No massy walls keep him out. No shield-shaped battlements
rear themselves up against the outer world as at Medinet-Abu. No huge
pylons cast down upon the ground their forms in darkness. The stone
glows with the sun, seems almost to have a soul glowing with the
sense, the sun-ray sense, of freedom. The heart leaps up in the
Ramesseum, not frivolously, but with a strange, sudden knowledge of
the depths of passionate joy there are in life and in bountiful,
glorious nature. Instead of the strength of a prison one feels the
ecstasy of space; instead of the safety of inclosure, the rapture of
naked publicity. But the public to whom this place of the great king
is consigned is a public of Theban hills; of the sunbeams striking
from them over the wide world toward the east; of light airs, of
drifting sand grains, of singing birds, and of butterflies with pure
white wings. If you have ever ridden an Arab horse, mounted in the
heart of an oasis, to the verge of the great desert, you will remember
the bound, thrilling with fiery animation, which he gives when he sets
his feet on the sand beyond the last tall date-palms. A bound like
that the soul gives when you sit in the Ramesseum, and see the
crowding sunbeams, the far-off groves of palm-trees, and the drowsy
mountains, like shadows, that sleep beyond the Nile. And you look up,
perhaps, as I looked that morning, and upon a lotus column near you,
relieved, you perceive the figure of a young man singing.
A young man singing! Let him be the tutelary god of this place,
whoever he be, whether only some humble, happy slave, or the
"superintendent of song and of the recreation of the king." Rather
even than Amun-Ra let him be the god. For there is something nobly
joyous in this architecture, a dignity that sings.
It has been said, but not established, that Rameses the Great was
buried in the Ramesseum, and when first I entered it the "Lay of the
Harper" came to my mind, with the sadness that attends the passing
away of glory into the shades of death. But an optimism almost as
determined as Emerson's was quickly bred in me there. I could not be
sad, though I could be happily thoughtful, in the light of the
Ramesseum. And even when I left the thinking-place, and, coming down
the central aisle, saw in the immersing sunshine of the Osiride Court
the fallen colossus of the king, I was not struck to sadness.
Imagine the greatest figure in the world - such a figure as this
Rameses was in his day - with all might, all glory, all climbing power,
all vigor, tenacity of purpose, and granite strength of will
concentrated within it, struck suddenly down, and falling backward in
a collapse of which the thunder might shake the vitals of the earth,
and you have this prostrate colossus.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 35 of 71
Words from 17686 to 18203
of 36756
