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+Title:  The Spell of Egypt
+
+Author:  Robert Hichens
+
+Official Release Date: September, 2002  [Etext #3407]
+[Yes, we are about one year ahead of schedule]
+[The actual date this file first posted = 04/05/01]
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+Project Gutenberg Etext of The Spell of Egypt, by Robert Hichens
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+PREPARER'S NOTE
+
+  This text was prepared from a 1911 edition, published by The
+  Century Co., New York.
+
+
+
+
+
+The Spell of Egypt
+
+by Robert Hichens
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+    THE PYRAMIDS
+    THE SPHINX
+    SAKKARA
+    ABYDOS
+    THE NILE
+    DENDERAH
+    KARNAK
+    LUXOR
+    COLOSSI OF MEMNON
+    MEDINET-ABU
+    THE RAMESSEUM
+    DEIR-EL-BAHARI
+    THE TOMBS OF THE KINGS
+    EDFU
+    KOM OMBOS
+    PHILAE
+    "PHARAOH'S BED"
+    OLD CAIRO
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE PYRAMIDS
+
+Why do you come to Egypt? Do you come to gain a dream, or to regain
+lost dreams of old; to gild your life with the drowsy gold of romance,
+to lose a creeping sorrow, to forget that too many of your hours are
+sullen, grey, bereft? What do you wish of Egypt?
+
+The Sphinx will not ask you, will not care. The Pyramids, lifting
+their unnumbered stones to the clear and wonderful skies, have held,
+still hold, their secrets; but they do not seek for yours. The
+terrific temples, the hot, mysterious tombs, odorous of the dead
+desires of men, crouching in and under the immeasurable sands, will
+muck you with their brooding silence, with their dim and sombre
+repose. The brown children of the Nile, the toilers who sing their
+antique songs by the shadoof and the sakieh, the dragomans, the
+smiling goblin merchants, the Bedouins who lead your camel into the
+pale recesses of the dunes--these will not trouble themselves about
+your deep desires, your perhaps yearning hunger of the heart and the
+imagination.
+
+Yet Egypt is not unresponsive.
+
+I came back to her with dread, after fourteen years of absence--years
+filled for me with the rumors of her changes. And on the very day of
+my arrival she calmly reassured me. She told me in her supremely
+magical way that all was well with her. She taught me once more a
+lesson I had not quite forgotten, but that I was glad to learn again--
+the lesson that Egypt owes her most subtle, most inner beauty to
+Kheper, although she owes her marvels to men; that when he created the
+sun which shines upon her, he gave her the lustre of her life, and
+that those who come to her must be sun-worshippers if they would truly
+and intimately understand the treasure or romance that lies heaped
+within her bosom.
+
+Thoth, says the old legend, travelled in the Boat of the Sun. If you
+would love Egypt rightly, you, too, must be a traveller in that bark.
+You must not fear to steep yourself in the mystery of gold, in the
+mystery of heat, in the mystery of silence that seems softly showered
+out of the sun. The sacred white lotus must be your emblem, and Horus,
+the hawk-headed, merged in Ra, your special deity. Scarcely had I set
+foot once more in Egypt before Thoth lifted me into the Boat of the
+sun and soothed my fears to sleep.
+
+I arrived in Cairo. I saw new and vast hotels; I saw crowded streets;
+brilliant shops; English officials driving importantly in victorias,
+surely to pay dreadful calls of ceremony; women in gigantic hats, with
+Niagaras of veil, waving white gloves as they talked of--I guess--the
+latest Cairene scandal. I perceived on the right hand and on the left
+waiters created in Switzerland, hall porters made in Germany,
+Levantine touts, determined Jews holding false antiquities in their
+lean fingers, an English Baptist minister, in a white helmet, drinking
+chocolate on a terrace, with a guide-book in one fist, a ticket to
+visit monuments in the other. I heard Scottish soldiers playing, "I'll
+be in Scotland before ye!" and something within me, a lurking hope, I
+suppose, seemed to founder and collapse--but only for a moment. It was
+after four in the afternoon. Soon day would be declining. And I seemed
+to remember that the decline of day in Egypt had moved me long ago--
+moved me as few, rare things have ever done. Within half an hour I was
+alone, far up the long road--Ismail's road--that leads from the
+suburbs of Cairo to the Pyramids. And then Egypt took me like a child
+by the hand and reassured me.
+
+It was the first week of November, high Nile had not subsided, and all
+the land here, between the river and the sand where the Sphinx keeps
+watch, was hidden beneath the vast and tranquil waters of what seemed
+a tideless sea--a sea fringed with dense masses of date-palms, girdled
+in the far distance by palm-trees that kept the white and the brown
+houses in their feathery embrace. Above these isolated houses pigeons
+circled. In the distance the lateen sails of boats glided, sometimes
+behind the palms, coming into view, vanishing and mysteriously
+reappearing among their narrow trunks. Here and there a living thing
+moved slowly, wading homeward through this sea: a camel from the sands
+of Ghizeh, a buffalo, two donkeys, followed by boys who held with
+brown hands their dark blue skirts near their faces, a Bedouin leaning
+forward upon the neck of his quickly stepping horse. At one moment I
+seemed to look upon the lagoons of Venice, a watery vision full of a
+glassy calm. Then the palm-trees in the water, and growing to its
+edge, the pale sands that, far as the eyes could see, from Ghizeh to
+Sakkara and beyond, fringed it toward the west, made me think of the
+Pacific, of palmy islands, of a paradise where men grow drowsy in
+well-being, and dream away the years. And then I looked farther,
+beyond the pallid line of the sands, and I saw a Pyramid of gold, the
+wonder Khufu had built. As a golden wonder it saluted me after all my
+years of absence. Later I was to see it grey as grey sands, sulphur
+color in the afternoon from very near at hand, black as a monument
+draped in funereal velvet for a mourning under the stars at night,
+white as a monstrous marble tomb soon after dawn from the sand-dunes
+between it and Sakkara. But as a golden thing it greeted me, as a
+golden miracle I shall remember it.
+
+Slowly the sun went down. The second Pyramid seemed also made of gold.
+Drowsily splendid it and its greater brother looked set on the golden
+sands beneath the golden sky. And now the gold came traveling down
+from the desert to the water, turning it surely to a wine like the
+wine of gold that flowed down Midas's throat; then, as the magic grew,
+to a Pactolus, and at last to a great surface that resembled golden
+ice, hard, glittering, unbroken by any ruffling wave. The islands
+rising from this golden ice were jet black, the houses black, the
+palms and their shadows that fell upon the marvel black. Black were
+the birds that flew low from roof to roof, black the wading camels,
+black the meeting leaves of the tall lebbek-trees that formed a tunnel
+from where I stood to Mena House. And presently a huge black Pyramid
+lay supine on the gold, and near it a shadowy brother seemed more
+humble than it, but scarcely less mysterious. The gold deepened,
+glowed more fiercely. In the sky above the Pyramids hung tiny cloud
+wreaths of rose red, delicate and airy as the gossamers of Tunis. As I
+turned, far off in Cairo I saw the first lights glittering across the
+fields of doura, silvery white, like diamonds. But the silver did not
+call me. My imagination was held captive by the gold. I was summoned
+by the gold, and I went on, under the black lebbek-trees, on Ismail's
+road, toward it. And I dwelt in it many days.
+
+The wonders of Egypt man has made seem to increase in stature before
+the spirits' eyes as man learns to know them better, to tower up ever
+higher till the imagination is almost stricken by their looming
+greatness. Climb the great Pyramid, spend a day with Abou on its
+summit, come down, penetrate into its recesses, stand in the king's
+chamber, listen to the silence there, feel it with your hands--is it
+not tangible in this hot fastness of incorruptible death?--creep, like
+the surreptitious midget you feel yourself to be, up those long and
+steep inclines of polished stone, watching the gloomy darkness of the
+narrow walls, the far-off pinpoint of light borne by the Bedouin who
+guides you, hear the twitter of the bats that have their dwelling in
+this monstrous gloom that man has made to shelter the thing whose
+ambition could never be embalmed, though that, of all qualities,
+should have been given here, in the land it dowered, a life perpetual.
+Now you know the Great Pyramid. You know that you can climb it, that
+you can enter it. You have seen it from all sides, under all aspects.
+It is familiar to you.
+
+No, it can never be that. With its more wonderful comrade, the Sphinx,
+it has the power peculiar, so it seems to me, to certain of the rock
+and stone monuments of Egypt, of holding itself ever aloof, almost
+like the soul of man which can retreat at will, like the Bedouin
+retreating from you into the blackness of the Pyramid, far up, or far
+down, where the pursuing stranger, unaided, cannot follow.
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE SPHINX
+
+One day at sunset I saw a bird trying to play with the Sphinx--a bird
+like a swallow, but with a ruddy brown on its breast, a gleam of blue
+somewhere on its wings. When I came to the edge of the sand basin
+where perhaps Khufu saw it lying nearly four thousand years before the
+birth of Christ, the Sphinx and the bird were quite alone. The bird
+flew near the Sphinx, whimsically turning this way and that, flying
+now low, now high, but ever returning to the magnet which drew it,
+which held it, from which it surely longed to extract some sign of
+recognition. It twittered, it posed itself in the golden air, with its
+bright eyes fixed upon those eyes of stone which gazed beyond it,
+beyond the land of Egypt, beyond the world of men, beyond the centre
+of the sun to the last verges of eternity. And presently it alighted
+on the head of the Sphinx, then on its ear, then on its breast; and
+over the breast it tripped jerkily, with tiny, elastic steps, looking
+upward, its whole body quivering apparently with a desire for
+comprehension--a desire for some manifestation of friendship. Then
+suddenly it spread its wings, and, straight as an arrow, it flew away
+over the sands and the waters toward the doura-fields and Cairo.
+
+And the sunset waned, and the afterglow flamed and faded, and the
+clear, soft African night fell. The pilgrims who day by day visit the
+Sphinx, like the bird, had gone back to Cairo. They had come, as the
+bird had come; as those who have conquered Egypt came; as the Greeks
+came, Alexander of Macedon, and the Ptolemies; as the Romans came; as
+the Mamelukes, the Turks, the French, the English came.
+
+They had come--and gone.
+
+And that enormous face, with the stains of stormy red still adhering
+to its cheeks, grew dark as the darkness closed in, turned brown as a
+fellah's face, as the face of that fellah who whispered his secret in
+the sphinx's ear, but learnt no secret in return; turned black almost
+as a Nubian's face. The night accentuated its appearance of terrible
+repose, of super-human indifference to whatever might befall. In the
+night I seemed to hear the footsteps of the dead--of all the dead
+warriors and the steeds they rode, defiling over the sand before the
+unconquerable thing they perhaps thought that they had conquered. At
+last the footsteps died away. There was a silence. Then, coming down
+from the Great Pyramid, surely I heard the light patter of a donkey's
+feet. They went to the Sphinx and ceased. The silence was profound.
+And I remembered the legend that Mary, Joseph, and the Holy Child once
+halted here on their long journey, and that Mary laid the tired Christ
+between the paws of the Sphinx to sleep. Yet even of the Christ the
+soul within that body could take no heed at all.
+
+It is, I think, one of the most astounding facts in the history of man
+that a man was able to contain within his mind, to conceive, the
+conception of the Sphinx. That he could carry it out in the stone is
+amazing. But how much more amazing it is that before there was the
+Sphinx he was able to see it with his imagination! One may criticize
+the Sphinx. One may say impertinent things that are true about it:
+that seen from behind at a distance its head looks like an enormous
+mushroom growing in the sand, that its cheeks are swelled
+inordinately, that its thick-lipped mouth is legal, that from certain
+places it bears a resemblance to a prize bull-dog. All this does not
+matter at all. What does matter is that into the conception and
+execution of the Sphinx has been poured a supreme imaginative power.
+He who created it looked beyond Egypt, beyond the life of man. He
+grasped the conception of Eternity, and realized the nothingness of
+Time, and he rendered it in stone.
+
+I can imagine the most determined atheist looking at the Sphinx and,
+in a flash, not merely believing, but feeling that he had before him
+proof of the life of the soul beyond the grave, of the life of the
+soul of Khufu beyond the tomb of his Pyramid. Always as you return to
+the Sphinx you wonder at it more, you adore more strangely its repose,
+you steep yourself more intimately in the aloof peace that seems to
+emanate from it as light emanates from the sun. And as you look on it
+at last perhaps you understand the infinite; you understand where is
+the bourne to which the finite flows with all its greatness, as the
+great Nile flows from beyond Victoria Nyanza to the sea.
+
+And as the wonder of the Sphinx takes possession of you gradually, so
+gradually do you learn to feel the majesty of the Pyramids of Ghizeh.
+Unlike the Step Pyramid of Sakkara, which, even when one is near it,
+looks like a small mountain, part of the land on which it rests, the
+Pyramids of Ghizeh look what they are--artificial excrescences,
+invented and carried out by man, expressions of man's greatness.
+Exquisite as they are as features of the drowsy golden landscape at
+the setting of the sun, I think they look most wonderful at night,
+when they are black beneath the stars. On many nights I have sat in
+the sand at a distance and looked at them, and always, and
+increasingly, they have stirred my imagination. Their profound calm,
+their classical simplicity, are greatly emphasized when no detail can
+be seen, when they are but black shapes towering to the stars. They
+seem to aspire then like prayers prayed by one who has said, "God does
+not need any prayers, but I need them." In their simplicity they
+suggest a crowd of thoughts and of desires. Guy de Maupassant has said
+that of all the arts architecture is perhaps the most aesthetic, the
+most mysterious, and the most nourished by ideas. How true this is you
+feel as you look at the Great Pyramid by night. It seems to breathe
+out mystery. The immense base recalls to you the labyrinth within; the
+long descent from the tiny slit that gives you entrance, your
+uncertain steps in its hot, eternal night, your falls on the ice-like
+surfaces of its polished blocks of stone, the crushing weight that
+seemed to lie on your heart as you stole uncertainly on, summoned
+almost as by the desert; your sensation of being for ever imprisoned,
+taken and hidden by a monster from Egypt's wonderful light, as you
+stood in the central chamber, and realized the stone ocean into whose
+depths, like some intrepid diver, you had dared deliberately to come.
+And then your eyes travel up the slowly shrinking walls till they
+reach the dark point which is the top. There you stood with Abou, who
+spends half his life on the highest stone, hostages of the sun, bathed
+in light and air that perhaps came to you from the Gold Coast. And you
+saw men and camels like flies, and Cairo like a grey blur, and the
+Mokattam hills almost as a higher ridge of the sands. The mosque of
+Mohammed Ali was like a cup turned over. Far below slept the dead in
+that graveyard of the Sphinx, with its pale stones, its sand, its
+palm, its "Sycamores of the South," once worshipped and regarded as
+Hathor's living body. And beyond them on one side were the sleeping
+waters, with islands small, surely, as delicate Egyptian hands, and on
+the other the great desert that stretches, so the Bedouins say, on and
+on "for a march of a thousand days."
+
+That base and that summit--what suggestion and what mystery in their
+contrast! What sober, eternal beauty in the dark line which unites
+them, now sharply, yet softly, defined against the night, which is
+purple as the one garment of the fellah! That line leads the soul
+irresistibly from earth to the stars.
+
+
+
+III
+
+SAKKARA
+
+It was the "Little Christmas" of the Egyptians as I rode to Sakkara,
+after seeing a wonderful feat, the ascent and descent of the second
+Pyramid in nineteen minutes by a young Bedouin called Mohammed Ali who
+very seriously informed me that the only Roumi who had ever reached
+the top was an "American gentlemens" called Mark Twain, on his first
+visit to Egypt. On his second visit, Ali said, Mr. Twain had a bad
+foot, and declared he could not be bothered with the second Pyramid.
+He had been up and down without a guide; he had disturbed the jackal
+which lives near its summit, and which I saw running in the sunshine
+as Ali drew near its lair, and he was satisfied to rest on his
+immortal laurels. To the Bedouins of the Pyramids Mark Twain's world-
+wide celebrity is owing to one fact alone: he is the only Roumi who
+has climbed the second Pyramid. That is why his name is known to every
+one.
+
+It was the "Little Christmas," and from the villages in the plain the
+Egyptians came pouring out to visit their dead in the desert
+cemeteries as I passed by to visit the dead in the tombs far off on
+the horizon. Women, swathed in black, gathered in groups and jumped
+monotonously up and down, to the accompaniment of stained hands
+clapping, and strange and weary songs. Tiny children blew furiously
+into tin trumpets, emitting sounds that were terribly European. Men
+strode seriously by, or stood in knots among the graves, talking
+vivaciously of the things of this life. As the sun rose higher in the
+heavens, this visit to the dead became a carnival of the living.
+Laughter and shrill cries of merriment betokened the resignation of
+the mourners. The sand-dunes were black with running figures, racing,
+leaping, chasing one another, rolling over and over in the warm and
+golden grains. Some sat among the graves and ate. Some sang. Some
+danced. I saw no one praying, after the sun was up. The Great Pyramid
+of Ghizeh was transformed in this morning hour, and gleamed like a
+marble mountain, or like the hill covered with salt at El-Outaya, in
+Algeria. As we went on it sank down into the sands, until at last I
+could see only a small section with its top, which looked almost as
+pointed as a gigantic needle. Abou was there on the hot stones in the
+golden eye of the sun--Abou who lives to respect his Pyramid, and to
+serve Turkish coffee to those who are determined enough to climb it.
+Before me the Step Pyramid rose, brown almost as bronze, out of the
+sands here desolate and pallid. Soon I was in the house of Marriette,
+between the little sphinxes.
+
+Near Cairo, although the desert is real desert, it does not give, to
+me, at any rate, the immense impression of naked sterility, of almost
+brassy, sun-baked fierceness, which often strikes one in the Sahara to
+the south of Algeria, where at midday one sometimes has a feeling of
+being lost upon a waste of metal, gleaming, angry, tigerish in color.
+Here, in Egypt, both the people and the desert seem gentler, safer,
+more amiable. Yet these tombs of Sakkara are hidden in a desolation of
+the sands, peculiarly blanched and mournful; and as you wander from
+tomb to tomb, descending and ascending, stealing through great
+galleries beneath the sands, creeping through tubes of stone,
+crouching almost on hands and knees in the sultry chambers of the
+dead, the awfulness of the passing away of dynasties and of race
+comes, like a cloud, upon your spirit. But this cloud lifts and floats
+from you in the cheerful tomb of Thi, that royal councillor, that
+scribe and confidant, whose life must have been passed in a round of
+serene activities, amid a sneering, though doubtless admiring,
+population.
+
+Into this tomb of white, vivacious figures, gay almost, though never
+wholly frivolous--for these men were full of purpose, full of an ardor
+that seduces even where it seems grotesque--I took with me a child of
+ten called Ali, from the village of Kafiah; and as I looked from him
+to the walls around us, rather than the passing away of the races, I
+realized the persistence of type. For everywhere I saw the face of
+little Ali, with every feature exactly reproduced. Here he was bending
+over a sacrifice, leading a sacred bull, feeding geese from a cup,
+roasting a chicken, pulling a boat, carpentering, polishing,
+conducting a monkey for a walk, or merely sitting bolt upright and
+sneering. There were lines of little Alis with their hands held to
+their breasts, their faces in profile, their knees rigid, in the happy
+tomb of Thi; but he glanced at them unheeding, did not recognize his
+ancestors. And he did not care to penetrate into the tombs of Mera and
+Meri-Ra-ankh, into the Serapeum and the Mestaba of Ptah-hotep. Perhaps
+he was right. The Serapeum is grand in its vastness, with its long and
+high galleries and its mighty vaults containing the huge granite
+sarcophagi of the sacred bulls of Apis; Mera, red and white, welcomes
+you from an elevated niche benignly; Ptah-hotep, priest of the fifth
+dynasty, receives you, seated at a table that resembles a rake with
+long, yellow teeth standing on its handle, and drinking stiffly a cup
+of wine. You see upon the wall near by, with sympathy, a patient being
+plied by a naked and evidently an unyielding physician with medicine
+from a jar that might have been visited by Morgiana, a musician
+playing upon an instrument like a huge and stringless harp. But it is
+the happy tomb of Thi that lingers in your memory. In that tomb one
+sees proclaimed with a marvellous ingenuity and expressiveness the joy
+and the activity of life. Thi must have loved life; loved prayer and
+sacrifice, loved sport and war, loved feasting and gaiety, labor of
+the hands and of the head, loved the arts, the music of flute and
+harp, singing by the lingering and plaintive voices which seem to
+express the essence of the east, loved sweet odors, loved sweet women
+--do we not see him sitting to receive offerings with his wife beside
+him?--loved the clear nights and the radiant days that in Egypt make
+glad the heart of man. He must have loved the splendid gift of life,
+and used it completely. And so little Ali had very right to make his
+sole obeisance at Thi's delicious tomb, from which death itself seems
+banished by the soft and embracing radiance of the almost living
+walls.
+
+This delicate cheerfulness, a quite airy gaiety of life, is often
+combined in Egypt, and most beautifully and happily combined, with
+tremendous solidity, heavy impressiveness, a hugeness that is well-
+nigh tragic; and it supplies a relief to eye, to mind, to soul, that
+is sweet and refreshing as the trickle of a tarantella from a reed
+flute heard under the shadows of a temple of Hercules. Life showers us
+with contrasts. Art, which gives to us a second and a more withdrawn
+life, opening to us a door through which we pass to our dreams, may
+well imitate life in this.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+ABYDOS
+
+Through a long and golden noontide, and on into an afternoon whose
+opulence of warmth and light it seemed could never wane, I sat alone,
+or wandered gently quite alone, in the Temple of Seti I. at Abydos.
+Here again I was in a place of the dead. In Egypt one ever seeks the
+dead in the sunshine, black vaults in the land of the gold. But here
+in Abydos I was accompanied by whiteness. The general effect of Seti's
+mighty temple is that it is a white temple when seen in full sunshine
+and beneath a sky of blinding blue. In an arid place it stands, just
+beyond an Egyptian village that is a maze of dust, of children, of
+animals, and flies. The last blind houses of the village, brown as
+brown paper, confront it on a mound, and as I came toward it a girl-
+child swathed in purple with ear-rings, and a twist of orange
+handkerchief above her eyes, full of cloud and fire, leaned from a
+roof, sinuously as a young snake, to watch me. On each side,
+descending, were white, ruined walls, stretched out like defaced white
+arms of the temple to receive me. I stood still for a moment and
+looked at the narrow, severely simple doorway, at the twelve broken
+columns advanced on either side, white and greyish white with their
+right angles, their once painted figures now almost wholly colorless.
