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.
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