On
The Right Of The Entrance A Giant Stands, On The Left One Is Seated,
And A Little Farther Away A Third Emerges From The Ground, Which
Reaches To Its Mighty Breast.
And there the children play perpetually.
And there the Egyptians sing
their serenades, making the pipes wail and striking the derabukkeh;
and there the women gossip and twitter like the birds. And the buffalo
comes to take his sun-bath; and the goats and the curly, brown sheep
pass in sprightly and calm processions. The obelisk there, like its
brother in Paris, presides over a cheerfulness of life; but it is a
life that seems akin to it, not alien from it. And the king watches
the simplicity of this keen existence of Egypt of to-day far up the
Nile with a calm that one does not fear may be broken by unsympathetic
outrage, or by any vision of too perpetual foreign life. For the
tourists each year are but an episode in Upper Egypt. Still the
shadoof-man sings his ancient song, violent and pathetic, bold as the
burning sun-rays. Still the fellaheen plough with the camel yoked with
the ox. Still the women are covered with protective amulets and hold
their black draperies in their mouths. The intimate life of the Nile
remains the same. And that life obelisk and king have known for how
many, many years!
And so I love to think of this intimacy of life about the temple of
the happy dancers and the humble little wives, and it seems to me to
strike the keynote of the golden coziness of Luxor.
IX
COLOSSI OF MEMNON
Nevertheless, sometimes one likes to escape from the thing one loves,
and there are hours when the gay voices of Luxor fatigue the ears,
when one desires a great calm. Then there are silent voices that
summon one across the river, when the dawn is breaking over the hills
of the Arabian desert, or when the sun is declining toward the Libyan
mountains - voices issuing from lips of stone, from the twilight of
sanctuaries, from the depths of rock-hewn tombs.
The peace of the plain of Thebes in the early morning is very rare and
very exquisite. It is not the peace of the desert, but rather,
perhaps, the peace of the prairie - an atmosphere tender, delicately
thrilling, softly bright, hopeful in its gleaming calm. Often and
often have I left the /Loulia/ very early moored against the long sand
islet that faces Luxor when the Nile has not subsided, I have rowed
across the quiet water that divided me from the western bank, and,
with a happy heart, I have entered into the lovely peace of the great
spaces that stretch from the Colossi of Memnon to the Nile, to the
mountains, southward toward Armant, northward to Kerekten, to Danfik,
to Gueziret-Meteira. Think of the color of young clover, of young
barley, of young wheat; think of the timbre of the reed flute's voice,
thin, clear, and frail with the frailty of dewdrops; think of the
torrents of spring rushing through the veins of a great, wide land,
and growing almost still at last on their journey.
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