+
+Here lay the Osirians, those blessed dead of the land of Egypt, who
+worshipped the Judge of the Dead, the Lord of the Underworld, and who
+hoped for immortality through him--Osiris, husband of Isis, Osiris,
+receiver of prayers. Osiris the sun who will not be conquered by
+night, but eternally rises again, and so is the symbol of the
+resurrection of the soul. It is said that Set, the power of Evil, tore
+the body of Osiris into fourteen fragments and scattered them over the
+land. But multitudes of worshippers of Osiris believed him buried near
+Abydos and, like those who loved the sweet songs of Hafiz, they
+desired to be buried near him whom they adored; and so this place
+became a place of the dead, a place of many prayers, a white place of
+many longings.
+
+I was glad to be alone there. The guardian left me in perfect peace. I
+happily forgot him. I sat down in the shadow of a column upon its
+mighty projecting base. The sky was blinding blue. Great bees hummed,
+like bourdons, through the silence, deepening the almost heavy calm.
+These columns, architraves, doorways, how mighty, how grandly strong
+they were! And yet soon I began to be aware that even here, where
+surely one should read only the Book of the Dead, or bend down to the
+hot ground to listen if perchance one might hear the dead themselves
+murmuring over the chapters of Beatification far down in their hidden
+tombs, there was a likeness, a gentle gaiety of life, as in the tomb
+of Thi. The effect of solidity was immense. These columns bulged,
+almost like great fruits swollen out by their heady strength of blood.
+They towered up in crowds. The heavy roof, broken in places most
+mercifully to show squares and oblongs of that perfect, calling blue,
+was like a frowning brow. And yet I was with grace, with gentleness,
+with lightness, because in the place of the dead I was again with the
+happy, living walls. Above me, on the roof, there was a gleam of
+palest blue, like the blue I have sometimes seen at morning on the
+Ionian sea just where it meets the shore. The double rows of gigantic
+columns stretched away, tall almost as forest trees, to right of me
+and to left, and were shut in by massive walls, strong as the walls of
+a fortress. And on these columns, and on these walls, dead painters
+and gravers had breathed the sweet breath of life. Here in the sun,
+for me alone, as it seemed, a population followed their occupations.
+Men walked, and kneeled, and stood, some white and clothed, some nude,
+some red as the red man's child that leaped beyond the sea. And here
+was the lotus-flower held in reverent hands, not the rose-lotus, but
+the blossom that typified the rising again of the sun, and that, worn
+as an amulet, signified the gift of eternal youth. And here was hawk-
+faced Horus, and here a priest offering sacrifice to a god, belief in
+whom has long since passed away. A king revealed himself to me,
+adoring Ptah, "Father of the beginnings," who established upon earth,
+my figures thought, the everlasting justice, and again at the knees of
+Amen burning incense in his honor. Isis and Osiris stood together, and
+sacrifice was made before their sacred bark. And Seti worshipped them,
+and Seshta, goddess of learning, wrote in the book of eternity the
+name of the king.
+
+The great bees hummed, moving slowly in the golden air among the
+mighty columns, passing slowly among these records of lives long over,
+but which seemed still to be. And I looked at the lotus-flowers which
+the little grotesque hands were holding, had been holding for how many
+years--the flowers that typified the rising again of the sun and the
+divine gift of eternal youth. And I thought of the bird and the
+Sphinx, the thing that was whimsical wooing the thing that was mighty.
+And I gazed at the immense columns and at the light and little figures
+all about me. Bird and Sphinx, delicate whimsicality, calm and
+terrific power! In Egypt the dead men have combined them, and the
+combination has an irresistible fascination, weaves a spell that
+entrances you in the sunshine and beneath the blinding blue. At Abydos
+I knew it. And I loved the columns that seemed blown out with
+exuberant strength, and I loved the delicate white walls that, like
+the lotus-flower, give to the world a youth that seems eternal--a
+youth that is never frivolous, but that is full of the divine, and yet
+pathetic, animation of happy life.
+
+The great bees hummed more drowsily. I sat quite still in the sun. And
+then presently, moved by some prompting instinct, I turned my head,
+and, far off, through the narrow portal of the temple, I saw the girl-
+child swathed in purple still lying, sinuously as a young snake, upon
+the palm-wood roof above the brown earth wall to watch me with her
+eyes of cloud and fire.
+
+And upon me, like cloud and fire--cloud of the tombs and the great
+temple columns, fire of the brilliant life painted and engraved upon
+them--there stole the spell of Egypt.
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE NILE
+
+I do not find in Egypt any more the strangeness that once amazed, and
+at first almost bewildered me. Stranger by far is Morocco, stranger
+the country beyond Biskra, near Mogar, round Touggourt, even about El
+Kantara. There I feel very far away, as a child feels distance from
+dear, familiar things. I look to the horizon expectant of I know not
+what magical occurrences, what mysteries. I am aware of the summons to
+advance to marvellous lands, where marvellous things must happen. I am
+taken by that sensation of almost trembling magic which came to me
+when first I saw a mirage far out in the Sahara. But Egypt, though it
+contains so many marvels, has no longer for me the marvellous
+atmosphere. Its keynote is seductiveness.
+
+In Egypt one feels very safe. Smiling policemen in clothes of spotless
+white--emblematic, surely, of their innocence!--seem to be everywhere,
+standing calmly in the sun. Very gentle, very tender, although perhaps
+not very true, are the Bedouins at the Pyramids. Up the Nile the
+fellaheen smile as kindly as the policemen, smile protectingly upon
+you, as if they would say, "Allah has placed us here to take care of
+the confiding stranger." No ferocious demands for money fall upon my
+ears; only an occasional suggestion is subtly conveyed to me that even
+the poor must live and that I am immensely rich. An amiable, an almost
+enticing seductiveness seems emanating from the fertile soil, shining
+in the golden air, gleaming softly in the amber sands, dimpling in the
+brown, the mauve, the silver eddies of the Nile. It steals upon one.
+It ripples over one. It laps one as if with warm and scented waves. A
+sort of lustrous languor overtakes one. In physical well-being one
+sinks down, and with wide eyes one gazes and listens and enjoys, and
+thinks not of the morrow.
+
+The dahabiyeh--her very name, the /Loulia/, has a gentle, seductive,
+cooing sound--drifts broadside to the current with furled sails, or
+glides smoothly on before an amiable north wind with sails unfurled.
+Upon the bloomy banks, rich brown in color, the brown men stoop and
+straighten themselves, and stoop again, and sing. The sun gleams on
+their copper skins, which look polished and metallic. Crouched in his
+net behind the drowsy oxen, the little boy circles the livelong day
+with the sakieh. And the sakieh raises its wailing, wayward voice and
+sings to the shadoof; and the shadoof sings to the sakieh; and the
+lifted water falls and flows away into the green wilderness of doura
+that, like a miniature forest, spreads on every hand to the low
+mountains, which do not perturb the spirit, as do the iron mountains
+of Algeria. And always the sun is shining, and the body is drinking in
+its warmth, and the soul is drinking in its gold. And always the ears
+are full of warm and drowsy and monotonous music. And always the eyes
+see the lines of brown bodies, on the brown river-banks above the
+brown waters, bending, straightening, bending, straightening, with an
+exquisitely precise monotony. And always the /Loulia/ seems to be
+drifting, so quietly she slips up, or down, the level waterway.
+
+And one drifts, too; one can but drift, happily, sleepily, forgetting
+every care. From Abydos to Denderah one drifts, and from Denderah to
+Karnak, to Luxor, to all the marvels on the western shore; and on to
+Edfu, to Kom Ombos, to Assuan, and perhaps even into Nubia, to Abu-
+Simbel, and to Wadi-Halfa. Life on the Nile is a long dream, golden
+and sweet as honey of Hymettus. For I let the "divine serpent," who at
+Philae may be seen issuing from her charmed cavern, take me very
+quietly to see the abodes of the dead, the halls of the vanished, upon
+her green and sterile shores. I know nothing of the bustling,
+shrieking steamer that defies her, churning into angry waves her
+waters for the edification of those who would "do" Egypt and be gone
+before they know her.
+
+If you are in a hurry, do not come to Egypt. To hurry in Egypt is as
+wrong as to fall asleep in Wall street, or to sit in the Greek Theatre
+at Taormina, reading "How to Make a Fortune with a Capital of Fifty
+Pounds."
+
+
+
+VI
+
+DENDERAH
+
+From Abydos, home of the cult of Osiris, Judge of the Dead, I came to
+Denderah, the great temple of the "Lady of the Underworld," as the
+goddess Hathor was sometimes called, though she was usually worshipped
+as the Egyptian Aphrodite, goddess of joy, goddess of love and
+loveliness. It was early morning when I went ashore. The sun was above
+the eastern hills, and a boy, clad in a rope of plaited grass, sent me
+half shyly the greeting, "May your day be happy!"
+
+Youth is, perhaps, the most divine of all the gifts of the gods, as
+those who wore the lotus-blossom amulet believed thousands of years
+ago, and Denderah, appropriately, is a very young Egyptian temple,
+probably, indeed, the youngest of all the temples on the Nile. Its
+youthfulness--it is only about two thousand years of age--identifies
+it happily with the happiness and beauty of its presiding deity, and
+as I rode toward it on the canal-bank in the young freshness of the
+morning, I thought of the goddess Safekh and of the sacred Persea-
+tree. When Safekh inscribed upon a leaf of the Persea-tree the name of
+king or conqueror, he gained everlasting life. Was it the life of
+youth? An everlasting life of middle age might be a doubtful benefit.
+And then mentally I added, "unless one lived in Egypt." For here the
+years drop from one, and every golden hour brings to one surely
+another drop of the wondrous essence that sets time at defiance and
+charms sad thoughts away.
+
+Unlike White Abydos, White Denderah stands apart from habitations, in
+a still solitude upon a blackened mound. From far off I saw the
+façade, large, bare, and sober, rising, in a nakedness as complete as
+that of Aphrodite rising from the wave, out of the plain of brown,
+alluvial soil that was broken here and there by a sharp green of
+growing things. There was something of sadness in the scene, and again
+I thought of Hathor as the "Lady of the Underworld," some deep-eyed
+being, with a pale brow, hair like the night, and yearning, wistful
+hands stretched out in supplication. There was a hush upon this place.
+The loud and vehement cry of the shadoof-man died away. The sakieh
+droned in my ears no more like distant Sicilian pipes playing at
+Natale. I felt a breath from the desert. And, indeed, the desert was
+near--that realistic desert which suggests to the traveller approaches
+to the sea, so that beyond each pallid dune, as he draws near it, he
+half expects to hear the lapping of the waves. Presently, when, having
+ascended that marvellous staircase of the New Year, walking in
+procession with the priests upon its walls toward the rays of Ra, I
+came out upon the temple roof, and looked upon the desert--upon sheeny
+sands, almost like slopes of satin shining in the sun, upon paler
+sands in the distance, holding an Arab /campo santo/, in which rose
+the little creamy cupolas of a sheikh's tomb, surrounded by a creamy
+wall, those little cupolas gave to me a feeling of the real, the
+irresistible Africa such as I had not known since I had been in Egypt;
+and I thought I heard in the distance the ceaseless hum of praying and
+praising voices.
+
+"God hath rewarded the faithful with gardens through which flow
+rivulets. They shall be for ever therein, and that is the reward of
+the virtuous."
+
+The sensation of solemnity which overtook me as I approached the
+temple deepened when I drew close to it, when I stood within it. In
+the first hall, mighty, magnificent, full of enormous columns from
+which faces of Hathor once looked to the four points of the compass, I
+found only one face almost complete, saved from the fury of fanatics
+by the protection of the goddess of chance, in whom the modern
+Egyptian so implicitly believes. In shape it was a delicate oval. In
+the long eyes, about the brow, the cheeks, there was a strained
+expression that suggested to me more than a gravity--almost an anguish
+--of spirit. As I looked at it, I thought of Eleanora Duse. Was this
+the ideal of joy in the time of the Ptolemies? Joy may be rapturous,
+or it may be serene; but could it ever be like this? The pale,
+delicious blue that here and there, in tiny sections, broke the almost
+haggard, greyish whiteness of this first hall with the roof of black,
+like bits of an evening sky seen through tiny window-slits in a sombre
+room, suggested joy, was joy summed up in color. But Hathor's face was
+weariful and sad.
+
+From the gloom of the inner halls came a sound, loud, angry, menacing,
+as I walked on, a sound of menace and an odor, heavy and deathlike.
+Only in the first hall had those builders and decorators of two
+thousand years ago been moved by their conception of the goddess to
+hail her, to worship her, with the purity of white, with the sweet
+gaiety of turquoise. Or so it seems to-day, when the passion of
+Christianity against Hathor has spent itself and died. Now Christians
+come to seek what Christian Copts destroyed; wander through the
+deserted courts, desirous of looking upon the faces that have long
+since been hacked to pieces. A more benign spirit informs our world,
+but, alas! Hathor has been sacrificed to deviltries of old. And it is
+well, perhaps, that her temple should be sad, like a place of silent
+waiting for the glories that are gone.
+
+With every step my melancholy grew. Encompassed by gloomy odors,
+assailed by the clamour of gigantic bats, which flew furiously among
+the monstrous pillars near a roof ominous as a storm-cloud, my spirit
+was haunted by the sad eyes of Hathor, which gaze for ever from that
+column in the first hall. Were they always like that? Once that face
+dwelt with a crowd of worship. And all the other faces have gone, and
+all the glory has passed. And, like so many of the living, the goddess
+has paid for her splendors. The pendulum swung, and where men adored,
+men hated her--her the goddess of love and loveliness. And as the
+human face changes when terror and sorrow come, I felt as if Hathor's
+face of stone had changed upon its column, looking toward the Nile, in
+obedience to the anguish in her heart; I felt as if Denderah were a
+majestic house of grief. So I must always think of it, dark, tragic,
+and superb. The Egyptians once believed that when death came to a man,
+the soul of him, which they called the Ba, winged its way to the gods,
+but that, moved by a sweet unselfishness, it returned sometimes to his
+tomb, to give comfort to the poor, deserted mummy. Upon the lids of
+sarcophagi it is sometimes represented as a bird, flying down to, or
+resting upon, the mummy. As I went onward in the darkness, among the
+columns, over the blocks of stone that form the pavements, seeing
+vaguely the sacred boats upon the walls, Horus and Thoth, the king
+before Osiris; as I mounted and descended with the priests to roof and
+floor, I longed, instead of the clamour of the bats, to hear the light
+flutter of the soft wings of the Ba of Hathor, flying from Paradise to
+this sad temple of the desert to bring her comfort in the gloom. I
+thought of her as a poor woman, suffering as only women can in
+loneliness.
+
+In the museum of Cairo there is the mummy of "the lady Amanit,
+priestess of Hathor." She lies there upon her back, with her thin body
+slightly turned toward the left side, as if in an effort to change her
+position. Her head is completely turned to the same side. Her mouth is
+wide open, showing all the teeth. The tongue is lolling out. Upon the
+head the thin, brown hair makes a line above the little ear, and is
+mingled at the back of the head with false tresses. Round the neck is
+a mass of ornaments, of amulets and beads. The right arm and hand lie
+along the body. The expression of "the lady Amanit" is very strange,
+and very subtle; for it combines horror--which implies activity--with
+a profound, an impenetrable repose, far beyond the reach of all
+disturbance. In the temple of Denderah I fancied the lady Amanit
+ministering sadly, even terribly, to a lonely goddess, moving in fear
+through an eternal gloom, dying at last there, overwhelmed by tasks
+too heavy for that tiny body, the ultra-sensitive spirit that
+inhabited it. And now she sleeps--one feels that, as one gazes at the
+mummy--very profoundly, though not yet very calmly, the lady Amanit.
+But her goddess--still she wakes upon her column.
+
+When I came out at last into the sunlight of the growing day, I
+circled the temple, skirting its gigantic, corniced walls, from which
+at intervals the heads and paws of resting lions protrude, to see
+another woman whose fame for loveliness and seduction is almost as
+legendary as Aphrodite's. It is fitting enough that Cleopatra's form
+should be graven upon the temple of Hathor; fitting, also, that though
+I found her in the presence of deities, and in the company of her son,
+Caesarion, her face, which is in profile, should have nothing of
+Hathor's sad impressiveness. This, no doubt, is not the real
+Cleopatra. Nevertheless, this face suggests a certain self-complacent
+cruelty and sensuality essentially human, and utterly detached from
+all divinity, whereas in the face of the goddess there is a something
+remote, and even distantly intellectual, which calls the imagination
+to "the fields beyond."
+
+As I rode back toward the river, I saw again the boy clad in the rope
+of plaited grass, and again he said, less shyly, "May your day be
+happy!" It was a kindly wish. In the dawn I had felt it to be almost a
+prophecy. But now I was haunted by the face of the goddess of
+Denderah, and I remembered the legend of the lovely Lais, who, when
+she began to age, covered herself from the eyes of men with a veil,
+and went every day at evening to look upon her statue, in which the
+genius of Praxiteles had rendered permanent the beauty the woman could
+not keep. One evening, hanging to the statue's pedestal by a garland
+of red roses, the sculptor found a mirror, upon the polished disk of
+which were traced these words:
+
+"Lais, O Goddess, consecrates to thee her mirror: no longer able to
+see there what she was, she will not see there what she has become."
+
+My Hathor of Denderah, the sad-eyed dweller on the column in the first
+hall, had she a mirror, would surely hang it, as Lais hung hers, at
+the foot of the pedestal of the Egyptian Aphrodite; had she a veil,
+would surely cover the face that, solitary among the cruel evidences
+of Christian ferocity, silently says to the gloomy courts, to the
+shining desert and the Nile:
+
+"Once I was worshipped, but I am worshipped no longer."
+
+
+
+VII
+
+KARNAK
+
+Buildings have personalities. Some fascinate as beautiful women
+fascinate; some charm as a child may charm, naively, simply, but
+irresistibly. Some, like conquerors, men of blood and iron, without
+bowels of mercy, pitiless and determined, strike awe to the soul,
+mingled with the almost gasping admiration that power wakes in man.
+Some bring a sense of heavenly peace to the heart. Some, like certain
+temples of the Greeks, by their immense dignity, speak to the nature
+almost as music speaks, and change anxiety to trust. Some tug at the
+hidden chords of romance and rouse a trembling response. Some seem to
+be mingling their tears with the tears of the dead; some their
+laughter with the laughter of the living. The traveller, sailing up
+the Nile, holds intercourse with many of these different
+personalities. He is sad, perhaps, as I was with Denderah; dreams in
+the sun with Abydos; muses with Luxor beneath the little tapering
+minaret whence the call to prayer drops down to be answered by the
+angelus bell; falls into a reverie in the "thinking place" of Rameses
+II., near to the giant that was once the mightiest of all Egyptian
+statues; eagerly wakes to the fascination of record at Deir-el-Bahari;
+worships in Edfu; by Philae is carried into a realm of delicate magic,
+where engineers are not. Each prompts him to a different mood, each
+wakes in his nature a different response. And at Karnak what is he?
+What mood enfolds him there? Is he sad, thoughtful, awed, or gay?
+
+An old lady in a helmet, and other things considered no doubt by her
+as suited to Egypt rather than to herself, remarked in my hearing,
+with a Scotch accent and an air of summing up, that Karnak was "very
+nice indeed." There she was wrong--Scotch and wrong. Karnak is not
+nice. No temple that I have seen upon the banks of the Nile is nice.
+And Karnak cannot be summed up in a phrase or in many phrases; cannot
+even be adequately described in few or many words.
+
+Long ago I saw it lighted up with colored fires one night for the
+Khedive, its ravaged magnificence tinted with rose and livid green and
+blue, its pylons glittering with artificial gold, its population of
+statues, its obelisks, and columns, changing from things of dreams to
+things of day, from twilight marvels to shadowy specters, and from
+these to hard and piercing realities at the cruel will of pigmies
+crouching by its walls. Now, after many years, I saw it first quietly
+by moonlight after watching the sunset from the summit of the great
+pylon. That was a pageant worth more than the Khedive's.
+
+I was in the air; had something of the released feeling I have often
+known upon the tower of Biskra, looking out toward evening to the
+Sahara spaces. But here I was not confronted with an immensity of
+nature, but with a gleaming river and an immensity of man. Beneath me
+was the native village, in the heart of daylight dusty and unkempt,
+but now becoming charged with velvety beauty, with the soft and heavy
+mystery that at evening is born among great palm-trees. Along the path
+that led from it, coming toward the avenue of sphinxes with ram's-
+heads that watch for ever before the temple door, a great white camel
+stepped, its rider a tiny child with a close, white cap upon his head.
+The child was singing to the glory of the sunset, or was it to the
+glory of Amun, "the hidden one," once the local god of Thebes, to whom
+the grandest temple in the world was dedicated? I listen to the
+childish, quavering voice, twittering almost like a bird, and one word
+alone came up to me--the word one hears in Egypt from all the lips
+that speak and sing: from the Nubians round their fires at night, from
+the little boatmen of the lower reaches of the Nile, from the Bedouins
+of the desert, and the donkey boys of the villages, from the sheikh
+who reads one's future in water spilt on a plate, and the Bisharin
+with buttered curls who runs to sell one beads from his tent among the
+sand-dunes.
+
+"Allah!" the child was singing as he passed upon his way.
+
+Pigeons circled above their pretty towers. The bats came out, as if
+they knew how precious is their black at evening against the ethereal
+lemon color, the orange and the red. The little obelisk beyond the
+last sphinx on the left began to change, as in Egypt all things change
+at sunset--pylon and dusty bush, colossus and baked earth hovel,
+sycamore, and tamarisk, statue and trotting donkey. It looked like a
+mysterious finger pointed in warning toward the sky. The Nile began to
+gleam. Upon its steel and silver torches of amber flame were lighted.
+The Libyan mountains became spectral beyond the tombs of the kings.
+The tiny, rough cupolas that mark a grave close to the sphinxes, in
+daytime dingy and poor, now seemed made of some splendid material
+worthy to roof the mummy of a king. Far off a pool of the Nile, that
+from here looked like a little palm-fringed lake, turned ruby-red. The
+flags from the standard of Luxor, among the minarets, flew out
+straight against a sky that was pale as a primrose almost cold in its
+amazing delicacy.
