For many
that is enough. Yet the temple is a noble one, and, for me, it gains a
definite attraction all its own from the busy life about it, the
cheerful hum and stir. And if you want fully to realize its dignity,
you can always visit it by night. Then the cries from the village are
hushed. The houses show no lights. Only the voices from the Nile steal
up to the obelisk of Rameses, to the pylon from which the flags of
Thebes once flew on festal days, to the shrine of Alexander the Great,
with its vultures and its stars, and to the red granite statues of
Rameses and his wives.
These last are as expressive as and of course more definite than my
dancers. They are full of character. They seem to breathe out the
essence of a vanished domesticity. Colossal are the statues of the
king, solid, powerful, and tremendous, boldly facing the world with
the calm of one who was thought, and possibly thought himself, to be
not much less than a deity. And upon each pedestal, shrinking
delicately back, was once a little wife. Some little wives are left.
They are delicious in their modesty. Each stands away from the king,
shyly, respectfully. Each is so small as to be below his down-
stretched arm. Each, with a surely furtive gesture, reaches out her
right hand, and attains the swelling calf of her noble husband's leg.
Plump are their little faces, but not bad-looking.
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