And Only When One At Last
Reaches The Sanctuary Is One Perfectly At Rest.
For then the spirit
feels:
"This is the meaning of it all."
One of the means which the Egyptian architects used to create this
sense of approach is very simple, but perfectly effective. It
consisted only in making each hall on a very slightly higher level
than the one preceding it, and the sanctuary, which is narrow and
mysteriously dark on the highest level of all. Each time one takes an
upward step, or walks up a little incline of stone, the body seems to
convey to the soul a deeper message of reverence and awe. In no other
temple is this sense of approach to the heart of a thing so acute as
it is when one walks in Edfu. In no other temple, when the sanctuary
is reached, has one such a strong consciousness of being indeed within
a sacred heart.
The color of Edfu is a pale and delicate brown, warm in the strong
sunshine, but seldom glowing. Its first doorway is extraordinarily
high, and is narrow, but very deep, with a roof showing traces of that
delicious clear blue-green which is like a thin cry of joy rising up
in the solemn temples of Egypt. A small sphinx keeps watch on the
right, just where the guardian stands; this guardian, the gift of the
past, squat, even fat, with a very perfect face of a determined and
handsome man. In the court, upon a pedestal, stands a big bird, and
near it is another bird, or rather half of a bird, leaning forward,
and very much defaced. And in this great courtyard there are swarms of
living birds, twittering in the sunshine. Through the doorway between
the towers one sees a glimpse of a native village with the cupolas of
a mosque.
I stood and looked at the cupolas for a moment. Then I turned, and
forgot for a time the life of the world without - that men, perhaps,
were praying beneath those cupolas, or praising the Moslem's God. For
when I turned, I felt, as I have said, as if all the worship of the
world must be concentrated here. Standing far down the open court, in
the full sunshine, I could see into the first hypostyle hall, but
beyond only a darkness - a darkness which led me on, in which the
further chambers of the house divine were hidden. As I went on slowly,
the perfection of the plan of the dead architects was gradually
revealed to me, when the darkness gave up its secrets; when I saw not
clearly, but dimly, the long way between the columns, the noble
columns themselves, the gradual, slight upward slope - graduated by
genius; there is no other word - which led to the sanctuary, seen at
last as a little darkness, in which all the mystery of worship, and of
the silent desires of men, was surely concentrated, and kept by the
stone for ever. Even the succession of the darknesses, like shadows
growing deeper and deeper, seemed planned by some great artist in the
management of light, and so of shadow effects. The perfection of form
is in Edfu, impossible to describe, impossible not to feel. The
tremendous effect it has - an effect upon the soul - is created by a
combination of shapes, of proportions, of different levels, of
different heights, by consummate graduation. And these shapes,
proportions, different levels, and heights, are seen in dimness. Not
that jewelled dimness one loves in Gothic cathedrals, but the heavy
dimness of windowless, mighty chambers lighted only by a rebuked
daylight ever trying to steal in. One is captured by no ornament,
seduced by no lovely colors. Better than any ornament, greater than
any radiant glory of color, is this massive austerity. It is like the
ultimate in an art. Everything has been tried, every strangeness
/bizarrerie/, absurdity, every wild scheme of hues, every preposterous
subject - to take an extreme instance, a camel, wearing a top-hat, and
lighted up by fire-works, which I saw recently in a picture-gallery of
Munich. And at the end a genius paints a portrait of a wrinkled old
woman's face, and the world regards and worships. Or all discords have
been flung together pell-mell, resolution of them has been deferred
perpetually, perhaps even denied altogether, chord of B major has been
struck with C major, works have closed upon the leading note or the
dominant seventh, symphonies have been composed to be played in the
dark, or to be accompanied by a magic-lantern's efforts, operas been
produced which are merely carnage and a row - and at the end a genius
writes a little song, and the world gives the tribute of its
breathless silence and its tears. And it knows that though other
things may be done, better things can never be done. For no perfection
can exceed any other perfection.
And so in Edfu I feel that this untinted austerity is perfect; that
whatever may be done in architecture during future ages of the world,
Edfu, while it lasts, will remain a thing supreme - supreme in form
and, because of this supremacy, supreme in the spell which it casts
upon the soul.
The sanctuary is just a small, beautifully proportioned, inmost
chamber, with a black roof, containing a sort of altar of granite, and
a great polished granite shrine which no doubt once contained the god
Horus. I am glad he is not there now. How far more impressive it is to
stand in an empty sanctuary in the house divine of "the Hidden One,"
whom the nations of the world worship, whether they spread their robes
on the sand and turn their faces to Mecca, or beat the tambourine and
sing "glory hymns" of salvation, or flagellate themselves in the night
before the patron saint of the Passionists, or only gaze at the snow-
white plume that floats from the snows of Etna under the rose of dawn,
and feel the soul behind Nature.
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