A radiant queen
reigns here - a queen of fantasy and splendor, and of that divine
shallowness - refined frivolity literally cut into the mountain - which
is the note of Deir-el-Bahari. And what a clever background! Oh,
Hatshepsu knew what she was doing when she built her temple here. It
was not the solemn Senmut (he wore a beard, I'm sure) who chose that
background, if I know anything of women.
Long before I visited Deir-el-Bahari I had looked at it from afar. My
eyes had been drawn to it merely from its situation right underneath
the mountains. I had asked: "What do those little pillars mean? And
are those little doors?" I had promised myself to go there, as one
promises oneself a /bonne bouche/ to finish a happy banquet. And I had
realized the subtlety, essentially feminine, that had placed a temple
there. And Menu-Hotep's temple, perhaps you say, was it not there
before the queen's? Then he must have possessed a subtlety purely
feminine, or have been advised by one of his wives in his building
operations, or by some favorite female slave. Blundering, unsubtle man
would probably think that the best way to attract and to fix attention
on any object was to make it much bigger than things near and around
it, to set up a giant among dwarfs.
Not so Queen Hatshepsu. More artful in her generation, she set her
long but little temple against the precipices of Libya. And what is
the result? Simply that whenever one looks toward them one says, "What
are those little pillars?" Or if one is more instructed, one thinks
about Queen Hatshepsu. The precipices are as nothing. A woman's wile
has blotted them out.
And yet how grand they are! I have called them tiger-colored
precipices. And they suggest tawny wild beasts, fierce, bred in a land
that is the prey of the sun. Every shade of orange and yellow glows
and grows pale on their bosses, in their clefts. They shoot out
turrets of rock that blaze like flames in the day. They show great
teeth, like the tiger when any one draws near. And, like the tiger,
they seem perpetually informed by a spirit that is angry. Blake wrote
of the tiger:
"Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night."
These tiger-precipices of Libya are burning things, avid like beasts
of prey. But the restored apricot-colored pillars are not afraid of
their impending fury - fury of a beast baffled by a tricky little
woman, almost it seems to me; and still less afraid are the white
pillars, and the brilliant paintings that decorate the walls within.
