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which tells the stature of the inundation as truly as the Nilometers on the islands of Roda and Elephantine.

Here doubtless in the summer the serpent, who seeks the protection of ruins and basks by the edges of still waters, gives further impressions appropriate to the scene. In the winter he hides in the vaults of Amon-Ra and Mût.

The temple of Mût at Karnak should have been the temple of the Goddess of Oblivion. Lethe could want no fairer or more forgotten-looking shrine; it is overgrown with a palm grove as lesser ruins might be overgrown with the flowers of the field or the grass of the graveyard. It is entered from the temple of Amon-Ra by a hall of colossi-maimed colossi but half-disinterred; it has an avenue of sphinxes buried in a wood; its end is surrounded on three sides by a lake, and has seated all round it, like a conclave of cardinals, images, cut in black, hard stone, of the dreaded Sekket or Pasht, lioness or cat.

But the temple of Mût is famous above all for its gigantic pylons; there may be a dozen pairs of them towering over the palm-trees in which the lesser ruins are lost. As seen from the roof of the temple of Amon-Ra they look as if they might have been the work of the Djinn. It lies on the south side of Karnak, where the graves of the pre-historic men are being found. On the north side beyond a thicket of camelthorn, used as a storehouse for the fragments of the temples, till they can be restored to their own places, lies that mysterious little temple of Ptah, where the moon shines through the roof.

Close by is the northern gate of the sanctuary, beyond which lies another temple almost razed to the ground, and the ruins of the city of Rameses II., for all the world like the ruins of Egyptian houses of to-day, though they have been there three thousand years or more.

And this is Karnak, the most splendid and complex temple of the world's most enduring capital. For Thebes was the chief city of the world's chief nation for more than a thousand years. Never was a temple so fabulously rich: its priests waxed and waxed in power till they displaced their effete

sovereigns and became the Pharaohs themselves—a prelude to the downfall of their country.

Here in the grand temple of Eastern Thebes we have the handiwork of all but one of the greatest of the Pharaohsof Hatasu, the Queen-King, of the third Thothmes, the first Seti, and the second and third Rameses.' Here is the exquisite oratory built by the first Ptolemy in honour of Alexander the Great's imbecile brother and successor, who never set foot in Egypt. Here, thanksgiving must have been offered up to the Trinity of Thebes with incomputable hoards of gold and myrrh and frankincense for every great event in the days of Egypt's glory. They are all set forth as they befell on the imperishable manuscript of the temple walls. Not a detail is lost; we know them as we know no event in the golden history of Greece, but they leave us as cold, as the semi-mythical exploits of the Mikados leave us cold. And why? Because human beings count for nothing. The history of Egypt is the history of gods. The Pharaoh, albeit born of woman, is a vengeful Apollo who has but to launch his darts. If only gods had fought in Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey would be as forgotten as the annals of the boastful Rameses. Even Homer could not make Apollo live, though Hector and Helen still have the power to move the world to

tears.

Α'

CHAPTER XL

APPENDIX

Pierre Loti's Mistakes about Egypt

LL through the winter our newspapers have been reviewing Pierre Loti's "Egypt " (through the medium of the translation brought out so sumptuously by Mr. Werner Laurie) with bated breath. They have been treating the Egyptology of this exquisite spinner of gossamer with as much respect as if he were a Dennis writing of Etruria, instead of an ill-read egotist who only sees with one eye. M. Loti's gift of observation is limited. If he has given us a "Madame Chrysanthème" with an admirable general effect, he has also given us books upon other countries with not much more resemblance to the originals than the Abyssinia of Rasselas bore to the actual dominions of the Negus.

M. Loti does not observe the country about which he intends to write; he uses it as a paint-box full of brilliant pigments, with which he creates chefs-d'œuvres. His style is delightful. There is no French author whose works I enjoy so much. But he is a stylist, and not a serious writer of travel-books, and therefore when he makes sweeping and unjust attacks on the work of the English in Egypt, and upon Thomas Cook & Son, who have done so much to benefit the poor Egyptians, and to open the glories of Egypt for the traveller, it behoves one to demonstrate how little importance need be attached to what he says.

his book.

