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.
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