The Best Adventure and Exploration Stories Ever Told

by Stephen Brennan

  But however that may be, it is certain that many martyrs suffered here— that it served as a Roman dungeon in Diocletian’s time. It is within the Roman camp of Fostat, and near the gate where the Prætorium was. It is certain that Mary was in Old Cairo, and I shall believe that it was here she lived till further notice.____ says it could not be, because it is so near the Prætorium; but it was much more likely that Mary should put herself under the protection of the Romans, who cared for no religion (till the Christians persecuted them), than under the enthusiastic bigoted Egyptians, who, like us, hated and despised every nation but their own. The insignificant Mary could be of no importance to the Romans, except as a Roman subject, for what were they likely to know of Herod’s quarrels?

  From hence we went to a Coptic convent, still on the site of the Roman fortress, of which the church is of the third century, full of beautiful Moorish screens and ivory work, with saints which work all sorts of miracles—one a “patriarch Abraham”, who with the help of a believing shoemaker saved the Christians’ lives by making a mountain move, to convince a hardly believing caliph. They showed us his and the shoemaker’s picture, and the mark on the pillar where he rested his head when he prayed. Is it not curious? Evidently some mixture of the visit of Abraham to Memphis, with “Christians” substituted in the tradition; also a picture of the Virgin and Child by St. Mark, and a St. Onofrio, whose shrine was covered with bits of hair nailed under his picture by believing g toothaches, who, having done this, are cured. We went to the rooms at the top of the convent, where sick Copts (among others, Dr. Abbott’s wife) come to get well, and the Roman Catholic odours savoured sweet in my nostrils. But I never remember so strange a feeling as looking through a chink in the convent wall (in a great state of rapture at finding myself really again in something like Catholic precincts) and seeing the pyramids as large as life in the plain. Strange incongruity!

  After alternating Osiriolatry and Mariolatry (on my part), we took a third dose in the form of Amrou’s Mosque, which he built when he took the Roman fortress sixteen years after the Hegira for the Caliph Omar, calling the place Fostat, from his leather tent. He was seven months taking the place: he made it the royal city. Now, his mosque stands among mounds and ruins, desolate to see. But oh! what a beautiful thing it is; an immense open quadrangle, with the octagonal well and water “de rigueur” in the middle; at the further end a colonnade of seven aisles, so light and airy that they look as if they were there for their amusement and were dancing with their shadows, not at all burthened by a sense of their responsibilities, but laughing merrily with the sunbeams. The adjoining side has rows of columns, three deep; the other two one. You never saw anything so pretty, or so gay. The pulpit and reading place, the niche towards Mecca, and Amrou’s unhonoured tomb in the corner, are still there. But it looks to me like the place of worship of the Cluricaunes, or where Titanis’s mischievous elves make their devotions; not at all where a reasonable Mahometan, like myself, could do so.

  We rode home over those desolate mounds—the ancient Rameses of the Egyptians, where the Pharaonic palace stood, only a little more to the south, in which Moses met Pharaoh—the Babylon of the Persians (who christened the re-built city after the Babylon of the East), whence peter wrote his first epistle (there seems no doubt that this is the Babylon he mentions at the end, and that he came here with Mark, whose stay at Alexandria everyone believes)—the Fostat of Amrou, who built his city at the northern end of the vast Babylon. Then came Salah-e-dien, my old friend Saladin, 500 years later, and moved the city still farther to the north, to Masr-el-Kahirah (the victorious Masr), which we have degraded into Cairo, and upon the citadel are his ruins still seen.

  All this story the mounds tell, besides the Roman one; for all the convents we saw are within the Roman fortress, which now contains a Christian village; and five steps away is the Jewish synagogue, which you can only go into on a Saturday, where the oldest copy of the law is found, and which is called the synagogue where Jeremiah was when in Egypt. I think it matters little to the spirit of the thing to verify the exact spot, whether five feet to the right or left, where these men walked and talked. If I can believe that here Jeremiah sighed over the miseries of his fatherland—that here Moses, a stronger character, planned the founding of his—that here the infant eyes opened, which first looked beyond the ideas of “fatherland”, and of “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob”, and planned the restoration of the world and the worship of the God of the whole earth, is not that all one wants? There is no want of interest, you see, in Cairo, even after Thebes.

