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.
