Nor does one think of
its finish, of its beautiful, rich color, of any of its details. One
thinks of it as a tremendous personage laid low, as the mightiest of
the mighty fallen. One thinks of it as the dead Rameses whose glory
still looms over Egypt like a golden cloud that will not disperse. One
thinks of it as the soul that commanded, and lo! there rose up above
the sands, at the foot of the hills of Thebes, the exultant Ramesseum.
XII
DEIR-EL-BAHARI
Place for Queen Hatshepsu! Surely she comes to a sound of flutes, a
merry noise of thin, bright music, backed by a clashing of barbaric
cymbals, along the corridors of the past; this queen who is shown upon
Egyptian walls dressed as a man, who is said to have worn a beard, and
who sent to the land of Punt the famous expedition which covered her
with glory and brought gold to the god Amun. To me most feminine she
seemed when I saw her temple at Deir-el-Bahari, with its brightness
and its suavity; its pretty shallowness and sunshine; its white, and
blue, and yellow, and red, and green and orange; all very trim and
fanciful, all very smart and delicate; full of finesse and laughter,
and breathing out to me of the twentieth century the coquetry of a
woman in 1500 B.C. After the terrific masculinity of Medinet-Abu,
after the great freedom of the Ramesseum, and the grandeur of its
colossus, the manhood of all the ages concentrated in granite, the
temple at Deir-el-Bahari came upon me like a delicate woman, perfumed
and arranged, clothed in a creation of white and blue and orange,
standing - ever so knowingly - against a background of orange and pink,
of red and of brown-red, a smiling coquette of the mountain, a gay and
sweet enchantress who knew her pretty powers and meant to exercise
them.
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