+
+I turned, and behind me the moon was risen. Already its silver rays
+fell upon the ruins of Karnak; upon the thickets of lotus columns;
+upon solitary gateways that now give entrance to no courts; upon the
+sacred lake, with its reeds, where the black water-fowl were asleep;
+upon sloping walls, shored up by enormous stanchions, like ribs of
+some prehistoric leviathan; upon small chambers; upon fallen blocks of
+masonry, fragments of architrave and pavement, of capital and cornice;
+and upon the people of Karnak--those fascinating people who still
+cling to their habitation in the ruins, faithful through misfortune,
+affectionate with a steadfastness that defies the cruelty of Time;
+upon the little, lonely white sphinx with the woman's face and the
+downward-sloping eyes full of sleepy seduction; upon Rameses II., with
+the face of a kindly child, not of a king; upon the Sphinx, bereft of
+its companion, which crouches before the kiosk of Taharga, the King of
+Ethiopia; upon those two who stand together as if devoted, yet by
+their attitudes seem to express characters diametrically opposed, grey
+men and vivid, the one with folded arms calling to Peace, the other
+with arms stretched down in a gesture of crude determination,
+summoning War, as if from the underworld; upon the granite foot and
+ankle in the temple of Rameses III., which in their perfection, like
+the headless Victory in Paris, and the Niobide Chiaramonti in the
+Vatican, suggest a great personality that once met with is not to be
+forgotten: upon these and their companions, who would not forsake the
+halls and courts where once they dwelt with splendor, where now they
+dwell with ruin that attracts the gaping world. The moon was risen,
+but the west was still full of color and light. It faded. There was a
+pause. Only a bar of dull red, holding a hint of brown, by where the
+sun had sunk. And minutes passed--minutes for me full of silent
+expectation, while the moonlight grew a little stronger, a few more
+silver rays slipped down upon the ruins. I turned toward the east. And
+then came that curious crescendo of color and of light which, in
+Egypt, succeeds the diminuendo of color and of light that is the
+prelude to the pause before the afterglow. Everything seemed to be in
+subtle movement, heaving as a breast heaves with the breath; swelling
+slightly, as if in an effort to be more, to attract attention, to gain
+in significance. Pale things became livid, holding apparently some
+under-brightness which partly penetrated its envelope, but a
+brightness that was white and almost frightful. Black things seemed to
+glow with blackness. The air quivered. Its silence surely thrilled
+with sound--with sound that grew ever louder.
+
+In the east I saw an effect. To the west I turned for the cause. The
+sunset light was returning. Horus would not permit Tum to reign even
+for a few brief moments, and Khuns, the sacred god of the moon, would
+be witness of a conflict in that lovely western region of the ocean of
+the sky where the bark of the sun had floated away beneath the
+mountain rim upon the red-and-orange tides. The afterglow was like an
+exquisite spasm, is always like an exquisite spasm, a beautiful,
+almost desperate effort ending in the quiet darkness of defeat. And
+through that spasmodic effort a world lived for some minutes with a
+life that seemed unreal, startling, magical. Color returned to the sky
+--color ethereal, trembling as if it knew it ought not to return. Yet
+it stayed for a while and even glowed, though it looked always
+strangely purified, and full of a crystal coldness. The birds that
+flew against it were no longer birds, but dark, moving ornaments,
+devised surely by a supreme artist to heighten here and there the
+beauty of the sky. Everything that moved against the afterglow--man,
+woman, child, camel and donkey, dog and goat, languishing buffalo, and
+plunging horse--became at once an ornament, invented, I fancied, by a
+genius to emphasize, by relieving it, the color in which the sky was
+drowned. And Khuns watched serenely, as if he knew the end. And almost
+suddenly the miraculous effort failed. Things again revealed their
+truth, whether commonplace or not. That pool of the Nile was no more a
+red jewel set in a feathery pattern of strange design, but only water
+fading from my sight beyond a group of palms. And that below me was
+only a camel going homeward, and that a child leading a bronze-colored
+sheep with a curly coat, and that a dusty, flat-roofed hovel, not the
+fairy home of jinn, or the abode of some magician working marvels with
+the sun-rays he had gathered in his net. The air was no longer
+thrilling with music. The breast that had heaved with a divine breath
+was still as the breast of a corpse.
+
+And Khuns reigned quietly over the plains of Karnak.
+
+Karnak has no distinctive personality. Built under many kings, its
+ruins are as complex as were probably once its completed temples, with
+their shrines, their towers, their courts, their hypo-style halls. As
+I looked down that evening in the moonlight I saw, softened and made
+more touching than in day-time, those alluring complexities, brought
+by the night and Khuns into a unity that was both tender and superb.
+Masses of masonry lay jumbled in shadow and in silver; gigantic walls
+cast sharply defined gloom; obelisks pointed significantly to the sky,
+seeming, as they always do, to be murmuring a message; huge doorways
+stood up like giants unafraid of their loneliness and yet pathetic in
+it; here was a watching statue, there one that seemed to sleep, seen
+from afar. Yonder Queen Hatshepsu, who wrought wonders at Deir-el-
+Bahari, and who is more familiar perhaps as Hatasu, had left there
+traces, and nearer, to the right, Rameses III. had made a temple,
+surely for the birds, so fond they are of it, so pertinaciously they
+haunt it. Rameses II., mutilated and immense, stood on guard before
+the terrific hall of Seti I.; and between him and my platform in the
+air rose the solitary lotus column that prepares you for the wonder of
+Seti's hall, which otherwise might almost overwhelm you--unless you
+are a Scotch lady in a helmet. And Khuns had his temple here by the
+Sphinx of the twelfth Rameses, and Ptah, who created "the sun egg and
+the moon egg," and who was said--only said, alas!--to have established
+on earth the "everlasting justice," had his, and still their stones
+receive the silver moon-rays and wake the wonder of men. Thothmes
+III., Thothmes I., Shishak, who smote the kneeling prisoners and
+vanquished Jeroboam, Medamut and Mut, Amenhotep I., and Amenhotep II.
+--all have left their records or been celebrated at Karnak. Purposely
+I mingled them in my mind--did not attempt to put them in their proper
+order, or even to disentangle gods and goddesses from conquerors and
+kings. In the warm and seductive night Khuns whispered to me: "As long
+ago at Bekhten I exorcised the demon from the suffering Princess, so
+now I exorcise from these ruins all spirits but my own. To-night these
+ruins shall suggest nothing but majesty, tranquillity, and beauty.
+Their records are for Ra, and must be studied by his rays. In mine
+they shall speak not to the intellectual, but only to the emotions and
+the soul."
+
+And presently I went down, and yielding a complete and happy obedience
+to Khuns, I wandered along through the stupendous vestiges of past
+eras, dead ambitions, vanished glory, and long-outworn belief, and I
+ignored eras, ambitions, glory, and belief, and thought only of form,
+and height, of the miracle of blackness against silver, and of the
+pathos of statues whose ever-open eyes at night, when one is near
+them, suggest the working of some evil spell, perpetual watchfulness,
+combined with eternal inactivity, the unslumbering mind caged in the
+body that is paralysed.
+
+There is a temple at Karnak that I love, and I scarcely know why I
+care for it so much. It is on the right of the solitary lotus column
+before you come to the terrific hall of Seti. Some people pass it by,
+having but little time, and being hypnotized, it seems, by the more
+astounding ruin that lies beyond it. And perhaps it would be well, on
+a first visit, to enter it last; to let its influence be the final one
+to rest upon your spirit. This is the temple of Rameses III., a brown
+place of calm and retirement, an ineffable place of peace. Yes, though
+the birds love it and fill it often with their voices, it is a
+sanctuary of peace. Upon the floor the soft sand lies, placing silence
+beneath your footsteps. The pale brown of walls and columns, almost
+yellow in the sunshine, is delicate and soothing, and inclines the
+heart to calm. Delicious, suggestive of a beautiful tapestry, rich and
+ornate, yet always quiet, are the brown reliefs upon the stone. What
+are they? Does it matter? They soften the walls, make them more
+personal, more tender. That surely is their mission. This temple holds
+for me a spell. As soon as I enter it, I feel the touch of the lotus,
+as if an invisible and kindly hand swept a blossom lightly across my
+face and downward to my heart. This courtyard, these small chambers
+beyond it, that last doorway framing a lovely darkness, soothe me even
+more than the terra-cotta hermitages of the Certosa of Pavia. And all
+the statues here are calm with an irrevocable calmness, faithful
+through passing years with a very sober faithfulness to the temple
+they adorn. In no other place, one feels it, could they be thus at
+peace, with hands crossed for ever upon their breasts, which are torn
+by no anxieties, thrilled by no joys. As one stands among them or
+sitting on the base of a column in the chamber that lies beyond them,
+looks on them from a little distance, their attitude is like a summons
+to men to contend no more, to be still, to enter into rest.
+
+Come to this temple when you leave the hall of Seti. There you are in
+a place of triumph. Scarlet, some say, is the color of a great note
+sounded on a bugle. This hall is like a bugle-call of the past,
+thrilling even now down all the ages with a triumph that is surely
+greater than any other triumphs. It suggests blaze--blaze of scarlet,
+blaze of bugle, blaze of glory, blaze of life and time, of ambition
+and achievement. In these columns, in the putting up of them, dead men
+sought to climb to sun and stars, limitless in desire, limitless in
+industry, limitless in will. And at the tops of the columns blooms the
+lotus, the symbol of rising. What a triumph in stone this hall was
+once, what a triumph in stone its ruin is to-day! Perhaps, among
+temples, it is the most wondrous thing in all Egypt, as it was, no
+doubt, the most wondrous temple in the world; among temples I say, for
+the Sphinx is of all the marvels of Egypt by far the most marvellous.
+The grandeur of this hall almost moves one to tears, like the marching
+past of conquerors, stirs the heart with leaping thrills at the
+capacities of men. Through the thicket of columns, tall as forest
+trees, the intense blue of the African sky stares down, and their
+great shadows lie along the warm and sunlit ground. Listen! There are
+voices chanting. Men are working here--working as men worked how many
+thousands of years ago. But these are calling upon the Mohammedan's
+god as they slowly drag to the appointed places the mighty blocks of
+stone. And it is to-day a Frenchman who oversees them.
+
+  "Help! Help! Allah give us help!
+   Help! Help! Allah give us help!"
+
+The dust flies up about their naked feet. Triumph and work; work
+succeeded by the triumph all can see. I like to hear the workmen's
+voices within the hall of Seti. I like to see the dust stirred by
+their tramping feet.
+
+And then I like to go once more to the little temple, to enter through
+its defaced gateway, to stand alone in its silence between the rows of
+statues with their arms folded upon their quiet breasts, to gaze into
+the tender darkness beyond--the darkness that looks consecrated--to
+feel that peace is more wonderful than triumph, that the end of things
+is peace.
+
+Triumph and deathless peace, the bugle-call and silence--these are the
+notes of Karnak.
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+LUXOR
+
+Upon the wall of the great court of Amenhotep III. in the temple of
+Luxor there is a delicious dancing procession in honor of Rameses II.
+It is very funny and very happy; full of the joy of life--a sort of
+radiant cake-walk of old Egyptian days. How supple are these dancers!
+They seem to have no bones. One after another they come in line upon
+the mighty wall, and each one bends backward to the knees of the one
+who follows. As I stood and looked at them for the first time, almost
+I heard the twitter of flutes, the rustic wail of the African hautboy,
+the monotonous boom of the derabukkeh, cries of a far-off gaiety such
+as one often hears from the Nile by night. But these cries came down
+the long avenues of the centuries; this gaiety was distant in the
+vasty halls of the long-dead years. Never can I think of Luxor without
+thinking of those happy dancers, without thinking of the life that
+goes in the sun on dancing feet.
+
+There are a few places in the world that one associates with
+happiness, that one remembers always with a smile, a little thrill at
+the heart that whispers "There joy is." Of these few places Luxor is
+one--Luxor the home of sunshine, the suave abode of light, of warmth,
+of the sweet days of gold and sheeny, golden sunsets, of silver,
+shimmering nights through which the songs of the boatmen of the Nile
+go floating to the courts and the tombs of Thebes. The roses bloom in
+Luxor under the mighty palms. Always surely beneath the palms there
+are the roses. And the lateen-sails come up the Nile, looking like
+white-winged promises of future golden days. And at dawn one wakes
+with hope and hears the songs of the dawn; and at noon one dreams of
+the happiness to come; and at sunset one is swept away on the gold
+into the heart of the golden world; and at night one looks at the
+stars, and each star is a twinkling hope. Soft are the airs of Luxor;
+there is no harshness in the wind that stirs the leaves of the palms.
+And the land is steeped in light. From Luxor one goes with regret. One
+returns to it with joy on dancing feet.
+
+One day I sat in the temple, in the huge court with the great double
+row of columns that stands on the banks of the Nile and looks so
+splendid from it. The pale brown of the stone became almost yellow in
+the sunshine. From the river, hidden from me stole up the songs of the
+boatmen. Nearer at hand I heard pigeons cooing, cooing in the sun, as
+if almost too glad, and seeking to manifest their gladness. Behind me,
+through the columns, peeped some houses of the village: the white home
+of Ibrahim Ayyad, the perfect dragoman, grandson of Mustapha Aga, who
+entertained me years ago, and whose house stood actually within the
+precincts of the temple; houses of other fortunate dwellers in Luxor
+whose names I do not know. For the village of Luxor crowds boldly
+about the temple, and the children play in the dust almost at the foot
+of the obelisks and statues. High on a brown hump of earth a buffalo
+stood alone, languishing serenely in the sun, gazing at me through the
+columns with light eyes that were full of a sort of folly of
+contentment. Some goats tripped by, brown against the brown stone--the
+dark brown earth of the native houses. Intimate life was here,
+striking the note of coziness of Luxor. Here was none of the sadness
+and the majesty of Denderah. Grand are the ruins of Luxor, noble is
+the line of columns that boldly fronts the Nile, but Time has given
+them naked to the air and to the sun, to children and to animals.
+Instead of bats, the pigeons fly about them. There is no dreadful
+darkness in their sanctuaries. Before them the life of the river,
+behind them the life of the village flows and stirs. Upon them looks
+down the Minaret of Abu Haggag; and as I sat in the sunshine, the
+warmth of which began to lessen, I saw upon its lofty circular balcony
+the figure of the muezzin. He leaned over, bending toward the temple
+and the statues of Rameses II. and the happy dancers on the wall. He
+opened his lips and cried to them:
+
+"God is great. God is great . . . I bear witness that there is no god
+but God. . . . I bear witness that Mohammed is the Apostle of God.
+. . . Come to prayer! Come to prayer! . . . God is great. God is
+great. There is no god but God."
+
+He circled round the minaret. He cried to the Nile. He cried to the
+Colossi sitting in their plain, and to the yellow precipices of the
+mountains of Libya. He cried to Egypt:
+
+"Come to prayer! Come to prayer! There is no god but God. There is no
+god but God."
+
+The days of the gods were dead, and their ruined temple echoed with
+the proclamation of the one god of the Moslem world. "Come to prayer!
+Come to prayer!" The sun began to sink.
+
+  "Sunset and evening star, and one clear call for me."
+
+The voice of the muezzin died away. There was a silence; and then, as
+if in answer to the cry from the minaret, I heard the chime of the
+angelus bell from the Catholic church of Luxor.
+
+  "Twilight and evening bell, and after that the dark."
+
+I sat very still. The light was fading; all the yellow was fading,
+too, from the columns and the temple walls. I stayed till it was dark;
+and with the dark the old gods seemed to resume their interrupted
+sway. And surely they, too, called to prayer. For do not these ruins
+of old Egypt, like the muezzin upon the minaret, like the angelus bell
+in the church tower, call one to prayer in the night? So wonderful are
+they under stars and moon that they stir the fleshly and the worldly
+desires that lie like drifted leaves about the reverence and the
+aspiration that are the hidden core of the heart. And it is released
+from its burden; and it awakes and prays.
+
+Amun-Ra, Mut, and Khuns, the king of the gods, his wife, mother of
+gods, and the moon god, were the Theban triad to whom the holy
+buildings of Thebes on the two banks of the Nile were dedicated; and
+this temple of Luxor, the "House of Amun in the Southern Apt," was
+built fifteen hundred years before Christ by Amenhotep III. Rameses
+II., that vehement builder, added to it immensely. One walks among his
+traces when one walks in Luxor. And here, as at Denderah, Christians
+have let loose the fury that should have had no place in their
+religion. Churches for their worship they made in different parts of
+the temple, and when they were not praying, they broke in pieces
+statues, defaced bas-reliefs, and smashed up shrines with a vigor
+quite as great as that displayed in preservation by Christians of
+to-day. Now time has called a truce. Safe are the statues that are
+left. And day by day two great religions, almost as if in happy
+brotherly love, send forth their summons by the temple walls. And just
+beyond those walls, upon the hill, there is a Coptic church. Peace
+reigns in happy Luxor. The lion lies down with the lamb, and the
+child, if it will, may harmlessly put its hand into the cockatrice's
+den.
+
+Perhaps because it is so surrounded, so haunted by life and familiar
+things, because the pigeons fly about it, the buffalo stares into it,
+the goats stir up the dust beside its columns, the twittering voices
+of women make a music near its courts, many people pay little heed to
+this great temple, gain but a small impression from it. It decorates
+the bank of the Nile. You can see it from the dahabiyehs. For many
+that is enough. Yet the temple is a noble one, and, for me, it gains a
+definite attraction all its own from the busy life about it, the
+cheerful hum and stir. And if you want fully to realize its dignity,
+you can always visit it by night. Then the cries from the village are
+hushed. The houses show no lights. Only the voices from the Nile steal
+up to the obelisk of Rameses, to the pylon from which the flags of
+Thebes once flew on festal days, to the shrine of Alexander the Great,
+with its vultures and its stars, and to the red granite statues of
+Rameses and his wives.
+
+These last are as expressive as and of course more definite than my
+dancers. They are full of character. They seem to breathe out the
+essence of a vanished domesticity. Colossal are the statues of the
+king, solid, powerful, and tremendous, boldly facing the world with
+the calm of one who was thought, and possibly thought himself, to be
+not much less than a deity. And upon each pedestal, shrinking
+delicately back, was once a little wife. Some little wives are left.
+They are delicious in their modesty. Each stands away from the king,
+shyly, respectfully. Each is so small as to be below his down-
+stretched arm. Each, with a surely furtive gesture, reaches out her
+right hand, and attains the swelling calf of her noble husband's leg.
+Plump are their little faces, but not bad-looking. One cannot pity the
+king. Nor does one pity them. For these were not "Les desenchantees,"
+the restless, sad-hearted women of an Eastern world that knows too
+much. Their longings surely cannot have been very great. Their world
+was probably bounded by the calf of Rameses's leg. That was "the far
+horizon" of the little plump-faced wives.
+
+The happy dancers and the humble wives, they always come before me
+with the temple of Luxor--joy and discretion side by side. And with
+them, to my ears, the two voices seem to come, muezzin and angelus
+bell, mingling not in war, but peace. When I think of this temple, I
+think of its joy and peace far less than of its majesty.
+
+And yet it is majestic. Look at it, as I have often done, toward
+sunset from the western bank of the Nile, or climb the mound beyond
+its northern end, where stands the grand entrance, and you realize at
+once its nobility and solemn splendor. From the /Loulia's/ deck it was
+a procession of great columns; that was all. But the decorative effect
+of these columns, soaring above the river and its vivid life, is fine.
+
+By day all is turmoil on the river-bank. Barges are unloading,
+steamers are arriving, and throngs of donkey-boys and dragomans go
+down in haste to meet them. Servants run to and fro on errands from
+the many dahabiyehs. Bathers leap into the brown waters. The native
+craft pass by with their enormous sails outspread to catch the wind,
+bearing serried mobs of men, and black-robed women, and laughing,
+singing children. The boatmen of the hotels sing monotonously as they
+lounge in the big, white boats waiting for travellers to Medinet-Abu,
+to the Ramesseum, to Kurna, and the tombs. And just above them rise
+the long lines of columns, ancient, tranquil, and remote--infinitely
+remote, for all their nearness, casting down upon the sunlit gaiety
+the long shadow of the past.
+
+From the edge of the mound where stands the native village the effect
+of the temple is much less decorative, but its detailed grandeur can
+be better grasped from there; for from there one sees the great towers
+of the propylon, two rows of mighty columns, the red granite Obelisk
+of Rameses the great, and the black granite statues of the king. On
+the right of the entrance a giant stands, on the left one is seated,
+and a little farther away a third emerges from the ground, which
+reaches to its mighty breast.
+
+And there the children play perpetually. And there the Egyptians sing
+their serenades, making the pipes wail and striking the derabukkeh;
+and there the women gossip and twitter like the birds. And the buffalo
+comes to take his sun-bath; and the goats and the curly, brown sheep
+pass in sprightly and calm processions. The obelisk there, like its
+brother in Paris, presides over a cheerfulness of life; but it is a
+life that seems akin to it, not alien from it. And the king watches
+the simplicity of this keen existence of Egypt of to-day far up the
+Nile with a calm that one does not fear may be broken by unsympathetic
+outrage, or by any vision of too perpetual foreign life. For the
+tourists each year are but an episode in Upper Egypt. Still the
+shadoof-man sings his ancient song, violent and pathetic, bold as the
+burning sun-rays. Still the fellaheen plough with the camel yoked with
+the ox. Still the women are covered with protective amulets and hold
+their black draperies in their mouths. The intimate life of the Nile
+remains the same. And that life obelisk and king have known for how
+many, many years!
+
+And so I love to think of this intimacy of life about the temple of
+the happy dancers and the humble little wives, and it seems to me to
+strike the keynote of the golden coziness of Luxor.
+
+
+
+IX
+
+COLOSSI OF MEMNON
+
+Nevertheless, sometimes one likes to escape from the thing one loves,
+and there are hours when the gay voices of Luxor fatigue the ears,
+when one desires a great calm. Then there are silent voices that
+summon one across the river, when the dawn is breaking over the hills
+of the Arabian desert, or when the sun is declining toward the Libyan
+mountains--voices issuing from lips of stone, from the twilight of
+sanctuaries, from the depths of rock-hewn tombs.
+
+The peace of the plain of Thebes in the early morning is very rare and
+very exquisite. It is not the peace of the desert, but rather,
+perhaps, the peace of the prairie--an atmosphere tender, delicately
+thrilling, softly bright, hopeful in its gleaming calm. Often and
+often have I left the /Loulia/ very early moored against the long sand
+islet that faces Luxor when the Nile has not subsided, I have rowed
+across the quiet water that divided me from the western bank, and,
+with a happy heart, I have entered into the lovely peace of the great
+spaces that stretch from the Colossi of Memnon to the Nile, to the
+mountains, southward toward Armant, northward to Kerekten, to Danfik,
+to Gueziret-Meteira. Think of the color of young clover, of young
+barley, of young wheat; think of the timbre of the reed flute's voice,
+thin, clear, and frail with the frailty of dewdrops; think of the
+torrents of spring rushing through the veins of a great, wide land,
+and growing almost still at last on their journey. Spring, you will
+say, perhaps, and high Nile not yet subsided! But Egypt is the favored
+land of a spring that is already alert at the end of November, and in
+December is pushing forth its green. The Nile has sunk away from the
+feet of the Colossi that it has bathed through many days. It has freed
+the plain to the fellaheen, though still it keeps my island in its
+clasp. And Hapi, or Kam-wra, the "Great Extender," and Ra, have made
+this wonderful spring to bloom on the dark earth before the
+Christian's Christmas.
