The Land of the Sphinx ... With ... illustrations, etc

Preface

. "VTTHENEVER a biped's bile gets beyond control and his gall-pouch overflows, or his too-excited vital spirits fly tumultuously to his brain, banging against the walls of his cranium, riotously cavalcading amidst the winding coils of his encephalon, he feels the necessity of discharging this bile, forerunner of jaundice ; of emptying the gall-pouch that is corroding his tissues and souring his temper ; of opening a safety-valve for the vapour of his seething brain, and freeing it of all dross. The manifestation of this intellectual epuration is to be found in the tangible form of a book, an exudatory by means of which the patient displays, either diluted or condensed, in an indefinite number of pages, the morbid state of his brain, beset by the relentless irritation of acrid, pernicious, and abundant secretions.

The invalid is saved, but the unfortunate public who receive the deleterious shower are attacked : they catch the disease ; the bacilli develop a million-fold in the fungus of imagination, stubbornly pursuing their detestable work, and the epidemic rages everywhere. I have been bitten by the terrible animalcule, and in my turn I save myself by an emission of my bile! When acting thus one is so thoroughly conscious of committing au aggressive action against society, of being a disturber of human VI

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. stupidity, that one instinctively feels, unless one is absolutely per verted, the necessity of excusing one's self, of uttering one's mea culpa in the form of a very anodyne and extremely sweet preface, which the public, that old blase, as artful as a Red Indian, never reads ! I have too much respect for routine not to steal a march upon readers whilst performing my little act of sly contrition — and the public would not be the public if it departed from its laudable habit of skipping the hypocritical preface. Well, I was at Marseilles, and already the symptoms of the malady, the paroxysm of which was to produce the lucubration occasioning this preface, were showing themselves with vigorous intensity : my gall was fermenting like a vat of new wine ; the impetuous ebb and flow of rebellions bile and uncontrollable blood rose and fell at their own sweet will !

My disease was at its height. One day I was sadly sauntering in the shade of the trees of the Cours Belzunce, digesting with difficulty an indefinable bouillabaisse. After a while I stopped to listen to a quack who was making a remarkable speech in the midst of the silence of a gaping crowd. Amongst other marvellous cures performed by this learned disciple of Æsculapius, and related by him, there was one which particularly struck me, owing to its prodigious originality. In narrating this incredible event I cannot do better than textually quote that portion of the eminent doctor's oration, of which I scrupulously noted the terms ; so here it is : — " In Africa, I was at Cairo, when they brought me a young girl who, fifteen years before, had fallen asleep on the banks of the Nile ; a little crocodile had crawled into her mouth, then into her stomach, and finally into her intestines, where, ever since, it had been causing the most frightful agony. What did I do ? Gentlemen, I had this young person laid on her back, I rubbed her well with my balm, and at that very instant the whole body

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. VII opened to the extent of three feet, and those present beheld, with as much awe as admiration, a monstrous crocodile issue from the body of that unfortunate young person. Gentlemen, in assuring you that it was fifteen feet long, and as big as a yearling pig, I am guilty of no exaggeration." This was a revelation. These words produced a deep and in effaceable impression on me, and settled the choice of the locality where the phases of my malady should develop, the frame wherein I would present the fruit of my labours to the public. From that moment I was dying to see the country where the crocodiles, by an inevitable law of atavism, take board and lodging in the bodies of the inhabitants, and grow and fatteii there as did formerly the gods in the bodies of the sacred animals, and then clear out with such amazing facility !

I started for Egypt, Since then I have overrun the valley of the Nile ; I here describe its strange and varied aspects, dwelling complaisantly upon the present, plunging occasionally into the sombre recesses of the past, in order to stir up its venerable cumulations and bring to the surface a few amusing bubbles, with the muffled echoes of vanished times ! Having travelled a great deal, and read numbers of historians, modern ones especially, I have acquired an incontestable skill in the art of relating fables, of distorting facts, and of arranging them to suit the exigencies of my mood or the requirements of the moment — the reader will easily perceive this. I have added a few thousand years to the vertiginous number of centuries so generously accorded to Egypt, thereby following in the wake of her ancient and venerable priests, those circumspect gossips, as cunning as the cleverest of quacks, who told such yarns to the credulous Greeks who came to interview them.

