No temple that I have seen upon the banks of the Nile is nice.
And Karnak cannot be summed up in a phrase or in many phrases; cannot
even be adequately described in few or many words.
Long ago I saw it lighted up with colored fires one night for the
Khedive, its ravaged magnificence tinted with rose and livid green and
blue, its pylons glittering with artificial gold, its population of
statues, its obelisks, and columns, changing from things of dreams to
things of day, from twilight marvels to shadowy specters, and from
these to hard and piercing realities at the cruel will of pigmies
crouching by its walls. Now, after many years, I saw it first quietly
by moonlight after watching the sunset from the summit of the great
pylon. That was a pageant worth more than the Khedive's.
I was in the air; had something of the released feeling I have often
known upon the tower of Biskra, looking out toward evening to the
Sahara spaces. But here I was not confronted with an immensity of
nature, but with a gleaming river and an immensity of man. Beneath me
was the native village, in the heart of daylight dusty and unkempt,
but now becoming charged with velvety beauty, with the soft and heavy
mystery that at evening is born among great palm-trees. Along the path
that led from it, coming toward the avenue of sphinxes with ram's-
heads that watch for ever before the temple door, a great white camel
stepped, its rider a tiny child with a close, white cap upon his head.
The child was singing to the glory of the sunset, or was it to the
glory of Amun, "the hidden one," once the local god of Thebes, to whom
the grandest temple in the world was dedicated? I listen to the
childish, quavering voice, twittering almost like a bird, and one word
alone came up to me - the word one hears in Egypt from all the lips
that speak and sing: from the Nubians round their fires at night, from
the little boatmen of the lower reaches of the Nile, from the Bedouins
of the desert, and the donkey boys of the villages, from the sheikh
who reads one's future in water spilt on a plate, and the Bisharin
with buttered curls who runs to sell one beads from his tent among the
sand-dunes.
"Allah!" the child was singing as he passed upon his way.
Pigeons circled above their pretty towers. The bats came out, as if
they knew how precious is their black at evening against the ethereal
lemon color, the orange and the red. The little obelisk beyond the
last sphinx on the left began to change, as in Egypt all things change
at sunset - pylon and dusty bush, colossus and baked earth hovel,
sycamore, and tamarisk, statue and trotting donkey. It looked like a
mysterious finger pointed in warning toward the sky. The Nile began to
gleam. Upon its steel and silver torches of amber flame were lighted.
The Libyan mountains became spectral beyond the tombs of the kings.
The tiny, rough cupolas that mark a grave close to the sphinxes, in
daytime dingy and poor, now seemed made of some splendid material
worthy to roof the mummy of a king. Far off a pool of the Nile, that
from here looked like a little palm-fringed lake, turned ruby-red. The
flags from the standard of Luxor, among the minarets, flew out
straight against a sky that was pale as a primrose almost cold in its
amazing delicacy.
I turned, and behind me the moon was risen. Already its silver rays
fell upon the ruins of Karnak; upon the thickets of lotus columns;
upon solitary gateways that now give entrance to no courts; upon the
sacred lake, with its reeds, where the black water-fowl were asleep;
upon sloping walls, shored up by enormous stanchions, like ribs of
some prehistoric leviathan; upon small chambers; upon fallen blocks of
masonry, fragments of architrave and pavement, of capital and cornice;
and upon the people of Karnak - those fascinating people who still
cling to their habitation in the ruins, faithful through misfortune,
affectionate with a steadfastness that defies the cruelty of Time;
upon the little, lonely white sphinx with the woman's face and the
downward-sloping eyes full of sleepy seduction; upon Rameses II., with
the face of a kindly child, not of a king; upon the Sphinx, bereft of
its companion, which crouches before the kiosk of Taharga, the King of
Ethiopia; upon those two who stand together as if devoted, yet by
their attitudes seem to express characters diametrically opposed, grey
men and vivid, the one with folded arms calling to Peace, the other
with arms stretched down in a gesture of crude determination,
summoning War, as if from the underworld; upon the granite foot and
ankle in the temple of Rameses III., which in their perfection, like
the headless Victory in Paris, and the Niobide Chiaramonti in the
Vatican, suggest a great personality that once met with is not to be
forgotten: upon these and their companions, who would not forsake the
halls and courts where once they dwelt with splendor, where now they
dwell with ruin that attracts the gaping world. The moon was risen,
but the west was still full of color and light. It faded. There was a
pause. Only a bar of dull red, holding a hint of brown, by where the
sun had sunk. And minutes passed - minutes for me full of silent
expectation, while the moonlight grew a little stronger, a few more
silver rays slipped down upon the ruins. I turned toward the east. And
then came that curious crescendo of color and of light which, in
Egypt, succeeds the diminuendo of color and of light that is the
prelude to the pause before the afterglow. Everything seemed to be in
subtle movement, heaving as a breast heaves with the breath; swelling
slightly, as if in an effort to be more, to attract attention, to gain
in significance.
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