It is deceived, and lets you pass.
And you are alone with the growing morning and Kom Ombos.
I was never taken, caught up into an atmosphere, in Kom Ombos. I
examined it with interest, but I did not feel a spell. Its grandeur is
great, but it did not affect me as did the grandeur of Karnak. Its
nobility cannot be questioned, but I did not stilly rejoice in it, as
in the nobility of Luxor, or the free splendor of the Ramesseum.
The oldest thing at Kom Ombos is a gateway of sandstone placed there
by Thothmes III. as a tribute to Sebek. The great temple is of a warm-
brown color, a very rich and particularly beautiful brown, that
soothes and almost comforts the eyes that have been for many days
boldly assaulted by the sun. Upon the terrace platform above the river
you face a low and ruined wall, on which there are some lively
reliefs, beyond which is a large, open court containing a quantity of
stunted, once big columns standing on big bases. Immediately before
you the temple towers up, very gigantic, very majestic, with a stone
pavement, walls on which still remain some traces of paintings, and
really grand columns, enormous in size and in good formation. There
are fine architraves, and some bits of roofing, but the greater part
is open to the air. Through a doorway is a second hall containing
columns much less noble, and beyond this one walks in ruin, among
crumbled or partly destroyed chambers, broken statues, become mere
slabs of granite and fallen blocks of stone. At the end is a wall,
with a pavement bordering it, and a row of chambers that look like
monkish cells, closed by small doors. At Kom Ombos there are two
sanctuaries, one dedicated to Sebek, the other to Heru-ur, or
Haroeris, a form of Horus in Egyptian called "the Elder," which was
worshipped with Sebek here by the admirers of crocodiles. Each of them
contains a pedestal of granite upon which once rested a sacred bark
bearing an image of the deity.
There are some fine reliefs scattered through these mighty ruins,
showing Sebek with the head of a crocodile, Heru-ur with the head of a
hawk so characteristic of Horus, and one strange animal which has no
fewer than four heads, apparently meant for the heads of lions. One
relief which I specially noticed for its life, its charming vivacity,
and its almost amusing fidelity to details unchanged to-day, depicts a
number of ducks in full flight near a mass of lotus-flowers. I
remembered it one day in the Fayum, so intimately associated with
Sebek, when I rode twenty miles out from camp on a dromedary to the
end of the great lake of Kurun, where the sand wastes of the Libyan
desert stretch to the pale and waveless waters which, that day, looked
curiously desolate and even sinister under a low, grey sky.
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