James Baikie

“ No one can fail to notice the beautiful set of phases through which the moon passes every month. A little after the almanac has announced 'new moon,' she begins to appear as a thin crescent low down in the West, and setting shortly after the sun. Night by night we can watch her moving eastward among the stars, and showing more and more of her illuminated surface, until at first quarter half of her disc is bright. ”

“ And then the actual story of the House of Minos will appeal to all. To-day, perhaps, the main impression left on the ordinary student by this resurrection is one of sadness. Here was a kingdom so great and so imposing, a civilization so highly advanced and so full of the joy of living. And it has all passed away and been forgotten, with its vivid life, and its hopes and fears; and we can only wonder how life looked to the men and women who peopled the courts of the vast palace, and what part was played by them in the fragments of old legend that have come down to us. ”

“ The waiting crowd bows to the dust as the sovereign passes; but Pharaoh looks neither to the right hand nor to the left. He stands erect and impassive in the swaying chariot, holding the crook and whip which are the Egyptian royal emblems. On his head he wears the royal war helmet, in the front of which a golden cobra rears its crest from its coils, as if to threaten the enemies of Egypt. ”

“ The sun may go on shining, a perpetual mystery and miracle, without attracting any attention, save when a wet spring brings on the usual talk of sun-spots and the weather; Jupiter and Venus excite only sufficient interest to suggest an occasional question as to whether that bright star is the Star of Bethlehem; but when a great comet spreads its fiery tail across the skies everybody turns astronomer for the nonce, and normally slumber-loving people are found willing, or at least able, to desert their beds at the most unholy hours to catch a glimpse of the strange and mysterious visitant. ”

“ With such a sport, in which life or death depended upon an instant, in which a slip of the foot, a misjudgment of distance, or a wavering of hand or eye meant horrible destruction, we may be sure that the tragedies of the Minoan bull-ring were many and terrible, and that the fair dames of the Knossian Palace, modern in costume and appearance as they seem to us, were as habituated to scenes of cruel bloodshed as any Roman lady who watched the sports of the Colosseum, and saw gladiators hack one another to pieces for her pleasure. ”

“ It is, of course, nothing of the sort, for it can be seen every month when the sky is reasonably clear; but it is the sign that our world shines to the other worlds of space as they do to her; for this dim light upon the part of the moon unlit by the sun is simply the light which our own world reflects from her surface to the moon. In amount it is thirteen times more than that which the moon gives to us, as the earth presents to her satellite a disc thirteen times as large as that exhibited by the latter. ”

“ He looks round him curiously, as if thinking that Thebes would be a splendid town to plunder. Then a priest of high rank goes by, with shaven head, a panther skin slung across his shoulder over his white robe, and a roll of papyrus in his hand. A Sardinian of the bodyguard swaggers along behind him, the ball and horns on his helmet flashing in the sunlight, his big sword swinging in its sheath as he walks; and a Libyan bowman, with two bright feathers in his leather skull-cap, looks disdainfully at him as he shoulders his way through the crowd.
All around us people are buying and selling. ”

“ Greece as we know it in the infant stages of its development, with a totally different state of society, a totally different organization and culture; and in the interval no one could say how many generations, concerning which, and their conditions and developments, there was nothing but blank ignorance. So that it seemed as though the marvellous fabric of Greek civilization as we know it were indeed something unexampled, rising almost at once out of nothing to its height of splendour, as the walls of Ilium were fabled to have risen beneath the hands of their divine builders. ”

“ On the west bank lies the city of the dead. It has neither streets nor palaces, and no hum of busy life goes up from it; but it is almost more striking than its neighbour across the river. The hills and cliffs are honeycombed with long rows of black openings, the doorways of the tombs where the dead of Thebes for centuries back are sleeping. Out on the plain, between the cliffs and the river, temple rises after temple in seemingly endless succession. ”

“ In the East some star-like points mark where the peaks of the eastern wall are beginning to catch the dawn. Then delicate streaks of light begin to stream across the floor, and the dark mass of shadow divides itself into long pointed shafts, which stretch across the plain like the spires of some great cathedral. The whole spectacle is so magnificent and strange that no words can do justice to it ”