M. Loti is amazingly inaccurate. You see this, if you know anything about Egypt, before you have read fifty pages of While he is trying to work-up the Oriental aspect, for instance, he multiplies the number of mosques and minarets by ten or twelve. On p. 181 of the English edition and

"Les milliers de minarets."

p. 221 he uses the expression "thousands of minarets," and on p. 312 he says that there are more than three thousand mosques. What are the facts?

In the guide-book written by the great Wilkinson in the days when mosques which have now fallen were still standing, it is stated that Cairo contains 264 mosques and 225 zawiyas or chapels. No one has ever known Egypt better than the author of "Ancient Egypt," who devoted his life to it.

Of these 264 mosques quite a large proportion have no minarets. Cairo is not a city of many minarets. For its size, it contains comparatively few. One can safely say that there is not a street in Cairo which contains a dozen minarets. In the face of this M. Loti says "thousands of minarets rise up on every side." It would be stretching a point to say that even scores rise up on every side.

But, then, M. Loti is never accurate. On p. 7,3 writing about the Sphinx, he says that "a little more than a mile away there ends a road travelled by hackney carriages and tramway-cars," and on p. 219 he calls Thebes, by which he means Karnak, "a league away from the Hotels of Luxor "absurd exaggerations of distance.

But to return to mosques, which he has taken under his special protection, though his remarks show that he could only have visited very few, because there is hardly any mosque of which they are all true but Al Moayy'ad. You would gather from his book that the mosques of Cairo are surrounded with regular parks. On p. 33 he writes, "The

"Les minarets par milliers se lèvent de partout."

2 "Elles sont presque innombrables, plus de trois mille."

"Mais, à une demi-lieue à peine, aboutit une route où circulent des fiacres, des tramways, où des automobiles de bonne marque viennent pousser leurs gracieux cris de canard."

4 "A une lieue d'ici, à Louxor, dans les hôtels. . ."

5 "Le charme rare de ces jardins de mosquée, souvent très vastes, est d'être si jalousement enclos entre leurs grands murs-toujours couronnés de trèfles de pierre-qui n'y laissent rien deviner des agitations du dehors; des palmiers de cent ans y jaillissent du sol, séparément ou en bouquets superbes. . . . Quant à la mosquée elle-même, rarement elle est un lieu fermé de tous côtés, comme dans les pays de l'Islam plus sombre du Nord; en Égypte, non . . . on a pu laisser une des faces complètement ouverte sur le jardin."

+

peculiar charm of the gardens of the mosques, which are often very extensive, is that they are so jealously enclosed within their high walls-crowned always with stone trefoilswhich completely shut out the hubbub of the outer world. Palm-trees, which have grown there for some hundred years perhaps, rise from the ground either separately or in superb clusters. . . . As for the mosque itself, it is rarely closed on all sides, as are those of the countries of the sombre Islam of the north. ... One of the sides of the mosque is left completely open to the garden.”

This paragraph bristles with inaccuracies. There is not a mosque in Cairo which has a very extensive garden. The only mosque which has a garden worth mentioning is Al Moayy'ad, of that, doubtless, he is thinking, because it is surrounded by magnificent walls, which cut it off from the hubbub round the Bab-es-Zuweyla. It has some good palmtrees, but not as old as the palms of Bordighera, and, in the matter of size, it is only as large as a fair-sized London square. The next best, chiefly on account of its size, is that of the Mosque of Ibrahim Agha-the famous Blue Mosque. But it can hardly be called a garden at all—it is a sandy waste with a few good palm-trees very picturesquely grouped in the centre.

Moreover, M. Loti seems never to have been in this mosque, for he says on p. 35, "There is no faience as in the mosques of Turkey or Iran,"1 and this mosque gets its name of “The Blue Mosque" from its liwân being lined throughout with old turquoise-blue titles. One or two other mosques have charming shady quadrangles, but they are small, and to the English mind are courts, not gardens. I might instance the delightful little mosque of El Mase, or that curious old double mosque of the dervishes, which has a road between its two parts-the Chikhûn. That sentence, "As for the mosque itself, it is rarely closed on all sides . . . one of the sides of the mosque is left completely open to the garden," alone would show how loosely M. Loti writes. The whole enclosure (including the courtyard, which he calls the garden)

1 Point de faïences, comme dans les mosquées de la Turquie ou de l'Iran.

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