And “Pharaoh’s Bed” looks out over the water and seems to wonder what will be the end.
I was glad to escape from Shellal, pursued by the shriek of an engine announcing its departure from the station, glad to be on the quiet water, to put it between me and that crowd of busy workers. Before me I saw a vast lake, not unlovely, where once the Nile flowed swiftly, far off a gray smudge--the very damnable dam. All around me was a grim and cruel world of rocks, and of hills that look almost like heaps of rubbish, some of them gray, some of them in color so dark that they resemble the lava torrents petrified near Catania, or the “black country” in England through which one rushes on one’s way to the North. Just here and there, sweetly almost as the pink blossoms of the wild oleander, which I have seen from Sicilian seas lifting their heads from the crevices of sea rocks, the amber and rosy sands of Nubia smiled down over grit stone and granite.
The setting of Philæ is severe. Even in bright sunshine it has an iron look. On a gray or stormy day it would be forbidding or even terrible. In the old winters and springs one loved Philæ the more because of the contrast of its setting with its own lyrical beauty, its curious tenderness of charm--a charm in which the isle itself was mingled with its buildings. But now, and before my boat had touched the quay, I saw that the island must be ignored--if possible.
The water with which it is entirely covered during a great part of the year seems to have cast a blight upon it. The very few palms have a drooping and tragic air. The ground has a gangrened appearance, and much of it shows a crawling mass of unwholesome-looking plants, which seem crouching down as if ashamed of their brutal exposure by the receded river, and of harsh and yellow-green grass, unattractive to the eyes. As I stepped on shore I felt as if I were stepping on disease. But at least there were the buildings undisturbed by any outrage. Again I turned toward “Pharaoh’s Bed,” toward the temple standing apart from it, which already I had seen from the desert, near Shellal, gleaming with its gracious sand-yellow, lifting its series of straight lines of masonry above the river and the rocks, looking, from a distance, very simple, with a simplicity like that of clear water, but as enticing as the light on the first real day of spring.