THE FAHERS OF THE DESERT

THE DESERT.

 

IN order to attain to the high spiritual life of the ancient solitaries, an extraordinary recollection and withdrawal of the activity of the soul from temporal things and from trivial occupations was necessary. To understand the gentlest word of God all the sounds of men must have died away, and in order to be able to turn steadfastly and tranquilly to Him alone, the dissipating tumult of the manifold agitations which stir the world must be hushed. For this reason it was that the desire of solitude led men towards the deserts of the East, to Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. Here human dwellings were necessarily confined to certain spots, because in them alone man's physical existence was possible, and hence those giant cities of the East, as Nineveh on the Tigris, Babylon on the Euphrates, Thebes on the Nile—Thebes, the ruins of whose temples are so colossal, that beside them the Coliseum is dwarfed, and St. Peter's appears diminutive—Thebes, where, in the single hall of Karnak, there are 122 columns of 27 feet, and 12 columns of 37 feet in circumference. These and other towns took advantage, as it were, of their fortunate situation on large rivers, to spread themselves out far and wide, and to gather together in themselves a numerous population. As far as their jurisdiction extended, in their gardens, their plantations, and all that belonged to the supplies and requirements of a large and brilliant city, there reigned the most flourishing cultivation. But wherever the hand of man arrested for a moment his labour, and where the water of the river did not penetrate, there the characteristics of the desert instantly asserted themselves. Such is the great Syrian desert, from Anti-Lebanon to the Euphrates, at the entrance to which lies Damascus, with its vast circle of green orchards, in which walnut-trees, apricots, olives, pomegranates, and figtrees thrive in indescribable profusion, watered by the seven branches of the Barrada, a small river which rises in the caverns of Anti-Lebanon.

Only ten paces from its banks begins the desert where the sand lies in heaps. The sands are equally overpowering in what is called the Lesser Arabian Desert, between Gaza and Cairo, which extends over the peninsula of Suez, and can be traversed with camels in eleven days' march, averaging eight hours a day. Nothing is to be seen but sand from the Mediterranean Sea to the line of hills which stretches from Arabia to Egypt. It is not always level, but sometimes lies in waves, and there is even a whole range of hills formed of loose sand, so deep that the camels sink up to their knees in it. A little moisture may collect in the rainy season in hollows at the foot of the hills, where isolated groups of palmtrees stand in dark contrast with the dazzling yellow sand, like tufts of black feathers. There is but one single water station with pure water in this desert, at Catya, and that is also a palm-grove. Beyond this there begins an interminable plain, with firmer soil, here and there covered with prickly bushes, all dry and gray, which lasts till you reach Lower Egypt and the irrigation of the Nile. There you can stand, as it were, with the left foot in the desert and the right in a paradise. To the right you have citron and nabek-trees, acacias, sycamores, palms, with reddish-coloured doves perched upon their waving branches, fields of sugarcanes, maize, and cotton, all of the brightest green; to the left, the dry, hard soil, which of itself would not bear one blade of grass. And that which works this striking contrast lies midway between them, — a small canal, which could be crossed at one stride, and from which still smaller channels diverge like little rivulets. The soil is so fertile that it only requires a few drops of water and some grains of seed to become clothed with the most magnificent and luxuriant vegetation.

Lower Egypt, especially where the two arms of the Nile form the Delta, is abundantly watered, and therefore exceedingly fruitful, and the desert-like character is driven back. But at Cairo it reasserts its full rights. Before the eastern gates is gravel strewn with many-coloured pebbles and shining quartz, first level and then undulated as far as the "petrified forest," where, by some convulsion of nature, large trees, palms and sycamores, have been dashed to the ground, covered with a deluge of sand, and turned into stone. Before the western gates are gardens, terraces, plantations, fields, and fruit-trees in abundance as far as the Nile, bearing on its bosom Ronda, the island of flowers. Cairo, the Egyptian Babylon, as it was formerly called, is situated midway between these two opposite poles of nature. Across the Nile in the boundless desert stands the city of the tombs of the ancient kings of Memphis, and the Pyramids tower above the horizon in various groups, while the actual Memphis, the residence of the Pharaohs, is now one vast region of verdant fields, interspersed with scanty palm-groves and innumerable villages.

