This evening, in the vast chaos of ruins - at the hour in which the
light of the sun begins to turn to rose - I make my way along one of
the magnificent roads of the town-mummy, that, in fact, which goes off
at a right angle to the line of the temples of Amen, and, losing
itself more or less in the sands, leads at length to a sacred lake on
the border of which certain cat-headed goddesses are seated in state
watching the dead water and the expanse of the desert. This particular
road was begun three thousand four hundred years ago by a beautiful
queen called Makeri,[*] and in the following centuries a number of
kings continued its construction. It was ornamented with pylons of a
superb massiveness - pylons are monumental walls, in the form of a
trapezium with a wide base, covered entirely with hieroglyphs, which
the Egyptians used to place at either side of their porticoes and long
avenues - as well as by colossal statues and interminable rows of rams,
larger than buffaloes, crouched on pedestals.
[*] To-day the mummy with the baby in the museum at Cairo.
At the first pylons I have to make a detour. They are so ruinous that
their blocks, fallen down on all sides, have closed the passage. Here
used to watch, on right and left, two upright giants of red granite
from Syene. Long ago in times no longer precisely known, they were
broken off, both of them, at the height of the loins.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 176 of 206
Words from 47295 to 47561
of 55391
