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.
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