In ascending the Nile the cultivation recedes and the desert advances, although 50,000 water­wheels (sakieh) turned by oxen, and assisted by countless shadoofs, are in motion night and day to supply the country with water. The shadoofs are holes dug to receive the water which men pour into them with leathern buckets, and from whence it flows through the trenches. But all these arrangements do not suffice, for there are not enough inhabitants to cultivate the earth. The lower grounds on the borders of the Nile sometimes become morasses, overgrown with rushes, the haunt of buffaloes; and by the side of fields where corn, rape, and beans grow to the height of a man, there lie tracts of the most fertile land perfectly waste for want of hands to drain the marshes and to till the ground. But what life there is, is of an attractive, pastoral character. "The evenings in Upper Egypt and Nubia are of matchless beauty. It is so hot in the daytime, and the sun's rays are reflected so dazzlingly from the water, the desert sands, and the calcareous mountains, that you are unwilling to leave the cabin of the boat in which the voyage up the Nile is performed. Towards evening you come out to inhale the mild and salutary air. The sun sinks behind the Lybian hills, which cover themselves with dark blue shadows, while the rays of light play upon the Arabian hills as upon a prism, and deck them with the fleeting hues of flowers, jewels, and butterflies. Single heights resemble large fiery roses, while the more extended ones seem like chains of purple amethysts. Date palms, in groups or garlands, or in less graceful straight rows, here and there a single nabek-tree, with its slender branches, or a stiff dom-palm, and the Acacia nilotica, sprinkled with millions of yellow blossoms, emitting a tropical fragrance, intertwined with blue and violet creepers, whose long wreaths hang in every direction in beautiful confusion,—all this is reflected in the still waters.

The perfume of spring fills the air, a nameless balmy scent which our fields and woods also give out, but in June, and not in January. Fields of beans, lupins, rape, vetches, and cotton, are in full flower; wheat and barley are shooting up vigorously, forced by the dark rich mould of the gardens, and enticed by the warm sunshine. Flights of wild doves greet you with their cooing from the branches of the aracias and the palms. Aquatic birds sit together in swarms on the sandy banks, here white as marble, there raven-black, and chirp or scream forth their monotonous song, which they might have learnt from the uniform murmur of the waves. At times a large heron flies across the river, or a pelican dips into it with her heavy flight, in pursuit of fish; or an eagle soars slowly and peacefully higher and higher into the clear sky, as if he wished to see whither the sun had gone. For it has set in the meantime, and the red glow of evening, which illuminated the whole western sky, has cooled down into a pale blue. But see, there rises in the south a second ruddy glow of a rich purple colour, which reddens anew the fading hills, and lures forth at the same time the first stars.

The glorious Venus shines in the west, the bold hunter Orion mounts slowly behind the Arabian hills; later on, low in the south-east appears Canopus, which is never seen in Europe. Then you travel, as it were, between two skies. The Nile, now widened into a large lake, now con­tracted to a narrow band, is changed into a dark firmament, full of softly trembling stars, which blends into the real heavens. The large and peaceful stars look down from above, and have none of the incessant twinkling which they have in our clear winter nights, as if they were trembling and shivering with cold. On the banks there is yet life for some time longer. Fires gleam in the villages, for the position of the hearth is in front of the door. Bleating flocks of sheep and goats are driven home; dogs bark, asses bray, children shout, the water-wheel creaks as it turns. The men at the shadoof sing regularly, "Salam ya Salam," (Peace, 0 peace,) while they fill the buckets in the Nile and empty them into the channels which carry the water farther. Loud voices and cries, and the songs of labourers returning from the fields, are heard on all sides. The watcher in the lonely bark passes his time and drives away sleep by beating the darabookah, a kind of drum. At length all is hushed, and the freshness of the night settles down upon the water."

