Even Now One Seems To Hear It
Fall, To Feel The Warm Soil Trembling Beneath One's Feet As One
Approaches It.
A row of statues of enormous size, with arms crossed as
if in resignation, glowing in the sun, in color not gold or amber, but
a delicate, desert yellow, watch near it like servants of the dead.
On
a slightly lower level than there it lies, and a little nearer the
Nile. Only the upper half of the figure is left, but its size is
really terrific. This colossus was fifty-seven feet high. It weighed
eight hundred tons. Eight hundred tons of syenite went to its making,
and across the shoulders its breadth is, or was, over twenty-two feet.
But one does not think of measurements as one looks upon it. It is
stupendous. That is obvious and that is enough. Nor does one think of
its finish, of its beautiful, rich color, of any of its details. One
thinks of it as a tremendous personage laid low, as the mightiest of
the mighty fallen. One thinks of it as the dead Rameses whose glory
still looms over Egypt like a golden cloud that will not disperse. One
thinks of it as the soul that commanded, and lo! there rose up above
the sands, at the foot of the hills of Thebes, the exultant Ramesseum.
XII
DEIR-EL-BAHARI
Place for Queen Hatshepsu! Surely she comes to a sound of flutes, a
merry noise of thin, bright music, backed by a clashing of barbaric
cymbals, along the corridors of the past; this queen who is shown upon
Egyptian walls dressed as a man, who is said to have worn a beard, and
who sent to the land of Punt the famous expedition which covered her
with glory and brought gold to the god Amun. To me most feminine she
seemed when I saw her temple at Deir-el-Bahari, with its brightness
and its suavity; its pretty shallowness and sunshine; its white, and
blue, and yellow, and red, and green and orange; all very trim and
fanciful, all very smart and delicate; full of finesse and laughter,
and breathing out to me of the twentieth century the coquetry of a
woman in 1500 B.C. After the terrific masculinity of Medinet-Abu,
after the great freedom of the Ramesseum, and the grandeur of its
colossus, the manhood of all the ages concentrated in granite, the
temple at Deir-el-Bahari came upon me like a delicate woman, perfumed
and arranged, clothed in a creation of white and blue and orange,
standing - ever so knowingly - against a background of orange and pink,
of red and of brown-red, a smiling coquette of the mountain, a gay and
sweet enchantress who knew her pretty powers and meant to exercise
them.
Hatshepsu with a beard! Never will I believe it. Or if she ever seemed
to wear one, I will swear it was only the tattooed ornament with which
all the lovely women of the Fayum decorate their chins to-day,
throwing into relief the smiling, soft lips, the delicate noses, the
liquid eyes, and leading one from it step by step to the beauties it
precedes.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 36 of 71
Words from 18204 to 18740
of 36756
