THE WADY FOWAKIYEH AND B?R HAGI SULIMAN

WE slumbered till the sun beat down on our tents. There was enough water obtainable to fill our collapsible baths to the brim, and good enough for the camels to drink—poor brackish stuff we should have found it, had we depended on it for our own consumption.

The well seemed an immense depth, and had a spiral staircase down it, though it was dangerous to descend more than a few yards. A mining company had of late years partially restored the building which stood over it, and for the first time since we left Luxor we saw the names of some fellow-countrymen who had put this well in workable order. Unfinished sarcophagi lay near by, with some flaws in the stone to account for their having been left here by the workmen of one of the Ptolemies.

We did not propose to travel more than a few miles that day, for the Wady Fowakiyeh, as the natives call it, is that part of the Hammamat valley where Lepsius and other former explorers made their greatest finds.

Now, as Mr. Weigall devotes to this valley many pages in his Travels in Upper Egyptian Deserts, I shall not attempt to describe what he has so ably given to the232 public. I will quote what he says of our arrival there, and of the earliest inscription which was found: ‘Amidst these relics of the old world our tents were pitched, having been removed from B?r Hammamat as soon as breakfast had been finished; and with camera, note-book, and sketching apparatus, the four of us dispersed in different directions, my own objective, of course, being the inscriptions. The history of Wady Fowakiyeh begins when the history of Egypt begins, and one must look back into the dim uncertainties of the archaic period for the first evidences of the working of the quarries of the valley. Many beautifully made bowls and other objects of this tuff are found in the graves of Dynasty I., fifty-five centuries ago; and my friends and I scrambling over the rocks were fortunate enough to find in a little wady leading northwards from the main valley a large rock-drawing and inscriptions of this date. A “vase-maker” here offers a prayer to the sacred barque of the hawk-god Horus, which is drawn so clearly that one may see the hawk standing upon its shrine in the boat, an upright spear set before the door; and one may observe the bull’s head, so often found in primitive countries, affixed to the prow; while the barque itself is shown to be standing upon a sledge in order that it might be dragged over the ground.’
Page 232
THE MOSQUE AT KOSSEIR
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233 By the modern German school of computation, which Mr. Weigall accepts, the period of the Shepherd Kings was but of two centuries’ duration; but according to the reckoning of the majority of Egyptologists, this period lasted a millennium longer. Should the latter be right these graffiti would date back sixty-five centuries; and from that remote period (with the exception of the dark ages known as that of the Hyksos or Shepherd Kings) some signs of human activity were visible in this valley, telling us something of the various peoples who ruled Egypt until the three Englishmen scratched their names with a penknife shortly after the British occupation.

Every collection of Egyptological objects will have some specimens of sculptured stone quarried out of these tufa and breccia rocks.

I found a large smooth surface of stone, forming the back wall of a hollow quarried out of a gigantic mass of breccia, which, in Ptolemaic times, had been made to serve as a shrine to the god Min of Koptos, the protecting deity of the Upper Egyptian deserts. There were signs that this shady nook had recently been used as an Arab encampment, and it suggested a delightful subject to paint. I was torn with conflicting emotions: whether to secure so good a background for a figure subject, or whether to join my companions in their search for arch?ological treasure. The background won the day. A faint hope that we might spend a second morning here on our return journey, which would make it possible to complete my study, finally decided me.

The smooth stone at the back of the hollow was decorated with very delicately incised Ptolemaic work. The spacing of the panels containing the deities was most artistically done, and the figures were chiselled with a delicacy and style not usually seen in work of that period. I had seen little Ptolemaic sculpture on any234 other material than on sandstone, and this was bound to look coarse compared to the eighteenth dynasty work on the finer grained limestone. The hard breccia rock surface gave the sculptor a chance; and though it lacked the distinction of earlier work, it compared well as to delicacy of treatment. Greek influence seemed more apparent than ever. Hathor looked less of a goddess, and was possibly more charming as a pretty little mortal; Ammon Ra without his headdress would have passed for a lithe and well-proportioned Greek slave; but the god Min, owing to his conventional pose, combined the Hellenic sensuosity with the severer Egyptian traditions. The Ptolemy who made offerings to the above trilogy was a Greek grandee in the pose and apparel of a Pharaoh. The figures measured about two feet high except that of an attendant priest, who, as modesty demanded, was a few inches shorter. There were one or two more panels in which Min figured conspicuously.

