It
Seemed To Plead For Mercy, Like Something Feminine Threatened With
Outrage, To Protest Through Its Mere Beauty, As A Woman Might Protest
By An Attitude, Against Further Desecration.
And in the distance the Nile roared through the many gates of the dam,
making answer to the protest.
What irony was in this scene! In the old days of Egypt Philae was
sacred ground, was the Nile-protected home of sacerdotal mysteries,
was a veritable Mecca to the believers in Osiris, to which it was
forbidden even to draw near without permission. The ancient Egyptians
swore solemnly "By him who sleeps in Philae." Now they sometimes swear
angrily at him who wakes in, or at least by, Philae, and keeps them
steadily going at their appointed tasks. And instead of it being
forbidden to draw near to a sacred spot, needy men from foreign
countries flock thither in eager crowds, not to worship in beauty, but
to earn a living wage.
And "Pharaoh's Bed" looks out over the water and seems to wonder what
will be the end.
I was glad to escape from Shellal, pursued by the shriek of an engine
announcing its departure from the station, glad to be on the quiet
water, to put it between me and that crowd of busy workers. Before me
I saw a vast lake, not unlovely, where once the Nile flowed swiftly,
far off a grey smudge - the very damnable dam. All around me was a grim
and cruel world of rocks, and of hills that look almost like heaps of
rubbish, some of them grey, some of them in color so dark that they
resemble the lava torrents petrified near Catania, or the "Black
Country" in England through which one rushes on one's way to the
north. Just here and there, sweetly almost as the pink blossoms of the
wild oleander, which I have seen from Sicilian seas lifting their
heads from the crevices of sea rocks, the amber and rosy sands of
Nubia smiled down over grit, stone, and granite.
The setting of Philae is severe. Even in bright sunshine it has an
iron look. On a grey or stormy day it would be forbidding or even
terrible. In the old winters and springs one loved Philae the more
because of the contrast of its setting with its own lyrical beauty,
its curious tenderness of charm - a charm in which the isle itself was
mingled with its buildings. But now, and before my boat had touched
the quay, I saw that the island must be ignored - if possible.
The water with which it is entirely covered during a great part of the
year seems to have cast a blight upon it. The very few palms have a
drooping and tragic air. The ground has a gangrened appearance, and
much of it shows a crawling mass of unwholesome-looking plants, which
seem crouching down as if ashamed of their brutal exposure by the
receded river, and of harsh and yellow-green grass, unattractive to
the eyes. As I stepped on shore I felt as if I were stepping on
disease. But at least there were the buildings undisturbed by any
outrage. Again I turned toward "Pharaoh's Bed," toward the temple
standing apart from it, which already I had seen from the desert, near
Shellal, gleaming with its gracious sand-yellow, lifting its series of
straight lines of masonry above the river and the rocks, looking, from
a distance, very simple, with a simplicity like that of clear water,
but as enticing as the light on the first real day of spring.
I went first to "Pharaoh's Bed."
Imagine a woman with a perfectly lovely face, with features as
exquisitely proportioned as those, say, of Praxiteles's statue of the
Cnidian Aphrodite, for which King Nicomedes was willing to remit the
entire national debt of Cnidus, and with a warmly white rose-leaf
complexion - one of those complexions one sometimes sees in Italian
women, colorless, yet suggestive almost of glow, of purity, with the
flame of passion behind it. Imagine that woman attacked by a malady
which leaves her features exactly as they were, but which changes the
color of her face - from the throat upward to just beneath the nose -
from the warm white to a mottled, greyish hue. Imagine the line that
would seem to be traced between the two complexions - the mottled grey
below the warm white still glowing above. Imagine this, and you have
"Pharaoh's Bed" and the temple of Philae as they are to-day.
XVII
"PHARAOH'S BED"
"Pharaoh's Bed," which stands alone close to the Nile on the eastern
side of the island, is not one of those rugged, majestic buildings,
full of grandeur and splendor, which can bear, can "carry off," as it
were, a cruelly imposed ugliness without being affected as a whole. It
is, on the contrary, a small, almost an airy, and a femininely perfect
thing, in which a singular loveliness of form was combined with a
singular loveliness of color. The spell it threw over you was not so
much a spell woven of details as a spell woven of divine uniformity.
To put it in very practical language, "Pharaoh's Bed" was "all of a
piece." The form was married to the color. The color seemed to melt
into the form. It was indeed a bed in which the soul that worships
beauty could rest happily entranced. Nothing jarred. Antiquaries say
that apparently this building was left unfinished. That may be so. But
for all that it was one of the most finished things in Egypt,
essentially a thing to inspire within one the "perfect calm that is
Greek." The blighting touch of the Nile, which has changed the
beautiful pale yellow of the stone of the lower part of the building
to a hideous and dreary grey - which made me think of a steel knife on
which liquid has been spilt and allowed to run - has destroyed the
uniformity, the balance, the faultless melody lifted up by form and
color.
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