The cluster of over the Nile and fulfills the South. boats with gay streamers at Luxor, and the turbaned groups under the temple columns on the shore, do justify those sunset dreams of Claude Lorraine, that stately architecture upon the sea. I was lost in a sun-dream one afternoon, wondering if, Saturn-like, the sun would not one day utterly consume his child, when I heard the Commander exclaim: "El Karnak!" much as Columbus might have heard "land" from his mast-head. "There," said the Commander; and I could scarcely believe such a confirmation of my dreams of palm architecture, as my eye followed the pointing of his finger to a dim, distant point. "Those?" said I. "Those," said he. I looked again with the glass and beheld, solitary and stately upon the distant shore, a company of most undoubted trees! The Pacha was smiling at my side, and declaring that he saw some very fine palms. The Commander looked again, confessed his mistake, and in extenuation, I remarked that he was not golden-sleeved. And, after all, what was Alà-ed-deen, if Mr. Lane will spell Aladdin so, without his lamp? A few moments after, a small boat drew up to us, and an Emerald Howadji stepped on board. He had left Thebes at two o'clock, which sounded strangely to me when he said it; for I fancied Thebes already to have done with time and become the property of eternity. He coffeed and smoked, and would leave a duck for dinner, gave us all the last news from Thebes, then shook hands and went over the side of the Ibis, and out of our knowledge forever. Bon voyage, Emerald Howadji! and as he pulled rapidly away with the flowing stream toward his descending dahabieh, he fired at a heron that was streaming whitely over him across the stream—a parting salute, possibly, and the dead heron streamed whitely after him upon the river. XIV. THEBES TRIUMPHANT. THE warm vaporous evening gathered, and we moored in a broad, beautiful bay of the river. Far inland over the shore, the mountain lines, differently dark, waved away into the night. There were no masts upon the river but our own, and only one neighboring sakia moaned to the twilight. Groups of turbaned figures crouched upon the bank. They looked as immovable forms of the landscape as the trees. Moulded of mystery, they sat like spirits of the dead-land personified. In the south, the Libyan mountains came to the river, vague and dim, stealthily approaching like the shy monsters of the desert. The eye could not escape the fascination of those fading forms; for those mountains overhung Thebes. Moored under the palm-trees in the gray beginnings of the evening, by the sad mud huts and the squalid fellah, and within the spell of the sighing sakia, I remembered Thebes and felt an outcast of time. A world died before our history was born. The pomp and splendor had passed along-the sounds that were the words of a great life had swept forward into silence, and I lingered in the wake of splendor, like a drowning child behind a ship, feeling it fade away. I remembered the West, too, and its budding life-its future, an unrolled heaven of new constellations. But it was only a dream dizzying the brain, as a man, thirst-stricken, dreams of flowing waters. Here, for the first time, probably the only time of a life, I felt the grandeur and reality of the past preponderate over all time. It was the success of Egypt in the East. A fading, visionary triumph, as of a dumb slave who wins for a single night the preference of her master. But in that mountain shadow sat Memnon, darling of the dawn, drawing reverence backward to the morning of time. I felt the presence of his land and age, sitting solemn, saddening but successful, in the hush of my mind, as he sat, marvellous, but melodious no longer, rapt in the twilight repose. It was not a permanent feeling. The ever young stars looked out, and smiled away antiquity as a vapor. They who have visions of the dead floating fair in their old beauty and power, do not see them so always, perhaps never again. They repair like all men to their tombs, and dream vaguely of the departed. But those tombs are temples to them forever after. XV. THE CROCODILE. "Where naked boys, bridling tame water snakes, DAY and night the Ibis did not rest, except when the wind fell, and her wings fell with it. She passed Dendereh-Thebes-Luxor. A light breeze wafted her along, and those sights of fame grew fair and faded, like pictures on the air. The upward Nile voyage is a Barmecide feast. You do not pause, except at Asyoot for the crew to bake bread, and at Esne, dear to Verde Giovane-so you enjoy the great fames and places by name only; as Shacabac, the Barber's sixth brother, delighted in the sweet bread, and the chicken stuffed with pistachio, and the golden cups of wine, although they did not appear until he had rehearsed his emotions. So finally, you, having partaken the Barmecide feast of the ascent, and passed Memphis, Abydos, Dendereh, Edfoo, and Kalabsheh, clap your hands at Aboo Simbel, and returning, taste the reality of Egypt. |