The Origin of Species was published in 1859. The rest is history. It cannot be maintained that without Darwin the theory of evolution would not have come into being, but it can be insisted that had Darwin not taken the voyage on the Beagle to the Galápagos, it would have been seriously delayed. It is now quite obvious why the Galápagos Archipelago interests students of science, and why it has become necessary to protect the species from which Darwin was first led to formulate his theory of evolution. That man’s descent is as controversial a subject with anthropologists and zoologists as with Tennessee jurors, none will gainsay. No modern zoologist (or Darwin, for that matter) thinks man was descended from the primate apes as we know them today, but all zoologists agree that ape and man have had common primate ancestors. Darwin is seldom read today even by zoologists, but the literature that has been directly and indirectly stimulated by the publication of the Origin of Species, has reached an infinity of volumes. One cannot hope to go through it in a lifetime. Despite the great advances of science since Darwin, his book remains a landmark in world thought. “Of course,” as Mr. Geoffrey West, the recent, and best, biographer of Darwin, wrote, “the Origin of Species has its omissions, its reticences, its glosses, its limitations. It was written by man, not God. But it is by any standard, a mighty product of the human mind. Question its validity, deny its truth and still it stands, a master-work, a synthesis of a whole section of knowledge, such as only a handful of beings have achieved in the history of the world.” On October 17, 1835, the H.M.S. Beagle, after completing a survey of the islands—so excellent that it has stood, with only minor corrections, through the century—sailed for the South Pacific. No one, least of all Charles Darwin, had any realization of the effect of that voyage on the thoughts of man.
H.M.S. Beagle had given the Galápagos scientific immortality.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE IN EGYPT
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE
You are DEAR GOOD PEOPLE. I have found here no end of letters from you. All good news.
We arrived here on Saturday morning, 16th, and Mr. B. said we would send into Cairo for the letters, and we would go up the Pyramids, because then, if anything had happened, we should at all events have secured them. This though said in joke, I believe pretty much expressed the feelings of all, viz., that it was a very good thing to have the Pyramids to occupy our attention while waiting for the letters. However, a greater than Mr. B. decided—the khamsin—and it made its decision with so loud a voice, that to the Pyramids we could not go. So Mr. B. and I mounted our asses and rode into Cairo for the letters, which we found after a world of trouble, and after frequently hearing there were none. Many and thick and happy ones, thank God; you are very good people. Nothing, however, decisive as to whether it is possible for us to go to Greece; so we came back again for ς and wandered about old Cairo in the afternoon.
Sunday we went in to church upon our asses; and meeting the Murrays, just landed, went in to luncheon, and then to call upon the L——.
You have no idea how strange it is to come back again into the world of life, and civilised wants and customs, after having been for three months and a half in the land of graves—amidst death and a world of spirits. But the spirits of the old Egyptians are such good company, and preach such nice cheerful sermons upon death and a hereafter.
I never shall forget the strange feeling, as we sailed up to Cairo on Saturday, of hearing a band of military music in the distance—we who have heard nothing but the music of the stars, or the still small voice of the dead, for a whole winter.
This morning we set finally and resolutely out for the Pyramids; but we had not reached the shore before it became invisible for the sand clouds; the wind covered us with water—it was hopeless. We said to the asses, wait—a welcome word to the Egyptian, who will wait for twenty four hours without moving, if you tell him—and came back, and at this moment I can hardly write, and cannot even see Roda. We are keeping on the boat, till we have accomplished these unaccomplishable Pyramids, and are lying off Gizeh, as it is too far to go from Cairo.
