Its
Youthfulness - It Is Only About Two Thousand Years Of Age - Identifies
It Happily With The Happiness And Beauty Of
Its presiding deity, and
as I rode toward it on the canal-bank in the young freshness of the
morning,
I thought of the goddess Safekh and of the sacred Persea-
tree. When Safekh inscribed upon a leaf of the Persea-tree the name of
king or conqueror, he gained everlasting life. Was it the life of
youth? An everlasting life of middle age might be a doubtful benefit.
And then mentally I added, "unless one lived in Egypt." For here the
years drop from one, and every golden hour brings to one surely
another drop of the wondrous essence that sets time at defiance and
charms sad thoughts away.
Unlike White Abydos, White Denderah stands apart from habitations, in
a still solitude upon a blackened mound. From far off I saw the
façade, large, bare, and sober, rising, in a nakedness as complete as
that of Aphrodite rising from the wave, out of the plain of brown,
alluvial soil that was broken here and there by a sharp green of
growing things. There was something of sadness in the scene, and again
I thought of Hathor as the "Lady of the Underworld," some deep-eyed
being, with a pale brow, hair like the night, and yearning, wistful
hands stretched out in supplication. There was a hush upon this place.
The loud and vehement cry of the shadoof-man died away. The sakieh
droned in my ears no more like distant Sicilian pipes playing at
Natale. I felt a breath from the desert. And, indeed, the desert was
near - that realistic desert which suggests to the traveller approaches
to the sea, so that beyond each pallid dune, as he draws near it, he
half expects to hear the lapping of the waves. Presently, when, having
ascended that marvellous staircase of the New Year, walking in
procession with the priests upon its walls toward the rays of Ra, I
came out upon the temple roof, and looked upon the desert - upon sheeny
sands, almost like slopes of satin shining in the sun, upon paler
sands in the distance, holding an Arab /campo santo/, in which rose
the little creamy cupolas of a sheikh's tomb, surrounded by a creamy
wall, those little cupolas gave to me a feeling of the real, the
irresistible Africa such as I had not known since I had been in Egypt;
and I thought I heard in the distance the ceaseless hum of praying and
praising voices.
"God hath rewarded the faithful with gardens through which flow
rivulets. They shall be for ever therein, and that is the reward of
the virtuous."
The sensation of solemnity which overtook me as I approached the
temple deepened when I drew close to it, when I stood within it. In
the first hall, mighty, magnificent, full of enormous columns from
which faces of Hathor once looked to the four points of the compass, I
found only one face almost complete, saved from the fury of fanatics
by the protection of the goddess of chance, in whom the modern
Egyptian so implicitly believes. In shape it was a delicate oval. In
the long eyes, about the brow, the cheeks, there was a strained
expression that suggested to me more than a gravity - almost an anguish
- of spirit. As I looked at it, I thought of Eleanora Duse. Was this
the ideal of joy in the time of the Ptolemies? Joy may be rapturous,
or it may be serene; but could it ever be like this? The pale,
delicious blue that here and there, in tiny sections, broke the almost
haggard, greyish whiteness of this first hall with the roof of black,
like bits of an evening sky seen through tiny window-slits in a sombre
room, suggested joy, was joy summed up in color. But Hathor's face was
weariful and sad.
From the gloom of the inner halls came a sound, loud, angry, menacing,
as I walked on, a sound of menace and an odor, heavy and deathlike.
Only in the first hall had those builders and decorators of two
thousand years ago been moved by their conception of the goddess to
hail her, to worship her, with the purity of white, with the sweet
gaiety of turquoise. Or so it seems to-day, when the passion of
Christianity against Hathor has spent itself and died. Now Christians
come to seek what Christian Copts destroyed; wander through the
deserted courts, desirous of looking upon the faces that have long
since been hacked to pieces. A more benign spirit informs our world,
but, alas! Hathor has been sacrificed to deviltries of old. And it is
well, perhaps, that her temple should be sad, like a place of silent
waiting for the glories that are gone.
With every step my melancholy grew. Encompassed by gloomy odors,
assailed by the clamour of gigantic bats, which flew furiously among
the monstrous pillars near a roof ominous as a storm-cloud, my spirit
was haunted by the sad eyes of Hathor, which gaze for ever from that
column in the first hall. Were they always like that? Once that face
dwelt with a crowd of worship. And all the other faces have gone, and
all the glory has passed. And, like so many of the living, the goddess
has paid for her splendors. The pendulum swung, and where men adored,
men hated her - her the goddess of love and loveliness. And as the
human face changes when terror and sorrow come, I felt as if Hathor's
face of stone had changed upon its column, looking toward the Nile, in
obedience to the anguish in her heart; I felt as if Denderah were a
majestic house of grief. So I must always think of it, dark, tragic,
and superb. The Egyptians once believed that when death came to a man,
the soul of him, which they called the Ba, winged its way to the gods,
but that, moved by a sweet unselfishness, it returned sometimes to his
tomb, to give comfort to the poor, deserted mummy.
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