Nevertheless, this face suggests a certain self-complacent
cruelty and sensuality essentially human, and utterly detached from
all divinity, whereas in the face of the goddess there is a something
remote, and even distantly intellectual, which calls the imagination
to "the fields beyond."
As I rode back toward the river, I saw again the boy clad in the rope
of plaited grass, and again he said, less shyly, "May your day be
happy!" It was a kindly wish. In the dawn I had felt it to be almost a
prophecy. But now I was haunted by the face of the goddess of
Denderah, and I remembered the legend of the lovely Lais, who, when
she began to age, covered herself from the eyes of men with a veil,
and went every day at evening to look upon her statue, in which the
genius of Praxiteles had rendered permanent the beauty the woman could
not keep. One evening, hanging to the statue's pedestal by a garland
of red roses, the sculptor found a mirror, upon the polished disk of
which were traced these words:
"Lais, O Goddess, consecrates to thee her mirror: no longer able to
see there what she was, she will not see there what she has become."
My Hathor of Denderah, the sad-eyed dweller on the column in the first
hall, had she a mirror, would surely hang it, as Lais hung hers, at
the foot of the pedestal of the Egyptian Aphrodite; had she a veil,
would surely cover the face that, solitary among the cruel evidences
of Christian ferocity, silently says to the gloomy courts, to the
shining desert and the Nile:
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