The Oldest Thing At Kom Ombos Is A Gateway Of Sandstone Placed There
By Thothmes III.
As a tribute to Sebek.
The great temple is of a warm-
brown color, a very rich and particularly beautiful brown, that
soothes and almost comforts the eyes that have been for many days
boldly assaulted by the sun. Upon the terrace platform above the river
you face a low and ruined wall, on which there are some lively
reliefs, beyond which is a large, open court containing a quantity of
stunted, once big columns standing on big bases. Immediately before
you the temple towers up, very gigantic, very majestic, with a stone
pavement, walls on which still remain some traces of paintings, and
really grand columns, enormous in size and in good formation. There
are fine architraves, and some bits of roofing, but the greater part
is open to the air. Through a doorway is a second hall containing
columns much less noble, and beyond this one walks in ruin, among
crumbled or partly destroyed chambers, broken statues, become mere
slabs of granite and fallen blocks of stone. At the end is a wall,
with a pavement bordering it, and a row of chambers that look like
monkish cells, closed by small doors. At Kom Ombos there are two
sanctuaries, one dedicated to Sebek, the other to Heru-ur, or
Haroeris, a form of Horus in Egyptian called "the Elder," which was
worshipped with Sebek here by the admirers of crocodiles. Each of them
contains a pedestal of granite upon which once rested a sacred bark
bearing an image of the deity.
There are some fine reliefs scattered through these mighty ruins,
showing Sebek with the head of a crocodile, Heru-ur with the head of a
hawk so characteristic of Horus, and one strange animal which has no
fewer than four heads, apparently meant for the heads of lions. One
relief which I specially noticed for its life, its charming vivacity,
and its almost amusing fidelity to details unchanged to-day, depicts a
number of ducks in full flight near a mass of lotus-flowers. I
remembered it one day in the Fayum, so intimately associated with
Sebek, when I rode twenty miles out from camp on a dromedary to the
end of the great lake of Kurun, where the sand wastes of the Libyan
desert stretch to the pale and waveless waters which, that day, looked
curiously desolate and even sinister under a low, grey sky. Beyond the
wiry tamarisk-bushes, which grow far out from the shore, thousands
upon thousands of wild duck were floating as far as the eyes could
see. We took a strange native boat, manned by two half-naked
fishermen, and were rowed with big, broad-bladed oars out upon the
silent flood that the silent desert surrounded. But the duck were too
wary ever to let us get within range of them. As we drew gently near,
they rose in black throngs, and skimmed low into the distance of the
wintry landscape, trailing their legs behind them, like the duck on
the wall of Kom Ombos. There was no duck for dinner in camp that
night, and the cook was inconsolable. But I had seen a relief come to
life, and surmounted my disappointment.
Kom Ombos and Edfu, the two houses of the lovers and haters of
crocodiles, or at least of the lovers and the haters of their worship,
I shall always think of them together, because I drifted on the
/Loulia/ from one to the other, and saw no interesting temple between
them and because their personalities are as opposed as were, centuries
ago, the tenets of those who adored within them. The Egyptians of old
were devoted to the hunting of crocodiles, which once abounded in the
reaches of the Nile between Assuan and Luxor, and also much lower
down. But I believe that no reliefs, or paintings, of this sport are
to be found upon the walls of the temples and the tombs. The fear of
Sebek, perhaps, prevailed even over the dwellers about the temple of
Edfu. Yet how could fear of any crocodile god infect the souls of
those who were privileged to worship in such a temple, or even
reverently to stand under the colonnade within the door? As well,
perhaps, one might ask how men could be inspired to raise such a
perfect building to a deity with the face of a hawk? But Horus was not
the god of crocodiles, but a god of the sun. And his power to inspire
men must have been vast; for the greatest concentration in stone in
Egypt, and, I suppose, in the whole world, the Sphinx, as De Rouge
proved by an inscription at Edfu, was a representation of Horus
transformed to conquer Typhon. The Sphinx and Edfu! For such marvels
we ought to bless the hawk-headed god. And if we forget the hawk,
which one meets so perpetually upon the walls of tombs and temples,
and identify Horus rather with the Greek Apollo, the yellow-haired god
of the sun, driving "westerly all day in his flaming chariot," and
shooting his golden arrows at the happy world beneath, we can be at
peace with those dead Egyptians. For every pilgrim who goes to Edfu
to-day is surely a worshipper of the solar aspect of Horus. As long as
the world lasts there will be sun-worshippers. Every brown man upon
the Nile is one, and every good American who crosses the ocean and
comes at last into the sombre wonder of Edfu, and I was one upon the
deck of the /Loulia/.
And we all worship as yet in the dark, as in the exquisite dark, like
faith, of the Holy of Holies of Horus.
XVI
PHILAE
As I drew slowly nearer and nearer to the home of "the great
Enchantress," or, as Isis was also called in bygone days, "the Lady of
Philae," the land began to change in character, to be full of a new
and barbaric meaning.
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