand tombs and crick our necks looking up at mutilated temples.
Ten years ago not one of us had ever heard of Koti or Khnemhotep. Now we refer to them in the most casual way, as if we had roomed with them for a while. It is certainly a gay life we are leading over the cemetery circuit. Just think what rollicking fun it must be to revel day after day in sarcophagi and sepulchres, stumbling through subterranean passages and kicking up the dust of departed kings, peering down into mummy pits, also trying to stretch the imagination like a rubber band so that we may get the full significance of what is meant by 1500 B.C. People come to Egypt to cure nervous depression and then spend nine-tenths of their time hanging around tombs. Why come all the way to Egypt? Why not go out to Woodlawn and run foot races from one family vault to another?
Mr. Peasley has no use for the tombs we have seen up to date. At Beni-Hassan we rode on donkeys and climbed hills for half an hour to inspect several large cubes of dim atmosphere surrounded by limestone. At Assiut we put in the best part of the afternoon toiling up to another gloomy cavern. While we stood in the main chamber of the tomb of Hapzefai (whoever he was), trying to pump up some enthusiasm, Mr. Peasley mopped his brow and declared himself.
"I'll tell you what I can do," he said. "I can take a hundred pounds of dynamite and a gang of dagoes and go anywhere along the Hudson and blow out a tomb in a week's time that will beat anything we've seen in Egypt. Then I'll hire a boy with a markin' brush to draw some one-legged men and some tall women with their heads turned the wrong way, and I'll charge six dollars to go in, and make my fortune."
The significance of the "six dollars" is that every traveller who wishes to visit the antiquities must pay a government tax of 120 piastres. He receives a "monument ticket," which he must show to the guard before entering any tomb or temple. I regret to say that the tickets are often passed along by departing travellers to those newly arrived, and as the guards do not read English, anything that looks like a monument ticket will satisfy the man at the door. At Beni-Hassan Mr. Peasley discovered, when he arrived at the tombs, that he had left his ticket at the boat. Fortunately, a fellow traveller had an extra ticket with him and Mr. Peasley had no difficulty in gaining admission to all the tombs under the name of "Miss Ella McPherson."
Before plunging into the details of our voyage, it is only fair that the indulgent reader should know how and why we came boating up the Nile. And first of all he should know something about this wonderful river. The Nile has been described one million times, at a rough guess, and yet at the risk of dealing out superfluous information I am going to insert some geography.
Total length, nearly four thousand miles. For thousands and thousands of years it has supported a swarming population along its banks, and yet until fifty years ago no one knew from whence it came. The inhabitants suspected that it came from somewhere, but they were too busy paying taxes and building pyramids to worry about scientific discoveries. For 1200 miles up stream from the delta outlet the Nile does not receive any tributary. It winds over a limestone base and through a rainless desert between high and barren tablelands. Occasionally, where there is a granite formation, the stream is narrowed and forces its way through rushing rapids, and these are known as the "cataracts." The first of these is at Assouan, about six hundred miles up stream.
Assouan has for many centuries marked the border line of Egypt proper. To the south is the land of the warlike blacks, who have been trouble-makers from the beginning of time. This First Cataract is the usual terminus of tourist travel, but those who wish to see Nubia and the Soudan board a small steamer, pass through the locks of the new dam, and go by river 210 miles to Wadi Halfa, thence by rail 576 miles to Khartoum. It is here, about thirteen hundred and fifty miles up stream, that the White and Blue Niles converge and bring down from the rainy equatorial regions the floods of muddy water which are the annual salvation of Egypt.
Ten years ago Khartoum seemed as inaccessible as the North Pole. It was headquarters for the most desperate swarm of frenzied fanatics that ever swept a region with fire and sword. They had wiped out British armies and put Gordon's head on a pole. They were in a drunken ecstasy of Mohammedan zeal, eager to fight and ready to die, and they got all that they were looking for.
It is less than eight years since Kitchener went down to call on them. Of all the cold-blooded and frozen-featured military tacticians of the inexorable school, Kitchener stands pre-eminent. General Grant in his grimmest moment was absolutely emotional and acrobatic as compared with Kitchener. He carried ice water in his veins, and his mental machinery ticked with Birmingham regularity. He did not get excited and dash into the open trap, as all the others had done. He moved slowly but relentlessly into the dread country and built a railroad as he went along. He carried everything that a British army needs – marmalade, polo ponies, Belfast ginger ale, tinned meats, pipe clay, etc.