“ The charred ends of beams and pillars, the very preservation of the clay tablets with their enigmatic records, a preservation due, probably, to the tremendous heat to which they were exposed by the furious blazing of the oil in the store jars of the magazines, the traces of the blackening of fire upon the walls—everything tells of an overwhelming tragedy. Nor was the catastrophe the result of an accident. There is no mistaking the significance of the fact that in the palace scarcely a trace of precious metal, and next to no trace of bronze has been discovered. ”

“ Apart from its wonderful river, the country itself has no very striking features. It is rather a monotonous land—a long ribbon of green running through a great waste of yellow desert and barren hills. But the great charm that draws people's minds to Egypt, and gives the old land a never-failing interest, is its great story of the past, and all the relics of that story which are still to be seen. ”

“ With the unaided eye we view the sun as a small tranquil white disc; the telescope reveals to us that it is a vast globe convulsed by storms which involve the upheaval or submersion, within a few hours, of areas far greater than our own world; the spectroscope or the total eclipse adds to this revelation the further conception of a sweltering ocean of flame surrounding the whole solar surface, and rising in great jets of fire which would dissolve our whole earth as a drop of wax is melted in the flame of a candle ”

“ The fragments of decoration which have survived help us to realize a very beautiful room, gay with colour, yet never garish because of the softness of the indirect illumination, in which we may imagine the Minoan Court ladies, in their modern gowns, reclining on the cushions of the long couch, discussing the incidents of the last bull-grappling entertainment, the skill of the young Athenian Theseus, and the obvious infatuation of Princess Ariadne, or employing their time more usefully in some of the wonderful embroidery-work in which the fashion of the period delighted. ”

“ Fastened to the towers are four tall flagstaves—two on either side of the gate—and from them float gaily-coloured pennons. The walls of the towers are covered with pictures of the wars of the King. Here you see him charging in his chariot upon his fleeing enemies; here, again, he is seizing a group of captives by the hair, and raising his mace or his sword to kill them; but whatever he is doing, he is always gigantic, while his foes are mere helpless human beings. All these carvings are brilliantly painted, and the whole front of the building glows with colour ”

“ To quote Proctor's words: 'The golden disc, faintly striped with silver-tinted belts; the circling rings, with their various shades of brilliancy and colour; and the perfect symmetry of the system as it sweeps across the dark background of the field of view, combine to form a picture as charming as it is sublime and impressive.' Fortunately the main features of this beautiful picture are within the reach of very humble instruments. ”

“ We may imagine Page 169 the men from Crete, lithe and agile, as we see them on the Boxer Vase of Hagia Triada, swaggering in their bronze armour among the weaker Orientals, much as the later Greek hoplite of the times of Psamtek I. or Haa-ab-ra domineered over the native Egyptians.
But all the same the Philistine was an anachronism, a survival from an older world. The day of the Minoan, like that of his early friend the Egyptian, had passed away. The stars of new races were rising above the horizon, and new claimants were dividing the heritage of the ancient world. ”

“ People come from all parts of the world to see even the ruins of these buildings, and they are altogether the most astonishing buildings in the world; but they are now only the skeletons of what the temples once were, and scarcely give you any more idea of their former glory and beauty than a human skeleton does of the beauty of a living man or woman. Suppose, then, that we are coming up to the gates of a great Egyptian temple in the days when it was still the house of a god who was worshipped by hundreds of thousands of people. ”

“ Imagination can work wonders, but it requires to have a certain amount of material in fact to start upon in its workings. If it creates a world entirely out of its own consciousness, that world may be one of extreme beauty and splendour, but it is most unlikely that it will present any verisimilitude to actual life. It will be either vague and shadowy, or else so grandiose and unearthly in its magnificence as to have no point of connection with ordinary terrestrial life. But it is exactly here that the realism of the Homeric world strikes the student. ”

“ Herkhuf was so proud of the King's letter that he caused it to be engraved, word for word, on the walls of the tomb which he hewed out for himself at Elephantine, and there to this day the words can be read which tell us how old is the story of African exploration, and how a boy was always just a boy, even though he lived five thousand years ago, and reigned over a great kingdom. ”

