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La Mort De Philae
by Pierre Loti, 1924
CHAPTER VII --THE OUTSKIRTS OF CAIRO
The tombs of the Caliphs
Night. A long straight road, the artery of some capital, through which
our carriage drives at a fast trot, making a deafening clatter on the
pavement. Electric light everywhere. The shops are closing; it must
needs be late.
The road is Levantine in its general character; and we should have no
clear notion of the place did we not see in our rapid, noisy passage
signs that recall us to the land of the Arabs. People pass dressed in
the long robe and tarboosh of the East; and some of the houses, above
the European shops, are ornamented with mushrabiyas. But this blinding
electricity strikes a false note. In our hearts are we quite sure we
are in the East?
The road ends, opening on to darkness. Suddenly, without any warning,
it abuts upon a void in which the eyes see nothing, and we roll over a
yielding, felted soil, where all noise abruptly ceases--it is the
desert! . . . Not a vague, nondescript stretch of country such as in
the outskirts of our towns, not one of the solitudes of Europe, but
the threshold of the vast desolations of Arabia. The desert; and,
even if we had not known that it was awaiting us, we should have
recognised it by the indescribable quality of harshness and uniqueness
which, in spite of the darkness, cannot be mistaken.
But the night after all is not so black. It only seemed so, at the
first moment, by contrast with the glaring illumination of the street.
In reality it is transparent and blue. A half-moon, high up in the
heavens, and veiled by a diaphanous mist, shines gently, and as it is
an Egyptian moon, more subtle than ours, it leaves to things a little
of their colour. We can see now, as well as feel, this desert, which
has opened and imposed its silence upon us. Before us is the paleness
of its sands and the reddish-brown of its dead rocks. Verily, in no
country but Egypt are there such rapid surprises: to issue from a
street flanked by shops and stalls and, without transition, to find
this! . . .
Our horses have, inevitably, to slacken speed as the wheels of our
carriage sink into the sand. Around us still are some stray ramblers,
who presently assume the air of ghosts, with their long black or white
draperies, and noiseless tread. And then, not a soul; nothing but the
sand and the moon.
But now almost at once, after the short intervening nothingness, we
find ourselves in a new town; streets with little low houses, little
cross-roads, little squares, all of them white, on whitened sands,
beneath a white moon. . . . But there is no electricity in this town,
no lights, and nobody is stirring; doors and windows are shut: no
movement of any kind, and the silence, at first, is like that of the
surrounding desert.
It is a town in which the half-light of the moon,
amongst so much vague whiteness, is diffused in such a way that it
seems to come from all sides at once and things cast no shadows which
might give them definiteness; a town where the soil is so yielding
that our progress is weakened and retarded, as in dreams. It seems
unreal; and, in penetrating farther into it, a sense of fear comes
over you that can neither be dismissed nor defined.
For assuredly this is no ordinary town. . . . And yet the houses, with
their windows barred like those of a harem, are in no way singular--
except that they are shut and silent. It is all this whiteness,
perhaps, which freezes us. And then, too, the silence is not, in fact,
like that of the desert, which did at least seem natural, inasmuch as
there was nothing there; here, on the contrary, there is a sense of
innumerable presences, which shrink away as you pass but nevertheless
continue to watch attentively. . . .
The cemetery of Cairo,
original plate by Geo Colucci.
We pass mosques in total darkness
and they too are silent and white, with a slight bluish tint cast on
them by the moon. And sometimes, between the houses, there are little
enclosed spaces, like narrow gardens, but which can have no possible
verdure. And in these gardens numbers of little obelisks rise from the
sand--white obelisks, it is needless to say, for to-night we are in
the kingdom of absolute whiteness. What can they be, these strange
little gardens? . . . And the sand, meanwhile, which covers the
streets with its thick coatings, continues to deaden the sound of our
progress, out of compliment no doubt to all these watchful things that
are so silent around us.
At the crossings and in the little squares the obelisks become more
numerous, erected always at either end of a slab of stone that is
about the length of a man. Their little motionless groups, posted as
if on the watch, seem so little real in their vague whiteness that we
feel tempted to verify them by touching, and, verily, we should not be
astonished if our hand passed through them as through a ghost.
Farther
on there is a wide expanse without any houses at all, where these
ubiquitous little obelisks abound in the sand like ears of corn in a
field. There is now no further room for illusion. We are in a
cemetery, and have been passing in the midst of houses of the dead,
and mosques of the dead, in a town of the dead.
Once emerged from this cemetery, which in the end at least disclosed
itself in its true character, we are involved again in the
continuation of the mysterious town, which takes us back into its
network. Little houses follow one another as before, only now the
little gardens are replaced by little burial enclosures.
And
everything grows more and more indistinct, in the gentle light, which
gradually grows less. It is as if someone were putting frosted globes
over the moon, so that soon, but for the transparency of this air of
Egypt and the prevailing whiteness of things, there would be no light
at all. Once at a window the light of a lamp appears; it is the
lantern of gravediggers. Anon we hear the voices of men chanting a
prayer; and the prayer is a prayer for the dead.
These tenantless houses were never built for dwellings. They are
simply places where men assemble on certain anniversaries, to pray for
the dead. Every Moslem family of any note has its little temple of
this kind, near to the family graves. And there are so many of them
that now the place is become a town--and a town in the desert--that is
to say, in a place useless for any other purpose; a secure place
indeed, for we may be sure that the ground occupied by these poor
tombs runs no risk of being coveted--not even in the irreverent times
of the future.
