The Passage Becomes Narrower And More
Obscure, And It Is Necessary Sometimes To Grope My Way.
And then again
my hands encounter the everlasting hieroglyphs carved everywhere, and
sometimes the legs of a colossus seated on its throne.
The stones are
still slightly warm, so fierce has been the heat of the sun during the
day. And certain of the granites, so hard that our steel chisels could
not cut them, have kept their polish despite the lapse of centuries,
and my fingers slip in touching them.
There is now no sound. The music of the night birds has ceased. I
listen in vain - so attentively that I can hear the beating of my
heart. Not a sound, not even the buzzing of a fly. Everything is
silent, everything is ghostly; and in spite of the persistent warmth
of the stones the air grows colder and colder, and one gets the
impression that everything here is frozen - definitely - as in the
coldness of death.
A vast silence reigns, a silence that has subsisted for centuries, on
this same spot, where formerly for three or four thousand years rose
such an uproar of living men. To think of the clamorous multitudes who
once assembled here, of their cries of triumph and anguish, of their
dying agonies. First of all the pantings of those thousands of
harnessed workers, exhausting themselves generation after generation,
under the burning sun, in dragging and placing one above the other
these stones, whose enormity now amazes us. And the prodigious feasts,
the music of the long harps, the blares of the brazen trumpets; the
slaughters and battles when Thebes was the great and unique capital of
the world, an object of fear and envy to the kings of the barbarian
peoples who commenced to awake in neighbouring lands; the symphonies
of siege and pillage, in days when men bellowed with the throats of
beasts. To think of all this, here on this ground, on a night so calm
and blue! And these same walls of granite from Syene, on which my puny
hands now rest, to think of the beings who have touched them in
passing, who have fallen by their side in last sanguinary conflicts,
without rubbing even the polish from their changeless surfaces!
*****
I now arrive at the hypostyle of the temple of Amen, and a sensation
of fear makes me hesitate at first on the threshold. To find himself
in the dead of night before such a place might well make a man falter.
It seems like some hall for Titans, a remnant of fabulous ages, which
has maintained itself, during its long duration, by force of its very
massiveness, like the mountains. Nothing human is so vast. Nowhere on
earth have men conceived such dwellings. Columns after columns, higher
and more massive than towers, follow one another so closely, in an
excess of accumulation, that they produce a feeling almost of
suffocation. They mount into the clear sky and sustain there traverses
of stone which you scarcely dare to contemplate. One hesitates to
advance; a feeling comes over you that you are become infinitesimally
small and as easy to crush as an insect. The silence grows
preternaturally solemn. The stars through all the gaps in the fearful
ceilings seem to send their scintillations to you in an abyss. It is
cold and clear and blue.
The central bay of this hypostyle is in the same line as the road I
have been following since I left the hall of Thothmes. It prolongs and
magnifies as in an apotheosis that same long avenue, for the gods and
kings, which was the glory of Thebes, and which in the succession of
the ages nothing has contrived to equal. The columns which border it
are so gigantic[*] that their tops, formed of mysterious full-blown
petals, high up above the ground on which we crawl, are completely
bathed in the diffuse clearness of the sky. And enclosing this kind of
nave on either side, like a terrible forest, is another mass of
columns - monster columns, of an earlier style, of which the capitals
close instead of opening, imitating the buds of some flower which will
never blossom. Sixty to the right, sixty to the left, too close
together for their size, they grow thick like a forest of baobabs that
wanted space: they induce a feeling of oppression without possible
deliverance, of massive and mournful eternity.
[*] About 30 feet in circumference and 75 feet in height including the
capital.
And this, forsooth, was the place that I had wished to traverse alone,
without even the Bedouin guard, who at night believes it his duty to
follow the visitors. But now it grows lighter and lighter. Too light
even, for a blue phosphorescence, coming from the eastern horizon,
begins to filter through the opacity of the colonnades on the right,
outlines the monstrous shafts, and details them by vague glimmerings
on their edges. The full moon is risen, alas! and my hours of solitude
are nearly over.
*****
The moon! Suddenly the stones of the summit, the copings, the
formidable friezes, are lighted by rays of clear light, and here and
there, on the bas-reliefs encircling the pillars, appear luminous
trails which reveal the gods and goddesses engraved in the stone. They
were watching in myriads around me, as I knew well, - coifed, all of
them, in discs or great horns. They stare at one another with their
arms raised, spreading out their long fingers in an eager attempt at
conversation. They are numberless, these eternally gesticulating gods.
Wherever you look their forms are multiplied with a stupefying
repetition. They seem to have some mysterious secret to convey to one
another, but have perforce to remain silent, and for all the
expressiveness of their attitudes their hands do not move. And
hieroglyphs, too, repeated to infinity, envelop you on all sides like
a multiple woof of mystery.
*****
Minute by minute now, everything amongst these rigid dead things grows
more precise.
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