“ It is very interesting, no doubt, to get a view of Jupiter or Saturn for one field's-breadth, and then to find, on attempting to readjust the instrument for another look, that the mounting has obligingly taken your star-gazing into its own hands, and is now directing your telescope to a different object altogether; but repetition of this form of amusement is apt to pall. A radically weak stand can never be made into a good one; the best plan is to get a properly proportioned mounting at once, and be done with it. ”

“ If those dark walls could only reveal the story of the doomed lives which they once imprisoned, we should probably be able to realize, even more fully than we do, the shadowed side of all the glittering splendour of Knossos, and the grim element of barbaric cruelty which mingled with a refined artistic taste and a delight in all forms of beauty. ”

“ Hundreds upon hundreds of years before anyone had ever heard of the Greeks and the Romans, there were great Kings reigning in Egypt, sending out their armies to conquer Syria and the Soudan, and their ships to explore the unknown southern seas, and wise men were writing books which we can still read. When Britain was a wild, unknown island, inhabited only by savages as fierce and untaught as the South Sea Islanders, Egypt was a great and highly civilized country, full of great cities, with noble palaces and temples, and its people were wise and learned. ”

“ At present the southern belt is by far the most conspicuous feature of the surface, over-powering all other details by its prominence, while its northern rival has shrunk in visibility to a mere shadow of what it appears in drawings made in the seventies. Through all the changes of the last thirty years, however, one very remarkable feature of the planet has remained permanent at least in form, though varying much in visibility. With the exception of the canals of Mars, no feature of any of the planets has excited so much interest as the great red spot on Jupiter. ”

“ Who carved it, or whose face it bears, we do not certainly know; but there the great figure crouches, as it has crouched for countless ages, keeping watch and ward over the empty tombs where the Pharaohs of Egypt once slept, its head towering seventy feet into the air, its vast limbs and body stretching for two hundred feet along the sand, the strangest and most wonderful monument ever hewn by the hands of man (Plate 11) .
Later on in Egyptian history the Kings and great folk grew tired of building pyramids, and the fashion changed. ”

“ The writer well remembers the keen feeling of delight with which he first discovered that a very humble and commonplace telescope—nothing more, in fact, than a small ordinary spy-glass with an object-glass of about 1 inch in aperture—was able to reveal many of the more prominent features of lunar scenery; and the possessor of any telescope, no matter whether its powers be great or small, may be assured that there is enough work awaiting him on the moon to occupy the spare time of many years with one of the most enthralling of studies. ”

“ Phæstos and Hagia Triada are as devoid of fortification as Knossos. Gournia and Palaikastro are open towns. Everything points to the existence of a strong and peaceful rule, allowing the natural bent of the island race to develop quietly and steadily during long periods in those lines of work, alike useful and artistic, whose remains excite our admiration to-day, and resting for generation after generation on the sea-power which kept all enemies far from the shores of the fortunate island and guarded the trade-routes of the Ægean. ”

“ We have not gone far before we find that life in Thebes can be quite exciting. A great noise is heard from one of the narrow riverside streets, and a crowd of men comes rushing up with shouts and oaths. Ahead of them runs a single figure, whose writing-case, stuck in his girdle, marks him out as a scribe. He is almost at his last gasp, for he is stout and not accustomed to running ”

“ The chromosphere is, to use Miss Clerke's expression, 'a solar envelope, but not a solar atmosphere.' It surrounds the whole globe of the sun to a depth of probably from 3,000 to 4,000 miles, and has been compared to an ocean of fire, but seems rather to present the appearance of a close bristling covering of flames which rise above the surface of the visible sun like the blades of grass upon a lawn. Any one of these innumerable flames may be elevated into unusual proportions in obedience to the vast and mysterious forces which are at work beneath, and then becomes a prominence. ”

“ The Empire of the Sea-Kings had not been immune from disaster and defeat any more than any other great Empire of the ancient world. The times of conquest and triumph, when Knossos exacted its human tribute from the vanquished states, Megara or Athens, or from its own far-spread dependencies, had occasionally been broken by periods when victory left its banners, and when the indignities it had inflicted on other states were retaliated on itself. ”