DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.27180#0185
ASSUAN
present comparatively restricted demand were to increase.
Babuschka’s dream would be to conduct a secret excavation
of her own, and she has discussed it in all seriousness with
Abdul, who to his loss quite failed to understand her. I
should be better pleased with a small bronze on view in the
tiny shop-window next door to the hotel; it represents two
little parallel ichneumons on one base and was probably a
funeral offering to a child of the eighteenth dynasty. Beside
it stands a round open alabaster bowl of classic shape. Both
things are absurdly cheap, and Schacht thinks one could do
even better. A dignified aloofness distinguishes the dealer
very favourably from those in the bazaar. He speaks English
with difficulty and counts Borchardt and many other museum
people among his customers. After we had turned every-
thing over to our heart’s content we decided, in the interests
of our Nubian expedition, to refrain from buying anything;
but some days later — yesterday, in fact — when Babuschka
and Frau Schacht had gone out for a ride by themselves and
I was supposed to be working, I bought the bowl and the
ichneumons, and besides these, a wonderfully preserved
eighteenth-dynasty marble head and a tiny bowl in the form
of a fish, apparently an early one. It was intoxicating.
Actually I had only gone out for a breath of air as an un-
usually extensive problem was troubling my head; but a
craving for action excited my powers which were not en-
slaved by my work and drove me to this extravagance. I
scarcely heard the dealer’s soft words of greeting and cer-
tainly paid no attention to them. The bronze ichneumons
shimmered with an unearthly patina and suddenly the scales
fell from my eyes in an unexpected fashion. The alabaster
bowl stood there for me alone and nobody else, a vessel for
my long-accumulated feelings; and the marble head — such
an one as we had never dreamed of — was, beyond all tor-
mented reflections, the symbol of a leap from the humdrum
of every day into the realms of poetry.
165
present comparatively restricted demand were to increase.
Babuschka’s dream would be to conduct a secret excavation
of her own, and she has discussed it in all seriousness with
Abdul, who to his loss quite failed to understand her. I
should be better pleased with a small bronze on view in the
tiny shop-window next door to the hotel; it represents two
little parallel ichneumons on one base and was probably a
funeral offering to a child of the eighteenth dynasty. Beside
it stands a round open alabaster bowl of classic shape. Both
things are absurdly cheap, and Schacht thinks one could do
even better. A dignified aloofness distinguishes the dealer
very favourably from those in the bazaar. He speaks English
with difficulty and counts Borchardt and many other museum
people among his customers. After we had turned every-
thing over to our heart’s content we decided, in the interests
of our Nubian expedition, to refrain from buying anything;
but some days later — yesterday, in fact — when Babuschka
and Frau Schacht had gone out for a ride by themselves and
I was supposed to be working, I bought the bowl and the
ichneumons, and besides these, a wonderfully preserved
eighteenth-dynasty marble head and a tiny bowl in the form
of a fish, apparently an early one. It was intoxicating.
Actually I had only gone out for a breath of air as an un-
usually extensive problem was troubling my head; but a
craving for action excited my powers which were not en-
slaved by my work and drove me to this extravagance. I
scarcely heard the dealer’s soft words of greeting and cer-
tainly paid no attention to them. The bronze ichneumons
shimmered with an unearthly patina and suddenly the scales
fell from my eyes in an unexpected fashion. The alabaster
bowl stood there for me alone and nobody else, a vessel for
my long-accumulated feelings; and the marble head — such
an one as we had never dreamed of — was, beyond all tor-
mented reflections, the symbol of a leap from the humdrum
of every day into the realms of poetry.
165