And now for Memphis—beautiful, poetic, melancholy Memphis. No one had prepared us for its beauty. We thought of it as a thing to be done; tiresome after Thebes. We had three fair days of sailing from Minieh, and had not been ashore. The last night a storm arose, and we were obliged to anchor; but rain— three drops!—fell, and the wind was so terrified that it fainted away. By dint of tacking we got on the next day to Bedreshayn, but took the little boat to get there. Paolo went up to the village for asses, we starving and shivering meanwhile in the boat; and shortly we saw Gad return, driving before him a troop of asses, about thirty or forty (Gad, if I mistake not, means “a troop”). After some delay we mounted (no ass having a bridle), and rode along a causeway till we came to the most beautiful spot you can imagine. I have seen nothing like it except in my dreams, certainly not in Egypt; a palm forest, the old palms springing out of the freshest grass; the ground covered with a little pink flower (of which I have tried in vain to preserve a plant for you) and the most delicate little lilac dwarf iris. Here and there a glassy pool and a flock of goats and kids, the long sun-light streaks and shadows falling among the trees. It looked as if nature had spread her loveliest coverlid, had grown her freshest flowers to deck the pall, and throw on the grave of Memphis. I have seen nothing like this palm forest in the East. And in the middle, in a grassy hollow, by the side of a bright pool of water, lies a statue of the great Rameses, the most beautiful sculpture we have yet seen. I must even confess that there is nothing at Ipsamboul to compare with it. I never felt so much the powerfulness of words. There he lies upon his face, as if he had just lain down weary; you speak low that you may not wake him to see the desolation of his land, yet there is nothing dreary, but all is still. It is the most beautiful tomb-stone for the grave of a nation I ever saw. I felt as if God had placed it there himself, and said—
“Very dear to me thou wert, my land of Memphis, and thou shalt have a fitting monument—the sweet green grass above thee spread, and one of the most glorious statues in the world to mark the place.” I could have cried when I heard them talk of turning it round upon its back,—as if God had placed it there, and it should not be touched by man. This statue was given to the English. It is well indeed we did not take it. We went down into the hollow to see the features; they are composed, serene, purified beyond anything I ever saw; with such a smile on the mouth, and such an intellect in the brow. I had rather look upon that face again than upon anything in Egypt. The art is so perfect that the stone has all the softness of flesh: you are really afraid to touch those colossal stone features, the high blood nostril, the short upper lip, the moulded brow, for fear of insulting him; and he lies so calmly upon his pillow—the pillow of his mother earth. Nothing is broken but the legs. In either hand is a papyrus, with his cartouche upon it. Though the eyes are open, there is the most perfect appearance of repose. But I am ashamed to speak about the art, when such an expression is there—the spiritualized, transfigured expression, not indeed of a Christ in his transfiguration, but of an Æschylean creation, a Prometheus, or an Abdiel of Milton. This was the colossal standing statue, which perhaps stood before the great temple of Phthah.
At some hundred yards distance is a cluster of three mounds, about a mile round, with walls of crude brick, varying from twelve to twenty-four feet thick. This we fixed upon in our own minds as the site of the temple of Phthah, that wonder of ancient times. I brought away (for the school) a crude brick, full of straw, which mayhap the Israelites may have made. At all events, it is part of no Arab building, but of a real old Egyptian one; but I felt as if I had lived so intimately with Moses and Rameses for the last three months, that I did not care much about their bricks, when I had themselves.
Today I walked with Moses, under the palms; through the desert, where he killed the Egyptian—about the palace, where he lived as the grandson of the king—round the temple, where he derived his ideas of a pure worship, and (sifting the chaff
from the wheat) thought how he could retain the spirit of the religion, while getting rid of the worship of animals. I forget whether it is Manetho or Strabo, who says that “Moyses” was a priest of Heliopolis, who wished to change the worship of brutes in Egypt; and I have often thought he may have tried the Egyptians first, and failing, gone to the Hebrews. I looked at the line of hills and of Pyramids which he had looked at, and thought that probably the hills were more altered than the Pyramids. How grieved he must have been to leave Memphis,—guilty of ingratitude, as he must have seemed, towards his princess-mother, who had so tenderly and wisely reared him, and given him the means of learning all he valued so much, as the way of raising his brethren—that great, that single instance in history as far as I know, of a learned man, a philosopher, and a gentleman, forming the plan of himself educating savages, and devoting himself to it. It was like Sir Isaac Newton keeping school among the Nubians—Charles James Fox turning missionary. There was more of the Roman Catholic, of the Jesuit, in Moses, than of the Protestant. We should have said, what a waste! to squander such talents among miserable slaves, who won’t understand you; keep in your own sphere; you will do much more good among educated men like yourself. I do not know any man in all history with whom I sympathise so much as with Moses—his romantic devotion—his disappointments—his aspirations, so much higher than anything he was able to accomplish, always striving to give the Hebrews a religion they could not understand.
