They are the
scattered fragments, slices, as it were, of a colonnade of the Ramses.
Farther on the ground seems to have passed through fire. You walk over
blackish scoriae encrusted with brazen bolts and particles of melted
glass. It is the quarter burnt by the soldiers of Cambyses. They were
great destroyers of the queen city, were these same Persian soldiers.
To break up the obelisks and the colossal statues they conceived the
plan of scorching them by lighting bonfires around them, and then,
when they saw them burning hot, they deluged them with cold water. And
the granites cracked from top to base.
It is well known, of course, that Thebes used to extend for a
considerable distance both on this, the right, bank of the Nile, where
the Pharaohs resided, and opposite, on the Libyan bank, given over to
the preparers of mummies and to the mortuary temples. But to-day,
except for the great palaces of the centre, it is little more than a
litter of ruins, and the long avenues, lined with endless rows of
sphinxes or rams, are lost, goodness knows where, buried beneath the
sand.
At wide intervals, however, in the midst of these cemeteries of
things, a temple here and there remains upright, preserving still its
sanctified gloom beneath its cavernous carapace. One, where certain
celebrated oracles used to be delivered, is even more prisonlike and
sepulchral than the others in its eternal shadow. High up in a wall
the black hole of a kind of grotto opens, to which a secret corridor
coming from the depths used to lead. It was there that the face of the
priest charged with the announcement of the sibylline words appeared -
and the ceiling of his niche is all covered still with the smoke from
the flame of his lamp, which was extinguished more than two thousand
years ago!
*****
What a number of ruins, scarcely emerging from the sand of the desert,
are hereabout! And in the old dried-up soil, how many strange
treasures remain hidden! When the sun lights thus the forlorn
distances, when you perceive stretching away to the horizon these
fields of death, you realise better what kind of a place this Thebes
once was. Rebuilt as it were in the imagination it appears excessive,
superabundant and multiple, like those flowers of the antediluvian
world which the fossils reveal to us. Compared with it how our modern
towns are dwarfed, and our hasty little palaces, our stuccoes and old
iron!
And it is so mystical, this town of Thebes, with its dark sanctuaries,
once inhabited by gods and symbols. All the sublime, fresh-minded
striving of the human soul after the Unknowable is as it were
petrified in these ruins, in forms diverse and immeasurably grand. And
subsisting thus down to our day it puts us to shame. Compared with
this people, who thought only of eternity, we are a lot of pitiful
dotards, who soon will be past caring about the wherefore of life, or
thought, or death. Such beginnings presaged, surely, something greater
than our humanity of the present day, given over to despair, to
alcohol and to explosives!
*****
Crumbling and dust! This same sun of Thebes is in its place each day,
parching, exhausting, cracking and pulverising.
On the ground where once stood so much magnificence there are fields
of corn, spread out like green carpets, which tell of the return of
the humble life of tillage. Above all, there is the sand, encroaching
now upon the very threshold of the Pharaohs; there is the yellow
desert; there is the world of reflections and of silence, which
approaches like a slow submerging tide. In the distance, where the
mirage trembles from morning till evening, the burying is already
almost achieved. The few poor stones which still appear, barely
emerging from the advancing dunes, are the remains of what men, in
their superb revolts against death, had contrived to make the most
massively indestructible.
And this sun, this eternal sun, which parades over Thebes the irony of
its duration - for us so impossible to calculate or to conceive!
Nowhere so much as here does one suffer from the dismay of knowing
that all our miserable little human effervescence is only a sort of
fermentation round an atom emanated from that sinister ball of fire,
and that that fire itself, the wonderful sun, is no more than an
ephemeral meteor, a furtive spark, thrown off during one of the
innumerable cosmic transformations, in the course of times without end
and without beginning.
CHAPTER XVII
AN AUDIENCE OF AMENOPHIS II.
King Amenophis II. has resumed his receptions, which he found himself
obliged to suspend for three thousand, three hundred and some odd
years, by reason of his decease. They are very well attended; court
dress is not insisted upon, and the Grand Master of ceremonies is not
above taking a tip. He holds them every morning in the winter from
eight o'clock, in the bowels of a mountain in the desert of Libya; and
if he rests himself during the remainder of the day it is only
because, as soon as midday sounds, they turn off the electric light.
Happy Amenophis! Out of so many kings who tried so hard to hide for
ever their mummies in the depths of impenetrable caverns he is the
only one who has been left in his tomb. And he "makes the most of it"
every time he opens his funeral salons.
*****
It is important to arrive before midday at the dwelling of this
Pharaoh, and at eight o'clock sharp, therefore, on a clear February
morning, I set out from Luxor, where for many days my dahabiya had
slumbered against the bank of the Nile. It is necessary first of all
to cross the river, for the Theban kings of the Middle Empire all
established their eternal habitations on the opposite bank - far beyond
the plains of the river shore, right away in those mountains which
bound the horizon as with a wall of adorable rose-colour.
