And Floods Of Light Now Enter
Through The Gaps, Into The Very Chapels Where The Men Of Old Had
Thought To Ensure A Holy Gloom.
Despite the disaster which has overtaken the ceilings, this is
nevertheless one of the most perfect of the sanctuaries of ancient
Egypt.
The sands, those gentle sextons, have here succeeded
miraculously in their work of preservation. They might have been
carved yesterday, these innumerable people, who, everywhere - on the
walls, on this forest of columns - gesticulate and, with their arms and
long hands, continue with animation their eternal mute conversation.
The whole temple, with the openings which give it light, is more
beautiful perhaps than in the time of the Pharaohs. In place of the
old-time darkness, a transparent gloom now alternates with shafts of
sunlight. Here and there the subjects of the bas-reliefs, so long
buried in the darkness, are deluged with burning rays which detail
their attitudes, their muscles, their scarcely altered colours, and
endow them again with life and youth. There is no part of the wall, in
this immense place, but is covered with divinities, with hieroglyphs
and emblems. Osiris in high coiffure, the beautiful Isis in the helmet
of a bird, jackal-headed Anubis, falcon-headed Horus, and ibis-headed
Thoth are repeated a thousand times, welcoming with strange gestures
the kings and priests who are rendering them homage.
The bodies, almost nude, with broad shoulders and slim waist, have a
slenderness, a grace, infinitely chaste, and the features of the faces
are of an exquisite purity. The artists who carved these charming
heads, with their long eyes, full of the ancient dream, were already
skilled in their art; but through a deficiency, which puzzles us, they
were only able to draw them in profile. All the legs, all the feet are
in profile too, although the bodies, on the other hand, face us fully.
Men needed yet some centuries of study before they understood
perspective - which to us now seems so simple - and the foreshortening
of figures, and were able to render the impression of them on a plane
surface.
Many of the pictures represent King Seti, drawn without doubt from
life, for they show us almost the very features of his mummy,
exhibited now in the museum at Cairo. At his side he holds
affectionately his son, the prince-royal, Ramses (later on Ramses II.,
the great Sesostris of the Greeks). They have given the latter quite a
frank air, and he wears a curl on the side of his head, as was the
fashion then in childhood. He, also, has his mummy in a glass case in
the museum, and anyone who has seen that toothless, sinister wreck,
who had already attained the age of nearly a hundred years before
death delivered him to the embalmers of Thebes, will find it difficult
to believe that he could ever have been young, and worn his hair
curled so; that he could ever have played and been a child.
*****
We thought we had finished with the Cooks and Cookesses of the
luncheon. But alas! our horses, faster than their donkeys, overtake
them in the return journey amongst the green cornfields of Abydos; and
in a stoppage in the narrow roadway, caused by a meeting with a number
of camels laden with lucerne, we are brought to a halt in their midst.
Almost touching me is a dear little white donkey, who looks at me
pensively and in such a way that we at once understand each other. A
mutual sympathy unites us. A Cookess in spectacles surmounts him - the
most hideous of them all, bony and severe. Over her travelling
costume, already sufficiently repulsive, she wears a tennis jersey,
which accentuates the angularity of her figure, and in her person she
seems the very incarnation of the respectability of the British Isles.
It would be more equitable, too - so long are those legs of hers,
which, to be sure, have scant interest for the tourist - if she carried
the donkey.
The poor little white thing regards me with melancholy. His ears
twitch restlessly and his beautiful eyes, so fine, so observant of
everything, say to me as plain as words:
"She is a beauty, isn't she?"
"She is, indeed, my poor little donkey. But think of this: fixed on
thy back as she is, thou hast this advantage over me - thou seest her
not!"
But my reflection, though judicious enough, does not console him, and
his look answers me that he would be much prouder if he carried, like
so many of his comrades, a simple pack of sugarcanes.
CHAPTER XI
THE DOWNFALL OF THE NILE
Some thousands of years ago, at the beginning of our geological
period, when the continents had taken, in the last great upheaval,
almost the forms by which we now know them, and when the rivers began
to trace their hesitating courses, it happened that the rains of a
whole watershed of Africa were precipitated in one formidable torrent
across the uninhabitable region which stretches from the Atlantic to
the Indian Ocean, and is called the region of the deserts. And this
enormous waterway, lost as it was in the sands, by-and-by regulated
its course: it became the Nile, and with untiring patience set itself
to the proper task of river, which in this accursed zone might well
have seemed an impossible one. First it had to round all the blocks of
granite scattered in its way in the high plains of Nubia; and then,
and more especially, to deposit, little by little, successive layers
of mud, to form a living artery, to create, as it were, a long green
ribbon in the midst of this infinite domain of death.
How long ago is it since the work of the great river began? There is
something fearful in the thought. During the 5000 years of which we
have any knowledge the incessant deposit of mud has scarcely widened
this strip of inhabited Egypt, which at the most ancient period of
history was almost as it is to-day.
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