PREFACE.

. I have admired the beauty and proportions of the lineaments of the Sphinx, that monster which possesses nothing remarkable but its size, less to render homage to truth than from deference to the strange enthusiasm of its irrepressible admirers. For the same reason I have enlarged upon the praise awarded to the temple of this same Sphinx, a sort of slightly rough-hewn cavern of troglodytes. I have stood enraptured in the presence of the imposing masses of the Pyramids, Cheops especially, the cuneiform character of which makes it, by right, the grandest thing in Egypt — because one is expected to be suffocated with admiration before those " barbarisms in hewn stone." I have described the elegant profile of the obelisks, those stupid big landmarks, those pales of Titans. I have noted without a smile the " robust delicacy " of the temples of the valley of the Nile, the genius of their architects, the prodigious art which presided at their erection, while I felt convinced that this debauchery of limestone congestions and piling up, on a large scale, of heavy and unsightly edifices proved absolutely nothing in favour of the art or the genius of their pretentious architects.

On the contrary ! The glaring ornamentation of the tombs of the Valley of Kings, a description of twopenny coloured pictures on stucco fixed to miles of walls, did not please me ; and the bats which swarm in those funereal tunnels annoyed me immensely. Nevertheless I did not fail to " tremble beneath the breath of memories of the past," with a few romantic Cookites who had poked themselves in there, and who, in spite of their respectable emotion, were extremely anxious to get out again. I have not missed bestowing the epithet " sublime " upon those stiff and gigantic statues of gods, which are in magnitude what a

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. IX Chinese magot is in exiguity. I have showered praise on the isle of Philæ, that pearl of Egypt, which, after all, excepting the hypæthral temple with its three meagre palm trees, is only a mass of rubbish scorched by the sun, of gutted temples and fallen columns. The cataract, that grandiose result of the freak of an angry god, recalled to my mind Shakespeare's play, Much Ado about Nothing ! The burlesques of the incoherent theogony of Egypt, its ridiculous menagerie, reminded me of the inmates of the Zoological Gardens and the masquerades of Mid-Lent, but in no wise predisposed me to believe, like a great Egyptologist, that " at the summit of the Egyptian Pantheon towers a unique, immortal, uncreate, and invisible god hidden in the inaccessible recesses of being"; for, if anything does tower there, it can only be the memory of the immense and cruel madness of those who conceived the laughable silhouettes of this fantastic Olympus, audaciously casting as food to the imbecile imagination of ignorant mankind those headless and tailless myths, which so long misled bewildered humanity in its search after truth.

I have generously alluded to the wisdom of the " most grateful of all men," but regretted that, instead of bequeathing us indirectly that famous wisdom from which we are now seeking to be freed, they did not preserve it for their own private use ; this would no doubt have suited them remarkably well, and us even better ! I have extolled the Nile, boasted of the " limpidity " of its muddy waters swarming with insects and fucus, and the " variety " which occurs in the dispiriting uniformity of its banks, where from time to time are washed up the swollen carcass of a Soudanese negro, an Arab, or a camel covered with bluish sores. Cook the Great, the Tourists' Cook, the Circular Cook, that enterprising manager of universal locomotion, King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Prince of the Nile River and its intelligent showman, would never have forgiven X

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me for inconsiderately attacking its fluvial fame, and disturbing the flow of his Pactolus ! To bathe in its waters is, it appears, the most agreeable of pleasures. I speak from hearsay, never having done so myself, for fear that a facetious and greedy monster might have played me the same trick as the one which was so fatal to Osiris and made Isis for ever inconsolable. I found Nile water a delicious beverage ; and when one remembers that the Princesses of the blood of the Ptolemies, wedded to foreigners, had it sent them to far-off countries, I should be very much looked down upon were I to state here that the water is brackish, that it produces pimples on the skin, especially during the first days of flood, and that the ancient Egyptians never drank it unmixed. The Nile without crocodiles would not be the Nile ; so, to avoid being accused of having confused this divine river with some common stream, as a certain general did the Seine with the Marne, I have mentioned crocodiles.