  And now, my dearest people, I must put up—very much more comfortable in my mind, I can assure you, since I have had my letters. If you can read this—it is in spite of the Khamsin—at this instant the floor of the cabin is a quarter of an inch deep in sand—our faces are covered like the hippopotamus, and I could write much more easily on the table with my finger than on the paper with my pen. It is almost dark, and to sit in the sitting cabin, which is the outer one, is impossible. Let an European wait till he has seen the Nile in a khamsin before he speaks uncivilly of a London fog. We are come over to the island of Roda for shelter—where the cradle of Moses stuck—but have not been on shore yet.

  As to our plans, Zirinia, the great Greek merchant, says there is no difficulty in going to Greece.

  In three weeks everything at Athens must be settled between the fleet and Otho, and this dreadful wind over, which will most likely last now all through the equinox.

  However, all this is en l’air, or rather en sable, at present. And if you were to see the “sable” on the paper, you would think it a sandy foundation. And the moon has just become visible, all covered with sand. She wants her face washed. We lie here because we are in mortal fear of a party to the Pyramids. People in Cairo are always making parties thither. All the boats from Thebes are coming in. There was such a shaking and bowing after church yesterday, and at Shepheard’s Hotel.

  ***

  Greek affairs go ill. I cannot very well tell what we shall do. European politics are disgusting, disheartening, or distressing—here there are no politics at all, only harem intrigues, and deep, grinding, brutalizing misery. Let no one live in the East, who can find a corner in the ugliest, coldest hole in Europe. Give me Edinburgh wynds rather than Cairo Arabian Nights. And yet they are such an attaching race, the poor Arabs, vide the tears of our crew at parting with us, their round merry faces a mile long, sobbing outside the door. And all for what? Merely for not having been maltreated. I am sure I could not have imagined what real sorrow it was to part from them. If I had not been crying myself, I should have said what a pretty picture it was yesterday. When they all came up to the hotel to bid us goodbye a second time, they begged to see me, else I should not have done it again, and when I went in they were ranged in two semicircles, all their shoes left outside, one black face learning against the white drapery of the bed, even the stupid old Reis cried, and my particular friend Abool Ali, arrayed in a beautiful new brown zaaboot and clean white turban, was spoiling all his new clothes with wiping his eyes. Then they all pressed forward to salute us, Arab fashion, which kisses your hand and presses it to the heart and to the head, and then they would do it all over again, and after that we parted, and shall never see one another more.

  In the evening, three of them, who had done us particular services, came by appointment for a particular conversation. And Abool Ali who is very anxious to marry, but cannot have the 150 piastres necessary to buy a “tob” or garment for the lady,—a saucepan, a mat, and two tin dishes, which is all the father, or any father requires,—agreed with me that he would really save 75 piastres within a year, if I would leave the other 75 piastres with the Consul for him. He further promised he would not beat his wife, which he said he should not have occasion to do, as she was not a Cairene, but of the country, and very steady, and that he would not put her away when he was tired of her; he was not profuse of words, and I believed him; and then he swore, not by my r
equest, but by Allah and his two eyes. Another hand-kissing followed, and so we parted. A crew of more native gentlemen never existed; they never showed any curiosity—never peeped into our cabins, and though not only always kind, but empressés, they yet never intruded themselves. The only thing that disconcerted them was that Mr. B. sometimes left us with strange gentlemen at Thebes, and kept them with him, instead of sending them to mount guard over us.

  But I ought to begin my story in order. I must kill a few of these files though unlike Sir Isaac, before I begin. I am getting just as bad as the Egyptians, and let them settle all over my face in black clusters, resigning myself to the will of Allah and the flies.

  Well, I have disturbed the flies; but now you must wait another moment while I check the salutatory exercises of a few dozen fleas; but it is of no use, I might as well devote myself to the pleasure of the chase at once and for ever.

