And I Was Quite Alone In The
"Thinking-Place" Of Rameses.
It was a brilliant day, the sky dark
sapphire blue, without even the spectre of a cloud, or any airy,
vaporous veil; the heat already intense in the full sunshine, but
delicious if one slid into a shadow.
I slid into a shadow, and sat
down on a warm block of stone. And the silence flowed upon me - the
silence of the Ramesseum.
Was /Horbehutet/, the winged disk, with crowned /uroei/, ever set up
above this temple's principal door to keep it from destruction? I do
not know. But, if he was, he failed perfectly to fulfil his mission.
And I am glad he failed. I am glad of the ruin that is here, glad that
walls have crumbled or been overthrown, that columns have been cast
down, and ceilings torn off from the pillars that supported them,
letting in the sky. I would have nothing different in the thinking-
place of Rameses.
Like a cloud, a great golden cloud, a glory impending that will not,
cannot, be dissolved into the ether, he loomed over the Egypt that is
dead, he looms over the Egypt of to-day. Everywhere you meet his
traces, everywhere you hear his name. You say to a tall young
Egyptian: "How big you are growing, Hassan!"
He answers, "Come back next year, my gentleman, and I shall be like
Rameses the Great."
Or you ask of the boatman who rows you, "How can you pull all day
against the current of the Nile?" And he smiles, and lifting his brown
arm, he says to you:
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