A Dam Two Thousand Yards In
Length, Upon Which Tourists Go Smiling On Trolleys.
Isis has her
expensive tribute - it cost about a million and a half pounds - and no
doubt she ought to be gratified.
Yet I think Isis mourns on altered Philae, as she mourns with her
sister, Nepthys, at the heads of so many mummies of Osirians upon the
walls of Egyptian tombs. And though the fellaheen very rightly
rejoice, there are some unpractical sentimentalists who form a company
about her, and make their plaint with hers - their plaint for the peace
that is gone, for the lost calm, the departed poetry, that once hung,
like a delicious, like an inimitable, atmosphere, about the palms of
the "Holy Island."
I confess that I dreaded to revisit Philae. I had sweet memories of
the island that had been with me for many years - memories of still
mornings under the palm-trees, watching the gliding waters of the
river, or gazing across them to the long sweep of the empty sands;
memories of drowsy, golden noons, when the bright world seemed softly
sleeping, and the almost daffodil-colored temple dreamed under the
quivering canopy of blue; memories of evenings when a benediction from
the lifted hands of Romance surely fell upon the temple and the island
and the river; memories of moonlit nights, when the spirits of the old
gods to whom the temples were reared surely held converse with the
spirits of the desert, with Mirage and her pale and evading sisters of
the great spaces, under the brilliant stars.
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