In fact, I saw — one ! as big as a lizard, and hanging to a string held by an Arab, who wished to sell it to me for twenty piastres. I had the tact to refuse, not wishing to deprive the great river of the only crocodile it possessed from Cairo to the first cataract; and from a certain fear too lest, yielding to the temptation of leading it away with me by a string, Typhon, finding himself insufficiently housed in that narrow cara jiace, should seek to change his residence and take up his abode in my far more ample person ; the gods are so capricious and so fond of comfort ! Dreading extremely to be despised by Orientalists orientalising, I stood enraptured in presence of the worm-eaten marvels of unstable equilibrium of Arabian art ; at the pleasing imagination displayed in its geometrical interlacings, at the surprises of its

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. XI arabesques, and at the grace of its ornamentation — not daring to own that these edifices resemble wedding-cakes, the interlacing pattern a tangled caligraphy, and the ornamentation is the gaudiest of daubs. I have commended the picturesque appearance of an Arab's rags, swarming with vermin ; the purity of the atmosphere of the bazaars, reeking with the smell of burnt incense, rose-water, and the dung of asses and dromedaries, combined with the unsavoury effluvia of all kinds of commodities piled up in stalls a few feet square, and with the penetrating goatish odour of the fellaheen. I have pitied these last, because every one pities them, especially those amiable philanthropists who, in Egypt, diligently tickle their backs with the conrbash. I would not criticise the gait of the worthy asses of Cairo, those cabs of the East, but yet I cannot deny the fact that after half an hour's ride one'-s person feels extremely sore ; and lucky is the rider who has not been thrown, once or several times, by a jerk of the back, as sudden as unexpected, which is quite peculiar to these steeds.

The camels, which we leave unnoticed at home, interest us enormously so soon as we set foot in the East ; so I have paid the tribute of admiration due to the ship of the desert, with its double motion of pitching and rolling, which, when you are seated on its hump, gives you a similar feeling to that which you experience on the deck of the Dover and Calais steamer, when your stomach is not quite as it should be. In order not to alarm the interesting idlers, the well-to-do people plunged in the delights of the Luxor Hotel, that Capua of Upper Egypt, I have exaggerated the salubrity of this land of — sun stroke, dysentery, ophthalmia, intermittent fever, bubos, frightful hypertrophy, and tuberculous leprosy ; this land infested with reptiles, scorpions, flies, and mosquitoes.

PREFACE.

. Fearing to turn away from the journey persons with delicate tympanums and civilised ears, I have been silent respecting the eternal and excruciating grinding sound of the sakiehs, the shrill complaints of the rebecks, the monotonous hum of the daraboukas, the piercing and snuffling voices of Arab virtuosi, the prolonged and discordant bellowing of the trombones of their orchestras, the unbearable cacophony of the Khedive's band. I would not deprive Gerome of his illusions by declaring that the Almehs sheltered at Esneh are now frightful jades, old and ugly, wearing boots down at heel and a kind of flowered dressing gown of glaring colour, who fuddle themselves with vermouth ; or by telling him that the sword-dance and the dance of the wasp are now no more than a bad and very repugnant cancan, which takes place on the beaten earth floor of a noxious hovel, lighted by a candle stuck in the neck of an empty bottle placed on a rickety deal table.

It is even much against my wish that I am obliged to state that no Arab with the least claim to respectability ever sets foot in these low filthy taverns, and that they are only frequented by a few soft-brained tourists taken there by smart dragomans, who are on the best of terms with the " friends of these ladies." I must admit, alas ! in spite of all my respect for our venerable ancestress, that the whole of the vaunted wisdom of Egypt is resumed at the present day in the immodest acrobatic performances of Karagueuz, her science in the juggleries of her Psylli, her religion in the epileptic convulsions of impure santons, the waltzing of a band of dancing dervishes and the hideous distortions of their howling companions. Her imposing ceremonies of by-gone times have given way to the feast of the Return of the Carpet, a pretext for a priest drunk with hasheesh to trample under his horse's hoofs the fanatic faithful ; and to the bloody anniversary of the

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. XIII death of Hussein and Hassan, when another variety of bigots take delight in hacking themselves and transpiercing their cheeks, to the accompaniment of most horrible yells. I have treated tourists in general, and English tourists in particular, rather badly, because it is understood that an English tourist, who, in reality, is very well-behaved and much less annoying than others, should be nevertheless described as a most disagreeable person. It is trne that I quite lost my temper with a fellow-countryman who persistently bawled out at the top of his voice some music-hall choruses in the hypogeum of Thebes ; and that I saw a German coolly break and carry off some bits of the Beni-Hassan mouldings as though they had merely been pieces of common work ; and if some very curious specimens of painting on stucco, at the temple of Abydos, did not disappear into the secret receptacles of this same Teuton, it was owing to the energetic intervention of English tourists, indignant at an act of vandalism as barefaced as it was barbaric.

