As I Stepped On Shore I Felt As If I Were Stepping On
Disease.
But at least there were the buildings undisturbed by any
outrage.
Again I turned toward "Pharaoh's Bed," toward the temple
standing apart from it, which already I had seen from the desert, near
Shellal, gleaming with its gracious sand-yellow, lifting its series of
straight lines of masonry above the river and the rocks, looking, from
a distance, very simple, with a simplicity like that of clear water,
but as enticing as the light on the first real day of spring.
I went first to "Pharaoh's Bed."
Imagine a woman with a perfectly lovely face, with features as
exquisitely proportioned as those, say, of Praxiteles's statue of the
Cnidian Aphrodite, for which King Nicomedes was willing to remit the
entire national debt of Cnidus, and with a warmly white rose-leaf
complexion - one of those complexions one sometimes sees in Italian
women, colorless, yet suggestive almost of glow, of purity, with the
flame of passion behind it. Imagine that woman attacked by a malady
which leaves her features exactly as they were, but which changes the
color of her face - from the throat upward to just beneath the nose -
from the warm white to a mottled, greyish hue. Imagine the line that
would seem to be traced between the two complexions - the mottled grey
below the warm white still glowing above. Imagine this, and you have
"Pharaoh's Bed" and the temple of Philae as they are to-day.
XVII
"PHARAOH'S BED"
"Pharaoh's Bed," which stands alone close to the Nile on the eastern
side of the island, is not one of those rugged, majestic buildings,
full of grandeur and splendor, which can bear, can "carry off," as it
were, a cruelly imposed ugliness without being affected as a whole. It
is, on the contrary, a small, almost an airy, and a femininely perfect
thing, in which a singular loveliness of form was combined with a
singular loveliness of color. The spell it threw over you was not so
much a spell woven of details as a spell woven of divine uniformity.
To put it in very practical language, "Pharaoh's Bed" was "all of a
piece." The form was married to the color. The color seemed to melt
into the form. It was indeed a bed in which the soul that worships
beauty could rest happily entranced. Nothing jarred. Antiquaries say
that apparently this building was left unfinished. That may be so. But
for all that it was one of the most finished things in Egypt,
essentially a thing to inspire within one the "perfect calm that is
Greek." The blighting touch of the Nile, which has changed the
beautiful pale yellow of the stone of the lower part of the building
to a hideous and dreary grey - which made me think of a steel knife on
which liquid has been spilt and allowed to run - has destroyed the
uniformity, the balance, the faultless melody lifted up by form and
color.
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