For Here, On
The Contrary, The Figures Might Be Those Of Living People, Palpitating
And Voluptuous, Who Had Posed Themselves For Sport In These
Consecrated Attitudes.
The throat of the beautiful goddess, her hips,
her unveiled nakedness, are portrayed with a searching and lingering
realism; the flesh seems almost to quiver.
She and her spouse, the
beautiful Horus, son of Iris, contemplate each other, naked, one
before the other, and their laughing eyes are intoxicated with love.
Around the holy of holies is a number of halls, in deep shadow and
massive as so many fortresses. They were used formerly for mysterious
and complicated rites, and in them, as everywhere else, there is no
corner of the wall but is overloaded with figures and hieroglyphs.
Bats are asleep in the blue ceilings, where the winged discs, painted
in fresco, look like flights of birds; and the hornets of the
neighbouring fields have built their nests there in hundreds, so that
they hang like stalactites.
Several staircases lead to the vast terraces formed by the great roofs
of the temple - staircases narrow, stifling and dimly lighted by
loopholes that reveal the heart-breaking thickness of the walls. And
here again are the inevitable rows of figures, carved on all the
walls, in the same familiar attitudes; they mount with us as we
ascend, making all the time the self-same signs one to another.
As we emerge on to the roofs, bathed now in Egyptian sunlight and
swept by a cold and bitter wind, we are greeted by a noise as of an
aviary.
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