"What Is Sweet To The Mouth, To Me Is As The Gall Of Birds;
Thy Breath Alone Can Comfort My Heart."
And I could imagine it looking profoundly grave, not sad, among the
columns with their opening lotus flowers.
For it is the hall of lotus
columns that Ibrahim calls the thinking-place of the king.
There is something both lovely and touching to me in the lotus columns
of Egypt, in the tall masses of stone opening out into flowers near
the sun. Near the sun! Yes; only that obvious falsehood will convey to
those who have not seen them the effect of some of the hypostyle
halls, the columns of which seem literally soaring to the sky. And
flowers of stone, you will say, rudely carved and rugged! That does
not matter. There was poetry in the minds that conceived them, in the
thought that directed the hands which shaped them and placed them
where they are. In Egypt perpetually one feels how the ancient
Egyptians loved the /Nymphaea lotus/, which is the white lotus, and
the /Nymphaea coeruloea/, the lotus that is blue. Did they not place
Horus in its cup, and upon the head of Nefer-Tum, the nature god, who
represented in their mythology the heat of the rising sun, and who
seems to have been credited with power to grant life in the world to
come, set it as a sort of regal ornament? To Seti I., when he returned
in glory from his triumphs over the Syrians, were given bouquets of
lotus-blossoms by the great officers of his household. The tiny column
of green feldspar ending in the lotus typified eternal youth, even as
the carnelian buckle typified the blood of Isis, which washed away all
sin. Kohl pots were fashioned in the form of the lotus, cartouches
sprang from it, wine flowed from cups shaped like it. The lotus was
part of the very life of Egypt, as the rose, the American Beauty rose,
is part of our social life of to-day. And here, in the Ramesseum, I
found campaniform, or lotus-flower capitals on the columns - here where
Rameses once perhaps dreamed of his Syrian campaigns, or of that
famous combat when, "like Baal in his fury," he fought single-handed
against the host of the Hittites massed in two thousand, five hundred
chariots to overthrow him.
The Ramesseum is a temple not of winds, but of soft and kindly airs.
There comes Zephyrus, whispering love to Flora incarnate in the Lotus.
To every sunbeam, to every little breeze, the ruins stretch out arms.
They adore the deep-blue sky, the shining, sifted sand, untrammeled
nature, all that whispers, "Freedom."
So I felt that day when Ibrahim left me, so I feel always when I sit
in the Ramesseum, that exultant victim of Time's here not sacrilegious
hand.
All strong souls cry out secretly for liberty as for a sacred
necessity of life. Liberty seems to drench the Ramesseum.
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