THE VALLEY OF HAMMAMáT

WE left Lakéta at dawn the next day. Being on higher ground and so much further in the desert, we felt the cold more than on the previous morning, and it was hard to realise that we should be seeking a shady spot for our luncheon at midday. We trotted our camels faster than previously, as if in a hurry to get nearer the luminous red disk which was peering over the distant hills.

The desert so far was hard surfaced, and not the sandy waste one is given to expect. When I attempted to make Laura go at more than a fast trot, I soon looked anxiously about for soft places below, and I was lucky in having kept my seat till she caught up with the rest of the party, when she as usual took her pace from that of the leader.

We passed nothing of exceptional interest during the first ten miles. The valley we followed would widen out to a mile or more, and sometimes contract to a few hundred feet. The rows of camel tracks, marked here and there by the skeleton of one which had fallen on the way, showed that this was still an important highway. I counted over twenty of these skeletons during one hour’s ride. Some may have been bleaching there222 for many years, but a few were of sufficiently recent date to make it advisable to keep on the windward side of them. The hackneyed camel ribs in the foregrounds of pictures of desert incidents are not the stage property I used to think they might be.

The Kasr el-Benat, or ‘the Castle of the Maidens,’ was the first object of real arch?ological interest we reached. It is a Roman station known formerly as the Hydreuma, and is still in a very fair state of preservation. No new builders have been at work near here since, to use it as a quarry with ready-cut stones; and Time in the desert deals gently with the structures of bygone ages. Roman soldiers in charge of gangs of quarrymen have used the little vaulted chambers within the large rectangular enclosing wall.

A huge rock close by was covered with inscriptions and rude drawings, dating from the early dynasties to the times when Arab traders began to use this highway to the coast. Drawings and photographs were duly taken of these records; and during most of that day we zigzagged across the valley to wherever a smooth rock surface showed any likelihood of inscriptions being found. We were seldom disappointed, and on one rock in particular our interest was particularly excited, for the graffiti here threw some light on the much vexed question as to the age of Akhnaton when he first came to the throne. I have described elsewhere our excitement at Thebes when, during the previous season, the royal tomb of Queen Thiy was discovered; how, after the body had been bereft of its royal casing, the arch?ological world was startled to find that the body was that of a young man.

223 Since then Weigall has made out a strong case in favour of the mummy being that of the heretic Queen’s son, Ammonhotep IV. (vide the October number of Blackwood’s Magazine for 1907). This same Ammonhotep, when secure of his throne, at the instigation of his mother, proclaimed the worship of Aton—the one supreme God whose earthly manifestation was the sun’s disk—and, so as to sever every tie with the worship of Ammon and the lesser divinities of that pantheism, the young Pharaoh changed his name from Ammonhotep to Akhnaton, i.e. the Beloved of Aton.

The weak point in Weigall’s contention was the youth of the mummy, which Dr. Elliot Smith declared could not have exceeded some five-and-twenty years of age, and it was doubtful whether he could have inaugurated and carried out a great religious revolution had he died at so early an age.

The three cartouches on this rock face are: one of Queen Thiy, one of her son as Ammonhotep IV., and one of the same prince under the name of Akhnaton. The symbols of royalty are placed beneath each cartouche, while the rays of the sun’s disk embrace the three from above. This clearly proves that the Pharaoh was still a child when he came to the throne, and that his mother ruled in fact if not in name, otherwise the royal cartouches would not have been united as here they are; and it also proves that the worship of Aton had begun while the prince was still under the tutelage of his mother.

As the images of Ammon and the lesser divinities were destroyed during the youth of Akhnaton, so did224 the priests of Ammon, when the old religion was restored, deface the inscriptions relating to the newer creed. The cartouches here of both Thiy and Akhnaton were partly erased; but the rays, terminating in hands, from the disk above were left intact as if the workmen, sent to obliterate the ‘marks of the beast,’ feared to desecrate the divine symbol. Thus after three and a half millenniums this rock gives an echo of the religious movement which caused the fall of the eighteenth dynasty.

I have so far encroached on a subject fully treated by Weigall because I had devoted a chapter to it in Below the Cataracts and sent this into print before the subject had been so fully thrashed out, and while speculation was rife as to whom to ascribe the mummy found in the royal sarcophagus of the great Queen Thiy.

Shortly after losing sight of the tell-tale rock and the Roman Hydreuma, our path lay through a narrowing valley which contracted to a pass between imposing masses of granite, now known as el-Mutrak es-Salam. It was an awe-inspiring pass. These gigantic and shiny black rocks which rose up on each side of us, deprived as they were of every vestige of growth, seemed hardly terrestrial, and suggested some landscape in the moon. There was no difficulty in finding a shady place for our midday meal and rest; but I was glad when we moved on, for there was something as oppressive in the aspect of the pass as there was in the atmosphere. More graffiti were found and duly photographed; but wishing to get into a more open country I pushed on ahead. I was safe not to lose my225 way as long as I followed the tracks of previous caravans, which were plainly visible. After a couple of hours of this pass the black shiny rocks became hateful to me, and when I emerged into a wide valley again my spirits rose rapidly.

Ranges of sandstone rock were to the right and left of me, and though not as beautiful in form as the limestone cliffs of Der el-Bahri, they were congenial in colour, and set off the intense blue of the distant mountains.

My solitary ride had to come to an end when the road branched off on two sides of a range of hills on both of which were camel tracks, though not in equal quantities. There is no risking a wrong route in a wilderness such as this, so I chose a shady place, and felt proud when I induced my camel to go down on its knees. I tied up its foreleg in the approved fashion to stop its running away in case I might fall asleep. My companions might easily fail to see me, but they would be sure to catch sight of the camel.

I tried to analyse the charm of the desert, the ‘Call of the Desert,’ as Hichens aptly names it; for while I rested here i............