As soon as you land, you are greeted with crocodiles, though
fortunately not by them.
A heap of their black mummies is shown to you
reposing in a sort of tomb or shrine open at one end to the air. By
these mummies the new note is loudly struck. The crocodiles have
carried you in an instant from that which is pervadingly general to
that which is narrowly particular; from the purely noble, which seems
to belong to all time, to the entirely barbaric, which belongs only to
times outworn. It is difficult to feel as if one had anything in
common with men who seriously worshipped crocodiles, had priests to
feed them, and decorated their scaly necks with jewels.
Yet the crocodile god had a noble temple at Kom Ombos, a temple which
dates from the times of the Ptolemies, though there was a temple in
earlier days which has now disappeared. Its situation is splendid. It
stands high above the Nile, and close to the river, on a terrace which
has recently been constructed to save it from the encroachments of the
water. And it looks down upon a view which is exquisite in the clear
light of early morning. On the right, and far off, is a delicious pink
bareness of distant flats and hills. Opposite there is a flood of
verdure and of trees going to mountains, a spit of sand where is an
inlet of the river, with a crowd of native boats, perhaps waiting for
a wind.
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