Edfu

I could hear the voices of the others getting fainter and fainter as they passed into a further hail of the temple. I could hear too, the confused jabber of the donkey-boys outside; they were playing a game of knucklebones in the sun-drenched sand; the donkeys were all tethered against a wall, and the blue-smocked boys sat round in a ring a little way off. Through the high gateway I could see two of them, who had been quarrelling, now rolling about in the sand, laughing, and the dust rising up like a whirlwind about their brown kicking legs.

I stood in the sun alone; that silent court with its austere colonnade was deserted by all but me. In one place a golden bank of sand showed above the wall of the temple and a yellow pariah dog stood on the top of the soft sloping mound. It was one of the usual thin dogs of Egypt, a forlorn race; it stretched itself, it scratched, suspiciously it looked at me again and finally lay down on the hot ground.

This temple, I remembered, was dedicated to Horus, the young sun-god. Here was still the golden sun, the golden sand, the golden-coloured walls, and above it was stretched the splendid blue of the African day. As I looked up I saw an eagle slowly wheeling round above; how solitary it looked in that empty sky with not a fleck of cloud! I leant against one of the sun-warmed columns covered with the cryptic signs of that vanished religion – the key of life, the key to the underworld – and watched the eagle swoop and swoop over the great wall; higher and lower it circled in smooth sweeps, its shadow crossing over the towers and the outer courts, over the passages, and over the dog that now lay, stretched out full-length, asleep.

All the voices have died away; even the donkey-boys are quiet at last. How heavy is the silence! Heavily the shadows lie in solemn lines across the ground, soft with dust like gold. Here in the brooding stillness of rich noonday I seem once more to be caught in one of those miraculous pauses in time when all the significance of a place is condensed and complete. ‘At this moment,’ I thought, ‘this place is my own. Nothing can take it from me.’

Again I looked round at the signs on the walls. For ever the same ideas! the same hopes and fears, then and now! Always the search for the key to true life, always the journey of the soul, always the altar-stone! My mind went back to the words of an Egyptian Jew with whom I had made friends on the boat on the way up the river. I was sitting on the deck turning over the leaves of a book of inscriptions when he passed near me. Glancing down at the page he stopped and said:

‘Shall I tell you what that means? It is a hymn to Ra written thirty centuries ago. It runs like this:

‘May I arrive at the land of eternity;
May I be united to the land of everlastingness!
Behold thou hast ordered it for me, my lord.
May I be joined with the shining beings, holy and perfect!
May I come forth with them to see thy beauties!’

He paused, then added with a half-smile: ‘That is my hope too, but I want to realize it here while I am living on this earth.’ I looked at him surprised; he didn’t seem of the stuff of which mystics are made; his plump broad face under his fez was decidedly devoid of expression. I had talked to him once or twice before and gathered that he was well off and had a house at Nice where he spent the winter. All the time, he said, he was ‘searching,’ and when I asked him for what exactly, he answered that he was always hoping to catch again the glimpses – which came to him only too rarely – of a world where all was coherent and all was one. Why did he prize this so much? I questioned; and he replied that since that consciousness had dawned upon him, nothing else in life appeared worth while. All the world now seemed but a shadow of that reality – transient and immaterial beside that concrete and convincing insight. Sometimes, he went on, he felt himself again upon the verge of the longed-for experience, and then it eluded him.

I thought Nice an odd place in which to wait for a revelation; but he answered that it made no difference where one was; he also spent a good deal of time at Monte Carlo. ‘Yes,’ he finished laughing, ‘even when I am at the roulette tables listening to the croupiers I remember and hope.’

Every man’s life-history, according to his idea, was prearranged; we were all launched upon the same journey, only some were more conscious of their destiny than others.

‘And should we all be preoccupied like you? so intent on this goal?’ I queried, for I felt a little oppressed by his urgent sense of fate.
He shrugged his shoulders.

‘If a man’s hand is put to the plough… Is not that in your scriptures? Yes, and it is true.’ I made no answer. Perhaps he read doubtfulness in my face. ‘We believe what we deserve to believe,’ he said with a sudden gesture of indifference and continued his march up and down the deck.

The thought of the Egyptian Jew kept coming into my mind now as I stood alone in the overflowing sunshine. It was very quiet there. A lizard ran in and out of the sun-baked stones in short darts and then lay for long dead pauses as still as the stones, with eye fixed and alert. Bees blundered about humming and seeking for flowers. One plant only at my feet offered them any blossom; the others were all ragged little weeds. But there was this one, spread over with flat white flowers, and on it reposed a silvery butterfly. It was large and frail; it lay there, spreading its gleaming wings of most delicately patterned grey. Wraith-like creature! I thought; wraith-like existence among those never-changing stones!

Presently a flock of little birds flew into the court, twittering and dusting themselves in the warm sand that rose round them in tiny golden eddies. Their busy twittering woke me out of my trance, and slowly I walked past them into the next hail where the columns stand in double rank on either side, and then into the further hall, each one growing darker than the one before, each with its shadows more velvety black than the last. Most sombre of all, however, were the priests’ chambers that held a shudder in their long-chilled air. I hurried through them, fearful of the wings of the bats flapping in the gloom of their ceilings, and came at last into the innermost place of all, a small sanctuary with its altar. Here the roof is painted a smoky hue and in the middle of the heavy darkness a square piece of black granite is set upon the floor; but the altar is empty, no god is worshipped here now.

Temple of Edfu

The massive outer walls of the temple are still whole at Edfu; one can look right down the open passages that run all the length of the building; one can walk unseen along those mighty corridors between calm golden walls incised with histories of gods and warriors and kings. There is no painting here, no colour but the scorched bright amber of the stone, and the pure cobalt of the sky above. I wandered about by myself without the fear of being alone, which haunts one beneath the monstrous columns of Karnac. This building is neither stupendous nor strange, and centuries of quiet burial beneath the drifting sand have kept it from falling into ruin. It stands now as it stood then, its beauty unchanged, its shadows clear-cut and distinct under the fierce insistent sunlight as they were of old.

As I passed between the towers of the gateway which lift their splendid sloping sides high into the blue I tried to imagine the scene on a feast day when decorated poles were fixed on the walls, and the coloured banners streamed fluttering against the sky. In the court the arrogant painted priests assembled in their brightly fringed robes of fine linen. I suppose they had the same proud mouths and delicate oval faces that one still sees here and there among the living as well as in the sculptured dead. Did they stand in solemn order, their shadows sharp upon the ground, with the vivid walls behind, all fresh with tints of daffodil, turquoise, and pale vermilion? and the King, would he be there with the leopard-skin thrown over his shoulder and the sun striking dazzling on the golden cobra with lifted head that made his royal headdress? Yes, and his arms are heavy with bracelets and ornaments set with lapis-lazuli and emeralds.

The stones of the stairs leading on to the roof are worn by the feet of men who walked there thousands of years ago. I climbed them now, going in the steps of those who carried offerings to the sun-god, and stood looking down on the wide empty view. There is no town here now; nothing moves at this somnolent hour, only down a path through the doura and the maize a man in a yellow-striped burnous walks slowly along carrying a squawking turkey blue with rage.

From Lotus and Pyramid
by Constance Sitwell, 1928