For such marvels
we ought to bless the hawk-headed god.
And if we forget the hawk,
which one meets so perpetually upon the walls of tombs and temples,
and identify Horus rather with the Greek Apollo, the yellow-haired god
of the sun, driving "westerly all day in his flaming chariot," and
shooting his golden arrows at the happy world beneath, we can be at
peace with those dead Egyptians. For every pilgrim who goes to Edfu
to-day is surely a worshipper of the solar aspect of Horus. As long as
the world lasts there will be sun-worshippers. Every brown man upon
the Nile is one, and every good American who crosses the ocean and
comes at last into the sombre wonder of Edfu, and I was one upon the
deck of the /Loulia/.
And we all worship as yet in the dark, as in the exquisite dark, like
faith, of the Holy of Holies of Horus.
XVI
PHILAE
As I drew slowly nearer and nearer to the home of "the great
Enchantress," or, as Isis was also called in bygone days, "the Lady of
Philae," the land began to change in character, to be full of a new
and barbaric meaning. In recent years I have paid many visits to
northern Africa, but only to Tunisia and Algeria, countries that are
wilder looking, and much wilder seeming than Egypt. Now, as I
approached Assuan, I seemed at last to be also approaching the real,
the intense Africa that I had known in the Sahara, the enigmatic
siren, savage and strange and wonderful, whom the typical Ouled Nail,
crowned with gold, and tufted with ostrich plumes, painted with kohl,
tattooed, and perfumed, hung with golden coins and amulets, and framed
in plaits of coarse, false hair, represents indifferently to the eyes
of the travelling stranger.
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