But In The Temple Of The Lovely Hathor, On The Contrary, Except For Some Figures Mutilated By The Hammers Of Christians Or Moslems, Everything Has Remained Intact, And The Lofty Ceilings Still Throw Their Fearsome Shadows.

The gloom deepens in the hypostyle which follows the pronaos.

Then come, one after another, two halls of increasing holiness, where the daylight enters regretfully through narrow loopholes, barely lighting the superposed rows of innumerable figures that gesticulate on the walls. And then, after other majestic corridors, we reach the heart of this heap of terrible stones, the holy of holies, enveloped in deep gloom. The hieroglyphic inscriptions name this place the "Hall of Mystery" and formerly the high priest /alone, and he only once in each year/, had the right to enter it for the performance of some now unknown rites.

The "Hall of Mystery" is empty to-day, despoiled long since of the emblems of gold and precious stones that once filled it. The meagre little flames of the candles we have lit scarcely pierce the darkness which thickens over our heads towards the granite ceilings; at the most they only allow us to distinguish on the walls of the vast rectangular cavern the serried ranks of figures who exchange among themselves their disconcerting mute conversations.

Towards the end of the ancient and at the beginning of the Christian era, Egypt, as we know, still exercised such a fascination over the world, by its ancestral prestige, by the memory of its dominating past, and the sovereign permanence of its ruins, that it imposed its gods upon its conquerors, its handwriting, its architecture, nay, even its religious rites and its mummies. The Ptolemies built temples here, which reproduce those of Thebes and Abydos. Even the Romans, although they had already discovered the /vault/, followed here the primitive models, and continued those granite ceilings, made of monstrous slabs, placed flat, like our beams. And so this temple of Hathor, built though it was in the time of Cleopatra and Augustus, on a site venerable in the oldest antiquity, recalls at first sight some conception of the Ramses.

If, however, you examine it more closely, there appears, particularly in the thousands of figures in bas-relief, a considerable divergence. The poses are the same indeed, and so too are the traditional gestures. But the exquisite grace of line is gone, as well as the hieratic calm of the expressions and the smiles. In the Egyptian art of the best periods the slender figures are as pure as the flowers they hold in their hands; their muscles may be indicated in a precise and skilful manner, but they remain, for all that, immaterial. The god Amen himself, the procreator, drawn often with an absolute crudity, would seem chaste compared with the hosts of this temple. For here, on the contrary, the figures might be those of living people, palpitating and voluptuous, who had posed themselves for sport in these consecrated attitudes. The throat of the beautiful goddess, her hips, her unveiled nakedness, are portrayed with a searching and lingering realism; the flesh seems almost to quiver.

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