These pictures are not to be seen everywhere upon the Nile. Sometimes, especially in Nubia, the vegetation on its banks dwindles down to a narrow strip of bean-fields, which scantily feeds the population of a poverty-stricken village. Sometimes it disappears altogether, when walls of rocks or boulders line the banks.

In Nubia the desert is increasing to such an extent, particularly on the Lybian side, that the gigantic temples of Abusimbil are gradually disappearing in the sand. At the Great Cataracts of the Nile, within the tropics, in the twenty-second degree of latitude, the desert somewhat resembles chaos before the Spirit of God had divided the elements. It is a plain, boundless as the ocean, of tawny sand, out of which rise dark blocks of lime­stone. These blocks, and the undulations of the uneven sandy soil which the wind raises here and there, and even the tops of the distant mountains, which are seen like clouds on the extreme verge of the horizon, make no variety in this immense plain. You seem able to see right into the heart of Africa, but not the slightest trace of waterfalls is to be detected.

The Nile has apparently disappeared. You are taken slowly some distance upon a camel to where the blocks of stone seem to cluster together more thickly. You climb one of them, and stand as it were upon a cliff, and thousands of similar cliffs are strewn to the southward as far as the horizon, like dark islands in the vast sandy sea of the desert. But that which surrounds them is water and not sand—a broad, shapeless mass of water, which dashes and curls wildly and confusedly round them, as the force of the torrent impels it. Such are the Great Cataracts of the Nile. It does not look like a river, nor like a lake; it is a waste of waters, whose course through the immeasurable plain is determined only by a slight depression of the ground, being bounded by the desert on the east and west. There is nothing here defined and circumscribed, or possessed of colour or form. Dull monotony and sullen confusion reign supreme. The yellow sand, the muddy waters, and the black stones, roll and tumble about together. There is no separation or division; all goes headlong, always on and on, since the earth has had her present form, and always will go on as long as she keeps it. Over this aspect of nature man has no power. He cannot guide such waters as this, nor govern this waste of moving sand and rocks. It is the most melancholy and insuperable of all wildernesses, at once in restless fermentation and of chilling stiffness, surpassingly curious, and unlike all other scenery.For a league farther the waters rush downwards. Then, near the village of Wadi Haifa, the rocky islands and obstructions come to an end, and the Nile gathers itself into its appointed bed, and becomes a river.

At Assouan (in the twenty-fourth degree of latitude) it forms the Lesser Cataracts by falling over masses of granite, which are here thrown across the whole country, split and sundered by chaotic forces. The falls and rapids are higher and more picturesque, because the Nile is pent up between steep rocky banks, and because the islands of Phil, Elephantine, and Bidscha, with their noble ruins, rise out of the midst; but the desert is, if possible, more frightful still. The sand is dazzlingly white, and so loose, that it is necessary positively to wade through it. The granite lies upon it, partly in blocks, partly in shattered pieces, and the eye grows weary of having neither bush nor blade of grass, nor even the tiniest piece of moss in the crevices of the rocks to rest upon.

Such is the nature of the Egyptian desert. It reaches from the right bank of the Nile to the Red Sea, a breadth of from five to six days' journey for a camel, and from the Cataracts to the neighbourhood of Cairo, where it joins the Arabian desert. Its centre is the Thebaid. It would hardly be possible to find on the face of the earth a spot better calculated to become the home of a soul estranged from the world, or which would better aid it to trample the world under foot.

One peculiarity of these deserts is the number of holes and caverns which are found in them. Limestone is the framework which supports the sand, and which rises out of it in the manifold forms of mountains and peaks, hills and rocks. The mountains of Palestine, Lebanon, Anti-Lebanon, and the Arabian mountains of Egypt, are all limestone. Time, the atmosphere, and the rain, easily form caverns in it, which, enlarged by human labour, are still made use of in Syria as dwellingplaces. The holy grotto at Bethlehem was a similar cavern. Mount Olivet, near Jerusalem, and the valley of Joshaphat, which reaches thence in intricate windings to the Dead Sea, as likewise the hilly desert of Mar Saba, which separates the Dead Sea from Bethlehem, are all perforated with caves like the cells in a beehive. In the first Christian centuries they were inhabited by solitaries; in those before the Christian era, they were used as graves. Hence it is often related in the lives of the anchorites, that they lived in tombs. These rocky sepulchres were nowhere more plentiful than in Egypt.