TO THE READER. J1 HE most salient feature of that ivhich precedes, and of that which is about to follow, will be the evident discursiveness which pre vails from one end to the other : it tvould be no mistake to behold in this the faithful likeness of the state of my mind, the immediate consequence of that of our crazy century, consumed, by a colossal and incurable athumia. It will be observed that I have often wandered away from my subject ; this has happened to me each time the subject annoyed me, and I returned to it so soon as the digressions, ivhich had led me astray, themselves commenced to bother me, a practice due to the habit of playing truant acquired in my school-boy days ! An absurd and precocious liking for noise, changing in course of time to an intemperate taste for the big drum, whose mighty rolls procured me indescribable delight, has clung to me in my mature age and exercised regrettable influence on my literary style.

Hence the sonorous rumbling of some of my periods, as empty as the insides of those worthy asses' skins, the delight of my childhood, the favourites of my youth ! I have indulged, in many Latin quotations, not for the purpose of laying claim to an erudition I do not possess, but from a mere instinct of the barbarian fascinated by the unknown, and an irresistible attraction for the mysterious, an invincible propensity for uttering enigmatical words ! I must have had some speakers of oracles or Pythonesses among my ancestors. I am obliged, however, to admit TO THE READER. that I understand the meaning of some of my quotations, those which I learnt by heart at college, but I must own that they please me infinitely less than the others, the meaning of which escapes me ; for me they have no longer the attraction of forbidden fruit ; they are, as to Eve after the apple, without the relish of a taste of risk.

Every time that I could, I have disguised truth with a veil. It smacks too much of a fable, truth stark naked issuing from a well, of all places in the ivorld. To begin with, it is indecent, and besides it gives one the shivers. The Athenians, those witty wags, the ingenious inventors of this piquant allegory, but rarely brought her out of her humid dwelling, preferring to let her cool her heels there, with quite Hellenic discourtesy and absolute leant of gallantry. The Greeks were right, and it is not I who would give her a hand to help her to come up, as I consider it very ill-bred to let people know what you think of them, and extremely disagreeable to be told the truth about oneself. I have quoted, according to circumstances, all the well-known yarns — those inoffensive old stereotypes which lulled us to sleep in our infancy ivitk their stately and monotonous lullaby ; and, out of love for the picturesque, I have respected the legend of Cleopatra stung by an asp, instead of displaying the bad taste of stating, on the authority of Baron Larrey, of the French Academy, that the seductive heroine put an end to her existence by means of a bushel of charcoal, just like a simple Parisian grisette.

Through an excess of modesty, ivhich will be readily appreciated, I have rarely believed what I have written, considering it most reprehensible to have too much confidence in oneself. It icould, in deed, be too great impertinence if, token passing our existence in conjuring up the wildest illusions, in revelling in the most, deceptive chimeras, toe carried our simplicity so far as to believe in those illusions, our ingenuousness to the point of giving a body to those TO THE READER. XVII chimeras, our stupidity to the extent of becoming ourselves dupes of the artifices of our undisciplined minds, and if, to cap all, we had the singularly overweening pretension of imposing our belief on others. I have been rather lavish with cant, the spice of modern literature, more anxious in its Byzantine refinement suitably to chisel out phrases, tastefully to encrust carefully selected words upon them, and to listen rapturously to the music of an empty and dis creetly sonorous prose, than to find lodging for an idea in this dazzling palace of verbiage.