Well, we rode on through palm groves and corn fields, and by a small lake where once the famous sacred lake of Memphis was, over which the dead were ferried, to the edge of the desert, where once was the necropolis of Memphis, and which we call the desert of Sakhara, a desert covered with whitened bones, mummy cloths, and fragments, and full of pits; not here and there; not in one place and then in another, but strewed like a battlefield, so as really to look like the burial place of the world. Of all the mighty world not one living man has remained to us, only this valley of their bones. Here Ezekiel might have seen his vision of the dry bones, and passed by them round about; for there were very many in the open valley, and lot they were very dry.
Here the Pyramids lost their vulgarity—their come, look-at-me appearance, and melted away into a fitting part and portion of this vast necropolis, subdued by the genius of the place. Hardly anything can be imagined more vulgar, more uninteresting than a Pyramid in itself, set up upon a tray, like a clipt yew in a public-house garden; it represents no idea; it appeals to no feeling; it tries to call forth no part of you, but the vulgarest part—astonishment at its size—at the expense. Surely size is a very vulgar element of the sublime,—duration, you will say, is a better, that is true, but this is the only idea it presents—a form without beauty, without ideal, devised only to resist time, to last the longest; and age is an idea one is so familiar with in Egypt, that if a thing has nothing but age to recommend it, you soon learn to pass by it to the children of Savak and Athor, of Time and of Beauty. No, the Pyramids are a fit emblem of the abominable race they represented and overthrew. Have they a thought in them? it is a thought of tyranny. And what earthly good they ever did to any human being, but upsetting the wretches who built them, I never could find out,—except determining, by the mathematical accuracy of their position that, in 6000 years the axis of the earth has not changed an iota of its direction. As a monument of time, then, the earth is as good as the Pyramids.
Well, I had been very loth to see the Pyramids; but here we stood at the bottom of the oldest monument of man in the known world, the large Pyramid of Sakhara, which is now believed to have been the family tomb of the first of the third dynasty, Sesorchris I, 3500 years before Christ. There is nothing left to testify of man’s existence before this. It is not above 300 feet high, and has a chamber excavated beneath it in the rock 100 feet deep, into which you descend by a well. I should like to have seen this mysterious cave, but it was impossible. This Pyramid, unlike the others, is made of five great steps.
I ran up a mound near it, from which I could see the whole of this necropolis of the world Sprinkled about the churchyard stood the nine Pyramids of Sakhara. On my left, to the south, the two of Dashoor, of which the nearest is almost as large (by thirty feet) as the Great Pyramid of Gizeh—both these are supposed to be of the third dynasty—near them the two brick pyramids—mere ruins. On my right, to the north, the three Pyramids of Abousir, of the three last kings of the third dynasty, and beyond them, but seeming quite near, the two Giants of Gizeh, with the smaller one of the Holy Mycerinus (all of the fourth dynasty, 3229 B.C.) Above my head was the great Pyramid of Sakhara, 3453 B.C. But their ugliness was softened away by the shadow of death, which reigned over the place—as moonlight makes everything look beautiful. I could have wandered about that desert and those tombs for hours, but fatigue and those screeching Arabs, the two great Egyptian evils, drove us away.
We stopped as we went at the tomb of Psammeticus II, a modern of 600 years before Christ, the predecessor of the Pharaoh Hophra of the Bible—who was the predecessor of Amasis, the patron of Pythagoras and Solon, and friend of Polycrates, of the twenty-sixth dynasty. This was a series of chambers, excavated in the ground, to which you descended by a pit. The chambers were vaulted, and had pits in them. The hieroglyphs were clear; they were of the decadence.