  On Tuesday it was still khamsin, but there was so little, that all of a sudden, at eight o’clock, we made up our minds to go to the Pyramids of Gizeh; we were tired of playing hide and seek with all our acquaintance at Cairo, who wanted to make a party there; tired, too, of having the boat off Gizeh. Paolo was too ill to go with us, but we thought we could manage with two of our excellent crew. The road from Gizeh is very pretty (though not equal to Memphis), with fields of corn, and acres of that exquisite little dwarf lilac Iris. We went along a causeway between an avenue of tamarisk,—the remains of the old causeway are quite perceptible in it, built to convey the stone, which cases the inside of the Pyramid; the outside is built from the Libyan quarries (refer to your Herodotus). Presently those forms of perfect ugliness loomed upon our view, through a grey fog of sand, not unbecoming however. We reached the desert,—as usual without the slightest warning, and an Egyptian donkey’s wont, my ass immediately lay down to roll—an operation he frequently repeated. In an hour and a half we were at the foot of the Great Pyramid, leaving the Sphynx to our left; but no feeling of awe, not even of wonder, much less of admiration, saluted us: there is nothing to compare the Pyramid with; you remain from first to last insensible of its great size, which, as it is its only quality, is unfortunate. As it was now calm, and the wind might rise, we immediately began to go up. As to the difficulty, people exaggerate it tremendously;— there is none, the Arabs are so strong, so quick, and I will say so gentlemanly; they drag you in step, giving the signal, so that you are not pulled up piecemeal. The only part of the plan I did not savour was the stopping every time you are warm for a chill on a cold stone, so that I came to the top long before the others. Arrived here, I walked about, trying to call up a sentiment: the stones certainly were remarkably large—the view was remarkably large—the European names cut there were remarkably large. Here are three sentiments; which will you have?

  I do not know why the desert of Gizeh is so much less striking than that of Sakhara. One can, in Egypt, seldom render an account to oneself of any impression. Perhaps it is that Sakhara looks like the burial-place of the world, it is so grand and desolate and lone, and so riddled with graves. Gizeh looks like what it is, the burial-place of a family of kings and their courtiers; the remains of buildings, too, about the place, give it the look of habitation, make one think of porters and sextons, and men and women; the utter loneliness of Sakhara, away from all that one is accustomed to see under the sun, makes one think of souls, not men,—of another planet set apart to be the churchyard of this which is the dwelling place.

  It was not at all cold or windy at the top, and we did not hurry ourselves; then we came down again, but no spirit of Rameses or of Moses helped me down the steps; only the spirit of Cheops gave me his arm, and very bad company I found him. About half way is a grotto, formed by a very few stones having been taken out; and this does give one some idea of size. You stop a few courses short of the bottom, under the wonderful pointed doorway, which makes the entrance to the inside; everybody knows it by picture. It is made of four huge blocks. Here, clad in brown Holland and flannel (one comfort is that the Arabs look upon this last with very different eyes from the English, as it is a festive or state garment, and two of our crew, to whom I gave flannel waistcoats, always wore them outside their mantles or zaaboots), having taken off your shoes, you are dragged by two Arabs (before you had three) down one granite drain, up another limestone one, hoisted up a place, where they broke a passage (how they ever found the real one is a miracle); you creep along a ledge, and at last find yourself in the lofty groove, I can call it nothing else, up which you ascend to the king’s chamber. This is the most striking part of the whole: you look up to what seems an immeasurable height, for your light does not approach the roof; only the overlappings in the sides, which gradually approach one another as they come nearer the top, give you any measure, and you see nothing but black stone blocks; blocks you should not call them, but surface, for you can barely perceive the joints. Except this, I think the imagination can very well supply your place in the Pyramid. After you have crawled, ramped, and scrambled for two hours in black granite sheaths, without an inscription, without a picture of any kind, but the Arabs fighting for the candle, “the mind”, I assure you, “is satisfied”. As to the difficulty, here again, there is none: people talk of heat, the Theban tombs are much hotter; of suffocation, I did not even feel the thirst, which in Egypt is no joke; of the slipperiness, it is impossible to fall with those Arabs. The only danger you can possibly run is that of catching an awful cold in your bones; this is unavoidable.

