WHERE CROCODILES WERE GODS. . .

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLV, Issue 21126, 27 August 1938, Page 9

WHERE CROCODILES WERE GODS. . .

I wanted to be moving. I wanted to get away from Cairo, where Europeans and Egyptians are so kind, and so hospitable, that you continue to stay on there long after you should have left. Like Dublin, Cairo is a difficult city to leave, because people are so friendly, invite you out, write letters to you, ring you up on the telephone and offer to take you here, there and everywhere. It requires great strength of mind to leave Cairo; it would, indeed, be easy to come to Egypt and see nothing except that city. Howevep, one night when I was reading in bed in the shadow of the Pyramids, I decided to hire a car the next morning and go to the Payum. I thought the Fayum would be interesting, because I had been reading Strabo and Herodotus. For in the old days—the first four centuries before ChrisL-Greek and Roman tourists always went to the Fayum to see the sacred crocodiles at Arsinoe. I suppose some pre-Chris-tian Thomas Cook advertised them as a sight which “no visitor to Egypt should miss.”

The crocodiles were kept in a sacred lake in the grounds of the temple of Sebek. They wore gold earrings and splashed the water with fore-paws decorated with jewelled bracelets. The visitor was expected to make offerings tof fried fish and honey cakes, but it Is clear, from the accounts of ancient writers, that the crocodiles would have preferred the visitor himself. The priest had a trick of opening the crocodiles’ mouths without getting hurt. Stealing up as the animals were asleep in the sun, they quickly’ opened their mouths, and injected the fried fish and honey cakes, leaping back as the crocodiles jumped angrily into the water. It Is surprising that ..one of those cynical Greeks ever wrote a dialogue between a sacred crocodile and a sacred cow on “the Horror of being a God." To-day the sacred ponds are dried up, and there are vast dusty mounds where the temple stood. Sometimes natives, digging in the earth, find the mummy of a crocodile, brittle as old wood, wrapped In yards of fine linen.

Early 1 the morning I set out for the Fayum. The road leaves the Pyramids to plunge for ferty miles across a blinding desert. Forty miles of desert are just enough to show you what a desert is like, but not enough to fill your heart with despair and weariness. The sandy track loses itself on a featureless horizon. The sand hills should each other mile after, here smooth as brown velvet, there rippled with the wind as if the tide has just gone out. And the sun beats down angrily upon this head land until the eyes grew weary and sore with looking at the burning flatness; until any object—a bird, the white bones of a camel, the chassis of a bumt-oe* Ford ca--—comes as a

welcome relief from the monotonous sterility. One feature of the desert is beautiful: the dry, clean air. It is like the air on top of Ben Nevis. And when you have lived in an Eastern city for some time, where the air Is full of all sorts of things, the desert air, blowing over thousands of miles of clean sand, stirs up the bloodstream and cheers the heart. Still, what a joy it is to see far off the first glimpse of palm trees, and to know that in a short time you will enter the first patch of shade, hear

the gurgle of running water and listen with delight to the sound of birds. The Fayum is an oasis lying about 140 feet below the level of the Mediterranean. The Arabs say that it was made fertile by the Visier Yusuf, who caused canals to be dug which brought water and life to the desert. The Vizier Yusuf is the Joseph of the Bible. The track led downhill towards a scene that looked to me I.’-e a child’s impression of the Garden of Eden. The desert ended suddently against a wall of date palms. High up where the fronds spray upwards against the blue sky, I saw bunches of dates lying like a swarm of bees in heavy clusters, the colour of Spanish mahogany. Instead of the barren sand, the road now lay along a high embankment of black earth, the rich, pregnant black earth of Egypt, and on either side ran slow canals of fresh water—the veins that carry the life blood of this land. The richness of the Fayum was proverbial in the days of the Pharaohs; it was a land with the climate of Paradise And to-day it is farmed by the rich landowners of Egypt, some of whom even know their own farms by sight, and attend to the details of farm management. The earth produces almost anything that is sown in it; oranges, bananas, mandarins, dates, sugar-cane, rice, maize, and the only real crop of olives in Egypt

The strangest of all the .Fayum products are sea fish! How can see fish come from an oasis in the desert 150 miles from the sea. The answer is that the water of Lake Karoun, a salt lake on the western boundary, is chemically much the same as the Mediterranean Sea. How hard the fellah works. With what unremitting toil must he slave at this black land, giving his life in return for its fruitfulness. Every head of maize is literally won at the cost of his sweat and the cracking of his muscles. He stands to the waist in water,

his single thin garment drenched with the drip 01 the shaduf; he stands in the clinging mud of the fields, the soles of his bare feet making him an easy victim to the terrible germ that lives in the soil of Egypt; he stands bowed above his Virginian plough; he strides, like Pharaoh’s soldiers or. a temple wall, slashing at the man-high maize stalks; he staggers, covered like a Jack-in-the-Green, burdened with a load of bersim. Every day, year in and year out, century after century, it is the same. He is the fellah, the man whose sweat built the Pyramids and the temples, the man whose indomitable sense of fatality is perhaps the most colossal of Egypt’s monuments. As I pass his pretty villages, built in groves of date palms beside shallow canals, I smell the wood smoke rising from the ovens where his women are baking the tough bread which is his staple food. I see the little mud houses where he goes home to sleep for a few hours before the sun, like a trumpet, in the morning, calls him out to strive again with water and with mud. And there is little inside his house of four walls of mud, except little children playing in the dust.

But the fellah is asleep In the wide and comfortable arms of ignorance. Over 85 per cent, of the population of Egypt is unable to read; and who, looking around at the fruits of socalled knowledge to-day, would wish

to awaken the fellah from his ancient slumber? I travelled through the villages to the edge of Lake Karoun, where a small two-storey hotel, kept by a young German, stands within a few yards of the water’s edge. The hotel was empty because it was mid-week. At the week-ends it is filled with sportsmen from Cairo, who come to shoot the countless thousands of wild duck, snipe and teal which haunt the lakeside. And I thought that this lake was the most beautiful thing I had seen so far in Egypt. It is a sheet of blue water lying in the sun-, light with the tawny desert on its western shores; a desert in which lie forgotten cities of the Greek age and old temples falling into dust. A few poor fishermen row about the lake with their nets, and sell their catches on the shore. In the still hush of this remote place, the blend of blue water and desert hill, I was reminded of another lake—the Lake of Galilee. An Arab servant took my bag up to a little bedroom overlooking the lake. The bed was covered with a mosquito net and the room smelt cleanly of camphor. “I have just opened the hotel,” said young Mr Schumacher, the proprietor, “for I keep it shut until the shooting season opens. What a business it is, opening a hotel that has been shut for an Egyptian summer! The lizards, the snakes, the birds and the frogs come and live here, also the wild bees.” I knew that I was going to like Lake Karoun.

(To be continued next week)