Amongst other faults which I possess, and which I will not mention here, lulling myself with the sweet illusion that they will perhaps escape the perspicacity of the reader, is that of being extremely talkative. This is unfortunately a propensity of which 1 have never tried and never wished to free myself ; and one ivhich, by long dwelling with me, tolerated at first, indispensable afterwards, has ended by making itself quite at home with me for good, and by becoming altogether part of the household. I beg the reader to show for this untoward habit some of the indulgence I have displayed, towards him, without, however, wishing that the ugly weed should acclimatise itself with him as it has done ivith me, where the soil was perhaps more suitable for its self-cultivation ! CONCEENING THE ILLUSTKATIONS.

When expressions have failed me for withdrawing becomingly from the inextricable tangle of my ideas, I have had recourse to drawing: hence the number of pictures which bedizen this book, and which are deserving of just the same amount of confidence as the text, the pencil having only accentuated and finished the fantastic vagaries of the pen. b A GEEETING TO GOOD OLD EGYPT, THE GEANDMOTHEE OF NATIONS. /~\ EGYPT, " Gift of the Nile ! " Land of Osiris ! Thou Land v>^ of Pharaohs and fellaheen, of the courbash and baksheesh, of the lotus and papyrus, of beetles and crocodiles, of the Book of the Dead and mausoleums, of ophthalmia and elephantiasis ! Sacred charnel - house ! Holy valley of everlasting tears and regrets ! Venerable Egypt, who restest slumberingin thy innumerable mummies, in the gigantic void of thy colossal and useless edifices, in the undecipherable secret of thy hieroglyphics, — I salute thee !

Glory to thee ! mysterious Ancestress of the world ; indefatigable Seeker after sublime nonsense ; questioning death to understand life ; elaborating, whilst meditating amidst thy deserts during thousands of centuries, the elements of the human idea ; a laborious parturition which cost thee thy existence, and bestowed on us that superb civilisation of which we, thy sickly grand-nephews, are dying, incapable of bearing the strength of its powerful effluvia ! XX A GREETING TO GOOD OLD EGYPT. Glory to thee ! mother of justice, laying down with Thoth, in the hermetic books, the bases of science, that vertiginous accumulation of hypotheses ; the A B C of wisdom, that of law and con ventional civility in nations ; the principles of justice, "that sovereign extravagance, that generous imbecility."

Glory to thee ! generative mother of the gods, insane with genius, whose phenomenal brain invented that mournful and picturesque fancy of the rite of the judgment of the dead ; audacious mystical lore, establishing at the same time the profound principle of palin genesis and the unfathomable stupidity of the human race ; giving birth to the dogma of metensomatosis, and to that monstrous and enormous pantheon, an insoluble enigma, so irritating to the anxious and unhealthy curiosity of our declining century, feverishly tracing all back to its origin, bent upon the impossible reconstruction of an uncertain past. Glory to thee ! who, for the greater jubilation of inept tourists, lost in amazement in the presence of thy stiff-limbed idols, didst carve the strange images of thy apocalyptic divinities in the granite and the limestone of thy mountains ; bestrewing thy plains with the temples of Titans, chiselling on their massive sides thy interminable hieroglyphics ; erecting with perfect art and prodigious science thy hermetic obelisks, thy fantastic pyramids, thy marvellous sphinx, thy labyrinth, that stupendous feat of thy architects ; digging out of the Arabian and Libyan rocks those gloomy recesses, those funereal hypogeums with their walls illuminated like the leaves of an old missal of the middle ages ; shedding with unheard-of profusion that infinite multitude of tiresome mastabas ; executing with in conceivable sagacity and surprising skill more gigantic works than now, after five thousand years, we take in hand timidly and complete with effort !

Glory to thee, illustrious vanquished ! For a Power that is mightier has mastered thee, thee the dread subduer ! It has destroyed thy celestial menagerie, strangled thy gods, dispersed their Therapeutæ ! May they rest in peace in Amenti, to the Occident, beyond the lake of Osiris ; thy sacred animals, those homes of the souls of thy divinities, those hairy, feathery, or scaly personifications of the attributes of the primordial might, of the sole uncreated god, begetting and bringing forth himself in infinite space ! Gloria victis ! Glory to you ! holy and revered beasts, habitations of the gods ! Enviable cow, who concealeth in thy broad flanks the soul of Isis-Athor, the gloomy Venus, with the pale golden skin, the pure oval face, the straight profile, the long velvety eyes ; ardent and in consolable spouse of Osiris ; unknown and impenetrable, mother and substance of that which is, mysterious source of all things !