  But I suppose, as we have got so far, I must go through with you, though very unwillingly. When I was a rat then, not in Pythagoras’ time, but on March 29, 1850, which I can but too well remember, I arrived, after running in my usual manner down one drain and up two others—large airy drains they were for me—to a sort of black thing like a tank with a flat roof, and a lesser granite tank in it without a cover, where they say a very bad rat indeed, and the grandson of a worse, Shafra Chabryes, laid his bones; and he made the rats work so hard to heap up this mound which the Big Rat, his grandfather, had begun, that they would have no more kings of that family. There is a very curious way of getting out of the grandson rat’s chamber; it seems the architect thought to stop it up for ever by granite portcullises, which you can still see with their grooves on the four sides of the entrance drain, and to climb out themselves either over the portcullis, or by a passage which, some say, came out under the chin of the great Sphynx, shutting up the drain as they came along. But the portcullises are broken through, and I, for my part, got under very well; some of the native rats with me spitting continually to moisten the stone for our pats. In the great granite tank are outlets to the outside of the rat hill, such as ants practice in their anthills, to let in air. I was very curious about these portcullises, which I thought surprising to have been made by my forefather rats 5000 years ago, and went over them again and again, but could not make out how they were managed; then I ran through a very easy drain without a fall in it, to a room with a gabled roof, just under the middle of the mound. After this, we wanted to run down the lowest drain which burrows almost to the centre of the earth, in the living rock underneath; but the rubbish has filled it up so entirely that even we rats are worsted, and it requires a mole; so we were obliged to give it up, as you know we abhor the infidel race of moles. The drains are so much like one another, that a travelled rat like me, who has seen one, has seen all. The other rats were very good natured in hauling me down the broken drain, and then we ran out above the ground; I, for my part, thinking that the rat who made all this might as well never have lived at all.

  As I was leisurely crawling up the last passage, my two Arabs having been left fighting for an end of candle, Abool Ali ran down from the outside, seized my hand, and dragged me up triumphantly to the top with the usual Hel-ehel, with which they haul up the yard or pole the boat off a sand-bank. With this appropriate introduction, I emerged (oh, could anyone but have seen that scene!) to find a harem from Constantinople; about fifty women, all look
ing like feather beds in their huge “habarahs”, veiled up to the eyes, and three grave Turks, their happy possessors, all sitting over the door of the Pyramid, like a semicircle of vultures, waiting to see me come out (and drinking coffee in that happy prospect), bonnetless, shoeless, in my flannel and brown Holland. If I had had “an umbrella in case of fire, it would have been something”: but ς was my good angel; she had not been in, and, though she could not speak for laughing, she pounced upon me, wrapped me in a shawl, and stuck on my bonnet. The Turks never moved a muscle; they probably thought me some description of sheytan, which are very common, as well as efreets, in Egypt.

  Well, my dears, I expect you will murder me. I could almost murder myself: all I can say for myself is, that I have faithfully rendered in blue ink what impressions the Pyramid makes.

  And now, what will become of me? That I can never revisit my native country, an outcast from my hearth and home is certain; and—the smallest evil resulting from an ill-timed sincerity—a victim to truth I must remain. In England, where Egypt is considered as a tray for pyramids and little else, where not to have prostrated oneself at the foot of the Pyramid is not to have admired Egypt, where Egypt=Pyr. and Pyr.=Egy., because things which are = the same thing, are = one another, which is out of Euclid; it is mathematically proved that either I have not been in Egypt, or I am no fit inhabitant of the land of England: Q.E.D. Goodbye. You will never see me more. One thing is a comfort, neither will the Pyramids.

  But before I sink, a victim to persecution, I will endeavour to atone for my errors by riding round the other Pyramids. The second, built by the first Cheops, 3229 B.C. (abominable man!), is the most perfect in its exterior casing; but we did not go in. The great one is built by the second Cheops, and finished by his grandson, the last of the fourth dynasty. It is no doubt a marvel of mathematical accuracy—the four sides lying to the four points of the compass—no easy matter with that size of building; height : base :: 5 : 8; ½ base: perpend. height :: inclined height : base, &c., &c. All that is very fine, but does not make an impression.