To The
Continual Chant Of The Rowers We Pass Slowly Over The Artificial Lake,
Which Is Upheld As It Were
In the air by the English masonry,
invisible now in the distance, but divined nevertheless and revolting.
A sacrilegious lake
One might call it, since it hides beneath its
troubled waters ruins beyond all price; temples of the gods of Egypt,
churches of the first centuries of Christianity, obelisks,
inscriptions and emblems. It is over these things that we now pass,
while the spray splashes in our faces, and the foam of a thousand
angry little billows.
We draw near to what was once the holy isle. In places dying palm-
trees, whose long trunks are to-day under water, still show their
moistened plumes and give an appearance of inundation, almost of
cataclysm.
Before coming to the sanctuary of Isis, we touch at the kiosk of
Philae, which has been reproduced in the pictures of every age, and is
as celebrated even as the Sphinx and the pyramids. It used to stand on
a pedestal of high rocks, and around it the date-trees swayed their
bouquets of aerial palms. To-day it has no longer a base; its columns
rise separately from this kind of suspended lake. It looks as if it
had been constructed in the water for the purpose of some royal
naumachy. We enter with our boat - a strange port indeed, in its
ancient grandeur; a port of a nameless melancholy, particularly at
this yellow hour of the closing twilight, and under these icy winds
that come to us mercilessly from the neighbouring deserts. And yet how
adorable it is, this kiosk of Philae, in this the abandonment that
precedes its downfall! Its columns placed, as it were, upon something
unstable, become thereby more slender, seem to raise higher still the
stone foliage of their capitals. A veritable kiosk of dreamland now,
which one feels is about to disappear for ever under these waters
which will subside no more!
And now, for another few moments, it grows quite light again, and
tints of a warmer copper reappear in the sky. Often in Egypt when the
sun has set and you think the light is gone, this furtive recoloration
of the air comes thus to surprise you, before the darkness finally
descends. The reddish tints seem to return to the slender shafts that
surround us, and also, beyond, to the temple of the goddess, standing
there like a sheer rock in the middle of this little sea, which the
wind covers with foam.
On leaving the kiosk our boat - on this deep usurping water, among the
submerged palm-trees - makes a detour in order to lead us to the temple
by the road which the pilgrims of olden times used to travel on foot -
by that way which, a little while ago, was still magnificent, bordered
with colonnades and statues. But now the road is entirely submerged,
and will never be seen again. Between its double row of columns the
water lifts us to the height of the capitals, which alone emerge and
which we could touch with our hands.
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