Goose of the Nile, within whom resides Seb, the layer of the egg of the world, the matter containing the germs of life ; husband of Nout, father of Ra ! Scarabæus, ornament of the brow ; lion with the luminous hide, who art the habitation of the cabiric Phtah, of the demiurge, the lord of wisdom, the light which accomplishes all things ! Black ibis of Ethiopia and cynocephalus with the azure rump, ye, the two habitations of Thoth Trismegistus, the hierogrammatist, the speaking column, the living verb, the guide of souls, showman of the shades, prince of undertakers ! Serpent coiled about thyself, who containest the "absolute," the divine breath, and Knouphis the androgynus, who himself fabricates the generative mother of the gods ! Jackal with the sharp muzzle, temporary lodging of Anubis, latrant, guardian of tombs, watcher of mummies !

Bennou, with the gold and crimson plumage, friend of Osiris, A GREETING TO GOOD OLD EGYPT. the god of Abydos, the lord of Amenti, the nocturnal sun, the good intent, for ever fructifying Isis ! Lumbering hippopotamus, habitation of Set, the spirit of evil, the enemy of Osiris ! Sacred hawk with the lightning wing, emblem of the solar gods, of the sun in his radiant course of Ra, erect amidst his crew of Akhimou-Ordou and Akhimou-Sekou, with a Hor at the helm and a Hor at the prow, in the sacred boat which roams, enveloped in the coils of the serpent Mehen, upon the celestial Oner-ness ! Great tawny vulture, symbol of maternity, dedicated to Mauth, the mother-goddess, in whose womb was self-conceived Ammon-Ra, the bull, the generating principle above all, to whom the ram and the cerastes are consecrated !

Cat and lioness of Sacht-the-Great, the cherished friend of Phtah, the creative and dissolving power, she who purifies aud she who punishes ' Famous Apis of Memphis, born of a celestial ray ! Mnevis of Heliopolis, with the black and bristling hair ! Onuphis of Her monthis, the good genius ! Peaceful and preposterous receptacles of divine incarnations ! Winged Uræus, with the venom-swollen throat, who circlest the heads of gods and kings, terrible symbol of their inexorable sovereignty ! And ye : lascivious goat of Mendes ! Wolf of Syout ! Ichneumon of Beracleopolis ! Crocodile of the Arsino'it nome ! Owl of Sais ! Falcon and shrew of Butos ! Mouse and dove of Isis ! Ye, sacred fishes : seal, eel, carp, phallivorous oxyrinx, honoured throughout Egypt ! Ye, garlic and onion, respectable vegetables, by whom the people swore !

Thou, palm tree almost human, all tremulous with love, who moanest at touch of the knife ! Acacia, whose trunk secreted Osiris ! Persæa of Isis, the guardian of hearts ! Your reign is for ever at an end, 0 fantastic medley of beasts, trees, plants, vegetables, incongruous types of a complicated theogony ; disjoined links of the most admirable web of extravagant mystifica tions the human mind ever conceived ! Grave and solemn throng of priests, with shaven heads and eyebrows, with long garments made of flax, cease your hyssop-scented lustrations ; your gods are dead ! the boat of Isis has capsized ! Dreaded prophets, bespangled with collars of gold, laden with charms, you will never again consult the entrails of the victims, or study the course of the planets, to learn and predict the future !

Hierostolites, you will no longer deck the images of the gods ! Learned Arpedonaptes, pluck off the plumes which adorn your heads ; the ink of your canon is dried up, your calamus is broken ; you will no more carry your sacred tablets covered with hieroglyphics ; you will no more indite your funereal rituals ! Horoscopists, cast away your hour-glasses and your palms ; you will never again draw conclusions from the movements of the sacred beasts ! Hieropsaltes, no more will you chant the hymns of the gods and the rules of life for kings, taught of Hermes, while accompanying yourselves on golden sistra ! Sphragistes, you will no more place your seal on the victim destined to the sacrifice I Pastophores, guardians of the temples, you will no more bear the baris of Isis, or the beds, or the utensils of assistance !