The breast that had heaved with a divine breath
was still as the breast of a corpse.
And Khuns reigned quietly over the plains of Karnak.
Karnak has no distinctive personality. Built under many kings, its
ruins are as complex as were probably once its completed temples, with
their shrines, their towers, their courts, their hypo-style halls. As
I looked down that evening in the moonlight I saw, softened and made
more touching than in day-time, those alluring complexities, brought
by the night and Khuns into a unity that was both tender and superb.
Masses of masonry lay jumbled in shadow and in silver; gigantic walls
cast sharply defined gloom; obelisks pointed significantly to the sky,
seeming, as they always do, to be murmuring a message; huge doorways
stood up like giants unafraid of their loneliness and yet pathetic in
it; here was a watching statue, there one that seemed to sleep, seen
from afar. Yonder Queen Hatshepsu, who wrought wonders at Deir-el-
Bahari, and who is more familiar perhaps as Hatasu, had left there
traces, and nearer, to the right, Rameses III. had made a temple,
surely for the birds, so fond they are of it, so pertinaciously they
haunt it. Rameses II., mutilated and immense, stood on guard before
the terrific hall of Seti I.; and between him and my platform in the
air rose the solitary lotus column that prepares you for the wonder of
Seti's hall, which otherwise might almost overwhelm you - unless you
are a Scotch lady in a helmet.
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