+
+What a pastoral it is, this plain of Thebes, in the dawn of day! Think
+of the reed flute, I have said, not because you will hear it, as you
+ride toward the mountains, but because its voice would be utterly in
+place here, in this arcady of Egypt, playing no tarantella, but one of
+those songs, half bird-like, and half sadly, mysteriously human, which
+come from the soul of the East. Instead of it, you may catch distant
+cries from the bank of the river, where the shadoof-man toils, lifting
+ever the water and his voice, the one to earth, the other, it seems,
+to sky; and the creaking lay of the water-wheel, which pervades Upper
+Egypt like an atmosphere, and which, though perhaps at first it
+irritates, at last seems to you the sound of the soul of the river, of
+the sunshine, and the soil.
+
+Much of the land looks painted. So flat is it, so young are the
+growing crops, that they are like a coating of green paint spread over
+a mighty canvas. But the doura rises higher than the heads of the
+naked children who stand among it to watch you canter past. And in the
+far distance you see dim groups of trees--sycamores and acacias,
+tamarisks and palms. Beyond them is the very heart of this "land of
+sand and ruins and gold"; Medinet-Abu, the Ramesseum, Deir-el Medinet,
+Kurna, Deir-el-Bahari, the tombs of the kings, the tombs of the queens
+and of the princes. In the strip of bare land at the foot of those
+hard, and yet poetic mountains, have been dug up treasures the fame of
+which has gone to the ends of the world. But this plain, where the
+fellaheen are stooping to the soil, and the women are carrying the
+water-jars, and the children are playing in the doura, and the oxen
+and the camels are working with ploughs that look like relics of far-
+off days, is the possession of the two great presiding beings whom you
+see from an enormous distance, the Colossi of Memnon. Amenhotep III.
+put them where they are. So we are told. But in this early morning it
+is not possible to think of them as being brought to any place.
+Seated, the one beside the other, facing the Nile and the home of the
+rising sun, their immense aspect of patience suggests will, calmly,
+steadily exercised, suggests choice; that, for some reason, as yet
+unknown, they chose to come to this plain, that they choose solemnly
+to remain there, waiting, while the harvests grow and are gathered
+about their feet, while the Nile rises and subsides, while the years
+and the generations come, like the harvests, and are stored away in
+the granaries of the past. Their calm broods over this plain, gives to
+it a personal atmosphere which sets it quite apart from every other
+flat space of the world. There is no place that I know on the earth
+which has the peculiar, bright, ineffable calm of the plain of these
+Colossi. It takes you into its breast, and you lie there in the
+growing sunshine almost as if you were a child laid in the lap of one
+of them. That legend of the singing at dawn of the "vocal Memnon," how
+could it have arisen? How could such calmness sing, such patience ever
+find a voice? Unlike the Sphinx, which becomes ever more impressive as
+you draw near to it, and is most impressive when you sit almost at its
+feet, the Colossi lose in personality as you approach them and can see
+how they have been defaced.
+
+From afar one feels their minds, their strange, unearthly temperaments
+commanding this pastoral. When you are beside them, this feeling
+disappears. Their features are gone, and though in their attitudes
+there is power, and there is something that awakens awe, they are more
+wonderful as a far-off feature of the plain. They gain in grandeur
+from the night in strangeness from the moonrise, perhaps specially
+when the Nile comes to their feet. More than three thousand years old,
+they look less eternal than the Sphinx. Like them, the Sphinx is
+waiting, but with a greater purpose. The Sphinx reduces man really to
+nothingness. The Colossi leave him some remnants of individuality. One
+can conceive of Strabo and AElius Gallus, of Hadrian and Sabina, of
+others who came over the sunlit land to hear the unearthly song in the
+dawn, being of some--not much, but still of some--importance here.
+Before the Sphinx no one is important. But in the distance of the
+plain the Colossi shed a real magic of calm and solemn personality,
+and subtly seem to mingle their spirit with the flat, green world, so
+wide, so still, so fecund, and so peaceful; with the soft airs that
+are surely scented with an eternal springtime, and with the light that
+the morning rains down on wheat and clover, on Indian corn and barley,
+and on brown men laboring, who, perhaps, from the patience of the
+Colossi in repose have drawn a patience in labor that has in it
+something not less sublime.
+
+From the Colossi one goes onward toward the trees and the mountains,
+and very soon one comes to the edge of that strange and fascinating
+strip of barren land which is strewn with temples and honeycombed with
+tombs. The sun burns down on it. The heat seems thrown back upon it by
+the wall of tawny mountains that bounds it on the west. It is dusty,
+it is arid; it is haunted by swarms of flies, by the guardians of the
+ruins, and by men and boys trying to sell enormous scarabs and
+necklaces and amulets, made yesterday, and the day before, in the
+manufactory of Kurna. From many points it looks not unlike a strangely
+prolonged rubbish-heap in which busy giants have been digging with
+huge spades, making mounds and pits, caverns and trenches, piling up
+here a monstrous heap of stones, casting down there a mighty statue.
+But how it fascinates! Of curse one knows what it means. One knows
+that on this strip of land Naville dug out at Deir-el-Bahari the
+temple of Mentu-hotep, and discovered later, in her shrine, Hathor,
+the cow-goddess, with the lotus-plants streaming from her sacred
+forehead to her feet; that long before him Mariette here brought to
+the light at Drah-abu'l-Neggah the treasures of kings of the twelfth
+and thirteenth dynasties; that at the foot of those tiger-colored
+precipices Theodore M. Davis the American found the sepulcher of Queen
+Hatshepsu, the Queen Elizabeth of the old Egyptian world, and, later,
+the tomb of Yuaa and Thuaa, the parents of Queen Thiy, containing
+mummy-cases covered with gold, jars of oil and wine, gold, silver, and
+alabaster boxes, a bed decorated with gilded ivory a chair with gilded
+plaster reliefs, chairs of state, and a chariot; that here Maspero,
+Victor Loret, Brugsch Bey, and other patient workers gave to the world
+tombs that had been hidden and unknown for centuries; that there to
+the north is the temple of Kurna, and over there the Ramesseum; that
+those rows of little pillars close under the mountain, and looking
+strangely modern, are the pillars of Hatshepsu's temple, which bears
+upon its walls the pictures of the expedition to the historic land of
+Punt; that the kings were buried there, and there the queens and the
+princes of the vanished dynasties; that beyond to the west is the
+temple of Deir-el-Medinet with its judgment of the dead; that here by
+the native village is Medinet-Abu. One knows that, and so the
+imagination is awake, ready to paint the lily and to gild the beaten
+gold. But even if one did not know, I think one would be fascinated.
+This turmoil of sun-baked earth and rock, grey, yellow, pink, orange,
+and red, awakens the curiosity, summons the love of the strange,
+suggests that it holds secrets to charm the souls of men.
+
+
+
+X
+
+MEDINET-ABU
+
+At the entrance to the temple of Medinet-Abu, near the small groups of
+palms and the few brown houses, often have I turned and looked back
+across the plain before entering through the first beautiful doorway,
+to see the patient backs and right sides of the Colossi, the far-off,
+dreamy mountains beyond Karnak and the Nile. And again, when I have
+entered and walked a little distance, I have looked back at the almost
+magical picture framed in the doorway; at the bottom of the picture a
+layer of brown earth, then a strip of sharp green--the cultivated
+ground--then a blur of pale yellow, then a darkness of trees, and just
+the hint of a hill far, very far away. And always, in looking, I have
+thought of the "Sposalizio" of Raphael in the Brera at Milan, of the
+tiny dream of blue country framed by the temple doorway beyond the
+Virgin and Saint Joseph. The doorways of the temples of Egypt are very
+noble, and nowhere have I been more struck by their nobility than in
+Medinet-Abu. Set in huge walls of massive masonry, which rise slightly
+above them on each side, with a projecting cornice, in their
+simplicity they look extraordinarily classical, in their sobriety
+mysterious, and in their great solidity quite wonderfully elegant. And
+they always suggest to me that they are giving access to courts and
+chambers which still, even in our times, are dedicated to secret cults
+--to the cults of Isis, of Hathor, and of Osiris.
+
+Close to the right of the front of Medinet-Abu there are trees covered
+with yellow flowers; beyond are fields of doura. Behind the temple is
+a sterility which makes one think of metal. A great calm enfolds the
+place. The buildings are of the same color as the Colossi. When I
+speak of the buildings, I include the great temple, the pavilion of
+Rameses III., and the little temple, which together may be said to
+form Medinet-Abu. Whereas the temple of Luxor seems to open its arms
+to life, and the great fascination of the Ramesseum comes partly from
+its invasion by every traveling air and happy sun-ray, its openness
+and freedom, Medinet-Abu impresses by its colossal air of secrecy, by
+its fortress-like seclusion. Its walls are immensely thick, and are
+covered with figures the same color as the walls, some of them very
+tall. Thick-set, massive, heavy, almost warlike it is. Two seated
+statues within, statues with animals' faces, steel-colored, or perhaps
+a little darker than that, look like savage warders ready to repel
+intrusion.
+
+Passing between them, delicately as Agag, one enters an open space
+with ruins, upon the right of which is a low, small temple, grey in
+hue, and covered with inscriptions, which looks almost bowed under its
+tremendous weight of years. From this dignified, though tiny, veteran
+there comes a perpetual sound of birds. The birds in Egypt have no
+reverence for age. Never have I seen them more restless, more gay, or
+more impertinent, than in the immemorial ruins of the ancient land.
+Beyond is an enormous portal, on the lofty ceiling of which still
+linger traces of faded red and blue, which gives access to a great
+hall with rows of mighty columns, those on the left hand round, those
+on the right square, and almost terribly massive. There is in these no
+grace, as in the giant lotus columns of Karnak. Prodigious, heavy,
+barbaric, they are like a hymn in stone to Strength. There is
+something brutal in their aspect, which again makes one think of war,
+of assaults repelled, hordes beaten back like waves by a sea-wall. And
+still another great hall, with more gigantic columns, lies in the sun
+beyond, and a doorway through which seems to stare fiercely the edge
+of a hard and fiery mountain. Although one is roofed by the sky, there
+is something oppressive here; an imprisoned feeling comes over one. I
+could never be fond of Medinet-Abu, as I am fond of Luxor, of parts of
+Karnak, of the whole of delicious, poetical Philae. The big pylons,
+with their great walls sloping inward, sand-colored, and glowing with
+very pale yellow in the sun, the resistant walls, the brutal columns,
+the huge and almost savage scale of everything, always remind me of
+the violence in men, and also--I scarcely know why--make me think of
+the North, of sullen Northern castles by the sea, in places where
+skies are grey, and the white of foam and snow is married in angry
+nights.
+
+And yet in Medinet-Abu there reigns a splendid calm--a calm that
+sometimes seems massive, resistant, as the columns and the walls.
+Peace is certainly inclosed by the stones that call up thoughts of
+war, as if, perhaps, their purpose had been achieved many centuries
+ago, and they were quit of enemies for ever. Rameses III. is connected
+with Medinet-Abu. He was one of the greatest of the Egyptian kings,
+and has been called the "last of the great sovereigns of Egypt." He
+ruled for thirty-one years, and when, after a first visit to Medinet-
+Abu, I looked into his records, I was interested to find that his
+conquests and his wars had "a character essentially defensive." This
+defensive spirit is incarnated in the stones of these ruins. One reads
+in them something of the soul of this king who lived twelve hundred
+years before Christ, and who desired, "in remembrance of his Syrian
+victories," to give to his memorial temple an outward military aspect.
+I noticed a military aspect at once inside this temple; but if you
+circle the buildings outside it is more unmistakable. For the east
+front has a battlemented wall, and the battlements are shield-shaped.
+This fortress, or migdol, a name which the ancient Egyptians borrowed
+from the nomadic tribes of Syria, is called the "Pavilion of Rameses
+III.," and his principal battles are represented upon its walls. The
+monarch does not hesitate to speak of himself in terms of praise,
+suggesting that he was like the God Mentu, who was the Egyptian war
+god, and whose cult at Thebes was at one period more important even
+than was the cult of Amun, and also plainly hinting that he was a
+brave fellow. "I, Rameses the King," he murmurs, "behaved as a hero
+who knows his worth." If hieroglyphs are to be trusted, various
+Egyptian kings of ancient times seem to have had some vague suspicion
+of their own value, and the walls of Medinet-Abu are, to speak
+sincerely, one mighty boast. In his later years the king lived in
+peace and luxury, surrounded by a vicious and intriguing Court,
+haunted by magicians, hags, and mystery-mongers. Dealers in magic may
+still be found on the other side of the river, in happy Luxor. I made
+the acquaintance of two when I was there, one of whom offered for a
+couple of pounds to provide me with a preservative against all such
+dangers as beset the traveller in wild places. In order to prove its
+efficacy he asked me to come to his house by night, bringing a dog and
+my revolver with me. He would hang the charm about the dog's neck, and
+I was then to put six shots into the animal's body. He positively
+assured me that the dog would be uninjured. I half-promised to come
+and, when night began to fall, looked vaguely about for a dog. At last
+I found one, but it howled so dismally when I asked Ibrahim Ayyad to
+take possession of it for experimental purposes, that I weakly gave up
+the project, and left the magician clamoring for his hundred and
+ninety-five piastres.
+
+Its warlike aspect gives a special personality to Medinet-Abu. The
+shield-shaped battlements; the courtyards, with their brutal columns,
+narrowing as they recede towards the mountains; the heavy gateways,
+with superimposed chambers; the towers; quadrangular bastion to
+protect, inclined basement to resist the attacks of sappers and cause
+projectiles to rebound--all these things contribute to this very
+definite effect.
+
+I have heard travelers on the Nile speak piteously of the confusion
+wakened in their minds by a hurried survey of many temples, statues,
+monuments, and tombs. But if one stays long enough this confusion
+fades happily away, and one differentiates between the antique
+personalities of Ancient Egypt almost as easily as one differentiates
+between the personalities of one's familiar friends. Among these
+personalities Medinet-Abu is the warrior, standing like Mentu, with
+the solar disk, and the two plumes erect above his head of a hawk,
+firmly planted at the foot of the Theban mountains, ready to repel all
+enemies, to beat back all assaults, strong and determined, powerful
+and brutally serene.
+
+
+
+XI
+
+THE RAMESSEUM
+
+"This, my lord, is the thinking-place of Rameses the Great."
+
+So said Ibrahim Ayyad to me one morning--Ibrahim, who is almost as
+prolific in the abrupt creation of peers as if he were a democratic
+government.
+
+I looked about me. We stood in a ruined hall with columns, architraves
+covered with inscriptions, segments of flat roof. Here and there
+traces of painting, dull-red, pale, ethereal blue--the "love-color" of
+Egypt, as the Egyptians often call it--still adhered to the stone.
+This hall, dignified, grand, but happy, was open on all sides to the
+sun and air. From it I could see tamarisk- and acacia-trees, and far-
+off shadowy mountains beyond the eastern verge of the Nile. And the
+trees were still as carven things in an atmosphere that was a miracle
+of clearness and of purity. Behind me, and near, the hard Libyan
+mountains gleamed in the sun. Somewhere a boy was singing; and
+suddenly his singing died away. And I thought of the "Lay of the
+Harper" which is inscribed upon the tombs of Thebes--those tombs under
+those gleaming mountains:
+
+  "For no one carries away his goods with him;
+   Yea, no one returns again who has gone thither."
+
+It took the place of the song that had died as I thought of the great
+king's glory; that he had been here, and had long since passed away.
+
+"The thinking-place of Rameses the Great!"
+
+"Suttinly."
+
+"You must leave me alone here, Ibrahim."
+
+I watched his gold-colored robe vanish into the gold of the sun
+through the copper color of the columns. And I was quite alone in the
+"thinking-place" of Rameses. It was a brilliant day, the sky dark
+sapphire blue, without even the spectre of a cloud, or any airy,
+vaporous veil; the heat already intense in the full sunshine, but
+delicious if one slid into a shadow. I slid into a shadow, and sat
+down on a warm block of stone. And the silence flowed upon me--the
+silence of the Ramesseum.
+
+Was /Horbehutet/, the winged disk, with crowned /uroei/, ever set up
+above this temple's principal door to keep it from destruction? I do
+not know. But, if he was, he failed perfectly to fulfil his mission.
+And I am glad he failed. I am glad of the ruin that is here, glad that
+walls have crumbled or been overthrown, that columns have been cast
+down, and ceilings torn off from the pillars that supported them,
+letting in the sky. I would have nothing different in the thinking-
+place of Rameses.
+
+Like a cloud, a great golden cloud, a glory impending that will not,
+cannot, be dissolved into the ether, he loomed over the Egypt that is
+dead, he looms over the Egypt of to-day. Everywhere you meet his
+traces, everywhere you hear his name. You say to a tall young
+Egyptian: "How big you are growing, Hassan!"
+
+He answers, "Come back next year, my gentleman, and I shall be like
+Rameses the Great."
+
+Or you ask of the boatman who rows you, "How can you pull all day
+against the current of the Nile?" And he smiles, and lifting his brown
+arm, he says to you: "Look! I am strong as Rameses the great."
+
+This familiar fame comes down through some twenty years. Carved upon
+limestone and granite, now it seems engraven also on every Egyptian
+heart that beats not only with the movement of shadoof, or is not
+buried in the black soil fertilized by Hapi. Thus can inordinate
+vanity prolong the true triumph of genius, and impress its own view of
+itself upon the minds of millions. This Rameses is believed to be the
+Pharaoh who oppressed the children of Israel.
+
+As I sat in the Ramesseum that morning, I recalled his face--the face
+of an artist and a dreamer rather than that of a warrior and
+oppressor; Asiatic, handsome, not insensitive, not cruel, but subtle,
+aristocratic, and refined. I could imagine it bending above the little
+serpents of the sistrum as they lifted their melodious voices to bid
+Typhon depart, or watching the dancing women's rhythmic movements, or
+smiling half kindly, half with irony, upon the lovelorn maiden who
+made her plaint:
+
+  "What is sweet to the mouth, to me is as the gall of birds;
+   Thy breath alone can comfort my heart."
+
+And I could imagine it looking profoundly grave, not sad, among the
+columns with their opening lotus flowers. For it is the hall of lotus
+columns that Ibrahim calls the thinking-place of the king.
+
+There is something both lovely and touching to me in the lotus columns
+of Egypt, in the tall masses of stone opening out into flowers near
+the sun. Near the sun! Yes; only that obvious falsehood will convey to
+those who have not seen them the effect of some of the hypostyle
+halls, the columns of which seem literally soaring to the sky. And
+flowers of stone, you will say, rudely carved and rugged! That does
+not matter. There was poetry in the minds that conceived them, in the
+thought that directed the hands which shaped them and placed them
+where they are. In Egypt perpetually one feels how the ancient
+Egyptians loved the /Nymphaea lotus/, which is the white lotus, and
+the /Nymphaea coeruloea/, the lotus that is blue. Did they not place
+Horus in its cup, and upon the head of Nefer-Tum, the nature god, who
+represented in their mythology the heat of the rising sun, and who
+seems to have been credited with power to grant life in the world to
+come, set it as a sort of regal ornament? To Seti I., when he returned
+in glory from his triumphs over the Syrians, were given bouquets of
+lotus-blossoms by the great officers of his household. The tiny column
+of green feldspar ending in the lotus typified eternal youth, even as
+the carnelian buckle typified the blood of Isis, which washed away all
+sin. Kohl pots were fashioned in the form of the lotus, cartouches
+sprang from it, wine flowed from cups shaped like it. The lotus was
+part of the very life of Egypt, as the rose, the American Beauty rose,
+is part of our social life of to-day. And here, in the Ramesseum, I
+found campaniform, or lotus-flower capitals on the columns--here where
+Rameses once perhaps dreamed of his Syrian campaigns, or of that
+famous combat when, "like Baal in his fury," he fought single-handed
+against the host of the Hittites massed in two thousand, five hundred
+chariots to overthrow him.
+
+The Ramesseum is a temple not of winds, but of soft and kindly airs.
+There comes Zephyrus, whispering love to Flora incarnate in the Lotus.
+To every sunbeam, to every little breeze, the ruins stretch out arms.
+They adore the deep-blue sky, the shining, sifted sand, untrammeled
+nature, all that whispers, "Freedom."
+
+So I felt that day when Ibrahim left me, so I feel always when I sit
+in the Ramesseum, that exultant victim of Time's here not sacrilegious
+hand.
+
+All strong souls cry out secretly for liberty as for a sacred
+necessity of life. Liberty seems to drench the Ramesseum. And all
+strong souls must exult there. The sun has taken it as a beloved
+possession. No massy walls keep him out. No shield-shaped battlements
+rear themselves up against the outer world as at Medinet-Abu. No huge
+pylons cast down upon the ground their forms in darkness. The stone
+glows with the sun, seems almost to have a soul glowing with the
+sense, the sun-ray sense, of freedom. The heart leaps up in the
+Ramesseum, not frivolously, but with a strange, sudden knowledge of
+the depths of passionate joy there are in life and in bountiful,
+glorious nature. Instead of the strength of a prison one feels the
+ecstasy of space; instead of the safety of inclosure, the rapture of
+naked publicity. But the public to whom this place of the great king
+is consigned is a public of Theban hills; of the sunbeams striking
+from them over the wide world toward the east; of light airs, of
+drifting sand grains, of singing birds, and of butterflies with pure
+white wings. If you have ever ridden an Arab horse, mounted in the
+heart of an oasis, to the verge of the great desert, you will remember
+the bound, thrilling with fiery animation, which he gives when he sets
+his feet on the sand beyond the last tall date-palms. A bound like
+that the soul gives when you sit in the Ramesseum, and see the
+crowding sunbeams, the far-off groves of palm-trees, and the drowsy
+mountains, like shadows, that sleep beyond the Nile. And you look up,
+perhaps, as I looked that morning, and upon a lotus column near you,
+relieved, you perceive the figure of a young man singing.
+
+A young man singing! Let him be the tutelary god of this place,
+whoever he be, whether only some humble, happy slave, or the
+"superintendent of song and of the recreation of the king." Rather
+even than Amun-Ra let him be the god. For there is something nobly
+joyous in this architecture, a dignity that sings.
+
+It has been said, but not established, that Rameses the Great was
+buried in the Ramesseum, and when first I entered it the "Lay of the
+Harper" came to my mind, with the sadness that attends the passing
+away of glory into the shades of death. But an optimism almost as
+determined as Emerson's was quickly bred in me there. I could not be
+sad, though I could be happily thoughtful, in the light of the
+Ramesseum. And even when I left the thinking-place, and, coming down
+the central aisle, saw in the immersing sunshine of the Osiride Court
+the fallen colossus of the king, I was not struck to sadness.
