To-Night A Freezing Wind Blows Fiercely In Our Faces.
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.
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