Oh, that Egypt could be kept as it is, even as it is now; that Philæ could be preserved even as it is now!
From stereograph, copyright, 1904, by Underwood & Underwood, New York
The spoilers are there, those blithe modern spirits, so frightfully clever and capable, so industrious, so determined, so unsparing of themselves and--of others! Already they are at work “benefiting Egypt.” Tall chimneys begin to vomit smoke along the Nile. A damnable tram-line for little trolleys leads one toward the wonderful Colossi of Memnon. Close to Kom Ombos some soul imbued with romance has had the inspiration to set up--a factory. And Philæ--is it to go?
Is beauty, then, of no value in the world? Is it always to be the prey of modern progress? Is nothing to be considered sacred; nothing to be left untouched, unsmirched by the grimy fingers of improvement? I suppose nothing.
Then let those who still care to dream go now to Philæ’s painted chamber by the long reaches of the Nile; go on, if they will, to the giant forms of Abu-Simbel among the Nubian sands. And perhaps they will think with me, that in some dreams there is a value greater than the value that is entered in any bank-book, and they will say, with me, however uselessly:
“Leave to the world some dreams, some places in which to dream; for if it needs dams to make the grain grow in the stretches of land that were barren, and railways, and tram-lines, and factory chimneys that vomit black smoke in the face of the sun, surely it needs also painted chambers of Philæ and the silence that comes down from Isis.”
By old Cairo I do not mean only “le vieux Caire” of the guide-book, the little, desolate village containing the famous Coptic church of Abu Sergius, in the crypt of which the Virgin Mary and Christ are said to have stayed when they fled to the land of Egypt to escape the fury of King Herod; but the Cairo that is not new, that is not dedicated wholly to officialdom and tourists, that, in the midst of changes and the advance of civilization,--civilization that does so much harm as well as so much good, that showers benefits with one hand and defaces beauty with the other,--preserves its immemorial calm or immemorial tumult; that stands aloof, as stands aloof ever the Eastern from the Western man, even in the midst of what seems, perhaps, like intimacy; Eastern to the soul, though the fantasies, the passions, the vulgarities, the brilliant ineptitudes of the West, beat about it like waves about some unyielding wall of the sea.