+
+Imagine the greatest figure in the world--such a figure as this
+Rameses was in his day--with all might, all glory, all climbing power,
+all vigor, tenacity of purpose, and granite strength of will
+concentrated within it, struck suddenly down, and falling backward in
+a collapse of which the thunder might shake the vitals of the earth,
+and you have this prostrate colossus. Even now one seems to hear it
+fall, to feel the warm soil trembling beneath one's feet as one
+approaches it. A row of statues of enormous size, with arms crossed as
+if in resignation, glowing in the sun, in color not gold or amber, but
+a delicate, desert yellow, watch near it like servants of the dead. On
+a slightly lower level than there it lies, and a little nearer the
+Nile. Only the upper half of the figure is left, but its size is
+really terrific. This colossus was fifty-seven feet high. It weighed
+eight hundred tons. Eight hundred tons of syenite went to its making,
+and across the shoulders its breadth is, or was, over twenty-two feet.
+But one does not think of measurements as one looks upon it. It is
+stupendous. That is obvious and that is enough. Nor does one think of
+its finish, of its beautiful, rich color, of any of its details. One
+thinks of it as a tremendous personage laid low, as the mightiest of
+the mighty fallen. One thinks of it as the dead Rameses whose glory
+still looms over Egypt like a golden cloud that will not disperse. One
+thinks of it as the soul that commanded, and lo! there rose up above
+the sands, at the foot of the hills of Thebes, the exultant Ramesseum.
+
+
+
+XII
+
+DEIR-EL-BAHARI
+
+Place for Queen Hatshepsu! Surely she comes to a sound of flutes, a
+merry noise of thin, bright music, backed by a clashing of barbaric
+cymbals, along the corridors of the past; this queen who is shown upon
+Egyptian walls dressed as a man, who is said to have worn a beard, and
+who sent to the land of Punt the famous expedition which covered her
+with glory and brought gold to the god Amun. To me most feminine she
+seemed when I saw her temple at Deir-el-Bahari, with its brightness
+and its suavity; its pretty shallowness and sunshine; its white, and
+blue, and yellow, and red, and green and orange; all very trim and
+fanciful, all very smart and delicate; full of finesse and laughter,
+and breathing out to me of the twentieth century the coquetry of a
+woman in 1500 B.C. After the terrific masculinity of Medinet-Abu,
+after the great freedom of the Ramesseum, and the grandeur of its
+colossus, the manhood of all the ages concentrated in granite, the
+temple at Deir-el-Bahari came upon me like a delicate woman, perfumed
+and arranged, clothed in a creation of white and blue and orange,
+standing--ever so knowingly--against a background of orange and pink,
+of red and of brown-red, a smiling coquette of the mountain, a gay and
+sweet enchantress who knew her pretty powers and meant to exercise
+them.
+
+Hatshepsu with a beard! Never will I believe it. Or if she ever seemed
+to wear one, I will swear it was only the tattooed ornament with which
+all the lovely women of the Fayum decorate their chins to-day,
+throwing into relief the smiling, soft lips, the delicate noses, the
+liquid eyes, and leading one from it step by step to the beauties it
+precedes.
+
+Mr. Wallis Budge says in his book on the antiquities of Egypt: "It
+would be unjust to the memory of a great man and a loyal servant of
+Hatshepsu, if we omitted to mention the name of Senmut, the architect
+and overseer of works at Deir-el-Bahari." By all means let Senmut be
+mentioned, and then let him be utterly forgotten. A radiant queen
+reigns here--a queen of fantasy and splendor, and of that divine
+shallowness--refined frivolity literally cut into the mountain--which
+is the note of Deir-el-Bahari. And what a clever background! Oh,
+Hatshepsu knew what she was doing when she built her temple here. It
+was not the solemn Senmut (he wore a beard, I'm sure) who chose that
+background, if I know anything of women.
+
+Long before I visited Deir-el-Bahari I had looked at it from afar. My
+eyes had been drawn to it merely from its situation right underneath
+the mountains. I had asked: "What do those little pillars mean? And
+are those little doors?" I had promised myself to go there, as one
+promises oneself a /bonne bouche/ to finish a happy banquet. And I had
+realized the subtlety, essentially feminine, that had placed a temple
+there. And Menu-Hotep's temple, perhaps you say, was it not there
+before the queen's? Then he must have possessed a subtlety purely
+feminine, or have been advised by one of his wives in his building
+operations, or by some favorite female slave. Blundering, unsubtle man
+would probably think that the best way to attract and to fix attention
+on any object was to make it much bigger than things near and around
+it, to set up a giant among dwarfs.
+
+Not so Queen Hatshepsu. More artful in her generation, she set her
+long but little temple against the precipices of Libya. And what is
+the result? Simply that whenever one looks toward them one says, "What
+are those little pillars?" Or if one is more instructed, one thinks
+about Queen Hatshepsu. The precipices are as nothing. A woman's wile
+has blotted them out.
+
+And yet how grand they are! I have called them tiger-colored
+precipices. And they suggest tawny wild beasts, fierce, bred in a land
+that is the prey of the sun. Every shade of orange and yellow glows
+and grows pale on their bosses, in their clefts. They shoot out
+turrets of rock that blaze like flames in the day. They show great
+teeth, like the tiger when any one draws near. And, like the tiger,
+they seem perpetually informed by a spirit that is angry. Blake wrote
+of the tiger:
+
+  "Tiger, tiger, burning bright
+   In the forests of the night."
+
+These tiger-precipices of Libya are burning things, avid like beasts
+of prey. But the restored apricot-colored pillars are not afraid of
+their impending fury--fury of a beast baffled by a tricky little
+woman, almost it seems to me; and still less afraid are the white
+pillars, and the brilliant paintings that decorate the walls within.
+
+As many people in the sad but lovely islands off the coast of Scotland
+believe in "doubles," as the old classic writers believed in man's
+"genius," so the ancient Egyptian believed in his "Ka," or separate
+entity, a sort of spiritual other self, to be propitiated and
+ministered to, presented with gifts, and served with energy and ardor.
+On this temple of Deir-el-Bahari is the scene of the birth of
+Hatshepsu, and there are two babies, the princess and her Ka. For this
+imagined Ka, when a great queen, long after, she built this temple, or
+chapel, that offerings might be made there on certain appointed days.
+Fortunate Ka of Hatshepsu to have had so cheerful a dwelling!
+Liveliness pervades Deir-el-Bahari. I remember, when I was on my first
+visit to Egypt, lunching at Thebes with Monsieur Naville and Mr.
+Hogarth, and afterward going with them to watch the digging away of
+the masses of sand and rubbish which concealed this gracious building.
+I remember the songs of the half-naked workmen toiling and sweating in
+the sun. and I remember seeing a white temple wall come up into the
+light with all the painted figures surely dancing with joy upon it.
+And they are surely dancing still.
+
+Here you may see, brilliant as yesterday's picture anywhere,
+fascinatingly decorative trees growing bravely in little pots, red
+people offering incense which is piled up on mounds like mountains,
+Ptah-Seket, Osiris receiving a royal gift of wine, the queen in the
+company of various divinities, and the terrible ordeal of the cows.
+The cows are being weighed in scales. There are three of them. One is
+a philosopher, and reposes with an air that says, "Even this last
+indignity of being weighed against my will cannot perturb my soaring
+spirit." But the other two sitting up, look as apprehensive as old
+ladies in a rocking express, expectant of an accident. The vividness
+of the colors in this temple is quite wonderful. And much of its great
+attraction comes rather from its position, and from them, than
+essentially from itself. At Deir-el-Bahari, what the long shell
+contains--its happy murmur of life--is more fascinating than the
+shell. There, instead of being uplifted or overawed by form, we are
+rejoiced by color, by the high vivacity of arrested movement, by the
+story that color and movement tell. And over all there is the bright,
+blue, painted sky, studded, almost distractedly studded, with a
+plethora of the yellow stars the Egyptians made like starfish.
+
+The restored apricot-colored columns outside look unhappily suburban
+when you are near them. The white columns with their architraves are
+more pleasant to the eyes. The niches full of bright hues, the arched
+chapels, the small white steps leading upward to shallow sanctuaries,
+the small black foxes facing each other on little yellow pedestals--
+attract one like the details and amusing ornaments of a clever woman's
+boudoir. Through this most characteristic temple one roves in a gaily
+attentive mood, feeling all the time Hatshepsu's fascination.
+
+You may see her, if you will, a little lady on the wall, with a face
+decidedly sensual--a long, straight nose, thick lips, an expression
+rather determined than agreeable. Her mother looks as Semitic as a Jew
+moneylender in Brick Lane, London. Her husband, Thothmes II., has a
+weak and poor-spirited countenance--decidedly an accomplished
+performer on the second violin. The mother wears on her head a snake,
+no doubt a cobra-di-capello, the symbol of her sovereignty. Thothmes
+is clad in a loin-cloth. And a god, with a sleepy expression and a
+very fish-like head, appears in this group of personages to offer the
+key of life. Another painting of the queen shows her on her knees
+drinking milk from the sacred cow, with an intent and greedy figure,
+and an extraordinarily sensual and expressive face. That she was well
+guarded is surely proved by a brave display of her soldiers--red men
+on a white wall. Full of life and gaiety all in a row they come,
+holding weapons, and, apparently, branches, and advancing with a gait
+of triumph that tells of "spacious days." And at their head is an
+officer, who looks back, much like a modern drill sergeant, to see how
+his men are marching.
+
+In the southern shrine of the temple, cut in the rock as is the
+northern shrine, once more I found traces of the "Lady of the Under-
+World." For this shrine was dedicated to Hathor, though the whole
+temple was sacred to the Theban god Amun. Upon a column were the
+remains of the goddess's face, with a broad brow and long, large eyes.
+Some fanatic had hacked away the mouth.
+
+The tomb of Hatshepsu was found by Mr. Theodore M. Davis, and the
+famous /Vache/ of Deir-el-Bahari by Monsieur Naville as lately as
+1905. It stands in the museum at Cairo, but for ever it will be
+connected in the minds of men with the tiger-colored precipices and
+the Colonnades of Thebes. Behind the ruins of the temple of Mentu-
+Hotep III., in a chapel of painted rock, the Vache-Hathor was found.
+
+It is not easy to convey by any description the impression this
+marvellous statue makes. Many of us love our dogs, our horses, some of
+us adore our cats; but which of us can think, without a smile, of
+worshipping a cow? Yet the cow was the Egyptian Aphrodite's sacred
+animal. Under the form of a cow she was often represented. And in the
+statue she is presented to us as a limestone cow. And positively this
+cow is to be worshipped.
+
+She is shown in the act apparently of stepping gravely forward out of
+a small arched shrine, the walls of which are decorated with brilliant
+paintings. Her color is red and yellowish red, and is covered with
+dark blotches of a very dark green, which look almost black. Only one
+or two are of a bluish color. Her height is moderate. I stand about
+five foot nine, and I found that on her pedestal the line of her back
+was about level with my chest. The lower part of the body, much of
+which is concealed by the under block of limestone, is white, tinged
+with yellow. The tail is red. Above the head, open and closed lotus-
+flowers form a head-dress, with the lunar disk and two feathers. And
+the long lotus-stalks flow down on each side of the neck toward the
+ground. At the back of this head-dress are a scarab and a cartouche.
+The goddess is advancing solemnly and gently. A wonderful calm, a
+matchless, serene dignity, enfold her.
+
+In the body of this cow one is able, indeed one is almost obliged, to
+feel the soul of a goddess. The incredible is accomplished. The dead
+Egyptian makes the ironic, the skeptical modern world feel deity in a
+limestone cow. How is it done? I know not; but it is done. Genius can
+do nearly everything, it seems. Under the chin of the cow there is a
+standing statue of the King Mentu-Hotep, and beneath her the king
+kneels as a boy. Wonderfully expressive and solemnly refined is the
+cow's face, which is of dark color, like the color of almost black
+earth--earth fertilized by the Nile. Dignified, dominating, almost but
+just not stern, strongly intelligent, and, through its beautiful
+intelligence, entirely sympathetic ("to understand all, is to pardon
+all"), this face, once thoroughly seen, completely noticed, can never
+be forgotten. This is one of the most beautiful statues in the world.
+
+When I was at Deir-el-Bahari I thought of it and wished that it still
+stood there near the Colonnades of Thebes under the tiger-colored
+precipices. And then I thought of Hatshepsu. Surely she would not
+brook a rival to-day near the temple which she made--a rival long lost
+and long forgotten. Is not her influence still there upon the terraced
+platforms, among the apricot and the white columns, near the paintings
+of the land of Punt? Did it not whisper to the antiquaries, even to
+the soldiers from Cairo, who guarded the Vache-Hathor in the night, to
+make haste to take her away far from the hills of Thebes and from the
+Nile's long southern reaches, that the great queen might once more
+reign alone? They obeyed. Hatshepsu was appeased. And, like a delicate
+woman, perfumed and arranged, clothed in a creation of white and blue
+and orange, standing ever so knowingly against a background of orange
+and pink, of red and of brown-red, she rules at Deir-el-Bahari.
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+THE TOMBS OF THE KINGS
+
+On the way to the tombs of the kings I went to the temple of Kurna,
+that lonely cenotaph, with its sand-colored massive façade, its heaps
+of fallen stone, its wide and ruined doorway, its thick, almost rough,
+columns recalling Medinet-Abu. There is not very much to see, but from
+there one has a fine view of other temples--of the Ramesseum, looking
+superb, like a grand skeleton; of Medinet-Abu, distant, very pale gold
+in the morning sunlight; of little Deir-al-Medinet, the pretty child
+of the Ptolemies, with the heads of the seven Hathors. And from Kurna
+the Colossi are exceptionally grand and exceptionally personal, so
+personal that one imagines one sees the expressions of the faces that
+they no longer possess.
+
+Even if you do not go into the tombs--but you will go--you must ride
+to the tombs of the kings; and you must, if you care for the finesse
+of impressions, ride on a blazing day and toward the hour of noon.
+Then the ravine is itself, like the great act that demonstrates a
+temperament. It is the narrow home of fire, hemmed in by brilliant
+colors, nearly all--perhaps quite all--of which could be found in a
+glowing furnace. Every shade of yellow is there--lemon yellow, sulphur
+yellow, the yellow of amber, the yellow of orange with its tendency
+toward red, the yellow of gold, sand color, sun color. Cannot all
+these yellows be found in a fire? And there are the reds--pink of the
+carnation, pink of the coral, red of the little rose that grows in
+certain places of sands, red of the bright flame's heart. And all
+these colors are mingled in complete sterility. And all are fused into
+a fierce brotherhood by the sun. and like a flood, they seem flowing
+to the red and the yellow mountains, like a flood that is flowing to
+its sea. You are taken by them toward the mountains, on and on, till
+the world is closing in, and you know the way must come to an end. And
+it comes to an end--in a tomb.
+
+You go to a door in the rock, and a guardian lets you in, and wants to
+follow you in. Prevent him if you can. Pay him. Go in alone. For this
+is the tomb of Amenhotep II.; and he himself is here, far down, at
+rest under the mountain, this king who lived and reigned more than
+fourteen hundred years before the birth of Christ. The ravine-valley
+leads to him, and you should go to him alone. He lies in the heart of
+the living rock, in the dull heat of the earth's bowels, which is like
+no other heat. You descend by stairs and corridors, you pass over a
+well by a bridge, you pass through a naked chamber; and the king is
+not there. And you go on down another staircase, and along another
+corridor, and you come into a pillared chamber, with paintings on its
+walls, and on its pillars, paintings of the king in the presence of
+the gods of the underworld, under stars in a soft blue sky. And below
+you, shut in on the farther side by the solid mountain in whose breast
+you have all this time been walking, there is a crypt. And you turn
+away from the bright paintings, and down there you see the king.
+
+Many years ago in London I went to the private view of the Royal
+Academy at Burlington House. I went in the afternoon, when the
+galleries were crowded with politicians and artists, with dealers,
+gossips, quidnuncs, and /flaneurs/; with authors, fashionable lawyers,
+and doctors; with men and women of the world; with young dandies and
+actresses /en vogue/. A roar of voices went up to the roof. Every one
+was talking, smiling, laughing, commenting, and criticizing. It was a
+little picture of the very worldly world that loves the things of
+to-day and the chime of the passing hours. And suddenly some people
+near me were silent, and some turned their heads to stare with a
+strangely fixed attention. And I saw coming toward me an emaciated
+figure, rather bent, much drawn together, walking slowly on legs like
+sticks. It was clad in black, with a gleam of color. Above it was a
+face so intensely thin that it was like the face of death. And in this
+face shone two eyes that seemed full of--the other world. And, like a
+breath from the other world passing, this man went by me and was
+hidden from me by the throng. It was Cardinal Manning in the last days
+of his life.
+
+The face of the king is like his, but it has an even deeper pathos as
+it looks upward to the rock. And the king's silence bids you be
+silent, and his immobility bids you be still. And his sad, and
+unutterable resignation sifts awe, as by the desert wind the sand is
+sifted into the temples, into the temple of your heart. And you feel
+the touch of time, but the touch of eternity, too. And as, in that
+rock-hewn sanctuary, you whisper "/Pax vobiscum/," you say it for all
+the world.
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+EDFU
+
+Prayer pervades the East. Far off across the sands, when one is
+traveling in the desert, one sees thin minarets rising toward the sky.
+A desert city is there. It signals its presence by this mute appeal to
+Allah. And where there are no minarets--in the great wastes of the
+dunes, in the eternal silence, the lifelessness that is not broken
+even by any lonely, wandering bird--the camels are stopped at the
+appointed hours, the poor, and often ragged, robes are laid down, the
+brown pilgrims prostrate themselves in prayer. And the rich man
+spreads his carpet, and prays. And the half-naked nomad spreads
+nothing; but he prays, too. The East is full of lust and full of
+money-getting, and full of bartering, and full of violence; but it is
+full of worship--of worship that disdains concealment, that recks not
+of ridicule or comment, that believes too utterly to care if others
+disbelieve. There are in the East many men who do not pray. They do
+not laugh at the man who does, like the unpraying Christian. There is
+nothing ludicrous to them in prayer. In Egypt your Nubian sailor prays
+in the stern of your dahabiyeh; and your Egyptian boatman prays by the
+rudder of your boat; and your black donkey-boy prays behind a red rock
+in the sand; and your camel-man prays when you are resting in the
+noontide, watching the far-off quivering mirage, lost in some wayward
+dream.
+
+And must you not pray, too, when you enter certain temples where once
+strange gods were worshipped in whom no man now believes?
+
+There is one temple on the Nile which seems to embrace in its arms all
+the worship of the past; to be full of prayers and solemn praises; to
+be the holder, the noble keeper, of the sacred longings, of the
+unearthly desires and aspirations, of the dead. It is the temple of
+Edfu. From all the other temples it stands apart. It is the temple of
+inward flame, of the secret soul of man; of that mystery within us
+that is exquisitely sensitive, and exquisitely alive; that has
+longings it cannot tell, and sorrows it dare not whisper, and loves it
+can only love.
+
+To Horus it was dedicated--hawk-headed Horus--the son of Isis and
+Osiris, who was crowned with many crowns, who was the young Apollo of
+the old Egyptian world. But though I know this, I am never able to
+associate Edfu with Horus, that child wearing the side-lock--when he
+is not hawk-headed in his solar aspect--that boy with his finger in
+his mouth, that youth who fought against Set, murderer of his father.
+
+Edfu, in its solemn beauty, in its perfection of form, seems to me to
+pass into a region altogether beyond identification with the worship
+of any special deity, with particular attributes, perhaps with
+particular limitations; one who can be graven upon walls, and upon
+architraves and pillars painted in brilliant colors; one who can
+personally pursue a criminal, like some policeman in the street; even
+one who can rise upon the world in the visible glory of the sun. To
+me, Edfu must always represent the world-worship of "the Hidden One";
+not Amun, god of the dead, fused with Ra, with Amsu, or with Khnum:
+but that other "Hidden One," who is God of the happy hunting-ground of
+savages, with whom the Buddhist strives to merge his strange serenity
+of soul; who is adored in the "Holy Places" by the Moslem, and lifted
+mystically above the heads of kneeling Catholics in cathedrals dim
+with incense, and merrily praised with the banjo and the trumpet in
+the streets of black English cities; who is asked for children by
+longing women, and for new dolls by lisping babes; whom the atheist
+denies in the day, and fears in the darkness of night; who is on the
+lips alike of priest and blasphemer, and in the soul of all human
+life.
+
+Edfu stands alone, not near any other temple. It is not pagan; it is
+not Christian: it is a place in which to worship according to the
+dictates of your heart.
+
+Edfu stands alone on the bank of the Nile between Luxor and Assuan. It
+is not very far from El-Kab, once the capital of Upper Egypt, and it
+is about two thousand years old. The building of it took over one
+hundred and eighty years, and it is the most perfectly preserved
+temple to-day of all the antique world. It is huge and it is splendid.
+It has towers one hundred and twelve feet high, a propylon two hundred
+and fifty-two feet broad, and walls four hundred and fifty feet long.
+Begun in the reign of Ptolemy III., it was completed only fifty-seven
+years before the birth of Christ.
+
+You know these facts about it, and you forget them, or at least you do
+not think of them. What does it all matter when you are alone in Edfu?
+Let the antiquarian go with his anxious nose almost touching the
+stone; let the Egyptologist peer through his glasses at hieroglyphs
+and puzzle out the meaning of cartouches: but let us wander at ease,
+and worship and regard the exquisite form, and drink in the mystical
+spirit, of this very wonderful temple.
+
+Do you care about form? Here you will find it in absolute perfection.
+Edfu is the consecration of form. In proportion it is supreme above
+all other Egyptian temples. Its beauty of form is like the chiselled
+loveliness of a perfect sonnet. While the world lasts, no architect
+can arise to create a building more satisfying, more calm with the
+calm of faultlessness, more serene with a just serenity. Or so it
+seems to me. I think of the most lovely buildings I know in Europe--of
+the Alhambra at Granada, of the Cappella Palatina in the palace at
+Palermo. And Edfu I place with them--Edfu utterly different from them,
+more different, perhaps, even than they are from each other, but akin
+to them, as all great beauty is mysteriously akin. I have spent
+morning after morning in the Alhambra, and many and many an hour in
+the Cappella Palatina; and never have I been weary of either, or
+longed to go away. And this same sweet desire to stay came over me in
+Edfu. The /Loulia/ was tied up by the high bank of the Nile. The
+sailors were glad to rest. There was no steamer sounding its hideous
+siren to call me to its crowded deck. So I yielded to my desire, and
+for long I stayed in Edfu. And when at last I left it I said to
+myself, "This is a supreme thing," and I knew that within me had
+suddenly developed the curious passion for buildings that some people
+never feel, and that others feel ever growing and growing.
