A NOTE ON THE THEBAN HILLS

By the late W. E. Evans.

About 400 miles up the Nile from Cairo lies the site of the ancient city of Thebes, for hundreds of years the capital of Egypt. In its prosperous days it covered a large area on both banks of the river. The more obvious remains of it to-day are, on the east bank, the great temples of Karnak to the north and Luxor to the south, with the typically unlovely town of Luxor in attendance, largely dependent on the tourist trade ; and on the west bank, the mortuary temples of Rameses II and III, certain other ancient remains, and an unsavoury collection of mud-huts occupied by the peasantry. Almost from the western edge of the irrigation belt of the Nile rises the steep escarpment of the Theban hills, amongst which were buried the kings and the courtiers from about 1600 B.C. for the next 500 years. As they worshipped the sun-god, Amen-Ra, in the east, so were they buried with him in the west. And they were buried in magnificence, not only in the gilded monuments of their tombs, but in the grand setting of the everlasting hills.

I find it tempting to fall into superlatives about these hills, perhaps on account of a year spent out of sight of anything worthy the name. To begin with, then, a few facts. They rise in a steep, eastward-facing escarpment, little more than 1,000 feet in height, to a level plateau stretching westwards as far as can be seen, and featureless except for the deep and tortuous indentations made into it by the dry, steep-sided wadis running down to the Nile flats. The rock is limestone, of a deep ochre, almost unvar}nng in colour; the whole area is dry and utterly devoid of life, save for a few choughs which squawk their way around the cliffs. In what then lies their appeal ? There is a fascination about the dry places of the earth, and added to that here there is line and form to fashion rock scenery unequalled by anything that I know on a com­ parable scale.

Although in some places, notably behind the Temple of Queen Hatshepsut, the scarp face rises in one great cliff almost to the full height of the plateau, it is more generally terraced, and this is especially marked in the indenting wadis. The different terraces, at intervals of about-300-400 feet, probably mark sea-levels at progressive geological periods, while the natural sculpture which characterises the cliffs may be the result of sea erosion. Certainly, throughout the hills, are to be found such profusion of fossils as I have not seen elsewhere. Mussels, sea-urchins and other crustaceans, complete and perfect in form and detail, abound and require no seeking.

Each terrace is separated from the next by perpendicular cliffs, eroded into giant pillars, standing rocks, hanging galleries, and countless strange shapes to make these fitting valleys of the dead. A curious circumstance which I am quite unable to explain, but of which I made good use, is that the terrace edges, and the slopes of rubble which lie against the upper cliffs, are honeycombed with paths. Who made them, when and why, is a mystery to me. They are not animal tracks, for there are no animals here, and besides, an occasional cairn was to be found beside them. There has been much tentative excavation in the hills, for archaeological reasons or purely for plunder, but this seems an inadequate reason for so many seemingly aimless tracks. Again there are frequent lodes of calcite, many fairly pure and occurring in remarkably large and well-formed crystal masses, but these, when found and unearthed, are often left to lie. Perhaps other and more marketable minerals are found, or suspected; I do not know, but the paths are there, and they led me round great amphi­ theatres of towering rock. At one moment I faced a cliff where the chiselling of nature bore an uncanny resemblance to the hieroglyphics and reliefs I had seen in the tombs and temples below. At a turn of the path is seen in profile a great rock standing sentinel to its parent cliff, its sun-baked rich ochre a perfect contrast against the cobalt sky. And so on, for a mile of exposed ledges, across narrow rifts and around savage gullies, from one fantastic rock formation to another, until a boulder slope gives access to the next terrace.

Hoping to find a way past the ramparts of the highest cliffs to the tableland above, I scrambled up the bed of a gully full of large blocks. It led me into a water-worn bowl whose further side was a smooth undercut wall, thirty feet high, above which the gully continued under a great Gothic arch to a narrow slit against the sky, whence came a shaft of sunlight making a glowing shield of rock to light the cool shadows of the cleft. There are many such gullies carrying clear evidence of water-erosion, and it can only be that, on the rare occasions when rain falls here, they become roaring torrents.

I have said how appropriate a dwelling-place for the departed these hills appear to be. It seems to me also that the juxtaposition of the great temples is not fortuitous. In these hills I have seen pyramid and pylon, sphinx with his characteristic forward-stretching paws, columns with their varied capitals, indeed the counterpart magnified ten-fold of every architectural feature of the great buildings of the plains below. I am convinced that the men who wrought the Theban temples gained their inspiration from the hills.