Their Calm Broods Over This Plain, Gives To
It A Personal Atmosphere Which Sets It Quite Apart From Every Other
Flat Space Of The World.
There is no place that I know on the earth
which has the peculiar, bright, ineffable calm of the plain of these
Colossi.
It takes you into its breast, and you lie there in the
growing sunshine almost as if you were a child laid in the lap of one
of them. That legend of the singing at dawn of the "vocal Memnon," how
could it have arisen? How could such calmness sing, such patience ever
find a voice? Unlike the Sphinx, which becomes ever more impressive as
you draw near to it, and is most impressive when you sit almost at its
feet, the Colossi lose in personality as you approach them and can see
how they have been defaced.
From afar one feels their minds, their strange, unearthly temperaments
commanding this pastoral. When you are beside them, this feeling
disappears. Their features are gone, and though in their attitudes
there is power, and there is something that awakens awe, they are more
wonderful as a far-off feature of the plain. They gain in grandeur
from the night in strangeness from the moonrise, perhaps specially
when the Nile comes to their feet. More than three thousand years old,
they look less eternal than the Sphinx. Like them, the Sphinx is
waiting, but with a greater purpose. The Sphinx reduces man really to
nothingness.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 52 of 135
Words from 14098 to 14347
of 36756