+
+Yes, Edfu is supreme. No alteration could improve it. Any change made
+in it, however slight, could only be harmful to it. Pure and perfect
+is its design--broad propylon, great open courtyard with pillared
+galleries, halls, chambers, sanctuary. Its dignity and its sobriety
+are matchless. I know they must be, because they touched me so
+strangely, with a kind of reticent enchantment, and I am not by nature
+enamored of sobriety, of reticence and calm, but am inclined to
+delight in almost violent force, in brilliance, and, especially, in
+combinations of color. In the Alhambra one finds both force and
+fairylike lightness, delicious proportions, delicate fantasy, a spell
+as of subtle magicians; in the Cappella Palatina, a jeweled splendor,
+combined with a small perfection of form which simply captivates the
+whole spirit and leads it to adoration. In Edfu you are face to face
+with hugeness and with grandeur; but soon you are scarcely aware of
+either--in the sense, at least, that connects these qualities with a
+certain overwhelming, almost striking down, of the spirit and the
+faculties. What you are aware of is your own immense and beautiful
+calm of utter satisfaction--a calm which has quietly inundated you,
+like a waveless tide of the sea. How rare it is to feel this absolute
+satisfaction, this praising serenity! The critical spirit goes, like a
+bird from an opened window. The excited, laudatory, voluble spirit
+goes. And this splendid calm is left. If you stay here, you, as this
+temple has been, will be molded into a beautiful sobriety. From the
+top of the pylon you have received this still and glorious impression
+from the matchless design of the whole building, which you see best
+from there. When you descend the shallow staircase, when you stand in
+the great court, when you go into the shadowy halls, then it is that
+the utter satisfaction within you deepens. Then it is that you feel
+the need to worship in this place created for worship.
+
+The ancient Egyptians made most of their temples in conformity with a
+single type. The sanctuary was at the heart, the core, of each temple
+--the sanctuary surrounded by the chambers in which were laid up the
+precious objects connected with ceremonies and sacrifices. Leading to
+this core of the temple, which was sometimes called "the divine
+house," were various halls the roofs of which were supported by
+columns--those hypostyle halls which one sees perpetually in Egypt.
+Before the first of these halls was a courtyard surrounded by a
+colonnade. In the courtyard the priests of the temple assembled. The
+people were allowed to enter the colonnade. A gateway with towers gave
+entrance to the courtyard. If one visits many of the Egyptian temples,
+one soon becomes aware of the subtlety, combined with a sort of high
+simplicity and sense of mystery and poetry, of these builders of the
+past. As a great writer leads one on, with a concealed but beautiful
+art, from the first words to which all the other words are ministering
+servants; as the great musician--Wagner in his "Meistersinger," for
+instance--leads one from the first notes of his score to those final
+notes which magnificently reveal to the listeners the real meaning of
+those first notes, and of all the notes which follow them: so the
+Egyptian builders lead the spirit gently, mysteriously forward from
+the gateway between the towers to the distant house divine. When one
+enters the outer court, one feels the far-off sanctuary. Almost
+unconsciously one is aware that for that sanctuary all the rest of the
+temple was created; that to that sanctuary everything tends. And in
+spirit one is drawn softly onward to that very holy place. Slowly,
+perhaps, the body moves from courtyard to hypostyle hall, and from one
+hall to another. Hieroglyphs are examined, cartouches puzzled out,
+paintings of processions, or bas-reliefs of pastimes and of
+sacrifices, looked at with care and interest; but all the time one has
+the sense of waiting, of a want unsatisfied. And only when one at last
+reaches the sanctuary is one perfectly at rest. For then the spirit
+feels: "This is the meaning of it all."
+
+One of the means which the Egyptian architects used to create this
+sense of approach is very simple, but perfectly effective. It
+consisted only in making each hall on a very slightly higher level
+than the one preceding it, and the sanctuary, which is narrow and
+mysteriously dark on the highest level of all. Each time one takes an
+upward step, or walks up a little incline of stone, the body seems to
+convey to the soul a deeper message of reverence and awe. In no other
+temple is this sense of approach to the heart of a thing so acute as
+it is when one walks in Edfu. In no other temple, when the sanctuary
+is reached, has one such a strong consciousness of being indeed within
+a sacred heart.
+
+The color of Edfu is a pale and delicate brown, warm in the strong
+sunshine, but seldom glowing. Its first doorway is extraordinarily
+high, and is narrow, but very deep, with a roof showing traces of that
+delicious clear blue-green which is like a thin cry of joy rising up
+in the solemn temples of Egypt. A small sphinx keeps watch on the
+right, just where the guardian stands; this guardian, the gift of the
+past, squat, even fat, with a very perfect face of a determined and
+handsome man. In the court, upon a pedestal, stands a big bird, and
+near it is another bird, or rather half of a bird, leaning forward,
+and very much defaced. And in this great courtyard there are swarms of
+living birds, twittering in the sunshine. Through the doorway between
+the towers one sees a glimpse of a native village with the cupolas of
+a mosque.
+
+I stood and looked at the cupolas for a moment. Then I turned, and
+forgot for a time the life of the world without--that men, perhaps,
+were praying beneath those cupolas, or praising the Moslem's God. For
+when I turned, I felt, as I have said, as if all the worship of the
+world must be concentrated here. Standing far down the open court, in
+the full sunshine, I could see into the first hypostyle hall, but
+beyond only a darkness--a darkness which led me on, in which the
+further chambers of the house divine were hidden. As I went on slowly,
+the perfection of the plan of the dead architects was gradually
+revealed to me, when the darkness gave up its secrets; when I saw not
+clearly, but dimly, the long way between the columns, the noble
+columns themselves, the gradual, slight upward slope--graduated by
+genius; there is no other word--which led to the sanctuary, seen at
+last as a little darkness, in which all the mystery of worship, and of
+the silent desires of men, was surely concentrated, and kept by the
+stone for ever. Even the succession of the darknesses, like shadows
+growing deeper and deeper, seemed planned by some great artist in the
+management of light, and so of shadow effects. The perfection of form
+is in Edfu, impossible to describe, impossible not to feel. The
+tremendous effect it has--an effect upon the soul--is created by a
+combination of shapes, of proportions, of different levels, of
+different heights, by consummate graduation. And these shapes,
+proportions, different levels, and heights, are seen in dimness. Not
+that jewelled dimness one loves in Gothic cathedrals, but the heavy
+dimness of windowless, mighty chambers lighted only by a rebuked
+daylight ever trying to steal in. One is captured by no ornament,
+seduced by no lovely colors. Better than any ornament, greater than
+any radiant glory of color, is this massive austerity. It is like the
+ultimate in an art. Everything has been tried, every strangeness
+/bizarrerie/, absurdity, every wild scheme of hues, every preposterous
+subject--to take an extreme instance, a camel, wearing a top-hat, and
+lighted up by fire-works, which I saw recently in a picture-gallery of
+Munich. And at the end a genius paints a portrait of a wrinkled old
+woman's face, and the world regards and worships. Or all discords have
+been flung together pell-mell, resolution of them has been deferred
+perpetually, perhaps even denied altogether, chord of B major has been
+struck with C major, works have closed upon the leading note or the
+dominant seventh, symphonies have been composed to be played in the
+dark, or to be accompanied by a magic-lantern's efforts, operas been
+produced which are merely carnage and a row--and at the end a genius
+writes a little song, and the world gives the tribute of its
+breathless silence and its tears. And it knows that though other
+things may be done, better things can never be done. For no perfection
+can exceed any other perfection.
+
+And so in Edfu I feel that this untinted austerity is perfect; that
+whatever may be done in architecture during future ages of the world,
+Edfu, while it lasts, will remain a thing supreme--supreme in form
+and, because of this supremacy, supreme in the spell which it casts
+upon the soul.
+
+The sanctuary is just a small, beautifully proportioned, inmost
+chamber, with a black roof, containing a sort of altar of granite, and
+a great polished granite shrine which no doubt once contained the god
+Horus. I am glad he is not there now. How far more impressive it is to
+stand in an empty sanctuary in the house divine of "the Hidden One,"
+whom the nations of the world worship, whether they spread their robes
+on the sand and turn their faces to Mecca, or beat the tambourine and
+sing "glory hymns" of salvation, or flagellate themselves in the night
+before the patron saint of the Passionists, or only gaze at the snow-
+white plume that floats from the snows of Etna under the rose of dawn,
+and feel the soul behind Nature. Among the temples of Egypt, Edfu is
+the house divine of "the Hidden One," the perfect temple of worship.
+
+
+
+XV
+
+KOM OMBOS
+
+Some people talk of the "sameness" of the Nile; and there is a lovely
+sameness of golden light, of delicious air, of people, and of scenery.
+For Egypt is, after all, mainly a great river with strips on each side
+of cultivated land, flat, green, not very varied. River, green plains,
+yellow plains, pink, brown, steel-grey, or pale-yellow mountains, wail
+of shadoof, wail of sakieh. Yes, I suppose there is a sameness, a sort
+of golden monotony, in this land pervaded with light and pervaded with
+sound. Always there is light around you, and you are bathing in it,
+and nearly always, if you are living, as I was, on the water, there is
+a multitude of mingling sounds floating, floating to your ears. As
+there are two lines of green land, two lines of mountains, following
+the course of the Nile; so are there two lines of voices that cease
+their calling and their singing only as you draw near to Nubia. For
+then, with the green land, they fade away, these miles upon miles of
+calling and singing brown men; and amber and ruddy sands creep
+downward to the Nile. And the air seems subtly changing, and the light
+perhaps growing a little harder. And you are aware of other regions
+unlike those you are leaving, more African, more savage, less suave,
+less like a dreaming. And especially the silence makes a great
+impression on you. But before you enter this silence, between the
+amber and ruddy walls that will lead you on to Nubia, and to the land
+of the crocodile, you have a visit to pay. For here, high up on a
+terrace, looking over a great bend of the river is Kom Ombos. And Kom
+Ombos is the temple of the crocodile god.
+
+Sebek was one of the oldest and one of the most evil of the Egyptian
+gods. In the Fayum he was worshipped, as well as at Kom Ombos, and
+there, in the holy lake of his temple, were numbers of holy
+crocodiles, which Strabo tells us were decorated with jewels like
+pretty women. He did not get on with the other gods, and was sometimes
+confused with Set, who personified natural darkness, and who also was
+worshipped by the people about Kom Ombos.
+
+I have spoken of the golden sameness of the Nile, but this sameness is
+broken by the variety of the temples. Here you have a striking
+instance of this variety. Edfu, only forty miles from Kom Ombos, the
+next temple which you visit, is the most perfect temple in Egypt. Kom
+Ombos is one of the most imperfect. Edfu is a divine house of "the
+Hidden One," full of a sacred atmosphere. Kom Ombos is the house of
+crocodiles. In ancient days the inhabitants of Edfu abhorred, above
+everything, crocodiles and their worshippers. And here at Kom Ombos
+the crocodile was adored. You are in a different atmosphere.
+
+As soon as you land, you are greeted with crocodiles, though
+fortunately not by them. A heap of their black mummies is shown to you
+reposing in a sort of tomb or shrine open at one end to the air. By
+these mummies the new note is loudly struck. The crocodiles have
+carried you in an instant from that which is pervadingly general to
+that which is narrowly particular; from the purely noble, which seems
+to belong to all time, to the entirely barbaric, which belongs only to
+times outworn. It is difficult to feel as if one had anything in
+common with men who seriously worshipped crocodiles, had priests to
+feed them, and decorated their scaly necks with jewels.
+
+Yet the crocodile god had a noble temple at Kom Ombos, a temple which
+dates from the times of the Ptolemies, though there was a temple in
+earlier days which has now disappeared. Its situation is splendid. It
+stands high above the Nile, and close to the river, on a terrace which
+has recently been constructed to save it from the encroachments of the
+water. And it looks down upon a view which is exquisite in the clear
+light of early morning. On the right, and far off, is a delicious pink
+bareness of distant flats and hills. Opposite there is a flood of
+verdure and of trees going to mountains, a spit of sand where is an
+inlet of the river, with a crowd of native boats, perhaps waiting for
+a wind. On the left is the big bend of the Nile, singularly beautiful,
+almost voluptuous in form, and girdled with a radiant green of crops,
+with palm-trees, and again the distant hills. Sebek was well advised
+to have his temples here and in the glorious Fayum, that land flowing
+with milk and honey, where the air is full of the voices of the flocks
+and herds, and alive with the wild pigeons; where the sweet sugar-cane
+towers up in fairy forests, the beloved home of the jackal; where the
+green corn waves to the horizon, and the runlets of water make a maze
+of silver threads carrying life and its happy murmur through all the
+vast oasis.
+
+At the guardian's gate by which you go in there sits not a watch dog,
+nor yet a crocodile, but a watch cat, small, but very determined, and
+very attentive to its duties, and neatly carved in stone. You try to
+look like a crocodile-worshipper. It is deceived, and lets you pass.
+And you are alone with the growing morning and Kom Ombos.
+
+I was never taken, caught up into an atmosphere, in Kom Ombos. I
+examined it with interest, but I did not feel a spell. Its grandeur is
+great, but it did not affect me as did the grandeur of Karnak. Its
+nobility cannot be questioned, but I did not stilly rejoice in it, as
+in the nobility of Luxor, or the free splendor of the Ramesseum.
+
+The oldest thing at Kom Ombos is a gateway of sandstone placed there
+by Thothmes III. as a tribute to Sebek. The great temple is of a warm-
+brown color, a very rich and particularly beautiful brown, that
+soothes and almost comforts the eyes that have been for many days
+boldly assaulted by the sun. Upon the terrace platform above the river
+you face a low and ruined wall, on which there are some lively
+reliefs, beyond which is a large, open court containing a quantity of
+stunted, once big columns standing on big bases. Immediately before
+you the temple towers up, very gigantic, very majestic, with a stone
+pavement, walls on which still remain some traces of paintings, and
+really grand columns, enormous in size and in good formation. There
+are fine architraves, and some bits of roofing, but the greater part
+is open to the air. Through a doorway is a second hall containing
+columns much less noble, and beyond this one walks in ruin, among
+crumbled or partly destroyed chambers, broken statues, become mere
+slabs of granite and fallen blocks of stone. At the end is a wall,
+with a pavement bordering it, and a row of chambers that look like
+monkish cells, closed by small doors. At Kom Ombos there are two
+sanctuaries, one dedicated to Sebek, the other to Heru-ur, or
+Haroeris, a form of Horus in Egyptian called "the Elder," which was
+worshipped with Sebek here by the admirers of crocodiles. Each of them
+contains a pedestal of granite upon which once rested a sacred bark
+bearing an image of the deity.
+
+There are some fine reliefs scattered through these mighty ruins,
+showing Sebek with the head of a crocodile, Heru-ur with the head of a
+hawk so characteristic of Horus, and one strange animal which has no
+fewer than four heads, apparently meant for the heads of lions. One
+relief which I specially noticed for its life, its charming vivacity,
+and its almost amusing fidelity to details unchanged to-day, depicts a
+number of ducks in full flight near a mass of lotus-flowers. I
+remembered it one day in the Fayum, so intimately associated with
+Sebek, when I rode twenty miles out from camp on a dromedary to the
+end of the great lake of Kurun, where the sand wastes of the Libyan
+desert stretch to the pale and waveless waters which, that day, looked
+curiously desolate and even sinister under a low, grey sky. Beyond the
+wiry tamarisk-bushes, which grow far out from the shore, thousands
+upon thousands of wild duck were floating as far as the eyes could
+see. We took a strange native boat, manned by two half-naked
+fishermen, and were rowed with big, broad-bladed oars out upon the
+silent flood that the silent desert surrounded. But the duck were too
+wary ever to let us get within range of them. As we drew gently near,
+they rose in black throngs, and skimmed low into the distance of the
+wintry landscape, trailing their legs behind them, like the duck on
+the wall of Kom Ombos. There was no duck for dinner in camp that
+night, and the cook was inconsolable. But I had seen a relief come to
+life, and surmounted my disappointment.
+
+Kom Ombos and Edfu, the two houses of the lovers and haters of
+crocodiles, or at least of the lovers and the haters of their worship,
+I shall always think of them together, because I drifted on the
+/Loulia/ from one to the other, and saw no interesting temple between
+them and because their personalities are as opposed as were, centuries
+ago, the tenets of those who adored within them. The Egyptians of old
+were devoted to the hunting of crocodiles, which once abounded in the
+reaches of the Nile between Assuan and Luxor, and also much lower
+down. But I believe that no reliefs, or paintings, of this sport are
+to be found upon the walls of the temples and the tombs. The fear of
+Sebek, perhaps, prevailed even over the dwellers about the temple of
+Edfu. Yet how could fear of any crocodile god infect the souls of
+those who were privileged to worship in such a temple, or even
+reverently to stand under the colonnade within the door? As well,
+perhaps, one might ask how men could be inspired to raise such a
+perfect building to a deity with the face of a hawk? But Horus was not
+the god of crocodiles, but a god of the sun. And his power to inspire
+men must have been vast; for the greatest concentration in stone in
+Egypt, and, I suppose, in the whole world, the Sphinx, as De Rouge
+proved by an inscription at Edfu, was a representation of Horus
+transformed to conquer Typhon. The Sphinx and Edfu! For such marvels
+we ought to bless the hawk-headed god. And if we forget the hawk,
+which one meets so perpetually upon the walls of tombs and temples,
+and identify Horus rather with the Greek Apollo, the yellow-haired god
+of the sun, driving "westerly all day in his flaming chariot," and
+shooting his golden arrows at the happy world beneath, we can be at
+peace with those dead Egyptians. For every pilgrim who goes to Edfu
+to-day is surely a worshipper of the solar aspect of Horus. As long as
+the world lasts there will be sun-worshippers. Every brown man upon
+the Nile is one, and every good American who crosses the ocean and
+comes at last into the sombre wonder of Edfu, and I was one upon the
+deck of the /Loulia/.
+
+And we all worship as yet in the dark, as in the exquisite dark, like
+faith, of the Holy of Holies of Horus.
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+PHILAE
+
+As I drew slowly nearer and nearer to the home of "the great
+Enchantress," or, as Isis was also called in bygone days, "the Lady of
+Philae," the land began to change in character, to be full of a new
+and barbaric meaning. In recent years I have paid many visits to
+northern Africa, but only to Tunisia and Algeria, countries that are
+wilder looking, and much wilder seeming than Egypt. Now, as I
+approached Assuan, I seemed at last to be also approaching the real,
+the intense Africa that I had known in the Sahara, the enigmatic
+siren, savage and strange and wonderful, whom the typical Ouled Nail,
+crowned with gold, and tufted with ostrich plumes, painted with kohl,
+tattooed, and perfumed, hung with golden coins and amulets, and framed
+in plaits of coarse, false hair, represents indifferently to the eyes
+of the travelling stranger. For at last I saw the sands that I love
+creeping down to the banks of the Nile. And they brought with them
+that wonderful air which belongs only to them--the air that dwells
+among the dunes in the solitary places, that is like the cool touch of
+Liberty upon the face of a man, that makes the brown child of the
+nomad as lithe, tireless, and fierce-spirited as a young panther, and
+sets flame in the eyes of the Arab horse, and gives speed of the wind
+to the Sloughi. The true lover of the desert can never rid his soul of
+its passion for the sands, and now my heart leaped as I stole into
+their pure embraces, as I saw to right and left amber curves and
+sheeny recesses, shining ridges and bloomy clefts. The clean delicacy
+of those sands that, in long and glowing hills, stretched out from
+Nubia to meet me, who could ever describe them? Who could ever
+describe their soft and enticing shapes, their exquisite gradations of
+color, the little shadows in their hollows, the fiery beauty of their
+crests, the patterns the cool winds make upon them? It is an enchanted
+/royaume/ of the sands through which one approaches Isis.
+
+Isis and engineers! We English people have effected that curious
+introduction, and we greatly pride ourselves upon it. We have
+presented Sir William Garstin, and Mr. John Blue, and Mr. Fitz
+Maurice, and other clever, hard-working men to the fabled Lady of
+Philae, and they have given her a gift: a dam two thousand yards in
+length, upon which tourists go smiling on trolleys. Isis has her
+expensive tribute--it cost about a million and a half pounds--and no
+doubt she ought to be gratified.
+
+Yet I think Isis mourns on altered Philae, as she mourns with her
+sister, Nepthys, at the heads of so many mummies of Osirians upon the
+walls of Egyptian tombs. And though the fellaheen very rightly
+rejoice, there are some unpractical sentimentalists who form a company
+about her, and make their plaint with hers--their plaint for the peace
+that is gone, for the lost calm, the departed poetry, that once hung,
+like a delicious, like an inimitable, atmosphere, about the palms of
+the "Holy Island."
+
+I confess that I dreaded to revisit Philae. I had sweet memories of
+the island that had been with me for many years--memories of still
+mornings under the palm-trees, watching the gliding waters of the
+river, or gazing across them to the long sweep of the empty sands;
+memories of drowsy, golden noons, when the bright world seemed softly
+sleeping, and the almost daffodil-colored temple dreamed under the
+quivering canopy of blue; memories of evenings when a benediction from
+the lifted hands of Romance surely fell upon the temple and the island
+and the river; memories of moonlit nights, when the spirits of the old
+gods to whom the temples were reared surely held converse with the
+spirits of the desert, with Mirage and her pale and evading sisters of
+the great spaces, under the brilliant stars. I was afraid, because I
+could not believe the asservations of certain practical persons, full
+of the hard and almost angry desire of "Progress," that no harm had
+been done by the creation of the reservoir, but that, on the contrary,
+it had benefited the temple. The action of the water upon the stone,
+they said with vehement voices, instead of loosening it and causing it
+to crumble untimely away, had tended to harden and consolidate it.
+Here I should like to lie, but I resist the temptation. Monsieur
+Naville has stated that possibly the English engineers have helped to
+prolong the lives of the buildings of Philae, and Monsieur Maspero has
+declared that "the state of the temple of Philae becomes continually
+more satisfactory." So be it! Longevity has been, by a happy chance,
+secured. But what of beauty? What of the beauty of the past, and what
+of the schemes for the future? Is Philae even to be left as it is, or
+are the waters of the Nile to be artificially raised still higher,
+until Philae ceases to be? Soon, no doubt, an answer will be given.
+
+Meanwhile, instead of the little island that I knew, and thought a
+little paradise breathing out enchantment in the midst of titanic
+sterility, I found a something diseased. Philae now, when out of the
+water, as it was all the time when I was last in Egypt, looks like a
+thing stricken with some creeping malady--one of those maladies which
+begin in the lower members of a body, and work their way gradually but
+inexorably upward to the trunk, until they attain the heart.
