Upon The Lids Of
Sarcophagi It Is Sometimes Represented As A Bird, Flying Down To, Or
Resting Upon, The Mummy.
As I went onward in the darkness, among the
columns, over the blocks of stone that form the pavements,
Seeing
vaguely the sacred boats upon the walls, Horus and Thoth, the king
before Osiris; as I mounted and descended with the priests to roof and
floor, I longed, instead of the clamour of the bats, to hear the light
flutter of the soft wings of the Ba of Hathor, flying from Paradise to
this sad temple of the desert to bring her comfort in the gloom. I
thought of her as a poor woman, suffering as only women can in
loneliness.
In the museum of Cairo there is the mummy of "the lady Amanit,
priestess of Hathor." She lies there upon her back, with her thin body
slightly turned toward the left side, as if in an effort to change her
position. Her head is completely turned to the same side. Her mouth is
wide open, showing all the teeth. The tongue is lolling out. Upon the
head the thin, brown hair makes a line above the little ear, and is
mingled at the back of the head with false tresses. Round the neck is
a mass of ornaments, of amulets and beads. The right arm and hand lie
along the body. The expression of "the lady Amanit" is very strange,
and very subtle; for it combines horror - which implies activity - with
a profound, an impenetrable repose, far beyond the reach of all
disturbance. In the temple of Denderah I fancied the lady Amanit
ministering sadly, even terribly, to a lonely goddess, moving in fear
through an eternal gloom, dying at last there, overwhelmed by tasks
too heavy for that tiny body, the ultra-sensitive spirit that
inhabited it. And now she sleeps - one feels that, as one gazes at the
mummy - very profoundly, though not yet very calmly, the lady Amanit.
But her goddess - still she wakes upon her column.
When I came out at last into the sunlight of the growing day, I
circled the temple, skirting its gigantic, corniced walls, from which
at intervals the heads and paws of resting lions protrude, to see
another woman whose fame for loveliness and seduction is almost as
legendary as Aphrodite's. It is fitting enough that Cleopatra's form
should be graven upon the temple of Hathor; fitting, also, that though
I found her in the presence of deities, and in the company of her son,
Caesarion, her face, which is in profile, should have nothing of
Hathor's sad impressiveness. This, no doubt, is not the real
Cleopatra. Nevertheless, this face suggests a certain self-complacent
cruelty and sensuality essentially human, and utterly detached from
all divinity, whereas in the face of the goddess there is a something
remote, and even distantly intellectual, which calls the imagination
to "the fields beyond."
As I rode back toward the river, I saw again the boy clad in the rope
of plaited grass, and again he said, less shyly, "May your day be
happy!" It was a kindly wish. In the dawn I had felt it to be almost a
prophecy. But now I was haunted by the face of the goddess of
Denderah, and I remembered the legend of the lovely Lais, who, when
she began to age, covered herself from the eyes of men with a veil,
and went every day at evening to look upon her statue, in which the
genius of Praxiteles had rendered permanent the beauty the woman could
not keep. One evening, hanging to the statue's pedestal by a garland
of red roses, the sculptor found a mirror, upon the polished disk of
which were traced these words:
"Lais, O Goddess, consecrates to thee her mirror: no longer able to
see there what she was, she will not see there what she has become."
My Hathor of Denderah, the sad-eyed dweller on the column in the first
hall, had she a mirror, would surely hang it, as Lais hung hers, at
the foot of the pedestal of the Egyptian Aphrodite; had she a veil,
would surely cover the face that, solitary among the cruel evidences
of Christian ferocity, silently says to the gloomy courts, to the
shining desert and the Nile:
"Once I was worshipped, but I am worshipped no longer."
VII
KARNAK
Buildings have personalities. Some fascinate as beautiful women
fascinate; some charm as a child may charm, naively, simply, but
irresistibly. Some, like conquerors, men of blood and iron, without
bowels of mercy, pitiless and determined, strike awe to the soul,
mingled with the almost gasping admiration that power wakes in man.
Some bring a sense of heavenly peace to the heart. Some, like certain
temples of the Greeks, by their immense dignity, speak to the nature
almost as music speaks, and change anxiety to trust. Some tug at the
hidden chords of romance and rouse a trembling response. Some seem to
be mingling their tears with the tears of the dead; some their
laughter with the laughter of the living. The traveller, sailing up
the Nile, holds intercourse with many of these different
personalities. He is sad, perhaps, as I was with Denderah; dreams in
the sun with Abydos; muses with Luxor beneath the little tapering
minaret whence the call to prayer drops down to be answered by the
angelus bell; falls into a reverie in the "thinking place" of Rameses
II., near to the giant that was once the mightiest of all Egyptian
statues; eagerly wakes to the fascination of record at Deir-el-Bahari;
worships in Edfu; by Philae is carried into a realm of delicate magic,
where engineers are not. Each prompts him to a different mood, each
wakes in his nature a different response. And at Karnak what is he?
What mood enfolds him there? Is he sad, thoughtful, awed, or gay?
An old lady in a helmet, and other things considered no doubt by her
as suited to Egypt rather than to herself, remarked in my hearing,
with a Scotch accent and an air of summing up, that Karnak was "very
nice indeed." There she was wrong - Scotch and wrong.
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