For Do Not These Ruins
Of Old Egypt, Like The Muezzin Upon The Minaret, Like The Angelus Bell
In The Church Tower, Call One To Prayer In The Night?
So wonderful are
they under stars and moon that they stir the fleshly and the worldly
desires that lie like drifted leaves about the reverence and the
aspiration that are the hidden core of the heart.
And it is released
from its burden; and it awakes and prays.
Amun-Ra, Mut, and Khuns, the king of the gods, his wife, mother of
gods, and the moon god, were the Theban triad to whom the holy
buildings of Thebes on the two banks of the Nile were dedicated; and
this temple of Luxor, the "House of Amun in the Southern Apt," was
built fifteen hundred years before Christ by Amenhotep III. Rameses
II., that vehement builder, added to it immensely. One walks among his
traces when one walks in Luxor. And here, as at Denderah, Christians
have let loose the fury that should have had no place in their
religion. Churches for their worship they made in different parts of
the temple, and when they were not praying, they broke in pieces
statues, defaced bas-reliefs, and smashed up shrines with a vigor
quite as great as that displayed in preservation by Christians of
to-day. Now time has called a truce. Safe are the statues that are
left. And day by day two great religions, almost as if in happy
brotherly love, send forth their summons by the temple walls. And just
beyond those walls, upon the hill, there is a Coptic church. Peace
reigns in happy Luxor. The lion lies down with the lamb, and the
child, if it will, may harmlessly put its hand into the cockatrice's
den.
Perhaps because it is so surrounded, so haunted by life and familiar
things, because the pigeons fly about it, the buffalo stares into it,
the goats stir up the dust beside its columns, the twittering voices
of women make a music near its courts, many people pay little heed to
this great temple, gain but a small impression from it. It decorates
the bank of the Nile. You can see it from the dahabiyehs. For many
that is enough. Yet the temple is a noble one, and, for me, it gains a
definite attraction all its own from the busy life about it, the
cheerful hum and stir. And if you want fully to realize its dignity,
you can always visit it by night. Then the cries from the village are
hushed. The houses show no lights. Only the voices from the Nile steal
up to the obelisk of Rameses, to the pylon from which the flags of
Thebes once flew on festal days, to the shrine of Alexander the Great,
with its vultures and its stars, and to the red granite statues of
Rameses and his wives.
These last are as expressive as and of course more definite than my
dancers.
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