I Had Sweet Memories Of
The Island That Had Been With Me For Many Years - Memories Of Still
Mornings Under
The palm-trees, watching the gliding waters of the
river, or gazing across them to the long sweep of the
Empty sands;
memories of drowsy, golden noons, when the bright world seemed softly
sleeping, and the almost daffodil-colored temple dreamed under the
quivering canopy of blue; memories of evenings when a benediction from
the lifted hands of Romance surely fell upon the temple and the island
and the river; memories of moonlit nights, when the spirits of the old
gods to whom the temples were reared surely held converse with the
spirits of the desert, with Mirage and her pale and evading sisters of
the great spaces, under the brilliant stars. I was afraid, because I
could not believe the asservations of certain practical persons, full
of the hard and almost angry desire of "Progress," that no harm had
been done by the creation of the reservoir, but that, on the contrary,
it had benefited the temple. The action of the water upon the stone,
they said with vehement voices, instead of loosening it and causing it
to crumble untimely away, had tended to harden and consolidate it.
Here I should like to lie, but I resist the temptation. Monsieur
Naville has stated that possibly the English engineers have helped to
prolong the lives of the buildings of Philae, and Monsieur Maspero has
declared that "the state of the temple of Philae becomes continually
more satisfactory." So be it! Longevity has been, by a happy chance,
secured. But what of beauty? What of the beauty of the past, and what
of the schemes for the future? Is Philae even to be left as it is, or
are the waters of the Nile to be artificially raised still higher,
until Philae ceases to be? Soon, no doubt, an answer will be given.
Meanwhile, instead of the little island that I knew, and thought a
little paradise breathing out enchantment in the midst of titanic
sterility, I found a something diseased. Philae now, when out of the
water, as it was all the time when I was last in Egypt, looks like a
thing stricken with some creeping malady - one of those maladies which
begin in the lower members of a body, and work their way gradually but
inexorably upward to the trunk, until they attain the heart.
I came to it by the desert, and descended to Shellal - Shellal with its
railway-station, its workmen's buildings, its tents, its dozens of
screens to protect the hewers of stone from the burning rays of the
sun, its bustle of people, of overseers, engineers, and workmen,
Egyptian, Nubian, Italian, and Greek. The silence I had known was
gone, though the desert lay all around - the great sands, the great
masses of granite that look as if patiently waiting to be fashioned
into obelisks, and sarcophagi, and statues. But away there across the
bend of the river, dominating the ugly rummage of this intrusive
beehive of human bees, sheer grace overcoming strength both of nature
and human nature, rose the fabled "Pharaoh's Bed"; gracious, tender,
from Shellal most delicately perfect, and glowing with pale gold
against the grim background of the hills on the western shore.
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