The Big Pylons,
With Their Great Walls Sloping Inward, Sand-Colored, And Glowing With
Very Pale Yellow In The Sun,
The resistant walls, the brutal columns,
the huge and almost savage scale of everything, always remind me of
the violence
In men, and also - I scarcely know why - make me think of
the North, of sullen Northern castles by the sea, in places where
skies are grey, and the white of foam and snow is married in angry
nights.
And yet in Medinet-Abu there reigns a splendid calm - a calm that
sometimes seems massive, resistant, as the columns and the walls.
Peace is certainly inclosed by the stones that call up thoughts of
war, as if, perhaps, their purpose had been achieved many centuries
ago, and they were quit of enemies for ever. Rameses III. is connected
with Medinet-Abu. He was one of the greatest of the Egyptian kings,
and has been called the "last of the great sovereigns of Egypt." He
ruled for thirty-one years, and when, after a first visit to Medinet-
Abu, I looked into his records, I was interested to find that his
conquests and his wars had "a character essentially defensive." This
defensive spirit is incarnated in the stones of these ruins. One reads
in them something of the soul of this king who lived twelve hundred
years before Christ, and who desired, "in remembrance of his Syrian
victories," to give to his memorial temple an outward military aspect.
I noticed a military aspect at once inside this temple; but if you
circle the buildings outside it is more unmistakable.
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