Even The Stones Themselves Tell Of Fatigue - The Fatigue Of Being
Crushed By One Another's Weight For Thousands Of Years;
The suffering
that comes of having been too exactly carved, and too nicely placed
one above the other, so that
They seem to be riveted together by the
force of their mere weight. Oh! the poor stones of the base that bear
the weight of these awful pilings!
And the ardent colour of these things surprises you. It has persisted.
On the red sandstone of the hypostyle, the paintings of more than
three thousand years ago are still to be seen; especially above the
central chamber, almost in the sky, the capitals, in the form of great
flowers, have kept the lapis blues, the greens and yellows with which
their strange petals were long ago bespeckled.
Decrepitude and crumbling and dust. In broad daylight, under the
magnificent splendour of the life-giving sun, one realises clearly
that all here is dead, and dead since days which the imagination is
scarcely able to conceive. And the ruin appears utterly irreparable.
Here and there are a few impotent and almost infantine attempts at
reparation, undertaken in the ancient epochs of history by the Greeks
and Romans. Columns have been put together, holes have been filled
with cement. But the great blocks lie in confusion, and one feels,
even to the point of despair, how impossible it is ever to restore to
order such a chaos of crushing, overthrown things - even with the help
of legions of workers and machines, and with centuries before you in
which to complete the task.
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