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.
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