"We cannot stampede them, because stampeding is their specialty," said Kitchener, "but I will lick them by algebra."
He did not say this, because he never said anything, but this is what he indicated by his calm preparations. He knew that the dervishes were frothing at the mouth and praying Allah to give them another chance to swim in gore, so he simply edged up to within striking distance of them and picked out his ground and waited. A kinetoscope hero would have galloped up and down the line shouting, "Up, men, and at them!" But Kitchener was not a hero. He was business manager of an abattoir. His object was not to win a great battle, but to exterminate a species. And he probably did one of the neatest jobs of house cleaning on record.
The bloodthirsty mob, led by the Khalifa, as principal maniac, charged across an open plain. Each determined dervish carried in his right hand a six foot spear, with which he hoped to do considerable damage. When he still lacked about a mile of being within poking distance of the hated infidel, the machine guns opened up and began to sweep the plain back and forth in long regular swaths, just as the sickle sweeps through the yellow grain. It was quite a handicap for the invincible children of Allah. They could not use their six foot spears on anyone a mile away, and before they could recover from the chagrin occasioned by this unexpected move on the part of the enemy, about eleven thousand of them had winged their way to eternal happiness and the others were radiating in all directions, pursued by those who wished to civilise them and bring them under British control. Those of the dervishes who escaped are supposed to be still running. At least they never came back to start another Messiah movement.
Ten years ago the Soudan was sealed to the whole world and death waited for the unbeliever who crossed the border. To-day the table d'hôte roams unafraid, and the illustrated post card blooms even as the rose.
The Nile of which you have read and along which are scattered the simon pure monuments of antiquity is the six hundred miles of winding river between Assouan, or First Cataract, and the sea. For the entire distance, until it spreads into a fan-shaped delta and filters into the Mediterranean, the stream is walled in by flat-topped hills of barren aspect. They are capped with limestone and carpeted about with shifting sands, and they look for all the world like the mesas of New Mexico and Arizona, for they lie baking in the same kind of clarified sunshine. This meandering hollow between the rugged hill ranges is the Valley of the Nile. Here and there the hills close in until the river banks are high and chalky cliffs. At one point the valley spreads to a width of thirty-three miles.
East and west of the hills are vast areas of desert without even a spear of vegetation except where there is a miraculous rise of water to the surface. These spots are grateful landmarks of clustered palms and are known as oases.
The Valley of the Nile would be just as bare and monotonous as an asphalt pavement were it not for the fact that once a year the Nile overflows. It has been overflowing every year for thousands of years, bringing down from the mountains of Abyssinia and the far-away regions of tropical rains a spreading volume of muddy water. Every winter, when the dwindling stream gets back into the customary bed, it has left a layer of black sediment over the inundated district. So many layers of sediment have been deposited that now the rich black soil is thirty to fifty feet deep along the river, thinning out as it meets the slope of the desert. Unlike our prairie soil of the Middle West, the Nile farms are not underlaid with clay. The Nile soil is black all the way down to limestone – a floury mineral powder of even composition. The only parts of Egypt which can be cultivated are those touched by the annual overflow. Egypt is really a ribbon of alluvial soil following the stream on either side. The tourist standing on the top deck of a Nile steamer can see both east and west the raw and broken edges of the desert.
The entire population lives on the river, literally and figuratively. Dark-robed women come down to the stream in endless processions to fill their water jars, and it seems that about every forty feet or so all the way up from Cairo the industrious fellah is lifting water up the bank and irrigating his little field with the same old-fashioned sweep and bucket arrangement that was in use when Joseph came over to Egypt and attracted the attention of Potiphar's wife. The Egyptian farmer is called a fellah. The clothing that he wears would wad a gun – that is, a rifle, not a shotgun. He puts in at least fourteen hours a day and his pay is from ten to fifteen cents. Mr. Peasley told a tourist the other day that the song "He's a jolly good fellah" originated in Egypt during the time of the Ptolemies. This is a sample of the kind of idiotic observation that is supposed to enliven a so-called pleasure trip.
