Instead Of The Strength Of A Prison One Feels The
Ecstasy Of Space; Instead Of The Safety Of Inclosure, The Rapture Of
Naked Publicity.
But the public to whom this place of the great king
is consigned is a public of Theban hills; of the sunbeams striking
from them over the wide world toward the east; of light airs, of
drifting sand grains, of singing birds, and of butterflies with pure
white wings.
If you have ever ridden an Arab horse, mounted in the
heart of an oasis, to the verge of the great desert, you will remember
the bound, thrilling with fiery animation, which he gives when he sets
his feet on the sand beyond the last tall date-palms. A bound like
that the soul gives when you sit in the Ramesseum, and see the
crowding sunbeams, the far-off groves of palm-trees, and the drowsy
mountains, like shadows, that sleep beyond the Nile. And you look up,
perhaps, as I looked that morning, and upon a lotus column near you,
relieved, you perceive the figure of a young man singing.
A young man singing! Let him be the tutelary god of this place,
whoever he be, whether only some humble, happy slave, or the
"superintendent of song and of the recreation of the king." Rather
even than Amun-Ra let him be the god. For there is something nobly
joyous in this architecture, a dignity that sings.
It has been said, but not established, that Rameses the Great was
buried in the Ramesseum, and when first I entered it the "Lay of the
Harper" came to my mind, with the sadness that attends the passing
away of glory into the shades of death.
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