The bold forms of the massive rock which overhung this wall may have helped to emphasise the delicacy of the sculpture. The colour of the rock formation is as extraordinary as its drawing: the untouched portions are a chocolate brown, and those parts exposed by the work of the quarrymen vary from green to a bluish black.

When the sun shifted to where I sat, the effect changed so much that it seemed hardly worth risking sunstroke by continuing my study. My companions calling out their several discoveries tempted me to join in the hunt. So much of interest was crowded into the235 one day spent at Wady Fowakiyeh that the thirteenth day of November 1908 will remain as a landmark in my somewhat varied existence.

One long inscription, which Mr. Weigall interpreted, tells us of 10,000 men who were sent during the eleventh dynasty to work the quarries. Amongst this army of quarrymen there were miners, artists, draughtsmen, stone-cutters, gold-workers, and officials, and full directions were given as to the work they were sent to do. When one thought of the voices of this host of men, awakening the echoes of the cliff-bound valley, the present silence became almost oppressive. As the shades deepened with the declining sun, the impressiveness of our surroundings seemed to have got hold even of our escort. We could just hear them muttering their evening prayer, and when that was over nothing but the crackling of the fire, round which they sat, disturbed the stillness of the night.

Till this point in our journey, the road we trod is sufficiently hard and smooth to allow a motor-car to do it in three or four hours. We had now reached the highest part of the desert highway, but the incline is so imperceptible that only the aneroid could prove that we were on a greater altitude than when we left Qús. No motor-car could, however, cross the mile or two of boulders which choked up the road on which we made an early start the following morning. Most of this we did on foot, jumping from boulder to boulder, the men leading the camels a serpentine route or assisting them over the rocks which blocked the way. We followed up a narrow pass in the mountains to inspect the abandoned236 workings of the gold-mines. We soon came across some huts used by miners who had in quite recent years come here to glean where the early Egyptians had reaped a good harvest. The huts were already in worse repair than many we saw at the Roman Hydreuma. From what I have heard since, the modern working of these mines had soon been abandoned as a hopeless task. There are, however, other mines north of these which are now worked at a profit.

We decided to continue on this pass and join the main route to Kosseir a few miles further on, the baggage train, of course, following the usual caravan road. Our guide declared that he knew the road, so there seemed nothing to apprehend. Nevertheless we took the precaution of leaving a trail behind us, as boys do on a paperchase, for there were tracks in the sand of other camels than our own, and the road, such as it was, split up into several winding passes through the hills. As one of our party had chosen to follow the baggage, we decided to send back Selim to the main highway to tell him when and where we expected to join him, and Selim had also instructions to prepare our midday meal at that spot.

The landscape became more extraordinary than ever when we left the tuff and breccia rocks behind us. On either side of us rose sandstone cliffs worn into the most fantastic shapes. It is difficult to associate rain with such a country as the one we were in, yet rain and nothing else could have worn this stone into the shapes we now beheld. An inscription which Weigall had carefully copied described a torrential237 shower which descended on the quarrymen in early dynastic times, and which they considered a good omen of a successful issue to their labours. Rain descends at long intervals, but during periods as counted by geologists an immense amount of water had fashioned these sandstone rocks into their unearthly shapes, for no growth is here to impede the action of the torrential streams.

We wound amongst these hills for two or three hours, and I was delighted when we regained the highway and returned to less strange, though more beautiful scenery. But where was Selim? We fortunately could see our companion in the distance, while the baggage camels which he followed were disappearing round an angle in the range of hills. We managed to make him hear, and he rode back to meet us. He had neither seen nor heard anything of our cook, and had the latter followed the trail he should have joined the main body a couple of hours ago. Our guide went back to try to find the lost cook, and as he was born to the desert, we had little fear of losing him. After a hunt of a couple of hours the guide returned, hoping that Selim might have found his way to us by the main road. There was nothing to be done but to send the guide back to try some of the passes which he had considered too unlikely for the cook to have taken.

It was awkward to............