No, it is on the other side of Cairo--on the other bank
of the Nile, amongst the verdure of the palm-trees, that we must look
for the suburb in course of transformation, with its villas of the
invading foreigner, and the myriad electric lights along its motor
roads. On this side there is no such fear; the peace and desuetude are
eternal; and the winding sheet of the Arabian sands is ready always
for its burial office.
At the end of this town of the dead, the desert again opens before us
its mournful whitened expanse. On such a night as this, when the wind
blows cold and the misty moon shows like a sad opal, it looks like a
steppe under snow.
The Tombs of the Khalifs (Caliphs or Mamelule Sultans)
By David Roberts, 1839.
But it is a desert planted with ruins, with the ghosts of mosques; a
whole colony of high tumbling domes are scattered here at hazard on
the shifting extent of the sands. And what strange old-fashioned domes
they are! The archaism of their silhouettes strikes us from the first,
as much as their isolation in such a place. They look like bells, or
gigantic dervish hats placed on pedestals, and those farthest away
give the impression of squat, large-headed figures posted there as
sentinels, watching the vague horizon of Arabia beyond.
They are the proud tombs of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
where the Mameluke Sultans, who oppressed Egypt for nearly three
hundred years, sleep now in complete abandonment. Nowadays, it is
true, some visits are beginning to be paid to them--on winter nights
when the moon is full and they throw on the sands their great clear-
cut shadows. At such times the light is considered favourable, and
they rank among the curiosities exploited by the agencies. Numbers of
tourists (who persist in calling them the tombs of the caliphs) betake
themselves thither of an evening--a noisy caravan mounted on little
donkeys. But to-night the moon is too pale and uncertain, and we shall
no doubt be alone in troubling them in their ghostly communion.
By David Roberts, 1839.
To-night indeed the light is quite unusual. As just now in the town of
the dead, it is diffused on all sides and gives even to the most
massive objects the transparent semblance of unreality. But
nevertheless it shows their detail and leaves them something of their
daylight colouring, so that all these funeral domes, raised on the
ruins of the mosques, which serve them as pedestals, have preserved
their reddish or brown colors, although the sand which separates
them, and makes between the tombs of the different sultans little dead
solitudes, remains pale and wan.
And meanwhile our carriage, proceeding always without noise, traces on
this same sand little furrows which the wind will have effaced by
to-morrow. There are no roads of any kind; they would indeed be as
useless as they are impossible to make. You may pass here where you
like, and fancy yourself far away from any place inhabited by living
beings.
The great town, which we know to be so close, appears from
time to time, thanks to the undulations of the ground, as a mere
phosphorescence, a reflection of its myriad electric lights. We are
indeed in the desert of the dead, in the sole company of the moon,
which, by the fantasy of this wonderful Egyptian sky, is to-night a
moon of grey pearl, one might almost say a moon of mother-of-pearl.
The Green Mosque
By Jean Gerome, 1878.
Each of these funeral mosques is a thing of splendour, if one examines
it closely in its solitude. These strange upraised domes, which from a
distance look like the head-dresses of dervishes or magi, are
embroidered with arabesques, and the walls are crowned with
denticulated trefoils of exquisite fashioning.
But nobody venerates these tombs of the Mameluke oppressors, or keeps
them in repair; and within them there are no more chants, no prayers
to Allah. Night after night they pass in an infinity of silence. Piety
contents itself with not destroying them; leaving them there at the
mercy of time and the sun and the wind which withers and crumbles
them. And all around are the signs of ruin. Tottering cupolas show us
irreparable cracks; the halves of broken arches are outlined to-night
in shadow against the mother-of-pearl light of the sky, and debris of
sculptured stones are strewn about. But nevertheless these tombs, that
are well-nigh accursed, still stir in us a vague sense of alarm--
particularly those in the distance, which rise up like silhouettes of
misshapen giants in enormous hats--dark on the white sheet of sand--
and stand there in groups, or scattered in confusion, at the entrance
to the vast empty regions beyond.
The Tombs of the Khalifs
By David Roberts, 1839.
We had chosen a time when the light was doubtful in order that we
might avoid the tourists, but as we approach the funeral dwelling of
Sultan Barkuk, the assassin, we see, issuing from it, a whole band,
some twenty in a line, who emerge from the darkness of the abandoned
walls, each trotting on his little donkey and each followed by the
inevitable Bedouin driver, who taps with his stick upon the rump of
the beast. They are returning to Cairo, their visit ended, and
exchange in a loud voice, from one ass to another, more or less inept
impressions in various European languages. . . .
And look! There is
even amongst them the almost proverbial belated dame who, for private
reasons of her own, follows at a respectable distance behind. She is a
little mature perhaps, so far as can be judged in the moonlight, but
nevertheless still sympathetic to her driver, who, with both hands,
supports her from behind on her saddle, with a touching solicitude
that is peculiar to the country. Ah! these little donkeys of Egypt, so
observant, so philosophical and sly, why cannot they write their
memoirs! What a number of droll things they must have seen at night in
the outskirts of Cairo!
This good lady evidently belongs to that extensive category of hardy
explorers who, despite their high respectability at home, do not
hesitate, once they are landed on the banks of the Nile, to supplement
their treatment by the sun and the dry winds with a little of the
"Bedouin cure."
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