And The Odd Fantasy In
The Coloring, Is Not That Like The Fantasy In The Temple Of A Dream?
For
Those who painted these capitals for the greater glory of Isis did
not fear to depart from nature, and to
Their patient worship a blue
palm perhaps seemed a rarely sacred thing. And that palm is part of
the spell, and the reliefs upon the walls and even the Coptic crosses
that are cut into the stone.
But at the end, one can only say that this place is indescribable, and
not because it is complex or terrifically grand, like Karnak. Go to it
on a sunlit morning, or stand in it in late afternoon, and perhaps you
will feel that it "suggests" you, and that it carries you away, out of
familiar regions into a land of dreams, where among hidden ways the
soul is lost in magic. Yes, you are gone.
To the right - for one, alas! cannot live in a dream for ever - is a
lovely doorway through which one sees the river. Facing it is another
doorway, showing a fragment of the poor, vivisected island, some
ruined walls, and still another doorway in which, again, is framed the
Nile. Many people have cut their names upon the walls of Philae. Once,
as I sat alone there, I felt strongly attracted to look upward to a
wall, as if some personality, enshrined within the stone, were
watching me, or calling. I looked, and saw written "Balzac."
Philae is the last temple that one visits before he gives himself to
the wildness of the solitudes of Nubia. It stands at the very
frontier. As one goes up the Nile, it is like a smiling adieu from the
Egypt one is leaving. As one comes down, it is like a smiling welcome.
In its delicate charm I feel something of the charm of the Egyptian
character. There are moments, indeed, when I identify Egypt with
Philae. For in Philae one must dream; and on the Nile, too, one must
dream. And always the dream is happy, and shot through with radiant
light - light that is as radiant as the colors in Philae's temple. The
pylons of Ptolemy smile at you as you go up or come down the river.
And the people of Egypt smile as they enter into your dream. A
suavity, too, is theirs. I think of them often as artists, who know
their parts in the dream-play, who know exactly their function, and
how to fulfil it rightly. They sing, while you are dreaming, but it is
an under-song, like the murmur of an Eastern river far off from any
sea. It never disturbs, this music, but it helps you in your dream.
And they are softly gay. And in their eyes there is often the gleam of
sunshine, for they are the children - but not grown men - of the sun.
That, indeed, is one of the many strange things in Egypt - the
youthfulness of its age, the childlikeness of its almost terrible
antiquity. One goes there to look at the oldest things in the world
and to feel perpetually young - young as Philae is young, as a lyric of
Shelley's is young, as all of our day-dreams are young, as the people
of Egypt are young.
Oh, that Egypt could be kept as it is, even as it is now; that Philae
could be preserved even as it is now! The spoilers are there, those
blithe modern spirits, so frightfully clever and capable, so
industrious, so determined, so unsparing of themselves and - of others!
Already they are at work "benefiting Egypt." Tall chimneys begin to
vomit smoke along the Nile. A damnable tram-line for little trolleys
leads one toward the wonderful colossi of Memnon. Close to Kom Ombos
some soul imbued with romance has had the inspiration to set up - a
factory! And Philae - is it to go?
Is beauty then of no value in the world? Is it always to be the prey
of modern progress? Is nothing to be considered sacred; nothing to be
left untouched, unsmirched by the grimy fingers of improvement? I
suppose nothing.
Then let those who still care to dream go now to Philae's painted
chamber by the long reaches of the Nile; go on, if they will, to the
giant forms of Abu-Simbel among the Nubian sands. And perhaps they
will think with me, that in some dreams there is a value greater than
the value that is entered in any bank-book, and they will say, with
me, however uselessly:
"Leave to the world some dreams, some places in which to dream; for if
it needs dams to make the grain grow in the stretches of land that
were barren, and railways and tram-lines, and factory chimneys that
vomit black smoke in the face of the sun, surely it needs also painted
chambers of Philae and the silence that comes down from Isis."
XVIII
OLD CAIRO
By Old Cairo I do not mean only /le vieux Caire/ of the guide-book,
the little, desolate village containing the famous Coptic church of
Abu Sergius, in the crypt of which the Virgin Mary and Christ are said
to have stayed when they fled to the land of Egypt to escape the fury
of King Herod; but the Cairo that is not new, that is not dedicated
wholly to officialdom and tourists, that, in the midst of changes and
the advance of civilisation - civilisation that does so much harm as
well as so much good, that showers benefits with one hand and defaces
beauty with the other - preserves its immemorial calm or immemorial
turmult; that stands aloof, as stands aloof ever the Eastern from the
Western man, even in the midst of what seems, perhaps, like intimacy;
Eastern to the soul, though the fantasies, the passions, the
vulgarities, the brilliant ineptitudes of the West beat about it like
waves about some unyielding wall of the sea.
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