The Silence Was Profound.
And I Remembered The Legend That Mary, Joseph, And The Holy Child Once
Halted Here On Their Long Journey, And That Mary Laid The Tired Christ
Between The Paws Of The Sphinx To Sleep.
Yet even of the Christ the
soul within that body could take no heed at all.
It is, I think, one of the most astounding facts in the history of man
that a man was able to contain within his mind, to conceive, the
conception of the Sphinx. That he could carry it out in the stone is
amazing. But how much more amazing it is that before there was the
Sphinx he was able to see it with his imagination! One may criticize
the Sphinx. One may say impertinent things that are true about it:
that seen from behind at a distance its head looks like an enormous
mushroom growing in the sand, that its cheeks are swelled
inordinately, that its thick-lipped mouth is legal, that from certain
places it bears a resemblance to a prize bull-dog. All this does not
matter at all. What does matter is that into the conception and
execution of the Sphinx has been poured a supreme imaginative power.
He who created it looked beyond Egypt, beyond the life of man. He
grasped the conception of Eternity, and realized the nothingness of
Time, and he rendered it in stone.
I can imagine the most determined atheist looking at the Sphinx and,
in a flash, not merely believing, but feeling that he had before him
proof of the life of the soul beyond the grave, of the life of the
soul of Khufu beyond the tomb of his Pyramid. Always as you return to
the Sphinx you wonder at it more, you adore more strangely its repose,
you steep yourself more intimately in the aloof peace that seems to
emanate from it as light emanates from the sun. And as you look on it
at last perhaps you understand the infinite; you understand where is
the bourne to which the finite flows with all its greatness, as the
great Nile flows from beyond Victoria Nyanza to the sea.
And as the wonder of the Sphinx takes possession of you gradually, so
gradually do you learn to feel the majesty of the Pyramids of Ghizeh.
Unlike the Step Pyramid of Sakkara, which, even when one is near it,
looks like a small mountain, part of the land on which it rests, the
Pyramids of Ghizeh look what they are - artificial excrescences,
invented and carried out by man, expressions of man's greatness.
Exquisite as they are as features of the drowsy golden landscape at
the setting of the sun, I think they look most wonderful at night,
when they are black beneath the stars. On many nights I have sat in
the sand at a distance and looked at them, and always, and
increasingly, they have stirred my imagination. Their profound calm,
their classical simplicity, are greatly emphasized when no detail can
be seen, when they are but black shapes towering to the stars. They
seem to aspire then like prayers prayed by one who has said, "God does
not need any prayers, but I need them." In their simplicity they
suggest a crowd of thoughts and of desires. Guy de Maupassant has said
that of all the arts architecture is perhaps the most aesthetic, the
most mysterious, and the most nourished by ideas. How true this is you
feel as you look at the Great Pyramid by night. It seems to breathe
out mystery. The immense base recalls to you the labyrinth within; the
long descent from the tiny slit that gives you entrance, your
uncertain steps in its hot, eternal night, your falls on the ice-like
surfaces of its polished blocks of stone, the crushing weight that
seemed to lie on your heart as you stole uncertainly on, summoned
almost as by the desert; your sensation of being for ever imprisoned,
taken and hidden by a monster from Egypt's wonderful light, as you
stood in the central chamber, and realized the stone ocean into whose
depths, like some intrepid diver, you had dared deliberately to come.
And then your eyes travel up the slowly shrinking walls till they
reach the dark point which is the top. There you stood with Abou, who
spends half his life on the highest stone, hostages of the sun, bathed
in light and air that perhaps came to you from the Gold Coast. And you
saw men and camels like flies, and Cairo like a grey blur, and the
Mokattam hills almost as a higher ridge of the sands. The mosque of
Mohammed Ali was like a cup turned over. Far below slept the dead in
that graveyard of the Sphinx, with its pale stones, its sand, its
palm, its "Sycamores of the South," once worshipped and regarded as
Hathor's living body. And beyond them on one side were the sleeping
waters, with islands small, surely, as delicate Egyptian hands, and on
the other the great desert that stretches, so the Bedouins say, on and
on "for a march of a thousand days."
That base and that summit - what suggestion and what mystery in their
contrast! What sober, eternal beauty in the dark line which unites
them, now sharply, yet softly, defined against the night, which is
purple as the one garment of the fellah! That line leads the soul
irresistibly from earth to the stars.
III
SAKKARA
It was the "Little Christmas" of the Egyptians as I rode to Sakkara,
after seeing a wonderful feat, the ascent and descent of the second
Pyramid in nineteen minutes by a young Bedouin called Mohammed Ali who
very seriously informed me that the only Roumi who had ever reached
the top was an "American gentlemens" called Mark Twain, on his first
visit to Egypt. On his second visit, Ali said, Mr. Twain had a bad
foot, and declared he could not be bothered with the second Pyramid.
He had been up and down without a guide; he had disturbed the jackal
which lives near its summit, and which I saw running in the sunshine
as Ali drew near its lair, and he was satisfied to rest on his
immortal laurels.
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