+
+I came to it by the desert, and descended to Shellal--Shellal with its
+railway-station, its workmen's buildings, its tents, its dozens of
+screens to protect the hewers of stone from the burning rays of the
+sun, its bustle of people, of overseers, engineers, and workmen,
+Egyptian, Nubian, Italian, and Greek. The silence I had known was
+gone, though the desert lay all around--the great sands, the great
+masses of granite that look as if patiently waiting to be fashioned
+into obelisks, and sarcophagi, and statues. But away there across the
+bend of the river, dominating the ugly rummage of this intrusive
+beehive of human bees, sheer grace overcoming strength both of nature
+and human nature, rose the fabled "Pharaoh's Bed"; gracious, tender,
+from Shellal most delicately perfect, and glowing with pale gold
+against the grim background of the hills on the western shore. It
+seemed to plead for mercy, like something feminine threatened with
+outrage, to protest through its mere beauty, as a woman might protest
+by an attitude, against further desecration.
+
+And in the distance the Nile roared through the many gates of the dam,
+making answer to the protest.
+
+What irony was in this scene! In the old days of Egypt Philae was
+sacred ground, was the Nile-protected home of sacerdotal mysteries,
+was a veritable Mecca to the believers in Osiris, to which it was
+forbidden even to draw near without permission. The ancient Egyptians
+swore solemnly "By him who sleeps in Philae." Now they sometimes swear
+angrily at him who wakes in, or at least by, Philae, and keeps them
+steadily going at their appointed tasks. And instead of it being
+forbidden to draw near to a sacred spot, needy men from foreign
+countries flock thither in eager crowds, not to worship in beauty, but
+to earn a living wage.
+
+And "Pharaoh's Bed" looks out over the water and seems to wonder what
+will be the end.
+
+I was glad to escape from Shellal, pursued by the shriek of an engine
+announcing its departure from the station, glad to be on the quiet
+water, to put it between me and that crowd of busy workers. Before me
+I saw a vast lake, not unlovely, where once the Nile flowed swiftly,
+far off a grey smudge--the very damnable dam. All around me was a grim
+and cruel world of rocks, and of hills that look almost like heaps of
+rubbish, some of them grey, some of them in color so dark that they
+resemble the lava torrents petrified near Catania, or the "Black
+Country" in England through which one rushes on one's way to the
+north. Just here and there, sweetly almost as the pink blossoms of the
+wild oleander, which I have seen from Sicilian seas lifting their
+heads from the crevices of sea rocks, the amber and rosy sands of
+Nubia smiled down over grit, stone, and granite.
+
+The setting of Philae is severe. Even in bright sunshine it has an
+iron look. On a grey or stormy day it would be forbidding or even
+terrible. In the old winters and springs one loved Philae the more
+because of the contrast of its setting with its own lyrical beauty,
+its curious tenderness of charm--a charm in which the isle itself was
+mingled with its buildings. But now, and before my boat had touched
+the quay, I saw that the island must be ignored--if possible.
+
+The water with which it is entirely covered during a great part of the
+year seems to have cast a blight upon it. The very few palms have a
+drooping and tragic air. The ground has a gangrened appearance, and
+much of it shows a crawling mass of unwholesome-looking plants, which
+seem crouching down as if ashamed of their brutal exposure by the
+receded river, and of harsh and yellow-green grass, unattractive to
+the eyes. As I stepped on shore I felt as if I were stepping on
+disease. But at least there were the buildings undisturbed by any
+outrage. Again I turned toward "Pharaoh's Bed," toward the temple
+standing apart from it, which already I had seen from the desert, near
+Shellal, gleaming with its gracious sand-yellow, lifting its series of
+straight lines of masonry above the river and the rocks, looking, from
+a distance, very simple, with a simplicity like that of clear water,
+but as enticing as the light on the first real day of spring.
+
+I went first to "Pharaoh's Bed."
+
+Imagine a woman with a perfectly lovely face, with features as
+exquisitely proportioned as those, say, of Praxiteles's statue of the
+Cnidian Aphrodite, for which King Nicomedes was willing to remit the
+entire national debt of Cnidus, and with a warmly white rose-leaf
+complexion--one of those complexions one sometimes sees in Italian
+women, colorless, yet suggestive almost of glow, of purity, with the
+flame of passion behind it. Imagine that woman attacked by a malady
+which leaves her features exactly as they were, but which changes the
+color of her face--from the throat upward to just beneath the nose--
+from the warm white to a mottled, greyish hue. Imagine the line that
+would seem to be traced between the two complexions--the mottled grey
+below the warm white still glowing above. Imagine this, and you have
+"Pharaoh's Bed" and the temple of Philae as they are to-day.
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+"PHARAOH'S BED"
+
+"Pharaoh's Bed," which stands alone close to the Nile on the eastern
+side of the island, is not one of those rugged, majestic buildings,
+full of grandeur and splendor, which can bear, can "carry off," as it
+were, a cruelly imposed ugliness without being affected as a whole. It
+is, on the contrary, a small, almost an airy, and a femininely perfect
+thing, in which a singular loveliness of form was combined with a
+singular loveliness of color. The spell it threw over you was not so
+much a spell woven of details as a spell woven of divine uniformity.
+To put it in very practical language, "Pharaoh's Bed" was "all of a
+piece." The form was married to the color. The color seemed to melt
+into the form. It was indeed a bed in which the soul that worships
+beauty could rest happily entranced. Nothing jarred. Antiquaries say
+that apparently this building was left unfinished. That may be so. But
+for all that it was one of the most finished things in Egypt,
+essentially a thing to inspire within one the "perfect calm that is
+Greek." The blighting touch of the Nile, which has changed the
+beautiful pale yellow of the stone of the lower part of the building
+to a hideous and dreary grey--which made me think of a steel knife on
+which liquid has been spilt and allowed to run--has destroyed the
+uniformity, the balance, the faultless melody lifted up by form and
+color. And so it is with the temple. It is, as it were, cut in two by
+the intrusion into it of this hideous, mottled complexion left by the
+receded water. Everywhere one sees disease on the walls and columns,
+almost blotting out bas-reliefs, giving to their active figures a
+morbid, a sickly look. The effect is specially distressing in the open
+court that precedes the temple dedicated to the Lady of Philae. In
+this court, which is at the southern end of the island, the Nile at
+certain seasons is now forced to rise very nearly as high as the
+capitals of many of the columns. The consequence of this is that here
+the disease seems making rapid strides. One feels it is drawing near
+to the heart, and that the poor, doomed invalid may collapse at any
+moment.
+
+Yes, there is much to make one sad at Philae. But how much of pure
+beauty there is left--of beauty that merely protests against any
+further outrage!
+
+As there is something epic in the grandeur of the Lotus Hall at
+Karnak, so there is something lyrical in the soft charm of the Philae
+temple. Certain things or places, certain things in certain places,
+always suggest to my mind certain people in whose genius I take
+delight--who have won me, and moved me by their art. Whenever I go to
+Philae, the name of Shelley comes to me. I scarcely could tell why. I
+have no special reason to connect Shelley with Philae. But when I see
+that almost airy loveliness of stone, so simply elegant, so, somehow,
+spring-like in its pale-colored beauty, its happy, daffodil charm,
+with its touch of the Greek--the sensitive hand from Attica stretched
+out over Nubia--I always think of Shelley. I think of Shelley the
+youth who dived down into the pool so deep that it seemed he was lost
+for ever to the sun. I think of Shelley the poet, full of a lyric
+ecstasy, who was himself like an embodied
+
+  "Longing for something afar
+   From the sphere of our sorrow."
+
+Lyrical Philae is like a temple of dreams, and of all poets Shelley
+might have dreamed the dream and have told it to the world in a song.
+
+For all its solidity, there are a strange lightness and grace in the
+temple of Philae; there is an elegance you will not find in the other
+temples of Egypt. But it is an elegance quite undefiled by weakness,
+by any sentimentality. (Even a building, like a love-lorn maid, can be
+sentimental.) Edward FitzGerald once defined taste as the feminine of
+genius. Taste prevails in Philae, a certain delicious femininity that
+seduces the eyes and the heart of man. Shall we call it the spirit of
+Isis?
+
+I have heard a clever critic and antiquarian declare that he is not
+very fond of Philae; that he feels a certain "spuriousness" in the
+temple due to the mingling of Greek with Egyptian influences. He may
+be right. I am no antiquarian, and, as a mere lover of beauty, I do
+not feel this "spuriousness." I can see neither two quarrelling
+strengths nor any weakness caused by division. I suppose I see only
+the beauty, as I might see only the beauty of a women bred of a
+handsome father and mother of different races, and who, not typical of
+either, combined in her features and figure distinguishing merits of
+both. It is true that there is a particular pleasure which is roused
+in us only by the absolutely typical--the completely thoroughbred
+person or thing. It may be a pleasure not caused by beauty, and it may
+be very keen, nevertheless. When it is combined with the joy roused in
+us by all beauty, it is a very pure emotion of exceptional delight.
+Philae does not, perhaps, give this emotion. But it certainly has a
+lovableness that attaches the heart in a quite singular degree. The
+Philae-lover is the most faithful of lovers. The hold of his mistress
+upon him, once it has been felt, is never relaxed. And in his
+affection for Philae there is, I think, nearly always a rainbow strain
+of romance.
+
+When we love anything, we love to be able to say of the object of our
+devotion, "There is nothing like it." Now, in all Egypt, and I suppose
+in all the world there is nothing just like Philae. There are temples,
+yes; but where else is there a bouquet of gracious buildings such as
+these gathered in such a holder as this tiny, raft-like isle? And
+where else are just such delicate and, as I have said, light and
+almost feminine elegance and charm set in the midst of such severe
+sterility? Once, beyond Philae, the great Cataract roared down from
+the wastes of Nubia into the green fertility of Upper Egypt. It roars
+no longer. But still the masses of the rocks, and still the amber and
+the yellow sands, and still the iron-colored hills, keep guard round
+Philae. And still, despite the vulgar desecration that has turned
+Shellal into a workmen's suburb and dowered it with a railway-station,
+there is a mystery in Philae, and the sense of isolation that only an
+island gives. Even now one can forget in Philae--forget, after a
+while, and in certain parts of its buildings, the presence of the grey
+disease; forget the threatening of the altruists, who desire to
+benefit humanity by clearing as much beauty out of humanity's abiding-
+place as possible; forget the fact of the railway, except when the
+shriek of the engine floats over the water to one's ears; forget
+economic problems, and the destruction that their solving brings upon
+the silent world of things whose "use," denied, unrecognized, or
+laughed at, to man is in their holy beauty, whose mission lies not
+upon the broad highways where tramps the hungry body, but upon the
+secret, shadowy byways where glides the hungry soul.
+
+Yes, one can forget even now in the hall of the temple of Isis, where
+the capricious graces of color, where, like old and delicious music in
+the golden strings of a harp, dwells a something--what is it? A
+murmur, or a perfume, or a breathing?--of old and vanished years when
+forsaken gods were worshipped. And one can forget in the chapel of
+Hathor, on whose wall little Horus is born, and in the grey hounds'
+chapel beside it. One can forget, for one walks in beauty.
+
+Lovely are the doorways in Philae, enticing are the shallow steps that
+lead one onward and upward; gracious the yellow towers that seem to
+smile a quiet welcome. And there is one chamber that is simply a place
+of magic--the hall of the flowers.
+
+It is this chamber which always makes me think of Philae as a lovely
+temple of dreams, this silent, retired chamber, where some fabled
+princess might well have been touched to a long, long sleep of
+enchantment, and lain for years upon years among the magical flowers--
+the lotus, and the palm, and the papyrus.
+
+In my youth it made upon me an indelible impression. Through
+intervening years, filled with many new impressions, many wanderings,
+many visions of beauty in other lands, that retired, painted chamber
+had not faded from my mind--or shall I say from my heart? There had
+seemed to me within it something that was ineffable, as in a lyric of
+Shelley's there is something that is ineffable, or in certain pictures
+of Boecklin, such as "The Villa by the Sea." And when at last, almost
+afraid and hesitating, I came into it once more, I found in it again
+the strange spell of old enchantment.
+
+It seems as if this chamber had been imagined by a poet, who had set
+it in the centre of the temple of his dreams. It is such a spontaneous
+chamber that one can scarcely imagine it more than a day and a night
+in the building. Yet in detail it is lovely; it is finished and
+strangely mighty; it is a lyric in stone, the most poetical chamber,
+perhaps, in the whole of Egypt. For Philae I count in Egypt, though
+really it is in Nubia.
+
+One who has not seen Philae may perhaps wonder how a tall chamber of
+solid stone, containing heavy and soaring columns, can be like a lyric
+of Shelley's, can be exquisitely spontaneous, and yet hold a something
+of mystery that makes one tread softly in it, and fear to disturb
+within it some lovely sleeper of Nubia, some Princess of the Nile. He
+must continue to wonder. To describe this chamber calmly, as I might,
+for instance, describe the temple of Derr, would be simply to destroy
+it. For things ineffable cannot be fully explained, or not be fully
+felt by those the twilight of whose dreams is fitted to mingle with
+their twilight. They who are meant to love with ardor /se passionnent
+pour la passion/. And they who are meant to take and to keep the
+spirit of a dream, whether it be hidden in a poem, or held in the cup
+of a flower, or enfolded in arms of stone, will surely never miss it,
+even though they can hear roaring loudly above its elfin voice the cry
+of directed waters rushing down to Upper Egypt.
+
+How can one disentangle from their tapestry web the different threads
+of a spell? And even if one could, if one could hold them up, and
+explain, "The cause of the spell is that this comes in contact with
+this, and that this, which I show you, blends with, fades into, this,"
+how could it advantage any one? Nothing could be made clearer, nothing
+be really explained. The ineffable is, and must ever remain, something
+remote and mysterious.
+
+And so one may say many things of this painted chamber of Philae, and
+yet never convey, perhaps never really know, the innermost cause of
+its charm. In it there is obvious beauty of form, and a seizing beauty
+of color, beauty of sunlight and shadow, of antique association. This
+turquoise blue is enchanting, and Isis was worshipped here. What has
+the one to do with the other? Nothing; and yet how much! For is not
+each of these facts a thread in the tapestry web of the spell? The
+eyes see the rapture of this very perfect blue. The imagination hears,
+as if very far off, the solemn chanting of priests and smells the
+smoke of strange perfumes, and sees the long, aquiline nose and the
+thin, haughty lips of the goddess. And the color becomes strange to
+the eyes as well as very lovely, because, perhaps, it was there--it
+almost certainly was there--when from Constantinople went forth the
+decree that all Egypt should be Christian; when the priests of the
+sacred brotherhood of Isis were driven from their temple.
+
+Isis nursing Horus gave way to the Virgin and the Child. But the
+cycles spin away down "the ringing grooves of change." From Egypt has
+passed away that decreed Christianity. Now from the minaret the
+muezzin cries, and in palm-shaded villages I hear the loud hymns of
+earnest pilgrims starting on the journey to Mecca. And ever this
+painted chamber shelters its mystery of poetry, its mystery of charm.
+And still its marvellous colors are fresh as in the far-off pagan
+days, and the opening lotus-flowers, and the closed lotus-buds, and
+the palm and the papyrus, are on the perfect columns. And their
+intrinsic loveliness, and their freshness, and their age, and the
+mysteries they have looked on--all these facts are part of the spell
+that governs us to-day. In Edfu one is enclosed in a wonderful
+austerity. And one can only worship. In Philae one is wrapped in a
+radiance of color and one can only dream. For there is coral-pink, and
+there a wonderful green, "like the green light that lingers in the
+west," and there is a blue as deep as the blue of a tropical sea; and
+there are green-blue and lustrous, ardent red. And the odd fantasy in
+the coloring, is not that like the fantasy in the temple of a dream?
+For those who painted these capitals for the greater glory of Isis did
+not fear to depart from nature, and to their patient worship a blue
+palm perhaps seemed a rarely sacred thing. And that palm is part of
+the spell, and the reliefs upon the walls and even the Coptic crosses
+that are cut into the stone.
+
+But at the end, one can only say that this place is indescribable, and
+not because it is complex or terrifically grand, like Karnak. Go to it
+on a sunlit morning, or stand in it in late afternoon, and perhaps you
+will feel that it "suggests" you, and that it carries you away, out of
+familiar regions into a land of dreams, where among hidden ways the
+soul is lost in magic. Yes, you are gone.
+
+To the right--for one, alas! cannot live in a dream for ever--is a
+lovely doorway through which one sees the river. Facing it is another
+doorway, showing a fragment of the poor, vivisected island, some
+ruined walls, and still another doorway in which, again, is framed the
+Nile. Many people have cut their names upon the walls of Philae. Once,
+as I sat alone there, I felt strongly attracted to look upward to a
+wall, as if some personality, enshrined within the stone, were
+watching me, or calling. I looked, and saw written "Balzac."
+
+Philae is the last temple that one visits before he gives himself to
+the wildness of the solitudes of Nubia. It stands at the very
+frontier. As one goes up the Nile, it is like a smiling adieu from the
+Egypt one is leaving. As one comes down, it is like a smiling welcome.
+In its delicate charm I feel something of the charm of the Egyptian
+character. There are moments, indeed, when I identify Egypt with
+Philae. For in Philae one must dream; and on the Nile, too, one must
+dream. And always the dream is happy, and shot through with radiant
+light--light that is as radiant as the colors in Philae's temple. The
+pylons of Ptolemy smile at you as you go up or come down the river.
+And the people of Egypt smile as they enter into your dream. A
+suavity, too, is theirs. I think of them often as artists, who know
+their parts in the dream-play, who know exactly their function, and
+how to fulfil it rightly. They sing, while you are dreaming, but it is
+an under-song, like the murmur of an Eastern river far off from any
+sea. It never disturbs, this music, but it helps you in your dream.
+And they are softly gay. And in their eyes there is often the gleam of
+sunshine, for they are the children--but not grown men--of the sun.
+That, indeed, is one of the many strange things in Egypt--the
+youthfulness of its age, the childlikeness of its almost terrible
+antiquity. One goes there to look at the oldest things in the world
+and to feel perpetually young--young as Philae is young, as a lyric of
+Shelley's is young, as all of our day-dreams are young, as the people
+of Egypt are young.
+
+Oh, that Egypt could be kept as it is, even as it is now; that Philae
+could be preserved even as it is now! The spoilers are there, those
+blithe modern spirits, so frightfully clever and capable, so
+industrious, so determined, so unsparing of themselves and--of others!
+Already they are at work "benefiting Egypt." Tall chimneys begin to
+vomit smoke along the Nile. A damnable tram-line for little trolleys
+leads one toward the wonderful colossi of Memnon. Close to Kom Ombos
+some soul imbued with romance has had the inspiration to set up--a
+factory! And Philae--is it to go?
+
+Is beauty then of no value in the world? Is it always to be the prey
+of modern progress? Is nothing to be considered sacred; nothing to be
+left untouched, unsmirched by the grimy fingers of improvement? I
+suppose nothing.
+
+Then let those who still care to dream go now to Philae's painted
+chamber by the long reaches of the Nile; go on, if they will, to the
+giant forms of Abu-Simbel among the Nubian sands. And perhaps they
+will think with me, that in some dreams there is a value greater than
+the value that is entered in any bank-book, and they will say, with
+me, however uselessly:
+
+"Leave to the world some dreams, some places in which to dream; for if
+it needs dams to make the grain grow in the stretches of land that
+were barren, and railways and tram-lines, and factory chimneys that
+vomit black smoke in the face of the sun, surely it needs also painted
+chambers of Philae and the silence that comes down from Isis."
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+OLD CAIRO
+
+By Old Cairo I do not mean only /le vieux Caire/ of the guide-book,
+the little, desolate village containing the famous Coptic church of
+Abu Sergius, in the crypt of which the Virgin Mary and Christ are said
+to have stayed when they fled to the land of Egypt to escape the fury
+of King Herod; but the Cairo that is not new, that is not dedicated
+wholly to officialdom and tourists, that, in the midst of changes and
+the advance of civilisation--civilisation that does so much harm as
+well as so much good, that showers benefits with one hand and defaces
+beauty with the other--preserves its immemorial calm or immemorial
+turmult; that stands aloof, as stands aloof ever the Eastern from the
+Western man, even in the midst of what seems, perhaps, like intimacy;
+Eastern to the soul, though the fantasies, the passions, the
+vulgarities, the brilliant ineptitudes of the West beat about it like
+waves about some unyielding wall of the sea.
+
+When I went back to Egypt, after a lapse of many years, I fled at once
+from Cairo, and upon the long reaches of the Nile, in the great spaces
+of the Libyan Desert, in the luxuriant palm-grooves of the Fayyum,
+among the tamarisk-bushes and on the pale waters of Kurun, I forgot
+the changes which, in my brief glimpse of the city and its environs,
+had moved me to despondency. But one cannot live in the solitudes for
+ever. And at last from Madi-nat-al-Fayyum, with the first pilgrims
+starting for Mecca, I returned to the great city, determined to seek
+in it once more for the fascinations it used to hold, and perhaps
+still held in the hidden ways where modern feet, nearly always in a
+hurry, had seldom time to penetrate.
+
+A mist hung over the land. Out of it, with a sort of stern energy,
+there came to my ears loud hymns sung by the pilgrim voices--hymns in
+which, mingled with the enthusiasm of devotees en route for the
+holiest shrine of their faith, there seemed to sound the resolution of
+men strung up to confront the fatigues and the dangers of a great
+journey through a wild and unknown country. Those hymns led my feet to
+the venerable mosques of Cairo, the city of mosques, guided me on my
+lesser pilgrimage among the cupolas and the colonnades, where grave
+men dream in the silence near marble fountains, or bend muttering
+their prayers beneath domes that are dimmed by the ruthless fingers of
+Time. In the buildings consecrated to prayer and to meditation I first
+sought for the magic that still lurks in the teeming bosom of Cairo.
+
+Long as I had sought it elsewhere, in the brilliant bazaars by day,
+and by night in the winding alleys, where the dark-eyed Jews looked
+stealthily forth from the low-browed doorways; where the Circassian
+girls promenade, gleaming with golden coins and barbaric jewels; where
+the air is alive with music that is feverish and antique, and in
+strangely lighted interiors one sees forms clad in brilliant
+draperies, or severely draped in the simplest pale-blue garments,
+moving in languid dances, fluttering painted figures, bending,
+swaying, dropping down, like the forms that people a dream.
+
+In the bazaars is the passion for gain, in the alleys of music and
+light is the passion for pleasure, in the mosques is the passion for
+prayer that connects the souls of men with the unseen but strongly
+felt world. Each of these passions is old, each of these passions in
+the heart of Islam is fierce. On my return to Cairo I sought for the
+hidden fire that is magic in the dusky places of prayer.
