The Boatmen Of The Hotels Sing Monotonously As They
Lounge In The Big, White Boats Waiting For Travellers To Medinet-Abu,
To The Ramesseum, To Kurna, And The Tombs.
And just above them rise
the long lines of columns, ancient, tranquil, and remote - infinitely
remote, for all their nearness, casting down upon the sunlit gaiety
the long shadow of the past.
From the edge of the mound where stands the native village the effect
of the temple is much less decorative, but its detailed grandeur can
be better grasped from there; for from there one sees the great towers
of the propylon, two rows of mighty columns, the red granite Obelisk
of Rameses the great, and the black granite statues of the king. On
the right of the entrance a giant stands, on the left one is seated,
and a little farther away a third emerges from the ground, which
reaches to its mighty breast.
And there the children play perpetually. And there the Egyptians sing
their serenades, making the pipes wail and striking the derabukkeh;
and there the women gossip and twitter like the birds. And the buffalo
comes to take his sun-bath; and the goats and the curly, brown sheep
pass in sprightly and calm processions. The obelisk there, like its
brother in Paris, presides over a cheerfulness of life; but it is a
life that seems akin to it, not alien from it. And the king watches
the simplicity of this keen existence of Egypt of to-day far up the
Nile with a calm that one does not fear may be broken by unsympathetic
outrage, or by any vision of too perpetual foreign life.
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