A granite sarcophagus here, an ibis pit there, stopped us, as we rode away from the Arabs, and back to Memphis, by the long palm grove and village of Sakhara. Again we stopped, and had a long look at out Rameses, whom we found still sleeping on the turf of the valley. I never saw anything which affected me so much. I do not believe there is anything like it in the world, except the Santa Cecilia decollate in Trastevere at Rome. We clambered over the mounds, and thought we made out two gigantic clusters of what must have been temples. Here and there we found an Athor capital, a granite figure of an official, bearing on his shoulders one of those slaves with king’s heads, which were carried in processions. Otherwise the city of three thousand six hundred and odd years before Christ, founded by Menes himself, lay asleep under the green sod and the palm trees—“At her head a green grass turf, at her feet a stone.”
The difficulty of writing about Egypt is, that one feels ashamed of talking about one’s own impressions at such a deathbed as this; and yet, to describe the place itself,—one cannot—there are no words big enough. Memphis has wound itself round my heart—made itself a place in my imagination. I have walked there with Moses and Rameses, and with them I shall always return there.
***
I told you how Saturday morning Mr. B—— and I rode into the town from old Cairo, about two miles (I always feel so proud when mounted like a caliph on my ass); how he deposited me with Madame François, my friend and hotel keeper, how I walked up and down the dreary sandy large high room, with no furniture, but mosquito curtains, and getting impatient looked out of the window into the white unwindowed street; how one solitary individual came down the street, who, looking up at the same moment that I was looking out, turned out to be the mad Count we met on the Nile, who gave us birds and books, but whose name we never knew; how I was very near jumping out of the window, but remembering I should have to give back the books, refrained; how Mr. B. came back with only one letter—how Mr. Legros followed with a new pair of primrose coloured gloves, put on for us, in which he looked like a dear old bear in satin shoes; how he fell about our necks—how he wanted me to go and see the hippopotamus—how I, getting uneasy about ς wished to go back—how he mounted us on our asses; how Mr. B., at the door of our consulate, remembered he must go to the Greek merchant; how I rode into the consulate, ass and all, taking her with me as a sufficient chaperone, and a quite maternal protector, even though she could not speak, how at this moment two handfuls of letters arrived—how I snatched—how Mr. Legros said, “Won’t you get off to read your letters?”—how I did it, but remembering in the house the gross impropriety I had been guilty of in leaving my ass, and coming in without her, implored to go into the garde
n; how I climbed up upon a white wall to be modest and retiring, and read my letters; how shocked I was when wine and biscuits arrived, and were deposited by a dumb Arab in beautiful trousers before me (if it had been coffee I might have had fewer scruples); how I crawled down again, and remounting our asses, for Mr. B. had by this time come back, we embraced Mr. Legros, and ambled away to old Cairo at a pace caliphs might have envied.
Well, we fetched ς and spent the afternoon in Fostat (old Cairo), very interesting, though differing from Memphis. First, we went through narrow, narrow streets, with threads, not gleams, of sun through them, where the Moorish balconies not only met, but overlapped, overhead, to a Coptish church in the Roman fortress, where a Coptic funeral was going on—women couchant on the floor and howling—the coffin a mere shallow tray with the body in it, covered by a pink gauze—a priest chanting; and when he had done, the finery torn off the corpse, which galloped away, followed by the women howling.
Below the church we went down into a grotto or crypt, supported by four slips of columns on either side, making three aisles, very small and low, about eight paces by seven, certainly the oldest Christian place of worship I ever was in, without excepting the catacombs of Rome. Mr. B. thought it older than any church at Jerusalem. Here, it is said, a serpent was worshipped by the Egyptians, till the Virgin and Child made it their abode, when it disappeared. Certain it is that all sects, however inimical, Copt, Catholic, Greek, Maronite, believe in the tradition, and each says mass there. I cannot help, like Robertson, believing in tradition, with one’s own reservations. It is astonishing how much more difficulty we have in believing in an antiquity one thousand eight hundred years old than in one of six thousand. We have lately been so intimate with buildings of thousands of years, and cannot now believe in one of hundreds.
The Best Adventure and Exploration Stories Ever Told Page 29
