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One might as well describe the Thebaid without mentioning that the hermits expected eternal bliss as the reward of their sacrifices here on earth. I cannot share the hopes of the Bolsheviks any more than those of the Egyptian anchorites; I regard both as tragic delusions, destined to bring upon the world centuries of darkness and futile violence.
Palladius, for instance, found it impossible to visit the Upper Thebaid, and Syene, and that "infinite multitude of monks, whose fashions of life no one would believe, for they surpass human life; who to this day raise the dead, and walk upon the waters, like Peter; and whatsoever the Saviour did by the holy Apostles, He does now by them.
Hanbury, taking advantage of an expedition sent into Ethiopia by the pacha of Egypt, examined this river four hundred miles beyond the place to which Burckhardt advanced. The travels of the two French gentlemen extended to the Oasis of Thebes and Dakel, and the deserts situated to the east and west of the Thebaid.
I worked with difficulty, and by fits and starts, despite my courage and the stimulation of despair. The music had fled. I could not exorcise the brilliant mocking image of Foedora. Something morbid brooded over every thought, a vague longing as dreadful as remorse. I imitated the anchorites of the Thebaid.
They are full of bitter reproaches against Origen and his writings, and they charge him with having treated Jesus more cruelly than Pilate or the Jews had done. John, the famous monk of the Thebaid, was no writer, though believed to have the gift of prophecy.
Not only was the Egyptian religion overthrown, but the Thebaid, the country of that religion, was fallen too low to be raised again. The people of Upper Egypt had lost all heart, not more from the tyranny of the Roman government in the north than from the attacks and settlement of the Arabs in the south.
For a time he looked thoughtfully before him, and then he went on in his soliloquy, "What was the story that old Serapion used to tell? In the Thebaid there dwelt a penitent who thought he led a perfectly saintly life and far transcended all his companions in stern virtue.
The extreme seclusion, the unbroken strain, were never repeated, and when we returned to London, it was to conditions of greater amenity and to a less rigid practice of 'the world forgetting by the world forgot'. That this relaxation was more relative than positive, and that nothing ever really tempted either of my parents from their cavern in an intellectual Thebaid, my recollections will amply prove.
The ape was sacred to and an emblem of Toth, the male deity of Wisdom and Law. Thebes Diospolis, the hundred-gated, was in holiday attire. The great suburb to the west of the Nile had emptied her multitudes into the solemn community of the gods. Besides her own inhabitants there were thousands from the entire extent of the Thebaid and visitors even from far-away Syene and Philae.
Such in vague and general outline is the strange story of the valley of the Nile of Egypt, the motherland of human culture and "That starr'd Ethiop Queen that strove To set her beauty's praise above The sea nymphs." Cf. Maciver and Thompson: Ancient Races of the Thebaid. Journal of Race Development, I, 484. Petrie: History of Egypt, I, 51, 237. From West Africa to Palestine, p. 114.
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