The ancient Egyptians were a peculiarly serious people, with a fanciful thoughtfulness. The utter sadness of the unredeemed is impressed in forcible characters upon their temples, their colossal monuments, and their sphynxes. Life and death, soul and body God and man, even the whole of nature—the mysterious desert, the unintelligible Nile—all was a problem to them. They therefore spoke in figures, as is shown by their hieroglyphics; and they made idols with the heads of animals, and enigmatical statues, such as the sphynx, with the body of a beast in repose, and the features of a woman. They had a mysterious and strong yearning for the divine things which were to come, and an obscure idea that godly things were near to man. But as they had not revealed faith, which alone gives a higher knowledge, they sought to satisfy their longings by deifying almost everything which surrounded them, either because it was of use to them, or because they feared it, as the bull, the cat, the onion, or the crocodile. They had also a kind of dim suspicion of the immortality of the soul, and the Christian dogma of the resurrection. They believed that the souls of the departed tarried 3000 years in Amenthes, (the kingdom of shadows,) and then returned to earth to be reunited to their bodies, and to begin a new life. In order, therefore, that the soul might easily recognise its own body, and find it in the best pos­sible preservation, they embalmed the corpses in the peculiar form of mummies, laid them in roomy stone sarcophagi, and placed these in sepulchral halls, which were most secure and indestructible when hollowed out of the rock. The magnificence of the tomb was in proportion to the riches and rank of the dead man. None certainly surpassed the Pyramid of King Cheops, a tomb nearly the height of St. Peter's at Rome, in which nothing was found save one single sarcophagus.

There are very many sepulchres in the hills of Upper Egypt, particularly near Thebes, in the valley of Assasiff, and in the rocky dale of Bab-el-Melek. The former are very much defaced by being made the habitation of the peasants, where little children share the space with fowls, donkeys, and bones of mummies. But the latter are very well preserved, because they are situated in the burning desert, a whole league distant from the Nile. They are called the tombs of the kings. Each tomb forms a spacious dwelling with a flight of steps, vestibules, halls, side-chambers, corridors, all hewn out of the rock, and painted from top to bottom with figures of the gods, scenes out of the region of shadows, and the lives of warriors, husbandmen, and artisans. One chamber is painted entirely with weapons, another with vases and vessels in incredible variety, another with musical instruments, another with tables, chairs, and sofas, covered with purple cushions and tiger-skins. Another with various kinds of fruits, many with representations of the judgments and worship of the gods. And all this expenditure of labour and art is buried in utter darkness with the mummy; for the whole sepulchral palace is as it were inserted into the cliff, and has no light, save from the entrance door. In each of these palaces, again, there is but one sarcophagus. Without having seen one, it is hardly possible to form an idea of the colossal and mysterious grandeur of such a tomb. It is hewn out of the bare rock with its steps and halls, its columns and chambers, and then with the utmost labour worked upon with chisel and brush, only to disappear with its mummy in the double night of death and oblivion, for large blocks of stone were rolled in front of the entrance to guard it from profanation.

What a contrast with the subterranean burial-places of the early Christians, the Catacombs. There also was the protecting darkness, there also labour, toil, and care, but only the reverence for the lifeless body which was due to it as the temple of the Holy Ghost, and as a member of the mystical body of Christ.

The sun of Christianity, however, changed the gloomy darkness of these ancient Egyptians into light, and in place of the mummies who occupied the tombs as bodies without souls, the solitaries entered into them, who might almost be named souls without bodies ; for St. Macarius bitterly complains, "This wicked sinner, my body, would not consent to be entirely weaned from all nourishment." Formerly they sought by the semblance of life to make the dead live; now this earthly life appears to them in comparison with the eternal life, as a kind of death, and entering willingly into this death, they lived like the dying or like the blessed.