+
+A mist lay over the city as I stood in a narrow byway, and gazed up at
+a heavy lattice, of which the decayed and blackened wood seemed on
+guard before some tragic or weary secret. Before me was the entrance
+to the mosque of Ibn-Tulun, older than any mosque in Cairo save only
+the mosque of Amru. It is approached by a flight of steps, on each
+side of which stand old, impenetrable houses. Above my head, strung
+across from one house to the other, were many little red and yellow
+flags ornamented with gold lozenges. These were to bear witness that
+in a couple of days' time, from the great open place beneath the
+citadel of Cairo, the Sacred Carpet was to set out on its long journey
+to Mecca. My guide struck on a door and uttered a fierce cry. A small
+shutter in the blackened lattice was opened, and a young girl, with
+kohl-tinted eyelids, and a brilliant yellow handkerchief tied over her
+coarse black hair, leaned out, held a short parley, and vanished,
+drawing the shutter to behind her. The mist crept about the tawdry
+flags, a heavy door creaked, whined on its hinges, and from the house
+of the girl there came an old, fat man bearing a mighty key. In a
+moment I was free of the mosque of Ibn-Tulun.
+
+I ascended the steps, passed through a doorway, and found myself on a
+piece of waste ground, flanked on the right by an old, mysterious
+wall, and on the left by the long wall of the mosque, from which close
+to me rose a grey, unornamented minaret, full of the plain dignity of
+unpretending age. Upon its summit was perched a large and weary-
+looking bird with draggled feathers, which remained so still that it
+seemed to be a sad ornament set there above the city, and watching it
+for ever with eyes that could not see. At right angles, touching the
+mosque, was such a house as one can see only in the East--
+fantastically old, fantastically decayed, bleared, discolored, filthy,
+melancholy, showing hideous windows, like windows in the slum of a
+town set above coal-pits in a colliery district, a degraded house, and
+yet a house which roused the imagination and drove it to its work. In
+this building once dwelt the High Priest of the mosque. This dwelling,
+the ancient wall, the grey minaret with its motionless bird, the
+lamentable waste ground at my feet, prepared me rightly to appreciate
+the bit of old Cairo I had come to see.
+
+People who are bored by Gothic churches would not love the mosque of
+Ibn-Tulun. No longer is it used for worship. It contains no praying
+life. Abandoned, bare, and devoid of all lovely ornament, it stands
+like some hoary patriarch, naked and calm, waiting its destined end
+without impatience and without fear. It is a fatalistic mosque, and is
+impressive, like a fatalistic man. The great court of it, three
+hundred feet square, with pointed arches supported by piers, double,
+and on the side looking toward Mecca quintuple arcades, has a great
+dignity of sombre simplicity. Not grace, not a light elegance of
+soaring beauty, but massiveness and heavy strength are distinguishing
+features of this mosque. Even the octagonal basin and its protecting
+cupola that stands in the middle of the court lack the charm that
+belongs to so many of the fountains of Cairo. There are two minarets,
+the minaret of the bird, and a larger one, approached by a big
+stairway up which, so my dragoman told me, a Sultan whose name I have
+forgotten loved to ride his favorite horse. Upon the summit of this
+minaret I stood for a long time, looking down over the city.
+
+Grey it was that morning, almost as London is grey; but the sounds
+that came up softly to my ears out of the mist were not the sounds of
+London. Those many minarets, almost like columns of fog rising above
+the cupolas, spoke to me of the East even upon this sad and sunless
+morning. Once from where I was standing at the time appointed went
+forth the call to prayer, and in the barren court beneath me there
+were crowds of ardent worshippers. Stern men paced upon the huge
+terrace just at my feet fingering their heads, and under that heavy
+cupola were made the long ablutions of the faithful. But now no man
+comes to this old place, no murmur to God disturbs the heavy silence.
+And the silence, and the emptiness, and the greyness under the long
+arcades, all seem to make a tremulous proclamation; all seem to
+whisper, "I am very old, I am useless, I cumber the earth." Even the
+mosque of Amru, which stands also on ground that looks gone to waste,
+near dingy and squat houses built with grey bricks, seems less old
+than this mosque of Ibn-Tulun. For its long façade is striped with
+white and apricot, and there are lebbek-trees growing in its court
+near the two columns between which if you can pass you are assured of
+heaven. But the mosque of Ibn-Tulun, seen upon a sad day, makes a
+powerful impression, and from the summit of its minaret you are
+summoned by the many minarets of Cairo to make the pilgrimage of the
+mosques, to pass from the "broken arches" of these Saracenic cloisters
+to the "Blue Mosque," the "Red Mosque," the mosques of Mohammed Ali,
+of Sultan Hassan, of Kait Bey, of El-Azhar, and so on to the Coptic
+church that is the silent centre of "old Cairo." It is said that there
+are over four hundred mosques in Cairo. As I looked down from the
+minaret of Ibn-Tulun, they called me through the mist that blotted
+completely out all the surrounding country, as if it would concentrate
+my attention upon the places of prayer during these holy days when the
+pilgrims were crowding in to depart with the Holy Carpet. And I went
+down by the staircase of the house, and in the mist I made my
+pilgrimage.
+
+As every one who visits Rome goes to St. Peter's, so every one who
+visits Cairo goes to the mosque of Mohammed Ali in the citadel, a
+gorgeous building in a magnificent situation, the interior of which
+always makes me think of Court functions, and of the pomp of life,
+rather than of prayer and self-denial. More attractive to me is the
+"Blue Mosque," to which I returned again and again, enticed almost as
+by the fascination of the living blue of a summer day.
+
+This mosque, which is the mosque of Ibrahim Aga, but which is
+familiarly known to its lovers as the "Blue Mosque," lies to the left
+of a ramshackle street, and from the outside does not look specially
+inviting. Even when I passed through its door, and stood in the court
+beyond, at first I felt not its charm. All looked old and rough,
+unkempt and in confusion. The red and white stripes of the walls and
+the arches of the arcade, the mean little place for ablution--a pipe
+and a row of brass taps--led the mind from a Neapolitan ice to a
+second-rate school, and for a moment I thought of abruptly retiring
+and seeking more splendid precincts. And then I looked across the
+court to the arcade that lay beyond, and I saw the exquisite "love-
+color" of the marvellous tiles that gives this mosque its name.
+
+The huge pillars of this arcade are striped and ugly, but between them
+shone, with an ineffable lustre, a wall of purple and blue, of purple
+and blue so strong and yet so delicate that it held the eyes and drew
+the body forward. If ever color calls, it calls in the blue mosque of
+Ibrahim Aga. And when I had crossed the court, when I stood beside the
+pulpit, with its delicious, wooden folding-doors, and studied the
+tiles of which this wonderful wall is composed, I found them as lovely
+near as they are lovely far off. From a distance they resemble a
+Nature effect, are almost like a bit of Southern sea or of sky, a
+fragment of gleaming Mediterranean seen through the pillars of a
+loggia, or of Sicilian blue watching over Etna in the long summer
+days. When one is close to them, they are a miracle of art. The
+background of them is a milky white upon which is an elaborate pattern
+of purple and blue, generally conventional and representative of no
+known object, but occasionally showing tall trees somewhat resembling
+cypresses. But it is impossible in words adequately to describe the
+effect of these tiles, and of the tiles that line to the very roof the
+tomb-house on the right of the court. They are like a cry of ecstasy
+going up in this otherwise not very beautiful mosque; they make it
+unforgettable, they draw you back to it again and yet again. On the
+darkest day of winter they set something of summer there. In the
+saddest moment they proclaim the fact that there is joy in the world,
+that there was joy in the hearts of creative artists years upon years
+ago. If you are ever in Cairo, and sink into depression, go to the
+"Blue Mosque" and see if it does not have upon you an uplifting moral
+effect. And then, if you like go on from it to the Gamia El Movayad,
+sometimes called El Ahmar, "The Red," where you will find greater
+glories, though no greater fascination; for the tiles hold their own
+among all the wonders of Cairo.
+
+Outside the "Red Mosque," by its imposing and lofty wall, there is
+always an assemblage of people, for prayers go up in this mosque,
+ablutions are made there, and the floor of the arcade is often covered
+with men studying the Koran, calmly meditating, or prostrating
+themselves in prayer. And so there is a great coming and going up the
+outside stairs and through the wonderful doorway: beggars crouch under
+the wall of the terrace; the sellers of cakes, of syrups and lemon-
+water, and of the big and luscious watermelons that are so popular in
+Cairo, display their wares beneath awnings of orange-colored
+sackcloth, or in the full glare of the sun, and, their prayers
+comfortably completed or perhaps not yet begun, the worshippers stand
+to gossip, or sit to smoke their pipes, before going on their way into
+the city or the mosque. There are noise and perpetual movement here.
+Stand for a while to gain an impression from them before you mount the
+steps and pass into the spacious peace beyond.
+
+Orientals must surely revel in contrasts. There is no tumult like the
+tumult in certain of their market-places. There is no peace like the
+peace in certain of their mosques. Even without the slippers carefully
+tied over your boots you would walk softly, gingerly, in the mosque of
+El Movayad, the mosque of the columns and the garden. For once within
+the door you have taken wings and flown from the city, you are in a
+haven where the most delicious calm seems floating like an atmosphere.
+Through a lofty colonnade you come into the mosque, and find yourself
+beneath a magnificently ornamental wooden roof, the general effect of
+which is of deep brown and gold, though there are deftly introduced
+many touches of very fine red and strong, luminous blue. The walls are
+covered with gold and superb marbles, and there are many quotations
+from the Koran in Arab lettering heavy with gold. The great doors are
+of chiseled bronze and of wood. In the distance is a sultan's tomb,
+surmounted by a high and beautiful cupola, and pierced with windows of
+jeweled glass. But the attraction of this place of prayer comes less
+from its magnificence, from the shining of its gold, and the gleaming
+of its many-colored marbles, than from its spaciousness, its airiness,
+its still seclusion, and its garden. Mohammedans love fountains and
+shady places, as can surely love them only those who carry in their
+minds a remembrance of the desert. They love to have flowers blowing
+beside them while they pray. And with the immensely high and
+crenelated walls of this mosque long ago they set a fountain of pure
+white marble, covered it with a shelter of limestone, and planted
+trees and flowers about it. There beneath palms and tall eucalyptus-
+trees even on this misty day of the winter, roses were blooming, pinks
+scented the air, and great red flowers, that looked like emblems of
+passion, stared upward almost fiercely, as if searching for the sun.
+As I stood there among the worshippers in the wide colonnade, near the
+exquisitely carved pulpit in the shadow of which an old man who looked
+like Abraham was swaying to and fro and whispering his prayers, I
+thought of Omar Khayyam and how he would have loved this garden. But
+instead of water from the white marble fountain, he would have desired
+a cup of wine to drink beneath the boughs of the sheltering trees. And
+he could not have joined without doubt or fear in the fervent
+devotions of the undoubting men, who came here to steep their wills in
+the great will that flowed about them like the ocean about little
+islets of the sea.
+
+From the "Red Mosque" I went to the great mosque of El-Azhar, to the
+wonderful mosque of Sultan Hassan, which unfortunately was being
+repaired and could not be properly seen, though the examination of the
+old portal covered with silver, gold, and brass, the general color-
+effect of which is a delicious dull green, repaid me for my visit, and
+to the exquisitely graceful tomb-mosque of Kait Bey, which is beyond
+the city walls. But though I visited these, and many other mosques and
+tombs, including the tombs of the Khalifas, and the extremely smart
+modern tombs of the family of the present Khedive of Egypt, no
+building dedicated to worship, or to the cult of the dead, left a more
+lasting impression upon my mind than the Coptic church of Abu Sergius,
+or Abu Sargah, which stands in the desolate and strangely antique
+quarter called "Old Cairo." Old indeed it seems, almost terribly old.
+Silent and desolate is it, untouched by the vivid life of the rich and
+prosperous Egypt of to-day, a place of sad dreams, a place of ghosts,
+a place of living spectres. I went to it alone. Any companion, however
+dreary, would have tarnished the perfection of the impression Old
+Cairo and its Coptic church can give to the lonely traveller.
+
+I descended to a gigantic door of palm-wood which was set in an old
+brick arch. This door upon the outside was sheeted with iron. When it
+opened, I left behind me the world I knew, the world that belongs to
+us of to-day, with its animation, its impetus, its flashing changes,
+its sweeping hurry and "go." I stepped at once into, surely, some
+moldering century long hidden in the dark womb of the forgotten past.
+The door of palm-wood closed, and I found myself in a sort of deserted
+town, of narrow, empty streets, beetling archways, tall houses built
+of grey bricks, which looked as if they had turned gradually grey, as
+hair does on an aged head. Very, very tall were these houses. They all
+appeared horribly, almost indecently, old. As I stood and stared at
+them, I remembered a story of a Russian friend of mine, a landed
+proprietor, on whose country estate dwelt a peasant woman who lived to
+be over a hundred. Each year when he came from Petersburg, this old
+woman arrived to salute him. At last she was a hundred and four, and,
+when he left his estate for the winter, she bade him good-bye for
+ever. For ever! But, lo! the next year there she still was--one
+hundred and five years old, deeply ashamed and full of apologies for
+being still alive. "I cannot help it," she said. "I ought no longer to
+be here, but it seems I do not know anything. I do not know even how
+to die!" The grey, tall houses of Old Cairo do not know how to die. So
+there they stand, showing their haggard facades, which are broken by
+protruding, worm-eaten, wooden lattices not unlike the shaggy,
+protuberant eyebrows which sometimes sprout above bleared eyes that
+have seen too much. No one looked out from these lattices. Was there,
+could there be, any life behind them? Did they conceal harems of
+centenarian women with wrinkled faces, and corrugated necks and hands?
+Here and there drooped down a string terminating in a lamp covered
+with minute dust, that wavered in the wintry wind which stole
+tremulously between the houses. And the houses seemed to be leaning
+forward, as if they were fain to touch each other and leave no place
+for the wind, as if they would blot out the exiguous alleys so that no
+life should ever venture to stir through them again. Did the eyes of
+the Virgin Mary, did the baby eyes of the Christ Child, ever gaze upon
+these buildings? One could almost believe it. One could almost believe
+that already these buildings were there when, fleeing from the wrath
+of Herod, Mother and Child sought the shelter of the crypt of Abu
+Sargah.
+
+I went on, walking with precaution, and presently I saw a man. He was
+sitting collapsed beneath an archway, and he looked older than the
+world. He was clad in what seemed like a sort of cataract of multi-
+colored rags. An enormous white beard flowed down over his shrunken
+breast. His face was a mass of yellow wrinkles. His eyes were closed.
+His yellow fingers were twined about a wooden staff. Above his head
+was drawn a patched hood. Was he alive or dead? I could not tell, and
+I passed him on tiptoe. And going always with precaution between the
+tall, grey houses and beneath the lowering arches, I came at last to
+the Coptic church.
+
+Near it, in the street, were several Copts--large, fat, yellow-
+skinned, apparently sleeping, in attitudes that made them look like
+bundles. I woke one up, and asked to see the church. He stared,
+changed slowly from a bundle to a standing man, went away and
+presently, returning with a key and a pale, intelligent-looking youth,
+admitted me into one of the strangest buildings it was ever my lot to
+enter.
+
+The average Coptic church is far less fascinating than the average
+mosque, but the church of Abu Sargah is like no other church that I
+visited in Egypt. Its aspect of hoary age makes it strangely, almost
+thrillingly impressive. Now and then, in going about the world, one
+comes across a human being, like the white-bearded man beneath the
+arch, who might be a thousand years old, two thousand, anything, whose
+appearance suggests that he or she, perhaps, was of the company which
+was driven out of Eden, but that the expulsion was not recorded. And
+now and then one happens upon a building that creates the same
+impression. Such a building is this church. It is known and recorded
+that more than a thousand years ago it had a patriarch whose name was
+Shenuti; but it is supposed to have been built long before that time,
+and parts of it look as if they had been set up at the very beginning
+of things. The walls are dingy and whitewashed. The wooden roof is
+peaked, with many cross-beams. High up on the walls are several small
+square lattices of wood. The floor is of discolored stone. Everywhere
+one sees wood wrought into lattices, crumbling carpets that look
+almost as frail and brittle and fatigued as wrappings of mummies, and
+worn-out matting that would surely become as the dust if one set his
+feet hard upon it. The structure of the building is basilican, and it
+contains some strange carvings of the Last Supper, the Nativity, and
+St. Demetrius. Around the nave there are monolithic columns of white
+marble, and one column of the red and shining granite that is found in
+such quantities at Assuan. There are three altars in three chapels
+facing toward the East. Coptic monks and nuns are renowned for their
+austerity of life, and their almost fierce zeal in fasting and in
+prayer, and in Coptic churches the services are sometimes so long that
+the worshippers, who are almost perpetually standing, use crutches for
+their support. In their churches there always seems to me to be a cold
+and austere atmosphere, far different from the atmosphere of the
+mosques or of any Roman Catholic church. It sometimes rather repels
+me, and generally make me feel either dull or sad. But in this
+immensely old church of Abu Sargah the atmosphere of melancholy aids
+the imagination.
+
+In Coptic churches there is generally a great deal of woodwork made
+into lattices, and into the screens which mark the divisions, usually
+four, but occasionally five, which each church contains, and, which
+are set apart for the altar, for the priests, singers, and
+ministrants, for the male portion of the congregation, and for the
+women, who sit by themselves. These divisions, so different from the
+wide spaciousness and airiness of the mosques, where only pillars and
+columns partly break up the perspective, give to Coptic buildings an
+air of secrecy and of mystery, which, however, is often rather
+repellent than alluring. In the high wooden lattices there are narrow
+doors, and in the division which contains the altar the door is
+concealed by a curtain embroidered with a large cross. The Mohammedans
+who created the mosques showed marvellous taste. Copts are often
+lacking in taste, as they have proved here and there in Abu Sargah.
+Above one curious and unlatticed screen, near to a matted dais, droops
+a hideous banner, red, purple, and yellow, with a white cross. Peeping
+in, through an oblong aperture, one sees a sort of minute circus, in
+the form of a half-moon, containing a table with an ugly red-and-white
+striped cloth. There the Eucharist, which must be preceded by
+confession, is celebrated. The pulpit is of rosewood, inlaid with
+ivory and ebony, and in what is called the "haikal-screen" there are
+some fine specimens of carved ebony.
+
+As I wandered about over the tattered carpets and the crumbling
+matting, under the peaked roof, as I looked up at the flat-roofed
+galleries, or examined the sculpture and ivory mosaics that, bleared
+by the passing of centuries, seemed to be fading away under my very
+eyes, as upon every side I was confronted by the hoary wooden lattices
+in which the dust found a home and rested undisturbed, and as I
+thought of the narrow alleys of grey and silent dwellings through
+which I had come to this strange and melancholy "Temple of the
+Father," I seemed to feel upon my breast the weight of the years that
+had passed since pious hands erected this home of prayer in which now
+no one was praying. But I had yet to receive another and a deeper
+impression of solemnity and heavy silence. By a staircase I descended
+to the crypt, which lies beneath the choir of the church, and there,
+surrounded by columns of venerable marble, beside an altar, I stood on
+the very spot where, according to tradition, the Virgin Mary soothed
+the Christ Child to sleep in the dark night. And, as I stood there, I
+felt that the tradition was a true one, and that there indeed had
+stayed the wondrous Child and the Holy Mother long, how long ago.
+
+The pale, intelligent Coptic youth, who had followed me everywhere,
+and who now stood like a statue gazing upon me with his lustrous eyes,
+murmured in English, "This is a very good place; this most interestin'
+place in Cairo."
+
+Certainly it is a place one can never forget. For it holds in its
+dusty arms--what? Something impalpable, something ineffable, something
+strange as death, spectral, cold, yet exciting, something that seems
+to creep into it out of the distant past and to whisper: "I am here. I
+am not utterly dead. Still I have a voice and can murmur to you, eyes
+and can regard you, a soul and can, if only for a moment, be your
+companion in this sad, yet sacred, place."
+
+Contrast is the salt, the pepper, too, of life, and one of the great
+joys of travel is that at will one can command contrast. From silence
+one can plunge into noise, from stillness one can hasten to movement,
+from the strangeness and the wonder of the antique past one can step
+into the brilliance, the gaiety, the vivid animation of the present.
+From Babylon one can go to Bulak; and on to Bab Zouweleh, with its
+crying children, its veiled women, its cake-sellers, its fruiterers,
+its turbaned Ethiopians, its black Nubians, and almost fair Egyptians;
+one can visit the bazaars, or on a market morning spend an hour at
+Shareh-el-Gamaleyeh, watching the disdainful camels pass, soft-footed,
+along the shadowy streets, and the flat-nosed African negroes, with
+their almost purple-black skins, their bulging eyes, in which yellow
+lights are caught, and their huge hands with turned-back thumbs, count
+their gains, or yell their disappointment over a bargain from which
+they have come out not victors, but vanquished. If in Cairo there are
+melancholy, and silence, and antiquity, in Cairo may be found also
+places of intense animation, of almost frantic bustle, of uproar that
+cries to heaven. To Bulak still come the high-prowed boats of the
+Nile, with striped sails bellying before a fair wind, to unload their
+merchandise. From the Delta they bring thousands of panniers of fruit,
+and from Upper Egypt and from Nubia all manner of strange and precious
+things which are absorbed into the great bazaars of the city, and are
+sold to many a traveller at prices which, to put it mildly, bring to
+the sellers a good return. For in Egypt if one leave his heart, he
+leaves also not seldom his skin. The goblin men of the great goblin
+market of Cairo take all, and remain unsatisfied and calling for more.
+I said, in a former chapter, that no fierce demands for money fell
+upon my ears. But I confess, when I said it, that I had forgotten
+certain bazaars of Cairo.
+
+But what matters it? He who has drunk Nile waters must return. The
+golden country calls him; the mosques with their marble columns, their
+blue tiles, their stern-faced worshippers; the narrow streets with
+their tall houses, their latticed windows, their peeping eyes looking
+down on the life that flows beneath and can never be truly tasted; the
+Pyramids with their bases in the sand and their pointed summits
+somewhere near the stars; the Sphinx with its face that is like the
+enigma of human life; the great river that flows by the tombs and the
+temples; the great desert that girdles it with a golden girdle.
+
+Egypt calls--even across the space of the world; and across the space
+of the world he who knows it is ready to come, obedient to its
+summons, because in thrall to the eternal fascination of the "land of
+sand, and ruins, and gold"; the land of the charmed serpent, the land
+of the afterglow, that may fade away from the sky above the mountains
+of Libya, but that fades never from the memory of one who has seen it
+from the base of some great column, or the top of some mighty pylon;
+the land that has a spell--wonderful, beautiful Egypt.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg Etext of The Spell of Egypt, by Robert Hichens
+