But let us get back to the river, for in Egypt one must get back to the river at least once every twenty minutes. The Nile is Egypt and Egypt is the Nile. All this description may sound like a few pages from the trusty red guide book, and yet the word "Egypt" will have no meaning to the reader who does not get a clear panoramic vision of this wonderfully slim-waisted country. Nearly six hundred miles long and yet containing only twelve thousand five hundred square miles – about the size of Maryland.
The strip of black land which yields the plentiful crops is nowhere more than ten miles wide, a mere fringe of fertility weaving along through dryness and desolation. Anywhere along the river if you will climb to the rocky plateau, you will see the slow moving river, probably a half-mile wide, as a glassy thread on which are strung fields of living green, bordered by the dreary uplifts of desert. The traveller who goes by boat from Cairo to Assouan sees all of Egypt. The cities and temples and tombs of olden times were perched on the high spots or planted in the bare hills, so as to be safe from the annual rise of waters. Anything worth seeing in the whole country is within an easy donkey ride of the river bank. The river is the only artery of travel. There is a railway, but it follows the river all the way up to Assouan.
It would seem that the country was especially laid out and punctuated with "sights" for the convenience of the modern traveller, for the visitor who goes up the Nile and stops off at the right spots can do a clean job of sight seeing without doubling on his tracks.
Until a few years age the tourist going up the Nile had to take a dahabeah. This sounds like the name of a disease, but it is really a big, roomy, flat-bottomed sailboat. The dahabeah moves only when the wind is in the right direction, and to go from Cairo to Assouan requires the greater part of a lifetime. Those travellers who have money to burn and who are content to settle down to many weeks of rest and indolence charter the private dahabeahs. When a traveller goes aboard a dahabeah he tears up the calendar and lets his watch run down. Those who have more money and are in a hurry use the private steam dahabeahs.
A majority of travellers go by passenger boats. The tourist steamers devote three weeks to a loafing voyage up to Assouan and back, with daily excursions to the graveyards and ruins. The express steamers, carrying freight and native passengers, take less time for the round trip, as they skip some of the less interesting antiquities. We took an express steamer, thereby missing many of the tombs and temples, but still getting enough of them to last us for the next hundred years or so.
Our steamer is a frail affair, double decked and of no draught worth mentioning. It resembles the old style of Missouri River boat, built to run on a heavy dew. There are thirty passengers, who devote most of their time to lolling on deck waiting for the next meal. Mud banks, natives hoisting water, green fields stretching away to the bald range of hills, 'dobe huts, spindly palms, now and then a solemn row of camels, always several donkeys and goats in evidence, every few miles the tall stack of a sugar mill, perpetual sunshine – it is monotonous travel, and yet there is continually something doing along the banks, and the traveller cannot get away from that feeling of satisfaction which results from lying back to watch other people work.
And the sunsets! You cannot estimate the real dignity and artistic value of a camel until you see him or her silhouetted against a sky of molten gold just at twilight. I have made two or three attempts to describe the glory of a sunset in the desert, but I find myself as helpless as Mr. Peasley, who, after gazing for five minutes at the flaming horizon can only murmur a low but reverent "Gosh!"
It may interest the reader to hear what Baedeker has to say on the subject. Baedeker says (p. 216) "The sunsets are very fine." That's what I like about Baedeker. He doesn't fuss over a lot of words and tack on superfluous adjectives. As soon as he has imparted the necessary information in a trim and concise manner he moves on to the next subject.
I am sending herewith two sketches which show the beauty and variety of landscape to which we are treated every day. View No. 1 is most characteristic. We see before us the rippling Nile and beyond it the sheer river bank of black dirt. Then the field of waving grain, in the distance the range of hills, and over all a dazzling sunshine.
No. 2 is more varied. Again we have the river, the mud bank, and the growing crops, together with the distant hills, behind which the sun is silently sinking. In the foreground at the left is a majestic palm. The structure at the right is a native house and will indicate something of the simple life of the agriculturist. The complicated device on the river bank at stage centre is the shadouf, used for lifting water from the stream. The cavernous opening in the distant hill (marked X in the drawing) is the entrance to a rock tomb. By studying this picture the reader may get a very fair understanding of the architectural splendour of these ancient sepulchres.
