And At Karnak What Is He?
What Mood Enfolds Him There?
Is he sad, thoughtful, awed, or gay?
An old lady in a helmet, and other things considered no doubt by her
as suited to Egypt rather than to herself, remarked in my hearing,
with a Scotch accent and an air of summing up, that Karnak was "very
nice indeed." There she was wrong - Scotch and wrong. Karnak is not
nice. No temple that I have seen upon the banks of the Nile is nice.
And Karnak cannot be summed up in a phrase or in many phrases; cannot
even be adequately described in few or many words.
Long ago I saw it lighted up with colored fires one night for the
Khedive, its ravaged magnificence tinted with rose and livid green and
blue, its pylons glittering with artificial gold, its population of
statues, its obelisks, and columns, changing from things of dreams to
things of day, from twilight marvels to shadowy specters, and from
these to hard and piercing realities at the cruel will of pigmies
crouching by its walls. Now, after many years, I saw it first quietly
by moonlight after watching the sunset from the summit of the great
pylon. That was a pageant worth more than the Khedive's.
I was in the air; had something of the released feeling I have often
known upon the tower of Biskra, looking out toward evening to the
Sahara spaces. But here I was not confronted with an immensity of
nature, but with a gleaming river and an immensity of man.
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